It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

"I prefer to tell you. Who is there that I can talk to about it if not to you?" This was the soul-brush again; and again Challis's inner consciousness gasped at the choice he had to make between giving way to a luxury, a dangerous intoxication, and attempting to freeze the conversation down to a safe temperature.

Duty dictated a struggle for the latter. He affected a manner of equable unconcern fairly well. "No one," said he, "unless you were to make a confidante of...." He stopped short of saying "Marianne," conscious of difficulties ahead. But he could shelve the side-issue, and fall back on the previous question with a sense of getting out of shoal water. "There was a row, then ... well—a warm discussion, suppose we say? It's more refined, certainly. What form did it take?"

"Then we mustn't go so quick," said Judith. "Or I shan't have time." She was inconsecutive; but it was clear, when she paused in her walk through the long grass, that it was for an anchorage. "Suppose we sit down a little here," she said. "Unless you mind?" Challis didn't.

"Here" was an oak trunk that must have said to itself when it was a sapling—four hundred years ago, maybe—"I will see to it, when I am grown up, that my roots shall live above ground, and be thick with moss; and one shall be horizontal and a seat for a king, who shall lean against me contented. But he shall go, that lovers may come; and they shall make up my contentment, and I shall hear their voices in the twilight." Challis half made this little legend as he took his place by Miss Arkroyd on that tree-trunk. But he fought shy of the sequel their presence suggested—what word ought his fancy to supply as the tree's imaginary speech about themselves? He shrank from it, and he knew the reason why. It was because, as his own disordered passion grew, as he found himself more and more at loggerheads with his lot, he became more and more alive to the danger of relying on this woman herself as his protection against himself. How if she gave way, too?

As far as any conscious loss of self-control at that moment went, on the part of Miss Judith Arkroyd, Challis need not have fretted. Never was a young woman more perfectly cool and collected, more equal to any occasion that might arise in connection with a love of power that she just felt this man was a satisfactory lay-figure for. That best defines all the feeling she had on his account—so far.

She resumed the conversation where the question of anchorage had interrupted her. "I don't think we have rows in our family, in the ordinary sense of the word. That is, if I understand it rightly.... No!—I know what you are going to say. It has nothing to do with that repose that marks the caste of Vere de Vere. It is entirely individual and local. We have our quarrels, of course, but they take the form of distant civility, entirely due, as I understand, to our self-respect. There is nothing we Arkroyds respect more than ourselves, not even the Bill of Rights or the Protestant Succession...."

Challis interrupted: "But the distant civility, this time?..."

"Followed naturally on my telling Sibyl that the first act of Estrild was ready for rehearsal. She merely said she supposed I must go my own way. But that day after lunch she allowed me to leave the apartment first. It had been a cold lunch, as far as emotions went; and I knew, when Sibyl stood courteously on one side to let me pass, what was coming. So I wasn't the least surprised to find a letter from my mother on the dressing-table next morning."

"A letter from your mother!" Challis's tone was puzzled, awaiting enlightenment. Judith was not to be hurried, though. For one thing, she was engaged with a beetle, who wanted either to go home or to get farther away from home. She had been heading off his successive rushes in different directions with an ungloved hand, which he always refused to crawl upon. The perseverance she gave to this seemed not altogether without its charm to her companion.

"He seems to be praying for those that despitefully use him," she said, referring to the action of his antennæ. Then, without discontinuing her amusement, she went back to the conversation. "Yes—a letter, with 'My dearest daughter' at the beginning, and 'Your affectionate mother' at the end. Do you not believe me? It's quite true—all my family do it! In fact, it was a long time before I found out that other families didn't do it, too. I can tell you this letter all through."