Her immediate response was to color with a soft, suffused rose-pink like that of the inside of sh.e.l.ls. Her eyes grew misty with a kind of helplessness. She looked at me imploringly, and looked away. One might have supposed that she was pleading with me to be let off answering.
Nevertheless, when she spoke at last, her words brought me to a new phase of her self-revelation.
"Why aren"t you afraid of him?"
"Oh, but I am."
"Yes, but not like--" Again she saved herself. "Yes, but not like--so many people. You may be afraid of him inside, but you fight."
"Any one fights for right."
There was a repet.i.tion of the wistful smile, a little to the left corner of the mouth.
"Oh, do they? I wish I did. Or rather I wish I had."
"It"s never too late," I declared, with what was meant to be encouragement.
There was a queer little gleam in her eye, like that which comes into the pupil of a startled bird.
"So I"ve heard some one else say. I suppose it"s true--but it frightens me."
I was quite strangely uneasy. Hints of her story came back to me, but I had never heard it completely enough to be able to piece the fragments together. It was new for me to imagine myself called on to protect any one--I needed protection so much for myself!--but I was moved with a protective instinct toward her. It was rather ridiculous, and yet it was so.
"Only one must be sure one is right before one fights, mustn"t one?" was all I could think of saying.
She responded dreamily, looking seaward.
"Don"t you think there may be worse things than wrong?"
This being so contrary to my pet principles, I answered, emphatically, that I didn"t think so at all. I brought out my maxim that if you did right nothing but right could come of it; but she surprised me by saying, simply, "I don"t believe that."
I was a little indignant.
"But it"s not a matter of believing; it"s one of proving, of demonstration."
"I"ve done right, and wrong came of it."
"Oh, but it couldn"t--not in the long run."
"Well, then I did wrong. That"s what I"ve been afraid of, and what--what some one else tells me." If a pet bird could look at you with a challenging expression it was the thing she did. "Now what do you say?"
I really didn"t know what to say. I spoke from instinct, and some common sense.
"If one"s done wrong, or made a mistake, I suppose the only way one can rectify it is to begin again to do right. Right must have a rectifying power."
"But if you"ve made a mistake the mistake is there, unless you go back and unmake it. If you don"t, isn"t it what they call building on a bad foundation?"
"I dare say it is; and yet you can"t push a material comparison too far when you"re thinking of spiritual things. This is spiritual, isn"t it? I suppose one can"t really do evil and expect good to come of it; but one can overcome evil with good."
She looked at me with a sweet mistiness.
"I"ve no doubt that"s true, but it"s very deep. It"s too deep for me."
She rose with an air of dismissing the subject, though she continued to speak of it allusively. "You know so much about it. I could see you did from the first. If I was to tell you the whole story--but, of course, I can"t do that. No, don"t get up. I have to run away, because we"re expecting people to tea; but I should have liked staying to talk with you. You"re awfully clever, aren"t you? I suppose it must be living round in those queer places--Gibraltar, didn"t you say? I"ve seen Gibraltar, but only from the steamer, on the way to Naples. I felt that I was with you from that very first time I saw you. I"d seen you before, of course, with little Gladys, but not to notice you. I never noticed you till I heard that Hugh was in love with you. That was just before Mr. Brokenshire took me over--you remember!--that day. He wanted me to see how easily he could deal with people who opposed him; but I didn"t think he succeeded very well. He made you go and sit at a distance. That was to show you he had the power. Did you notice what I did? Oh, I"m glad. I wanted you to understand that if it was a question of love I was--I was with you. You saw that, didn"t you? Oh, I"m glad. I must run away now. We"ve people to tea; but some time, if I can manage it, I"ll come again."
She had begun slipping up the path, like a great rose-colored moth in the greenery, when she turned to say:
"I can never do anything for you, I"m too afraid of him; but I"m on your side."
After she had gone I began putting two and two together. What her visit did for me especially was to distract my mind. I got a better perspective on my own small drama in seeing it as incidental to a larger one. That there was a large one here I had no doubt, though I could neither seize nor outline its proportions. As far as I could judge of my visitor I found her dazed by the magnitude of the thing that had happened to her, whatever that was. She was good and kind; she hadn"t a thought that wasn"t tender; normally she would have been the devoted, clinging type of wife I longed to be myself; and yet some one"s pa.s.sion, or some one"s ambition, or both in collusion, had caught her like a bird in a net.
It was perhaps because she was a woman and I was a woman and J. Howard was a man that my reactions concerned themselves chiefly with him. I thought of him throughout the afternoon. I began to get new views of him. I wondered if he knew of himself what I knew. I supposed he did. I supposed he must. He couldn"t have been married two or three years to this sweet stricken creature without seeing that her heart wasn"t his.
Furthermore, he couldn"t have beheld, as he and I had beheld that afternoon, the hand that went up palm outward, without divining a horror of his person that was more than a shrinking from his poor contorted eye. For love the contorted eye would have meant more love, since it would have been love with its cognate of pity; but not so that uplifted hand and that instinctive waving of him back. There was more than an involuntary repulsion in that, more than an instant of abhorrence. What there was he must have discovered, he must have tasted, from the minute he first took her in his arms.
I was sorry for him. I could throw enough of the masculine into my imagination to know how he must adore a creature of such perfected charm. She was the sort of woman men would adore, especially the men whose ideal lies first of all in the physical. For them it would mean nothing that she lacked mentality, that the pendulum of her nature had only a limited swing; that she was as good as she looked would be enough, seeing that she looked like an angel straight out of heaven. In spite of poor J. Howard"s kingly suavity I knew he must have minutes of sheer animal despair, of fierce and bitter suffering.
Mrs. Rossiter spoke to me that evening with a suggestion of reprimand, which was letting me off easily. I was so sure of my dismissal, that when I returned to the house from the sh.o.r.e I expected some sort of _lettre de cong_; but I found nothing. I had had supper with Gladys and put her to bed when the maid brought me a message to say that Mrs.
Rossiter would like me to come down and see her dress, as she was going out to dinner.
I was admiring the dress, which was a new one, when she said, rather fretfully:
"I wish you wouldn"t talk like that to father. It upsets him so."
I was adjusting a slight fullness at the back, which made it the easier for me to answer.
"I wouldn"t if he didn"t talk like that to me. What can I do? I have to say something."
She was peering into the cheval gla.s.s over her shoulder, giving her attention to two things at once.
"I mean your saying you expected both of those preposterous things to happen. Of course, you don"t--nor either of them--and it only rubs him up the wrong way."
I was too meek now to argue the point. Besides, I was preoccupied with the widening interests in which I found myself involved. To probe the security of my position once more, I said:
"I wonder you stand it--that you don"t send me away."
She was still twisting in front of the cheval gla.s.s.
"Don"t you think that shoulder-strap is loose? It really looks as if the whole thing would slip off me. If he can stand it I can," she added, as a matter of secondary concern.
"Oh, then he can stand it." I felt the shoulder-strap. "No, I think it"s all right, if you don"t wriggle too much."
"I"m sure it"s going to come down--and there I shall be. He has to stand it, don"t you see, or let you think that you wound him?"
I was frankly curious.
"Do I wound him?"
"He"d never let you know it if you did. The fact that he ignores you and lets you stay on with me is the only thing by which I can judge. If you didn"t hurt him at all he"d tell me to send you about your business."
She turned from the gla.s.s. "Well, if you say that strap is all right I suppose it must be, but I don"t feel any too sure." She was picking up her gloves and her fan which the maid had laid out, when she said, suddenly: "If you"re so keen on getting married, for goodness" sake why don"t you take that young Strangways?"