The Helpmate Part 38

So, for the sake of peace, Mr. Gorst kept away from Prior Street and his Edie, and spent a great deal of time in Evans's shop, cultivating the attention of Miss Forrest.

And, for the sake of peace, Majendie kept silence, and his sister concealed her trembling and her tears.

CHAPTER XVII

Gloom fell on the house in Prior Street in the weeks that followed Christmas. The very servants went heavily in the shadow of it. Anne began to have her bad headaches again. Deep lines of worry showed on Majendie's face. And on her couch by the window, looking on the blackened winter garden, Edith fought day after day a losing battle with her spine.

The slow disease that held her captive there seemed to be quickening its pace. In January there came a whole procession of bad nights, without, as she pathetically said, "anything to show for it," for her hands could make nothing now. She lay flatter than ever; each day she seemed to sink deeper into her couch.

Anne, between her headaches, devoted herself to her sister with a kind of pa.s.sion. Her keenest experience of pa.s.sion came to her through the emotion wakened in her by the sight of Edith's suffering. She told herself that her love for Edith satisfied her heart completely; that she fulfilled herself in it as she never could have fulfilled herself in any other way. Nothing could degrade or spoil the spiritual beauty of this relation. It served as a standard by which she could better judge her relation to her husband. "I love her more than I ever loved him," she thought. "I cannot help it. If it had been possible to love him as I love her--but I have lowered myself by loving him. I will raise myself by loving her."

She was never tired of being with Edith, sewing silently by her fireside, or reading aloud to her (for Edith's hands were too tremulous now to hold a book), or sitting close up against her couch, nursing her hands in hers, as if she would have given them her own strength.

And thus her ardour spent and renewed itself, and left her colder than ever to her husband.

At times she mourned, obscurely, the destruction of the new soul that had been given her last year, on her birthday, when she had been born again to her sweet human destiny. At times she had glimpses of the perfect thing it might have been. There was no logical sequence in the events that had destroyed it, the return of Lady Cayley and the spectacle of her triumph. She could not say that her husband had deteriorated in consequence. The change was in herself, and not in him. He was what he always had been; only she seemed to see him more completely now. At times, when the high spiritual life died down in sleep, she slipped from her trouble, and turned, with her arms stretched towards him, where he lay. In her dreams he came to her with the low cry she had heard in the wood at Westleydale. And in her dreams she was tender; but her waking thoughts were sad and hard.

Majendie found it more than ever difficult to realise that she had ever shown him kindness, that her arms had opened to him and her pulses beaten with his own. Her face and her body were changing with this change of soul. Her health suffered. Her eyes became dull, her skin dry; her small, reticent mouth had taken on the tragic droop; she was growing austerely thin. She had abandoned the pleasing and worldly fashion of her dress, and arrayed herself now in straight-cut, sombre garments, very serviceable in the sick-room, but mournfully suggestive, to her husband's fancy, of her renunciation of the will to please.

On her first appearance in this garb he enquired whether she had embraced the religious life.

"I always have embraced it," said she in her ringing voice.

"I believe it's about the only thing you ever wanted to embrace."

"You need not say so," she returned.

"Then why, oh why, do you wear those awful clothes?"

"My clothes are suitable," said she.

"Suitable? My dear girl, they suggest a divorce-suit, Majendie _versus_ Majendie, if you like. You're a walking prosecution. Your face, with that expression on it, is a decree _nisi_ with costs. You don't want to be a libel on your husband, do you?"

"How can you say such things?"

"Well--look in the gla.s.s, dear, if you don't believe me."

She looked. The dress was certainly not becoming. She greeted the joyless apparition with her thin, unwilling smile.

He put his arm around her and drew her to him. He loved her dearly, for all her sadness and unsweetness.

"Poor Nancy," he said, "I _am_ a brute. Forgive me."

"I do forgive you."

The words seemed the refrain of her life's sad song.

And as he kissed her he said to himself, "That's all very well; but if I only knew what I'm supposed to have done to her! Her friends must think me a perfect monster."

And, indeed, there was more truth than Majendie was aware of in his extravagant jests. His wife's face was so eloquent of misery that her friends were not slow in drawing their conclusions. Thurston Square prepared itself to rally round her. Mrs. Eliott was loyal in keeping what she supposed to be Anne's secret, but when she found that the Gardners also understood that young Mrs. Majendie wasn't very happy with her husband, discussion became free in Thurston Square, though it went no further.

"The kindest thing we can do is to give her a refuge sometimes from his dreadful friends," said Mrs. Eliott. "I have to ask her here every time they're there."

Mrs. Gardner declared that she also would ask her gladly. Miss Proctor said that she would ask Mr. Majendie and Mr. Gorst, which would come to the same thing for Anne, but that she would not have Anne without her husband. Miss Proctor could be depended on to take a light view of any situation, a view entirely her own.

So the Gardners, as well as the Eliotts, rallied round Mrs. Majendie, and offered their house also as her refuge. And thus poor Anne, whose ideal was an indestructible loyalty, contrived to build up the most undesirable reputation for her husband in Thurston Square. Of this reputation she now became aware, and it reacted on her own estimate of him. She said to herself, "They don't approve of him. They seem to know something. They are sorry for me." And she was humbled in her pride.

The one who seemed to know most, and to be sorriest of all, was Canon Wharton. She was always meeting him now. It was positively as if he lay in wait for her. His eyes seemed more than ever to have penetrated her secret. They held it safe under the pent-house of his brows. They seemed to be always making allusions to it, while his tongue preserved a delicate reticence. At meeting they said to her, "It doesn't matter if I know your secret. Do you suppose it is so evident to everybody? Why, in all this town, there is no one--no one, dear lady--capable of discovering it but I. It is a spiritual secret." And at parting they said, "When you can bear it no longer you must come to me. Sooner or later you will come to me."

And the weeks went on towards Lent. Anne longed for the time of cleansing, and absolution and communion; for the peace of the week-day services; and for the sweet, sharp, grey light of the young Spring at evening, a light that recalled, piercingly, the long Lent of her girlhood, and the pa.s.sing of its pure and consecrated days.

She had not yet completely forsaken St. Saviour's for All Souls. She loved the grey old church in the market-place. Set in the midst of that sordid scene of chaffering and grime, St. Saviour's perpetuated for her the ancient beauty and the majesty of her faith. When she desired to forget herself, to sink humbly back into the ages, pa.s.sive to a superb tradition, she went to St. Saviour's. When she wished to be stirred and strengthened, to realise her spiritual value, to feel the grip of divine forces centring on her, she went to All Souls.

On the Sunday before Lent she was fairly possessed by this ardent personal mood. In obedience to it she attended Matins at the Canon's church.

She had had a scruple about going, for Edith had been worse that morning, and more evidently unhappy. She went alone. Majendie had admitted lately that he liked going to St. Saviour's, but he refused to accompany her to All Souls.

She went in a strange, premonitory mood, expectant of some great illumination. It came with the Collect for the day. Anne was deeply moved by the Collect. She prayed inaudibly, with parted lips thirsting for the sources of her spiritual help. Her light went up with the ascending, sentence by sentence, of the prayer.

"Oh, Lord, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth;

"Send Thy Holy Ghost and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues;

"Without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before Thee;

"Grant this for thine only Son, Jesus Christ's sake." The ritual rang upon that note. The music of the hymns of charity was part of the light that penetrated her, poignant, but tender.

Poignant but tender, too, were the aspect and the mood of the Canon as he ascended the pulpit and looked upon his congregation.

There was a rustling, sliding sound as the congregation turned to listen to their vicar.

"Though I speak,'" said the Canon, "'with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding bra.s.s or as a tinkling cymbal."

He gripped his hearers with the stress he laid upon certain words, "angels," and "cymbal." He bade them mark that it was not by hazard that the great prayer for Charity was appointed for the Sunday before Lent.

"The Church," he said, "has such care for her children that she does nothing by hazard. This call is made to us on the eve of the great battle against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Why, but that those among us who come off victors may have mercy upon those weakly ones who are worsted and fallen in the fight. The life of the spirit has its own unique temptations. It is against these that we pray to-day. We are all prepared to repent, to use abstinence, to mortify the body with its corrupt affections. Are we prepared to bear the burden of our brother's and our sister's unrepentance? Of their self-indulgence? Of their sin? To follow in all things the Divine Example? We are told that the Saviour of the world was the friend of publicans and sinners. We accept the statement, we have gone on accepting it, year after year, as the statement of a somewhat remote, but well-authenticated historical fact.

Have we yet realised its significance? Have we pictured, are we able to picture to ourselves, what company He kept? Among what surroundings His divine figure was actually seen? In what purlieus of degenerate Jerusalem? In what iniquitous splendours? In what orgies of the Gentiles?

And who are they to whom He showed most tenderness? Who but the rich young man? The woman taken in adultery? And Mary Magdalene with her seven devils? Which is the divinest of the divine parables? The parable of the prodigal son who devoured his father's living with harlots!"

The Canon's voice rose and fell, and rose again; thrilling, as his breast heaved with the immense pathos and burden of the world.

Anne had a vision of the Hannays and the Ransomes, and of the prodigal cast out from the house that loved him. And she said to herself for the first time: "Have I done right? Have I done what Christ would have me do?" The light that went up in her was a light by which her deeds looked doubtful. If she had failed in this, in charity? She pondered the problem, while the Canon approached, gloriously, his peroration.

"Therefore we pray for charity"--the Canon's voice rang tears--"for charity, oh, dear and tender Lord, lest, having known Thy love, we fall, ourselves, into the sins of unpity and of pride."