Love

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

Pictures of her flashed vivid in his mind, lovely little pictures, such as had haunted him with increasing frequency the longer his holiday without her dragged on; and he saw her in them with the eye of starved passion, a most lovely little Catherine, far, far prettier than she had ever been in her prettiest days,—so sweet with her soft white skin, so sweet with her soft dark hair, so sweet with her soft grey eyes, and her face lit up with love,—love all and only for him. And he who had thought, those last days before Scotland, that there was too much love about! He all but swerved into a ditch when he remembered this piece of incredible folly. Well, he knew now what life was like for him away from her: it was like being lost in the frozen dark.

He got to Chickover about five in the morning, just as the grey light was beginning to creep among the trees. He couldn’t go and rouse that sad house so early, so he stopped in the village and managed, after much difficulty, to induce the inn to open and let him in, and give him water and a towel and promise him tea when the hour should have become more decent; and then he lay down on the horsehair sofa in the parlour and tried to sleep.

But how sleep, when he was at last so near Catherine? Just the thought of seeing her again, of looking into her eyes after their four weeks’ separation, was enough to banish sleep; and then there was the anxiety about her, the knowledge that she must be crushed with sorrow, the effort to imagine life there with that poor devil of a husband....

At half-past seven he began to urge on breakfast, ringing the bell and going out into the beer-smelling passage and calling. With all his efforts, however, he couldn’t get anything even started till after eight, when a sleepy girl came downstairs and put a dirty cloth on the table and a knife or two.

He went out into the road and walked up and down while the table was being laid. He wouldn’t question any one there, though they all of course could have told him about Virginia’s death and what was happening at the house. And they, supposing he was a stranger,—as indeed he was and hoped for ever to be in regard to Chickover—did not of themselves begin to talk.

He knew nothing; neither when she died, nor when she was buried. Perhaps she hadn’t been buried yet, and in that case he wouldn’t be able to get Catherine away, as he had hoped, that very day. He found himself trying not to think of Virginia,—he owed her so many apologies! But only because she was dead. Who could have supposed she would die, and put him, by doing that, in the wrong? One had to talk as one felt at the moment, and it wasn’t possible to shape one’s remarks with an eye to the possibility of their subject dying. Yet Christopher was very sorry, and also sore. He felt he had been a brute, but he also felt she had taken an unfair advantage of him.

He switched his thoughts off her as much as he could. Poor little thing. And such fine weather, too,—such a good day to be alive on; for by this time the September sun was flooding Virginia’s village, and the dew-drenched asters in the cottage gardens were glittering in the light. Poor little thing. And poor devil of a husband. How well he could understand his misery. God, if anything were to happen to Catherine!

He drank some tepid tea and ate some unpleasant bread and butter—Stephen evidently hadn’t succeeded in making the village innkeeper good, anyhow—and then, feeling extraordinarily agitated, a mixture of palpitating love and excitement and reluctance and fear, and all of it shot with distress because of Virginia, he started off through the park, cutting across the grass, going round along the back of the kitchen-garden wall to the lodge gates, and walking up the avenue like any other respectful sympathetic early caller; and when he turned the bend and got to the point where one first saw the house he gave a great sigh of thankfulness, for the blinds were up. The poor little thing’s funeral was over, then, and at least he wasn’t going to tumble, as he had secretly feared, into the middle of that.

But if it was over, why hadn’t Catherine sent for him? Or come home? Or at least written? He remembered, however, that she supposed he was in Scotland, and of course she would have written to him there; and, consoled, he went on up the avenue whose very trees seemed sad, with their yellowing leaves slowly fluttering to the ground at every little puff of wind.

The front door was open, and the drawing-room door on the other side of the hall was open too, so that while he stood waiting after ringing the bell he could see right through to the sunny terrace and garden. The house was very silent. He could hear no sounds at all, except somewhere, away round behind the stables, the quacking of a distant duck. Wasn’t anybody having breakfast? Were they still asleep? If Catherine were still asleep he could go up to her,—not like the last time when he came to this place to fetch her, and had to wait in the drawing-room, a stranger still, a suppliant without any rights.