The Helpmate Part 40

At last she slept, and sleeping, she dreamed a strange dream. She found herself again in Westleydale, walking in green aisles of the holy, mystic, cathedral woods. The tall beech-stems were the pillars of the temple. A still light came through them, guiding her to the beech-tree that she knew. And she saw an angel lying under the beech-tree. It lay on its side, with its wings stretched out so that the right wing covered the left. As she approached, it raised the covering wing, and in the warm hollow of the other she saw that it cradled a little naked child. And at the sight there came a thorn in her breast that p.r.i.c.ked her. The child stirred in its sleep, and crawled to the place of the angel's breast, and it fondled it with searching lips and hands. Then it wailed, and as she heard its cry the thorn pressed sharper into Anne's breast; and the angel's eyes turned to her with an immortal anguish, and pity, and despair. She looked, and saw that its breast was as the breast of the little child. And she was moved to compa.s.sion at the helplessness of them both, of the heavenly and of the earthly thing; and she stooped and lifted the child, and laid it to her own breast, and nourished it; and had peace from her pain.

CHAPTER XVIII

It was the first day in Lent. Anne had come down in a state of depression. She was silent during breakfast, and Majendie became absorbed in his morning paper. So much wisdom he had learnt. Presently he gave a sudden murmur of interest, and looked up with a smile. "I see," said he, "your friend Mrs. Gardner has got a little son."

"Has she?" said Anne coldly.

The blood flushed in her cheeks, and a sudden pang went through her and rose to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s with a p.r.i.c.king pain, such pain as she had felt once in her dream, and only once in her waking life before. She thought of dear little Mrs. Gardner, and tried to look glad. She failed miserably, achieving an expression of more than usual austerity. It was the expression that Majendie had come to a.s.sociate with Lent. He thought he saw in it the spiritual woman's abhorrence of her natural destiny. And with the provocation of it the devil entered into him.

"Is there anything in poor Mrs. Gardner's conduct to displease you?"

She looked at him in a dull pa.s.sion of reproach.

"Oh," she said, "how can you be so unkind to me!"

Her breast heaved, her lower lip trembled. She rose suddenly, pressing her handkerchief to her mouth, and left the room. He heard the study door open hastily and shut again. And he said to himself, as if with a sudden lucid freshness, "What an extraordinary woman my wife is. If I only knew what I'd done."

As she had left her breakfast unfinished, he waited a judicious interval and then went to fetch her back.

He found her standing by the window, holding her hands tight to her heaving sides, trying by main force to control the tempest of her sobs.

He approached her gently.

"Go away," she whispered, through loose lips that shook with every word.

"Go away. Don't come near me."

"Nancy--what is it?"

She turned from him, and leaned up against the folded window shutter. Her emotion was the more terrible to him because she was so seldom given to these outbursts. She had seemed to him a woman pa.s.sionless, and of almost superhuman self-possession. He removed himself to the hearth-rug and waited for five minutes.

"Poor child," he said at last. "Can't you tell me what it is?"

No answer.

He waited another five minutes, thinking hard.

"Was it--was it what I said about Mrs. Gardner?"

He still waited. Then he conceived a happy idea. He would try to make her laugh.

"Just because I said she'd had a little son?"

Her tears fell to answer him.

She gathered herself together with a supreme effort, and steadied her lips to speak. "Please leave me. I came here to be alone."

A light broke in on him, and he left her.

He shut himself up in the dining-room with his light. He had pushed his breakfast aside, too preoccupied to eat it.

"So that's it?" he said to himself. "That's it. Poor Nancy. That's what she's wanted all the time. What a fool I was never to have thought of it."

He breathed with an immense relief. He had solved the enigma of Anne with all her "funniness." It was not that she had turned against him, nor against her destiny. She had been disappointed of her destiny, that was all. It was enough. She must have been fretting for months, poor darling, and just when she could bear it no longer, Mrs. Gardner, he supposed, had come as the last straw. No wonder that she had said he was unkind.

And in that hour of his enlightenment a great chastening fell upon Majendie. He told himself that he must be as gentle with her as he knew how; gentler than he had ever yet known how. And his heart smote him as he thought how he had hurt her, how he might hurt her again unknowingly, and how the tenderness of the tenderest male was brutality when applied to these wonderful, pitiful, incomprehensible things that women were.

He accepted the misery of the last three months as a fit punishment for his lack of understanding.

His light brought a great longing to him and a great hope. From that moment he watched her anxiously. He had never realised till now, after three months of misery, quite what she meant to him, how sacred and dear she was, and how much he loved her.

The depth of this feeling left him for the most part dumb before her. His former levity forsook him, and Anne wondered at this change in him, and brooded over the possible cause of his serious and unintelligible silences. She attributed them to some deep personal preoccupation of which she was not the object.

Meanwhile her days went on much as before, a serene and dignified procession to the outward eye. She was thankful that she had so established her religion of the household that its services could still continue in their punctual order, after the joy of the spirit had departed from them. The more she felt that she was losing, hour by hour, her love of the house in Prior Street, the more she clung to the observances that held her days together. She had become a pale, sad-eyed, perfunctory priestess of the home. Majendie protested against what he called her base superst.i.tion, her wholesale sacrifice to the G.o.ds of the hearth. He forbade her to stay so much indoors, or to sit so long in Edith's room.

One afternoon he came home unexpectedly and found her there, doing nothing, but watching Edith, who dozed. He touched her gently, and told her to get up and go out for a walk.

"I'm too tired," she whispered.

"Then go upstairs and lie down."

She went; but, instead of lying down, she wandered through the house, restless and unsettled. She was possessed by a terrible sense of isolation. It came over her that this house of which she was the mistress did not in the least belong to her. She had not been consulted or thought of in any of its arrangements. There was no place in it that appealed to her as her own. She went into the little grave old-fas.h.i.+oned drawing-room. It had a beauty she approved of, a dignity that was in keeping with her own traditions, but to-day its aspect roused in her discontent and irritation. The room had remained unchanged since the days when it was inhabited, first by her husband's mother, then by his aunt, then by his sister. He had handed it over, just as it stood, to his wife.

It was full, the whole house was full, of portraits of the Majendies; Majendies in oils; Majendies in water-colours; Majendies in crayons, in miniatures and silhouettes. She thought of Mrs. Eliott's room in Thurston Square, of the bookcases, the bronzes, the triptych with its saints in glory, and of how f.a.n.n.y sat enthroned among these things that reflected completely her cultured individuality. f.a.n.n.y had counted. Her rarity had been appreciated by the man who married her; her tastes had been studied, consulted, exquisitely indulged. Anne did not want more books, nor bronzes, nor a triptych in her drawing-room. But such things were symbols. Their absence stood for the immense spiritual want through which her marriage had been made void. Brooding on it, she closed her heart to her unspiritual husband. She looked round the room with her cold disenchanted eyes. Numberless signs of his thought and care for her rebuked her, and rebuking, added to her misery. As her restlessness increased, it occurred to her that she might find some satisfaction in arranging the furniture on an entirely different plan. She rang the bell and sent for Walter. He came, and found her sitting on the high-backed chair whose cover had been worked by his grandmother. He smiled at the uncomfortable figure she presented.

"So that's what you call resting, is it?"

"Walter--do you mind if I move some of the furniture in this room?"

"Move it? Of course I don't. But why?"

"Because I don't very much like the room as it is."

"Why don't you like it?" (He really wanted to know.)

"Because I don't feel comfortable in it."

"Oh, I'm so sorry, dear. Perhaps--we'd better have some new things."

"I don't want any new things."

"What do you want, then?" His voice was gentleness itself.

"Just to move all the old ones--to move everything."

She spoke with an almost infantile petulance that appealed to him as pathetic. There was something terrible about Anne when armoured in the cold steel of her spirituality, taking her stand upon a lofty principle.

But Anne, sitting on a high-backed chair, uttering tremulous absurdities, Anne, protected by the unconscious humour of her own ill-temper, was adorable. He loved this humanly captious and capricious, childishly unreasonable Anne. And her voice was sweet even in petulance.

"My darling," he said, "you shall turn the whole house upside down if it makes you any happier. But"--he looked round the room in quest of its deficiencies--"what's wrong with it?"