第87章

He drew his arm away sharply.There was something too domestic in all this to be borne with patience.Humiliating, also, he had to confess.

"When did I ever give you the right to delve into my private affairs?" he asked, with amazing cruelty."We're married,--isn't that enough? I've given you everything I have except my independence.You can't ask for more than that,--from me."He added "from me" because the expression of pain on her pretty face made him out to be a brute, and he was not that.He tried to hedge by the use of those two small words and put it to her, without explanation, that he was different from most men,--more careless and callous to the old-fashioned vows of marriage, if she liked, but different.That might be due to character or upbringing or the times to which he belonged.He wasn't going to argue about it.The fact remained."I'll take you back," he added.

But she blocked the way."I only want your love," she said."If you've taken that away from me, nothing else counts."He gave a sort of groan.Her persistence was appalling, her courage an indescribable reproach.For a moment he remained silent, with a drawn face and twitching fingers, strangely white and wasted, like a man who had been through an illness,--a caricature of the once easy-going Gilbert Palgrave, the captain of his fate and the master of his soul.

"All right then," he said, "if you must know, you shall, but do me the credit to remember that I did my best to leave things vague and blurred." He took her by the elbow and put her into a chair.With a touch of his old thoughtfulness and rather studied politeness he chose one that was untouched by the sun that came low over the dune.

Then he sat down and bent forward and looked her full in the eyes.

"This is going to hurt you," he said, "but you've asked for the truth, and as everything seems to be coming to a head, you'd better have it, naked and undisguised.In any case, you're one of the women who always gets hurt and always thrives on it.You're too earnest and sincere to be able to apply eye-wash to the damn thing we call life, aren't you?""Yes, Gilbert," she answered, with the look of one who had been placed in front of a firing squad, without a bandage over her eyes.

There was a brief pause, filled by what he had called the everlasting drumming of the sea.

"One night, in Paris, when I was towering on the false confidence of twenty-one,"--curious how, even at that moment, he spoke with a certain self-consciousness,--"I came out of the Moulin Rouge alone and walked back to the Maurice.It was the first time I'd ever been on the other side, and I was doing it all in the usual way of the precocious undergraduate.But the 'gay Paree' stuff that was specially manufactured to catch the superfluous francs of the pornographic tourist and isn't really in the least French, bored me, almost at once.And that night, going slowly to the hotel, sickened by painted women, chypre and raw champagne I turned a mental somersault and built up a picture of what I hoped I should find in life.It contained a woman, of course--a girl, very young, the very spirit of spring, whose laugh would turn my heart and who, like an elusive wood nymph, would lead me panting and hungry through a maze of trees.I called it the Great Emotion and from that night on Itried to find the original of that boyish picture, looking everywhere with no success.At twenty-nine, coming out of what seemed to be the glamor of the impossible, I married you to oblige my mother,--you asked for this,--and imagined that I had settled into a conventional rut.Do you want me to go on with it?""Please, Gilbert," said Alice.

He shrugged his shoulders as much as to say, "Well, if you enjoy the Christian martyr business it's entirely your lookout."But he dropped his characteristic habit of phrase making and became more jerky and real."I respected you, Alice," he went on."I didn't love you but I hoped I might, and I played the game.I liked to see you in my house.You fitted in and made it more of a home than that barrack had ever been.I began to collect prints and first editions, adjust myself to respectability and even to look forward with pride to a young Gilbert."Alice gave a little cry and put her hand up to her breast.But he was too much obsessed by his own pain to notice hers.

"And then,--it's always the way,--I saw the girl.Yes, by God, I saw the girl, and the Great Emotion blew me out of domestic content and the pleasant sense of responsibility and turned me into the panting hungry youth that I had always wanted to be." He stopped and got up and walked up and down that mausoleum, with his eyes burning and the color back in his face.

"And the girl is Joan?" asked Alice in a voice that had an oddly sharp note for once.