“My child!”
“No, Auntie, you will tell him, won’t you?... Tell him that I am sorry ... but ... but that I don’t care for him.... I care ... I care for some one else....”
And now, without speaking a word, raising her beseeching, tear-filled eyes to her aunt’s, she said to Constance, without speaking a word, told her only with her beseeching glance, told her that she loved ... that she loved Uncle Henri ... and that she couldn’t help it; that she knew it was very wrong of her; that she begged her aunt to forgive her and implored her please not to be angry; that she entreated only to be allowed to suffer and sob about it; but that for the rest she hoped for nothing more from life, nothing, nothing; that she would go quietly to Baarn, with her mother and sisters, and try to manage to live there and pine away silently in her grief....
And Constance, as she held her in her arms, thought:
“Living ... Living.... This child ... this poor child ... is living early; and, if I have begun to live late ... O God, O God, must I also suffer as she is doing ... must I also suffer some day ... soon, perhaps ... if one cannot have life without suffering?...”
Chapter XXVI
When Constance returned home, she was even more troubled than she had been in the morning by what she called her dishonesty towards Van der Welcke. She lunched alone with Addie; Van der Welcke did not come in, was evidently trying to lose himself on his bicycle in the roads outside the Hague and lunching off a sandwich and a glass of beer at a country inn. He did not come home till very late, tired and dusty, and he was in an unbearable mood, as though his surfeit of movement and speed and space had produced nothing but an evil intoxication and not the beneficent anæsthesia which he had expected of it. Roughly, as though dispirited and disgusted, he put away his machine, without bestowing on it the care which he usually gave to it after a long ride, angry with the lifeless steel which had not consoled him, which had not shown itself a friend this time. It was three o’clock; and he went straight to his room to change his clothes.
Constance, in her drawing-room, remained uneasy. In her heart there was a deep pity for Marianne; and for him too an almost motherly pity, which made her eyes fill with tears. Oh, when she had found so very much for herself, so much that was broad and lofty, radiant and lovely, of which she asked no more than that it should exist, exist in soft radiance within herself, a mystic sun, a glowing mystery, invisible to all but her, it pained her that those two, Henri and Marianne, could find nothing for themselves and for each other!... She listened anxiously to the sounds upstairs. She heard his footsteps tramping overhead, heard him even throwing his clothes about, splashing the water noisily, almost breaking the jug and basin in his savage recklessness, his violent resentment against everything. It all reechoed in her; she kept on starting: there he was flinging his boots across the room; bang went the door of his wardrobe; and, when he had finished, she heard him go to his den. Everything became still; the warmth of the summer afternoon floated in through the open windows; a heat mist hung over the garden of the little villa; in the kitchen, the maid was droning out a sentimental song, in a dreary monotone....
Constance’ uneasiness increased. Yes, she must, she must tell him something: she almost became frightened at the idea of telling him nothing, of concealing from him entirely that Van Vreeswijck had asked her to go to Marianne. And yet nothing compelled her to say anything to Henri; and it would perhaps not even, she thought, be fair to Van Vreeswijck. She did not know; her thoughts rambled on uneasily. But persistently, as though from out of the new, fresh youth that was hers, one idea obtruded itself: it would not be honest to tell Henri nothing, not even a casual word, so that at any rate he should not imagine, if he came to hear later, that she had been plotting behind his back....