Dividing Waters. I. A. R. Wylie
wanted him to propose to me," Nora went on with her confession. "I wanted to find out if I cared—I wanted to care, but—I don't—not enough. So I said 'No.' I am glad it is over."
Mrs. Ingestre pressed the arm resting on her own.
"And I am glad that you have said 'no,'" she said. "I should always have been afraid if it had been 'yes' that Karlsburg and vegetation had given the casting vote. It is dangerous to treat marriage as an escape loop-hole. Sometimes it means the tragedy of a lifetime."
They talked of other things, as people do who have touched on a subject too near the heart's innermost and untrodden places, but Mrs. Ingestre had unconsciously lifted a corner of the veil. The words "a tragedy of a lifetime" remained ineffaceable, and, though they had been untouched with self-pity or bitterness, Nora believed she understood.
From that moment she saw in her mother's face, words, and acts a new meaning—the revelation of a harsh punishment nobly and patiently accepted.
CHAPTER IV
OUTWARD BOUND
After the final decision, events moved swiftly in Nora Ingestre's life. It was almost as though Mrs. Ingestre was afraid delay might develop imperceptibly into a gradual surrender to the protests of her husband and the scoffing criticisms of her son. The former treated Nora's journey as a sort of soul-contaminating emigration into the land of the Moabites—a matter full of spiritual danger for her, and, incidentally, of annoyance for him. During the six weeks that passed in correspondence between Delford and Karlsburg and in busy preparations, he varied the table conversation with anxious appeals to a watchful, if occasionally inexplicable Providence on behalf of his dearest child and a fretful review of his own crippled condition without her assistance.
"God forbid that I should criticise my fellow-creatures," was his usual introductory sentence, "but foreigners are not as we. They have ways and customs which I cannot believe are well-pleasing in His sight. Do not, my child, be led astray by the creeping influence of example; do not surrender the proud and glorious tenets of your country because you see many, less fortunate, following other paths than those you have been taught to tread. They may seem fair, but remember the end is not here. Be careful that a light and frivolous conception of a terrible God does not taint your blood. I shall think of you always, dear child, but most of all on Sundays, in our beloved church, when I shall pray that you too are joining in the universal praise in some suitable place of worship."
After which he was wont to remark that his sermon was not yet copied out, and on Nora having offered to perform the task, only too thankful that her soul's condition should cease to be made the subject for an after-dinner's conversation, he would draw her to him and kiss her.
"What shall I do without my right hand?" he usually added, with a grave and melancholy shake of the head.
It was then Miles's turn to take up the ball and keep it rolling after his own methods and ideas. References to fat Germans and to people who chose to associate with that sort of foreign bounder rather than stay at home with decent English people were plentiful, and became tiresome even in their variations. But alike to her brother's pungent sarcasm and her father's periods Nora bore the same determined front. She was on her mother's side, blindly and devotedly, and in spite of the fact that at the bottom of her heart she shared the prejudices of the masculine element in her family. She had the firm conviction that her mother was right, and felt, moreover, that anything—even Karlsburg—was better than the dreary Puritan monotony of her present life.
As for Mrs. Ingestre, she said little, but went on quietly with the necessary arrangements and ignored the constant, if indirect, attacks of her husband and son. Neither ventured to criticise her plans to her face. Miles lived in a wholesome shamefaced awe of his mother's dignity and keener insight into his own weaknesses; the Rev. John had his private reasons for caution. He had, in fact, waged one battle royal with his wife, and had been momentarily forced to realise that for twenty-five years he had been living with a master who had acted willingly as his slave. Not that the awakening was more than momentary. When he first recovered from the shock of finding himself confronted by an iron wall of opposition, he had dozed back into the old delusion that he was sent with a divine mission to be the guide and support to a frail and helpless woman. But there were a few words uttered in the course of a short and painful interview which the Rev. John could not forget. They rankled in his mind as the proof of the injustice, ingratitude, and perversity of the best of women.
"We look at things from a different standpoint," Mrs. Ingestre had said wearily. "You regard the world and all that it has to offer in beauty and happiness as something to be hated and avoided. You do hate the world. You boast of the fact. I am different. I believe that I was put into the world to enjoy it to the uttermost power of my capability, that every day in which I had not seen or done something new or experienced some fresh wonder was a day wasted. I believed all this in spite of my home and upbringing. I simply waited for the time when I should be allowed to live as I understood living. I married you—and then too late I saw that your ideas and mine clashed. It was a mistake, John, but in all justice you must admit it was a mistake which you have never had to feel. I have done my best to smother my wishes and instincts because I realised that it was not your fault that I had seen more in you than was really there. I have stood by you loyally—I felt it was my duty to do so even at the cost of my own individuality. I had made a mistake. But it was a mistake none the less, John, and it is one for which Nora shall not suffer. My responsibility to her is greater than it is to you. She is my daughter. She shall live as her character requires—as my character required. She shall not be stunted and dwarfed in her growth. This is the first time I have ever opposed you. I do so because I must."
And, strangely enough, the Rev. John had found nothing to say. He prayed very earnestly for his wife against the hydra-headed monster of worldliness and vanity which he firmly believed had taken hold upon her soul, but from that moment his protest confined itself to an increased gravity in her presence and the indirect reproach of his after-dinner orations.
Thus time slipped past, and almost before she knew it the day of departure dawned for Nora. In the fresh autumnal air and bright sunshine she forgot the pangs of the previous night, when she had wept a few tears of regret and vague remorse. In the darkness she had reproached herself to the point of believing that to desert her father and the copying of his sermons was a piece of unfilial selfishness. Even Robert Arnold appeared to her in a new light—that light which our "good-night" thoughts, first cousins to "last" thoughts, cast about those dear to us. He seemed very dear to her at midnight. A dozen episodes, grave and gay, in their common life recurred to her, also illuminated by the same tender regret. A year's parting from him caused her almost intolerable heartache, the more so because she had repulsed him and the love after which she began to hunger. "If he will only wait, I am sure I shall grow to love him," she confided to her damp pillow, more than half convinced that the love had come already, startled to life by the fear of loss and separation.
But the morning sunshine is a spritely, cold-hearted magician. As the shaky old four-wheeled cab, glorified in the village by the name of "the brougham," rolled over the uneven cobbles, she found herself nodding a cheerful, almost triumphant, farewell to the church and the monument. They were in her eyes the symbols of a life she was leaving behind her, like the gates of a not intolerable prison. She was quite sorry that Mrs. Clerk failed to be on her usual watchful guard at the window. Certainly, if the village was a sort of prison, Mrs. Clerk was its spiritual gaoler, and Nora would have dearly loved to flourish her dawning freedom in the disapproving face of her natural enemy. But Mrs. Clerk was nowhere to be seen, and Nora's flashing glance encountered only her mother's grave, thoughtful eyes.
Against all advice, Mrs. Ingestre had determined to accompany her daughter up to London. Perhaps she feared her husband's last exhortations, perhaps she was urged by a secret heart-hunger. Yet her whole face brightened with warm sympathy as she read in Nora's smile and heightened colour the proud, bold joy of youth plunging for the first time into the full tide of life.
"You are glad to go?" she asked in a low voice that was without the faintest tone of reproach.
Nora nodded.
"I am excited," she said. "I feel like a pioneer