The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/The Given Case/Chapter 5
V
'Mrs. Gorton has come in?'
'No, miss; but Mrs. Despard is here. She said she'd wait for you.'
'Then I'm not at home to any one.' Margaret Hamer went straight upstairs and found her visitor in the smaller drawing-room, not seated, erect before the fireplace and with the air of having for some time restlessly paced and turned. Mrs. Despard hailed her with an instant cry.
'It has come at last!'
'Do you mean you've seen your husband?'
'He dropped on me to-day—out of the blue. He came in just before luncheon. If the house is his own———!' And Mrs. Despard, who, as with the first relief to her impatience, had flung herself, to emphasise her announcement on the sofa, gave a long, sombre sigh.
'If the house is his own he can come when he likes?' Standing before her and looking grave and tired, Margaret Hamer showed interest, but kept expression down. 'And yet you were so splendidly sure,' she continued, 'that he wouldn't come!'
'I wasn't sure—I see now I wasn't; I only tried to convince myself. I knew—at the back of my head—that he probably was in England; I felt in all my bones—six weeks ago, you know—that he would really have returned and, in his own infamous, underhand way, would be somewhere looking out. He told me to-day about ninety distinct lies. I don't know how he has kept so dark, but he has been at one of the kind of places he likes—some fourth-rate watering-place.'
Margaret waited a moment. 'With any one?'
'I don't know. I don't care.' This time, for emphasis, Mrs. Despard jumped up and, wandering, like a caged creature, to a distance, stopped before a glass and gave a touch or two to the position of her hat. 'It makes no difference. Nothing makes any.'
Her friend, across the room, looked at her with a certain blankness. 'Of what does he accuse you?'
'Of nothing whatever,' said Mrs. Despard, turning round. 'Not of the least little thing!' she sighed, coming back.
'Then he made no scene?'
'No—it was too awful.'
Again the girl faltered. 'Do you mean he was———?'
'I mean he was dreadful. I mean I can't bear it.'
'Does he want to come back?'
'Immediately and forever. "Beginning afresh," he calls it. Fancy,' the poor woman cried, rueful and wide-eyed as with a vision of more things than she could name—'fancy beginning afresh!' Once more, in her fidget, appalled, she sank into the nearest seat.
This image of a recommencement had just then, for both ladies, in all the circumstances, a force that filled the room—that seemed for a little fairly to make a hush. 'But if he can't oblige you?' Margaret presently returned.
Mrs. Despard sat sombre. 'He can oblige me.'
'Do you mean by law?'
'Oh,' she wailed, 'I mean by everything! By my having been the fool———!' She dropped to her intolerable sense of it.
Margaret watched her an instant. 'Oh, if you say it of yourself!'
Mrs. Despard gave one of her springs. 'And don't you say it?'
Margaret met her eyes, but changed colour. 'Say it of you?'
'Say it of yourself.'
They fixed each other awhile; it was deep—it was even hard. 'Yes,' said the girl at last. But she turned away.
Her companion's eyes followed her as she moved; then Mrs. Despard broke out. 'Do you mean you're not going to keep faith?'
'What faith do you call faith?'
'You know perfectly what I call faith for you, and in how little doubt, from the first, I've left you about it!'
This reply had been sharp enough to jerk the speaker for a moment, as by the toss of her head, out of her woe, but Margaret met it at first only by showing her again a face that enjoined patience and pity. They continued to look indeed, each out of her peculiar distress, more things than they found words for. 'I don't know,' Margaret Hamer finally said. 'I have time—I've a little; I've more than you—that's what makes me so sorry for you. I've been very possibly the direst idiot—I'll admit anything you like; though I won't pretend I see now how it could have been different. It couldn't—it couldn't. I don't know, I don't know,' she wearily, mechanically repeated. There was something in her that had surrendered by this time all the importance of her personal question; she wished to keep it back or to get rid of it. 'Don't, at any rate, think one is selfish and all taken up. I'm perfectly quiet—it's only about you I'm nervous. You're worse than I, dear,' she added with a dim smile.
But Mrs. Despard took it more than gravely. 'Worse?'
'I mean you've more to think of. And perhaps even he's worse.'
Mrs. Despard thought again. 'He's terrible.'
Her companion hesitated—she had perhaps mistaken the allusion. 'I don't mean your husband.'
Mrs. Despard had mistaken the allusion, but she carried it off. 'Barton Reeve is terrible. It's more than I deserve.'
'Well, he really cares. There it is.'
'Yes, there it is!' Mrs. Despard echoed. 'And much that helps me!'
They hovered about, but shifting their relation now and each keeping something back. 'When are you to see him again?' Margaret asked.
This time Mrs. Despard knew whom she meant. 'Never—never again. What I may feel for him—what I may feel for myself—has nothing to do with it. Never as long as I live!' Margaret's visitor declared. 'You don't believe it?' she, however, the next moment demanded.
'I don't believe it. You know how I've always liked him. But what has that to do with it either?' the girl almost incoherently continued. 'I don't believe it—no,' she repeated. 'I don't want to make anything harder for you, but you won't find it so easy.'
'I shan't find anything easy, and I must row my own boat. But not seeing him will be the least impossibility.'
Margaret looked away. 'Well!'—she spoke at last vaguely and conclusively.
Something in her tone so arrested her friend that she found herself suddenly clutched by the arm. 'Do you mean to say you'll see Mr. Mackern?'
'I don't know.'
'Then I do!' Mrs. Despard pronounced with energy. 'You're lost.'
'Ah!' wailed Margaret with the same wan detachment.
'Yes, simply lost!' It rang out—would have rung out indeed too loud had it not caught itself just in time. Mrs. Gorton at that moment opened the door.