III

She was still reflecting on this when the surprised parlourmaid came in and found her. No, Charlotte said, she wasn’t going to dress for dinner; Mr. Ashby didn’t want to dine. He was very tired and had gone up to his room to rest; later she would have something brought on a tray to the drawing-room. She mounted the stairs to her bedroom. Her dinner dress was lying on the bed, and at the sight the quiet routine of her daily life took hold of her and she began to feel as if the strange talk she had just had with her husband must have taken place in another world, between two beings who were not Charlotte Gorse and Kenneth Ashby, but phantoms projected by her fevered imagination. She recalled the year since her marriage — her husband’s constant devotion; his persistent, almost too insistent tenderness; the feeling he had given her at times of being too eagerly dependent on her, too searchingly close to her, as if there were not air enough between her soul and his. It seemed preposterous, as she recalled all this, that a few moments ago she should have been accusing him of an intrigue with another woman! But, then, what —

Again she was moved by the impulse to go up to him, beg his pardon and try to laugh away the misunderstanding. But she was restrained by the tear of forcing herself upon his privacy. He was troubled and unhappy, oppressed by some grief or tear; and he had shown her that he wanted to fight out his battle alone. It would be wiser, as well as more generous, to respect his wish. Only, how strange, how unbearable, to be there, in the next room to his, and feel herself at the other end of the world! In her nervous agitation she almost regretted not having had the courage to open the letter and put it back on the hall table before he came in. At least she would have known what his secret was, and the bogy might have been laid. For she was beginning now to think of the mystery as something conscious, malevolent: a secret persecution before which he quailed, yet from which he could not free himself. Once or twice in his evasive eyes she thought she had detected a desire for help, an impulse of confession, instantly restrained and suppressed. It was as if he felt she could have helped him if she had known, and vet had been unable to tell her!

There flashed through her mind the idea of going to his mother. She was very fond of old Mrs. Ashby, a firm-fleshed clear-eyed old lady, with an astringent bluntness of speech which responded to the forthright and simple in Charlotte’s own nature. There had been a tacit bond between them ever since the day when Mrs. Ashby senior, coming to lunch for the first time with her new daughter-in-law, had been received by Charlotte downstairs in the library, and glancing up at the empty wall above her son’s desk, had remarked laconically: “Elsie gone, eh?” adding, at Charlotte’s murmured explanation: “Nonsense. Don’t have her back. Two’s company.” Charlotte, at this reading of her thoughts, could hardly refrain from exchanging a smile of complicity with her mother- in-law; and it seemed to her now that Mrs. Ashby’s almost uncanny directness might pierce to the core of this new mystery. But here again she hesitated, for the idea almost suggested a betrayal. What right had she to call in any one, even so close a relation, to surprise a secret which her husband was trying to keep from her? “Perhaps, by and by, he’ll talk to his mother of his own accord,” she thought, and then ended: “But what does it matter? He and I must settle it between us.”

She was still brooding over the problem when there was a knock on the door and her husband came in. He was dressed for dinner and seemed surprised to see her sitting there, with her evening dress lying unheeded on the bed.

“Aren’t you coming down?”

“I thought you were not well and had gone to bed,” she faltered.

He forced a smile. “I’m not particularly well, but we’d better go down.” His face, though still drawn, looked calmer than when he had fled upstairs an hour earlier.

“There it is; he knows what’s in the letter and has fought his battle out again, whatever it is,” she reflected, “while I’m still in darkness.” She rang and gave a hurried order that dinner should be served as soon as possible — just a short meal, whatever could be got ready quickly, as both she and Mr. Ashby were rather tired and not very hungry.

Dinner was announced, and they sat down to it. At first neither seemed able to find a word to say; then Ashby began to make conversation with an assumption of ease that was more oppressive than his silence. “How tired he is! How terribly overtired!” Charlotte said to herself, pursuing her own thoughts while he rambled on about municipal politics, aviation, an exhibition of modern French painting, the health of an old aunt and the installing of the automatic telephone. “Good heavens, how tired he is!”

When they dined alone they usually went into the library after dinner, and Charlotte curled herself up on the divan with her knitting while he settled down in his armchair under the lamp and lit a pipe. But this evening, by tacit agreement, they avoided the room in which their strange talk had taken place, and went up to Charlotte’s drawing-room.

They sat down near the fire, and Charlotte said: “Your pipe?” after he had put down his hardly tasted coffee.

He shook his head. “No, not tonight.”

“You must go to bed early; you look terribly tired. I’m sure they overwork you at the office.”

“I suppose we all overwork at times.”

She rose and stood before him with sudden resolution. “Well, I’m not going to have you use up your strength slaving in that way. It’s absurd. I can see you’re ill.” She bent over him and laid her hand on his forehead. “My poor old Kenneth. Prepare to be taken away soon on a long holiday.”

He looked up at her, startled. “A holiday?”

“Certainly. Didn’t you know I was going to carry you off at Easter? We’re going to start in a fortnight on a month’s voyage to somewhere or other. On any one of the big cruising steamers.” She paused and bent closer, touching his forehead with her lips. “I’m tired, too, Kenneth.”

He seemed to pay no heed to her last words, but sat, his hands on his knees, his head drawn back a little from her caress, and looked up at her with a stare of apprehension. “Again? My dear, we can’t; I can’t possibly go away.”

“I don’t know why you say ‘again’, Kenneth; we haven’t taken a real holiday this year.”

“At Christmas we spent a week with the children in the country.”

“Yes, but this time I mean away from the children, from servants, from the house. From everything that’s familiar and fatiguing. Your mother will love to have Joyce and Peter with her.”

He frowned and slowly shook his head. “No, dear; I can’t leave them with my mother.”

“Why, Kenneth, how absurd! She adores them. You didn’t hesitate to leave them with her for over two months when we went to the West Indies.”

He drew a deep breath and stood up uneasily. “That was different.”

“Different? Why?”

“I mean, at that time I didn’t realize” — He broke off as if to choose his words and then went on: “My mother adores the children, as you say. But she isn’t always very judicious. Grandmothers always spoil children. And she sometimes talks before them without thinking.” He turned to his wife with an almost pitiful gesture of entreaty. “Don’t ask me to, dear.”

Charlotte mused. It was true that the elder Mrs. Ashby had a fearless tongue, but she was the last woman in the world to say or hint anything before her grandchildren at which the most scrupulous parent could take offense. Charlotte looked at her husband in perplexity.

“I don’t understand.”

He continued to turn on her the same troubled and entreating gaze. “Don’t try to,” he muttered.

“Not try to?”

“Not now — not yet.” He put up his hands and pressed them against his temples. “Can’t you see that there’s no use in insisting? I can’t go away, no matter how much I might want to.”

Charlotte still scrutinized him gravely. “The question is, do you want to?”

He returned her gaze for a moment; then his lips began to tremble, and he said, hardly above his breath: “I want — anything you want.”

“And yet—”

“Don’t ask me. I can’t leave — I can’t!”

“You mean that you can’t go away out of reach of those letters!”

Her husband had been standing before her in an uneasy half-hesitating attitude; now he turned abruptly away and walked once or twice up and down the length of the room, his head bent, his eyes fixed on the carpet.

Charlotte felt her resentfulness rising with her fears. “It’s that,” she persisted. “Why not admit it? You can’t live without them.”

He continued his troubled pacing of the room; then he stopped short, dropped into a chair and covered his face with his hands. From the shaking of his shoulders, Charlotte saw that he was weeping. She had never seen a man cry, except her father after her mother’s death, when she was a little girl; and she remembered still how the sight had frightened her. She was frightened now; she felt that her husband was being dragged away from her into some mysterious bondage, and that she must use up her last atom of strength in the struggle for his freedom, and for hers.

“Kenneth — Kenneth!” she pleaded, kneeling down beside him. “Won’t you listen to me? Won’t you try to see what I’m suffering? I’m not unreasonable, darling; really not. I don’t suppose I should ever have noticed the letters if it hadn’t been for their effect on you. It’s not my way to pry into other people’s affairs; and even if the effect had been different — yes, yes; listen to me — if I’d seen that the letters made you happy, that you were watching eagerly for them, counting the days between their coming, that you wanted them, that they gave you something I haven’t known how to give — why, Kenneth, I don’t say I shouldn’t have suffered from that, too; but it would have been in a different way, and I should have had the courage to hide what I felt, and the hope that some day you’d come to feel about me as you did about the writer of the letters. But what I can’t bear is to see how you dread them, how they make you suffer, and yet how you can’t live without them and won’t go away lest you should miss one during your absence. Or perhaps,” she added, her voice breaking into a cry of accusation— “perhaps it’s because she’s actually forbidden you to leave. Kenneth, you must answer me! Is that the reason? Is it because she’s forbidden you that you won’t go away with me?”

She continued to kneel at his side, and raising her hands, she drew his gently down. She was ashamed of her persistence, ashamed of uncovering that baffled disordered face, yet resolved that no such scruples should arrest her. His eyes were lowered, the muscles of his face quivered; she was making him suffer even more than she suffered herself. Yet this no longer restrained her.

“Kenneth, is it that? She won’t let us go away together?”

Still he did not speak or turn his eyes to her; and a sense of defeat swept over her. After all, she thought, the struggle was a losing one. “You needn’t answer. I see I’m right,” she said.

Suddenly, as she rose, he turned and drew her down again. His hands caught hers and pressed them so tightly that she felt her rings cutting into her flesh. There was something frightened, convulsive in his hold; it was the clutch of a man who felt himself slipping over a precipice. He was staring up at her now as if salvation lay in the face she bent above him. “Of course we’ll go away together. We’ll go wherever you want,” he said in a low confused voice; and putting his arm about her, he drew her close and pressed his lips on hers.