When Constance returned home, she was even more troubled than she had been in the morning by what she called her dishonesty towards Van der Welcke. She lunched alone with Addie; Van der Welcke did not come in, was evidently trying to lose himself on his bicycle in the roads outside the Hague and lunching off a sandwich and a glass of beer at a country inn. He did not come home till very late, tired and dusty, and he was in an unbearable mood, as though his surfeit of movement and speed and space had produced nothing but an evil intoxication and not the beneficent anæsthesia which he had expected of it. Roughly, as though dispirited and disgusted, he put away his machine, without bestowing on it the care which he usually gave to it after a long ride, angry with the lifeless steel which had not consoled him, which had not shown itself a friend this time. It was three o'clock; and he went straight to his room to change his clothes.
Constance, in her drawing-room, remained uneasy. In her heart there was a deep pity for Marianne; and for him too an almost motherly pity, which made her eyes fill with tears. Oh, when she had found so very much for herself, so much that was broad and lofty, radiant and lovely, of which she asked no more than that it should exist, exist in soft radiance within herself, a mystic sun, a glowing mystery, invisible to all but her, it pained her that those two, Henri and Marianne, could find nothing for themselves and for each other! . . . She listened anxiously to the sounds upstairs. She heard his footsteps tramping overhead, heard him even throwing his clothes about, splashing the water noisily, almost breaking the jug and basin in his savage recklessness, his violent resentment against everything. It all reechoed in her; she kept on starting: there he was flinging his boots across the room; bang went the door of his wardrobe; and, when he had finished, she heard him go to his den. Everything became still; the warmth of the summer afternoon floated in through the open windows; a heat mist hung over the garden of the little villa; in the kitchen, the maid was droning out a sentimental song, in a dreary monotone . . .
Constance' uneasiness increased. Yes, she must, she must tell him something: she almost became frightened at the idea of telling him nothing, of concealing from him entirely that Van Vreeswijck had asked her to go to Marianne. And yet nothing compelled her to say anything to Henri; and it would perhaps not even, she thought, be fair to Van Vreeswijck. She did not know; her thoughts rambled on uneasily. But persistently, as though from out of the new, fresh youth that was hers, one idea obtruded itself: it would not be honest to tell Henri nothing, not even a casual word, so that at any rate he should not imagine, if he came to hear later, that she had been plotting behind his back . . .
All of a sudden, the anxiety, the uneasiness became so great in her that she rose, impulsively, and went upstairs. The servant was droning sentimentally. Constance quietly opened the door of Henri's little den. He was sitting in a chair, with his arms hanging down beside him; he was not even smoking.
"Am I disturbing you?" she asked. "I should like to speak to you for a moment . . ."
He gave her a sharp look. Usually, when she came in like that, it meant that she had something to reproach him with, that she was spoiling for a scene . . . about a trifle, sometimes about nothing. She would come in then with the same words; and her voice at once sounded aggressive. This time, though she tried to speak gently, her voice, because of her uneasiness and anxiety, sounded harsh and discordant; and he, with his irritated nerves, seemed to hear the aggressive note, the prelude to a scene. It was as though his nerves at once became set, as though he were pulling himself together in self-defence:
"What is it now?" he asked, roughly.
She sat down, outwardly calm, inwardly trembling, anxious, uneasy. And she made an effort to clear her hoarse voice and to speak calmly . . . so that he might know:
"Oh," she began, reflectively, wishing to show him at once that she had not come to make reproaches, that she did not wish to make a scene, "I wanted to speak to you . . . to ask your advice . . ."
Her voice, now under control, sounded soft, as she wished it; and he was astonished for a second, just remembered, almost unconsciously, that she had not been so quick-tempered lately, that in fact they had not had a scene for weeks. Still he continued suspicious: she, who never asked his advice! And he echoed:
"To ask my advice?"
"Yes," she went on, in that same calm, reflective tone, with a certain constraint, "I wanted to tell you—what do you think?—Vreeswijck stayed talking to me for a long time yesterday evening . . . and he wanted absolutely . . ."
"Wanted what?"
She saw him turn pale; his eyes blazed angrily, as though sparks were flashing from that vivid blue, generally so young and boyish.
"He would so much like . . . he asked me . . ."
She could not get the words out, looked at him, afraid of his eyes, now that she was in no mood for a scene of mutual recrimination. But she could not keep silent either:
"He asked me . . . if I thought . . . that Marianne . . ."
She saw him give a shiver. He understood it all. Nevertheless, she went on:
"That Marianne could get to care for him . . . He asked me to go to Bertha . . . and ask her . . ."
"Van Vreeswijck? Marianne?" he repeated; and his eyes were almost black. "Asked you . . . to go to Bertha? . . . Well, you're not mixing yourself up in it, are you? You're not going, surely?"
"I went this morning," she said; and her voice once more sounded discordant.
He seemed to hear a hostile note in it. And, unable to contain himself, he flew into a passion:
"You went? You went this morning?" he raved; and even in his raving she saw the suffering. "Why need you mix yourself up in it? What business has Van Vreeswijck to come asking you? . . . Van Vreeswijck . . ."
He could not find the words. All that he could get out was a rough word, cruel, hard and insulting:
"Plotting and scheming . . . if you want to go plotting . . ."
Her eyes flamed; she felt his intention to insult her. But his suffering was so obvious, she saw him so plainly writhing under his pain, that the angry tempest died down at once and she merely said, very gently:
"She has refused him."
He looked at her. The black cloud lifted from his eyes, which turned blue again, and his gloomy frown gave way to his usual boyish expression, full of wide-eyed astonishment now. His features relaxed, his whole body relaxed; he gave a shiver and sat down, as though all his temper and rage were subsiding like a sudden storm that had arisen for no reason at all. And he asked, slowly:
"She . . . has refused him?"
"Yes. Of course, Bertha had nothing against it. But Marianne, when I spoke to her, declined at once. I did not insist. Poor Vreeswijck!"
"Yes, poor fellow!" he said, mechanically.
"I wanted to tell you, because . . ."
"Because what?"
"Because Vreeswijck is a friend and I thought it better that you should know. I meant to tell you this morning, before I started. But you went out . . ."
He looked at her again, with a keen glance, wondering if she was sincere or if there was anything behind her words; wondering what she thought, knew or guessed about him and Marianne; what she would really have liked; if it was a disappointment to her that Marianne had declined so promptly: so promptly that Constance had not insisted for a moment. But she was so calm and gentle, as she stood leaning against his table, that he found her incomprehensible and was only conscious of breathing again after that first moment when it had seemed to him that his throat, lungs, chest and heart were all gripped in one hideous constriction.
They were silent, she standing there and he looking at her, with his keen glance. A heat haze hung over the garden; the heavy summer scent floated up to them; from the kitchen came the monotonous voice of the housemaid droning out her love-song. And suddenly a sort of remorse loomed as a spectre before Constance, because she had fettered him to her life, for all his life, years ago; because she had fettered him to her then by accepting his sacrifice and that of his parents in her despair and helplessness, reviled outcast as she then was. It flashed before her: the recollection of that day when he came to her in Florence, when he made his gift of himself to her, made it despairingly, feeling even then perhaps, despite the forced love-illusion of passion, the life-long mistake which they were mutually making. She had accepted his gift, taken his youth; she had rendered him aimless, him and his life, his career and his happiness: all that he might perhaps yet have found. It flashed before her again: the recollection of that good-looking boy, the way he had come to her in Florence and the way she had taken everything, without having anything to give him in exchange. Oh, how the past oppressed her now, how it hung round her shoulders, crushing her like a nightmare that was not to be shaken off, like the embrace of some leering monster! Oh, the remorse, the remorse that was beginning to torture her!
She stared before her as she stood leaning against the table; and beads of perspiration began to come out on her forehead in the small, warm room, full of summer haze. He continued to look at her, penetratingly. And suddenly he heard her voice speak his name:
"Henri . . ."
He did not answer, thought her strange, did not recognize her; and again he wondered what she thought, guessed or knew . . . and what else she wanted to say. But she, while a sweat of fear broke from her, made a great inward effort to release herself from the oppression of her past and her remorse, to be once more the woman that she had become: the woman young again; the woman whose life was beginning for the first time; the woman who thought, dreamed and loved; the woman in whom nowadays the thoughts and dreams sometimes darted and darted like multitudes of laughing butterfly fancies, swiftly, swiftly in front of them; the woman who loved so deeply that she floated in ecstasy as in the mystic sun of herself. Did she not now see farther than the usual little circle which had bounded her vision for years: the little circle of the little prejudices, the little moralities, the little follies; the little circle in which all the others—her own people, people like herself, the small people—felt happy and comfortable with their little philosophies, their little religions, their little dogmas? Had she not, for weeks and months past, been contemplating more distant prospects, all the distant cities of light on the horizons above which sailed the spacious cloud-worlds and across which shot the revealing lightning-flashes? In the love which she had already confessed to herself so honestly that it etherealized into sheer ecstasy, had she not risen above all that was still left in her and about her of prejudice and insincerity, that sneering at herself and others, with all the rest of that feeble cynicism? If she wanted to live, must she not be honest, honest in all things? Oh, she felt—in these thoughts which rushed through her mind in those few seconds while she leant against the table, her forehead bedewed with heat and excitement—that she was shaking off the nightmare of the past and that, if she felt remorse, she must also try to give back what she had taken . . . and what had never belonged to her, because it had never been her right, because it had never been her happiness, any more than his, nor her life, any more than his life! No, she had grown out of that prejudice, the horror of making herself ridiculous; and what she had stolen she would like to give back now . . . in so far as was possible to her!
"Henri," she repeated, for her whole thought had rushed through her in those two or three seconds, "there is something more I want to say to you. I should like to talk frankly to you. Promise me to keep calm; and do not let us lose our tempers. It is not necessary to lose our tempers, Henri, in order to understand each other at last . . ."
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"I have been thinking a great deal lately," she continued, turning her steady eyes towards him. "I have been thinking a very great deal, about our life, about both our lives . . . and about the mistake we made . . ."
He became impatient:
"What on earth are you driving at and what is it all about?" he asked, with an irritable shake of his shoulders.
"Come, Henri," she said, gently, "let us talk for once, for once in our lives, and be quite frank and serious. Our life has been a mistake. And the fault . . ."
"Is mine, I suppose?" he broke in, angrily, aggressively, working himself up for the scene which he foresaw.
She looked at him long and deeply and then said, firmly:
"The fault is mine."
He remained silent, again shook his shoulders, restlessly, not understanding her, not recognizing her at all. This woman was now a stranger to him; and, above all, her calm seriousness confused him: he would almost have preferred that she should fly out at him and have done with it and tell him that he had no business to go bicycling alone with Marianne.
But she did not do this, she merely repeated, calmly:
"The fault is mine. The fault, the blame is mine alone, Henri. I ought not, in Florence, to have accepted the sacrifice which you made for me, which your father and mother made for me. It was my fault that your life did not become . . . what it might have been."
Yes, she was frank and calm: he had to admit that; and it was not a crafty prelude leading up to one of her angry scenes. She was speaking so quietly and gently; her voice had a note of sorrowful humility that almost touched him.
"But what are you driving at?" he said, nevertheless, in a voice that was still nervous and jerky. "You are very frank and honest in looking at things like that; but what is the use of it all now? It is so long ago. It is the past. And it was my duty then to make up for the wrong which I had done you."
"I had done you quite as great a wrong, Henri. I should not have accepted your sacrifice. I ought not to have become your wife."
"But what would you have done then?"
"I should have gone away, somewhere or other. If I had been then the woman that I am now, I should have gone away, somewhere or other. And I should have left you to your life . . . and to the happiness that was perhaps awaiting you elsewhere . . ."
"I should have had to give up the service just the same . . ."
"But you would have been freer without me. You were still so young: you had your whole life before you; and you would perhaps have found your happiness. As it is, you have never found it . . . or . . . perhaps too late."
He stood up, very restless and nervous, and his boyish eyes pleaded anxiously:
"Constance, I can't talk in this way. I'm not used to it . . ."
"Can't you face things seriously for a moment? . . ."
"No, I can't. It upsets me. I don't know: you mean to be nice, I believe, but please don't let us talk like this. We're not accustomed to it. And I . . . I can't do it. You can see for yourself, it upsets me."
"Come," she said, in a motherly tone, "you are not so much upset as all that. You can have a bicycle-ride afterwards and you will feel better. But first let us talk seriously for a moment . . ."
He sighed, sank into his chair, submitted to her stronger will. If only she had flown out at him, he would have stormed back at her; but she was saying such strange things, the sort of things that people never said, and she was so calm and frank about it, calmer and franker than people ever were.
"You will listen seriously for a moment? Well, what I want to ask you is this: have you never thought that it would be better . . . if we just quietly separated, Henri?"
He said nothing, looked at her with his great wondering eyes.
"It is certainly very late," she said, "very late for me to propose it. But it is perhaps not too late . . . Let us be honest, Henri: we have never been happy together. You might perhaps still be happy without me, released from me, free . . ."
He continued to look at her, his eyes still full of amazement; and it seemed as though he was afraid to turn his gaze towards a life of such transcendent peace and quietness and sincerity. It seemed to him that she was urging him to take a road which grew fainter and fainter as it took its mystic, winding way towards clouds . . . towards things that did not exist.
"I? . . . Happy?" he stammered, not knowing what to say.
But a more concrete thought now came into his mind:
"And Addie?" he asked.
"I am not forgetting him," she said, gently. "He is the child of both of us, whom we both love. If we quietly . . . quietly separate, if you become happy later, he will be able to understand that his parents, however passionately they both loved him, separated because it was better that they should. He need not suffer through it. He will not suffer through it. At least, I like to think that he will not. If we are only honest, Henri, he cannot suffer through it."
"And you . . . what would you do?"
She blushed, but did not lose her composure; he did not see her blush. She had not yet thought of herself for a moment: she was thinking, had been thinking, after that wave of remorse and after holding Marianne that morning in her arms, only of him and Marianne, of their happiness, his and Marianne's, even though she did not mention the girl's name again, once she had told him that Marianne had refused Van Vreeswijck. She was thinking only of the two of them. . . . What would she do? She did not know. Her love, it is true, rose radiantly before her: her love, her new life; but she was not thinking of outward change. Life, the real life, was an inward thing; outwardly she was the mother of her son and would remain so . . .
"I?" she asked. "Nothing. I should simply stay as I am. Addie could be with us in turns."
"It would distress him, Constance . . ."
"Perhaps, at first . . . But he would soon understand."
"Constance, tell me, why are you speaking like this?"
"In what way?"
"What do you really mean, Constance? What do you mean by my happiness?"
"Only what I say, Henri: that you may still be able to find your happiness."
"You are frank," he said, forcing himself to adopt her tone, though it was difficult for him to speak like that. "You are frank. I will also try to be frank. My happiness? You speak of my happiness? . . . I am too old to find that now."
"No, you are not old. You are young."
"And you?"
"I . . . am old. But there is no question about me. I am thinking . . . of you."
She looked at him and he suddenly understood her. He understood her, but he writhed under so much frankness and at seeing life so honestly:
"No, no, Constance," he mumbled.
"Think it over," she said, gently. "If you like . . . I will agree. Only . . . let us do it quietly, Henri, . . . let us do it, if possible, with something of affection for each other."
Her eyes filled with tears. He was very much moved:
"No, Constance, no," he mumbled.
"Henri, have the courage to be honest. Have the courage and do not be weak. Be a man. I am only a woman and I have the courage."
"Constance, people . . ."
"No, Henri, you must not hesitate because of people. If we cannot do it, it would be because of Addie. But I like to think that, if he understands, he will not suffer through it. He must not suffer through it: that would be selfish of him; and he is not selfish."
"No, Constance, no!" he protested again.
"Think it over, Henri," she repeated. "Think it all out. I shall think of Addie also. You know how passionately devoted I am to him. But . . ."
"Constance, it is all too late."
"But think it over, Henri."
"Yes, yes, Constance, I shall . . . I shall think it over."
"And, if we decide upon it . . . let us do it . . . let us decide to do it with something of affection for each other . . ."
"Yes, Constance . . . yes, with affection . . . You are nice . . . you are kind . . ."
He looked at her, his chest heaving with emotion; a haze dimmed the boyish glance of his eyes. She had meant to go, quietly, to leave him alone. She went to the door, without another word, another look, wishing to leave him alone with his thoughts.
"Constance!" he cried, hoarsely.
She looked round. He was standing before her; and she saw him quivering, trembling with the emotion, the shock which the reality of life had sent shuddering through him. For a moment they stood in front of each other; and, because they saw into each other's eyes, they told each other once more—silently, without words—that they understood each other! A great gratitude, an emotion that to him was almost superhuman shot through his small soul and flowed over her. And, impotently, he cried once more, like a man in a fever:
"Constance!"
He flung himself, distractedly, desperately, with a wild impulse, into her arms; bursting into sobs, he buried his head in her breast. She started violently; she felt his convulsive tremors against her heart. Then she threw her arm around him, stroked his hair. It was as though she were comforting her son.
"I am mad, I am mad!" he muttered.
He released himself, hurriedly pressed a quivering kiss on her forehead and tore down the stairs. And, when she went down to her drawing-room, she suddenly heard the front-door slam and saw him bicycling away like a madman, his back arched like a professional's. He pedalled, pedalled furiously: she watched him lose himself . . . in movement, speed and space . . .
"Poor boy!" she thought.
Then she sank into a chair, while the room swam round her. She closed her eyes and her hands fell limply at her side. So she sat for half an hour, unconscious, alone . . . as if the new life had been too keen, too intense, with its pure air, its honesty . . . too rare and keen in its cold-blue ether . . . and as if she were swooning away in it . . .