The Irrational Knot Part 39

CHAPTER XII

One Sunday afternoon, as the sun was making rainbows in the cloud of spray thrown from the fountain in Kew Gardens, Sholto Douglas appeared there amongst the promenaders on the banks of the pond. He halted on the steps leading down to the basin, gazing idly at the waterfowl paddling at his feet. A lady in a becoming grey dress came to the top of the steps, and looked curiously at him. Somehow aware of this, he turned indifferently, as if to leave, and found that the lady was Marian. Her ripened beauty, her perfect self-possession, a gain in her as of added strength and wisdom, and a loss in her as of gentleness outgrown and timidity overcome, dazzled him for a moment--caused a revulsion in him which he half recognized as the beginning of a dangerous pa.s.sion. His former love for her suddenly appeared boyish and unreal to him; and this ruin of a once cherished illusion cost him a pang. Meanwhile, there she was, holding out her hand and smiling with a cool confidence in the success of her advance that would have been impossible to Marian Lind.

"How do you do?" she said.

"Thank you: I am fairly well. You are quite well, I hope?"

"I am in rude health. I hardly knew you at first."

"Am I altered?"

"You are growing stout."

"Indeed? Time has not been so bounteous to me as to you."

"You mean that I am stouter than you?" She laughed; and the sound startled him. He got from it an odd impression that her soul was gone.

But he hastened to protest.

"No, no. You know I do not. I meant that you have achieved the impossible--altered for the better."

"I am glad you think so. I cling to my good looks desperately now that I am growing matronly. How is Mrs. Douglas?"

"She is quite well, thank you. Mr. Conolly is, I trust--"

"He is suffering from Eucalyptus on the brain at present. Do not trouble yourself to maintain that admirable expression of shocked sadness.

Eucalyptus means gum-tree; and Ned is at present studying the species somewhere in the neighborhood. He came here with that object: he never goes anywhere without an object. He wants to plant Eucalyptuses round some new works where the people suffer from ague."

"Oh! You mean that he is here in the gardens."

"Yes. I left him among the trees, as I prefer the flowers. I want to see the lilies. There used to be some in a hot-house, or rather a hot bath, near this."

"That is it on our right. May I go through it with you?"

"Just as you please."

"Thank you. It is a long time since we last met, is it not?"

"More than a year. Fifteen months. I have not seen you since I was married."

Douglas looked rather foolish at this. He was fatter, lazier, altogether less tenacious of his dignity than of old; and his embarra.s.sment brought out the change strikingly. Marian liked him all the better for it; he was less imposing; but he was more a man and less a mere mask. At last, reddening a little, he said, "I remember our last meeting very well. We were very angry then: I was infuriated. In fact, when I recognized you a minute ago, I was not quite sure that you would renew our acquaintance."

"I had exactly the same doubt about you."

"A very unnecessary doubt. Not a sincere one, I am afraid. You know too well that your least beck will bring me to you at any time."

"Dont you think we had better not begin that. I generally repeat my conversations to Ned. Not that he will mind, if you dont."

Douglas now felt at his ease and in his clement. He was clearly welcome to philander. Recovering his poise at once, he began, in his finest voice, "You need not chide me. There can be no mistake on my part now.

You can entangle me without fear; and I can love without hope. Ned is an unrepealed statute of Forbiddance. Go on, Mrs. Conolly. Play with me: it will amuse you. And--spiritless wretch that I am!--it will help me to live until you throw me away, crushed again."

"You seem to have been quite comfortable without me: at least you look extremely well. I suspect you are becoming a little lazy and attached to your dinner. Your old haughtiness seems to have faded into a mere habit.

It used to be the most active principle in you. Are you quite sure that n.o.body else has been helping you to live, as you call it?"

"Helping me to forget, you mean. No, not one. Time has taught me the way to vegetate; and so I no longer need to live. As you have remarked, I have habits, not active principles. But one at least of these principles is blossoming again even as I speak. If I could only live as that lily lives now!"

"In a warm bath?"

"No. Floating on the surface of a quiet pool, looking up into your eyes, with no memory for the past, no antic.i.p.ation of the future."

"Delightful! especially for me. I think we had better go and look for Ned."

"Were I in his place I would not be absent from your side now--or ever."

"That is to say, if you were in his place, you wouldnt be in his place--among the gum trees. Perhaps you would be right."

"He is the only man I have ever stooped to envy."

"You have reason to," said Marian, suddenly grave.

"I envy him sometimes myself. What would you give to be never without a purpose, never with a regret, to regard life as a succession of objects each to be accomplished by so many days' work; to take your pleasure in trifling lazily with the consciousness of possessing a strong brain; to study love, family affection, and friendship as a doctor studies breathing or digestion; to look on disinterestedness as either weakness or hypocrisy, and on death as a mere transfer of your social function to some member of the next generation?"

"I could achieve all that, if I would, at the cost of my soul. I would not for worlds be such a man, save on one condition."

"To wit?"

"That only as such could I win the woman I loved."

"Oh, you would not think so much of an insignificant factor like love if you were Ned."

"May I ask, do you, too, think of love as 'an insignificant factor'?"

"I? Oh, I am not a sociologist. Besides, I have never been in love."

"What! You have never been in love?"

"Not the real, romantic, burning, suicidal love your sonnets used to breathe."

"Then you do not know what love is."

"Do you?"

"You should know whether I do or not."

"Should I? Then I conclude that you do not. You are growing stout. Your dress is not in the least neglected. I am certain you enjoy life thoroughly. No, you have never known love in all its novelistic-poetic outrageousness. That respectable old pa.s.sion is a myth."