“Do you take an interest in the comings and the goings of the moon?” He accompanied this unusual triviality with an effort at a smile.
“No except that from a window in my room it rather forces itself upon me.”
He did not reply to this, and after a while she said, “Tell me something about your childhood in China. I’ve never been anywhere except in Europe.”
“I don’t want to think of my childhood,” he said with the strange sort of abruptness which she was beginning to realize did not mean irritation.
“Was it unhappy?” she persisted.
“No, just useless to me.”
“Useless?”
“Yes. I was the son of a missionary. You don’t think there could be any advantage to me to have missionary parents, do you? I kept it a secret all the time I was at college. It was a fearful disadvantage to me even in the English prep school I went to in China.” He wanted her to know the worst about him and he pressed the point. “To be the son of a missionary made my classmates think I must be queer. As a matter of fact, my father was rather remarkable. I didn’t discover it, though, until he came home to die in my house.”
“Tell me about him.” Her voice led him on.
“Sometime, Lady Emory. I don’t want to talk about him now.”
“Wait,” Lady Emory said. Her brown eyes widened a little and her soft voice took a slight imperious edge. “I wonder if I know what you want to talk about to me. If I do, I beg you to remember that we scarcely know each other.”
“You may not know me but I know you,” William replied. Passion seized him with a violence monstrous even to himself. He did not want to wait one moment to take this beautiful Englishwoman into his arms. He wanted her now, he wanted it settled.
Lady Emory looked frightened. “How can you know me?”
“I’ve always known England,” William said. “I’ve always loved England, against my will I confess, but there it is. Now I’ve found you and you are the personification of all that I have loved.”
“Michael said you were married—”
“That has nothing to do with you or me.”
“No.” Her word was a breath, a sigh, and he let it be acceptance. He took one step and she rose at his approach, and he drew her into his arms. Sweet and fearful was this exultation, his soaring pride in what he had, this arrogance of love! He was speechless, his face in the darkness of her hair, and he did not notice her silence or the still motionlessness with which she stood.
She was shocked to discover that the conviction in which she had sheathed herself since last she stood in Cecil’s arms was entirely false. She did not feel repelled at all by another man’s body pressed against her own. She had supposed it would be intolerable, eternally abhorrent, and it was not. It was even pleasant and comforting, as it would be pleasant and comforting to live in riches and plenty, no more a burden to her parents because she did not marry, no more a charity for Michael when his inheritance came to him. England was old and tired, and somehow with her dead lover it had died for her. America was young and strong, a rising empire, and to go there now, to leave England and take her own unspent womanhood with her, would be the nearest happiness that she could know. And this American, she perceived, contrary to what she had always heard about Americans, was neither stupid nor boyish.
“You can’t love me — as quickly as I have loved you — I don’t expect it—” William was stammering these broken sentences.
She was an honest woman, though beautiful, and what she now knew she would do, she wanted done with all her heart.
She stepped back, but only a little, and she let him hold her hands. “I suppose it is too soon,” she said frankly. “But I don’t think it is at all impossible — William!”
July in Ohio could be as hot as in India. Henrietta felt the heat. She had spent the last month with Clem in Mexico, where he had gone to confer with the Food Minister who wanted American wheat. Washington had been apathetic and he had called on Clem who, after listening carefully, had insisted on seeing Mexico for himself, so that he would know just how much the people needed wheat. He had not noticed the hot weather. His blood ran cool and he was thinner than ever. Mexican food was poison to him, the tamales hot as Indian food and even the vegetables full of red peppers, the spinach boiled to the color and taste of dead grass. He doggedly ate the native foods here as elsewhere, however, because he wanted to know what the people lived on, and afterward was tortured with the dyspepsia that got worse as he grew older. He had promised to get the wheat somehow, and they had come home.
Their house now as they opened the front door was hot and dusty and the air was stale.
“You get your dress off, hon,” Clem said to Henrietta. “Go upstairs and put on a wrapper and relax. I’ll open the windows.”
Henrietta obeyed without answer. She had begun to gain weight and it was a relief to get out of her corset. She went upstairs into the large bathroom which Clem had fitted up himself and modeled after the ones in India. She stood in the big zinc-lined tray and filled a jar with water from the tap; then with a dipper she poured it over herself Indian fashion. The house was full of things that Clem had admired in other countries. He liked chopsticks, for instance, better than knives and forks. They were cleaner, he said. The water was lukewarm but even so, cooler than she was. She toweled herself and then put on the negligee that Clem always called a wrapper. She did not mind. It was comfortable to live with a man who did not know what she wore.
She went downstairs to unpack the groceries they had bought for supper. Clem had taken off his coat and sat in his white shirtsleeves at the dining table, figuring on a sheet of paper. His shoulder blades were sharp and the back of his neck was hollowed. He had lost weight in the Mexico heat. She did not speak aloud her worry. Nothing annoyed him more than to hear her worry about his being thin.
She sat down in a large wicker chair, tore open the envelope which was postmarked New York City, and began to read to herself. The first paragraph revealed catastrophe. Her mother wrote, “I am glad your poor father has passed on. He could never have endured what is about to happen to our family. I have wept and prayed to no avail. William is adamant. He is beyond my reach. I remember when he was a small infant upon my bosom. I know he is my son, but I cannot recognize him. What have we done to deserve this?”
Thus far Henrietta went without comment to Clem. Then she saw the next sentence and a smothered cry escaped her.
“What is it?” Clem asked.
He turned from his figures. It was not like Henrietta to cry out about anything. Now her large gray eyes were wide, staring at the sheet she held. They were the color of William’s eyes but not like them in their depths.
“William is going to divorce Candace!” She breathed the words with the utmost horror, and he received them with horror as they looked at each other.
“What’s Candace done?” he asked sternly.
Henrietta returned to the letter. “She can’t have done anything,” she murmured. Her eyes swept down the page. “Mamma doesn’t say — yes, she does. She says Candace is just what she always was — there’s no excuse for William — he doesn’t even make an excuse — you know how he is. He always does what he is going to do and never says why. Mamma says it’s just an infatuation. It’s an Englishwoman he met on his trip.”
Henrietta would have cried had she tears, but she had none. Against William her heart hardened, and she crushed the letter in her hand and threw it into the woven wicker wastepaper basket. She had never loved Candace but now she almost loved her. Long ago she had left her father’s profound faith, but she had a sort of religion, fed by Clem’s unselfishness and devotion to his single cause. The Camerons were good people, in their way as good as her father had been, and all the old decencies remained. A man did not divorce his wife without cause and the best of men did not divorce their wives for any cause. William had left the ranks of the good.