"Did I sigh?" said she, trying to smile as she looked down at him.
"Yes—and you haven't been listening as we came along. You didn't hear what I said about the dead whip-poor-will I found on the lawn—did you?"
"No," she confessed. "But I'll listen now."
She found herself wondering at her calmness. "Perhaps," reflected she, "my fright about Winchie conquered my love. And how deep the roots of my life are sunk into the soil of this place! Still—I don't understand it. It doesn't seem natural I should be calm." There flashed before her mind a picture—herself flying disheveled—coming forward with laughter and jest—and lie—with the sting of forbidden kisses still upon her face—the thrill of forbidden caresses— And she flushed crimson as the autumnal maples above her head, and glanced guiltily down at Winchie—and saw that he was trying to pretend not to see.
XV
Long before Dick got caught up with the particular piece of work that postponed their "fresh start," Courtney's "queer mood" and his own resolution were shelved in one of those back closets of his memory where reposed in darkness and dust matters relating to his family. He forgot nothing; his was not the forgetting kind of mind. Everything was stored away somewhere, under its proper heading, ready for him if he should happen to need it. But for that especial matter there came no demand. His happy married life had resumed its unrippled course. He worked, with allowance for exercise—usually a long walk or a row on the lake in the very early morning, before breakfast. Courtney occupied herself with house and garden. She was building a vegetable greenhouse with a small legacy from an aunt; also, there was the household routine of a multitude of time-filling, thought-filling, not to be neglected details for keeping things smooth and orderly—and there were reading and painting and music—and there were callers and visits. She even began to be philosophical about the almost daily evidences that her husband regarded her as an inferior. All men felt that way toward women. The very men who never made a move without consulting their wives thought themselves superior intelligences, and their wives mere possessors of a crafty instinct, in common with the lower animals, an instinct that was worth availing themselves of, as long as it was right there in the house. No, she was a silly supersensitive, she told herself, to be disturbed by such a ridiculous universal masculine weakness of vanity. As husbands went, Richard was about as good as any—better than most.
The evenings they spent together. A charming picture of family life they made each evening during that rare, exquisite September. The big log fire in the sitting room; he at the desk, she reading or sewing, or, less frequently, playing and singing softly. She had never been lovelier. The slightly haggard look was becoming to her young face, and the weariness of the eyelids also, and the pathos of her mouth so eager to smile, and the milky emerald of the eyes, like seas troubled so deep down that the surface was only clouded, but not ruffled. Sometimes she let Winchie stay with them an hour or so. Then the picture was complete—the boy playing on the floor before the fire, making what he called drawings at the table, always between his father and his mother, always nearer his mother, near enough to put out his hand and touch her and make quite sure of the reality of her lovely presence. Yes, she assured herself many times each day, the struggle was over; the pain would grow less and less, would pass—for the question of her life relations was settled—"and settled right."
This until mid-October, when the bleak rains inaugurated what promised to be a worse than the previous winter. On the fourth successive day indoors, as she sat at a drawing table in the upstairs sitting room, she suddenly lifted her head, thrust back the table, flung down the pencil, and rushed to the window. The lawns were flooded. Bushes and trees were drearily fluttering the last wet faded tatters of autumnal finery. Decay—desolation—death— "Will he never come! Will he never write!" And the secret of her calm, so carefully guarded from herself, was a secret from her no longer.
It had been a farce—the six weeks of resignation. One of self-deception's familiar farces; those farces that finally make old people cynical in spite of themselves about the reality of disinterested goodness, of self-sacrifice, of anything except selfishness. A farce—nothing more. That was why she could write a brief farewell and send it off with merely a pang and a sigh. And ever since she had been confidently waiting for something to happen. Something? What but his coming—coming to give her again the love that was life and light to her, the love she could no more refuse than a drowning man can withhold his hand from clutching the rope though the devil himself toss it. And once more her father's maxim, "Nothing is settled until it's settled right," began to thrust itself at her—mockingly now, as if deriding her self-deceiving attempts to found her life upon conditions to which mind and conscience had agreed, but not heart. And heart, the most powerful of the trinity that must harmonize within a human being or there is no peace—heart had suddenly torn up the treaty of peace and declared war. And war there was.
About seven that evening Dick knocked at her bedroom door. "May I come?" he called.