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Though One Rose From The Dead
by
“Isn’t it all there is?” she asked, and Alderling burst into his laugh.
“I’m afraid she’s got you there, Wanhope. When it comes to polemics there’s nothing like the passive obstruction of Mrs. Alderling. Marion might never have been an early Christian herself–I think she’s an inexpugnable pagan–but she would have gone round making it awfully uncomfortable for the other unbelievers.”
“You know,” she said to him, and I never could decide how much she was in earnest, “that I can’t believe till you do. I couldn’t take the risk of keeping on without you.”
Alderling followed her in-doors, where she now went to put the book away, with the mock addressed to me, “Did you ever know such a stubborn woman?”
IV.
One conclusion from my observation of the Alderlings during the week I spent with them was that it is bad for a husband and wife to be constantly and unreservedly together, not because they grow tired of each other, but because they grow more intensely interested in each other. Children, when they come, serve the purpose of separating the parents; they seem to unite them in one care, but they divide them in their employments, at least in the normally constituted family. If they are rich, and can throw the care of the children upon servants, then they cannot enjoy the relief from each other that children bring to the mother who nurtures and teaches them, and to the father who must work for them harder than before. The Alderlings were not rich enough to have been freed from the wholesome responsibilities of parentage, but they were childless, and so they were not detached from the perpetual thought of each other. If they had only had different tastes, it might have been better, but they were both artists, she not less than he, though she no longer painted. When their common thoughts were not centred upon each other’s being, they were centred on his work, which, viciously enough, was the constant reproduction of her visible personality. I could always see them studying each other, he with an eye to her beauty, she with an eye to his power.
He was every now and then saying to her, “Hold on, Marion,” and staying her in some pose or movement, while he made mental note of it, and I was conscious of her preying upon his inmost thoughts and following him into the recesses of his reveries, where it is best for a man to be alone, even if he is sometimes a beast there. She was not like those wives who ask their husbands, when they do not happen to be talking, “What are you thinking about?” and I put this to her credit, till I realized that she had no need to ask, for she knew already. Now and then I saw him get up and shake himself restively, but I am bound to say in her behalf, that her pursuit of him seemed quite involuntary, and that she enjoyed it no more than he did. Twenty times I was on the point of asking, “Why don’t you people go in for a good long separation? Is there nothing to call you to Europe, Alderling? Haven’t you got a mother, or sister, or some one that you could visit, Mrs. Alderling? It would do you both a world of good.”
But it happened, oddly enough, that the Alderlings were as kinless as they were childless, and if he had gone to Europe he would have taken her with him, and prolonged their seclusion by the isolation in which people necessarily live in a foreign country. I found I was the only acquaintance who had visited them during the years of their retirement on the coast, where they had stayed, partly through his inertia, and partly from his superstition that he could paint better away from the ordinary associations and incentives; and they ceased, before I left, to get the good they might of my visit because they made me a part of their intimacy, instead of making themselves part of my strangeness.