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_ "Sam!" she cried from the top of the crooked stairs.
No answer. The door at the foot was closed.
"Sam!"
"Hello?" Distantly, faintly.
"I've done all I'm going to do to-night."
And she ran back along the corridor, a white figure in the deep
gloom, and hurried into bed, and drew the clothes up to her chin.
In the life of a bride there are some dramatic moments. If she has
married the industrious apprentice, one of those moments occurs
when she first occupies the sacred bed-chamber of her ancestors,
and the bed on which she was born. Her parents' room had always
been to Constance, if not sacred, at least invested with a certain
moral solemnity. She could not enter it as she would enter another
room. The course of nature, with its succession of deaths,
conceptions, and births, slowly makes such a room august with a
mysterious quality which interprets the grandeur of mere existence
and imposes itself on all. Constance had the strangest sensations
in that bed, whose heavy dignity of ornament symbolized a past
age; sensations of sacrilege and trespass, of being a naughty girl
to whom punishment would accrue for this shocking freak. Not since
she was quite tiny had she slept in that bed--one night with her
mother, before her father's seizure, when he had been away. What a
limitless, unfathomable bed it was then! Now it was just a bed--so
she had to tell herself--like any other bed. The tiny child that,
safely touching its mother, had slept in the vast expanse, seemed
to her now a pathetic little thing; its image made her feel
melancholy. And her mind dwelt on sad events: the death of her
father, the flight of darling Sophia; the immense grief, and the
exile, of her mother. She esteemed that she knew what life was,
and that it was grim. And she sighed. But the sigh was an
affectation, meant partly to convince herself that she was grown-
up, and partly to keep her in countenance in the intimidating bed.
This melancholy was factitious, was less than transient foam on
the deep sea of her joy. Death and sorrow and sin were dim shapes
to her; the ruthless egoism of happiness blew them away with a
puff, and their wistful faces vanished. To see her there in the
bed, framed in mahogany and tassels, lying on her side, with her
young glowing cheeks, and honest but not artless gaze, and the
rich curve of her hip lifting the counterpane, one would have said
that she had never heard of aught but love.
Mr. Povey entered, the bridegroom, quickly, firmly, carrying it
off rather well, but still self-conscious. "After all," his
shoulders were trying to say, "what's the difference between this
bedroom and the bedroom of a boarding-house? Indeed, ought we not
to feel more at home here? Besides, confound it, we've been
married a fortnight!"
"Doesn't it give you a funny feeling, sleeping in this room? It
does me," said Constance. Women, even experienced women, are so
foolishly frank. They have no decency, no self-respect.
"Really?" replied Mr. Povey, with loftiness, as who should say:
"What an extraordinary thing that a reasonable creature can have
such fancies! Now to me this room is exactly like any other room."
And he added aloud, glancing away from the glass, where he was
unfastening his necktie: "It's not a bad room at all." This, with
the judicial air of an auctioneer.
Not for an instant did he deceive Constance, who read his real
sensations with accuracy. But his futile poses did not in the
slightest degree lessen her respect for him. On the contrary, she
admired him the more for them; they were a sort of embroidery on
the solid stuff of his character. At that period he could not do
wrong for her. The basis of her regard for him was, she often
thought, his honesty, his industry, his genuine kindliness of act,
his grasp of the business, his perseverance, his passion for doing
at once that which had to be done. She had the greatest admiration
for his qualities, and he was in her eyes an indivisible whole;
she could not admire one part of him and frown upon another.
Whatever he did was good because he did it. She knew that some
people were apt to smile at certain phases of his individuality;
she knew that far down in her mother's heart was a suspicion that
she had married ever so little beneath her. But this knowledge did
not disturb her. She had no doubt as to the correctness of her own
estimate.
Mr. Povey was an exceedingly methodical person, and he was also
one of those persons who must always be 'beforehand' with time.
Thus at night he would arrange his raiment so that in the morning
it might be reassumed in the minimum of minutes. He was not a man,
for example, to leave the changing of studs from one shirt to
another till the morrow. Had it been practicable, he would have
brushed his hair the night before. Constance already loved to
watch his meticulous preparations. She saw him now go into his old
bedroom and return with a paper collar, which he put on the
dressing-table next to a black necktie. His shop-suit was laid out
on a chair.
"Oh, Sam!" she exclaimed impulsively, "you surely aren't going to
begin wearing those horrid paper collars again!" During the
honeymoon he had worn linen collars.
Her tone was perfectly gentle, but the remark, nevertheless,
showed a lack of tact. It implied that all his life Mr. Povey had
been enveloping his neck in something which was horrid. Like all
persons with a tendency to fall into the ridiculous, Mr. Povey was
exceedingly sensitive to personal criticisms. He flushed darkly.
"I didn't know they were 'horrid,'" he snapped. He was hurt and
angry. Anger had surprised him unawares.
Both of them suddenly saw that they were standing on the edge of a
chasm, and drew back. They had imagined themselves to be wandering
safely in a flowered meadow, and here was this bottomless chasm!
It was most disconcerting.
Mr. Povey's hand hovered undecided over the collar. "However--" he
muttered.
She could feel that he was trying with all his might to be gentle
and pacific. And she was aghast at her own stupid clumsiness, she
so experienced!
"Just as you like, dear," she said quickly. "Please!"
"Oh no!" And he did his best to smile, and went off gawkily with
the collar and came back with a linen one.
Her passion for him burned stronger than ever. She knew then that
she did not love him for his good qualities, but for something
boyish and naive that there was about him, an indescribable
something that occasionally, when his face was close to hers, made
her dizzy.
The chasm had disappeared. In such moments, when each must pretend
not to have seen or even suspected the chasm, small-talk is
essential.
"Wasn't that Mr. Yardley in the shop to-night?" began Constance.
"Yes."
"What did he want?"
"I'd sent for him. He's going to paint us a signboard."
Useless for Samuel to make-believe that nothing in this world is
more ordinary than a signboard.
"Oh!" murmured Constance. She said no more, the episode of the
paper collar having weakened her self-confidence.
But a signboard!
What with servants, chasms, and signboards, Constance considered
that her life as a married woman would not be deficient in
excitement. Long afterwards, she fell asleep, thinking of Sophia. _
Read next: BOOK II CONSTANCE: CHAPTER I - REVOLUTION: PART III
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