The Second Fiddle Part 11

She would not have withstood a spoken wish of his; but there is something in speechless suffering from which light sympathies shrink away. Pity lay in Marian a tepid, quickly roused feeling, blowing neither hot nor cold. She cried easily over sad books, but she had none of the maternal instinct which seizes upon the faintest indication of pain with a combative pa.s.sion for its alleviation. She became antagonistic when she was personally disturbed by suffering.

She was keeping her word to Julian while her heart was drifting away from him; and he, while he desired her to be free, instinctively tried to hold her back. They had both put their theories before their instincts, and they expected their instincts to stand aside until their theories had been carried out.

Perhaps if Julian could have told her his experiences he might have recaptured her imagination; but when she asked him to tell her about them, he said quickly, "I can't," and turned away his head. He was afraid to trust himself. He wanted to tell her everything. He was afraid that if he began, his reticence would break down, and he would tell her things which must never pa.s.s his lips. He longed for her to know that every day, and nearly every hour, he had fought and conquered intricate abnormal obstacles. He had slipped across imminent death as a steady climber grips and pa.s.ses across the face of a precipice.

He had never faltered. All that he had gone to find he had found, and more. At each step he had seen a fresh opportunity, and taken it. He had been like a bicyclist in heavy traffic a.s.sailed on every side by converging vehicles, and yet seeing only the one wavering ribbon of his way out. And he had won his way out with knowledge that was worth a king's ransom. He could have borne anything if Marian would realize that what he had borne had been worth while. But after her first unanswered question, Marian never referred again to what he had done. She behaved as if his services had been a regrettable mistake.

She talked with real feeling about the sufferings of those who fought in the war. Her eyes seemed to tell him what her lips refrained from uttering, that she could have been more sorry for him if he had been wounded in a trench, and not shot at and abandoned by a nervous sentry firing in the dark. He could not remember the exact moment when out of the vague turmoil of his weakened mind he gripped this cold truth: Marian was not tender.

When she was not there he could pretend. He could make up all the beautiful, loving little things she had not said, and sometimes he would not remember that he had made them up. Those were the best moments of all. He believed then that she had given him what his heart hungered for. He was too much ashamed of his ruined strength to feel resentment at Marian's coldness. It struck him as natural that she should care less for a broken man.

His mind traveled slowly, knocking against the edges of his old dreams.

He thought perhaps a nursing home wasn't the kind of place in which people could really understand one another, all mixed up with screens and medicine bottles, and nurses bringing things in on trays. If he could see Marian once at Amberley for the last time, so that he could keep the picture of her moving about the dark wainscoted rooms, or looking out from the terrace above the water meadows, he would have something precious to remember for the rest of his life; and she mightn't mind him so much there, surrounded by the dignity of the old background of his race. One day he said to her:

"I want to go to Amberley as soon as I can be moved. I want to see it again with you."

"In December?" asked Marian, with lifted, disapproving brows. "It would be horribly damp, my dear Julian, all water-meadows and mist. You would be much more comfortable here."

Julian frowned. He hated the word "comfort" in connection with himself.

"You don't understand," he said, a little impatiently. "I know every inch of it, and it's quite jolly in the winter. We are above the water.

I want to see the downs. One gets tired of milk-carts and barrel organs, and the brown tank on the roof across the way. You remember the downs, Marian?"

His eyes met hers again with that new, curiously weak look of his.

Marian turned her head away. How could Julian bear to speak of the downs?

She saw for a moment the old Julian springing up the hillside a.s.sured and eager, the fine, strong lover who had taken her heart by storm. She spoke coldly to this weaker Julian.

"Yes," she said, "I am not likely to forget the downs. I spent the last happy hours of my life there; but I cannot say I ever wish to see them again."

Julian's eyes fell, so that she could not see if he had even noticed how bitterly she remembered Amberley.

The next day she found him sitting up for the first time. He was propped up by cushions, but it made him look as if he had gained some of his old incisive strength.

The other two men had been moved, and they had the large, bare room to themselves.

No sound came from the square beneath them; in the house itself there were pa.s.sing footsteps and the occasional persistent buzzing of an electric bell.

"Look here," said Julian in a queer, dry voice, "I've got an awful lot to say to you--d'you mind drawing your chair nearer? I meant to say it at Amberley. I'd have liked it better there. I rather hate this kind of disinfected, sloppy place for talk. You must loathe it, too. But here or there it's got to be said. You said something or other when I first put it to you--about our engagement never being broken. It was awfully good of you, of course. I couldn't see through it at the time. I wanted to let things slide. But it's all nonsense my dear girl. Women like you can't marry logs of wood."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Women like you can't marry logs of wood"]

He looked at her anxiously. Her eyes were shut to expression. She sat there, just as lovely, just as sphinx-like as some old smiling portrait.

There was the same unfluctuating, delicate color in her face, and the same unhara.s.sed, straightforward glancing of the eyes. She was not the least perturbed by what he said; she expected him to say it.

"We should be foolish," she answered quietly, "to try to ignore the terrible difference in our lives, Julian, and I was sure you would want to set me free; but you cannot do it. I took the risk of your accident, unwillingly at first; but, still, eventually I accepted it, and I will not be set free."

His eyes held hers compellingly, as if he were searching for some inner truth behind her words, and then slowly reluctant tears gathered across the keenness of his vision. He leaned his head back on his pillow and looked away.

"I don't think," he said slowly, "you're glad to have me back. I don't want to marry you, I couldn't marry you; but I wish to Heaven you'd been glad! O Marian, I'm a coward and a fool, but if you'd been glad, I'd have gone down under it! I'd have married you then. I oughtn't to say this. It's all nonsense, and you're quite right. It's awfully fine of you to want to keep your word; but, you see, I didn't want your word.

It's your heart I wanted. I used to say out there sometimes, when things were a bit thick, 'Never mind. If I get through, she'll be glad.'"

Marian drew herself up. This did not seem to her fair of Julian. She had prayed very earnestly to G.o.d for his safe return. Neither G.o.d nor he had been quite fair about it. This was not a safe return.

"I don't know what more I can do, Julian," she said steadily, "than offer to share my life with you."

"That's just it," said Julian, with that curious look in his eyes which kept fighting her, and yet appealing to her simultaneously. "You can't do more. If you could, I'm such a weak hound, I'd lie here and take it.

If you wanted me, Marian,--wanted a broken fragment of a man fit for a dust-pan,--I'd land you with it. But, 'pon my word, it's too steep when you don't want it. Out of some curious sense of duty toward the dust-pan--I'm afraid I'm being uncivil to the universe, but I feel a little uncivil to it just now. No; you've got to go. I'm sorry. Don't touch me. Just let me be; but if you could say just where you are before you go! But it doesn't matter. I shouldn't believe it. I wouldn't believe the mother that bore me now. I've seen the end of love."

The tears burned themselves away from his eyes; they gazed at her as sunken and blue as the sea whipped by an east wind. She turned slowly toward the door.

"I want you to remember, Julian," she said, "that I meant what I said. I mean it still. I _wish_ to carry out our engagement."

Julian said something in reply that Marian didn't understand. He was repeating out loud and very slowly the cipher he had sent to the Government.

After all, it had been easier to send the cipher to the Government than to release Marian. His mind had sprung back to the easier task.

CHAPTER XIV

It was not often that Stella took anything for herself, least of all Sat.u.r.day afternoons. They belonged by a kind of sacred right to Eurydice, and what was left over from Eurydice was used on the weekly accounts. Mrs. Waring found it easier to explain to Stella than to any one else why one and sixpence that was really due to the butcher should have been expended upon "The Will of G.o.d," bound in white and gold for eighteenpence, an indisputable spiritual bargain, but a poor equivalent to the butcher.

But this Sat.u.r.day afternoon Stella hardened her heart against Eurydice and turned her mind away from the vista of the weekly bills. She wanted to think about Julian.

Marian had left London the day after her interview with him. She belonged to that cla.s.s of people which invariably follows a disagreeable event by a change of address; but she had found time before she went to write to Stella. There was something she wanted Stella to send on after her from the Army and Navy stores. She was really too upset and rushed to go there herself. Julian had been so extraordinary; he apparently expected her to be fonder of him now than when he was all right. She had really made tremendous sacrifices going to that horrid nursing home every day for a month. Both her parents were delighted that the engagement was at an end, and of course it was a relief in some ways, though horribly sad and upsetting, especially as Julian behaved as if she were to blame. Marian was afraid he wasn't as chivalrous as she had always thought. She had idealized him. One does when one is in love with people; but it doesn't last. One wakes up and finds everything different.

Stella wanted to forget Marian's letter. It seemed to her as cursory and callous as a newspaper account of a storm in China. It was all so far off, and drowned Chinamen are so much alike; and yet she had written to tell Stella about Julian and the end of love. "Many waters cannot quench love"; it had not taken many waters to quench Marian's. It occurred to Stella for the first time that the quality of love depends solely upon the heart that holds it; not even divine fire can burn on an untended hearth.

It was a mild December day; winter had given itself a few soft hours in which to brood upon the spring. London, the last of places to feel the touch of nature and the first to profit by it, had pa.s.sed into a golden mist.

Stella left the town hall at two o'clock, and walked down the busy highway. All the little, lively shops were awake and doing their noisy business of the week, while farther west all the big, quiet shops, with other habits, closed on the heels of their departing customers. Stella slipped away from the eager friendly crowd, glued together in indissoluble groups upon the pavement. She wanted to be alone and not to have to keep reminding herself not to think of Julian until she had finished what she had to do.

She turned down a narrow lane with high brick walls. Silence and solitude were at the turn of a corner. London fell away from her like a jangling dream.

She pa.s.sed an iron-scrolled gateway which led into an old garden. The low-browed house, with its overhanging eaves, was once the home of a famous poet. Poetry clung about it still; it was in the air, and met her like the touch of a friend's hand. A little farther along the lane she came to an opening in the wall, and saw before her a small, surrounded field of gra.s.s. It was a Quaker burial-ground. This unique and quiet people, in their enmity with form, had chosen of all forms the most resilient. They had made in the heart of London a picture, and a place of peace for death.

There was no sense of desolation in the silent field; only the sunshine, the old walls, and the green emptiness. It might have been the gra.s.s-grown citadel of Tusculum spread out at Stella's feet, it was a spot so acquainted with the air, with solitude, and with a nameless history.

Beyond it lay a maze of old and narrow streets, with quaint, lop-sided houses, uneven roofs, and winding causeways.

At the end of one of these she came suddenly upon a waste of waters the color of a moonstone. Stella had never been abroad; but she felt as if a wall between her mind and s.p.a.ce had broken down and shown her Venice.

Drifting slowly down the broad stream were two white swans, and across the river a green bank stood beneath a row of shining towers.

They were a row of factory chimneys; but rising out of the mist, above the moonstone flood, they looked like ancient towers. Stella sat upon a wooden float; it made a luxurious seat for her opposite the drifting swans. She felt as if all her thoughts at last were free. There was no one in sight; old and dignified houses leaned toward the water-front: but for all the life that inhabited them, they might have been the ghosts of houses. Nothing stirred, but sometimes up the river a sea-gull, on level wings, with wary eyes, wandered above the watery highway, challenging the unaccustomed small s.p.a.ces of the sky.