MORE SHE-NOTES.
(By Iõpna, Author of "A Yellow Plaster.")
Chapter III.
Colour-blind from his tenth year, Chamois Hyde (late of Christ's, Oxford, not to be confused with Christchurch, Cambridge), had hitherto ignored details of scenery; but now the vermiliony petal of the pimpernel, the rubicund radix of the carrot, the blue of the insensate bottle-fly—these reminded him respectively of the cheeks of Margerine, her hair, the spots in her grey eyes where, as we said, the soul looked through. The harvest-sheaves again were, broadly speaking, her figure.
Till now he had been impervious to the new femalehood, rising like Proteus from the azure foam; dumbly he had waited for a woman with possible potentialities, or, failing this, with potential possibilities.
Margerine, whom we left a fortnight ago inarticulately gurgling by the trout-stream, caught the note of a step in the briar-patch. With her budding instinct she could tell her lover's footfall half a mile away, waking the age-echo in her chest. This one was lighter and less gregarious. In her sphinxy way she divined that it belonged to a woman with Puritan impossibilities and a yellow plaster next her heart.
Under a mask of habitual and hereditary reticence, the step came on, revealing a finished creature, gowned beyond all mending. Margerine, whose face was her ewe-lamb, became sub-acutely aware of her own half-made frock, and yearned a little in the other's direction.
"Oh!" she said; "how did you get it built that way? I mean the gown." The woman's voice came through the envelope of Margerine's sub-consciousness, steely clear as a cheese-cutter. "My name is Mrs. Chamois Hyde. In other words, I am the wife of Mr. Chamois Hyde!"
"The wife of Chamois Hyde?" said the innocent girl; "I do not follow you."
"Let me explain," said the other, unsparingly. "Chamois Hyde, who is now due at your trout-stream" (Margarine smiled stoopingly), "is my husband. I say, he married me. Once I had a maiden name. That is all past. I changed it when I married. All honourable women do. I am honourable. I changed mine. Now I am Mrs. Chamois Hyde. See?"
"Can't help that," said Margerine cheerfully; "he loves me." This was the folded-lamb's point of view.
"Girl, have you no shame?" This was the other woman's.
"Rather I blush for you," said the unfinished creature. "You couldn't make him love you, you couldn't; you're the hankering feminine counterpart of the man in the other book, the Yellow Plaster book. Now it is too late. We love each other. The matter is taken out of our hands. We are merely impassive, irresponsible, agents. Do try and look at the case as I do, from an unbiassed, impersonal, point of view; and see that the fault is utterly your own."
The girl's regard for her lover had suffered no transitional throwing-back at the news of his deception. She was overwhelming with her palpabilites. Ah! it is these that men love—palpabilities. "And have I none?" moaned the unhappy wife. "If I could blush, could only blush! He would have loved me then. But stay, he is colour-blind; I forgot."
Worth re-tailing.
"I said just now I would blush for you," replied the other, who had been under the eaves overhearing her thoughts. "And to think of the chances you have missed, and with a gown like that! Why, if you are his wife, you must often have met him about, and not had to make arrangements at a trout-stream like me. Conceivably he has even kissed you. I read once of a married man who kissed his wife." She suddenly stopped; not that one of her intoxicating gutturals had come loose; but an odd flood of pathos was playing on the other's brow as she caught sight of Chamois whistling aloofly behind a sycamore, and went in thought all over that first kiss, complicated, perhaps, perhaps rather billiardy, but still a thing to remember.
Like a cloud the stigma lifted, and Margerine guessed her horrid secret. "You love him too? I never thought of that. How forgetful of me! But if you love him and I love him, why, we both love him! This is too much!" For a moment both of them pulsated even as one tuning-fork. Though sundered by the estranging ocean of the past that had closed its lid between them, leaving them like shuttlecocks, sick with strong doses of womanhood and experience, now that Chamois, steadied by his breeding, was rapidly joining the party, the two women leaned against one another (how seldom women do this!), and waited, containedly restless. But the man, as I said before, comes into the next chapter, if we ever get as far.