第67章

I was sorry enough for him to feel that if he had suddenly taken me by the throat and strangled me slowly, avec delices, I could forgive him while I choked.How correct he was! But bitterness against me peeped out of every second phrase.At last I raised my hand and said to him, 'Enough.' I believe he was shocked by my plebeian abruptness but he was too polite to show it.His conventions will always stand in the way of his nature.I told him that everything that had been said and done during the last seven or eight months was inexplicable unless on the assumption that he was in love with me, - and yet in everything there was an implication that he couldn't forgive me my very existence.I did ask him whether he didn't think that it was absurd on his part..

."

"Didn't you say that it was exquisitely absurd?" I asked.

"Exquisitely!..." Dona Rita was surprised at my question."No.

Why should I say that?"

"It would have reconciled him to your abruptness.It's their family expression.It would have come with a familiar sound and would have been less offensive.""Offensive," Dona Rita repeated earnestly."I don't think he was offended; he suffered in another way, but I didn't care for that.

It was I that had become offended in the end, without spite, you understand, but past bearing.I didn't spare him.I told him plainly that to want a woman formed in mind and body, mistress of herself, free in her choice, independent in her thoughts; to love her apparently for what she is and at the same time to demand from her the candour and the innocence that could be only a shocking pretence; to know her such as life had made her and at the same time to despise her secretly for every touch with which her life had fashioned her - that was neither generous nor high minded; it was positively frantic.He got up and went away to lean against the mantelpiece, there, on his elbow and with his head in his hand.

You have no idea of the charm and the distinction of his pose.Icouldn't help admiring him: the expression, the grace, the fatal suggestion of his immobility.Oh, yes, I am sensible to aesthetic impressions, I have been educated to believe that there is a soul in them."With that enigmatic, under the eyebrows glance fixed on me she laughed her deep contralto laugh without mirth but also without irony, and profoundly moving by the mere purity of the sound.

"I suspect he was never so disgusted and appalled in his life.His self-command is the most admirable worldly thing I have ever seen.

What made it beautiful was that one could feel in it a tragic suggestion as in a great work of art."She paused with an inscrutable smile that a great painter might have put on the face of some symbolic figure for the speculation and wonder of many generations.I said:

"I always thought that love for you could work great wonders.And now I am certain.""Are you trying to be ironic?" she said sadly and very much as a child might have spoken.

"I don't know," I answered in a tone of the same simplicity."Ifind it very difficult to be generous."

"I, too," she said with a sort of funny eagerness."I didn't treat him very generously.Only I didn't say much more.I found Ididn't care what I said - and it would have been like throwing insults at a beautiful composition.He was well inspired not to move.It has spared him some disagreeable truths and perhaps Iwould even have said more than the truth.I am not fair.I am no more fair than other people.I would have been harsh.My very admiration was making me more angry.It's ridiculous to say of a man got up in correct tailor clothes, but there was a funereal grace in his attitude so that he might have been reproduced in marble on a monument to some woman in one of those atrocious Campo Santos: the bourgeois conception of an aristocratic mourning lover.When I came to that conclusion I became glad that I was angry or else I would have laughed right out before him.""I have heard a woman say once, a woman of the people - do you hear me, Dona Rita? - therefore deserving your attention, that one should never laugh at love.""My dear," she said gently, "I have been taught to laugh at most things by a man who never laughed himself; but it's true that he never spoke of love to me, love as a subject that is.So perhaps.

..But why?"

"Because (but maybe that old woman was crazy), because, she said, there was death in the mockery of love."Dona Rita moved slightly her beautiful shoulders and went on:

"I am glad, then, I didn't laugh.And I am also glad I said nothing more.I was feeling so little generous that if I had known something then of his mother's allusion to 'white geese' I would have advised him to get one of them and lead it away on a beautiful blue ribbon.Mrs.Blunt was wrong, you know, to be so scornful.Awhite goose is exactly what her son wants.But look how badly the world is arranged.Such white birds cannot be got for nothing and he has not enough money even to buy a ribbon.Who knows! Maybe it was this which gave that tragic quality to his pose by the mantelpiece over there.Yes, that was it.Though no doubt Ididn't see it then.As he didn't offer to move after I had done speaking I became quite unaffectedly sorry and advised him very gently to dismiss me from his mind definitely.He moved forward then and said to me in his usual voice and with his usual smile that it would have been excellent advice but unfortunately I was one of those women who can't be dismissed at will.And as I shook my head he insisted rather darkly: 'Oh, yes, Dona Rita, it is so.

Cherish no illusions about that fact.' It sounded so threatening that in my surprise I didn't even acknowledge his parting bow.He went out of that false situation like a wounded man retreating after a fight.No, I have nothing to reproach myself with.I did nothing.I led him into nothing.Whatever illusions have passed through my head I kept my distance, and he was so loyal to what he seemed to think the redeeming proprieties of the situation that he has gone from me for good without so much as kissing the tips of my fingers.He must have felt like a man who had betrayed himself for nothing.It's horrible.It's the fault of that enormous fortune of mine, and I wish with all my heart that I could give it to him;for he couldn't help his hatred of the thing that is: and as to his love, which is just as real, well - could I have rushed away from him to shut myself up in a convent? Could I? After all Ihave a right to my share of daylight."