The Dweller on the Threshold Part 16

"I am expecting Mr. Chichester almost immediately. He's coming to tea."

"I shall be glad to meet him," said Malling, concealing his surprise, which was great.

Yet he did not know why it should be. For what more natural than that Chichester should be coming?

"I heard of you at St. Joseph's," Lady Sophia continued. "A friend of mine, Lily Armitage, saw you there. I didn't. I was sitting at the back.

I have taken to sitting quite at the back of the church. What did you think of it?"

"Do you wish me to be frank, and do you mean the two sermons?"

She hesitated for an instant. Then she said:

"I do mean the sermons, and I do wish you to be frank."

"I thought Mr. Chichester's sermon very remarkable indeed."

"And my husband's sermon?"

Her lips twisted almost as if with contempt when she said the words, "my husband's."

"Why doesn't Mr. Harding take a long rest?" said Malling, speaking conventionally, a thing that he seldom did.

"You think he needs one?"

"He has a tiresome malady, I understand."

"What malady?"

"Doesn't he suffer very much from nervous dyspepsia?"

She looked at him with irony, which changed almost instantly into serious reflection. But the irony returned.

"Now and then he has a touch of it," she said. "Very few of us don't have something. But we have to go on, and we do go on, nevertheless."

"I think a wise doctor would probably order your husband away," said Malling, though Mr. Harding's departure was the last thing he desired just then.

"Even if he were ordered away, I don't know that he would go."

"Why not?"

"I don't think he would. I don't feel as if he could get away," she said, with what seemed to Malling a sort of odd obstinacy. "In fact, I know he's not going," she abruptly added. "I have an instinct."

Malling felt sure that she had considered, perhaps long before he had suggested it, this very project of Mr. Harding's departure for a while for rest, and that she had rejected it. Her words recalled to his mind some other words of her husband, spoken in Mr. Harding's study: "Surely one ought to get out of such an atmosphere, to get out of it, and to keep out of it. But how extraordinary it is the difficulty men have in getting away from things!"

Perhaps Lady Sophia was right. Perhaps the rector could not get away from the atmosphere which seemed to be destroying him.

"I dare say he is afraid to trust everything to his curates," observed Malling, prosaically.

"He needn't be--now," she replied.

In that "now," as she said it, there lay surely a whole history. Malling understood that Lady Sophia, suddenly perhaps, had given her husband up.

Since Malling had first encountered her she had cried, _"Le roi est mort!"_ in her heart. The way she had just uttered the word "now" made Malling wonder whether she was not about to utter the supplementary cry, _"Vive le roi!"_

As he looked at her, with this wonder in his mind, Henry Chichester came into the room.

There was an expression of profound sadness on his face, which seemed to dignify it, to make it more powerful, more manly, than it had been. The choir-boy look was gone. Malling of course knew how very much expression can change a human being; nevertheless, he was startled by the alteration in the curate's outward man. It seemed, to use the rector's phrase, that he had "shed his character." And now, perhaps, the new character, mysteriously using matter as the vehicle of its manifestation, was beginning to appear to the eyes of men. He showed no surprise at the sight of Malling, but rather a faint, though definite, pleasure. The way in which Lady Sophia greeted him was a revelation to Malling, and a curious exhibition of feminine psychology.

She looked up at him from the low chair in which she was sitting, gave him her left hand, and said, "Are you very tired?" That was all. Yet it would have been impossible to express more clearly a woman's mental, not affectional, subjugation by a man, her instinctive yielding to power, her respect for authority, her recognition that the master of her master had come into the room.

Her "_Vive le roi!_" was said.

Chichester accepted Lady Sophia's subtle homage with an air of unconsciousness. His interior melancholy seemed to lift him above the small things that flatter small men. He acknowledged that he was tired, and would be glad of tea. He had been down in the East End. The rector had asked him to talk over something with Mr. Carlile of the Church Army.

"You mean that you suggested to the rector that it would be wise to see Mr. Carlile," said Lady Sophia.

"Is the rector coming in to tea?" asked Chichester.

"Possibly he may," she replied. "He knew Mr. Malling was to be here. Did you tell him you were coming?"

"No. I was not certain I should get away in time."

"I think he will probably turn up."

A footman brought in tea at this moment, and Malling told the curate he had heard him preach in the evening of last Sunday.

"It was a deeply interesting sermon," he said.

"Thank you," said Chichester, very impersonally.

The footman went away, and Lady Sophia began to make tea.

"When I went home," Malling continued, "I sat up till late thinking it over. Part of it suggested to my mind one or two rather curious speculations."

"Which part?" asked Lady Sophia, dipping a spoon into a silver tea-caddy.

"The part about the man and his double."

She s.h.i.+vered, and some of the tea with which she had just filled the spoon was shaken out of it.

"That was terrible," she said.

"What were your speculations?" said Chichester, showing a sudden and definite waking up of keen interest.

"One of them was this--"

Before he could continue, the door opened again, and the tall and powerful form of the rector appeared. And as the outer man of Chichester seemed to Malling to have begun subtly to change, in obedience surely to the change of his inner man, so seemed Mr. Harding a little altered physically, as he now slowly came forward to greet his wife's two visitors. The power of his physique seemed to be struck at by something within, and to be slightly marred. One saw that largeness can become but a wide surface for the tragic exhibition of weakness. As the rector perceived the presence of Chichester, an expression of startled pain fled over his face and was gone in an instant. He greeted the two men and sat down.

"Have you just begun tea?" he asked, looking now at his wife.