Simplicity and freshness and life; Christina did not recall the words definitely when she saw d.i.c.k Quentyn spring up the steps to greet his wife at the threshold of the house; but something unformulated echoed in her mind with a deepened sense of presage.
Milly stretched out both her hands. "Welcome home, d.i.c.k," she said. And she held her cheek to be kissed. There was no restraint or shyness in her eyes. She looked at the bronzed, stalwart, smiling being with as open and happy a gaze as though he had been an oak-tree. The happiness of gaze was new; but then it was only part of Milly"s revival; and then, he had been in danger. Christina took comfort, she knew not for what.
"It is good to be at home again," d.i.c.k a.s.severated more than once during the day; and, "I say, how jolly those primroses look," he exclaimed in the long drawing-room.
Milly, her arm in Christina"s, stood beside him. "I gathered them, d.i.c.k, all of them, and arranged them, in honour of your return."
"Oh, come now!" d.i.c.k Quentyn e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed with humorous incredulity.
Milly smiled, making no protest. He, she and Christina walked about the grounds. Christina had felt a curious shrinking from joining them, a shrinking, in any normal condition of things between husband and wife, so natural that it was only with a shock of amazement that she recognized its monstrousness as applied to the actual one. She leave Milly alone with her husband! What a revolution in all their relations would such a withdrawal have portended! To leave them would have been to yield to morbid imaginations, to make them almost real; at all events to make them visible to Milly; and Milly certainly did not see them. Milly, indeed, seemed to see nothing.
She still held Christina"s hand drawn through her arm while they walked and listened to d.i.c.k"s laconic and much prompted recital of his African adventures.
"I do hope you won"t go off on any more terrible expeditions of this sort for a very long time, d.i.c.k," said Milly. "I expected every morning to read in the newspaper that you"d been eaten by savages."
"Well, I wasn"t among cannibals, you know," literal d.i.c.k objected, "and I think I"ll have to have another brush at it. Harvey is going out in a month or so."
"And you are going with him?"
"Well, I rather think I shall," said d.i.c.k. "He is a splendid fellow, and it seems my sort of thing."
Before dinner, in the drawing-room, he joined Christina, who was sitting alone looking out at the evening. "As inseparable as ever, you and Milly, aren"t you?" he said, coming and standing over her, his genial eyes upon her.
"Just as inseparable," she a.s.sented, looking up at him. She smiled with an emphasis that was faintly defiant, though neither she nor d.i.c.k recognized defiance.
"Milly is looking a little f.a.gged, don"t you think," he went on. "Has she been doing too much this winter? You are frightfully busy, aren"t you? Milly always likes going at a great pace, I know."
"I should not have thought there was anything noticeable," said Christina. "She was a little f.a.gged, perhaps; but the country has already refreshed her wonderfully."
"London always does pull one down, I hate the beastly place," said d.i.c.k.
And he went on: "She is being awfully nice to me. I don"t remember her ever having been so nice--since, I mean, we decided that we couldn"t hit it off. One would really say that she rather liked seeing me!" and d.i.c.k smiled, as if the joke were very comical.
"You have been in such danger. Milly can but feel relief." Her voice was full of an odd repression, discouragement, but d.i.c.k was altogether too innocent of any hope to be aware of discouragement or repression.
"She was worried about me? Really? That was awfully good of her," he said.
Christina was remembering that Milly had only expressed indifference as to d.i.c.k"s danger.
The ensuing evening was, to Christina, uncanny in its unapparent strangeness. She and d.i.c.k were both aware of novelty and Milly was aware of none. Her cheerful kindness was as natural and spontaneous as though she had been a girl greeting a long absent brother. She questioned d.i.c.k, and, as her questions showed interest--interest and a knowledge horribly surprising to Christina--d.i.c.k talked with unusual fluency.
Christina looked at them and listened to them, while Milly, leaning an arm on the table, gazed with gravely s.h.i.+ning eyes at her husband. The arm, the eyes, the lines of the throat, were very lovely. Christina"s mind fixed upon that beauty, and she wished that Milly would not lean so and look so. Milly, again, was unaware. It was Christina who was aware; Christina who was quivering with latent, unformulated consciousness.
After dinner, Milly and d.i.c.k still talked; she still listened. She knew nothing about Africa.
For three or four days this was the situation; a reunited brother and sister; a friend, for the time being, necessarily incidental. Then, suddenly, the presages grew plainly ominous. Was it her own realization of loneliness, of not being needed, that so overwhelmed her? or the sense of some utter change in her darling--a change so gradual that until its accomplishment it had seemed madness to recognize it? The moment of recognition came one day, when, on going into the library, she found d.i.c.k and Milly sitting side by side at the table, their heads bent over a map; and they were not looking at the map; they were looking at each other; still like brother and sister, but such fond brother and sister, while they smiled and talked.
Milly turned her head and saw Christina, and Christina knew that some evident adjustment went over her own face, for Milly jumped up, eagerly, too eagerly, and pulled a chair back for her and said; "Sit down, dearest. d.i.c.k is telling me adventures."
What was it that drove into Christina"s heart like a knife? Milly smiled at her, eagerly smiled; and yet she was miles and miles away; had she been in the jungles of Africa with her husband she could not have been further; and she was greeting her as though she were a guest, greeting her with conventional warmth and courteous sweetness. Christina was not wanted; through the warmth and sweetness she felt that.
Smiling, she said she had come for a book. Going to the book-cases she sought for one accurately--why she should seek, as though she had come in with the intention of finding it, a volume of frothy eighteenth century French memoirs she could not have told--and, smiling again upon them with unconstrained lightness, she left them. She walked steadily to her room, locked the door, and, falling upon her knees beside the bed, broke into an agony of tears.
The end had come; not of Christina"s love, not of her need, but of Milly"s. At first her mind refused to face the full realization--groped among the omens of the past, would not see in d.i.c.k, even now, the cause of all. She could trace the gradual, the dreadful severance; Milly"s slow loss of interest in her and in their life together. It was at first only for the fact of loss that she wept, that loss, only, she could look at. But by degrees, as her stifled sobs grew quieter, she was able to think, to think clearly, fiercely, with desperate s.n.a.t.c.hings at hope, while she crouched by the bed; pus.h.i.+ng back her hair from her forehead; pressing her hot temples with icy hands.
Why should Milly lose interest? How could she? How could love and truest sympathy, truest understanding--how could they fail?
"Love begets love. Love begets love," she whispered under her breath, not knowing that she spoke, and, in this hour of s.h.i.+pwreck, clinging unconsciously to such spars and fragments of childish, unreasoning trust as her memory tossed her. No other friends.h.i.+p threatened hers; she was first as friend, irrevocably, she knew it. First as friend did not mean to Milly, could never mean, the deep-dwelling devotion that it meant to her; but such affinity and attachment as Milly felt could not die without some other cause than mere weariness. And the truth no longer to be evaded broke over her. It was the simplest while the most absurd of truths. Milly was falling in love; Milly was falling in love with d.i.c.k; and she was frank and happy because she did not know it; and he did not know it. Like two children with a fresh day of play and suns.h.i.+ne before them, they were engaged in merry, trivial games, picnics, make-believes, no thought of sentiment or emotion in them to account for the new sympathy; but from these games they would return hand in hand, all in all to each other, bound together in the lover"s illusion and needing no one else. Maps! Travels! Africa! Did they not see these things as silly toys, as she did? What could Milly care for such toys? That she should play with them, as if she placed tin soldiers and blew a tin trumpet, showed the fatal glamour that was upon her; glamour only, a moons.h.i.+ne mood of vague restlessness and craving. How dignify by the sacred name of love this sentiment, all made of her weakness, her emotionalism, her egotism, that swayed her now so ludicrously towards the man whom, open-eyed, she had rejected and scorned for years?
Pa.s.sionate repudiation of the debas.e.m.e.nt for Milly swept through the stricken friend and mingled with the throes of her anguish for herself.
For how was she to live without Milly? How could she live as Milly"s formal friend, kept outside the circle of intimate affection, the circle where, till now, she had reigned alone? Ah! she understood Milly"s nature too well; she saw that with all its sweetness it was slight.
Love, with her, would efface all friends.h.i.+ps. Like a delicate, narrow little vase, her heart could hold but one deep feeling. She would come, simply, not to care for Christina at all. Would come? Had she not come already? In her eyes, her smiles, the empty caressing of her voice, was there not already the most profound indifference? And all the forces of Christina"s nature rose in rebellion. She felt the rebellion like the onslaught of angels of light against powers of darkness; it was the ideal doing battle with some primal, instinctive force. She must fight for Milly and for herself. For she, too, had her claim. She measured herself beside d.i.c.k Quentyn, her needs beside his. His life was cheerful, contented, complete; hers without Milly would be a warped, a meaningless, a broken life. Strangely, her thoughts, in all their anguish, turned in not one reproach upon her friend; rather, her comprehension, from maternal heights of love, sorrowed over her with infinite tenderness. For, so she told herself, she could have resigned her, in spite of her own bereavement, to true companions.h.i.+p, true fulfilment. But Milly--her Milly--made hers by all these years--in love with d.i.c.k Quentyn! It was a calamity, a disease which had befallen her darling. Asking no heights, this love would lead her down to contented levels, and Milly"s life, too, in all true senses, would be warped and meaningless and broken.
Meanwhile, in the library, d.i.c.k said to his wife: "An"t I interrupting you? Don"t you read or talk or do something with Mrs. Drent at this time of the day?"
And at the question alone, contentedly alone with him as she was, dimly enlightened, too, by Christina"s guarded glance, Milly made a swift, surprised survey of the situation. She did not want to talk to Christina; she wanted to go on talking to d.i.c.k. She had not as yet realized that Christina"s presence had become an interruption, a burden; Christina"s personality had seemed blurred, merely, and far away. She was now aware of this, aware, for the first time, of something to hide from Christina, and a sense of awkwardness and almost of confusion came upon her.
"Oh no, you are not interrupting us. Christina and I will have heaps of time for talking and reading when you are gone," she said, smiling and blus.h.i.+ng faintly.
d.i.c.k, even more unconscious than she of its meaning, gazed at the blush, and then they went on with their talk about crocodiles.
When Christina saw Milly again that evening, it was evident to her that Milly had at last become aware of something changed, and that her own composure urged Milly into a self-protecting overdemonstrativeness. She was completely composed. She stood aside, mild, unemphatic, unaware, seeming not to see, making no effort to hold; and as her desperate dread thus instinctively armed her, she saw that no other att.i.tude could have been so efficacious. When she stood aside, Milly was forced to draw her in; when she pretended to see nothing, Milly must pretend--to her and to d.i.c.k--that there was nothing to see. Milly was afraid of her; that became apparent to her during the ensuing days, terrible, lovely days of spring, when, as if with drawn breath and cold, measuring eye, she crossed an abyss on a narrow plank laid above the emptiness. Milly was afraid; of her scorn and incredulity, perhaps; perhaps only of her pain.
Milly was cowardly in her shrinking from giving pain; it would be impossible for her to go to her friend and say:--"I have fallen in love with my husband, and you and I must part." In that impossibility for Milly lay her only hope. If Milly and d.i.c.k could be held apart, and by Milly"s own cowardice rather than by any word or gesture of her own, the wretched interlude might pa.s.s and Milly come to look back upon it with shame and amazement and to thank her friend for the strength and control that had made escape possible.
And the first-fruits of her strategy were soon apparent. Milly saw less and less of d.i.c.k. d.i.c.k, as of old, made no attempt to seek her out and, obviously, it was now impossible for Milly, with Christina"s quiet eyes upon her, to seek him. Milly took up again the idea of Greece and said that, after all, they must go that spring. They would all, she gaily declared, go up to London and depart to their different quarters of the globe at the same time, d.i.c.k to Africa and she and Christina to Greece.
This was said in d.i.c.k"s presence and he cheerfully acquiesced. Christina wondered if Milly had not hoped for some protest or suggestion from him.
In d.i.c.k"s blindness lay, she began to see, an even greater hope than in Milly"s cowardice. Milly could not very well come to her and avow her love for d.i.c.k when d.i.c.k, it was evident, did not dream of avowing his for her. And Milly became aware of this as she did. Her manner towards d.i.c.k changed. She rallied him with a touch of irritability; she scored off him as she had used to do, by means of Christina; she put forward Christina and her relation to Christina constantly, and seemed to taunt him, as of old, with his own inadequacy. All her innocent gaiety was gone; she hid her deep disquiet under an air of feverish brightness, and poor stupid d.i.c.k, accepting Milly"s alteration as he had always accepted things from her, showed no hurt and no reproach; he merely effaced himself, cheerfully, once more.
Christina understood it all and the breathless subterfuges in which Milly"s perturbation concealed itself. She was longing that d.i.c.k should see what she could not show, and that he should break through the web with an avowal. She was longing that Christina, if d.i.c.k remained blind, should mercifully give d.i.c.k and her their chance. Christina knew the horrible risk she ran in remaining blandly unaware, in continuing to take Milly at her word, in keeping there, between her and d.i.c.k, where Milly herself placed her. She might part them, but Milly might come to hate her.
Milly"s plan was carried out: they all went up to town together, Milly to her friend"s house, d.i.c.k to his bachelor"s chambers. And it was Christina who asked d.i.c.k to come and dine with them the night before he left for Africa. She maintained every appearance. The very air that night was electric with the restraints ready to burst into reverberations which would surprise no one but d.i.c.k. Christina herself was aware of a strange little dart of impatience with him. His stupidity helped her as nothing else could have helped; yet, while she blessed it, she could feel for Milly, and actually, while she blessed, resent it.
It was true that she read in his eyes a slight shyness as they rested upon his wife. He was bewildered, and it was evident he was not happy.
And Milly had dropped her s.h.i.+eld of flippancy. She sat silent, absent, absorbed, looking up at her husband now and then, with curious eyes, eyes cold and deep and suffering. Christina saw it all. Should she leave them now, it was inevitable that the revelation would come, and it would come from Milly. Mutely, in their respective unconsciousness and consciousness, they were begging her to go; and she sat on. Her inflexible determination upheld her over the terrible falsity of her position. Milly, now, must know that she knew; yet she sat on, smiling, talking, until the hour was late.
Then, as d.i.c.k rose, it was Milly who went towards the barrier that she herself had raised and showed d.i.c.k that it had an unlocked gate. From her deep knowledge of Milly"s nature, Christina could gauge, with a dreadful accuracy, what the strength of the feeling must be that could nerve her, rising and sauntering to the door beside him, to say in a strange, in a nonchalant voice: "How about a walk in the park to-morrow, d.i.c.k? You don"t go till the evening, do you?"
d.i.c.k stared for a moment. He was pitiably, mercifully stupid. His stare might really have been interpreted as one of mere astonishment. Then:
"Really?" he asked. "Aren"t you and Mrs. Drent too busy?"
"No, indeed. Our arrangements are all made."
"Shall I come for you here?"
"Do. At eleven."
They shook hands, and d.i.c.k took Christina"s hand. She felt, always, that d.i.c.k looked upon her as a friend. His eyes, now, revealed to her his boyish wonder and gladness. She and Milly were left alone. Milly, still with the sauntering step, went to the mantelpiece and touched her hair, looking in the gla.s.s. "Dear me, how late!" she said, her eyes turning to the clock. "How dreadful of us to have kept poor d.i.c.k up so late. Shall we go to bed, dearest? I"m dreadfully sleepy."
"You didn"t mean me to come for the walk, too, did you?" Christina asked, in a voice as easy, putting up her hand to hide a yawn. "It"s our usual hour;--that"s why I ask. But you meant him to understand that you wanted it to be a _tete-a-tete_, didn"t you? It"s all right. I can go to Mrs. Pomfret"s for my fitting at eleven."