The Splendid Folly Part 40

"I don't see how you can prevent it," she said dully.

"I? No; I can do nothing. But you can. Diana, beloved, have faith in me! I can't explain those things to you--not now. Some day, please G.o.d, I shall be able to, but till that day comes--trust me!" There was a depth of supplication and entreaty in his tone, but it left her unmoved. She felt frozen--pa.s.sionless.

"Do you mean--do you mean that Adrienne, your name, everything, is all part of--of what you can't tell me? Part of--the shadow?"

He was silent a moment. Then he answered steadily:--

"Yes. That much I may tell you."

She put up her hand and pushed back her hair impatiently from her forehead.

"I can't understand it . . . I can't understand it," she muttered.

"Dear, must one understand--to love? . . . Can't you have faith?"

His eyes, those blue eyes of his which could be by turns so fierce, so unrelenting, and--did she not know it to her heart's undoing?--so unutterably tender, besought her. But, for once, they awakened no response. She felt cold--quite cold and indifferent.

"No, Max," she answered wearily. "I don't think I can. You ask me to believe that there is need for you to see so much of Adrienne. At first you said it was because of the play. Now you say it has to do with this--this thing I may not know. . . . I'm afraid I can't believe it. I think a man's wife should come first--first of anything. I've tried--oh, I've tried not to mind when you left me so often to go to Adrienne. I used to tell myself that it was only on account of the play. I tried to believe it, because--because I loved you so.

But"--with a bitter little smile--"I don't think I ever _really_ believed it--I only cheated myself. . . . There's something else, too--the shadow. Baroni knows what it is--and Olga Lermontof. Only I--your wife--I know nothing."

She paused, as though expecting some reply, but Max remained silent, his arms folded across his chest, his head a little bent.

"I was only a child when you married me, Max," she went on presently.

"I didn't realise what it meant for a husband to have some secret business which he cannot tell his wife. But I know now what it means.

It's merely an excuse to be always with another woman--"

In a stride Max was beside her, his eyes blazing, his hands gripping her shoulders with a clasp that hurt her.

"How dare you?" he exclaimed. "Unsay that--take it back? Do you hear?"

She shrank a little, twisting in his grasp, but he held her remorselessly.

"No, I won't take it back. . . . Ah! Let me go, Max, you're hurting me!"

He released her instantly, and, as his hands fell away from her shoulders, the white flesh reddened into bars where his fingers had gripped her. His eyes rested for a moment on the angry-looking marks, and then, with an inarticulate cry, he caught her to him, pressing his lips against the bruised flesh, against her eyes, her mouth, crus.h.i.+ng her in his arms.

She lay there pa.s.sively; but her body stiffened a little, and her lips remained quite still and unresponsive beneath his.

"Diana! . . . Beloved! . . ."

She thrust her hands against his chest.

"Let me go," she whispered breathlessly, "Let me go. I can't bear you to touch me."

With a quick, determined movement she freed herself, and stood a little away from him, panting.

"Don't ever . . . do that . . . again. I--I can't bear you to touch me . . . not now."

She made a wavering step towards the door. He held it open for her, and in silence she pa.s.sed out and up the stairs. Presently, from the landing above, he heard the lock of her bedroom door click into its socket. . . .

CHAPTER XX

THE SHADOW FALLS

Breakfast, the following morning, was something of an ordeal. Neither Max nor Diana spoke to each other if speech could be avoided, and, when this was impossible, they addressed each other with a frigid politeness that was more painful than the silence.

Jerry and Joan, sensing the antagonism in the atmosphere, endeavoured to make conversation, but their efforts received scant encouragement, and both were thankful when the meal came to an end, and they were free to seek refuge in another room, leaving husband and wife alone together.

Diana glanced a trifle nervously at her husband as the door closed behind them. There was a coldness, an aloofness about him, that reminded her vividly of the early days of their acquaintances.h.i.+p, when his cool indifference of manner had set a barrier between them which her impulsive girlhood had been powerless to break through.

"Will you spare me a few minutes in my study?" he said. His face was perfectly impa.s.sive; only the peculiar brilliancy of his eyes spoke of the white-hot anger he was holding in leash.

Diana nodded silently. For a moment, bereft of words, she quailed before the knowledge of that concentrated anger, but by the time they had reached his study she had pulled herself together, and was ready to face him with a high temper almost equal to his own.

She had had the night for reflection, and the sense of bitter injustice under which she was labouring had roused in her the same dogged, unbending obstinacy which, in a much smaller way, had evinced itself when Baroni had thrown the music at her and had subsequently bade her pick it up.

But now that sense of wild rebellion against injustice, against personal injury, was magnified a thousandfold. For months she had been drifting steadily apart from her husband, acutely conscious of that secret thing in his life, and fiercely resentful of its imperceptible, yet binding influence on all his actions. Again and again she had been perplexed and mystified by certain incomprehensible things which she had observed--for instance, the fact that, as she knew, part of Max's correspondence was conducted in cipher; that at times he seemed quite unaccountably worried and depressed; and, above all, that he was for ever at the beck and call of Adrienne de Gervais.

Gradually she had begun to connect the two things--Adrienne, and that secret which dwelt like a shadowy menace at the back of everything. It was clear, too, that they were also linked together in the minds both of Baroni and Olga Lermontof--a dropped sentence here, a hint there, had a.s.sured her of that.

Then had come Olga's definite suggestion, "Adrienne de Gervais is a bad friend for the man one loves!" And from that point onward Diana had seen new meanings in all that pa.s.sed between her husband and the actress, and a blind jealousy had taken possession of her. Something out of the past bound her husband and Adrienne together, of that she felt convinced. She believed that the knowledge which Max had chosen to withhold from her--his wife--he shared with Adrienne--and all Diana's fierce young sense of possession rose up in opposition.

Last night, the sight of her husband and the actress, standing together on the stage, had seemed to her to epitomise their relative positions--Max and Adrienne, working together, fully in each other's confidence, whilst she herself was the outsider, only the onlooker in the box!

"Well?" she said, defiantly turning to her husband. "Well? What is it you wish to say to me?"

"I want an explanation of your conduct--last night."

"And I," she retorted impetuously, "I want an explanation of your conduct--ever since we've been married!"

He swept her demand aside as though it were the irresponsible prattle of a child, ignored it utterly. He was conscious of only one thing--that she had barred herself away from him, humiliated him, dealt their mutual love a blow beneath which it reeled.

The bolted door itself counted for nothing. What mattered was that it was she who had closed it, deliberately choosing to shut him outside her life, and cutting every cord of love and trust and belief that bound them together.

An Englishman might have stormed or laughed, as the mood took him, and comforted himself with the reflection that she would "get over it."

But not so Max. The sensitiveness which he hid from the world at large, but which revealed itself in the lines of that fine-cut mouth of his, winced under the humiliation she had put upon him. Love, in his idea, was a thing so delicate, so rare, that Diana's crude handling of the situation bore for him a far deeper meaning than the impulsive, headlong action of the over-wrought girl had rightly held. To Max, it signified the end--the denial of all the exquisite trust and understanding which love should represent. If she could think for an instant that he would have asked aught from her at a moment when they were so far apart in spirit, then she had not understood the ideal oneness of body and soul which love signified to him, and the knowledge that she had actually sought to protect herself from him had hurt him unbearably.

"Last night," he said slowly, "you showed me that you have no trust, no faith in me any longer."

And Diana, misunderstanding, thinking of the secret which he would not share with her, and impelled by the jealousy that obsessed her, replied impetuously:--

"Yes, I meant to show you that. You refuse me your confidence, and expect me to believe in you! You set me aside for Adrienne de Gervais, and then you ask me to--_trust_ you? How can I? . . . I'm not a fool, Max."

"So it's that? The one thing over which I asked your faith?" The limitless scorn in his voice lashed her.