The Return of the Prodigal Part 5

"It may have been. Anyhow, you mustn't go getting ill."

"I don't think," she said, "there's any need. But don't be frightened. It won't go away."

"What won't?"

"The gift."

They laughed again. It was their own name for it.

"I wasn't thinking of it. I was thinking of you."

"It's the same thing," said she. "No. It won't go. It can't go. I've got it fast."

He rose. He looked down on her; he seemed to hesitate, to consider.

"I wonder," he said, "if I might ask my friend, Miss Nethersole, to call on you? She's Mrs. Dysart's niece."

She consented, and with a terse good night he left her.

She, too, wondered and considered. She knew that she would some day have to reckon with his life, with the world that knew him, with the women whom he knew.

II

Freda and Miss Nethersole had met several times before the remarkable conversation that made them suddenly intimate.

That she would have, sooner or later, some remarkable conversation with Miss Nethersole was an idea that had dawned upon Freda from the first. But until the hour struck for them their acquaintance had been distant.

It had the fascination of deep distance. Freda had not been sure that she desired to break the charm. It seemed somehow to hold her safe. From what danger she would have found it hard to say, when Miss Nethersole covered her with so large and soft a wing. Still, they had come no nearer to the friendship which the older woman had offered as the end of their approaches.

It was as if Miss Nethersole were also bound under the charm. When Freda allowed herself to meditate profoundly she divined that what drew them on and held them back was an uncertainty regarding Wilton Caldecott. Neither knew in what place the other really held him. The first day they met each had searched, secretly, the other's face for some betrayal of his whereabouts; each, it had seemed to Freda, had shrunk from finding what she looked for; shrunk even more from owning that there might be anything to find.

And he had hoped that she would "like Julia."

If reticence were required of them, Freda felt that her poor little face could never rival the inimitable reserves, the secure distinction of Miss Nethersole's. There was nothing, so to speak, to take hold of in Julia's dark, attenuated elegance; nothing that betrayed itself anywhere, from the slender brilliance of her deep-lidded, silent eyes, to her small flat chin, falling sheer from the immobile lower lip. Miss Nethersole's features and her figure were worn away to the last expression of a purely social intention.

Quite useless to look for any signs of Wilton Caldecott's occupation. Freda was convinced that, if the lady possessed any knowledge of him, she would keep it concealed about her to the end of time. She was aware of Miss Nethersole's significance as a woman of the larger world. It was wonderful to think that she held the clue to the social labyrinth, in which, to Freda's vision, their friend's life was lost. She knew what ways he went. She could follow all his turnings and windings there; perhaps she could track him to the heart of the maze; perhaps she herself was the heart of it, the very secret heart. She sat alone for him there, in the dear silent place where all the paths led. The very thickness and elaboration of the maze would make their peace. Freda's heart failed her before the intricacy of Miss Nethersole's knowledge of him, the security of her possession. Miss Nethersole was valuable to him for her own sake, it being evident that she had no "gift."

It was her personal sufficiency, unsustained as she was by anything irrelevant, that made Julia so formidable.

She had never seemed more so to Freda than on this afternoon when they sat together among the adornments of her perfect drawing-room.

Everything about Miss Nethersole was as delicate and finished as her own perfection. She was finely unconscious of all that Freda recognized in her. It seemed as if what she chiefly recognized in Freda was her gift. She had been superbly impersonal in her praise of it. It was the divine thing given to Freda, hers and yet not hers, so wonderful, compared with the small pale creature who manipulated it, that it could be discussed with perfect propriety apart from her.

And to-day Wilton Caldecott's name had risen again in the discussion, when Julia had the air of insisting more than ever on the gift. It was almost as if she narrowed Freda down to that, suggesting that it was the only thing that counted in her intimacy with their friend.

"Yes," said Freda, "but the extraordinary thing is that I hadn't it when first he knew me."

"He saw what was in you."

"He said the other day he saw nothing. I was too bad for words."

"Oh, I know all about that. He told me."

"What did he tell you?"

"That you were like a funny little unfledged bird, trying to fly before its wing feathers were grown."

"I hadn't any. I hadn't anything of my own. Everything I have I owe to him."

"Don't say that. Why should you pluck off all your beautiful feathers to make a nest for his conceit?"

"Is he conceited?"

Freda said to herself, "After all, she doesn't count. She doesn't know him."

Miss Nethersole smiled. "He's a male man, my dear. If you want him to have an even higher idea of your genius than he has already, tell him--tell him you owe it all to him."

"Ah," said Freda, "you don't know him."

"I have known him," said Miss Nethersole, "for fifteen years. I knew him before he married."

She had proved incontestably the superiority of her knowledge. Freda felt as if Miss Nethersole were looking at her to see how she would take it. There was an appreciable moment in which she adjusted her mind to the suddenness of the revelation. Then she told herself that there was nothing in it that she had not reckoned with many times before. It left her relations with Wilton Caldecott where they were.

There was nothing in it that could change for her the unique and immaterial tie. She was even relieved by the certainty that it was not Julia Nethersole, then, after all. She had an idea that she would have grudged him to Julia Nethersole.

Julia was much too well-bred to show that she had the advantage. She took it for granted that Miss Farrar was also acquainted with the circ.u.mstances of Wilton Caldecott's marriage.

"That," said she, "is what makes him so extraordinarily interesting."

"His marriage"--Freda hesitated. She wondered if Miss Nethersole would really go into it.

"Some people's marriages are quite unilluminating. Wilton's, I always think, is the key to his character, sometimes to his conduct."

Freda held her breath. She saw that Miss Nethersole was about to go in deep.

"He has suffered"--Miss Nethersole went on--"all his life, from an over-developed sense of honor. He could see honor in situations where you wouldn't have said there was the ghost of an obligation.

His marriage was not an affair of the heart. It was an affair of honor. The woman--she's dead now--was in love with him."

"Did you know her?"

"No. She was not the sort of person you do know. She was simply a pretty, underbred little governess. He met her--on the staircase, I imagine--in some house he was staying in, and, as I say, she was in love with him. She was a scheming little wretch, and she and her people made him believe that he had compromised her in some shadowy way. I suppose he _had_ paid her a little ordinary attention--I don't know the details. Anyhow, he was so fantastically honorable that he married her."

"Poor thing. It must have been awful for her, to be married in that way--for honor!"

"She didn't consider it awful in the least. She didn't mind what she was married _for_, so long as she _was_ married. She was that sort.

Do I bore you?"

"No. You interest me immensely."

"Of course they were miserable. He couldn't make her happy. Wilton is, in his way, a rather spiritual person, and his wife was anything but. Marriage can be an awful revelation to a nice woman. Sometimes it's a shock to a nice man. Wilton never got over _his_ shock. It left him with a morbid horror of the thing. That's what has prevented him from marrying again."