Part 144

"My dear, we pay for everything--after."

She leaned back in her chair. The movement withdrew her a little from Brodrick's unremitting gaze.

"There are women--angels naturally--who become devils if they can't have children. I'm an angel--you know I'm an angel--but I shall be a devil if I can't have this. Can't you see that it's just as natural and normal--for me?"

"It's pretty evident," he said, "that you can't have both. You weren't built to stand the double strain----"

"And you mean--you mean----"

"I mean that it would be better for you if you could keep off it for a while. At any rate while the child's young."

"But he'll be young, though, for ages. And if--if there are any more of him, there'll be no end to the keeping off."

"You needn't think about that," he said.

"It would be all very well," she said, "if it were simpler; if either you or I could deal with the thing, if we could just wring its neck and destroy it. I would if it would make you any happier, but I can't. It's stronger than I. I can't keep off it."

He pondered. He was trying, painfully, to understand the nature of this woman whom he thought he knew, whom, after all, it seemed, he did not know.

"You used to understand," she said. "Why can't you now?"

Why couldn't he? He had reckoned with her genius when he married her. He had honestly believed that he cared for it as he cared for her, that Jinny was not to be thought of apart from her genius. He had found Henry's opinion of it revolting, absurd, intolerable. And imperceptibly his attitude had changed. In spite of himself he was coming round to Henry's view, regarding genius as a malady, a thing abnormal, disastrous, not of nature; or if normal and natural--for Jinny--a thing altogether subordinate to Jinny's functions as a wife and mother. There was no sane man who would not take that view, who would not feel that nature was supreme. And Jinny had proved that left to nature, to her womanhood, she was sound and perfect. Jinny's genius had had, as he put it, pretty well its fling. It was nature's turn.

Under all his arguments there lurked, unrecognized and unsuspected, the natural man's fear of the thing not of nature, of its dominion, coming between him and her, slackening, perhaps sundering the tie of flesh. Through the tie of flesh, insensibly, he had come to look on Jinny as his possession.

"What would you do," he said, "if the little chap were to get ill?"

She turned as if he had struck her.

"Ill? Why couldn't you tell me he was ill?"

"But he isn't. I was only----"

"Does Henry say he's ill?"

"Henry? Oh Lord, no."

"You're lying. I'll go to him and see----"

She made a rush for the window. He sprang after her and caught her. She struggled in his arms.

"Jinny, you little fool. There's nothing--nothing----He's bursting with health."

"What did you mean, then?"

"I meant--supposing he were ill----"

"You meant to frighten me?"

She sat down and he saw her fighting for her breath. He knelt beside her and took her in his arms, murmuring inarticulate things in his terror. At his touch she turned to him and kissed him.

"Hugh, dear," she said, "don't frighten me again. It's not necessary."

All that week, and for many weeks, she busied herself with the child and with the house. It was as if she were trying, passionately, to make up for some brief disloyalty, some lapse of tenderness.