The Enchanted April
She must go nearer. She began to creep towards him—softly, softly.
He did not move. He had not heard.
She stole nearer and nearer, and the fire crackled and he heard
nothing.
She stopped a moment, unable to breathe. She was afraid. Suppose
he—suppose he—oh, but he had come, he had come.
She went on again, close up to him, and her heart beat so loud that she
thought he must hear it. And couldn’t he feel—didn’t he know—
“Frederick,” she whispered, hardly able even to whisper, choked by the
beating of her heart.
He spun round on his heels.
“Rose!” he exclaimed, staring blankly.
But she did not see his stare, for her arms were round his neck, and
her cheek was against his, and she was murmuring, her lips on his ear,
“I knew you would come—in my very heart I always, always knew you would
come—”
Chapter 21
Now Frederick was not the man to hurt anything if he could help it;
besides, he was completely bewildered. Not only was his wife here—here,
of all places in the world—but she was clinging to him as she had not
clung for years, and murmuring love, and welcoming him. If she welcomed
him she must have been expecting him. Strange as this was, it was the
only thing in the situation which was evident—that, and the softness of
her cheek against his, and the long-forgotten sweet smell of her.
Frederick was bewildered. But not being the man to hurt anything if he
could help it he too put his arms round her, and having put them round
her he also kissed her; and presently he was kissing her almost as
tenderly as she was kissing him; and presently he was kissing her quite
as tenderly; and again presently he was kissing her more tenderly, and
just as if he had never left off.
He was bewildered, but he still could kiss. It seemed curiously natural
to be doing it. It made him feel as if he were thirty again instead of
forty, and Rose were his Rose of twenty, the Rose he had so much adored
before she began to weigh what he did with her idea of right, and the
balance went against him, and she had turned strange, and stony, and
more and more shocked, and oh, so lamentable. He couldn’t get at her in
those days at all; she wouldn’t, she couldn’t understand. She kept on
referring everything to what she called God’s eyes—in God’s eyes it
couldn’t be right, it wasn’t right. Her miserable face—whatever her
principles did for her they didn’t make her happy—her little miserable
face, twisted with effort to be patient, had been at last more than he
could bear to see, and he had kept away as much as he could. She never
ought to have been the daughter of a low-church rector—narrow devil;
she was quite unfitted to stand up against such an upbringing.
What had happened, why she was here, why she was his Rose again, passed
his comprehension; and meanwhile, and until such time as he understood,
he still could kiss. In fact he could not stop kissing; and it was he
now who began to murmur, to say love things in her ear under the hair
that smelt so sweet and tickled him just as he remembered it used to
tickle him.
And as he held her close to his heart and her arms were soft round his
neck, he felt stealing over him a delicious sense of—at first he didn’t
know what it was, this delicate, pervading warmth, and then he
recognised it as security. Yes; security. No need now to be ashamed of
his figure, and to make jokes about it so as to forestall other
people’s and show he didn’t mind it; no need now to be ashamed of
getting hot going up hills, or to torment himself with pictures of how
he probably appeared to beautiful young women—how middle-aged, how
absurd in his inability to keep away from them. Rose cared nothing for
such things. With her he was safe. To her he was her lover, as he used
to be; and she would never notice or mind any of the ignoble changes
that getting older had made in him and would go on making more and
more.
Frederick continued, therefore, with greater and greater warmth and
growing delight to kiss his wife, and the mere holding of her in
his arms caused him to forget everything else. How could he, for
instance, remember or think of Lady Caroline, to mention only one of
the complications with which his situation bristled, when here was his
sweet wife, miraculously restored to him, whispering with her cheek
against his in the dearest, most romantic words how much she loved him,
how terribly she had missed him? He did for one brief instant, for even
in moments of love there are brief instants of lucid thought, recognise
the immense power of the woman present and being actually held compared
to that of the woman, however beautiful, who is somewhere else, but
that is as far as he got towards remembering Scrap; no farther. She was
like a dream, fleeing before the morning light.
“When did you start?” murmured Rose, her mouth on his ear. She couldn’t
let him go; not even to talk she couldn’t let him go.
“Yesterday morning,” murmured Frederick, holding her close. He couldn’t
let her go either.
“Oh—the very instant then,” murmured Rose.
This was cryptic, but Frederick said, “Yes, the very instant,” and
kissed her neck.
“How quickly my letter got to you,” murmured Rose, whose eyes were shut
in the excess of her happiness.
“Didn’t it,” said Frederick, who felt like shutting his eyes himself.
So there had been a letter. Soon, no doubt, light would be vouchsafed
him, and meanwhile this was so strangely, touchingly sweet, this
holding his Rose to his heart again after all the years, that he
couldn’t bother to try to guess anything. Oh, he had been happy during
these years, because it was not in him to be unhappy; besides, how many
interests life had had to offer him, how many friends, how much
success, how many women only too willing to help him to blot out the
thought of the altered, petrified, pitiful little wife at home who
wouldn’t spend his money, who was appalled by his books, who drifted
away and away from him, and always if he tried to have it out with her
asked him with patient obstinacy what he thought the things he wrote
and lived by looked in the eyes of God. “No one,” she said once,
“should ever write a book God wouldn’t like to read. That is the test,
Frederick.” And he had laughed hysterically, burst into a great shriek
of laughter, and rushed out of the house, away from her solemn little
face—away from her pathetic, solemn little face. . .
But this Rose was his youth again, the best part of his life, the part
of it that had had all the visions in it and all the hopes. How they
had dreamed together, he and she, before he struck that vein of
memoirs; how they had planned, and laughed, and loved. They had lived
for a while in the very heart of poetry. After the happy days came the
happy nights, the happy, happy nights, with her asleep close against
his heart, with her when he woke in the morning still close against his
heart, for they hardly moved in their deep, happy sleep. It was
wonderful to have it all come back to him at the touch of her, at the
feel of her face against his—wonderful that she should be able to give
him back his youth.
“Sweetheart—sweetheart,” he murmured, overcome by remembrance, clinging
to her now in his turn.
“Beloved husband,” she breathed—the bliss of it—the sheer bliss . . .
Briggs, coming in a few minutes before the gong went on the chance that
Lady Caroline might be there, was much astonished. He had supposed Rose
Arbuthnot was a widow, and he still supposed it; so that he was much
astonished.
“Well I’m damned,” thought Briggs, quite clearly and distinctly, for
the shock of what he saw in the window startled him so much that for a
moment he was shaken free of his own confused absorption.
Aloud he said, very red, “Oh I say—I beg your pardon”—and then stood
hesitating, and wondering whether he oughtn’t to go back to his bedroom
again.
If he had said nothing they would not have noticed he was there, but
when he begged their pardon Rose turned and looked at him as one looks
who is trying to remember, and Frederick looked at him too without at
first quite seeing him.
They didn’t seem, thought Briggs, to mind or to be at all embarrassed.
He couldn’t be her brother; no brother ever brought that look into a
woman’s face. It was very awkward. If they didn’t mind, he did. It
upset him to come across his Madonna forgetting herself.
“Is this one of your friends?” Frederick was able after an instant to
ask Rose, who made no attempt to introduce the young man standing
awkwardly in front of them but continued to gaze at him with a kind of
abstracted, radiant goodwill.
“It’s Mr. Briggs,” said Rose, recognizing him. “This is my husband,”
she added.
And Briggs, shaking hands, just had time to think how surprising it was
to have a husband when you were a widow before the gong sounded, and
Lady Caroline would be there in a minute, and he ceased to be able to
think at all, and merely became a thing with its eyes fixed on the
door.
Through the door immediately entered, in what seemed to him an endless
procession, first Mrs. Fisher, very stately in her evening lace shawl
and brooch, who when she saw him at once relaxed into smiles and
benignity, only to stiffen, however, when she caught sight of the
stranger; then Mr. Wilkins, cleaner and neater and more carefully
dressed and brushed than any man on earth; and then, tying something
hurriedly as she came, Mrs. Wilkins; and then nobody.
Lady Caroline was late. Where was she? Had she heard the gong? Oughtn’t
it to be beaten again? Suppose she didn’t come to dinner after all. . .
Briggs went cold.
“Introduce me,” said Frederick on Mrs. Fisher’s entrance, touching
Rose’s elbow.
“My husband,” said Rose, holding him by the hand, her face exquisite.
“This,” thought Mrs. Fisher, “must now be the last of the husbands,
unless Lady Caroline produces one from up her sleeve.”
But she received him graciously, for he certainly looked exactly like a
husband, not at all like one of those people who go about abroad
pretending they are husbands when they are not, and said she supposed
he had come to accompany his wife home at the end of the month, and
remarked that now the house would be completely full. “So that,” she
added, smiling at Briggs, “we shall at last really be getting our
money’s worth.”
Briggs grinned automatically, because he was just able to realise that
somebody was being playful with him, but he had not heard her and he
did not look at her. Not only were his eyes fixed on the door but his
whole body was concentrated on it.
Introduced in his turn, Mr. Wilkins was most hospitable and called
Frederick “sir.”
“Well, sir,” said Mr. Wilkins heartily, “here we are, here we are”—and
having gripped his hand with an understanding that only wasn’t mutual
because Arbuthnot did not yet know what he was in for in the way of
trouble, he looked at him as a man should, squarely in the eyes, and
allowed his look to convey as plainly as a look can that in him would
be found staunchness, integrity, reliability—in fact a friend in need.
Mrs. Arbuthnot was very much flushed, Mr. Wilkins noticed. He had not
seen her flushed like that before. “Well, I’m their man,” he thought.
Lotty’s greeting was effusive. It was done with both hands. “Didn’t I
tell you?” she laughed to Rose over her shoulder while Frederick was
shaking her hands in both his.
“What did you tell her?” asked Frederick, in order to say something.
The way they were all welcoming him was confusing. They had evidently
all expected him, not only Rose.
The sandy but agreeable young woman didn’t answer his question, but
looked extraordinarily pleased to see him. Why should she be
extraordinarily pleased to see him?
“What a delightful place this is,” said Frederick, confused, and making