Part 11 (1/2)

She would not have withstood a spoken wish of his; but there is something in speechless suffering from which light sympathies shrink away. Pity lay in Marian a tepid, quickly roused feeling, blowing neither hot nor cold. She cried easily over sad books, but she had none of the maternal instinct which seizes upon the faintest indication of pain with a combative pa.s.sion for its alleviation. She became antagonistic when she was personally disturbed by suffering.

She was keeping her word to Julian while her heart was drifting away from him; and he, while he desired her to be free, instinctively tried to hold her back. They had both put their theories before their instincts, and they expected their instincts to stand aside until their theories had been carried out.

Perhaps if Julian could have told her his experiences he might have recaptured her imagination; but when she asked him to tell her about them, he said quickly, ”I can't,” and turned away his head. He was afraid to trust himself. He wanted to tell her everything. He was afraid that if he began, his reticence would break down, and he would tell her things which must never pa.s.s his lips. He longed for her to know that every day, and nearly every hour, he had fought and conquered intricate abnormal obstacles. He had slipped across imminent death as a steady climber grips and pa.s.ses across the face of a precipice.

He had never faltered. All that he had gone to find he had found, and more. At each step he had seen a fresh opportunity, and taken it. He had been like a bicyclist in heavy traffic a.s.sailed on every side by converging vehicles, and yet seeing only the one wavering ribbon of his way out. And he had won his way out with knowledge that was worth a king's ransom. He could have borne anything if Marian would realize that what he had borne had been worth while. But after her first unanswered question, Marian never referred again to what he had done. She behaved as if his services had been a regrettable mistake.

She talked with real feeling about the sufferings of those who fought in the war. Her eyes seemed to tell him what her lips refrained from uttering, that she could have been more sorry for him if he had been wounded in a trench, and not shot at and abandoned by a nervous sentry firing in the dark. He could not remember the exact moment when out of the vague turmoil of his weakened mind he gripped this cold truth: Marian was not tender.

When she was not there he could pretend. He could make up all the beautiful, loving little things she had not said, and sometimes he would not remember that he had made them up. Those were the best moments of all. He believed then that she had given him what his heart hungered for. He was too much ashamed of his ruined strength to feel resentment at Marian's coldness. It struck him as natural that she should care less for a broken man.

His mind traveled slowly, knocking against the edges of his old dreams.

He thought perhaps a nursing home wasn't the kind of place in which people could really understand one another, all mixed up with screens and medicine bottles, and nurses bringing things in on trays. If he could see Marian once at Amberley for the last time, so that he could keep the picture of her moving about the dark wainscoted rooms, or looking out from the terrace above the water meadows, he would have something precious to remember for the rest of his life; and she mightn't mind him so much there, surrounded by the dignity of the old background of his race. One day he said to her:

”I want to go to Amberley as soon as I can be moved. I want to see it again with you.”

”In December?” asked Marian, with lifted, disapproving brows. ”It would be horribly damp, my dear Julian, all water-meadows and mist. You would be much more comfortable here.”

Julian frowned. He hated the word ”comfort” in connection with himself.

”You don't understand,” he said, a little impatiently. ”I know every inch of it, and it's quite jolly in the winter. We are above the water.

I want to see the downs. One gets tired of milk-carts and barrel organs, and the brown tank on the roof across the way. You remember the downs, Marian?”

His eyes met hers again with that new, curiously weak look of his.

Marian turned her head away. How could Julian bear to speak of the downs?

She saw for a moment the old Julian springing up the hillside a.s.sured and eager, the fine, strong lover who had taken her heart by storm. She spoke coldly to this weaker Julian.

”Yes,” she said, ”I am not likely to forget the downs. I spent the last happy hours of my life there; but I cannot say I ever wish to see them again.”

Julian's eyes fell, so that she could not see if he had even noticed how bitterly she remembered Amberley.

The next day she found him sitting up for the first time. He was propped up by cus.h.i.+ons, but it made him look as if he had gained some of his old incisive strength.

The other two men had been moved, and they had the large, bare room to themselves.

No sound came from the square beneath them; in the house itself there were pa.s.sing footsteps and the occasional persistent buzzing of an electric bell.

”Look here,” said Julian in a queer, dry voice, ”I've got an awful lot to say to you--d'you mind drawing your chair nearer? I meant to say it at Amberley. I'd have liked it better there. I rather hate this kind of disinfected, sloppy place for talk. You must loathe it, too. But here or there it's got to be said. You said something or other when I first put it to you--about our engagement never being broken. It was awfully good of you, of course. I couldn't see through it at the time. I wanted to let things slide. But it's all nonsense my dear girl. Women like you can't marry logs of wood.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”Women like you can't marry logs of wood”]

He looked at her anxiously. Her eyes were shut to expression. She sat there, just as lovely, just as sphinx-like as some old smiling portrait.

There was the same unfluctuating, delicate color in her face, and the same unhara.s.sed, straightforward glancing of the eyes. She was not the least perturbed by what he said; she expected him to say it.

”We should be foolish,” she answered quietly, ”to try to ignore the terrible difference in our lives, Julian, and I was sure you would want to set me free; but you cannot do it. I took the risk of your accident, unwillingly at first; but, still, eventually I accepted it, and I will not be set free.”