Sir Walter was subjugated. He pleaded for pardon; promised not to torment her—to try not to torment her. A trysting-place was fixed on for next day and Holland felt another chill of fear at Kitty's swift resource and craft in planning it. The child knew how to plot and lie. It thought itself nobly justified, no doubt, and that its fidelity to duty gave it the right to every liberty of conscience. And before Sir Walter went there was a moment of relenting that showed how near was the joy of yielding to the joy of ruthlessness, "For this once,—for this once only—" Kitty murmured. And Holland knew that Sir Walter held her in his arms and kissed her.
After his departure Kitty sat on for some moments in the summer-house. She sighed deeply once or twice and Holland fancied, from her light movements, that she had leaned her arms on the table and rested her head on them. He heard presently, that she was softly saying a prayer, and at the sound, tears filled his eyes. Then, rising, she collected her basket of flowers, her parasol, her books, and walked away with slow steps along the path leading to the house.
CHAPTER II
Two facts stood clear before Holland's eyes. He had been culpably blind and Kitty was in danger. He asked himself if he had not been culpably selfish too, for Kitty's summing up of his attitude towards her would have hurt had he not been beyond such hurts; but, looking back, he could not see that he had ever pushed Kitty aside nor relegated her to the place of plaything. No; the ship of his romance, all its sails set to fairest, sweetest hopes, had been well-ballasted by the most serious, most generous of modern theories as to the right relations of man and wife. And the shock and disillusion had been to find, day by day, that it was, so to speak, only the sails that Kitty cared for. The cargo, the purpose of their voyage, left her prettily, vaguely indifferent. Again and again, he remembered, it had been as if he had led her down into the busy heart of the ship, explained the chart to her, pointed out all the interesting wares. Kitty had shown a graceful interest, but with the manner of a lovely voyager, brought down from sunny or starlit contemplations on deck to humour the dry tastes of the captain. She didn't care a bit for the cargo, or the purposes; she didn't care a bit for any of his interests nor wish to share them; his interests, in so far as specialized and unrelated to their romance, were, she intimated, by every retreating grace—as of gathered-up skirts and a backward smile for the captain in his prosy room—the captain's own particular manly business; her business was to be womanly, that is, to be charming, to feel the breeze in the sails, and to gaze at the stars. And though, now for the first time he saw it, Kitty was not the happy, facilely contented woman he had thought her, it was really as if the ship, with weightier cargoes to carry, more distant ports to reach, had undergone a transformation; throbbing and complicated machinery moved instead of sails, and on its workaday decks Kitty strolled wistfully, missing the sails, missing the romance, but missing only that.
He had accepted, helplessly, her interpretation of their specialised existences, hoping only that hers might assume the significance that would, perhaps, justify the old-fashioned separation of interests; but no children came after the first, the child that died at birth, the child that his heart ached over still; and he could not believe that Kitty felt the lack, could hardly believe that she shared his hope for other children. She had suffered terribly in the birth of the one, more, perhaps, than in its death—though that had temporarily crushed her—and she had been horribly frightened by the cruelties and perils of maternity. So, though he had come to think of her as essentially womanly, it was in a rather narrow sense; the term had by degrees lost many, even, of its warm, instinctive associations, and as he now sat thinking, near the summer-house, it took on its narrowest, if most piteous meaning. Kitty was essentially womanly. She needed some one to be in love with her. Her husband had ceased to be in love—though he had not ceased to be a loving husband—and she responded helplessly to a lover's appeal. Sir Walter's appeal was very persuasive. A ship of snowy, wing-like sails, a fairy ship, rocked on the waves at the very edge of Kitty's sheltered life. Only a shutting of the eyes, a holding of the breath, and she would be carried across the narrow intervening depth to the deck, to freedom, to safety—she would believe—to sails trimmed for an immortal romance. Would Kitty's cowardice, and Kitty's prayers—they were interwoven he felt sure—keep her for one month from running away with Sir Walter? In only a month's time she could respond and not be shattered: in only a month's time the ship of romance would be really safe, she might walk on board with no shutting of the eyes or holding of the breath. Holland gazed, and the facts became clearer and more ominous. For the lack of a knowledge that was his, Kitty and Sir Walter might wreck their lives. All the motives for the concealment of his secret, the vanity, the bravery, the cherishing tenderness that had inspired him, were scattered to the winds. The nest was a tattered, wind-pierced ruin. And he, already, was a ghost. Kitty should not lack the knowledge.
The dew was falling, and he had grown chilly. He walked back quickly to the house that he had left a little while ago so vividly aware of the sweetness that the shallow cup might hold. The cup was empty. Not a drop of self was left to hope or live for.
He waited till the next day to tell her. He did not feel a tremor, he felt too deep a fatigue.
Their meeting at dinner was a placid gliding over the depths; two hooded gondolas floating side by side, each with its shrouded secret. But skill and vigilance were his. Kitty's gondola drifted with the current, knowing no need of skill, secure of secrecy. The eyes she quietly lifted to her husband were unclouded. He guessed the inner drama that held her thoughts, the tragically beautiful role that she herself played in it. It was as a heroine that she saw herself. Why not, indeed. No heroine could have played her part more gracefully and worthily, and a heroine's innocent eyes could not be expected to see as far as his "ironic" ones.