It is not often that youth allows itself to feel undividedly happy: the sensation is too much the result of selection and elimination1 to be within reach of the awakening2 clutch on life. But Kate Orme, for once, had yielded herself to happiness; letting it permeate3 every faculty4 as a spring rain soaks into a germinating5 meadow. There was nothing to account for this sudden sense of beatitude; but was it not this precisely6 which made it so irresistible7, so overwhelming? There had been, within the last two months — since her engagement to Denis Peyton — no distinct addition to the sum of her happiness, and no possibility, she would have affirmed, of adding perceptibly to a total already incalculable. Inwardly and outwardly the conditions of her life were unchanged; but whereas, before, the air had been full of flitting wings, now they seemed to pause over her and she could trust herself to their shelter.
Many influences had combined to build up the centre of brooding peace in which she found herself. Her nature answered to the finest vibrations8, and at first her joy in loving had been too great not to bring with it a certain confusion, a readjusting of the whole scenery of life. She found herself in a new country, wherein he who had led her there was least able to be her guide. There were moments when she felt that the first stranger in the street could have interpreted her happiness for her more easily than Denis. Then, as her eye adapted itself, as the lines flowed into each other, opening deep vistas9 upon new horizons, she began to enter into possession of her kingdom, to entertain the actual sense of its belonging to her. But she had never before felt that she also belonged to it; and this was the feeling which now came to complete her happiness, to give it the hallowing sense of permanence.
She rose from the writing-table where, list in hand, she had been going over the wedding-invitations, and walked toward the drawing-room window. Everything about her seemed to contribute to that rare harmony of feeling which levied10 a tax on every sense. The large coolness of the room, its fine traditional air of spacious11 living, its outlook over field and woodland toward the lake lying under the silver bloom of September; the very scent12 of the late violets in a glass on the writing-table; the rosy-mauve masses of hydrangea in tubs along the terrace; the fall, now and then, of a leaf through the still air — all, somehow, were mingled13 in the suffusion14 of well-being15 that yet made them seem but so much dross16 upon its current.
The girl’s smile prolonged itself at the sight of a figure approaching from the lower slopes above the lake. The path was a short cut from the Peyton place, and she had known that Denis would appear in it at about that hour. Her smile, however, was prolonged not so much by his approach as by her sense of the impossibility of communicating her mood to him. The feeling did not disturb her. She could not imagine sharing her deepest moods with any one, and the world in which she lived with Denis was too bright and spacious to admit of any sense of constraint17. Her smile was in truth a tribute to that clear-eyed directness of his which was so often a refuge from her own complexities18.
Denis Peyton was used to being met with a smile. He might have been pardoned for thinking smiles the habitual19 wear of the human countenance20; and his estimate of life and of himself was necessarily tinged21 by the cordial terms on which they had always met each other. He had in fact found life, from the start, an uncommonly22 agreeable business, culminating fitly enough in his engagement to the only girl he had ever wished to marry, and the inheritance, from his unhappy step-brother, of a fortune which agreeably widened his horizon. Such a combination of circumstances might well justify23 a young man in thinking himself of some account in the universe; and it seemed the final touch of fitness that the mourning which Denis still wore for poor Arthur should lend a new distinction to his somewhat florid good looks.
Kate Orme was not without an amused perception of her future husband’s point of view; but she could enter into it with the tolerance24 which allows for the inconscient element in all our judgments25. There was, for instance, no one more sentimentally26 humane27 than Denis’s mother, the second Mrs. Peyton, a scented28 silvery person whose lavender silks and neutral-tinted manner expressed a mind with its blinds drawn29 down toward all the unpleasantness of life; yet it was clear that Mrs. Peyton saw a “dispensation” in the fact that her step-son had never married, and that his death had enabled Denis, at the right moment, to step gracefully30 into affluence31. Was it not, after all, a sign of healthy-mindedness to take the gifts of the gods in this religious spirit, discovering fresh evidence of “design” in what had once seemed the sad fact of Arthur’s inaccessibility32 to correction? Mrs. Peyton, beautifully conscious of having done her “best” for Arthur, would have thought it unchristian to repine at the providential failure of her efforts. Denis’s deductions33 were, of course, a little less direct than his mother’s. He had, besides, been fond of Arthur, and his efforts to keep the poor fellow straight had been less didactic and more spontaneous. Their result read itself, if not in any change in Arthur’s character, at least in the revised wording of his will; and Denis’s moral sense was pleasantly fortified34 by the discovery that it very substantially paid to be a good fellow.
The sense of general providentialness on which Mrs. Peyton reposed35 had in fact been confirmed by events which reduced Denis’s mourning to a mere36 tribute of respect — since it would have been a mockery to deplore37 the disappearance38 of any one who had left behind him such an unsavory wake as poor Arthur. Kate did not quite know what had happened: her father was as firmly convinced as Mrs. Peyton that young girls should not be admitted to any open discussion of life. She could only gather, from the silences and evasions39 amid which she moved, that a woman had turned up — a woman who was of course “dreadful,” and whose dreadfulness appeared to include a sort of shadowy claim upon Arthur. But the claim, whatever it was, had been promptly40 discredited41. The whole question had vanished and the woman with it. The blinds were drawn again on the ugly side of things, and life was resumed on the usual assumption that no such side existed. Kate knew only that a darkness had crossed her sky and left it as unclouded as before.
Was it, perhaps, she now asked herself, the very lifting of the cloud — remote, unthreatening as it had been — which gave such new serenity42 to her heaven? It was horrible to think that one’s deepest security was a mere sense of escape — that happiness was no more than a reprieve43. The perversity44 of such ideas was emphasized by Peyton’s approach. He had the gift of restoring things to their normal relations, of carrying one over the chasms45 of life through the closed tunnel of an incurious cheerfulness. All that was restless and questioning in the girl subsided46 in his presence, and she was content to take her love as a gift of grace, which began just where the office of reason ended. She was more than ever, to-day, in this mood of charmed surrender. More than ever he seemed the keynote of the accord between herself and life, the centre of a delightful47 complicity in every surrounding circumstance. One could not look at him without seeing that there was always a fair wind in his sails.
It was carrying him toward her, as usual, at a quick confident pace, which nevertheless lagged a little, she noticed, as he emerged from the beech-grove and struck across the lawn. He walked as though he were tired. She had meant to wait for him on the terrace, held in check by her usual inclination48 to linger on the threshold of her pleasures; but now something drew her toward him, and she went quickly down the steps and across the lawn.
“Denis, you look tired. I was afraid something had happened.”
She had slipped her hand through his arm, and as they moved forward she glanced up at him, struck not so much by any new look in his face as by the fact that her approach had made no change in it.
“I am rather tired. — Is your father in?”
“Papa?” She looked up in surprise. “He went to town yesterday. Don’t you remember?”
“Of course — I’d forgotten. You’re alone, then?” She dropped his arm and stood before him. He was very pale now, with the furrowed49 look of extreme physical weariness.
“Denis — are you ill? Has anything happened?”
He forced a smile. “Yes — but you needn’t look so frightened.”
She drew a deep breath of reassurance50. He was safe, after all! And all else, for a moment, seemed to swing below the rim51 of her world.
“Your mother —?” she then said, with a fresh start of fear.
“It’s not my mother.” They had reached the terrace, and he moved toward the house. “Let us go indoors. There’s such a beastly glare out here.”
He seemed to find relief in the cool obscurity of the drawing-room, where, after the brightness of the afternoon light, their faces were almost indistinguishable to each other. She sat down, and he moved a few paces away. Before the writing-table he paused to look at the neatly52 sorted heaps of wedding-cards.
“They are to be sent out to-morrow?”
“Yes.”
He turned back and stood before her.
“It’s about the woman,” he began abruptly53 — “the woman who pretended to be Arthur’s wife.”
Kate started as at the clutch of an unacknowledged fear.
“She was his wife, then?”
Peyton made an impatient movement of negation55. “If she was, why didn’t she prove it? She hadn’t a shred56 of evidence. The courts rejected her appeal.”
“Well, then —?”
“Well, she’s dead.” He paused, and the next words came with difficulty. “She and the child.”
“The child? There was a child?”
“Yes.”
Kate started up and then sank down. These were not things about which young girls were told. The confused sense of horror had been nothing to this first sharp edge of fact.
“And both are dead?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know? My father said she had gone away — gone back to the West — ”
“So we thought. But this morning we found her.”
“Found her?”
He motioned toward the window. “Out there — in the lake.”
“Both?”
“Both.”
She drooped57 before him shudderingly58, her eyes hidden, as though to exclude the vision. “She had drowned herself?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, poor thing — poor thing!”
They paused awhile, the minutes delving59 an abyss between them till he threw a few irrelevant60 words across the silence.
“One of the gardeners found them.”
“Poor thing!”
“It was sufficiently61 horrible.”
“Horrible — oh!” She had swung round again to her pole. “Poor Denis! You were not there — you didn’t have to —?”
“I had to see her.” She felt the instant relief in his voice. He could talk now, could distend62 his nerves in the warm air of her sympathy. “I had to identify her.” He rose nervously63 and began to pace the room. “It’s knocked the wind out of me. I— my God! I couldn’t foresee it, could I?” He halted before her with outstretched hands of argument. “I did all I could — it’s not my fault, is it?”
“Your fault? Denis!”
“She wouldn’t take the money — ” He broke off, checked by her awakened64 glance.
“The money? What money?” Her face changed, hardening as his relaxed. “Had you offered her money to give up the case?”
He stared a moment, and then dismissed the implication with a laugh.
“No — no; after the case was decided65 against her. She seemed hard up, and I sent Hinton to her with a cheque.”
“And she refused it?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“Oh, I don’t know — the usual thing. That she’d only wanted to prove she was his wife — on the child’s account. That she’d never wanted his money. Hinton said she was very quiet — not in the least excited — but she sent back the cheque.”
Kate sat motionless, her head bent66, her hands clasped about her knees. She no longer looked at Peyton.
“Could there have been a mistake?” she asked slowly.
“A mistake?”
She raised her head now, and fixed67 her eyes on his, with a strange insistence68 of observation. “Could they have been married?”
“The courts didn’t think so.”
“Could the courts have been mistaken?”
He started up again, and threw himself into another chair. “Good God, Kate! We gave her every chance to prove her case — why didn’t she do it? You don’t know what you’re talking about — such things are kept from girls. Why, whenever a man of Arthur’s kind dies, such — such women turn up. There are lawyers who live on such jobs — ask your father about it. Of course, this woman expected to be bought off — ”
“But if she wouldn’t take your money?”
“She expected a big sum, I mean, to drop the case. When she found we meant to fight it, she saw the game was up. I suppose it was her last throw, and she was desperate; we don’t know how many times she may have been through the same thing before. That kind of woman is always trying to make money out of the heirs of any man who — who has been about with them.”
Kate received this in silence. She had a sense of walking along a narrow ledge54 of consciousness above a sheer hallucinating depth into which she dared not look. But the depth drew her, and she plunged69 one terrified glance into it.
“But the child — the child was Arthur’s?”
Peyton shrugged70 his shoulders. “There again — how can we tell? Why, I don’t suppose the woman herself — I wish to heaven your father were here to explain!”
She rose and crossed over to him, laying her hands on his shoulders with a gesture almost maternal71.
“Don’t let us talk of it,” she said. “You did all you could. Think what a comfort you were to poor Arthur.”
He let her hands lie where she had placed them, without response or resistance.
“I tried — I tried hard to keep him straight!”
“We all know that — every one knows it. And we know how grateful he was — what a difference it made to him in the end. It would have been dreadful to think of his dying out there alone.”
She drew him down on a sofa and seated herself by his side. A deep lassitude was upon him, and the hand she had possessed72 herself of lay in her hold inert73.
“It was splendid of you to travel day and night as you did. And then that dreadful week before he died! But for you he would have died alone among strangers.”
He sat silent, his head dropping forward, his eyes fixed. “Among strangers,” he repeated absently.
She looked up, as if struck by a sudden thought. “That poor woman — did you ever see her while you were out there?”
He drew his hand away and gathered his brows together as if in an effort of remembrance.
“I saw her — oh, yes, I saw her.” He pushed the tumbled hair from his forehead and stood up. “Let us go out,” he said. “My head is in a fog. I want to get away from it all.”
A wave of compunction drew her to her feet.
“It was my fault! I ought not to have asked so many questions.” She turned and rang the bell. “I’ll order the ponies74 — we shall have time for a drive before sunset.”
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1
elimination
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| n.排除，消除，消灭 | |
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awakening
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| n.觉醒，醒悟 adj.觉醒中的；唤醒的 | |
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3
permeate
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| v.弥漫，遍布，散布；渗入，渗透 | |
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faculty
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| n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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germinating
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| n.& adj.发芽（的）v.（使）发芽( germinate的现在分词 ) | |
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6
precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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irresistible
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| adj.非常诱人的，无法拒绝的，无法抗拒的 | |
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8
vibrations
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| n.摆动( vibration的名词复数 )；震动；感受；（偏离平衡位置的）一次性往复振动 | |
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vistas
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| 长条形景色( vista的名词复数 )； 回顾； 展望； （未来可能发生的）一系列情景 | |
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levied
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| 征（兵）( levy的过去式和过去分词 )； 索取； 发动（战争）； 征税 | |
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spacious
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| adj.广阔的，宽敞的 | |
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scent
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| n.气味，香味，香水，线索，嗅觉；v.嗅，发觉 | |
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13
mingled
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| 混合，混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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14
suffusion
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| n.充满 | |
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well-being
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| n.安康，安乐，幸福 | |
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16
dross
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| n.渣滓；无用之物 | |
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constraint
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| n.(on)约束，限制；限制(或约束)性的事物 | |
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18
complexities
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| 复杂性(complexity的名词复数)； 复杂的事物 | |
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19
habitual
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| adj.习惯性的；通常的，惯常的 | |
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countenance
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| n.脸色，面容；面部表情；vt.支持，赞同 | |
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tinged
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| v.（使）发丁丁声( ting的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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22
uncommonly
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| adv. 稀罕(极，非常) | |
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23
justify
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| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
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24
tolerance
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| n.宽容；容忍，忍受；耐药力；公差 | |
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25
judgments
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| 判断( judgment的名词复数 )； 鉴定； 评价； 审判 | |
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sentimentally
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| adv.富情感地 | |
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humane
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| adj.人道的，富有同情心的 | |
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28
scented
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| adj.有香味的；洒香水的；有气味的v.嗅到(scent的过去分词) | |
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29
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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30
gracefully
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| ad.大大方方地；优美地 | |
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affluence
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| n.充裕，富足 | |
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32
inaccessibility
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| n. 难接近, 难达到, 难达成 | |
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33
deductions
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| 扣除( deduction的名词复数 )； 结论； 扣除的量； 推演 | |
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34
fortified
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| adj. 加强的 | |
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35
reposed
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| v.将（手臂等）靠在某人（某物）上( repose的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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deplore
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| vt.哀叹，对...深感遗憾 | |
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38
disappearance
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| n.消失，消散，失踪 | |
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39
evasions
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| 逃避( evasion的名词复数 )； 回避； 遁辞； 借口 | |
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promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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discredited
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| 不足信的，不名誉的 | |
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42
serenity
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| n.宁静，沉着，晴朗 | |
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43
reprieve
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| n.暂缓执行（死刑）；v.缓期执行；给…带来缓解 | |
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44
perversity
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| n.任性；刚愎自用 | |
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45
chasms
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| 裂缝( chasm的名词复数 )； 裂口； 分歧； 差别 | |
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46
subsided
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| v.（土地）下陷（因在地下采矿）( subside的过去式和过去分词 )；减弱；下降至较低或正常水平；一下子坐在椅子等上 | |
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47
delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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48
inclination
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| n.倾斜；点头；弯腰；斜坡；倾度；倾向；爱好 | |
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49
furrowed
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| v.犁田，开沟( furrow的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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50
reassurance
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| n.使放心，使消除疑虑 | |
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51
rim
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| n.(圆物的)边，轮缘；边界 | |
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52
neatly
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| adv.整洁地，干净地，灵巧地，熟练地 | |
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53
abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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54
ledge
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| n.壁架，架状突出物；岩架，岩礁 | |
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55
negation
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| n.否定；否认 | |
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56
shred
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| v.撕成碎片，变成碎片；n.碎布条，细片，些少 | |
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57
drooped
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| 弯曲或下垂，发蔫( droop的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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58
shudderingly
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59
delving
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| v.深入探究，钻研( delve的现在分词 ) | |
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60
irrelevant
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| adj.不恰当的，无关系的，不相干的 | |
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61
sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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62
distend
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| vt./vi.（使）扩大，（使）扩张 | |
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nervously
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| adv.神情激动地，不安地 | |
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64
awakened
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| v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
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65
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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66
bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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67
fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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68
insistence
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| n.坚持；强调；坚决主张 | |
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69
plunged
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| v.颠簸( plunge的过去式和过去分词 )；暴跌；骤降；突降 | |
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70
shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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71
maternal
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| adj.母亲的，母亲般的，母系的，母方的 | |
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72
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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73
inert
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| adj.无活动能力的，惰性的；迟钝的 | |
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74
ponies
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| 矮种马，小型马( pony的名词复数 )； ￡25 25 英镑 | |
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