The Nest, The White Pagoda, The Suicide, A Forsaken Temple, Miss Jones and the Masterpiece Part 16

They were sudden, spontaneous and swift, and it was as if, in reading them, one heard a distant wail or saw across a bleak sky the flight of an unknown bird. In her own little world of fas.h.i.+on they had made her a tolerably famous figure. But it was an echo only of her regrets and longings that Christina was able to put into her poems, all perhaps that she chose to put; they were never intimate or personal. The essence of her was that pa.s.sionate reserve and, with it, that pa.s.sionate longing to devote herself, lavishly, exclusively, upon one idolized and, inevitably, idealized object. She was full of a fervour of faith, once the reserve was broken down, and her idol, high on a pedestal in its well-built temple, was secure henceforth from overthrow.

Such an idol her husband had been. Such an idol her child would have been. The doors of that sanctuary were sealed for ever, the sacred emptiness for ever empty; Christina could never have remarried. But beside it rose a second temple, only less fair, and in it, lovingly enshrined, stood Milly Quentyn.

Happily Milly was an idol worthy of idealization, perhaps even worthy of temple-building. She was sweet and tender, in friends.h.i.+p most upright and loyal. She loved to be loved, to see her own tenderness blossom about her in responsive tenderness. She was not vain, but she loved those she cared for to find her exquisite, and to show her that they did. Like a frail flower, unvisited by sunlight, she could hardly live without other lives about her, fortifying, expanding her own. Her disappointment in her husband had turned to something like a wan disgust. His crude appreciations of her, which, in the first girlish trust of her married life, she had taken as warrant of all the subtle, manifold appreciations that she needed, were now offences. Poor d.i.c.k Quentyn blundered deeper and deeper into the quagmire of his wife's disdain. His was a boyish, unexacting nature. He asked for no great things, and the lack of even small mercies left him serene. As he had never thought about himself at all, it did not surprise him that his wife thought very little of him; he did not, because of it, think less well of himself. Milly's indifference argued in her a difference from most women, facilely contented as they usually seemed. It did not change or harm him or make him either a.s.sertive or self-conscious.

He had soon discovered that the things he cared to talk about wearied her--sport, the estate, very uncomplex politics or very uncomplex books; and after a little while he discovered, further, that for him to try to adapt himself to her, to try to talk about the things she cared for, exasperated her. She listened, indeed, with a bleak patience, while he admired, with a genial endeavour to do the right thing, all the wrong pictures at the shows where they went together. She sat silent, her eyes aloof, dimly smiling, while he tried to win her interest in a very jolly book,--watered Dumas, as a rule, decantered into modern bottles. He saw that she made an effort to care about the big game he shot--the hall and dining-room bristled with trophies, one walked over them everywhere--and she looked at pictures of them in the books of travel he eagerly put before her; but it was as pictures that they interested her, remotely, not as animals suitable for shooting.

d.i.c.k Quentyn, with an unmysterious, undifficult wife, could have been a very gracefully affectionate husband; his manners were as charming as his mind was blundering; but with this chill young nymph any attempt at marital pettings and caressings seemed clumsy and grotesque. With Milly, he soon felt it, the barrier between their minds was inevitably a barrier shutting him out from even these manifestations of tenderness.

He was not at all dull in feeling that; not at all dull in his quick withdrawal before her pa.s.sive distaste; not dull in knowing that if he were not to withdraw the distaste would become more than negative. He had now, cheerfully, it seemed, recognized that his marriage was a failure and, as Milly had said, it did not seem, after an unpleasant wrench or two when he did show an uncontrollable grimace of pain, to make very much difference to him. She endured him; she did not dislike him at all--at a distance; and, very gaily, with a debonair manner of perfect trust, he kept at a distance. He travelled constantly, and it was rarely that he required her to pour out his tea for him.

Milly poured out his tea for a fortnight during Christina's first visit to Chawlton House, the Quentyns' country-place. Christina looked forward to meeting her friend's inappropriate husband almost with trembling. She felt that she might be called to the great and happy mission of reconciliation, that Milly might have been mistaken and d.i.c.k undervalued. Milly's trust in her and dependence upon her had grown with leaps and bounds, and she hoped that with tact and time she might do much to rebuild the broken life, if there were materials with which to build it. The first glance at d.i.c.k showed her the futility of such hopes. He was a dear; that at once was obvious to her; and he was delightful looking; his small head well set on broad shoulders, his short nose expressive of courage and character; his grey eyes as free from all malice and uncharitableness as they were from introspection.

But he was a boy, a kind, good boy, an ingenuous, well-mannered materialist, living, as it were, by automatic functions, and as incapable of spiritual initiative as he was of evil. What ground of meeting could there be between him and her Milly, compact as she was of subtleties, profundities and possibilities? No; d.i.c.k offered no materials for the building of a shrine, and unless marriage was a shrine Christina could not contemplate it. There had been a deep instinct, like one of nature's cruel yet righteous laws, in Milly's withdrawal; to have consented, to have compromised, would have been to stifle and stultify herself.

Christina so justified her, and yet it pained her that Milly, in her treatment of her husband, should be almost unbeautiful. The streak of hardness, almost of cruelty, like nature's own, showing itself in her darling, distressed her. She did not care so much about d.i.c.k's very problematic discomfort. He showed none; he talked with great good spirits, made cheerful, obvious jokes and looked eminently sane, fresh and picturesque in his out-of-door attire. Yet even he must know that every fibre of Milly's face, every tone of her voice, expressed her indifference and her oppression. "Really, dear, you are not kind,"

Christina protested. Milly opened innocent eyes. "You think I'm wrong about d.i.c.k?"

"Not wrong about him; wrong to him. Surely, just because you are so right in what you feel to be impossibility, you can afford to be kind."

"You think I behave badly to d.i.c.k? Oh, Christina!--you are displeased with me?"

They were very sincere with each other, these two, and bared their souls to each other relentlessly.

"Only because you are so dear to me, Milly." Mrs. Drent flushed a little as she looked tenderly at her friend. "Only because I want to see you always right, exquisitely right. You make me uncomfortable when you are not. He has done you no wrong. Why should you treat him as you did this morning, using me as a foil to show him his own stupidity? Not that I do find him stupid, Milly; only very, very simple."

"I know it! Oh, I know it!" Milly wailed. "If only he had done me a wrong it would be so much easier! He irritates me so unspeakably, and I seem to feel it more, now that I have you. That laboured chaffing of you at breakfast--how could you have borne it? I can't pretend amus.e.m.e.nt, and chaff is his only conception of human intercourse. I know I'm horrid--I know it; but it is the long, long acc.u.mulations of repressed exasperation that have made me so--worse than exasperations. I remember, during the first months of our married life, when I was becoming dreadfully frightened, catching glimpses on every side of my awful mistake--I remember once kissing him and saying something playful that hid an appeal for comfort, comprehension, rea.s.surance. And do you know, he answered me with a chaffing jest--a stupid, stupid jest--some piece of would-be gallant folly. It was like a dagger!"

"Perhaps it pleased him so much, your kissing him, that it made him shy," Christina suggested, but Milly said:--"d.i.c.k shy! Oh no, he is not sensitive enough for shyness. He doesn't feel things at all as you, with your exquisiteness, imagine. He isn't shy at all, and I'm afraid he is sometimes immensely, hideously stupid."

After all, as Christina came to see, d.i.c.k's inevitable loss was her own gain. Milly, who could not be her husband's, was hers, almost as a child might have been. Christina, for the first time in her life, knew the intoxicating experience of being sought out and needed. It was Milly who turned to her; Milly who put out appealing hands, like a lonely child; who nestled her head on her shoulder, contentedly sighing, as she begged her please, please not to go until she had to--and couldn't she, wouldn't she, stay on until the winter?

Why shouldn't she? Her own life was empty. It ended in her pa.s.sing most of the winter with Milly in the country after d.i.c.k had gone off to India. It was a blissful winter, the happiest, in reality, that Christina had ever known, though she was not aware of this nor aware that it was the first time in her life that she was the recipient of as much devotion as she gave. They read and rode and walked and talked and carried on energetic reforms and charities in the village. Christina was full of ardent enthusiasms which infected Milly. In spite of her physical delicacy, for she had a weak heart, she showed an enterprise and endurance that Milly was not capable of. The winter went by and life was full of significance.

Then Christina asked Milly to come and stay with her in London for the spring, and so, by degrees, they both came to think of home as the being together. Christina's little house in Sloane Street became a centre of discriminating hospitality; they had an equal talent for selection and recognition, and Milly possessed the irradiating attractive qualities that Christina lacked. Together they became something of a touchstone for the finer, more recondite elements in the vortex of the larger London life. All their people seemed to come to them through some pleasant affinity, the people who had done clever things; the people who, better still, shone only with latent possibilities and were the richer for their reticences; and dear, comfortable, unexacting people who were not particularly clever, but responsive, appreciative and genuine.

Christina still wrote a little, but not so much. She and Milly studied and travelled and, in the country, at the proper seasons, rusticated.

With all its harmony, their life did not want its more closely knitting times of fear, as when Milly was dangerously ill and Christina nursed her through the long crisis, or when Christina's heart showed alarming symptoms and hurried them away to German specialists.

There were funny little quarrels, too, funny to look back upon, though very painful at the moment; for Milly could be fretful, and Christina violent in reproach. The swift reconciliations atoned for all, when, holding each other's hands, they laughed at each other, each eager to take the blame. Certain defects they came to recognize and to take into account, tolerant, loving comprehension, the ripest stage of affection, seeming achieved. Milly was capricious, had moods of gloom and disconsolateness when nothing seemed to interest her, neither books nor music nor people, not even Christina, and when, sunken in a deep armchair, she would listlessly tap her fingers on the chair-arms, her eyes empty of all but a monotonous melancholy. These moods always hurt Christina,--Milly herself seemed hardly aware of them, certainly was not aware of their hurting,--and she hid the hurt in a gentle sympathy that averted tactful eyes from her friend's retirement. But she did not quite understand; for she never wished to retire into herself and away from Milly.

And Milly discovered that Christina could be unreasonable--so she tolerantly termed a smouldering element in her friend's nature; Christina, in fact, could be fiercely jealous. They shared all their friends, many of them dear friends, but dear on a certain level, below the illuminated solitude where they two stood in their precious isolation. And Milly protested to herself that she was the last person to wish that isolation disturbed. No one knew her, understood her, helped and loved her as Christina did; there was no one like Christina, no one so strong, so generous, so large-natured. Why then should Christina, like a foolish school-girl, show unmistakably--her efforts to hide it only making her look dim-eyed, white-lipped--a sombre misery if Milly allowed anyone to absorb her? This really piteous infirmity was latent in Christina; she did not show it at all during the first years of their companions.h.i.+p; it grew with her growing devotion to Milly.

Milly discovered it when she asked little Joan Ashby to go to Italy with them. Christina, at the proposal, had been all glad, frank acquiescence.

Unsuspectingly Milly petted and made much of the girl whose adoration was sweet to her. She went about with her sight-seeing, when Christina said that she was tired and did not care to see things, not remembering that when they were alone together Christina had never seemed tired. She laughed and talked till all hours of the night with Joan, when Christina had gone to bed saying that she was sleepy. All had seemed peaceful and normal. Milly was stupefied when, by degrees, a consciousness of a difference in Christina crept upon her.

Christina smiled much, was alert, crisply responsive; but ice was in the smile, the response was galvanized. She was suffering--the realization rushed upon Milly once her innocent eyes were opened, and all her strength went to hiding the suffering. Milly, watching, felt a helpless alarm, really a shyness, gaining upon her in the face of this development. She found Christina sobbing in her room one night when she cut short her talk with Joan and came upon her unexpectedly.

Milly's tender heart rose at a bound over alarm and shyness. But when she ran to her, Christina pushed her fiercely away. "You know! Of course you know! Go back to her if you like her better!"

She was like a frantic child. Milly could have laughed, had not the exhibition in her grave, staunch Christina frightened her too much, made her too terribly sorry and almost ashamed for her.

Later, when Christina, laughing quiveringly at her own folly, yet confessing her own powerlessness before it, put her arms around her neck and begged for forgiveness, Milly in all her soft, humorous reproaches daring now to tease and rally, had yet the chill of a new discovery to reckon with. A weight seemed to have come upon her as she realised how much Christina cared. It was as if Christina had confessed that she cared so much more than she, Milly, could ever do. She had not before thought of their friends.h.i.+p as a responsibility. It was too dear, and silly and pathetic in Christina, but it seemed to manacle her.

She must be very careful to like no Joans too much in the future.

Christina protested pa.s.sionately that she must talk to Joan and love Joan--any number of Joans, young or old, male or female, as much as before, more than before, since now her folly was dissipated by confession; but Milly in her heart knew better than to believe her. She filled Christina's life completely, to the exclusion of any other deep affection, and Christina could never be happy unless her friend's life were equally undivided.

CHAPTER II

d.i.c.k

Four years pa.s.sed, and during them d.i.c.k Quentyn had wandered about the world, not at all disconsolately. He spent several seasons with friends in India; he went to Canada and to j.a.pan; when he came home he filled his time largely with shooting and hunting.

It was almost as a guest that, in the country and in his own house, he pa.s.sed a few weeks with Milly and Christina and entirely as a guest that he dined now and then with them in London.

It was a rather ludicrous situation, but he did not seem depressed or abashed by it. Christina always felt that by some boyish intuition he recognized in her a friendly sympathy, a sympathy which he must certainly see as terribly detached, since it was she who had now fixed definitely Milly's removal from his life, made it permanent and given it a meaning. But it was a sympathy very friendly, even slightly humorous.

He would catch her dark eyes sometimes as he sat, a guest at her dinner-table--(he never took Milly in, all the negations of married life were still his)--and in them he saw and responded to an almost affectionate playfulness. He evidently saw the joke and it amused him.

Christina often reflected that d.i.c.k was a dear, in all his impossibility, and that Milly was not nearly nice enough to him. But Milly was nicer than she had been; the new effectiveness and happiness of her own life made it less of an effort to be so. From her illumined temple she smiled at him, a smile that gained in sweetness and lost its chill. She handed on to him a little of the radiance.

"Since we can't hit it off together, Milly, I must say there is no one you could have chosen for a friend that I could have liked so much as Mrs. Drent," d.i.c.k said to his wife one evening in the drawing-room after dinner. They often had an affable chat before the wondering eyes of the world. Milly chatted with great affability. d.i.c.k, as Christina so often reminded her, was a dear. No one could have less suggested shackles.

"Now, d.i.c.k," she said, smiling, "what do _you_ find to like in Christina?" Even in her new tolerance there lurked touches of the old irrepressible disdain.

d.i.c.k, twisting his moustache, contemplated her. "Do you mean that I'm not capable of liking anything or anybody that you do?" he inquired.

Milly flushed, though the mildness of her husband's tone, one of purely impersonal interest, suggested no conscious laying of a coal of fire upon her head. It was what she had meant. That d.i.c.k should like Christina, Christina d.i.c.k, was wholly delightful, but that d.i.c.k should seem to like what she liked for the same reasons irked her a little. It was rather as if he had expressed enthusiasms about her favourite Brahms Rhapsody. She rather wanted to show him that any idea he might entertain of a community of tastes was illusory. How could d.i.c.k like a Brahms Rhapsody, he whose highest ideals of music were of something sedative after a day's hard riding? And how could d.i.c.k really like Christina? If he really did, and for any of her reasons, there must be between them the link, if ever so small a one, of a community of taste--a link that she had never recognized.

"I think that we could only like the same things in a very different way," she confessed. "Why do you like Christina?"

He did not reply at once, and she went on, looking at him, smiling--they were sitting side by side on a little sofa; "it isn't her charm, for you think her ugly."

"Yes; she's ugly certainly," d.i.c.k a.s.sented, quite as dully as she had hoped he would, "though her figure is rather neat."

Milly's smile s.h.i.+fted to its habitual kindly irony. "She is subtle and delicate and sensitive," she said, rehearsing to herself as much as to him all the reasons why d.i.c.k could not really like Christina. "Her truths would never blunder and her silences never bore." "As d.i.c.k's did," was in her mind. It was cruel to be so conscious of the contrast when he looked at her with such unconsciousness; to rea.s.sure herself with the expression of it was rather like mocking something blind and deaf and trusting. A sudden pity confused her, and, with a little artificiality of manner which masked the confusion, she went on: "One could never be unhappy without her knowing it, and then one would be glad she did know, for she can sympathise without hurting you with sympathy. She feels everything that is beautiful and rare, everything that is sad and tragic; she feels everything and sees everything, and she sees and feels in order to act, to give, to help. Is it all this you like in her?" Milly finished.

d.i.c.k Quentyn still looked mildly at his wife. "Yes; I suppose so," he said.

"You see these things in Christina?"

"In a different way," he smiled. It was almost a very clever smile.

Milly might have felt startled at it had he not gone on very simply:--"One sees that she is such a thoroughly good sort; so loyal; she would go through thick and thin for anyone she cared about; and so kind, as you say; she would talk as nicely to a dull person as to a clever one; she'd never snub one or make one feel a duffer."

For a moment Milly was silent. "Do you mean that I used to snub you--and make you feel a duffer?" she then asked.

"Oh, I say, Milly!" d.i.c.k, genuinely distressed, looked his negative.

"You didn't suppose?----"

"I know that I was often horrid."