IV
In August this pair of disappointed people met once more amid their old surroundings. Perhaps their enforced absence from one another gave at first some zest to their reunion. Jim was at times tender, and like his former self; Rosalys, if sad and subdued, less sullen and reproachful than she had been in London.
Mrs. Ambrose had fallen into delicate health, and her daughter was inconsequence able to dispose of her time outside the house as she wished. The moonlight meetings with Jim were discontinued, but husband and wife went for long strolls sometimes in the remoter nooks of the park, through winding walks in the distant shrubberies, and down paths hidden by high yew-hedges from intruding eyes that might look with suspicion on their being together.
On one especially beautiful August day they paced side by side, talking at moments with something of their old tenderness. The sky above the dark-green barriers on either hand was a bottomless deep of blue. The yew-boughs were covered in curious profusion by the handiwork of energetic spiders, who had woven their glistening webs in every variety of barbaric pattern. In shape some resembled hammocks, others ornamental purses, others deep bags, in the middle of which a large yellow insect remained motionless and watchful.
“Shall we sit for a little while in the summerhouse?” said Rosalys at last, in flat accents, for a tête-à-tête with Jim had long ceased to give her any really strong beats of pleasure. “I want to talk to you further about plans; how often we had better write, and so on.”
They sat down, in an arbour made of rustic logs, which overlooked the mere. The woodwork had been left rough within, and dusty spiderwebs hung in the crevices; here and there the bark had fallen away in strips; above, on the roof, there were clumps of fungi, looking like tufts of white fur.
“This is a sunless, queer sort of place you have chosen,” he said, looking round critically.
The boughs had grown so thickly in the foreground that the glittering margin of water was hardly perceptible between their interlacing twigs, and no visible hint of a human habitation was given, though the rustic shelter had been originally built with the view of affording a picturesque glimpse of the handsome old brick house wherein the Ambroses had lived for some three centuries.
“You might have found a more lively scene for what will be, perhaps, our last interview for years,” Jim went on.
“Are you really going so soon?” she asked, passing over the complaint.
“Next week. And my father has made all sorts of arrangements for me. Besides, he is beginning to suspect that you and I are rather too intimate. And your mother knows, somehow or other that I have been up here several times of late. We must be careful.”
“I suppose so,” she answered absently, looking out under the log roof at a chaffinch swinging himself backwards and forwards on a larch bough. A sort of dreary indifference to her surroundings; a sense of being caged and trapped had begun to take possession of Rosalys. The present was full of perplexity, the future objectless. Now and then, when she looked at Jim’s lithe figure, and healthy, virile face, she felt that perhaps she might have been able to love him still if only he had cared for her with a remnant of his former passionate devotion. But his indifference was even more palpable than her own. They sat and talked on within the dim arbour for a little while. Then Jim made one of the unfortunate remarks that always galled her to the quick. She rose in anger, answered him with cold sarcasm, and hastened away down the little wood. He followed, a rather ominous light shining in his eyes.
“Your temper is really growing insufferable, Rosalys!” he cried, and clenched his hand roughly on her arm to detain her.
“How dare you!” said the girl. “For God’s sake leave me, and don’t come back again! I rejoice to think that in a few days it will not be in your power to insult me any more!”
“Damn it—I am going to leave you, am I not! I only want to keep you here for a moment to come to some understanding! … Indeed you’ll be surprised to find how very much I am going to leave you, when you hear what I mean! My ideas have grown considerably emancipated of late, and therefore I tell you that there is no reason on earth why any soul should ever know of that miserable mistake we made in the spring.”
She winced a little; it was an unexpected move; and her eyes lingered uneasily on a copper-coloured butterfly playing a game of hide-and-seek with a little blue companion.
“Who,” he continued, “is ever going to search the register of that old East-London church? We must philosophically look on the marriage as an awkward fact in our lives, which won’t prevent our loving elsewhere when we feel inclined. In my opinion this early error will carry one advantage with it—that we shall be unable to extinguish any love we may each feel for another person by a sordid matrimonial knot—unless, indeed, after seven years of obliviousness to one another’s existence.”
“I’ll—try to—emancipate myself likewise,” she said slowly. “It will be well to forget this tragedy of our lives! And the most tragic part of it is—that we are not even sorry that we don’t love each other any more!”
“The truest words you ever spoke!”
“And the surest event that was ever to come, given your nature—”
“And yours!”
She hastened on down the grass walk into the broad gravelled path leading to the house. At the corner stood Mrs. Ambrose, who was better, and had come out for a stroll—assuming as an invalid the privilege of wearing a singular scarlet gown and a hat in which a number of black quills stood startlingly erect.
“Ah—Rosy!” she cried. “Oh, and Mr. Durrant? What a colour you have got, child!”
“Yes. Mr. Durrant and I have been having a furious political discussion, mamma. I have grown quite hot over it. He is more unreasonable than ever. But when he gets abroad he won’t be as he is now. A few years of India will change all that.” And to carry on the idea of her unconcern she turned to whistle to a bold robin that had flitted down from a larch tree, perched on the yew hedge, and looked inquiringly at her, answering her whistle with his pathetic little pipe.
Durrant had come up behind. “Yes,” he said cynically. “One never knows how an enervating country may soften one’s brains.”
He bade them a cool goodbye and left. She watched his retreating figure, the figure of the active, the strong, the handsome animal, who had scarcely won the better side of her nature at all. He never turned his head. So this was the end!
The bewildering bitterness of it well-nigh paralysed Rosalys for a few moments. Why had they been allowed—he and she—to love one another with that eager, almost unholy, passion, and then to part with less interest in each other than ordinary friends? She felt ashamed of having ceded herself to him. If her mother had not been beside her she would have screamed out aloud in her exasperating pain.
Mrs. Ambrose lifted up her voice. “What are you looking at, child? … My dear, I want a little word with you. Are you attending? When you pout your lip like that, Rosalys, I always know that you are in a bad frame of mind. … The vicar has been here; and he has made me a little unhappy.”
“I should have thought he was too stupid to give anyone a pang! Why do they put such simpletons into the churches!”
“Well—he says that people are chattering about you and that young Durrant. And I must tell you that—that, from a marrying point of view, he is impossible. You know that. And I don’t want him to make up to you. Now, Rosalys, my darling, tell me honestly—I feel I have not looked after you lately as I ought to have done—tell me honestly: Is he in love with you?”
“He is not, mother, to my certain knowledge.”
“Are you with him?”
“No. That I swear.”