The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/The Given Case/Chapter 6
VI
Mrs. Despard at last came down—he had been sure it would be but a question of time. Barton Reeve had, to this end, presented himself, on the Sunday morning, early: he had allowed a margin for difficulty. He was armed with a note of three lines, which, on the butler's saying to him that she was not at home, he simply, in a tone before which even a butler prompted and primed must quail, requested him to carry straight up. Then unannounced and unaccompanied, not knowing in the least whom he should find, he had taken, for the hundredth time in four months, his quick course to the drawing-room, where emptiness, as it proved, reigned, but where, notwithstanding, he felt, at the end of an hour, rather more than less in possession. To express it, to put it to her, to put it to any one, would perhaps have been vain and vulgar; but the whole assurance on which he had proceeded was his sense that, on the spot, he had, to a certain point, an effect. He was enough on the spot from the moment she knew he was, and she would know it—know it by divination, as she had often before shown how extraordinarily she knew things—even if that pompous ass had not sent up his note. To what point his effect would prevail in the face of the biggest obstacle he had yet had to deal with was exactly what he had come to find out. It was enough, to begin with, that he did, after a weary wait, draw her—draw her in spite of everything: he felt that as he at last heard her hand on the doorknob. He heard it indeed pause as well as move—pause while he himself kept perfectly still. During this minute, it must be added, he looked straight at the ugliest of the whole mixed row of possibilities. Something had yielded—yes; but what had yielded was quite most probably not her softness. It might well be her hardness. Her hardness was her love of the sight of her own effect.
Dressed for church, though it was now much too late, she was more breathless than he had ever seen her; in spite of which, beginning immediately, he gave her not a moment. 'I make a scandal, your letter tells me—I make it, you say, even before the servants, whom, you appear to have taken in the most extraordinary way into your confidence. You greatly exaggerate—but even suppose I do: let me assure you frankly that I care not one rap. What you've done you've done, and I'm here in spite of your letter—and in spite of anything, of everything, any one else may say—on the perfectly solid ground of your having irretrievably done it. Don't talk to me,' Reeve went on, 'about your husband and new complications: to do that now is horribly unworthy of you and quite the sort of thing that adds—well, you know what—to injury. There isn't a single complication that there hasn't always been and that we haven't, on the whole, completely mastered and put in its place. There was nothing in your husband that prevented, from the first hour we met, your showing yourself, and every one else you chose, what you could do with me. What you could do you did systematically and without a scruple—without a pang of real compunction or a movement of real retreat.'
Mrs. Despard had not come down unprepared, and her impenetrable face now announced it. She was even strong enough to speak softly—not to meet anger with anger. Yet she was also clearly on her defence. 'If I was kind to you—if I had the frankness and confidence to let it be seen I liked you—it's because I thought I was safe.'
'Safe?' Barton Reeve echoed. 'Yes, I've no doubt you did! And how safe did you think I was? Can't you give me some account of the attention you gave to that?' She looked at him without reply to his challenge, but the full beauty of her silent face had only, as in two or three still throbs, to come out, to affect him suddenly with all the force of a check. The plea of her deep, pathetic eyes took the place of the admission that his passion vainly desired to impose upon her. They broke his resentment down; all his tenderness welled up with the change; it came out in supplication. 'I can't look at you and believe any ill of you. I feel for you everything I ever felt, and that we're committed to each other by a power that not even death can break. How can you look at me and not know to what depths I'm yours? You've the finest, sweetest chance that ever a woman had!'
She waited a little, and the firmness in her face, the intensity of her effort to possess herself, settled into exaltation, at the same time that she might have struck a spectator as staring at some object of fear. 'I see my chance—I see it; but I don't see it as you see it. You must forgive me. My chance is not that chance. It has come to me—God knows why!—but in the hardest way of all. I made a great mistake—I recognise it.'
'So I must pay for it?' Barton Reeve asked.
She continued to look at him with her protected dread. 'We both did—so we must both pay.'
'Both? I beg your pardon,' said the young man: 'I utterly deny it—I made no mistake whatever. I'm just where I was—and everything else is. Everything but you!'
She looked away from him, but going on as if she had not heard him. 'We must do our duty—when once we see it. I didn't know—I didn't understand. But now I do. It's when one's eyes are opened—that the wrong is wrong.' Not as a lesson got by heart, not as a trick rehearsed in her room, but delicately, beautifully, step by step, she made it out for herself—and for him so far as he would take it. 'I can only follow the highest line.' Then, after faltering a moment, 'We must thank God,' she said, 'it isn't worse. My husband's here,' she added with a sufficient strangeness of effect.
But Barton Reeve accepted the mere fact as relevant. Do you mean he's in the house?
'Not at this moment. He's on the river—for the day. But he comes back to-morrow.'
'And he has been here since Friday?' She was silent, on this, so long that her visitor continued: 'It's none of my business?'
Again she hesitated, but at last she replied. 'Since Friday.'
'And you hate him as much as ever?'
This time she spoke out. 'More.'
Reeve made, with a sound irrepressible and scarce articulate, a motion that was a sort of dash at her. 'Ah, my own own!'
But she retreated straight before him, checking him with a gesture of horror, her first outbreak of emotion. 'Don't touch me!' He turned, after a minute, away; then, like a man dazed, looked, without sight, about for something. It proved to be his hat, which he presently went and took up. 'Don't talk, don't talk—you're not in it! she continued. 'You speak of "paying," but it's I who pay.' He reached the door and, having opened it, stood with his hand on the knob and his eyes on her face. She was far away, at the most distant of the windows. 'I shall never care for any one again,' she kept on.
Reeve had dropped to something deeper than resentment; more abysmal, even, it seemed to him, than renouncement or despair. But all he did was slowly to shake his helpless head at her. 'I've no words for you.'
'It doesn't matter. Don't think of me.'
He was closing the door behind him, but, still hearing her voice, kept it an instant. 'I'm all right!'—that was the last that came to him as he drew the door to.