Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
The Builders
CHAPTER III
Man's Woman
FROM the second drawing-room, where Angelica had tea every afternoon, there drifted the fragrance of burning cedar, and as Blackburn walked quickly toward the glow of the fire, he saw his wife in her favourite chair with deep wings, and Alan Wythe stretched languidly on the white fur rug at her feet. Mary was not there. She had evidently just finished tea, for her riding-crop lay on a chair by the door; but when Blackburn called her name, Alan stopped his reading and replied in his pleasant voice, "I think she has gone out to the stable. William came to tell her that one of the horses had a cough."
"Then I'll find her. She seems out of sorts, and I'm trying to make her see the doctor."
"I am sorry for that." Laying aside the book, Alan sprang to his feet, and stood gazing anxiously into the other's face. "She always appears so strong that one comes to take her fitness as a matter of course."
"Yes, I never saw her look badly until the last day or two. Have you noticed it, Angelica?"
Without replying to his question, Angelica rested her head against the pink velvet cushion, and turned a gentle, uncomprehending stare on his face. It was her most disconcerting expression, for in the soft blankness and immobility of her look, he read a rebuke which she was either too amiable or too well-bred to utter. He wondered what he had done that was wrong, and, in the very instant of wondering, he felt himself grow confused and angry and aggressive. This was always the effect of her stare and her silence – for nature had provided her with an invincible weapon in her mere lack of volubility – and when she used it as deliberately as she did now, she could, without speaking a syllable, goad him to the very limit of his endurance. It was as if her delicate hands played on his nerves and evoked an emotional discord.
"Have you noticed that Mary is not well?" he asked sharply, and while he spoke, he became aware that Alan's face had lost its friendliness.
"No, I had not noticed it." Her voice dropped as softly as liquid honey from her lips. "I thought her looking very well and cheerful at tea." She spoke without movement or gesture; but the patient and resigned droop of her figure, the sad grey eyes, and the hurt quiver of her eyelashes, implied the reproach she had been too gentle to put into words. The contrast with her meekness made him appear rough and harsh; yet the knowledge of this, instead of softening him, only increased his sense of humiliation and bitterness.
"Perhaps, then, there is no need of my speaking to her?" he said.
"It might please her." She was sympathetic now about Mary. "I am sure that she would like to know how anxious you are."
For the first time since he had entered the room she was smiling, and this slow, rare smile threw a golden radiance over her features. He thought, as Caroline had done several afternoons ago, that her beauty, which had grown a little dim and pale during the autumn, had come back with an April colour and freshness. Not only her hair and eyes, but the ivory tint of her skin seemed to shine with a new lustre, as if from some hidden fire that was burning within. For a minute the old appeal to his senses returned, and he felt again the beat and quiver of his pulses which her presence used to arouse. Then his mind won the victory, and the emotion faded to ashes before its warmth had passed to his heart.
"I'll go and find her," he said again, with the awkwardness he always showed when he was with her.
Her smile vanished, and she leaned forward with an entreating gesture, which flowed through all the slender, exquisite lines of her body. Instinctively he knew that she had not finished with him yet; that she was not ready to let him go until he had served some inscrutable purpose which she had had in view from the beginning. His mind was not trained to recognize subtleties of intention or thought; and while he waited for her to reveal herself, he began wondering what she could possibly want with him now? Clearly it was all part of some intricate scheme; yet it appeared incredible to his blunter perceptions that she should exhaust the resources of her intelligence merely for the empty satisfaction of impressing Mary's lover.
"David," she began in a pleading tone, "aren't you going to have tea with me?"
"I had it upstairs." He was baffled and at bay before an attack which he could not understand.
"In the nursery?" Her voice trembled slightly.
"Yes, in the nursery." As if she had ever expected or desired him to interrupt her amusements!
"Was Cousin Matty up there?" Though he was still unable to define her motive, his ears detected the faint note of suspense that ruffled the thin, clear quality of her voice.
"No, only Letty and Miss Meade."
A tremor crossed her face, as if he had struck her; then she said, not reproachfully, but with a pathetic air of self-effacement and humility, "Miss Meade is very intelligent. I am so glad you have found someone you like to talk to. I know I am dull about politics." And her eyes added wistfully, "It isn't my fault that I am not so clever."
"Yes, she is intelligent," he answered drily; and then, still mystified and dully resentful because he could not understand, he turned and went out as abruptly as he had entered.
While his footsteps passed through the long front drawing-room and across the hall, Angelica remained motionless, with her head bent a little sadly, as if she were listening to the echo of some half-forgotten sorrow. Then, sighing gently, she looked from Alan into the fire, and reluctantly back at Alan again. She seemed impulsively, against her will and her conscience, to turn to him for understanding and sympathy; and at the sight of her unspoken appeal, he threw himself on the rug at her feet, and exclaimed in a strangled voice,
"You are unhappy!" With these three words, into which he seemed to put infinity, he had broken down the walls of reticence that divide human souls from each other. She was unhappy! Before this one torrential discovery all the restraints of habit and tradition, of conscience and honour, vanished like the imperfect structures of man in the rage of the hurricane.
She shivered, and looked at him with a long frightened gaze. There was no rebellion, there was only a passive sadness in her face. She was too weak, her eyes said, to contend with unhappiness. Some stronger hands than hers must snatch her from her doom if she were to be rescued.
"How can I be happy?" The words were wrung slowly from her lips. "You see how it is?"
"Yes, I see." He honestly imagined that he did. "I see it all, and it makes me desperate. It is unbelievable that any one should make you suffer."
She shook her head and answered in a whisper, "It is partly my fault. Whatever happens, I always try to remember that, and be just. The first mistake may have been mine."
"Yours?" he exclaimed passionately, and then dropping his face into his hands, "If only I were not powerless to protect you!"
For a moment, after his smothered cry, she said nothing. Then, with an exquisite gesture of renunciation, she put the world and its temptations away from her. "We are both powerless," she responded firmly, "and now you must read me the rest of your play, or I shall be obliged to send you home."
Blackburn, meanwhile, had stopped outside on his way to the stable, and stood looking across the garden for some faint prospect of a clearer to-morrow. Overhead the winter sky was dull and leaden; but in the west a thin silver line edged the horizon, and his gaze hung on this thread of light, as if it were prophetic not only of sunshine, but of happiness. Already he was blaming himself for the scene with Angelica; already he was resolving to make a stronger effort at reconciliation and understanding, to win her back in spite of herself, to be patient, sympathetic, and generous, rather than just, in his judgment of her. In his more philosophical moments he beheld her less as the vehicle of personal disenchantment, than as the unfortunate victim of a false system, of a ruinous upbringing. She had been taught to grasp until grasping had become not so much a habit of gesture, as a reflex movement of soul – an involuntary reaction to the nerve stimulus of her surroundings.
Though he had learned that the sight of any object she did not own immediately awoke in her the instinct of possession, he still told himself, in hours of tolerance, that this weakness of nature was the result of early poverty and lack of mental discipline, and that disappointment with material things would develop her character as inevitably as it would destroy her physical charm. So far, he was obliged to admit, she had risen superior to any disillusionment from possession, with the ironic exception of that brief moment when she had possessed his adoration; yet, in spite of innumerable failures, it was characteristic of the man that he should cling stubbornly to his belief in some secret inherent virtue in her nature, as he had clung, when love failed him, to the frail sentiments of habit and association. The richness of her beauty had blinded him for so long to the poverty of her heart, that, even to-day, bruised and humiliated as he was, he found himself suddenly hoping that she might some day change miraculously into the woman he had believed her to be. The old half-forgotten yearning for her swept over him while he thought of her, the yearning to kneel at her feet, to kiss her hands, to lift his eyes and see her bending like an angel above him. And in his thoughts she came back to him, not as she was in reality, but as he longed for her to be. With one of those delusive impersonations of memory, which torment the heart after the mind has rejected them, she came back to him with her hands outstretched to bless, not to grasp, and a look of goodness and love in her face.
He remembered his first meeting with her – the close, over-heated rooms, the empty faces, the loud, triumphant music; and then suddenly she had bloomed there, like a white flower, in the midst of all that was ineffectual and meaningless. One minute he had been lonely, tired, depressed, and the next he was rested and happy and full of wild, startled dreams of the future. She had been girlish and shy and just a little aloof – all the feminine graces adorned her – and he had surrendered in the traditional masculine way. Afterwards he discovered that she had intended from the first instant to marry him; but on that evening he had seen only her faint, reluctant flight from his rising emotion. She had played the game so well; she had used the ancient decoy so cleverly, that it had taken years to tear the veil of illusion from the bare structure of method. For he knew now that she had been methodical, that she had been utterly unemotional; and that her angelic virtue had been mere thinness of temperament. Never for a moment had she been real, never had she been natural; and he admitted, in the passing mood of confession, that if she had once been natural – as natural as the woman upstairs – the chances were that she would never have won him. Manlike, he would have turned from the blade-straight nature to pursue the beckoning angel of the faint reluctance. If she had stooped but for an instant, if she had given him so much as the touch of her fingers, she might have lost him. Life, not instinct, had taught him the beauty of sincerity in woman, the grace of generosity. In his youth, it was woman as mystery, woman as destroyer, to whom he had surrendered.
Descending the steps from the terrace, he walked slowly along the brick way to the stable, where he found Mary giving medicine to her favourite horse.
"Briar Rose has a bad cough, David."
He asked a few questions, and then, when the dose was administered, they turned together, and strolled back through the garden. Mary looked cross and anxious, and he could tell by the way she spoke in short jerks that her nerves were not steady. Her tone of chaffing had lost its ease, and the effort she made to appear flippant seemed to hurt her.
"Are you all right again, Mary?"
"Quite all right. Why shouldn't I be?"
"There's no reason that I know of," he replied seriously. "Have you decided when you will be married?"
She winced as if he had touched a nerve. "No, we haven't decided." For a minute she walked on quickly, then looking up with a defiant smile, she said, "I am not sure that we are ever going to be married."
So the trouble was out at last! He breathed heavily, overcome by some indefinable dread. After all, why should Mary's words have disturbed him so deeply? The chances were, he told himself, that it was nothing more than the usual lovers' quarrel.
"My dear, Alan is a good fellow. Don't let anything make trouble between you."
"Oh, I know he is a good fellow – only – only I am not sure we – we should be happy together. I don't care about books, and he doesn't care any longer for horses – "
"As if these things mattered! You've got the fundamental thing, haven't you?"
"The fundamental thing?" She was deliberately evading him – she, the straightforward Mary!
"I mean, of course, that you care for each other."
At this she broke down, and threw out her hands with a gesture of despair. "I don't know. I used to think so, but I don't know any longer," she answered, and fled from him into the house.
As he looked after her he felt the obscure doubt struggling again in his mind, and with it there returned the minor problem of his financial difficulties, and the conversation he must sooner or later have with Angelica. Nothing in his acquaintance with Angelica had surprised him more than the discovery that, except in the embellishment of her own attractions, she could be not only prudent, but stingy. Even her extravagance – if a habit of spending that exacted an adequate return for every dollar could be called extravagance – was cautious and cold like her temperament, as if Nature had decreed that she should possess no single attribute of soul in abundance. No impulse had ever swept her away, not even the impulse to grasp. She had always calculated, always schemed with her mind, not her senses, always moved slowly and deliberately toward her purpose. She would never speak the truth, he knew, just as she would never over-step a convention, because truthfulness and unconventionality would have interfered equally with the success of her designs. Life had become for her only a pedestal which supported an image; and this image, as unlike the actual Angelica as a Christmas angel is unlike a human being, was reflected, in all its tinselled glory, in the minds of her neighbours. Before the world she would be always blameless, wronged, and forgiving. He knew these things with his mind, yet there were moments even now when his heart still desired her.
An hour later, when he entered her sitting-room, he found her, in a blue robe, on the sofa in front of the fire. Of late he had noticed that she seldom lay down in the afternoon, and as she was not a woman of moods, he was surprised that she had broken so easily through a habit which had become as fixed as a religious observance.
"It doesn't look as if you had had much rest to-day," he said, as he entered.
She looked up with an expression that struck him as incongruously triumphant. Though at another time he would have accepted this as an auspicious omen, he wondered now, after the episode of the afternoon, if she were merely gathering her forces for a fresh attack. He shrank from approaching her on the subject of economy, because experience had taught him that her first idea of saving would be to cut down the wages of the servants; and he had a disturbing recollection that she had met his last suggestion that they should reduce expenses with a reminder that it was unnecessary to employ a trained nurse to look after Letty. When she wanted to strike hardest, she invariably struck through the child. Though she was not clever, she had been sharp enough to discover the chink in his armour.
"Did you find Mary?" she asked.
"Yes, she seems out of sorts. What is the trouble between her and Alan?"
"Is there any trouble?" She appeared surprised.
"I fear so. She told me she was not sure that they were going to be married."
"Did she say that?"
"She said it, but she may not have meant it. I cannot understand."
Angelica pondered his words. "Well, I've noticed lately that she wasn't very nice to him."
"But she was wildly in love with him. She cannot have changed so suddenly."
"Why not?" She raised her eyebrows slightly. "People do change, don't they?"
"Not when they are like Mary." With a gesture of perplexity, he put the subject away from him. "What I really came to tell you isn't very much better," he said. "Of late, since the war began, things have been going rather badly with me. I dare say I'll manage to pull up sooner or later, but every interest in which I am heavily involved has been more or less affected by the condition of the country. If we should go into this war – "
She looked up sharply. "Don't you think we can manage to keep out of it?"
"To keep out of it?" Even now there were moments when she astonished him.
For the first time in months her impatience got the better of her. "Oh, I know, of course, that you would like us to fight Germany; but it seems to me that if you stopped to think of all the suffering it would mean – "
"I do stop to think."
"Then there isn't any use talking!"
"Not about that; but considering the uncertainty of the immediate future, don't you think we might try, in some way, to cut down a bit?"
Turning away from him, she gazed thoughtfully into the fire. "If it is really necessary – ?"
"It may become necessary at any moment."
At this she looked straight up at him. "Well, since Letty is so much better, I am sure that there is no need for us to keep a trained nurse for her."
She had aimed squarely, and he flinched at the blow. "But the child is so happy."
"She would be just as happy with any one else."
"No other nurse has ever done so much for her. Why, she has been like a different child since Miss Meade came to her."
While he spoke he became aware that she was looking at him as she had looked in the drawing-room.
"Then you refuse positively to let me send Miss Meade away?"
"I refuse positively, once and for all."
Her blank, uncomprehending stare followed him as he turned and went out of the room.
CHAPTER IV
The Martyr
A fortnight later light was thrown on Blackburn's perplexity by a shrewd question from Mrs. Timberlake. For days he had been groping in darkness, and now, in one instant, it seemed to him that his discovery leaped out in a veritable blaze of electricity. How could he have gone on in ignorance? How could he have stumbled, with unseeing eyes, over the heart of the problem?
"David," said the housekeeper bluntly, "don't you think that this thing has been going on long enough?" They were in the library, and before putting the question, she had closed the door and even glanced suspiciously at the windows.
"This thing?" He looked up from his newspaper, with the vague idea that she was about to discourse upon our diplomatic correspondence with Germany.
"I am not talking about the President's notes." Her voice had grown rasping. "He may write as many as he pleases, if they will make the Germans behave themselves without our having to go to war. What I mean is the way Mary is eating her heart out. Haven't you noticed it?"
"I have been worried about her for some time." He laid the paper down on the desk. "But I haven't been able to discover what is the matter."
"If you had asked me two months ago, I could have told you it was about that young fool Alan."
"About Wythe? Why, I thought she and Wythe were particularly devoted." If he were sparring for time, there was no hint of it in his manner. It really looked, the housekeeper told herself grimly, as if he had not seen the thing that was directly before his eyes until she had pointed it out to him.
"They were," she answered tartly, "at one time."
"Well, what is the trouble now? A lovers' quarrel?"
It was a guiding principle with Mrs. Timberlake that when her conscience drove her she never looked at her road; and true to this intemperate practice, she plunged now straight ahead. "The trouble is that Alan has been making a fool of himself over Angelica." It was the first time that she had implied the faintest criticism of his wife, and as soon as she had uttered the words, her courage evaporated, and she relapsed into her attitude of caustic reticence. Even her figure, in its rusty black, looked shrunken and huddled.
"So that is it!" His voice was careless and indifferent. "You mean he has been flattered because she has let him read his plays to her?"
"He hasn't known when to stop. If something isn't done, he will go on reading them for ever."
"Well, if Angelica enjoys them?"
"But it makes Mary very unhappy. Can't you see that she is breaking her heart over it?"
"Angelica doesn't know." He might have been stating a fact about one of the belligerent nations.
"Oh, of course." She grasped at the impersonal note, but it escaped her. "If she only knew, she could so easily stop it."
"So you think if someone were to mention it?"
"That is why I came to you. I thought you might manage to drop a word that would let Angelica see how much it is hurting Mary. She wouldn't want to hurt Mary just for the sake of a little amusement. The plays can't be so very important, or they would be on the stage, wouldn't they?"
"Could you tell her, do you think?" It was the first time he had ever attempted to evade a disagreeable duty, and the question surprised her.
"Angelica wouldn't listen to a word I said. She'd just think I'd made it up, and I reckon it does look like a tempest in a teapot."
He met this gravely. "Well, it is natural that she shouldn't take a thing like that seriously."
"Yes, it's natural." She conceded the point ungrudgingly. "I believe Angelica would die before she would do anything really wrong."
If he accepted this in silence, it was not because the tribute to Angelica's character appeared to him to constitute an unanswerable argument. During the weeks when he had been groping his way to firmer ground, he had passed beyond the mental boundaries in which Angelica and her standards wore any longer the aspect of truth. He knew them to be not only artificial, but false; and Mrs. Timberlake's praise was scarcely more than a hollow echo from the world that he had left. That Angelica, who would lie and cheat for an advantage, could be held, through mere coldness of nature, to be above "doing anything really wrong," was a fallacy which had once deluded his heart, but failed now to convince his intelligence. Once he had believed in the sacred myth of her virtue; now, brought close against the deeper realities, he saw that her virtue was only a negation, and that true goodness must be, above all things, an affirmation of spirit.
"I'll see what I can do," he said, and wondered why the words had not worn threadbare.
"You mean you'll speak to Angelica?" Her relief rasped his nerves.
"Yes, I'll speak to Angelica."
"Don't you think it would be better to talk first to Mary?"
Before replying, he thought over this carefully. "Perhaps it would be better. Will you tell her that I'd like to see her immediately?"
She nodded and went out quickly, and it seemed to him that the door had barely closed before it opened again, and Mary came in with a brave step and a manner of unnatural alertness and buoyancy.
"David, do you really think we are going to have war?" It was an awkward evasion, but she had not learned either to evade or equivocate gracefully.
"I think we are about to break off diplomatic relations – "
"And that means war, doesn't it?"
"Who knows?" He made a gesture of impatience. "You are trying to climb up on the knees of the gods."
"I want to go," she replied breathlessly, "whether we have war or not, I want to go to France. Will you help me?"
"Of course I will help you."
"I mean will you give me money?"
"I will give you anything I've got. It isn't so much as it used to be."
"It will be enough for me. I want to go at once – next week – to-morrow."
He looked at her attentively, his grave, lucid eyes ranging thoughtfully over her strong, plain face, which had grown pale and haggard, over her boyish figure, which had grown thin and wasted.
"Mary," he said suddenly, "what is the trouble? Is it an honest desire for service or is it – the open door?"
For a minute she looked at him with frightened eyes; then breaking down utterly, she buried her face in her hands and turned from him. "Oh, David, I must get away! I cannot live unless I get away!"
"From Briarlay?"
"From Briarlay, but most of all – oh, most of all," she brought this out with passion, "from Alan!"
"Then you no longer care for him?"
Instead of answering his question, she dashed the tears from her eyes, and threw back her head with a gesture that reminded him of the old boyish Mary. "Will you let me go, David?"
"Not until you have told me the truth."
"But what is the truth?" She cried out, with sudden anger. "Do you suppose I am the kind of woman to talk of a man's being 'taken away,' as if he were a loaf of bread to be handed from one woman to another? If he had ever been what I believed him, do you imagine that any one could have 'taken' him? Is there any man on earth who could have taken me from Alan?"
"What has made the trouble, Mary?" He put the question very slowly, as if he were weighing every word that he uttered.
She flung the pretense aside as bravely as she had dashed the tears from her eyes. "Of course I have known all along that she was only flirting – that she was only playing the game – "
"Then you think that the young fool has been taking Angelica too seriously?"
At this her anger flashed out again. "Seriously enough to make me break my engagement!"
"All because he likes to read his plays to her?"
"All because he imagines her to be misunderstood and unhappy and ill-treated. Oh, David, will you never wake up? How much longer are you going to walk about the world in your sleep? No one has said a breath against Angelica – no one ever will – she isn't that kind. But unless you wish Alan to be ruined, you must send him away."
"Isn't she the one to send him away?"
"Then go to her. Go to her now, and tell her that she must do it to-day."
"Yes, I will tell her that." Even while he spoke the words which would have once wrung his heart, he was visited by that strange flashing sense of unreality, of the insignificance and transitoriness of Angelica's existence. Like Mrs. Timberlake's antiquated standards of virtue, she belonged to a world which might vanish while he watched it and leave him still surrounded by the substantial structure of life.
"Then tell her now. I hear her in the hall," said Mary brusquely, as she turned away.
"It is not likely that she will come in here," he answered, but the words were scarcely spoken before Angelica's silvery tones floated to them.
"David, may I come in? I have news for you." An instant later, as Mary went out, with her air of arrogant sincerity, a triumphant figure in grey velvet passed her in the doorway.
"I saw Robert and Cousin Charles a moment ago, and they told me that we had really broken off relations with Germany – "
She had not meant to linger over the news, but while she was speaking, he crossed the room and closed the door gently behind her.
"Don't you think now we have done all that is necessary?" she demanded triumphantly. "Cousin Charles says we have vindicated our honour at last."
Blackburn smiled slightly. The sense of unreality, which had been vague and fugitive a moment before, rolled over and enveloped him. "It is rather like refusing to bow to a man who has murdered one's wife."
A frown clouded her face. "Oh, I know all you men are hoping for war, even Alan, and you would think an artist would see things differently."
"Do you think Alan is hoping for it?"
"Aren't you every one except Cousin Charles? Robert told me just now that Virginia is beginning to boil over. He believes the country will force the President's hand. Oh, I wonder if the world will ever be sane and safe again?"
He was watching her so closely that he appeared to be drinking in the sound of her voice and the sight of her loveliness; yet never for an instant did he lose the feeling that she was as ephemeral as a tinted cloud or a perfume.
"Angelica," he said abruptly, "Mary has just told me that she has broken her engagement to Alan."
Tiny sparks leaped to her eyes. "Well, I suppose they wouldn't have been happy together – "
"Do you know why she did it?"
"Do I know why?" She looked at him inquiringly. "How could I know? She has not told me."
"Has Alan said anything to you about it?"
"Why, yes, he told me that she had broken it."
"And did he tell you why?"
She was becoming irritated by the cross examination. "No, why should he tell me? It is their affair, isn't it? Now, if that is all, I must go. Alan has brought the first act of a new play, and he wants my opinion."
The finishing thrust was like her, for she could be bold enough when she was sure of her weapons. Even now, though he knew her selfishness, it was incredible to him that she should be capable of destroying Mary's happiness when she could gain nothing by doing it. Of course if there were some advantage —
"Alan can wait," he said bluntly. "Angelica, can't you see that this has gone too far, this nonsense of Alan's?"
"This nonsense?" She raised her eyebrows. "Do you call his plays nonsense?"
"I call his plays humbug. What must stop is his folly about you. When Mary goes, you must send him away."
Her smile was like the sharp edge of a knife. "So it is Alan now? It was poor Roane only yesterday."
"It is poor Roane to-day as much as it ever was. But Alan must stop coming here."
"And why, if I may ask?"
"You cannot have understood, or you would have stopped it."
"I should have stopped what?"
