The Whirligig of Time Part 51

"Oh, James!"

"Yes, that's just it! It's the devil in me!"

"When that was all over, James!"

"All over! Then there was something!... Oh, good _Lord_! We can't go through it all over again!"

"James, I meant that you were all over feeling that--"

"Yes, yes, I know you did, and I thought you meant the other and said that, and of course I had no right to because of what we are, and so forth, over and over again! Round and round and round, like a mouse in a trap! Caught again!..."

He got up and walked across the room once or twice, steadying himself with one last great effort. In a moment he stopped dead in front of her.

"See here, Beatrice!"

"Yes?"

"It can't happen again, do you see? It's got to stop right here and now!

I can't stand it--call it weak of me if you like, but I can't. It'll drive me stark mad. We are not going to talk about these things again, do you see?"

"What sort of things?"

"Anything! Anything that can possibly bring these things into my head and make a human fiend of me. And you're not to tempt me to talk of them, either. Do you promise?"

"I promise anything that's reasonable--anything that will help you. But do you intend to let this--this weakness end everything--spoil our whole life?"

"Spoil! What on earth is there to spoil? We've got on well enough up to now, haven't we? Well, we'll go back to where we were, where we were this morning! And we'll stay there, please G.o.d, as long as we two shall live! You're free, absolutely free, from now on! I shan't question anything you may care to do from this moment, I promise you!"

She remained silent a moment, awed in spite of herself by the fervency of his words. She was cruelly disappointed in him. She had made so many attempts, she had humbled herself so often, she had suffered his rebuffs so many times and she had brought him at one time in spite of himself so near to a happier state of things that his one-minded insistence on his own humiliation seemed to her indescribably petty and selfish. His jealousy, his vile, rudimentary dog-in-the-manger jealousy; that was what he couldn't get over; that was what he could not forgive her for!

What a small thing that was to resent, in view of what she herself had so steadfastly refrained from resenting!... However, since he wished it, there was nothing more to be done. She could be as cold and unemotional as he, if it came to the test.

"Then you definitely give up every effort toward a better understanding?"

"Yes!"

"And you prefer, once for all, to be strangers rather than friends?"

"Strangers don't squabble!"

"Very well, then, James," she said with a quiet smile, "strangers let it be. I daresay it's better so, after all. I shouldn't wonder if you found me quite as good and thorough a stranger, from now on, as you could desire. It was foolish of me to talk to you as I did."

"No, no--don't get blaming yourself. It's such a cheap form of satisfaction."

She stood looking at him a moment with coldly glittering eyes.

"It's quite true," she repeated; "I was a fool. I was a fool to imagine that you and I could have anything in common. Ever. Well, nothing can very well put us farther apart than we are now. There's a certain comfort in that, perhaps."

"There is."

"At last we agree. Husbands and wives should always agree. Good-night, James."

"Good-night,"

He watched her as she glided from the room, so slim and beautiful and disdainful. Perhaps a shadow of regret for her pa.s.sed across his mind, a thought of what a woman, what a wife, even, she might have been under other circ.u.mstances; but it did not go far into him. Things were as they were; he had long since given up bothering about them, trying only to think and feel as little as possible. He took up his book again and read far into the night.

CHAPTER XI

HESITANCIES AND TEARS

Thomas Mackintosh Drummond Erskine, by courtesy known as Viscount Clairloch, was not a remarkably complicated person. His life was governed by a few broad and well-tried principles which he found, as many had found before him, covered practically all the contingencies he was called upon to deal with. One wanted things, and if possible, one got them. That was the first and great commandment of nature, and the second was akin to it; one did nothing contrary to a thing generally known as decency. This was a little more complicated, for though decency was a natural thing--one always wanted to be decent, other things being equal--it had a rather difficult technique which had to be mastered by a long slow process. If any one had asked Tommy how this technique was best obtained he would undoubtedly have answered, by a course of six years at either Eton, Harrow or Winchester, followed by three years at one of half a dozen colleges he could name at Oxford or Cambridge.

Occasionally, of course--though not often--the paths of desire and decency diverged, and this divergence was sometimes provocative of unpleasantness. Treated sensibly, however, the problem could always be brought to an easy and simple solution. Tommy found that in such a case it was always possible to do one of two things; persuade oneself either that the desire was compatible with decency or that it did not exist at all. Either of those simple feats of dialectic accomplished, everything worked out quite beautifully. It is a splendid thing to have been educated at Harrow and Christchurch.

Ever since he arrived in America it had been evident to Tommy that he wanted Beatrice. He did not want her with quite the absorbing intensity that would make him one of the great lovers of history--Harrow and Christchurch decreed that one should go fairly easy on wanting a married woman--but still he wanted her, for him, very much indeed. Up to the night of the boat-race everything had gone swimmingly. Then, indeed, he had received a setback; a setback which came very near making him abandon further pursuit and proceed forthwith to those portions of America which lie to the west of Upper Montclair. If Aunt Cecilia had not casually invited him to accompany the yacht on its trip round Cape Cod he might have started the very next morning. But he went to Bar Harbor, and before he left there it had become plain to him that he could probably have what he had so long desired.

Everything had favored him. Aunt Cecilia had made it pleasant for him for a while, and when the time came when Aunt Cecilia might be expected to become tired of making it pleasant for him others came forward who were more than willing to do as much. Tommy was a desirable as well as an agreeable guest; he looked well in the papers. With the result that he was still playing about Bar Harbor at the end of July, at which time Beatrice, looking quite lovely and wan and heat-f.a.gged, came, unattended by her husband, to be the chief ornament of Aunt Cecilia's s.p.a.cious halls.

And how Beatrice had changed since he last saw her! She was as little the cold-eyed, contemptuous Artemis of that night in New London as she was the fresh-cheeked debutante of his early knowledge; and she was infinitely more attractive, he thought, than either of them. She had a new way of looking up at him when he came to greet her; she was willing to pa.s.s long hours in his sole company; she depended on him for amus.e.m.e.nt, she relied on him in various little ways; and more important, she soon succeeded in making him forget his fear of her. For the first time in his knowledge of her he had the feeling of being fully as strong as she, fully as self-controlled, as firm-willed. This was in reality but another symptom of her power over him, but he never recognized it as such.

Appet.i.te, as we know, increases with eating, and every sign of favor that came his way fanned the almost extinguished flame of Tommy's desire into renewed warmth and vigor. Before many weeks it had grown into something warmer and more vigorous than anything he had ever experienced, till at last his gentle bosom became the battlefield of the dreaded Armageddon between desire and decency. It wasn't really dreaded, in his case, because he was not the sort of person who is capable of living very far ahead of the present moment, and perhaps, in view of the strength of both the contending forces, the term Armageddon may be an exaggeration; but it was the most serious internal conflict that the good-natured viscount (by courtesy) ever knew.

But the struggle, though painful, was short-lived. After going to bed for five evenings in succession fearing that care would drive sleep from his pillow that night, and sleeping soundly from midnight till eight-thirty, the illuminating thought came to him that, owing to the truly Heaven-made laws of the country in which he then was, the conflict practically did not exist. In America people divorced; no foolish stigma was attached to the process, as at home; it was easy, it was respectable, it was done! He blessed his stars; what a marvelous stroke of luck that Beatrice had married an American and not an Englishman! He thought of the years of carking secrecy through which such things are dragged in England, and contrasted it with the neat despatch of the Yankee system. A few weeks of legal formalities, tiresome, of course, but trivial in view of the object, and then--a triumphant return to native sh.o.r.es, closing in a long vista of years with Beatrice at his side as Lady Clairloch and eventually as Lady Strathalmond! Sweet ultimate union of desire and decency! He gave thanks to Heaven in his fervent, simple-souled way.

Nothing remained save to persuade Beatrice to take the crucial step.

Well, there would be little trouble about that, judging by the way things were going....

As for Beatrice, she was at first much too exhausted, both physically and mentally, to think much about Tommy one way or the other. That last month in New York had been a horribly enervating one, both meteorologically and domestically speaking. Scarcely had she been able to bring herself to face the impossibility of winning her husband's affection when the hot weather came on, the crus.h.i.+ng heat of July, that burned every ounce of a desire to live out of one and made the whole world as great a desert as one's own home.... It was James who had suggested her going to Aunt Cecilia's--"because he didn't want me to die on his hands," Beatrice idly reflected, as she lay at last in a hammock on the broad verandah, luxuriating in the sea breeze that made a light wrap necessary.

Then Tommy came back to the Wimbournes' to stay, and a regular daily routine was begun. Beatrice remained in her room all the morning, while Tommy played golf. They met at lunch and strolled or drove or watched people play tennis together in the afternoon. After dinner Beatrice generally ensconced herself with rugs on the verandah while Tommy buzzed about fetching footstools or cus.h.i.+ons or talked to her or simply sat by her side. After a while she found that Tommy was quite good company, if you didn't take him seriously. Tommy--she supposed this was the real foundation of her liking for him--was her countryman. He knew things, he understood things, he looked at things as she had been brought up to look at them. Tommy, to take a small instance, never stifled a smile when she used such words as caliber or schedule, p.r.o.nouncing them in the English way--the proper way, when all was said and done, for was not England the home and source of the English language?

A few days later, as returning health quickened her perceptions, she realized that another thing that made Tommy agreeable was the fact that he strove honestly to please her. A pleasant change, at least!... She was well enough to be bitter again, it seemed. Not only was Tommy attentive in such matters as rugs and cus.h.i.+ons, but he made definite efforts to fit his speech and his moods to her. He found that she liked to talk about England and he was at some pains to read up information about current events there, a thing he had not bothered much about since his departure from home. She had only to ask a leading question about a friend at home and he would gossip for a whole evening about their mutual acquaintance.

Presently she began to discover--or fancy she discovered--hitherto unsounded depths--or what were, comparatively speaking, depths--in Tommy's character.

"I say, how jolly the stars are to-night," he observed as he took his place by her one evening. "Never see the stars, somehow, but I think of tigers. Ever since I went to India. Went off on a tiger hunt, you know, out in the wilds somewhere, and we had to sleep out on a sort of gra.s.sy place with a fire in the middle of us, you know, to keep the beasties off. Well, I'd never seen a tiger, outside of the zoo, and I had 'em on the brain. I had a dream about meeting one, and it got so bad that I woke up at last with a shout, thinkin' a tiger was standin' just over me with his two dev'lish old eyes staring down into mine! Then I saw it was only two bright stars, rather close together. But I never can see stars now without thinkin' of tiger's eyes, though I met a tiger quite close on soon after that and his eyes weren't like that, at all....

"Rather sad, isn't it?" he added after a moment.

"Sad? Why?"

"Well, other people have something better than an old beast's blinkers to compare stars to. Women's eyes, you know, and all that."

There was something in the way he said this that made Beatrice reply "Oh, rot, Tommy!" even as she laughed. But his mood entertained her.

"Tommy," she went on, "I believe you'd try, even so, to say something about my eyes and stars if I let you! Though anything less like stars couldn't well be imagined.... Honestly now, Tommy, do my eyes look more like stars or tiger's eyes?"