‘I am not prepared to admit that,’ Stephen felt bound to reply.
‘Oh do let’s be real friends, won’t we?’ she said, still smiling at him and looking like somebody’s slightly undesirable daughter. ‘Then we can really talk. I wanted to thank you for my great happiness——’
He tried to withdraw his hand. ‘I think perhaps——’ he began.
‘No, no—listen,’ she went on, holding it tighter. ‘If it hadn’t been for you I never would have married Christopher and never would have had an idea of what happiness is really like. So you see, your thinking those wicked things of us was what brought it all about. Just like roses, coming up and flowering divinely out of mud.’
He had made the most serious resolutions to let bygones be bygones, and he shut his mouth in a thin tight line lest he should be unable not to say something Virginia would be sorry for. That his mother-in-law, who was once so dovelike, so becoming of speech and discreet of behaviour, should suddenly slough the decencies and allude in highly distasteful images to occurrences he was doing his utmost to forget and forgive, that she should use, herself having been wicked, the word wicked in connection with any thoughts of his was surely outrageous.
Yet even while he locked his mouth he remembered that it was his mother-in-law’s postcard that had renewed and made more radiant his Virginia’s belief in him. The service this regrettable mother-in-law had done him was great and undeniable. She had in the past, and consciously, done him very great service, and he had been grateful. She had eight weeks ago done him another. Should he, because the last service had been accidental and unconscious, not repay her? Twice over now she had helped him to his wife. The side of him that judged, disapproved, suspected, that was his early training and all the long years before Virginia, made him not able to unlock his mouth; the side of him that didn’t and wasn’t, that longed to justify Virginia’s belief in him, made him try extraordinarily hard to unlock it. He did earnestly now desire to let mercy prevail over justice; but, when he looked at Catherine, how hard it was. This blooming gaiety—he used the adjective correctly, not as Christopher would have used it—upset his plans. He had not been prepared for it. She was not like the same person.
He sat silent, struggling within himself, and they arrived at the house holding each other’s hands for the simple reason that he couldn’t get his away.
There on the steps stood Virginia, as if she had never stood anywhere else since Catherine left her on them the day she departed in Christopher’s side-car on the momentous journey that had changed her life; only this time Mrs. Colquhoun wasn’t standing there with her, and Virginia had grown considerably rounder.
‘Sweet of you to come, mother,’ she said, shy and flushed, when Catherine had run up to her and was folding as much of her as she could in her arms.
It had not escaped Virginia that her mother and Stephen had arrived hand in hand. She gave him a look of deep and tender gratitude when he, too, came up the steps. He wiped his forehead. He seemed to be in a constant condition of rousing Virginia’s gratitude for things he hadn’t done. Really, he thought, following the two into the house, he was a worm; a worm decked, by his darling wife’s belief, in the bright adornments of a saint.