Chapter 5

PENALTY

He went to Berne because she had let slip the name of that place during the afternoon at Maidenhead. It was the only hint of the kind she threw out during the afternoons--four in all--they passed together. He forgot the connection in which they came, but he retained the words: "He may have to go to Berne."

He was between them as an awesome presence, never mentioned otherwise than allusively. His name was too sinister to speak. Each thought of him unceasingly, in silence, and with anguish; but, as far as possible, they kept him out of their intercourse. It was enough to know that he was there, a fearful authority in the background, able to summon her from this brief renewal of old happiness, as Pluto could recall Eurydice.

It was the supremacy of this power, which they themselves had placed in his hands, that in the end drove Chip Walker to wondering what he was like.

"What is he like?" he found the force to ask.

She looked distressed. "He's a good man."

He nerved himself to come to a point at which he had long been aiming: "Look here, Edith! Why did you marry him?"

"Do you mean, why did I marry him in particular, or why did I marry any one?"

"I mean both."

"Oh, I don't know. There--there seemed to be reasons."

That was at Tunbridge Wells--in the twilight, on the terrace of the old Calverly Hotel. They were sitting under a great hawthorn in full bloom. The air was sweet with the scent of it. It was sweet, too, with the scent of flowers and of new-mown hay. In a tree at the edge of the terrace a blackbird was singing to a faint crescent moon. There was still enough daylight to show the shadows deepening toward Bridge and over Broadwater Down, while on the sloping crest of Bishop's Down Common human figures appeared of gigantic size as they towered through the gloaming.

Edith was pouring the after-dinner coffee. It was the first time they had dined together. On the other days she had made it a point to be back in London before nightfall; but she had so far yielded to him now as to be willing to wait for a later train.

"What sort of reasons?" he urged.

"Oh, I don't know," she said again, pensively, dropping a lump of sugar into his coffee-cup. She added, while passing the cup to him: "It isn't so easy for a woman to be--to be drifting about--especially with two children."

"But why should you have drifted about, when you knew that at a sign from you--?"

She went on as if he hadn't spoken. "And when I saw you had dismantled the house and other people were living in it--I couldn't help seeing that, you know, in driving by--"

"But, good God, Edith, you wouldn't have come back to me?"

She stirred her own coffee slowly.