She paused for a moment as though his a.s.surance hurt rather than helped her. "That is what it all comes back to, for me, Bevis. Am I unfaithful?

If Malcolm were alive, I should be."

"If Malcolm were alive, you wouldn't be in love with me," he set her straight.

"I'm so glad you see that and believe it," she murmured, while he saw the slow flush in her cheek. "That's one of the things I most wanted to make clear."

"You had no need to, my dear girl. I know how it was with you and Malcolm."

"You know. You remember. Yes." She drew a deep breath. He had comforted her. "So, you see, I'm only in love with you because he isn't here any longer. If he were here, I couldn't love any one but him." She stopped for a moment. "Bevis, that is what it comes to. Is he here?"

"Here? How do you mean?" the young man asked.

"Are we immortal? Do we survive death? Does Malcolm, somewhere, still love me?" She kept her face turned from him and he was aware that he felt her questions irrelevant and that this was wrong of him or perhaps came of his being tired. Or perhaps it came from the fact that the soft edges and tips of Antonia's averted profile, soft yet so clear, shadowed yet so pale, against the sky, were more relevant than any such questions. He looked away from her, calling himself to order, and then, in a different voice, for though he still felt her questions irrelevant, he was able to think of them, he said, "I see."

What he seemed first to see was himself as he had been not many years ago, a youth in his rooms at Oxford. Books piled beside him, a pipe between his teeth, he saw himself staring into the fire, while, in a sad yet pleasant perplexity, he had brooded on such questions. Body and soul; appearance and reality; the temporal and the eternal consciousness;--the old words chimed in his brain. Then came a swift memory of Antonia and himself dancing the tango in London, and then the memory of the dead face of a little French _poilu_ he had come upon one evening in France, by the roadside, a face sweet and childlike. How many dead faces he had seen since he had danced the tango with Antonia, and how wraith-like, beside the agonies he had since pa.s.sed through, were the mental disciplines and distractions of his studious youth! Yet it all held together. It was because of the agonies that the answers had come.

Antonia's voice broke in upon his reverie and his eyes were brought back to her. "Help me, Bevis," she said.

Something in that made him dimly smile. "Help you in what way, my dear girl? Which do you want most--to have me and to believe that Malcolm doesn't exist any longer; or to believe him immortal and to lose me?"

He had not meant to be cruel; he was placing the dilemma before himself as well as her; but he saw he had been, when her slow, helpless gaze of pain turned upon him and her eyes filled with tears.

"Why do you always show me that I must despise myself?" she said. "How can I know what I want?"

"Dear Tony," he said gently, "what you want, what you really want, is me. And I don't despise you for that."

"Oh--it's not so simple, Bevis;--oh, it's not! I want you; but if he were here I'd go to him and leave you without a pang."

"No, you wouldn't," he smiled grimly. "You'd leave me, of course, because he has been far more in your life than I have;--and he is your husband. But it wouldn't be without a pang."

"With a pang, then," she was brave and faced it. "But that would pa.s.s when I had told him everything and been forgiven. Malcolm, I know, would forgive me."

"I should rather say he would!" Still the young man laughed a little grimly. "Why shouldn't he? If a man returns from the dead, he must expect to find that the world has gone on without him, mustn't he? After all, Tony dear, Malcolm hasn't merely gone to Australia or Patagonia; he's dead; and that does make a difference."

She was the most generous and unresentful of creatures. A warm flood of recognition filled him as he saw how he still hurt her and how she took it. And he was harsh and crabbed. He had always had an ironic tongue and an ironic eye for reality, in himself and in others. And now, entangled in his own pa.s.sion and in the webs of her dreams and difficulties, he recognized something perfidious in his nature, something that, while it adored her, yet found pleasure, or relief, in dealing her now and then, as a punishment for what she made him suffer, the light lash of his unentangled and pa.s.sionless perception. And who was he to lash Tony?

"Forgive me," he said, leaning over and looking down at her. "I am a brute, as I told you. Why am I not more merely grateful to you for loving any one so useless? I'll help you in any way I can, Tony. What do you really want to ask me? Perhaps what makes me so odious to you is that I've got no help for you."

Perhaps it was. A shrinking from the issue she put before him had been in him from the first.

And poor Tony did not suspect what he meant; did not, for all her attempt at clearness, see in what way she really wanted him to help her.

"Please, please do," she said. "Try to be gentle and to understand. I'll go by what you say. So there it is: Do _you_ believe in immortality, Bevis?"

There it was, indeed, and no wonder he had shrunk. If it had come to him as a test before the war, how easy it would have been, with a sincerity sad, for all its personal gain, to say, "I don't know; I really don't know what I believe, darling; but it doesn't seem to me at all likely."

But now, leaning over her, still looking at her, he had to answer in the only verbal form that fitted with his thought, and as he did so he felt himself grow pale. "Yes," he said; "I do believe in immortality, Tony."

She, too, then grew very pale. It was as he had foreseen. She had not really believed. It had only been a haunting dream. And her hope had been that he would tell her that to him, too, it was only a dream. Poor child! Poor, poor child. And poor Malcolm. Was it with this face he was welcomed back among the realities of her world? She continued to look at him in silence, taking it all in, with a trust, an acceptance, pitiful indeed; and suddenly, seeing in her despair his full justification, he took her into his arms;--was it to comfort, or to claim her, against his conviction and her despair? "My darling," he said, pressing his head against hers, "it can't part us. It shan't part us. I won't let you destroy your life and mine."

She had, piteously, put her arms around his neck and she clung to him like a frightened child.

"Listen, dearest," he said; "when I say it I don't mean it in the way you feel and fear it. I don't know how to say what I believe. It doesn't go into words. But it all means love. That's what I've come to know. I can't explain how. It came to me, one night, in a sort of inner vision, Tony, after dreadful things had happened--over there, you know. But he is safe and we are safe. We are all held round by love. That's what I believe, Tony. It's G.o.d that makes the meaning of immortality, not immortality that makes the meaning of life."

Nothing, he knew it as he held her, could ever bring them nearer than this moment. He had never in his life been so near any creature.

Reticent, and, with his English nature, pa.s.sionately shy, never in his life could he have believed himself capable of uttering such words. It was doing himself a violence to utter them, yet sweet to do himself the violence for her. And, as if he had cut out his heart to show to her, it seemed to him that it must bring her his conviction: must light faith in her from the flame it bared.

But, in the silence that followed and as she still clung to him, his child and not his lover, it came to him that he had lighted nothing. She groped in a bewilderment of darkness.

"But he's there," she said. "He knows and feels and suffers, if he's there."

"No, no, Tony. It's not like that. We are all together, your love and his and mine, in the eternity where Malcolm is."

"All together? When you tell me that it's you I want--not him? I don't know what you mean, Bevis. How can he not suffer when I forget him in loving you?"

"You don't forget him in loving me. But we're not made in such a way that we can think of everything at once. I don't believe he suffers. Our love may be happiness to him." But now he was using mere words. He had fallen back into the world of words. This was not the light he had tried to show her.

"But if love is around us there, it's around us here, too; yet people, here, suffer terribly. They may go on suffering terribly when they are gone. You can't know what they feel when they are gone, Bevis."

"No; I can't know. We can know nothing, of course. It's a question of feeling, rather. I don't feel it as you do, and the reason for that is, I think, that I see more of the truth than you do; that I have more faith."

He knew his faith; but he no longer felt it. That was because his body was becoming very tired. And her fear, too, had its infecting power. A pang did stir his heart.

Poor Tony. She never knew when to stop; never knew when there was nothing more to be gained. Mercilessly and pitifully she went on: "If it's still Malcolm, must he not be waiting for me; wanting me? Hasn't love like that something special and unsharable? Oh, you know it has. It must be two; it can't be three. How could I go to him, with you? Which of you would be my other self? You know you could not share me. We could not hold each other, like this, and love each other, if Malcolm stood before us now."

"I know," he said, and his deep fatigue was in his voice. "Perhaps one must accept that there is loss and suffering always. Perhaps Malcolm does grieve to see you with me. Who can tell? I can't. I can only say that I don't feel it so. I can only say that if I felt it so I'd not want to marry you; I couldn't want you if I felt it so. And even if you yourself felt him so near and real that my love could only hurt you, I'd go away and leave you in peace. But it's not like that, Tony. It wouldn't be to leave you in peace. You couldn't bear to have me go.

Something quite different has happened. You've fallen in love with me."

She sat silent in his arms, her head still leaning on his shoulder, and he knew from her slow, careful breathing that she was intensely thinking and that he had not helped her. If only he had not been so tired to begin with, perhaps he might have found something more. But he was now horribly tired and his artificial leg began to pull at him, and though he sat very still, she must at last have guessed at his growing exhaustion, for, raising herself, she drew away, saying, in a dulled and gentle voice: "Shall we walk back? Your leg must be getting stiff."

He took her hand as she stood beside him and kissed it without speaking, and he saw that she turned her head away then to hide her tears.

They walked slowly up toward the house by the winding path among the heather. Wyndwards stood high and they had to climb a little. Only when they drew near did she speak, and in a trembling voice.

"You've shown me all the truth. I've been unfaithful. I am unfaithful.

If I'd loved him enough, if I'd loved him as he should have been loved, I couldn't have fallen in love with you."

"Perhaps," said the young man.

"What I say to myself is this," Antonia went on. "If he had been alive and had gone away, as you said, to Australia or Patagonia, and during his absence I had grown fond of you and fallen in love--what I say to myself is that of course I should have fought against the feeling and avoided seeing you, and when he came back I should have confessed to him what had happened. And he would have forgiven me. It would make him very unhappy; but I know that Malcolm would forgive me."

"Right you are, my dear Tony; he would. And you'd have fallen out of love with me and gone on living happily ever after."

She ignored his jaded lightness. "Well--isn't it like that now? Can't I do that now?" She stopped in the little path and her soft, exhausted face dwelt on him.

"No," said Bevis patiently, but his own exhaustion was in his voice; "it isn't like that now. As I've said, the difference is that he won't come back; that he is dead."

"But immortal, Bevis."

"I believe, immortal."