“What is it?” he asked suddenly. “What is it in that house? Why is he different from other men? What is it in Marlborough that … what …”
He waved his hand expressively, showing for the first time a curious liveliness.
A slow startled look suffused her face. She gazed at him steadily for a moment, and then the corners of her mouth quivered. Behind the cold mask of her face she seemed to smile.
“I will not tell you,” she answered. “At least, not now.”
There was an implicit promise in her voice. But no sooner had she conveyed this slight intimation of future explanations than she seemed to regret it.
“There is nothing,” she said. “It is the loneliness. It is the ingrowing. It is the days passing along and every day the same.”
“Have you lived here all your life?” he asked.
She paused a moment. She said:
“All my life. I have never left this valley. I have never found the door that leads out into the world.”
She was a liar. Dreeme knew that at last. Her voice had again become a husky caress. It strove to reach out and embrace the dubious young doctor. He was conscious of a vague note of insincerity in it. Far back in his mind a sly intuition manifested itself, and it suggested that this woman was very near to acting, that she was cautiously feeling her way into his emotions. She wanted to find out if he could be swayed by passion, pity or intellect. He must be careful, terribly careful. He must avoid the almost overpowering magnetism that emanated from her white slumberous body.
“Life should proceed,” she said, her words sounding like slow calculating steps through the difficult labyrinth of her thoughts. “It should go on and touch different places and different people, accepting and rejecting, considering all. It should meet the passions and accept them all and live through them and with them. But my life is not like that. I am cut off, set apart from things, bounded by walls and the will of one man. My thoughts boil in me to no purpose. My mind revolves and it achieves no friction, no flashing of sparks. It is just an insane wheel whirling endlessly in a vacuum. That is what it really is. I cannot go on like that and remain sane.”
Dreeme did not know what to say. He knew that he was beginning to be frightened.
“I do not live in that house,” she went on. “I exist in it. I stare out of the window in summer and see parched fields stretching to eternity. In the winter it is all an expanse of untrodden snow. Sometimes voices come to me from the road. That is all. That is all, I tell you.”
Her voice rose, deep and husky. Louder than she had spoken before she declared:
“I was born to great acceptances.”
Dreeme was becoming more and more frightened. He did not want to hear these things, these somber intimacies of a household that was no part of his affair and yet he could not stop listening. Her words were a warm web that caught up all his thoughts. He could not stand up and say, “I’m sorry, but this is not my business.” It would be cowardice. He opened his mouth to say something, perhaps that very thing, but she continued to speak as though to hold his wavering will in the balance.
“I don’t have to describe my life to you,” she said. “You know. You know because you know Marlborough, and the strength that exists in the walls of the houses of Marlborough. But there are things that you do not know. You do not know that my husband is … but why should you know? He is like God, but I cannot tell you what I mean by that.”
She stopped, apparently expecting some exclamation, but Dreeme sat in silent bewilderment and said nothing.
“He directs destinies,” she went on. “He lets nothing stand between him and the objectives he has planned for himself. Not even me. Least of all, me. He has great power over the minds and futures of people when he chooses to exercise it. It is impossible to be independent with him. Once inside the walls of his house there is no individuality left to the visitor—or rather the intruder, for no one enters his house except intruders. He spreads like a great force over everything. Freedom becomes a secret possession then, something to be cherished darkly at one’s bosom. It is only in an escape from that house that one may assert one’s unique unity. It is by slipping away that I keep myself sane. I have slipped away now. He is busy at his books, and the new girl moving about will, perhaps, seem to be me.”
“What books?” asked Dreeme abruptly. If he could find out what Westcott read he could find out what he thought. That was Westcott’s own idea. Even as he asked the question he realized that he was crudely diverting Martha Westcott from her self-revelation, and he flushed at his unconscious rudeness. She did not seem to notice his divagation. She said:
“I don’t know. He buys old books, sends to Europe constantly for items he finds in the catalogues that come to him, but I never look into them. My mind is my book. I think that he is formulating a new religion from them.”
He was aware of her untruthfulness again, of something held back and reformulated in the mind, of a desire to impress him and yet not to tell him anything substantial.
“A new religion?” he repeated with a shade of curiosity.
She dismissed it vaguely. She said:
“He is fashioning a new god in his own image.”
It sounded silly
