They were just in sight of the Rectory, and Challis had to get back in time for dinner. So he shook hands with his friend, remarking: "You will go on blowing me up another time." Athelstan Taylor replied with a cordial handshake. "You deserve it, you know!" and pulled out his watch. "I shall be in time for Mrs. Silverton," said he. But who and what that lady was this story knoweth not, neither whence she came nor whither she went. But she occurs in the text for all that.
Challis wandered back, having intentionally allowed himself time to do so, keeping out of the direct path to avoid meeting people. He liked his own company best.
His talk with Athelstan Taylor, which else could claim little place in the story, had had a curious effect on him. It had brought back vividly his early days with his wife. As he sauntered on with his eyes on the ground, choosing rather destructively special whitey-green heads of new young fern to crush down, or cutting here and there an inoffensive flower with his stick, his ears heard nothing of the wind-music in the trees, his eyes saw nothing of the evening rabbits, popping away and vanishing one by one—for which of them could say he had no gun, off hand?—as he approached. The small village maiden who stopped and stood still through a blank bar, and dropped a semiquaver curtsey in the middle and then went on andante capriccioso, might almost as well not have been there for any notice Challis took of her. His thoughts were back in Great Coram Street, in the dingy London home this Marianne—yes! this very Marianne—made cheerful, more than cheerful, to the industrious accountant of ten years since; who parted from her each morning looking forward to the return each evening brought to the grubby domicile he associated with so many blackbeetles in the impenetrable basement, such smells of mice in spite of such much stronger smells of cats, and the wails and choral conclusions of these last in the backyard they held against all comers, in the small hours of so many foggy mornings.
How many escapes from the fog without to the firelight within could he recall, in those days when he rose from his office-desk without a dream of what he could have used his brain for, instead of those interminable figures! How many a shock of trivial disappointment to find that Missis wasn't home yet!—how many an insignificant reviving thrill of contentment when Missis's knock followed near upon his own arrival and his thwarted expectation! For now and again it must happen to a man that some woman he has no passionate love for, pedantically speaking, shall grow round his heart and make the comfort of his life. That was the sort of thing that had come to pass in the case of Marianne and Alfred Challis. And now, as he—the flattered guest of folk he then had never thought to sit at meat with—passed up the great beech-avenue to the house, respectfully saluted by a great game-keeper, a Being who, in those older years, would simply have spurned him, his thoughts had all gone back to the rosy, if rather short-tempered girl who then seemed plenty for his life, and might surely have remained so, only ... only Challis couldn't finish the sentence. Now, why was he, in his own mind, commenting a moment after on the inappropriateness of two lines of Browning that had come into it:
"... Strange, that very way
Love begun! I as little understand
Love's decay."
He resented their intrusion. Who would dare to say his affection for Marianne was not what it had always been? It was—he would swear it!—and that in spite of the fact that Marianne, look you, was not now what she was in those days.
How and when had the change come over things? He was on the alert to keep Judith out of the answer to this question. He must see to that, or Unfairness, that was in the air, would twist awry the admiration of her beauty that was all mankind's—womankind's, for that matter, jealousy apart!—and put a misconstruction on his simplest actions, his most obvious feelings. He could have held his head up better, true enough, over this passage of his analytical self-torment, if only it had not been for that unhappy revelation of unspoken suspicion, by the river there, not two hours since. But be fair!—be fair! It was unspoken, at least! Who had said anything? As he asked the question of himself, Challis wiped from his brow perspiration he ascribed to the weather!