"But, dear, we should be taxing the capabilities of your charming little house too much," she said, feeling certain of her ground. "I should not wonder if Henry was unable to go anywhere without his secretary, as well as a servant. He must have to keep in constant touch with the India Office. But it is delightful of you to suggest it, only we must not trespass on your good-nature."
"No difficulty at all!" cried Mrs. Hancock. "There is the pink room and the best blue bedroom and the lilac dressing-room next mine, into which Elizabeth can go. The thing is done, dear, if you will only say the word. And if Sir Henry plays golf, there will be Mr. Martin delighted to lend him some golf-sticks and go round with him, do they not call it? It will be a pleasure to him; he has always had such an admiration for soldiers, for, to be sure, as he says sometimes, he is a soldier himself, fighting battles continually. I will get up a little dinner-party for Monday night, and Edward and Elizabeth shall play afterwards, if Sir Henry likes music."
While this kittenish comedy was going on something younger and more tragical was in progress in the two adjacent houses. Edward had been sitting in his smoking-room after breakfast, with eyes that wandered over his uncomprehended newspaper, conscious of an overmastering desire to slip across to the house next door merely to see Elizabeth, to satisfy the eyes that ached for her and, as he knew well, but to render the more acute the aching of his heart. His wife, as was often her custom, had come in after she had attended to her household duties, and sat in her usual seat by the window, speaking occasionally to him, or replying in perfectly commonplace fashion, to his dropped observations. They had spoken of their plans for the day, of the arrival of Mrs. Fanshawe and Elizabeth, and now and then, focusing his eyes but not his mind, he had mentioned some newspaper topic. Such half-hours they had spent a hundred times before, but to-day each was intensely conscious of something that, always lying behind their intercourse and never spoken of between them, had suddenly enveloped and enshadowed, like the gathering of a tropical storm, the foreground of their life as well. He tried to imagine himself putting down his newspaper in a leisurely way, and forming his voice to say, lightly and casually, that he would stroll across to Mrs. Hancock's. But he felt that, as if intoxicated, his tongue would stammer and stumble on the words. Once he laid his paper down, and saw that on the instant she had started into attentive expectation, had fixed her eyes on him ready for what she knew would come from his lips, for she read, so he felt, his unspoken sentence, knowing what filled his mind. But still he sat there, unable to tell her what he ached to do, while she waited. In all the months of their marriage Elizabeth's name had been mentioned only as the name of some indifferent cousin might have been; never as one who held Edward's heart in the hollow of her hands.
For herself, even as bees build up in walls of impenetrable gluelike wax some intruder and enemy to their hive, Edith had walled away from her life all thought of her cousin. She had built her up into a separate chamber of her brain, so that her worker-bees, the conscious denizens of her mind, should have no access to her. Her love for Edward (that nipped and unexpanded bud, which had never blown), which had claimed possession of him, instead of giving him his liberty and seeking his happiness at the cost of the last drop of her heart's blood, had starved on its comfortless food, and the leanness of her desire had entered into her soul. For seven months she had been his wife, sharer in name in all that nominally was his, recipient of his unwearied kindness and affection, but never for a single moment possessing his essential self. She had no word or thought of complaint of him in his conduct or in his feelings towards her; he gave all that was his to give. She had demanded of him the fulfilment of his bargain, and to the full extent of his solvency, so to speak, he had paid it. But now she knew that he was absolutely insolvent towards her with regard to the coinage of the only true mint. She had thought that her love with its hopeless limitations could make his reef of gold hers. She had thought that they could settle down into a sham that would cheat both himself and her, that the mask of his face would either be withdrawn or would deceive her into the belief of its reality. Neither had happened; he must always wear a mask for her, and that mask would never grow so like the human face below it (so little way below, and yet withdrawn into impenetrable depths) that it would deceive her into believing in it. And now, before long, she would bear a child to him, and it seemed to her, in the enlightenment that these smooth, prosperous months of misery had brought her, that her baby would be no better than a bastard.
It must not be supposed that this misery was acute or the degree of enlightenment it brought clear and cloudless. Her perceptions were not of the kind that admit great poignancy either of wretchedness or of bliss. Once only perhaps in all her life had the engines of her being worked up to their full power, and that was when she claimed the fulfilment of Edward's promise. She had felt intensely and acutely then the impossibility of giving him up, but since that flash of deplorable intensity she had fallen back on to her normal levels, where the ground, so to speak, was solid and rather clayey, where there were neither peaks nor precipices. But it declined slowly and unintermittently into a place of featureless gloom. Yet, except to any one who was gifted with the divine intuition of love towards her, there were no signs in her normal behaviour of this inward wretchedness, and for poor Edith there was nobody thus inspired. She had always been rather reserved and silent, and even Mr. Martin, that brilliant seeker after the joys and sorrows of others, had neither missed in her the steady placidity that he knew nor had detected any other change. As for her mother, Edith's invariable punctuality, her quiet recognition of objects of interest like the towers of Windsor Castle and the trains on the Great Western Railway, were sufficient evidence of contentment, especially since Edward always got home by the dinner train and she was going to have a baby. Here were adequate causes for thankfulness, and she was sure that Edith, who had so strong a sense of duty, appreciated them.
Edith's enlightenment was of the same order, no noonday blaze, but only a diffused luminance that came veiled through those clouds, not dispersing them. But she no longer groped in darkness as she had done when she decided that she could not voluntarily give Edward his liberty. She could see more now. Not only could she see the utter unreality at which she had grasped, but that there was in existence a real light different altogether from the phantasmal will-o'-the-wisp which she had blindly followed into the quagmire. She had sought her own, thinking that it was love she followed. She would have sought her own no longer, if it had been possible for her to make choice again.
Vaguely, as she sat this morning by the window, these things passed before her mind, as the pictures of some well-known and familiar book pass before the eye of one who listlessly turns the leaves. At the end of the book, she knew, there were pictures she had not seen yet. It was as if Edward's finger as well as hers was on the page, doubting whether to turn on or not. Nearly an hour wore away thus, outwardly like many other hours, but in reality an hour of poise and expectancy. Then on the road outside the gate she saw pass, as she had so often seen, her mother's motor. Mrs. Fanshawe was with her, and next door Elizabeth was alone.
"Mother going out for her drive," she said mechanically.
She did not look round, but heard the paper flutter in Edward's fingers.
"Alone?" he asked. "Or with whom?"