Double Harness. Anthony Hope

can't leave her as she is," said Mrs. Mumple, threatening a fresh outburst of tears.

      Grantley walked out of the room, muttering savagely.

      The strain of irritation, largely induced by Mrs. Mumple's lachrymosely reproachful glances and faithful doglike persistency, robbed him of the tenderness by which alone he might possibly have won his wife's willing obedience and perhaps convinced her reason through her love. He used his affection now, not in appeal, but as an argumentative point. He found in her a hard opposition; she seemed to look at him with a sort of dislike, a mingling of fear and wonder. Thus she listened in silence to his cold marshalling of the evidences of his love and his deliberate enforcing of the claims it gave him. Seeing that he made no impression, he grew more impatient and more imperious, ending with a plain intimation that he would discuss the question no further.

      "You'll make me the murderess of my child," she said.

      The gross irrational exaggeration drove him to worse bitterness.

      "I've no intention of running even the smallest risk of being party to the murder of my wife," he retorted.

      Lying among her pillows, very pale and weary, she pronounced the accusation which had so long brooded in her mind.

      "It's not because you love me so much; you do love me in a way: I please you, you're proud of me, you like me to be there, you like to make love to me, you like taking all I have to give you, and God knows I liked to give it—but you haven't given the same thing back to me, Grantley. I don't know whether you've got it to give to anybody, but at any rate you haven't given it to me. I haven't become part of you, as I was ready to become—as I've already become of my little unborn child. Your life wouldn't be made really different if I went away. In the end you've been apart from me. I thought the coming of the child must make all that different; but it hasn't: you've been about the child just as you've been about me."

      "Oh, where on earth do you get such notions?" he exclaimed.

      "Just the same as about me. You wanted me and you wanted a child too. But you wanted both with—well, with the least disturbance of your old self and your old thoughts: with the least trouble—it almost comes to that really. I don't know how to put it, except like that. You enjoyed the pleasant parts very much, but you take as little as you can of the troublesome ones. I suppose a lot of people are—are like that. Only it's a—a little unfortunate that you should have happened on me, because I—I can't understand being like that. To me it seems somehow rather cruel. So, knowing you're like that, I can't believe you when you tell me that you think of nothing but your love for me. I daresay you think it's true—I know you wouldn't say it if you didn't think it true; and in a way it's true. But the real, real truth is——" She paused, and for the first time turned her eyes on him. "The real truth is not that you love me too much to do what I ask."

      "What else can it be?" he cried desperately, utterly puzzled and upset by her accusation.

      "What else can it be? Ah, yes, what else?" Her voice grew rather more vehement. "I can answer that. What have I been doing these five months but learning the answer to that? I'll tell you. It's not that you love me so much, it's that you don't care about the child."

      The words brought a suspicion into his mind.

      "That old fool Mrs. Mumple has been talking to you? She's been repeating something I said? Well, I expressed it carelessly, awkwardly, but——"

      "What does it matter what Mumples has repeated? I knew it all before."

      "Meddlesome old idiot!" he grumbled fiercely.

      To him there was no reason in it all. The accusation angered him fiercely and amazed him even more; he saw no shadow of justice in it. He put it all down to Sibylla's exaggerated way of talking and thinking. He was conscious of no shortcomings; the accusation infuriated the more for its entire failure to convince. "When two women put their heads together and begin to talk nonsense, there's no end to it; bring a baby, born or unborn, into the case, and the last chance of any limit to the nonsense is gone." He did not tell her that (though it expressed what he felt) in a general form; he fell back on the circumstances of the minute.

      "My dear Sibylla, you're not fit to discuss things rationally at present. We'll say no more now; we shall only be still more unjust to one another if we do. Only I must be obeyed."

      "Yes, you shall be obeyed," she said. "But since it's like that, I think that, whatever happens now, I—I won't have any more children, Grantley."

      "What?"

      He was startled out of the cold composure which he had achieved in his previous speech.

      She repeated her words in a low tired voice, but firmly and coolly.

      "I think I won't have any more children, you know."

      "Do you know what you're saying?"

      "Oh, surely, yes!" she answered, with a faint smile.

      Grantley walked up and down the room twice, and then came and stood by her bed, fixing his eyes on her face in a long sombre contemplation. The faint smile persisted on her lips as she looked up at him. But he turned away without speaking, with a weary shrug of his shoulders.

      "I'll send the nurse to you," he said as he went towards the door.

      "Send Mumples, please, Grantley."

      Mrs. Mumple had done all the harm she could. "All right," he replied. "Try to sleep. Good-night."

      He shut the door behind him before her answer came.

      On the stairs he met Mrs. Mumple. The fat woman shrank out of his path, but he bade her good-night not unkindly, although absently; she needed no bidding to send her to Sibylla's room. He found Jeremy still in the study, still wide awake.

      "Oh, go home to bed, old fellow!" he exclaimed irritably, but affectionately too. "What good can you do sitting up here all night?"

      "Yes, I suppose I may as well go—it's half-past two. I'll go out by the garden." He opened the window which led on to the lawn. The fresh night air came in. "That's good!" sniffed Jeremy.

      Grantley stepped into the garden with him, and lit a cigarette.

      "But is it all right, Grantley? Is Sibylla reasonable now?"

      "All right? Reasonable?" Grantley's innermost thoughts had been far away.

      "I mean, will she agree to what you wish—what we wish?"

      "Yes, it's all right. She's reasonable now."

      His face was still just in the light of the lamp which stood on a table in the window. Jeremy saw the paleness of his cheeks and the hard set of his eyes. There was no sign of relief in him or of anxiety assuaged.

      "Well, thank heaven for that much, anyhow!" Jeremy sighed.

      "Yes, for that much anyhow," Grantley agreed, pressing his arm in a friendly way. "And now, old boy, good-night."

      Jeremy left him there in the garden smoking his cigarette, standing motionless. His face was in the dark now, but Jeremy knew the same look was in the eyes still. It was hard for the young man, even with the new impulses and the new sympathies that were alive and astir within him, to follow, or even to conjecture, what had been happening that night. Yet as he went down the hill it was plain even to him, plain enough to raise a sharp pang in him, that somehow the little child, unborn or whether it should yet be born, had brought not union, but estrangement to the house; not peace but a sword.