Was ever a blanker home-coming? Challis began to suspect he would certainly make hay of his life, unless some deus ex machina came into it. Was he a dignus vindice nodus? He put the question aside to read accumulated letters, kept back by request. Then lunch was on table, and life seemed suddenly as usual. But no Marianne, so far!
The drizzle "it" had "come on" made a dreary outlook from the house, and a sense of the absence of the children a conscious cause of dreariness within. No consolation could be found in the distant voices of the two servants at loggerheads in the basement. "Probably one specific loggerhead," thought Challis, as he gave real thought and care to the filling of a pipe he meant to enjoy. Because a certain incisive repetition, which seemed to relate to the same theme, conveyed the idea of diametrically opposed opinions, intemperately advocated by street-door knocks. A lull would come when Harmood brought him a cup of coffee—fresh-made, he hoped—and he would then hint broadly that the discussion was needlessly audible. "Keep the kitchen-door shut" is the usual formula.
The coffee came. It was ower good for banning and ower bad for blessing, like Rob Roy; only certainly not so strong. So thought Challis to himself—all such thoughts are his, not the story's—as he submitted to it. But he found a satisfaction for the ban he had withheld, in an increased acerbity of manner in his allusion to the kitchen-door. He called it out to Harmood as she departed, having sipped the coffee in the interim. "Yes, sir," said Harmood, speaking as though butter would not melt in her mouth.
However, the kitchen-door closed, and the discussion went on as though both the knockers' families had had a baby. It would not interfere with the pipe.
What was all this that had happened? He found himself asking space this, as he watched the smoke curling away, and changing to the smell he meant to let out of the window before Marianne came back. Now that he was here again, in his old surroundings, he could live back into them, and think of that intoxication of last night—only last night!—as nothing but a strange, bewitching dream. Never was man more susceptible to surroundings than Challis. Turn where he might, some trifle or other brought back his old days to him.
There, upon the chimney-piece, in defiance of modern taste, were certain treasures that had never found a place on a dust-heap because of their various associations with "poor Kate." The parian candlesticks at either end—religiously mended whenever chipped, and one of them obliged to submit to a rivet—did he and Kate not buy them in Oxford Street, and were they not therefore precious? The Swiss haymakers, carved in wood, that were an early present of Marianne's to her sister, were they not—although, of course, they were not high art, and you might sneer at them—things Kate had valued, and on that account never to be discarded or forgotten? The ingenious ship under a glass cover, with chenille round its base, whose hull was muscle-shells, and whose rigging spun glass, was it not a precious inheritance of past ages, treasured with curses, because every time it was moved it tumbled over, and had to be taken from its shelter and made the subject of unskilful experiments with sealing-wax and gum-arabic? Each had its tale of a former time. And everything that said a word about Kate added a postscript about her sister.
Was it not as well that last night's folly or delirium should rank as a dream?—was it not best? If only Destiny could have become a visible Rhadamanthus and driven the nail home, saying, "Now that's settled, Mr. Challis, and you are not to see Miss Arkroyd of Royd again," and he could have believed all his experiences of the last eight months hallucinations! But he could not do so without a warranty, and a strong one. He happened to know that Royd Hall was still there, in Rankshire; and that a week-end ticket was sixteen and sixpence. Let him try to make a dream of that, with Bradshaw ready to rise in evidence and denounce him! He could not but fail, with all the facts against him, in an attempt to quench his memories; but the more dreamlike and unreal they seemed to him, the less guilty he felt of duplicity towards Marianne. Other men might not have felt so; but this is his story, and we must take him as we find him.
Would any other man in like case have fashioned, as he did, the rough-hewn incidents of a scene in which he should make a clean breast of the whole tormenting dream to his wife, get absolution, and be once more his natural self, with no reserves? How on earth should he set about it? that was the thought that started it. Suppose he succeeded in saying, "Polly Anne, I'm a bad, wicked man, and I've been making love to Judith Arkroyd, and forgetting my duty to the wife of my bosom and her kids," would Marianne know what would be a correct attitude for an injured matron under her circumstances? Would she be able to say, perjured and forsworn and betrayer, and hence!—ere she did some correct thing or other? Not she! But suppose instead she were to say, "Just one minute, till I've done with Harmood, and I shall be able to listen to you.... Now, what is it?" what on earth would he do then with the position? Say it all over again, or try a variation, "You see before you a guilty et cetera," or something of that sort? No, no!—that would never do. Why, part of the awkwardness of the position was that the word guilty would overweight the confession so terribly. None of the substantial conditions of broken marriage-vows had been complied with, and it really would be difficult to know exactly what to confess to. How could he know that Charlotte Eldridge—for, dramatist that he was, he knew that lady down to the ground!—would not have dismissed the case with, "You see, my dear, there really hadn't been anything!"
And all the while the worst of it was that, according to his own canon of morals, there had been everything. He had profaned the temple of Love, soiled the marble floor, torn some chaplet from the altar; done something, no matter what, that was making him a secret-keeper from his wife; that would make him flinch from her gaze. Were other men all like that? No, certainly not! But then, they were not milksops, but Men of the World. Also, they worshipped at another temple, down the road, those merry satyrs; a temple where Pan and Silenus had altars.