Sally Bishop Part 38

He held her face, crumpling it, in his hands.

"What on earth sort of a child are you?" he asked.

"How do you mean?"

"Why--I give you a certain amount of money to spend on clothes and you bring me back fifteen pounds like the little girl coming back with change from the grocer's."

"But I've got everything I want," she replied, laughing.

"Have you got an opera cloak?"

"No, I don't want that."

"Have you got an umbrella?"

She laughed again--head thrown back, like a child at its father's knee.

"No, I have one of my own already."

"Did you get a--get a--oh, I don't know--did you get boots for tramping through the country with--boots for show, boots for wear, boots for comfort? How many pair of boots _did_ you get?"

"Two."

"Well--go and get some more and an opera cloak--to-morrow evening, we're going to sit in the Comedie Francais and not understand a word that's said."

Then they had gone abroad, and life--wonderful--had pa.s.sed from day to day like a pageant before Sally's eyes. The dark moments came with less frequency. After a time, they pa.s.sed away altogether. She saw no end to it; she saw no sin in it. What sin could there be? Janet's arguments had penetrated more deeply into her mind than she had ever imagined. When, on rare occasions, she was alone in the hotel where they happened to be staying--and it was then that doubt, while there was any, oppressed her--she hugged Janet's sayings to her mind, forced them to support her. "You're only a conventionalist, like everybody else--you're not a moralist."

Now she was a moralist, or nothing. She had cut the last link with convention and, at a moment such as that, the realization that there was no returning, no getting back, obsessed her with a shuddering fear. She did not understand that she was conventionalist still at heart; she did not divine that she was not the great woman, loving greatly--only the lesser woman, loving, it is true, with all the utmost of her personality, but loving less.

There is no conventionality in greatness. Great natures make laws for lesser natures to obey; and, far though she had gone from the broad path where the little people huddle on their way, the blood of the little people was in her veins and conventionality still held its claim upon her. She liked to think that she was married. It was beyond the strength of her mind to look upon herself as the mistress of the man she loved.

"It cannot end--it can never end," she told herself. "He loves me too much and I love him better still. It's as good--quite as good, as being married. The Church makes no difference." She thought of her father, remembering how, through the very precepts of that very Church, he had found retribution. So people, who married with the Church's sanction, found retribution too. Some lives were miserable; she had known them. What good had the blessing of the Church been to them? None!

Then Traill would return to her and doubts would vanish like shadows that a light disperses. They were happy. She had never conceived of such happiness before. Her mood was one of continual grat.i.tude. She thanked him for everything--if not with lips, then with eyes.

"You remind me of a little starved gutter-arab, whenever I give you anything," he once said, when he had brought her back from a theatre in Rome and given her supper in the restaurant of the Quirinale.

"Not very complimentary," she replied without objection.

"Well--you look at me that way--as if I were giving you G.o.d's earth for G.o.d's sake. Have you never been happy before in your life?"

"Never."

"I don't mean particularly like this. Like this, I know you haven't.

But any other way?"

"No, I don't think I ever have. I went away from home when I was eighteen--I wasn't happy there. Then I had to work too hard."

"Then you are a little starved gutter-arab." He took her gently in his arms. "And what do I seem to you--eh? Sort of fairy prince, I suppose, in gold armour."

"You seem like G.o.d, sometimes," she whispered.

He put her away with a stab of conscience--seated her on a chair and looked down at her.

"It's silly to talk like that," he said evenly. "If there is a G.o.d--and I suppose there is--the world spends a heap of money in fostering the idea--then He's certainly more consistent in His being than I am--though consistency always seems to me His weak point. But you've not got to idealize me, you know. You remember what I once said to you--don't you?"

"What was that?"

"There's a beast in every man, thank G.o.d!"

"Yes--I don't think I shall ever forget that."

"Well--don't," he added.

But even this did not harbour in her mind. She wrote long, impulsive letters to Janet, pouring out a flood of description of all the places which they visited, opening her heart of its perfect happiness.

"You said he was hard once," she wrote from Florence. "You said you knew he was hard. He's never said a hard thing to me the whole time we've been away. He may be hard to other people. I've seen him awfully bitter sometimes, but never to me. We are in love, you see. We shall always be in love. Dear, dear old Janet, I wish you could be with us."

Janet took a deep breath when she had finished the reading of that letter, and when Mrs. Hewson pushed some shrimps on to her plate, she pulled the sh.e.l.ls from them with impatient energy.

And so--slowly, even in that month--some little of the change in her character was wrought. Her nature began to set in the mould of luxury in which he placed her. Not for one moment was she spoilt by it; not for one moment made selfish. Whenever he gave her money for a definite object, she still made her purchases as cheaply as possible, still brought what was left over in the flat of an empty palm to him. But the enfranchising influence of those two years of hard work began to lose its effect. She lost independence at every turn and, by the time they returned to London, was beginning to lean on Traill, rely on him, submit subserviently to every wish he uttered.

Such had been her desertion from the cause, a conscript in which, she had so ill-understood. The falling back into luxury, the acceptance of those things which in her tentative, unrevolutionary way she had always imagined to come into her right of possession, had been very easy--very gentle--the drifting of a feather on an idle summer wind. She had let herself be borne on it, using it, not as an advantage, not as a step to lift her to a greater freedom and a wider independence, but as a fit setting, a worthy environment to this love which consumed the whole of her being and rode, the master, with an unslacking rein, over all her actions.

If she had taken the situation as it was, faced the meaning of it with firm lips and a steady eye, there would have been hope--more, there would have been salvation for her. But frail, sensitive, tender-hearted, little Sally Bishop was not of that blood, that breeding was not in her bone. She took the threads, coloured them one and all with that deceptive dye of the imagination, and wove a romance out of the materials of a stern reality.

To every intent, to every purpose in her mind, she was a married woman.

The constant use of his name in the hotels where they stayed abroad had fostered the delusion in her mind. That, in reality, she was still Sally Bishop was a fact, obvious enough, patent enough, and one which she was not so foolish as to try and force herself to forget; but she was Sally Bishop only in name. So, in contrary comparison, other women were wives only in name, yet had no husbands.

The true, logical state of the case never made its appeal to her.

She was too much of a romantic, living, as many women do, in a cloudland of hallucination, until a lightning circ.u.mstance tears its rent in the vaporous fabric and experience thunders in their ears.

Had she consented to the reasoning that she had but left the plying of one trade in exchange for another; had she admitted the fact that she had but abandoned one master for the service of another, there would have been every chance that, if the end should come, she would be able to take up the threads where they had broken off and wring profit from the ultimate position. But no such thought entered her mind. Emanc.i.p.ation was no goal for her ambitions. She sought for chains to gyve about her soul and, in her relations.h.i.+p with Traill, she fondly dreamed that she had found them. If the real aspect of the case had forcibly made its way into her consideration, she would never have accepted the situation, never have laid seal to the compact.

All this delirium of reasoning, she showed in the first few moments to Janet when she had returned to London. Down at Kew she spent an evening, delighted, with a justifiable pride, to be seen in one of the dainty frocks that Traill had bought her.

"So you're married now, I 'ear," said Mrs. Hewson.

"Yes." Sally beamed with her reply, and Janet watched her with questioning eyes.

"I hope you're happy."

"I couldn't be happier," Sally answered; then she dragged Janet upstairs to the room they had shared together for two years, and throwing her parcels--presents that she had brought from abroad--on to the bed, she twined her arms round Janet's slender neck and covered the thin, drawn face with kisses.

One knows the endearments that such an occasion exacts. They come out of a full heart and bear no repet.i.tion, for only a full heart can understand them. They swept over Janet, for the moment blinding her in her fondness for this child, full of swift impulse in her grat.i.tude, and drugged with romance in her mind. But once those endearments had been spoken, when once the presents had been divested of their paper wrappings--porcelain representations of the Bambinos from Florence--a marble statue of the Venus de Milo from Pisa--an ornament in mosaic from Rome--when once they had been set up, admired, paid for in kisses of grat.i.tude, then Janet gave words to the questions that had been looking from her eyes.

"What sort of a settlement has he made on you?" she asked.

The inquiry, notwithstanding the fact that it had been spoken with a gentle voice, tuned to consideration for her feelings, struck the sensitiveness of Sally's mind, whipped the blood to her cheeks.