第141章

He must not know--he must not! For if he knew he might dislike her, might leave her--and she dared not think what life would be without him, her only source of companionship and affection, her only means of support.She was puzzled that her discovery, not of his treachery--he had so broken her spirit with his suspicions and his insulting questions that she did not regard herself as of the rank and dignity that has the right to exact fidelity--but of his no longer caring enough to be content with her alone, had not stunned her with amazement.She did not realize how completely the instinct that he was estranged from her had prepared her for the thing that always accompanies estrangement.Between the perfect accord, that is, the never realized ideal for a man and a woman living together, and the intolerable discord that means complete repulse there is a vast range of states of feeling imperceptibly shading into each other.Most couples constantly move along this range, now toward the one extreme, now toward the other.As human kings are not given to self-analysis, and usually wander into grotesque error whenever they attempt it, no couple knows precisely where it is upon the range, until something crucial happens to compel them to know.Susan and Rod had begun as all couples begin--with an imaginary ideal accord based upon their ignorance of each other and their misunderstanding of what qualities they thought they understood in each other.The delusion of accord vanished that first evening in New York.What remained? What came in the place? They knew no more about that than does the next couple.

They were simply "living along." A crisis, drawing them close together or flinging them forever apart or forcing them to live together, he frankly as keeper and she frankly as kept, might come any day, any hour.Again it might never come.

After a few weeks the matter that had been out of her mind accidentally and indirectly came to the surface in a chance remark.She said:

"Sometimes I half believe a man could be untrue to a woman, even though he loved her."She did not appreciate the bearings of her remark until it was spoken.With a sensation of terror lest the dreaded crisis might be about to burst, she felt his quick, nervous glance.She breathed freely again when she felt his reassurance and relief as she successfully withstood.

"Certainly," he said with elaborate carelessness."Men are a rotten, promiscuous lot.That's why it's necessary for a woman to be good and straight."All this time his cross-examination had grown in severity.

Evidently he was fearing that she might be having a recurrence of the moral disease which was fatal in womankind, though only mild indiscretion in a man, if not positively a virtue, an evidence of possessing a normal masculine nature.Her mind began curiously--sadly--to revolve the occasional presents--of money, of books, of things to wear--which he gave, always quite unexpectedly.At first unconsciously, but soon consciously, she began to associate these gifts, given always in an embarrassed, shamefaced way, with certain small but significant indications of his having strayed.And it was not long before she understood; she was receiving his expiations for his indiscretions.Like an honest man and a loyal--masculinely loyal--lover he was squaring accounts.She never read the books she owed to these twinges; it was thus that she got her aversion to Thackeray--one of his "expiations" was a set of Thackeray.

The things to wear she contrived never to use.The conscience money she either spent upon him or put back into his pocket a little at a time, sure that he, the most careless of men about money, would never detect her.

His work forced him to keep irregular hours; thus she could pretend to herself that his absences were certainly because of office duty.Still, whenever he was gone overnight, she became unhappy--not the crying kind of unhappiness; to that she was little given--but the kind that lies awake and aches and with morbid vivid fancy paints the scenes suspicion suggests, and stares at them not in anger but in despair.She was always urging herself to content herself with what she was getting.She recalled and lived again the things she had forgotten while Roderick was wholly hers--the penalties of the birth brand of shame--her wedding night--the miseries of the last period of her wanderings with Burlingham--her tenement days--the dirt, the nakedness, the brutal degradation, the vermin, the savage cold.

And the instant he returned, no matter how low-spirited she had been, she was at once gay, often deliriously gay--until soon his awakened suspicion as to what she had been up to in his absence quieted her.There was little forcing or pretense in this gayety; it bubbled and sparkled from the strong swift current of her healthy passionate young life which, suspended in the icy clutch of fear when he was away from her, flowed as freely as the brooks in spring as soon as she realized that she still had him.

Did she really love him? She believed she did.Was she right?

Love is of many degrees--and kinds.And strange and confused beyond untangling is the mixture of motives and ideas in the mind of any human being as to any other being with whom his or her relations are many sided.