May Sinclair - The Helpmate

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She asked him how they were to break the news to Anne.

"Better not break it at all," said he. "Just let him come."

"If he does," said Edith, "she'll walk straight out of the house."

"Oh no, she won't."

"Yes, she will. On principle. I understand her."

"I confess I don't."

"But I believe," said she, "if you explained it all to her, she'd give in
for once."

Rather against his judgment, he endeavoured to explain, "We simply can't
not ask him, you know."

"Ask him by all means. But I shall have to put myself on the Gardners, or
the Proctors, for the Eliotts are away."

"Don't be absurd. You know you won't be allowed to do anything of the
sort."

"There's nothing else left for me to do."

He looked at her gravely; but his speech was light, for it was not in him
to be weighty. "Don't you think that, at this holy season, for the sake
of peace, and good-will, and all the rest of it, you might drop it just
for once? And let the poor chap have a happy Christmas?"

She seemed to be considering it. "You think me very hard," said she.

"Oh no, no, not hard." But he was wondering for the first time what this
wife of his was made of.

"Yes, hard. I don't want you to think me hard. If you could understand
why I cannot meet that man--what it means to me--the effect it has on
me."

"What," he said, "is the precise effect?" He was really interested. He
had always been curious to know how different men affected different
women, and to get his knowledge at first hand.

"It's the effect," said she, "of being brought into contact with
something terribly painful and repulsive, the effect of intense
suffering--of unbearable disgust."

He listened with his thoughtful, interested air. "I know. The effect that
your friend Canon Wharton sometimes has on me."

"I see no resemblance between Canon Wharton and your friend Mr. Gorst."

"And I see no resemblance between my friend Mr. Gorst and Canon Wharton."

She was silent, gathering all her strength to deliver her spirit's last
appeal.

"Dear," said she (for she wished to be very gentle with him, since he had
thought her hard), "dear, I wonder if you ever realise what the thing we
call--purity is?"

He blushed violently.

"I only know it's one of those things one doesn't speak about."

"I must speak," said she.

"You needn't," he said curtly; "I understand all right."

"If you did you wouldn't ask me. All the same, Walter--" She lifted to
him the set face of a saint surrendered to the torture--"If you compel
me--"

"Compel you? I can't compel you. Especially if you're going to look like
that."

"It's no use," he said to Edith. "First she talks of dining with the
Gardners--"

"She will, too--"

"No. She'll stay--if I compel her."

"Oh, I see. That's worse. She'd let him see it. He wouldn't enjoy his
Christmas if he came."

"No, poor fellow, I really don't think he would. She's awfully funny
about him."

"You still think her funny?"

"My dear--it's the only way to take her. I'm sorry, but I can't let
Charlie spoil her Christmas; nor," he added, "Anne his."

So Mr. Gorst did not come to Prior Street that Christmas. There came
instead of him whole sheaves and stacks of flowers, Christmas roses and
white lilies, the sacred flowers which, at that festival, the poor
prodigal brought as his tribute to his adored and beloved lady.

He spent the greater part of his Christmas Day in the society of Mr. Dick
Ransome, and the greater part of his Christmas Night in the society of
pretty Maggie Forrest, the new girl in Evans's shop who had sold him the
Christmas roses and the lilies. "For," said he, "if I can't go and see
Edie, I'll go and see Maggie." And he enjoyed seeing Maggie as much as it
was possible to enjoy anything that was not seeing Edie.

And Edie lay among her Christmas roses and her lilies, and smiled, with
a high courage, at Nanna, at Majendie, and Anne; and did her best to make
everybody believe that she was having a very happy Christmas. But at
night, when it was all over, Majendie held a tremulous and tearful Edie
in his arms.

"Don't think me a brute, darling," he said. "I would have insisted, only
if he'd come to-day he'd have found out he wasn't wanted."

"I know; and he never would have come again."

He didn't come. For Canon Wharton enlightened Mrs. Hannay, and Mrs.
Hannay enlightened Mr. Hannay, and Mr. Hannay enlightened Mr. Gorst.

"Of course," said the prodigal, "if she walks out of the house when
I walk into it, I can't very well go."

"Well, not at present, perhaps, for the sake of peace," said Hannay. "It
strikes me poor old Majendie's in a pretty tight place with that wife of
his."

So, for the sake of peace, Mr. Gorst kept away from Prior Street and his
Edie, and spent a great deal of time in Evans's shop, cultivating the
attention of Miss Forrest.

And, for the sake of peace, Majendie kept silence, and his sister
concealed her trembling and her tears.

CHAPTER XVII

Gloom fell on the house in Prior Street in the weeks that followed
Christmas. The very servants went heavily in the shadow of it. Anne began
to have her bad headaches again. Deep lines of worry showed on Majendie's
face. And on her couch by the window, looking on the blackened winter
garden, Edith fought day after day a losing battle with her spine.

The slow disease that held her captive there seemed to be quickening its
pace. In January there came a whole procession of bad nights, without, as
she pathetically said, "anything to show for it," for her hands could
make nothing now. She lay flatter than ever; each day she seemed to sink
deeper into her couch.

Anne, between her headaches, devoted herself to her sister with a kind
of passion. Her keenest experience of passion came to her through the
emotion wakened in her by the sight of Edith's suffering. She told
herself that her love for Edith satisfied her heart completely; that she
fulfilled herself in it as she never could have fulfilled herself in any
other way. Nothing could degrade or spoil the spiritual beauty of this
relation. It served as a standard by which she could better judge her
relation to her husband. "I love her more than I ever loved him," she
thought. "I cannot help it. If it had been possible to love him as I love
her--but I have lowered myself by loving him. I will raise myself by
loving her."

She was never tired of being with Edith, sewing silently by her fireside,
or reading aloud to her (for Edith's hands were too tremulous now to hold
a book), or sitting close up against her couch, nursing her hands in
hers, as if she would have given them her own strength.

And thus her ardour spent and renewed itself, and left her colder than
ever to her husband.

At times she mourned, obscurely, the destruction of the new soul that had
been given her last year, on her birthday, when she had been born again
to her sweet human destiny. At times she had glimpses of the perfect
thing it might have been. There was no logical sequence in the events
that had destroyed it, the return of Lady Cayley and the spectacle of
her triumph. She could not say that her husband had deteriorated in
consequence. The change was in herself, and not in him. He was what he
always had been; only she seemed to see him more completely now. At
times, when the high spiritual life died down in sleep, she slipped from
her trouble, and turned, with her arms stretched towards him, where he
lay. In her dreams he came to her with the low cry she had heard in the
wood at Westleydale. And in her dreams she was tender; but her waking
thoughts were sad and hard.

Majendie found it more than ever difficult to realise that she had ever
shown him kindness, that her arms had opened to him and her pulses beaten
with his own. Her face and her body were changing with this change of
soul. Her health suffered. Her eyes became dull, her skin dry; her small,
reticent mouth had taken on the tragic droop; she was growing austerely
thin. She had abandoned the pleasing and worldly fashion of her dress,
and arrayed herself now in straight-cut, sombre garments, very
serviceable in the sick-room, but mournfully suggestive, to her husband's
fancy, of her renunciation of the will to please.

On her first appearance in this garb he enquired whether she had embraced
the religious life.

"I always have embraced it," said she in her ringing voice.

"I believe it's about the only thing you ever wanted to embrace."

"You need not say so," she returned.

"Then why, oh why, do you wear those awful clothes?"

"My clothes are suitable," said she.

"Suitable? My dear girl, they suggest a divorce-suit, Majendie _versus_
Majendie, if you like. You're a walking prosecution. Your face, with that
expression on it, is a decree _nisi_ with costs. You don't want to be a
libel on your husband, do you?"

"How can you say such things?"

"Well--look in the glass, dear, if you don't believe me."

She looked. The dress was certainly not becoming. She greeted the joyless
apparition with her thin, unwilling smile.

He put his arm around her and drew her to him. He loved her dearly, for
all her sadness and unsweetness.

"Poor Nancy," he said, "I _am_ a brute. Forgive me."

"I do forgive you."

The words seemed the refrain of her life's sad song.

And as he kissed her he said to himself, "That's all very well; but if I
only knew what I'm supposed to have done to her! Her friends must think
me a perfect monster."

And, indeed, there was more truth than Majendie was aware of in his
extravagant jests. His wife's face was so eloquent of misery that her
friends were not slow in drawing their conclusions. Thurston Square
prepared itself to rally round her. Mrs. Eliott was loyal in keeping what
she supposed to be Anne's secret, but when she found that the Gardners
also understood that young Mrs. Majendie wasn't very happy with her
husband, discussion became free in Thurston Square, though it went no
further.

"The kindest thing we can do is to give her a refuge sometimes from his
dreadful friends," said Mrs. Eliott. "I have to ask her here every time
they're there."

Mrs. Gardner declared that she also would ask her gladly. Miss Proctor
said that she would ask Mr. Majendie and Mr. Gorst, which would come to
the same thing for Anne, but that she would not have Anne without her
husband. Miss Proctor could be depended on to take a light view of any
situation, a view entirely her own.

So the Gardners, as well as the Eliotts, rallied round Mrs. Majendie, and
offered their house also as her refuge. And thus poor Anne, whose ideal
was an indestructible loyalty, contrived to build up the most undesirable
reputation for her husband in Thurston Square. Of this reputation she now
became aware, and it reacted on her own estimate of him. She said to
herself, "They don't approve of him. They seem to know something. They
are sorry for me." And she was humbled in her pride.

The one who seemed to know most, and to be sorriest of all, was Canon
Wharton. She was always meeting him now. It was positively as if he lay
in wait for her. His eyes seemed more than ever to have penetrated her
secret. They held it safe under the pent-house of his brows. They seemed
to be always making allusions to it, while his tongue preserved a
delicate reticence. At meeting they said to her, "It doesn't matter if I
know your secret. Do you suppose it is so evident to everybody? Why, in
all this town, there is no one--no one, dear lady--capable of discovering
it but I. It is a spiritual secret." And at parting they said, "When you
can bear it no longer you must come to me. Sooner or later you will come
to me."

And the weeks went on towards Lent. Anne longed for the time of
cleansing, and absolution and communion; for the peace of the week-day
services; and for the sweet, sharp, grey light of the young Spring at
evening, a light that recalled, piercingly, the long Lent of her
girlhood, and the passing of its pure and consecrated days.

She had not yet completely forsaken St. Saviour's for All Souls. She
loved the grey old church in the market-place. Set in the midst of that
sordid scene of chaffering and grime, St. Saviour's perpetuated for her
the ancient beauty and the majesty of her faith. When she desired to
forget herself, to sink humbly back into the ages, passive to a superb
tradition, she went to St. Saviour's. When she wished to be stirred and
strengthened, to realise her spiritual value, to feel the grip of divine
forces centring on her, she went to All Souls.

On the Sunday before Lent she was fairly possessed by this ardent
personal mood. In obedience to it she attended Matins at the Canon's
church.

She had had a scruple about going, for Edith had been worse that morning,
and more evidently unhappy. She went alone. Majendie had admitted lately
that he liked going to St. Saviour's, but he refused to accompany her to
All Souls.

She went in a strange, premonitory mood, expectant of some great
illumination. It came with the Collect for the day. Anne was deeply moved
by the Collect. She prayed inaudibly, with parted lips thirsting for the
sources of her spiritual help. Her light went up with the ascending,
sentence by sentence, of the prayer.

"Oh, Lord, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are
nothing worth;

"Send Thy Holy Ghost and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of
charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues;

"Without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before Thee;

"Grant this for thine only Son, Jesus Christ's sake." The ritual rang
upon that note. The music of the hymns of charity was part of the light
that penetrated her, poignant, but tender.

Poignant but tender, too, were the aspect and the mood of the Canon as he
ascended the pulpit and looked upon his congregation.

There was a rustling, sliding sound as the congregation turned to listen
to their vicar.

"Though I speak,'" said the Canon, "'with the tongues of men and of
angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or as a
tinkling cymbal."

He gripped his hearers with the stress he laid upon certain words,
"angels," and "cymbal." He bade them mark that it was not by hazard that
the great prayer for Charity was appointed for the Sunday before Lent.
"The Church," he said, "has such care for her children that she does
nothing by hazard. This call is made to us on the eve of the great battle
against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Why, but that those among us
who come off victors may have mercy upon those weakly ones who are
worsted and fallen in the fight. The life of the spirit has its own
unique temptations. It is against these that we pray to-day. We are all
prepared to repent, to use abstinence, to mortify the body with its
corrupt affections. Are we prepared to bear the burden of our brother's
and our sister's unrepentance? Of their self-indulgence? Of their sin? To
follow in all things the Divine Example? We are told that the Saviour of
the world was the friend of publicans and sinners. We accept the
statement, we have gone on accepting it, year after year, as the
statement of a somewhat remote, but well-authenticated historical fact.
Have we yet realised its significance? Have we pictured, are we able to
picture to ourselves, what company He kept? Among what surroundings His
divine figure was actually seen? In what purlieus of degenerate
Jerusalem? In what iniquitous splendours? In what orgies of the Gentiles?
And who are they to whom He showed most tenderness? Who but the rich
young man? The woman taken in adultery? And Mary Magdalene with her seven
devils? Which is the divinest of the divine parables? The parable of the
prodigal son who devoured his father's living with harlots!"

The Canon's voice rose and fell, and rose again; thrilling, as his breast
heaved with the immense pathos and burden of the world.

Anne had a vision of the Hannays and the Ransomes, and of the prodigal
cast out from the house that loved him. And she said to herself for the
first time: "Have I done right? Have I done what Christ would have me
do?" The light that went up in her was a light by which her deeds looked
doubtful. If she had failed in this, in charity? She pondered the
problem, while the Canon approached, gloriously, his peroration.

"Therefore we pray for charity"--the Canon's voice rang tears--"for
charity, oh, dear and tender Lord, lest, having known Thy love, we fall,
ourselves, into the sins of unpity and of pride."

Tears came into Anne's eyes. She was overcome, bowed, shaken by the
Canon's incomparable pleading. The Canon was shaken by it himself, his
voice trembled in the benediction that followed. No one had a clearer
vision of the spiritual city. It was his tragedy that he saw it, and
could not enter in. Many, remembering that sermon, counted it, long
afterwards, to him for righteousness. It had conquered Anne. The tongues
of men and of angels, of all spiritual powers, human and divine, spoke to
her in that vibrating, indomitable voice.

The problem it had raised remained with her, oppressed, tormented her.
What she had done had seemed to her so good. But if, after all, she had
done wrong? If she had failed in charity?

She had come to a turning in her way when she could no longer see for
herself, or walk alone. She was prepared to surrender, meekly, her own
judgment. She must ask help of the priest whose voice told her that he
had suffered, and whose eyes told her that he knew.

She sent a note to All Souls Vicarage, requesting an interview, at Canon
Wharton's house rather than her own. She did not want Edith or the
servants to know that she had been closeted with the Canon. The answer
came that night, making an appointment after early Evensong on the
morrow.

After early Evensong, Anne found herself in the Canon's library. He did
not keep her waiting, and, as he entered, he held out to her, literally,
the hand of help. For the Canon never wasted a gesture. There was no
detail of social observance to which he could not give some spiritual
significance. This was partly the secret of his power. His face had lost
the light that illuminated it in the pulpit, but his eyes gleamed with a
lambent triumph. They said, "Sooner or later. But rather sooner than I
had expected."

Anne presented her case in a veiled form, as a situation in the abstract.
She scrupulously refrained from mentioning any names.

The Canon smiled at her precautions. "We are working in the dark," said
he. "I think I can help you a little bit more if you'll allow me to come
down to the concrete. You are speaking, I fancy, of our poor friend, Mr.
Gorst?"

She looked at him helplessly, startled at his penetration and her own
betrayal, but appeased by the pitying adjective which brought Gorst into
the regions of pardonable discussion.

"You needn't be afraid," he said. "I had to be certain before I could
advise you. I can now tell you with confidence that you are doing right.
I--know--the--man."

He uttered the phrase with measured emphasis, and closed his teeth upon
the last words with a snap. It was impossible to convey a stronger effect
of moral reprobation. "But I see your difficulty," he continued. "I
understand that he is a rather intimate friend of Miss Majendie."

Anne noticed that he deliberately avoided all mention of her husband.

"She has known him for a very long time."

"Ah yes. And it is your affection, your pity for your sister that makes
you hesitate. You do not wish to be hard, and at the same time you wish
to do right. Is it not so?"

She murmured her assent. (How well he understood her!)

"Ah, my dear Mrs. Majendie, we have sometimes to be a little hard, in
order that we may not be harder. You have thought, perhaps, that you
should be tender to this friendship? Now, I am an old man, and I have had
a pretty large experience of men and women, and I tell you that such
friendships are unwholesome. Unwholesome. Both for the woman and the
man."

"If I thought that--"

"You may think it. Look at the man--What has it done for him? Has it made
him any better, any stronger, any purer? Has it made her any happier?"

"I think so. It is all she has--"

"How can you say that, my dear Mrs. Majendie, when she has you?"

"And her brother."

The Canon gave her a keen glance. He seemed to be turning a little extra
light on to her secret, to see it the better by. And under that light her
mind conceived again a miserable suspicion.

"He knows something," she thought. "What is it that he knows? They all
seem to know."

She turned the subject back again to her sister-in-law and Mr. Gorst.
"She thinks she can save him."

"Her brother?"

It was another turn of the searchlight, but this time the Canon veiled
his eyes, as if in mercy. He really knew nothing, nothing at all; but, as
a man of the world, he felt that there was a great deal more than Mr.
Gorst and Miss Majendie at the back of this discussion, and he was very
curious to know what it might be.

Anne recoiled from the veiled condemnation of his face more than she had
from its open intimations. She was not clever enough to see that the
clever Canon had simply laid a trap for her.

She was now convinced that there was something that he knew. She lifted
her head in loyal defiance of his knowledge. "No," said she proudly, "Mr.
Gorst. It was of him I was speaking."

"Ah," said the Canon, as if his mind had come down with difficulty from
the contemplation of another and more interesting personality; and again
the significance of his manner was not lost upon Anne.

"I do not know Miss Majendie," he went on, still with the air of forcing
himself to deal equitably with a subject of minor interest; "but if I am
not much mistaken, she is, is she not, a little morbid?"

"She is a hopeless invalid."

"I know she is" (his voice dropped pity). "Poor thing--poor thing! And
she thinks that she can save him? Mark me, I put no limit to the saving
grace of God, and I would not like to say whom He may not choose as
His instrument. But before we presume to act for Him, we should be
very sure about the choice. Judging by the fruits--the fruits of this
friendship"--he paused, as if seeking for a perfect justice--"Yes. That
is what we must look at. I imagine Miss Majendie has been morbid on this
subject. Morbid; and, perhaps, a little weak?"

Anne flushed. She was distressed to think she had given such an
impression. "Indeed, indeed she isn't. You wouldn't say that if you knew
her."

"I do not know her. But the strongest of us may be sometimes weak. You
must be strong for her. And I"--he smiled--"must be strong for you. And I
tell you that you have been--so far--wise and right. As long as this man
continues in his evil courses, go on as you are doing. Do not encourage
him by admitting him to your house and to your friendship. But"--(the
Canon stood up, both for the better emphasis of his point, and as a
gentle reminder to Mrs. Majendie that his dinner-hour was now
approaching)--"but let him repent; let him give up his most objectionable
companions; let him lead a pure life--and _then_--accept him--welcome
him--"(the Canon opened his arms, as if he were that moment receiving a
repentant sinner) "rejoice over him"--(the Canon's face became fairly
illuminated) "as--as much as you like."

The peroration was rapid, valedictory, complete. He thrust out his hand,
displaying the whole palm of it as a sign of openness, honesty, and
good-will.

"God bless you."

The solemn benediction atoned for any little momentary brusquerie.

Anne went away with a conscience wholly satisfied, in an exalted mood,
fortified by all the ramparts of the spiritual life.

She was very gentle with Edith that evening. She said to herself that her
love must make up to Edie for the loss her conscience had been compelled
to inflict. "After all," she said to herself, "it's not as if she hadn't
me." Measuring her services with those of the disreputable Mr. Gorst, it
seemed to her that she was amply making up. She had a hatred of moral
indebtedness, as of any other, and she loved to spend. In reckoning the
love she had spent so lavishly on Edie, she had not allowed for the
amount of forgiveness that Edie had spent on her. Forgiveness is a gift
we have to take, whether we will or no, and Anne was blissfully unaware
of what she took.

Majendie watched her ministrations curiously. Her tenderness was the
subtlest lure to the love in him that still watched and waited for its
hour. That night, in the study, he was silent, nervous, and unhappy. She
shrank from the unrest and misery in his eyes. They followed or were
fixed on her, rousing in her an obscure resentment and discomfort. She
was beginning to be afraid of him. It had come to that.

She left him earlier than usual, and went very miserably to bed. She
prayed, to-night, with her eyes fixed on the crucifix. It had become for
her the symbol of her life, and of her marriage, which was nothing to her
now but a sacrifice, a martyrdom, a vicarious expiation of her husband's
sin.

As she lay down, the beating of her pulses told her that she was not to
sleep. She longed for sleep, and tried to win it to her by repeating the
Psalm which had been her comfort in all times of her depression. "I will
lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help. My help cometh
from the Lord, which made heaven and earth."

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