"That's how it ought to be," said Sibylla. "But – well, the Courtlands have children too."
The remark struck Kate Raymore as rather odd, coming from Sibylla, and associated with the hint of pain in Sibylla's eyes; but she was just now engrossed in her own feelings. She went on describing family life on the true lines – she wouldn't have it that they were unreal or merely ideal – and was quite content that Sibylla should listen.
Sibylla did listen; it was easier to do that than to talk on the subject herself. But she listened without much interest. It was old ground to her, broken by imagination, if not by experience – very familiar to her thoughts some months before. She had lived with – nay, seemed to live on – such ideas in the early days of her marriage, before the accident and all that had come from it. The things Kate Raymore said were no doubt true sometimes; but they were not true for her. That was the upshot of the matter. They were not true for Grantley Imason's wife, nor for the mother of his child. Her reason, dominated by emotion and almost as impulsive as its ruler, had brought her to that conclusion before ever her child was born. It dated from the night when she battled with Grantley, and she had never wavered in it since. She had abandoned hope of the ideal.
What of that? Do not most people have to abandon the ideal? Many of them do it readily enough, even with a secret sense of relief, since there is always something of a strain about an ideal: it is, in famous phrase, so categorically imperative. But Sibylla was a stickler for ideals; they were what she dealt in, what she proposed to barter and to bargain with; she had no place in her stock for humbler wares. Ideals or nothing! And, in the ideal, wifehood and motherhood were so indissolubly united that the failure of one soured her joy in the other. She loved the little child, but loved him with bitterness. He had become the symbol of her lost ideal.
But she did not say this to Kate Raymore, for with the loss of the ideal comes a certain shame of it. We see it then as we did not before, as we know now that others – so many others – see it; and we veil the broken image. The heart, once its throne, becomes its hiding-place.
All this was not for Kate Raymore. She must be left to wonder that Sibylla said so little about the baby – left to be amazed at an apparent coldness in the young mother – left to miss gracious extravagances of maternal joy and pride. For if Sibylla could not be open, neither would she play the hypocrite by parading a light-hearted enjoyment and exultation in the child. How should she display the boy and her proud pleasure in him to the world outside, when her pleasure was not shared at home, and her pride made her love covert there?
Christine Fanshaw, sharply guessing, had cried once:
"But surely Grantley's manner is irreproachable?"
Even now Sibylla's humour rose at the challenge.
"Yes, irreproachable. Of course it would be. All through, his solicitude for both of us was – beautiful! Even Mumples was shaken!"
"Shaken? Why, I thought – "
"Shaken in her bad opinion, I mean, Christine dear. Yes, if ever a man did his duty, did and said all the proper things, Grantley did. And he wasn't the least angry with me; he was only annoyed with Adam and Eve, you know. Of course he was awfully busy just then: County Council elections and what not. But you'd never have guessed it. He never seemed hurried, and he was always very – very solicitous."
"And now, Sibylla?"
"Just the same – and quite pleased. Only I think he wishes babies were like kittens – more animated and growing up quicker, you know. We happen to have a kitten, and I think he's more at his ease with that."
"Nonsense! Men are men, you know."
"Most of them seem to be," admitted Sibylla.
"It would be becoming," Christine observed, "if you recollected that you'd been in the wrong all through. You believed in the wrong doctor, you wanted the wrong thing, you were quite unreasonable. Hadn't you better remember that?"
"I do remember it. And if you want another admission – well, Grantley never reminds me of it by a look or a word."
"He's very much of a gentleman, Sibylla."
"He's never the least ungentlemanlike, Christine."
Christine enjoyed a distinction; she laughed gently.
"And you're a very lucky woman," she went on.
"Don't I say so in my prayers?"
"In a very dangerous state of mind."
Christine's eyes were set on her friend. Sibylla met them full and square. Her mirth, real or affected, vanished. She looked hard at Christine, and made no answer for a moment.
"Yes, I suppose I know what you mean by that," she said at last.
"It's so much easier to despair of your husband than of anybody else in the world – except your wife."
"I try to consider him a type."
"Well, don't find an exception. Oh, I'm not talking at random. I know!" She paused a moment and then went on: "There's a question I should like to ask you, but I suppose it's a question nobody ought to ask; it's too impertinent, even for me, I'm afraid."
Sibylla looked at her, and a faint touch of colour rose on her cheeks. There was a little defiance about her manner, as though she were accused, and stood on her defence rather uneasily. She understood what question it was that even Christine could not ask.
"Grantley and I are – perfectly good friends," she said.
Christine's next question was drawled out in a lazy murmur, and was never completed, apparently from mere indolence.
"It's you who – ?"
Sibylla nodded in an abrupt decisive fashion.
"And who do you see most of?" asked Christine.
The colour deepened a little on Sibylla's face.
"That doesn't follow. Don't talk like that."
"I've gone a great deal too far?"
"I really think you have, rather, and without an atom of reason."
"Oh, entirely! I apologise. That sort of thing happens to be – to be in my thoughts."
Sibylla, in some anger, had risen to go. The last words arrested her movement, and she stood in the middle of the room, looking down on Christine's little figure, nestling in a big armchair.
"Your thoughts? That sort of thing in your thoughts?"
"Oh, entirely in retrospect, my dear; and it generally comes of not being appreciated, and of wanting an outlet for – for – well, for something or other, you know."
"Are you going to speak plainly, Christine?"
"Not for worlds, my dear! Are you going to drop my acquaintance?"
"Why is it in your thoughts? You say it's – it's all in the past?"
"Really I'm beginning to doubt if there's such a thing as the past; and if there isn't, it makes everything so much worse! I thought it was all done with – done with long ago; and now it isn't. It's just all – all over my life, as it used to be. And I – I'm afraid again. And I'm lying again. It means so many lies, you know." She looked up at Sibylla with a plaintiveness coloured by malice. "So if I've been impertinent, just put it down to what I happen to be thinking about, my dear."
Sibylla stood very quiet, saying nothing. Christine went on after a minute:
"Can't you manage to be wrapped up in the baby, my dear?"
"No, I can't." The answer was hard and unhesitating. "You've told me something people don't generally tell. I'll tell you something that I didn't think I ever should tell. I love my baby – and sometimes I hate to have to see him." Her eyes were on Christine's face, and there was distress – hopeless distress – in them. "Now I should think you'd drop my acquaintance," she ended with a laugh.
"Oh, I've never had a baby – I'm not shocked to death. But – but why, Sibylla?"
"Surely you can guess why! It's horrible, but it's not unintelligible, surely?"
"No, I suppose it's not," Christine sighed.
Christine's legs had been curled up on her chair; she let them down to the ground and rose to her feet.
"That's all from both of us for to-day?" she asked, with a wry smile.
"All for to-day, I think," answered Sibylla, buttoning her glove.
"I meant to be – friendly."
"You have been. I never guessed anything – anything of what you've said – about you."
"Nobody hinted it? Not even Harriet Courtland? She knew."
"I never see her. How did she know?"
"She was my great friend then. Rather funny, isn't it? I'm told Tom's getting quite regardless of appearances."
"Oh, I can't bear to talk about that!"
"No? Well, you can think of it now and then, can't you? It's rather wholesome to reflect how other people look when they're doing the things that you want – "
"Christine! Good-bye!"
"Oh, good-bye, my dear! And take care of yourself. Oh, I only mean the wind's cold."
But her look denied the harmless meaning she claimed for her parting words.
Grantley's attitude admits of simpler definition than his wife's. He attributed to her an abnormally prolonged and obstinate fit of sulks. People who have been in the wrong are generally sulky; that went a long way to account for it. Add thereto Sibylla's extreme expectations of a world and of an institution both of which deal mostly with compromises and arrangements short of the ideal, and the case seemed to him clear enough and not altogether unnatural, however vexatious it might be. He flew to no tragical or final conclusion. He did not despair; but neither did he struggle. He made no advances; his pride was too wounded, and his reason too affronted for that. On the other hand he offered no provocation. The irreproachability of his manner continued; the inaccessibility of his feelings increased. He devoted his mind to his work, public and commercial; and he waited for Sibylla to come to her senses. Given his theory of the case, he deserved credit for much courtesy, much patience, and entire consistency of purpose. And he, unlike Sibylla, neither talked to intimate friends nor invited questions from them. Both pride and wisdom forbade. Finally, while he acknowledged great discomfort (including a disagreeable element of the ludicrous), the idea of danger never crossed his mind; he would have laughed at Christine Fanshaw's warning, had it been addressed to him.
Whatever Sibylla's faults, levity was not among them, and danger in Christine's sense – danger of a break-up of the household, as distinguished from a continuance of it, however unsatisfactory that continuance might be – there would probably have been none, had not Walter Blake, after a lively, but not very profitable, youth, wanted to reform his life. He might have wanted to be wicked without creating any peril at all for the Imason household. But he wanted to be good, and he wanted Sibylla to make him good. This idea had occurred to him quite early in their acquaintance. He too had a faculty – even a facility – for idealising. He idealised Sibylla into the image of goodness and purity, which would turn him from sin and folly by making virtue and wisdom not better (which of course they were already), but more attractive and more pleasurable. If they were made more attractive and more pleasurable, he would be eager to embrace them. Besides he had had a good deal of the alternatives, without ever being really content with them. By this time he was firmly convinced that he must be good, and that Sibylla, and Sibylla alone, could make him good. He did not at all think out what the process was to be, nor whither it might lead. He had never planned much, nor looked where things led to. Until they led to something alarming, he did not consider the question much. How she was to reform him he seemed to leave to Sibylla, but his demand that she should do it grew more and more explicit.
This was to attack Sibylla on her weak spot, to aim an arrow true at the joint in her harness. For (one is tempted to say, unfortunately) she knew the only way in which people could be reformed and made good, and caused to feel that wisdom and virtue were not only better (which of course they felt already), but also more pleasurable than folly and sin. (People who want to be reformed are sometimes, it must be admitted, a little exacting.) That could be done only by sympathy and understanding. And if they are thorough, sympathy and understanding compose, or depend on, or issue in love – in the best kind of love, where friend gives himself unreservedly to friend, entering into every feeling, and being privy to every thought. This close and intimate connection must be established before one mind can, lever-like, raise another, and the process of reformation be begun. So much is old ground, often trodden and with no pretence of novelty about it. But much of the power of a proposition may depend not on its soundness, but on the ardour with which it is seized upon, and the conviction with which it is held – which things, again, depend on the character and temper of the believer. Sibylla's character and temper made the proposition extraordinarily convincing. Her circumstances, as she conceived them, were equally provocative in the same direction. What was wrong with her? In the end that she was not wanted, or not wanted enough, that she had more to give than had been asked of her, and no outlet (as Christine had put it) sufficient to relieve the press of her emotions. It was almost inevitable that she should respond to Blake's appeal. He was an outlet. He was somebody who wanted her very much, whom she could help, with whom she could expand, to whom she could give what she had to give in such abundant measure.
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