The mother was tractable and not greatly concerned. I could see she was one of those ministering women upon whom sickness acts as a challenge, and who can look forward to a long spell of nursing, untroubled by misgivings as to the ultimate result. But the girl's white face and questioning eyes tortured me. I could feel the question in them even when my back was turned to her. I would not judge Paul hardly: would not judge him at all. I knew enough of life to know that a man may without a moment's warning find himself faced by some terrifying, insoluble problem, out of which there is no gentle, no easy, no honorable way. But his strange manner—his phrase, stranger still, about the "exceptions" it had been his lot to encounter, filled me with misgiving. I even wondered if mayhap I was the last man that should ever see perfect happiness in that perfect face.
I had put them into their cab, and was leaving the terminus, when, passing before a telephone box, I remembered my other message. I rang through to Portland Place, and, for the first time since I had known her, heard Althea's level voice along the wire, not only without pleasurable emotion, but even with a sudden inexplicable distaste. I was surprised, too, at the concern in it when I had delivered my message. She pressed me for a true account, and, tired of mystification, I gave her Paul's own words. At her next sentence I nearly dropped the receiver.
"My dear lady—think! Oh! you can't."
"I'll risk it," Althea said, with a stubborn little laugh that I could fancy a flushed cheek accompanied. "I'm not conventional, as you know. Besides, you say the creature isn't in bed. Oh! you clever male duffers, with your insight and analysis, and not enough wit to know after months what a woman sees in the first five minutes—that a fellow-creature is perishing before your eyes of sheer intellectual starvation."
What could I do? Ring off. Sigh and make a further mental note as to the insane quality in a woman's courage. For what Althea proposed was nothing more nor less than to call at Ingram's rooms the next day in her car, if fine, and discuss alterations and revisions with him in the course of a long motor ride. As for me, with that child's white face and panic-stricken eyes before me, and a pleasant sense of being responsible for more than I could control, it was only left to pray for foul weather. Which, believe me or not, I heartily did.
XVIII
AMENDE HONORABLE
Meantime, with many jolts and halts, and to the accompaniment of a good deal of mercifully muffled blasphemy from the box, the cab drew out of the station yard and rolled heavily toward Suffolk Square. The blighting autumn rain drummed pitilessly on its roof and lashed the closed window-panes. So dark had the afternoon turned that Mrs. Barbour could only see her daughter's face as a white blur against the black velvet cushion, and was forced to guess at its expression. A good deal of new-born hope mingled with her own concern. I am a poor actor, and know now that after the first Mrs. Barbour had been undeceived by my message. She had suspected a "quarrel" on the last day at La Palèze, and though she had not been a witness to any further manifestations of it, did not believe, perhaps because she did not wish to believe, that it had even been made up. She had never approved her daughter's choice in her heart—had thought it but a poor fulfilment of so many fond imaginings. She had the relish for change often to be found in easy-going, hospitable natures. She was not callous nor indifferent to the girl's probable suffering, but she had lived through a good deal herself and had the robust scepticism of middle age in affairs of the heart. Beyond inevitable storms and fevers, beyond a few tearful days and sleepless nights, what rosy vistas might not be opening! With Ingram out of the way, she became seized again of all her old air-castles. It is a strange fact that the dark homeward drive, which was one long torture for the daughter, should have been invested for the being who loved her best with the subdued cheerfulness of an executor returning from a funeral.
A year ago she would have been profuse of tenderness and sympathy; but during that year her child's heart had grown away from her, exhausted by a passion it was too immature to bear, and shrank too perceptibly from the ministrations of any other love. For the present she judged an elaborate heedlessness to be at once the easiest and the safest course.
The promise of better days, of a clearer horizon, persisted in the clean, stately house that welcomed the wanderers home, in its high-ceiled rooms, so strangely wide and light after the dark, cramped little cottage in which she had been living under protest, and in the open kindly English faces of Druce and Kendal, who had not so much grown gray as they had toughened and flattened in faithful service. Her lodgers would not be back for a couple of weeks, and she could roam from room to room and indulge her sense of proprietorship undisturbed, finding everything brighter, fresher, better for her absence. One would have said that Number Eleven, too, had taken a trip to the seaside for change of air. She unpacked her trunk, found her knitting, and was humming a little brisk air when she returned to the sitting-room.