It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

"He gets so irritated with hedgehogs, and I don't wonder, poor darling! I hope he hasn't strained your hand?" Mr. Challis couldn't say very much about that. Nothing to speak of! "Let's go on. He'll get tired of that, and I don't hear the bull anywhere—it's all right. What was I saying?" It is perturbing to the non-bucolic mind to hear a necessary and inevitable bull taken as a matter of course.

"You were speaking of Mr. Taylor and Miss Caldecott. Is he supposed to want to marry her?"

"I really couldn't say. Men are so odd. Of course, if she were less angular...." The young lady blew a whistle for Saladin. The intentness with which both watched for the dog to appear from the quarter he was last seen in enabled him to play off a little joke at their expense. For when Challis turned his head, after much watching and whistling, there was that confounded beast, pretending all the while to wait, after a brief circuit of a mile or so out of sight. He made a pretence of not being able to understand motives, combined with great forbearance in not asking for an explanation of them.

The skein-winding had been a little spoiled, but Judith got it again in order before arriving at the Hall, and it would wait for its opportunity. Her mere acceptance of silence in the twilight of the great avenue, as though conversation-making was not called for under the circumstances, had its force. It might have been spoiled by a quicker pace, to finish the walk up; but, if anything, there was a disposition to loiter and to hate the idea of being indoors on such a heavenly evening.

"Your wife's name was...?" Surely the subject franked a dropped voice, in harmony with the beauty of the said evening—a touch of tenderness for its sake entirely. None but a coarse nature would shout against the musical hushing of the wind in the beeches. Let there be no false note in the chord.

Challis accepted this tenderness as a tribute to the departed. He answered, "Kate—Kate Verrall." He need have said no more, but it filled out a sympathetic funeral tone, in keeping with the hour, to add: "She died within two years of our first meeting."

Miss Arkroyd's regret at having raked up a painful memory was so great that she all but laid her hand on her companion's sleeve. "Oh no," she said, still more tenderly, "I did not mean that. I meant Marianne's maiden name." It would have been artificial, and stodgy, too, to call her "your present wife." Better the frankness of a sympathetic nature, and Marianne.

"Craik," was the unqualified answer. Challis wished that his first wife's mother, when she married again, had chosen someone with a more rhythmic name, not to interfere with the general feeling of the foreground and middle distance. For, you see, she then provided this maiden name for the second Mrs. Alfred Challis, whose mother she was also. Mr. Challis had married his deceased wife's half-sister, and would stand condemned—presumably, at least, in the eyes of his companion—for bad taste certainly, possibly worse. He repeated the name, rather crisply, in correction of Judith's first understanding of it as "Blake," but never a word said he, there and then, about Marianne's half-sistership with the original of "Ziz." Was he bound to say anything?

He departed to his room, to dress for dinner, with a disjointed, incomplete feeling that he was rather glad that a mere au revoir had involved no handshake. Could he have trusted himself not to emphasize its pressure unduly? Faugh!—where was the sense of such an imbecile speculation, or the need for it? He was angry with himself for the thought—angry at the way he had enjoyed his walk with "that girl." He brushed her off his mind discourteously as "that girl." Why, he had only known her a couple of days! He even found that an impulse of his wanted him to say, "Damn all these people! What are they to me, or I to them, that they should come into my life, and make hay of a working contentment I have never dreamed of questioning?" But he refused to say it, merely noting what its syntax would have been if he had done so. En revanche, he made up his mind to write a jolly long letter to Marianne to-night.

The other party—though, indeed, it is hard to say to what—retired to her room to dress, not very sorry to hear that Sibyl was not home yet. She had quite made up her mind that if her sister talked any nonsense about flirtations with married men, she would speak sharply to her—give her a piece of her mind. But she hated rows. So if the motor-car broke down—and it was pretty sure to—she shouldn't be sorry. In a day or two she was going up to London, and would go straight and call on Mrs. Challis, the Impossible one, and that would put the friendship with her husband on a footing. She would wear that white chiffon and the pearls again this evening, though; she had looked so well in them last night.