The Bond/Part 3/Chapter 7
VII
THREE days later, without warning, Egisto di Pepoli arrived. He walked into the drawing-room where Nina, Teresa, and Crayven were taking tea—a rather short, powerfully made man with a ruddy face and gleaming black eyes. Teresa had never seen him before, but Nina sprang to her feet and cried, "Egisto!"
He kissed her cheek perfunctorily, bowed to the others, and said, abruptly, "Where is Edith?"
"Lying down with a headache," Nina said. She had turned quite pale.
"Will you tell her I am here?"
Nina went into the hall, beckoning to Teresa.
"Don't go," she whispered. "But do get Crayven away—there's going to be an awful row. You wait up in my room, will you? Don't go, Teresa—I don't know what will happen. …"
She seemed terrified, and was urging Teresa to take Crayven away, and not to leave her, when Crayven himself came out to take leave. His face was inexpressive, but it was clear that he had felt something of the situation. He went away; Teresa stood on the verandah for a moment with him, and promised a long walk next day—"if I can," she added absently.
His eyes rested on her with a look of separating her from the rest of the world—a soft, imperious look.
"You must come—I've only a few days left," he said.
Then he walked away slowly, and Teresa went upstairs. As she reached the landing a door opened and Nina came out with Edith. Edith passed Teresa without seeing her, and Teresa stared at her, fascinated. Edith was wrapped in a silk dressing-gown, her hair was carelessly rolled up; she had not stopped to think of her appearance. Her face was pale, her blue eyes looked intensely dark and large, her mouth was firmly set. Teresa did not know the flabby creature who had wept and hung upon them all. She held herself erect and walked quickly downstairs, and half-way down she turned and said with calm resolution:
"No, Nina, I don't want you."
Nina stopped, her hand on the railing, till Edith had gone into the drawing-room and shut the door. The two sisters, in Nina's room, could hear the murmur of voices echoing between the wooden walls. At first it was only Egisto's voice, harsh and vehement, pouring out a flood of rapid staccato Italian. Then Edith's, ringing and hard. Then the two together, rising in key, till what they said was audible. Nina shut her door and sat down, putting her hands over her ears.
"Thank heaven, they're talking it out," she said. " I was afraid he'd come up to murder her. … But, oh, the talking's bad enough. You've no idea what an Italian family row is like!"
Teresa got some idea of what it was like as the voices went on for an hour; Egisto's like a bull's bellow; Edith's breaking in, sharp and hard as steel, gradually predominating, bearing down with a sheer nervous intensity of will, under which, at last, the male violence sank into an exhausted mumble. Nina sat the whole time with her hands over her ears and an expression of such misery on her face that Teresa went and put her arms about her.
"Don't feel so about them—I daresay it will come out all right," she urged.
"It can't come right!" cried Nina. "She will get the better of him now—she'll get her way. But she's bad—bad!"
Suddenly the door below was flung open and Egisto cried out for Nina. She sprang up and ran downstairs. Teresa heard a confused murmur, then Nina called out to her to bring some water and the smelling-salts from Edith's room. She got a glass of water, but could not find the salts. As she came out on the landing they were bringing Edith upstairs. Nina was supporting her, but after mounting a few steps Edith's tall figure seemed to collapse. She wavered back toward Egisto, who was a step below, and with an exclamation he pushed Nina aside, gathered his wife up in his arms and carried her upstairs, stumbling once or twice on her loose gown. Teresa saw his face, drawn and passionate; hate was in it, and a feeling stronger than hate. And over his shoulder, as he brushed past her, she saw the white face of the victorious woman—a cruel face, with lowered eyelids and contented mouth.
••••••
That night Edith kept her room, and kept Egisto beside her. Her maid was hurriedly packing. They were to leave the next morning. Egisto had made his conditions. Edith was to go to the family place at Castiglione di Pepoli and live there with her mother-in-law, whom she hated, at Egisto's pleasure. She yielded without question, having won her victory; other things could be arranged later.
Nina kept Teresa to dinner, which neither of them could eat. Ernestine was with them, her cheeks aflame, asking inconvenient questions, which the governess pretended to repress. The murmur of those two voices, heard now from above, seemed somehow to fill the house. The closed room and its drama was in the thoughts of all, even the uncanny child was preoccupied with it. Teresa felt herself trembling with desire to be gone. An overwhelming sense of disgust was upon her. She fled as soon as the farce of dinner was over, and walked alone through the fields in the soft night, where starlight, and the cool breath sifting down from the mountain-peaks, and the murmur of the streams, quieted after a time her racked nerves. It was not altogether clear to her why this event should disurb her so deeply, why she should so hate the whole affair and want passionately as she did to erase it from her mind. Above all she desired that Crayven should not know of it, and she wondered how much he did know. At least he would not speak of it.
But she knew what he would think of it, what Basil would think, what any man she knew would think—the light contempt that would be Edith's portion from them all. Men were harder on women than other women, she thought. No man was above taking his advantage from a woman's weakness—none that would not despise her for it after. Men were more conventional than women, she thought. Basil was conventional in that way, Crayven undoubtedly was. …
There was the other side, too. Women took terrible revenges. There were men possessed, as Egisto was, by a passion that carried hatred with it, a pure torment. There were women who reached out for men, captured them perhaps for a month or a year—as Isabel had done. Only in this case, too, the woman usually got the worst of it. Isabel, she was fairly sure, had got the worst of it. What could a woman do, in fact, and not get the worst of it? Absolute faithfulness to a man meant being treated as Nina was treated, as—Basil had treated her. She stopped still in the middle of the road, her head bowed and her hands clenched in the physical suffering that always came with this thought. It hurt her too much—the sting of it had only grown sharper with time—and she saw that it might be a perpetual suffering, and that she could never get free from Basil, no matter what he did. He was to her what Edith was to Egisto—a passion—and she felt that she might hate him, too. One could not help hating unkindness, selfishness, hardness—and Basil had injured her, had made her harder and more indifferent about hurting him. No—more that that. She wanted to hurt him.
She walked on a few steps and stopped again, and repeated to herself, recognising it fully for the first time, that she wanted to hurt Basil. And it would be easy to hurt him—he had shown himself susceptible enough. He had even said that she could make him suffer infinitely more than she could suffer through him. The world said, too, that a man's infidelity was nothing; even the wife's pride need not suffer because of it. … Well, all that she knew was that she suffered, world or no world, convention or no convention—and that the pain of her jealousy was as sharp as her love of Basil's beauty. … His face came up before her now, as she stood with closed eyes—its clear, vigorous lines, the beautiful mouth, the keen eyes and tawny hair. It seemed to her that a year had gone since she left him. All the same, she would not go back until. …
She went on, shaking her head; and moodily wondered, on a sudden, what was Crayven's real idea of her. She had not heretofore cared much what it was. She had liked him, and had taken him as an anodyne to her mental pain. He was the only person near her at present who did not throw her back distressingly upon herself. It was his strength that he was a stranger to her, that he gave her, a new outlook, different ideas, and, perhaps, feelings. With him all her instincts for gaiety, for play, woke again. She had been conscious that she was charming him, that there was an emotional element in their relation, and she had done nothing to guard against it. Nina's protest was not necessary to show her that she had been unconventional. But she had a serene contempt for convention and, at bottom, in spite of her desire to be liked, for other people's opinion of her. In the people she liked, she counted upon enough intelligence to see her for what she was.
But after all, what did she know really about Crayven's intelligence? All that she did know of him went to show that his relations with human beings had not been successful. His love-affair—his marriage—both had been failures. There must be a lack of comprehension in him, of himself, of people, of life. His matter-of-fact bitterness, the aridity of his feeling about the world, showed that. It did not show lack of feeling—but disappointment, frustration. An emotion of pity and of tenderness for him stirred in her, and regret for what she felt had been her own egotistic attitude toward him. She had not really thought of him at all, but only of the pleasure he gave her. Now she began to care how she appeared to him, to care for his feeling about her, to wonder how far it was genuine, to desire that it should not be any commonplace sense of adventure that attracted him. She felt suddenly insecure, and both proud and humble—conscious of the faults she had shown him, no longer indifferent to his opinion of them, but not able to endure the thought that he should take her at anything but her best. … But what was her best, after all? Why should anyone seriously like her? She sat down on a bench by the roadside, and bowed her head in real humility. It was still early evening, and groups of people from the hotels passed by before her. Down the one street, in a glare of electric light, the band was playing sentimental waltzes. She felt suddenly very much alone, very small. "An egotist—that's what I am," she was saying to herself. Why should anyone care for her—unless it were indeed with that amour passion which takes no account of liking or disliking, approval or disapproval? She had that feeling for Basil, and she doubted that he had it for her. What he had for her was really the amour gout; he found her amusing, he delighted in her beauty, he had tenderness for her, deep affection—but he had not the passion that could bind him to her beyond possibility of change. Here—here—was the reason of her intense feeling at the discovery of his relation with another woman. Instinct told her—had told her from the first—that she might lose him. Her jealousy was a spasm of fear. … She thought of Edith and of the look on Egisto's dark face. There was a man who was held—who was forced to act in spite of himself, against his will, by a woman he despised at heart. And it was in that way that she herself was held. There must be something base in such a passion. But, no! something in her cried out—it was terrible, terribly beautiful, deep as the nature that held it, deeper than right OP wrong. She had wished sometimes that she could kill her love for Basil—but she knew that with it would go her life.