“If only I’d had the Red Cross training,” she said, “I could have taken care of his leg then. I suppose I mustn’t ask to be allowed to. Isn’t it quite early?” she added. “He’s enjoying the talk with Lady Vera.” “It’s half-past ten, and we are strict with our invalids. Here is nurse now. I’ll come up with you and see that you are comfortable.”
No one could have said that there was any creature comfort lacking in Mrs. Thornton’s reception at Compton Dally. Captain Thornton, as the invalid, had a larger room, but Mrs. Thornton’s room, next it, was quite as charming a one, pink and grey, with old French prints and hangings of toile de Jouy. She went up to the prints for a moment of silent appreciation before turning to me with a sigh, half pleasure and half wistfulness.
“How lovely everything is here! Papa would have been in rapture over those Cochins. I shall enjoy my sleep to-night.” And then,—it was her only sign of awareness,—“I suppose I’m to be allowed to go and say good-night to Clive when nurse has done with him.”
My study at Compton Dally, where I type and write and do accounts, opens on the west terrace, and from my bureau I seemed, at most hours of the days that followed, to have a view of Mollie Thornton’s little figure wandering, as it were, on the outskirts, not plaintive,—there was never a touch of plaintiveness,—but passive. With her sewing or knitting or a book she sat a good deal under the shade of the cedar that stands at the corner of the terrace, and she spent a good deal of time drifting up and down the vistas of the lawns and park watching birds, a binocular in her hand. She was certainly a most comfortable person to relegate, since she never looked melancholy and usually contrived to seem occupied, and Vera, when she passed behind her on the terrace on her way to the dream-garden, Captain Thornton beside her, would pause and put her hand on her shoulder and say, “Happy, dear?” in the most dulcet tone. And when Mrs. Thornton, lifting those meditative eyes, answered, “Yes, thank you,” Vera, all bland benevolence, would say, “That’s right,” and pass on. Leila Travers-Cray and Lady Dighton sometimes exchanged a few friendly remarks with her, and she read the morning papers to Colonel Appleby when his eyes hurt him; but she was relegated far, far away, as completely as any human being could be who could in any way count as a guest.
I was very busy and had not much time to be with her, though all the time I had was hers; but I knew accurately what she was feeling. I related it always with that dreadful Victoria platform, with those moments of pain and yet of rapture which we had both known, when we had felt ourselves, in our suffering, stand for England, lifted up in accepting sacrifice to the august and beautiful spirit that claimed our dearest. One would expect, after that transcendent suffering, to find as transcending a joy; but how was joy possible to a young wife caught into what might be to her husband a fairyland or a paradise, but to her was a cruel and complicated machine where her only part was to turn round with the other wheels and pretend to like it? I knew that it must not be taken too seriously. It was only to last for six weeks, and then she would have her Clive back again; yet while it lasted it must make the months of suffering passed through seem happy by comparison. There had then been nothing between them but distance and the fear of death; and now everything was between them—everything Vera stood for; her house, her friends, her smile, her pearls, her dream-garden.
On morning after morning I saw Vera leading him away to it, with her armful of books, and Chang, her Pekinese, trotting at her heels. I perfectly understood Vera’s state of mind in regard to Captain Thornton. There was no occasion for commonplace jealousy. He merely made her feel cheerful and rejuvenated. Everything she had to show and tell him was new to him. She became new to herself, poor old Vera! and gained from the quiet regard of his sane and simple eyes—handsome eyes under straight, dark brows—a sense of freshness and worth in everything. She liked him better than any of the wounded heroes she had yet had. Some of them had been merely stupid, and one or two had been gloomy, sardonic men—men of her own world, to whom nothing she had to say would seem new. Clive Thornton was neither stupid nor sardonic, and he was simple enough to accept Vera’s fancy tricks—her talk of dreaming dreams and solitude—as part of an angel’s manner, and he was just clever enough to be able to appreciate anything she had to say. I could quite see how endearing Vera must find his steady gaze and his considering silences. Even with my vigorous espousal of his wife’s side I never felt angry with him. His not seeing that she was unhappy was part of the same innocence that made him not see that Vera was a cat. Mollie, besides, took quite as much care to conceal her unhappiness as Vera to behave like an angel. It never crossed his mind that his wife was relegated; it never crossed his mind that they were separated. He did not feel separated; they were both, as far as he knew, in fairyland together. And yet I knew it might not all be so trivial and transient as it seemed. A new standard was being formed for him; a new idea of what it was to be an angel. It was possible that all unconsciously he would no longer think of Mollie as one when he left Compton Dally; and when I took this in I began to gather up my weapons.
I found Mollie one afternoon sitting on the bench under the willow-tree where we had had our first talk. She had her knitting, but her hands were still, and she was gazing before her at the water. If she were not a tragic figure, it was only because there are some things sadder than tragedy. She had faced everything, been through everything, she had gone down into the Hades where so many of us were still living, and now she found herself baulked and menaced by commonplace daylight. Tragedy is, in some ways, an easy thing to bear.
“Well, what are you doing here by yourself?” I asked her, advancing. There was a look on her face, startled and steadied, that showed me what she had been thinking about in the fancied security of her solitude. But she managed at once the vague smile that concealed so much, and said that she had been, as usual, resting. “I seem to find out every day more and more how tired I was,” she added.
“You didn’t care to go with the others, motoring?” I took my place beside her. “You’d have liked Marjorams. It’s a lovely old place. Some people think it beats Compton Dally, though, naturally, I’m not one of them.”
“I’m sure you’re not,” said Mollie, laughing a little. “That was one of the things that first struck me about you—how you loved it. I felt that you were a fiercely loyal person.”