The Letter of the Contract Part 14

"You'll insist at the risk of having your feelings hurt."

"Oh, that!" A shrug of his shoulders and a wry smile expressed his indifference to such a result. "Did he ask you anything?"

She nodded, without turning from the window.

"Won't you tell me what it was? It would help me in my future dealing with the boy."

She continued to gaze out at the park-like fields, from which the mists had risen. "He asked me if you had done anything bad."

"And you told him--?"

"I told him that I didn't understand--that perhaps I'd never understood."

"Thank you for putting it like that. But you did understand, you know--perfectly. You mustn't have it on your conscience that--"

"Oh, we can't help the things we've got on our consciences. There's no way of shuffling away from them."

He allowed some minutes to pa.s.s before saying gently: "You're happy?"

She spoke while watching a flock of sheep trotting clumsily up a hillside from the noise of the train. "And you?"

"Oh, I'm as happy as--well, as I deserve to be. I'm not _un_happy." A pause gave emphasis to his question when he said, almost repeating her tone: "And you?"

"I suppose I ought to say the same." A dozen or twenty rooks alighting on an elm engaged her attention before she added: "I've no _right_ to be unhappy."

"One can be unhappy without a right."

"Yes; but one forfeits sympathy."

"Do you need sympathy?"

She answered hurriedly: "No, not at all."

"I do."

His words were so low that it was permissible for her not to hear them.

Perhaps she meant at first to make use of this privilege, but when a minute or more had gone by she said: "What for?"

"Partly for the penalties I've had to pay, but chiefly for deserving them."

It seemed to him that her profile grew pensive. Though it detached itself clearly enough against the pane, it was a soft profile, a little blurred in the outline, with delicate curves of nose and lips and chin--the profile to go with dimpling smiles and a suffused sweetness.

It pained him to notice that, though the suffused sweetness and the dimpling smiles were still as he remembered them, they didn't keep out of her face certain lines that had not been there when he saw her last.

"I think I ought to tell you," she said, after long reflection, "that I understand that sort of sympathy better now than I did some years ago.

One grows more tolerant, if that's the right word, as one grows older."

"Does that mean that if certain things were to do again--you wouldn't do them?"

She took on an air of dignity. "That's something I can't talk about."

"But you think about it."

"Even so, I couldn't discuss it--with you."

"But I'm the very one with whom you _could_ discuss it. Between us the conversation would be what lawyers call privileged."

She looked round at him for the first time since entering the compartment. "Is anything privileged between you and me?"

"Isn't everything?"

"I don't see how."

"We've been man and wife--"

"That's the very reason. No two people seem to me so far apart as those who've been man and wife--and aren't so any longer."

"And yet, in a way, no two are so near together."

Her eyes were full of mute questioning. He made no attempt to approach her, but in leaning across the upholstered arm of his seat he seemed to overcome some of the distance between them.

"No two are so near together," he went on, "for the very reason that when they're separated outwardly they're bound the more closely by the things of the heart and the soul and the spirit. After all, those are the ties that count. The legal dissolving of bonds and making of new ones is only superficial. It hasn't put you and me asunder--not the you and me," he hurried on, as something in her expression and att.i.tude seemed to indicate dissent, "not the you and me that are really essential. No court and no judge could dissolve the union we entered into when you were twenty-one and I was twenty-seven, and our two lives melted into each other like the flowing together of two streams. Neither judge nor court can resolve into their original waters the rivers that have already become one."

She smiled faintly, perhaps bitterly. "Doesn't your figure of speech carry you too far? In our case the judge and the court were only incidental. What really dissolved our union was--"

"I know what you're going to say. And it _was_ against the letter of the contract. Of course. I've never denied that, have I? But in every true marriage there's something over and above the letter of the contract--to which the letter of the contract is as nothing. And if ever there was a true marriage, Edith, ours was."

"Stop!" Her little figure became erect. Her eyes, which up to the present he had been comparing to forget-me-nots, as he used to do, now shone like blue-fired winter stars. "Stop, Chip."

"Why?"

"Because I ask you to."

"But why should you ask me to, when I'm only stating facts? It _is_ a fact, isn't it? that our marriage was a true one in every sense in which a marriage _can_ be true, till other people--no, let me go on!--till other people--your Aunt Emily most of all--advised you to exact your pound of flesh and the strict rigor of the law. I gave you your pound of flesh, Edith, right off the heart; so that if atonement could be made in that way--"

"Chip, _will_ you tell me what good there is in bringing this up now?

You're married to some one else, and so am I. We can't go back, because we've burned the bridges behind us--"

"But it's something to know that we'd go back if we could."

"I haven't said so."

"True."

He fell silent because of the impossibility of speech. He made no move to go. To sit with her in this way, without speaking, was like an obliteration of the last seven years, reducing them to a nightmare. It was a shock to him, therefore, when she pointed to a distant spire on a hill, saying:

"There's Harrow. We shall be in London in half an hour."

In London in half an hour, and this brief renewal of what never should have been interrupted would be ended! He recalled similar journeys with her over this very bit of line, when the arrival in London had been but the beginning of long delightful days together. And now he might not see her for another seven years; he might never see her any more. It was unnatural, incredible, impossible; and yet the facts precluded any rebellion on his part against them. Even if she were willing to rebel he couldn't do it--with a wife and boy in New York. He had married again on purpose to satisfy his longing for a child--a family. He felt very tenderly toward them, the little chap and his mother; but he was clear as to the fact that he felt tenderly toward them, pityingly tender, largely because when face to face with Edith he wished to G.o.d that they had never been part of his life. And doubtless she felt the same toward her Mr. Lacon and the child of that union. But she would never admit it--not directly, at any rate. He might gather it from hints, or read it between the lines; but he could never make her say so. Why should she say so? What good would it do? Were she to confess to him that she hated the man toward whom she was traveling, he would experience an unholy satisfaction--but, after all, it would be unholy.