He pressed her closer to him, covering her with this tenderness as with a hot cloth rug, heavy and not fine. "Frightened of me, my darling?"

She pulled herself off his knee. "I don't know, I don't know."

"Why? Why?"

She moved into the middle of the room and looked down on the sea and the flatlands with a feeling like thirst; and turned loyally back to Richard, who was standing silently on the hearth-rug watching her. The immobility of his body, and the indication in his flickering eyes and twitching mouth that, within his quietness, his soul was dancing madly because of some thought of her, recalled to her the night when Mr.

Philip had stood by the fire in the office in Edinburgh. That man had hated her and this one loved her, but the difference in their aspects was not so great as she would have hoped. She could bear it no longer, and screamed out: "Oh! Oh! That's how Mr. Philip looked!"

It took him a minute to remember who she meant. Then his face shadowed.

"Don't remind me of him, for G.o.d's sake!" he said through his teeth. "Go and put on your things and come out with me to the registrar."

She drew backwards from him and stood silent till she could master her trembling. He was very like Mr. Philip. Softly she said: "You sounded awful, as if you were telling me."

"I was."

She began to want to cry. "I'll not do anything that I'm told."

He made a clicking noise of disgust in his throat. It struck her as a mark of debas.e.m.e.nt that their bodies were moving more swiftly than their minds, and that each time they spoke they first gesticulated or made some wordless sound. He burst out, more loudly than she had ever heard him before: "Go and put on your things."

"Away yourself to the registrar," she cried more loudly still, "and tell him he'll never marry you to me."

The ringing of her own voice and his answering clamour recalled something to her that was dyed with a sunset light and yet was horrible.

She drew her hands across her face and tried to remember what it was; and found herself walking in memory along a street in Edinburgh towards a sunset which patterned the west with sweeping lines of little golden feathers as if some vain angel, forbidden to peac.o.c.k it in heaven, had come to show his wings to earth. On the other side, turned to the colour of a Gloire de Dijon rose, towered the height of the MacEwan Hall, that Byzantine pile which she always thought had an air as if it were remembering beautiful music that had been played within it at so many concerts; and at its base staggered a quarrelling man and woman. The woman was not young and wore a man's cloth cap and a full, long, filthy skirt. They were moving sideways along the empty pavement about a yard apart, facing one another, shouting and making threatening gestures across the gap. At last they stopped, put their drink-ulcerated faces close together, and vomited coa.r.s.e cries at one another; and she had looked up at the pale golden stone that was remembering music, and at the bright golden sky that was promising that there was more than terrestrial music, as one might look at well-bred friends after some boor had stained some pleasant occasion with his ill manners. Then she had been sixteen. Now she was seventeen, and she and a man were shouting across a s.p.a.ce. Could it be that vileness was not a state which one could choose or refuse to enter, but a phase through which, being human, one must pa.s.s? If that were so, life was too horrible. She cried out through his vehemence: "No, I'm not going to marry you."

"Don't be stupid. You're being exactly like all other women, silly and capricious. Go and put your things on."

"I will not. I'm going away."

"Don't talk nonsense! Where are you going?"

"Back to Edinburgh." She made a hard line of her trembling mouth. "My mind's made up."

He made a sound that expressed pure exasperation untouched with tenderness, and his eyes darted about her face in avaricious apprais.e.m.e.nt of this property that was trying to detach itself from him with a display of free will that might not be tolerated in property. She could see him resolving to take it lightly, and thought to herself: "Maybe it's just as well that it's to be broken off, for I doubt I'm too clever for marriage. I would read him like a book and, considering what's in him"--a convulsion of rage shook her--"he'd be annoyed at that."

He had been saying with deliberate flippancy: "Oh, you silly little Ellen," but at that convulsion a change came over him. Delight transfigured him. He jerked his head back as she had done, as if he would like to continue the violent rhythm of her movement through his own body, and blood and laughter rushed back to his face. Taking a step towards her, he called softly: "Oh, my Ellen, don't let us quarrel! Come here."

But she remembered then how that scene at the base of the golden stone had ended. The pair had swung apart and had staggered their several ways, shrieking over their shoulders; and had suddenly pivoted round and stood looking at each other in silence. Then they had run together and joined in a rocking embrace, a rubbing of their bodies, and had put their mouths to each other's faces so munchingly that it had looked as if they must turn aside some time and spit out the cores of their kisses. She would have no such reconciliation. "I won't! I tell you I hate you!" she cried, and escaped his arm.

Rage came into his face without displacing his intention to make love to her. That was against nature, unless nature was utterly perverse! She could not bear it. She struck him across the mouth and ran out of the room.

There was a moment of confusion on the landing when she could not tell which of the white doors on the right and left led into her bedroom. The first one she opened showed her a table piled with heavy books; a vast wardrobe with gla.s.s doors showing a line of dresses coloured like autumn and of fabrics so exquisite that they might be imagined sentient; under a shelf beneath it a long straight line, regular as the border plants in a parterre, of glossy wooden shoe-trees rising out of rather large shoes made from many kinds of leather and velvets and satins; and in the carpets and the hangings a profound and vibrant blue. Accusingly she exclaimed into the emptiness, "Marion!" and darted into her own room just as Richard burst out into the pa.s.sage. She flung herself on the bed and lay quite still while he knocked on the door. Twice he called her name. Nothing in her desired to answer. That was both relief and the loss of all. Three times again he knocked, and there penetrated through the panels one of those wordless noises that had been disgusting her all the afternoon. After a moment's silence she heard him go downstairs. She leaped up and dragged her trunk from a corner into the middle of the room, but instead of beginning to pack she fell on her knees and wept on to the comfortingly cool and smooth black surface.

"I did so mean to be happy when I got among the English," she sobbed. "I thought England was a light-minded, cheerful kind of place. But I'll just go back to Edinburgh." She jumped up and went to the wardrobe and looked at her dresses hanging there, and cried: "It'll waste them terribly if I pack them without tissue paper, and I can't ring with my face in this pickle." There was not even a newspaper by to stuff into her shoes. Suddenly she wanted her mother, who had always packed and found things for her and who had been so very female, so completely guiltless of this excess of blood that was maleness. It would be dreadful to go back to Edinburgh and find no mother; and it would be dreadful to leave Richard. The light of reason showed that as a necessary and n.o.ble journey towards economic and spiritual independence it somehow proved her, she felt, worthy of having a vote. But her flesh, which she curiously felt to be more in touch with her soul than was her mind, was appalled by her intention. It would be an unnatural flight.

What had been between Richard and herself had mingled them in some real way, so that if she went back and lived without him she would be crippled, and that, too, in a real way: so real that she would suffer pain from it every day until she died, and that children would notice it and laugh at it when she got to be old and walked rusty and unmarried about the town.

Yet she could not stay here now when she had seen Richard red and glazed and like those wranglers in the street, and not pale and fine-grained and more splendid and deliberate than kings. She could not tell what her life might come to if she trusted it into the sweaty hands of this man whom, as it turned out, she did not know. Which of these horrid paths to disappointment must she tread? In her brooding she stared at her face in the gla.s.s which Marion had bought for her and noted how inappropriate the sad image was to the gay green and gold wood that framed it. It struck her how typical it was of Marion that the gaiety of a gift from her should, a day after the giving, become a wounding irony, and she was overwhelmed by a double hatred of this home and what had just happened to her in it.

She flung herself again on the bed and tried to lose herself in weeping, but had to see before her mind's eye the gorgeous seaworthy galleon that her love had been till this last hour. It seemed impossible that a vessel that had so proudly left the harbour could already have foundered. Hope freshened her whole body, till she remembered how the galleon of her mother's hopes had been wrecked and had sunk in as many fathoms as the full depth of misfortune. Certainly there were those who died G.o.d's creditors, and she had no reason to suppose she was not one of them.

She was lying with her face to the window, and it occurred to her that it was the plethora of light let in by that prodigious square of gla.s.s which was making her think and think and think. That the device of a dead Yaverland's spite against his contemporaries should work on the victim of a living Yaverland gave her a shuddering sense of the power of this family. She rolled over and covered her head with the quilt and wept and wept, until she fell asleep.

It was the slow turning of the doorhandle that woke her. Instantly she remembered the huge extent to which life had gone wrong during the past few hours, and rolled back to face the window, which was now admitting a light grown grave with the lateness of the afternoon. It might be that it was Richard who was coming into her room to say that he did not want to marry her either; or Marion, who would be quiet and kind, and yet terrifying as if she carried a naked sword; or one of those superior-looking maids to tell her that tea was ready. She lay and waited. Her heart opened and closed because these were Richard's steps that were crossing the room, and they were slow. They were more--they were shy. And when they paused at the foot of the bed his deep sigh was the very voice of penitence. She shot up out of her pretence of sleep and sat staring at him. Tears gushed out of her eyes, yet her singing heart knew there was nothing more irrelevant to life than tears. For he was pale again and fine-grained, and though he stood vast above her he was pitiful as a child. She stretched out her arms and cried: "Oh, you poor thing! Come away! Come close to me!"

But he did not. He came slowly round to the side of the bed and knelt down, and began to pick at the hem of the counterpane, turning his face from her. She was aware that she was witnessing the masculine equivalent of weeping, and let him be, keeping up a little stream of tender words and sometimes brushing his tense, unhappy hands with faint kisses.

"Forgive me," he muttered painfully at last. "I was a brute--oh, such a brute. Do, do forgive me."

"Yes, yes," she soothed. "Never heed. I knew you didn't mean it."

"Oh, I was foul," he groaned, and turned his head away again.

"But don't grieve so over it, darling; it's over now," she said softly, and took his face between her hands and kissed it. Its bronze beauty and the memory that she had struck it pierced her, and she cried, "Oh, my love, say I didn't hurt you when I hit you!"

He broke into anguished laughter. "No, you wee little thing!" He strained her to him and faltered vehemently: "You generous dear! When I've insulted and bullied you and shouted at you, you ask me if you've hurt me! I wish you had. It would have given me some of the punishment I deserve. Oh, keep me, you wonderful, strong, forgiving dear! Keep me from being a hound, keep me from forgetting--whatever it is we've found out. You've seen what I'm like when I've forgotten it. Oh, love me! Love me!"

"I will, I will!"

They clung together and spent themselves in reconciling kisses.

"It was my fault, too," she whispered. "I was awful hard on you. And maybe I took you up too quick."

"No, it was all my fault," he answered softly. "I was worried and I lost my head."

"Worried? What are you worried about, my darling? You never told me that."

"Oh, there's nothing to tell, really. It's not a definite worry. It's to do"--his dark eyes left her and travelled among the gathering shadows of the room--"with my mother."

If he had kissed her now he would not have found her lips so soft. "Your mother?" she repeated.

"Yes," he said petulantly. It struck her that there was something infantile about his tone, a shade of resentment much as a child might feel against its nurse. "She's been the centre of my whole life. And now ... I don't know whether she cares for me at all. I don't believe she ever cared for anybody but my father. It's puzzling."

His eyes were fixed on the shadows. He had quite forgotten her. She leant back on the pillows, closing her eyes to try and master a feeling of faintness, and stretched out her hand towards his lips.

He dropped a kiss on it and went on: "So, you see, I fell back on you for consolation, and somehow at that moment love went out of me. It's funny the change it makes in everything. I became--so conventional. When you ran in here and slammed the door on me, I didn't follow you because I was conscious that I oughtn't to come into your room. Afterwards, when suddenly I loved you again and I wanted to come and be forgiven by you, I didn't care a d.a.m.n for any rule." Their lips met again. She had to dissemble a faint surprise that at this moment he should think about anything so trivial as the rule that a man should not come into a woman's bedroom. "Ellen, it was beastly. Really, I don't get any more fun out of it than you did. I lost my soul. I didn't feel anything for you that I've ever felt. I simply felt a sort of generalised emotion ...

that any man might have felt for any woman.... It wasn't us...." The corners of his mouth were drawn down by self-disgust. "Perhaps I am like my father," he said loathingly. "He was a vile man." Again he forgot her, and again she laid her hand on his lips. When his thoughts came back to her he looked happier, though he had to think of her penitently.

"I was a beast," he went on, "the coldest, cruellest beast. Do you know why I raged at you when you mentioned that little snipe you call Mr.

Philip? I knew it was the roughest luck on you to have gone through that time with him. But I wasn't sorry for you. I was jealous. I felt you might have protected yourself from being looked at by any other man in the world except me, though I knew perfectly you had to earn your living, and I ought to make it my business to see that you're specially happy to make up for those months you spent up in that office with those l.u.s.tful old swine."

She checked him. He was speaking out of that special knowledge which she had not got and for lack of which she felt inferior and hoodwinked, and what he said to her suggested to her that a part of her life which she had thought she had perfectly understood was a mystery from which she was debarred by ignorance. "What do you mean?" she cried deridingly, as if there were no such knowledge. "Why do you call them l.u.s.tful?"

In his excitement he spoke on. "Of course they both wanted you. I could see that little snipe Philip did. And everything you told me about them proves it. And the old man liked to think how he would have wanted you if he'd been young."

Ellen repeated wistfully, "They wanted me." She did not know what it meant, but accepted it.

A sudden hush fell on his vehemence. He turned away from her again, and began to pick at the hem of the counterpane. "Don't you know what that means?"

She shook her head.

"Oh, Lord!" he said. "I wasn't sure. How frightened you must be."