Part 77 (1/2)
”You and Daniel will have a fine talk, I suppose. The walls of that house are very thin. Be careful.”
”Yes, my dear. I can't help wis.h.i.+ng I had not left home.”
She stood up. ”I don't wish anything undone. If you begin undoing, you find yourself in a worse tangle.”
”You're not unhappy?”
”Do I look it?”
”You always answer one question with another. You didn't look it. You do now.”
She sighed. ”I almost wish you hadn't come, Rupert. You made beauty seem so near.”
CHAPTER x.x.xV
She had another reason for her wish. She knew that Rupert had but delayed what was inevitable, and when it came one night, a few weeks later, she had no feeling beyond relief that the fight was over, that she need no longer scheme to outwit George with her advances and retreats. Afterwards, she suffered from a black anger that she must serve the man she did not love, a dull despair from the knowledge that, while both lived, the tie would hold. Her mind tried, and failed, to make nothing of it; by nature she was bound to him who took most from her, and when George had played the husband, he left her dest.i.tute. That Zebedee would always have the best of her had been her boast, but for a time, there was nothing he could have. She was George Halkett's woman.
The day was fogged with memories of the night, yet through that fog she looked for his return. She was glad when she heard his step outside and, going to the kitchen door, felt herself lifted off her feet. She did not try to a.n.a.lyze the strange mingling of willingness and shrinking that made up her feeling for him, but she found mental safety in abandoning herself to what must be, a primitive pleasure in the fact of being possessed, a shameful happiness in submission.
Nevertheless, it was only in his presence that she lost her red sense of shame, and though she still walked n.o.bly, looked with clear eyes, and carried a high head, she fancied herself bent by broken pride, blinded and dusty-haired. Zebedee's books helped her to blot out that vision of herself and the other of Mildred Caniper still sitting by the fire and refusing the fulness of the sun. What she read amazed her with its profundity and amused her with its inconclusiveness. She had an awed pity for men whose lives were occupied in these endless questionings, and while Mildred idly turned the pages of periodicals she once had scorned, Helen frowned and bit her lips over the problems of the ages.
They gave her and Zebedee something impersonal to talk of when he came on his weekly visit.
”It's no good telling me,” she warned him firmly, ”that my poplars are not really there. I can feel them and see them and hear them--always hear them. If they weren't there, they would be! If I exist, so do they.”
”Quite so. You're doing very well. I told you the medicine would turn to food.”
”It's not food. What is it that nasty people chew? Gum? Yes, chewing-gum. It keeps me going. I mean--”
He helped her over that abyss. ”It's a most improper name for wisdom.”
”This isn't wisdom. Wisdom is just going on--and--keeping the world clean.”
”Then,” he said slowly, ”you may count among the sages.”
They stood together by the schoolroom window and watched the windy suns.h.i.+ne darting among the laurel bushes and brightening the bra.s.s on the harness of the patient horse outside the gate.
”I wonder,” Helen said, speaking as if she were not quite awake, ”whether Mr. Pinderwell ever read philosophy.”
”No,” Zebedee answered in the same tones; ”he took to wood-carving.”
This time she leapt the abyss unaided and with a laugh.
”But then, he never had a stepmother nodding beside the fire. What is going to happen to her?”
”She has very little strength.”
”But she isn't going to die?”
”Not yet, I think, dear.” The word slipped from him, and they both listened to its echoes.