Sherston was a widower, though he never used the word, even in his innermost heart, for to him the term connoted something slightly absurd, and he was sensitive to ridicule.
Very few of the people at preset acquainted with the brilliant, pleasantly eccentric architect, knew that he had been married before. But of course the handful of old Bohemian comrades whom he had faithfully kept from out of the past, were well aware of the fact. They were not likely to forget it either, for whenever it was mentioned, each of them at once remembered that which at the time it had happened, Sherston had every reason to tell rather than to conceal, namely, that the woman who had been his wife had gone down with the Titanic.
But how long ago that now seemed!
The outbreak of war, which caused so much unmerited misfortune to
English artists and their like, and which at one moment had threatened
to wreck his own successful opening career, had brought to Shirley
Sherston a piece of marvelous good fortune..
Early in the memorable August, 1914, at a time when the fabric of his life and work seemed shattered, and when the lameness which he had so triumphantly coped with during his grown up life as to cause those about him scarcely to know it was there, made it out of the question for him to respond to his country's first call for men, the architect happened to run across James Pomeroy, a cultivated millionaire with whom he had once had a slight business relation. Acting on a kindly impulse which even now Mr. Pomeroy hardly knew whether to remember with pleasure or regret, the older man had pressed the younger to spend a week in a country house which he had taken for the summer near London.
That was now fourteen months ago, but Sherston, standing there, remembered as if it had happened yesterday, his first sight of the girl who was to become his wife to-morrow. Helen Pomeroy had been standing on a brick path bordered with holly hocks, and she had smiled, a little shyly and gravely, at her father's rather eccentric-looking guest. But on that war-summer morning she had appeared to the stranger as does a mirage of spring water to a man who is dying of thirst in the desert.
Up to that time Sherston had always supposed himself to be attracted to small women. He was a big, fair man, with loosely hung limbs, and his wife—poor little baggage—had been a tiny creature, vixenish at her worst, kittenish at her best. But Helen Pomeroy was tall, with the noble proportions and tapering limbs of a goddess, and gradually—not for some time, for all social life was dislocated in England during that strange summer—Sherston became aware, with a kind of angry revolt of soul, that he was but one of many worshipers at the shrine.
Following an irresistible impulse, he early in their acquaintance told Helen Pomeroy more of himself than he had ever told any other human being; and his confidences at last included a bowdlerized account of his wretched marriage. But though they soon became friends, and though he went on seeing a great deal of her, all through that autumn and winter, Sherston feared to put his fate to the touch, and he was jealous—God alone knew how hideously, intolerably jealous—of the khaki-clad soldiers who came and went in her father's house in town.
and then, one day, during the second summer of their acquaintance, a word let drop by Mr. Pomeroy, who had become fond of the odd, restless fellow, opened a pit before Sherston's feet. It was a word implying that now, at last, Helen's father and mother hoped she would "make up her mind." A very distinguished soldier, whom she had refused as a girl of twenty, had come back unchanged, after six years, from India, and Helen, or so her parents hoped and thought, was seriously thinking of him.
Sherston had kept away. He had even left two of her letters—the rather formal letters which had come to mean so very much in his life—unanswered. A fortnight had gone by, and then there had reached him a prim little note from Mrs. Pomeroy, asking him why he had not been to see them lately. There was a postscript: "If you do not come soon, you will not see my daughter. She has not been well, and we are thinking of sending her up to Scotland, to friends who are in Skye, for a good long holiday."