The Nest, The White Pagoda, The Suicide, A Forsaken Temple, Miss Jones and the Masterpiece Part 20

"Well," said Milly after a moment, and in a voice that Christina had never heard from her, "he did not come, you see. I am up and dressed--yes--you know that I intended to get up and dress as soon as you were gone, I am sure--and I have been waiting here for an hour--and he has not come. He has not cared enough to come. So there are no roundabout questions for you to ask or evasive answers for you to hear.

You have the truth before you."

Christina was not at all surprised, though there was something so horrible in this unshrinking frankness from one so reticent, so delicate as Milly. She knew, as she heard her speak, that it was what she had expected. The subterfuges of the past weeks lay in ruin about them. She sat, her eyes fallen, drawing off her gloves, and she said gently, "I am sorry, Milly, if you hoped that he would come."

"No," said Milly, not moving from her place. "You are not sorry, Christina. You are glad. You are sorry that I care and you are glad that he does not care, because you think that it will keep us together. But that is your mistake. It is all impossible now, and you have made it so.

I am going away. I am going back to the country. I want to be alone."

Again Christina was not surprised; this was the fear which she had glanced down at from her haze of uncanny lightness.

"Have I made it so impossible? What have I done, Milly?" she asked, after a moment.

Milly sat down in the nearest chair. She had pa.s.sed beyond fear. There was no mist or illusion in her calmness. "You didn't give us a chance,"

she said. "Not a chance. You saw how I cared. You saw how I had come to need him. You saw how stupid he was and unless he were helped he would see nothing. I was afraid to hurt you. Of course I was. Of course I was sorry for you, horribly sorry. And you traded on that. You saw that unless you stood aside I could do nothing."

"I thought that I did stand aside, Milly," said Christina after another moment.

"Never really," said Milly.

"I don't quite see what you mean by really, Milly," said Christina. "I left you with him whenever you gave me the opportunity for doing so.

Perhaps you mean that I ought to have committed suicide."

"No; I don't mean that," Milly returned sullenly, with an unaltered hostility. "There are different ways of standing aside. You could have made it possible for me to tell you, openly, what I felt; you could have made me feel that you would be glad to have me happy with him. You need not have made me feel in everything you did and said--and didn't do or say--that if I went back to d.i.c.k I should be going to him over your dead body."

"I think you mean, Milly," Christina answered in her dull and gentle voice, "that I ought not to have loved you. That is my crime, is it not?"

"Yes; perhaps that is your crime, if you want to put it so," said Milly.

"I don't blame you, you know. You could not help it. But your love has always been a prison. As long as I was contented in the prison you made it a very charming place to live in. But when I wanted to be free, to have other, deeper, realler loves, I knew that I had a gaoler to get past, a gaoler who would not kill me, but whom I would have to kill. So that I sat in my cell and did not dare turn the key in the lock for fear of what would happen to you. And it isn't true to say that you left the door open. You pretended to, of course. But when I did make my one effort, when I did try to creep out under your eyes, you turned the key on me quickly enough. The walk this morning. You knew that I hoped for it alone. You knew that it was our last chance."

While Milly spoke these words to her, Christina sat with her head bent down and her hands pressed tightly together in her lap, and it seemed to her that she was weeping inwardly, tears of blood. It was shame, unutterable shame, that she felt, mixed with the anguish, and weighing her down to the earth. Shame for what she had done in sacrifice to the love she heard thus abused; shame for the truth, the cruel half-truth, in Milly's words; and shame for Milly that she could find it in her to speak such words to her. Deeper? Realler? Could any love, though tricked out in romantic conventions, be deeper or realler than the love she had for Milly? In the innermost chambers of her heart she knew that, in spite of the cruel half-truth, what Milly said was not the whole. She would--oh yes, she would have given her up--with gladness--as a mother gives up her child--to a love that she could have recognized as enn.o.bling. It had not been her own selfish clinging, only, that had nerved her. It had been the thought of Milly's truest good. And if she were to say this to Milly, she knew now what withering laughter she would hear.

The thought of this laughter from Milly's lips, of Milly's cruelty to her, hunted her down the first turning of concealment open to her. "I didn't want to come with you," she said. "You made me come. But I was glad--for your sake--because it s.h.i.+elded you. You had made it so obvious to him that you wanted it to be alone. I thought that you had made it too obvious."

Milly drew a long breath and a vivid red mounted to her cheeks. For some moments she sat still, saying nothing. Then, not meeting her friend's eyes, for they were now fixed on her, she rose.

"Yes. I have been unfair," said Milly. "I have been ungrateful and unkind, and unfair. I know that you have thought only of me; and you saw what I've only realised in this last hour. It has hurt so terribly to realise it--to realise that I've had my chance of happiness and thrown it away and that now it's too late to get it back again--it's hurt so terribly that it has made me cruel. You have been right all along and I have been a fool. But there it is. I love him and I'm broken-hearted, and now all that I can do is to go away and hide myself."

She was going, actually going. Their life together was over, shattered.

The intolerable realisation crashed down upon Christina's abas.e.m.e.nt. She stood up, staring at her friend. "You are going to leave me, Milly?" she asked.

Milly averted her eyes. "Yes, Christina. I want to be alone."

"But you will come back?"

"I don't know," said Milly. Still she averted her eyes; but, in the rigid silence that followed, compunction evidently wrought upon her. She glanced round at her suffering friend and Christina's eyes met hers.

They hurt her. They were glazed, like the eyes of a deer, waiting for the hunter's final blow.

"Christina," she said, and her voice showed her pity; "won't you try to learn to live without me? Really--really--it can't come back again, as it was. You must see that. Not after all that we have said, all that has happened. Learn to live without me. Get some nice woman and go to Greece and try to forget me. I can only mean suffering for you now, and I'm not nearly good enough for you."

At this Christina broke into dreadful sobs. She did not move towards her friend, but she stretched her clasped hands out towards her and said, while her voice, half-strangled, came in gasps: "Milly--Milly--Have you forgotten everything?--All the years when we were so happy together?--When he was nothing to you?--For all these years, Milly--nothing--nothing.--How can you care--suddenly--like this--when you have almost hated him for so long?--You know what you said, in the winter, Milly--that you would not care if he were to die."

Milly's eyes had hardened. She moved towards the door.

"Milly!" Christina's cry arrested her. She had to stop and listen, though her hand was on the door. "Wait! Forgive me!--I don't know what I am saying!--And it was true! It was! You did not care!--Oh don't be cruel to me. I shall die if you leave me. What have I done that you should change so?"

"You have done nothing, Christina," said Milly in a voice of schooled forbearance. "It is I who have changed, and been cruel, first to d.i.c.k and then to you. I am a shallow, feeble creature, but the shallowness was in thinking that I couldn't love my husband--not in loving him now.

I don't want the things you and I had together. I only want the stupid, simple things that he could have given me. I want someone to be in love with me. That is it, I think. I am the most usual, common sort of woman, who must have someone in love with her and be in love. And I am in love with d.i.c.k. And I am too unhappy to think of anyone but myself."

Christina stood with her face covered. Convulsive sobs shook her.

"Good-bye," said Milly.

She did not reply. She moved her head a little, in negation?

acquiescence? appeal?--Milly did not know. And since Christina still said nothing, she turned the handle softly and left her.

Milly went down to Chawlton. In the country, alone, she could sit and look at her life and at the wreckage she had made in it without feeling that another's eyes were watching her. It pained her, when she could turn her mind from the humiliation of her own misery, to see how completely all love for poor Christina had died from her, to see how the perhaps crude and elemental love had killed the delicate, derivative affection. It was even sadder to realise that under the superficial pain lay a deep indifference. She was very sorry for Christina. She had accepted Christina's life and used it, and now, through the strange compulsion of fate, she must cut herself away from it, even if that were to leave it broken and bleeding. For if she were to remain sorry for Christina, to look back at her with pity and compunction, she must not see her. Words, glances, silences of Christina's rankled in her, and when she thought of them she could not forgive her. Christina had seen too much, understood too much. She was a blight upon her love, a menace to her tragic memory of it. Under everything, deeper than anything else in her feeling about Christina, was a dim repulsion and dislike.

That Christina had submitted showed in her letters, for Milly, before many days had pa.s.sed, wrote kindly and mildly, in the tone which, for the future, she intended to use towards Christina. Milly surprised herself with her own calm ruthlessness. She found that the gentle and the cowardly can, when roused, be more cruel than the harsh and fearless. Her letters to Christina were serene and impersonal. They recognised a bond, but they defined its limits. They might have been letters written to a former governess, with whom her relation had been kindly but not fond. They never mentioned her husband's name, nor alluded, even indirectly, to her mistimed love; and to ask Christina's forgiveness again for her unjust arraignment of her would have been to allude indirectly to it.

And Christina's letters made no appeal. They were infrequent, hardly affectionate; amazingly tactful letters. Milly shrank in recognising how tactful. It showed Christina's power that she should be so tactful, should so master herself to a responsive calm. Milly had come to dread Christina's tact, her patience and her reticence, more than all the vehemence and pa.s.sionate upbraidings of former years. Beneath the careful words she knew that a profound, undying hope lay hidden; pain, too, profound and undying. The thought of such hope, such pain, made Milly feel at once the pity and the repulsion.

In none of Christina's letters was there any mention of her health.

Milly knew how fragile was her hold on life and how much had happened of late to tax it; but it was with a shock of something unrealisable, unbelievable, that she read one autumn morning, in a blurred and shaking hand: "I am very ill--dying, they say. Come to me at once. I must tell you something."

Christina dying. She had said that it would kill her. And what had she not said to Christina that might not well have killed her? Milly was stricken with dreadful remorse and horror.

She hastened to London.

The maid at the door of the little house in Sloane Street told her that Mrs. Drent was rapidly sinking. Milly read reproach in her simple eyes.

"I did not know! Why was I not told?--Why was I not told?"--she repeated to the nurse who came to meet her. Mrs. Drent, the nurse said, would not have her sent for, but during these last few days she had become slightly delirious and had spoken of something she wished to tell, had, at last, insisted on writing herself. She could hardly live a day longer. Heart-failure had made her illness fatal.

In the sick room, Milly paused at the door. Was that Christina? That strange face with such phantom eyes? Christina's eyes did not look at her with reproach or with sorrow, but, it seemed, with terror, a wild, infectious terror; Milly felt it seize her as she stood, spellbound, by the door. Then a rush of immense pity and comprehension shook her through and through. Christina was dying, delirious, and what must she be feeling in her haunted abandonment and desolation? She ran to the bed weeping. She knelt beside it. Her tears rained upon Christina's hands, as she took her in her arms and kissed her. "Christina!--dearest Christina!--Forgive me! Forgive me!--I did not know!--Why did you not let me come and nurse you?--I have always nursed you! Why did you not tell me?--Oh, Christina!"

Holding her, kissing her, she could not see clearly the illumination that, at her words, illuminated the dying woman's face. Life seemed suddenly to leap to her eyes and lips. The terror vanished like a ghost in the uprising of morning sunlight. With a rapture of hope and yearning which resumed all her ebbing power, physical and spiritual, she stretched out her arms and clasped them about Milly's neck. "Do you love me again?" she asked. Her voice was like a child's in its ecstasy.

"My darling Christina!--Love you?--Who is there in all the world but you!" Milly cried. No affirmation could be too strong, she felt, no atonement too great.

"Better than you love him?"

Milly did not even hesitate. Lies were like obstacles hardly seen as, in the onrush of her remorse and pity, she leaped them.--"Yes,--Yes. You are everything," she reiterated. "I love you best. It has pa.s.sed--that feeling."

"It has pa.s.sed! I knew that it would pa.s.s!" Christina seemed to gasp and smile at once. "You know, now, that it was not right;--that it was not you;--that it was an illness;--something that would pa.s.s?--You see it too, Milly?--And you will be happy with me again?"

"Yes, yes, dearest Christina."

Still smiling, Christina closed her eyes and Milly laid her back upon her pillows. Her fingers closed tightly on Milly's hand. "It has pa.s.sed," she said. "It could not have been right. You were everything to me. And he could not have seen the pictures, the jewels, Milly; or heard the music."

"No, dear, no." Milly covered her own eyes. Ah!--those cravings to which Christina had responded;--now so dead.