第66章

"Can you really want to live all your days half-dead in this little hole?Come back to me,and I'll give you all you want.You shall live your own life;I swear it."He saw her face quiver ironically.

"Yes,"he repeated,"but I mean it this time.I'll only ask one thing.I just want--I just want a son.Don't look like that!Iwant one.It's hard."His voice had grown hurried,so that he hardly knew it for his own,and twice he jerked his head back as if struggling for breath.It was the sight of her eyes fixed on him,dark with a sort of fascinated fright,which pulled him together and changed that painful incoherence to anger.

"Is it so very unnatural?"he said between his teeth,"Is it unnatural to want a child from one's own wife?You wrecked our life and put this blight on everything.We go on only half alive,and without any future.Is it so very unflattering to you that in spite of everything I--I still want you for my wife?Speak,for Goodness'sake!do speak."Irene seemed to try,but did not succeed.

"I don't want to frighten you,"said Soames more gently."Heaven knows.I only want you to see that I can't go on like this.Iwant you back.I want you."

Irene raised one hand and covered the lower part of her face,but her eyes never moved from his,as though she trusted in them to keep him at bay.And all those years,barren and bitter,since--ah!when?--almost since he had first known her,surged up in one great wave of recollection in Soames;and a spasm that for his life he could not control constricted his face.

"It's not too late,"he said;"it's not--if you'll only believe it."Irene uncovered her lips,and both her hands made a writhing gesture in front of her breast.Soames seized them.

"Don't!"she said under her breath.But he stood holding on to them,trying to stare into her eyes which did not waver.Then she said quietly:

"I am alone here.You won't behave again as you once behaved."Dropping her hands as though they had been hot irons,he turned away.Was it possible that there could be such relentless unforgiveness!Could that one act of violent possession be still alive within her?Did it bar him thus utterly?And doggedly he said,without looking up:

"I am not going till you've answered me.I am offering what few men would bring themselves to offer,I want a--a reasonable answer."And almost with surprise he heard her say:

"You can't have a reasonable answer.Reason has nothing to do with it.You can only have the brutal truth:I would rather die."Soames stared at her.

"Oh!"he said.And there intervened in him a sort of paralysis of speech and movement,the kind of quivering which comes when a man has received a deadly insult,and does not yet know how he is going to take it,or rather what it is going to do with him.

"Oh!"he said again,"as bad as that?Indeed!You would rather die.That's pretty!""I am sorry.You wanted me to answer.I can't help the truth,can I?"At that queer spiritual appeal Soames turned for relief to actuality.He snapped the brooch back into its case and put it in his pocket.

"The truth!"he said;"there's no such thing with women.It's nerves-nerves."He heard the whisper:

"Yes;nerves don't lie.Haven't you discovered that?"He was silent,obsessed by the thought:'I will hate this woman.I will hate her.'That was the trouble!If only he could!He shot a glance at her who stood unmoving against the wall with her head up and her hands clasped,for all the world as if she were going to be shot.And he said quickly:

"I don't believe a word of it.You have a lover.If you hadn't,you wouldn't be such a--such a little idiot."He was conscious,before the expression in her eyes,that he had uttered something of a non-sequitur,and dropped back too abruptly into the verbal freedom of his connubial days.He turned away to the door.But he could not go out.Something within him--that most deep and secret Forsyte quality,the impossibility of letting go,the impossibility of seeing the fantastic and forlorn nature of his own tenacity--prevented him.He turned about again,and there stood,with his back against the door,as hers was against the wall opposite,quite unconscious of anything ridiculous in this separation by the whole width of the room.

"Do you ever think of anybody but yourself?"he said.

Irene's lips quivered;then she answered slowly:

"Do you ever think that I found out my mistake--my hopeless,terrible mistake--the very first week of our marriage;that I went on trying three years--you know I went on trying?Was it for myself?"Soames gritted his teeth."God knows what it was.I've never understood you;I shall never understand you.You had everything you wanted;and you can have it again,and more.What's the matter with me?I ask you a plain question:What is it?"Unconscious of the pathos in that enquiry,he went on passionately:"I'm not lame,I'm not loathsome,I'm not a boor,I'm not a fool.What is it?

What's the mystery about me?"

Her answer was a long sigh.

He clasped his hands with a gesture that for him was strangely full of expression."When I came here to-night I was--I hoped--I meant everything that I could to do away with the past,and start fair again.And you meet me with 'nerves,'and silence,and sighs.

There's nothing tangible.It's like--it's like a spider's web.""Yes."

That whisper from across the room maddened Soames afresh.

"Well,I don't choose to be in a spider's web.I'll cut it."He walked straight up to her."Now!"What he had gone up to her to do he really did not know.But when he was close,the old familiar scent of her clothes suddenly affected him.He put his hands on her shoulders and bent forward to kiss her.He kissed not her lips,but a little hard line where the lips had been drawn in;then his face was pressed away by her hands;he heard her say:"Oh!

No!"Shame,compunction,sense of futility flooded his whole being,he turned on his heel and went straight out.