A Forsaken Temple

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

A FORSAKEN TEMPLE

BY ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK

Author of "The Rescue," "The Confounding of Camelia," "The Dull Miss Archinard," etc.

I
Milly

"IT is the emptiness, the loneliness, the lack of response and understanding," said Milly. "It is as if I looked always at a face that never smiled at me or spoke to me. Such a mistake as I have made, or as others have made for me, is irretrievable. An unhappy marriage makes ruins all about one; one must dwell in the midst of ruins thenceforth; one can't go away and leave them behind one, as one can other calamities in life."

Milly Quentyn and Mrs. Drent were alone this afternoon in the big country house where they had come really to know each other, and Milly, acting hostess for her absent cousin, had poured out Mrs. Brent's tea and then her own, leaving it untouched, however, while she spoke, her hands falling, clasped together, in her lap, her eyes fixed on vacancy. The contemplation of ruins for the last five years had made these eyes steady holders of a pensive resignation; they showed no tearful repinings, no fretful restlessness. They were clear eyes, large and luminous, and in looking at them, and at the wan, lovely little face where they bloomed like melancholy flowers, Mrs. Drent's face, on the other side of the tea-table, grew yet more somber and more intent in its brooding sympathy.

"Why did you," she began—"why did you—love him?" This was a more penetrating question than to ask Mrs. Quentyn why she had married him.

The extreme lowness of Mrs. Drent's voice muffled, as it were, its essential harshness; one felt in it the effort to be soft, as in her one felt an effort, always, to quell some latent fierceness, an eager, almost savage energy. She was thirty years old—six years older than Milly Quentyn. Her skin was swarthy; her eyes, under broad, tragically bent eyebrows, were impenetrably black. Her features' had they not been so small," so finely finished, would have seemed too emphatic; as it was, they were significant at once of a race-horse nervousness and of something inflexible in the midst of an expression all flexibility. Her hands were curiously slight and small, and as she now, in looking at her companion and in asking her question, locked them together with a force that made them tremble, they showed the same mingling of an excessive strength informing an excessive fragility.

Mrs. Quentyn's gaze drifted to her, and rested upon her in silence. Presently she smiled.

"How kind you are to care so much, to care at all!"

"I do care."

"Are you—will you be—my friend—always?" asked Milly, leaning toward her a little, and the smile seemed to flutter to the other woman like an appealing and grateful kiss.

"I am your friend; I will be your friend—always," Mrs. Drent replied in an even lower tone than before.

The tears just came softly into Milly's eyes, while they looked at each other, she gently, Mrs. Drent still somberly. Then, leaning back again with a sigh, Milly said:

"Why I loved him? I did n't love him. Is n't that the almost invariable answer? I was nineteen. I was in love with my own ideal of love, which amounts to saying, probably, that I was in love with myself; ready to love anybody who echoed that love nicely. You know, you must know, the silly, pathetic, sentimental, and selfish mixture one is at nineteen; and mamma said that he was that ideal, and I believed her and him. Poor Dick! He was in love, I think, really, and not a bit with himself; but not very articulate, even then. You know mamma. She has married us all off very well, they say—you know how they say it. She is as careless of the single life in her ruthless eagerness for the comfortable ensconcing of the family type as nature itself. In this case an apparently very cozy niche offered itself for me, and she shoved me into it. I have grown since then, and the niche is hardly a foothold."

"But he still loves you?"

"Oh, I suppose so," said Milly, with a sigh, "if you call it love. He is rather dismayed by the situation; only rather; sorry that we don't 'get on better,' as he would express it; jocosely resigned to my unkindness and queerness, as he considers it. But as for tragedy, suffering, one can't associate such perturbing things with imperturbable Dick. I have n't to reproach myself with having hurt his life seriously, and Heaven knows I don't reproach his simplicity and harmlessness for having broken mine. Marriage and a wife were incidents—incidents only—to him, and if they have failed to be satisfactory incidents, he has other far more absorbing interests in his life to take his mind off the breakdown of his domestic happiness. Indeed, domesticity, when he cares to avail himself of it, is always there in its superficial forms and ceremonies. I can't pretend to love him, but I take care of his money and house, I entertain his friends, I give him his tea and breakfast and a decorous kiss when he comes back from shooting animals in some savage country. One could hardly call us separated, so discreetly do I bridge the chasm with all the conventional observances. Thank Heaven! the shooting is his one great passion, so that he is usually wandering happily in distant jungles, and not requiring too many tête-à-têtes at breakfast of me."

"And—why can't you love him?"

Milly's eyes now definitely fixed themselves on her, and they were solemn.

"My dear—you loved your husband, did you not?"

Mrs. Drent's husband had died five years before. She wore black, exquisite and unobtrusive, always. Exquisitely and unobtrusively, she was unconsolable. Her face crimsoned painfully, although no tears came to her eyes.

"Everybody knows you did," said Milly. "And why? Because he meant everything to you: my husband means nothing to me. Because you needed him: nothing in me needs Dick. Because he interested, charmed you: my husband bores me to intensest desperation. Because he understood what there was most individual, most real in you,"—Milly was drawing largely upon her imagination in this effective picture of Mrs. Drent's married happiness,—"and responded to it. I don't claim at all any remarkable individuality; but what I have Dick does n't understand at all, does n't even see. He is blundering about the dullest, most distant parks and preserves of a castle; that is as near as he ever gets to the castle of my personality. And Dick does n't really care much about getting to the castle; it hardly worries him that he can't find it. There might be wonderful pictures on its walls, and jewels in its cabinets, and music in its chambers; but even if he got to it, were able to enter and to see and hear, he would n't really care one bit about them; would say, 'Awfully nice,' and look for the smoking-room. And there," said Mrs. Quentyn, suddenly leaning forward, her eyes again filling with swift tears, as from a pictorial appreciation of her situation its reality smote upon her—"there is the tragedy. For every woman thinks that she has pictures and jewels and music, and longs—oh, longs!—to show them to the one—the one person who will love to see and to hear. And when she finds that the one can't see, can't hear, does n't even know that there is anything to look for, to listen for, then the music dies, and the pictures fade, and the jewels grow dim, and at last everything magical vanishes from life, and she sees herself, not as an enchanted castle, but as a first-class house in Mayfair—with all the modern improvements; as much a matter of course, as much a convenience, as unmysterious and as unalluring, as the hot-water pipes, the bath-tubs, and the electric lighting. It is only as if in a dream—a far, far dream—that she remembers the castle, and feels sometimes within her the ruins, the empty ruins."

"Oh—dearest!" breathed Mrs. Drent. It was as if she could not help it, as if, shaken from her passionate reserve, she must show her very heart. She clasped the other woman's hands. "Don't—don't let the magic vanish! Don't cease to believe in the pictures, the jewels, the music! They are there, I see. I hear."

"How—sweet of you!" faltered Milly Quentyn.

She was startled, she was touched; she, who rarely felt it, felt shyness. She had known that this dark, still woman was attracted to her; responsively, she had felt attraction; something in Mrs. Drent had made her feel, too, that it would be easy, a relief, to talk to her about all one's miseries and desolations. But the sudden leap of flame found her unprepared. She was a little ashamed, as though her own reality were somewhat unreal beside Mrs. Brent's intense belief in it Something pleasant there had been to her in the tracing of her little tragedy, something sweet in the showing of that sad castle of her soul, with its stilled music, its fading enchantments. But Mrs. Drent had seen only the sadness, the tragedy. Such response, such understanding, might well take one's breath away.

But in this scene of showing and of seeing was the beginning of their long friendship.

It was a charming friendship, to both very becoming. Milly Quentyn, for all the clouds of her background, was a creature of sunshine, though sunshine in a mist; a creature of enduring fluctuations. Indeed, Christina Drent told her afterward, when they analyzed the beginnings, it had been her childlike radiance, her smiles, her air as of rifts of blue over a rainy landscape (for everybody knew that Mrs. Quentyn was not happy with her husband)—it was these sweet, these doubly pathetic qualities that had charmed her.

"I am not easily charmed," said Christina. "Had there been a languishing hint of the femme incomprise about you, any air of self-pity, I should never have so longed to take care of you—to try to help to make you happier. But you were so made for happiness; one saw it; it appealed to everything in one."

In spite of these defects, had Milly had them, she might, perhaps, have so longed. For Christina Drent's likings were as vehement, as absorbing, as they were rare, and did not permit her much critical acuteness once they held her.

The death of her husband had left her stricken numb, dumb, it seemed. She could hardly speak of him. Yet it was whispered that Gilbert Drent had married her for her money, and that it was not only in material matters that she had given more than she received. He had been, of course, as charming to his wife as he was to everybody else. Certainly he had never let her discover any lack in him, and certainly in her there had been, especially at the time of their marriage, little to attract his beauty-loving nature. She was then an ugly, silent, horribly shy little thing. Only since his death had a few discriminating people discovered that her face was as full of charm as of force and reticence; discovered that she was really clever; and only two years before her meeting with Milly did she astonish the undiscriminating by suddenly becoming a very tolerably famous young poetess. It was as the poetess that Milly had really first known her (though for years they had met vaguely), a somber little personage, not pretty, but—oh! full of delicious buts—and most enchantingly well dressed—so Milly had summed her up. How often she and Christina laughed together over the summing!

In the poetry the dumbness, the numbness, had found a partial outlet and awakening. Mrs. Drent's poems were not great things, but they were quite sufficiently simple, sincere, strangely original, to make her name stand by itself in a dignified little niche among the poets of the last decade. They were written with no touch of artifice, no strain or effort. They were sudden, spontaneous, swift. It was as if, in reading them, one heard a distant wail in a desolate country—always distant; as if one saw, across a bleak sky, the flight of an unknown bird. They were troubling, haunting, with here and there a sweetness helpless and poignant, more touching, even, than the vague wildness of their great regrets and longings.

But it was, indeed, only an echo of her regrets and longings that Christina was able to put into her poems—all, perhaps, that she chose to put; they were never intimate, personal.

The essence of her was that passionate reserve, and, with it, that passionate longing to devote herself, to expend herself, blindly, lavishly, exclusively upon one idolized, and inevitably idealized, object. She was full of a fervor of faith once the reserve, the shyness, was passed, and her ideal, high on a pedestal in its well-built temple, was secure thenceforth from overthrow.

Such an idol had her husband been. The doors of that sanctuary were sealed forever, the sacred emptiness forever empty. But beside it arose a second temple, scarcely less fair, and in it, lovingly enshrined, stood Milly Quentyn.

Happily Milly was an ideal worthy of idealization, perhaps even of temple-building. She was sweet, tender, clinging; in friendship most upright and loyal. She loved to be loved, to see her sweetness reflected in appreciation, her tenderness blossom about her in responsive tenderness. She was not vain, but she loved those she cared for to find her exquisite, and to show her that they did. Like a faint, frail flower unvisited by sunlight, she could hardly live without other lives about her, fortifying, expanding her own. Her disappointment in her husband had turned to something like a wan disgust. His crude appreciations of her, that, in the first girlish trust of her married life, she had taken as warrant of all the subtle, manifold appreciations she needed, were now offenses. Poor Dick Quentyn blundered deeper and deeper into the quagmire of his wife's disdain. Christina Drent, when she went to spend some months with Milly at the Quentyns' country house, was sorry for Dick at once. Her heart echoed quickly the faintest note of pain; certainly in his perfectly good-humored yet, even now, rather wondering resignation she divined such a note: but even her exquisite acuteness was unable to do more than hear it as very faint indeed. His was a boyish, unexacting nature. He asked for no great things, and the lack of even small mercies left him serene. As he had never thought at all about himself, it did not surprise him that his wife thought very little of him; he did not, because of it, think of himself less well or more. Milly's indifference argued in her a difference from most women—facilely contented. they usually seemed. It did not change or harm him, did not make him either self-assertive or self-conscious.

He had soon discovered that the things he cared to talk about wearied her—sport, the estate, very uncomplex politics, or very uncomplex books; and after a little while he discovered, further, that for him to try to adapt himself to her, to try to talk about the things she cared for, exasperated her. She listened, indeed, with a bleak patience while he admired genially, thinking it the right thing, all the wrong pictures at the shows where they went together. She sat silent, her eyes aloof, dimly smiling, while he tried to win her interest in a very jolly book—harmless, watered Dumas, decantered into very modern bottles. He saw that she made an effort to care about the big game he shot,—the hall and dining-room bristled with these trophies, one walked over them everywhere,—she looked at pictures of them in books of travel; but it was as pictures, as animals, not as sport, that they remotely interested her.

Dick Quentyn, with an unmysterious, undifficult wife, could have been a very gracefully affectionate husband,—his manners were as charming as his mind was blundering,—but with this chill young nymph any attempts at marital pettings and caressings seemed clumsy, grotesque. With Milly—he soon saw it—the barrier between their minds was inevitably to constitute a barrier shutting him from even those manifestations of affection: he was not at all dull in feeling that; not at all dull in his quick and delicate withdrawal before her passive distaste; not dull in knowing that if he were not to draw back, the distaste would become something more than negative.

He had now, cheerfully, it seemed, recognized that his marriage was a very thorough failure, and, as Milly had said, it did not seem, after an unpleasant wrench or two when he did show an uncontrollable grimace of pain, to make very much difference to him. She endured him; she did not, indeed, dislike him at all—at a distance; and very gaily, and with a certain debonair manner of perfect trust, he kept at a distance. She led her life; he led his. He traveled constantly; it was very rarely that he required her to pour his tea for him. And she was very willing that the breach between them should not be crudely open and avowed.

Milly poured his tea for a fortnight during Christina's first visit to Chawlton House, and, recognizing to the full, as she did, her hosts' deep incongruity, Christina could but feel some dismay at the wife's betrayal of her consciousness of it. Christina did not care so much about Dick's very problematical discomfort under Milly's cold, sweet endurance of him. He showed no discomfort at all; talked with great good spirits to her and to the other guests assembled for the fortnight's shooting, made cheerful, obvious jokes, and looked eminently sane, fresh, strong, and even picturesque in his out-of-door attire against the paneled walls of the dining-room. He was large and spare; his small head well set; his hair closely cropped, but showing a resolute curl; his short nose expressive of pleasant character; his gray eyes as free from all malice and uncharitableness as they were from introspection. He was a nut-brown sort of person; one could associate him only with the most simple, concrete aspects of life. And yet the shape of his nails and the delightful fitness of his clothing, showing quite an esthetic sense of selection, bespoke a consciousness of the more complex niceties of civilization. Christina felt very keenly on the subject of nails, and Dick's pleased her.

What pained her, though, was that Milly, in her treatment of him, should be almost unbeautiful. It was a streak of hardness, of almost cruelty, in her darling that distressed her. When Milly did not care about a person, every fiber of her face, every tone of her voice, expressed her weariness, her indifference—worse still, her oppression.

"Really, dear, you are not kind," Christina protested.

Milly opened helpless eyes.

"If you were married to him—shackled for life—could you be more so?"

"Kind? Yes. Why not? Surely simple humanity. Can't you treat him as kindly as if he were not shackled, too?"

"You blame me, Christina? You are displeased with me?"

They were very sincere with each other, these two; bared their souls to each other constantly. The daring frankness of their friendship charmed them, and it rested on such firm foundations of perfect trust.

"Yes, I do blame you, dearest Milly; and I am displeased with you just because you are so dear to me." Mrs. Drent flushed a little as she looked tenderly at her friend. "I want to see you always right, exquisitely right. You make me uncomfortable when you are not. He has done you no wrong."

"Oh, I know it, I know it! If only he had, it would be so much easier! He irritates me so immensely!" Milly wailed. "That labored chaffing of you this morning—how could you have borne it? I can't pretend amusement, and chaff—a constant bidding for a cheap amusement—is his only conception of human intercourse. I know I am horrid—I know it; but it is the long, long accumulations of repressed exasperation that have made me so—worse than exasperations. I remember, during the first months of our married life, when I was becoming dreadfully frightened, catching glimpses on every side of my awful mistake—I remember once kissing him, saying something, apparently playful, but hiding such an appeal for comfort, comprehension, reassurance. Do you know, he answered me with a stupid, stupid jest—some piece of would-be-gallant folly. It was like a dagger! I have never forgiven him."

"Perhaps he was shy," Mrs. Drent murmured.

"Dick shy? No, no; he is not sensitive enough for shyness. He is n't shy at all; only immensely—hideously stupid."

The breach could not be healed. Christina recognized it sadly, recognizing, too, that she could hardly wish it healed, Dick and Milly being what they were.

What ground of meeting could there indeed be between them, Dick, a dear, child-like materialist, and Milly, compact of subtleties, profundities, ideals? And then, living in daily, delightful companionship with the sweet, dependent creature, she came to see that it was well for herself that the breach could never be healed. Could they have been so near had there not been that emptiness to fill? Milly meant too much to her; she could not have shared her with a husband, even with a husband who claimed only the commonplaces of the relationship; and in such a case, how horrid to see Milly submissive to commonplaces! No; after all, Dick's little loss was her immense gain.

She passed most of the winter with Milly in the country. They read and rode, and walked and talked, and carried on energetic charities in the village. Mrs. Drent was full of ardent enthusiasms, and, in spite of her physical delicacy,—she had an unreliable heart,—she threw herself eagerly into organizing and beneficent action of all kinds.

Then Christina asked Milly to come and live with her in London, while Dick was away,—he was in Japan that winter,—and by degrees they both came to think of home as the being together. Christina's little house near Sloane street became a center of charming hospitality; for Milly possessed the irradiating, attractive qualities that she herself lacked, counted as something of a touchstone for the finer, more delicate elements in the larger and necessarily undiscriminating vortex of London life. Mrs. Quentyn and Mrs. Drent almost accomplished the miracle of seeing only the people they liked. There were no jarring elements. They had an equal talent for selection. All their people came to them naturally, easily—the people who had done clever things; the people who, better still, shone only with latent possibilities and were the richer for their reticences; and dear, comfortable, unexacting people who were not particularly clever, but responsive, appreciative, and genuine.

Christina still wrote a little—not so much. She and Milly studied things, collected things; they traveled; and, in the country, did a great deal of gardening.

This life, with all its harmony, did not want its more closely knitting times of fear, as when Milly was dangerously ill and Christina nursed her through the long crisis, as when Christina's heart showed alarming symptoms of breakdown and hurried them away to German watering-places.

There were funny little quarrels, too—funny to look back upon, though very painful at the moment, for Milly could be fretful, and Christina passionate in reproach. The swift reconciliations atoned for all, when, holding each other's hands, they laughed at each other, each one eager to take all the blame.

Certain defects in each they came to recognize and to take into account; tolerant, loving comprehension, the ripest stage of affection, seeming achieved.

Milly was capricious, had moods of gloom and disconsolateness when nothing seemed to interest her,—neither books, nor music, nor people, not even Christina,—and when, sunken in a deep arm-chair in the drawing-room, she would listlessly tap her fingers on the chair-arms, her eyes empty of all but a monotonous melancholy. These moods always hurt Christina,—Milly herself seemed hardly aware of them, certainly not aware of their hurting,—but she hid the hurt in a gentle sympathy that averted tactful eyes from her friend's retirement. She hid the hurt, she adapted herself, but she did not quite understand; for she never wished to retire into herself and away from Milly.

And Milly discovered that Christina could be unreasonable—so she tenderly termed a smoldering element in her friend; Christina, in fact, could be fiercely jealous.

 

"They both came to think of home as the being together"

 

They shared all their friends, many of them dear friends, but dear on a certain level below the illuminated solitude where she and Milly stood in their precious isolation. And Milly protested to herself she was the last person in the world to wish the isolation disturbed. No one knew her, understood her, loved her, as Christina did; it was truest, deepest, most devoted love; and in her eyes there was no one like Christina, no one so strong, so generous, so large-natured. Why, then, should Christina, like a foolish school-girl, show unmistakably—her efforts to hide it only making her look dim-eyed, white-lipped—a somber misery if Milly allowed any one to come too near her? This really piteous infirmity was latent in Christina; she did not show it during the first years of their companionship; it grew with her growing absorption in Milly. Milly discovered it when she asked little Joan Ashby to go to Italy with them. Christina, at the proposal, was all glad, frank acquiescence, she was so fond of Joan. Unsuspectingly Milly petted, made much of, the girl, whose adoration of herself was sweet to her. She went about with her, sight-seeing, when Christina said that she was tired and did not care to see things, not remembering that when they were alone together Christina had never seemed tired; she laughed and talked in Joan's bedroom at night when Christina said that she was sleepy. All seemed peacefully normal. Milly was stupefied when, by degrees, a consciousness of a difference in Christina crept upon her.

Christina smiled much, was alert, crisply responsive; but ice was in the smile, the response was galvanized. She was suffering,—the realization rushed upon Milly once her innocent eyes were opened,—and all her strength went to hiding the suffering. Milly, watching, felt a helpless alarm, really a shyness, gaining upon her in the face of this odd development. She found foolish Christina sobbing in her room one night when she cut short her good-night visit to Joan and came upon her unexpectedly. Milly's tender heart rose at a bound over alarm and shyness; but when she ran to her, Christina pushed her fiercely away. "You know! Of course you know! Go back to her, if you like her better!" She was like a frantic child. Milly could have laughed, had not the exhibition in her grave, stanch Christina frightened her too much, made her too terribly sorry, almost ashamed, for her.

Later, when Christina, laughing quiveringly at her own folly, yet confessing her powerlessness before it, put her arms around her neck and begged for her forgiveness, Milly, in all her soft, humorous reproaches, daring now to tease and rally, had yet the chill of a new discovery about her heart. A weight seemed to have come upon her as she realized how much Christina cared. She had not before thought of their friendship as a responsibility. It was dear, too dear, too silly, too pathetic in Christina, but it seemed to manacle her.

She must be very careful to like no Joans too much in the future. Christina passionately protested that she must talk to Joan, love Joan, any number of Joans, old or young, male or female, as much as before, more indeed, since now her folly was dissipated by confession; but Milly, in her heart, knew better than to believe her. She filled Christina's life completely, to the exclusion of any other deep affection, and Christina could never be happy unless her friend's life were as undivided.

 

II
Dick

During these five years of feminine David and Jonathan Mr. Quentyn had wandered about the world, not at all disconsolately. He spent several seasons with friends in India; he went to Australia and to America; when he came home he stayed a great deal in Scotland, and in England took an interest in racing that largely filled his time.

It was almost as a guest that, in the country and in his own house, he passed a few weeks with Milly and Christina and with all the other people they had about them. It was as guest entirely that he dined with Christina and Milly in London. It was a rather ludicrous situation, but Mr. Quentyn did not seem depressed or even abashed by it. Christina always felt that by some boyish intuition he recognized in her a friendly sympathy—a sympathy that he must certainly see as terribly detached, since it was she who had now fixed definitely Milly's removal from his life, made it permanent, given it a motive, as it were. But it was a sympathy very friendly, even slightly humorous, since he, with a silent, unemphatic humor, was so humorous about it all. He would catch her dark eyes sometimes as he sat, a guest, at her dinner-table (he never took in Milly; all the negations of married life were still his), and in them he saw, and responded to, an almost playful friendliness.

"He is such a perfect dear, you know," Christina often said to Milly, and Milly, smiling, had owned that he was indeed. His attitude, Christina fancied, had begun to impress his wife at its proper value. She was certainly far nicer to him than she used to be. The new effectiveness and happiness of her own life made niceness less of an effort. From her illumined temple she smiled at him—a smile that kept its sweetness and more and more lost its chill. She handed on to him a little of the radiance.

"Since we can't hit it off together, Milly, I must say there is no one you could have chosen for a friend that I could have liked so much as Mrs. Drent," Dick said to his wife one evening, in the drawing-room, after dinner. They often had an affable chat before the wondering eyes of the world. Milly chatted with the greatest affability. Dick was a dear. Surely no one could have reminded her less of shackles.

"Now, Dick," she said, smiling, "what do you find to like in Christina?" Even in her new kindliness there lurked touches of the old, irrepressible disdain.

Dick, twisting his mustache, contemplated her. "Do you mean to say that I am not capable of liking anything or anybody that you do?" he inquired.

Milly flushed, though the mildness of her husband's tone, one of a purely impersonal interest, suggested no conscious laying of a coal of fire upon her head. It was what she had meant. That Dick should like Christina, Christina Dick, was wholly-delightful; but that Dick should seem to like what she liked, should seem to like it for the same reasons, irked her a little. It was rather as if he had expressed enthusiasms about some favorite Brahms ballade of hers. She rather wanted to show him that any idea he might entertain of a community of tastes was illusory. How could Dick like a Brahms ballade, he whose highest ideals of music were of something sweetly, sedatively unexacting after a day's hard riding? How could Dick really like Christina? If he really did, and for any of her reasons, there must be between them the link, if ever so small a one, of a community of tastes—a link that she had never recognized. The thought of it held a distinct sting of self-reproach.

"I think we could only like the same things in a very different way," she confessed. "Why do you like Christina?"

He did not reply at once, and she went on looking at him, smiling,—they were sitting side by side on a little sofa,—"It is n't her charm; for you think her ugly."

"Yes; she 's ugly, certainly," Dick assented, quite as dully as she had hoped he would, "though her figure is rather nice."

Milly's smile shifted to its habitual, kindly irony. "She is delicate and tactful and very, very clever," she said, rehearsing to herself, as much as to him, all the reasons why Dick could not really like Christina; "her truths would never blunder, her silences never bore." "As Dick's did," was in her mind; it was cruel to be conscious of the contrast when he looked at her with such unconsciousness; to reassure herself with the expression of it was rather like mocking something blind, deaf, and trusting.

A sudden pity confused her, and with a little artificiality of manner, that masked the confusion, she went on: "One could never be unhappy without her knowing it and then one would be glad she did know, for she can sympathize without hurting you with sympathy. She feels everything that is beautiful or rare, everything that is sad or tragic; she feels everything, sees everything, but she sees and feels in order to act, to give, to help. Is it all this you like in her?" Milly finished very gently.

Mr. Quentyn still looked mildly at his wife.

"Yes, I suppose so," he said.

"You recognize these reasons?"

"In a different way," he smiled. It was almost a very clever smile; Milly might have felt rather startled at it had he not gone on, very simply: "One sees that she is such a thoroughly good sort; so loyal,—she would go through thick and thin for any one she cared about,—and so kind, as you say; she would talk as nicely to a dull person as to an awfully clever one; she 'd never snub one, or make one feel uncomfortable."

For a moment Milly was silent. "Do you mean that I used to snub you—make you uncomfortable?" she then asked.

"Oh, I say, Milly!" Dick, genuinely distressed, looked his negative. "You did n't suppose—"

"I know that I was often horrid."

"Well, if you were, you did n't suppose I 'd tell you in that roundabout fashion. Besides, all that 's done with long ago." He looked away from her now, down at the floor.

Again Milly was silent. Strangely to herself, she felt her eyes fill with tears. She waited till she had conquered them before saying very gently:

"Dick, do forgive me for being horrid."

He stared up at her. "Forgive you, Milly?" The request seemed to leave him speechless.

She was able to smile gaily at him.

"You do?"

"You never were. It 's more to the point for me to ask you to forgive me."

"For what, pray?" She had to control a quiver in her voice.

"Oh, for everything—for being so wrong—so altogether the wrong person, you know," said Dick, smiling gaily too. He again looked away from her, across the room, now, at Christina; and after a silence, filled, for Milly, with perplexing impulses, he added: "But the real reason I like her so much is that she is so tremendously fond of you."

Milly had to bring her thoughts with an effort back to Christina; she must let his remark about being forgiven remain as casual as he had felt it, and, indeed, his last words even more emphatically held her attention.

She thought of them all the evening, after he had gone; and, while her hair was being brushed, she looked at her reflection in the mirror and thought of that "long ago." It was as if Dick had shown her a quiet, a dead thing, and had turned the key on it with the words.

She looked in the mirror: surrounded by the softly falling radiance of her hair, her face was still girlish in tint and outline; but already her eyes had in them the look of time lived through, her cheeks were dimly wasted, her lips differently sweet.

She was accustomed to think of herself as a much-admired woman, as a beautiful woman; this evening, as the realization of time's swift passage stole upon her, a vague, strong protest filled her, a sense of deep, irremediable disappointment with life.

Mr. Quentyn that winter went to Africa, and Milly gave her husband a farewell all kindness, all composure, when he came to bid Christina and her good-by. She did not know that she was not composed, though she did know that her kindness was greater than any she expressed.

Dick always wrote punctually, once a fortnight, to his wife, short bulletins, to which, as accurately and as laconically, she responded. This winter the bulletins were often delayed, sometimes altogether missing. Dick had joined an exploring party, and his allusions, by the way, to "narrow shaves," "nasty rows with natives," and "a rather bad fever," explained these irregularities.

"He really ought to write a book about it. They have evidently had most perilous adventures," Christina said, during a sympathetic perusal of these documents, which were always handed on to her, as, for any intimacy they contained, they might have been handed on to anybody; they began "Dear Milly," and ended "Yours aff'ly, D. Q." The "affectionately" was always abbreviated.

"I suppose they are in a good deal of danger," said Milly, nibbling at her toast—they were at breakfast.

"That, I suppose, was what they went for," Christina replied, her eyes passing over the letter as they might have passed over a newspaper.

Milly, leaning her elbow on the table, watched her read. "Poor Dick!" she said presently.

Christina had laid down the letter and was going on with her coffee. "Why poor, dear?"

"If he were killed to-morrow I suppose it would hardly affect us more than the death of any of the men who had tea here yesterday."

"Milly!" said Christina; she put down her coffee-cup.

"Would it?" Milly insisted. "Would you mind more?"

"Your husband—my child!" This elder-sister mode of address was often Christina's.

"Why should a husband one has n't been able to live with count for as much as a friend one is glad to see?"

"Because he has counted for so much."

"All the same, Christina, you can't deny that you would hardly be sorry, and that you would not expect me to be sorry—only solemn."

"I should expect you to be both."

"Sorry for a man I have no affection for—a man I have almost hated?"

"Yes; if only for these reasons—and that it should be only for these reasons is what you meant when you said 'poor Dick!'" Christina demonstrated it.

Milly was thinner, paler; Christina noticed that, though she hardly noticed how often she returned to the subject of her husband's danger, the pathos of her own indifference to it. And Milly's listless moods followed one another so closely this winter as to be almost permanent. She was evidently bored. More and more frequently, when she talked to her over their tête-à-tête tea, the very dearest hour of the day, Christina saw that Milly did not hear her. After these five years of comprehension and forbearance this apparent indifference could not, at first, seriously disturb her; hurt her it always did. Picking up a book, with a smile of loving humor for Milly's absorption, she would read and cease to talk. The mood always passed the sooner for not being recognized; she would come out of the cloud, unaware of it, sunnier, sweeter, more responsive than before. But this winter she did not come out. That Milly should be so indifferent, so bored, so apathetic, began to disturb as well as hurt Christina. Then came a quick pulsing of fear: did some new attachment account for it? But her mind, in a swift, flame-like running around the circle of possibilities, saw them all as impossibilities, and put away that fear.

One day, taking Milly's face between her hands, yet feeling, strangely, a sudden shyness that made a complete confession of her vague alarms impossible, she asked her if she were unhappy.

"Unhappy, dear Christina? Why should I be?" Milly put an affectionate arm about her friend's neck.

"But are you? Is there anything you would like to do? Anywhere you would like to go? I am sure that you are frightfully bored." Christina smiled. "Confess that you are."

"No, dear, no. Have I seemed bored? No. I can't think of anything that would interest me. One comes on these Sahara-like times in life, you know—stretches of dull, dull sands. Or is it that I am getting old, Christina?"

"You old—you child!"

"I feel old," said Milly, "really old and tired."

Christina still smiled at her, but smiled over a something choking in her throat. It was not sympathy for her friend's Weltschmerz made that hurting constriction; it was the recognition of her remoteness from her, the recognition of something in her eyes, her voice,—something she could not analyze,—as if a faint barrier wavered, impalpable, formless, between them, and as if, did she say that it was there, beg to break through, it would change suddenly to stone, and perhaps shut her away forever.

All winter she battled with the unseen terror, able still to tell herself that she was a fool. Of two things she was sure: there was no one else, and Milly herself did not know there was a barrier, did not recognize her own remoteness. It was her unconsciousness of any change that was Christina's only comfort—a bleak, shivering comfort. Strange, strange, that in the heart of her great love should be this fear. What was it in Milly that made her feel that to cry out all her doubts, her follies, perhaps her unhappiness, would only be to make more permanent that remoteness?

Christina looked forward to a trip to Greece and Sicily as a definite goal. Milly had shown some interest in the idea of a two months' wandering among the whispering ruins of the past. They were to sail from Marseilles in April, and in talking over plans, getting up information, burnishing historical memories, Milly had shown some of her old, girlish eagerness. She had even read over again the Greek tragedies to steep herself in the proper atmosphere. It was, therefore, with a shock of bitter surprise, bitter disappointment, and, at once, a dim, dark foreboding, that Christina one day, only a week before the time fixed for their departure, heard Milly announce, flushing slightly, slightly averting her eyes, that she thought she would give up the trip, she would rather spend the spring at Chawlton; and, at once going on, as if with a recovery of composure, looking clearly at her friend:

"You see, dear, I have just had a letter from Dick. He gets back next week, and is going down there. He says he wants to see the primroses after that horrid Africa—quite a poetical yearning, is n't it, for Dick! And I think it would really be a little too brutal of me—would n't it?—if I sailed off without seeing him at all—without pouring his tea for even one week!"

Milly was smiling, really with her own light gaiety; the momentary look of evasion had passed. Christina was convinced of her own misinterpretation. Duty had called Milly away from pleasure, and she had feared, a little, that her friend would think too much sacrificed to it.

"Of course, dearest; of course we will put it off," she cried, "and of course we will go down to welcome home the wanderer."

Milly kissed her. "After all, it is a pity to miss primroses," she said.

The packing projects turned topsy-turvy, servants to be redistributed, plans countermanded, Christina saw to all; while Milly, with still her new cheerfulness, flitted in the spring sunshine from shop to shop, decking herself in appropriate butterfly garments. They were to get to Chawlton House only a day or two before Dick's arrival.

The gardens, the lawns, the woods, were radiant with spring, and Milly, in the environment of jocund revival, shared the radiance. All barriers seemed gone, were it not that Christina, full of strange presages, felt the very radiance to make one.

Milly gathered primroses in the woods, hatless, her white dress and fair head glimmering and shining among the young grays and greens. She came in laden with flowers, and the house smiled with their pale gold, their innocent and fragile gaiety.

"Is n't the country delicious?" she said to Christina. "Much, much nicer than dreary Greece and tiresome ruins, is n't it?"

"Much," said Christina, who was finding the country, the spring, the sunshine, the very primroses, full of a haunting melancholy.

 

Christina "broke into an agony of sobs"

 

"I have a thirst for simplicity and freshness and life," Milly went on, looking at the sky, "and here one feels that one has them—oh, the cuckoo, Christina! is n't it a sound that makes one think of tears—and happiness!"

Of tears only, not of happiness, thought Christina; of regret—regret for something gone—gone, lost forever. The cuckoo's cry pierced her all day long.

Simplicity and freshness and life—Christina did not recall the words definitely when she saw Dick Quentyn spring up the steps to greet his wife at the threshold of the house; but something unformulated echoed in her mind with a deepened sense of presage.

Milly stretched out both her hands. "Welcome home, Dick," she said; and she held her cheek to be kissed. There was no restraint or shyness in her eyes, nothing that foreboding could fix and dwell upon. She looked at the bronzed, stalwart, smiling being with as open and happy a gaze as though he had been an oak-tree. The happiness of gaze was new, but it was only part of Milly's revival; and, then, he had been in danger. Christina took comfort, she knew not for what.

"It is good to be at home again," Dick asseverated more than once during the day; "and, I say, how jolly those primroses look!" he exclaimed in the long, white drawing-room.

Milly, holding Christina's hand, stood beside him.

"I gathered them, Dick—all of them, and arranged them, in honor of your return."

"Oh, come, now!" Mr. Quentyn ejaculated, with humorous incredulity.

Milly smiled, making no protest. He, she, and Christina walked together about the grounds. Christina had felt a curious, shrinking from joining them—a shrinking, in any normal condition of things between husband and wife, so natural that it was only with a slowly growing amazement that she recognized its monstrousness as applied to those conditions. She leave Milly alone with her husband! What a revolution in all their relations would such a withdrawal have portended! To do so would be to yield to those vague alarms, to make them real, to make them visible to Milly, perhaps; and Milly certainly did not see them.

She still held Christina's hand drawn within her arm while they walked and listened to Mr. Quentyn's laconic recital of his African adventures.

"I am pretty sick of it, I can tell you," he said, smiling at the friends. "I sha'n't be off again on anything of that sort for a long time."

"What will you do, Dick?" Milly asked.

"Oh, I shall drift about a bit; this is quite good enough for me."

That evening in the drawing-room he joined Christina, who was sitting alone, looking out at the evening.

"As inseparable as ever, you and Milly, are n't you?" he said, coming and standing over her, his genial eyes upon her.

Christina, as always, felt that his chief impression of the situation was its enormous humorousness.

"Just as inseparable," she assented, looking up at him; she smiled with an emphasis that was faintly defiant, though neither she nor Dick recognized defiance.

"Milly is looking a little fagged, don't you think?" he went on. "Has she been doing too much this winter? You are frightfully busy, are n't you, always? Milly likes going at a great pace, I know."

"I should not have thought there was anything noticeable," said Christina; "she was a little fagged, perhaps, but the country has already refreshed her wonderfully."

"Oh, it was nothing to speak of, really. London always does pull one down a bit." He went on presently: "She is being awfully nice to me. I don't ever remember her having been more nice—since, I mean, we decided that we could n't hit it off. One would really say that she did n't mind seeing me"; and Dick smiled as if the joke were becoming quite exquisitely comical.

"You have been in such danger; Milly can but feel relief." Her voice, she knew, was full of an odd repression, discouragement; but Dick was altogether too innocent of any hope to be aware of discouragement or repression.

"She was worried about me? Really?—That was awfully good of her," he said.

The ensuing evening was, to Christina, distinctly odd, to say the very least of it. She and Dick both were aware of change, of novelty, and Milly, apparently, was aware of none.

Her cheerful kindness was as natural, as spontaneous, as though she had been a girl greeting a long-absent brother. She questioned Dick, and, as her questions showed interest,—interest and a knowledge surprising to Christina,—Dick talked with unusual ease and fluency.

Christina looked at them and listened to them, while Milly, leaning an arm on the table, gazed with gravely shining eyes at her husband. The arm, the eyes, the long lines of her throat, were very lovely. Christina's mind fixed funnily on them; she wished Milly would not lean so, look so. Milly was unaware of eyes and arm and throat; she always looked so, leaned so, when she listened with absorption. It was Christina who was aware—Christina who was quivering with latent, unformulated consciousness. After dinner, Milly and Dick still talked; she still listened.

For three or four days this was the situation—the reunited brother and sister, the friend necessarily incidental for the time being. "For the time being"—Christina clung to that phrase. The situation could be only temporary. Even in her it would be too great a folly to feel slighted.

And then, suddenly, the latent consciousness, the presages, grew ominous. What it was she could not say. Milly was sweet, frank, unreserved, apparently; Dick unchanged. Was it her own realization of being left out, of not being needed, that overwhelmed her? Or was it a sense of some utter change in her darling—a change so gradual, so subtle, that until its accomplishment she had not clearly interpreted it?

The moment of definite interpretation came one day when, on going into the library, she had found Milly and Dick sitting side by side at the table, their heads bent over a map; and they were not looking at the map; they were looking at each other, still like brother and sister,—but such fond brother and sister,—looking while they smiled and talked.

Milly, on seeing her friend, jumped up,—too eagerly,—and pulled back a chair for her. "Sit down, dearest; Dick is telling me adventures," she said.

What was it that drove into Christina's heart like a knife? Milly smiled at her, eagerly smiled; and yet Milly was miles and miles away, was greeting her as though she were a guest, greeting her with conventional warmth, courteous sweetness. She was not wanted; through the warmth, through the sweetness, she felt that. Smiling, she said that she had come for a book. Going to the book-cases, she sought for one accurately,—why she should seek, as though she had come in with the intention of finding it, a volume of frothy eighteenth-century memoirs she could not have told,—pulled it out, and, smiling again upon them with unconstrained lightness, she left them. She walked steadily to her room, into it, locked the door, and, falling upon her knees beside the bed, broke into an agony of sobs.

 

 

PART II

THE end had come; not of Christina's love, not of her absorption, her need, but of Milly's. At first her mind refused to face the full realization; groped among the omens of the past; refused, even now, to fix on Dick as the cause of all. She could trace the gradual, the dreadful severance; Milly's slow loss of interest in her—in their life together. It was at first only for the fact of loss that she wept—that, only, that she could look at. But by degrees, as her stifled sobs grew quieter, she was able to think, to think clearly, fiercely, with desperate snatchings at hope, while she crouched by the bed, pushing back her hair from her forehead, pressing her hot temples with icy hands.

Why should Milly lose interest? How could she? How could love and truest sympathy, truest understanding—how could they fail? "Love begets love. Love begets love," she whispered under her breath, not knowing that she spoke, and, in this hour of shipwreck, clinging unconsciously to such spars and fragments of childish, unreasoning trust as her memory tossed her. No other friendship threatened hers; she was first as friend—she knew it—irrevocably. First as friend did not mean to Milly, could never mean, the deep-burning attachment that it meant to her; but such friendship could not die without some cause other than mere weariness of sameness. And the truth, no longer to be evaded, leaped upon her: Milly was falling in love with Dick. Whether the weariness was the cause of her love, or whether the latent love had been the cause of her long weariness, Christina could not tell, nor, as she acutely guessed, could Milly. But now, this abnormal interest in a man so utterly alien to her, this gentle eagerness, this frank comradeship—above all, this indifference to herself—could only mean one thing: Milly was falling in love; and she was frank and happy because she did not know it; and he did not know it. Like two children with a fresh day of play and sunshine before them, they were engaged in merry, trivial games—picnics, make-believes, no thought of sentiment or emotion in them to account for the new sympathy; but from these games, these picnics,—Christina saw it with burning eyes,—they would return hand in hand, all in all to each other, needing no one else.

Maps! travels! adventures! Africa!—folly! folly! Did they not see these things as silly toys—as she did? What could Milly care for such toys? That she should play with them—as if she placed tin soldiers and blew a tin trumpet—showed the fatal glamour that was upon her; glamour only; a moonshine mood of vague cravings. Dick happened to have stepped into it, and it was fastening around him. How dignify by the sacred name of love thus sentiment—all made of her weakness, her impressionability, her emotionalism—that swayed her toward her husband?

Passionate rejection of the degradation for Milly swept through the stricken friend and mingled with the throes of her anguish for herself. For how could she live without Milly? How could she live as Milly's formal friend, kept outside the circle of deepest affection, the circle where, till now, she had reigned alone? Ah! she understood Milly's nature too well; saw that, with all its sweetness, it was slight. Love, with her, would efface all friendship. Like a delicate, narrow little vase, her heart could hold but one deep feeling. She simply would come not to care at all for Christina—would come? Had she not come already? In her eyes, her smiles, the empty caressing of her voice, was there not already the most profound indifference?

Had Milly's relation with her husband been normal there could have been no such appeal as that upon which their friendship was founded, and when the relation ceased to be abnormal the need of the stop-gap friendship would cease.

The essence of Milly was a complete self-abandonment to one, surrounded by complete reserve to everybody else. She could never give herself to two; Christina saw that. What she did not see so distinctly was that Milly had never really given herself to her; that it had always been she who gave and Milly, tenderly smiling, who received; she did not see that Milly was essentially the woman who must be in love, the woman who must have somebody in love with her. How she would be in love she did see: how she would idealize Dick; imagine him strong and stately, and proceed to lavish upon him, encompass him, and decorate him with all her clasping vines and tendrils. Milly would remain fond of herself as she had been fond of little Joan Ashby—a fondness all sweet demonstration, all emptiness. Yes; she saw it, felt it, luridly: the greater Milly's need of her had been, the less it would be now. She would mean much less to her for having meant so much. She would be the quaffed cordial that had sustained Milly over the desert of quite illusory disillusion, to be cast aside when the desert was passed and her uses gone.

And all the forces of Christina's nature rose in rebellion. She felt the rebellion like the onslaught of angels of light against powers of darkness; it was the ideal thing doing battle with some primal, evil force. She measured herself beside Dick Quentyn, her needs beside his. His life was cheerful, contented, complete; hers would be without Milly a warped, a meaningless, a broken life. Strangely her thoughts in all their anguish turned in not one reproach upon her friend; rather, her comprehension, from heights of love, sorrowed over her with infinite tenderness. For, so she told herself, she could have resigned her to true greatness, to true comprehension, to true companionship; but Milly, her Milly,—made hers by all these years,—in love with Dick! It was a calamity, a disease, that had befallen her darling. It would last with her, too; she would not learn to unlove him. This love, asking no heights, would slowly lead her down to contented levels, and her life, too, in all true senses, would be warped, meaningless, broken.

In Christina's mind there grew, inflexibly, the determination to fight for Milly as well as for herself, to save herself, and Milly too. She armed herself with desperate measures.

Meanwhile in the library Dick said to his wife: "Are n't I interrupting you? Don't you want to read—or talk with Mrs. Drent?"

And at the question, alone with him as she was, Milly made a swift, surprised little survey of the situation. She was sitting contentedly—more than contentedly—talking with her husband; she did not want to talk to Christina; she wanted to go on talking to Dick. Her thoughts did not carry her further, did not dwell on Christina. She had not yet realized—as Christina had—that Christina was profoundly indifferent to her; she had not realized that Christina's presence had become an interruption, a burden. Christina's personality merely seemed blurred and very far away.

"Oh, no, you are not interrupting me; Christina and I have read everything—talked of everything," she said, smiling, and yet, though she was unconscious of it, blushing faintly; Dick, as unconscious of its meaning, gazed at the blush; and then they went on talking.

When Christina came down to dinner that evening her eyes were only very slightly shadowed with her weeping.

Her task was enormous. She must never let them feel her there, as a barrier between them, and yet she must be there always, and always as a barrier. She was all ease, all lightness, all unemphatic adaptation. She seemed as soft, as unmenacing, as she was resolute and implacable.

"We had thought, you know, Dick, of going to Greece," said Milly. "How would you like to go to Greece, Dick?"

"With you and Mrs. Drent, do you mean? Immensely. But you don't mean it."

"Indeed, why not?" laughed Milly. "Indeed, I do mean it. Do come. Would it not be nice, Christina dear? He would take such good care of us."

"It would be delightful," said Christina, smiling at Dick over the fruit she was peeling.

"Dick is going to London in a few days, and I thought we might all go together, and then start for Greece in about a week's time," said Milly.

"Delightful," Christina reiterated; "you know how much my heart has been set on Greece."

Her greatest terror now was that Milly should guess her terror.

Two days afterward they went up to London, and during these two days Christina had effectually—though so delicately so imperceptibly—kept the wife and husband apart. Dick went to his bachelor chambers, Milly to her friend's house. She and Christina had hardly been alone together since Dick's return, and now, in the unchanged surroundings of the old companionship, the change in the companionship itself could but strike them both; but Christina did not show any consciousness of change. Over the lava-heavings of her terror and misery she showed a constant smiling composure. Poor Milly, hardly yet seeing distinctly, hardly yet comprehending clearly, felt a strange awkwardness, a strange confusion; Christina's ignoring of change deepened it; she tried to hide it by an over-demonstrativeness that only revealed new and huge reserves. She was horribly afraid lest Christina should guess things at which she herself had hardly looked, and the fear at once gave her an odd feeling of defiance. She thought a great deal, unreasonably it seemed to her, of that distant scene over Joan Ashby. Milly was cowardly about giving pain, yet, stung to desperation, she could be crueler than a less tender person. She was not yet stung to desperation, but she was afraid of Christina. The fear, superficially, was that Christina should guess that she was not altogether frank with her, and it nerved her to apparent frankness.

"I asked Dick to come and dine," she said; "we can talk over the trip."

"It is all arranged, dear," Christina could not repress—a false step, she knew, but in her position false steps were almost inevitable from time to time.

"Yes—but not for three," said Milly. And the monstrousness of there being three, of there being such a third, suddenly overcame her; she stood dyed in helpless blushes, not knowing what her helplessness confessed. Christina ignored the blush.

"Yes, that will need retalking," she said gaily. Perhaps Milly would think that she saw and did not mind; for the present that was safest; for the present the safest of all was to keep on the surface, to define nothing.

After dinner that night, in the drawing-room, Christina felt the very air electric with all the restraints ready to burst into revelations that would surprise no one. The terrible falseness of her attitude, the thing that put her terribly in the wrong, was that she ought to leave them; but she could not risk an explanation between them, and if she left them there must be an explanation. They must, dumbly, feel her as an intolerable intruder, and she must, as yet, be intolerable. With all her inflexible calm, a new feeling was surging over her—blind hatred of Dick Quentyn, a torment of jealousy. And in this room!—where everything spoke of her and Milly,—which had grown, as it were, around their affection, symbolized it in every bit of porcelain chosen together, every print, the furniture, the very wall-paper—all speaking of that real community of taste and feeling that this crude, elemental passion was to part forever. And Dick was unsuspecting, even now; even now when Milly had begun to grope toward complete discovery. But Christina read in his eyes, as they rested upon his wife, in the new slight shyness that had suddenly colored all his manner toward her, that for him, too, revelation would not be long delayed. Christina hated him so much that she knew that joy only would be in her were he to fall suddenly dead before her. She sat quaking with misery, her throat dry, her eyes hot; she sat, smiling, until the hour was late and Dick was forced to go.

Milly walked beside him to the door; Christina guessed that she wanted to go outside with him, and then that the courage to be frankly cowardly failed her, for, bidding him good-by inside the drawing-room, she said:

"Would you like a walk to-morrow, in the park?" She had lacked the courage to murmur it out of earshot, and in the question Christina felt the defiant hostility of weakness brought to bay.

"Delighted; may I come for you at eleven?" said Dick.

Left alone, the two women were silent. Milly went to the mantelpiece and touched her hair, looking at her reflection in the mirror.

"Dear me, how late!" she said at last, turning to her friend, but not looking at her. "Good night, dearest; I am dead with sleepiness."

"May I not come, too, for the walk?" Christina asked, smiling up at her from the review she had opened on her knees; "it is our usual hour, you know."

"Why, dearest, of course you are coming," said Milly, instantly.

Christina measured the depth of estrangement in all that the flexible acquiescence hid of bitterness, disappointment—hatred even. The contest was becoming desperate indeed.

The walk next morning was as meaningless as Christina had intended it should be. She felt herself a frail barrier between two surging impatiences. She could not long divide them unless she armed herself with some towering strength.

But even her reckless dexterity was not to prevent a meeting. Next morning, at an hour she thought thoroughly safe,—indeed, she had heard Dick speak of an engagement for that morning,—she went out to make the last preparations for the Grecian trip. She and Milly were still to go to Greece, and they were to go alone—so Christina saw the future.

During her absence Mr. Quentyn came, and Milly, in the drawing-room, seeing him drive up, hearing his voice, knew a sudden throb of triumph. She had not time to analyze it. Dick was in the room; she only knew that she was unutterably glad to see him, unutterably glad to see him alone; knew, too, that she was suddenly shy of showing her gladness. With cool sweetness she gave him her hand.

"Surely I have further privileges," said Dick. He bent his head and kissed his wife's cheek.

"Only after a return from Africa," said Milly, lightly, turning away to hide her new and quite overwhelming confusion. Waves of it were going over her; she was seeing, in flashes, the absurdity, the difficulty, the wonder of what was happening to her.

"I must be off again at once, then," said Dick, "and get back as soon as possible."

She had sat down, now, on the sofa, still wondering greatly. Why, why was this foolish talk so charming, so dear to her? Why did she dread—and hope—that Dick would take the place beside her? He took it. For a moment she was so frightened that sh» thought she was sorry.

"It will be awfully jolly, this Grecian trip," said Dick, who, on his side, was also feeling a mixture of dread and hope; he hardly dared to hope—and yet—Dick, too, was wondering greatly. Most definitely he was wondering if he could dare propose something—that they might take the trip to Greece alone—together.

"It 's awfully good of you to let me come," he said.

She said nothing, looking away, a little smile fixed on her face. She could not alter it; it meant nothing—was therefore safe.

"Why are you so good to me, Milly?" he asked, and leaning to her, gently, very timidly, yet with a certain elated air of right asserting itself, he took her hand. She burst into tears.

"Oh, Milly!" said Dick. He held her hand and stared.

And upon these tears, and Dick's look of mingled alarm and rapture, Christina entered.

Through her tears Milly saw, blurred and wavering, Christina's face, white, distorted, in agony. Christina and Christina's agony were now, indeed, intolerable. Milly sprang up and ran out of the room.

"How much have they said? How much? How much?" Christina was saying to herself monotonously. She was left alone confronting the husband.

"What has happened? What has happened?" She asked it in her lowest, most intent tones.

Dick had risen, agitated, yet, as usual, simple. "I am afraid I have distressed Milly. At least—"

"What have you said to her?" Her right to question him seemed, oddly, far greater than his to resent such questioning.

"I asked her—to tell you the truth, I have always hoped, Mrs. Drent, that Milly could care for me—again. I asked her why she was so good to me. She has been good, you know—surprisingly so. And—but of course you have known that—I have always been in love with Milly—quite desperately in love; that 's why I never minded—never felt turned against her—you understand—"

She understood all, as he blundered on in his terribly telling way. How it would tell upon Milly with her new longings for simplicity and strength she understood too.

"Did you tell her that you loved her?" she asked.

"She must know it. No, I did n't tell her; I had n't time."

She felt as if she held, lifted in her hand above some innocent life, a murderous weapon. Yet, relentlessly, it fell.

"I must tell you, Mr. Quentyn, you will kill your wife if you continue to see her—to pursue her," she said; and she heard, as if from a far distance, the icy steadiness of her voice. "I cannot keep the truth from you now. You know my love for Milly, as great, as true, as any love can be. She told me that when you came back she was going to be kind—as kind as she could be. She felt it to be her duty—her duty only. An almost morbid change came over her this winter. Life took a new aspect to her. She saw it only as a sacrifice to be offered. She determined to live for duty only; to sacrifice herself. But you will, I know, ask no such sacrifices when you know that it is upon them that your happiness will be based. You will help me to save her from her own sick conscience. Milly does not love you—could never love you. She does not even care for you. I must tell you all the truth—as she told it to me—last night,"—she was rapidly drawing her gloves through her hands while she spoke; now she twisted them around her knuckles, clenched her fingers upon them,—"she hates you. You are repulsive to her. She cannot conquer the repulsion. It will kill her if she tries to conquer it. She is strong for martyrdom, but, you have just seen it, not strong enough to go through it, always, unflinching. Spare her. Do not see her again. Go away. Go away forever."

Her voice was hardly more than an insistent thread of sound. Drops of sweat stood on her brow. The truth of her dreadful outspeaking seemed stamped upon her rigid face. Dick Quentyn did not know a doubt. There was bewilderment, horror, on his countenance; but of incredulity not a trace—not even a trace of humiliation. A quick dart of keenest admiration for him went through her, cutting, horridly painful.

"Mrs. Drent—how right of you! This is awfully right of you," he murmured. "Of course I'll go; at once." He looked about dazedly for his hat.

"Forever?" Christina asked.

"Forever—of course."

"And you will never let Milly guess—what I have told you?"

He stared for a moment.

"That I have let you know!" her impatience, almost fierce, explained to him.

"Of course I 'll never let her know. You will tell her that I have gone? I will write—some sort of a letter. Make her think I don't mind—that will be easiest for her. Make her think that shooting—all that sort of thing—is all that I really care for—that she could n't do anything for me."

"I will make her think it. Where are you going?"

Again Dick stared for a vague moment. Where was he going?

"I may as well go back to Africa," he proposed.

"To Africa," Christina assented.

She was looking, still with the inflexible face, at him, but she felt as if the pain of her admiration were almost killing her.

"It was for her sake," she whispered. "I had to do it. It was for her sake."

"I understand—perfectly," said Dick. "Good-by." He held out his hand to her.

"Noble! noble!" she breathed, still fiercely.

And Dick actually smiled.

 

III
Christina

He was gone. She pressed her hands to her face. She shook in every limb. And yet she did not regret. Above the horror and the pain she felt, with a savage joy, that she had bound Milly to herself, snatched her from degradation—forever. She was breathless, trembling, but her soul was still dauntless. And now—Milly.

Christina went to her.

She found her sitting near her window, looking out, still with the wonder on her face. When she looked round at her friend, Christina read upon it, too,—under the confusion and the attempt at affection,—that latent, instinctive hostility, as though her nature warned her against the enemy to her love.

Christina knelt down beside her.

"Darling," she said, "do you care for him?"

"Yes," said Milly, sullenly. She had been nerving herself to the difficult task of declaring her love; Christina's solemn question forestalled her declaration and seemed ominous of something against which, unconsciously, she armed herself.

"Oh, my own dearest—no, no. Not really?"

"Yes, really," said Milly, more sullenly. "I can't help it. I don't want to help it. You need not reproach me. It has all been a hideous mistake. I believe that I have always needed him."

"No! no!" It was an almost fierce appeal. Milly misread its significance. She shook off her friend's encircling arms and rose.

"I can't help it, if it does part us—and it has parted us. It is all impossible—and you have made it so, Christina, not I; the way you have acted toward us shows it. You have been so false—pretending not to see, and yet seeing all, and separating us! I am fearfully sorry. I know how ungrateful I seem, how cruel; but—you oppress me; you imprison me: I have felt it for a long, long time without knowing that I felt it. I must be free. I must love Dick, and be alone with him,—do you understand, Christina?—alone with him."

The cruel courage with which weakness in supreme moments of self-assertion can arm itself thrilled in her sharpened voice; a violent red burned on either cheek; her eyes were wild with the half-terrified,determination to be pitiless.

And even now Christina did not waver. Her faith in the power of her own love swept her on.

"Milly—Milly—I am not thinking of myself—of parting from you—of obtruding myself upon you." The quality of the deep sadness, of the infinitely sorrowful tenderness, in her voice stilled Milly's agitation to instant attention. "I was thinking of you—of how to tell you. Dearest, how to tell you! It was not for myself I pretended not to see that you were in love with your husband; it was for you, Milly—and, if possible, to keep him from seeing, too: it was for that I tried to separate you. Dear one, from me you must hear it; who else could tell you? Your husband, Milly, has gone."

Milly gazed, again wildly.

"He has gone to Africa."

"To Africa?"

"Yes." Christina grasped her hands. "Now bear it. I will bear it with you. We will never speak of it again. He guessed to-day at your love for him—and he has gone—because he has none to give you."

Milly stood rigidly, manacled by the other's grasp.

"He told me all the truth. He said that to me, who loved you so, he could speak—must speak. He felt, after what your tears had revealed, that it would be dastardly to remain. I was not to let you know that he had guessed; I was to let you think that he believed you cared as little as he did. He does n't love you. He does n't love you,"—Christina paused, looking her friend in the eyes,—"but more than that," she said, "more than that—though he did not tell me this—there is another woman; and for years, Milly, I have known it."

She saw all the enormous risks she was taking; she knew that Milly might be armed with some knowledge of her husband's heart that would unmask the lie: but she dared it, ready to meet passionate denial with pitiful and inflexible reiteration, or to catch her friend, fainting, to her breast.

But Milly neither fainted nor denied.

For a long moment she looked, with strange eyes, and lips parted, at Christina. Then, not violently, with a cold, soft persistence, she twisted her hands from the grasp that clung to them. Silently she sat down again by the window, and again looked out.

On her face was none of the horror and bewilderment that her husband's had shown, but, like his, it showed no humiliation; it was with a new wonder, a frozen calm, that she looked out at the street.

"Dear one," Christina whispered, "you will love me again—and forget him?"

Her work accomplished, a dreadful weakness—a weakness that clung, shuddered, appealed—seized her.

"Will you let me be alone, please?" said Milly, not turning her head.

"Milly! Milly!" Christina moaned, "what have I done that you should change so?"

"Nothing. Nothing. It is not you who have changed me—or anything you have done. I cannot think of you. Have mercy on me," Milly answered, "and leave me."

 

Dick's note of farewell came next morning; Christina did not see it, but she knew that it had been effective. Milly had not needed the effectiveness of the brief information as to his sudden determination to be off on another expedition; no more than Christina's other victim did she feel incredulity.

She and Christina went on living together in Christina's house, living together, yet parted unutterably.

And it was not Milly who drooped and pined and leaned, again, upon her friend. Milly never mentioned her husband's name; never alluded to the terrible episode of her mistimed love; never—ah, never!—asked a question about that "other woman." With a look of hard serenity she went through her days; refused with gentle courtesy the proposal of the Grecian trip; acceded with formal gratitude to less onerous suggestions.

She went out; she saw people; she smiled, was alert, almost merry, and altogether reticent. The barriers, now, were of stone indeed, but of stone overlaid with diamonds; her manner glittered with forbidding sweetness. No conscious cruelty could have been so cruel as the cruelty with which her broken and bleeding heart shut itself from any look or touch.

It was Christina who grew thin and wan, Christina who pined and sickened.

Milly did not notice—or care to notice—her wasted hands, her sunken cheeks, the haunted eyes that dwelt in a deep humility of dumb appeal upon her. She could not think of Christina's feelings; the hiding of her own demanded all her strength. Christina's mere presence was an almost insupportable burden; it made huge demands, to none of which she could respond. It was a constant reminder of all the things she could not longer give, all the things she did not care to remember. She knew that Christina saw her unutterable misery, but she determined that Christina should never see it without its mask. Endurance was all that she could give Christina, and after a month of mutual torture Milly felt that even that she could not longer give.

She said one day that she was going down to Chawlton House—to be alone for a little while. There was no longer any veiled defiance in Milly's manner; it was gentle and inflexible. Christina made no protest, no reply. She submitted. All hope now lay in submission. But deep in her heart dwelt the dreadful fear that all had been in vain and that all was in vain; that Milly would never come to her again; that she had lost her the more utterly for having tried, at such awful costs, to keep her; that Milly had no longer been hers to lose, and would never again be hers.

Milly left her, kissing her good-by with more sincere affection than she had shown for months.

"I have been very horrid, but you have understood," she whispered hurriedly as they stood together in the hall, the carriage waiting outside. "Learn to live without me; I am not nearly fine enough, generous enough, true enough for you. Go to Greece, Christina; take some nice woman and go to Greece."

Christina only bowed her forehead upon the speaker s shoulder, clasping her, for one moment, mutely.

In the country, full of summer now, Milly felt the hateful oppression fall from her. She could be miserable and not have to hide her misery. She could sit and look at her life without dreading that another's eyes were looking with her.

It pained her to see how utterly all love for poor Christina had died from her; to see how the, perhaps, crude and elemental love had killed the delicate, derivative affection; it pained her for Christina's sake, and grieved her for her own, too, to contemplate her own essential smallness and instability of nature. And yet the pain and grief were very superficial; it was saddest of all to realize that—to realize that her chief feeling about Christina, and really about herself too, was a deep indifference. Worst of all,—and she turned from the thought with a pain that was no longer superficial,—with the sensation of a real cruelty in herself, was the other latent feeling about Christina, the feeling that she could not conquer, that vaguely underlay the indifference—a dim repulsion, a dim dislike. Was it that she could not forgive her for having seen her deepest woe?

The thought of Dick was like the blue sky, like the free wind, like the grass and wild flowers; to think of Christina—even apart from recent black associations—was to think of a hothouse atmosphere, where one was exquisite—and imprisoned. It had been real, it had been normal—for Christina; for her, with her far less idealistic nature, her nature so puny, for all its big cravings (Milly was very severe with herself), it had been a long, gradual exhaustion. She could not live in a hothouse, nor on heights either; she could not live in any rarefied atmosphere. Nectarines would not do for daily food. She only wanted simple, wholesome bread. Bread was denied her; the trees, the wind, the blue sky were not to be hers; but never, never would she go again into the hothouse, never eat nectarines again.

She was sorry, very sorry, for poor Christina. She had accepted Christina's life, used it, and now, through the strange compulsion of fate, she must cut herself away from it—even if she left it to bleed to death. That, of course, was only a simile; Christina would not carry the abnormal so far as actually to die; but that she must bleed Milly knew. But the cruelty was kind, because so truly necessary, and with time—time healed everything—Milly dropped finally into soothing truisms—with time Christina would find some other parasite, some other fragile life to cling to her own, and joy and strength would come to her again in upholding and supporting it.

That Christina had submitted showed in her letters, not too frequent, making no appeal, unemphatic, friendly recordings of superficial facts. Among them was no mention of her own health. It was, therefore, with a shock, a shock that roused her effectually from her condition of benumbed indifference, that Milly read one autumn morning, in a blurred, shaking hand:

 

I am very ill—dying, I think. Come to me at once. I must tell you something.

 

Milly was horrified, conscience-stricken too. She hastened to London and to the little house, home of so many remembrances, near Sloane street.

The maid at the door told her that Mrs. Drent was rapidly sinking. Milly read wondering reproach in her simple eyes.

"I did not know! Why was I not told? Why was I not told?" she repeated to the nurse who came to meet her.

Mrs. Drent, the nurse said, would not have her sent for; but during these last few days she had become slightly delirious, had spoken repeatedly of something she wished to tell, had, at last, written herself. She could hardly live a day longer; heart-failure had made her illness fatal.

Milly felt herself choking with sobs. In the room she paused for one moment. Was that Christina, that strange face with such phantom eyes? For the one moment she felt herself seized by the terror that seemed to look at her from those eyes; for Christina did not smile at her; only looked, silently, and, it seemed, with terror unspeakable.

Then Milly remembered: she was dying; not herself; and oh, what must she be feeling in her abandonment, her desolation! The rush of intense pity, intense self-reproach, shook her through and through.

She ran to the bed, weeping. Her tears rained upon Christina's face, upon her hands as she took her in her arms, kissed hands and face.

"Christina—dearest—dearest! Forgive me for leaving you—oh, forgive me! I did not know! Why did you not tell me? let me come and nurse you? Oh, Christina! Christina!"

Holding her, kissing her, she could not see clearly, or at all interpret, the strange illumination that, at her words, irradiated the dying woman's face.

Life seemed suddenly to leap to her eyes and lips. Terror vanished like a ghost in the uprising of strong morning sunlight. With a rapture of hope, a vigor of yearning that resumed all her ebbing power, physical and spiritual, she stretched up her body and clasped her hands around Milly's neck.

"Do you love me again? Do you love me again?" she repeated. Her voice was like a flame springing from the languors of dissolution.

"Yes! yes! yes!" cried Milly. No affirmation could be too strong, she felt, no atonement too great.

"Better than you love him?" Christina asked.

Milly did not even hesitate. Lies were like obstacles hardly seen, as, in the gallop of her remorse and pity, she leaped them.

"Yes, yes, yes," she reiterated.

"You could be happy with me—again?"

"Yes, dearest Christina. It has passed—that feeling. I love you—only you."

 

"Milly sat sobbing"

 

She smiled, a solemn, intent smile, into Christina's eyes.

"Ah!" Christina gasped. Milly laid her back upon her pillows. Her eyes had closed; but her fingers hunted among Milly's, seized her hand, held it.

"Only me," she said; "the other love has passed. All was right, then; all was right. He could not have seen the pictures—the jewels, Milly—heard the music."

"No, dear, no." Milly put over her eyes the hand Christina did not hold. Ah! those cravings, to which Christina had responded—now so dead.

"He could never have loved you—as I did—could he, Milly?"

Christina's face was still radiant, but her voice had sunken to a shrouded whisper.

"Never, Christina."

"I shall get better," said Christina; "I feel it now, I know it. I shall get better—and be always with you."

Held by those cold, clutching fingers, Milly sat sobbing. Christina would not get better; and, with horror at herself, she felt that only at the gates of death could she love Christina and be with her. Life would be impossible. And, glancing round at the head on the pillow—ah, poor head! Christina's wonderful head, more wonderful than ever now, so eager, so doomed. So white, with all its flood of black, black hair—glancing at its ebony and marble, she saw, in the closed eyes, the relaxed lips, that she need have no fear of life. Death was to end all. Christina would not get better. Brokenly, she spoke a few vague words:

"If you had loved him—you would have hated me. Now you will never hate me."

"I love you, dearest."

"You will not send for him? You will not see him? You will stay with me?"

"I will stay with you—not send for him."

"And be glad again—with me?"

"So glad."

"I shall get better," Christina repeated, turning her head on Milly's arm.

And the disarray of her mind still whispered on in strange fragments:

"It was not useless. I had not lost you. You were really mine. You are mine now; for always."

A few hours afterward, her head still turned on Milly's arm, Christina died.

 

Sitting alone very sadly on a winter day in the library at Chawlton, Milly heard carriage-wheels outside, and then a voice, and steps, familiar, wonderfully dear, wonderfully terrible to hear. Dick—returned.

All the misery and humiliation of her ruined married life rose before her as she heard, and as she felt her terror and her joy. She could hardly bear to see him. And then, her mind running swiftly over wild possibilities, she felt suddenly that his cruelty in coming might be explained by a great hope. Shaken by fear and hope, she rose to meet him. Dick appeared immediately,—he had not even taken off his long traveling-coat,—with no emphasis at all of look or manner, almost as casually as he might have returned from a day's hunting, though she detected at once a new and natural embarrassment; his pity, however, cloaked it. His manner might be casual, but his pity was warm and vehement, so warm, so vehement, that it gave her no further time for wonder over his conquest of the other, older pity.

"My dearest Milly," he said, "I only heard yesterday. I got back from Africa yesterday. And I felt that I must see you. I don't want to bother you, you know, or make a nuisance of my sympathy. I have only come down for the afternoon; but I wanted to ask you if I could do anything—help you in any way—be of any use—" In spite of his careful voice, his longing to see her—a longing that even his generous love for her had not made him proof against—showed in his candid, clouded eyes. Milly could only feel it vaguely; her hope, face to face with reality, was hardly conscious of itself.

"How kind of you—dear Dick!" she said, and her poor voice groped vainly for firmness. "I am glad to see you. Yes, I have been very unhappy."

And that he should know the other reason for her unhappiness! that he should know that not Christina's death alone had crushed her to the earth—that he should know that she loved him! Suddenly she seemed not to care that he should know. Her womanly pride broke. With this human kindness, so warm, so true, near her, she forgot their tangled relations as man and woman; the simple human one only remained, and the loneliness, the grief of a child overwhelmed her. She sank, sobbing helplessly, into her chair.

 

"They stood in the firelight, holding each other's hands"

 

"Oh, Milly!" said poor Dick Quentyn, as he had said on another occasion. But the human appeal, the human longing to console, overcoming his fears and diffidence, he knelt beside her and took her in his arms.

Milly then did and said what she never could have believed herself capable of doing or saying. No pride could hold her back from it—no dignity, no common shame, even. She simply could not keep herself from dropping her face upon his shoulder and sobbing: "Oh, Dick—try—to love me—a little. I can't bear it any longer."

It was a startling moment for Dick Quentyn—the most startling of his life.

"Try—to love you!" he stammered. He pushed her back to look at her. "Milly, the maddest self-sacrifice does n't demand that from you. I ought, I know, to be ashamed to force myself upon you like this, knowing as I do—for I do, Milly—that you simply can't endure me."

Milly had shut her eyes after her appeal; it had been like a diving under deep waters—she had not known how or where or when she would come up again. Now she opened them and stared at her husband. She seemed to have come up under new, bewildering skies; strange stars made her dizzy.

She and Dick looked, and in each other's faces they saw great wonder, and, amazing yet unmistakable, great love.

"What do you mean?" asked Milly.

"Why, that is why I went away—because you could n't endure me. What do you mean?"

"Endure you? When I adore you! And you—who love the other woman! Oh, Dick! Dick!" She hid her face, she could not look at him, and still the strange stars seemed to dance, the very universe to turn round.

Dick was repeating with a stupefaction numbed to mildness: "The other woman? Another woman, Milly?—when there has never been any woman but you—never, never—from the first."

Again they gazed at each other. It was as if, groping toward each other through a forest, they were calling in the dark. Suddenly Milly sprang to her feet.

"Oh!" she cried, "oh! oh!" Horror, triumph, love, and hatred thrilled in her voice.

Dick rose, still gazing, still uncomprehending.

"Christina! Christina!" cried Milly. "That is what she was going to tell me!—and did not—did not—died without telling me!"

She seized her husband's hands.

"Was it she? Did Christina say that I could not endure you?"

This was no time for a careful keeping of promises. The truth must trample on lies and disdain hoodwinked pledges.

"Yes, she did," said Dick, and he grew white.

"And she told me," said Milly, "that you were going because you guessed that I loved you, and because you could not love me, and that you loved somebody else."

After this they stood in the firelight, holding each other's hands, as though, after long wanderings, they had found each other at last. There was silence. Only after many moments of grave, mutual survey did Dick say, gently, with a sudden acute wonder and pity: "Poor thing!"

"Horrible! oh, horrible!" said Milly. "You might have died away from me—I might never have seen you again. Horrible woman! Horrible love!"

"Poor thing!" Dick repeated vaguely. He kissed his wife's forehead, and, his arm around her: "I have n't died: she is dead. I do see you again: she does n't see you. I have got you: she has lost you."

Milly still shuddered; she still looked down the black precipice—only just escaped.

"Yes; she has lost me—lost me forever. It may be cruel, but I hate her. I shall never forgive her. Oh, Dick, I can never—never forgive her."

"Ah, but she loved you tremendously," said Dick. "All I can feel is that."

But Milly only said: "I love you all the more for feeling it."

THE END