Part 27 (1/2)

'I am going to give you a good stiff peg,' I said. I apologize for the 'peg,' but not for the whisky and soda. It is a beverage on the frontier, of which the vulgarity is lost in the value. While it was coming I tried to talk of other things, but she would only nod absently in the pauses.

'Last night we dined with him, it was guest night at the mess, and she was there. I watched her, and she knew it. I don't know whether she tried, but anyway, she failed. The covenant between them was written on her forehead whenever she looked at him, though that was seldom. She dared not look at him. And the little conversation that they had--you would have laughed--it was a comedy of stutters. The facile Mrs.

Harbottle!'

'You do well to be angry, naturally,' I said; 'but it would be fatal to let yourself go, Anna.'

'Angry?' Oh, I am SICK. The misery of it! The terror of it! If it were anybody but Judy! Can't you imagine the pa.s.sion of a temperament like that in a woman who has all these years been feeding on herself? I tell you she will take him from my very arms. And he will go--to I dare not imagine what catastrophe! Who can prevent it? Who can prevent it?'

'There is you,' I said.

Lady Chichele laughed hysterically. 'I think you ought to say, ”There are you.” I--what can I do? Do you realize that it's JUDY? My friend--my other self? Do you think we can drag all that out of it? Do you think a tie like that can be broken by an accident--by a misfortune? With it all I ADORE Judy Harbottle. I love her, as I have always loved her, and--it's d.a.m.nable, but I don't know whether, whatever happened, I wouldn't go on loving her.'

'Finish your peg,' I said. She was sobbing.

'Where I blame myself most,' she went on, 'is for not seeing in him all that makes him mature to her--that makes her forget the absurd difference between them, and take him simply and sincerely as I know she does, as the contemporary of her soul if not of her body. I saw none of that. Could I, as his mother? Would he show it to me? I thought him just a charming boy, clever, too, of course, with nice instincts and well plucked; we were always proud of that, with his delicate physique. Just a boy! I haven't yet stopped thinking how different he looks without his curls. And I thought she would be just kind and gracious and delightful to him because he was my son.'

'There, of course,' I said, 'is the only chance.'

'Where--what?'

'He is your son.'

'Would you have me appeal to her? Do you know I don't think I could?'

'Dear me, no. Your case must present itself. It must spring upon her and grow before her out of your silence, and if you can manage it, your confidence. There is a great deal, after all, remember, to hold her in that. I can't somehow imagine her failing you. Otherwise--'

Lady Chichele and I exchanged a glance of candid admission.

'Otherwise she would be capable of sacrificing everything--everything.

Of gathering her life into an hour. I know. And do you know if the thing were less impossible, less grotesque, I should not be so much afraid?

I mean that the ABSOLUTE indefensibility of it might bring her a recklessness and a momentum which might--'

'Send her over the verge,' I said. 'Well, go home and ask her to dinner.'

There was a good deal more to say, of course, than I have thought proper to put down here, but before Anna went I saw that she was keyed up to the heroic part. This was none the less to her credit because it was the only part, the dictation of a sense of expediency that despaired while it dictated. The n.o.ble thing was her capacity to take it, and, amid all that warred in her, to carry it out on the brave high lines of her inspiration. It seemed a literal inspiration, so perfectly calculated that it was hard not to think sometimes, when one saw them together, that Anna had been lulled into a simple resumption of the old relation.

Then from the least thing possible--the lift of an eyelid--it flashed upon one that between these two every moment was dramatic, and one took up the word with a curious sense of detachment and futility, but with one's heart beating like a trip-hammer with the mad excitement of it.

The acute thing was the splendid sincerity of Judy Harbottle's response.

For days she was profoundly on her guard, then suddenly she seemed to become practically, vividly aware of what I must go on calling the great chance, and pa.s.sionately to fling herself upon it. It was the strangest cooperation without a word or a sign to show it conscious--a playing together for stakes that could not be admitted, a thing to hang upon breathless. It was there between them--the tenable ground of what they were to each other: they occupied it with almost an equal eye upon the tide that threatened, while I from my mainland tower also made an anguished calculation of the chances. I think in spite of the menace, they found real beat.i.tudes; so keenly did they set about the business that it brought them moments finer than any they could count in the years that were behind them, the flat and colourless years that were gone. Once or twice the wild idea even visited me that it was, after all, the projection of his mother in Somers that had so seized Judy Harbottle, and that the original was all that was needed to help the happy process of detachment. Somers himself at the time was a good deal away on escort duty: they had a clear field.

I can not tell exactly when--between Mrs. Harbottle and myself--it became a matter for reference more or less overt, I mean her defined problem, the thing that went about between her and the sun. It will be imagined that it did not come up like the weather; indeed, it was hardly ever to be envisaged and never to be held; but it was always there, and out of our joint consciousness it would sometimes leap and pa.s.s, without shape or face. It might slip between two sentences, or it might remain, a d.o.g.g.i.ng shadow, for an hour. Or a week would go by while, with a strong hand, she held it out of sight altogether and talked of Anna--always of Anna. Her eyes shone with the things she told me then: she seemed to keep herself under the influence of them as if they had the power of narcotics. At the end of a time like this she turned to me in the door as she was going and stood silent, as if she could neither go nor stay. I had been able to make nothing of her that afternoon: she had seemed preoccupied with the pattern of the carpet which she traced continually with her riding crop, and finally I, too, had relapsed. She sat haggard, with the fight forever in her eyes, and the day seemed to sombre about her in her corner. When she turned in the door, I looked up with sudden prescience of a crisis.

'Don't jump,' she said, 'it was only to tell you that I have persuaded Robert to apply for furlough. Eighteen months. From the first of April.

Don't touch me.' I suppose I made a movement towards her. Certainly I wanted to throw my arms about her; with the instinct, I suppose, to steady her in her great resolution.

'At the end of that time, as you know, he will be retired. I had some trouble, he is so keen on the regiment, but I think--I have succeeded.

You might mention it to Anna.'

'Haven't you?' sprang past my lips.

'I can't. It would be like taking an oath to tell her, and--I can't take an oath to go. But I mean to.'