"Well, if you were, you didn"t suppose I"d tell you in that roundabout fas.h.i.+on. Besides, all that"s done with long ago." He looked away from her now and down at the floor.
Again Milly was silent. Strangely to herself, she felt her eyes fill with tears. She waited to conquer them before saying very gently: "d.i.c.k, do forgive me for having been so horrid."
He stared up at her. "Forgive you, Milly?" The request seemed to leave him speechless.
She was able to smile at him. "You do?"
"You never were. It"s more to the point for me to ask you to forgive me."
"For what, pray?" She had to control a quiver in her voice.
"Oh--for everything--for being so wrong, so altogether the wrong person, you know," said d.i.c.k, smiling too. He again looked away from her, across the room, now, at Christina; and, after a silence, filled for Milly with perplexing impulses, he added: "But the real reason I like her so much is that she is so tremendously fond of you."
Milly had to bring her thoughts back with an effort to Christina; she must let his remark about being forgiven remain as casual as he had evidently felt it; and it was something else that he had said which more emphatically held her attention. She thought of it all the evening, after he had gone; and, while her hair was being brushed, she looked at her reflection in the mirror and saw herself in that time, "long ago."
It was as if d.i.c.k had shown her a dead thing, and had turned the key on it with his quiet words of acquiescence.
She looked in the mirror. Surrounded by the softly falling radiance of her hair, her face was still girlish in tint and outline; but already her eyes had in them the depth of time lived through, her cheeks and lips were differently sweet; and as the realization of time"s swift pa.s.sage stole upon her, a vague, strong protest filled her, a sense of deep, irremediable disappointment with life.
d.i.c.k Quentyn went that winter to Africa, and Milly gave her husband a farewell all kindness and composure, when he came to bid Christina and her good-bye. Composure was a habit, and she was unaware of a new discontent and protest that stirred beneath it, though aware that the kindness she felt for her husband was greater than what her words of farewell expressed.
d.i.c.k always wrote punctually, once a fortnight, to his wife, short bulletins, to which, as accurately and as laconically, she responded.
This winter the bulletins were often delayed, sometimes altogether missing.
d.i.c.k had joined an exploring party, and his allusions, by the way, to "Narrow shaves," "Nasty rows with natives," and "A rather beastly fever," explained these irregularities.
"He really ought to write a book about it. They have evidently been in danger, and had an heroic time of it altogether," Christina said, during a sympathetic perusal of these doc.u.ments which were always handed on to her, as, for any intimacy they contained, they might have been handed on to anybody. They began--"Dear Milly"; and ended--"Yours aff"ly, D. Q."
The "affectionately" was always abbreviated.
"I suppose they really are in a good deal of danger," said Milly, nibbling at her toast,--they were at breakfast.
"That, I suppose, was what they went for," Christina replied, her eyes pa.s.sing over the letter.
Milly, leaning her elbow on the table, watched and read. "Poor d.i.c.k!"
she said presently.
Christina had laid down the letter and was going on with her coffee.
"Why poor, dear? It"s what he enjoys."
"If he were killed to-morrow I suppose it would hardly affect us more than the death of any of the men who had tea here yesterday."
"Milly!" said Christina. She put down her cup.
"Would it?" Milly insisted. "Would you really mind more?"
"Your husband--my child!" This elder-sister mode of address was often Christina"s.
"Why should a husband one hasn"t been able to live with count for as much as a friend one is glad to see?"
"Because he has counted for so much."
"But, Christina, you can"t deny that you would hardly be sorry, and that you would not expect me to be sorry--only solemn."
"I should expect you to be both."
"Sorry because a man I have no affection for--a man I have almost hated--is dead?"
"Yes; if only for those reasons; and that it should be only for those reasons is what you meant when you said: "Poor d.i.c.k,"" Christina demonstrated with an air of finality that showed her displeased with what she felt to be an unbecoming levity.
Milly was thinner, paler; Christina noticed that, though she did not notice how often she returned to the subject of her husband"s danger and the irony of her own indifference to it. And Milly"s listless moods followed one other so closely this winter as to become almost permanent.
She was evidently bored. More and more frequently, when they were talking over their _tete-a-tete_ tea, the very dearest hour of the day, Christina saw that Milly did not hear her. After these four years of comprehension and mutual forbearance the apparent indifference or preoccupation could not, at first, seriously disturb her; hurt her it always did. Picking up a book she would read and cease to talk. The mood always pa.s.sed the sooner for not being recognised, and Milly would come out of the cloud, unaware of it, sunnier, sweeter, more responsive than before. But this winter she did not come out. That she should be so bored, so apathetic, began to disturb as well as to hurt Christina.
There came a quick pulsing of fear; did some new attachment account for it? Her mind, in a swift, flame-like running around the circle of possibilities, saw them all as impossibilities, and put the fear away.
One day, taking Milly"s face between her hands, yet feeling, strangely, a sudden shyness that made the complete confession of her alarms too difficult, she asked her if she were unhappy.
"Unhappy, dear Christina? Why should I be?" Milly put an affectionate arm about her friend"s neck.
"But are you? Is there anything you would like to do? Anywhere you would like to go? I am sure that you are frightfully bored," Christina smiled. "Confess that you are."
"Have I seemed bored? No. I can"t think of anything that would interest me. One comes on these Sahara-like times in life, you know--stretches of dull sands. Or is it that I am getting old, Christina?"
"You old? You, child!"
"I feel old," said Milly. "Really old and tired."
Christina still smiled at her, but smiled over a sudden choking in her throat. It was not sympathy for her friend"s _Weltschmertz_; it was the recognition of something in her eyes, her voice--something she could not a.n.a.lyze, as if a faint barrier wavered, impalpable, formless, between them, and as if, did she say that it was there, it would change suddenly to stone and perhaps shut her out for ever.
What was it in Milly that made her afraid that to cry out her fears might make them permanent? She battled with them all the winter. They had arranged to go to Sicily and Greece for the spring, and Christina looked forward to this trip as a definite goal. It would break the spell, turn the difficult corner,--for all her fierce idealism she was too wise a woman not to know that every human relation must have corners; and, indeed, in talking over plans, getting up information, burnis.h.i.+ng historical memories, Milly showed some of her old girlish eagerness. She and Christina even read the Greek tragedies over together, in order, Milly said, that they should steep themselves in the proper atmosphere. It was therefore with a shock of bitter surprise and disappointment that Christina, only a fortnight before the time fixed for their departure, heard Milly announce, with evident openness, though she flushed slightly, that she thought she would rather put off the trip; she would rather spend April at Chawlton; and, at once going on, looking clearly at her friend: "You see, dear, I have just had a letter from d.i.c.k. He gets back next week and is going down there. He says that he wants to see the primroses after that horrid Africa;--quite a poetical touch, isn"t it,--for d.i.c.k! And I think it would be really a little too brutal of me, wouldn"t it, if I sailed off without seeing him at all--without pouring out his tea for even one week."
Milly was smiling, really with her own soft gaiety; the flush had gone.
Christina was convinced of her own misinterpretation. Duty had called Milly away from pleasure, and she had feared, for a moment, that her friend would think too much sacrifice to it.
"Of course, dearest, of course we will put it off," she said. "And of course we will go down to welcome home the wanderer. It is sweet of you to have thought of it."
Milly kissed her. "You see I am becoming quite a virtuous woman," she said. "And it is a pity to miss the primroses."
The packing projects turned topsy-turvy, servants to be redistributed, Christina saw to all, while Milly, with still her new cheerfulness, flitted in the spring suns.h.i.+ne from shop to shop, decking herself in appropriate b.u.t.terfly garments. They were to get to Chawlton only a day or two before d.i.c.k"s arrival.
The gardens, the lawns, the woods, were radiant, and Milly, in the environment of jocund revival, shared the radiance. All barriers seemed gone, were it not that Christina, full of strange presages, felt the very radiance to make one.
Milly gathered primroses in the woods, hatless, her white dress and fair head s.h.i.+ning among the young greys and greens. She came in laden with flowers, and the house smiled with their pale gold, their innocent and fragile gaiety. "Isn"t the country delicious?" she said to Christina.
"Much nicer than dreary Greece and tiresome ruins, isn"t it?"
"Much," said Christina, who was finding the country, the spring, the suns.h.i.+ne, the very primroses, full of a haunting melancholy.
"I have a thirst for simplicity and freshness and life," Milly went on, looking at the sky, "and how one feels them all here. Oh, the cuckoo, Christina, isn"t it a sound that makes one think of tears and happiness!"
Of tears only, not of happiness, thought Christina; of regret--regret for something gone; lost for ever. The cuckoo"s cry pierced her all day long.