In her own room she lay a long time, accustoming herself to the new face of the situation, struggling back from extremes of self-hate and self-love to a clearer vision. She must touch again what she had so hoped she had finished with. Something she had called fate had seemed to be thrusting him from that girl; but fate, as she looked, grew to wear too much her own aspect. Had she let conditions alone in the beginning—but she had fought them, curbed them in a measure to her will. She had made a catastrophe, and she must mend it. That was the reason of it. But under reason was a passionate desire that he should be happy. That covered everything.
His self-accusation recurred to her. “Something no woman could forgive.” Could not that girl forgive him that he was loyal? But she was so young, so appallingly young! And oh, the dangerous, difficult task of playing another’s game for him! Yet, could he have played it himself, had he had his strength, he would have made it a different matter. Now, all he could manage in his great bodily weakness was that one absorbing desire to get away. She knew how impossible it was to deflect him where once his obstinate mind was made up. She felt every moment, with his returning strength, her chance was slipping further from her. But she was baffled. Turn and twist as she could, she was shut fast in the middle of a deadlock.
The departure of all the amalgamating presences had left the estrangement of these few so closely concerned a naked fact. They felt its presence palpable among them. It filled the rooms of the house, sat between them at table, walked with them in the gardens. Julia, unreachable behind her hard indifference, through which her voice broke sometimes with sharp suggestions of collapse; Mrs. Budd, nervous, vacillating, strung to the verge of tears; she, herself, out of love with everything but the hope of one man’s life; all were desperately at odds, no one trusting another.
Thair, alone, had given her the sense of an outsider. If he were in the midst of it as much as any one, it didn’t touch him. The very perfection of his manner, meeting those anxious, studying looks Mrs. Budd threw at him, was assurance that he knew his uneasy place in her conjecture. To Florence he had been, with his unconcern, like fresh air in a close room. He perfectly understood; and he took it easily. Their tacit understanding was the only note of confidence in the unquiet house.
She knew he knew to a certain point just how she stood; but that point was the turn where she had let Longacre go. Just how far Thair missed this, she had read in his kind, congratulatory looks at her—his odd, half-protecting air of seeming to ease her off, as much as possible, from the strain, the reiterant conflict of mother and daughter, as from something quite beside her interest.
He had never had so much that air to her as now, this afternoon, when he encountered her stepping through the tall French window upon the veranda, and turned and lifted the passion-vines for her to pass under—such a pretty thing, she thought, for a man to do for a woman as old, as haggard, as self-absorbed as she. They went the length of the fennel walk together. She remembered the morning when Longacre had left Julia so impetuously to follow her as something that had happened a very long time ago—something into which Thair’s voice dropped sharply, shattering the image.
“We are to be abandoned,” he was saying. “The young madam is leaving us for town.”
She stood, looking over the sun-drenched terraces. The thing had come on her so suddenly! She had lost her chance! She put her hand to her forehead. This would be the end! The thing would just fall to pieces by itself!
Then the lasting silence got her, and she looked at Thair. He was looking at her.
“What is the matter?” that look was saying. “Isn’t it all right? Aren’t you glad? Wasn’t it that that you wanted?”