Hugh, at the time, had thought privately that this was because Lamoir did not take very much interest in his collections of fine things. Not that he wasn’t quite contented with his marriage. Good Lord, contented! I wonder what Lamoir thought about that. Contented! But she never confided, that quiet Lamoir.
It was a great unhappiness to her, Hugh said, that there were no children. A very great unhappiness. He hadn’t, he admitted, minded so much, because year by year he was growing more absorbed in his collections. Throughout his married life he would go off searching Europe for pieces. Italy, Greece, Spain. At first he used to take Lamoir with him, but later on she would stay at home. She preferred that, Hugh said. She wouldn’t stay in the London house, but at Langton Weaver, the house which was larger but not so clean-looking as Playmate Place. Lamoir lived in the garden and the park. I met Hugh and Lamoir in the last years of their life together, and whenever I went to stay at Langton Weaver I would find Lamoir in the park. She would generally be standing just off a path, quite still, wearing gardening-gloves, and looking thoughtfully down at the flowers. Then she would touch one here and there. She was gardening.
So, Hugh said, ten years passed; and he, when he thought of it at all, would think theirs a happy enough marriage, as marriages go. Reality, after all, couldn’t be so good as dreams, ever. That is what he thought. And he loved Lamoir. He was a collector of fine things, and so it was bred in his bone to love Lamoir. She loved him, too. Sometimes in quite a strange abandoned way, for a woman who had been married so long. In quite an un-English way, when you came to think of it—although it can’t be in the least “un-English” to be passionate, but one gets into the habit of saying the idiotic things that English novelists say. Lamoir would say things unmentionable and beautiful, in the rare moments. But, somehow, those rarest moments would never be of Hugh’s contriving, not after the first year or so. They would come suddenly, out of the night of ordinary marriage, they would come like angels with silent wings. And Lamoir would be the voice of the angel with silent wings, and Lamoir in those rarest moments would be the very body and soul of love. But Hugh couldn’t woo those moments. Perhaps no man ever can. It may be, Hugh said, that there’s a frontier to any woman’s love for any man, and beyond that frontier is the unknowable darkness and unknowable light, and from that secret place can leap a passion that no man in the world is worthy to woo. It just comes or it doesn’t come.
These moments did not come when he thought they would, when he expected them. She would somehow be passive then, somehow there yet not there. Then suddenly, when he had got used to the hurt of her “coldness,” out of the night of ordinary marriage would sweep the angel with the silent wings in the body and the voice of Lamoir. Hugh said that sometimes the song of the sirens was in Lamoir’s voice, but if Hugh was right about that Ulysses must have been just a silly old man and the sirens darlings.
IV
For Hugh, his pleasure in travelling was given an exquisite point by returning to Lamoir. That was when he seemed to love her most, as he returned to her. One gets out of the habit of being desirous if one stays in the home all the time. And Lamoir would be waiting for him, sweet and still. He thought of her all the time, as he returned towards her.
Once, nine years ago, he returned to her by night. He had been away from England for four or five months, and, arriving that evening in London, he had dined quickly and taken the first train down to Langton Weaver. It was a cool July night, loaded with stars. He had walked the two miles from the railway station.
Hugh was happy as he walked. He was conscious of his happiness, of his health, of his strength. Hugh was forty then, a dry, taut forty. And the idea of Lamoir, white and supple, was like a temptation that exalted and ennobled. The sky was almost Italian, Hugh said, the stars were so unusually clear and bright. He walked, not up the drive towards the door, but across the lawn towards the three French windows of the drawing-room. They showed a faint bronze light. Lamoir was there. She was sitting in a Dorothy chair of old blue velvet, reading. A lamp in a bowl of yellow amber lit the book, but her face was only a frail whiteness, and her hair was as though veiled. He pushed open a window which was unlatched. He called: “Lamoir!”
She made that gesture he knew so well, loved so well. Lamoir would not be Lamoir without that gesture. Always, at first sight of him returning to her, she would make that gesture. It was delicious with a lure which he never could explain. It was as though she was afraid of her love for him. Towards her heart, the gesture was: but faint, not definite: a hand like a white bird, fluttering, fluttering vainly, fluttering out of stillness, fluttering back into stillness—all in a second. Lamoir, you see, had a weak heart, and that was why, maybe, she was born so still, to balance the weakness of her heart.
And it was always the same with him when he saw her after an absence. The world stood still, no living thing moved but Lamoir’s hand and his infinite desire. The pleasure of seeing her was exquisite, like a pain. In all his life Hugh had known no woman but Lamoir. Seeing her now, the earth and sky held only himself and her and the thing that was between them. That vivid thing with eyes of fire which can be beautiful or beastly. She troubled him and exalted him, and somehow his love for her would be stabbed by a queer sense of terror, which he never could explain. And she was so still, so passive, unknowable. But her eyes, as he made to touch her, adored him.