In the gathering dusk on Hartle Pike he tried to be cool about it and to see things in proportion. Effie had the supreme advantage of immediacy. It wasn’t easy, whilst he lived encircled by her glamour, to see Ada at all.
But he had been Ada’s husband for ten years, a long time, more than a quarter of his life. In all those years there must be something which he could positively remember of her, some definite characteristic; something, at any rate, which was individual to her. He searched and found nothing. She had less individuality in his mind than his sideboard. He supposed that she kept house, or did she? Didn’t he recall that the cook’s wages went up one year, and that the cook became cook-housekeeper? In that case, and he felt certain of it now, Ada did nothing. He was equally certain that she was nothing. Since he had grown accustomed to her demands for money, she was not even an irritant. She was a standing charge, like the warehouse rent.
Quite suddenly, as he lingered over that definition of his wife, “a standing charge,” he saw that it was double-edged. It cut at him, and shrewdly.
Ada, like Effie, was a woman, and he knew from Effie what a woman could be. There must, at least, have been possibilities in Ada. Dear God, what had he done with them if she was nothing now? That was the charge—that he had married her and that she was nothing: that he had permitted her to become nothing. He could summon no witness for his defence, he remembered no occasion when he had fought for Ada, as Effie had fought for him. And as to sacrifice——! Yet he was supposed to have loved Ada.
He could have howled for very shame, he could not, in fairness, think that Ada had given him anything, but writhed that he had thought just now of Anne and Effie as the two women who counted in his life. They were the women who gave. Was he to take all from women and render nothing to a woman in return? If he could say of Ada, his wife these last ten years, that she did not count, then he was very much to blame and the path was clear before him. He saw to where the gleam that Effie gave him pointed. To Ada. It annoyed him desperately that it should point to Ada.
He began to descend the hill in a cold fury. The world was hideous, Marbeck an illusion, Effie a fool. No: Effie was right. One could not run away from facts and hide one’s head amongst the hills, and say there were no facts. She had not brought him there to obscure facts, but to reveal them.
It remained to face them, to return to Manchester with new knowledge and new courage. It needed courage to turn his back on Marbeck, to go away from happiness to Ada.
He stamped upon that thought, as on a snake. It was disloyalty to Effie who had sacrificed to him and shown him all the beauty of her sacrifice. He, too, would sacrifice and find a beauty in it.
He found it extraordinarily difficult to meet Effie, and spent an unnecessarily long time with the landlord of the Inn. Then he went in to her.
“I’m leaving,” he stammered. “I couldn’t stay another night. By driving fifteen miles I can catch the South Mail at midnight. I’ve arranged for you to come to-morrow.”