White Narcissus Read Online Free PDF Page B

against too many torturing perplexities. Again there was an upward inflection here suddenly warily deceitful, though he would not openly question her; for while he knew the outward circumstances of this quandary, never yet had he known Ada Lethen to talk about it in the way he wished, as though she expected or even hoped that he could understand.
    “That is to be expected,” she answered, with a tinge of coldness, “seeing the source of it all. Had it been any ordinary quarrel which tempted them into declaring in the frenziedtones I remember, that they would never speak to each other again – the bitterness might have, it must have, lapsed, passed away in the lukewarm tolerance with which most people must regard each other.”
    It came to him that she was a stranger to the warmth and coolness of ordinary domestic relations and family intercourse. An uncanny thrill was imparted with her words, as if they had embodied an exercise of intuition on the part of an immigrant from another planet, but hardly inured to the life of this; and he could have wept to think of that little girl.
    “You – you were present at the quarrel, the original one?” He dared not ask, and yet he must.
    Yes, she told him. The child had sat at the head of the stairs, shivering in her nightgown, and she heard it all. The raised voices went on for hours, and, as in the height of a storm, it always seemed that violence could reach no further pitch and these emotions would come to outrageous ends. “I’ll never forget how I shivered, and my heart went when I thought they meant to kill one another. But at last I fell asleep there.” She went on with added constraint in her tone, “And there I was in the morning.” They had passed her, the woman to her room, the father to get his coat in the hall. Neither had touched the child, though they had passed so near as almost to step over its insensible form.
    His arm went out to her again. “Poor little thing! I’m afraid I can never understand all that your childhood was; only pity. But what you say does not tend to make me pity – these people. Quite the contrary.”
    In an instant, while he sat there unmoving, unchanged in aspect, a flame of rage had wrapped him as a tree may be robed in fire, leaving him for the moment gripped helpless and listening only half-consciously to her words.
    “You shouldn’t pity me,” she murmured, and continued, “it must have been that, perhaps, rather than my rational intelligence, which taught me to be cold to both of them. Perhaps if any love for either of them had been left afterward my heart should have been broken. As it is –” She laughed bitterly.
    “You know that as it is I am heartless.” Yet this speech and the eyes with which she looked at him as she said it made Richard Milne wonder and hope. Clearly there had been a change, and she must have learned in his absence to admit to herself whether or not she loved him. The thought was enough: with mounting surety he felt she did love him, that this was the time appointed – that surely he and Ada Lethen would not let go the chance of happiness without a struggle. If only it were just a matter of duty. But it was not. For so much of her life she had been bound to this place and to these slowly petrifying people that she could not imagine herself apart from them.
    Perhaps the knot of the whole difficulty lay there. Desperately as she might yearn, he felt that she could not conceive happiness. Perhaps nothing but the death of one of those parents would bring her awake – alone – drive her to living.
    “Your heart was too tender for such storms. It makes me wild to think of it – to think of your sitting there, hearing –” The vividness of the picture he saw caused him to wince away from its unbelievable pathos, its meagre sharpness, like the outline of a remote folk-story, suddenly quickened to life by the lips of one of its participants.
    “I think I could repeat every word,” she said