IV
THE question of his right to know was then waived. That night she told him what there was to tell, with complete frankness. He would leave no detail to the imagination. He wanted to know all, all.
It seemed to Teresa that there was not very much to tell. It seemed to her that Basil's infinite questions wanted to wring more out of the facts than they contained, almost. It seemed to her that some part of his intelligence was trying to construct, quite impersonally, a drama, in which she figured merely as an actor. This was a momentary impression, swept away by the outbreak of his emotion.
He was moved as she had never seen him. Never before had she seen hate in his eyes, and she saw it now. It was as though an earthquake had convulsed the depths of an heretofore quiet sea, and all sorts of monsters came tossing to the surface—monstrous thoughts, blind words. She sat silent while the storm raged, her hands clenched on the arms of her chair, her eyes fixed on Basil's face, which for the first time looked ugly to her. All the strength and brightness of his aspect were gone, swamped in the nervous frenzy that shook him.
"It is his pride that is hurt," thought Teresa. "It is his vanity, his sense of possession …" And she felt farther removed from him at that moment than ever before. It seemed possible to her that this might really mean a break between them. It was clearly in his mind, the idea of separation. And he threw out a fierce threat—he would take the child. At that, every atom of colour left her face. She sat, ashy-white, staring at him. She felt her heart beating with great dull throbs—she felt the life ebbing out of her body in anguish. He might ruin her life, then. It was an enemy that she saw before her, and one that she could not fight. He had not the right to take the child, but the thought of such a contest between them was impossible. If it came to that, she would kill herself.
There came a silence, at last. Basil had hurled at her everything he had to say, and he stood at the far end of the room, not looking at her. She had no impulse to defend herself—it would have been physically impossible for her to utter a word, to move even. At last he went abruptly out of the room, and a moment later she heard him leave the house. She sat where he had left her, while the fire died down into a bed of coals, and grey ashes gathered over it and killed the last red gleam, and the chill of the frosty night crept into the room. …
When she heard him come back, hours later, she went shivering to her bed, but she did not sleep. He was there, under the same roof with her, but a freezing terror lay between them—the terror of the end of love, of ugliness where there had been beauty, of death where there had been life. Was it possible that such a failure could be theirs? Was this thing real, or was it a spectre, a shadow, that they might still escape from? She did not know …
Whose was the fault? Hers directly, she knew. How prodigal they had both been of the real treasure of their lives, how careless of the precious thing they held! But who could have guessed that it was fragile? How had it been possible to think that what held them together needed cherishing, needed care? Had either of them really conceived before that that bond could be broken? Had either of them imagined such bankruptcy?
And now it was facing them. She knew instinctively that this was the real test of their relation. She knew that Basil's fault could not have ruined the scheme of their life together; she knew that hers could. She saw herself as the key-stone of the structure; she saw suddenly that there was, that there must be a structure, and that it must depend upon her. All the laboriousness of life, the grey aspect of duty, the necessity for infinite, incessant exertion of the will, for self-control, for self-sacrifice—all the puritan conception of the world and the human soul—surged over her like a cold muddy sea. Was this, then, what one must live in? And to what end? To pass the endless struggle on to someone else?
For the first time, it seemed to her, in the long hours of that night, she saw the world as it really was. She saw it as a long combat, and she saw that no relation could escape this law of struggle and change, certainly not hers and Basil's. Between them, too, it must be a combat, a struggle to keep what they had conquered, a fight against those things in one another, in themselves, that tended to destroy, a long fight against decay and the death of what was precious.
She saw in a flash how she had injured a certain ideal of herself in Basil's mind; she saw all the power of that ideal to bind, to anchor him. She saw how he had set her apart, because of it, from all feminine lightness and weakness, too well known. And the violence of his reaction against the having to change his idea of her showed her how much it had meant to him. It was perhaps unreasonable, his ideal, his idea of her, but she acknowledged that he was right to want her to realise it. Now, perhaps, it would never be real to him again. She had broken one of the cords that bound him to her. She saw before her a battle to regain what she had lost, or to replace it by something else. She took up her courage in both hands and vowed herself to that battle. If she could not be to him, now, what he had thought her, she would make herself a new value to him. They might be fellow-sinners, but he should not, for all that, hold her for less.
••••••
At dawn he came into her room, came and put his head down on her pillow, and said wearily that he could not sleep. At that she burst out crying wildly, sobbed out passionately her humility, her regret, her fear, her love. And they clung together like two waifs in a storm, feeling darkness and danger all about them …
All that day Basil spent moodily by himself, fitfully trying to work, or tramping about the place. In the afternoon a cablegram came for Teresa—her informant said that the danger was past, and Crayven safe and the storm broke out afresh. Basil's resentment surged up furiously—Teresa replied bitterly.
"You treat me like a slave," she said at last, in deep humiliation. "I am an individual as much as you. You haven't the right to judge me."
"But I do judge you. Either you belong to me, or you don't. It's as simple as that, and you can choose. If you belong to me, you don't belong even by a thought to anyone else. That's all there is to it. If you're my wife, you'll have no lovers, by letter or any other way. You'll have no more letters from Crayven"
"You issue your commands as though I had nothing to do but obey."
"It isn't a question of commands and obeying. It's a question of seeing a clear situation, recognising what it means to me and to you … and I'm not sure, even if you do recognise it, that I can ever trust you again. I can't feel toward you as I did before. You'll always be different—less mine than you were … I can't understand how you could do this …"
"And you? You keep the full right to do exactly as you choose, yourself? You won't recognise any responsibility in what has happened …"
"The question is entirely different for me and you you know it must be so. If I made a mistake I paid for it, long before this, and now you have made me pay a thousand times over. But you'll have to pay too, inevitably. If you were trying for revenge!"
"No, it wasn't quite so crude as that! But perhaps it was inevitable, too, that you should suffer for what you made me suffer"
"You suffer? You didn't, you didn't really care deeply"
"Oh, didn't I! Didn't I! Do you believe that, Basil? I had no idea of making you pay, though. I had impulses to hurt you, I hated you sometimes, but I never deliberately meant to make you suffer—but perhaps you ought to, for what you did to me. You made me worse than I was, Basil."
"Don't say that—it isn't true!" he cried. "Haven't you given me enough? … It isn't only for myself I feel this," he went on. "It's for you, too. It's because I know in the end it's always the woman that pays. If you injure our life together, you'll pay even more than I shall. If you, being what you are, should have a lover, you'd have to pay for that—pay in injury to your pride, in a thousand ways. A woman that gives herself to a man who doesn't deeply love her—a woman who has anything to lose—is a fool. The reaction takes him away from her, as sure as fate, and even a man who isn't a brute can't help making her feel it. You've nothing to gain in that game, Teresa, and everything to lose. And first of all you lose me—if you care anything about me. For I tell you, I couldn't stand it. If you did that sort of thing again, I believe I'd kill you—at least I'd take myself off where you'd never see me again … I've had more than one impulse to do it, anyway."
"What—kill me?" said Teresa, with a wan smile.
"No, go away from you. I'm not sure that I shan't, as it is. I can never believe now that you really care about me. You might find somebody else, who'd make you happier. You've always disliked a lot about me, anyway."
"And you—what would you do?"
"Oh, I'd knock about somehow and work. I've had enough of women. There isn't one that I've any respect for now."
Basil's anger sank into a cool and biting mood, which lasted on from day to day. He talked less and less to Teresa, and finally became almost altogether silent. He shut himself up in the studio for the greater part of the day, and now he was really working. He was forcing himself to work, and Teresa saw the marks of this fierce effort of will in his face. And she saw in it a new hardness, forming like a mask—a jaded, an older look …
Basil was cutting himself off from her. They were very little together now. She felt that some change was impending. Something was going on in his mind, of which he would not speak. Whatever it was, it would have some practical effect. She felt that he was deciding something, and without her. Was he slipping away from her …? Was she to lose him, really, and for a thing so slight in itself as her relation with Crayven, whatever that relation might have indicated to Basil? She could not believe it possible. But she was proudly silent, too, while her very heart seemed turning to ice within her.