“No, really my darling. Don’t, don’t cry any more.”
Christie grew calmer, but he was evidently disappointed. He was not satisfied with the end of the story; and yet it was very pretty like that, much prettier than if Joseph had been angry, and put Benjamin in prison.
“What a baby to cry!” said Dolf. “It was only a story.”
Cecile did not reply that the story had really happened, because it was in the Bible. She had suddenly become very sad, in doubt of herself. She fondly dried the child’s eyes with her pocket-handkerchief.
“And now, children, bed. It’s late!” she said, faintly.
She put them to bed, a ceremony which lasted a long time; a ceremony with an elaborate ritual of undressing, washing, saying of prayers, tucking-in, and kissing. When after an hour she was sitting downstairs again alone, she first realised how sad she felt.
Ah no, she did not know! Amélie was quite right: one never knew anything, never! She had been so happy that day; she had found herself again, deep in the recesses of her most secret self, in the essence of her soul; all day she had seen her dreams hovering about her as an apotheosis; all day she had felt within her the consuming love of her children. She had told them stories out of the Bible after dinner, and suddenly, when Christie began to cry, a doubt had arisen within her. Was she really good to her little boys? Did she not, in her love, in the tenderness of her affection for them spoil and weaken them? Would she not end by utterly unfitting them for a practical life, with which she did not come into contact, but in which the children, when they grew up, would have to move? It flashed through her mind: parting, boarding-schools, her children estranged from her, coming home big, rough boys, smoking and swearing, cynicism on their lips and in their hearts; lips which would no longer kiss her, hearts in which she would no longer have a place. She pictured them already with the swagger of their seventeen or eighteen years, tramping across her rooms in their cadet’s and midshipman’s uniforms, with broad shoulders and a hard laugh, flicking the ash from their cigars upon the carpet. Why did Quaerts’ image suddenly rise up in the midst of this cruelty? Was it chance or a consequence? She could not analyse it; she could not explain the presence of this man, rising up through her grief in the atmosphere of her antipathy. But she felt sad, sad, sad, as she had not felt sad since Van Even’s death; not vaguely melancholy, as she so often felt, but sad, undoubtedly sorrowful at the thought of what must come. Oh! to have to part with her children! And then, to be alone … Loneliness, everlasting loneliness! Loneliness within herself; that feeling of which Jules had such dread; withdrawn from the world which had no charm for her, sunk away alone into all emptiness! She was thirty, she was old, an old woman. Her house would be empty, her heart empty! Dreams, clouds of dreaming, which fly away, which rise like smoke, revealing only emptiness. Emptiness, emptiness, emptiness! The word each time fell hollowly, with hammer strokes, upon her breast. Emptiness, emptiness …
“Why am I like this?” she asked herself. “What ails me? What has altered?”
Never had she felt that word emptiness throb within her in this way: that very afternoon she had been gently happy, as ordinarily. And now! She saw nothing before her, no future, no life, nothing but broad darkness. Estranged from her children, alone within herself …
She rose up with a half moan of pain, and walked across the boudoir. The discreet half-light troubled her, oppressed her. She turned the key of the lace-covered lamp; a golden gleam crept over the rose folds of the silk curtains like glistening water. A fire burned on the hearth, but she felt cold.
She stood by the little table; she took up a card, with one corner turned down, and read: “T. H. Quaerts.” A coronet with five balls was engraved above the name. “Quaerts!” How short it sounded! A name like the smack of a hard hand. There was something bad, something cruel in the name: “Quaerts, Quaerts …”
She threw down the bit of card, angry with herself. She felt cold, and not herself, just as she had felt at the Van Attemas’ the evening before.
“I will not go out again. Never again, never!” she said, almost aloud. “I am so contented in my own house, so contented with my life, so beautifully happy … That card! Why should he leave a card? What do I want with his card? …”
She sat down at her writing-table and opened her blotting-book. She wished to finish a half-written letter to India but she was in quite a different mood from when she had begun it. So she took from a drawer a thick book, her diary. She wrote the date, then reflected a moment, tapping her teeth nervously with the silver penholder.
But then, with a little ill-tempered gesture, she threw down the pen, pushed the book aside, and, letting her head fall into her hands, sobbed aloud.
VI
Cecile was astonished at this unusually long fit of abstraction, that it should continue for days before she could again enter into her usual condition of serenity, the delightful abode from which, without wishing it, she had wandered. But she compelled herself, with gentle compulsion, to recover the treasures of her loneliness. She argued with herself that it would be some years before she would have to part from Dolf and Christie: there was time enough to grow accustomed to the idea of separation. Besides, nothing had altered either about her, or within her, and so she let the days glide slowly over her, like gently flowing water.
In this way, gently flowing by, a fortnight had elapsed since the evening she spent at Dolf’s. It was a Saturday afternoon; she had been working with the children – she still taught them herself – and she had walked out with them; and now she sat again in her favourite room awaiting the Van Attemas, who came every Saturday at half-past four to afternoon tea. She rang for the servant, who lighted the blue flame of methylated spirit. Dolf and Christie were with her; they sat upon the floor on footstools, cutting the pages of a children’s magazine to which Cecile subscribed for them. They were sitting quietly and well-bred, like children who grow up in a feeble surrounding, in the midst of too much refinement, too pale, with hair too long and too blonde, Christie especially, whose little temples were veined as if with lilac blood. Cecile stepped by them as she went to glance over the tea-table, and the look she cast upon them wrapped the children in a warm embrace of devotion. She was in her calmly happy mood; it was so pleasant that she would soon see the Van Attemas coming in. She liked these hours in the afternoon when her silver tea-kettle hissed over the blue flame. An exquisite intimacy filled the room; she had in her long, shapely feminine fingers that special power of witchery, that gentle art of handling by which everything, over which they merely glided, acquired a look of herself; an indefinable something, of tint, of position, of light, which the things had not until the touch of those fingers came across them.
There came a ring. She thought it rather early for the Van Attemas, but she rarely saw anyone else in her seclusion from the outer world – therefore it must be they. A few moments, however, and Greta came in, with a card. Was Mevrouw at home, and could the gentleman see her?
Cecile recognised the card from a distance: she had seen one like it quite recently. Yet she took it up, glanced at it discontentedly, with drawn eyebrows.
What an idea! Why did he do it? What did it mean? But she thought it unnecessary to be impolite and refuse to see him. After all he was a friend of Dolf’s.
“Show Meneer up,” she said.
Greta went, and it seemed to Cecile as though something trembled in the intimacy which filled the room; as if the objects over which her fingers had just passed took another aspect, a look of fright. But Dolf and Christie had not changed; they were still sitting looking at the pictures, with occasional remarks falling softly from their lips. The door opened, and Quaerts entered the room. He had in still greater measure than before his air of shyness as he bowed to Cecile. To her this air was incomprehensible in him, who seemed so strong, so determined.