The Passionate Friends Part 24

"Stuff," said the Furstin.

"You know perfectly well why I am out of England."

"Everybody knows--except of course quite young persons who are being carefully brought up."

"Does _she_ know?"

"She doesn't seem to."

"Well, that's what I want to know."

"Need she know?"

"Well, it does seem rather essential----"

"I suppose if you think so----"

"Will you tell her?"

"Tell her yourself, if she must be told. Down there in Surrey, she _must_ have seen things and heard things. But I don't see that she wants a lot of ancient history."

"If it is ancient history!"

"Oh! two years and a half,--it's an Era."

I made no answer to that, but sat staring into the fire while my cousin watched my face. At length I made my confession. "I don't think it is ancient history at all," I said. "I think if I met Mary again now----"

"You mean Lady Mary Justin?"

"Of course."

"It would be good for your mind if you remembered to call her by her proper name.... You think if you met her again you two would begin to carry on. But you see,--you aren't going to meet her. Everybody will see that doesn't happen."

"I mean that I---- Well----"

"You'd better not say it. Besides, it's nonsense. I doubt if you've given her a thought for weeks and weeks."

"Until I came here perhaps that was almost nearly true. But you've stirred me up, sweet cousin, and old things, old memories and habits have come to the surface again. Mary wrote herself over my life--in all sorts of places.... I can't tell you. I've never talked of her to anyone. I'm not able, very well, to talk about my feelings.... Perhaps a man of my sort--doesn't love twice over."

I disregarded a note of dissent from my cousin. "That was all so magic, all my youth, all my hope, all the splendid adventure of it. Why should one pretend?... I'm giving none of that to Rachel. It isn't there any more to give...."

"One would think," remarked the Furstin, "there was no gift of healing."

She waited for me to speak, and then irritated by my silence struck at me sharply with that wicked little tongue of hers.

"Do you think that Lady Mary Justin thinks of you--as you think of her?

Do you think she hasn't settled down?"

I looked up at her quickly.

"She's just going to have a second child," the Furstin flung out.

Yes, that did astonish me. I suppose my face showed it.

"That girl," said the Furstin, "that clean girl would have sooner died--ten thousand deaths.... And she's never--never been anything to you."

I think that for an instant she had been frightened at her own words.

She was now quite angry and short of breath. She had contrived a rapid indignation against Mary and myself.

"I didn't know Mary had had any child at all," I said.

"This makes two," said the Furstin, and held up a brace of fingers, "with scarcely a year and a half between them. Not much more anyhow....

It was natural, I suppose. A natural female indecency. I don't blame her. When a woman gives in she ought to do it thoroughly. But I don't see that it leaves _you_ much scope for philandering, Stephen, does it?... And there you are, and here is Rachel. And why don't you make a clean job of your life?..."

"I didn't understand."

"I wonder what you imagined."

I reflected. "I wonder what I did. I suppose I thought of Mary--just as I had left her--always."

I remained with my mind filled with confused images of Mary, memories, astonishment....

I perceived the Furstin was talking.

"Maundering about," she was saying, "like a huntsman without a horse....

You've got work to do--blood in your veins. I'm not one of your ignorant women, Stephen. You ought to have a wife...."

"Rachel's too good," I said, at the end of a pause and perceiving I had to say something, "to be that sort of wife."

"No woman's too good for a man," said the Furstin von Letzlingen with conviction. "It's what G.o.d made her for."

-- 4

My visit to Boppard was drawing to an end before I had a clear opportunity to have things out with Rachel. It was in a little garden, under the very shadow of that gracious cathedral at Worms, the sort of little garden to which one is admitted by ringing a bell and tipping a custodian. I think Worms is in many respects one of the most beautiful cathedrals I have ever seen, so perfectly proportioned, so delicately faded, so aloof, so free from pride or presumption, and it rises over this green and flowery peace, a towering, lithe, light brown, sunlit, easy thing, as unconsciously and irrelevantly splendid as a tall ship in the evening glow under a press of canvas. We looked up at it for a time and then went on with the talk to which we had been coming slowly since the Furstin had packed us off for it, while she went into the town with Berwick to buy toys for her gatekeeper's children. I had talked about myself, and the gradual replacement of my ambition to play a part in imperial politics by wider intentions. "You know," I asked abruptly, "why I left England?"

She thought through the briefest of pauses. "No," she decided at last.

"I made love," I said, "to Lady Mary Justin, and we were found out. We couldn't go away together----"

"Why not?" she interjected.

"It was impossible."

For some moments neither of us spoke. "Something," she said, and then, "Some vague report," and left these fragments to be her reply.

"We were old playmates; we were children together. We have--something--that draws us to each other. She--she made a mistake in marrying. We were both very young and the situation was difficult. And then afterwards we were thrown together.... But you see that has made a great difference to my life; it's turned me off the rails on which men of my sort usually run. I've had to look to these other things....

They've become more to me than to most people if only because of that...."