“No,” he said at length, “I don’t think—ah, my heart, what do I think about it? Indeed, how can I settle? Do you see what you are asking me? Settle yourself, and I welcome it because you wish it.”
Edith gave a great sigh of relief.
“Ah, then, if I have to leave Davos,” she said, “let me go home, down to Mannington, and lie there and wait with all those things round us which have become part of us. May we? You said I might settle, Hugh. So we will.”
Edith knew there was more to say, that, in fact, which she had charged Peggy to tell Hugh in case she did not. And now—though the opportunity was there, though they were actually talking of this aspect of her illness—she did not. Now that the barrier, fictitious but seeming-solid, had been withdrawn, Hugh was so much her own again, none other’s. And she could not see him in any other setting, possessing and possessed by any other. Hers he was, hers by the inalienable right of love. Once and once again she tried to speak of that. But she could not. And since she could not she asked leave for this subject to withdraw.
“I have nothing else to say about it, dear Hughie,” she said, “because there is very little ever to say about anything that really matters—like—like that. I just wanted to know whether you would let me go home quietly, and live a little less long perhaps, and not want me to drag wearily about the world, living a life that is no life. It is so feeble, the mere continuance of life, if life means nothing except its mere continuance. What should we do on board a dreadful, swaying, heaving ship? And, ah, there is one thing more. Don’t give up your engagement in London next year, at any rate not at present. Supposing, by then, I want you very badly, and they think I shall not have you for long, I think then I should be selfish, and wish you to stop down there with me. I know I ask you nothing you do not want to give. But let us wait, let us see.”
She paused again, stroking his hair gently. The hair in question was very straight and wiry; there had been no end of trouble, she remembered now, in making it passable as Lohengrin’s. But he had looked so ridiculous in a crimped, flaxen wig. After all, though, it had done well enough.
“Now, Hughie, have you anything to say?” she asked. “If not, do let us leave this side of the future until such time comes as makes it necessary for us to look at it closer. We hope it won’t come, don’t we? but it is no longer any use to pretend it may not. So I shall count up to ten slowly, and if you don’t say anything till I have finished, you must hold your peace until—until things are much more serious.”
And, looking at him, she counted. At “six” she paused, for she could not get on. But it was not long before “seven” was said, and the other three numbers followed.
By the immutable laws that seem to govern fiction, they ought to have had a series of pathetic, heart-breaking, but soul-inspiring scenes during the next week. But they—this impossible hero and heroine—had nothing of the kind. Instead of the culminating poetry of sunset and evening star, they had the prose (but it was good prose) of midday. What had happened, what they knew might happen, did not make them in the least melodramatic, but instead it expunged the possibility of melodrama. For the melodramatist is self-conscious—he sees himself as he wishes to appear. Neither Hugh nor Edith wished to appear at all. They did not wish to take any part. But, like plain, simple people, they stood there hand in hand to take what God was sending them, simply and plainly.
They were happy too. It is not implied that they would not have wished things to be utterly different from what they were, but they faced the things that were. And it would have been much more strange if they had not been happy, for they had refused to admit life (the mere continuance of it) or death into the chamber of love. But all the little flower-like joys of the world, the small pleasures of sense, the common things of the day, were admitted there. It was still good to be hungry and have dinner, to be sleepy and go to bed, to smell the odour of the pines, to hear the whisper of the sea, to mark the timid uprising of the first crocuses of spring. All these little things found easy access to the hall of love, while death, mere death, chattered impotently on the threshold, and was told they were not at home.