To explain his daily absences he told Laura Lou that he was needed at the office. Tarrant, he mentioned, had been called to Europe on business, and they were shorthanded. … A few months ago he would have been ashamed of deceiving her; now, since her illness, prevarication seemed wiser as well as safe. She mustn’t be worried … she wouldn’t understand. … He was beginning to see that there might be advantages in a wife who didn’t understand. …
Curiously enough, since he had settled down to this view his tenderness for her had increased. It was as though at first he had expected too much of her, and of himself in his relation to her. Since her illness he had learnt to know her better, had found her limitations easier to accept; and now that his intellectual hunger was appeased she satisfied the rest of his nature. The fact that he had so nearly lost her made her more precious, more vividly present to him; he felt in her a new quality which not only enchanted his senses but fed his imagination—if indeed there were any dividing line between the two. For Laura Lou seemed to belong equally to his body and soul—it was only his intelligence that she left unsatisfied. Into the world of his mind, with its consuming curiosities, its fervid joys, she would never enter—would never even discover that it existed. Sometimes, when a new idea grew in him like a passion, he ached to share it with her, but not for long. He had never known that kind of companionship, had just guessed at it through the groping wonder of his first talks with Halo Spear, when every word she spoke was a clue to new discoveries. He knew now that he and she might have walked those flaming ramparts together; but the path he had chosen was on a lower level. And he was happy there, after all; intellectual solitude was too old a habit to weigh on him. …
Meanwhile the tale called Instead was taking shape. It began by a description of the Willows, and was to deal with the mysterious substitution of one value for another in a soul which had somehow found peace. The beginning went quickly; he had only to let the spirit of the place work in him, the picture shape itself under his attentive pen. And this justified his daily escape to the Willows—he had to do the novel as quickly as he could to pay off the interest on his loan. …
One day he put his pen down, dismayed to find that—as so often before—he did not know his subject well enough to go on. His mind wandered back to his first sight of the Willows, when he had come there with Laura Lou and Upton. He had recalled, then, waking in the night years before at Euphoria, as a little boy, and hearing the bell of the Roman Catholic church toll the hour. That solemn reverberation, like the note of Joshua’s trumpet, had made the walls of the present fall, and the little boy had reached back for the first time into the past. His first sight of the Willows had renewed that far-off impression; he had felt that the old house was full of muffled reverberations which his hand might set going if he could find the rope. … Since then the years had passed, and he had learned many things. His hand was nearer the rope—he was “warm,” as the children said. But when he tried to evoke the Elinor Lorburn who had waltzed in the ballroom and wreathed her hair with flowers before her tilted toilet mirror the dumb walls remained dumb … he could not wake them. …
The meagreness of his inherited experience, the way it had been torn off violently from everything which had gone before, again struck him with a pang of impoverishment. On the Fourth of July, at Advance and then at Euphoria, the orators of the day (and Grandpa Scrimser foremost among them) had been much given to dilating on the priceless qualities the pioneers had brought with them into the wilderness. To Vance it sometimes seemed that they had left the rarest of all behind. …
He fancied he heard a step in the shadows and glanced up from his writing. “Vance!” Halo Tarrant exclaimed. She was standing there, in the doorway of the drawing room, with a look so amazed that Vance, jumping to his feet, lost his own sense of surprise in the shock of hers. “Why I thought you were in Europe!” he said.
“I was to have been.” She coloured slightly. “And then, at the last minute, I didn’t go.” She moved a step nearer. “You hadn’t heard I was at Eaglewood?”
“No. I didn’t know.”
She smiled a little. “Well, I didn’t know you were at the Willows. But just now, in passing the gate, I saw it was open—” (Oh, curse it, Vance thought—how could he have forgotten the padlock?) “and as I knew it wasn’t Mrs. Tracy’s day I came in to see who was here.”
Her eyes were fixed on him with a looked which seemed to call for an explanation, and he mumbled: “Mrs. Tracy’s been sick. …”
“I know; I’m sorry. And you’re replacing her?”
“There was no one else. At first
