Part 166

"No. The best dreams come through the gates that never open."

"It looks as if a good south wind would bring it down."

"It will last my time," he said.

Laura received her as if Prothero were not there; as if he never had been, never would be there. She looked up from their embrace with a blue-eyed innocence that ignored him in its perfect assurance that they had kept their pledge, that nothing had ever come or would come between them.

It struck Nina that he had no grounds for his anxiety. Laura was not suffering; she was not going to suffer. She had no consciousness or conscience in the matter.

It was made clear to Nina that she was too happy for that, too much in love with Owen, too much aware that Owen was in love with her, though their fineness saved them both from any flagrant evidences of their state. They evaded as by a common understanding the smallest allusion to themselves and their affairs. They suggested charmingly that what excited them was the amazing performance of their friends, of Tanqueray, of Jane, of Nina. In her smiling protest that she no longer counted Laura gave the effect of serene detachment from the contest. She surveyed it from an inaccessible height, turning very sweetly and benignly from her bliss. She was not so remote, she seemed to say, but that she remembered. She knew how absorbing those ardent rivalries could be. Nina she evidently regarded as absorbed fatally, beyond recall; and no wonder, when for her the game was so magnificent. If Nina cared for the applause of a blessed spirit, it was hers.

It seemed to Nina's morbid sense that Laura overdid it; that the two of them closed round her by a common impulse and a common fear, that they rushed to her wild head to turn her to her course and keep her there. In every word there was a sting for her, the flick of the lash that drove her on.

Nina was then aware that she hated Laura. The hatred was not active in her presence; it made no movement towards its object; it lay somewhere in the dark; it tossed on a hot bed, sleepless in an incurable distress.

And Laura remained unconscious. She took her presently up-stairs to her room, Owen's room. It was all they had, she said. Nina held her head very straight, trying hard not to see Owen's coat that hung behind the door, or his big boots all in a row beside Laura's little ones. Her face in the glass met her with a challenge to her ironic humour. It demanded why she could not face that innocent juxtaposition, after all she had stood, after all that they were evidently prepared to make her stand. But she was not to be moved by any suggestions of her face. She owed it a grudge; it showed so visibly her murkiness. Sun-burnt, coarsened a little by the wind, with the short, virile, jutting bridge of the nose, the hot eyes, the mouth's ironic twist, it was the face not of a woman but a man, or rather of a temperament, a face foredoomed to disaster. She accentuated its effect by the masculine fashion of her clothes and the way she swept back her hair sidelong from her forehead. Laura saw her doing it now.

"I like your face," was her comment.

"It's more than I do," said Nina. "But I like my hands."

She began washing them with energy, as if thus dismissing an unpleasant subject. She could admire their fine flexible play under the water; do what she would with them her hands at least were feminine. But they brought her up sharp with the sight of the little scar, white on her wrist, reminding her of Owen. She was aware of the beast in her blood that crouched, ready to fall upon the innocent Laura.

At the other end of the room, by the wardrobe, Laura, in her innocence, was babbling about Owen.

"He's growing frightfully extravagant," she said. "He got fifteen pounds for an article the other day, and what do you think he did with it? Look there!"

She had taken a gown, a little mouse-coloured velvet gown, from the wardrobe and laid it on the bed for Nina to admire.

"He went and spent it, every bit of it, on that. He said he thought I should look nice in it. Wasn't it clever of him to know? And who ever would have thought that he'd have cared?"

Nina looked at the gown and remembered the years when Laura had gone shabby.

"He cares so much," said Laura, "that I have to put it on every evening."

"Put it on now," said Nina.

"Shall I?" She was longing to. "No, I don't think I will."

"You must," said Nina.

Laura put it on, baring her white neck and shoulders, and turned for Nina to "fasten her up the back."

Nina had a vision of Prothero standing over the little thing, his long deft hands trembling as he performed this office.

The Kiddy, divinely unconscious, babbled on of Owen and the wonderful gown.

"Conceive," she said, "the darling going out all by himself to get it! How he knew one gown from another--how he knew the shops--what hand guided him--I can't think. It must have been his guardian angel."

"Or yours."

"Yes--when you think of the horrors he might have got."

Laura had stroked the velvet to smoothness about her waist, and now she was pulling up a fold of lace above her breasts. As she did this she looked at her own image in the glass and smiled softly, unaware. Nina saw then that her breasts were slightly and delicately rounded; she recognized the work of life, shaping Laura's womanhood; it was the last touch of the passion that had made her body the sign and symbol of its perfection. Her own breasts heaved as the wild fang pierced them.