They were married immediately; and through the ceremony and the succeeding days she had been almost entirely absorbed in a sensation of escape. At the death of Amelia Lowrie, soon after, Arnaud had suggested a temporary period in the house she remembered with pleasure; and, making small alterations with the months and years, they had tacitly agreed to remain.
Linda often wondered, walking about the lower floor, why it seemed so familiar to her: she would stand in the dining-room, with its ceiling of darkened beams, and gaze absent-minded through the long windows at the close-cut walled greenery without. The formal drawing-room, at the right of the street entrance, equally held her—a cool interior with slatted wooden blinds, a white mantelpiece with delicately reeded supports and a bas-relief of Minerva on the center panel, a polished brass scuttle for cannel-coal and chairs with wide severely fretted backs upholstered in old pale damask.
The house seemed familiar, but she could never grow accustomed to the undeniable facts of her husband, the children and her completely changed atmosphere. She admitted to herself that her principal feeling in connection with Lowrie and Vigné was embarrassment. Here she always condemned herself as an indifferent, perhaps unnatural, mother. She couldn't help it. In the same sense she must be an unsatisfactory wife. Linda was unable to shake off the conviction that it was like a play in which she had no more than a spectator's part.
This was her old disability, the result of her habit of sitting, as a child, apart from the concerns and stir of living. She made every possible effort to overcome it, to surrender to her new conditions; but, if nothing else, an instinctive shyness prevented. It went back further, even, she thought, than her own experience, and she recalled all she had heard and reconstructed of her father—a man shut in on himself who had, one day, without a word walked out of the door and left his wife, never to return. These realizations, however, did little to clarify her vision; she was continually trying to adjust her being to circumstances that persistently remained a little distant and blurred.
In appearance, anyhow, Linda told herself with a measure of reassurance, she was practically unchanged. She still, with the support of Arnaud, disregarding current fashion, wore her hair in a straight bang across her brow and blue gaze. She was as slender as formerly, but more gracefully round, in spite of the faint characteristic stiffness that was the result of her mental hesitation. Her clothes, too, had hardly varied—she wore, whenever possible, white lawns ruffled about the throat and hem, with broad soft black sashes, while her more formal dresses were sheaths of dull unornamented satin extravagant in the perfection of their simplicity.
XXIV
Arnaud Hallet stirred, sharply closing his book. He had changed—except for a palpable settling down of grayness—as little as Linda. For a while she had tried to bring about an improvement in his appearance, and he had met her expressed wish whenever he remembered it; but this was not often. In the morning a servant polished his shoes, brushed and ironed his suits; yet by evening, somehow, he managed to look as though he hadn't been attended to for days. She would have liked him to change for dinner; other men of his connection did, it was a part of his inheritance. Arnaud, however, in his slight scoffing disparagement, declined individually to annoy himself. He was, she learned, enormously absorbed in his historical studies and papers.
“Did you enjoy it?” she asked politely of his reading. “Extremely,” he replied. “The American Impressions of Tyrone Power, the English actor, through eighteen thirty-three and four. His account of a European packet with its handbells and Saratoga water and breakfast of spitch-cock is inimitable. I'd like to have sat at Cato's then, with a julep or hail-storm, and watched the trotting races.”