“I am a perplexing bride, am I not, Sigismund?” she said, with a feeble grasping at a natural manner. “I think I must be too weak a creature to marry. I have a headache this morning, as retribution for doing so yesterday. You will not mind, if I rest for an hour?”
Her husband put his hands on her shoulders.
“Ah, you are a tender thing,” he said. “That is why it is well that you are married. Yes; you go to your rest, while I go to my work. That is the division of labour between us.”
He pressed his hands on her shoulders, as though seeking some passage to himself of her young responsiveness; and she raised her head with an effort at archness, which recalled the Perdita of the past.
To him the Perdita of to-day was the same; and she went to solitude, with a sense that his blindness was pushing her from the only cherishing her lot afforded.
The days began to pass, carrying that lot with daily sameness. Claverhouse gave himself to his work; growing utterly absorbed as its old grip returned, and more than could be spared of his time was demanded by the toil for the bread. The breaks in the life were Soulsby’s evening visits; and except for the hours for food, these were the only times of intercourse of the husband and wife. Beneath it all there was the hopelessness of truth. A want may absorb a life while it remains unfilled, and bear but little filling. Perdita lived joyless days, with privation of all that was good to her thought. Their only change was the growing of her suffering shame in her lot, to the indifference of feeling blunted by bitter use; and she marvelled, now with fierce resentment, now helpless wonder, that he could thus be blind to the claims of her youth.
For it was true that he went his way in blindness; the blindness of a consciousness so long absorbed in a purpose, that it has lost the power of fair survey of surrounding things. He had taken Perdita from the earning of her bread to freely yielded nurture. There was something repelling to his thought in a woman’s working to live; and he had no doubt that this change in itself was enough for her content. For the definite things that her life gave — they were those which had sufficed to his mother with her stronger needs; and he gave them no thought. He could not but learn that her knowledge of his aims was a thing feigned for his worthier judging of her; but he judged of her tenderly, as a creature calling for tenderness; and as touched her faith and interest held to his trust.
But it was sad that the trust should be held. Poor Perdita! It seemed to her the hardest thing of her wifehood, that, when he joined her at the end of his hours of toil, the lonely longing for human kindness, which had grown with those hours, should be met by demands for expending herself on the labour whose own demands were bringing that self to starvation. Day after day she raised her eyes from the book or trifling of needle supposed to be holding them, with helpless appeal for some sign of cherishing, or at least undemanding fellowship; and day after day she fought with anger and despair, and forced from herself the weariness of self-dissembling. One evening, when a deeper than her wonted depression was met by stronger eagerness for the alien interest, her spirit faltered; and she met the first appeal with silence, and the question which followed with petulant words.
Surprised, but hardly wrought upon deeply, he made kindly question of her health or weariness.
She could not bring her courage to confession of what was pent within her; and, clutching at the second plea, sought the loneliness which seemed to be draining her life.
The dramatist did not forget the occurrence; but the significance he gave it, though allied to the true one, had nothing of its depth. He made his demands on her interest and sympathy fewer; and formed a habit of trying to afford her what he sought for himself. He would ask her what books she was reading, and talk to her of them with gentle moulding of himself to her needs; or tell her stories of his youth, with his early struggles and ambitions. He even, in the thought of a moment, asked her what friends she had; and bade her seek them if she willed, or bid them to her home. These words she heard with leaping heart. Her soul cried out for Dolores. But her torturing shame on her daily experience, and the passion of pride which was fiercest touching the woman she most loved, wrung an answer from her lips which sealed the straitness of her lot.
Chapter XIII
The nine months of Perdita’s wifehood had worn to their end. Perdita lay as still and sorrowless, as her child who had never breathed.
Soulsby, as he stood on the steps of the darkened dwelling, looked on the shrouded windows with feelings he could not name. The close of this passage in his friend’s experience, which seemed already to have fallen back into a past whose life was in memory, was a bewildering, constraining thing. Would the old days return — with unwitnessed fellowship and unmarked words; as if the suffering eyes had never wearied of unheeded watching, and the sweet, faint tones had never struggled to be steady? He worked his hands nervously, as a step sounded in the passage.
“I–I did not know whether — whether the sad message was a request for my coming or not. I thought that — that I might just come to inquire, and either go or stay, as it was best. Can you — you will tell me what I should do?”
“Ah, sir! come in, if you please; come in,” said the old servant; making a sign towards the living-room, as she spoke in a toneless voice. “He sits in there alone hour after hour. He has never uttered a word, except to ask me if the poor young creature seemed happy in the time she lived with us. And, indeed, she never opened her lips to say she wasn’t; so proud to the end as she was, and such a spirit as there was in that weak body. Yes; go in, sir; go in. I fear he is taken, as after the mistress died, with looking back on things, and wishing they had all been different; and it will be a sad thing for him, if it is so, sir.”
Soulsby entered the room, and paused just inside the doorway, as if to accept notice or repulsion, as either might meet him.
Claverhouse was standing by the chimney-piece. He did not turn, but moved as though he felt his presence; and beckoning him forward with a sidelong gesture, spoke without looking towards him.
“Soulsby, it was a wrong thing that I did — that taking a young creature’s youth, and burying it. It is a thing for which I must live and die sorrowing. The memory of these months, as she lived them and suffered in them — for whether or no she knew it, she must have suffered — suffered starvation of her growing nature — must be always with me.”
He talked on; and Soulsby listened in silence, except for needful response, and at times a restraining or remonstrant word. There was a feeling upon him, that he was living the experience for the second time. A similar hour after Janet’s burial was present with him, in spite of an effort to repel it. Each word and look of his friend seemed in a strange manner familiar; and he found himself looking, without the bidding of his will, over the days that must be darkened, to the further inevitable time, when the cloud should surely have passed.
But there was different and sadder to come.
The following day he came as he was bidden, to fulfil this new demand on his unwearying friendship. With characteristic shrinking from breaking the silence of the dwelling of death, he entered the house without knock or ring.
The playwright was sitting with his arms stretched out on the table, and his head bowed over them. His friend was struck by a difference from the yesterday. His face was set in lines of hopeless misery, which on a face marked thus with the years and their burden, was tragic; and he gave no sign of knowing that his solitude was broken. On the table before him, almost covered by both his hands, was what seemed to be a small, black notebook.