The Kingdom Round the Corner Part 32

He interrupted himself to glance again across his shoulder, following her eyes where they probed the stealthy shadows. Then he brought his gaze back. "That was how I first learnt to know your face--from the portrait which your husband carried. Into whatever danger he was ordered, you went--you accompanied him in the most real sense: he carried you in his heart. From time to time I got glimpses of you. When he thought no one was looking, he would prop your portrait against the walls of dug-outs with a candle lighted before it, as if you were a saint whom he wors.h.i.+ped. You were the inspiration of his steadfastness to duty. What he did, he did for you. His courage was your courage; his kindness was your kindness. He was striving every minute to be worthy of you. I know of what I'm talking, for I did the same for Terry. Late at night one would stumble down greasy dug-out stairs, coming in from a patrol, to find him lost in thought and gazing at you. Or one would find him covering page after page of letters which he never sent. When he was dying, alone and far out in No Man's Land, he must have drawn out your portrait from next his heart. It was so tightly clasped in his hand when we found him, that we couldn't take it from him. I'd almost forgotten all this until two months ago, when I recognized Sargent's painting of you in your sister's house. Then for the first time I discovered your name and who he was. Since then he's given me no rest."

She had been leaning forward, her arm supported on her knee, her chin cus.h.i.+oned in her hand, the white light from the mist-covered meadows falling softly on her through the tall window, revealing the pulse beating in her throat and the trembling of her thin sweet mouth.

"What was it that he wanted you to do for me, Lord Taborley?"

He hesitated, clasping his forehead, like a man whose memory had suddenly gone blank. "I'm not sure. And yet I was sure before I started talking. Didn't you believe that he died hating you?"

She shook her head. "He left a child by me."

"Then, perhaps it wasn't that he hadn't hated you, but that he'd loved you in his last moments. Was it that which he wanted me to tell you?"

Again, with a gesture, she negatived his suggestion. "He'd never have doubted that I would know he had died loving me."

"Then why did he send me?"

Even while he asked it, he marveled at his certainty that she shared his conviction that he had been sent.

She turned her eyes full on his face and let them dwell there searchingly. As he returned her gaze, he noted that she was less young than he had supposed. She was older than her portrait. Her hair, which had looked night-black in the shadows, was prematurely frosted. The moonlight, strengthening, picked out remorselessly each silver thread.

She was no longer capable of putting back the hands of time for any man.

She had read his thoughts. The pride went out of her voice. "Perhaps he sent you," she faltered, "that he might give me back a little of what he took."

"What did he take? Anything that I have----"

She leant back in her chair. Her face was again in shadow. "My youth. My happiness."

In the silence which followed he was aware that the third presence had departed.

IX

"Your youth! Your happiness!" He was astounded. "Strange that you should say that! I thought that I alone was searching."

"Let me talk," she begged. "I want to speak about myself. Not for my own sake, but for yours. To men like you who have lived at the Front, life has become a terribly earnest affair. You're like impatient children; what you want you want quickly. You seem to be afraid to postpone anything lest death should carry you off before your desire has been granted. But you're not really different from women like myself. Crises come to all of us, when life grows desperate--when to be alone becomes intolerable: when everything, even one's pleasures, becomes a burden, because they are unshared. Such a crisis would have come to you sooner or later in any event. It comes to every unmarried man and woman. The war only happened to be the means of bringing home to you your loneliness. When it broke, you didn't have time to choose; you seized on Terry, because she was young and pretty and susceptible. You were terrified by the calamity of being blotted out before you had known love. You forgot that there's a worse calamity--and that's being compelled to live forever with a person for whom you have ceased to care. A man like yourself can have any woman he likes, only any woman wouldn't suit. She would have to be unusual--of a high type like yourself. Such women are rare. The thought of Terry attracts you because a marriage with her would seem to halve your years. But why should you want to halve your years? To have lived ought to mean that you have gained experience, which is the most dearly purchased form of knowledge.

Why should you be ashamed of it and so anxious to be rid of it? You purchased your experience with blood. It's the most valuable of all your possessions. And if you were to marry Terry, what could she contribute? A pretty face, an unbroken body and all the intolerance of her youth. A pretty face doesn't go far in matrimony. Husbands soon get used to mere prettiness and learn to look behind it for character. A wife, in order to be your friend, would have to be your equal in her understanding of suffering. How much suffering has a girl like Terry had?"

He wasn't angry. He wasn't even offended. What she had been saying had so clarified his thoughts that it had been as if he had been thinking aloud. Her voice was a dark mirror, glancing into which he had recognized himself. His self-knowledge carried him far beyond any arguments of hers. He sat perfectly still with a face of iron, gazing straight before him.

What he had mistaken for chivalry and romance had been nothing but foolishness. He had been enacting the unwisdom of an infatuated boy with the solemnity of a mature man. His clamor had been unprofitable, undignified, absurd--on a level with the amorous hysterics of Grand Opera, save that it had lacked the redeeming storm of contending music.

The utter futility of so much wasted feeling bordered on tragedy; the need which it had expressed had been so primitive, so distressingly sincere. He was confronted with the necessity of confessing that his pa.s.sion for Terry was at an end.

When had it died? Perhaps only since he had entered this quiet room, with its moonlit landscape, its lowered lights and its wise mistress, sitting so gravely alone with her patient beauty and her gently folded hands. But even before he had entered, it must have been dying. For weeks he had been flogging it, like an over-tired horse, into a feeble display of energy. More than anything, his conduct with Maisie proved that.

Maisie's excuse for the error of her many marriages recurred to him--that Gervis and Lockwood had hung up their hats in her hall.

Frivolous, yes! But had he been less frivolous in his treatment of Terry? He had felt the compulsion to concentrate his craving to love and be loved on some special woman! Terry had been handiest, so he'd hung his idolatry on her.

But to acknowledge this implied a fickleness of temperament that was disastrous to his self-respect. It deflated him to the proportions of an Adair. It toppled his lofty standards in the dust. It changed him from a loyalist, making a fanatical last stand, into a haggard runaway.

His pride leapt up in his defense. Turning to Lady Dawn, with grim despair he muttered, "But I want her. I can't do without her. I want no one else."

X

Her voice reached him out of the darkness. "To own that we've been mistaken takes more courage than to persist in the wrong direction. 'I want no one else!' We've all said that. It was through saying it that I brought about my s.h.i.+pwreck. But if you're sure that you want no one else, you must have her. If there's any way of getting her for you, I'll do my best to help."

She made an effort to rise. She stood before him swaying, a blinded look on her face, her eyes closed, her hands stretched out. He placed his arm about her. Her weight sagged against him.

"Not the servants," she whispered. "You and I. Give me air."

With his free hand he jerked the catch and pushed the window wide. The cool dampness of the night streamed in on her. He stood there with her clasped against him, her head stretched back, her body drooping. In the bowl of darkness at the foot of the turret, the rose-garden floated. Out of sight, in the green-sc.u.mmed moat, a fish leapt with a sullen splash.

A bird called. Wheels rumbled on a distant road. Again the silence was unbroken. The moonlight, falling on her face, gave to it an expression of childishness. Her breast and throat, gleaming white as marble, reminded him she was a woman.

She stirred. Her eyes opened. She gazed up at him wonderingly. "I'm better. Foolish of me!" Then, inconsequently, "How tall you are, Lord Taborley!"

He supported her till she could lean across the sill. They leant there together, their faces nearly touching. His arm was still about her; she did not seem to notice it. He was dumb with tremulous expectancy.

"It was about myself that I had to tell you," she whispered. "I was once like you. I wanted no one else. I knew, even while I wanted him, that he could never make me happy. Even when I was most in love with him, he had qualities which I distrusted. After marriage the distrusting grew.

Yet all the while I was sorry for him. I would have given anything to undo---- His sins were mine. With another woman, less virtuous, he might have been good. In his yearning he tried to drag me down. I couldn't go, not even if going would have saved him. There was something in me, not exactly pride, that prevented. I have never spoken of this to anybody.

I'm saying it to you because----"

She broke off. Why was she saying it? The perfume of June roses under moonlight, mingling with the fragrance of her hair, was intoxicating.

His arm about her tightened. Was she only allowing him to hold her out of pity because of his confession?

"Because," she said, "I think before she knows of your visit it would be better that you should go."

He failed to grasp her logic. "But if I stay, she will never know."

She released herself gently and gazed at him reproachfully. "Never know!

But you came in order that she might know."

He was more than ever puzzled. He had come to tell her of her husband.

Did she not believe him? She seemed to be accusing him. He remembered how she had claimed, when he had entered, that she could guess what had brought him. "I came solely to see you," he said, speaking slowly. "I was compelled, as I've told you. I give you my word of honor that my visit wasn't even remotely related to----"

A sharply indrawn breath cut short what he was saying. They turned quickly, moving instinctively apart. Gazing in from the open door, across the pool of lamplight, was Terry.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

ROUND THE CORNER

I

Lady Dawn was the first to recover her composure. "Why, Terry, I thought you were in bed!"

"I was."