don’t, and you shan’t. So let that be clearly understood.” In his heart he was very ill-used and very savage.
But he only said:
“Well, we shall see.”
She retorted:
“Naturally if you’ve made up your mind, there’s no more to be said.”
He broke out viciously:
“I’ve not made up my mind. Don’t I tell you I’ve only just begun to think about it?”
He was angry. And now that he actually was angry, he took an almost sensual pleasure in being angry. He had been angry before, though on a smaller scale, with less provocation, and he had sworn that he would never be angry again. But now that he was angry again, he gloomily and fiercely revelled in it.
Hilda silently folded up the shawl, and, putting it into a drawer of the wardrobe, shut the drawer with an irritatingly gentle click.... Click! He could have killed her for that click.... She seized a dressing-gown.
“I must just go and look at George,” she murmured, with cool, clear calmness,—the virtuous, anxious mother; not a trace of coquetry anywhere in her.
“What bosh!” he thought. “She knows perfectly well George’s door is bolted.”
Marriage was a startling affair. Who could have foretold this finish to the evening? Nothing had occurred ... nothing ... and yet everything. His plans were all awry. He could see naught but trouble.
She was away some time. When she returned, he was in bed, with his face averted. He heard her moving about.
“Will she, or won’t she, come and kiss me?” he thought.
She came and kissed him, but it was a meaningless kiss.
“Good-night,” she said, aloofly.
“‘Night.”
She slept. But he could not sleep. He kept thinking the same thought: “She’s no right whatever.... I must say I never bargained for this....” etc.
Chapter VII
The Truce
i
Nearly a week passed. Hilda, in the leisure of a woman of fashion after dinner, was at the piano in the drawing-room. She had not urgent stockings to mend, nor jam to make, nor careless wenches to overlook, nor food to buy, nor accounts to keep, nor a new dress to scheme out of an old one, nor to perform her duty to her neighbour. She had nothing to do. Like Edwin, she could not play the piano, but she had picked up a note here and a note there in the course of her life, and with much labour and many slow hesitations she could puzzle out a chord or a melody from the printed page. She was now exasperatingly spelling with her finger a fragment of melody from one of Dvorak’s “Legends,”—a fragment that had inhabited her mind since she first heard it, and that seemed to gather up and state all the sweet heart-breaking intolerable melancholy implicit in the romantic existence of that city on the map, Prague. On the previous day she had been a quarter of an hour identifying the unforgetable, indismissible fragment amid the multitude of notes. Now she had recognisably pieced its phrases together, and as her stiff finger stumbled through it, her ears heard it, once more; and she could not repeat it often enough. What she heard was not what she was playing but something finer,—her souvenir of what Tertius Ingpen had played; and something finer than that, something finer than the greatest artist could possibly play—magic!
It was in the nature of a miracle to her that she had been able to reproduce the souvenir in physical sound. She was proud of herself as a miracle-worker, and somewhat surprised. And at the same time she was abject because she “could not play the piano.” She thought that she would be ready to sacrifice many happinesses in order to be able to play as well as even George played, that she would exchange all her own gifts multiplied by a hundred in order to be able to play as Janet Orgreave played, and that to be a world-renowned pianist dominating immense audiences in European capitals must mean the summit of rapture and glory. (She had never listened to a world-renowned pianist.) Meanwhile, without the ennui and slavery of practice, she was enchanting herself; and she savoured her idleness, and thought of her young pretty servants at work, and her boy loose and at large, and her husband keeping her, and of the intensity of beautiful sorrow palpitating behind the mediæval façades of Prague. Had Ingpen overheard her, he might have demanded: “Who is making that infernal noise on the piano?”
Edwin came into the room, holding a thick green book. He ought long ago to have been back at the works (or “shop,” as it was still called, because it had once been principally a shop), keeping her.
“Hello!” she murmured, without glancing away from the piano. “I thought you were gone.”
They had not quarrelled; but they had not made peace; and the open question of lithography and the new works still separated them. Sometimes they had approached each other, pretending amiably or even affectionately that there was no open question. But the reality of the question could not be destroyed by any pretence of ignoring it.
While gazing at the piano, Hilda could also see Edwin. She thought she knew him, but she was always making discoveries in this branch of knowledge. Now and then she was so bewildered by discoveries that she came to wonder why she had married him, and why people do marry—really! The fact was that she had married him for the look in his eyes. It was a sad look, and beyond that it could not be described. Also, a little, she had married him for his bright untidy hair, and for that short oblique shake of the head which with him meant a greeting or an affirmative. She had not married him for his sentiments nor for his goodness of heart. Some points in him she did not like. He had a tendency to colds, and she hated him whenever he had a cold. She often detested his terrible tidiness, though it was a convenient failing. More and more she herself wilfully enjoyed being untidy, as her mother had been untidy.... And to think that her mother’s untidiness used to annoy her! On the other hand she found pleasure in humouring Edwin’s crotchettiness in regard to the details of a meal. She did not like his way of walking, which was ungainly, nor his way of standing, which was infirm. She preferred him to be seated. She could not but regret his irresolution, and his love of ease. However, the look in his eyes was paramount, because she was in love with him. She knew that he was more deeply and helplessly in love with her than she with him, but even she was perhaps tightlier bound than in her pride she thought.
Her love had the maladies of a woman’s love when it is great; these may possibly be also the maladies of a man’s love. It could be bitter. Certainly it could never rest from criticism, spoken or unspoken. In the presence of others she would criticise him to herself, if not aloud, nearly all the time; the ordeal was continuous. When she got him alone she would often endow him at a stroke with perfection, and her tenderness would pour over him. She trusted him profoundly; and yet she had constant misgivings, which weakened or temporarily destroyed her confidence. She would treat a statement from him with almost hostile caution, and accept blindly the very same statement from a stranger! Her habit was to assume that in any encounter between him and a stranger he would be worsted. She was afraid for him. She felt that she could protect him better than he could protect himself,—against any danger whatever. This instinct to protect him was also the instinct of self-protection; for peril to him meant peril to her. And she had had enough of peril. After years
