A FORSAKEN TEMPLE
BY ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK
Author of “The Rescue,” “The Confounding of Camelia,” “The Dull Miss Archinard,” etc.
“IT is the emptiness, the loneliness, the lack of response and understanding,” said Milly. “It is as if I looked always at a face that never smiled at me or spoke to me. Such a mistake as I have made, or as others have made for me, is irretrievable. An unhappy marriage makes ruins all about one; one must dwell in the midst of ruins thenceforth; one can’t go away and leave them behind one, as one can other calamities in life.”
Milly Quentyn and Mrs. Drent were alone this afternoon in the big country house where they had come really to know each other, and Milly, acting hostess for her absent cousin, had poured out Mrs. Brent’s tea and then her own, leaving it untouched, however, while she spoke, her hands falling, clasped together, in her lap, her eyes fixed on vacancy. The contemplation of ruins for the last five years had made these eyes steady holders of a pensive resignation; they showed no tearful repinings, no fretful restlessness. They were clear eyes, large and luminous, and in looking at them, and at the wan, lovely little face where they bloomed like melancholy flowers, Mrs. Drent’s face, on the other side of the tea-table, grew yet more somber and more intent in its brooding sympathy.
“Why did you,” she began—”why did you—love him?” This was a more penetrating question than to ask Mrs. Quentyn why she had married him.
The extreme lowness of Mrs. Drent’s voice muffled, as it were, its essential harshness; one felt in it the effort to be soft, as in her one felt an effort, always, to quell some latent fierceness, an eager, almost savage energy. She was thirty years old—six years older than Milly Quentyn. Her skin was swarthy; her eyes, under broad, tragically bent eyebrows, were impenetrably black. Her features’ had they not been so small,” so finely finished, would have seemed too emphatic; as it was, they were significant at once of a race-horse nervousness and of something inflexible in the midst of an expression all flexibility. Her hands were curiously slight and small, and as she now, in looking at her companion and in asking her question, locked them together with a force that made them tremble, they showed the same mingling of an excessive strength informing an excessive fragility.
Mrs. Quentyn’s gaze drifted to her, and rested upon her in silence. Presently she smiled.
“How kind you are to care so much, to care at all!”
“I do care.”
“Are you—will you be—my friend—always?” asked Milly, leaning toward her a little, and the smile seemed to flutter to the other woman like an appealing and grateful kiss.
“I am your friend; I will be your friend—always,” Mrs. Drent replied in an even lower tone than before.
The tears just came softly into Milly’s eyes, while they looked at each other, she gently, Mrs. Drent still somberly. Then, leaning back again with a sigh, Milly said:
“Why I loved him? I did n’t love him. Is n’t that the almost invariable answer? I was nineteen. I was in love with my own ideal of love, which amounts to saying, probably, that I was in love with myself; ready to love anybody who echoed that love nicely. You know, you must know, the silly, pathetic, sentimental, and selfish mixture one is at nineteen; and mamma said that he was that ideal, and I believed her and him. Poor Dick! He was in love, I think, really, and not a bit with himself; but not very articulate, even then. You know mamma. She has married us all off very well, they say—you know how they say it. She is as careless of the single life in her ruthless eagerness for the comfortable ensconcing of the family type as nature itself. In this case an apparently very cozy niche offered itself for me, and she shoved me into it. I have grown since then, and the niche is hardly a foothold.”
“But he still loves you?”
“Oh, I suppose so,” said Milly, with a sigh, “if you call it love. He is rather dismayed by the situation; only rather; sorry that we don’t ‘get on better,’ as he would express it; jocosely resigned to my unkindness and queerness, as he considers it. But as for tragedy, suffering, one can’t associate such perturbing things with imperturbable Dick. I have n’t to reproach myself with having hurt his life seriously, and Heaven knows I don’t reproach his simplicity and harmlessness for having broken mine. Marriage and a wife were incidents—incidents only—to him, and if they have failed to be satisfactory incidents, he has other far more absorbing interests in his life to take his mind off the breakdown of his domestic happiness. Indeed, domesticity, when he cares to avail himself of it, is always there in its superficial forms and ceremonies. I can’t pretend to love him, but I take care of his money and house, I entertain his friends, I give him his tea and breakfast and a decorous kiss when he comes back from shooting animals in some savage country. One could hardly call us separated, so discreetly do I bridge the chasm with all the conventional observances. Thank Heaven! the shooting is his one great passion, so that he is usually wandering happily in distant jungles, and not requiring too many tête-à-têtes at breakfast of me.”
“And—why can’t you love him?”
Milly’s eyes now definitely fixed themselves on her, and they were solemn.
“My dear—you loved your husband, did you not?”
Mrs. Drent’s husband had died five years before. She wore black, exquisite and unobtrusive, always. Exquisitely and unobtrusively, she was unconsolable. Her face crimsoned painfully, although no tears came to her eyes.
“Everybody knows you did,” said Milly. “And why? Because he meant everything to you: my husband means nothing to me. Because you needed him: nothing in me needs Dick. Because he interested, charmed you: my husband bores me to intensest desperation. Because he understood what there was most individual, most real in you,”—Milly was drawing largely upon her imagination in this effective picture of Mrs. Drent’s married happiness,—”and responded to it. I don’t claim at all any remarkable individuality; but what I have Dick does n’t understand at all, does n’t even see. He is blundering about the dullest, most distant parks and preserves of a castle; that is as near as he ever gets to the castle of my personality. And Dick does n’t really care much about getting to the castle; it hardly worries him that he can’t find it. There might be wonderful pictures on its walls, and jewels in its cabinets, and music in its chambers; but even if he got to it, were able to enter and to see and hear, he would n’t really care one bit about them; would say, ‘Awfully nice,’ and look for the smoking-room. And there,” said Mrs. Quentyn, suddenly leaning forward, her eyes again filling with swift tears, as from a pictorial appreciation of her situation its reality smote upon her—”there is the tragedy. For every woman thinks that she has pictures and jewels and music, and longs—oh, longs!—to show them to the one—the one person who will love to see and to hear. And when she finds that the one can’t see, can’t hear, does n’t even know that there is anything to look for, to listen for, then the music dies, and the pictures fade, and the jewels grow dim, and at last everything magical vanishes from life, and she sees herself, not as an enchanted castle, but as a first-class house in Mayfair—with all the modern improvements; as much a matter of course, as much a convenience, as unmysterious and as unalluring, as the hot-water pipes, the bath-tubs, and the electric lighting. It is only as if in a dream—a far, far dream—that she remembers the castle, and feels sometimes within her the ruins, the empty ruins.”
“Oh—dearest!” breathed Mrs. Drent. It was as if she could not help it, as if, shaken from her passionate reserve, she must show her very heart. She clasped the other woman’s hands. “Don’t—don’t let the magic vanish! Don’t cease to believe in the pictures, the jewels, the music! They are there, I see. I hear.”
“How—sweet of you!” faltered Milly Quentyn.
She was startled, she was touched; she, who rarely felt it, felt shyness. She had known that this dark, still woman was attracted to her; responsively, she had felt attraction; something in Mrs. Drent had made her feel, too, that it would be easy, a relief, to talk to her about all one’s miseries and desolations. But the sudden leap of flame found her unprepared. She was a little ashamed, as though her own reality were somewhat unreal beside Mrs. Brent’s intense belief in it Something pleasant there had been to her in the tracing of her little tragedy, something sweet in the showing of that sad castle of her soul, with its stilled music, its fading enchantments. But Mrs. Drent had seen only the sadness, the tragedy. Such response, such understanding, might well take one’s breath away.
But in this scene of showing and of seeing was the beginning of their long friendship.
It was a charming friendship, to both very becoming. Milly Quentyn, for all the clouds of her background, was a creature of sunshine, though sunshine in a mist; a creature of enduring fluctuations. Indeed, Christina Drent told her afterward, when they analyzed the beginnings, it had been her childlike radiance, her smiles, her air as of rifts of blue over a rainy landscape (for everybody knew that Mrs. Quentyn was not happy with her husband)—it was these sweet, these doubly pathetic qualities that had charmed her.
“I am not easily charmed,” said Christina. “Had there been a languishing hint of the femme incomprise about you, any air of self-pity, I should never have so longed to take care of you—to try to help to make you happier. But you were so made for happiness; one saw it; it appealed to everything in one.”
In spite of these defects, had Milly had them, she might, perhaps, have so longed. For Christina Drent’s likings were as vehement, as absorbing, as they were rare, and did not permit her much critical acuteness once they held her.
The death of her husband had left her stricken numb, dumb, it seemed. She could hardly speak of him. Yet it was whispered that Gilbert Drent had married her for her money, and that it was not only in material matters that she had given more than she received. He had been, of course, as charming to his wife as he was to everybody else. Certainly he had never let her discover any lack in him, and certainly in her there had been, especially at the time of their marriage, little to attract his beauty-loving nature. She was then an ugly, silent, horribly shy little thing. Only since his death had a few discriminating people discovered that her face was as full of charm as of force and reticence; discovered that she was really clever; and only two years before her meeting with Milly did she astonish the undiscriminating by suddenly becoming a very tolerably famous young poetess. It was as the poetess that Milly had really first known her (though for years they had met vaguely), a somber little personage, not pretty, but—oh! full of delicious buts—and most enchantingly well dressed—so Milly had summed her up. How often she and Christina laughed together over the summing!
In the poetry the dumbness, the numbness, had found a partial outlet and awakening. Mrs. Drent’s poems were not great things, but they were quite sufficiently simple, sincere, strangely original, to make her name stand by itself in a dignified little niche among the poets of the last decade. They were written with no touch of artifice, no strain or effort. They were sudden, spontaneous, swift. It was as if, in reading them, one heard a distant wail in a desolate country—always distant; as if one saw, across a bleak sky, the flight of an unknown bird. They were troubling, haunting, with here and there a sweetness helpless and poignant, more touching, even, than the vague wildness of their great regrets and longings.
But it was, indeed, only an echo of her regrets and longings that Christina was able to put into her poems—all, perhaps, that she chose to put; they were never intimate, personal.
The essence of her was that passionate reserve, and, with it, that passionate longing to devote herself, to expend herself, blindly, lavishly, exclusively upon one idolized, and inevitably idealized, object. She was full of a fervor of faith once the reserve, the shyness, was passed, and her ideal, high on a pedestal in its well-built temple, was secure thenceforth from overthrow.
Such an idol had her husband been. The doors of that sanctuary were sealed forever, the sacred emptiness forever empty. But beside it arose a second temple, scarcely less fair, and in it, lovingly enshrined, stood Milly Quentyn.
Happily Milly was an ideal worthy of idealization, perhaps even of temple-building. She was sweet, tender, clinging; in friendship most upright and loyal. She loved to be loved, to see her sweetness reflected in appreciation, her tenderness blossom about her in responsive tenderness. She was not vain, but she loved those she cared for to find her exquisite, and to show her that they did. Like a faint, frail flower unvisited by sunlight, she could hardly live without other lives about her, fortifying, expanding her own. Her disappointment in her husband had turned to something like a wan disgust. His crude appreciations of her, that, in the first girlish trust of her married life, she had taken as warrant of all the subtle, manifold appreciations she needed, were now offenses. Poor Dick Quentyn blundered deeper and deeper into the quagmire of his wife’s disdain. Christina Drent, when she went to spend some months with Milly at the Quentyns’ country house, was sorry for Dick at once. Her heart echoed quickly the faintest note of pain; certainly in his perfectly good-humored yet, even now, rather wondering resignation she divined such a note: but even her exquisite acuteness was unable to do more than hear it as very faint indeed. His was a boyish, unexacting nature. He asked for no great things, and the lack of even small mercies left him serene. As he had never thought at all about himself, it did not surprise him that his wife thought very little of him; he did not, because of it, think of himself less well or more. Milly’s indifference argued in her a difference from most women—facilely contented. they usually seemed. It did not change or harm him, did not make him either self-assertive or self-conscious.
He had soon discovered that the things he cared to talk about wearied her—sport, the estate, very uncomplex politics, or very uncomplex books; and after a little while he discovered, further, that for him to try to adapt himself to her, to try to talk about the things she cared for, exasperated her. She listened, indeed, with a bleak patience while he admired genially, thinking it the right thing, all the wrong pictures at the shows where they went together. She sat silent, her eyes aloof, dimly smiling, while he tried to win her interest in a very jolly book—harmless, watered Dumas, decantered into very modern bottles. He saw that she made an effort to care about the big game he shot,—the hall and dining-room bristled with these trophies, one walked over them everywhere,—she looked at pictures of them in books of travel; but it was as pictures, as animals, not as sport, that they remotely interested her.
Dick Quentyn, with an unmysterious, undifficult wife, could have been a very gracefully affectionate husband,—his manners were as charming as his mind was blundering,—but with this chill young nymph any attempts at marital pettings and caressings seemed clumsy, grotesque. With Milly—he soon saw it—the barrier between their minds was inevitably to constitute a barrier shutting him from even those manifestations of affection: he was not at all dull in feeling that; not at all dull in his quick and delicate withdrawal before her passive distaste; not dull in knowing that if he were not to draw back, the distaste would become something more than negative.
He had now, cheerfully, it seemed, recognized that his marriage was a very thorough failure, and, as Milly had said, it did not seem, after an unpleasant wrench or two when he did show an uncontrollable grimace of pain, to make very much difference to him. She endured him; she did not, indeed, dislike him at all—at a distance; and very gaily, and with a certain debonair manner of perfect trust, he kept at a distance. She led her life; he led his. He traveled constantly; it was very rarely that he required her to pour his tea for him. And she was very willing that the breach between them should not be crudely open and avowed.
Milly poured his tea for a fortnight during Christina’s first visit to Chawlton House, and, recognizing to the full, as she did, her hosts’ deep incongruity, Christina could but feel some dismay at the wife’s betrayal of her consciousness of it. Christina did not care so much about Dick’s very problematical discomfort under Milly’s cold, sweet endurance of him. He showed no discomfort at all; talked with great good spirits to her and to the other guests assembled for the fortnight’s shooting, made cheerful, obvious jokes, and looked eminently sane, fresh, strong, and even picturesque in his out-of-door attire against the paneled walls of the dining-room. He was large and spare; his small head well set; his hair closely cropped, but showing a resolute curl; his short nose expressive of pleasant character; his gray eyes as free from all malice and uncharitableness as they were from introspection. He was a nut-brown sort of person; one could associate him only with the most simple, concrete aspects of life. And yet the shape of his nails and the delightful fitness of his clothing, showing quite an esthetic sense of selection, bespoke a consciousness of the more complex niceties of civilization. Christina felt very keenly on the subject of nails, and Dick’s pleased her.
What pained her, though, was that Milly, in her treatment of him, should be almost unbeautiful. It was a streak of hardness, of almost cruelty, in her darling that distressed her. When Milly did not care about a person, every fiber of her face, every tone of her voice, expressed her weariness, her indifference—worse still, her oppression.
“Really, dear, you are not kind,” Christina protested.
Milly opened helpless eyes.
“If you were married to him—shackled for life—could you be more so?”
“Kind? Yes. Why not? Surely simple humanity. Can’t you treat him as kindly as if he were not shackled, too?”
“You blame me, Christina? You are displeased with me?”
They were very sincere with each other, these two; bared their souls to each other constantly. The daring frankness of their friendship charmed them, and it rested on such firm foundations of perfect trust.
“Yes, I do blame you, dearest Milly; and I am displeased with you just because you are so dear to me.” Mrs. Drent flushed a little as she looked tenderly at her friend. “I want to see you always right, exquisitely right. You make me uncomfortable when you are not. He has done you no wrong.”
“Oh, I know it, I know it! If only he had, it would be so much easier! He irritates me so immensely!” Milly wailed. “That labored chaffing of you this morning—how could you have borne it? I can’t pretend amusement, and chaff—a constant bidding for a cheap amusement—is his only conception of human intercourse. I know I am horrid—I know it; but it is the long, long accumulations of repressed exasperation that have made me so—worse than exasperations. I remember, during the first months of our married life, when I was becoming dreadfully frightened, catching glimpses on every side of my awful mistake—I remember once kissing him, saying something, apparently playful, but hiding such an appeal for comfort, comprehension, reassurance. Do you know, he answered me with a stupid, stupid jest—some piece of would-be-gallant folly. It was like a dagger! I have never forgiven him.”
“Perhaps he was shy,” Mrs. Drent murmured.
“Dick shy? No, no; he is not sensitive enough for shyness. He is n’t shy at all; only immensely—hideously stupid.”
The breach could not be healed. Christina recognized it sadly, recognizing, too, that she could hardly wish it healed, Dick and Milly being what they were.
What ground of meeting could there indeed be between them, Dick, a dear, child-like materialist, and Milly, compact of subtleties, profundities, ideals? And then, living in daily, delightful companionship with the sweet, dependent creature, she came to see that it was well for herself that the breach could never be healed. Could they have been so near had there not been that emptiness to fill? Milly meant too much to her; she could not have shared her with a husband, even with a husband who claimed only the commonplaces of the relationship; and in such a case, how horrid to see Milly submissive to commonplaces! No; after all, Dick’s little loss was her immense gain.
She passed most of the winter with Milly in the country. They read and rode, and walked and talked, and carried on energetic charities in the village. Mrs. Drent was full of ardent enthusiasms, and, in spite of her physical delicacy,—she had an unreliable heart,—she threw herself eagerly into organizing and beneficent action of all kinds.
Then Christina asked Milly to come and live with her in London, while Dick was away,—he was in Japan that winter,—and by degrees they both came to think of home as the being together. Christina’s little house near Sloane street became a center of charming hospitality; for Milly possessed the irradiating, attractive qualities that she herself lacked, counted as something of a touchstone for the finer, more delicate elements in the larger and necessarily undiscriminating vortex of London life. Mrs. Quentyn and Mrs. Drent almost accomplished the miracle of seeing only the people they liked. There were no jarring elements. They had an equal talent for selection. All their people came to them naturally, easily—the people who had done clever things; the people who, better still, shone only with latent possibilities and were the richer for their reticences; and dear, comfortable, unexacting people who were not particularly clever, but responsive, appreciative, and genuine.
Christina still wrote a little—not so much. She and Milly studied things, collected things; they traveled; and, in the country, did a great deal of gardening.
This life, with all its harmony, did not want its more closely knitting times of fear, as when Milly was dangerously ill and Christina nursed her through the long crisis, as when Christina’s heart showed alarming symptoms of breakdown and hurried them away to German watering-places.
There were funny little quarrels, too—funny to look back upon, though very painful at the moment, for Milly could be fretful, and Christina passionate in reproach. The swift reconciliations atoned for all, when, holding each other’s hands, they laughed at each other, each one eager to take all the blame.
Certain defects in each they came to recognize and to take into account; tolerant, loving comprehension, the ripest stage of affection, seeming achieved.
Milly was capricious, had moods of gloom and disconsolateness when nothing seemed to interest her,—neither books, nor music, nor people, not even Christina,—and when, sunken in a deep arm-chair in the drawing-room, she would listlessly tap her fingers on the chair-arms, her eyes empty of all but a monotonous melancholy. These moods always hurt Christina,—Milly herself seemed hardly aware of them, certainly not aware of their hurting,—but she hid the hurt in a gentle sympathy that averted tactful eyes from her friend’s retirement. She hid the hurt, she adapted herself, but she did not quite understand; for she never wished to retire into herself and away from Milly.
And Milly discovered that Christina could be unreasonable—so she tenderly termed a smoldering element in her friend; Christina, in fact, could be fiercely jealous.
“They both came to think of home as the being together”
They shared all their friends, many of them dear friends, but dear on a certain level below the illuminated solitude where she and Milly stood in their precious isolation. And Milly protested to herself she was the last person in the world to wish the isolation disturbed. No one knew her, understood her, loved her, as Christina did; it was truest, deepest, most devoted love; and in her eyes there was no one like Christina, no one so strong, so generous, so large-natured. Why, then, should Christina, like a foolish school-girl, show unmistakably—her efforts to hide it only making her look dim-eyed, white-lipped—a somber misery if Milly allowed any one to come too near her? This really piteous infirmity was latent in Christina; she did not show it during the first years of their companionship; it grew with her growing absorption in Milly. Milly discovered it when she asked little Joan Ashby to go to Italy with them. Christina, at the proposal, was all glad, frank acquiescence, she was so fond of Joan. Unsuspectingly Milly petted, made much of, the girl, whose adoration of herself was sweet to her. She went about with her, sight-seeing, when Christina said that she was tired and did not care to see things, not remembering that when they were alone together Christina had never seemed tired; she laughed and talked in Joan’s bedroom at night when Christina said that she was sleepy. All seemed peacefully normal. Milly was stupefied when, by degrees, a consciousness of a difference in Christina crept upon her.
Christina smiled much, was alert, crisply responsive; but ice was in the smile, the response was galvanized. She was suffering,—the realization rushed upon Milly once her innocent eyes were opened,—and all her strength went to hiding the suffering. Milly, watching, felt a helpless alarm, really a shyness, gaining upon her in the face of this odd development. She found foolish Christina sobbing in her room one night when she cut short her good-night visit to Joan and came upon her unexpectedly. Milly’s tender heart rose at a bound over alarm and shyness; but when she ran to her, Christina pushed her fiercely away. “You know! Of course you know! Go back to her, if you like her better!” She was like a frantic child. Milly could have laughed, had not the exhibition in her grave, stanch Christina frightened her too much, made her too terribly sorry, almost ashamed, for her.
Later, when Christina, laughing quiveringly at her own folly, yet confessing her powerlessness before it, put her arms around her neck and begged for her forgiveness, Milly, in all her soft, humorous reproaches, daring now to tease and rally, had yet the chill of a new discovery about her heart. A weight seemed to have come upon her as she realized how much Christina cared. She had not before thought of their friendship as a responsibility. It was dear, too dear, too silly, too pathetic in Christina, but it seemed to manacle her.
She must be very careful to like no Joans too much in the future. Christina passionately protested that she must talk to Joan, love Joan, any number of Joans, old or young, male or female, as much as before, more indeed, since now her folly was dissipated by confession; but Milly, in her heart, knew better than to believe her. She filled Christina’s life completely, to the exclusion of any other deep affection, and Christina could never be happy unless her friend’s life were as undivided.
During these five years of feminine David and Jonathan Mr. Quentyn had wandered about the world, not at all disconsolately. He spent several seasons with friends in India; he went to Australia and to America; when he came home he stayed a great deal in Scotland, and in England took an interest in racing that largely filled his time.
It was almost as a guest that, in the country and in his own house, he passed a few weeks with Milly and Christina and with all the other people they had about them. It was as guest entirely that he dined with Christina and Milly in London. It was a rather ludicrous situation, but Mr. Quentyn did not seem depressed or even abashed by it. Christina always felt that by some boyish intuition he recognized in her a friendly sympathy—a sympathy that he must certainly see as terribly detached, since it was she who had now fixed definitely Milly’s removal from his life, made it permanent, given it a motive, as it were. But it was a sympathy very friendly, even slightly humorous, since he, with a silent, unemphatic humor, was so humorous about it all. He would catch her dark eyes sometimes as he sat, a guest, at her dinner-table (he never took in Milly; all the negations of married life were still his), and in them he saw, and responded to, an almost playful friendliness.
“He is such a perfect dear, you know,” Christina often said to Milly, and Milly, smiling, had owned that he was indeed. His attitude, Christina fancied, had begun to impress his wife at its proper value. She was certainly far nicer to him than she used to be. The new effectiveness and happiness of her own life made niceness less of an effort. From her illumined temple she smiled at him—a smile that kept its sweetness and more and more lost its chill. She handed on to him a little of the radiance.
“Since we can’t hit it off together, Milly, I must say there is no one you could have chosen for a friend that I could have liked so much as Mrs. Drent,” Dick said to his wife one evening, in the drawing-room, after dinner. They often had an affable chat before the wondering eyes of the world. Milly chatted with the greatest affability. Dick was a dear. Surely no one could have reminded her less of shackles.
“Now, Dick,” she said, smiling, “what do you find to like in Christina?” Even in her new kindliness there lurked touches of the old, irrepressible disdain.
Dick, twisting his mustache, contemplated her. “Do you mean to say that I am not capable of liking anything or anybody that you do?” he inquired.
Milly flushed, though the mildness of her husband’s tone, one of a purely impersonal interest, suggested no conscious laying of a coal of fire upon her head. It was what she had meant. That Dick should like Christina, Christina Dick, was wholly-delightful; but that Dick should seem to like what she liked, should seem to like it for the same reasons, irked her a little. It was rather as if he had expressed enthusiasms about some favorite Brahms ballade of hers. She rather wanted to show him that any idea he might entertain of a community of tastes was illusory. How could Dick like a Brahms ballade, he whose highest ideals of music were of something sweetly, sedatively unexacting after a day’s hard riding? How could Dick really like Christina? If he really did, and for any of her reasons, there must be between them the link, if ever so small a one, of a community of tastes—a link that she had never recognized. The thought of it held a distinct sting of self-reproach.
“I think we could only like the same things in a very different way,” she confessed. “Why do you like Christina?”
He did not reply at once, and she went on looking at him, smiling,—they were sitting side by side on a little sofa,—”It is n’t her charm; for you think her ugly.”
“Yes; she ‘s ugly, certainly,” Dick assented, quite as dully as she had hoped he would, “though her figure is rather nice.”
Milly’s smile shifted to its habitual, kindly irony. “She is delicate and tactful and very, very clever,” she said, rehearsing to herself, as much as to him, all the reasons why Dick could not really like Christina; “her truths would never blunder, her silences never bore.” “As Dick’s did,” was in her mind; it was cruel to be conscious of the contrast when he looked at her with such unconsciousness; to reassure herself with the expression of it was rather like mocking something blind, deaf, and trusting.
A sudden pity confused her, and with a little artificiality of manner, that masked the confusion, she went on: “One could never be unhappy without her knowing it and then one would be glad she did know, for she can sympathize without hurting you with sympathy. She feels everything that is beautiful or rare, everything that is sad or tragic; she feels everything, sees everything, but she sees and feels in order to act, to give, to help. Is it all this you like in her?” Milly finished very gently.
Mr. Quentyn still looked mildly at his wife.
“Yes, I suppose so,” he said.
“You recognize these reasons?”
“In a different way,” he smiled. It was almost a very clever smile; Milly might have felt rather startled at it had he not gone on, very simply: “One sees that she is such a thoroughly good sort; so loyal,—she would go through thick and thin for any one she cared about,—and so kind, as you say; she would talk as nicely to a dull person as to an awfully clever one; she ‘d never snub one, or make one feel uncomfortable.”
For a moment Milly was silent. “Do you mean that I used to snub you—make you uncomfortable?” she then asked.
“Oh, I say, Milly!” Dick, genuinely distressed, looked his negative. “You did n’t suppose—”
“I know that I was often horrid.”
“Well, if you were, you did n’t suppose I ‘d tell you in that roundabout fashion. Besides, all that ‘s done with long ago.” He looked away from her now, down at the floor.
Again Milly was silent. Strangely to herself, she felt her eyes fill with tears. She waited till she had conquered them before saying very gently:
“Dick, do forgive me for being horrid.”
He stared up at her. “Forgive you, Milly?” The request seemed to leave him speechless.
She was able to smile gaily at him.
“You do?”
“You never were. It ‘s more to the point for me to ask you to forgive me.”
“For what, pray?” She had to control a quiver in her voice.
“Oh, for everything—for being so wrong—so altogether the wrong person, you know,” said Dick, smiling gaily too. He again looked away from her, across the room, now, at Christina; and after a silence, filled, for Milly, with perplexing impulses, he added: “But the real reason I like her so much is that she is so tremendously fond of you.”
Milly had to bring her thoughts with an effort back to Christina; she must let his remark about being forgiven remain as casual as he had felt it, and, indeed, his last words even more emphatically held her attention.
She thought of them all the evening, after he had gone; and, while her hair was being brushed, she looked at her reflection in the mirror and thought of that “long ago.” It was as if Dick had shown her a quiet, a dead thing, and had turned the key on it with the words.
She looked in the mirror: surrounded by the softly falling radiance of her hair, her face was still girlish in tint and outline; but already her eyes had in them the look of time lived through, her cheeks were dimly wasted, her lips differently sweet.
She was accustomed to think of herself as a much-admired woman, as a beautiful woman; this evening, as the realization of time’s swift passage stole upon her, a vague, strong protest filled her, a sense of deep, irremediable disappointment with life.
Mr. Quentyn that winter went to Africa, and Milly gave her husband a farewell all kindness, all composure, when he came to bid Christina and her good-by. She did not know that she was not composed, though she did know that her kindness was greater than any she expressed.
Dick always wrote punctually, once a fortnight, to his wife, short bulletins, to which, as accurately and as laconically, she responded. This winter the bulletins were often delayed, sometimes altogether missing. Dick had joined an exploring party, and his allusions, by the way, to “narrow shaves,” “nasty rows with natives,” and “a rather bad fever,” explained these irregularities.
“He really ought to write a book about it. They have evidently had most perilous adventures,” Christina said, during a sympathetic perusal of these documents, which were always handed on to her, as, for any intimacy they contained, they might have been handed on to anybody; they began “Dear Milly,” and ended “Yours aff’ly, D. Q.” The “affectionately” was always abbreviated.
“I suppose they are in a good deal of danger,” said Milly, nibbling at her toast—they were at breakfast.
“That, I suppose, was what they went for,” Christina replied, her eyes passing over the letter as they might have passed over a newspaper.
Milly, leaning her elbow on the table, watched her read. “Poor Dick!” she said presently.
Christina had laid down the letter and was going on with her coffee. “Why poor, dear?”
“If he were killed to-morrow I suppose it would hardly affect us more than the death of any of the men who had tea here yesterday.”
“Milly!” said Christina; she put down her coffee-cup.
“Would it?” Milly insisted. “Would you mind more?”
“Your husband—my child!” This elder-sister mode of address was often Christina’s.
“Why should a husband one has n’t been able to live with count for as much as a friend one is glad to see?”
“Because he has counted for so much.”
“All the same, Christina, you can’t deny that you would hardly be sorry, and that you would not expect me to be sorry—only solemn.”
“I should expect you to be both.”
“Sorry for a man I have no affection for—a man I have almost hated?”
“Yes; if only for these reasons—and that it should be only for these reasons is what you meant when you said ‘poor Dick!'” Christina demonstrated it.
Milly was thinner, paler; Christina noticed that, though she hardly noticed how often she returned to the subject of her husband’s danger, the pathos of her own indifference to it. And Milly’s listless moods followed one another so closely this winter as to be almost permanent. She was evidently bored. More and more frequently, when she talked to her over their tête-à-tête tea, the very dearest hour of the day, Christina saw that Milly did not hear her. After these five years of comprehension and forbearance this apparent indifference could not, at first, seriously disturb her; hurt her it always did. Picking up a book, with a smile of loving humor for Milly’s absorption, she would read and cease to talk. The mood always passed the sooner for not being recognized; she would come out of the cloud, unaware of it, sunnier, sweeter, more responsive than before. But this winter she did not come out. That Milly should be so indifferent, so bored, so apathetic, began to disturb as well as hurt Christina. Then came a quick pulsing of fear: did some new attachment account for it? But her mind, in a swift, flame-like running around the circle of possibilities, saw them all as impossibilities, and put away that fear.
One day, taking Milly’s face between her hands, yet feeling, strangely, a sudden shyness that made a complete confession of her vague alarms impossible, she asked her if she were unhappy.
“Unhappy, dear Christina? Why should I be?” Milly put an affectionate arm about her friend’s neck.
“But are you? Is there anything you would like to do? Anywhere you would like to go? I am sure that you are frightfully bored.” Christina smiled. “Confess that you are.”
“No, dear, no. Have I seemed bored? No. I can’t think of anything that would interest me. One comes on these Sahara-like times in life, you know—stretches of dull, dull sands. Or is it that I am getting old, Christina?”
“You old—you child!”
“I feel old,” said Milly, “really old and tired.”
Christina still smiled at her, but smiled over a something choking in her throat. It was not sympathy for her friend’s Weltschmerz made that hurting constriction; it was the recognition of her remoteness from her, the recognition of something in her eyes, her voice,—something she could not analyze,—as if a faint barrier wavered, impalpable, formless, between them, and as if, did she say that it was there, beg to break through, it would change suddenly to stone, and perhaps shut her away forever.
All winter she battled with the unseen terror, able still to tell herself that she was a fool. Of two things she was sure: there was no one else, and Milly herself did not know there was a barrier, did not recognize her own remoteness. It was her unconsciousness of any change that was Christina’s only comfort—a bleak, shivering comfort. Strange, strange, that in the heart of her great love should be this fear. What was it in Milly that made her feel that to cry out all her doubts, her follies, perhaps her unhappiness, would only be to make more permanent that remoteness?
Christina looked forward to a trip to Greece and Sicily as a definite goal. Milly had shown some interest in the idea of a two months’ wandering among the whispering ruins of the past. They were to sail from Marseilles in April, and in talking over plans, getting up information, burnishing historical memories, Milly had shown some of her old, girlish eagerness. She had even read over again the Greek tragedies to steep herself in the proper atmosphere. It was, therefore, with a shock of bitter surprise, bitter disappointment, and, at once, a dim, dark foreboding, that Christina one day, only a week before the time fixed for their departure, heard Milly announce, flushing slightly, slightly averting her eyes, that she thought she would give up the trip, she would rather spend the spring at Chawlton; and, at once going on, as if with a recovery of composure, looking clearly at her friend:
“You see, dear, I have just had a letter from Dick. He gets back next week, and is going down there. He says he wants to see the primroses after that horrid Africa—quite a poetical yearning, is n’t it, for Dick! And I think it would really be a little too brutal of me—would n’t it?—if I sailed off without seeing him at all—without pouring his tea for even one week!”
Milly was smiling, really with her own light gaiety; the momentary look of evasion had passed. Christina was convinced of her own misinterpretation. Duty had called Milly away from pleasure, and she had feared, a little, that her friend would think too much sacrificed to it.
“Of course, dearest; of course we will put it off,” she cried, “and of course we will go down to welcome home the wanderer.”
Milly kissed her. “After all, it is a pity to miss primroses,” she said.
The packing projects turned topsy-turvy, servants to be redistributed, plans countermanded, Christina saw to all; while Milly, with still her new cheerfulness, flitted in the spring sunshine from shop to shop, decking herself in appropriate butterfly garments. They were to get to Chawlton House only a day or two before Dick’s arrival.
The gardens, the lawns, the woods, were radiant with spring, and Milly, in the environment of jocund revival, shared the radiance. All barriers seemed gone, were it not that Christina, full of strange presages, felt the very radiance to make one.
Milly gathered primroses in the woods, hatless, her white dress and fair head glimmering and shining among the young grays and greens. She came in laden with flowers, and the house smiled with their pale gold, their innocent and fragile gaiety.
“Is n’t the country delicious?” she said to Christina. “Much, much nicer than dreary Greece and tiresome ruins, is n’t it?”
“Much,” said Christina, who was finding the country, the spring, the sunshine, the very primroses, full of a haunting melancholy.
Christina “broke into an agony of sobs”
“I have a thirst for simplicity and freshness and life,” Milly went on, looking at the sky, “and here one feels that one has them—oh, the cuckoo, Christina! is n’t it a sound that makes one think of tears—and happiness!”
Of tears only, not of happiness, thought Christina; of regret—regret for something gone—gone, lost forever. The cuckoo’s cry pierced her all day long.
Simplicity and freshness and life—Christina did not recall the words definitely when she saw Dick Quentyn spring up the steps to greet his wife at the threshold of the house; but something unformulated echoed in her mind with a deepened sense of presage.
Milly stretched out both her hands. “Welcome home, Dick,” she said; and she held her cheek to be kissed. There was no restraint or shyness in her eyes, nothing that foreboding could fix and dwell upon. She looked at the bronzed, stalwart, smiling being with as open and happy a gaze as though he had been an oak-tree. The happiness of gaze was new, but it was only part of Milly’s revival; and, then, he had been in danger. Christina took comfort, she knew not for what.
“It is good to be at home again,” Dick asseverated more than once during the day; “and, I say, how jolly those primroses look!” he exclaimed in the long, white drawing-room.
Milly, holding Christina’s hand, stood beside him.
“I gathered them, Dick—all of them, and arranged them, in honor of your return.”
“Oh, come, now!” Mr. Quentyn ejaculated, with humorous incredulity.
Milly smiled, making no protest. He, she, and Christina walked together about the grounds. Christina had felt a curious, shrinking from joining them—a shrinking, in any normal condition of things between husband and wife, so natural that it was only with a slowly growing amazement that she recognized its monstrousness as applied to those conditions. She leave Milly alone with her husband! What a revolution in all their relations would such a withdrawal have portended! To do so would be to yield to those vague alarms, to make them real, to make them visible to Milly, perhaps; and Milly certainly did not see them.
She still held Christina’s hand drawn within her arm while they walked and listened to Mr. Quentyn’s laconic recital of his African adventures.
“I am pretty sick of it, I can tell you,” he said, smiling at the friends. “I sha’n’t be off again on anything of that sort for a long time.”
“What will you do, Dick?” Milly asked.
“Oh, I shall drift about a bit; this is quite good enough for me.”
That evening in the drawing-room he joined Christina, who was sitting alone, looking out at the evening.
“As inseparable as ever, you and Milly, are n’t you?” he said, coming and standing over her, his genial eyes upon her.
Christina, as always, felt that his chief impression of the situation was its enormous humorousness.
“Just as inseparable,” she assented, looking up at him; she smiled with an emphasis that was faintly defiant, though neither she nor Dick recognized defiance.
“Milly is looking a little fagged, don’t you think?” he went on. “Has she been doing too much this winter? You are frightfully busy, are n’t you, always? Milly likes going at a great pace, I know.”
“I should not have thought there was anything noticeable,” said Christina; “she was a little fagged, perhaps, but the country has already refreshed her wonderfully.”
“Oh, it was nothing to speak of, really. London always does pull one down a bit.” He went on presently: “She is being awfully nice to me. I don’t ever remember her having been more nice—since, I mean, we decided that we could n’t hit it off. One would really say that she did n’t mind seeing me”; and Dick smiled as if the joke were becoming quite exquisitely comical.
“You have been in such danger; Milly can but feel relief.” Her voice, she knew, was full of an odd repression, discouragement; but Dick was altogether too innocent of any hope to be aware of discouragement or repression.
“She was worried about me? Really?—That was awfully good of her,” he said.
The ensuing evening was, to Christina, distinctly odd, to say the very least of it. She and Dick both were aware of change, of novelty, and Milly, apparently, was aware of none.
Her cheerful kindness was as natural, as spontaneous, as though she had been a girl greeting a long-absent brother. She questioned Dick, and, as her questions showed interest,—interest and a knowledge surprising to Christina,—Dick talked with unusual ease and fluency.
Christina looked at them and listened to them, while Milly, leaning an arm on the table, gazed with gravely shining eyes at her husband. The arm, the eyes, the long lines of her throat, were very lovely. Christina’s mind fixed funnily on them; she wished Milly would not lean so, look so. Milly was unaware of eyes and arm and throat; she always looked so, leaned so, when she listened with absorption. It was Christina who was aware—Christina who was quivering with latent, unformulated consciousness. After dinner, Milly and Dick still talked; she still listened.
For three or four days this was the situation—the reunited brother and sister, the friend necessarily incidental for the time being. “For the time being”—Christina clung to that phrase. The situation could be only temporary. Even in her it would be too great a folly to feel slighted.
And then, suddenly, the latent consciousness, the presages, grew ominous. What it was she could not say. Milly was sweet, frank, unreserved, apparently; Dick unchanged. Was it her own realization of being left out, of not being needed, that overwhelmed her? Or was it a sense of some utter change in her darling—a change so gradual, so subtle, that until its accomplishment she had not clearly interpreted it?
The moment of definite interpretation came one day when, on going into the library, she had found Milly and Dick sitting side by side at the table, their heads bent over a map; and they were not looking at the map; they were looking at each other, still like brother and sister,—but such fond brother and sister,—looking while they smiled and talked.
Milly, on seeing her friend, jumped up,—too eagerly,—and pulled back a chair for her. “Sit down, dearest; Dick is telling me adventures,” she said.
What was it that drove into Christina’s heart like a knife? Milly smiled at her, eagerly smiled; and yet Milly was miles and miles away, was greeting her as though she were a guest, greeting her with conventional warmth, courteous sweetness. She was not wanted; through the warmth, through the sweetness, she felt that. Smiling, she said that she had come for a book. Going to the book-cases, she sought for one accurately,—why she should seek, as though she had come in with the intention of finding it, a volume of frothy eighteenth-century memoirs she could not have told,—pulled it out, and, smiling again upon them with unconstrained lightness, she left them. She walked steadily to her room, into it, locked the door, and, falling upon her knees beside the bed, broke into an agony of sobs.
Nguồn: Wikisource English — Century Magazine/Volume 65/Issue 1/A Forsaken Temple. Văn bản được nhập và định dạng lại; CC BY-SA 4.0, có thể áp dụng điều khoản bổ sung của tác phẩm.