Silvia, as the car hooted its way through Kingston, did not concern herself to recall with what small accompaniment she had sustained those arpeggios. She must have said something, for Nellie had gone on talking, talking.... Silvia had blinked before that brilliant vitality, which so decorated all that lay under its beams; but for the first time, when she spoke like that about herself and Peter, the light hurt her. It dazzled rather than illuminated, and when it fell on certain dark places it did not illuminate them, it only showed up their blackness. She, with Nellie’s light, Nellie’s impressions, to help her, peered into them. Such glimpses as she caught between the dazzle and the darkness made her turn away with protest against this bull’s-eye that now seemed to intrude on privacy. What, after all, had her relations with Peter to do with Nellie?
The streets were slippery with the newly-fallen snow, and at some corner, while they were still passing through houses, there was a furious hooting of the horn outside, which to Silvia at that moment was not so much a warning of danger ahead on the road, as of danger lying somewhere deep within herself. They came to a dead stop, which made Wilton scream faintly and clutch the jewel-case, and for a yard or two they slid backwards. All that, too, seemed instantly translated in her mind into interior action, and, keeping pace with it, she slid a little farther back in her journey of thought.
She brought out from the locked cupboard of her very soul, where she had turned the key on it, one particular moment. It was yesterday that she had put it there. She was in a room of a house in Welbeck Street, and at the end of the consultation the great man, jovial and kindly, had got up from his chair, and smoothed the pillow of a sofa on which she had lain just before.
“Be quite active,” Dr. Symes summed up, “without overtiring yourself. Appetite good? That’s all right. Just go on with your ordinary life. What? No: no doubt of any kind. Your husband well? A cold? Everyone’s got a cold.”
Silvia paused over that while a wheel of her car slipped and skidded. Soon it hit the ground again. But in that pause she faced the fact that she had not told Peter. She meant to last night, but—but.... He had bewailed his cold; he had accepted her proposal that he should stop in London to-night. He had waved his hand at her and left her, not kissing her for fear of giving her his cold. But that was not the reason—it was only the excuse—for not telling him. She had welcomed it, at the time, as an adequate excuse; but if she had not found any such, she would have done without it.
For a second or two her thought paused, merely contemplating this fact as if looking at some picture. It seemed quite incredible that she had not gone straight to him with her news, blurted it, whispered it, kissed him with it. Yet if he had been sitting here now instead of Wilton, in this privacy of snow and twilight-travel, she knew that she would again be struggling, and in vain, to tell him.
From that point she swept back to one morning in October. It was then that some seed of knowledge which had previously lain dormant in her soul began to sprout. For two months now she had been conscious of its growth, and for two months she had steadily refused to acknowledge it. Her relations with him had been of the most normal and friendly, but the fact, as she saw now, of his content and tranquillity was sunshine and rain to the growth of it. Then, at the news Dr. Symes had given her, it burst into bitter blossom, and she could ignore it no longer.
Peter had never loved her: he had never, in finding her, lost himself. Mentally and sympathetically she knew that he liked her—liked her, she was prepared to say, immensely; physically she attracted and satisfied him. To think that he had married her “for” her money would be an exaggerated and hysterical estimate; her wealth had not been a counterweight that overcame some opposing disadvantage, but it was, so she now believed, a determining factor. Without it he would not have sought her.
It seemed odd to herself how little that mattered. Her wealth was an advantage—so, too, was her beauty; and even if he had married her “for” her wealth, that would have seemed to her no worse than if he had married her “for” her beauty, or “for” (had she been witty) her wit, or “for” any quality whatsoever of mind or body. All these were advantages, pleasant circumstances; but all of them, singly or together, compared with love, were no more than the bright shells on the seashore compared with the sea.
It was just here that she blamed him with a bitterness that appalled her; it was this that had made it possible for her to accept any excuse (or if necessary to have done without one) for not telling him what she had learned yesterday. He had bidden her shut her eyes, and picking up a shell had held it to her ear, and had told her that what she heard there was the sea.... He had looked, he had spoken, he had acted as if he brought close to her that splendid shining vastness. She had trusted him, and had listened with all the rapture of love to that murmuring. Therein he had cheated her, passed off on her a “fake” which, had she not been blinded by his hand over her eyes, he knew she must have recognized as such.