CHAPTER XIX
The interloper was established between Kingston and Gundred, and the purely formal nature of their marriage might have been clear even to themselves. They fell apart without wrench or difficulty, and on Gundred a heavy sense of loneliness settled like a cloud. She it was that suffered most from the separation, for she had not her husband’s compensations. All these years she had lived in the happiness of what she believed to be perfect intimacy with Kingston, sharing his hopes, his wishes, his thoughts; now, in a flash, she was made to guess that she had merely shared the outer aspects of his life, that the fancied beautiful completeness of their union was merely the band of tolerance strengthened through the long years by custom. Now that the elasticity of the tie that bound them was put to too great a stretch, it flew asunder, and, in the rebound, struck Gundred a stinging blow. It was not, of course, to be expected of her that she should realize the situation clearly, or face the true state of the case with any perspicacious candour. All she felt was felt dimly, instinctively, half-consciously; not even to herself would she admit what she felt, or analyze the solitude that seemed gathering round her. But very vaguely, in the introduction of Ivor Restormel, she understood that she herself must somehow have failed—could not be quite all to her husband that she had imagined herself, must at some point have fallen short of the perfect wife’s proper performance. This uncomfortable perception, which caught her in her tenderest spot, she made haste to burke and bury in the depths of her consciousness. But its ghost occasionally walked; and, though she did the best for herself by insisting daily on her husband’s unjustifiable cruelty and the blackness of the influences that had seduced him, yet she could never wholly escape that faint instinct of failure which was the one thing that her efficiency-worshipping nature most passionately dreaded.
The days went by in a strain that was wholly absurd, but also wholly unpleasant. Examining things in the light of healthy, normal experience, Gundred could not even tell herself that she had a grievance. She still feared and disliked the presence of Ivor Restormel, with a fear which no reason could account for, but which no reason could dispel. But in every way the boy was perfectly harmless and even pleasant. Gundred, in her heart of hearts had expected that her instinct would immediately be justified on closer acquaintance by discovering that Ivor Restormel took drugs, or read French novels, or had a tendency to gambling and kleptomania. She watched him carefully, in public and in private, secretly and openly, hoping that some such development might force her husband to recognise the soundness of her intuitions, and get rid of the undesirable immigrant. However, none of these idiosyncrasies could be brought to light, observe she never so minutely. The boy was just an ordinary, nice, healthy boy; there was nothing vague or mysterious or neurotic about him; his personality had no strong colours anywhere, was altogether mild, unformed, healthy in its growth. And yet Gundred, recognising all this, could not help shrinking from him, shrinking from him more eagerly day by day, with a vigour of feeling not by any means wholly attributable to her anger against Kingston for disobeying her wishes in this matter. Among the weak points of her character a lack of honesty could not always be counted; she frankly acknowledged to herself that no fault could be found with Ivor Restormel. Good, kind, companionable, nice-minded, he appeared to be everything that she herself, by all the rules of her code, should most warmly have liked and approved. This only made it the odder, therefore, that she should feel against him so unconquerable a secret dislike. Gundred almost felt as if it were not the boy himself that she disliked, but some deep corner of his character which she seemed to have known and dreaded for many years. She divined in him a lurking enmity of which his own innocent and sunny nature was altogether unconscious. But Gundred pulled herself up short at this point, and refused to indulge in any such vain fantasies. People, it is well known, do not contain these dual personalities; if Gundred dreaded this boy, who, to all seeming, was everything sane and wholesome, her feeling could have nothing to do with any nonsensical superstition, but would certainly—if not sooner, then later—be disastrously shown to have been founded on fact, by the discovery of its object’s carefully hidden iniquity. Gundred, as the days went by, withdrew herself more and more wholly from her husband’s life. Now she no longer took even a formal share in it. She stood outside and watched for her opportunity to strike at the intruder. That neither Kingston nor Gundred any longer felt how completely they were removed from each other in itself revealed the secret weakness which all these years had underlain the smooth, firm surface of their relations. Each, it appeared, could do perfectly well without the other, and only feel the separation as a matter for indignant pride.
The interloper, meanwhile, was quite unconscious of the hidden passions that were seething round him. Ivor Restormel had a happy temperament that only looked for the best in everything. Reasons and explanations did not interest him, nor had he much subtlety to discern any animosity that did not take the form of a blow in the eye. So long as he was not made to enter the smoke-haunted rooms of Brakelond he was inclined simply and wholly to enjoy himself. What it all meant he had no idea, nor what he had done to attract so smooth and pleasant a life as seemed to be opening out before him. Occasionally he had a very faint suspicion that Lady Gundred, for some reason, did not entirely approve of him. But, then, she was always so mild and remote in manner, so it must only be his fancy; after all, he had done absolutely nothing to annoy her; and, anyway, what was the good of bothering? So he took the pleasures that the gods provided, without question or cavil, and began to enjoy the surroundings to which he had been so suddenly, so unexpectedly, transplanted. He had inherited a love of beauty, comfort, calm; the change from a penurious life spent between a third-rate Oxford college and a dingy little house in the Banbury Road, among people no less distasteful than the lives they led—the change from all this to the large serenity of Brakelond was restful and delicious in the extreme. Here voices were never raised in queribund tones; here all the little difficulties of life were kept in oblivion, and existence went on oiled wheels along a gentle, placid course. Lady Gundred might be a little chilly and undemonstrative, but, at any rate, she was always smooth; she never fussed or grew peevish, was never worried about the details of housekeeping. Ivor Restormel loved the unquestioning quiet of his new life. As for his host, well, there he was altogether baffled.
Mr. Darnley seemed at once indifferent and enthusiastic about his new secretary. At one moment he would talk eagerly, almost affectionately; and then, again, he would be perfectly indefinite and tame in tone. Ivor could not make it out at all; did Mr. Darnley like him or not? Surely he must—surely he must even have taken a strange, violent fancy to him. Otherwise, why should Mr. Darnley have made such rapid advances; why should he have been so anxious to get him over to Brakelond; why should he have been in such haste to offer him the secretaryship, and so keen that he should take it? All these things were proof of liking, if anything in the world could ever be. Yet Ivor Restormel could never feel wholly satisfied, after all, that his host had any personal feeling for him. In himself he even seemed to bore Mr. Darnley. Ivor was quite acute enough to see before long that Mr. Darnley took very little interest in him personally. And this made the whole relation incalculably strange. Why saddle yourself, why go out of your way to saddle yourself with a person for whom you do not intrinsically care two straws? Ivor began to think that he even noticed a certain animosity sometimes in his host’s attitude towards him. It almost seemed as if by talking in his own person, of his own concerns, that he was annoying and disappointing Mr. Darnley. What could this mean? Mr. Darnley appeared to be always watching him, always listening for some chance word from him. And then, all of a sudden, Mr. Darnley’s interest would kindle and flame. Warmth would come into his manner, and Ivor would get the sensation of being acutely liked. And then, in a moment, perhaps, his talk would wander outside the range of its listener’s interest. Mr. Darnley would shake his head with a sort of desperate irritation, the light would die out of his eyes, and his demeanour become cold, and sometimes even savage. Evidently the talker must have somehow cheated him, must have ceased to say the things he wished to hear. But what were those things? Ivor Restormel spurred himself to unaccustomed subtlety; he disliked this sensation of being, as it were, only spasmodically and vicariously cultivated. His face and manners generally made him friends without difficulty; he was piqued by their apparent failure to give him any victory over a man whom they had seemed to lead so unresistingly captive at first sight.
Ivor exerted himself to ensure Mr. Darnley’s approval, and carefully marked the moments which held his employer’s enthusiasm and the subjects that provoked it. Apparently, though, any talk of his own life and ideas was of no interest, or very little, to Mr. Darnley. And how can one capture people’s friendship if they are obviously bored by everything that concerns one’s self? No; not quite everything. Ivor soon found that any talk about his particular private weaknesses was always sure to rouse Mr. Darnley to a subdued, secret fury of eagerness. As soon as Ivor dropped any chance apologetic word about the terrors that he had so strangely inherited, and as long as he continued telling of them, so long, and so long only, did Mr. Darnley seem to have an interest and a liking for him—an interest wonderfully keen, a liking deep and strong. And then, if he took advantage of this evident friendship to go on to other matters, then the evident friendship would immediately chill off and vanish into an annoyed indifference. Mr. Darnley could not be touched by conversation on any other topic. But that one topic was always sure of the most instant success; it had only to hint its presence in the dialogue for Mr. Darnley’s whole zeal to leap to the alert. Mr. Darnley even seemed to be always watching for its appearance, and, what was strange and even exasperating, would put up with hours of Ivor’s conversation in the obvious hope that sooner or later the one matter of interest would crop up into the talk. It is annoying to find one’s company cherished only for the sake of conversation on one particular subject, and Ivor began deliberately to avoid the topic, as much from hurt vanity as from personal pride.
Then the situation developed even more oddly, for Mr. Darnley would hardly let the boy out of his sight. He must be always at his side, always putting up with what clearly failed to interest him, in the persistent hope that as the delay grew longer and more wearisome, so the reappearance of the one interesting topic must be coming nearer and growing surer. He clung to Ivor’s company, although it plainly had no intrinsic value for him, anxious not to lose a moment of it, for fear the moment of true speech should come and pass without his knowledge. Ivor, sweet-natured as he was, showed his resentment at the topsy-turvy situation by talking persistently of things that concerned himself, his daily life, or his employer’s. And it was even amusing, had it not been rather humiliating, to notice how Mr. Darnley chafed beneath the interminable ordeal, yet would not lose an instant of it, lest in that instant the thing he was looking for so passionately should poke its head up and vanish again unnoticed. But Ivor, for sheer pride, would indulge him but seldom. Besides, it happened that the one thing which Kingston wished to hear was also, naturally enough, the one thing that Ivor least wished to tell. For the boy was acutely ashamed of those idiotic instincts of terror with which his premature birth had left him. The one thing worse than those terrors themselves was the humiliation of acknowledging them. So he was doubly reluctant to gratify the morbid curiosity of the older man.
Kingston, in fact, was paying very heavily for the indulgence of his long desire. The situation, to him, was one persistent agony of expectation, always straining, always being disappointed. Now at last he understood the punishment that he had earned. For, by his own wish, he was doomed to call, and call for ever, to something that could never hear. The dead was free, but the living was still bound, was more tightly bound than ever in that bond of desire which is at once the pet pleasure and the dreadful agony of all who enter it. And a dreary agony it was; Isabel was there, within his reach almost, but for ever beyond his reach. No cry could rouse her, no appeal restore her personality to life. And yet, mysteriously but certainly, she was there once more; once more clothed in flesh, once more gazing out of human eyes and speaking with a human voice. Nevertheless, for all the good he could have of his prayer’s gratification, she might still have been dead bones and dust of the earth. For she could not hear him, could not recognise him, and the irony of her deaf, blind presence at his side was a torment far more keen than all the long years of her absence. He ravened and battered against the iron wall of her unconsciousness, and for ever was beaten back, sickened, bruised and bleeding from the violence—the eternally fruitless violence—of his effort to stir her recollection. Her memory slept for ever in the dead past; only the immortal part of her still lived, and was incurably deaf to any human call. She did not hear him, she could not hear him; never, never, all down the ages could she hear him again. The irremediable separation was only made more ghastly, more appalling, by the tantalizing proximity of her. He could see her, hear her, know her well. And all the knowledge was not only profitless, but an aggravation of his misery. He saw now what a fool he had been to tie himself anew in the bondage of desire; an eternal parting would have been far less painful, far less maddeningly cruel, than this grim and nugatory reunion.
Again and again he battled fiercely to win the recognition that he knew in his heart of hearts to be for ever beyond his reach. He was incessantly trying to lead Ivor Restormel into some discussion of his secret terrors, hoping that so Isabel’s voice might speak once more, and possibly, in time, Isabel’s self be aroused again. But the task was hard, and Ivor reluctant to be made the mouthpiece of that inmost self of his whose identity—whose very existence, even—he never suspected. And then it was that Kingston found himself hating the boy. The boy stood between himself and Isabel; for ever must stand between himself and Isabel. And yet the boy contained the secret treasure—was, in a worldly sense, the secret treasure; he could not have the one for a neighbour without putting up with the presence of the other, without keeping the boy for ever at his side, and tolerating endlessly the revelations of the boy’s uninteresting personality. Kingston approved of the young fellow well enough in himself; he was amiable, kind, pleasant to look at and talk to. In ordinary circumstances Kingston would have liked him and never thought twice about him. Now, however, his liking was complicated by a resentment that at times deepened into something like hate. The boy was keeping so much from him. It was not the boy’s fault, of course, yet that did not make the situation any easier to bear. He alternately liked and disliked him with a vigour for which the boy’s own personality was entirely innocent.
He was always laying traps for him, watching him, trying to stir up the spirit that possessed him. Gladly would Kingston have pierced between Ivor and the secret thing that inhabited him. The one he valued not at all, or only as containing the other which he now valued above everything in the world, for ever beyond his reach though it was. He resented the boy’s body, his beauty, his young developing nature which, sooner or later, might be expected to conquer those old dim memories and achieve the ultimate death of the Isabel he had known those twenty years before. If he could have set free the sleeping soul he would gladly have seen its new body break up and die. He hated that new body, which made so impermeable a wall between himself and the vanished thing he had so vainly found again. He looked on Ivor Restormel as an unarmed burglar might look on an impregnable safe in which lies the diamond of his ambition. The safe is precious and desirable because of the diamond inside, but, in so far as it makes the diamond impregnable, is doubly detestable for the very fact that the diamond is inside. And in Kingston’s case the problem was even crueller; for the burglar may, with long labour, break the safe and attain the diamond. Kingston, in breaking the safe, would by the same action cause the diamond to vanish once more. As things stood, the safety—at all events, the continued proximity—of the diamond depended entirely on the continued security and inviolate condition of the safe.