The Bond/Part 2/Chapter 10
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WHY was Mrs. Perry in such a rage?" asked Teresa calmly, as they walked up toward the Park.
She walked more easily, with more energy, than she had done for many months, and her face above the grey fur looked suddenly animated, though by no means happy.
"In a rage, was she? Why, what did she say? She didn't like my spoiling the picture," Basil answered off-hand.
"Was that what she was crying about?"
"She wasn't crying—Teresa!"
"She had been, about five minutes before. She was in a thorough hysterical passion. I'm not exactly blind, Basil."
"You're fanciful, like all women," he said uncomfortably. "Now, don't—please, dearest!—don't fancy things. You don't know how happy I am to have you here with me, looking like your dear old self again—I'm so happy that you felt like coming out. We'll dine together as we used to do—oh, how I have missed you, these last months!"
His voice shook, and he took her hand and put it through his arm. It was dusk. The avenue was crowded with carriages, though the walk was comparatively free. In the clear frosty air the lights of the street sparkled and flashed gaily.
"Were you really glad to see me?" said Teresa slowly.
"Glad? If you knew how glad"
"But you'd rather I'd have come a little later—after she'd gone? I'm sure she would."
Basil sighed impatiently.
"How long since you began the picture?" Teresa asked meditatively.
"Oh, only a week or so. I'd only worked on it four times. Thank heaven, I haven't got to touch it again! She's going away, and I hope I shall never see her again."
His involuntary expression was too unrestrained, too savagely convincing. Teresa was silent, and drew her hand away. He began to talk, too quickly, about other things. She answered in the right places, and he began to think the other question had dropped; but she came back to it abruptly.
"I see now what you meant by saying you had missed me these months. … I might have known that your life would not stop just because mine did. … I have been half dead, it's true, but you—you could not be. But I did not think it was this. …"
"You're utterly mistaken. Whatever interest I had in her stopped long before. These last months—for a long time—it's been nothing but"
He stopped suddenly. He had meant vaguely to express his weariness of the whole affair, but saw too late how it was committing him. He was not a practiced liar.
"Long before," said Teresa slowly. "You mean—before the baby?"
"Yes, I mean—oh, I mean she did interest me somewhat, as you know, at one time—some time ago"
"Ah, it was then," said Teresa in a far-off tone.
"But it's nothing you need care about. I was never emotionally interested in her, if that's what you're driving at. I don't see why you question me. I tell you I don't care for her, and never did, except as a friend, a person that it was interesting to talk to occasionally. She is interesting, objectively—so much temperament and energy somehow gone to waste. But even in that way I'm not interested now."
"Why not?"
"Oh, because nothing interests me just now, except being quiet with you. I'm infernally tired. I'd like to get out of everything and go away somewhere and have nothing to think of but work—my own work, that I haven't been able to do at all this winter."
"I'm so sorry. But you're sure there was nothing else—nothing but friendship—nothing emotional between you?"
"Absolutely sure. Not that I think you've any right to question me like this, but I answer this once—there was nothing of what you seem to suspect."
"Basil, you lie badly," was her quiet comment.
"How dare you say I lie!" he burst out. "I won't say another word to you about it! First, you cross-question me as you've no right to do, and then you say I lie! I won't stand it."
Teresa walked on a few steps farther to a corner, and stopped.
"Will you get me a cab, please?" she said gently. "I'll go home."
"No, Teresa!" he cried wretchedly. "We can't separate like this. I can't quarrel with you now. Let us go and have our dinner—don't, don't quarrel with me, for heaven's sake!"
"I don't want to quarrel," she said in the same deadly quiet tone. "Let us go to dinner, then. But I'd like the cab—I'm cold."
In the carriage he felt her shivering beside him. She hid her face in her muff, and replied by monosyllables to his anxious questions. Basil had given the address of a down-town restaurant where they had often dined together gaily, and they had rather a long drive. When they were seated at the table, Basil, worried by Teresa's deadly pallor, made her drink a little brandy. To his surmise that the walk was too much for her, she assented absently, and then said:
"But it is time I made some effort. I see that myself, now. Life does not stop for one. Life goes on. And one must live, too, while it lasts."
She spoke without emotion; in her neutral eyes, that rested everywhere except on Basil's face, there was a look of suffering.
"You need a change. I've felt it for some time, only you didn't seem strong enough"
"If I don't get away now, I shall die," she said, in the same quiet way. "I shall start next week. I want to be away, alone, all summer."
"Alone? But you're not fit, Teresa"
"Oh, you know I'm to be with Nina and her family—that's arranged. We shall go to some quiet place, where I can be at peace, and get strong."
"Alone, then, means just that you don't want me."
Her assent was silence. She looked away, at the faces of the other people in the room, and her face was quiet as marble.
Basil's head drooped. Neither of them had made more than a pretence of tasting their food. He began to make lines on the tablecloth with a fork. After some moments she looked at him. She saw that his face was haggard, and pale under its brown tone. She recognised in its drawn look of nervous fatigue the accentuation of a change that had been coming about for some time, that she had noticed at intervals during the winter. At last he glanced up, and his eyes, that had always seemed to her so strangely young, now in their passionate misery sent a pang to her heart.
"Perhaps it is best for you," he said with some difficulty, looking down again. "Perhaps you will be better off, away from me. But it isn't best for me."
"For both of us, I think," she said gently.
"Not for me! I want you, I need you, and now more than ever. You could be a thousand times more to me now even than you have been. For this last year you've hardly been mine at all—you've been away in spirit—you haven't been conscious of me much of the time"
"And, therefore, you took a mistress."
His fork dropped with a clatter on his plate.
"I did no such thing! But if I had tried to have—not a mistress, I couldn't—but some sort of active interest in my life, most people wouldn't blame me"
"It was because I was so unhappy," Teresa said in her far-away voice. "Life seemed to have been taken out of me for the time. I could not be anything else, do anything but go on from day to day. …"
"I know, I'm not reproaching you—and you don't understand me, either. All these months you only have been in my thoughts—you have been my only real interest, though I tried to be interested in my work. I've wanted only to take care of you—if you remember, you know that's true."
"Yes, you have tried. I have been a great burden."
"Never to me have you been anything but the dearest part of myself, the dearest thing on earth. Never a burden. I've often been sad because of you, but if you think I've loved you less"
He could not go on. He took up his glass with a shaking hand, and drank.
"I can't understand," said Teresa, and her voice was a low cry of pain.
"I wish to God you could know every thought of my heart, every act of mine—then perhaps you would understand. You would know, at least, how I love you."
"But you can't tell me, can you? You can't tell me the truth about—this."
Basil was silent now. Uppermost in his consciousness was a feeling of unbearable fatigue, confusing his mind. He thought vaguely that if he had not been so tired he would not have got into this intolerable predicament. How to get out of it lie could not see. The impulse of confession was so strong in him that he had to fight it down consciously. He desired intensely to tell Teresa everything, to make her feel as nothing else now could, the real unimportance of his liaison, to himself and to her. But a feeling that he would be a cur if he told, miserably held him back. He had not yet admitted anything to her. He must deny it, not for his own sake, but for that of the other woman. Only he could not deny convincingly. His lies, he knew, must be half hearted. Each one put another barrier in the way of Teresa's understanding of him, given the moral certainty of the truth which, in some mysterious way, she seemed to to have acquired. How she had leaped to that certainty he could not see. In another woman her attitude might have been a ruse, but Teresa was not artful. She believed that he had been deceiving her, and was still trying to do so; she could not possibly know how essentially truthful, so far as their own real relation went, he had always been.
"You can't tell me—can you?" she repeated softly.
"I can't tell you more than I have already said. I've not been unfaithful to you, Teresa. This suspicion that you've got in your head is absolutely wrong."
"Will you swear it? " she asked with a faint mocking smile.
"Yes, if necessary. But you might be willing to take my word."
"No—don't swear—don't swear," she said musingly. Then she looked straight at him. "I'll ask you no more questions. It is finished. That leaf is turned down. One lives and learns—unfortunately. … Something is changed in me, Basil—this day has made a difference in our lives. I don't quite know what it is yet—I haven't got adjusted to it. It came on me so suddenly—like a physical blow."
"I don't know what you're talking about," said Basil violently. "But I know I've had as much as I can stand. Life hasn't been any too pleasant of late, and this caps the climax. I think it is better you should go away. Then, perhaps, I can feel like a free man again, and not like an infernal miserable slave!"
"Yes—poor Basil," said Teresa softly, mockingly.
"Have you had enough to eat?" he demanded, a flame of anger in his eyes.
"Oh, plenty, thanks. Pay the bill and we'll go. And give the waiter a good big fee. It's been such a pleasant dinner."
Basil did not look at her again till just as they were leaving the restaurant. He had sent for a cab, and now he said:
"You can go home alone, can't you?"
"Perfectly." Her eyes met his—wrath meeting wrath.
She drove away in the cab. Basil walked up the street, with wild desires to smash something seething in his mind. Brutal dissipation presented itself as a means of forgetting for a time the world and his tormented soul. He turned into a music-hall; and sat alone at a table, and drank three strong whiskies, and looked at the spectacle about him with haggard, forbidding eyes. In half an hour he got up and went home.
He let himself in quietly, and paused at Teresa's closed door. He heard her sobbing—deep, racking, choking sounds of pain. He turned the handle of the door, called her name. The sobs were stifled then, but he heard them still. He called her again, imploringly, angrily, pleadingly, and shook the door, and threatened to break it down. But it remained locked.