Part 67

Amanda shook her head.

“I don't want a divorce,” she said.

“Then what do you want?” asked Benham with sudden asperity.

“I don't want a divorce,” she repeated. “Why do you, after a long silence, come home like this, abruptly, with no notice?”

“It was the way it took me,” said Benham, after a little interval.

“You have left me for long months.”

“Yes. I was angry. And it was ridiculous to be angry. I thought I wanted to kill you, and now I see you I see that all I want to do is to help you out of this miserable mess--and then get away from you. You two would like to marry. You ought to be married.”

“I would die to make Amanda happy,” said Easton.

“Your business, it seems to me, is to live to make her happy. That you may find more of a strain. Less tragic and more tiresome. I, on the other hand, want neither to die nor live for her.” Amanda moved sharply. “It's extraordinary what amazing vapours a lonely man may get into his head. If you don't want a divorce then I suppose things might go on as they are now.”

“I hate things as they are now,” said Easton. “I hate this falsehood and deception.”

“You would hate the scandal just as much,” said Amanda.

“I would not care what the scandal was unless it hurt you.”

“It would be only a temporary inconvenience,” said Benham. “Every one would sympathize with you.... The whole thing is so natural.... People would be glad to forget very soon. They did with my mother.”

“No,” said Amanda, “it isn't so easy as that.”

She seemed to come to a decision.

“Pip,” she said. “I want to talk to--HIM--alone.”

Easton's brown eyes were filled with distress and perplexity. “But why?” he asked.

“I do,” she said.

“But this is a thing for US.”

“Pip, I want to talk to him alone. There is something--something I can't say before you....”

Sir Philip rose slowly to his feet.

“Shall I wait outside?”

“No, Pip. Go home. Yes,--there are some things you must leave to me.”

She stood up too and turned so that she and Benham both faced the younger man. The strangest uneasiness mingled with his resolve to be at any cost splendid. He felt--and it was a most unexpected and disconcerting feeling--that he was no longer confederated with Amanda; that prior, more fundamental and greater associations prevailed over his little new grip upon her mind and senses. He stared at husband and wife aghast in this realization. Then his resolute romanticism came to his help. “I would trust you--” he began. “If you tell me to go--”

Amanda seemed to measure her hold upon him.

She laid her hand upon his arm. “Go, my dear Pip,” she said. “Go.”

He had a moment of hesitation, of anguish, and it seemed to Benham as though he eked himself out with unreality, as though somewhen, somewhere, he had seen something of the sort in a play and filled in a gap that otherwise he could not have supplied.

Then the door had closed upon him, and Amanda, pale and darkly dishevelled, faced her husband, silently and intensely.