The Misses Mallett (The Bridge Dividing) Part 39

'A kind of hold,' she explained.

'How could it be? I wasn't trying to tempt you, but we're engaged and you must have a ring.'

She shook her small, clenched fists. 'We're not, we're not! Oh, yes, you can be, if you like; but I didn't mean it would hold me in that way. I meant it would be like a sign--of you. I shouldn't be able to forget you; you would be there in the ring, in the box, in the drawer, like the portrait of Aunt Sophia's--' She stopped herself. 'And I can't burn you.'

'I don't know what you are talking about. I suppose I ought to.'

'No, you oughtn't.' She sprang up, delivered from her weakness. 'This is nonsense. Of course, I can't keep your ring. Take it back, Charles.

It's beautiful. I thought it would be all red and blue like a flag, but it's lovely. It makes my mouth water. It's like white fire.'

'It's like you,' he said. 'You're just as bright and just as hard, and if only you were as small, I could put you in my pocket and never let you go.'

She opened her eyes very wide. 'Then why do you let me go?' she asked on an ascending note, and she did not mean to taunt him. It would be so easy for him to keep her, if he knew how. She expected a despairing groan, she half hoped for a violent embrace, but he answered quietly, 'I don't really let you go. It's you I love, not just your hair and your face and the way your nose turns up, and your hands and feet, and your straight neck. I have to let them go, but you don't go. You stay with me all the time: you always will. You're like music, always in my head, but you're more than that. You go deeper: I suppose into my heart. Sometimes I think I'm carrying you in my arms. I can't see you but I can feel you're there, and sometimes I laugh because I think you're laughing.'

She listened, charmed into stillness. Here was an echo of his outpouring in the darkness of that hour by the Monks' Pool, but these words were closer, dearer. She felt for that moment that he did indeed carry her in his arms and that she was glad to be there. He spoke so quietly, he was so certain of his love that she was exalted and abashed. She did not deserve all this, yet he knew she was hard as well as bright, he knew her nose turned up. Perhaps there was nothing he did not know.

He went on simply, without effort. 'And though I'm ugly and a fool, I can't be hurt whatever you choose to do. What you do isn't you.' He touched himself. 'The you is here. So it doesn't matter about the ring. It doesn't matter about Francis Sales.'

She said on a caught breath and in a whisper, 'What about him?'

He looked at her and made a slight movement with the hands hanging at his sides, a little flicking movement, as though he brushed something away. 'I think perhaps you are going to marry him,' he said deeply.

Her head went up. 'Who told you that?' she demanded.

'n.o.body. n.o.body tells me anything.'

'Because n.o.body knows,' she said scornfully. 'I haven't seen him since--' She hesitated. This Charles knew everything, and he said for her, rather wearily, very quietly, 'Since his wife died. No. But you will.'

'Yes,' she said defiantly, 'I expect I shall. I hope I shall.'

A shudder pa.s.sed through Charles Batty's big frame and the words, 'Don't marry him,' reached her ears like a distant muttering of a storm. 'You would not be happy.'

'What has happiness to do with it?' she asked with an astonis.h.i.+ng young bitterness.

'Ah, if you feel like that,' he said, 'if you feel as I do about you, if nothing he does and nothing he says--'

'He says very little,' Henrietta interrupted gloomily, but Charles seemed not to hear.

'If his actions are only like the wind in the trees, fluttering the leaves--yes, I suppose that's love. The tree remains.'

She dropped her face into her hands. 'You're making me miserable,' she cried.

He removed her hands and held them firmly. 'But why?'

'I don't know,' she swayed towards him, but he kept her arms rigid, like a bar between them, 'but I don't want to lose you.'

'You can't,' he a.s.sured her.

'And though you think you have me in your heart, the me that doesn't change, you'd like the other one too, wouldn't you? I mean, you'd really like to hold me? Not just the thought of me? Tell me you love me in that way too.'

'Yes,' he said, 'I love you in that way too, but I tell you it doesn't matter.' He dropped her hands as though he had no more strength.

'Marry your Francis Sales. You still belong to me.'

'But will you belong to me?' she asked softly. She could not lose him, she wanted to have them both, and Charles, perhaps unwisely, perhaps from the depth of his wisdom, which was truth, answered quietly, 'I belonged to you since the first day I saw you.'

She let out a sigh of inexpressible relief.

-- 10

To Rose, the time between the death of Caroline and the coming of spring was like an invalid's convalescence. She felt a languor as though she had been ill, and a kind of content as though she were temporarily free from cares. She knew that Henrietta and Charles Batty often met, but she did not wish to know how Charles had succeeded in preventing her escape: she did not try to connect Christabel's illness with Henrietta's return; she enjoyed unquestioningly her rich feeling of possession in the presence of the girl, who was much on her dignity, very well behaved, but undeniably aloof. She had not yet forgiven her aunt for that episode in the gipsies' hollow, but it did not matter. Rose could tell herself without any affectation of virtue that she had hoped for no benefit for herself; looking back she saw that even what might be called her sin had been committed chiefly for Francis's sake, only she had not sinned enough.

But for the present she need not think of him. He had gone away, she heard, and she could ride over the bridge without the fear of meeting him and with the feeling that the place was more than ever hers. It was gloriously empty of any claim but its own. To gallop across the fields, to ride more slowly on some height with nothing between her and great ma.s.sy clouds of unbelievable whiteness, to feel herself relieved of an immense responsibility, was like finding the new world she had longed for. She wished sincerely that Francis would not come back; she wished that, riding one day, she might find Sales Hall blotted out, leaving no sign, no trace, nothing but earth and fresh spikes of green.

Day by day she watched the advance of spring. The larches put out their little ta.s.sels, celandines opened their yellow eyes, the smell of the gorse was her youth wafted back to her and she shook her head and said she did not want it. This maturity was better: she had reached the age when she could almost dissociate things from herself and she found them better and more beautiful. She needed this consolation, for it seemed that her personal relations.h.i.+ps were to be few and shadowy; conscious in herself of a capacity for crystallizing them enduringly, they yet managed to evade her; it was some fault, some failure in herself, but not knowing the cause she could not cure it and she accepted it with the apparent impa.s.sivity which was, perhaps, the origin of the difficulty.

And capable as she was of love, she was incapable of struggling for it. She wanted Henrietta's affection; she wanted to give every happiness to that girl, but she could not be different from herself, she could not bait the trap. And it seemed that Henrietta might be finding happiness without her help, or at least without realizing that it was she who had given Charles his chance. She had rejected her plan of taking Henrietta away: it was better to leave her in the neighbourhood of Charles, for he was not a Francis Sales, and if Henrietta could once see below his queer exterior, she would never see it again except to laugh at it with an understanding beyond the power of irritation; and she was made to have a home, to be busy about small, important things, to play with children and tyrannize over a man in the matter of socks and collars, to be tyrannized over by him in the bigger affairs of life.

And with Henrietta settled, Rose would at last be free to take that journey which, like everything else, had eluded her so far. She would be free but for Sophia who seemed in these days pathetically subdued and frail; but Sophia, Rose decided, could stay with Henrietta for a time, or one of the elderly cousins would be glad to take up a temporary residence in Nelson Lodge.

She was excited by the prospect of her freedom and sometimes, as though she were doing something wrong, she secretly carried the big atlas to her bedroom and pored over the maps. There were places with names like poetry and she meant to see them all. She moved already in a world of greater s.p.a.ce and fresher air; her body was rejuvenated, her mind recovered from its weariness and when, on an April day, she came across Francis Sales in one of his own fields, it was a sign of her condition that her first thought was of Henrietta and not of herself. He had returned and Henrietta was again in danger, though one of another kind.

She stopped her horse, thinking firmly, Whatever happens, she shall not marry him: he is not good enough. She said: 'Good morning,' in that cool voice which made him think of churches, and he stood, stroking the horse's nose, looking down and making no reply.

'I've been away,' he said at last.

'I know. When did you come back?'

'Last night. I've been to Canada to see her people. I thought they'd like to know about her and she would have liked it, too.'

A small smile threatened Rose's mouth. It seemed rather late to be trying to please Christabel.

'I didn't hope,' he went on quietly, 'to have this luck so soon. I've been wanting to see you, to tell you something. I wanted to get things cleared up.'

'What things?'

He looked up. 'About Henrietta.'

'There's no need for that.'

'Not for you, perhaps, but there is for me. You were quite right that day. I went home and I made up my mind to break my word to her. I'd made it up before Christabel became so ill. I wanted you to know that.

I couldn't have left her that night--perhaps you hadn't realized I'd meant to--but anyhow I couldn't have left her, and I wouldn't have done it if I could. You were perfectly right.'

Rose moved a little in her saddle. 'And yet I had no right to be,' she said. 'You and I--'

'Ah,' he said quickly, 'you and I were different. I don't blame myself for that, but with Henrietta it was just devilry, sickness, misery.

Don't,' he commanded, 'dare to compare our--our love with that.'