The Third Window Part 1

The Third Window.

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick.

I

"I love this window," said Antonia, walking down the drawing-room; "and this one. They both look over the moors, you see. This view is even lovelier." She stopped at the end of the long room, and the young man with the pale face and the limping step followed and looked out of the third window with her. "But--I don't know why--I hate it. I wish it weren't here."

Captain Saltonhall looked out and said nothing.

"I wonder if you see what I mean," said Antonia.

"No; I don't. I like it." The young man spoke gently and with something of a drawl, unimpressed, apparently, by her antipathy and putting up the back of a placid forefinger to stroke along the edge of his moustache.

"One gets the hills, peaceful and silvery; one gets the walled garden and the cedar," she enumerated.

"The little pond with its fountain is as serene as a happy dream. It's all like a happy dream. Yet--I wish there weren't this window here."

"You could wall it up if you don't like it," Captain Saltonhall suggested, his eyes, as he stood behind her, turning from the walled garden beneath to fix themselves with a rather sad attentiveness upon the head of the young woman. Her dark hair was near him and the curve of her cheek; he thought that he felt against his the warmth of her shoulder in its thin black dress.

She looked out, motionless, for a little while; then, turning suddenly, as if with impatience of her thoughts, found him so near, and his eyes on hers. She, too, was pale and tall; but all in her was soft, splendid, and almost opulent, while he was sharp-edged and wasted. He looked much the older, though they were of the same age; both, indeed, were very young.

He did not move away as she faced him nor did his look alter. Sad and attentive, it merely remained attached upon her, and if he felt any nervousness it showed itself only in the slight gesture of his forefinger pa.s.sing meditatively along the edge of his moustache. It was she who spoke. "Well, Bevis?" she said gravely. Her look asked: "Have you anything to tell me?"

"Well, Tony," he returned. He had, apparently, nothing to say.

She studied him for a moment longer, and then, with an added impatience--if anything so soft could so be called--walking away to an easy-chair before the fire, she said, "You think me very silly, I suppose."

"Silly? Why?"

"Because of the window. My hating it."

He came and leaned on the back of her chair, looking across her head up at the mantelpiece where a row of white fritillaries stood in tall crystal gla.s.ses, their reflections showing as if through a film of sea-water in the ancient mirror behind them. There had been white fritillaries among the flagged paths of the walled garden, and, finding them again, he recognized that they had been the only things he had felt uncanny there; for he had always felt them wraith-like flowers.

"I think you'd better wall it up, quite seriously, if you really hate it." He repeated his former suggestion. "It would rather spoil the room.

But I wouldn't, if I were you, live with a discomfort like that--if it's really a discomfort."

The young woman beneath him laughed, a little sadly, if lightly. "How you suspect me."

"Of what, pray?"

"Oh--of unconscious humbug; of unconscious posing. Of induced emotions generally. It's always been the same."

"I rather like induced emotions in you," said Captain Saltonhall. "They suit you. They are like the colour of a pomegranate or the taste of a mulberry or the smell of a branch of flowering hawthorn; something rich, thick, and pleasingly oppressive."

"Thanks. I don't take it as a compliment."

"I don't mean it as one. I merely said I liked it in you; and if I do it's only because I'm in love with you."

He lowered his eyes now from the fritillaries to watch the very faint colour that rose, very slowly, in her cheek. It could hardly be called a response. It was merely an awareness. And after a moment she said, still with her soft impatience: "Do come and sit where I can see you.

It's bad for your leg to stand too long, I'm sure."

He obeyed her, limping to a chair on the opposite side of the fireplace, laying his hands on either arm as he lowered himself with some little awkwardness. He was not yet accustomed to the complicated mechanical apparatus, the artificial leg, that, always, he felt hang so heavily about his thigh.

Antonia Wellwood's dark eyes watched him, with solicitude, it seemed, rather than tenderness; though indeed their very shape--the outer corners drooping, a line of white showing under the full iris--expressed a melancholy so sweet that their most casual glance seemed to convey tenderness.

The young people sat then for a little while in silence. Though the spring day was sunny, it was sharp. On a bed of ashes the log-fire burned softly and clearly. The silvery light of the high, Northern sky shone along the polished floor.

The room was modern, like the house, and imaged carefully, but not too carefully for ease, eighteenth-century austerities and graces. The walls were panelled in white; the chintzes were striped in white and citron-colour. In spite of bowls of flowers, books and magazines, a half-knit sock here, its needles transfixing the ball of heather-coloured wool, and the embroidery there, with tangled skeins, it was an impersonal room, an object calmly and confidently awaiting appraisal rather than a long-memoried presence, making beauty forgotten in significance. It was not a room expressive of the young woman sunken in the deep chair. Appointed elaborately as she was, in her dense or transparent blacks, her crossed feet in their narrow buckled shoes stretched before her, her hands lying along the white and citron chintz, she was neither disciplined nor austere. Brooding, melancholy, restless, and with a latent exasperation, her eyes dwelt on the flames and her wide, small lips puckered themselves at moments as if with the bitterness of unshed tears.

She did not move for a long time, nor did the young man who, his elbows propped, rested his chin on the backs of interlaced hands and surveyed her over them. He noted her, as he had done for many months now; just as, for months before that, he had, in France, dreamed over her; not her mystery; her clouded, drifting quality; he had perhaps got round that or perhaps given it up, sometimes he did not himself know which; but the pictorial incidents of her appearance; the black velvet bow in the gauze upon her breast; the heavy pins of tortoise-sh.e.l.l that held up her great tresses; the odd, dusky mark on her eyelids that looked like the freaking of a lovely else unblemished fruit; her pale cheek; her childlike forehead; her hand, beautiful and indolent, with its wedding-ring. He dwelt on all these appearances with a still absorption, and whether with more delight or irony he could not have told; but it was an irony at his own expense, not at hers; for he had always been a young man aloof from appearances, tolerant yet contemptuous of their appeal, and he knew that they absorbed him now because he was in love with her, and he sometimes even wondered if he was in love with her because of them. He did not, however, wonder much. Before the war he would have computed, a.n.a.lyzed, perhaps done away with his pa.s.sion with the fretting of over-acute thought. That sort of vitality, the a.n.a.lytic, destructive sort, had been, he imagined, bled, beaten, and cut out of him. He was now a wraith, a wreck of his former self, fit only for contemplation and acceptance. She was enough for him now, just as she was; ignorant, for all her accomplishment; indolent and self-absorbed; and she could more than satisfy him. The old acuteness remained, but it no longer tormented. He was aware of everything and all he asked was to possess it all. That, however, didn't mean that he pretended anything.

If he had no illusions and asked for none, he did not let her think he had them.

"When did you begin to know you were in love with me?" she said at last, and now, in spite of the tearful pucker in her lips and liquid fullness of her eyes, he knew that the theme was the one to which she had intended to bring him. But it hadn't been deviously; for all her shifting shadows and eddies she was one of the straightest creatures he had ever known. Perhaps, after all, it was that quality in her, rather than the appearances, that accounted for his state.

"How long? Since I've loved you? Oh--since before Malcolm's death, I'm afraid."

It was what she had feared; he saw that, and that it hurt her. Yet it pleased her, too.

"I never guessed," she said.

He laughed. "Rather not! How could you have guessed?"

"Women do--these things."

"Perhaps you are less clever than other women, then, or I more clever than other men."

"I don't think I'm less clever than other women," said Antonia, and a smile just touched her lips; another evidence of that straightness in her. She was willing to smile, even though smiling might be misunderstood. Yes, more than anything, perhaps, it was her genuineness he cherished.

"You're cleverer than most," he a.s.sured her. "Far. But I'm cleverer than most men."

"We are a wonderful pair!" she exclaimed, and he agreed: "We are indeed."

"And why was it?" she went on, more happily now, for, another precious point, and it seemed more than anything else to pair them, they were happy with each other. Apart from her woman's craving to feel her power over him, apart from his definitely amorous condition, they were comrades, and it crossed his mind, oddly, at the moment of thinking it, that this could not have been said of Antonia and Malcolm. Their relation had been that, specially, of man and woman, lover and beloved.

He doubted, really, whether Antonia would have cared much about Malcolm had he not been a man and a lover. Whereas, had he himself been another woman, Antonia, he felt sure, would have made a friend of him. These reflections took him far from her question, and before the vague musing of his look she repeated it in an altered form. "Why did you begin--after having known me so long without?"

"Ah, that I can't tell. Perhaps it didn't begin. Perhaps it was always there. I knew it for the first time when I was ordered to France; that day I came to say good-bye to you and Malcolm in London--before he went."

The name of her dead husband brought the cloud about her again. "Oh, yes," she murmured. "I remember that day. I was horribly frightened over the war. I had a presentiment. I knew he was going to volunteer."

"It could hardly have been a presentiment. He evidently would."

She showed no resentment for his clipping of her dark pinions. It was as if she still hovered on them as she said: "Of course. I mean presentiment of what came after that. What had to come. Don't you believe in Fate, Bevis? Perhaps it was that you felt in me. You had never seen me suffering before."

"Perhaps," said the young man, sceptically if kindly. "However, I don't want to talk about it," he added. "That is, unless you do, very much."

She looked up at him, still unresentful, but now a little ironic, though irony was not her note. "You are an odd lover, Bevis."