"Hallo, kids!" he smiled at them from the door-way, "here's Daddy come back. Come and see if you remember him. What a great girl Minna's grown, and is that the baby Dadda left behind him?"
He picked up the baby and danced and dandled her, but the four-year-old Minna came more sagely, more slowly; she had to be won over by bribe and strategy, and her aloofness made him a trifle sore. In a moment or two he heard the maid go down the corridor and let in a boisterous boy, who ran into the dining-room swinging a satchel of books and pulled up short at seeing the stranger among them.
But his memory, older and longer than Minna's, served him.
"Daddy!" said George, shy and very nervous.
Osborn wondered why this boy was nervous of him. Forgetting his previous sharpness and irritation with the children, he now suddenly wanted George's confidence.
"Daddy's back!" he said, "with lots of stories to tell you about great big ships and trains and wonderful birds which you never saw."
"How splendid!" said the boy, still very shy. He had a guilty feeling about his boisterous entry.
"I was afraid you would be cross with me for making a noise when I came in," he explained.
"Like you used to be," Minna added.
"I'm not cross, old son," Osborn said slowly.
"We're going to have tea now, Daddy," Minna continued, as the maid entered with a cloth and a tray.
Osborn stayed talking to the children while the tea things were set upon the table. He supposed that they would all have tea together in the way which he had once so heartily deplored, and which at this moment seemed so dear and homely, until he saw the maid standing respectfully behind her chair waiting for his departure.
He spoke genially, but ill at ease.
"You give them their tea, do you?"
"Yes, sir," she answered, "and I have taken tea into the sitting-room."
The baby was now sitting in a high chair, bland and fat and greedy, a bib about her neck. George and Minna, after a propitiatory smile at him, had climbed into their places.
"You don't mind if we begin, Daddy, do you?" George asked.
"Go on, old son," said Osborn hastily.
There was no more use there for the father who had been cross, so he returned to his wife.
She was still sitting in the corner of the chesterfield, but she had picked up some knitting, with which her hands were busy. As he entered she looked up and gave him a contemplative regard such as he had given her as he went out, only that it was colder, more detached. She saw him big and splendid, handsome and virile, and the eagerness in his eyes fell into her heart like a cold weight. Her hands became cold and trembled.
She did not want him.
Beside her the tea table was drawn up. Its equipment seemed to him very dainty. It was a picture he liked, this pretty woman by the fire, with the environment suited to her charms.
Through the wall came faintly the jolly sound of their children's voices.
He hurried forward, sat down close to her, and laid a hand over hers which held the knitting.
"What's that?" he asked.
"George's winter stockings; they're to have turn-down tops like grown-up ones."
He took the knitting and pretended to examine the pattern, though he was not thinking of anything save her.
The year's parting had been a miracle. Love had slyly redecorated his house throughout.
"Jolly nice," he commented on the stockings, "but, please, give me my tea now."
He smiled at her a lazy, autocratic smile. All this flat and the people in it were his, and he would not have changed it for a throne. He thought again, though in a more mature fashion, much as he used to do in the first married year, how good it was to come in and shut your own door upon a snubbed world.
She answered the smile by one faint and chilly and reposeful. Leaning forward she began to busy herself with the tea things. The sugar tongs poised: "Let's see," she cogitated, "it was two lumps, wasn't it?"
He assented, surprised. "Time I came home," he said, affecting to grumble lightly.
"What do you think of the children?" she asked. "I suppose you find them grown? Did they remember you?"
"Yes, of course. I should think they did!"
"Muffin, Osborn?"
"Thank you, darling. I say," he smiled with gratification, "you look as though you'd all done yourselves pretty well while I've been away. This is cosy."
He indicated the tea table.
"Of course, after mother's death—"
"I was awf'ly sorry, Marie. I'm afraid I wrote rather a brief letter about it; life was rather a rush, you know."
"It didn't matter. I was going to say, that after her death, I found myself quite well off, comparatively."
"You didn't tell me much."
"No. Well, you didn't ask much. Surely, I answered all your questions?"
He remembered uncomfortably the many months of his abstraction with Roselle; she had occupied his thoughts for a while almost to the exclusion of everything else.
"I expect you did, dearest."
"However, I'm going into accounts with you presently, and then you'll know everything."
"Overspent yourself?" he smiled complacently, with the knowledge of that thousand pounds backing him. "Want money to go on with?"
She shook her head.
"I don't want anything, thanks."
The thought was to her like a bulwark; it was a thought which thousands of wives would have loved to possess. It somehow completed her sense of detachment from him. She puzzled him.
"How long have you had a maid?" he asked. "I must say I was awf'ly surprised when what's—her—name—Ann—opened the door to me."
"Let's see," she considered, wrinkling her brows, "I've had her for six months. Before that I had a woman in to do the rough work."
"Well, if you could manage it—"
"I managed it, and kept quite within our income, thank you, Osborn."
"I must say it's very jolly to have you all to myself like this. We always used to talk of what we'd do when my ship came home, and now here she is!"
"Poor Osborn! You must be glad."
"Aren't you?"
"Of course I am."
"We'll have a bigger flat; it's rather a crowd here, isn't it?"
"Yes, I'd like another room."
"You shall have what you like, darling."
He put an arm round her shoulders, drawing her face to his. "You know I'd like to give you the world!"
She was silent.
He kissed her cheek, holding her against him. "I must show you what I've brought as soon as I unpack. I got you some things in the Bon Marché—I think you'll like them."
"I'm sure to."
"Tell me what you've been doing. I want to hear all about you," he said persistently.
"There's very little to tell. I've been able to go out a great deal more lately; and I've been resting and reading while I had the opportunity. I took the children to the sea in the summer. Ann went with us, so I was very free and had long walks and swims. It was delightful."
"And you've missed me?" he asked quickly. "I don't hear anything about that."
"We have all missed you."
Her assurance left him vaguely unsatisfied. She drew away from him with a sidelong glance, half sad, half ribald, as if she knew and was regretfully amused at what he was thinking. She leaned over the table, cake knife in hand.
"Have some of this iced cake, Osborn? Bought specially for you."
For a while that pleased and appeased him. He asked more casually for news, and she told him of Rokeby's and Julia's surprise wedding.
He sat back, astonished, exclaiming:
"Good heavens! How unsuitably people marry!"
"They do, don't they?"
The noise in the next room had subsided; and presently the handle of the sitting-room door turned quietly, and three inquiring faces looked in, Minna holding the baby steady.
Over Marie's face there came a change. From its half-cold inconsequence and restraint, it warmed and lighted, as her hands went out eagerly.
"Come along, chicks," she said; and then, turning to her husband, she added quickly: "If you don't mind? I always read to them before bedtime. Do you mind?"
"Why should I, darling?" he said, surprised.
The three children, encouraged, came forward. George had the chosen book under his arm and, opening it at a favourite story, he laid it on his mother's knee. Nursing the baby and with Minna snuggled into her other arm, she prepared to read.
"Come and sit on my knee, old chap," Osborn whispered to George.
The child came dutifully, but his attention was for his mother. She began to read in her light, clear voice, and for some while that was the only sound in the room; the man and the three children listened, as if entranced. During the progress of the reading Ann came in without interrupting and took the baby away to bed.
A quarter of an hour later it was Minna's turn, and only George remained; he was eager to tell his mother of the day's experiences at school; clambering down from his father's lap he went to her, and, with an arm flung about her neck, began an involved account.
She listened with interest and comprehension. And Osborn looked at George's rapt face and her loving one, and drew a sharp comparison between what mattered and trash.
At last George went, and the husband and wife were alone again.
He started to the door on a sudden impulse.
"I'll unpack and get those things," he said over his shoulder.
"Yes, do," she nodded, "before George goes to sleep. Your things are in the dressing-room, and he will be there."
"We've simply got to have another flat," he replied, with a pleasant sensation of the power to pay for it.
For a few minutes Marie Kerr sat quiet, staring at the fire. The home-coming, so stimulating to Osborn, had for her been inexpressibly stale. She was not thrilled; she was left cold as the November night outside. The new and pretty habits of her life were in peril of being broken, and her reluctance that it should be so was keen. She got up and mended the fire and patted the cushions absently. She could hear Osborn talking to his son, and Ann busy in the kitchen.
A man in the house was once more going to set the clock of life.
Before Osborn had found what he sought she went to her bedroom. The baby and Minna were sleeping side by side in their cots, a screen drawn round them to shade them from the light. Deep in the perfect slumber of childhood, they did not awake at her careful entry. She switched up the electric light over her dressing-table, and began to change her blouse and skirt for the black frock in which she dined. While she was standing thus, half dressed, Osborn came in.
She swung round upon him, hands raised in the act of smoothing her hair, and there was something in her face which made him halt. He looked at her uncertainly.
She could not have helped saying if she would:
"You startled me. I didn't hear you knock."
He had not knocked. The puzzle in his head increased. Why should he knock? His mouth opened and shut again. He came forward hesitatingly.
"I—I—what do you mean, darling?" he began. "I wanted to bring you these."
His coming thus was to her symbolic of legal intrusion upon all her future privacy. In that year, privacy had been one of the things she enjoyed most, after the edge was off the first loneliness. She found it hard to relinquish her right to it. She stepped into the frock quickly, and drew it upwards before he reached her. His hands were full of little things, which he cast in a hurry upon the dressing-table. She knew that he wanted to touch, to fondle her. She slipped her arms swiftly into the sleeves and fastened the first hook across her breast; in her eyes a shrinking antagonism unveiled itself.
She uttered hurriedly: "We have to be very quiet; the children are asleep."
He cast a cursory glance towards the screened corner.
"They're all right; they can't see or hear or anything else. Come here and let me put this hair-band thing on."
She stood a dressing-table length away, fumbling with the hooks, her eyes fixed on him.
"I have lots of things to say to you," she began suddenly.
"Say them to-morrow," he replied in his old way.
"No," she said, "they have to be said to-night—not this minute, perhaps, but presently."
She was in Osborn's arms again, and he was touching her throat, her hair, and the velvet texture of her cheek.
"You've got fatter again," he was saying delightedly; "you look just like the little girl I married, only there's something bigger about you; firmer. There's no doubt marriage stiffens a woman up. That's it, isn't it? You're sure of yourself."
She gazed full into his eyes. "Yes. I'm sure of myself; absolutely sure."
"You always had ripping hair; but I think it's got thicker, hasn't it? It's springy, sort of electric."
"It used to be thick; and then it was thin; and now it's thick again, I think."
"You do it differently."
"One changes with the styles."
"You would, you up-to-date thing. Now, you're going to look at these souvenirs of Paris, aren't you?"
He held her close to his side, while he showed her what he had chosen; the pale-pink collars—"You were always gone on pink, weren't you?" he asked—the silk stockings and the vanity garters. With clumsy fingers he tried to adjust the hair-band.
"Let me do it," she protested, "if you really want me to wear it."
"Well, don't you want to?" he asked, a little hurt.
"I'd love to, if I may put it on properly. It's sweet."
"It makes you look awf'ly French!"
"Does that improve me?"
"You don't want improving."
He sat down by the dressing-table, while she stood, fixing the glittering circle round her hair with clever fingers. He kept his hand on her waist and, leaning forward, looked at her in the glass. She had a lithe naturalness, a slim strength, which newly arrested his admiration. Struck by the charm of his own wife, he missed no detail of her appearance. She had dressed to please herself with a true woman's delight in dessous; and he was quick to notice the mauve gleam of ribbon shoulder straps under the filmy black of her bodice, which gave the sombre gown a charming colour-note; her sleeves, transparent, long, and braceleted round the wrists with black velvet bands, showed the whole length of her white arms; in her ears amethyst earrings repeated the note of the mauve ribbons. Her stockings were silk and her slippers of velvet.
She was as amazing to him as a beautiful stranger.
"It doesn't go with my earrings," she said carelessly when she had fixed the band, "but it's so pretty, and thank you ever so much."
She turned and showed him; and she showed him, too, the interest she took in herself, which had caused her to pull out those waves of fluffy hair over the tops of her ears, from under the hair-band, and the curls she had pulled from beneath to dance on her forehead.
"Give me a kiss for it," he said, drawing her down.
She kissed him lightly.
"Fancy you the mother of a family!" he remarked, with a look at the screened corner.
She smiled to herself, and began fingering the other things. "How nice they are! And silk stockings! They're always welcome."
"But you're wearing them already," he said, with rather a disappointed glance at her ankles.
"That doesn't matter. If there's one thing you can't glut a woman with, it's silk stockings."
"Thanks, Mrs. Kerr! I'll remember that when I come home in the small hours and have to provide a peace offering."
"Come home any time you like," she said goodhumouredly, "there will always be peace as far as I am concerned."
When he had entered the room, he had missed something in it; and now it occurred to him what it was.
"Where's my bed?" he demanded.
"In the dressing-room. I had it moved there, when you went; I thought I might as well give myself more space."
"Of course! I noticed something unusual about the dressing-room. You waited for me to move it back here, I suppose? It's rather a tough job for women."
"The hall-porter would have done it, you know."
"Never mind, pet. I'll do it ever so quietly after dinner."
She did not reply.
"Are you ready?" he asked. "Come back to the fire, and sit down. There's so much to tell each other about, isn't there?"
She moved to the door acquiescently and switched out the light, he following. A savoury smell crept through the chinks of the kitchen door, with the all-pervasiveness of cookery in flats. He sniffed it.
"How familiar! But you don't do the cooking now?"
"No; I only help, sometimes. Ann's a treasure."
"What do we pay her?"
"Thirty pounds a year."
"Whew!"
She cast a sidelong glance at him. "A domestic drudge is worth it, I assure you; women have been consistently underrated."
"But fool work like cleaning saucepans and helping with the kids—"
"Shutting oneself up with the sink; working early; working late; breathing ashes and dust and grease; keeping tolerably civil and cheerful over it ... that's the job we're speaking of. I ought to know all about it," she said in a low voice, as if to herself.
She sat in her corner of the chesterfield and took up her knitting. He sat down, too, by her, all at once alert, surveying the flying movements of her dear hands; hands as tender and white as ever he remembered them.
"Oh come!" he said in affectionate but uneasy remonstrance, "you don't look much as if you'd been shut up with the sink, working early and working late."
"You forget I've had a whole year's holiday." She kept her eyes on her work, as if re-casting that first year upon her busy needles. "At least," she reflected, almost as if to herself, "part of the time was only half-holiday; but the last six months have been wonderful."
Jealousy rose in Osborn; jealousy of he knew not what. Something or someone had brought colour and smiles to her, and it was not himself. As he began to suggest that fact to himself, before he could do more than begin: "How, do you mean—?" the door opened, and the maid announced: "Dinner is served, ma'am."
Marie sprang up and put her hand kindly in his arm.
"Come along," she said. "We have all your favourite things, so I hope you're hungry."
Re-entering the dining-room Osborn was struck by its comfort and charm. It was a room humanised by the hand of a kind and clever woman. And how well-ordered his table was! How nice his silver looked! How well his wife looked! What good cooking he could command! And in what attractively comfortable circumstances he now found himself after that year which had ended by palling; that year in which he had done as other men—free men!
There was no place like home, for permanence; no woman like the wife of one's choice, for permanence. These were the things which mattered.
He was moved to speak to her in some measure of this thought during dinner. They were not separated from one another by the whole breadth of the table. He sat on his wife's right hand, and the maid served them from the sideboard, an arrangement which pleased him because it saved him the trouble of carving, and also because it was rather smart, he thought, for home, where things generally tended to be dowdy.
"I've had an awf'ly good time, this last year," he confided, "but I'm glad to be back. There's nothing like one's own home and one's own girl." The maid having gone to the kitchen, he reached for and squeezed his wife's hand. "I'm going to be an awf'ly good boy now you've got me again," he assured her.
"Don't bore yourself," she said with gentle politeness.
"What—what queer things women say!" he observed, after a pause, in which he had regarded her with some surprise.
"Not so queer as the things men do," she replied thoughtfully.
He started and felt a flush creeping from his collar to the roots of his hair. She spoke almost as if she knew of the folly and fun—but even as the idea came to him he knew it to be impossible. It was just one of the half-bitter remarks which wives made. Bitterness in a woman was horrible. The flush on his face had been imperceptible to her in the roseate light of the pink candle-shades, he was glad to think; but he waited until it had subsided before he spoke with a hint of reproof.
"I say, don't try sarcasm. Sarcasm in a woman jars, somehow."
"I wasn't sarcastic, really." Her tone was of raillery and somehow he didn't like that she should speak so lightly.
"Besides," he said, with an inconsequent effort, "as to the queer things men do, men are natural animals all the world over."
"And you don't suppose we forget it?"
She had a pretty laugh; but what made for laughter in her question?
"Men are men," he stated, rather at a loss, "and women are women."
She laughed more.
"It's been said before" she replied.
Osborn was relieved to find the maid at his elbow with a sweet.
"Alexandra cream, sir?" she was asking confidentially.
"I hope you'll like this, Osborn," said Marie; "I prepared it myself this morning."
When the maid had gone, he switched off to a less troublous track.
"My socks are all in a shocking condition; I don't know how long it'll take to mend 'em, dear."
"I'll spend to-morrow looking over your things. I daresay you want repairs throughout."
"You're a darling. I believe I've wanted you to look after me. But don't stew in over my mending all day. Run into town and lunch with me."
"I'll be delighted, Osborn."
"We must have a beano one evening, quite soon. You'd like it?"
"I'd love it."
He smiled affectionately, pressing her hand. It was nice to give a woman such pleasure.
After dinner they were to make their own coffee in their old way, in the sitting-room; and after Marie had made it and brought his cup to him, Osborn leaned back in his corner of the couch to smoke and dream and talk happily, as a well-fed man does. His gaze, wandering round the room, found the piano, which he recognised with respect.
"I say, you said the cushions were the only different things. There's that!" He nodded towards the instrument.
"Yes," she said, her eyes following his, "there's mother's piano. I must tell you all about her will, Osborn; about everything. She left all she had to me."
"The furniture and money?"
"Yes. I sold most of the furniture; Mr. Rokeby helped me to arrange it and saw the dealers for me."
"Good old Desmond! I must thank him for that."
"He's been extremely kind." She looked into the fire. "Extremely," she repeated. "He advised me and told me exactly what to do."
"Did the furniture make much?" Osborn asked with masculine interest in things financial.
"A hundred and fifty pounds, odd."
"Good!" he exclaimed.
"I paid off all the rest of our own furniture instalments with it."
"Oh, splendid!" he exclaimed in approval.
"I hoped you'd think so. A hundred cleared it, as you would know."
"So little Marie had fifty pounds odd for her own banking account!"
"Not at all," she said, smiling into the fire as if she saw a very pleasant vision there; "I spent it."
Osborn took his pipe from his mouth and sat forward. "Whatever on?" he ejaculated.
His motion was surprise rather than disapproval. The money was hers, of course. But that a woman should have the temerity to spend fifty pounds odd in a few months when she was already supplied with enough to ensure comfort for herself and her family....
She lifted her head and looked at him. She dared him. The curls on her forehead danced and the amethyst eardrops twinkled; the shrug of her shoulders brought the mauve ribbons again under his notice.
"As I told you, I'm going into accounts with you this evening."
"Oh, well ... it's your own affair."
"But husbands like to make wives' affairs their own, don't they?"
She rose to find her account-books in a pigeon-hole of the bureau. Her colour had faded; her eyes were bright. Like all women she feared the hour of battle, while she did not flinch from it. So pretty she looked, standing there, that Osborn sprang up after her. He was just man—not husband, not master, nor judge, nor timekeeper of the home; but man, admiring and passionate.
"I say, hang the accounts! Come to me!"
There was again that about her which checked him. It was an almost virginal aloofness, though he would not have known how so to define it. When she sat down once more by his side he reached for his pipe again calmly and put it between his teeth, clenching them hard on the stem.
"Well, pretty cat?" he asked in a strained voice.
The old love-name fell upon cold ears. Opening the first book, she mused busily:
"This is the housekeeping; the other's odd expenses. But I'd better finish telling you about mother's will first. She left me two hundred and twenty pounds a year."
This time he made no sign at the news, except by raising his eyebrows and directing towards her a steady look of interest and inquiry.
"So," she continued, "we have been quite well off. Directly you left I reckoned up our expenses and found we were better off than before, on two hundred a year, and I got a charwoman. I told you the first part of the year was like a half-holiday. After my dear mother died and I had the money, I engaged Ann."
"Quite right," he said rather gruffly.
"I am like you, Osborn, I have had a great year. If it hadn't meant losing mother it would have been a perfect year."
After a long pause, he dropped out, incredulously:
"Without me?"
She felt her hands grow suddenly cold with fear of the battle.
"Yes," she nodded, "without you."
As he looked at her she was again as dazzling to him as a beautiful stranger; and as strange.
He said somewhat stiffly: "That's not exactly what a man expects to hear when he comes back after a long time."
"I'm sorry."
"You've changed somehow. What's the matter?"
"I've grown young again. That's all, isn't it?"
"I don't know if that's all."
"Let's talk of something else," she said gaily; "tell me more about yourself. I've had no details yet, and I'm longing for them. You're keeping the job, are you? And just what good things does keeping it mean?"
"A fur coat for Marie," he said with a hint of reproachful pathos.
"How lovely! But what will it mean to you was what I'm asking?"
"The salary is five hundred, as you know." And guardedly, for he knew many men who deemed it well to be careful over telling their wives these things, he added: "With any luck the commission's more than the salary."
He left it vague, like that, for safety.
"I do congratulate you, Osborn."
"Our ship's really in, at last, you see, old girl."
"My poor income fades into the background behind yours!"
"Well, yours isn't so bad for a woman!"
"So I've found. I've had clothes, and gone about, and begun to think and read and see good plays again, all on the strength of it."
She opened a bank-book. "This is all the accounting for the two hundred you arranged to be paid in to me. You'll see I've used it legitimately—none of it's gone on frippery. And I've paid George's schooling myself this last six months, and Ann's wages, as I hadn't your permission for either. So you'll see there's even a balance left to your credit."
"Why make a song about my 'permission'? You've always been a free agent, haven't you?"
"Won't you just run your eye over this, now you're taking hold of the family bank account again?"
To satisfy her he took the book and skimmed over figures rapidly.
"You've been a good girl."
"So glad you think so."
Osborn smoked on quietly, but his thoughts were turbulent. She was giving him strange qualms, and he could not quite understand her direction. That something worked in her head he guessed, but, unwilling to hear of it, he asked no questions. It was very comfortable by the fire, and when he pitched the account-books away from her and took her hand again, she let it lie in his.
He pressed it.
"Well?" he whispered with a meaning look, wanting response.
It seemed as if she had none to give, kind and sweet as she was to him.
"I'm forgetting," he said in a few minutes, leaning forward to knock out his pipe, "that I've a job to do for you. I'll see to that bedstead now, shall I?"
"Why?" she said coldly. "It is all ready made up for you in the dressing-room. What do you want to do?"
He stared, bewildered.
"I'm not going to sleep there."
"Aren't you? Then I will."
He began to see dimly the meaning of her mood; but he was stumbling about in darkness to find her reasons for it. What reasons could she have for so extraordinary a reply?
"My dear good girl," he cried sharply, "explain yourself."
"I don't know how to, exactly. But I have liked having my room to myself. I wish to keep it."
"You've got some nonsense into your head—"
"It isn't nonsense. It's just fact. I've been without a husband for a year and I've found it wonderfully restful. I can be without him some more."
"Have you any idea of the rubbish you're talking?"
She looked at him curiously, unaffected by his authoritative tone, and, seeing her disaffection, he felt uncomfortably at a loss, since his authority had failed him. He was dumbfounded; angry and stricken at once; he had not the least idea now what tone to take.
He dropped suddenly to persuasion.
"Look here, my dear girl, tell me what you're thinking of. You know I'm only too anxious to respect your feelings and wishes; I don't think I've ever violated them to the least extent, have I? If I have, it was unknowingly. You women have such queer moods. What is it? Perhaps you're unwell and nervy, though you look all right. Anyway, come here and tell me all about it."
To avoid his encircling arm she rose. She laid one arm along the mantelpiece, and put one foot on the fender as if to be warmed; the attitude struck him as exceedingly negligent, and when she began to speak it was in no sense as an argument, but as a statement of facts long ago cut-and-dried for storage in her mind.
"I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. But I don't want you. I couldn't bear you in my room."
She had got it out, and he was saying nothing, only sitting forward, hands on knees, looking up at her, horror, anger and disbelief in his face.
She went on: "It'll be no good arguing. I've suffered and suffered, and had it all out with myself, and it's over. But I'll tell you everything, putting it plainly, because I'd like you to understand—if men ever do trouble to understand. Look at me!"
"I'm looking."
"Then you see I've changed. You thought so when you came in. I'm young again; I've rested and got my complexion back. My hair's nice; I get time for regular shampoos now. I spend a lot of my time on myself. It's lovely. And my teeth, have you noticed them?"
She set them together and opened her lips to show him all the gleamy whiteness between.
"I spent ten pounds on them, having them filled and cleaned and polished; I go regularly to the dentist now. And my hands, have you noticed them?"
Osborn met her question by a dead silence.
"They're as they used to be again. And I've done it all in this year you've been away. And there's another thing—it occurred to me the other day when I was wondering what really made all the difference—there's not been a cross word or a grumble in this flat for twelve months. That's happiness. Heavens! That keeps women young!"
She stopped and thought, and continued slowly:
"Marriage is funny. It's a thing men can't bear unless it's gilded. And they vent their intolerance. Do you know that before you went away—for four years—I scarcely ever expected you to say loving or civil things. Before you went out in the mornings you shouted for the breakfast, and I was hurrying all I could; and you grumbled if the children made a noise. And when you came in, if dinner wasn't ready or right, you grumbled at that again. And in the week-ends the kids dared hardly play, and I was buffer all the time between you and them. It's just what happens in thousands of homes, of course."
"This exaggeration—"
"Ah, it isn't. It sounds bad, but it isn't so very. It's rather ordinary. And, Osborn, do you remember when I had to ask you for money—?"
She looked at him freezingly. "Do you think a woman who's been begged and cajoled and petted into marrying a man enjoys creeping and crawling to him for odd shillings for household expenses? Do men think we enjoy it or do it wilfully, that they grudge it so? We can't help it."
"Where's all this harangue—"
"There's more to it yet. Do you know when you told me you were going away at once for a year, I thought I was broken? I loved you so. It seemed awful to see the gladness and relief in your face at leaving us, getting rid of us for a whole year! I'd been watching you for so long, and seeing you change, and get irritated with it all, and trying to keep young for you when I was tired out. And that night, when I saw how I'd failed, how dead your love was—"
"No; it was never dead, Marie."
"Wasn't it? Was it sleeping, then? Where was it? What was it doing?"
"You see—"
"Oh, yes, I see. I saw, then, how joyfully you shelved us all. You were like a boy let out of school. And I'd worked so hard to keep home happy for you, but you just thought of it as a place of bills and worry and children, presided over by a perpetual asker. That night before you went, do you remember leaving me to mend your things?"
"Yes."
"When you had gone, I cried, and prayed; it didn't do any good. I didn't know women could suffer so—even when the children were born—"
Osborn sprang up. "Don't," he said hurriedly, with visions of anguish in his mind.
"Very well. I don't want to harrow you. I'm only just giving the explanation you asked. A year ago you left me, glad to go, and I thought my heart would break. But it didn't. And it's changed. You've come back—to exact again all the things that husbands do exact. But I don't want you."
She had appalled him.
He stammered hoarsely: "I don't understand—I can't see what you want us to do."
"Well; to live—apart."
"You can't mean it."
"But I do. How often am I to say, I don't want you? The last part of this year, after the pain was over, I've been as glad to be without you as during the first part of the year you were glad to be without me. Isn't that plain?"
"You're making it horribly plain. And now I'm going to ask you, could I help being poor and short of cash?"
She shook her head. "No! But I couldn't either, and you were awfully down on me."
"'Down' on you! I!"
"You grumbled persistently every day. The kiddies and I just waited upon your moods. And if I had to ask for anything, you weren't kind about it; you just flung out of the place, leaving me all the worries. You never helped nor shared. I've come to this conclusion lately; that it simply isn't worth while living with a person who grumbles persistently and has to be propitiated every day."
He reflected deeply, his hands in his trousers pockets.
"I think I'm taking all this sermon peaceably enough," he barked savagely.
Again he had that disaffected look from her; she seemed to analyse him coldly.
"It isn't a sermon. Go on grumbling and nagging and grudging every day, if you want to. I haven't asked you to refrain. I've merely explained that, as a result of your husbandly behaviour, you've ceased to attract me, and I don't want to live with you—intimately—again."
He caught her arm. "Look here! I know. You've been to some of these beastly Suffragette meetings."
She laughed scornfully.
"Suffragette! Don't be an ass, dear!"
"No," he said under his breath, regarding her, "you haven't. Hanged if I know what you have been doing."
"I told you. Getting my youth back. Do you know what a very pretty young girl feels like? Did you know what I used to feel like when you were engaged to me? Like a queen with a crowd of courtiers at her orders and you the most courtier-like of them all! You used to hang on every word I said and promise me heaven and earth, and my every look was law. Oh! the power a pretty young girl feels in herself!"
Standing on tiptoe she looked into the glass, touched her fluffs of hair and the purple earrings with tender finger-tips.
"I've got it back," she said with a thrill. "I feel it flowing back; the power one has through being pretty and magnetic. If a woman's tired out she can't be magnetic. But I've got it all again—and more. I wonder if a man can ever understand the pleasure of having it? It's coming to me again just as I had it fresh and unconquered in those dear old days when you were at my feet."
He spoke in a sort of beaten amazement. "If you want me again at your feet—"
"Thank you, I don't. I'll never pay the price again. Never! Never!"
"Then whom do you want? Do you mean there's anyone else? By God! if there is—"
As she saw his fury she could laugh. "There isn't."
"Let's sit down again," he said more quietly; "this isn't threshed out yet."
"If more discussion gives you any pleasure I'll discuss. But what I said I meant. I'm not glad to see you; I'm sorry. You mean the breaking-up of household peace for me again. Men would be surprised, if they knew how many wives are glad to see their husbands go."
"Take care you don't drive me into going for good. Your way of treating a man is pretty dangerous."
"I'm sorry," she replied with a convincing gentleness, "that I shouldn't care if you did go. I'd have the children."
"Do you mean they've been more to you than I have?"
"What haven't they been to me?" Her face was soft. "You can't think—you've never troubled to know—how kind children are."
"Once I was first with you."
She quoted with irreverent glee: "'And they that were first shall be last.'"
"You can laugh?"
"Thank God I can, at last."
"Supposing I did go—right now?"
She shrugged her shoulders slightly and the mauve shoulder straps again arrested him. She did not speak; but without her answer, whatever it would have been, he knew that he could not leave her; that he must always come back at last, longing for her arms.
Ten o'clock struck, and she looked up thoughtfully at the wedding-gift timepiece.
"I'm going to bed," she said. "Good night."
A dark rush of colour flooded his face. "You really mean—"
She nodded.
"Then," he almost whispered, "exactly how do we stand?"
"I'll keep house for you very capably and look after our children. You can leave me if you like, you know."
"God!" he groaned. "What are women made of?"
"Ordinary flesh and blood that gets tired and wants loving. Have you only just remembered to inquire?"
He ran after her along the corridor as she went swiftly to her room.
"Marie!" he prayed. "Relent! Marie, it'll be all so different now. I've all this money; you could have what you wanted."
"I know it'll be different. But, you see, you've done something to me; you've killed all the love I had for you, drained it dry somehow. There's none left. I just—I just—don't want you."
She left his hands and gained her door, leaving him standing; he could have followed her forcibly, but it would have been violation. He felt it and was frightened. Through his anger there broke this fear, the fear of further offending her. When she turned to ask naturally, "You'll turn out the lights?" he just nodded. His mouth was very dry. He wheeled round abruptly, returning to the warm room they had just left.
The whole room seemed to bear her impress; the faintest perfume, almost too delicate to be definite scent, hung there; on the bureau the little stocking she was knitting adhered to the ball of wool, pierced thereto by the long needles. It looked homely, but it was not home. Something had happened, devastating home. He sat for awhile in a sunk posture of dejection, his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees.
"She'll come round," he assured himself presently.
Sentences isolated themselves from her burning speech and struck in his brain ... "if I had to ask for anything, you weren't kind about it; you just flung out of the place, leaving me all the worries. You never helped nor shared." ... "A year ago you left me, glad to go, and I thought my heart would break." ... "But I don't want you." ...
"If she knew," he thought restlessly, with Roselle in his mind, "it'd be different. I'd understand what's piqued her. But, as far as she knows, she's been no worse off than other men's wives."
Her joy over her restored teeth and hands surprised him; it seemed so freshly childish. "I'll own it's hard on women," he thought, "but what could I have done? What did she expect me to do?"
He was quivering, soft, vulnerable.
"Did I really mean—just that—to her and the kids? Just somebody coming in to grump and grumble...."
The fire died down while he sat there, but what matter? She was not lying awake for him. When the desire came to him to make one last appeal, he checked it.
"No," he told himself cautiously, "give her time—lots of it. She'll come round."
He began to rake out the ashes suddenly and methodically, to switch out the lights. And very soberly he went to the room where his small son lay asleep.
His entrance roused George.
"Are you going to sleep with me, Daddy?" he asked nervously.
"Yes, old son," Osborn replied as nervously as the child had spoken.
"I'll be very quiet in the morning, Daddy," said George.
"You needn't be, old boy," Osborn replied.
He sat down on the edge of George's bed, with a wish that someone of all his household, this child at least, should be glad to see him.
"We're going to be great pals," he stated, "aren't we?"
"Yes, Daddy," the child answered.
"Give me a kiss and say good night, then."
George obeyed dutifully. Osborn tucked him up and turned away. As he undressed he thought of the toys he would buy the children to-morrow.
Marie met her husband serenely at the breakfast-table next morning. She looked fair and fresh and had other things to do than to give him undivided attention. George and Minna were at table, behaving charmingly, though the baby, being yet at a sloppy stage, was taking her breakfast in the kitchen in deference to her father's return. Osborn paid his family some attention and his newspaper none; and he appeared to be in no hurry to be off.
"My first morning back," he remarked; "I need hardly turn up punctually."
"I suppose," said Marie, with interest, from behind her coffee-pot, "that your work will be rather different."
"It will, rather. I believe I'm to put in some days in town, and then run down to our various agents in the Midlands. There's quite a busy programme mapped out, I believe."
"You'll enjoy that."
"Shall you go away again, Daddy?" asked Minna.
"Don't talk at breakfast, dear," said her mother.
Osborn looked across at his wife.
"I shall be off your hands a good deal."
Bitterness savoured his voice. She smiled at him sympathetically, but he smarted under the knowledge that her sympathy did not go very deep. Yet he was strangely reluctant to hurry away. He remained until George had started for school; until Minna had begged to be allowed to get down and go to see baby finish her breakfast. Then he rose, and went rather heavily round the table to his wife, and laid a hand on her shoulder.
"I couldn't sleep. I was thinking of you and all the things you said last night."
"I'm sorry you didn't sleep. I expect you were rather tired with travelling; over-tired, perhaps."
"I was as fresh as paint when I got here yesterday and you know I was. You took it out of me."
"We shan't be able to argue about this every day; I couldn't stand it, Osborn."
"I'm ready to say that I daresay we men are thoughtless sort of brutes; but you didn't marry one of the worst by a long chalk, you know."
A smile twitched her lips, goading him to desperation.
"No," she owned. "There was nothing lurid about you. But, heavens! it was dull!"
He took his hand off her shoulder and went to search for matches and pipe on the mantelpiece. He noticed many little things acutely in his unhappiness; how nicely the silver vases were cleaned, and that the piperack was kept on the righthand side now instead of the left.
"You'll come round."
"If you knew how impossible it seems to me you wouldn't say that."
"I suppose I shall be worrying over this business all day as well as all night?"
"I hope not. I'm lunching with you, at one, at the Royal Red."
"What! You'll come to lunch?"
"You asked me."
Pleasure, almost triumph, lit his face. "I'll give you a good time. Sure you wouldn't like some other place better than the Royal Red?"
"I've got, somehow, a special ache for it."
"Then you must have what you want, of course. I'll get away punctually, so as not to keep you waiting."
Marie accompanied him into the hall to help him on with his coat, and to remark that his muffler needed washing. But she did not kiss him on parting; before he could ask mutely for the salute she was on her way back to the breakfast-table.
She sat there some while after he had gone, comfortably finishing her own meal, which had been interrupted by attendance on the children, as if deliberately determining that Osborn's return should interfere in no whit with her recent ease. Only when she was quite ready, with no hurry and at her own pleasure, did she start out to the Heath to give the children their morning airing.
"Mummie," said Minna, "George said Daddy has promised to bring us some toys."
"That's very kind of Daddy, isn't it?"
She walked thoughtfully. "Things have changed," she said to herself, "I suppose money has changed them. It always can." She thought this with a certain enjoyment, yet down underneath, where that stony organ which used to be her heart lay, she knew that she wanted, more than thousands and thousands of pounds, the light and life of that first year over again. What joy was like the birth of such love? Or what regret like the death of it?
Their walk on the Heath lasted till eleven o'clock, when she returned to put the children under the charge of the maid. She was meticulous in her instructions for their care and requirements, almost passionate in her loving good-byes to them. Truly no one, she thought again, as their arms clung about her neck, could know all that they had been to her, how heavenly kind they were.
Minna, admiring her mother's clothes, walked with her to the door and waved her down the bleak staircase.
It was precisely one o'clock when Marie Kerr entered the lounge of the big restaurant, where she had waited some while for Osborn on a birthday evening which she remembered keenly this morning. But this time he was there before her, waiting anxious and alert, like a lover for the lady of his affections. He had booked a table and upon it, as she sat down, she saw, laid beside her cover, a big bunch of her favourite violets, blue and dewy.
"You still like them best?" he asked.
"Still faithful," she smiled back lightly and, when she had thrown open her coat, she pinned them at her breast.
She looked around her unafraid.
Her clothes were good; her hair was burnished; her hands were white; her man worshipped like the other women's men.
She was once more, after that long, that humble and tearful abdication, at the zenith of her power.
They did not rise from their table until nearly three o'clock. Twice she had asked: "How about the firm?" and twice he had answered irreverently: "Let them be hanged!" He looked into her eyes wondering and hoping, but in their clearness read no promise. He tried to lead their talk round to the one subject which pervaded and appalled him, but each time that he drove in his wedge of reference she shook her head at him, smiled and closed her lips, as a woman saying: "You don't talk me over in this world or the next."
But when he reminded her "It was here, to this very table, that I took you, on your birthday before last," she joined him in reminiscence.
"And I was miserable, envying every woman I saw, ashamed of my frock and my hands and my old shoes; ashamed of everything. I knew I couldn't compete."
"You could compete with any woman in the world." He cast a deprecating look around them.
"I couldn't then. There was a woman I specially envied, I remember, an actress whose name you knew. How long ago it seems."
"Only a year and a half," he replied quickly, plunging into a side issue.
"You admired her," she said curiously, "didn't you?"
He lied: "I don't remember."
"I do," she said. "I used to pray about you—that woman was in my mind when I prayed, and asked God to make you admire me for the children I'd borne, and not to let you see how old and ugly I should grow. Doesn't it seem funny?"
"It's not at all funny," he said, his eyes on the tablecloth. "I'm sorry you—if you'd told me—talked to me—"
"You'd have thought me more of a whining wife than ever."
"Well, it's over, anyway. Won't you forget it?"
"I'm just delighted to forget it. But there's a kind of joy in remembering all the same, such as a man feels in thinking of his starvation early days after he's made himself rich."
"And now I'm to be starved instead?"
Then she collected her muff and gloves, closed her coat, pinning the violets outside, thanked him for a nice lunch and left him. He paid the bill in a hurry and hastened after her, catching up with her upon the kerb.
"Well," he said in her ear, "I shall keep on asking. What do you think?"
She signalled a passing omnibus to stop and boarding it left him with a smile and wave of the hand. For a few seconds, he stood on the kerb, at grips with a feeling of humiliation and defeat, then he began to walk back to his work. He was not yet accustomed to the setting of this new act he was playing with his wife—he thought of it thus—though it was making him smart badly. As he went forward, threading his way among the hurrying after-lunch throngs, he was thinking hard. He attracted some attention from women's eyes as he swung along, oblivious, big, straight-shouldered and masculine. All the afternoon, while his mind was ostensibly upon his business, he fumed and fretted.
In taking up his job in London, he found a good deal to do and to book that first day. He had to pay rushing visits to two agents, talk over his tour with the head of the firm, and drive about the Park, in a Runaway, a rich undecided peer who couldn't make up his mind to buy her. But he bought the car de luxe before they parted, and his cheque lay in Osborn's pocket.
Another twenty-pounds commission, and what for? To spend on a woman who coolly didn't want it. Osborn Kerr started for home, chafing sorely.
On his way to the Piccadilly Tube he passed the Piccadilly Theatre. Outside the doors hung a big frame of photographs of the entire cast of Sautree's new production, and he paused to look, absent-minded as he was, with male interest in that galaxy of charm. In the second row of faces he met Roselle's. She photographed well, her big, smooth shoulders bare, her hair smooth and smart, her chin uptilted so that she looked out, foreshortened. She smiled inscrutably. He knew the smile well, although he had never translated it so far as to guess that it covered stupidity in a sphinx's mask that baffled and piqued. That smile was of sterling value to Roselle; it was like so many pounds paid regularly into her pocket; it set men wondering what her meaning was when all the while she meant nothing. As Osborn Kerr paused before the rows of portraits, he wondered, a little yet, what Roselle meant when, so inscrutably, she smiled.
She was beautiful, there was no doubt of it. He remembered with some self-gratulation those hours spent with her in the blue Runaway with its silver fittings; Roselle in her fur coat and the purple velvet hat crushed close, in a cheeky fashion, over her night-black hair; and people turning to look at them both. He had seen in men's faces as they passed that they thought him a lucky fellow. They would have liked to be in his shoes, or rather, in his seat beside her, in the Runaway.
He passed on, the trouble in his heart a shade lighter for the intrusion of something else, something pleasant. It was like diluting a nasty draught, or soothing pain by partly anæsthetising it.
He reached home at his old time; it seemed so familiar to fit the key into the lock and step into the hall, redolent, even through the closed kitchen door, of the savoury preparations for dinner. But no little woman ran out, smiling and anxious, to ascertain his mood.
He had to go in search of her; he opened the sitting-room door and found her ensconced on the chesterfield, knitting those socks. This evening she had on a purply thing, a wrap, a tea-gown—he did not know what to call it—very graceful. It made her look slimmer than ever; and stranger. All these strange clothes had the effect of increasing the gulf between them. In the old days she had to ask him, and she did not do it very often, for what she wanted, and it was his to withhold or to give. Everything about her then had seemed familiar because, in a way, it was his. But now she had a horrible independence, a mastery of life, even to spending her own money upon her own clothes. He did not mind that, of course; he liked her to be able to buy what she wanted; but it made a difference.
She wore her amethyst earrings, but not the hair ornament from Paris.
Coming up behind her quickly, he bent over and kissed her cheek, it being all that she offered. He laid a box of sweets on a table near, and it reminded her of that evening before he went away, when he had brought home a packet of chocolates to sugar his news.
"Not lost your sweet tooth I hope," he smiled.
"It's sweeter than ever."
He untied the ribbons. "Do you still thread these in your cammies?"
"If they're pretty. That'll do for Minna—I'm wearing mauve now."
"I'd noticed."
"Because of poor mother, you know."
"Oh, of course." He put a bonbon in her mouth.
"What a nice baby it is!" he said softly, stroking her silk knee.
He knew himself to be a fool, but all that evening he let himself remain on the rack, wondering; wondering if she'd relent; if her stoniness wasn't just a mood, and if it hadn't passed away; wondering if he couldn't break down that unnatural opposition in her. And when at ten o'clock she rose and nodded "Good night," he detained her, asking again urgently:
"Can't we—can't we—be as we were before?"
"Thank heaven, no!" she replied, with a tiny shudder.
Osborn looked at her narrowly and spoke crudely:
"Do you know, if I were like some men, I should tell you that I wouldn't stand such fool nonsense; and there'd be an end of it?"
She went a trifle paler, but displayed no fear. "Don't you dare!" she said between her teeth. "I'd leave you next day."
Again he went a little way up the corridor, but stopped before the aloof reserve of her look.
"Believe me," she said gravely, "I couldn't stand you."
He bit his lip sharply. "It's dangerous, you know, what you're doing. I told you last night men are natural animals all the world over. I shan't stand being turned down like this for ever; it's absurd, unnatural; it's preposterous after we've been married all these years. I tell you what you're doing is not safe. You'll drive me elsewhere."
"Make your own life," she said, with a cheerful indifference; "I have all I want in mine."
Osborn turned away with a sharp exclamation; and heard her door click behind her while he still stood in the corridor.
"That's that!" he breathed hard.
The next morning he took a bag with him and in the afternoon he wired home: "Shall not be back for dinner."
She read the telegram, uncaring. Two years ago it would have made her fear. She would have trembled over it; her heart would have leapt as at a thunderbolt; she would have run to her glass and reckoned with the sallowness of her face, the little lines about her eyes, each representing little anxieties about little things; her chapped hands and her dull wits. She would have thought of the other women, the hundreds of them, the younger, freer and fresher women who passed him by every day in the streets. But now she smiled; she felt awfully old, experienced in reading under and between the brief message.
She mused: "Tactics! How funny men are! Can he think I'll mind?"
It occurred to her, too, that perhaps it was not tactics; perhaps he genuinely quested in other directions; perhaps, already, she had driven him elsewhere. And still she was unmoved; she could not care. She longed to care very deeply, tragically, to thrill to the pulse of life again, but she could not. She even told herself that she was a little glad on his behalf and her own, if such was the solution. As she went in to dinner, and seated herself at the solitary table, she liked it; privacy had returned to her. This was almost like the year of her grass-widowhood.
Osborn visited a smart flower shop when he went out to lunch and ordered carnations, a generous sheaf of them, to be sent to Miss Roselle Dates at the Piccadilly Theatre at half-past seven. He rang up and booked a stall for himself and, later, sent the wire to his wife.
"She's cut me loose," he said to himself, "and that's that."
He lunched as he liked now, with a memory that could afford to be humorous of the five-shilling weekly limit to which he had cut himself down in the bad old days only just over a year ago. But they were dear old days, too, when this extraordinary complication between his wife and him wasn't even thought of....
His luck was wonderful. He sold another car that afternoon. Two three-hundred-pound cars in two days, meaning forty pounds in his pocket! People liked him; he was big, good-looking and plausible, and he had a way with him which absolutely prevented any possible purchaser from ever giving another thought to any two-seater but the Runaway. When he turned out of the establishment that winter afternoon, on his way to an hotel to dress for his early and lonely dinner somewhere or other, he was pleased. Brisk business did a little towards lightening his trouble, just as less innocuous excitements might do.
"Stick to business and stick to fun," he told himself grimly, as he strode along, "and you'll worry through."
He thought of his children more than of anyone else throughout the courses of his dinner in a light, bright, well-served restaurant. George was a fine little boy, and should be done well, thoroughly well, with no expense spared; he must get to know the little chap, take him about a bit and make him interested in things worth knowing. Minna was going to be pretty, a facsimile of her mother; and the baby was a splendid little female animal. There was no doubt that he possessed three beautiful kids of whom any man might be proud.
Surely, if only for their sakes, some day she'd soften and return to him? Some evening he'd come home and find her as she used to be during the first year, sweet and eager, and shining; loving and passionate....
Osborn smoked several cigarettes over his coffee thinking of these things; he was in no hurry to see the show at the Piccadilly, and there would be plenty of time for Roselle afterwards. But he was rather lonely here by himself, and looked around somewhat wistfully at gay couples, laughing parties, all about him. There was not a woman there who could equal Marie, he said to himself; if she were only here with him, with her fresh, soft face, and her springing hair, and her round and slender figure, she'd put all this paint and powder right out of court.
But she was sitting afar off in a quiet flat, softly lighted, ineffably cosy, in the place called home, where husbands were not wanted.
He confessed to himself: "It used to be pretty beastly for her; a little delicate thing—three babies and no nurse; no help with anything. I suppose I could have done a lot, but how's one to think of these things? I suppose I've failed as a husband, but what am I to do about it now? It's all over and can't be helped."
He went to his stall at the Piccadilly, and, looking about him at other men's clothes, decided that he must have new ones. The price of an evening suit need not trouble him now. He settled down and began to enjoy the play.
Roselle was on the stage, in the beauty chorus, looking magnificent, and her eyes were sweeping the stalls. They paused here and there in their saucy habit, lingering upon more than one man with one of her tiny inscrutable smiles winging a message, but their search continued until at last she had found Osborn Kerr sitting on the lefthand side in the third row. He had scribbled on the card which accompanied his flowers, "Look for me to-night," and when her look met his, he had a sudden thrill of pleasure. Watching her eyes sweeping here and there, it had been exciting to wait for the moment when they should fall on him. After he had signalled back a discreet smile in answer, he put up his glasses and looked at her eagerly.