The Nest, The White Pagoda, The Suicide, A Forsaken Temple, Miss Jones and the Masterpiece Part 21

"I shall get better," said Christina. "I feel it now; I know it. I shall get better and be always with you. My darling. My Milly. My little Milly." Her voice had sunken to a shrouded whisper.

Held by those cold, clutching fingers, Milly sat sobbing. Christina would not get better; and, with horror at herself, she knew that only at the gates of death could she love Christina and be with her. And, glancing round at the head on the pillow--ah!--poor head!--Christina's wonderful head!--more wonderful than ever now, so eager, so doomed, so white, with all its flood of black, black hair--glancing at its ebony and marble, she saw that she need have no fear of life. Christina would not get better.

She spoke again, brokenly. "If you had loved him, you would have hated me. Now you will never hate me."

"I love you."

"You will not send for him? You will not see him alone? You will stay with me?"

"I will stay with you."

"And be glad with me again."

"With you again, dear Christina."

"I shall get better," Christina repeated, turning her head on Milly's arm. But the disarray of her mind still whispered on in vague fragments.--"It was not useless.--I was right.--I did not need to tell; you were mine; I had not lost you."

A few hours afterwards, her head still turned on Milly's arm, Christina died.

Sitting alone on a winter day in the library of Chawlton, Milly heard the sound of a motor outside. Since Christina's death she had shut herself away, refusing to see anyone, and she listened now with apathetic interest, expecting to hear the retreating wheels. But the motor did not move away. Instead, after some delay at the door, steps crossed the hall, familiar, wonderful, dear and terrible. d.i.c.k had returned.

All the irony and humiliation of her married life rose before her as she felt herself trembling, flus.h.i.+ng, with the joy and terror. He had come back; and so he had not guessed. Or was it that he had guessed and yet was too kind not to come? She had only time to s.n.a.t.c.h at conjecture, for d.i.c.k was before her.

d.i.c.k's demeanour was as unemphatic as she remembered it always to have been. It was almost as casual as if he had returned from a day's hunting merely. Yet there was difference, too, though what it was her hurrying thoughts could not seize. She felt it as a radiance of pity, warm and almost vehement.

"My dear Milly," he said coming to her and taking her hand; "I only heard yesterday.--I only got back yesterday.--And I felt that I must see you. I'm not going to bother you in any way. I've only come down for the afternoon. But I wanted to ask you if I could do anything--help you in any way, be of any use." In spite of his schooled voice his longing to see her, his delight in seeing her, showed in his clouded, candid eyes.

Milly felt it as the difference, the vague warmth and radiance.

"How kind of you, dear d.i.c.k," she said, and her poor voice groped vainly for firmness. "I am so glad to see you. It was good of you to come. Yes; it has been dreadful. You know;--Christina--our friends.h.i.+p"--But how to confess to d.i.c.k her remorse or explain to d.i.c.k why she had left Christina? Her pride broke. With this human kindness near her, she could not maintain the decorum of their tangled relations as man and woman; the simple human relation alone became the most real one; the loneliness and the grief of a child overwhelmed her. She sank, sobbing helplessly, into her chair.

"Oh--Milly!"--said poor d.i.c.k Quentyn. And the longing to comfort and console effacing his diffidence and the memory of her long unkindness towards himself, he knelt down beside her and took her into his arms.

Milly then said and did what she could never have believed herself capable of saying and doing. No pride could hold her from it, no dignity, not even common shame. She could not keep herself from dropping her face on his shoulder and sobbing;--"Oh--d.i.c.k--try--try to love me again. I am cold and selfish. I have behaved cruelly to everyone who loved me;--but I can't bear it any longer."

It was a startling moment for d.i.c.k Quentyn, the most startling of his life. "Try to love you?" he stammered. He pushed her back to look at her. "What do you mean, Milly?"

"What I say," Milly gasped.

"But what does it mean?" d.i.c.k repeated. "It isn't for you to ask me to love you. You know I love you. You know there's never been another woman in the world for me but you. It's you who have never loved me, Milly."

Her appeal had been like a diving under deep waters--she had not known when or where or how she would come up again. Now she opened her eyes and stared at her husband. She seemed, after that whirlpool moment of abysmal shame, to have come up from the further reaches of darkness, and it was under new, bewildering skies. Strange stars made her dizzy.

"Then why didn't you come and say good-bye to me--that day--in London this spring?" was all she found to say.

d.i.c.k was not stupid now. The lover's code was at last open between them, and he as well as she could read the significance of seemingly trivial words.

"Did you expect me?" he asked.

"Of course I expected you. I thought you saw how much," said Milly.

"I didn't think you expected me at all; why should I have thought it?

But I did come. Didn't you know it?" said d.i.c.k.

"You did come?" In its extremity her astonishment was mild.

"That is to say--I never got there. Mrs. Drent met me. She told me how you'd gone to sleep, you know. She thought you'd gone to sleep, Milly.

She didn't know you expected me either, you see. It was in the park we talked, just there by the rhododendrons."

"She told you I had gone to sleep?--But why did that keep you from coming?" Milly had suddenly risen to her feet. She had grown pale.

"Why--it was obvious--you wouldn't want to be disturbed. She said that.

And--everything else. She told me--for I confided in her then--she'd always been so kind to me; and I thought she might help me--but she told me how little you cared for me."

Milly had grasped his shoulder as she stood above him. "What did Christina tell you? What did she say about me? Let me understand."

"Why, Milly--what is it?--She told me--I didn't blame you, though it hurt, most unconscionably--because I'd always believed that, in spite of everything, you had some sort of kindly feeling for me--as though I'd been a well-intentioned dog who didn't mean to get in your way--she told me that I mustn't have any hopes. And she told me that that very winter you had said to her that you'd feel my death less than that of any of the men who came to tea with you. Yes, she told me so, Milly--and wasn't it true?"

Milly now looked away from him and round at the room, stupor on her face. "Yes, it was true I said it," she said in the voice of a sleep-walker. "Yes; I said it, d.i.c.k. But it was so long ago. How did she remember?--And I knew when I said it that it wasn't true."

"But she thought it was true." d.i.c.k now had risen, and he, too, very pale, looked at his wife.

"Yes; then, she may have thought it. I wanted her to think it because I did not want her to guess how much I was getting to care. But, afterwards--after you had come back--she did not think it then. She knew, then, everything. She knew before I did. It was she who showed it to me.--Oh, d.i.c.k!--She knew that I loved you--and she kept you from coming to me!" She was gazing at him now, stupefied, horrified, yet enraptured. It was of him she thought, her lover, her husband, rather than of the unhappy woman who had parted them. But d.i.c.k still did not see.

"What do you mean, Milly?" he said. "Kept me from coming? But she loved you, Milly? She'd given her life to you. You can't mean what you are saying."

"Yes," Milly kept her grasp of his shoulder. "It is true. She loved me, but it was a madness of jealousy. Her love was a prison. I told her so.

We spoke of it all on that day, when she came back from seeing you and did not tell me that she had seen you. I told her that her love was a prison and that she had kept you from me, and that I was going to leave her. And even then she did not tell me. We parted and I did not see her again until the day she died. She sent for me to come to her. Yes--" her eyes, deep with joy and horror, were on him.--"That is what she was going to confess to me; and died without confessing. She kept us apart because she knew that we loved each other and she could not bear to give me up."

They stood in the firelight and he took her hands and they looked at each other as though, after long wanderings, they had found each other at last. There would yet be much to tell and to explain, but d.i.c.k saw now what had happened. Only after many moments of grave mutual survey, did he say, gently, with a sudden acute wonder and pity--"Poor thing."

"Horrible, oh horrible!" said Milly, leaning her head on his shoulder.

"You might have died away from me--never knowing.--I might never have seen you again.--Horrible woman!--Horrible love."

"Poor thing," d.i.c.k repeated gently. He kissed his wife's forehead and, his arm around her;--"I haven't died.--She is dead. I do see you again.--She doesn't see you. I have got you.--She has lost you."

Milly still shuddered; she still looked down the black precipice, only just escaped. "Yes, she has lost me for ever. I wish I did not feel that I hate her; but I do. It may be cruel, it is cruel. But all that I can feel for her now is hatred."

"Ah--but she loved you tremendously. And she's dead," said d.i.c.k. "All that I can feel is that."

But Milly only said: "I love you all the more for feeling it."

MISS JONES AND THE MASTERPIECE