The Helpmate | Page 4

outside. A man was putting out the lights one by
one along the cold little grey parade. A figure, walking slowly, with
down-bent head, was approaching the hotel from the pier. Anne
recognised it as that of her husband. Both sights reminded her that her
life had to be begun all over again, and to go on.
Another hour passed. Majendie had sent up a waitress with breakfast to
her room. He was always thoughtful for her comfort. It did not occur to
her to wonder what significance there might be in his thus keeping
away from her, or what attitude toward her he would now be inclined to
take. She would not have admitted that he had a right to any attitude at
all. It was for her, as the profoundly injured person, to decide as to the
new disposal of their relations.
She was very clear about her grievance. The facts, that her husband had
been pointed at in the public drawing-room of their hotel; that the
terrible statement she had overheard had been made and received
casually; that he had assumed, no less casually, her knowledge of the
thing, all bore but one interpretation: that Walter Majendie and the
scandal he had figured in were alike notorious. The marvel was that,
staying in the town where he lived and was known, she herself had not
heard of it before. A peculiarly ugly thought visited her. Was it possible
that Scarby was the very place where the scandal had occurred?

She remembered now that, when she had first proposed that
watering-place for their honeymoon, he had objected on the ground that
Scarby was full of people whom he knew. Besides, he had said, she
wouldn't like it. But whether she would like it or not, Anne, who had
her bridal dignity to maintain, considered that in the matter of her
honeymoon his wishes should give way to hers. She was inclined to
measure the extent of his devotion by that test. Scarby, she said, was
not full of people who knew her. Anne had been insistent and Majendie
passive, as he was in most unimportant matters, reserving his energies
for supremely decisive moments.
Anne, bearing her belief in Majendie in her innocent breast, failed at
first to connect her husband with the remarkable intimations that passed
between the two newcomers gossiping in the drawing-room before
dinner. They, for their part, had no clue linking the unapproachably
strange lady on the neighbouring sofa with the hero of their tale. The
case, they said, was "infamous." At that point Majendie had put an end
to his own history and his wife's uncertainty by entering the room.
Three words and a look, observed by Anne, had established his
identity.
Her mind was steadied by its inalienable possession of the facts. She
had returned through prayer to her normal mood of religious
resignation. She tried to support herself further by a chain of reasoning.
If all things were divinely ordered, this sorrow also was the will of God.
It was the burden she was appointed to take up and bear.
She bathed and dressed herself for the day. She felt so strange to herself
in these familiar processes that, standing before the looking-glass, she
was curious to observe what manner of woman she had become. The
inner upheaval had been so profound that she was surprised to find so
little record of it in her outward seeming.
Anne was a woman whose beauty was a thing of general effect, and the
general effect remained uninjured. Nature had bestowed on her a body
strongly made and superbly fashioned. Having framed her well, she
coloured her but faintly. She had given her eyes of a light thick grey.
Her eyebrows, her lashes, and her hair were of a pale gold that had

ashen undershades in it. They all but matched a skin honey-white with
that even, sombre, untransparent tone that belongs to a temperament at
once bilious and robust. For the rest, Nature had aimed nobly at the
significance of the whole, slurring the details. She had built up the
forehead low and wide, thrown out the eyebones as a shelter for the
slightly prominent eyes; saved the short, straight line of the nose by a
hair's-breadth from a tragic droop. But she had scamped her work in
modelling the close, narrow nostrils. She had merged the lower lip with
the line of the chin, missing the classic indentation. The mouth itself
she had left unfinished. Only a little amber mole, verging on the thin
rose of the upper lip, foreshortened it, and gave to its low arc the
emphasis of a curve, the vivacity of a dimple (Anne's under lip was
straight as the tense string of a bow). When she spoke or smiled Anne's