Mrs. Cathcart had referred to it herself in these terms, and an uncomfortable feature of their estrangement had been the question of the necklace and its retention by the broker.
Mrs. Cathcart shrugged her shoulders. There was nothing to be done; she must trust to luck. She could not imagine that Edith would ever feel the need of the jewel; yet if her husband was poor, and she was obsessed with this absurd sense of loyalty to the man who had deceived her, there might be a remote possibility that from a sheer quixotic desire to help her husband, she would make inquiries as to the whereabouts of the necklace.
Edith was not like that, thought Mrs. Cathcart. It was a comforting thought as she made her way up the stairs to her room.
She stopped halfway up to allow the maid to overtake her with the letters which had arrived at that moment. With a little start she recognised upon the first of these the handwriting of her daughter, and tore open the envelope. The letter was brief:—
“Dear Mother,” it ran,
“Would you please arrange for me to have the necklace which father left to me. I feel now that I must make some sort of display if only for my husband’s sake.”
The letter dropped from Mrs. Cathcart’s hand. She stood on the stairs transfixed.
Edith Standerton was superintending the arrangement of the lunch table when her husband came in. Life had become curiously systematised in the St. John’s Wood house.
To neither of the young people had it seemed possible that they could live together as now they did, in perfect harmony, in sympathy, yet with apparently no sign of love or demonstration of affection on either side.
To liken them to brother and sister would be hardly descriptive of their friendship. They lacked the mutual knowledge of things, and the common interest which brother and sister would have. They wanted, too, an appreciation of one another’s faults and virtues.
They were strangers, and every day taught each something about the other. Gilbert learnt that this quiet girl, whose sad grey eyes had hinted at tragedy, had a sense of humour, could laugh on little provocation, and was immensely shrewd in her appraisement of humanity.
She, for her part, had found a force she had not reckoned on, a vitality and a doggedness of purpose which she had never seen before their marriage. He could be entertaining, too, in the rare intervals when they were alone together. He was a traveller, had visited Persia, Arabia, and the less known countries of Eastern Asia.
She never referred again to the events of that terrible marriage night. Here, perhaps, her judgment was at fault. She had seen a player with a face of extraordinary beauty, and had given perhaps too much attention to this minor circumstance. Somewhere in her husband’s heart was a secret, what that secret was she could only guess. She guessed that it was associated in some way with a woman—therein the woman in her spoke.
She had no feeling of resentment either towards her husband or to the unknown who had sent a message through the trembling strings of her violin upon that wedding night.
Only, she told herself, it was “curious.” She wanted to know what it was all about. She had the healthy curiosity of the young. The revelation might shock her, might fill her with undying contempt for the man whose name she bore, but she wanted to know.
It piqued her too, after a while, that he should have any secrets from her—a strange condition of mind, remembering the remarkable relationship in which they stood, and yet one quite understandable.
Though they had not achieved the friendly and peculiar relationship of man and wife, there had grown up between them a friendship which the girl told herself (and did her best to believe) was of a more enduring character than that which marriage qua marriage could produce. It was a comradeship in which much was taken for granted; she took for granted that he loved her, and entered into the marriage with no other object. That was a comforting basis for friendship with any woman.
For his part, he took it for granted that she had a soul above deception, that she was frank even though in her frankness she wounded him almost to death. He detected in that an unusual respect for himself, though in his more logical mood he argued she would have acted as honourably to any man.
She herself wove into the friendship a peculiar sexless variety of romance—sexless since she thought she saw in it an accomplished ideal towards which the youth of all ages have aspired without any conspicuous success.
There is no man or woman in the world who does not think that the chance in a million may be his or hers; there is no human creature so diffident that it does not imagine in its favour is created exception to evident and universal rules.
Plato may have stopped dead in his conduct of other friendships, his philosophies may have frizzled hopelessly and helplessly, and have been evaporated to thin vapour before the fire of natural love. A thousand witnesses may rise to testify to the futility of friendship in two people of opposite sex, but there always is the “you” and the “me” in the world, who defies experience, and comes with sublime faith to show how different will be the result to that which has attended all previous experiments.
As she told herself, if there had been the slightest spark of love in her bosom for this young man who had come into her life with some suddenness, and had gone out in a sense so violently, only to return in another guise, if there had been the veriest smouldering ember of the thing called love in her heart, she would have been jealous, just a little jealous, of the interests which drew him away from her every night, and often brought him
