i

It was a Sunday in the middle of April.

Jerrold had motored up to London on the Friday and had brought Eliot back with him for the week-end.  Anne had come over as she always did on a Sunday afternoon.  She and Maisie were sitting out on the terrace when Eliot came to them, walking with the tired limp that Anne found piteous and adorable.  Very soon Maisie murmured some gentle, unintelligible excuse, and left them.

There was a moment of silence in which everything they had ever said to each other was present to them, making all other speech unnecessary, as if they held a long intimate conversation.  Eliot sat very still, not looking at her, yet attentive as if he listened to the passing of those unuttered words.  Then Anne spoke and her voice broke up his mood.

“What are you doing now?  Bacteriology?”

“Yes.  We’ve found the thing we were looking for, the germ of trench fever.”

“You mean you have.”

“Well, somebody would have spotted it if I hadn’t.  A lot of us were out for it.”

“Oh Eliot, I am so glad.  That means you’ll stamp out the disease, doesn’t it?”

“Probably.  In time.”

“I knew you’d do it.  I knew you’d do something big before you’d finished.”

“My dear, I’ve only just begun.  But there’s nothing big about it but the research, and we were all in that.  All looking for the same thing.  Happening to spot it is just heaven’s own luck.”

“But aren’t you glad it was you?”

“It doesn’t matter who it is.  But I suppose I’m glad.  It’s the sort of thing I wanted to do and it’s rather more important than most things one does.”

He said no more.  Years ago, when he had done nothing, he had talked excitedly and arrogantly about his work; now that he had done what he had set out to do he was reserved, impassive and very humble.

“Do Jerrold and Colin know?” she said.

“Not yet.  You’re the first.”

“Dear Eliot, you did know I’d be glad.”

“It’s nice of you to care.”

Of course she cared.  She was glad to think that he had that supreme satisfaction to make up for the cruelty of her refusal to care more.  Perhaps, she thought, he wouldn’t have had it if he had had her.  He would have been torn in two; he would have had to give himself twice over.  She felt that he didn’t love her more than he loved his science, and science exacted an uninterrupted and undivided service.  One life hadn’t room enough for two such loves, and he might not have done so much if she had been there, calling back his thoughts, drawing his passion to herself.

“What are you going to do next?” she said.

“Next I’m going off for a month’s holiday.  To Sicily ­Taormina.  I’ve been overworking and I’m a bit run down.  How about Colin?”

“He’s better.  Heaps better.  He soon got over that relapse he had when I was away in February.”

“You mean he got over it when you came back.”

“Well, yes, it was when I came back.  That’s just what I don’t like about him, Eliot.  He’s getting dependent on me, and it’s bad for him.  I wish he could go away somewhere for a change.  A long change.  Away from me, away from the farm, away from Wyck, somewhere where he hasn’t been before.  It might cure him, mightn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said.  “Yes.  It would be worth trying.”

He didn’t look at her.  He knew what she was going to say.  She said it.

“Eliot ­do you think you could take him with you?  Could you stand the strain?”

“If you could stand it for four years I ought to be able to stand it for a month.”

“If he gets better it won’t be a strain.  He isn’t a bit of trouble when he’s well.  He’s adorable.  Only ­perhaps ­if you’re run down you oughtn’t to.”

“I’m not so bad as all that.  The only thing is, you say he ought to get away from you, and I wanted you to come too.”

“Me?”

“You and Maisie and Jerrold.”

“I can’t.  It’s impossible.  I can’t leave the farm.”

“My dear girl, you mustn’t be tied to it like that.  Don’t you ever get away?”

“Not unless Jerrold or Colin are here.  We can’t all three be away at once.  But it’s awfully nice of you to think of it.”

“I didn’t.  It was Maisie.”

Maisie?  Would she never get away from Maisie, and Maisie’s sweetness and kindness, breaking her down?

“She’ll be awfully disappointed if you don’t go.”

“Why should she be?”

“Because she wants you to.”

“Maisie?”

“Yes.  Surely you know she likes you?”

“I was afraid she was beginning to ­”

“Why?  Don’t you want her to like you?  Don’t you like her?”

“Yes.  And I don’t want to like her.  If I once begin I shall end by loving her.”

“My dear, it would be the best thing you could do.”

“No, Eliot, it wouldn’t.  You don’t know....  Here she is.”

Maisie came to them along the terrace.  She moved with an unresisting grace, a delicate bowing of her head and swaying of her body, and breathless as if she went against a wind.  Eliot gave up his chair and limped away from them.

“Has he told you about Taormina?” she said.

“Yes.  It’s sweet of you to ask me to go with you ­”

“You’re coming, aren’t you?”

“I’m afraid I can’t.”

“Why ever not?”

“I can’t leave the land for one thing.  Not if Jerrold and Colin aren’t here.”

“Oh, bother the old land!  You must leave it.  It can get on without you for a month or two.  Nothing much can happen in that time.”

“Oh, can’t it!  Things can happen in a day if you aren’t there to see that they don’t.”

“Well, Jerrold won’t mind much if they do.  But he’ll mind awfully if you don’t come.  So shall I. Besides, it’s all settled.  He’s to come back with Eliot in time for the hay harvest, and you and I and Colin are to go on to the Italian Lakes.  My father and mother are joining us at Como in June.  We shall be there a month and come home through Switzerland.”

“It would be heavenly, but I can’t do it.  I can’t, really, Maisie.”  She was thinking:  He’ll be back for the hay harvest.

“But you must.  You can’t go and spoil all our pleasure like that.  Jerrold’s and Eliot’s and Colin’s. And mine.  I never dreamed of your not coming.”

“Do you mean you really want me?”

“Of course I want you.  So does Jerrold.  It won’t be the same thing at all without you.  I want to see you enjoying yourself for once.  You’d do it so well.  I believe I want to see that more than Taormina and the Italian Lakes.  Do say you’ll come.”

“Maisie ­why are you such an angel to me?”

“I’m not.  I want you to come because ­oh because I want you.  Because I like you.  I’m happy when you’re there.  So’s Jerrold.  Don’t go and say you care more for the land than Jerrold and me.”

“I don’t.  I ­It isn’t the land altogether.  It’s Colin.  I want him to get away from me for a time and do without me.  It’s frightfully important that he should get away.”

“We could send Colin to another part of the island with Eliot.  Only that wouldn’t be very kind to Eliot.”

“No.  It won’t do, Maisie.  I’ll go off somewhere when you’ve come back.”

“But that’s no good to us.  Jerrold will be here for the haying, if you’re thinking of that.”

“I’m not thinking of that.  I’m thinking of Colin.”

As she said it she knew that she was lying.  Lying to Maisie.  Lying for the first time.  That came of knowing Maisie; it came of Maisie’s sweetness.  She would have to lie and lie.  She was not thinking of Colin now; she was thinking that if Jerrold came back for the hay harvest and Maisie went on with Colin to the Italian Lakes, she would have her lover to herself; they would be alone together all June.  She would lie in his arms, not for their short, reckless hour of Sunday, but night after night, from long before midnight till the dawn.

For last year, when the warm weather came, Anne and Colin had slept out of doors in wooden shelters set up in the Manor fields, away from the noises of the farm.  A low stone wall separated Anne’s field from Colin’s.  This year, when Jerrold came home, Colin’s shelter had been moved up from the field to the Manor garden.  In the summer Anne would sleep again in her shelter.  The path to her field from the Manor garden lay through three pastures and two strips of fir plantation with a green drive between.

Jerrold would come to her there.  He would have his bed in Colin’s shelter in the garden, and when the night was quiet he would get up and go down the Manor fields and through the fir plantation to her shelter at the bottom.  They would lie there in each other’s arms, utterly safe, hidden from passing feet and listening ears, and eyes that watched behind window panes.

And as she thought of his coming to her, and heard her own voice lying to Maisie, the blood mounted to her face, flooding it to the roots of her hair.

“I’m thinking of Colin.”

Her voice kept on sounding loud and dreadful in her brain, while Maisie’s voice floated across it, faint, as if it came from somewhere a long way off.

“You never think of yourself.  You’re too good for anything, Anne.”

She would never be safe from Maisie and Maisie’s innocence that accused, reproached and threatened her.  Maisie’s sweetness went through her like a thrusting sword, like a sharp poison; it had words that cut deeper than threats, reproaches, accusations.  Before she had seen Maisie she had been fearless, pitiless, remorseless; now, because of Maisie, she would never be safe from remorse and pity and fear.

She recovered.  She told herself that she hadn’t lied; that she had been thinking of Colin; that she had thought of him first; that she had refused to go to Taormina before she knew that Jerrold was coming back for the hay harvest.  She couldn’t help it if she knew that now.  It was not as if she had schemed for it or counted on it.  She had never for one moment counted on anything or schemed.  And still, as she thought of Jerrold, her heart tightened on the sharp sword-thrust of remorse.

Because of Maisie, nothing would ever be the same again.

ii

In the last week of April they had gone, Jerrold and Maisie, Eliot and
Colin, to Taormina.  In the last week in May Jerrold and Eliot took
Maisie up to Como on their way home.  They found Sir Charles and Lady
Durham there waiting for her.  They had left Colin by himself at
Taormina.

From the first moment of landing Colin had fallen in love with Sicily and refused to be taken away from it.  He was aware that his recovery was now in his own hands, and that he would not be free from his malady so long as he was afraid to be alone.  He had got to break himself of his habit of dependence on other people.  And here in Taormina he had come upon the place that he could bear to be alone in.  There was freedom in his surrender to its enchantment and in the contemplation of its beauty there was peace.  And with peace and freedom he had found his indestructible self; he had come to the end of its long injury.

One day, sitting out on the balcony of his hotel, he wrote to Anne.

“Don’t imagine because I’ve got well here away from you that it wasn’t you who made me well.  In the first place, I should never have gone away if you hadn’t made me go.  You knew what you were about when you sent me here.  I know now what Jerrold meant when he wanted to get away by himself after Father died.  He said he wanted to grow a new memory.  Well, that’s what I’ve done here.

“It seemed to happen all at once.  One day I’d left them all and gone out for a walk by myself.  It came over me that between me and being well, perfectly well, there was nothing but myself, that I was really hanging on to my illness for some sort of protection that it gave me, just as I’d hung on to you.  I’d been thinking about it all the time, filling my mind with my illness, hanging on to the very fear of it; to save myself, I suppose, from a worse fear, the fear of life itself.  And suddenly, out there, I let go.  And the beauty of the place got me.  I can’t describe the beauty, except that there was a lot of strong blue and yellow in it, a clear gold atmosphere, positively quivering, and streaming over everything like gold water.  I seemed to remember it as if I’d been here before, a long, steady memory, not just a flash.  It was like finding something you’d lost, or when a musical phrase you’ve been looking for suddenly comes back to you.  It was the most utter, indescribable peace and satisfaction.  And somehow this time joined on to the times at Wyck when we were all there and happy together; and the beastly time in between slipped through.  It just dropped out, as if it had never happened, and I got a sense of having done with it forever.  I can’t tell you what it was like.  But I think it means I’m well.

“And then, on the top of it all, I remembered you, Anne, and all your goodness and sweetness.  I got right away from my beastly self and saw you as you are.  And I knew what you’d done for me.  I don’t believe I ever knew, really knew, before.  I had to be alone with myself before I could see it, just as I always had to be alone with my music before I could get it right.  I’ve never thanked you properly.  I can’t thank you.  There aren’t any words to do it in.  And I only know now what it’s cost you....”

Did he know?  Did he know that it had once cost her Jerrold?

“...  For instance, I know you gave up coming here with us because you thought it would be better for me without you.”

Colin, too, turning it in her heart, the sharp blade of remorse.  Would they never have done punishing her?

And then:  “Maisie knows what you are.  She told Eliot you were the most beautiful thing, morally, she had ever known.  The one person, she said, whose motives would always be clean.”

If he had tried he couldn’t have hit on anything that would have hurt her so.  It was more than she could bear to be punished like this through the innocence of innocent people, through their kindness and affection, their belief, their incorruptible trust in her.  There was nothing in the world she dreaded more than Maisie’s trust.  It was as if she foresaw what it would do to her, how at any minute it would beat her, it would break her down.

But she was not beaten yet, not broken down.  After every fit of remorse her passion asserted itself again in a superb recovery.  Her motives might not be so spotless as they looked to Maisie, but her passion itself was clean as fire.  Nothing, not even Maisie’s innocence, Maisie’s trust in her, could make her go back on it.  Hard, wounding tears cut through her eyelids as she thought of Maisie, but she brushed them away and began counting the days till Jerrold should come back.

iii

He came back the first week in June, in time for the hay harvest.  And it happened as she had foreseen.

It would have been dangerous for Jerrold to have left the house at night to go to the Manor Farm.  At any moment he might have been betrayed by his own footsteps treading the passages and stairs, by the slipping of locks and bolts, the sound of the opening and shutting of doors.  The servants might be awake and hear him; they might go to his room and find that he was not there.

But Colin’s shelter stood in a recess on the lawn, open to the fields and hidden from the house by tall hedges of yew.  Nobody could see him slip out into the moonlight or the darkness; nobody could hear the soft padding of his feet on the grass.  He had only to run down the three fields and cross the belt of firs to come to Anne’s shelter at the bottom.  The blank, projecting wall of the mill hid it from the cottages and the Manor Farm house; the firs hid it from the field path; a high bank, topped by a stone wall, hid it from the road and Sutton’s Farm.  Its three wooden walls held them safe.

Night after night, between eleven and midnight, he came to her.  Night after night, she lay awake waiting till the light rustling of the meadow grass told her he was there:  on moonlit nights a quick brushing sound; in the thick blackness a sound like a slow shearing as he felt his way.  The moon would show him clear, as he stood in the open frame of the shelter, looking in at her; or she would see him grey, twilit and mysterious; or looming, darker than dark, on black nights without moon or stars.

They loved the clear nights when their bodies showed to each other white under the white moon; they loved the dark nights that brought them close, shutting them in, annihilating every sensation but that of his tense, hard muscles pressing down, of her body crushed and yielding, tightening and slackening in surrender; of their brains swimming in their dark ecstasy.

They loved the warmth of each other’s bodies in the hot windless nights; they loved their smooth, clean coolness washed by the night wind.  Nothing, not even the sweet, haunting ghost of Maisie, came between.  They would fall asleep in each other’s arms and lie there till dawn, till Anne woke in a sudden fright.  Always she had this fear that some day they would sleep on into the morning, when the farm people would be up and about.  Jerrold lay still, tired out with satisfaction, sunk under all the floors of sleep.  She had to drag him up, with kisses first and light stroking, then with a strong undoing of their embrace, pushing back his heavy arms that fell again to her breast as she parted them.  Then she would wrench herself loose and shake him by the shoulders till she woke him.  He woke clean, with no ugly turning and yawning, but with a great stretching of his strong body and a short, sudden laugh, the laugh he had for danger.  Then he would look at his wrist watch and show it her, laughing again as she saw that this time, again, they were safe.  And they would lie a little while longer, looking into each other’s faces for the sheer joy of looking, reckless with impunity.  And he would start up suddenly with, “I say, Anne, I must clear out or we shall be caught.”  And they would get up.

Outside, the world looked young and unknown in the June dawn, in the still, clear, gold-crystal air, where green leaves and green grass shone with a strange, hard lustre like fresh paint, and yet unearthly, uncreated, fixed in their own space and time.

And she would go with him, her naked feet shining white on the queer, bright, cold green of the grass, up the field to the belt of firs that stood up, strange and eternal, under the risen sun.

They parted there, holding each other for a last kiss, a last clinging, as if never in this world they would meet again.

Dawn after dawn.  They belonged to the dawn and the dawn light; the dawn was their day; they knew it as they knew no other time.

And Anne would go back to her shelter, and lie there, and live through their passion again in memory, till she fell asleep.

And when she woke she would find the sweet, sad ghost of Maisie haunting her, coming between her and the memory of her dark ecstasy.  Maisie, utterly innocent, utterly good, trusting her, sending Jerrold back to her because she trusted her.  Only to think of Maisie gave her a fearful sense of insecurity.  She thought:  If I’d loved her I could never have done it.  If I were to love her even now that would end it.  We couldn’t go on.  She prayed God that she might not love her.

By day the hard work of the farm stopped her thinking.  And the next night and the next dawn brought back her safety.

iv

The hay harvest was over by the last week of June, and in the first week of July Maisie had come back.

Maisie or no Maisie, the work of the farm had to go on; and Anne felt more than ever that it justified her.  When the day of reckoning came, if it ever did come, let her be judged by her work.  Because of her love for Jerrold here was this big estate held together, and kept going; because of his love for her here was Jerrold, growing into a perfect farmer and a perfect landlord; because of her he had found the one thing he was best fitted to do; because of him she herself was valuable.  Anne brought to her work on the land a thoroughness that aimed continually at perfection.  She watched the starting of every tractor-plough and driller as it broke fresh ground, to see that machines and men were working at their highest pitch of efficiency.  She demanded efficiency, and, on the whole, she got it; she gave it by a sort of contagion.  She wrung out of the land the very utmost it was capable of yielding; she saw that there was no waste of straw or hay, of grain or fertilizers; and she knew how to take risks, spending big sums on implements and stock wherever she saw a good chance of a return.

Jerrold learned from her this perfection.  Her work stood clear for the whole countryside to see.  Nobody could say she had not done well by the land.  When she first took on the Manor Farm it had stood only in the second class; in four years she had raised it to the first.  It was now one of the best cultivated estates in the county and famous for its prize stock.  Sir John Corbett of Underwoods, Mr. Hawtrey of Medlicote, and Major Markham of Wyck Wold owned to an admiration for Anne Severn’s management.  Her morals, they said, might be a trifle shady, but her farming was above reproach.  More reluctantly they admitted that she had made something of that young rotter, Colin, even while they supposed that he had been sent abroad to keep him out of Anne Severn’s way.  They also supposed that as soon as he could do it decently Jerrold would get rid of Anne.

Then two things happened.  In July Maisie Fielding came back and was seen driving about the country with Anne Severn; and in the same month old Sutton died and the Barrow Farm was let to Anne, thus establishing her permanence.

Anne had refused to take it from Jerrold as his gift.  He had pressed her persistently.

“You might, Anne.  It’s the only thing I can give you.  And what is it?  A scrubby two hundred acres.”

“It’s a thundering lot of land, Jerrold.  I can’t take it.”

“You must.  It isn’t enough, after all you’ve done for us.  I’d like to give you everything I’ve got; Wyck Manor and the whole blessed estate to the last turnip, and every cow and pig.  But I can’t do that.  And you used to say you wanted the Barrow Farm.”

“I wanted to rent it, Jerry darling.  I can’t let you give it me.”

“Why not?  I think it’s simply beastly of you not to.”

At that point Maisie had passed through the room with her flowers and he had called to her to help him.

“What are you two quarrelling about?” she said.

“Why, I want to give her the Barrow Farm and she won’t let me.”

“Of course I won’t let him.  A whole farm.  How could I?”

“I think you might, Anne.  It would please him no end.”

“She thinks,” Jerrold said, “she can go on doing things for us, but we mustn’t do anything for her.  And I say it’s beastly of her.”

“It is really, Anne darling.  It’s selfish.  He wants to give it you so awfully.  He won’t be happy if you won’t take it.”

“But a farm, a whole thumping farm.  It’s a big house and two hundred acres.  How can I take a thing like that?  You couldn’t yourself if you were me.”

Maisie’s little white fingers flickered over the blue delphiniums stacked in the blue-and-white Chinese jar.  Her mauve-blue eyes were smiling at Anne over the tops of the tall blue spires.

“Don’t you want to make him happy?” she said.

“Not that way.”

“If it’s the only way ?”

She passed out of the room, still smiling, to gather more flowers.  They looked at each other.

“Jerrold, I can’t stand it when she says things like that.”

“No more can I. But you know, she really does want you to take that farm.”

“Don’t you see why I can’t take it ­from you?  It’s because we’re lovers.”

“I should have thought that made it easier.”

“It makes it impossible.  I’ve given myself to you.  I can’t take anything.  Besides, it would look as if I’d taken it for that.”

“That’s an appalling idea, Anne.”

“It is.  But it’s what everybody’ll think.  They’ll wonder what on earth you did it for.  We don’t want people wondering about us.  If they once begin wondering they’ll end by finding out.”

“I see.  Perhaps you’re right.  I’m sorry.”

“It sticks out of us enough as it is.  I can’t think how Maisie doesn’t see it.  But she never will.  She’ll never believe that we ­”

“Do you want her to see it?”

“No, but it hurts so, her not seeing....  Jerrold, I believe that’s the punishment ­Maisie’s trusting us.  It’s the worst thing she could have done to us.”

“Then, if we’re punished we’re quits.  Don’t think of it, Anne darling.  Don’t let Maisie come in between us like that.”

He took her in his arms and kissed her, close and quick, so that no thought could come between.

But Maisie’s sweetness had not done its worst.  She had yet to prove what she was and what she could do.

v

July passed and August; the harvest was over.  And in September Jerrold went up to London to stay with Eliot for the week-end, and Anne stayed with Maisie, because Maisie didn’t like being left in the big house by herself.  Through all those weeks that was the way Maisie had her, through her need of her.

And on the Thursday before Anne came Maisie had called on Mrs. Hawtrey of Medlicote, and Mrs. Hawtrey had asked her to lunch with her on the following Monday.  Maisie said she was afraid she couldn’t lunch on Monday because Anne Severn would be with her, and Mrs. Hawtrey said she was very sorry, but she was afraid she couldn’t ask Anne Severn.

And Maisie enquired in her tender voice, “Why not?”

And Mrs. Hawtrey replied, “Because, my dear, nobody here does ask Anne
Severn.”

Maisie said again, “Why not?”

Then Mrs. Hawtrey said she didn’t want to go into it, the whole thing was so unpleasant, but nobody did call on Anne Severn.  She was too well known.

And at that Maisie rose in her fragile dignity and said that nobody knew Anne Severn so well as she and her husband did, and that there was nobody in the world so absolutely good as Anne, and that she couldn’t possibly know anybody who refused to know her, and so left Mrs. Hawtrey.

The evening Jerrold came home, Maisie, flushed with pleasure, entertained him with a report of the encounter.

“So you’ve given an ultimatum to the county.”

“Yes.  I told you I’d cut them all if they went on cutting Anne.  And now they know it.”

“That means that you won’t know anybody, Maisie.  Except for Anne and me you’ll be absolutely alone here.”

“I don’t care.  I don’t want anybody but you and Anne.  And if I do we can ask somebody down.  There are lots of amusing people who’d come.  And Eliot can bring his scientific crowd.  It simply means that Corbetts and Hawtreys won’t be asked to meet them, that’s all.”

She went upstairs to lie down before dinner, and presently Anne came to him in the drawing-room.  She was dressed in her riding coat and breeches as she had come off the land.

“What do you think Maisie’s done now?” he said.

“I don’t know.  Something that’ll make me feel awful, I suppose.”

“If you’re going to take it like that I won’t tell you.”

“Yes.  Tell me.  Tell me.  I’d rather know.”

He told her as Maisie had told him.

“Can’t you see her, standing up to the whole county?  Pounding them with her little hands.”

His vision of the gentle thing, rising up in that sudden sacred fury of protection, moved him to admiring, tender laughter.  It made Anne burst into tears.

“Oh, Jerrold, that’s the worst that’s happened yet.  Everybody’ll cut her, because of me.”

“Bless you, she won’t care.  She says she doesn’t care about anybody but you and me.”

“But that’s the awful thing, her caring.  That’s the punishment.  The punishment.”

Again he took her in his arms and comforted her.

“What am I to do, Jerry?  What am I to do?”

“Go to her,” he said, “and say something nice.”

“Go to her and take my punishment?”

“Well, yes, darling, I’m afraid you’ve got to take it.  We can’t have it both ways.  It wouldn’t be a punishment if you weren’t so sweet, if you didn’t mind so.  I wish to God I’d never told you.”

She held her head high.

“I made you.  I’m glad you told me.”

She went up to Maisie in her room.  Maisie had dressed for dinner and lay on her couch, looking exquisite and fragile in a gown of thick white lace.  She gave a little soft cry as Anne came to her.

“Anne, you’ve been crying.  What is it, darling?”

“Nothing.  Only Jerrold told me what you’d done.”

“Done?”

“Yes, for me.  Why did you do it, Maisie?”

“Why?  I suppose it was because I love you.  It was the least I could do.”

She held out her hands to her.  Anne knelt down, crouching on the floor beside her, with her face hidden against Maisie’s body.  Maisie put her arm round her.

“But why are you crying about it, Anne?  You never cry.  I can’t bear it.  It’s like seeing Jerrold cry.”

“It’s because you’re so good, so good, and I’m such a brute.  You don’t know what a brute I am.”

“Oh yes, I know.”

“Do you?” she said, sharply.  For one moment she thought that Maisie did indeed know, know and understand so perfectly that she forgave.  This was forgiveness.

“Of course I do.  And so does Jerrold. He knows what a brute you are.”

It was not forgiveness.  It was Maisie’s innocence again, her trust ­the punishment.  Anne knelt there and took the pain of it.

vi

She lay awake, alone in her shelter.  She had given the excuse of a racking headache to keep Jerrold from coming to her.  For that she had had to lie.  But what was her whole existence but a lie?  A lie told by her silence under Maisie’s trust in her, by her acceptance of Maisie’s friendship, by her acquiescence in Maisie’s preposterous belief.  Every minute that she let Maisie go on loving and trusting and believing in her she lied.  And the appalling thing was that she couldn’t be alone in her lying.  So long as Maisie trusted him Jerrold lied, too ­Jerrold, who was truth itself.  One moment she thought:  That’s what I’ve brought him to.  That’s how I’ve dragged him down.  The next she saw that reproach as the very madness of her conscience.  She had not dragged Jerrold down; she had raised him to his highest intensity of loving, she had brought him, out of the illusion of his life with Maisie, to reality and kept him there in an immaculate faithfulness.  Not even for one insane moment did Anne admit that there was anything wrong or shameful in their passion itself.  It was Maisie’s innocence that made them liars, Maisie’s goodness that put them in the wrong and brought shame on them, her truth that falsified them.

No woman less exquisite in goodness could have moved her to this incredible remorse.  It took the whole of Maisie, in her unique perfection, to beat her and break her down.  Her first instinct in refusing to know Maisie had been profoundly right.  It was as if she had foreseen, even then, that knowing Maisie would mean loving her, and that, loving her, she would be beaten and broken down.  The awful thing was that she did love Maisie; and she couldn’t tell which was the worse to bear, her love for Maisie or Maisie’s love for her.  And who could have foreseen the pain of it?  When she prayed that she might take the whole punishment, she had not reckoned on this refinement and precision of torture.  God knew what he was about.  With all his resources he couldn’t have hit on anything more delicately calculated to hurt.  Nothing less subtle would have touched her.  Not discovery; not the grossness of exposure; but this intolerable security.  What could discovery and exposure do but set her free in her reality?  Anne would have rejoiced to see her lie go up in one purifying flame of revelation.  But to go safe in her lie, hiding her reality, and yet defenceless under the sting of Maisie’s loving, was more than she could bear.  She had brought all her truth and all her fineness to this passion which Maisie’s innocence made a sin, and she was punished where she had sinned, wounded by the subtle God in her fineness and her truth.  If only Jerrold could have escaped, but he was vulnerable, too; there was fineness and truth in him.  To suffer really he had to be wounded in his soul.

If Jerrold was hurt then they must end it.

As yet he had given no sign of feeling; but that was like him.  Up to the last minute he would fight against feeling, and when it came he would refuse to own that he suffered, that there was any cause for suffering.  It would be like the time when his father was dying, when he refused to see that he was dying.  So he would refuse to see Maisie and then, all at once, he would see her and he would be beaten and broken down.

vii

And suddenly he did see her.

It was on the first Sunday after Jerrold’s return.  Maisie had had another of her heart attacks, by herself, in her bed, the night before; and she had been lying down all day.  The sun had come round on to the terrace, and she now rested there, wrapped in a fur coat and leaning back on her cushions in the garden chair.

They were sitting out there, all three, Jerrold and Anne talking together, and Maisie listening with her sweet, attentive eyes.  Suddenly she shut her eyes and ceased to listen.  Jerrold and Anne went on talking with hushed voices, and in a little while Maisie was asleep.

Her head, rising out of the brown fur, was tilted back on the cushions, showing her innocent white throat; her white violet eyelids were shut down on her eyes, the dark lashes lying still; her mouth, utterly innocent, was half open; her breath came through it unevenly, in light jerks.

“She’s asleep, Jerrold.”

They sat still, making no sound.

And as she looked at Maisie sleeping, tears came again into Anne’s eyes, the hard tears that cut her eyelids and spilled themselves, drop by slow drop, heavily.  She tried to wipe them away secretly with her hand before Jerrold saw them; but they came again and again and he had seen.  He had risen to his feet as if he would go, then checked himself and stood beside her; and together they looked on at Maisie’s sleeping; they felt together the infinite anguish, the infinite pathos of her goodness and her trust.  The beauty of her spirit lay bare to them in the white, tilted face, slackened and smoothed with sleep.  Sleep showed them her innocence again, naked and helpless.  They saw her in her poignant being, her intense reality.  She was so real that in that moment nothing else mattered to them.

Anne set her teeth hard to keep her mouth still.  She saw Jerrold glance at her, she heard him give a soft groan of pity or of pain; then he moved away from them and stood by the terrace wall with his back to her.  She saw his clenched hands, and through his terrible, tense quietness she knew by the quivering of his shoulders that his breast heaved.  Then she saw him grasp the terrace wall and grind the edge of it into the palms of his hands.  That was how he had stood by his father’s deathbed, gripping the foot-rail; and when presently he turned and came to her she saw the look on his face she had seen then, of young, blind agony, sharpened now with some more piercing spiritual pain.

“Come,” he said, “come into the house.”

They went together, side by side, as they had gone when they were children, along the terrace and down the steps into the drive.  In the shelter of the hall she gave way and cried, openly and helplessly, like a child, and he put his arm round her and led her into the library, away from the place where Maisie was.  They sat together on the couch, holding each other’s hands, clinging together in their suffering, their memory of what Maisie had made their sin.  Even so they had sat in Anne’s room, on the edge of Anne’s bed, when they were children, holding each other’s hands, miserable and yet glad because they were brought together, because what they had done and what they had borne they had done and borne together.  And now as then he comforted her.

“Don’t cry, Anne darling; it isn’t your fault.  I made you.”

“You didn’t.  You didn’t.  I wanted you and I made you come to me.  And I knew what it would be like and you didn’t.”

“Nobody could have known.  Don’t go back on it.”

“I’m not going back on it.  If only I’d never seen Maisie ­then I wouldn’t have cared.  We could have gone on.”

“Do you mean we can’t now?”

“Yes.  How can we when she’s such an angel to us and trusts us so?”

“It does make it pretty beastly,” he said.

“It makes me feel absolutely rotten.”

“So it does me, when I think about it.”

“It’s knowing her, Jerry.  It’s having to love her, and knowing that she loves me; it’s knowing what she is....  Why did you make me see her?”

“You know why.”

“Yes.  Because it made it safer.  That’s the beastliness of it.  I knew how it would be.  I knew she’d beat us in the end ­with her goodness.”

“Darling, it isn’t your fault.”

“It is.  It’s all my fault.  I’m not going back on it.  I’d do it again to-morrow if it weren’t for Maisie.  Even now I don’t know whether it’s right or wrong.  I only know it’s the most real and valuable part of me that loves you, and it’s the most real and valuable part of you that loves me; and I feel somehow that that makes it right.  I’d go on with it if it made you happy.  But you aren’t happy now.”

“I’m not happy because you’re not.  I don’t mind for myself so much.  Only I hate the beastly way we’ve got to do it.  Covering it all up and pretending that we’re not lovers.  Deceiving her.  That’s what makes it all wrong.  Hiding it.”

“I know.  And I made you do that.”

“You didn’t.  We did it for Maisie.  Anyhow, we must stop it.  We can’t go on like this any more.  We must simply tell her.”

“Tell her?”

“Yes; tell her, and get her to divorce me, so that I can marry you.  It’s the only straight thing.”

“How can we?  It would hurt her so awfully.”

“Not so much as you think.  Remember, she doesn’t care for me.  She’s not like you, Anne.  She’s frightfully cold.”

As he said it there came to her a sudden awful intimation of reality, a sense that behind all their words, all the piled-up protection of their outward thinking, there hid an unknown certainty, a certainty that would wreck them if they knew it.  It was safer not to know, to go on hiding behind those piled-up barriers of thought.  But an inward, ultimate honesty drove her to her questioning.

“Are you sure she’s cold?”

“Absolutely sure.  You go on thinking all the time that she’s like you, that she takes things as hard as you do; but she doesn’t.  She doesn’t feel as you do.  It won’t hurt her as it would hurt you if I left you for somebody else.”

“But ­it’ll hurt her.”

“It’s better to hurt her a little now than to go on humbugging and shamming till she finds out.  That would hurt her damnably.  She’d hate our not being straight with her.  But if we tell her the truth she’ll understand.  I’m certain she’ll understand and she’ll forgive you.  She can’t be hard on you for caring for me.”

“Even if she doesn’t care?”

“She cares for you,” he said.

She couldn’t push it from her, that importunate sense of a certainty that was not his certainty.  If Maisie did care for him Jerrold wouldn’t see it.  He never saw what he didn’t want to see.

“Supposing she does care all the time?  How do you know she doesn’t?”

“I don’t think I can tell you.”

“But I must know, Jerrold.  It makes all the difference.”

“It makes none to me, Anne.  I’d want you whether Maisie cared for me or not.  But she doesn’t.”

“If I thought she didn’t ­then ­then I shouldn’t mind her knowing.  Why are you so certain?  You might tell me.”

Then he told her.

After all, that sense of hidden certainty was an illusion.

“When was that, Jerrold?”

“Oh, a night or two after she came down here in April.  She didn’t know, poor darling, how she let me off.”

“April ­September.  And she’s stuck to it?”

“Oh ­stuck to it.  Rather.”

“And before that?”

“Before that we were all right.”

“And she’d been away, too.”

“Yes.  Ages.  That made it all the funnier.”

“I wish you’d told me before.”

“I wish I had, if it makes you happier.”

“It does.  Still, we can’t go on, Jerrold, till she knows.”

“Of course we can’t.  It’s too awful.  I’ll tell her.  And we’ll go away somewhere while she’s divorcing me, and stay away till I can marry you....  It’ll be all different when we’ve got away.”

“When you’ve told her.  We ought to have told her long ago, before it happened.”

“Yes.  But now ­what the devil am I to tell her?”

He saw, as if for the first time, what telling her would mean.

“Tell her the truth.  The whole truth.”

“How can I ­when it’s you?”

“It’s because it is me that you’ve got to tell her.  If you don’t, Jerrold, I’ll tell her myself.”

“All right.  I’ll tell her at once and get it over.  I’ll tell her tonight.”

“No.  Not tonight, while she’s so tired.  Wait till she’s rested.”

And Jerrold waited.