May Sinclair - The Helpmate

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THE HELPMATE

by

MAY SINCLAIR

Author of "The Divine Fire," "Superseded," "Audrey Craven," Etc.

New York
Henry Holt and Company
1907
The Quinn & Boden Co. Press
Rahway, N.J.

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

It was four o'clock in the morning. Mrs. Walter Majendie still lay on
the extreme edge of the bed, with her face turned to the dim line of sea
discernible through the open window of the hotel bedroom.

Since midnight, when she had gone to bed, she had lain in that
uncomfortable position, motionless, irremediably awake. Mrs. Walter
Majendie was thinking.

At first the night had gone by her unperceived, black and timeless. Now
she could measure time by the dull progress of the dawn among the objects
in the room. A slow, unhappy thing, born between featureless grey cloud
and sea, it had travelled from the window, shimmered in the watery square
of the looking-glass, and was feeling for the chair where her husband had
laid his clothes down last night. He had thought she was asleep, and had
gone through his undressing noiselessly, with movements of angelic and
elaborate gentleness that well-nigh disarmed her thought. He was sleeping
now. She tried not to hear the sound of his placid breathing. Only the
other night, their wedding night, she had lain awake at this hour and
heard it, and had turned her face towards him where he lay in the divine
unconsciousness of sleep. The childlike, huddled posture of the sleeper
had then stirred her heart to an unimaginable tenderness.

Now she had got to think, to adjust a new and devastating idea to a
beloved and divine belief.

Somewhere in the quiet town a church clock clanged to the dawn, and the
sleeper stretched himself. The five hours' torture of her thinking wrung
a low sob from the woman at his side.

He woke. His hand searched for her hand. At his touch she drew it away,
and moved from under her cramped shoulder the thick, warm braid of her
hair. It tossed a gleam of pale gold to the risen light. She felt his
drowsy, affectionate fingers pressing and smoothing the springy bosses of
the braid.

The caress kindled her dull thoughts to a point of flame. She sat up and
twisted the offending braid into a rigid coil.

"Walter," she said, "_who_ is Lady Cayley?"

She noticed that the name waked him.

"Does it matter now? Can't you forget her?"

"Forget her? I know nothing about her. I want to know."

"Haven't you been told everything that was necessary?"

"I've been told nothing. It was what I heard."

There was a terrible stillness about him. Only his breath came and went
unsteadily, shaken by the beating of his heart.

She quieted her own heart to listen to it; as if she could gather from
such involuntary motions the thing she had to know.

"I know," she said, "I oughtn't to have heard it. And I can't believe
it,--I don't, really."

"Poor child! What is it that you don't believe?"

His calm, assured tones had the force of a denial.

"Walter--if you'd only say it isn't true--"

"What Edith told you?"

"Edith? Your sister? No; about that woman--that you--that she--"

"Why are you bringing all that up again, at this unearthly hour?"

"Then," she said coldly, "it _is_ true."

His silence lay between them like a sword.

She had rehearsed this scene many times in the five hours; but she had
not prepared herself for this. Her dread had been held captive by her
belief, her triumphant anticipation of Majendie's denial.

Presently he spoke; and his voice was strange to her as the voice of
another man.

"Anne," he said, "didn't she tell you? It was before I knew you. And it
was the only time."

"Don't speak to me," she cried with a sudden passion, and lay shuddering.

She rose, slipped from the bed, and went to a chair that stood by the
open window. There she sat, with her back to the bed, and her eyes
staring over the grey parade and out to the eastern sea.

"Anne," said her husband, "what are you doing there?"

Anne made no answer.

"Come back to bed; you'll catch cold."

He waited.

"How long are you going to sit there in that draught?"

She sat on, upright, immovable, in her thin nightgown, raked by the keen
air of the dawn. Majendie raised himself on his elbow. He could just see
her where she glimmered, and her braid of hair, uncoiled, hanging to her
waist. Up till now he had been profoundly unhappy and ashamed, but
something in the unconquerable obstinacy of her attitude appealed to the
devil that lived in him, a devil of untimely and disastrous humour. The
right thing, he felt, was not to appear as angry as he was. He sat up on
his pillow, and began to talk to her with genial informality.

"See here,--I suppose you want an explanation. But don't you think we'd
better wait until we're up? Up and dressed, I mean. I can't talk
seriously before I've had a bath and--and brushed my hair. You see,
you've taken rather an unfair advantage of me by getting out of bed."
(He paused for an answer, and still no answer came.)--"Don't imagine I'm
ignobly lying down all the time, wrapped in a blanket. I'm sitting on my
pillow. I know there's any amount to be said. But how do you suppose I'm
going to say it if I've got to stay here, all curled up like a blessed
Buddha, and you're planted away over there like a monument of all the
Christian virtues? Are you coming back to bed, or are you not?"

She shivered. To her mind his flippancy, appalling in the circumstances,
sufficiently revealed the man he was. The man she had known and married
had never existed. For she had married Walter Majendie believing him to
be good. The belief had been so rooted in her that nothing but his own
words or his own silence could have cast it out. She had loved Walter
Majendie; but it was another man who called to her, and she would not
listen to him. She felt that she could never go back to that man, never
sit in the same room, or live in the same house with him again. She would
have to make up her mind what she would do, eventually. Meanwhile, to get
away from him, to sit there in the cold, inflexible, insensitive, to
obtain a sort of spiritual divorce from him, while she martyrised her
body which was wedded to him, that was the young, despotic instinct she
obeyed.

"If you won't come," he said, "I suppose it only remains for me to go."

He got up, took Anne's cloak from the door where it hung, and put it
tenderly about her shoulders.

"Whatever happens or unhappens," he said, "we must be dressed."

He found her slippers, and thrust them on her passive feet. She lay back
and closed her eyes. From the movements that she heard, she gathered that
Walter was getting into his clothes. Once, as he struggled with an
insufficiently subservient shirt, he laughed, from mere miserable
nervousness. Anne, not recognising the utterance of his helpless
humanity, put that laugh down to the account of the devil that had
insulted her. Her heart grew harder.

"I am clothed, and in my right mind," said Majendie, standing before her
with his hand on the window sill.

She looked up at him, at the face she knew, the face that (oddly, it
seemed to her) had not changed to suit her new conception of him, that
maintained its protest. She had loved everything about him, from the
dark, curling hair of his head to his well-finished feet; she had loved
his slender, virile body, and the clean red and brown of his face, the
strong jaw and the mouth that, hidden under the short moustache, she
divined only to be no less strong. More than these things she had loved
his eyes, the dark, bright dwelling-places of the "goodness" she had
loved best of all in him. Used to smiling as they looked at her, they
smiled even now.

"If you'll take my advice," he said, "you'll go back to your warm bed.
You shall have the whole place to yourself."

And with that he left her.

She rose, went to the bed, arranged the turned-back blanket so as to hide
the place where he had lain, and slid on to her knees, supporting herself
by the bedside.

Never before had Anne hurled herself into the heavenly places in
turbulence and disarray. It had been her wont to come, punctual to some
holy, foreappointed hour, with firm hands folded, with a back that, even
in bowing, preserved its pride; with meek eyes, close-lidded; with
breathing hushed for the calm passage of her prayer; herself marshalling
the procession of her dedicated thoughts, virgins all, veiled even before
their God.

Now she precipitated herself with clutching hands thrown out before her;
with hot eyes that drank the tears of their own passion; with the shamed
back and panting mouth of a Magdalen; with memories that scattered the
veiled procession of the Prayers. They fled before her, the Prayers, in a
gleaming tumult, a rout of heavenly wings that obscured her heaven. When
they had vanished a sudden vagueness came upon her.

And then it seemed that the storm that had gone over her had rolled her
mind out before her, like a sheet of white-hot iron. There was a record
on it, newly traced, of things that passion makes indiscernible under its
consuming and aspiring flame. Now, at the falling of the flame, the faint
characters flashed into sight upon the blank, running in waves, as when
hot iron changes from white to sullen red. Anne felt that her union with
Majendie had made her one with that other woman, that she shared her
memory and her shame. For Majendie's sake she loathed her womanhood that
was yesterday as sacred to her as her soul. Through him she had conceived
a thing hitherto unknown to her, a passionate consciousness and hatred of
her body. She hated the hands that had held him, the feet that had gone
with him, the lips that had touched him, the eyes that had looked at him
to love him. Him she detested, not so much on his own account, as because
he had made her detestable to herself.

Her eyes wandered round the room. Its alien aspect was becoming
transformed for her, like a scene on a tragic stage. The light had
established itself in the windows and pier-glasses. The wall-paper was
flushing in its own pink dawn. And the roses bloomed again on the grey
ground of the bed-curtains. These things had become familiar, even dear,
through their three days' association with her happy bridals. Now the
room and everything in it seemed to have been created for all time to be
the accomplices and ministers of her degradation. They were well
acquainted with her and it; they held foreknowledge of her, as the
pier-glass held her dishonoured and dishevelled image.

She thought of her dead father's house, the ivy-coated Deanery in the
south, and of the small white bedroom, a girl's bedroom that had once
known her and would never know her again. She thought of her father and
mother, and was glad that they were dead. Once she wondered why their
death had been God's will. Now she saw very clearly why. But why she
herself should have been sent upon this road, of all roads of suffering,
was more than Anne could see.

She, whose nature revolted against the despotically human, had schooled
herself into submission to the divine. Her sense of being supremely
guided and protected had, before now, enabled her to act with decision
in turbulent and uncertain situations of another sort. Where other people
writhed or vacillated, Anne had held on her course, uplifted,
unimpassioned, and resigned. Now she was driven hither and thither,
she sank to the very dust and turned in it, she saw no way before her,
neither her own way nor God's way.

Widowhood would not have left her so abject and so helpless. If her
husband's body had lain dead before her there, she could have stood
beside it, and declared herself consoled by the immortal presence of his
spirit. But to attend this deathbed of her belief and of her love, love
that had already given itself over, too weak to struggle against
dissolution, it was as if she had seen some horrible reversal of the
law of death, spirit returning to earth, the incorruptible putting on
corruption.

Not only was her house of life made desolate; it was defiled. Dumb and
ashamed, she abandoned herself like a child to the arms of God, too
agonised to pray.

An hour passed.

Then slowly, as she knelt, the religious instinct regained possession of
her. It was as if her soul had been flung adrift, had gone out with the
ebb of the spiritual sea, and now rocked, poised, waiting for the turn of
the immortal tide.

Her lips parted, almost mechanically, in the utterance of the divine
name. Aware of that first motion of her soul, she gathered herself
together, and concentrated her will upon some familiar prayer for
guidance. For a little while she prayed thus, grasping at old shadowy
forms of petition as they went by her, lifting her sunken mind by main
force from stupefaction; and then, it was as if the urging, steadying
will withdrew, and her soul, at some heavenly signal, moved on alone into
the place of peace.

CHAPTER II

It was broad daylight outside. A man was putting out the lights one by
one along the cold little grey parade. A figure, walking slowly, with
down-bent head, was approaching the hotel from the pier. Anne recognised
it as that of her husband. Both sights reminded her that her life had to
be begun all over again, and to go on.

Another hour passed. Majendie had sent up a waitress with breakfast to
her room. He was always thoughtful for her comfort. It did not occur to
her to wonder what significance there might be in his thus keeping away
from her, or what attitude toward her he would now be inclined to take.
She would not have admitted that he had a right to any attitude at all.
It was for her, as the profoundly injured person, to decide as to the new
disposal of their relations.

She was very clear about her grievance. The facts, that her husband had
been pointed at in the public drawing-room of their hotel; that the
terrible statement she had overheard had been made and received casually;
that he had assumed, no less casually, her knowledge of the thing, all
bore but one interpretation: that Walter Majendie and the scandal he had
figured in were alike notorious. The marvel was that, staying in the town
where he lived and was known, she herself had not heard of it before. A
peculiarly ugly thought visited her. Was it possible that Scarby was the
very place where the scandal had occurred?

She remembered now that, when she had first proposed that watering-place
for their honeymoon, he had objected on the ground that Scarby was full
of people whom he knew. Besides, he had said, she wouldn't like it. But
whether she would like it or not, Anne, who had her bridal dignity to
maintain, considered that in the matter of her honeymoon his wishes
should give way to hers. She was inclined to measure the extent of his
devotion by that test. Scarby, she said, was not full of people who knew
_her_. Anne had been insistent and Majendie passive, as he was in most
unimportant matters, reserving his energies for supremely decisive
moments.

Anne, bearing her belief in Majendie in her innocent breast, failed at
first to connect her husband with the remarkable intimations that passed
between the two newcomers gossiping in the drawing-room before dinner.
They, for their part, had no clue linking the unapproachably strange lady
on the neighbouring sofa with the hero of their tale. The case, they
said, was "infamous." At that point Majendie had put an end to his own
history and his wife's uncertainty by entering the room. Three words and
a look, observed by Anne, had established his identity.

Her mind was steadied by its inalienable possession of the facts. She had
returned through prayer to her normal mood of religious resignation. She
tried to support herself further by a chain of reasoning. If all things
were divinely ordered, this sorrow also was the will of God. It was the
burden she was appointed to take up and bear.

She bathed and dressed herself for the day. She felt so strange
to herself in these familiar processes that, standing before the
looking-glass, she was curious to observe what manner of woman she had
become. The inner upheaval had been so profound that she was surprised
to find so little record of it in her outward seeming.

Anne was a woman whose beauty was a thing of general effect, and the
general effect remained uninjured. Nature had bestowed on her a body
strongly made and superbly fashioned. Having framed her well, she
coloured her but faintly. She had given her eyes of a light thick grey.
Her eyebrows, her lashes, and her hair were of a pale gold that had ashen
undershades in it. They all but matched a skin honey-white with that
even, sombre, untransparent tone that belongs to a temperament at once
bilious and robust. For the rest, Nature had aimed nobly at the
significance of the whole, slurring the details. She had built up the
forehead low and wide, thrown out the eyebones as a shelter for the
slightly prominent eyes; saved the short, straight line of the nose by a
hair's-breadth from a tragic droop. But she had scamped her work in
modelling the close, narrow nostrils. She had merged the lower lip with
the line of the chin, missing the classic indentation. The mouth itself
she had left unfinished. Only a little amber mole, verging on the thin
rose of the upper lip, foreshortened it, and gave to its low arc the
emphasis of a curve, the vivacity of a dimple (Anne's under lip was
straight as the tense string of a bow). When she spoke or smiled Anne's
mole seemed literally to catch up her lip against its will, on purpose to
show the small white teeth below. Majendie loved Anne's mole. It was that
one charming and emphatic fault in her face, he said, that made it human.
But Anne was ashamed of it.

She surveyed her own reflection in the glass sadly, and sadly went
through the practised, mechanical motions of her dressing; smoothing the
back of her irreproachable coat, arranging her delicate laces with a
deftness no indifference could impair. Yesterday she had had delight in
that new garment and in her own appearance. She knew that Majendie
admired her for her distinction and refinement. Now she wondered what he
could have seen in her--after Lady Cayley. At Lady Cayley's personality
she had not permitted herself so much as to guess. Enough that the woman
was notorious--infamous.

There was a knock at the door, the low knock she had come to know, and
Majendie entered in obedience to her faint call.

The hours had changed him, given his bright face a tragic, submissive
look, as of a man whipped and hounded to her feet.

He glanced first at the tray, to see if she had eaten her breakfast.

"There are some things I should like to say to you, with your permission.
But I think we can discuss them better out of doors."

He looked round the disordered room. The associations of the place were
evidently as painful to him as they were to her.

They went out. The parade was deserted at that early hour, and they found
an empty seat at the far end of it.

"I, too," she said, "have things that I should like to say."

He looked at her gravely.

"Will you allow me to say mine first?"

"Certainly; but I warn you, they will make no difference."

"To you, possibly not. They make all the difference to me. I'm not going
to attempt to defend myself. I can see the whole thing from your point of
view. I've been thinking it over. Didn't you say that what you heard you
had not heard from Edith?"

"From Edith? Never!"

"When did you hear it, then?"

"Yesterday afternoon."

"From some one in the hotel?"

"Yes."

"From whom? Not that it matters."

"From those women who came yesterday. I didn't know whom they were
talking about. They were talking quite loud. They didn't know who I was."

"You say you didn't know whom they were talking about?"

"Not at first--not till you came in. Then I knew."

"I see. That was the first time you had heard of it?"

Her lips parted in assent, but her voice died under the torture.

"Then," he said, "I am profoundly sorry. If I had realised that, I would
not have spoken to you as I did."

The memory of it stung her.

"That," she said, "was--in any circumstances--unpardonable."

"I know it was. And I repeat, I am profoundly sorry. But, you see, I
thought you knew all the time, and that you had consented to forget it.
And I thought, don't you know, it was--well, rather hard on me to have it
all raked up again like that. Now I see how very hard it was on you,
dear. Your not knowing makes all the difference."

"It does indeed. If I _had_ known----"

"I understand. You wouldn't have married me?"

"I should not."

"Dear--do you suppose I didn't know that?"

"I know nothing."

"Do you remember the day I asked you why you cared for me, and you said
it was because you knew I was good?"

Her lip trembled.

"And of course I know it's been an awful shock to you to discover
that--I--was _not_ so good."

She turned away her face.

"But I never meant you to discover it. Not for yourself, like this. I
couldn't have forgiven myself--after what you told me. I meant to have
told you myself--that evening--but my poor little sister promised me that
she would. She said it would be easier for you to hear it from her. Of
course I believed her. There _were_ things she could say that I
couldn't."

"She never said a word."

"Are you sure?"

"Perfectly. Except--yes--she _did_ say----"

It was coming back to her now.

"Do you mind telling me exactly what she said?"

"N--no. She made me promise that if I ever found things in you that I
didn't understand, or that I didn't like----"

"Well--what did she make you promise?"

"That I wouldn't be hard on you. Because, she said, you'd had such a
miserable life."

"Poor Edith! So that was the nearest she could get to it. Things you
didn't understand and didn't like!"

"I didn't know what she meant."

"Of course you didn't. Who could? But I'm sorry to say that Edith made me
pretty well believe you did."

He was silent a while, trying to fathom the reason of his sister's
strange duplicity. Apparently he gave it up.

"You can't be a brute to a poor little woman with a bad spine," said he;
"but I'm not going to forgive Edith for that."

Anne flamed through her pallor. "For what?" she said. "For not having had
more courage than yourself? Think what you put on her."

"I didn't. She took it on herself. Edith's got courage enough for
anybody. She would never admit that her spine released her from all moral
obligations. But I suppose she meant well."

The spirit of the grey, cold morning seemed to have settled upon Anne.
She gazed sternly out over the eastern sea. Preoccupied with what he
considered Edith's perfidy, he failed to understand his wife's silence
and her mood.

"Edith's very fond of you. You won't let this make any difference between
you and her?"

"Between her and me it can make no difference. I am very fond of Edith."

"But the fact remains that you married me under false pretences? Is that
what you mean?"

"You may certainly put it that way."

"I understand your point of view completely. I wish you could understand
mine. When Edith said there were things she could have told you that I
couldn't, she meant that there were extenuating circumstances."

"They would have made no difference."

"Excuse me, they make all the difference. But, of course, there's no
extenuation for deception. Therefore, if you insist on putting it that
way--if--if it has made the whole thing intolerable to you, it seems to
me that perhaps I ought, don't you know, to release you from your
obligations----"

She looked at him. She knew that he had understood the meaning and the
depth of her repugnance. She did not know that such understanding is
rare in the circumstances, nor could she see that in itself it was a
revelation of a certain capacity for the "goodness" she had once believed
in. But she did see that she was being treated with a delicacy and
consideration she had not expected of this man with the strange devil.
It touched her in spite of her repugnance. It made her own that she had
expected nothing short of it until yesterday.

"_Do_ you insist?" he went on. "After what I've told you?"

"After what you've told me--no. I'm ready to believe that you did not
mean to deceive me."

"Doesn't that make any difference?" he asked tenderly.

"Yes. It makes some difference--in my judgment of you."

"You mean you're not--as Edith would say--going to be too hard on me?"

"I hope," said Anne, "I should never be too hard on any one."

"Then," he inquired, eager to be released from the strain of a most
insupportable situation, "what are we going to do next?"

He had assumed that the supreme issue had been decided by a polite
evasion; and his question had been innocent of all momentous meaning. He
merely wished to know how they were going to spend the day that was
before them, since they had to spend days, and spend them together. But
Anne's tense mind contemplated nothing short of the supreme issue that,
for her, was not to be evaded, nor yet to be decided hastily.

"Will you leave me alone," she said, "to think it over? Will you give me
three hours?"

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