The Immortal Moment Part 34

He said to himself that this fierceness, her pa.s.sionate perversity, all that was most unintelligible in her, was just Kitty's way--the way of a woman recklessly, adorably in love. It stirred in him the very depths of tenderness. When she was married (they must marry very soon) she would be happy; she would understand him; she would settle down.

He looked at his watch. "I'm afraid I must be going."

She glanced at the hands of the watch over his shoulder. "You needn't,"

she said. "It isn't really time."

"Well--five minutes."

The five minutes went. "Time's up," he said.

"Oh, no, Robert--not yet."

"Kitty--don't you want to see them?"

"I don't want you to go."

"I'm coming back."

"Yes, but it won't be the same thing. It never will be the same thing as now."

"Poor Kitty--I say, I _must_ go and meet them."

"Very well." She stood up. "Kiss me," she said.

She took his kiss as if it were the last that would be given her.

They went together to the hotel. Jane had started five minutes ago for the station.

"It's all right," he said. "I'll catch her up."

She followed to the gates and looked down the white road where Jane had gone.

"Let me come with you--just a little way--to the first lamp-post on the station road."

"Well, to the first lamp-post."

At the lamp-post she let him go.

She stood looking after him till he swung round the turn of the road, out of her sight. Then she went back, slowly, sad-eyed, and with a great terror in her heart.

CHAPTER XVII

It was not the thing she had confessed to him, fear of his little unseen children, it was terror, unconfessed, uncomprehended, as it were foreknowledge of the very soul of destiny clothed for her in their tender flesh and blood.

Up till now she had been careless of her destiny. She had been so joyous, so defiant in her sinning. By that charm of hers, younger than youth, indestructibly childlike, she had carried it through with the audacity of chartered innocence. She had propitiated, ignored, eluded the more feminine amenities of fate. Of course, she had had her bad moments. She had been sorry, sometimes, and she had been sick; but on the whole her powers had been splendidly recuperative. She had shown none of those naked tender spots that provoke destiny to strike. And with it all she had preserved, perhaps too scrupulously, the rules laid down for such as she. She had kept her own place. She had never attempted to invade the sanctuaries set apart for other women.

It was Robert who had tempted her to that transgression. He had opened the door of the sanctuary for her and shut it behind her and put his back against it. He had made her believe that if she stayed in there, with him, it would be all right. She might have known what would happen.

It was for such a moment, of infatuation made perfect, that destiny was waiting.

Kitty had no very luminous idea of its intentions. But she bore in her blood forebodings, older and obscurer than the flashes of the brain; and her heart had swift immortal instincts, forerunners of the mortal hours.

The powers of pain, infallibly wise, implacably just, would choose their moment well, striking at her through the hands of the children she had never borne.

If Robert found out what she was before he married her, he would have to give her up because of them. She knew better than he did the hold she had over him. She had tried to keep him in ignorance of her power, so great was her terror of what it might do to him, and to her through him.

Yet, with all her sad science, she remained uncertain of his ultimate behaviour. That was the charm and the danger of him. For fear of some undiscovered, uncalculated quality in him she had held herself back; she had been careful how she touched him, how she looked at him, lest her hands or her eyes should betray her; lest in his heart he should call her by her name, and fling her from him because of them. Whereas, but for them, she judged that whatever she was he would not give her up. She was not quite sure (you couldn't say _what_ a man like Robert would or wouldn't do), but she felt that if she could have had him to herself, if there had been only he and she, facing the world, then, for sheer chivalry, he simply couldn't have left her. Even now, once he was married to her it would be all right; he couldn't give her up or leave her; the worst he could do would be to separate her from them.

There was really no reason then why she should be frightened. He was going to marry her very soon. She knew that, by her science, though he had not said so. She would be all right. She would be very careful. It wasn't as if she didn't want to be nice and to do all the proper things.

And so Kitty cast off care.

Only, as she waited in the room prepared for the children, she looked at herself in the gla.s.s, once, to make sure that there was nothing in her face that could betray her. No; Nature had spared her as yet and her youth was good to her. Her face looked back at her, triumphantly reticent, innocent of memory, holding her charm, a secret beyond the secrets of corruption, as her perfect body held the mystery and the prophecy of her power. Besides, her face was different now from what it had been. Wilfrid had intimated to her that it was different. It was the face that Robert loved; it had the look that told him that she loved him, a look it never wore for any other man. Even now as she thought of him it lightened and grew rosy. She saw it herself and wondered and took hope. "That's how I look when I'm happy, is it? I'm always happy when I'm with him, so," she reasoned, "he will always see me like that; and it will be all right."

Anyhow, there would be no unhappiness about his pretty lady when he came back with them.

She smiled softly as she went about the room, putting the touches of perfection to the festival. There were roses everywhere; on the table, on the mantelpiece; the room was sweet with the smell of them; there was a rose on each child's plate. The tremulous movements of her hands betrayed the immensity and the desperation of her pa.s.sion to please.

The very waiter was touched by her, and smiled secretly in sympathy as he saw her laying her pretty lures. When he had gone she arranged the table all over again and did it better. Then she stood looking at it, hovering round it, thinking. She would sit here, and the children there, Janet between her and Robert, Barbara between her and Jane.

"Poor little things," she said, "poor little things." She yearned to them even in her fear of them, and when she thought of them sitting there her lips moved in unspoken, pitiful endearments.

The light from the south-west streamed into the little room and made it golden. Everything in it s.h.i.+mmered and shone. The window, flung wide open to the veranda, framed the green lawn and the s.h.i.+ning, s.h.i.+mmering sea. A wind, small and soft, stirred the thin curtains to and fro, fanning the warm air. The sunlight and heat oppressed her. She shut her eyes and put her hands over them to cool them with darkness. It was a trick she had when she was troubled.

She sat by the window and waited in the strange, throbbing darkness of hot eyes closed in daylight, a darkness smitten by the sun and shot with a fiery fume.

They were coming now. She heard feet on the gravel outside, round the corner; she heard Robert's voice and Janey's; and then little shuffling footsteps at the door, and two voices shrill and sweet.

Robert came in first and the children with him. They stood all three on the threshold, looking at her. Robert was smiling, but the little girls (they were very little) were grave. His eyes drew her and she came toward them as she was used to come to the things of her desire, swift and shy, with a trailing, troubling movement; the way that he had seen her come, swayed by the rhythm of impulse.

The children stood stock still as she stooped to them. Her fear of them made her supremely gentle. Little Barbara put up her round rose face with its soft mouth thrust forward in a premature kiss. Janet gave her a tiny hand and gazed at her with brooding, irresponsive eyes. Her little mouth never moved as Kitty's mouth touched it.

But little Barbara held out her spade and bucket for Kitty to see.

"Look, look," said little Barbara, "Daddy gave them me to build castles in the sand." Barbara spoke so fast that she panted, and laughed in a divine superfluity of joy.

Robert stood looking down from his tremendous height at Barbara, tenderly as one who contemplates a thing at once heartrending and absurd. Then his eyes turned to Kitty, smiling quietly as if they said, "Didn't I tell you to wait until you'd seen them?" Kitty's heart contracted with a sharp, abominable pang.

Then Janey took the little girls to the room upstairs where their nurse was. Barbara looked back at Kitty as she went, but Kitty's eyes followed Janet.

"Robert," she said, "will she always look at me like that? Shall I never know what she is thinking?"

"None of us know what Janet's thinking."

He paused.

"I told you we had to be very careful of her."

"Is she delicate?"