THE NEST

THE WHITE PAGODA

THE SUICIDE

A FORSAKEN TEMPLE

MISS JONES AND THE MASTERPIECE

BY ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK

(MRS. BASIL DE SÉLINCOURT)

AUTHOR OF "TANTE," "FRANKLIN WINSLOW KANE," "A FOUNTAIN SEALED," "THE SHADOW OF LIFE," ETC.

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1913

Copyright, 1902, 1904, 1912, 1913, by
The Century Co.

Copyright, 1898, by Charles Scribner's Sons

Published, January, 1913

PREFACE

It seemed suitable, when making a selection of short stories for publication in book form, to include my first attempt with my last, and therefore the very juvenile production—"Miss Jones and the Masterpiece"—finds a place with the others.

My thanks are due to the Editors of the Century Magazine, Scribners' Magazine, and the English Review, for allowing me to republish the stories that appeared in their pages.

November, 1912.

CONTENTS

[THE NEST]
[CHAPTER I]
[CHAPTER II]
[CHAPTER III]
[CHAPTER IV]
[CHAPTER V]
[THE WHITE PAGODA]
[THE SUICIDE]
[A FORSAKEN TEMPLE]
[CHAPTER I]
[CHAPTER II]
[CHAPTER III]
[MISS JONES AND THE MASTERPIECE]
[CHAPTER I]
[CHAPTER II]
[Other Books by Anne Douglas Sedgwick]

THE NEST

CHAPTER I

He seemed to have had no time for thinking before he sank into a corner of the railway carriage and noted, with a satisfaction under the circumstances perhaps trivial, that he would have it to himself for the swift hour down to the country. Satisfactions of any sort seemed inappropriate, an appanage that he should have left behind him for ever on stepping from the great specialist's door in Wimpole Street two hours ago. When a man has but a month—at most two months—to live, small hopes and fears should drop from him: he should be stripped, as it were, for the last solitary wrestle in the arena of death.

But the drive, from the doctor's to the city and from there to Paddington, had seemed unusually full of life's solicitations. The soft, strained eyes of an over-laden horse, appealing in patience from the shade of dusty blinkers; the dismal degradation of a music-hall poster—a funny man with reddened nose and drunken hat, as appealing in his slavery as the horse; the vaporous blue-green silhouettes of the Park on a silvery sky;—he had found himself responding to these with pity, repugnance and pleasure as normally as if they meant for him now what they always would have meant. That such impressions were so soon to cease must change all their meaning,—at least, so one would have supposed; he began to think of that and to wonder a little over the apparent stoicism of those intervening hours; but, while the mood had lasted, the fact that he had come to the end of things, that there was a pit dug across his path, had done hardly more than skim on the outskirts of his alert yet calm receptivity. He seemed never to have noticed more, never to have been more conscious of the outer world and so little conscious of himself.

Now, in the train, the outer world, wraith-like in a sudden summer shower, became the background as it sped on either side, and thoughts were in the foreground, thoughts of himself as doomed, and of the life that he had loved and worked in, as measured into one shallow cupful at his lips. Even yet it was almost absurd, the difficulty he found in realising it. The doomed figure detached itself, became that of a piteous, a curious alien, whom one watched respectfully and from a distance. From a safe shore he observed the tossing of the rapidly sinking skiff with its helpless occupant. It required a great pull, push, and effort of his whole being, like that of awakening from a half-dream, in order to see, in order to say to himself, really believing it, that he was the man. Wonder, rather than dread or sorrow, was still the paramount feeling, though, oppressively, as if he picked his steps about the verge of an echoing cavern, turning away his eyes, there lurked behind all that he felt the sense of sudden emptiness and dark.

It was wonderful, immensely absorbing and interesting, this idea of being himself doomed. Self-conscious, observant, sensitive as he was, he still thought more than felt. It was at last credible and indubitable that he was the man, and he was asking himself how he would take it; he was asking himself how he would bear it. He was amused to observe that the pathetic old human vanity, by no means stunned, was pushing its head above the tossing surface in order to assure him again and again that he would bear it very well. It should be a graceful and gallant exit. If there were to be dark moments, moments when the cavern sucked him in and had him, if he was to know horror and despair, no one else, at all events, should know that he knew them; no one else should share his suffering. Up to the edge of extinction he would keep silence and a stoic cheerfulness. The doctor had promised him that there would be little pain; there would be knowledge only to conceal.

This vanity, and there was satisfaction in it for all his ironic insight, was not so selfish as it seemed; the next turn of thought led him to this. For no one had a right to share his suffering; or perhaps it would be more magnanimous to say that the some one of whom he was thinking had a right to be spared the sharing of it. He shared so few of the things that mattered with Kitty that she might well claim immunity. His wife's figure, since the very beginning, had been hovering near his thoughts, not once looked at directly. It might be horribly painful to look at it, but he suspected that it would not be so painful as to look at the other near thing that he must leave behind: his work; the work that with all its grind and routine—so hard to harness to at first—had now become so much a part of himself. The fact that he might come nearer to despair, nearer to the crumbling edge of the cavern, when he thought of leaving his work than when he thought of leaving his wife, was in itself a pain; but it was an old pain in a new guise. Kitty had for so long been one of the things that counted for less than his work. Vanity even raised its voice high enough to say ruefully that they might get on badly without him at the Home Office; the country itself might suffer. He smiled; but the dart told; it was perhaps feathered with truth. Yes, everything most essential in him, everything that most counted, was answered, called forth in his work. It was in that that he would most truly die. For, of course, in the many other, the young, the ardent, the foolish hopes, he was dead already. And it was round the figure of his wife, that light and radiant figure, sweet, soft, appealing, that those dead hopes seemed to gather, like mist about a flower.

Poor, lovely little Kitty: the sight of the rain-dimmed meadow-sweet, by the brookside in a passing field, brought her before him in this aspect of innocent disillusioner. For nothing essential, nothing that counted in him, was answered or called forth by Kitty except a slightly ironic tenderness. He didn't judge life from his own failure to find splendid mutual enterprise and sacred mutual comprehension where his lover's blindness had thought to find it. Nor did he judge Kitty. His own blindness was the fault, if fault there were, and even that blindness he could now see tolerantly. The dart and pang had gone from his memory of young love; his smile for it was indulgent; he was even glad that the memory was there, glad that he had known the illusion, even if it were at the price of failure in that happy realm of life. Little of the sadness could have been Kitty's; she had not known the bitterness of his slow awakening; she was easily contented with the tame terms of unillumined life. A charming home; a fond husband; a pretty, diligent part to play in the political and social life of the countryside; the nicest taste to show in dress and friends;—Kitty, he imagined, thought of her life as completely successful. And why not? He himself saw love as an episode and contentedly accepted the fact that for the flower-like woman and the man who works there can be, eventually, no deeper bond.

He knew two or three other women who interested him more than Kitty ever could; to them he went when he wanted to talk about anything he cared for. Kitty was sweet to see; she made him very comfortable; she rarely irritated him. With friends and Kitty what did he want of women more? Outside these domestic and drawing-room circles was the world of men and ideas in which he lived, in which his real life had its roots.

Yet, as the train neared the little country station, as familiar lanes and meadows glided slowly past the windows, he became aware that his thoughts had more and more slid from this outside life, this world of work and reality, and that from thinking of the little part that Kitty played in it he had come to thinking of Kitty and to the thought that he was to see her for the last time.—Yes; that crashed in at last. At last something seemed to come to him which, in the pain of it, was completely adequate to the situation. It was the Kitty of six years ago that he saw most clearly, the girl he had fallen in love with, his bride; but there were all the other memories too, the little silent memories, the nothings, the everythings of daily life together; small joys, small sorrows. The breakfast-table, Kitty behind the coffee, reading aloud to him some scrap of her morning budget; the garden, Kitty showing him how a new flower was thriving; Kitty riding beside him in the dew to an early meet; and, suddenly, among all the trivial memories, the solemn one that hardly seemed to go with Kitty at all,—Kitty's face looking up at him, disfigured with grief and pain, as he told her that their child—it had died at birth—was dead.

The other women, the interesting ones, the women who, more or less, knew their way about his mind and soul, were forgotten, blotted out completely by the trivial and the solemn memories. He felt no desire to see them, no desire at all to say good-bye to them; that would be to bring them near. But he did want to see Kitty, at once. She was not near mind or soul; but she was near as life is near; near like the pulse of his heart; and, with all the other things, he felt, suddenly, that Kitty was his child, too, and that paternal yearning was mingled with the crying out of his whole nature towards her. For it was crying out; and, if she was his child, in what deep strange sense was he not her child, too.

The wide world, the real world, the outside world of work and achievement, collapsed like a crumpled panorama; he was covering his eyes; he was shuddering; he was stumbling back to the nest, wounded to death, there to fold himself in darkness, in oblivion, in love.—How near we are to the animal, he thought, smiling, with trembling lips, as he saw the station slide outside the windows at last, saw the face of the station-master—he had never before known that the station-master was such a lovable person—he seemed so near the nest that he must be lovable—saw, beyond the flower-wreathed palings, the dog-cart waiting for him. But his deeper self rebuked the cynical side-glance. The trembling smile, he knew, had more of truth:—how near we are to the divine. The pain and ecstasy of this moment of arrival made it one of the most vivid and significant of his life. Almost worth while to know that one is to die in a month if the knowledge brings with it such flashes of beauty of vision. The whole earth seemed transfigured and heavenly.

Dean, the coachman, gave acquiescent answers to his questions on the homeward drive. He heard the sound of his own voice and knew that he was speaking as he wanted to be sure of speaking for these next weeks, with ease and lightness. He would be able to keep up before Kitty. Until the very end she should be spared everything; there was joy in the thought, and no longer any vanity. He would see her, be with her, and she should not know. He would see her happy for their last month together. He clasped the thought of her happiness—with her—to his heart.

Like all ecstasies, it faded, this rapture of his return. By the time the house was reached, the lovely little Jacobean house that they had found together, the buoyancy was gone and what was left was a sweetness and a great fatigue. He was to see her; that was well; and here was the nest; that was well, too. But he wanted to fold his wings and sleep.

Mrs. Holland was not in the house, the butler told him, she and Sir Walter had gone down to the river together. Holland felt that he would rather not go after them. He would wait so that he should see Kitty alone when he first saw her. He liked Sir Walter, their friend and neighbour; it would not be difficult to act before him, and he knew that he could begin acting at once; but, for this first meeting of the new, short epoch, he must see Kitty alone. So he had his tea in the library—queer to go on having tea, queer to find one still liked tea—and looked over some papers, and saw, outside, the afternoon grow stiller and more golden, and knew that all dreads were in abeyance and that the somnolence, as of a drugged sweetness and fatigue, still kept him safe.

He was conscious at last of a purely physical chill; the library was cool and he stepped into the sunlight on the lawn, walking up and down among the flowers and, presently, across the grassy terraces, to the lower groups of trees, vaguely directing his steps to the little summer-house that faced the west and was as full of sunlight at this hour as a fretted shell of warm, lapping sea-water. They could not see him, on their way up from the river, nor he them, from here, and after a half-hour or so of dreamy basking it would be time to dress for dinner, Sir Walter would have gone and Kitty would be at the house again.

He followed the narrow path, set thickly with young ashes and sycamores, and saw beyond the trees the roof of the summer-house heaped with illumined festoons of traveller's-joy, and then, when he was near, he heard voices within it, Kitty's voice and Sir Walter's.

Hesitating, half-turning to go back, it was as if a childish panic of shyness seized him, so that he smiled at himself as he stood there, in the arrested attitude of an involuntary eavesdropper. But the smile faded. A look of bewilderment came to his face. Kitty was weeping and Sir Walter was pleading with her, and so strange was Sir Walter's voice, so strange what he was saying to Kitty, that all the strangeness of the day found now its culminating moment.

He walked on, slowly, unwillingly, helplessly, walked on, as he now knew, into some far other form of suffering than any that had been foreseen by him that afternoon.

A rustic seat ran round the summer-house. On the side most hidden he sank down. He did not choose the hidden side. He had no feeling of will or choice; had they come out upon him he would have looked at them with the same bewildered eyes. But, dully, he felt that he must know,—know,—why Kitty was unhappy.

Sunken on the seat, among the traveller's-joy, exhausted, yet alert, his head dizzy and his heart stilled, as it were, to listen, it was this amazement and curiosity that Holland felt rather than anger, jealousy, or grief.

Kitty was unhappy; Sir Walter loved her, and she loved Sir Walter. Sir Walter was imploring her to come away with him. "But you do love me," was the phrase that he repeated again and again, the strong protest of fact against her refusal.

The dizziness lifting, the heart beating more normally, Holland knew more. Kitty was unhappy and loved Sir Walter, but, deeper than that, was the truth that she was happy in her knowledge of his love, deeper than that—though this depth was of thankfulness in her husband's heart—was the truth that the love was as yet a beautiful pastime; there was joy for her in her own sadness, drama in her pain; she was a child with a strange toy in her hand; it charmed her and she had not learned to dread it.

Her husband's comprehension of her, of her childishness, her fluidity, her weakness, actually touched with respect his comprehension of Sir Walter; for Sir Walter's strength was reverent, even in his recklessness there was dignity. Holland knew that he spoke the truth when he said to Kitty that she might trust him for life.

It was the real thing with Sir Walter. With Kitty the real thing could be little more than the response to reality in others. There was the danger that her husband steadied himself to look at, as he sat in the sunlight outside the summer-house and listened.

The dizziness was quite gone. He had never felt a greater mental clarity. He knew that he must be suffering; but suffering seemed relegated to some region of mere physical sensation. He saw and understood so many things that he had never seen or understood before. He felt no jealousy, not a pang of the defrauded, injured male, not a throb of the broken-hearted lover; yet it was not indifference to Kitty that gave him his immunity; he had never cared more for Kitty; it was, perhaps, in a tenderer key, as he cared for the station-master, as he cared, now, for Sir Walter. He was himself soon to die and, as personalities, as related to his own life, people had ceased to count; but as lives that were to go on after he was dead, they counted as they had never done till then; and Kitty most of all. It was this intense consciousness of her youth, of all the years of life she had to live, that pressed with such clearness and such fear upon him. She had all her life before her and she held in her hands a terrible, a beautiful toy that, suddenly transformed to an engine of destruction, might shatter her.

Sir Walter was going. He said that he would come again to-morrow.

"Nicholas will be here," said Kitty. She no longer wept. Her voice, now that the stress of the situation was over, had regained its pensive sweetness.

"Yes," said Sir Walter, "that's what's so odious, darling; he will always be here and everything will be twisted and horrible. I like your husband."

"He is a strange man; I sometimes think that he cares for nothing but his work; he is all thought and no heart. I don't believe that he would really mind if I were to go away with you. He would smile, sadly and ironically, and say: 'Poor, silly child.' And then he would turn to his papers. I'm nothing to him but a doll, a convenient, domestic doll. And he doesn't care for playing with dolls except for a little while now and then." Kitty spoke with a sober pathos that did not veil resentment.

"Ah, you can say all that to me—and expect me to go on bearing seeing you wasted and thrown away!" Sir Walter broke out. "What stands between us? Why must we go on suffering like this?"

"Isn't it a great joy—to know that the other is there, understanding—and caring?"

"A killing sort of joy."

"How cruel, how wrong you are," Kitty murmured; but her husband knew that for her, indeed, the joy was deep, and that it was in such moments of power over an emotion she could rouse yet dominate that she had her keenest sense of it.

"I can't help it," said Sir Walter. "I shall always want you to come away with me."

"Good-bye:—for to-day."

"It's you who are cruel."

At that, silence following, Holland knew that Kitty's quiet tears fell again.

Sir Walter was subjugated. He pleaded for pardon; promised not to torment her—to try not to torment her. A trysting-place was fixed on for next day and Holland felt another chill of fear at Kitty's swift resource and craft in planning it. The child knew how to plot and lie. It thought itself nobly justified, no doubt, and that its fidelity to duty gave it the right to every liberty of conscience. And before Sir Walter went there was a moment of relenting that showed how near was the joy of yielding to the joy of ruthlessness, "For this once,—for this once only—" Kitty murmured. And Holland knew that Sir Walter held her in his arms and kissed her.

After his departure Kitty sat on for some moments in the summer-house. She sighed deeply once or twice and Holland fancied, from her light movements, that she had leaned her arms on the table and rested her head on them. He heard presently, that she was softly saying a prayer, and at the sound, tears filled his eyes. Then, rising, she collected her basket of flowers, her parasol, her books, and walked away with slow steps along the path leading to the house.

CHAPTER II

Two facts stood clear before Holland's eyes. He had been culpably blind and Kitty was in danger. He asked himself if he had not been culpably selfish too, for Kitty's summing up of his attitude towards her would have hurt had he not been beyond such hurts; but, looking back, he could not see that he had ever pushed Kitty aside nor relegated her to the place of plaything. No; the ship of his romance, all its sails set to fairest, sweetest hopes, had been well-ballasted by the most serious, most generous of modern theories as to the right relations of man and wife. And the shock and disillusion had been to find, day by day, that it was, so to speak, only the sails that Kitty cared for. The cargo, the purpose of their voyage, left her prettily, vaguely indifferent. Again and again, he remembered, it had been as if he had led her down into the busy heart of the ship, explained the chart to her, pointed out all the interesting wares. Kitty had shown a graceful interest, but with the manner of a lovely voyager, brought down from sunny or starlit contemplations on deck to humour the dry tastes of the captain. She didn't care a bit for the cargo, or the purposes; she didn't care a bit for any of his interests nor wish to share them; his interests, in so far as specialized and unrelated to their romance, were, she intimated, by every retreating grace—as of gathered-up skirts and a backward smile for the captain in his prosy room—the captain's own particular manly business; her business was to be womanly, that is, to be charming, to feel the breeze in the sails, and to gaze at the stars. And though, now for the first time he saw it, Kitty was not the happy, facilely contented woman he had thought her, it was really as if the ship, with weightier cargoes to carry, more distant ports to reach, had undergone a transformation; throbbing and complicated machinery moved instead of sails, and on its workaday decks Kitty strolled wistfully, missing the sails, missing the romance, but missing only that.

He had accepted, helplessly, her interpretation of their specialised existences, hoping only that hers might assume the significance that would, perhaps, justify the old-fashioned separation of interests; but no children came after the first, the child that died at birth, the child that his heart ached over still; and he could not believe that Kitty felt the lack, could hardly believe that she shared his hope for other children. She had suffered terribly in the birth of the one, more, perhaps, than in its death—though that had temporarily crushed her—and she had been horribly frightened by the cruelties and perils of maternity. So, though he had come to think of her as essentially womanly, it was in a rather narrow sense; the term had by degrees lost many, even, of its warm, instinctive associations, and as he now sat thinking, near the summer-house, it took on its narrowest, if most piteous meaning. Kitty was essentially womanly. She needed some one to be in love with her. Her husband had ceased to be in love—though he had not ceased to be a loving husband—and she responded helplessly to a lover's appeal. Sir Walter's appeal was very persuasive. A ship of snowy, wing-like sails, a fairy ship, rocked on the waves at the very edge of Kitty's sheltered life. Only a shutting of the eyes, a holding of the breath, and she would be carried across the narrow intervening depth to the deck, to freedom, to safety—she would believe—to sails trimmed for an immortal romance. Would Kitty's cowardice, and Kitty's prayers—they were interwoven he felt sure—keep her for one month from running away with Sir Walter? In only a month's time she could respond and not be shattered: in only a month's time the ship of romance would be really safe, she might walk on board with no shutting of the eyes or holding of the breath. Holland gazed, and the facts became clearer and more ominous. For the lack of a knowledge that was his, Kitty and Sir Walter might wreck their lives. All the motives for the concealment of his secret, the vanity, the bravery, the cherishing tenderness that had inspired him, were scattered to the winds. The nest was a tattered, wind-pierced ruin. And he, already, was a ghost. Kitty should not lack the knowledge.

The dew was falling, and he had grown chilly. He walked back quickly to the house that he had left a little while ago so vividly aware of the sweetness that the shallow cup might hold. The cup was empty. Not a drop of self was left to hope or live for.

He waited till the next day to tell her. He did not feel a tremor, he felt too deep a fatigue.

Their meeting at dinner was a placid gliding over the depths; two hooded gondolas floating side by side, each with its shrouded secret. But skill and vigilance were his. Kitty's gondola drifted with the current, knowing no need of skill, secure of secrecy. The eyes she quietly lifted to her husband were unclouded. He guessed the inner drama that held her thoughts, the tragically beautiful role that she herself played in it. It was as a heroine that she saw herself. Why not, indeed. No heroine could have played her part more gracefully and worthily, and a heroine's innocent eyes could not be expected to see as far as his "ironic" ones.

It was the sense of distance, from her, from everything, that grew upon him during the long intervals of the night when he lay awake and watched the stars slowly cross his open window. He was no longer divided from himself, no longer groping, as in the train, to find a clue between the doomed man and the watcher. The self that he had found was adrift upon a sea, solitary indeed, and saw pigmy figures moving in the shifting lights and shadows of the shore. His mild preoccupation was with one figure, light, fluttering, foolish: she was walking near the verge of the cliff and her foothold might give way. He intended to signal to her and to point out a safe road through the cornfields, before he turned himself again to loneliness, the sky, and the sea that was soon to engulf him.

This self-obliterating immensity of mood was contracted and ruffled next morning by the trivial difficulties that stood in the way of his determination. He went to Kitty's boudoir—and, in spite of immensities, he knew that his heart beat heavily under the burden of its project, how careful he must be, how delicate—to find her interviewing the cook. In the garden, she was talking to the gardener, and afterwards, in her room, she was trying on a tea-gown before the mirror. Actually he felt some irritation.

"When can I see you, Kitty?" he asked.

Her eyes in the glass met his with surprise at his tone; but surprise was all. "See me? Here I am. What is it?—No, Cécile, the sash must knot, so; tie it more to the side."

"I want to talk over something with you."

"I'm rather busy this morning. Will after lunch do? Don't you see, Cécile, like this."

"No, it won't. I must see you now," said Holland, almost querulously.

She turned her head to look at him and a shadow crossed her face. Suddenly, he saw it, she was a little frightened.

"Of course, directly. I'll come to the library."

Seeing that fear, and smitten with compunction, a rather silly impulse made him smile at her and say:—"Don't bother to hurry. I can wait." But he did want her to hurry. He felt that he could wait no longer.

He walked up and down the library. The weariness of the day before was gone; the sweetness, of course, was gone, and the inhuman immensity was gone too. He felt oddly normal and reasonable, detached yet implicated; almost like a friendly family doctor come to break the fatal news to the ignorant wife. It was just the anxiety that the doctor might feel, the grave trouble and the twinge of awkwardness.

He had only waited for ten minutes when Kitty appeared in the doorway.

Kitty Holland was still a young woman and looked younger than her years. The roundness and blueness and steady gaze of her eyes, the bloom of her cheeks and innocent lustre of her golden hair gave an infantile quality to her loveliness. She was not a vain woman, but she was conscious of these advantages and the consciousness had touched the childlike candour and confidingness with a little artificiality, for long apparent to her husband's kindly but dispassionate eye. To other people Mrs. Holland's manner, the whispering vagueness of her voice, the wistful dwelling of her glance, was felt to be artificial only as the gold embroideries and serrated edges on the robes of a Fra Angelico angel are felt as something added and decorative. Kitty was far too intelligent to try to look like a Fra Angelico angel; she was picturesque as only the extremely fashionable can be picturesque; but Holland knew she was conscious that she reminded people of an angel, and of a child, and that she reminded herself continually of all sorts of exquisite things, partly because she was dreamily self-conscious and keenly aware of exquisiteness, and partly because he had, in their first year, the year of sails and breezes, so impressed these things upon her attention.

He himself had grown accustomed to—perhaps a little tired of—the lily poise of the head, the long, gentle hands, the floating step, quite the step of an angel aware of flower-dappled grass beneath its feet and the flutter of embroidered draperies. But Kitty, though accustomed to these graces, in herself, had not grown tired of them, they had, indeed, more and more filled the foreground of her delicate and decorative life, so that he could guess at how much his own indifference had helped to alienate her.

And now, as he turned to look at her, these half ironic, half affectionate impressions hovered as a background, and, sharply drawn upon it, with the biting acid of his new perceptions, he saw something else in Kitty's face that he had never seen before.

Already he had seen her as a womanly woman, as that in its narrowest sense. He saw her now as a type of the woman who live in and through and for their affections, and this with their sensations rather than with their intelligences. Vividly his memory struck them out;—the faces of the satisfied women, taking on, as years pass over them, as experience detaches from the craving, sentimental self, and frees the instincts to push, climb, cling in roots and tendrils for other selves, a vegetable serenity and simplicity;—and, more vividly, with discomfort in the memory, the faces of the unsatisfied; the womanly married woman whose romance is over, the spinster who has missed romance; faces chiselled to subtlety by dreams and frustration.

On Kitty's face he saw it now, that look of a subtlety childlike, innocent, of flesh rather than of spirit, yet, in its very unconsciousness, almost sinister. For a moment, as the lines of the sharp new perception etched themselves, lines gossamer-like in fineness, floating, transforming shadows rather than lines, he was afraid of his wife, afraid of the alien, mysterious force he guessed in her.

For the delicately sinister subtlety was remote from his understanding, was a subtlety that no man's face can show, capable as it is of a grossness and corruption merely animal by contrast; open and obvious. Kitty's subtlety did not make her animal: it made her more than ever like an angel; but an ambiguous angel; and to feel that he did not understand her made her strange. It was no clue to feel that she did not understand herself; it was only a further depth of mystery.

He was ashamed of his own folly in another moment, ashamed of an insight distorted and distorting, so he told himself. Over and above all such morbidities was the fact that Kitty was looking at him with the eyes of a frightened child—a real child.

The reaction from his fear, the recognition of her fear, stirred in him a love more personal than any of the vast benevolences that he had felt. He went to her and led her to the window-seat where, sitting down himself, holding both her hands in his and looking up at her standing before him, he said with the quiet of long-prepared words: "Kitty, dear, I have something that I want to tell you and that will make you, I think, a little sad. We have had happy times together, haven't we? It isn't all regret. You and I are going to part, Kitty."

She gazed at him and terror widened her eyes. She could not speak. She did not move. Her hands in his hands seemed dead.

He saw in a moment what the fear was that showed itself in this torpor of apprehension, and he hastened on so that she should not, in her dread, reveal the secret that need never be spoken.

"I'm going to die, Kitty," he said, "I had my sentence yesterday, from Dr. Farebrother. I never dreamed that it was anything serious, that complaint of mine, you know,—never dreamed it even when it began to trouble me a good deal, as it has of late. But it's not what I thought. It's fatal; and it will gallop now. He gives me one month—at the very most, two months." He spoke deliberately, though swiftly, and, as he finished, he smiled up at her, a reassuring smile. His wife's dilated eyes, fixed on him, made him flush a little in the ensuing pause. He felt that the smile had been inept. He had spoken too much from the height of his detachment, and the placidity of his words might well seem horrible to her.

She was finding it horrible. She seemed to be breathing the icy air of a vault that he had opened before her; heavy, slow, painful breaths, those of a sleeper oppressed by nightmare; the sound of them, the sight of her labouring breast hurt him. He put his arms around her and smiled now, as one smiles at a child to console it. "I've frightened you," he said; "forgive me. You see, one gets used to it, so soon, for oneself. Dear little Kitty, I'm so sorry."

Still she did not speak. Still it was that torpid terror that gazed at him. And the terror was not for what he had thought it was; it was for what he had said. It was a contagious terror. She cared. In some unexplained, unforeseen way she cared terribly; and his projects crumbled beneath her gaze; bewilderment drifted in his mind; her fear gained him.

"What is the matter? What is it?" he asked.

The change and sharpness in his voice brought them near at last. Kitty seized his hands and lifted them from her; yet grasping, clinging as she held him off. He would not have thought her face capable of such fierceness and demand. She was hardly recognisable as she said: "Do you want to die? Don't you mind dying?"

"Mind?—I should rather not, of course. I care for my life. But one must face it; what else is there to do?—And,—what is it Kitty? What have I done to you?"

And now, her head fallen back, her eyes closed, tears ran down her face, as piteously, agonised and stricken, she asked:

"Don't you love me at all? Don't you mind leaving me at all?"

His astonishment was so great that for a moment it bereft him of words. He had risen and was holding her; her eyes were closed and she sobbed and sobbed, her head fallen back. And her passion of sorrow and despair, her loveliness, too, and youth, seized and shook him; so that all the things he had not felt yet, all the hovering, dreadful things, the dark forms of the cavern, encompassed, pressed upon him; despair and longing, the horror of annihilation, the agonising sweetness of life. It was as if a hidden wound had been opened and that his blood was gushing forth, not to peace, but to pain and torment. He felt his own sobs rising; she cared; how much she cared. It was as if her caring gave him back the self that yesterday had blotted out; in her pain he knew his own; in her self he saw and mourned his own doomed and piteous self. His head leaned to hers and his lips sought hers, when, suddenly, a furious memory came, and indignation suffocated him.

He thrust her violently away, holding her by the shoulders. "How dare you! how dare you!" he cried. "You don't love me. You don't mind my dying. How dare you torture me like this—when it's not real,—when I was at peace."

It was like a wild, impossible dream. Their faces stared at each other; their hands seized each other; they spoke, their voices clashing, and shaken by strangling sobs.

"How dare you say that to me! You have broken my heart! You haven't cared for years—for years!" Kitty cried. "I've longed—longed. It is too horrible. How dare you come and tell me that you are going to die and that it will make me a little sad. Oh! I love you—and you are horrible to me."

"You are lying, Kitty—you are lying!"

"That too! You can say that! To me! To me!"

"It's true. You know you lie. I haven't loved you as I did. But I've cared—good God! I see now how much.—It is you who have ceased to care."

At these words Kitty was transfigured. Joy, joy unmistakable, flamed up in her. It mounted to her eyes and lips, revivifying her ravaged face, beaming forth, inundating him, unfaltering, assured, absolute. "Darling—darling—you love me? you do love me?—Oh, you shan't die—I won't let you die. My love will keep you with me. We will forget all these years when we haven't understood—when we've forgotten. We will forget everything—except that we love each other and that that is all there is to live for in the world."

"And—Sir Walter?—" he said, simply and helplessly.

Kitty's arms were about his neck, her transfigured face was upturned to him. Worshipped by those eyes, held in that embrace, his words, in his own ears, were absurd. Yet he hadn't been dreaming yesterday. Kitty might make the words seem absurd; but even Kitty's eyes and Kitty's arms could not conjure away the facts of the sunlit summer-house, the tears, the parting kiss. What of Sir Walter? What else was there left to say?

But after he had said them, and stood looking at her, it was as if his words released the last depths of her rapture. She did not flush or falter or show, even, any shock or surprise. Her arms about him, her eyes on his, it was a stiller, a more solemn joy that dwelt on him and enfolded him.

"You know?" she said.

"I heard you last evening," Holland answered. "I was sitting outside the summer-house. You said you loved him. You let him kiss you."

"You will forgive me," said Kitty. They were looking at each other like two children. "I thought I loved him, because I was so unhappy, and he is so dear and kind and loves me so much. I must love some one. I must be loved. I was so lonely. And you seemed not to care at all any more. You were only my husband, you weren't my lover.—And you don't know all. He doesn't know it. But I know it now. And I must tell you everything—all the dreadful weakness—you must understand it all. Perhaps, if this hadn't come, perhaps, if you hadn't been given back to me like this, I might have gone away with him, Nicholas. It wasn't that I had ceased to love you; it was that I had to be loved and was weak before love. It is dreadful;—I believe all women are like that. And I did struggle, oh, I did. Nicholas, you will forgive me?"

"I knew it, dear, and I forgave you."

"You knew it? You loved me so much that you forgave?"

"That was why I told you, Kitty. I hadn't meant to tell you; I had meant to keep it from you, this sadness, and to make our last month together a happy one for you. I was coming back to you with such longing, dear. And then I heard; and then I was afraid that you might go away before you would be free."

"You loved me so much? You did it because you loved me so much?—Oh! Nicholas—Nicholas!"

"That was why I said those horrible things. I wanted you to be happy. I didn't think you could be more than a little sad when you knew that you were going to be free. Foolish, darling Kitty—you are sure it's me you do love?"

Again she could not speak, but it was her joy that made her silent. She was no more to be disbelieved than an angel appearing in the vault, irradiating the darkness. Flowers sprang beneath her footsteps; her smile was life. And the memory of his own cynical vision of her smote him with a self-reproach that deepened tenderness. She was only subtle, only sinister, when shut away, unloved. She was womanly, meant for love only, and her folly made her the more lovable. Love was all that was left him. One month of love. His hands yielded to her hands; his eyes answered her eyes. The fragrance of the flowers was in the air, the flutter of heavenly garments. One month of life; but how flat, how mean, how dusty seemed the arduous outer world of the last years; how deep the goblet of enchantment that the unambiguous angel held out to him.

CHAPTER III

There were two cups to drink, for he had to put the cup of death to her lips. He told her all as they walked in the garden that afternoon; of the growing gravity of symptoms, the interview with the great specialist to whom his own doctor, unwilling to pronounce a final verdict, had sent him. He begged her to spare him further interviews. He was to die, that was evident; and doctors could do nothing for him. If pain came he promised that he would take what relief they had to give.

She leaned her head against his shoulder, weeping and weeping as they walked.

They were two lovers again, lovers shut into the straitest, most compassed paradise. On every side the iron walls enclosed them; there were no distances; there was no horizon. But within the circle of doom blossomed the mazy sweetness; the very sky seemed to have narrowed to the roofing of a bower.

To be in love again; to feel the whole world beating like a doubled pulse of you-and-I to and fro between them. She must weep, and he, with this newly born self, must know to the full the pang and bitterness; but the moments blossomed and smiled over the dread; because the dread was there. Sir Walter passed away like a shadow. Kitty saw him and came to her husband from the interview with a composure that almost made him laugh. It would have hurt her feelings for him to laugh at her, and he listened gravely while she told him that Sir Walter, now, was going to accept the big post in India that, for her sake, he had been on the point of refusing. He was going away that very night. She had been perfectly frank with him; she had explained to him—"quite simply and gently" said Kitty—that she had been very foolish and had let her friendship for him, her fondness, and her loneliness mislead her; yes, she had told him quite simply that he would always be a dear, dear friend, but that she was in love with her husband.

The poor toy. The child, with placid hands and unpitying eyes, had snapped it across the middle and walked away from it. He didn't need her to say it again; he saw that she had ceased completely to love Sir Walter. "And weren't you sorry for him at all?" he asked.

"Sorry? Of course, dear, how can you ask?" said Kitty. "I was as tender as possible. But you know, I can't but feel that he deserved punishment. Oh, I know that I did, too!—don't think me hard and self-righteous. But see—see, darling, what you have saved me from! Remember what he wanted me to do. Oh—it was wrong and cruel of him. I shall never be able to forgive him, just because I was so weak—just because I did listen."

"Ah, do forgive him—just because you were so strong that you never let him guess that you were weak," said Holland. He was very sorry for Sir Walter. And he was conscious, since he might not smile outwardly, of smiling inwardly over the ruthlessness of women towards the man, loved no longer, who has tarnished their image in their own eyes. The angel held him fast in Paradise, but something in him, a mere sense of humour, the humour of the outer world, perhaps, escaped her at moments, looked down at her, at himself, at Paradise, and accepted comedy as well as tragedy. It was only to these places of silence, loneliness and contemplation that Kitty did not come.

She shared sorrow and joy. She guessed too well at the terrors; she would be beside him, her very heart beating on his, through all the valley of the shadow; he would be able to spare her nothing, and even in death he would not be alone. And she was joy. The years of pining and lassitude, the toying with danger, the furnace of affliction that, in the library, had burned the dross from her soul, all had made another woman of Kitty from his girl-bride of six years before. She was joy; she knew how to make it, to give it. She surprised him continually with her inventiveness in rapture. When fear came upon them, she folded it from him with encircling arms. When fear passed, she seemed to lead him out into the dew and sunlight of early morning and to show him new paths, new flowers, new bowers of bliss. All artifice, all self-centred dreaminess, all the littler charms, dropped from her. She was as candid, as single-minded, as passionate as a newly created Eve, and she seemed dowered with a magic power of diversity in simplicity. There was no forethought or plan in her triumph over satiety. Like a flower, or an Eve, she seemed alive with the instinctive impulse that grows from change to change, from beauty to further beauty. Holland, summer-day after summer-day, was conscious only of joy and sorrow; of these, and of the still places where, sometimes, he seemed to hover above them. The serpent of weariness still slept.

"Tell me, dearest," said Kitty one day—how they talked and talked about themselves, recapturing every mutual memory, analysing long-forgotten scenes and motives, explaining themselves, accusing themselves, for the joy of being forgiven—"Tell me; you loved me so much that you were willing to give me up to him, to make me happy, and to save me;—but, if you hadn't been going to die—oh darling!—then you would have loved me too much to give me up, wouldn't you?"

His arm was about her, a book between them—unread, it usually was unread—and they were sitting in the re-consecrated summer-house; Kitty had insisted on that punishment for herself, had knelt down before her husband there and, despite his protest, had kissed his hands, with tears; the summer-house had become their sweetest retreat.

He answered her now swiftly, and with a little relief for the obvious answer: "But then I couldn't have set you free, dear."

"No;" Kitty mused. "I see. But—would the fear of losing me have made you re-fall in love with me? You know you only re-fell, darling, only knew how much you cared when you thought I was deceiving you, lying to you, in saying that I loved you; but you would have loved me—not in that dreadful, big, inhuman way—but loved me, just me—loved me enough to fight for me, wouldn't you?"

He looked into her adoring, insistent eyes and a little shadow of memory crossed his mind. Was she an altogether unambiguous angel? Was it there, the subtlety, in her eyes, her smile; something sweet, insinuating, insatiable? And as she fondled him, leaning close and questioning, it was as though a little eddy of dust from the outer world blew into Paradise through an unguarded gate. Well, why should not the dear angel have a little dust on its shining hair? It was a foolish angel, as he knew; and it lived for love, as he knew; and women who did that and who didn't get loved enough grew to look subtle—he remembered the swift train of thought. But Kitty was loved enough, so that there must be no subtlety to make her beauty stranger and less sweet, and in Paradise one forgot the outer world and need not consider it again; it was done with him and he with it, so that he answered, smiling, "I would have loved you for yourself; I would have fought for you."

"And won me," she murmured, hiding her face on his breast. "Oh, Nick, if only it had been sooner, sooner."

Her suffering sanctified even the shadow; but he remembered it; remembered that the dust had blown in. It lay, though so lightly, on the angel's hair, on the blossoms, on the bowers, and it made him think, at times, of the outer world, of his old judgments and values. He would have had to fight for her, of course; he would have had to save her; but it wouldn't have been because he had "re-fallen." That was a secret that he kept from Kitty; it belonged to the contemplative region of thought, where he was alone. And in Paradise, it seemed, one was forced to tell only half-truths.

Their ties with the outer world were all slackened during these days. No one knew the secret of the doomed honeymoon. The one or two friends who dropped in upon them for a night seemed like quaint marionettes crossing a stage that now and then they agreed to have set up before the bower. These figures, their own relation to them, quickened the sense of secrecy and love. Their eyes sought each other past unconscious eyes; they had lovers' dexterities in meeting unobserved by their guests, gay little escapades when they would run away for an hour drifting on the river or wandering in the woods. And the formalities and chatter of social life—all these queer people interested in queer things, people who used the present only for the future, who were always planning and looking forward,—made the hidden truths the sharper and sweeter. Nothing, for the two lovers, was to go on. That was the truth that made the marionettes so insignificant and that made their love so deep. There was, for them, no looking forward, no adapting of means to ends. There were no ends, or, rather, they were always at the end. And there was nothing for them to do except to love each other.

"I feel sometimes as if we had become a Pierrot and a Pierrette," Holland said to her. "It's for that, I suppose, that a Pierrot is such an uncanny and charming creature;—the future doesn't exist for him at all."

Kitty, who had always been a literal person, and whose literalness had now become so beautifully appropriate,—for what is literalness but a seeing of the fact as standing still?—Kitty tried to smile but begged him not to jest about such things.

"I'm not jesting, darling. I'm only musing on our strange state. It's like a fairy-tale, the life we lead."

She turned her head, with the pathetic gesture grown habitual with her of late, and hid her eyes on his shoulder. "Oh, darling," she said, "do you hate to leave me!"

She had felt the moment of detached fancy as separative, and he had now to soothe her passionate weeping.

He found that there was a certain pendulum-swing of mood in Paradise. Emotion was the being of this mood, and to keep emotion one must swing.

Either he must soothe Kitty or Kitty must soothe him, or they must transcend the dark necessities of their case by finding in each other a joy including in its ecstasy the sorrow it obliterated. This pendulum swung spontaneously during those first weeks, it swung as their hearts beat, from need to response. And, at the beginning of the third week, it was not so much a faltering in the need or the response that Holland knew, as a mere lessening of the swing;—it didn't go quite so fast or carry him quite so far. He became conscious of an unequal rhythm; Kitty seemed to swing even faster and further.

She saw him as dead; that was the urgent vision that lay behind her demonstrations and ministrations; she saw him as more dead with every day that passed, and every moment of every day was, to her, of passionate significance. No one had ever been idealised as he was idealised, or clung to as he was clung to. The sense of desperate tendrils enlacing him was almost suffocating, and each tendril craved for recognition; a lapse, a look, an inattention was the cutting of something that bled, and clung the closer. Every moment was precious, and any not given to love was a robbery from her dwindling store. As the time grew less her need for significance grew greater. Her sense of her own tragedy grew with her sense of his, and he must share both. Resignation to his fate was a resignation of her, and a crime against their love. Holland by degrees grew conscious of keeping himself up to a mark.

It was then that the blossoms began to look a little over-blown, the paths to become monotonous, the bowers to grow oppressive with their heavy sweetness as though a noonday sun beat down changelessly upon them. The dew was gone, and though Kitty remained a primitive Eve, he himself knew that in his conscious ardour there hovered the vague presence of something no longer pure, something unwholesome and enervating.

She saw him as dead, and the thought of death, always with her, renewed her pity and her adoration; he knew that his own background lent a charm enthralling and poignant to his every word, look and gesture. But for him this charm and this renewal were lacking. He could not feel such pity, either for her or for himself. She was to live, poor little Kitty, and, by degrees, the tragedy would fade and the beauty of their last weeks together would remain with her. There was no cavern yawning behind Kitty's figure; life, inexorably, showed him her smiling future.

And, for himself; well, if it was tragic to have to die, it was a tragedy one got used to. He might have felt it more if only Kitty hadn't been there to feel it so superabundantly for him. No: he could keep up; he could see to it that the pendulum didn't falter; but he couldn't hide from himself that its swing was growing mechanical.

By the end of the third week the serpent was awake and walking in Paradise. Holland was tired; profoundly tired.

He found his wife's eyes on him one day as they sat with books under the trees on the lawn. He tried to read the books now, though in a casual manner that would offer no offence to Kitty's unoccupied hands and eyes. He wanted very much to read and to forget himself—to forget Kitty—for a little while. It was difficult to do this when such a desultory air must be assumed, when he must be ready to answer anything she said at a moment's notice, and must remember to look up and smile at her or to read some passage aloud to her at every few pages. But he had been trying thus to combine oblivion and alertness when a longer interval than usual of the first held him beguiled, and alertness, when it returned, returned too late. Kitty's eyes made him think of the eyes she had gazed with on the day of revelation in the library. They were candid, they were frightened; the eyes of the real child. Now, as then, they were drinking in some new knowledge; a new fear and an old fear, come close at last, were pressing on her. He felt so tired that he would have liked to look away and to have pretended not to see; but he was not so tired as to be cruel, and he tried to smile at her, as, tilting his hat over his eyes so that they were shadowed, he asked her what she was thinking of.

She rose and came to him, kneeling down beside his chair and putting her hands on his shoulders.

"What is the matter, Kitty?" he asked her, as he had asked on that morning three weeks before.

"Nicholas—Nicholas—are you feeling worse?" she returned.

Holland was surprised and almost relieved. It was no new demand, it was merely a sharper fear. And perhaps she was right, perhaps he was feeling worse and the end was approaching. If so, any languor would be taken as symptomatic of dissolution and not of indifference, and he might relax his hold. Actually a deep wave of satisfaction seemed to go lapping through him.

"I don't feel badly, dear," he said, smoothing back her hair. "You know, I shall suffer hardly any pain; but I do feel very tired."

"In what way tired?" Another alarm was in her voice.

"Bodily fatigue, dear. Of course, one doesn't die without fading."

He felt, when he had said it, that the words, in spite of his care, were cruel; that she would feel them as cruel; he had gone too fast; had tried to grasp at his immunity too hastily.

"Nicholas!" she gasped. "You speak as if I were accusing you!"

"Accusing me, darling! How could you be! Of what?"

"Oh, Nick," she sobbed, hiding her face on his breast,—"Am I tiring you? Do you sometimes want me to go away and to leave you more alone?"

His heart stood still. Over her bowed head he looked at the sunlit trees and flowers, the hazy glory of the summer day, a phantasmagoric setting to this knot of human pain and fear, and he said to himself that unless he were very careful he might hurt her irremediably; he might rob her of the memory that was to beautify everything when he was gone.

He had found in a moment, he felt sure, just the right quiet tone, expressing a comprehension too deep for the fear of any misunderstanding between them. "There would be no me left, Kitty, if you went away. I am you—all that there is of me. You are life itself; don't talk of robbing me of any of it; I have so little left."

She was silent for a moment, not lifting her face, no longer weeping. Then in a voice curiously hushed and controlled she said: "How quiet you are; how peaceful you are—how terribly peaceful."

"You want me to be at peace, don't you, dear?"

"You don't mind leaving life. You don't mind leaving me," she said.

"Kitty—Kitty——"

She interrupted his protest: "I've nothing to give you but love; I've never had anything to give you but love. And you are tired of that. You are going, you are going for ever. I shall never see you again. And you don't mind! You don't mind!" She broke into dreadful sobs.

Helpless and tormented he held her, trying to soothe, to reassure, to convince, recovering, even, in the vehemence of his pity, the very tones of passionate love, the personal note that her quick ear had felt fading. She sobbed, and sobbed, but answered him at last, in the pathetic little child language of their first honeymoon that they had revived and enriched with new, sweet follies. But he felt that she was not really comforted, that she tried to delude herself.

"You do feel tired—in your body—only in your body?—not in your soul?" she repeated. "It isn't I, it's only you."

"It's only I who am dying," he almost felt that, with grim irony, he would have liked to answer for her complete reassurance. The funny, ugly, pathetic truth peeped out at him; she would rather have him die than have him cease to love her.

Soulless sylvan creatures, dryads, nymphs, seemed to gaze from green shadows among branches; the mocking faces of pucks and elves to tilt and smile in the breeze-shaken flowers;—that subtle gaze, that sinister smile, of what did it remind him? All Nature was laughing at him, cruelly laughing; yet all Nature was consoling him.

His love and Kitty's was a flower rooted in death and contradiction. Not affinity, not the growing needs of normal life had brought them together; only the magic of doom and the craving to be loved.

Poor Kitty; she did not know. It was his love she loved, his love she clung to and watched for and caressed. She did not know it, but she would rather have him dead than have him loveless. That was the truth that smiled the sinister smile. One might summon one's courage to smile back at it, but one was rather glad to be leaving it—and Kitty.

And, in the days that followed, when from the pretence of passion he could find refuge only in the pretence of dying, disgust crept into the weariness, he began to wonder when the pretence would become reality. He began to want to die.

This weariness, this irritation, this disgust belonged to life rather than to death; it was a sharp longing to escape from consciousness of Kitty—Kitty, alert and agonised in her suspicion. It was a nostalgic longing for the old, tame, dusty life, his work, his selfless interests. The month was almost up, and yet he was no worse; was he really going to last for another month?

He said to Kitty one morning that he must go up to town. Her face grew ashen. "The doctor! You are going to the doctor, Nicholas?"

"No, no; it's only that Collier is passing through. I heard from him this morning. He wants to see me."

"Why should you bother and think about work now, darling?"

"Why, dearest, I must be of any use I can until the end."

He tried to keep lightness in his voice and patience out of it.

"Let him come down here. I'll write myself and ask him." She, too, was assuming something. She, too, was afraid of him, as he of her.

"He hasn't time. He is on his way to the Continent."

"It will be bad for you to travel now. And London in August!" Her voice was grave, reproachfully tender.

"No, dear, I promise you I will run no risk."

"Promise as much as you will"—now, gaily, sweetly, falsely, but how pathetically, she clasped her hands about his arm;—"but I couldn't think of letting you go alone: you didn't really believe I'd let you go alone, darling: I'll come too, of course. Won't that be fun!—Oh, Nick, you want me to come! You don't want to get away!"—The falsity broke down and the full anguish of her suspicion was in her voice and eyes. It was this sincerity that pierced him and made him helpless—sick and helpless. He was able now to blindfold its dreadful clear-sightedness by swift resource: he acted his delight, his gratitude: he hadn't liked to ask his dearest—all the bother for only a day and night; he had thought it would bore her, for he must be most of the time with Collier; but, yes, they would go together, since she petted him so; they would do a play; he would help her choose a new hat; it would be great fun.

Yet, while he knotted the handkerchief around her eyes, turned her about and confused her sense of direction, as if in a merry game, he knew that fear and suspicion lurked for them both in their playing.

He had, indeed, meant to go to the doctor, but now that must be postponed. The meeting with Collier, his chief at the Home Office, was his only gulp of freedom. At the hotel Kitty waited, and his heart smote him when he found her sitting just as he had left her, mute, white, smiling and enduring. She hadn't even been to her dressmaker's or done any shopping as she had promised him to do. "I know I am absurd;—I know you think me, silly;—but I can't—I can't do anything—think anything—but you!" she said, her lips trembling.

"Absurd, darling, indeed!" he answered, "as if you couldn't think of me and order a new dress at the same time! You know I told you I wanted to see you in a pale blue lawn—isn't lawn the pretty stuff?—And what of the hat? You do want one?—Come, let us go out and I'll help you to choose it."

But she did not want to go out; she only wanted to sit near him, lean her head against him, have him make up to her for the hours of loneliness. He knew that night at the play that she hardly heard a word, and that when once or twice, he was lured from his absorption and made to laugh, really forgetting, really amused, his laughter hurt her. She gazed at the stage with wide, vacant eyes. He felt the strain of being in town with this desperate devotion beside him worse than the strain of being shut up with it in the country; for there Kitty need hide and repress nothing, and his danger of hurting her by forgetfulness was not so great. He was like a prisoner led about by his gaoler, manacles on his wrists and ankles and a yoke on his neck; there was a certain relief in going back to prison where, at all events, one wasn't so tormented by the sights and sounds of freedom, nor so conscious of chains and the watchful eye upon one.

"This is the end," he thought, as, in the train, they sat side by side, holding hands and very silent, but that, from time to time, when their eyes met, she would smile her doting, hungry smile and murmur: "Darling."

After this, the prison again; the high walls and stifling sweetness of Paradise, and then, thank goodness, release.

How strange a contrast to the journey a month ago, when, stunned, shot through, he had only felt the bliss of home-coming, the longing for the nest. It was all nest now; there was no space for the fear of death. He was shut in, smothered by this panting breast of love.

CHAPTER IV

He knew that evening that Kitty was horribly frightened from the fact that she was horribly careful. She did not once press for assurances or demonstrations of love. She foresaw all his needs, even his need of silence. Delicately assiduous, she pulled his chair near the lamp for him, lit his cigar, cut the pages of his review, even brought a footstool for his feet, saying, when he protested, "You are tired, darling; you must let me wait on you."

"And won't you read, or sew,—or do something, dear?" he asked, as she drew her low chair near his.

"I only want to sit here quietly, and look at your dear face," she said.

And she sat there, quietly, not moving, not speaking, only mutely, gently, fiercely watching him. Holland felt his hand tremble as he turned the pages.

A full hour passed so. Accurately, punctually, he turned the pages; he had not understood one page; and he had not once looked up.

It was almost a sense of nightmare that grew upon him, as if he were going to sit there for ever, hearing the clock tick, hearing Kitty breathe, knowing that he was watched. Fear, pity, and repulsion filled his soul.

He longed at last to hear her voice. He did not dare to hear his own; something in it would have broken and revealed him to her; but if she would but speak the nightmare might pass. And, with the longing, furtively, involuntarily, he glanced round at her.

Her eyes were on him, fixed, shining. How horrible;—how ridiculous. Their gaze smote upon his heart and shattered something,—the nightmare, or the repulsion. An hysterical sob and laugh rose in his throat. He dropped the review, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and the tears ran down his face.

She was there, of course, poor creature, there, close, holding him, moaning, weeping with him. He could do nothing but yield to her arms, feel his head pillowed on her breast, and mingle his tears with hers; but horribly, ridiculously, he knew that laughter as well as weeping shook him.

And he heard her saying "Oh, my darling—my darling—is it because you must leave me?"—and heard himself answering "Yes, because I must leave you."

"You love me—so much—so much——"

"So much," he echoed.

And, her voice rising to a cry, he knew how dead, as if sounded from the cavern, his echo had been: "You are not dying! Not now!" And it was again only the echo he could give her: "Not now," it came. Why not now? Why could it not be, mercifully now? When in heaven's name was he going to die?

A strong suspicion rose in him and seemed to pulse into life with the strong beat of his heart. How strong a beat it was; how faint and far any whispers of the old ill. What if he were not going to die? What if he were to go on loving Kitty for a lifetime?

And at that the mere hysterics conquered the tears; he burst out laughing. There, on Kitty's breast, he laughed and laughed, helpless, cruel and ridiculous.

Terrified, she tried to still him. When he lifted his face he saw that hers was ashen, set to meet the tragedy of imminent parting. Did she think it the death rattle?

He flung his head back from her kisses, flung himself back from her arms. Still laughing the convulsive laugh he got up and pushed away the chair.

"I'm tired—I'm so tired, Kitty," he said.

She sat, her hands fallen in her lap, staring at him.

"You are tired, too," he went on; "it's been a tiring day, hasn't it?—we have been through a lot, haven't we, poor Kitty? Poor Kitty:—do go to bed now. Will you go to bed, and leave me here to rest a little?"

"Nicholas, are you mad—what has happened to you?" she murmured, spellbound, not daring to move.

"Why, I'm ill, you know; I'm very ill. I'm not mad—I'm only so abominably tired. You mustn't ask questions; I can't stand it,—I can't stand it——" And, leaning his arms on the back of the chair, resting his face on them, with tears of sheer fatigue, tears untouched by laughter—"I'm so tired. I want to be alone," he sobbed.

The abominable moments that followed were more full of shame for him than any he had even known:—of shame, and of relief. He had torn his way, with his words, out of the nest; he had fallen to the ground. He was ashamed and horrified, yet—oh, the joy, the deep joy of being on the ground, out in the cold, fresh world, out of the nest.

At last he heard her speak, slowly, softly, with difficulty, as though she were afraid of angering him. "Shall I go away, Nicholas?"

His face was still hidden. "Yes, do go to bed," he answered.

"I can do nothing for you?"

"Nothing, dear."

"You are not dying?"

"No; I'm not feeling in the least ill."

"You would—send for me—if you were dying?"

"Dear Kitty,—of course."

"And——" she had risen, not daring to draw near, he knew that the trembling voice came through tears:—"And, you love me? you love me a little?"

"Dear Kitty—of course I love you."

It was over. She was gone. She had not asked for his good-night kiss. It was like a sword between them.

He drew a long breath, lifting his head.

Alone. There was ecstasy in the thought.

He walked out into the garden and looked up at the stars as he walked. There had been no stars in the nest.

He didn't think of death. There had been too much thinking of death; that was one of the things he was tired of. Still less did he want to think of Kitty or of himself.

He looked at the stars and thought of them, but not in any manner emotional or poetical; he thought of astronomical facts, dry, sound, delightful facts: he looked at the darkened trees and dim flowers and thought of botany: the earth he trod on was full of scientific interest; the Pierrots, the fairies and the angels—yes, the angels too—were vanished. He hungered for impersonal interests and information.

Kitty would, indeed, have thought him mad; after the calming walk he came in, lit a cigar and sat for hours studying.

Before Kitty was up next morning he was on his way back to London to see the great specialist.

It was a long visit he paid, an astonishing visit, though the astonishment, really, was not his; life had seemed deeply to have promised something when he had ceased to think of death—when he had ceased to want death, even. That strong beating of his heart had been a mute forestalling. The astonishment was the good, great doctor's, and it was reiterated with an emphasis that showed something of wounded professional pride beneath it. It was, indeed, humiliating to have made such a complete mistake, to have seen only one significance in symptoms that, to far-sightedness clairvoyant enough, should have hinted, at all events, at another, and, as a result, to have doomed to speedy death a man now obviously as far from dying as oneself: "I can't forgive myself for robbing you of a month of life," the doctor said. "A month with death at the end of it can't be called a month of life."

"Very much of life," said Holland. "So much so that I hardly know yet whether I am glad or sorry that you were mistaken."

He indeed hardly did know. All the way down in the train he was thinking intently of the new complicated life that had been given back to him, and of what he should do with it. At moments the thought seemed to overwhelm him, to draw him into gulfs deeper than death's had been.

All through that month life had meant the moment only. The vistas and horizons seemed now to open and flash and make him dizzy. How could he take up again the burden of far ends and tangled purposes? The dust of coming conflicts seemed to rise to his nostrils. Life was perilous and appalling in its fluctuating immensity.

But, with all the disillusion and irony of his new experience, with all the unwholesome languor that had unstrung his will, some deeper wisdom, also, had been given him. He could turn from the nightmare vision that saw time as eternity.

The walk in the night had brought a message. He could not say it, nor see it clearly, but the sense of its presence was like the coolness and freshness of wings fanning away fevers and nightmare. Somewhere there it hovered, the significance of the message, somewhere in those allied yet contrasted thoughts of eternity and time.

There had been his mistake, his and Kitty's, the mistake that had meant irony and lassitude and corruption. To heap all time into the moment, to make a false eternity of it, was to arrest something, to stop blood from flowing, thought from growing, was to create a nightmare distortion, a monstrous, ballooned travesty of the eternity that, in moving life, could never be more, could never be less, than the ideal life sought unceasingly.

As for Paradise, what more grotesque illusion than to see it with walls around it, what more piteous dream than to feel it narrowed to a nest?

CHAPTER V

He found Kitty alone in the drawing-room, alone, with empty hands and empty, waiting eyes. He saw that she had wept, and that his departure, only a brief note to break it to her, had added deep indignation to her sorrow. She was no longer timid, nor cowed by the change she felt in him. She had cast aside subtlety and appeal. It was a challenge that met him in her eyes.

He had intended to tell her his news at once and the preparatory smile was on his lips as he entered, a smile, though he did not know this, strangely like that smile of reassurance and consolation that had met her in the library a month ago.

But she gave him no time for a word.

Leaping from her chair she faced him, and with a vision still clearer than that which had showed him subtlety a month ago, he saw now her pettiness, her piteousness, her girlish violence and weakness. "Cruel! Cruel! Cruel!"—she cried.

He remained standing at a little distance from her, looking at her sadly and appealingly. Her words of reproach rushed forth and overwhelmed him like a frenzied torrent.

"To leave me without a word, after last night! You treat me like a dog that one kicks aside because it wearies one with its love. You have no heart—I've felt it for days and days!—No heart! You hate me! You despise me! And what have I done to deserve it but love—love—love you—like the poor dog! But I know—I know—It is Sir Walter. You can't forgive me that—It has poisoned everything—that ignorant folly of mine. At first you thought you could forgive, and then you grew to hate me. And I—I—" her voice choked, gasped into sobs;—"I have only loved you—loved you—more and more——"

"Kitty, you are mistaken," said Holland. "I've never given Sir Walter a thought." It was a reed she grasped at in the torrent, he saw that well;—a desperate hope.

"It's false!" she cried. "You have! You thought at first that you would be magnanimous and save me,—you could be magnanimous because you were going to die—it's easy enough to be magnanimous if you are going to die! easy enough to be peaceful and sad—and to stand there and smile and smile as if you were only sorry for me. But you found out that you were alive enough to be jealous after all, and that you could not really forgive me, and then you hated me."

"Kitty—you know that you do not believe what you are saying."

"Can you deny that if you had been going to live you would not have forgiven me?"

"I can. I could have forgiven. But then, as I said to you—that day, Kitty, on the lawn,—it would have been more difficult to save you."

"Your love, then, was a pretence to save me!"

"Nothing was pretence, at first," he answered her patiently. "At first I was only glad for your sake that I was going to be out of the way so soon; and when I found that you could care for me again I was glad that I had still a month to live with you."

His words smote on her heart like stones. He saw it and yearned over her pain; but such yearning, such dispassionate tenderness was, he knew, the poison in her veins that maddened her.

She looked, now, at last, at the truth. He had not put it into words, but with the abandonment of her specious hope she saw and spoke it.

"It was, then, because it was only for a month."

He hesitated, seeing, too. "That I was glad?"

"That you loved me."

Across the room, in a long silence, they looked at each other. And in the silence another truth came to him, cruel, clear, salutary.

"Wasn't it, perhaps, for both of us, because it was only for a month?"

The shock went as visibly through her as though it had, indeed, been a stone hurled at her breast. "You mean—you mean—" she stammered—"Oh—you don't believe that I love you—You believe that it could pass, with me, as it has with you!" She threw herself into the chair, casting her arms on the back, burying her face in them.

Holland, timidly, approached her. He was afraid of the revelation he must make. "I believe that you do love me, Kitty, and that I love you; but not in the way we thought. We neither of us could go on loving like that; it was because it was only for a month that we thought we could. It wasn't real."

"Oh," she sobbed, "that is the difference—the cruel difference. You love me in that terrible way—the way that could give me up and not mind; but I am in love with you;—that's the dreadful difference. Men get over it; but women are always in love."

Perhaps Kitty saw further than he did. Holland was abashed before the helpless revelation of a mysterious and alien sorrow. For women the brooding dream; for men the active dusty world. Yet even here, on the threshold of a secret, absurd, yet perhaps, in its absurdity, lovelier than man's sterner visions, he felt that, for her sake, he must draw her away from the contemplation of it. That was one thing he had learned, for Kitty. She, too, must manage to fly—or fall—out of the nest; she must get, in some way, more dust into her life. He had forgotten the news he was to tell her; he had forgotten all but her need.

"Perhaps that is true, dear Kitty," he said; "but isn't it, in a way, that women are merely in love. It's not with anybody; or, rather, it is with anybody—with me or with Sir Walter; I mean, anybody who seems to promise more love. Horrible I sound, I know. Forgive me. But I wish I could shake you out of being in love. I want you to be more my comrade than you have been. Don't let us think so much of love."

But Kitty moaned: "I don't want a comrade. I want a lover."

And, in the silence that followed, lifting her head suddenly, she fixed her eyes on him.

"You talk as if we could be comrades," she said. "You talk as if we were to go on living together. What did the doctor say? I don't believe that you are going to die."

He felt ridiculous now. The real tragedy was there, between them; but the tragedy upon which all their fictitious romance had been built was to tumble about their ears.

It was as if he had all along been deceiving, misleading her, acting on false pretences, winning her love by his borrowed funereal splendour. Almost shamefacedly, looking down and stammering over the silly confession, he said: "It was all a mistake. I'm not going to die."

He did not look at her for some moments. He was sure that she was deaf and breathless with the crash and crumbling.

Presently, when he did raise his eyes, he found that she was staring at him, curiously, intently. She had found herself: she had found him; and—oh yes—he saw it—he was far from her. The stare, essentially, was one of a hard hostility. She had been betrayed and robbed; she could not forgive him.

"Kitty," he said timidly, "are you sorry?"

Her sombre gaze dwelt on him.

"Tell me you're not sorry," he pleaded.

She answered him at last: "How dare you ask me that? How dare you ask me whether I am sorry that you are not going to die? You must know that it is an insult."

"I mean—if I disappointed—failed you so—"

"I must wish you dead? You have a charming idea of me."

How her voice clashed and clanged with the hardness, the warfare, the uproar of the outer world. After the hush, the gentleness of Paradise, it was like being thrown, dizzy and bewildered, among the traffic and turmoil of a great city.

"Don't be cruel," he murmured.

"I? Cruel!" she laughed.

She got up and walked up and down the room. A fever of desperate, baffled anger burned in her. He saw that she did not trust herself to speak. She was afraid of betraying, to herself and to him, the ugly distortion of her soul.

He was not to die; he was not her lover; and Kitty was the primitive woman. She could be in love, but she could not love unless pity were appealed to. His loss of all passion had killed her romance. His loss of all pathos had, perhaps, killed even human tenderness. For it was he who had drawn away. She was humiliated to the dust.

And that she made a great effort upon herself, so that to his eyes the ugliness might not be betrayed, he guessed presently when, looking persistently away from him and out at the garden—their garden! alas!—where a fine rain fell silently, she said: "I am glad that your sorrow is over. I hope that you will find happier things—and realler things—than you have found in this month. I will remember all that you have said to-day. I think that you have cured me for ever. I shall not be in love again."

"Kitty! Kitty!" he breathed out. She hurt him too much, the poor child, arming its empty heart against him. "Don't speak like that. Remember—the month has been beautiful."

The tears rose in her eyes, but the hostility did not leave them. "Beautiful? When it has not been real?"

"Can't we remember the beauty—make something more real?" he now almost wept. But there it was, the shallow, the hard child's heart. He was not in love with her. And, like a nest of snakes, the memory of all her humiliations—her appeals, her proffered love, his evasions and withdrawals—was awake within her. She smiled, a smile that, seeking magnanimity, found only bitterness. "You must speak for yourself, dear Nicholas. For me it was real, and you have spoiled the beauty."

The servants came in while she spoke and she moved aside to make way for the placing of the tea-table. Traces of the fever were upon her yet; her delicate face was flushed, her eyes sparkled. But she had regained the place she meant to keep. She would own to no discomfitures deeper than those that were creditable to her. Moving here and there, touching the flowers in a vase, straightening reviews scattered on a table, she was even able to smile again at him a smile almost kind, and keeping, before him, as well as for the servants, all the advantage of composure.

That smile would often meet him throughout life, and so he would see her, moving delicately and gracefully, making order and comeliness about her, for many years. She set the key. It was the key of their future life together, Holland knew, as he heard her say: "Do sit down and rest. You must want your tea after that tiresome journey."

THE WHITE PAGODA