Unless he asked her that there would be no point in
his cross-questioning, and he would have sacrificed
his pride without a purpose. But suddenly, as
they stood there face to face, almost touching, she
became something immeasurably alien and far off, and
the question died on his lips.
“Is that all?” she asked with a slight
smile.
“Yes; you’d better go and dress,”
he said, and turned back to his room.
The turnings of life seldom show a sign-post; or rather,
though the sign is always there, it is usually placed
some distance back, like the notices that give warning
of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing.
Ralph Marvell, pondering upon this, reflected that
for him the sign had been set, more than three years
earlier, in an Italian ilex-grove. That day his
life had brimmed over—so he had put it at
the time. He saw now that it had brimmed over
indeed: brimmed to the extent of leaving the
cup empty, or at least of uncovering the dregs beneath
the nectar. He knew now that he should never
hereafter look at his wife’s hand without remembering
something he had read in it that day. Its surface-language
had been sweet enough, but under the rosy lines he
had seen the warning letters.
Since then he had been walking with a ghost:
the miserable ghost of his illusion. Only he
had somehow vivified, coloured, substantiated it, by
the force of his own great need—as a man
might breathe a semblance of life into a dear drowned
body that he cannot give up for dead. All this
came to him with aching distinctness the morning after
his talk with his wife on the stairs. He had
accused himself, in midnight retrospect, of having
failed to press home his conclusion because he dared
not face the truth. But he knew this was not
the case. It was not the truth he feared, it
was another lie. If he had foreseen a chance of
her saying: “Yes, I was with Peter Van
Degen, and for the reason you think,” he would
have put it to the touch, stood up to the blow like
a man; but he knew she would never say that.
She would go on eluding and doubling, watching him
as he watched her; and at that game she was sure to
beat him in the end.
On their way home from the Elling dinner this certainty
had become so insufferable that it nearly escaped
him in the cry: “You needn’t watch
me—I shall never again watch you!”
But he had held his peace, knowing she would not understand.
How little, indeed, she ever understood, had been
made clear to him when, the same night, he had followed
her upstairs through the sleeping house. She
had gone on ahead while he stayed below to lock doors
and put out lights, and he had supposed her to be
already in her room when he reached the upper landing;
but she stood there waiting in the spot where he had
waited for her a few hours earlier. She had shone
her vividest at dinner, with revolving brilliancy
that collective approval always struck from her; and
the glow of it still hung on her as she paused there
in the dimness, her shining cloak dropped from her
white shoulders.
