sir isaac was greatly fatigued by his long journey to santa margherita in spite of every expensive precaution to relieve him; but as soon as the effect of that wore off, his recovery under the system bergener had prescribed was for a time remarkable. in a little while he was out of bed again and in an armchair. then the young doctor began to talk of drives. they had no car with them, so he went into genoa and spent an energetic day securing the sweetest-running automobile he could find and having it refitted for sir isaac's peculiar needs. in this they made a number of excursions through the hot beauty of the italian afternoons, eastward to genoa, westward to sestri and northward towards montallegro. then they went up to the summit of the monte de porto fino and sir isaac descended and walked about and looked at the view and praised bergener. after that he was encouraged to visit the gracious old monastery that overhangs the road to porto fino.
at first lady harman did her duty of control and association with an apathetic resignation. this had to go on—for eight or ten years. then her imagination began to stir again. there came a friendly letter from mr. brumley and she answered with a description of the colour of the sea and the charm and wonder of its tideless shore. the three elder children wrote queer little letters and she answered them. she went into rapallo and got herself a carriageful of tauchnitz books....
that visit to the monastery on the porto fino road was like a pleasant little glimpse into the brighter realities of the middle ages. the place, which is used as a home of rest for convalescent carthusians, chanced to be quite empty and deserted; the bavarian rang a jangling bell again and again and at last gained the attention of an old gardener working in the vineyard above, an unkempt, unshaven, ungainly creature dressed in scarce decent rags of brown, who was yet courteous-minded and, albeit crack-voiced, with his yellow-fanged mouth full of gracious polysyllables. he hobbled off to get a key and returned through the still heat of the cobbled yard outside the monastery gates, and took them into cool airy rooms and showed them clean and simple cells in shady corridors, and a delightful orangery, and led them to a beautiful terrace that looked out upon the glowing quivering sea. and he became very anxious to tell them something about "francesco"; they could not understand him until the doctor caught "battaglia" and "pavia" and had an inspiration. francis the first, he explained in clumsy but understandable english, slept here, when he was a prisoner of the emperor and all was lost but honour. they looked at the slender pillars and graceful archings about them.
"chust as it was now," the young doctor said, his imagination touched for a moment by mere unscientific things....
they returned to their dépendance in a state of mutual contentment, sir isaac scarcely tired, and lady harman ran upstairs to change her dusty dress for a fresher muslin, while he went upon the doctor's arm to the balcony where tea was to be served to them.
she came down to find her world revolutionized.
on the table in the balcony the letters had been lying convenient to his chair and he—it may be without troubling to read the address, had seized the uppermost and torn it open.
he was holding that letter now a little crumpled in his hand.
she had walked close up to the table before she realized the change. the little eyes that met hers were afire with hatred, his lips were white and pressed together tightly, his nostrils were dilated in his struggle for breath. "i knew it," he gasped.
she clung to her dignity though she felt suddenly weak within. "that letter," she said, "was addressed to me."
there was a gleam of derision in his eyes.
"look at it!" he said, and flung it towards her.
"my private letter!"
"look at it!" he repeated.
"what right have you to open my letter?"
"friendship!" he said. "harmless friendship! look what your—friend says!"
"whatever there was in my letter——"
"oh!" cried sir isaac. "don't come that over me! don't you try it! oooh! phew—" he struggled for breath for a time. "he's so harmless. he's so helpful. he——read it, you——"
he hesitated and then hurled a strange word at her.
she glanced at the letter on the table but made no movement to touch it. then she saw that her husband's face was reddening and that his arm waved helplessly. his eyes, deprived abruptly of all the fury of conflict, implored assistance.
she darted to the french window that opened into the dining-room from the balcony. "doctor greve!" she cried. "doctor greve!"
behind her the patient was making distressful sounds. "doctor greve," she screamed, and from above she heard the bavarian shouting and then the noise of his coming down the stairs.
he shouted some direction in german as he ran past her. by an inspiration she guessed he wanted the nurse.
miss summersley satchell appeared in the doorway and became helpful.
then everyone in the house seemed to be converging upon the balcony.
it was an hour before sir isaac was in bed and sufficiently allayed for her to go to her own room. then she thought of mr. brumley's letter, and recovered it from the table on the balcony where it had been left in the tumult of her husband's seizure.
it was twilight and the lights were on. she stood under one of them and read with two moths circling about her....
mr. brumley had had a mood of impassioned declaration. he had alluded to his "last moments of happiness at kew." he said he would rather kiss the hem of her garment than be the "lord of any other woman's life."
it was all so understandable—looked at in the proper light. it was all so impossible to explain. and why had she let it happen? why had she let it happen?
9
the young doctor was a little puzzled and rather offended by sir isaac's relapse. he seemed to consider it incorrect and was on the whole disposed to blame lady harman. he might have had such a seizure, the young doctor said, later, but not now. he would be thrown back for some weeks, then he would begin to mend again and then whatever he said, whatever he did, lady harman must do nothing to contradict him. for a whole day sir isaac lay inert, in a cold sweat. he consented once to attempt eating, but sickness overcame him. he seemed so ill that all the young doctor's reassurances could not convince lady harman that he would recover. then suddenly towards evening his arrested vitality was flowing again, the young doctor ceased to be anxious for his own assertions, the patient could sit up against a pile of pillows and breathe and attend to affairs. there was only one affair he really seemed anxious to attend to. his first thought when he realized his returning strength was of his wife. but the young doctor would not let him talk that night.
next morning he seemed still stronger. he was restless and at last demanded lady harman again.
this time the young doctor transmitted the message.
she came to him forthwith and found him, white-faced and unfamiliar-looking, his hands gripping the quilt and his eyes burning with hatred.
"you thought i'd forgotten," was his greeting.
"don't argue," signalled the doctor from the end of sir isaac's bed.
"i've been thinking it out," said sir isaac. "when you were thinking i was too ill to think.... i know better now."
he sucked in his lips and then went on. "you've got to send for old crappen," he said. "i'm going to alter things. i had a plan. but that would have been letting you off too easy. see? so—you send for old crappen."
"what do you mean to do?"
"never you mind, my lady, never you mind. you send for old crappen."
she waited for a moment. "is that all you want me to do?"
"i'm going to make it all right about those hostels. don't you fear. you and your hostels! you shan't touch those hostels ever again. ever. mrs. pembrose go! why! you ain't worthy to touch the heel of her shoe! mrs. pembrose!"
he gathered together all his forces and suddenly expelled with rousing force the word he had already applied to her on the day of the intercepted letter.
he found it seemed great satisfaction in the sound and taste of it. he repeated it thrice. "zut," cried the doctor, "sssh!"
then sir isaac intimated his sense that calm was imperative. "you send for crappen," he said with a quiet earnestness.
she had become now so used to terms of infamy during the last year or so, so accustomed to forgive them as part of his suffering, that she seemed not to hear the insult.
"do you want him at once?" she asked. "shall i telegraph?"
"want him at once!" he dropped his voice to a whisper. "yes, you fool—yes. telegraph. (phew.) telegraph.... i mustn't get angry, you know. you—telegraph."
he became suddenly still. but his eyes were active with hate.
she glanced at the doctor, then moved to the door.
"i will send a telegram," she said, and left him still malignant.
she closed the door softly and walked down the long cool passage towards her own room....
10
she had to be patient. she had to be patient. this sort of thing had to go on from crisis to crisis. it might go on for years. she could see no remedy and no escape.
what else was there to do but be patient? it was all amazing unjust, but to be a married woman she was beginning to understand is to be outside justice. it is autocracy. she had once imagined otherwise, and most of her life had been the slow unlearning of that initial error. she had imagined that the hostels were hers simply because he had put it in that way. they had never been anything but his, and now it was manifest he would do what he liked with his own. the law takes no cognizance of the unwritten terms of a domestic reconciliation.
she sat down at the writing-table the hotel management had improvised for her.
she rested her chin on her hand and tried to think out her position. but what was there to think out, seeing that nature and law and custom have conspired together to put women altogether under the power of jealous and acquisitive men?
she drew the telegram form towards her.
she was going to write a telegram that she knew would bring crappen headlong—to disinherit her absolutely. and—it suddenly struck her—her husband had trusted her to write it. she was going to do what he had trusted her to do.... but it was absurd.
she sat making patterns of little dots with her pencil point upon the telegram form, and there was a faint smile of amusement upon her lips.
it was absurd—and everything was absurd. what more was to be said or thought about it? this was the lot of woman. she had made her struggle, rebelled her little bit of rebellion. most other women no doubt had done as much. it made no difference in the long run.
but it was hard to give up the hostels. she had been foolish of course, but she had not let them make her feel real. and she wasn't real. she was a wife—just this....
she sighed and bestirred herself and began to write.
then abruptly she stopped writing.
for three years her excuse for standing—everything, had been these hostels. if now the hostels were to be wrenched out of her hands, if at her husband's death she was to be stripped of every possession and left a helpless dependant on her own children, if for all her good behaviour she was to be insulted by his frantic suspicions so long as he lived and then disgraced by his posthumous mistrust; was there any reason why she should go on standing anything any more? away there in england was mr. brumley, her man, ready with service and devotion....
it was a profoundly comforting thing to think of him there as hers. he was hers. he'd given so much and on the whole so well. if at last she were to go to him....
yet when she came to imagine the reality of the step that was in her mind, it took upon itself a chill and forbidding strangeness. it was like stepping out of a familiar house into empty space. what could it be like? to take some odd trunks with her, meet him somewhere, travel, travel through the evening, travel past nightfall? the bleak strangeness of that going out never to return!
her imagination could give her no figure of mr. brumley as intimate, as habitual. she could as easily imagine his skeleton. he remained in all this queer speculation something friendly, something incidental, more than a trifle disembodied, entirely devoted of course in that hovering way—but hovering....
and she wanted to be free. it wasn't mr. brumley she wanted; he was but a means—if indeed he was a means—to an end. the person she wanted, the person she had always wanted—was herself. could mr. brumley give her that? would mr. brumley give her that? was it conceivable he would carry sacrifice to such a pitch as that?...
and what nonsense was this dream! here was her husband needing her. and the children, whose inherent ungainliness, whose ungracious spirits demanded a perpetual palliation of culture and instilled deportment. what honest over-nurse was there for him or helper and guide and friend for them, if she withdrew? there was something undignified in a flight for mere happiness. there was something vindictive in flight from mere insult. to go, because she was disinherited, because her hostels were shattered,—no! and in short—she couldn't do it....
if sir isaac wanted to disinherit her he must disinherit her. if he wanted to go on seizing and reading her letters, then he could. there was nothing in the whole scheme of things to stop him if he did not want to stop himself, nothing at all. she was caught. this was the lot of women. she was a wife. what else in honour was there but to be a wife up to the hilt?...
she finished writing her telegram.
