XII
COLLOQUY IN THE HILLS
By the time the coffee was made, and the porridge, and Mary had emerged from the tent, washed and brushed and sparkling, she bethought her of the boy. “I’ll fetch him,” she told Senhouse. “He must be fed.” Senhouse nodded, so she went back to her gîte of the night. The boy had disappeared, and with him her cloak.
Senhouse chuckled when he heard her faltered tale. “Nature all over—bless her free way,” he said. “She’ll lap you like a mother—and stare you down for a trespasser within the hour. She takes her profit where she finds it, and if she can’t find it will cry herself to sleep. Don’t you see that you were so much to the good for our friend? Well, what have you to regret? You warmed him, cuddled him, fed him—and he’s gone, warmed, cuddled, and fed. You’ve been the Bona Dea—and he’s not a bit obliged to you; very likely he thinks you were a fool. Perhaps you were, my dear; but I tell you, fools are the salt of the earth.”
“Yes, I know,” Mary said. “Of course I don’t mind the cloak. He wanted it more than I did. But what will become of him—poor little pinched boy?”
Senhouse picked up a bleached leaf of rowan—a gossamer leaf—and showed it to her. “What will become of that, think you? It all goes back again. Nothing is lost.” He threw it up, and watched it drift away on the light morning wind. Then, “Come and have your breakfast,” he bade her.
As they ate and drank she found herself talking to him of matters which London might have shrieked to hear. But it seemed not at all strange that Senhouse should listen calmly, or she candidly discuss them. He had not shown the least curiosity either to find her here or to know why she had come; in fact, after his question of “No trouble, I hope?” and her reply, he had become absorbed in what he had to do that day—the meal to be prepared, and the plantation of Mariposa lilies which he was to show her. “The work of three years—just in flower for the first time. You’re lucky in the time of your visit—another week and you would have missed them.” But her need to speak was imperious, and so she gave him to understand.
She told him, therefore, everything which had been implied in former colloquies—and found him prepared to believe her. Indeed, he told her fairly that when he had first heard from her that she was to marry John Germain he recognized that she would not be married at all. “Mind you,” he went on, “that need not have mattered a bit if the good man had had any other career to open to you. It was a question of that. You might have been his secretary, or his confidante, or his conscience, or his housekeeper. But he’s so damned self-contained—if you’ll forgive me for saying that—that he and the likes of him start in life filled up with everything except nature. There was really nothing for you to be to him except an object of charity. Nor did he want you to be anything else. He actually bought you, don’t you see, so that he might do his benevolence comfortably at home. You were to be beneficiary and admiring bystander at once. And you must have made him extremely happy until you began to make use of his bounties, and learn by what you had to do without them. Where was he then? It’s like a mother with a sucking child. She makes it strong, makes a man of it; and then, when it leaves her lap and goes to forage for itself, she resents it. What else could she expect? What else could Germain expect? He gives you the uses of the world; you find out that you are a woman with parts; you proceed to exercise yourself—and affront him mortally. I’ll warrant that man quivering all over with mortification—but I am sure he will die sooner than let you know it.”
Her eyes shone bright. “Yes, that’s true. He is like that. Well, but——”
Senhouse went on, speaking between pulls at his pipe. He did not look at her; he looked at his sandalled feet.
“I may be wrong, but I do not see what you owe him that has not been at his disposal any day these two years and a half. I suppose, indeed, that the blessed Law would relieve you—but by process so abominable and disgusting that a person who would seek that way of escape would be hardly fit to be let loose on the world. That being so, what are you to do? The fact is, Germain’s not sane. One who misreads himself so fatally, so much at another’s expense, is not sane. Then, I say, the world’s before you, if you have courage enough to face the policeman. He can’t touch you, you know, but he can stare you up and down and make you feel mean.” Then he looked at her, kindly but coolly—as if to ask, Well, what do you make of that? And if he saw what was behind her hot cheeks and lit eyes he did not betray the knowledge.