The Helpmate Part 8

"I'll try to think of it."

"And it won't make you not like him?"

"My dear, I liked him first for your sake, then I liked you for his, now I suppose I must like him for yours again."

"No--for his own sake."

"Does it matter which?"

"Not much--so long as you like him. He really is angelic, though you mayn't think it."

"I think you are."

Edith was not only angelic, but womanly and full of guile, and she knew with whom she had to do. She had humbled Anne with shrewd shafts that hit her in all her weak places; now she exalted her. Anne had not her likeness in a thousand. She was a woman magnificently planned, of stature not to be diminished by the highest pedestal. A figure fit for a throne, a niche, a shrine. Edith could see the dear little downy feathers sprouting on Anne's shoulder-blades, and the infant aureole playing in her hair.

"You're a saint," said Edith.

"I am not," said Anne, while her pale cheek glowed with the flattery.

"Of course you are," said Edith, "or you could never have put up with me."

Whereupon Anne kissed her.

"And I may tell Walter what you've said?"

It was thus that she spared Anne's mortal pride. She knew how it would shrink from telling him.

Anne went down to Majendie in the garden and sent him to his sister. They returned to the house by the open window of his study. A bright fire was burning in the room. He looked at her shyly and half in doubt, drew up an arm-chair to the hearth, and left her there.

His manner brought back to her the days of their engagement when that room had been their refuge. Not that they had often been alone together.

She could count the times on the fingers of one hand, the times when Edith was too ill to be wheeled into her room. It had been nearly always in Edith's room that she had seen him, surrounded by all the feminine devices, the tender trivialities that were part of the moving pathos of the scene. She had so a.s.sociated him with his sister that it had been hard for her to realise that he had any separate life of his own. She felt that his love for her had simply grown out of his love for Edith, it was the flame, the flower of his tenderness. It was one with his goodness, and she had been glad to have it so. There was no jealousy in Anne.

It came over her now with a fresh shock, how very little, after all, she had known of him. It was through Edith that she really knew him. And yet it was impossible that Edith could have absorbed him utterly. Anne had not counted his business; for it had not interested her, and to say that Walter was a s.h.i.+p-owner did not define him in the very least. What remained over of Walter was a secret that this room, his study, must partially reveal.

She remembered how she had first come there, and had looked shyly about her for intimations of his inner nature, and how it was his pipe-rack and his boots that had first suggested that he had a life apart and dealings with the outer world. Now she rose and went round the room, searching for its secret, and finding no new impressions, only fresh lights on the old.

If the room told her anything it told her how little Majendie had used it, how little he had been able to call anything his own. The things in it had no comfortable look of service. He could not have smoked there much, the curtains were too innocent. He could not have sat in that arm-chair much, the surface was too smooth. He could not have come there much at any time, for, though the carpet was faded, there was no well-worn pa.s.sage from the threshold to the hearth. As far as she could make out he came there for no earthly purpose but to change his boots before going upstairs to Edith.

The bookcase told the same story. It held histories and standard works inherited from Majendie's father; the works of d.i.c.kens, and Thackeray, and Hardy, read over and over again in the days when he had time for reading; several poets whom, by his own confession, he could not have read in any circ.u.mstances. One Meredith, partly uncut, testified to an honest effort and a baulked accomplishment. On a shelf apart stood the books that he had loved when he was a boy, the Annuals, the tales of travel and adventure, and one or two school prizes gorgeously bound.

As she looked at them his boyhood rose before her; its dead innocence appealed to her comprehension and compa.s.sion.

She knew that he had been disappointed in his ambition. Instead of being sent to Oxford he had been sent into business, that he might early support himself. He had supported himself. And he had stuck to the business that he might the better support Edith.

She could not deny him the virtue of unselfishness.

She remembered one Sunday, three weeks before their wedding-day, when she had stood alone with him in this room, at the closing of their happy day.

It was then that he had asked her why she cared for him, and she had answered: "Because you are good. You always have been good."

And he had said (how it came back to her!), "And if I hadn't always?

Wouldn't you have cared then?"

She had answered, "I would have cared, but I couldn't marry you."

And he had turned away from her, and looked out of the window, keeping his back to her, and had stood so without speaking for a moment. She had wondered what had come over him.

Now she knew. He had not been good. And she had married him.

At the recollection the thoughts she had quieted stirred again and stung her, and again she trampled them down.

She faced the question how she was going to build up the wedded life that her knowledge of him had laid low. She told herself that, after all, much remained. She had loved Walter for his unhappiness as well as for his goodness. He had needed her, and she had felt that there was no other woman who could have borne his burden half so well. Edith was too sweet to be thought of as a burden, but it could not be denied she weighed. In marrying Walter she would lift half the weight. Anne was strong, and she glorified in her strength. That was what she was there for.

How much more was she prepared to do? Keeping his house was nothing; Nanna had always kept it well. Caring for Edith was nothing; she could not help but care for her. She had promised Walter that she would be a good wife to him, and she had vowed to herself that she would live her spiritual life apart.

Was that being a good wife to him? To divorce her soul, her best self, from him? If she confined her duty to the preservation of the mere material tie, what would she make of herself? Of him?

It came to her that his need of her was deeper and more spiritual than that. She argued that there must be something fine in him, or he never would have appreciated _her_. That other woman didn't count; she had thrust herself on him. When it came to choosing, he had chosen a spiritual woman! (Anne had no doubt that she was what she aspired to be.) And since all things were divinely ordered, Walter's choice was really G.o.d's will. G.o.d's hand had led him to her.

It had been a blow to Anne's pride to realise that she had married--spiritually--beneath her. Her pride now recovered wonderfully, seeing in this very inequality its opportunity. She beheld herself superbly seated on an eminence, her spiritual opulence supplying Walter's poverty. Spiritually, she said, it might also be more blessed to give than to receive.

Their marriage, in this its new, its immaterial consummation, would not be unequal. She would raise Walter. That, of course, was what G.o.d had meant her to do all the time. Never again could she look at her husband with eyes of mortal pa.s.sion. But her love, which had died, was risen again; it could still turn to him a glorified and spiritual face; it could still know pa.s.sion, a pa.s.sion immortal and supreme.

But it was an emotion of which by its very nature she could not bring herself to speak. It could mean nothing to Walter in his yet unspiritual state. She felt that when he came to her he would insist on some satisfaction, and there was no satisfaction that she could give to the sort of claim he would make. Therefore she awaited his coming with nervous trepidation.

He came in as if nothing had happened. He sank with every symptom of comfortable a.s.surance into the opposite arm-chair. And he asked no more formidable question than, "How's your headache?"

"Better, thank you."

"That's all right."

He did not look at her, but his eyes were smiling as if at some agreeable thought or reminiscence. He had apparently a.s.sumed that Anne had recovered, not only from her headache, but from its cause. To Anne, tingling with the tension of a nervous crisis, this att.i.tude was disconcerting. It seemed to reduce her and her crisis to insignificance.

She had expected him to be tingling too. He had more cause to.

"Do you mind my smoking? Say if you really do."

She really did, but she forbore to say so. Forbearance henceforth was to be part of her discipline.

He smoked contentedly, with half-closed eyes; and when he talked, he talked of the garden and of bulbs.

Of bulbs, after what he had discussed with Edith upstairs. She would rather that he had asked his question, forced her to the issue. That at least would have shown some comprehension of her state. But he had taken the issue for granted, refused to face the immensity of it all. She had had her first taste of sacrificial flames, and her spirit was prepared to go through fire to reach him. And he presented himself as already folded and protected; satisfied with some inferior and independent secret of his own.

She felt that a little perturbation would have become him more than that impenetrable peace.

It would make it so difficult to raise him.

CHAPTER V