Edith Wharton - SSC 10 (8 page)

 
          
“Not
what?”

 
          
“I’m
sorry; I don’t believe I know what I’m saying. I’ve got a blinding headache.”
He looked wan and furrowed enough for the statement to be true, but she was
exasperated by his evasion.

 
          
“Ah, yes; the gray-envelope headache!”

 
          
She
saw the surprise in his eyes. “I’d forgotten how closely I’ve been watched,” he
said coldly. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go up and try an hour in the
dark, to see if I can get rid of this neuralgia.”

 
          
She
wavered; then she said, with desperate resolution: “I’m sorry your head aches.
But before you go I want to say that sooner or later this question must be
settled between us.

 
          
Someone
is trying to separate us, and I don’t care what it costs me to find out who it
is.” She looked him steadily in the eyes. “If it costs me your love, I don’t
care! If I can’t have your confidence I don’t want anything from you.”

 
          
He
still looked at her wistfully. “Give me time.”

 
          
“Time for what?
It’s only a word to say.”

 
          
“Time to show you that you haven’t lost my love or my confidence.”

 
          
“Well,
I’m waiting.”

 
          
He
turned toward the door, and then glanced back hesitatingly. “Oh, do wait, my
love,” he said, and went out of the room.

 
          
She
heard his tired step on the stairs and the closing of his bedroom door above.
Then she dropped into a chair and buried her face in her folded arms. Her first
movement was one of compunction; she seemed to herself to have been hard,
unhuman,
unimaginative
. “Think of telling him that I
didn’t care if my insistence cost me his love!
The lying
rubbish!”
She started up to follow him and unsay the meaningless words.
But she was checked by a reflection. He had had his way, after all; he had
eluded all attacks on his secret, and now he was shut up alone in his room,
reading that other woman’s letter.

 
          
  

 
          
She
was still reflecting on this when the surprised parlourmaid came in and found
her. No,
Charlotte
said, she wasn’t going to dress for dinner;
Mr. Ashby didn’t want to dine. He was very tired and had gone up to his room to
rest; later she would have something brought on a tray to the drawing-room. She
mounted the stairs to her bedroom. Her dinner dress was lying on the bed, and
at the sight the quiet routine of her daily life took hold of her and she began
to feel as if the strange talk she had just had with her husband must have
taken place in another world, between two beings who were not Charlotte Gorse
and Kenneth Ashby, but phantoms projected by her fevered imagination. She
recalled the year since her marriage—her husband’s constant devotion; his
persistent, almost too insistent tenderness; the feeling he had given her at
times of being too eagerly dependent on her, too searchingly close to her, as
if there were not air enough between her soul and his. It seemed preposterous,
as she recalled all this, that a few moments ago she should have been accusing
him of an intrigue with another woman! But, then, what—

 
          
Again
she was moved by the impulse to go up to him, beg his pardon and try to laugh
away the misunderstanding. But she was restrained by the tear of forcing
herself upon his privacy. He was troubled and unhappy, oppressed by some grief
or tear; and he had shown her that he wanted to fight out his battle alone. It
would be wiser, as well as more generous, to respect his wish. Only, how
strange, how unbearable, to be there, in the next room to his, and feel herself
at the other end of the world! In her nervous agitation she almost regretted
not having had the courage to open the letter and put it back on the hall table
before he came in. At least she would have known what his secret was, and the
bogy might have been laid. For she was beginning now to think of the mystery as
something conscious, malevolent: a secret persecution before which he quailed,
yet from which he could not free himself. Once or twice in his evasive eyes she
thought she had detected a desire for help, an impulse of confession, instantly
restrained and suppressed. It was as if he felt she could have helped him if
she had known, and vet had been unable to tell her!

 
          
There
flashed through her mind the idea of going to his mother. She was very fond of
old Mrs. Ashby, a firm-fleshed clear-eyed old lady, with an astringent
bluntness of speech which responded to the forthright and simple in
Charlotte
’s own nature. There had been a tacit bond
between them ever since the day when Mrs. Ashby senior, coming to lunch for the
first time with her new daughter-in-law, had been received by Charlotte
downstairs in the library, and glancing up at the empty wall above her son’s
desk, had remarked laconically: “Elsie gone, eh?” adding, at Charlotte’s
murmured explanation: “Nonsense. Don’t have her back.
Two’s
company.”
Charlotte
, at this reading of her thoughts, could hardly refrain from exchanging
a smile of complicity with her mother-in-law; and it seemed to her now that
Mrs. Ashby’s almost uncanny directness might pierce to the core of this new
mystery. But here again she hesitated, for the idea almost suggested a
betrayal. What right had she to call in any one, even so close a relation, to
surprise a secret which her husband was trying to keep from her? “Perhaps, by
and by, he’ll talk to his mother of his own accord,” she thought, and then
ended: “But what does it matter? He and I must settle it between us.”

 
          
She
was still brooding over the problem when there was a knock on the door and her
husband came in. He was dressed for dinner and seemed surprised to see her
sitting there, with her evening dress lying unheeded on the bed.

 
          
“Aren’t
you coming down?”

 
          
“I
thought you were not well and had gone to bed,” she faltered.

 
          
He
forced a smile. “I’m not particularly well, but we’d better go down.” His face,
though still drawn, looked calmer than when he had fled upstairs an hour
earlier.

 
          
“There
it is; he knows what’s in the letter and has fought his battle out again,
whatever it is,” she reflected, “while I’m still in darkness.” She rang and
gave a hurried order that dinner should be served as soon as possible—just a
short meal, whatever could be got ready quickly, as both she and Mr. Ashby were
rather tired and not very hungry.

 
          
Dinner
was announced, and they sat down to it. At first neither seemed able to find a
word to say; then Ashby began to make conversation with an assumption of ease
that was more oppressive than his silence. “How tired he is!
How
terribly overtired!”
Charlotte
said to herself, pursuing her own thoughts while he rambled on about
municipal politics, aviation,
an
exhibition of modern
French painting, the health of an old aunt and the installing of the automatic
telephone. “Good heavens, how tired he is!”

 
          
When
they dined alone they usually went into the library after dinner, and
Charlotte
curled herself up on the divan with her
knitting while he settled down in his armchair under the lamp and lit a pipe.
But this evening, by tacit agreement, they avoided the room in which their
strange talk had taken place, and went up to
Charlotte
’s drawing-room.

 
          
They
sat down near the fire, and
Charlotte
said: “Your pipe?” after he had put down his hardly tasted coffee.

 
          
He
shook his head.
“No, not tonight.”

 
          
“You
must go to bed early; you look terribly tired. I’m sure they overwork you at
the office.”

 
          
“I
suppose we all overwork at times.”

 
          
She
rose and stood before him with sudden resolution. “Well, I’m not going to have
you use up your strength slaving in that way. It’s absurd. I can see you’re
ill.” She bent over him and laid her hand on his forehead.
“My
poor old Kenneth.
Prepare to be taken away soon on a long holiday.”

 
          
He
looked up at her, startled.
“A holiday?”

 
          
“Certainly.
Didn’t you know I was going to carry you off at
Easter? We’re going to start in a fortnight on a month’s voyage to somewhere or
other.
On any one of the big cruising steamers.”
She
paused and bent closer, touching his forehead with her lips. “I’m tired, too,
Kenneth.”

 
          
He
seemed to pay no heed to her last words, but sat, his hands on his knees, his
head drawn back a little from her caress, and looked up at her with a stare of
apprehension.
“Again?
My dear, we can’t; I can’t
possibly go away.”

 
          
“I
don’t know why you say ‘again’, Kenneth; we haven’t taken a real holiday this
year.”

 
          
“At
Christmas we spent a week with the children in the country.”

 
          
“Yes,
but this time I mean away from the children, from servants, from the house.
From everything that’s familiar and fatiguing. Your mother will love to have
Joyce and Peter with her.”

 
          
He
frowned and slowly shook his head. “No, dear; I can’t leave them with my
mother.”

 
          
“Why,
Kenneth, how absurd! She adores them. You didn’t hesitate to leave them with
her for over two months when we went to the
West Indies
.”

 
          
He
drew a deep breath and stood up uneasily. “That was different.”

 
          
“Different?
Why?”

 
          
“I
mean, at that time I didn’t realize”—He broke off as if to choose his words and
then went on: “My mother adores the children, as you say. But she isn’t always
very judicious. Grandmothers always spoil children. And she sometimes talks
before them without thinking.” He turned to his wife with an almost pitiful
gesture of entreaty. “Don’t ask me to, dear.”

 
          
Charlotte
mused. It was true that the elder Mrs.
Ashby had a fearless tongue, but she was the last woman in the world to say or
hint anything before her grandchildren at which the most scrupulous parent
could take offense.
Charlotte
looked at her husband in perplexity.

 
          
“I
don’t understand.”

 
          
He
continued to turn on her the same troubled and entreating gaze. “Don’t try to,”
he muttered.

 
          
“Not
try to?”

 
          
“Not
now—not yet.” He put up his hands and pressed them against his temples. “Can’t
you see that there’s no use in insisting? I can’t go away, no matter how much I
might want to.”

 
          
Charlotte
still scrutinized him gravely. “The
question is
,
do
you want to?”

 
          
He
returned her gaze for a moment; then his lips began to tremble, and he said,
hardly above his breath: “I want—anything you want.”

 
          
“And
yet—”

 
          
“Don’t
ask me. I can’t leave—I can’t!”