The Third Window

"I LOVE this window," said Antonia, walking down the drawing-room; "and this one. They both look over the moors, you see. This view is even lovelier." She stopped at the end of the long room, and the young man with the pale face and the limping step followed and looked out of the third window with her. "But-I don't know why-I hate it. I wish it weren't here."

Captain Saltonhall looked out and said nothing.

"I wonder if you see what I mean," said Antonia.

"No; I don't. I like it." The young man spoke gently and with something of a drawl, unimpressed, apparently, by her antipathy and putting up the back of a placid forefinger to stroke along the edge of his moustache.

"One gets the hills, peaceful and silvery; one gets the walled garden and the cedar," she enumerated.

"The little pond with its fountain is as serene as a happy dream. It's all like a happy dream. Yet-I wish there weren't this window here."

"You could wall it up if you don't like it," Captain Saltonhall suggested, his eyes, as he stood behind her, turning from the walled garden beneath to fix themselves with a rather sad attentiveness upon the head of the young woman. Her dark hair was near him and the curve of her cheek; he thought that he felt against his the warmth of her shoulder in its thin black dress.

She looked out, motionless, for a little while; then, turning suddenly, as if with impatience of her thoughts, found him so near, and his eyes on hers. She, too, was pale and tall; but all in her was soft, splendid, and almost opulent, while he was sharp-edged and wasted. He looked much the older, though they were of the same age; both, indeed, were very young.

He did not move away as she faced him nor did his look alter. Sad and attentive, it merely remained attached upon her, and if he felt any nervousness it showed itself only in the slight gesture of his forefinger passing meditatively along the edge of his moustache. It was she who spoke. "Well, Bevis?" she said gravely. Her look asked: "Have you anything to tell me?"

"Well, Tony," he returned. He had, apparently, nothing to say.

She studied him for a moment longer, and then, with an added impatience-if anything so soft could so be called-walking away to an easy-chair before the fire, she said, "You think me very silly, I suppose."

"Silly? Why?"

"Because of the window. My hating it."

He came and leaned on the back of her chair, looking across her head up at the mantelpiece where a row of white fritillaries stood in tall crystal glasses, their reflections showing as if through a film of sea-water in the ancient mirror behind them. There had been white fritillaries among the flagged paths of the walled garden, and, finding them again, he recognized that they had been the only things he had felt uncanny there; for he had always felt them wraith-like flowers.

"I think you'd better wall it up, quite seriously, if you really hate it." He repeated his former suggestion. "It would rather spoil the room. But I wouldn't, if I were you, live with a discomfort like that-if it's really a discomfort."

The young woman beneath him laughed, a little sadly, if lightly. "How you suspect me."

"Of what, pray?"

"Oh-of unconscious humbug; of unconscious posing. Of induced emotions generally. It's always been the same."

"I rather like induced emotions in you," said Captain Saltonhall. "They suit you. They are like the colour of a pomegranate or the taste of a mulberry or the smell of a branch of flowering hawthorn; something rich, thick, and pleasingly oppressive."

"Thanks. I don't take it as a compliment."

"I don't mean it as one. I merely said I liked it in you; and if I do it's only because I'm in love with you."

He lowered his eyes now from the fritillaries to watch the very faint colour that rose, very slowly, in her cheek. It could hardly be called a response. It was merely an awareness. And after a moment she said, still with her soft impatience: "Do come and sit where I can see you. It's bad for your leg to stand too long, I'm sure."

He obeyed her, limping to a chair on the opposite side of the fireplace, laying his hands on either arm as he lowered himself with some little awkwardness. He was not yet accustomed to the complicated mechanical apparatus, the artificial leg, that, always, he felt hang so heavily about his thigh.

Antonia Wellwood's dark eyes watched him, with solicitude, it seemed, rather than tenderness; though indeed their very shape-the outer corners drooping, a line of white showing under the full iris-expressed a melancholy so sweet that their most casual glance seemed to convey tenderness.

The young people sat then for a little while in silence. Though the spring day was sunny, it was sharp. On a bed of ashes the log-fire burned softly and clearly. The silvery light of the high, Northern sky shone along the polished floor.

The room was modern, like the house, and imaged carefully, but not too carefully for ease, eighteenth-century austerities and graces. The walls were panelled in white; the chintzes were striped in white and citron-colour. In spite of bowls of flowers, books and magazines, a half-knit sock here, its needles transfixing the ball of heather-coloured wool, and the embroidery there, with tangled skeins, it was an impersonal room, an object calmly and confidently awaiting appraisal rather than a long-memoried presence, making beauty forgotten in significance. It was not a room expressive of the young woman sunken in the deep chair. Appointed elaborately as she was, in her dense or transparent blacks, her crossed feet in their narrow buckled shoes stretched before her, her hands lying along the white and citron chintz, she was neither disciplined nor austere. Brooding, melancholy, restless, and with a latent exasperation, her eyes dwelt on the flames and her wide, small lips puckered themselves at moments as if with the bitterness of unshed tears.

She did not move for a long time, nor did the young man who, his elbows propped, rested his chin on the backs of interlaced hands and surveyed her over them. He noted her, as he had done for many months now; just as, for months before that, he had, in France, dreamed over her; not her mystery; her clouded, drifting quality; he had perhaps got round that or perhaps given it up, sometimes he did not himself know which; but the pictorial incidents of her appearance; the black velvet bow in the gauze upon her breast; the heavy pins of tortoise-shell that held up her great tresses; the odd, dusky mark on her eyelids that looked like the freaking of a lovely else unblemished fruit; her pale cheek; her childlike forehead; her hand, beautiful and indolent, with its wedding-ring. He dwelt on all these appearances with a still absorption, and whether with more delight or irony he could not have told; but it was an irony at his own expense, not at hers; for he had always been a young man aloof from appearances, tolerant yet contemptuous of their appeal, and he knew that they absorbed him now because he was in love with her, and he sometimes even wondered if he was in love with her because of them. He did not, however, wonder much. Before the war he would have computed, analyzed, perhaps done away with his passion with the fretting of over-acute thought. That sort of vitality, the analytic, destructive sort, had been, he imagined, bled, beaten, and cut out of him. He was now a wraith, a wreck of his former self, fit only for contemplation and acceptance. She was enough for him now, just as she was; ignorant, for all her accomplishment; indolent and self-absorbed; and she could more than satisfy him. The old acuteness remained, but it no longer tormented. He was aware of everything and all he asked was to possess it all. That, however, didn't mean that he pretended anything. If he had no illusions and asked for none, he did not let her think he had them.

"When did you begin to know you were in love with me?" she said at last, and now, in spite of the tearful pucker in her lips and liquid fullness of her eyes, he knew that the theme was the one to which she had intended to bring him. But it hadn't been deviously; for all her shifting shadows and eddies she was one of the straightest creatures he had ever known. Perhaps, after all, it was that quality in her, rather than the appearances, that accounted for his state.

"How long? Since I've loved you? Oh-since before Malcolm's death, I'm afraid."

It was what she had feared; he saw that, and that it hurt her. Yet it pleased her, too.

"I never guessed," she said.

He laughed. "Rather not! How could you have guessed?"

"Women do-these things."

"Perhaps you are less clever than other women, then, or I more clever than other men."

"I don't think I'm less clever than other women," said Antonia, and a smile just touched her lips; another evidence of that straightness in her. She was willing to smile, even though smiling might be misunderstood. Yes, more than anything, perhaps, it was her genuineness he cherished.

"You're cleverer than most," he assured her. "Far. But I'm cleverer than most men."

"We are a wonderful pair!" she exclaimed, and he agreed: "We are indeed."

"And why was it?" she went on, more happily now, for, another precious point, and it seemed more than anything else to pair them, they were happy with each other. Apart from her woman's craving to feel her power over him, apart from his definitely amorous condition, they were comrades, and it crossed his mind, oddly, at the moment of thinking it, that this could not have been said of Antonia and Malcolm. Their relation had been that, specially, of man and woman, lover and beloved. He doubted, really, whether Antonia would have cared much about Malcolm had he not been a man and a lover. Whereas, had he himself been another woman, Antonia, he felt sure, would have made a friend of him. These reflections took him far from her question, and before the vague musing of his look she repeated it in an altered form. "Why did you begin-after having known me so long without?"

"Ah, that I can't tell. Perhaps it didn't begin. Perhaps it was always there. I knew it for the first time when I was ordered to France; that day I came to say good-bye to you and Malcolm in London-before he went."

The name of her dead husband brought the cloud about her again. "Oh, yes," she murmured. "I remember that day. I was horribly frightened over the war. I had a presentiment. I knew he was going to volunteer."

"It could hardly have been a presentiment. He evidently would."

She showed no resentment for his clipping of her dark pinions. It was as if she still hovered on them as she said: "Of course. I mean presentiment of what came after that. What had to come. Don't you believe in Fate, Bevis? Perhaps it was that you felt in me. You had never seen me suffering before."

"Perhaps," said the young man, sceptically if kindly. "However, I don't want to talk about it," he added. "That is, unless you do, very much."

She looked up at him, still unresentful, but now a little ironic, though irony was not her note. "You are an odd lover, Bevis."

"Am I?"

"You don't like declaring your love."

"I have declared it."

"You don't like talking about it."

"Why should I? Unless you'll talk about yours, too. What you mean, I suppose, is that you miss pleading and passion in me and would like to see them displayed. I quite understand that in you. Perhaps it's what's needed to bring you round. But I'm not that sort of person. I couldn't do it naturally. I think, though you miss it in me, you'd not really find it natural, either. We're too clever, too civilized, I suppose."

"I suppose we are," she conceded, though a little wistfully. "I don't exactly miss it. I know it's there. It's merely that I'd like you to talk about it, even if you don't display it."

"I'm glad you recognize that it's there," said the young man.

"Shall I tell you what I really feel about the window?" Antonia now asked. Her back was to it as she sat, and its great cedar, cutting against the pale blue sky, made a distant background to her head. Like a Renaissance portrait, sombre, serene, splendid in tone, the picture she made was before him; an allegorical figure of poetry, youth or melancholy, with its dwelling eyes and spacings dark and pale. He was often to see her afterwards as she then looked across at him.

"We never lived at Wyndwards, you know, Malcolm and I," she said, "though Malcolm, of course, spent his life here until we married. But we visited his mother, often, and I never thought about the window then. It was only after Malcolm's death, and hers; when I stayed here alone for the first time; a year ago. Alone except for Cicely."

"Miss Latimer has always lived here, hasn't she?" Captain Saltonhall inquired.

"Yes. But she is so much a part of it that it was like being alone. I used to walk up and down here and look out. Just a year ago it was; spring like this. And, as I walked, I found that while I loved looking out of the front windows, I shrank, I couldn't tell why, from looking out of the third; the end one." Antonia turned herself still farther in her chair, leaning both elbows on the wide arm. "I shrank from it, yet it drew me, too. And when I yielded, and looked, I felt frightened. And one day it came over me, as I looked out, that what I feared was that I should see Malcolm standing there, beside the fountain." Her voice had dropped. Her eyes dwelt on him, full of their genuine distress.

"Ah, I see." Captain Saltonhall nodded. "That was very natural, I think."

"Why natural?"

"He had died so shortly before. Your thoughts were full of him. The place is full of him-with all the years he lived here."

She listened to his alleviations, finding them, apparently, irrelevant. "But why the third window? Why only that one? Why not the others? He is more on the moors than in the flagged garden."

"A flagged garden with a fountain and a cedar tree is obviously a more suitable place for a ghost than the moors would be."

"You do believe in ghosts and apparitions, then?"

"I don't know whether I believe in them or not. There may be appearances we can't account for. There's a good deal of evidence for them. But I don't believe they embody any consciousness. It's far more likely, from what I've read, that they are a kind of photograph of some past emotion."

"But, Bevis, wouldn't it frighten you dreadfully to see one, whatever it was?"

"Perhaps. Yes. It might be very nasty," he agreed.

"Yet if I could be sure that it embodied consciousness it might frighten me, but it would mean such rapture, too. I should know then that Malcolm had survived death and still thought of me."

"Yes. I see," Captain Saltonhall murmured, rather awkwardly. "Yes. Of course. That would be a great comfort to you."

"Comfort hardly expresses it, Bevis."

Silence fell between them for a little while, and when the young man next spoke it was still with the slight awkwardness. "But then, if that's what you need, you ought to like the third window and the chance you feel it gives you."

She heaved a weary, exasperated sigh, stretching out in her chair, stretching up her arms, letting them fall again along her sides, while, sunken, extended, she seemed to abandon to him the avowal of her own perplexity and extravagance. "I don't know what I want. I don't know what I fear. I don't know anything," she said.

A step came outside at this point and, the door opening, there entered a woman, older than the other two, though still not old, with a bleached face and bleached hair; a straight, old-fashioned little fringe showing under her hat. She paused at once on the threshold. "Am I interrupting?" she asked. Her voice was curiously high; not sharp or shrill; but high and reedy, like a child's.

"No. Not a bit. Of course not. Come in, Cicely," said Antonia sadly. She did not turn her eyes on the newcomer, but Captain Saltonhall did so, watching her as she crossed the room with her basket of spring flowers. She was dressed in weather-beaten mourning, with a knitted black silk scarf thrown back from her open jacket. The basket she carried was full of primroses and windflowers, and, setting it down on a distant table, she began to fill the bowls and vases that she had evidently placed there in readiness. Her entry and her presence, which might be prolonged, were, he felt, very inopportune; yet Antonia showed no impatience of the interruption. Perhaps, indeed, Miss Latimer's presence was a relief to her, since she had really no answer to give to his rather arid and even provocative logic. It had been a little vicious of him to put it to her like that; but there was, he recognized, an instinct in him to show her that her perplexities were irrelevant and even absurd rather than to argue with them. She remained silent and sunken in her chair, slowly twisting her wedding-ring round and round her finger, and it must be apparent to Miss Latimer that she had interrupted an intimate conversation. He felt this to be a little unfortunate; why, he could not quite have said.

Miss Latimer, whom he had seen for the first time the night before, at dinner, after his late arrival, had not endeared herself to him. He had not liked her stillness, nor her whiteness, nor her sudden piping voice. She was effaced, but not insignificant, and had an air, for all her silence, of taking everything in. Her small face, peaked and pinched rather than delicate, would have been childish, like her voice, were it not for her eyes. He reflected now, watching her move quietly among her flowers, that it was really because of her eyes he had not liked her. They were so unchildish; so large; so bright; so pale; and her broad eyebrows, darker in tint than her faded hair, gave them an almost startling emphasis. Her face seemed barred across by these eyebrows, and, beneath them, her eyes were like captives looking out.

The flowers at last were finished and placed, beautifully placed, beautifully arranged, the primroses in shallow white earthenware, the windflowers in glasses that showed their thin, rosy stems, and when Cicely Latimer went at last, closing the door softly behind her, he felt himself draw a long breath of relief.

"That's a singular little person," he remarked.

Antonia, it was evident, was not thinking of Cicely Latimer. Her eyes came back to him from far distances. Or, were they far, those distances? Was it in shallows or in depths that her mind had lain dreaming?

"Is she a cousin, did you tell me?" he asked.

"Cicely?" She recovered his comment as well as his question and answered that first. "She's a great dear, not singular at all. Yes; a cousin; Malcolm's first cousin. A niece of old Mrs. Wellwood's."

"And she's always lived here?"

"Almost always. Mr. and Mrs. Wellwood built the house, you know, when they were first married, and Cicely came to them here as a child. She had been left an orphan."

"How old is she, then?"

"Oh, she must be quite old now," Antonia in her secure youth computed. "She was older, a good deal, than Malcolm; nearly forty, perhaps."

"She's still in mourning, I see."

"Yes. So am I," said Antonia, not resentfully, but with an added sadness. "It's not yet two years, Bevis. And hardly more than a year since Mrs. Wellwood's death."

"It's a matter of feeling, naturally. One doesn't expect a cousin to wear mourning as long as a widow. But they were like brother and sister, I suppose."

"Absolutely. Malcolm went to her with everything. He told her all about me when he first fell in love, and she helped him in it all."

"Will she go on living with you here?"

"Go on? Cicely? Of course she will. I can't think of this place without her. I think it would kill her if she were to be taken from it. Mrs. Wellwood spoke to me about it before she died. It's like a sacred trust. She has a little money. It's not that. But she's as much a part of it as the trees and hills. She came to me at once, all the same, after everything happened, and said she would perfectly understand if I would rather start anew, quite by myself. There wasn't a quaver or an appeal. She was, I saw, quite ready. She is the sort of person who is ready for anything. I told her that as long as she lived it was her home. I took her into my arms," said Antonia, "and, in a sense, she's been there ever since. Though, in another sense, perhaps the deeper, it's I who am in hers. She takes such wonderful, such devoted care of me."

"I see." Captain Saltonhall was feeling for his cigarette-case. "It's lucky you are so much attached to each other.-Do you mind?-Will you have one?"

"Please."

He was preparing to hoist himself out of his chair with the cigarette-case and matchbox, but she sprang up and came to him. "You can't give yourself these luxuries of convention," she smiled, rather as if at an unruly patient. "You must let me wait on you, rather. At all events, till you get more used to it. Dear old Bevis. You're so brave that one forgets all about it."

She leaned over him, while he gave her a light, and then, the match having gone out in his rather unsteady fingers, leaned still nearer to light his cigarette from hers. But, gently, he laid his hands upon her arms and held her there, looking closely into her eyes. "Do you love me?" he asked.

Her cigarette was between her lips. She could not answer. He released one hand so that she might free herself, and although the gesture might have brought an element of mirth into their gravity she sought no refuge in it. Half leaning, half kneeling beside him, she made no attempt to draw away and he saw her eyes widen in their grief, their perplexity, and their delight. "I don't know, Bevis dear. I don't know. How can I know?" she almost wept.

"You do know. I can tell you that you know, for I do. You love me." He had laid his hold again upon her and he slightly shook her as he spoke.

"I can't. I can't. You must let me wait. You must give me time."

"All the time you want. I've nothing to do but go on waiting. I'm ready for it. But don't be too cruel. What do you gain by it?"

"I don't mean to be cruel. Please believe that; please do."

"You don't mean it; but you are. It's enough for you to have me here, waiting, and making love to you, day after day, month after month, as I did in London. I understand it all. You keep him like that, and you keep me. And what torments you is that you can't see how you can keep us both if you give me more."

"Oh-Bevis. You are so horrible. So horribly clear. You are far, far clearer than I can ever be. Yet-no, that's not all there is to it. Give me time to think. I told you that I should think better up here, in his home-with you to help me. I can only think clearly if I'm given time."

"You can't do anything clearly. You're always in a mist. You want to know yourself; I grant you your honesty; but your feeling makes a mist around you. Listen to me. Let me show it to you. You love him still, of course. I shouldn't care for you if you didn't. You'll go on loving him. And it will hurt sometimes. It will hurt me, too. People are made up of these irreconcilable knots. It can't be helped. We're here in life together, and we belong to each other, and there's nothing between us but a memory. Perhaps you could go on holding out against me; but you can't go on holding out against yourself. You want to be mine nearly as much as I want you to be. Darling Tony-your eyes are full of love as you look at me now."

He had held her more tightly, drawn her more near, and now, his haggard young face lighted with the sudden ardour of his conviction, he saw his light flash back to him from her, so that dropping his hands from her arms, he seized her, drew her down to him, enfolded her, and, feeling her yield, kissed her again and again.

"Bevis!" she whispered, amazed, aghast, yet, in her yielding, confessing everything.

When she drew herself away and stood up beside him, it was blindly, putting her hand out for the table, her face averted; and so she stood for a moment, while he saw that the colour bathed her face and neck. Then he saw that the tears rained down. He had, strangely, never seen her cry before, though he had seen her at the earlier moments of her great grief. She had been frozen, gaunt, lost, then.

"Darling Tony-forgive me."

"Oh," she wept, "it's not your fault!"

"Yes, it is. Don't ask me to regret it; but it is."

"No; no. It's not your fault," she repeated. And she began to move away, blindly.

"Tell me you forgive me." He had drawn himself up in his chair and looked after her.

"Of course I forgive you. I can't forgive myself."

"That's just as bad. Must you go?"

"I must. I must. Later-we'll talk. I'll try to think. I'll try to understand. I'll try to explain everything."

She had got herself to the door and she had not turned her face to him again. "Don't despise me," she said as she left him.