Looking back over the four years of her marriage, it seemed to her that her life had been one round of archaeological discoveries—all timed to take place at the wrong season. She vividly remembered the first of these events; the discovery of some subterranean passages in the neighbourhood of Carrara, which had taken place two months after her arrival in Italy, while life yet retained something of the dark, vague semblance usually associated with a nightmare. Still desperately home-sick and unreasonably miserable in her new position, she had eagerly grasped at Milbanke's suggestion that they should visit the scene of these excavations. But with this first essay, her interest in discoveries had taken permanent flight.
The heat had been tremendous; the country parched and unsympathetic; the associations terribly uncongenial. She remembered the first morning, when she and Nance, stifling in their black dresses, had by tacit consent stolen away from the party of fellow enthusiasts to which Milbanke had attached himself; and climbing to the summit of a low, olive-crowned hill, had sat tired, silent, and unutterably wretched, looking out upon the arid land.
But that excursion had been the prelude to a new era. Visits to various antiquities had succeeded each other with dull regularity, broken by long, uneventful sojourns in the green seclusion of the villa at Florence. Then the first break had occurred in the companionship of the trio. Nance had been sent home to an English school.
Clodagh's acceptance of this fiat had been curiously interesting—as had been her whole attitude towards Milbanke and his wishes. From the day on which she recognised that the state of matrimony was something irrevocably serious, she had taken upon herself an attitude of reserved surrender that was difficult to analyse—difficult even to superficially understand. By a strangely immature process of deduction, she had satisfied herself that marriage was a state of bondage, more or less distasteful as chance decreed—a state in which, by a fundamental law of nature, submission and self-repression were the chief factors necessary upon the woman's side.
As sometimes happens when there is a great disparity in years, the wedded state had widened instead of lessening the gulf between Milbanke and herself. It had cast a sudden, awkward restraint upon the affection and respect that his actions had kindled in her mind, while inspiring no new or ardent feelings to take its place. Ridiculously—and yet naturally—her husband had become an infinitely more distant and unapproachable being than her father's friend had been. And to this new key she had, perforce, attuned her existence.
With a greater number of years—even with a little more worldly experience—she might have made a vastly different business of her life; for, at the time of his marriage, Milbanke had been hovering upon the borderland of that fatuous love in which an old man can lose himself so completely. If, in those first months, she had permitted any of the ardour, any of the fascination of her nature to shine upon him, she might have led him by a silken thread in whatever direction she pleased. But three factors had precluded this—her youth, her inexperience, her entire ignorance of artifice. In her primary encounter with the realities of life, she had lost her strongest weapon—her frank, unswerving fearlessness; and in lieu of this she had, in the moment of first panic, seized upon the nearest substitute, and had wrapped herself in an armour of reserve.
And on this armour, the weapons of Milbanke's love had been turned aside. There had been no scenes, no harassing disillusionment; but gradually, inevitably his original attitude with regard to her—his shy reticence, his uncertainty, as in the presence of some incomprehensible quality—had returned. He had slowly but surely withdrawn into himself, turning with a pathetic eagerness to the interests that had previously usurped his thoughts. With the nervous sensitiveness that warred continuously with his matter-of-fact precision, he became uncomfortably conscious of occupying a false position, of having made an indisputable—almost a ridiculous—mistake; and he had taken a blind leap towards the quarter in which he believed compensation to lie. While Clodagh, vaguely divining this—vaguely remorseful, of what she scarcely knew—had held her own enthusiasms more rigidly in check, schooling herself into acquiescence with every impersonal suggestion that he chose to make.
From this had arisen the pursuit of the antique in whatever corner of Europe—and at whatever season of the year—circumstances might decree. To Clodagh, the pilgrimages had seemed unutterably wearisome and unutterably foolish; but there is a great capacity for silent endurance in the Irish nature. Quick-blooded though it may be, it possesses that strong fatalistic instinct that accepts without question the decree of the gods. The spirit of revolt is not lacking in it; but it requires a given atmosphere—a given sequence of events—to bring it into activity. At two-and-twenty Clodagh was weary of her husband, of herself, of her life. But precisely as her father had fretted out his existence in the quiet monotony of Orristown, she had accepted her fate without thought of question.
In the second year, when they had travelled to England with Nance, Milbanke had suggested a visit to Ireland, but this proposal she had declined. The days when every fibre of her being had yearned for her own country were passed; and the idea of return had lost its savour.
As she sat now, sipping her coffee and gazing abstractedly down to where the hot sun glinted on the Arno, it seemed to her that her life—the glorious, exuberant state that she had been accustomed to call her life—had drifted incredibly far away; that it lay asleep, if not already dead, in some intangible realm widely beyond her reach. She thought of Nance away at her English school, and unconsciously she envied her. To be fifteen, and to be surrounded by young people! Involuntarily she sighed; and Mick, ever acutely sensitive to her change of mood, turned and pressed his cold nose against her knee.