The Helpmate Part 81

"I would. I'd live mine, horrors and all. Just for those two little years. I say, if we'd keep each other in for those two years, we needn't turn each other out now, need we?"

"Oh no, oh no."

His brain followed her lead, originating nothing.

"See here," she said, "if I come in--"

"Yes, yes," he said vaguely.

He was bending forward now, with his hands clasped on the table. She stretched out her beautiful white arms and covered his hands with hers, and held them. Her eyes were full-orbed, luminous, and tender. They held him, too.

"I come in on my own terms, this time, not yours."

"Oh, of course."

"I mean I can't come in on the same terms as before. All that was over nine years ago, when you married. You and I are older. We have had experience. We've suffered horribly. We know."

"What do we know?"

She let go his hands.

"At least we know the limits--the lines we must draw. Fifteen years ago we didn't know anything, either of us. We were innocents. You were an innocent when you left me, when you married."

"When I married?"

"Yes, when you married. You were a blessed innocent, or you couldn't have done it. You married a good woman."

"I know."

"So do I. Well, I've given one or two men a pretty bad time, but you may write it on my tombstone that I never hurt another woman."

"Of course you haven't."

"And I'm not going to hurt your wife, remember."

"I'm stupid, I don't think I understand."

"Can't you understand that I'm not going to make trouble between you and her?"

"Me? And her?"

"You and her. You've come back to me as my friend. We'll be better friends if you understand that, whatever I let you do, dear, I'm not going to let you make love to me."

She drew herself back and faced him with her resolution.

She knew the man with whom she had to deal. His soul must be off its guard before she could have any power over his body. In presenting herself as unattainable she would make herself desired. She would bring him back.

She knew what fires he had pa.s.sed through on his way to her. She saw that she could not bring him back by playing poor, tender Maggie's part. She could not move him by appearing as the woman she once was, by falling at his feet as she had once fallen. This time, it was he who must fall at hers.

Anne Majendie had held her empire, and had made herself for ever desirable, by six years of systematic torturings and deceptions and denials, by all the infidelities of the saint in love with her own sanct.i.ty. The woman who was to bring him back now would have to borrow for a moment a little of Anne Majendie's spiritual splendour. She saw by his flaming face that she had suggested the thing she had forbidden.

"You think," said she, "there isn't any danger? I don't say there is. But if there was, you'd never see it. You'd never think of it. You'd be up to your neck in it before you knew where you were."

He moved impatiently. "At any rate I know where I am now."

"And I," said she, in response to his movement, "mean that you shall stay there." She paused. "I know what you're thinking. You'd like to know what right I have to say these things to you."

"Well--I'm awfully stupid--"

"I earned the right fifteen years ago. When a woman gives a man all she has to give, and gets nothing, there are very few things she hasn't a right to say to him."

"I've no doubt you earned your right."

"I'm not reproaching you, dear. I'm simply justifying the plainness of my speech."

He stared at her, but he did not answer.

"Don't think me hard," said she. "I'm saying these things because I care for you. Because--" She rose, and flung her arms out with a pa.s.sionate gesture towards him. "Oh, my dear--my heart aches for you so that I can't bear it."

She came over to where he sat staring at her, staring half stupefied, half inflamed. She stood beside him, and pa.s.sed her hand lightly over his hair.

"I only want to help you."

"You can't help me."

"I know I can't. I can only say hard things to you."

She stooped, and her lips swept his hair. For a moment love gave her back her beauty and the enchantment of her youth; it illuminated the house of flesh it dwelt in and inspired. And yet she could not reach him. His soul was on its guard.

"You've come back," she whispered. "You've come back. But you never came till you were driven. That's how I thought you'd come. When you were driven. When there was n.o.body but me."

He heard her speaking, but her words had no significance that pierced his thick and swift sensations.

"What have you done that you should have to pay so?"

"What have I done?"

"Or I?" she said.

He did not hear her. There was another sound in his ears.

Her voice ceased. Her eyes only called to him. He pushed back his chair and laid his arms on the table, and bowed his head upon them, hiding his face from her. She knelt down beside him. Her voice was like a warm wind in his ears. He groaned. She drew a short sharp breath, and pressed her shoulder to his shoulder, and her face to his hidden face.

At her touch he rose to his feet, violently sobered, loathing himself and her. He felt his blood leap like a hot fountain to his brain. When she clung he raged, and pushed her from him, not knowing what he did, thrusting his hands out, cruelly, against her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, so that he wrung from her a cry of pain and anger.

But when he would have gone from her his feet were loaded; they were heavy weights binding him to the floor. He had a sensation of intolerable sickness; then a pain beat like a hammer on one side of his head. He staggered, and fell, headlong, at her feet.