The Helpmate Part 28

"Who, if I may ask, is this celestial, this transcendent being?"

She shook her head. "I can't tell you, yet."

"What, isn't even that settled?"

Majendie was so genuinely diverted at that moment that he would not have left her if he could.

She took the sting of it, and flushed, dumbly. Remorse seized him, and he sought to soothe her.

"My dear lady, I had a vision of heavenly hosts standing round you in such quant.i.ties that it might be difficult to make a selection, you know."

She rallied finely under the reviving compliment. "My dear, it's a case of quality, not quant.i.ty--" Her past was so present to them both that he almost understood her to say, "this time."

"I see," he said. "The wings. But nothing's settled?"

"It's settled right enough," said she, by which he understood her to imply that the "angel's" case was. She had settled him. Majendie could see her doing it. His imagination played lightly with the preposterous idea. He conceived her in the act of bringing down her bird of heaven, actually "winging him."

"But it's not given out yet."

"I see."

"You're the first I've told, except Topsy. Topsy knows it. So you mustn't tell anybody else."

"I never tell anybody anything," said he.

He gathered that it was not quite so settled as she wished him to suppose, and that Lady Cayley antic.i.p.ated some possible dashing of the cup of matrimony from her lips.

"So I'm not to have panics, in the night, and palpitations, every time I think of it?"

"Certainly not, if it rests with me."

"I wanted you to know. But it's so precious, I'm afraid of losing it.

Nothing," said Lady Cayley, "can make up for the loss of a good man's love. Except," she added, "a good woman's."

"Quite so," he a.s.sented coldly, with horror at his perception of her drift.

His coldness riled her.

"Who," said she with emphasis, "is the lady who keeps making those awful eyes at us over p.u.s.s.y's top-knot?"

"That lady," said Majendie, "as it happens, is my wife."

"Why didn't you tell me that before? That's what comes, you see, of not introducing people. I'll tell you one thing, Wallie. She's awfully handsome. But you always had good taste. Br-r-r, there's a draught cutting my head off. You might shut that window, there's a dear."

He shut it.

"And put my cup down."

He put it down.

Anne saw him. She had seen everything.

"And help me on with my cape."

He lifted the heavy sable thing with two fingers, and helped her gingerly. A scent, horrid and thick, and profuse with memories, was shaken from her as she turned her shoulder. He hoped she was going. But she was not going; not she. Her body swayed towards him sinuously from hips obstinately immobile, weighted, literally, with her unshakable determination to sit on.

She rewarded him with a smile which seemed to him, if anything, more atrociously luminous than the last. "I must keep you up to the mark,"

said she, as she turned with it. "Your wife's looking at you, and I feel responsible for your good behaviour. Don't keep her waiting. Can't you see she wants to go?"

"And I want to go, too," said he savagely. And he went.

And as she watched Mrs. Walter Majendie's departure, Lady Cayley smiled softly to herself; tasting the first delicious flavour of success.

She had made Mrs. Walter Majendie betray herself; she had made her furious; she had made her go.

She had sat Mrs. Walter Majendie out.

If the town of Scale, the mayor and the aldermen, had risen and given her an ovation, she could not have celebrated more triumphally her return.

CHAPTER XIII

Anne and her husband walked home in silence across the Park, grateful for its darkness. Majendie could well imagine that she would not want to talk. He made allowance for her repulsion; he respected it and her silence as its sign. She had every right to her resentment. He had let her in for the Hannays, who had let her in for the inconceivable encounter. On the day of her divorce Sarah Cayley had removed herself from Scale, and he had shrunk from providing for the supreme embarra.s.sment of her return. He had looked on her as definitely, consummately departed. She had disappeared, down dingy vistas, into unimaginable obscurities. He pictured her as sunk, in Continental abysses, beyond all possibility of resurgence. And she had emerged (from abominations) smiling that indestructible smile. The incident had been unpleasant, so unpleasant that he didn't want to talk about it. All the same, he would have done violence to his feelings and apologised for it then and there, but that he really judged it better to let well alone. It was well, he thought, that Anne was so silent. She might have had a great deal to say, and it was kind of her not to say it, to let him off so easily.

Anne's interpretation of Majendie's silence was not so favourable. After being exposed to the pain and insult of Lady Cayley's presence she had expected an immediate apology, and she inferred from its omission an unpardonable complicity. Any compliance with the public toleration of that person would have been inexcusable, and he had been more than compliant, more than tolerant; he had been solicitous, attentive, deferent. And deference to such a woman was insolence to his wife. Anne was struck dumb by the shameless levity of the proceedings. The two had behaved as if nothing had happened, or rather (she bitterly corrected herself) as if everything had happened, and might happen any day again (she inferred as much from his silence). It would--it would happen. _Her_ intentions were, to Anne's mind, unmistakable; that was plainly what she had come back for. As to his intentions, Anne was not yet clear. She had not made up her mind that they were bad; but she shuddered as she said to herself that he was "weak." He had come at that woman's call; he had hung round her; he had waited on her at her bidding; at her bidding he had sat down beside her; he had listened to her, attracted, charmed, delighted; he had talked to her in the low voice Anne knew. How could she tell what had or had not pa.s.sed between them there, what intimacies, what recognitions, what resurrections of the corrupt, ill-buried past? He had been "weak--weak--weak." Henceforth she must reckon with his weakness, and reckoning with it, she must keep him from that woman by any method, and at any cost! It was something that he had the grace to be ashamed of himself (another inference from his silence). No wonder, after that communion, if he was ashamed to look at his wife or speak to her.

He went straight to Edith when they reached home, and Anne went upstairs to her bedroom.

She had a great desire to be alone. She wanted to pray, as she had prayed in that room at Scarby on the morning of her discovery. Not that she felt in the least as she had felt then. She was more profoundly wounded--wounded beyond pa.s.sion and beyond tears, calm and self-contained in her vision of the inevitable, the fore-ordained reality. She had to get rid of her vision; it was impossible to live with it, impossible to live through another hour like the last. Her desire to pray was a terrible, urgent longing that consumed her, impatient of every minute that kept her from her prayer. She controlled it, moving slowly as she took off her outdoor clothes and put them decorously away; feeling that the force of her prayer gathered and mounted behind these minute obstructions and delays.

She knelt down by her bed. She had been used to pray there with her eyes fixed upon the crucifix which he had given her. It hung low, almost between the pillows of their bed. Now she closed her eyes to shut it from her sight. It was then that she realised what had been done to her. With the closing of her eyes she opened some back room in her brain, a hot room, now dark, and now charged with a red light, vaporous and vivid, that ran in furious pulses, as it were the currents of her blood made visible. The room thus opened was tenanted by the revolting image of Lady Cayley. Now it loomed steadily in the dark, now it leapt quiveringly into the red, vaporous light. She could not see her husband, but she had a sickening sense that he was there, looming, and that his image, too, would leap into sight at some signal of her unwilling thought. She knew that that back room would remain, built up indestructibly in the fabric of her mind. It would be set apart for ever for the phantom of her husband and her husband's mistress. By a tremendous effort of will she shut the door on it. There it must be for ever, but wherever she looked, she would not look there; much less allow herself to dwell in the unclean place. It was not to think of that woman, his mistress, that she had gone down on her knees. To think of her was contamination. After all, the woman had no power over her inner life. She was not forced to think of her. She had her sanctuary and her way of escape.

But before she could get there she had to struggle against the fatigue which came of her effort not to think. Once she would have resigned herself to this physical la.s.situde, mistaking it for the sinking of the soul in the beatific self-surrender. But Anne's sufferings had brought her a little further on her path. She had come to recognise that supine state as a great danger to the spiritual life. It was not by la.s.situde, but by concentration that the intense communion was attained. She lifted her bowed head as a sign of her exaltation.

And as she lifted it, she caught, as it were, the approach of triumphal music. Words gathered, as on wings, from the clean-swept heavenly s.p.a.ces--they went by her like the pa.s.sing of an immense processional: "Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in...." It came on, that heavenly invasion, and all her earthly barriers went down before it. And it was as if something strong in her, something solitary and pure, had cloven its way through the mesh of the throbbing nerves, through the beating currents of the blood, through the hot red lights of the brain, and had escaped into the peaceful blank. She remained there a moment, in the place of bliss, the divine place of the self-surrendered soul, where mortal emptiness draws down immortality.

She said to herself, "I have my refuge; no one can take it from me.

Nothing matters so long as I can get there."

She rose from her knees more calm and self-contained than ever, barely conscious of her wound.

So calm and so self-contained was she at dinner that Majendie had an agreeable rebound; he supposed that she had recovered from the abominable encounter, and had put Lady Cayley out of her head like a sensible woman.

Edith had received his account of that incident with a gravity that had made him profoundly uncomfortable; and his relief was in proportion to his embarra.s.sment. Unfortunately it gave him the appearance of complacency; and complacency in the circ.u.mstances was more than Anne could bear. Coming straight from her exaltation and communion, she was crushed by the profound, invisible difference that separated them, the perpetual loneliness of her unwedded, unsubjugated soul. They lived a whole earth and a whole heaven apart. He was untouched by the fires that burnt and purified her. The tragic crises that destroyed, the spiritual moments that built her up again, pa.s.sed by him unperceived. If she were to tell him how she had attained her present serenity of mind, by what vision, by what effort, by what sundering of body and soul, he would not understand.

And that was not the worst. She had learnt not to look for that spiritual understanding in him. It mattered little that her unique suffering and her unique consolation should remain alike ignored. The terrible thing was that he should have come out of his own ordeal so smiling and so unconcerned; that he could have sinned as he had sinned, and that he could meet, after seven years, in his wife's presence, the partner of his sin (whose face was a revelation of its grossness)--meet her, and not be shaken by the shame of it. It showed how lightly he held it, how low his standard was. She recalled, shuddering, the woman's face. Nothing in the visions she had so shrunk from could compare with the violent reality.