"Couldn"t I in the same way, when I find him again, confess and be forgiven?"
"You"d not need to, my child." A certain dryness was in his voice. "He knows all about it, I imagine; and more than you do."
"You mean that he knows and has forgiven already?"
"He hasn"t much to forgive!" Bevis could not repress, with a drier smile.
"You are unkind."
"I know. Forgive me, Tony dear; but you are tormenting. Don"t let us talk about it any more. There"s nothing to be gained by it."
"I don"t mean to be tormenting. Isn"t it for your sake, too?"
"I can bear more," he laughed now, "if you can a.s.sure me of that!"
"There may be a way out, Bevis; there may be a way out, although you can"t show it to me, although I can"t find it yet. Because you don"t feel as I do; and you may be right and I wrong. You do believe that everything is changed, quite changed, after we die? You do believe that it does not hurt him?"
He was aware, with a dim, a tender irony, of the so feminine impulse in her that, when she no longer found any help in him, sought help for herself in her own misconceptions of his beliefs. Irony deepened a little, and tenderness, as he set her straight.
"I don"t believe it hurts him; but I don"t believe, either, that everything is changed. It depends on what you call change."
"You believe it"s all peace and love; that people there don"t feel in the way we do here?" She was supplicating him.
"You might put it like that, perhaps," he acquiesced, "though even here we feel peace and love sometimes." And, glancing up at the house, as she had laid her hand on his arm, he added: "Miss Latimer is looking out at us. Don"t take your hand off quickly, all the same."
She had not controlled herself, however, from glancing round at the house, in an upper window of which they saw a curtain fall.
"It makes no difference," she said. "She must know why you are here. She must know that I am very fond of you."
"You mean she must know how faithless? There"s no point in her thinking you faithless--unless you"re going to be, is there?"
"Why do you gibe at me," she murmured, "and taunt me, when I need help most of all? Why are you so dry and cold?"
"My dear," he said, "I"m frightfully tired. You"re twice as strong as I am, and I think my case is safer in your hands than in my own. That"s what it comes to. I"m not dry and cold. Only worn out. What I"d like"--and putting his hand within her arm, indifferent to the possible spectator, he glanced round at her with a smile half melancholy and half whimsical--"would be to be with you in the firelight somewhere, and stillness; and to put my head on your breast and go to sleep, for hours and hours; held in your arms. Is that cold, Tony?"
IV
Was one not, when one could make speeches like that, to be listened to as Tony had listened to him--was one not, implicitly, an accepted lover?
They had hurt and misunderstood each other and their talk had left a strain; yet such hurts, in natures as intimately united as his and Tony"s, only brought one the nearer. After all, in spite of his essential failure with her, he had shown her, in a clear light, the shapes of her half-seen fears. That was all to the good. She must now, for the first time, accept such fears fully; and might she not, as a result, find herself the readier to live with them? And though she had not seen his truth, he had, through his very unkindness, what she had felt to be his gibes and taunts, made her see her own; and Tony"s truth was, simply, that she could never give him up. So he had computed and a.n.a.lyzed during the evening, while Tony had again sung to them and while Miss Latimer sat, her head bent beneath a lamp, and put fine darns into an embroidered tea-cloth. And what most came to him next morning, with the sense of shock, was an awareness of hidden things; of hours in which he had no part, when Tony said to him, "I talked to Cicely last night."
They were, as usual, in the drawing-room, after breakfast, and Antonia had seated herself on the low cane settee before the fire, for the grey day was chilly and she had, to an unbecoming extent, the look of being cold. When Tony looked least beautiful, she looked most childlike, and it was for her childlike self that he felt, always, his deepest tenderness aroused. And he was aware now, as he meditated her announcement, of the curious check it gave to his tenderness. "Did you?"
he said. His tone was dry. He was not glad to hear that Miss Latimer was in their counsels; but it was a more subtle disquiet than that that took his thoughts from Tony"s dear pouting lips and tightened eyelids. Miss Latimer had all sorts of chances that he didn"t have. His love was like a steady vase into which Tony"s fluidity inevitably poured and shaped itself when he was with her. But when he was not there, Miss Latimer had spells that dissolved her again into wistful, wandering water.
"I didn"t tell her, of course, that I was in love with you and was wondering whether I might marry you," Antonia went on, "though I think she must know it. I said nothing about myself, really. What we talked of was immortality. I asked her what she believed."
He kept his eyes upon her, though she did not meet them, standing before her, his cigarette between his teeth. And she felt his displeasure in his silence.
"She doesn"t think as you do," Antonia went on, in a carefully steady voice. "I mean, her belief is much more definite than yours; much deeper; for she"s always believed, and you, I think, from what you told me, haven"t;--and, oh, pa.s.sionate. I can"t express to you how I felt that. A white flame of cert.i.tude."
"Ah," Bevis murmured. He knocked the ash from his cigarette and examined the tip. "No; I"ve no white flames about me."
She did not pause for his irony. "And we spoke of Malcolm. We never have spoken of him before. I asked her if she expected to see him again, as she knew him here; unchanged. And she does. No; expect is not the right word. She is sure of it. And she told me something else. Malcolm believed like that. He and she had talked about it; twice. Once when he was hardly more than a boy. And once before he went to France, on the last night he spent here, with her and his mother. He was sure, too. He believed that he was to see me, and her, again. Cicely cried and cried in telling me. I never saw her cry before."
"Did Malcolm ever talk to you about it?" Bevis asked her after a moment.
If he had computed and a.n.a.lyzed new hopes last night, how much more, this morning, he found himself a.n.a.lyzing and computing new difficulties.
He had more than Tony"s fluidity to deal with now. Like a tragic, potent moon, Miss Latimer drew her tides away from the rest and safety of the sh.o.r.es he stretched for them.
"No," she answered, still in the careful, steady voice. "Never like that. Though I remember, in looking back, things he said that meant it."
He recognized then, and only then, when she answered with such unsuspecting candour, the treacherous suggestion that had underlain his query. Could he really have wanted to hint that Malcolm"s deepest confidence had been given to his cousin and not to her? Could he really have hoped that a touch of spiritual jealousy might help him? How complete her trust in her husband, and how justified, was further revealed to him, for his discomfiture, as she went on: "It was of me they talked that last night; of our love for each other. He wanted to thank her, again, for having helped him to win me."
They were silent for a little after that; he cast down upon the sofa beside the fire and Antonia on her settee, her hands holding it on either side, her eyes fixed before her, a new hardness in their gaze.
She was, this morning, neither the frightened child nor the helpless lover. She had withdrawn from him, and whether in coldness or control he could not tell. But it was not with her own strength she was armed. She had withdrawn in order to think, without his help, and with the help of Miss Latimer.
"Well, what does it all come to for you, now?" he asked, and he heard the coldness in his voice, a coldness not for her, but for that new opponent he had now to deal with.
"It makes it all more terrible, doesn"t it?" she said, sitting there and not looking at him.
"You mean her belief has so much more weight with you than mine?"
"Does it contradict yours?"
"You know it does; or why should things be more difficult--terrible you call them--for you this morning? You say she is more definite than I am.
I think definiteness in such matters pure illusion, and I only ask you to realize that it"s easy to a simple nature like Miss Latimer"s. She is unaware of the complexity of the problem."
"You think that Malcolm, too, was so simple?"
"I do. Not so simple as Miss Latimer; but simpler than you, and you know it; and far simpler than I am; and you know that, too, my dear."
She sought no dispute. Almost with a hard patience she went on. "Wasn"t their definiteness intuition rather than illusion? Isn"t intuition easier for the simple than for the complex?"
"Intuition isn"t definiteness; that"s just what it isn"t. As for it"s being easier; everything is easier, of course, to simple people." She, like himself, and she had admitted it, was complex; yet his terrible disadvantage with her was that, while too clever to be satisfied by anything she did not understand, she was too ignorant, really, to understand the cogency of what he might have found to say. Miss Latimer"s simplicities would have more weight with her.
"Something must be definite," she said. "Immortality means nothing unless it can in some way be defined. It must mean a person, and a person means memory, feeling, will. So, if Malcolm is immortal, he exists now, as he existed here; unchanged; loving me, as he told Cicely he should always love me; and waiting for me, as he told her he would wait." She had come back to it and Miss Latimer had fixed her in it.
"Perhaps he"s fallen in love with some one else," Bevis suggested.
"You"ve changed to that extent, after all. And you are not longing for him. Quite the contrary."
Somehow he could not control these exhibitions of his exasperation, nor could he unsay them, ashamed of them as he immediately was.
Her dark gaze rested on him at last, unresentful still, but with, at last, an almost recognized hostility. He was ashamed, yet more exasperated than ever as he saw it.
"It"s almost as if you tried to insult me with my infidelity," she murmured. "It"s as if, already, you had no respect for me because you know I am unfaithful. Take care, Bevis, for, after all, I may get over you."