It was, as Westall had just reminded her, on this understanding that they had married. The ceremony was an unimportant concession to social prejudice: now that the door of divorce stood open, no marriage need be an imprisonment, and the contract therefore no longer involved any diminution of self-respect. The nature of their attachment placed them so far beyond the reach of such contingencies that it was easy to discuss them with an open mind; and Julia’s sense of security made her dwell with a tender insistence on Westall’s promise to claim his release when he should cease to love her. The exchange of these vows seemed to make them, in a sense, champions of the new law, pioneers in the forbidden realm of individual freedom: they felt that they had somehow achieved beatitude without martyrdom.
This, as Julia now reviewed the past, she perceived to have been her theoretical attitude toward marriage. It was unconsciously, insidiously, that her ten years of happiness with Westall had developed another conception of the tie; a reversion, rather, to the old instinct of passionate dependency and possessorship that now made her blood revolt at the mere hint of change. Change? Renewal? Was that what they had called it, in their foolish jargon? Destruction, extermination rather—this rending of a myriad fibres interwoven with another’s being! Another? But he was not other! He and she were one, one in the mystic sense which alone gave marriage its significance. The new law was not for them, but for the disunited creatures forced into a mockery of union. The gospel she had felt called on to proclaim had no bearing on her own case…. She sent for the doctor and told him she was sure she needed a nerve tonic.
She took the nerve tonic diligently, but it failed to act as a sedative to her fears. She did not know what she feared; but that made her anxiety the more pervasive. Her husband had not reverted to the subject of his Saturday talks. He was unusually kind and considerate, with a softening of his quick manner, a touch of shyness in his consideration, that sickened her with new fears. She told herself that it was because she looked badly—because he knew about the doctor and the nerve tonic—that he showed this deference to her wishes, this eagerness to screen her from moral draughts; but the explanation simply cleared the way for fresh inferences.
The week passed slowly, vacantly, like a prolonged Sunday. On Saturday the morning post brought a note from Mrs. Van Sideren. Would dear Julia ask Mr. Westall to come half an hour earlier than usual, as there was to be some music after his “talk”? Westall was just leaving for his office when his wife read the note. She opened the drawing-room door and called him back to deliver the message.
He glanced at the note and tossed it aside. “What a bore! I shall have to cut my game of racquets. Well, I suppose it can’t be helped. Will you write and say it’s all right?”
Julia hesitated a moment, her hand stiffening on the chair-back against which she leaned.
“You mean to go on with these talks?” she asked.
“I—why not?” he returned; and this time it struck her that his surprise was not quite unfeigned. The discovery helped her to find words.
“You said you had started them with the idea of pleasing me—”
“Well?”
“I told you last week that they didn’t please me.”
“Last week? Oh—” He seemed to make an effort of memory. “I thought you were nervous then; you sent for the doctor the next day.”
“It was not the doctor I needed; it was your assurance—”
“My assurance?”
Suddenly she felt the floor fail under her. She sank into the chair with a choking throat, her words, her reasons slipping away from her like straws down a whirling flood.
“Clement,” she cried, “isn’t it enough for you to know that I hate it?”
He turned to close the door behind them; then he walked toward her and sat down. “What is it that you hate?” he asked gently.
She had made a desperate effort to rally her routed argument.
“I can’t bear to have you speak as if—as if—our marriage—were like the other kind—the wrong kind. When I heard you there, the other afternoon, before all those inquisitive gossiping people, proclaiming that husbands and wives had a right to leave each other whenever they were tired—or had seen some one else—”
Westall sat motionless, his eyes fixed on a pattern of the carpet.
“You have ceased to take this view, then?” he said as she broke off. “You no longer believe that husbands and wives are justified in separating—under such conditions?”
“Under such conditions?” she stammered. “Yes—I still believe that—but how can we judge for others? What can we know of the circumstances—?”
He interrupted her. “I thought it was a fundamental article of our creed that the special circumstances produced by marriage were not to interfere with the full assertion of individual liberty.” He paused a moment. “I thought that was your reason for leaving Arment.”
She flushed to the forehead. It was not like him to give a personal turn to the argument.
“It was my reason,” she said simply.
“Well, then—why do you refuse to recognize its validity now?”
“I don’t—I don’t—I only say that one can’t judge for others.”
He made an impatient movement. “This is mere hair-splitting. What you mean is that, the doctrine having served your purpose when you needed it, you now repudiate it.”
“Well,” she exclaimed, flushing again, “what if I do? What does it matter to us?”
Westall rose from his chair. He was excessively pale, and stood before his wife with something of the formality of a stranger.
“It matters to me,” he said in a low voice, “because I do not repudiate it.”
“Well—?”
“And because I had intended to invoke it as”—
He paused and drew his breath deeply. She sat silent, almost deafened by her heart-beats.—“as a complete justification of the course I am about to take.”
Julia remained motionless. “What course is that?” she asked.
He cleared his throat. “I mean to claim the fulfilment of your promise.”
For an instant the room wavered and darkened; then she recovered a torturing acuteness of vision. Every detail of her surroundings pressed upon her: the tick of the clock, the slant of sunlight on the wall, the hardness of the chair-arms that she grasped, were a separate wound to each sense.
“My promise—” she faltered.
“Your part of our mutual agreement to set each other free if one or the other should wish to be released.”
She was silent again. He waited a moment, shifting his position nervously; then he said, with a touch of irritability: “You acknowledge the agreement?”
The question went through her like a shock. She lifted her head to it proudly. “I acknowledge the agreement,” she said.
“And—you don’t mean to repudiate it?”
A log on the hearth fell forward, and mechanically he advanced and pushed it back.
“No,” she answered slowly, “I don’t mean to repudiate it.”
There was a pause. He remained near the hearth, his elbow resting on the mantel-shelf. Close to his hand stood a little cup of jade that he had given her on one of their wedding anniversaries. She wondered vaguely if he noticed it.
“You intend to leave me, then?” she said at length.
His gesture seemed to deprecate the crudeness of the allusion.
“To marry some one else?”