Double Harness

When Christine had been at Milldean a fortnight or so, business carried Grantley to town. The change his departure made was instantaneous and striking. A weight was off the house, the clouds dispersed. Sibylla was full of gaiety, and in that mood she could make all about her share her mirth. Above all, her devotion to Frank was given full rein. The child was always with her, and she knew no happiness save in evoking and responding to his love. She was now open and ostentatious about it, fearing no frigid glances and no implied criticism of her fond folly. Christine might well have found new ground for despair, so plainly did Sibylla display to her the blighting influence of Grantley's presence. He it was who froze up love – so Sibylla declared with an impetuous aggressive openness. But Christine would not despair. A wholesome anger rose in her heart and forbade despair. Her manner took on a coldness exceeding Grantley's indifference. She would not be a sharer in the games, a partner in the merriment, a sympathiser in the love. Sibylla was not slow to see how she stood off and drew herself away. Quickly she sought for reasons. Was it that Christine would not join in what seemed to be a league against Grantley; or was there another reason? She had told Christine how it was through Walter Blake's weakness and not through her scruples that little Frank had not been left to his fate. Did her love then seem hypocrisy? That was not true – though it might be true that remorse now had a share in it. The more the child grew to life, the more horrible became the thought that he might have died. After a day or two of smouldering protest, she broke out on Christine.

"You think I've no right to love him," she asked, "after what I was ready to do? Is that what you think? Oh, speak out plainly! I see you've got something against me."

Christine was cold and composed. Never had her delicately critical manner been more pronounced.

"I'm sure I hope you repent," she observed meditatively; "and I hope you thank heaven that man was what he turned out to be."

"Well, call it repentance, then. I suppose I've a right to repent? You can't understand how I really feel. But if it is repentance, why need you discourage it?"

"I don't discourage repentance, and I'm glad you're beginning to see that you ought to repent. But it's not that I'm thinking of."

"What are you thinking of, then?" cried Sibylla in unrestrained impatience.

"You're prepared for an open quarrel?"

"Oh, I shan't quarrel with you!" Her smile was rather disdainful.

"No, you won't quarrel with me; I'm not of enough importance to you! I'm very glad I'm not, you know. Being important to you doesn't seem to be consistent with being an independent creature."

Sibylla glanced at her in arrested attention.

"What do you mean by that?" she asked in low quick tones. The charge was so strangely like that which she was for ever formulating against Grantley. Now Christine levelled it at her.

"You call Grantley selfish," Christine went on. "You're just as bad yourself – yes, worse! He is trying to be different, I believe. Oh, I admit the poor man doesn't do it very well: he gets very little encouragement! But are you trying? No! You're quite content with yourself. You've done no wrong – Well, perhaps it was a little questionable to be ready to leave Frank to die! But even that would be all right if only I could understand it!"

"You'd better go on now," said Sibylla quietly.

"Yes, I will go on; I am going on. You were ready to leave the child to die sooner than go on living as you'd been living. Isn't that how you put it? You were willing to give his life to prevent that? Well, are you willing to give any of your own life, any of your way of thinking, any of what you call your nature, or your temperament, or what not? Not a bit of it! You can love Frank when there's no danger of Grantley's thinking it may mean that you could forgive him! As soon as there's any danger of that, you draw back. You use the unhappy child as a shield between Grantley and yourself, as a weapon against Grantley. Yes you do, Sibylla. Whenever you're inclined to relent towards Grantley, you go and sit by that child's cot and use your love for him to fan your hatred against Grantley. Isn't that true?"

Sibylla sat silent, with attentive frightened eyes. This was a new picture – was it a true one? One feature of it at least struck home with a terribly true-seeming likeness of her own mind. She used her love for her child to fan her hatred against Grantley!

"You complain," Christine went on in calm relentlessness, "of what Grantley is to the child. That's a sham most of the time. You're thinking of what he is to you. And even where it's true, don't you do all you can to make him feel as he does? How is he to love what you make the stalking-horse of your grievances?" She turned on Sibylla scornfully, almost fiercely now. "Your husband, your son, the whole world, aren't made for your emotions to go sprawling over, Sibylla! You must have caught that idea from young Blake, I think."

She walked off to the window and stood there, looking out. No sound came from Sibylla. Presently Christine looked round rather nervously. She had gone a little too far perhaps. That phrase about emotions "sprawling" was – well, decidedly uncompromising. She met Sibylla's eyes. They wore a hunted look – as though some peril walled her in and she found no way of escape. Her voice trembled as she faltered:

"Is that what you really think of me, Christine?"

"A bruised reed thou shalt not break." Christine had the wisdom to remember that. Remorse must fall short of despair, self-knowledge of self-hatred, or there remains no possibility of a rebound to hope and effort. Christine came across to her friend with hands outstretched.

"No, no, dear," she said, "not you – not yourself! But this mood of yours, the way you're going on. And, true or false, isn't it what you must make Grantley think?"

Sibylla moved her hands in a restless gesture, protesting against the picture of herself – even thus softened – denying its truth, fascinated by it.

"I don't know," she murmured, "I don't know. Christine, it's a horrible idea!"

Christine fell on her knees beside her.

"If only you hadn't been so absurdly in love with him, my dear!" she whispered.

CHAPTER XXII

ASPIRATIONS AND COMMON SENSE

Rumour spoke truly. Young Walter Blake was back in town with an entirely new crop of aspirations maturing in the ready soil of his mind. The first crop had not proved fortunate. It had brought him into a position most disagreeable and humiliating to reflect upon, and into struggles for which he felt himself little fit. He had been given time to meditate and to cool – to cool even to shuddering when he recalled that night in the Sailors' Rest, and pictured the tragedy for which he had so nearly become responsible. His old desires waning, his aspirations were transfigured at the suggestion of a new attraction. He had been on the wrong tack – that was certain. Again virtue seemed to triumph in this admission. He no longer desired to be made good – it was (as he had conceived and attempted it) such a stormy and soul-shaking process. Now he desired to be kept good. He did not now want a guiding star which he was to follow through every peril, over threatening waves and through the trough of an angry sea. The night at the Sailors' Rest disposed of that metaphor and that ideal. Now he wanted an anchor by whose help he might ride out the storm, or a harbour whose placid bosom should support his gently swaying barque. Strength, constancy, and common sense supplanted imagination, ardour, and self-devotion as the requisites his life demanded.

Again Caylesham showed tact. He would not ask the lady's name. But when Blake next dined with him, he enjoyed the metamorphosis, and silently congratulated Grantley Imason.

"So it's St. George's, Hanover Square, and everything quite regular this time, is it?" he asked, with an indulgent humour. "Well, I fancy you're best suited to that. Only take care!"

"You may be sure that the woman I marry will be – " Blake began.

"Perfection? Oh, of course! That's universal. But it's not enough." He lay back comfortably in his armchair, enjoying his cigar. "Not enough, my boy! I may have two horses, and you may have two horses, and each of my horses may be better than either of your horses; but when we come to driving them, you may have the better pair. Two good 'uns don't always make a good pair." He grew quite interested in his subject – thanks, perhaps, to the figure in which he clothed it. "They've got to match – both their paces and their ways. They've got to go kindly together, to like the feel of one another, don't you know? Each of 'em may be as good as you like single, but they may make – by Jove, yes! – the devil of a bad pair! It's double harness we're talking about, Blake, my boy. Oh, you may think I know nothing about it, but I've seen a bit – Well, that's not a thing I boast about; but I have seen a bit, you know."

"That's just what I've been thinking," said young Blake sagaciously. He referred to Caylesham's doctrines, not his experiences.

"Oh, you've been thinking, have you?" smiled Caylesham. "Come a mucker then, I suppose?"

"I – I miscalculated. Well, we must all learn by experience."

"Devilish lucky if we can!"

"There's no other way," Blake insisted.

"Have I said there is?" He looked at Blake in an amused knowledge. "Going in for the straight thing this time?"

Half in pride, half in shame, Blake answered:

"Yes."

"Quite right too!" Caylesham was very approving.

"Well, if you say so – " began Blake, laughing.

"Quite right for you, I mean." There was a touch of contempt somewhere in his tone. "But don't forget what I've been saying. It's double harness, my boy! Pace, my boy, and temper, and the feel – the feel! All the things a fellow never thinks about!"

"Well, you're a pretty preacher on this subject!"

"I've heard a lot of things you never have. Oh, well, you may have once, perhaps." His glance was very acute, and Blake flushed under it. "You're well out of that affair," Caylesham went on, dropping his mask of ignorance. "Oh, I don't want to know how it happened. I expect I can guess."

"What do you mean?" Blake's voice sounded angry.

"You funked it – eh?"

It was a strong thing to say to a man in your own house. But a sudden gust of impatience had swept Caylesham away. The young man was in the end so contemptible, so incapable of strength, such a blarney over his weakness.

"Now don't glare at me; I'm not afraid. You tackled too big a job, I fancy. Oh, I'm not asking questions, you know." He got up and patted Blake's shoulder. "Don't mind me. You're doing quite right. Hope you won't find it devilish dull!"

Blake's bad temper vanished. He began to laugh.

"That's right," said Caylesham. "I'm too old to convert, and nearly too old to fight; but I'll be your best man, Walter."

"It'll keep me straight, Caylesham."

"Lord bless you, so it will!"

He chuckled in irrepressible amusement.

"The other thing's no go!"

"No more it is. It needs – No, I'm not going to be immoral any more. Go ahead! You're made for double harness, Walter. Choose her well! you'll have to learn her paces, you know."

"Or she mine?"

Blake was a little on his dignity again.

"Have another whisky and soda," said Caylesham, with admirable tact.

His advice, meant as precautionary, proved provocative. Memory worked with it – the carking memory of a failure of courage. Blake might blarney as he would about awakened conscience, but Caylesham had put his finger on the sore spot. Pleasure's potentiality of tragedy had asserted itself. It had been supremely disconcerting to discover and recognise its existence. Young Blake was for morality now – not so much because its eyes were turned upwards as for the blameless security of its embrace. He had suffered such a scare. He really wondered how Caylesham had managed to stand the strain of pleasing himself – with the sudden tragic potentialities of it. He paid unwilling homage to the qualities necessary for vice – for candid unmasquerading vice; he knew all about the other species.

Yet he was not hard on Sibylla. He recognised her temperament, her unhappy circumstances, and his own personal attractions. What he did not recognise was the impression of himself which that night in the Sailors' Rest would leave on her. He conceived an idea of his own magnanimity resting in her mind – yes, though such a notion could gain no comfortable footing in his.

Caylesham let him go without more advice – though he had half a mind to tell him not to marry a pretty woman.

"Oh, well, in his present mood he won't; and it would do him lots of good if he did," the impenitent, clear-sighted, good-humoured sinner reflected, with all the meaning which his experience could put into the words. He was of opinion that for certain people the only chance of salvation lay in suffering gross injustice. "If what a fellow brings on himself is injustice," he used to say. He always maintained that fellows brought it on themselves – an expiring gasp of conscience, perhaps.

Gossip and conjecture had played so much with Walter Blake's name that Mrs. Selford had at first been shy of his approaches and chary of her welcome. "We must think of Anna," she had said to her husband. But thinking of or for Anna was rapidly becoming superfluous. The young woman took that department to herself. Her stylishness grew marvellously, and imposed a yoke of admiring submission. It was an extraordinary change from the awkward, dowdy, suppressed girl to this excellently appointed product. The liberty so tardily conceded was making up for lost time, and bade fair to transform itself into a tyranny. The parents were ready subjects, and cast back from the theories of to-day a delusive light on the practices of the past. They concluded that they had always indulged Anna, and that the result was most satisfactory. Then they must indulge her still. So Blake's visits went on, and the welcome became cordial. For Anna was quite clear that she at least had nothing against Blake. His attraction for her was not what had been his charm in Sibylla's eyes. Her impulse was not to reform; it was to conquer. But gossip and conjectures as to his past life were as good incentives to the one task as to the other. His good looks, his air of fashion, his comfortable means, helped the work. He widened the horizon of men for her, and made her out of conceit with her first achievements. She was content that Jeremy should disappear from her court; she became contemptuously impatient of Alec Turner's suit. She was fastidious and worldly-wise.

Again Mrs. Selford rejoiced. She had been in some consternation over Alec Turner's now obvious attachment, coming just at the time when Anna had established the right to please herself. Suppose her first use of liberty had been to throw herself away? For to what end be stylish if you are going to marry on a hundred and fifty pounds a year? But Anna was quite safe – strangely safe, Mrs. Selford thought in her heart, though she rebuked the wonder. Almost unkindly safe, she thought sometimes, as she strove to soften the blows which fell on poor Alec – since, so soon as he ceased to be dangerous, he became an object of compassion.

"Anna is so sensible," she said to Selford. "She's quite free from the silliness that girls so often show"; but she sighed just a little as she spoke.

"She'd make a good wife for any man," declared Selford proudly – a general declaration in flat contradiction to Caylesham's theories about double harness.

Anna paid no heed to opinions or comments. She went about her business and managed it with instinctive skill. It sometimes puzzled poor Alec Turner to think why his presence was so often requested, when his arrival evoked so little enthusiasm. He did not realise the part he played in Anna's scheme, nor how his visits were to appear to Walter Blake. Anna's generalship had thought all this out. The exhibition of Alec was a subsidiary move in the great strategic conception of capturing Walter Blake on the rebound from Sibylla.

But the pawn was not docile, and objected violently so soon as its function began to be apparent. Anna precipitated what she did not desire – a passionate avowal in which the theme of her own gifts and fascination was intermingled with the ideal of influencing the trend of public opinion from a modest home and on a modest income. She was told that she could be removed from the vanities of life and be her true, her highest self. When she showed no inclination to accept the path in life thus indicated, Alec passed through incredulity to anger. Had he cast his pearls before – Well, at inappreciative feet? At this tone Anna became excusably huffy; to refuse a young man is not to deny all the higher moral obligations. Besides Alec annoyed her very much by assuming persistently that the dictates of her heart called her towards him, and that worldly considerations alone inspired her refusal.

"Oh, you're silly!" she cried. "I tell you it's nothing of the sort."

The dusk of the afternoon softened her features; the light of the fire threw up in clear outline the stylish well-gowned figure. Poor Alec, in his shabby mustard suit, stood opposite her, his hands in his pockets, in dogged misery and resentment, with all the helpless angry surprise of a first experience of this kind, fairly unable to understand how it was that love did not call forth love, obstinate in clinging to the theory of another reason as the sole explanation. Things did not exist in vain. For what was his love?

"But – but what am I to do?" he stammered.

Rather puzzled – after all rather flattered, Anna prayed him to be sensible and friendly. He consented to hope for her happiness, though he was obviously not sanguine about it. For himself all was over! So he said as he flung out of the room, knowing nothing of what lay before him on the path of life; discerning nothing of a certain daughter of a poor old political writer – a little round woman who made her own gowns, was at once very thrifty and very untidy, was inclined to think that the rulers of the earth should be forcibly exterminated, and lavished an unstinted affection on every being, human or brute, with which she was ever brought into contact. And if she did not greatly influence the trend of public opinion – well, anyhow she tried to. Just now, however, Alec knew nothing about her; he was left to think hopelessly of the trim figure and the lost ideals – the two things would mix themselves up in his mind.

To his pathetic stormy presence there succeeded Walter Blake, with all his accomplishment in the art of smooth love-making, with his aspirations again nicely adjusted to the object of his desires (he was so much cleverer than poor Alec over that!), with his power to flatter not only by love but still more by relative weakness. He, of course, did not run at the thing as Alec had done. That would be neither careful of the chances nor economical of the pleasure. Many a talk was needed before his purpose became certain or Anna could show any sign of understanding it.

He dealt warily with her; he was trying, unconsciously perhaps, to perform the task Caylesham had indicated to him – the task of learning her paces and adapting his thereto. It was part of his theory about her that she must be approached with great caution; and of course he knew that there was one very delicate bit of ground. How much had she heard about himself and Sibylla? It was long before he mentioned Sibylla's name. At last he ventured on throwing out a feeler. Anna's unruffled composure persuaded him that she knew nothing of the facts; but her shrewd analysis of Sibylla showed, in his judgment, that she quite understood the woman. It was the dusk of the afternoon again (Anna rather affected that time of day), and Blake, with a sigh which might be considered in the nature of a confession, ventured to say:

"I wish I could read people as you can. I should have avoided a lot of trouble."

"You can read yourself anyhow, can't you?" asked Anna.

"By Jove, that's good – that's very good! No, I don't know that I can. But I expect you can read me, Miss Selford. I shall have to come to you for lessons, shan't I?"

"I'll tell you all the hard bits," she laughed.

"You'll have to see a lot of me to do that!"

Anna was not quite so sure of the need, but she did not propose to stop the game.

"Do I seem so very reluctant to see a lot of you?" she inquired.

Blake's eyes caught hers through the semi-darkness. She was aware of the emotion with which he regarded her. It found an answer in her, an answer which for the moment upset both her coolness and her sense of mastery. She had a revelation that her dominion, not seriously threatened, yet would be pleasantly chequered by intervals of an instinctive submission. This feeling almost smothered the element of contempt which had hitherto mingled in her liking for him and impaired the pride of her conquest.

"I was judging you by myself. Compared with me, you seem reluctant," he said in a low voice, coming a little nearer to her. "But then it does me such a lot of good to come and see you. It's not only the pleasure I come for, though that's very great. You keep up my ideals."

"I'm so glad. The other day I was told I'd ruined all somebody's ideals. Well, I oughtn't to have told you that, I suppose; but it slipped out."

Things will slip out, if one takes care to leave the door open.

She was standing by the table, and Blake was now close by her.

"Since I've known you – "

"Why, you've known me for years, Mr. Blake!"

"No, I only knew a little girl till – till I came back to town this time." He referred to that yachting cruise on which he had ultimately started alone. "But since then I've been a different sort of fellow. I want to go on being different, and you can help me." His voice trembled; he was wrapped up in his emotion, and abundantly sure of its sincerity.

Anna moved away a little, now rather nervous, since no instinct, however acute, can give quite the assurance that practice brings. But she was very triumphant too, and, moreover, a good deal touched. That break in young Blake's voice had done him good service before: it never became artificial or overdone, thanks to his faculty of coming quite fresh to every new emotional crisis; it was always most happily natural.

"Anna!" he said, holding out his hands, with those skilfully appealing eyes of his just penetrating to hers.

With a long-drawn breath she gave him her hand. He pressed it, and began to draw her gently towards him. She yielded to him slowly, thinking at the last moment of what she had decided she would never think about and would show no wisdom in recalling. The vision of another woman had shot into her mind, and for a few seconds gave her pause. Her hesitation was short, and left her self-confidence unbroken. What she had won she would keep. The dead should bury its dead – a thing it had declined to do for Christine Fanshaw.

"Anna!" he said again. "Do you want me to say more? Isn't that saying it all? I can't say all of it, you know."

She let him draw her slowly to him; but she had spoken no word, and was not yet in his arms, when the door opened, and she became aware of a man standing on the threshold. Young Blake, all engrossed, had noticed nothing, but he had perceived her yielding.

"Ah, my Anna!" he whispered rapturously.

"Hush!" she hissed, drawing her hand sharply away. "Is that you, Richards?"

Richards was the Selfords' manservant.

The man laughed.

"If you'd turn the light on, you couldn't mistake me for anybody so respectable as Richards," he said. "I've been with your father in the study, and he told me I should find your mother here."

Anna recognised the voice.

"Mr. Imason! I didn't know you were in London."

"Just up for the day, and I wanted to see your father."

Anna moved to the switch, and turned on the light. She glanced hastily at young Blake. He had not moved; his face was rather red, and he looked unhappy. Anna's feeling was one of pronounced anger against Grantley Imason. His appearance had all the effect of purposed malice; it made her feel at once jealous and absurd. But it was on her own behalf that she resented it. She was not free from a willingness that Blake should be made uncomfortable; so much discipline would be quite wholesome for him. For her own part, though, she wanted to get out of the room.