The Creators Part 98

How could she?

She couldn't, even if she tried; not even afterwards, when she sat alone in that room of hers that reminded her so intolerably of Prothero.

To-night it reminded her still more intolerably of her dreadful self.

She had been afraid to enter it lest it should put her to the torture.

It was the place where her beast had gone out and in with her. It still crouched in the corner where she had kicked it. It was an unhappy beast, but it was not cruel any more. It could have crawled to Laura's feet and licked them.

For the Kiddy was such a little thing. It was impossible to feel hatred for anything so soft and so unintentionally sweet and small. Life had been cruel enough to Laura, before Owen married her. If it came to suffering, it was not conceivable that she should have been allowed to suffer more.

Nina put it to herself, beast or no beast, if she had had the power to take Owen from the Kiddy, to make the Kiddy suffer as she had suffered, could she have done it? Could she have borne to be, really, such a beast as that? Even if the choice had lain, innocently, between her own torture and the Kiddy's, could she have endured to see the little tender thing stretched out, in her place, on the rack? Of course she couldn't.

And since she felt like that about it, beast or no beast, wouldn't even Owen say that she was not so dreadful after all?

She remembered then that, though he had seen through her, he had never at any time admitted that she was dreadful. He had spoken rather as if, seeing _through_ her, he had seen things she could not see, fine things which he declared to be the innermost truth of her.

He must have known all the time that she would feel like that when she could bring herself to see Laura.

She saw through _him_ now. That was why he had insisted on her coming.

It was as if he had said to her, "I'm not thinking so tremendously of her. What I mean is that it'll be all right for you if you'll trust yourself to me; if you'll only come." He seemed to say frankly, "That beast of yours is really dreadful. It must be a great affliction to have to carry it about with you. I'll show you how to get rid of it altogether. You've only got to see her, Nina, in her heartrending innocence, wearing, if you would believe it, a mouse-coloured velvet gown."

That night Laura stood silent and thoughtful while Prothero's hands fumbled gently over the many little hooks and fastenings of the gown.

She let it slide with the soft fall of its velvet from her shoulders to her feet.

"I wish," she said, "I hadn't put it on."

He stooped and kissed her where the silk down of her hair sprang from her white neck.

"Does it think," he said, "that it crushed poor Nina with its beauty?"

She shook her head. She would not tell him what she thought. But the tears in her eyes betrayed her.

LI

It was April in a week of warm weather, of blue sky, of white clouds, and a stormy south-west wind. Brodrick's garden was sweet with dense odours of earth and sunken rain, of young gra.s.s and wallflowers thick in the borders, and with the pure smells of virgin green, of buds and branches and of lime-leaves fallen open to the sun. Outside, among the birch-trees, there was a flas.h.i.+ng of silver stems, a shaking of green veils, and a triumphing of bright gra.s.s over the blown dust of the suburb, as the spring gave back its wildness to the Heath.

Brodrick was coming back. He had been away a fortnight, on his holiday.

He was to have taken Jane with him but at the last moment she had been kept at home by some ailment of the child's. They had been married more than three years now, and they had not been separated for as many nights and days. In all his letters Brodrick had stated that he was enjoying himself immensely and could do with three months of it; and at the end of a fortnight he had sent Jane a telegram to say that he was coming back.

She was waiting for him, walking in the garden, as she used to wait for him more than three years ago, in excitement and ecstasy. The spring made her wild with the wildness of her girlhood when the white April evenings met her on her Dorset moors.

She knew again the virgin desire of desire, the poignant, incommunicable pa.s.sion, when the soul knows the body's mystery and the body half divines the secret of the soul. She felt again that keen stirring of the immortal spirit in mortal sense, her veins were light, they ran fire and air, and the fine nerves aspired and adored. At moments it was as if the veils of being shook, and in their commotion all her heights and depths were ringing, reverberant to the indivisible joy.

It was so until she heard Brodrick calling to her at the gate. And at his voice her wedded blood remembered, and she came to him with the swift feet, and the flushed face uplifted, and the eyes and mouth of a bride.

Up-stairs Gertrude Collett was dressing for dinner. She looked out at her window and saw them walking up and down the long alley of the kitchen garden, like children, hand in hand.

They were late for dinner, which was the reason, Brodrick thought, why the Angel of the Dinner (as Jane called her) looked annoyed.

They were very polite and kind to her, sustaining a conversation devised and elaborated for her diversion.

Gertrude was manifestly not diverted. She congratulated Brodrick on his brilliant appearance, and said in her soft voice that his holiday had evidently done him good, and that it was a pity he hadn't stayed away a little longer. Brodrick replied that he didn't want to stay away longer.

He thought Gertrude looked fatigued, and suggested that a holiday would do her good. She had better take one.

"I wish you would," said Jane.

"We both," said Brodrick, "wish you would."

Gertrude said she never wanted to take holidays. She got on better without them. Jane looked at Brodrick.

"I might have gone with you," she said. "After all, Baby never did have convulsions."

"I knew he wouldn't," said Brodrick, and remembered that it was Gertrude who had said he would.

A pause in the dialogue robbed Gertrude's next remark of any relevance it might have had.

"We've seen," said she, "a good deal of Mr. Tanqueray." (Another pause.) "I wonder how Mrs. Tanqueray gets on."

"I imagine," said Brodrick, "that she never did get on with him."

"I meant--without him."

"Oh." He caused the conversation to flourish round another subject.

In the drawing-room, where Gertrude did not follow them all at once, Jane turned to him.

"Hugh," she said, "was I unkind to her?"

"Unkind?"

"Well, was I kind enough?"

"You are always kind," he said.

"Do you think so? Do you really think so?"

"Don't talk about her, Jinny, I've got other things to attend to."

"What things?"

He put his arm round her and drew her to their seat beside the hearth.

So drawn, so held, she looked in his face and smiled that singular smile of hers that he found so adorable and incomprehensible.

"I'm tired of being made love to. I'm going," she said, "to fling off all maidenly reserve and make love to you."

She put away his arm from her and rose and seated herself with audacity on his knees.