The Market-Place

CHAPTER XXV

“I DIDN'T ask your father, after all,” was one of the things that Thorpe said to his wife next day. He had the manner of one announcing a concession, albeit in an affable spirit, and she received the remark with a scant, silent nod.

Two days later he recurred to the subject. They were again upon the terrace, where he had been lounging in an easy-chair most of the day, with the books his sister had bid him read on a table beside him. He had glanced through some of them in a desultory fashion, cutting pages at random here and there, but for the most part he had looked straight before him at the broad landscape, mellowing now into soft browns and yellows under the mild, vague October sun. He had not thought much of the books, but he had a certain new sense of enjoyment in the fruits of this placid, abstracted rumination which perhaps they had helped to induce.

“About your father,” he said now, as his wife, who had come out to speak with him on some other matter, was turning to go away again: “I'm afraid I annoyed you the other day by what I said.”

“I have no recollection of it,” she told him, with tranquil politeness, over her shoulder.

He found himself all at once keenly desirous of a conversation on this topic. “But I want you to recollect,” he said, as he rose to his feet. There was a suggestion of urgency in his tone which arrested her attention. She moved slowly toward the chair, and after a little perched herself upon one of its big arms, and looked up at him where he leant against the parapet.

“I've thought of it a good deal,” he went on, in halting explanation. His purpose seemed clearer to him than were the right phrases in which to define it. “I persisted in saying that I'd do something you didn't want me to do—something that was a good deal more your affair than mine—and I've blamed myself for it. That isn't at all what I want to do.”

Her face as well as her silence showed her to be at a loss for an appropriate comment. She was plainly surprised, and seemingly embarrassed as well. “I'm sure you always wish to be nice,” she said at last. The words and tone were alike gracious, but he detected in them somewhere a perfunctory note.

“Oh—nice!” he echoed, in a sudden stress of impatience with the word. “Damn being 'nice'! Anybody can be 'nice.' I'm thinking of something ten thousand times bigger than being 'nice.'”

“I withdraw the word immediately—unreservedly,” she put in, with a smile in which he read that genial mockery he knew so well.

“You laugh at me—whenever I try to talk seriously,” he objected.

“I laugh?” she queried, with an upward glance of demurely simulated amazement. “Impossible! I assure you I've forgotten how.”

“Ah, now we get to it!” he broke out, with energy. “You're really feeling about it just as I am. You're not satisfied with what we're doing—with the life we're leading—any more than I am. I see that, plain enough, now. I didn't dream of it before. Somehow I got the idea that you were enjoying it immensely—the greenhouses and gardens and all that sort of thing. And do you know who it was that put me right—that told me you hated it?”

“Oh, don't let us talk of him!” Edith exclaimed, swiftly.

Thorpe laughed. “You're wrong. It wasn't your father. I didn't see him. No—it was my sister. She's never seen you, but all the same she knew enough to give me points. She told me I was a fool to suppose you were happy here.”

“How clever of her!” A certain bantering smile accompanied the words, but on the instant it faded away. She went on with a musing gravity. “I'm sorry I don't get to know your sister. She seems an extremely real sort of person. I can understand that she might be difficult to live with—I daresay all genuine characters are—but she's very real. Although, apparently, conversation isn't her strong point, still I enjoy talking with her.”

“How do you mean?” Thorpe asked, knitting his brows in puzzlement.

“Oh, I often go to her shop—or did when I was in town. I went almost immediately after our—our return to England. I was half afraid she would recognize me—the portraits in the papers, you know—but apparently she didn't. And it's splendid—the way she says absolutely nothing more than it's necessary to say. And her candour! If she thinks books are bad she says so. Fancy that!”

He still frowned uneasily as he looked down at her. “You never mentioned to me that you had gone there,” he told her, as if in reproach.

“Ah, it was complicated,” Edith explained. “She objects to knowing me—I think secretly I respect her a great deal for that—and therefore there is something clandestine about my getting to know her—and I could not be sure how it would impress you, and really it seemed simplest not to mention it.”

“It isn't that alone,” he declared, grave-faced still, but with a softer voice. “Do you remember what I said the other day? It would make all the difference in the world to me, if—if you were really—actually my other half!”

The phrase which he had caught at seemed, as it fell upon the air, to impregnate it with some benumbing quality. The husband and wife looked dumbly, almost vacantly at one another, for what appeared a long time.

“I mean”—all at once Thorpe found tongue, and even a sort of fluency as he progressed—“I mean, if you shared things really with me! Oh, I'm not complaining; you mustn't think that. The agreement we made at the start—you've kept your part of it perfectly. You've done better than that: you've kept still about the fact that it made you unhappy.”

“Oh no,” she interposed, gently. “It is not the fact that it has made me unhappy.”

“Well—discontented, then,” he resumed, without pause. “Here we are. We do the thing we want to do—we make the kind of home for ourselves that we've agreed we would like—and then it turns out that somehow it doesn't come up to expectations. You get tired of it. I suppose, if the truth were known, I'm by way of being tired of it too. Well, if you look at it, that fact is the most important thing in the world for both of us. It's the one thing that we ought to be most anxious to discuss, and examine frankly in all its bearings—in order to see if we can't better it—but that's precisely the thing that doesn't get talked about between us. You would never have told me that you were unhappy——”

“You use the word again,” she reminded him, a wan smile softening her protest.

Thorpe stood up, and took a slow step toward the chair. He held her glance with his own, as he stood then, his head bent, gravely regarding her.

“Do you tell me that you are happy?” he asked, with sober directness.

She fluttered her hands in a little restrained gesture of comment. “You consider only the extremes,” she told him. “Between black and white there are so many colours and shades and half-tones! The whole spectrum, in fact. Hardly anybody, I should think, gets over the edge into the true black or the true white. There are always tints, modifications. People are always inside the colour-scheme, so to speak. The worst that can be said of me is that I may be in the blues—in the light-blues—but it is fair to remember that they photograph white.”

Though there was an impulse within him to resent this as trifling, he resisted it, and judicially considered her allegory. “That is to say”—he began hesitatingly.

“To the observer I am happy. To myself I am not unhappy.”

“Why won't you tell me, Edith, just where you are?”

The sound of her name was somewhat unfamiliar to their discourse. The intonation which his voice gave to it now caused her to look up quickly.

“If I could tell myself,” she answered him, after an instant's thought, “pray believe that I would tell you.”

The way seemed for the moment blocked before him, and he sighed heavily. “I want to get nearer to you,” he said, with gloom, “and I don't!”

It occurred to her to remark: “You take exception to my phraseology when I say you always try to be 'nice,' but I'm sure you know what I mean.” She offered him this assurance with a tentative smile, into which he gazed moodily.

“You didn't think I was 'nice' when you consented to marry me,” he was suddenly inspired to say. “I can't imagine your applying that word to me then in your mind. God knows what it was you did say to yourself about me, but you never said I was 'nice.' That was the last word that would have fitted me then—and now it's the only one you can think of.” The hint that somehow he had stumbled upon a clue to the mysteries enveloping him rose to prominence in his mind as he spoke. The year had wrought a baffling difference in him. He lacked something now that then he had possessed, but he was powerless to define it.

He seated himself again in the chair, and put his hand through her arm to keep her where she lightly rested beside him. “Will you tell me,” he said, with a kind of sombre gentleness, “what the word is that you would have used then? I know you wouldn't—couldn't—have called me 'nice.' What would you have called me?”

She paused in silence for a little, then slipped from the chair and stood erect, still leaving her wrist within the restraining curve of his fingers. “I suppose,” she said, musingly—“I suppose I should have said 'powerful' or 'strong.'” Then she released her arm, and in turn moved to the parapet.

“And I am weak now—I am 'nice,'” he reflected, mechanically.

In the profile he saw, as she looked away at the vast distant horizon, there was something pensive, even sad. She did not speak at once, and as he gazed at her more narrowly it seemed as if her lips were quivering. A new sense of her great beauty came to him—and with it a hint that for the instant at least her guard was down. He sprang to his feet, and stood beside her.

“You ARE going to be open with me—Edith!” he pleaded, softly.

She turned from him a little, as if to hide the signs of her agitation. “Oh, what is there to say?” she demanded, in a tone which was almost a wail. “It is not your fault. I'm not blaming you.”

“WHAT is not my fault?” he persisted with patient gentleness.

Suddenly she confronted him. There were the traces of tears upon her lashes, and serenity had fled from her face. “It is a mistake—a blunder,” she began, hurriedly. “I take it all upon my own shoulders. I was the one who did it. I should have had more judgment—more good sense!”

“You are not telling me, are you,” he asked with gravity, “that you are sorry you married me?”

“Is either of us glad?” she retorted, breathlessly. “What is there to be glad about? You are bored to death—you confess it. And I—well, it is not what I thought it would be. I deceived myself. I do not reproach you.”

“No, you keep saying that,” he observed, with gloomy slowness of utterance. “But what is it you reproach yourself with, then? We might as well have it out.”

“Yes,” she assented, with a swift reversion to calm. Her eyes met his with a glance which had in it an implacable frankness. “I married one man because he would be able to make me a Duchess. I married another because he had eighty thousand a year. That is the kind of beast I am. There is bad blood in me. You know my father; that is quite enough. I am his daughter; that explains everything.”

The exaggeration of her tone and words produced a curious effect upon him. He stared at her for a little, perceiving slowly that a new personage was being revealed to him. The mask of delicately-balanced cynicism, of amiably polite indifference, had been lifted; there was a woman of flesh and blood beneath it, after all—a woman to whom he could talk on terms of intimacy.

“Rubbish!” he said, and his big face lightened into a genial, paternal smile. “You didn't marry me for my money at all! What nonsense! I simply came along and carried you off. You couldn't help yourself. It would have been the same if I hadn't had sixpence.”

To his sharp scrutiny there seemed to flicker in her eyes a kind of answering gleam. Then she hastily averted her glance, and in this action too there was a warrant for his mounting confidence.

“The trouble has been,” he declared, “that I've been too much afraid of you. I've thought that you were made of so much finer stuff than I am, that you mustn't be touched. That was all a mistake. I see it right enough now. You ARE finer than I am—God knows there's no dispute about that—but that's no reason why I should have hung up signs of 'Hands off!' all around you, and been frightened by them myself. I had the cheek to capture you and carry you off—and I ought to have had the pluck to make you love me afterward, and keep it up. And that's what I'm going to do!”

To this declaration she offered no immediate reply, but continued to gaze with a vaguely meditative air upon the expanse of landscape spread below them. He threw a hasty glance over the windows behind him, and then with assurance passed his arm round her waist. He could not say that there was any responsive yielding to his embrace, but he did affirm to himself with new conviction, as he looked down upon the fair small head at his shoulder, with its lovely pale-brown hair drawn softly over the temples, and its glimpse of the matchless profile inclined beneath—that it was all right.

He waited for a long time, with a joyous patience, for her to speak. The mere fact that she stood beneath his engirdling arm, and gave no thought to the potential servants'-eyes behind them, was enough for present happiness. He regarded the illimitable picture commanded from his terrace with refreshed eyes; it was once again the finest view in England—and something much more than that beside.

At last, abruptly, she laughed aloud—a silvery, amused little laugh under her breath. “How comedy and tragedy tread forever on each other's heels!” she remarked. Her tone was philosophically gay, but upon reflection he did not wholly like her words.

“There wasn't any tragedy,” he said, “and there isn't any comedy.”

She laughed again. “Oh, don't say that this doesn't appeal to your sense of humour!” she urged, with mock fervour.

Thorpe sighed in such unaffected depression at this, that she seemed touched by his mood. Without stirring from his hold, she lifted her face. “Don't think I'm hateful,” she bade him, and her eyes were very kind. “There's more truth in what you've been saying than even you imagine. It really wasn't the money—or I mean it might easily have been the same if there had been no money. But how shall I explain it? I am attracted by a big, bold, strong pirate, let us say, but as soon as he has carried me off—that is the phrase for it—then he straightway renounces crime and becomes a law-abiding, peaceful citizen. My buccaneer transforms himself, under my very eyes, into an alderman! Do you say there is no comedy in that—and tragedy too?”

“Oh, put it that way and it's all right,” he declared, after a moment's consideration. “I've got as much fun in me as anybody else,” he went on, “only your jokes have a way of raising blisters on me, somehow. But that's all done with now. That's because I didn't know you—was frightened of you. But I aint scared any more. Everything is different!”

With a certain graciousness of lingering movement, she withdrew herself from his clasp, and faced him with a doubtful smile. “Ah, don't be too sure,” she murmured.

“Everything is different!” he repeated, with confident emphasis. “Don't you see yourself it is?”

“You say it is,” she replied, hesitatingly, “but that alone doesn't make it so. The assertion that life isn't empty doesn't fill it.”

“Ah, but NOW you will talk with me about all that,” he broke in triumphantly. “We've been standing off with one another. We've been of no help to each other. But we'll change that, now. We'll talk over everything together. We'll make up our minds exactly what we want to do, and then I'll tuck you under my arm and we'll set out and do it.”

She smiled with kindly tolerance for his new-born enthusiasm. “Don't count on me for too much wisdom or invention,” she warned him. “If things are to be done, you are still the one who will have to do them. But undoubtedly you are at your best when you are doing things. This really has been no sort of life for you, here.”

He gathered her arm into his. “Come and show me your greenhouses,” he said, and began walking toward the end of the terrace. “It'll turn out to have been all right for me, this year that I've spent here,” he continued, as they strolled along. There was a delightful consciousness of new intimacy conveyed by the very touch of her arm, which filled his tone with buoyancy. “I've been learning all sorts of tricks here, and getting myself into your ways of life. It's all been good training. In every way I'm a better man than I was.”

They had descended from the terrace to a garden path, and approached now a long glass structure, through the panes of which masses of soft colour—whites, yellows, pinks, mauves, and strange dull reds—were dimly perceptible.

“The chrysanthemums are not up to much this year,” Edith observed, as they drew near to the door of this house. “Collins did them very badly—as he did most other things. But next year it will be very different. Gafferson is the best chrysanthemum man in England. That is he in there now, I think.”

Thorpe stopped short, and stared at her, the while the suggestions stirred by the sound of this name slowly shaped themselves.

“Gafferson?” he asked her, with a blank countenance.

“My new head-gardener,” she explained. “He was at Hadlow, and after poor old Lady Plowden died—why, surely you remember him there. You spoke about him—you'd known him somewhere—in the West Indies, wasn't it?”

He looked into vacancy with the aspect of one stupefied. “Did I?” he mumbled automatically.

Then, with sudden decision, he swung round on the gravel. “I've got a kind of headache coming on,” he said. “If you don't mind, we won't go inside among the flowers.”