She saw that all her calculations had been mistaken. She had fancied that her tactics would render his situation intolerable; that if only she could bear to spend a few weeks in his presence she would demonstrate to him the impossibility of his spending the rest of his life in hers. But his reasoning reached a good deal farther, and embraced certain essential elements in human nature that hers had left out. He had said to himself—she was sure of it now—: “The next few weeks will be pretty bad, but after that I’ll have the upper hand.” He had only to hold out till the wedding; after that she would be a mere mother-in-law, and mothers-in-law are not a serious problem in modern life. How could she ever have imagined that he would not see through her game and out-manœuvre her, when he had done it so often before, and when his whole future depended on his doing it just once more? She felt herself beaten at every point.
Unless—unless she told the truth to Anne. Every day was making that impossible thing more impossible; yet every day was bringing them nearer to the day when not to do so—if all other measures failed—would be most impossible of all. She seemed to have reached that moment when, one morning, Anne came into her room and caught her by the hand.
“Dearest—you’ve got to come with me this very minute.”
Kate, yielding to the girl’s hand, was drawn along the corridor to her bedroom. There, on the bed, in a dazzle of whiteness, lay the wedding-dress.
“Will you help me to try it on?” Anne asked.
Kate Clephane rang the Rectory bell and found herself in the Rectory sitting-room. As she sat there, among photogravures of Botticelli Virgins and etchings of English cathedrals, she could not immediately remember why she had come, and looked with a kind of detached curiosity at the volumes of memoirs and sermons on the table at her elbow, at the perpendicular Gothic chairs against the wall, and the Morris armchairs which had superseded them. She had not been in a rectory sitting-room since the committee meeting at the Merrimans’, on the day when she had received Anne’s cable.
Her lapse of memory lasted only for a few seconds, but during that time she relived with intensity the sensations of that other day, she felt her happy heart dancing against the message folded under her dress, she saw the southern sun gilding the dull faces about the table, and smelt the violets and mimosa in Mrs. Merriman’s vases. She woke again to the present just as an austere parlour-maid was requesting her to step this way.
Dr. Arklow’s study was full of books, of signed photographs of Church dignitaries, of more English cathedrals, of worn leather armchairs and scattered pipes and tobacco-pouches. The Rector himself, on the hearth, loomed before her at once bland and formidable. He had guessed, of course, that she had come to talk about the date and hour of the wedding, and all the formulas incidental to such visits fell from his large benevolent lips. The visit really passed off more easily than she had expected, and she was on her feet again and feeling him behind her like a gentle trade-wind accustomed to waft a succession of visitors to the door, when she stopped abruptly and faced him.
“Dr. Arklow—”