Time Will Darken It Read Free Page B

window-box. The ceiling of the bedroom is eleven feet high, indicating the house’s age and some previous history—quarrels between husband and wife, perhaps, in this very room.
    After twenty minutes he came back and went over to the dressing-table. With his head bent forward so that the mirror would accommodate his reflection, he parted his damp hair solemnly on the left side and combed it flat against his skull. In sleep, in repose, in all unguarded moments, his face had a suggestion of sadness about it.
    “Was it something that happened this afternoon?” he asked, standing beside the bed. “Did I do something or say something in front of them that hurt your feelings?”
    With her voice half-smothered in the pillow Martha King said, “You didn’t do anything or say anything and my feelings are not hurt. Now will you please go away?”
    He leaned across her, trying to see her face.
    “And please don’t touch me!”
    Austin had a sudden angry impulse to turn her over and slap her, but it was so faint and so immediately disowned that he himself was hardly aware of it. “Listen to me,” he said. “You’ve got to get up now and come downstairs. I don’t know what they’ll think if you——”
    “I don’t care what they think. I’m not going downstairs.”
    “You’ve got to. We have company in the house and you’ve asked all those people.”
    “You go down if you want to. It’s your company.”
    “But what’ll I tell them?”
    “Whatever you feel like telling them. Tell them you’re married to an impossible woman who doesn’t care what she does or how much humiliation she brings upon you.”
    “That isn’t true,” he said, in a tone of voice that carried only partial conviction—the intention to believe what he had just said, rather than belief itself.
    “Yes it is, it’s all true and you know it! Tell them I’m lazy and extravagant and a bad housekeeper and that I don’t take proper care of my child!”
    Austin’s eyes wandered to the clock on the dressing-table.
    “Couldn’t we postpone this—this discussion until later? I know I said something that hurt your feelings but I didn’t mean to. Really I didn’t. I don’t know what it was, even.” Again the voice was not wholly convinced of what it said. “Tonight after the party, we’ll have it all out, everything. And in the meantime——”
    “In the meantime I wish I were dead,” Martha King said, and rolled over on her back. Her face was flushed and creased from the pillow, and so given over to feeling that one part of him looked at it with curiosity and detachment. Beautiful (and dear to him) though her ordinary face was, in colouring and feature, in the extreme whiteness and softness of the skin and in the bone structure that lay under this whiteness and softness, and the bluish tint of the part of her eyes surrounding the brown iris, it was a beauty that was all known to him. He saw something now that he might not ever see again, an effort on the part of flesh to make a new face, stranger and more vulnerable than the other. And more beautiful. Tears formed in the right eye and spilled over, and then both eyes were blinded by them. The detachment gave way and he gathered her in his arms.
    “I don’t see why you aren’t happy with me,” she said mournfully. “I try so hard to do everything the way you want me to do it.”
    He wiped the tears away with his hand gently, but there were more. “I
am
happy,” he said. “I’m very happy.”
    “You can’t be. Not as long as you’re married to a woman who gives you no peace.”
    “But I am, I tell you. Why do I have to keep saying that I’m happy? If you’d only stop worrying about it and take things for granted, we’d never have these——Was it Nora Potter? Was it something about Nora?”
    Martha shook her head.
    “Sweetheart, Nora is like a cousin. She doesn’t mean anything more to me than that. You don’t have any cousins or you’d understand.”
    “I saw you