The Lifting of a Finger/Chapter 19

AT the close of the week Margaret told her husband that she had invited Mr. and Mrs. Westlake to pay them a visit. Whether she had done this to cheer him or to relieve her own loneliness Francis did not know, but the coming of his sister and her husband pleased him. They were perhaps the only two people of whom he had always been fond.

With the knowledge that he loved his wife there came to Bellamy a conviction that he had no right to try to win her heart, but his hopelessness in regard to his love did not lessen his determination to gain her respect.

He began the task of making a man ​of himself with no one to help him, like a child groping in the dark, not knowing how to set about being good. His helplessness did not last long, however. Bellamy had been what he was because it had suited him to be so, not because of weakness, and now his indomitable will, turned in an opposite direction, did not fail him. What he had chosen to be in the past he had been; what he wished to be now he slowly became. The forces of his nature, once powerful for evil, but now arrested and the course of their direction changed, were just as strong for good. Thus Francis fought his battle out by himself. If there were moments when he longed for a hand in his, a voice to urge him onward, he took himself to task as being weak.

​He was very busy during these days. Westlake had put him in the way of getting an appointment which paid a fair salary, and Francis was up and off for the city each morning, only returning in time for a late dinner.

His evenings were for the most part spent at home. Sometimes he played chess with his brother-in-law; at others he made a fourth at whist or sat with a book in his hand and covertly watched his wife.

The change in him, if she noticed it, caused no change in Margaret's manner to her husband, except that at any indication of it she would look at him with an expression in her eyes which either was fear or greatly resembled it.

Margaret was growing afraid of him! As the fact slowly dawned upon him, ​Francis told himself that this was the most surprising of the many phases of his wife's character he had hitherto observed. Before now she had shown anger, contempt, indifference, courage to oppose and wit to circumvent him, and on occasions even gratitude for the brutal sort of kindness he had sometimes shown her. But fear Francis had not supposed her capable of feeling. And if she had not feared him in the old days, why should she do it now? Over and over again Francis asked himself the question and found no answer.

The winter passed and the Westlakes went back to the city. Spring came and found Francis more changed, had he but known it, than he had ever hoped to be; but still Margaret, if she knew ​that he had become a better man, gave no sign of being glad.

She went on with her calm round of duties and pleasures much as she had always done, but with a growing restlessness that filled Bellamy with a nameless fear.

He decided that she was doubtless at work upon another book, and that the writing of it kept her mind in an unquiet state, but when he ventured to question her on the subject Margaret replied that she was not writing at all.

Sometimes as he sat alone after his wife had gone to her room Bellamy went over in his mind the incidents that had marked their intercourse—their strange meeting and stranger marriage, and their separate lives since that marriage—and wondered what the end ​would be. Were things to be always thus? Were their lives always to run side by side and never meet? He felt that he could not bear it. Daily to see the woman he loved and yet not daring even to touch her hand, to be near her constantly, and have to battle with the longing to take her in his arms—these things were, to the man unused to resisting his fleetest impulse, growing to be unbearable torture.

Often he told himself that he would go away, out of sight of her face and the sound of her voice, but he knew, even while the resolve was shaping itself in his mind, that to leave her would be harder than to stay.

Then he would plan to exert the charm that had always been potent with women and try if he could not make ​his wife love him, and there would rise before his mind recollections of nights of dissipation, of the coarse men and painted women he had called his friends: memories that made him loathe himself and that seemed to stand an impassable barrier between his wife and him.

During this time none of his torture of mind showed itself in his attitude towards Margaret. He treated her with grave courtesy, with a manner that was calm as hers. She never knew that he listened for her footstep and the sound of her voice, and that except when she looked at him his eyes were always upon her.

One day in early spring Bellamy did not go to town as usual. He had writing to do at home, he told Marga​ret at breakfast, and after the meal was over he shut himself in the library.

When she went into the room some hours later Francis had thrown himself upon a lounge. Margaret softened the glare by lowering the shades, after which she came and stood by the couch.

"Can I do anything for you?" she asked, after Bellamy had told her that his head ached.

The hand nearest him hung at her side, and Francis longed to take it in his and press it to his lips and then to lay it on his hot, throbbing forehead.

As if in answer to his unspoken wish, he felt the touch of her cool fingers on his aching head; a moment later she had gone, closing the door gently behind her.

​Bellamy started up and held out his arms. "Madge! Madge!" he cried, all his love and his despair because of that love in his voice. But Margaret did not hear, or, if she heard, did not turn back.

Bellamy took his hat and rushed from the room and the house.