The Green Bough
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Title: The Green Bough
Creator: E. Temple Thurston
Release date: January 21, 2013 [eBook #41895]
Most recently updated: September 25, 2020
Language: English
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[Illustration: Cover]
THE GREEN BOUGH
BY
E. TEMPLE THURSTON
AUTHOR OF "THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL NONSENSE,"
"THE WORLD OF WONDERFUL REALITY," ETC.
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK
MCMXXI
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
E. F. COWLIN
PHASE I
I
The life of Mary Throgmorton, viewed as one would scan the chronicles of
history, impersonally, without regard to the conventions, is the life of
a woman no more than fulfilled in the elements of her being.
All women would be as Mary Throgmorton if they dared. All women would
love as Mary Throgmorton loved--suffer as she suffered. Perhaps not all
might yield, as she yielded towards the end; not all might make her
sacrifices. But, in the latitudinous perspective of Time where
everything vanishes to the point of due proportion, she must range with
that vast army of women who have hungered, loved, been fed and paid the
reckoning with the tears out of their eyes and the very blood out of
their hearts.
It is only when she comes to be observed in the immediate and narrow
surroundings of her circumstance that her life stands out tragically
apart. She becomes then as a monument, set up on a high and lonely hill
amongst the many of those hills in drowsy Devon, a monument, silently
claiming the birthright of all women which the laws men make by force
have so ungenerously circumscribed.
There is no woman who could look at that monument without secret
emotions of a deep respect, while there were many in her lifetime who
spurned Mary Throgmorton with tongue and with a glance of eye, and still
would spurn her to-day in the narrow streets where it is their wont to
walk.
The respect of one's neighbors is a comforting thing to live with, but
it is mostly the little people who earn it and find the pleasure of its
warmth. The respect of the world is won often by suffering and in the
wild and open spaces of the earth. It was on Gethsemane and not in
Bethlehem that Christianity revealed its light.
In Bridnorth, the name of Mary Throgmorton was a byword for many a day.
They would have erased her from their memory if they could. It was in
the hush of voices they spoke of her--that hush with which women muffle
and conceal the envy beneath their spite.
No one woman in Bridnorth, unless it was Fanny Throgmorton, the third of
her three sisters, could have had honesty enough in her heart to
confess, even in silence, her real regard for Mary.
Who should blame them for this? The laws had made them and what is made
in a shapen mold can bend neither to the left nor to the right. They
were too close to her to see her beauty; all too personally involved to
look dispassionately at the greatness of her soul.
Yet there in spirit, as it were some graven monument upon those hills of
Devon, she stands, a figure of tragic nobility. Had indeed they carved
her in stone and set her there upon the hills that overlooked the sea,
they would have recognized then in her broad brow, in the straight
direction of her eyes, the big, if not beautiful then generous line of
her lips, the full firm curve of her breasts, how fine a mate she must
have made, how strong a mother even in the weakest hour of her travail.
Stone truly would have been the medium for her. It was not in color that
she claimed the eye. The fair hair, neither quite golden nor quite
brown, that clear, healthy skin, neither warmed with her blood nor
interestingly pale, these would have franked her passage in a crowd and
none might have noticed her go by.
There on the rising of that cliff in imagination is the place to see her
with the full sweep of Bridnorth bay and that wide open sea below and
all the heathered stretches of the moors behind her. There, had they
carved a statue for her in rough stone, you must have seen at once the
beauty that she had.
But because it was in stone her beauty lay and not in pink white flesh
that makes a fool of many a man, they had the less of mercy for her.
Because it was in stone, man found her cold of touch and stood away. And
yet again because it was in stone, once molten with the heat of life,
there was no hand in little Bridnorth that could have stayed her fate.
Once stirred, the little pettiness of Bridnorth folk charred all like
shavings from the plane at touch of her. Once stirred, she had in her
passion to defy them every one. Once stirred, herself could raise that
monument to the birthright of women which, in fancy, as her tale is
read, will be seen there over Bridnorth on the high cliff's edge.
II
Hannah, Jane, Fanny and Mary, these were the four sisters of the
Throgmorton family in the order of their respective ages. A brother they
had, but he comes into no part of this history. The world had taken him
when he was twenty-three. He left Bridnorth, the mere speck upon the
map it was and, with the wide affairs of life at his touch, the mere
speck it became in his memory. Stray letters reached Mary, his favorite
sister. Read aloud at the breakfast table, they came, bringing strange
odors of the world to those four girls. Vague emotions they experienced
as they heard these infrequent accounts of where he was and what he did.
Silently Fanny's imagination would carry her to the far places he wrote
of. Into the big eyes she had would rise a haze of distance across
which an untrained vision had power vaguely to transport her. Hannah
listened in a childish wonder. Jane made her sharp comments. It was
Mary who said--
"Why do men have the real best of it? He'll never come back to
Bridnorth again."
He never did come back. From the time their father and mother died they
lived in Bridnorth alone.
Theirs was the square, white early Victorian house in the middle of the
village through which the coach road runs from Abbotscombe to King's
Tracey.
That early Victorian house, the furniture it contained, the narrow strip
of garden in front protected from the road by low iron palings so that
all who passed could see in the front windows, the unusually large
garden at the back surrounded by a high brick wall, all these composed
the immediate atmosphere in which Mary and her three sisters had been
brought up from childhood.
It must be supposed that that condition of being overlooked through the
front windows was not without its effect upon their lives. If it takes
all sorts to make a world, it is all the variety of conditions that go
to make such sorts as there are. For it was not only the passers-by who
looked in at the Throgmorton windows and could have told to a fraction
of time when they had their meals, when Hannah was giving lessons to the
children she taught, those hours that Fanny was sitting alone in her
bedroom writing her verses of poetry. Also it was the Throgmorton girls
themselves who preferred the occupation of the rooms fronting the road
to those whose windows overlooked the shady and secluded garden at the
back.
This was the attraction of the stream for those who walk in quiet
meadows. There on the banks you will find the footpath of the many who
have passed that way. They sat at those front windows, sewing, reading,
often writing their letters on blotting pads upon their laps, scarcely
conscious that the little filtering stream of life in Bridnorth drew
them there. For had they been questioned on these matters, one and all,
severally or together they would have laughed, saying that for the
greater half of the year there was no life in Bridnorth to pass by, and
certainly none that concerned them.
Nevertheless it was the stream, however lightly they may have turned the
suggestion away. The passing of the postman, of the Vicar or the
Vicar's wife, these were the movements of life, such as you see in a
meadow stream and follow, dreaming in your mind, as they catch in the
eddies and are whirled and twisted out of sight. So they had dreamt in
their minds, in Bridnorth, these Throgmorton girls. So Mary had dreamed
the twenty years and more that dreams had come to her.
For the greater half of the year, they might have said there was no life
in Bridnorth. But from late Spring through Summer to the Autumn months
they must have claimed with pride that their Devon village had a life of
its own. The old coach with its four horses, beating out the journey
from Abbotscombe to King's Tracey, brought visitors from all parts;
generally the same every year. For a few months they leased whatever
furnished houses there were to be had, coming regularly every season for
the joy of that quiet place by the sea where there was a sandy beach to
bathe on, and lonely cliffs on which to wander their holidays away.
So the Throgmorton girls made friends with some whose lives lay far
outside the meadows through which the Bridnorth stream flowed peacefully
between its banks. To these friends sometimes they paid visits when the
Summer was passed. They went out of Bridnorth themselves by the old
coach, later returning, like pigeons homing, with the wind of the
outside world still in their wing feathers, restless for days until the
dreams came back again. Then once more it seemed a part of life to sit
at the window sewing and watch the postman go by.
There were regular visitors who came every summer, renewing their claim
from year to year upon the few houses that were to be let, so that there
was little available accommodation of that nature for any outsiders.
They called Bridnorth theirs, and kept it to themselves. But every
year, they had their different friends to stay with them and always
there was the White Hart, where strangers could secure rooms by the day
or the week all through the season.
The Bridnorth stream was in flood those days of the late Spring where
every afternoon the coach came rumbling up the hill past the
Throgmortons' house to set down its passengers at the hotel only a
little farther up the road.
Like the Severn bore it was, for coming from Abbotscombe down the
winding road that had risen with the eminence of the cliffs, the coach
could be seen descending by twists and turns and serpentine progressions
to the bottom of Bridnorth village, crossing the bridge that spans the
little river Watchett and climbing again with the contour of the cliffs
once more on its way to King's Tracey.
Leaning far out of one of the upper windows of the square, white house
or standing even at the gate in the iron paling, the little cloud of
dust or, in rainy weather, the black speck moving slowly like a fly
crawling down a suspended thread of cotton, could easily be seen two
miles away heralding the coming of the coach.
She who leant out of the window might certainly retire, closing it
slowly as the coach drew near. She who stood at the gate in the iron
palings might return casually into the house. But once they were out of
sight of those on the other bank of the Bridnorth stream, there would be
voices crying through the rooms that the coach was coming.
Thus, as it passed, there might four figures be seen at different
windows, who, however engrossing their occupations, would look out with
confessions of mild interest at the sound of the horses' hoofs on the
stony road, at the rattle of harness, the rumbling of wheels and,
casually, at the passengers come to Bridnorth.
Any visitor catching sight of these temperate glances from his box seat
on the coach might have supposed the eyes that offered them were so
well-used to that daily arrival as to find but little entertainment in
the event. From their apparent indifference, he would never have
believed that even their hearts had added a pulse in the beating, or
that to one at least that coach was the vehicle of Fate which any day
might bring the burden of her destiny.
III
It is by the ages of these four they can most easily and comprehensively
be classified; yet the age of one at least of them was never known, or
ever asked in Bridnorth.
Hannah might have been forty or more. She might well have been less.
But the hair was gray on her head and she took no pains to conceal it.
Hers, if any, was the contented soul in that household. With her it was
not so much that she had given up the hope that every woman has, as that
before she knew what life might be, that hope had passed her by. She
was as one who stands in a crowd to see the runners pass and, before
even she has raised herself on tiptoe to catch a glimpse above the heads
around her, is told that the race is over.
This was Hannah, busying her life with the household needs and, for
interest, before all reward, teaching the little children of friends in
Bridnorth and the neighborhood, teaching them their lessons every
morning; every morning kissing them when they came, every morning
kissing them when they left.
To her, the arrival of the coach was significant no more than in the
unaccustomed passage and hurry of life it brought. To her it was a
noise in a silent street. She came to the windows as a child would come
to see a circus go by. She watched its passengers descend outside the
Royal George with the same light of childish interest in her eyes.
Nothing of what those passengers were or what they meant reached the
communicating functions of her mind. They were no more than mere
performers in the circus ring. What their lives were behind that
flapping canvas of the tent, which is the veil concealing the lives of
all of us, she did not trouble to ask herself. Like the circus
performers, they would be here to-day and to-morrow their goods and
chattels would be packed, the naphtha flares beneath whose light they
had for a moment appeared would be extinguished. Only the bare ring over
which their horses had pranced would remain in Hannah's mind to show
where they had been. And in Hannah's mind the grass would soon grow
again to blot it out of sight.
To Hannah Throgmorton, these advents and excursions were no more than
this.
IV
Somehow they knew in Bridnorth that Jane was thirty-six. She hid her
gray beneath the careful combing of her back hair.
There is a different attitude of mind in the woman who hides these
things successfully and her who still hides but knows that she fails.
Sharp antagonism and resentment, this is the mind of the latter. Not
only does she know that she fails. She knows how others realize that
she has tried. Yet something still urges in her purpose.
Jane knew she failed. That was bitter enough. But the greater
bitterness lay in the knowledge that had she succeeded it would have
been of no avail. For some years, unlike her sister Hannah, she had
relinquished hope, flung it aside in all consciousness of loss; flung it
aside and often looked her God in the face with the accusing glances of
unconcealed reproach.
To Jane that coming of the coach was the reminding spur that pricked her
memories to resentment. No Destiny for her was to be found in the
freight it carried. For each passenger as they descended outside the
Royal George, she had her caustic comment. Hers was the common but
forgivably ungenerous spirit, of the critic in whose breast the milk of
human kindness has grown sour from standing overlong in the idleness of
impotent ability.
Yet reminding spur that it was, and deeply as it hurt her, her eyes were
as swift and sharp as any to take note of the new arrivals. Perhaps it
was the very pain that she cherished. Life is a texture of sensations,
and if only the thread of pain be left to keep the whole together, there
are many who welcome it rather than feel the bare boards beneath their
feet.
Whenever a man, strange to them amongst the regular visitors to
Bridnorth, slipped off the coach at the Royal George, she knew his
arrival meant nothing in Destiny to her. Yet often she would be the
first to pick him out.
"He's new. Wonder if he's come with the Tollursts."
And having taken him in with a swiftness of apprehension, her glances
would shoot from Fanny to Mary and back again as though she could steal
the secrets of Fate out of their eyes.
It was Fanny she read most easily of all; Fanny who in such moments
revealed to the shrewdness of her gaze that faint acceleration of pulse,
to the realization of which nothing but the bitterness in her heart
could have sharpened her. It was upon Fanny then in these moments her
observation concentrated. Mary eluded her. Indeed Mary, it seemed, was
the calmest and serenest of them all. Sometimes if she were engrossed
in reading she did not even come to the window, but was content from her
chair to hear what they had to report.
And when there were no visitors descending from the coach, in language
their brother had long brought home from school and left behind him in
phrases when he went, it was Jane, with a laugh, who turned upon those
other three and said--
"What a suck for everybody!"
V
Then there was Fanny, whose age in Bridnorth was variously guessed to be
between thirty and thirty-three. No one knew. Her sisters never
revealed it. Jane had her loyalties and this was one.
Only Fanny herself, in those quiet moments when a woman is alone before
the judgment of her own mirror, knew that the gray hairs had begun to
make their appearance amidst the black. They were not even for
concealment yet. It was as though they tried to hide themselves from
the swift searching of her eyes. But she had found them out. Each one
as pensively she rolled it round her fingers, hiding it away or burning
it in the fire, was a thorn that pricked and drew blood.
Hope had not yet been laid aside by her. In that vivid if untrained
imagination of hers, Romance still offered her promise of the untold
joys and ecstasies of a woman's heart. She had not laid Hope aside, but
frettingly and constantly Hope was with her. She was conscious of it,
as of a hidden pain that warns of some disease only the knife can cure.
Always she was clutching it and only the writing of her ill-measured
verses of poetry could anesthetize her knowledge of its presence. Then,
when she was beating out her fancies in those uncomely words of almost
childish verse, the pain of the hope she had would lie still, soothed to
sleepfulness by the soporific of her wandering imagination.
What, can it be supposed, was the coming of the coach to her?
The vehicle of Fate it has been said it was, bringing a Destiny which
for thirty years and more had lingered on its journey, for never had it
been set down at the Royal George.
Already she knew that she was tired of waiting for it. Often that
tiredness overcame her. Through the long winter months when the
Bridnorth stream was languid and shallow in its flow, she became
listless when she was not irritable, and the look of those thirty-three
years was added in their fullness in her eyes.
A visit into the world amongst those friends they had, transitory though
those visits may have been, revived courage in her. And all through the
Spring and Summer season, she fought that fatigue as a woman must and
will so long as the hope of Romance has even one red spark of fire in
her heart.
It was not a man so much she wanted, as Romance. She alone could have
told what was meant by that. The one man she had known had almost made
her hate his sex. It was not so much to her a stranger who stepped down
outside the Royal George and trod her pulse to acceleration, as the
urgent wonder of what might happen in the weeks to come; of what might
happen to her in the very core of her being. He was no more than a
medium, an instrument to bring about those happenings. She knew in
herself what ecstasy she could suffer, how her heart could throb behind
her wasted breast, how every vein threading her body would become the
channel for a warmer race of blood.
It was not so much that she wanted a man to love as to feel love itself
with all its accompanying sensations of fear and wonder, yet knowing all
the time that before these emotions could happen to her, she must
attract and be found acceptable, must in another waken some strange need
to be the kindling spark in her.
Only once had it seemed she had succeeded. There had come a visitor to
the Royal George with whom in the ordinary course of the summer life of
Bridnorth, acquaintance had soon been made. None of them were slow to
realize the interest he had taken in Fanny. Before he left they twice
had walked over the moors to where on the highest and loneliest point of
the cliffs you can see the whole sweep of Bridnorth bay and in clear
weather the first jutting headland on the Cornish coast.
Many a love match in Bridnorth had been made about those heathered
moors. It was no love match he made with Fanny. What happened only
Mary knew. He had taken Fanny in his arms and he had kissed her. For
many months she had felt those kisses, not in the touch of his lips so
much as in waves of emotion that tumbled in a riot through her veins and
left her trembling in the darkness of night. For he had never told her
that he loved her.
In three weeks he had gone away having said no word to bind her. In two
months' time or little more, she read of his marriage in the London
papers and that night stared and stared at her reflection in the mirror
when she went to bed.
For in her heart and below the communicating consciousness of her
thoughts, she knew what had happened. Never could she have told
herself; far less spoken of it to others. But while he had held her in
his arms, she had known even then. She had felt her body thin and spare
and meager against his. Something unalluring in herself she had
realized as his lips touched the eagerness of her own.
That strange need of which in experience she had no knowledge, she knew
in that instant had not wakened in him as he held her. However
passionate his kisses in their strangeness had seemed, they lacked a
fire of which, knowing nothing, she yet knew all.
Still, nevertheless, she waited and the fatigue of that waiting each
year was added in her eyes.
The coming of the coach to her was like that of a ship, hard-beating
into harbor with broken spars and sails all rent. Yet with every
coming, her heart lifted, and with every new arrival, strange to
Bridnorth, her eyes would wear a brighter light, her laugh would catch a
brighter ring.
"Really, you'd never think Fanny was thirty-three!" Hannah once said on
one of these occasions.
"You wait for a week or two," retorted Jane.
And in a week or two when the visitor had departed, Jane would catch
Hannah's eyes across the breakfast table and direct them silently to
Fanny sitting there. There was no need to say--"I told you so." Jane
could convey all and more in her glance than that. She took charge of
Hannah's vision, as Hannah took charge of her children. That was
enough.
VI
It was to Mary Throgmorton in those days that this coming of the
Abbotscombe coach is most elusive of all to define. So much less of the
emotions of hopefulness, of curiosity, or even of childish interest did
she betray, that there is little in action or conduct to illuminate her
state of mind.
In those days, which must be understood to mean the beginning of this
history, and in fact were the final decade of the last century, Mary was
twenty-nine.
That is a significant age and, to any more versed in experience than
she, must bring deep consideration with it. By then a woman knows the
transitoriness of youth; she realizes how short is the span of time in
which a woman can control her destiny. She sees in the eyes of others
that life is slipping by her; she discovers how those who were children
about her in her youth are gliding into the age of attractiveness,
claiming attention that is not so readily hers as it was or as she
imagines perhaps it might have been.
In such a state of mind must many a woman pause. It is as though for one
instant she had power to arrest the traffic of time that she might take
this crossing in the streets of life with unhampered deliberation. For
here often she will choose her direction in the full consciousness of
thought. No longer dare she leave her destiny to the hazard of chance.
It has become, not the Romance that will happen upon her in the glorious
and unexpected suddenness of ecstasy, but the Romance she must find,
eager in her searching, swift in her choice lest life all go by and the
traffic of time sweep over her.
This choice she must make or work must save her, for life has become as
vital to women as it is to men. At twenty-nine this is many a woman's
dilemma. Yet at twenty-nine no such consciousness of the need of
deliberation had entered the mind of Mary Throgmorton. Perhaps it was
because there were no younger creatures about her, growing up to the
youth she was leaving behind; perhaps because in the quietness of
seclusion, by that Bridnorth stream, the gentle, rippling song of it had
never wakened her to life.
In the height of its flood, that Bridnorth stream had never a note to
distress the placidity of her thoughts. She had heard indeed the Niagara
of life in London, but as a tourist only, standing for a moment on its
brink with a guide shouting the mere material facts of so-called
interest in her ears. It was all too deafening and astounding to be
more than a passing wonder in her mind. She would return to Bridnorth
with its thunder roaring in her ears, glad of the quiet stream again and
having gained no more experience of life than does an American tourist
of the life of London when he counts the steps up to the dome of St.
Paul's Cathedral and hurries down to catch the train to the birthplace
of Shakespeare.
At twenty-nine, Mary Throgmorton was in many respects still the same
girl as when at the age of eighteen she had first bound that fair hair
upon her head and looked with all the seriousness of her gray eyes at
the vision the reflecting mirror presented to her. Scarcely had she
noticed her growth into womanhood for, as has been said, her beauty was
not that of the flesh that is pink and white. It was in stone her
beauty lay and even her own hands did not warm to the touch of it. But
where in Bridnorth was there kindling enough to light so fierce a fire
as she needed to overwhelm her?
This is the tragedy of a thousand women who pass through life and never
touch its meaning; these thousand women who one day will alter the
force-made laws for a world built nearer to the purpose of their being;
these thousand women to whom the figure of Mary Throgmorton stands there
by Bridnorth village in her monument of stone upon the Devon cliffs.
With all this unconsciousness of design in the pattern of her life, the
coming of the coach to Mary is well-nigh too subtle to admit of capture
in the rigid medium of words. Truly enough, if deeply engaged in one of
the many books she read, there were times and often when, from those
front windows of the square, white house, she would let her sisters
report upon the new or strange arrivals set down outside the Royal
George.
Even Jane, with her shrewdness of vision, was misled by this into the
belief that Mary cared less than them all what interest the Abbotscombe
coach might bring for the moment into their lives.
"I wonder what his handicap is," she had said when they had described a
young man descending from the box seat with a bag of golf clubs.
Notwithstanding all Mary's undoubted excellence at that game or indeed
at any game to which she gave her hand, Jane, disposed by nature to
doubt, would sharply look at her. But apparently there was no intention
to deceive. If the book was really engrossing, she would return to its
pages no sooner than the remark was made, as though time would prove
what sort of performer he was, since all golfers who came to Bridnorth
found themselves glad to range their skill against hers on the links.
And when, as it happened, she joined them at those front windows,
consenting to their little deceptions of casual interest in the midst of
more important occupations--for Jane would say, "Mary, you can't just
stare"--it was with no more than calculation as to what amusement the
visitors would provide that Mary appeared to regard their arrival.
Not one of them, however, not even Fanny, knew that there were days in
those Spring and Summer months, when Mary, setting forth with her strong
stride and walking alone up on to the heathered moors would, with
intention, seat herself in a spot where the Abbotscombe coach could be
seen winding its way down the hill into Bridnorth. It was one spot
alone from which the full stretch of the road could be observed. By
accident one day she had found it, just at that hour when the coach went
by. She had known and made use of it for six years and more.
At first it was the mere interest of a moving thing passing in the far
line of vision to its determined destination; the interest of that
floating object the stream catches in its eddies and carries in its
flowing out of sight.
So it was at first, until in some subconscious way it grew to hold for
her a sense of mystery. She would never have called it mystery
herself--the attraction had no name in her mind. No more did she do
than sit and watch its passage, dimly conscious that that little moving
speck upon the road, framed in its aura of dust, was moving into the
horizon of her life and as soon would move out again, leaving her the
same as she was before.
Habit it was to think she would be left the same; yet always whilst it
was there in the line of her eyes, it had seemed that something, having
no word in her consciousness, might happen to her with its passing.
So vividly sometimes it appeared to be moving directly into her life.
So vividly sometimes, when it had gone, it appeared to have left her
behind. She would have described it no more graphically or consciously
than that.
For during those six years, nothing indeed had happened to her. The
passing of the coach along that thread of road had remained a mystery.
Companions and acquaintances it had brought and often; women with whom
she had formed friendships, men with whom she had played strenuously and
enjoyably in their games of golf.
Never had it brought her even such an experience as her elder sister's.
She had never wished it should. There was no such readiness to yield in
her as there was in Fanny; no undisguised eagerness for life such as
might tempt the heartlessness of a man to a passing flirtation.
She treated all men the same with the frank candor of her nature, which
allowed no familiarity of approach. Only with his heart could a man
have reached her, never with his arms or his lips as Fanny had been.
Perhaps in those brief acquaintanceships, mainly occupied with their
games, there was no time for the deeper emotions of a man's heart to be
stirred. But most potent reason of all, it was that she had none of the
superficial allurements of her sex. Strength was the beauty of her. It
was a common attitude of hers to stand with legs apart set firmly on her
feet as she talked. Yet there was no masculinity she conveyed. Only it
was that so would a man find her if he sought passion in her arms and
perhaps they feared the passion they might discover.
It was the transitoriness not only of hers but of all those women's
touch with life that made the pattern of their destiny. No man had
stayed long enough in Bridnorth to discover the tenderness and nobility
of Mary Throgmorton. In that cold quality of her beauty they saw her
remotely and only in the distances in which she placed herself. None
had come close enough to observe that gentle smile the sculptor had
curved about her lips, the deep and tender softness of her eyes. It was
in outline only they beheld her, never believing that beneath that firm
full curve of her breast there could beat a heart as wildly and as
fearfully as a netted bird's, or that once beating so, that heart would
beat for them forever.
It was just the faint knowledge of this in herself which made that
passing coach a mystery to Mary. It was not as with Fanny that she
thought of it as a vehicle of her Destiny, but that, as she sat there on
the moors above Bridnorth, it was a link with the world she had so often
read of in her books.
It came to her out of the blue over the hill, as a pigeon come with a
message under its wing. Detaching that message again and again, she
read it in a whisper in her heart.
"There is life away there beyond the hill," it ran. "There is life away
there beyond the hill--and life is pain as well as joy and life is
sorrow as well as happiness; but life is ours and we are here to live."
That message somewhere in the secrets of her heart she kept and every
time the coach passed by when she was in the house the horses' hoofs on
the village road beat in her thoughts--"Life is ours, we are here to
live."
VII
Portraits in oil of Mr. and Mrs. Throgmorton hung on the walls of the
dining-room in their square, white house. Though painted by a local
artist when Mary was quite a child, they had one prominent virtue of
execution. They were arresting likenesses.
It is open to question whether a man has a right to impose his will when
he is gone upon those who follow after him. With Mr. and Mrs.
Throgmorton it was not so much an imposition of will. Their money had
been left without reservation to be divided equally amongst the four
girls. If any imposition there might be, it was of their personality.
Looking down at their children from those two portraits on the wall,
they still controlled the spirit of that house as surely as when they
had been alive.
Every morning and evening, Hannah read the prayers as her father had
done before her. No more could she have ceased from doing this than
could any one of them have removed his portrait from its exact place in
the dining-room.
It was the look in her father's and her mother's eyes more than any
comment of her sisters' that Fanny feared to meet after her episode with
the visitor to Bridnorth.
For in their lifetime, Mr. and Mrs. Throgmorton had been parents of that
rigid Victorian spirit. Love they must have given their children or
their influence would never have survived. Love indeed they did give,
but it was a stern and passionless affection.
Looking down upon their four daughters in those days of the beginning of
this story, they must have been well satisfied that if not one of them
had found the sanctity of married life then at least not one of them,
unless perhaps it was Fanny, had known the shame of an unhallowed
passion.
Fanny they might have had their doubts about. After that episode she
often felt they had; often seemed to detect a glance not so much of pity
as of pain in her mother's eyes. At her father, for some weeks after
the visitor's departure, she was almost afraid to look. In his life he
had been just. He would have been just in his condemnation of her then.
Self-control had been the measure of all his actions. Of self-control
in that moment on the cliffs she knew she had had none. She had leant
herself into his arms because in the violent beating of her breast it
had seemed she had no strength to do otherwise. And when he kissed her,
it had felt as though all the strength she had in her soul and body had
been taken from her into his.
Had her father known such sensations as that when he talked of
self-control?
Well indeed did she know what her mother would have said. To all those
four girls she had said the same with parental regard; and to each one
severally as they had come to that age when she had felt it expedient to
enlighten them.
"God knows," she had always begun, for the use of the name of God
hallowed such moments as these to her and softened the terribleness of
all she had to say, "God knows, my dear, what future there is in store
for you. If it is His will you should never marry, you will be spared
much of the pain, much of the trouble and the penalties of life. I love
your father. No woman could have loved him more. He is a fine and a
good man. But there are things a woman must submit to in her married
life--that is the cross she must bear--which no words of mine can
describe to you. Nevertheless, don't think I complain. Don't think I
do not realize there is a blessed reward. Her children are the light of
life to her. Without them, I dread to think what she must suffer at the
hands of Nature when the mercy of God has no recompense in store. Eve
was cursed with the bearing of children, but they brought the mercy of
God to her in their little hands when once they were born."
This usually had been her concluding phrase. This without variation she
repeated to all of them. Of this phrase, if vanity she had at all, she
was greatly proud. It seemed to her, in illuminating language to
comprise the whole meaning of her discourse.
Hannah, Jane, Fanny, all in their turn had accepted it in silence. It
had been left to Mary to say--
"It seems hard on a man that he should have to suffer, because he
doesn't get the reward of having children like the woman does. Of
course they're his--but he doesn't bring them into the world."
At this issue, Mrs. Throgmorton had taken her daughter's hands in hers
and, in a tone of voice Mary had never forgotten, she had replied--
"I never said, my dear, that the man did suffer. He doesn't. If it were
not for the sanctity of marriage, it would have to be described as
unholy pleasure to him. That pleasure a woman must submit to. That
pleasure it is her bitter duty to give. That's why I say I dread to
think what she must suffer, as some unfortunately do, when the mercy of
God does not recompense her with the gift of children."
Closely watching her daughter's face in the silence that followed, Mrs.
Throgmorton had known that Mary's mind was not yet satisfied with the
food for thought and conduct she had given it. She became conscious of
a dread of what this youngest child of hers would say next. And when
Mary spoke at last, her worst fears were realized.
"Can a woman," she said, "give pleasure to the man she loves when all
the time she is suffering shame and agony herself? If he loves her,
what pleasure could it be to him?"
Mrs. Throgmorton had closed her eyes and doubtless in that moment of
their closure she had prayed. So confused had been her mind in face of
this question that for the instant she could do no more than say--
"What do you mean?"
"Well--simply--" replied Mary in a childlike innocence--"simply that it
seems to me if a woman is giving pleasure to a man she really loves, she
must be getting pleasure herself. If I give you a present at Christmas
and you like it and it gives you pleasure, I'm not sure it doesn't give
me more pleasure than you to see you pleased, because--well, because I
love you. Why do you say 'It's more blessed to give than to receive'?"
That little touch of affection from her daughter had stirred Mrs.
Throgmorton's heart. Unable to restrain herself, she had taken Mary's
hands again with a closer warmth in her own.
"Ah, more blessed, dear--yes--there is of course the pleasure of
blessedness, the satisfaction of duty uncomplainingly done. I have
never denied that."
She had spoken this triumphantly, feeling that light at last had been
shown in answer to her prayer. Not for a moment was she expectant of
her daughter's reply.
"I don't mean that, mother," Mary had said. "Satisfaction seems to me a
thing you know in your own heart. No one can share it with you. Of
course I don't know the feelings of a man, how could I? I'm not
married. But if I were a man it wouldn't give me any pleasure to think
that the woman I loved was just satisfied because she'd done her duty.
I should want to share my pleasure with her, not look on at a distance
at her satisfaction. If a man ever loves me, I believe I shall feel
what he feels and if I do, I shall be glad of it and make him glad too."
She had said it all without emotion, almost without one note of feeling
in her voice; but the mere words themselves were sufficient to strike
terror into Mrs. Throgmorton's heart. That terror showed itself
undisguised in her face.
"My dear--my dear--" she whispered--"I pray God you never do feel so, or
if it be His will you should, that you will never forget your modesty or
your self-respect so much as to reveal it to any man however much you
may love him."
To these four girls in that square, white house in Bridnorth, this was
such an influence as still reigned in undisputed sway. The eyes of
their parents from those portraits still looked down upon them at their
prayers or at their meals. Still the voice of Mrs. Throgmorton
whispered in Mary's ears--"I pray God you will never forget your modesty
or your self-respect." Still, even when she was twenty-nine, Mary's
eyes would lift to her father's face gazing down from the wall upon her,
wondering if he had ever known the life she had suspicion of from the
books she read. Still she would glance at them both, prepared to
believe that, however dominant it was in their home, the expression of
their lives had been only the husk of existence.
And then perhaps at that very moment the coach might pass by on its way
to the Royal George and the horses' hoofs would sing as they beat upon
the road--"Life is ours--we are here to live--Life is ours--we are here
to live."
Yet there in Bridnorth at twenty-nine, no greater impetus had come to
her to live than the most vague wonderings, the most transient of
dreams.
VIII
It was the Sunday before Christmas of the year 1894. No coach had come
to Bridnorth for three weeks. The snow which had fallen there was still
lying six inches deep all over the countryside and on the roads where it
had been beaten down at all, was as hard as ice. Footmarks had mottled
it. It shone in the sun like the skin of a snow leopard.
The hills around Bridnorth and all the fields as far as eye could see
were washed the purest white. Every hedge had its mantle, every tree
and every branch its sleeves of snow. The whole world seemed buried.
Scarce one dark object was to be seen. Only the sea stretched dark and
gray like ice water, the little waves in that still air there was,
falling on the beach with the brittle noises of breaking glass.
Only for this, a silence had fallen everywhere. Footsteps made no sound.
The birds were hidden in the hearts of the hedges and even when hunger
drew them forth in search of berries, it was without noise they went, in
swift, dipping flights--a dark thing flashing by, no more.
Every one put on goloshes to climb or descend the hill to church. The
Vicar and his wife came stepping over from the Vicarage close by like a
pair of storks and when the bell stopped ringing it was as though
another cloak of silence had been flung over Bridnorth village. The
Vicar felt that additional silence as acutely as any one. It seemed to
him it fell to prepare the way for worship in the house of God and the
sermon he was about to preach.
The attendance that morning was no different from what it would have
been had the roads been clear. Going to church in the country is a
comfortable habit. At their midday meal afterwards the subject of the
attendance would crop up at the Vicar's table as it always did, ever
full of interest as is the subject of the booking-office returns to a
theatrical manager. He would congratulate himself upon the numbers he
had seen below him from that eminence of the pulpit and would have been
hurt beyond degree had any one suggested it was largely habit that
brought them there.
The Throgmorton family would no more have thought of staying away
because of the weather than they would have thought of turning the two
portraits in the dining-room with their faces to the wall.
They collected in the square hall of the square, white house. They put
on their gloves and their goloshes; they held their prayer books in
their hands; they each looked for the last time to see that their
threepenny bits were safe in the palms of their gloves. Then they set
off.
The church in the country is a meeting place in a sense other than that
of worship. You may desire at most times the quietness of your own
home, but you like to see the world about you in a public place.
They worshipped God, those people in Bridnorth. Who could hope to
maintain that they did not? They were close enough to Him in all
conscience and fact on those Devon hills. But that worship was more in
the silence of their own hearts, more on the floor at their own bedside
than ever it was at the service conducted by the Vicar as so many
services are conducted by so many Vicars in so many parishes throughout
the length and breadth of the whole country.
The interest of seeing a fresh face, of even seeing an old face if it be
under a new hat; the mere interest of human contact, of exchanging a
word as they went in or mildly criticizing as they came out; the mild
necessity of listening to what the Vicar said from the pulpit, the
sterner necessity of trying to understand what he meant; the excitement
of wearing a new frock, the speculations upon the new frock worn by
another, these were more the causes of a good attendance in the worst of
weather, these and that same consciousness of being overlooked, of
having one's conduct under the gaze of all who chose to satisfy
themselves about it.
As the Vicar climbed the pulpit steps, the congregation settled
themselves down with that moving in their pews with all customary signs
of that spirit of patience every priest believes to be one of interest.
Leaning her square, strong shoulders against the upright back of the
Throgmorton pew, Mary composed her mind with mild attention. Fanny
shifted her hassock to the most restful position for her feet. That
sharp interrogative look of criticism drew itself out in the line of
Jane's lips and steadied itself in her eyes. Hannah was the only one
upon whose face a rapt expression fell. With all her gray hair and her
forty years, she was the youngest of them all, still cherishing her
ideals of the infallible priest in the man of cloth; still believing
that the voice of God could speak even through the inferior brain of a
country Vicar. Above all there were her children who the next morning
would ask her what the sermon meant. It was necessary if only for their
sakes she should not lose a word that was said.
After that pause on his knees when the Vicar's head was bent in prayer,
he rose to his feet and, as he spread out the pages of his sermon before
him, cast a significant glance around the church. This was preliminary
to every sermon he preached. It was as though he said--"I cannot have
any signs of inattention. If your minds have wandered at all during the
service, they must wander no more. I feel I have got something to say
which is vital to all of you."
All this happened that December morning, just as it had occurred every
morning for the twenty years he had been the shepherd of their souls.
It was almost as long as Mary could remember.
Having cast that glance about him, he cleared his throat--the same
sounds as Jane once caustically remarked they had heard one thousand
times, allowing two Sundays in the year for a _locum tenens_.
Then he gave out his text: "And the Angel said unto her--'Fear not,
Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.'"
IX
Perhaps it was the sound of her own name there amongst all those people
which stirred her mind and added a quicker beat of the pulse to Mary
Throgmorton's heart. The full significance of the text, the
circumstance to which it referred, these could not have reached her mind
so swiftly, even though Fanny with a sharp turn of the head had looked
at her.
"'Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.'"
It was at first the sound of her name, the more as he repeated it.
Listening to that habitual intonation of the Vicar's voice, it meant
nothing to her as yet that Mary had found favor with her God. The only
effect it had was the more completely to arrest her mind in a manner in
which she had never been conscious of its arrest before. She folded her
hands in her lap. It was a characteristic sign of attention in her.
She folded her hands and raised her eyes steadily to the pulpit.
"There are some things," began the Vicar, "which it is necessary for us
to understand though they are completely outside the range of our
comprehension."
Involuntarily her interest was set back. It was the delivery of such
statements as these with which the Vicar had fed the mind of his
congregation for the last twenty years. For how could one understand
that which was completely outside the range of comprehension? Insensibly
Mary's fingers relaxed as they lay in her lap. She drew a long breath
of disappointment.
"The immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary," he continued, "is one of
those mysteries in the teaching of the Church which passes comprehension
but which it is expedient for us to understand, lest we be led away by
it towards such false conceptions as are held by the Church of Rome."
There was scarcely a sermon he preached in which the Vicar lost
opportunity for such attacks as these. He seemed to fear the Roman
Catholic Church as a man fears the alluring attractions of an
unscrupulous woman. From the eminence of his pulpit, he would have
cursed it if he could and, firmly as she had been brought up to
disapprove of the Romish doctrines, Mary often found in her mind a
wonder of this fear of his, an inclination to suspect the power of the
Roman Catholic Church.
From that moment, fully anticipating all they were going to be told, her
mind became listless. She looked about her to see if the Mainwarings
were in Church. Often there were moments in the sermon when she would
catch the old General's eye which for her appreciation would lift
heavenwards with a solemn expression of patient forbearance.
They lived too far out of Bridnorth. It was not to be expected they
would have walked all that distance in the snow. Her eyes had scarcely
turned back from their empty pew when the Vicar's words arrested her
again.
"Because Mary was the sinless mother of Our Lord," he was saying, "is no
justification for us to direct our prayers to her. For this is what it
is necessary for us to understand. It is necessary for us to understand
that Mary was the mother of Our Lord's manhood. His divinity comes from
God alone. What is the Trinity to which we attach our faith? It is the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the three in one. Mary, the
Virgin, has no place here and it is beyond this in our thoughts of
worship we have no power or authority to go.
"The Roman Catholic Church claims the mediation of the Virgin Mary
between the hearts of its people and the divine throne of God. Lest we
should drift into such distress of error as that, let us understand the
mystery of the Immaculate Conception, however much as a mystery we allow
it to be beyond our comprehension. Being the Son of God, Christ must
have been born without sin, yet being the Son of Man, He must, with His
manhood, have shared all the inheritance of suffering which is the
accompaniment of our earthly life. How else could He have been tempted
in the Wilderness? How else could He have passed through His agony on
the Cross?
"To what conclusion then are we thus led? It is to the conclusion that
Mary, the Mother of that manhood in Christ, must have suffered as all
women suffer. She had found favor with God; but the Angel did not say
she had found immunity from that nature which, being born in sin as are
we all, was her inevitable portion.
"So, lest we fall into the temptation of raising her in dignity to the
very throne of God, lest we succumb to the false teaching of those who
would address their prayers to her, it becomes incumbent upon us to see
the Virgin Mary in a clear and no uncertain light. Mystery in her
conception there must always be, but in her giving birth in that manger
of Bethlehem, it is as Mary the wife of Joseph, the carpenter of
Nazareth, we must regard her."
To all those present in the congregation this was no more than one of
the many tirades the Vicar had so often preached against the Roman
Catholic Church. They listened as they had always listened before, with
patience but without interest. It was no real matter of concern to
them. They had no desire to be converted. They had not in the silence
of their homes been reading the works of Roman Catholic authorities as
the Vicar had done. They did not entertain the spirit of rivalry or
feel the sense of competition as he felt it. They listened because it
was their duty to listen and one and all of them except Mary, thinking
of their warm firesides, hoped that he would soon make an end.
Only Mary amongst them all sat now with heart and mind attentive to what
he said, pursuing not the meaning he intended to convey, but a train of
thought, the sudden illumination of an idea which yet she dared not find
words in her consciousness to express.
"We must think of her," the Vicar continued, "as a woman passing through
the hours of her travail. We must think of her brought in secret haste
by the fear of consequence and the expedience of necessity to that
manger in Bethlehem, where, upon her bed of straw, with the cattle all
about her in their stalls, she gave birth to a man child in all the
suffering and all the pain it is the lot of women to endure. For here
is the origin of that manhood in which we must place our faith if we are
to appreciate the fullness of sacrifice our Savior made upon the Cross.
It was a woman, as any one of you, who was the mother of Our Lord. A
woman, blessed above all women to be the link between the divinity of
God the Father and the manhood of God the Son. It was a woman who had
found favor in the eyes of her Creator, such favor as had sought her out
to be the instrument of the will and mercy of God.
"And the Angel said unto her--'Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor
with God.'"
So often had Mary's name been repeated that by now no association was
left in Fanny's mind with her sister. She turned and looked at her no
more. But to Mary herself, with this last reiteration of all, the sound
of it throbbed in every vein and beat in violent echoes in her heart.
For now no longer could she keep back the conscious words that sought
expression of those thoughts in her mind. She knew beyond concealment
the idea which had forced itself in a suspicion upon her acceptance.
In all his eagerness to lead their minds away from worship of the Virgin
Mary, the Vicar had destroyed for her every shred of that mystery it had
been his earnest intention to maintain. Now indeed it seemed she did
understand and nothing was left that lay beyond her comprehension.
It was the woman, as he had urged them, whom she saw, the woman on her
bed of straw, with that look in the eyes, the look of a woman waiting
for her hour which often she had seen in the eyes of others it had been
her duty to visit in Bridnorth. It was the woman, eager and suffering,
with that eagerness she sometimes had felt as though it were a vision
seen within herself. He had substituted a woman--just such a woman it
might be as herself.
And here it was then that the thought leapt upon her like some ambushed
thing, bearing her down beneath its weight; beating at her heart,
lacerating her mind so that she knew she never in any time to come could
hide from herself the scars it made.
"If she had suffered," Mary asked herself--"must she not also have
known?" And then, shaking her with the terror of its blasphemy, there
sprang upon her mind the words--
"Who was the father of the Son of Man?"
"In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost!" a
voice intoned in a far distance and with all the others she rose
automatically to her feet. Her eyes were glazed. She scarcely could see
the Vicar as he descended from the pulpit. Her heart was thumping in
her breast. She could hear only that.
X
They walked home in groups and in couples when the service was over.
Only Fanny kept alone. A verse of poetry was building itself in her
mind. One couplet already had formed a rounded phrase. It had been
revolving in her thoughts all through the sermon. Round and about she
had beaten it as with a pestle in a mortar until she had pounded it into
shape.
"Were all the trees as green to you
As they were green to me?"
It was not so much what rhymed with "you" or "me" that was troubling her
as what more she could continue to make the full matter of her verse.
She could think of no more. The whole substance of life was summed up
in those two lines to her. She walked alone that morning, cutting words
to a measure that would not meet and had no meaning.
Mary walked with Jane. The sound of the voice and the laughter of
others behind her in that sharp air was like the breaking of china
falling upon a floor as hard as that beaten snow beneath their feet.
She was still in an amaze with the bewilderment of what she had thought.
Every long-trained sense in her was horrified at the knowledge of its
blasphemy. She tried to believe she had never thought it. To induce
that belief, she would have persuaded herself if she could that the
Vicar had never preached his sermon, that it was not to church they had
been, that it was all a dream, horrible and more vivid than life itself,
but a dream.
For life was peaceful and sweet enough there in Bridnorth.
Notwithstanding the song the hoofs of the coach horses had always beaten
out for her on the roads, she had been well content with it. Often
doubtless the call of life had come to her there beyond the hill; it
came with its cry of pain and joy, its voice of sorrow as well as
happiness. But now, here amongst the peace and the sweetness, where
none of these vital contrasts had ever existed, there had come something
more terrible than pain, more cruel and relentless than sorrow.
In moments she was astonished at herself that she did not dismiss it all
with one sweep of her mind, dismiss it all as lies and blasphemy, as
machinations of the Devil himself. For what was the good just of
telling herself it was a dream, of pretending to hide her thoughts from
it as though it were not there? It was there! She had thought it and
so had the thought come to her like a light suddenly in dark corners,
that she knew it was true. Never now could she cast out its
significance from the processes of her mind. In the desperate fear that
the very foundations of her religious beliefs were shaken, she might
buttress her faith with the determined exclusion of all blasphemy in her
thoughts. Never again might she allow her mind to dwell upon the origin
of the manhood of that figure of Christ, still dearer to her than life
itself. With persistent effort of will, she knew she could make blind
her vision of that scene in the manger at Bethlehem which the Vicar in
his ignorance and the pettiness of his apprehensions had conjured forth
so clearly in her sight.
All this she might do, clinging to the faith in which she had been
brought up; but never could she efface the change which in those few
moments had been made in her. How could she know so soon what that
change might be? She knew only it was there. She was a different
being. Already she felt apart and aloof from her sisters. Even Jane,
walking there beside her, appeared at a strange distance in which was a
clearer light for her to see by, a crystal atmosphere through which she
could distinguish nothing but the truth.
Suddenly as they walked together, these two in silence, Jane looked up
and said--
"I wish some one would kill that bee in the Vicar's bonnet. As if there
was the slightest chance of any of us becoming Roman Catholics!"
It was like Jane, that remark. Suddenly Mary knew how like it was. But
more she knew in that moment the change had not come to her sisters.
They had not seen what she had seen. No vision such as hers had been
vouchsafed to them. Still they were happy, contented, and at peace in
their garden of Eden. It was she alone who had tasted of the fruit; she
alone who now had knowledge of good and evil.
Already she felt the edge of the sword of the angel of God turned
against her. The gates of that garden they lived in were opened. In
the deep consciousness of her heart she felt she was being turned away.
How it would difference her life, where she should go now that she had
been driven forth, what even the world outside those gates might be, she
did not know.
All she realized was that for twenty-nine years a Mary Throgmorton had
been living in Bridnorth, that now she had gone and another Mary
Throgmorton had taken her place.
Looking down at Jane beside her when she spoke, she saw for the first
time a sad figure of a woman, shrivelled and dried of heart, bitter and
resentful of mind. No longer was she the Jane who, with her sharp
tongue, had often made them laugh, who, with her shrewd criticisms had
often shown them their little weaknesses and the pettiness of their
thoughts. In place of her she saw a woman wilted and seared, a body
parched with the need of the moisture of life; one who had been cut from
the tree to wither and decay, one, the thought then sprang upon her, who
had never found favor with God or man.
XI
They came loitering to the square, white house, pausing at the gate and
talking to friends, lingering over the removal of their goloshes
indoors. The crisp air was in their lungs. There was the scent of
cooking faintly in the hall. It rose pleasantly in their nostrils.
They laughed and chatted like a nestful of starlings. Jane was more
amusing than usual. Her comments upon the hat bought by the police
sergeant's wife in Exeter and worn that Sunday morning for the first
time were shrewd and close of observation; too close to be kind, yet so
shrewd as to prick even the soft heart of Hannah to laughter she would
have restrained if she could.
Even Fanny, with mind still beating out her meters, lost that far-off
look in her eyes and lingered in the hall to listen to Jane's sallies,
to every one of which Hannah would murmur between her laughter--
"Jane! Jane--how can you? Fancy your noticing that! Oh dear! we
oughtn't to be laughing at all. Poor thing! She can't help her eye or
her figure."
"If I were fat," said Jane, "I wouldn't go in stripes. You don't put
hoops round a barrel to make it look thin."
Foolish though that might have sounded in London drawing-rooms, it found
a burst of laughter in the square, white house.
On her knees above, upstairs in her bedroom, Mary heard the noise of it.
She could guess well the kind of remark from Jane that had evoked it.
Until those moments Jane had been a source of amusement to her as much
as to any of them. She was a source of amusement no longer. Even there
on her knees with the sound of their laughter far away in the distance
of the house, it was that sad figure of a woman, shrivelled and dried,
bitter with the need of sun to ripen her, that came before her eyes.
Then what were the others? With this new vision, she dreaded to think
that she in time must look at them. What thoughts to have on one's
knee! What thoughts to bring into the sight and mind of God!
She had come there alone to her bedroom to pray--but what for? How
could prayer help? Could she by prayer make numb and dead the motion of
her mind? By prayer could she silence her thoughts, inducing oblivion
as a drug could induce sleep?
Hastening away alone to her bedroom, she had hoped she could. Even then
she cherished the belief of all she had been taught of the efficacy of
prayer. But having fallen upon her knees at her bedside, what could she
pray? Nothing.
"Oh--God, my heavenly Father," she began, and staring before her with
rigid eyes at the pillow on her bed it became a twisted bundle of straw
on which for poor comfort rested the pale face of a woman patient and
enduring in her hour.
How could prayer put away such visions as these? With conscious muscular
effort she closed her eyes and began repeating in a voice her ears could
hear--"Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name."
So she would have decoyed herself into the attitude of mind of prayer,
but the sound of laughter in the house broke in upon the midst of it.
She saw that thin, withered woman in whom the sap of life had dried to
pith, and, casting away the formula of supplication, her voice had cried
out for understanding of it all.
"Something's all wrong!" she said aloud as though one were there in the
room beside her to hear and oppose her accusations. "I don't know what
it is. I've never thought it was wrong before. And perhaps after all
it's I who am wrong."
She knew what she meant by that. Wrong she might insist it was for her
to have thought what she thought in church. And yet some quality of
deliberation seemed necessary to compose the substance of evil. What
deliberation had there been in her? Out of the even and placid monotony
of life had shrilled this voice into her heart.
"Who was the father of the Son of Man?"
She had not beckoned the voice. It had lifted out of nowhere above the
soulless intonation of the Vicar's sermon. But what was more, now once
she had heard it, it appeared as though it long had been waiting to cry
its message in her ears. She wondered why she had never heard it
before. For twenty-nine years she realized as she knelt there on her
knees, she had been little more than a child. Now in the lateness of
the day she was a woman, knowing more of the world than ever she would
have learnt by experience.
The deeper purposes of life they were that had come without seeking upon
her imagination. It was not this or that she knew about women, not this
or that which had come in revelation to her about men. Only that there
was a meaning within herself, pitiably and almost shamefully
unfulfilled. Something there was wrong--all wrong. Half she suspected
in herself what it was. For those few moments as they walked back from
church, she had caught actual sight of it in her sister Jane.
Would she discern it in the others? Discovering it in them would she
know what it was in her? Why was she on her knees for thoughts like
this? This was not prayer. She could not pray.
The sound of the bell downstairs raised her slowly to her feet. She
took off her hat and laid it on the bed. Automatically she crossed to
the mirror and began to tidy her hair.
Was there anything in her face that made her heart beat the faster? She
stood looking at her reflection, pondering that there was not. What
beauty of color was there in her cheeks? What line of beauty in her
lips? And why did she look for these things and why, when behind her
eyes she saw something in her mind she dared not speak, did her heart
set up a beating in every pulse?
With a gesture of impatient self-rebuke, she turned away and went
downstairs.
XII
Jane carved. As their father had always done, she still gave them just
portions of fat so that the joint might evenly be consumed. There was
not the same necessity to eat it when it was hot as there had been when
Mr. Throgmorton was alive; yet even still, Fanny with an unconquerable
distaste for it, did her best to leave a clean plate.
When Mary came in, they were already seated at the table. Hannah had
said grace. They all asked where she had been.
"Tidying up," said she, and pulling out her chair, sat down, beginning
her meal at once with her eyes steady upon her plate. Fanny was
opposite to her. Being the eldest, Hannah sat at the head of the table.
With the new vision of mind that had come to her, there were long
moments before Mary could determine to raise her head and look at them.
It was sufficient to hear them talking. The subject of Christmas
presents was monopolizing the conversation. They were all going in to
Exeter for a day's shopping if the roads permitted. Mary found herself
caught in astonishment at the apparent note of happiness in their
voices.
Were they happy after all? Had she herself become morbid and
supersensitive with the sudden unexpectedness of her revelation? Was it
all a mood? Would she wake on the morrow after a night of sleep, finding
the whole aspect of life set back again to its old focus?
In a sudden hope and expectancy that it might be so, she raised her head
and looked across the table at Fanny seated there with the full light of
the window on her face.
It was a moment when, in a pause of the conversation, Fanny's thoughts
had slipped back to the labor of her verses.
"Were ever the trees so green to you
As they were green to me?"
The strained expression of fretted composition was settled on her
forehead. The far-off look of a memory clutching at the past was a pain
in her eyes. In every outline and feature of her pale, thin face were
the unmistakable signs of the utter weariness of her soul.
In that one glance, Mary knew her vision was true. It was no mood. All
those signs of fatigue she had seen in Fanny's face again and again. It
was her health, she had often said to herself. Fanny was not strong.
Ill-health it might have been, but the root of the evil was in her
spirit, not in her blood.
Sitting there opposite, as in all the countless times from childhood
upwards she had seen her, it was another Fanny--the real Fanny--she
beheld, just as she knew now it was the real Jane. These three sisters
of hers, suddenly they had all become real. Hannah with her heart more
in the flow of the Bridnorth stream, to the smooth round edges of
contentment, each one of them in her turn they were presented with their
new significance in her eyes.
But it was Fanny most of all in whom she felt full sense of the tragedy
of circumstance. That episode of the visitor to Bridnorth came now with
a fresh meaning upon Mary's mind. They had all felt deeply sorry for
Fanny at the time, but one and all they had agreed she had had a lucky
escape.
Was it such a lucky escape after all? Did Fanny regard it in that
light? Could they be considered fortunate who escaped from life however
it might wound and ill-treat them?
Mary realized as she sat there, fascinated by the terribleness of her
thoughts, that they all had escaped from life. Not in one of them had
there been the moment's fulfillment of their being. They were women,
but it was not as women they had lived. One by one the purpose of life
was running slower in their veins. She with the rest of them. Her turn
would come. First she would become a Fanny, tired with waiting. That
eager look of a spirit hunger would come into her eyes, alternating as
events came and passed her by with those dull, dead shadows of fatigue.
Hope she would cling to as a blind man to the string that is knotted to
the collar of his dog. Hope, becoming fainter and weaker year by year,
would lead her until, as with Jane, bitter and seared and dry of heart,
she sought its services no more. Still like the blind man then she
would beat with her stick up and down the unchanging pavements of her
life till at last with Hannah she found a numbed contentment in her lot.
Something indeed, as she had cried up there alone in her room, something
was wrong. She had come as just a few women do to that conscious
realization. But her vision had not power to show her what it was. In
those moments it never occurred to her to raise her eyes to the portrait
of her father on the wall. She was not didactic enough of mind to argue
it with herself or trace the origin of those conventions which had bound
and still were binding the lives of those three women her eyes were
watching.
Something was wrong. Vaguely she sensed it was the waste of life. It
was beyond the function of her mind to follow the reason of that wastage
to its source. Her process of thought could not seek out the social laws
that had woven themselves about the lives of women until, so much were
they the slaves of the law, that they would preach it, earnestly,
fervently, believingly as her mother had done.
Something was wrong. That was just all she knew; but in those moments,
she knew it well. There were those three women about her to prove how
wrong it was. There was she herself nearing that phase when the wrong
would be done to her, and she would be powerless as they had been to
prevent it.
"Fear not, Mary--" it was as though she heard a voice beckoning within
her--"Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God."
Ever since they had come to an age of understanding, their spirits had
been warped and twisted with the formalities of life. To fit the plan
of those laws man makes by force, they had been bent in their growing to
the pattern of his needs. It was those needs of his that had invented
the forced virtues of their modesty and self-respect, beneath the
pressure of which he kept them as he required them, trained and set back
to fulfill the meaning of his self-centered purpose.
Modesty and self-respect, surely these were qualities of all, of men as
well as women. By unnatural temperatures to force them in their growth
was to produce exotic flowers having none of the simple sweetness of
sun-given odors in their scent.
As life was meant, it grew in the open spaces; it was an upright tree,
spreading its green boughs under the pure light of heaven. There was
nothing artificial about life. It was free.
It was the favor of God. That was the truth she had come by and with
her eyes marking that weary look of resignation in Fanny's face, she
knew she would not fear it whenever or however it came.
This was the seed, planted in the heart of Mary Throgmorton, which in
its season was to bring forth and, for the life of the woman she was,
bear the fruit of her being.
PHASE II
I
It was in the summer of 1895 that Julius Liddiard came to Bridnorth. He
came alone, having engaged rooms at the White Hart.
From the Throgmorton windows he was observed descending at the George
Hotel when, with a glance at Mary, it was announced by Jane that he
played golf. As he slung a bulky satchel over his shoulder, Fanny
surmised him to be an artist, entertaining for a swift moment as it sped
across her mind, a vision of herself sitting beside him, watching his
sketches with absorbing interest as they came to life beneath his brush.
It remained with Jane to make the final observation as, accompanied by a
man carrying his trunk, he passed the windows on his way back to the
White Hart.
"Has his suit case polished," she said. "He's not an artist. Paints
for fun. Probably has a valet. Too wealthy for the likes of Bridnorth.
Comes here to be alone."
If judging the facts of appearance leads to a concept of truth, these
observations of Jane were shrewdly accurate. Time, during the first
week, proved the soundness of their deduction.
He was seen by Fanny on the cliff's edge above the bay, painting with
pleasing amateurish results and so engrossed in his work as scarcely to
notice her presence. She had looked over his shoulder as she passed.
She was no critic but had, what is more common to find, the candor of
ill-formed opinion.
"It was not bad," she said--"rather slobbery. It was running all over
the paper. P'r'aps he pulls it together. Course I didn't stop."
Jane's eyes narrowed. It was superfluous to say she did not stop. That
was one of Fanny's lies; one of the lies all women tell which record
their conscious intentions while they belie the subconscious things they
do. She had not meant to stop. It was obvious to Jane that she did.
Her next words proved it.
"Can't understand," she said, "how any one can become so engrossed,
messing about with paints on a piece of paper."
She had stopped and he had not noticed her. After a week had passed,
Mary came back one evening from the golf club. They were all having
tea.
"His name's Liddiard," she said casually in the midst of a silence, and
they all knew to whom she alluded and what had occurred.
Questions poured upon her then from all but Hannah, who went on eating
her pieces of bread and butter, letting her eyes wander from one to
another as they spoke.
She informed them of all she had gathered about him during their game of
golf, but gave her information only under pressure of their questioning.
Ever since her eyes had penetrated the veil that for so long had hidden
her sisters from her, Mary had resented, while so well she understood,
their curiosity about the visitors who came to Bridnorth. There were
times when it almost had a savor of indecency to her; times when she
felt her cheeks grow warm at the ill-hidden purpose of their interest;
times when it seemed to her as though Fanny, revealing her soul, had
dressed it in diaphanous garments which almost were immodest in their
transparent flimsiness.
She knew Fanny's soul now. She knew the souls of all of them. She knew
her own and often she prayed that however Fate might treat her, even if
as it now treated them, she still would keep it secret and hidden from
eyes that were not meant to see.
"He comes from Somerset," she told them. "He has a large estate there.
Something like two thousand acres and I suppose a big house. No--does
nothing. I expect looking after a place like that is work enough. Farms
himself, I believe--the way he speaks about it. Yes--married."
Jane thought the annoyance with which she gave it out was upon her own
account. There was a smile in her eyes when Mary admitted it, as though
her rejoinder might have been--"What a suck for you."
Such good nature as she had kept the words from utterance. But as well
it was that Mary's annoyance had really had nothing to do with herself.
Their question, chimed from Fanny and Jane together, had made the blood
tingle in her cheeks. Why did they expose themselves like that? She
would sooner have seen them with too short a skirt or too low a bodice.
Scarcely conscious of this shame in Mary, it yet had had power to hold
back the words from Jane's lips. Nevertheless she credited it to her
virtue.
"They say I'm bitter," she thought. "They don't know how bitter I could
be."
"Why isn't his wife with him?" she asked.
Mary professed complete indifference and ignorance.
"Do you suppose I asked him?" she said. "Marriage isn't a grazing in
one field, is it? Life isn't one acre to everybody."
How interestingly he must have talked about his estate and farming.
That came leaping at once into Jane's mind. A grazing in one
field--that was a new-learnt phrase for Mary. There was little she knew
about grazing and could not tell an acre from a rood.
"How does he play golf?" she inquired.
"Fairly well."
"How many strokes did he give you?"
"None--we played level."
"What did he win by?"
"I did--two and one."
"So you're going to play again?"
"Well, of course. It was a tight match."
Jane rose from the table to go and make out the linen for the laundry.
Fanny sat staring at the tea leaves in the bottom of her cup. Hannah
inquired in her gentle voice if any one wanted the last piece of bread
and butter.
II
It was a closer observation than she knew when Jane said that Julius
Liddiard came to Bridnorth to be alone.
He was a lonely man. There is that condition of loneliness more
insuperable than others, the loneliness of mind in a body surrounded by
the evidences of companionship. In this condition he suffered, unable
to explain, unable to express.
Much as he loved it, in his own home at times he felt a stranger, whose
presence within its walls was largely upon sufferance. Mastery, he
claimed, exacting the purpose of his will, but in the very consciousness
that it must be forced upon those about him, he felt his loneliness the
more.
Authority was not his conception of a home. He had looked for unity,
but could not find it. His wife and her sister who lived with them, the
frequent visits of their friends and relations, these were the evidences
of a companionship that served merely to drive him further and deeper
into the lonely companionship of himself.
She had her right to life, he was forced in common justice to tell
himself, and if she chose the transitory gayeties, finding more
substance of life in a late night in London than an early morning on
Somersetshire downs, that was her view of things to which she was fully
entitled.
Of his own accord, he had invited her sister to live with them, seeking
to please her; hoping to please himself. She made her home there. It
was too late actually to turn her away when he had discovered the habit
of her life was an incurable laziness which fretted and jarred against
the energies of his mind.
"We make our lives," he said, enigmatically to Mary, that first day when
they were playing golf. "Lord knows what powers direct us. I may make
the most perfect approach on to this green, but nothing on earth can
tell me exactly which way the ball is going to kick."
He had approached his life with all the precision of which he was
capable, but the kick had come and it had come the wrong way. There was
no accounting for its direction. It was obvious to him he could not see
the world through his wife's eyes. After some years it had become no
less obvious that she could not see it through his.
He wandered through the rooms of his own house, a stranger to the sounds
of meaningless laughter that echoed there. He took his walking-stick,
called a dog and strode out on to the downs, glad to be in fact alone.
Gradually such laughter as there was in him--he had his full share of
it--died out of him. Much as he loved his wife, much as she loved him,
he knew he was becoming more and more of a disappointment to her. In
the keener moments of consciousness of his loneliness, she found him
morose, until, unable to sing or laugh with the songs and laughter of
that house, he came at times to believe he was morose himself.
"What's happening to me," he would say when he was alone; "what's
happening to me is that I'm losing the joy of life."
Yet the sight of the countryside at Springtime seemed to himself to give
him more sense of joy than all the revels in London that made his wife's
eyes dance with youth.
He had laughed inordinately once; had won her heart by the compound of
his spirits, grave and gay. It was quite true when she accused him of
becoming too serious-minded. He heard the absence of his laughter and
sometimes took himself away and alone that she might notice it the less.
There were times when it seemed she had lost all touch with his mind
that once had interested her. He took his mind away and left his heart
there at Wenlock Hall behind him.
What can happen with a man's mind when he holds it alone in his keeping
is what happened to Julius Liddiard.
Jane was more accurate than she knew when she declared that he had come
to Bridnorth to be alone.
It was his intention to sketch and play golf with the professional until
such time as the longing for his home again would urge him back with a
mind ready to ignore its disappointments in the joy of mating and
meeting with his heart again.
Upon his first appearance on the golf links, the professional had
disappointed him. Mary Throgmorton had stepped into the breach,
recommended by the secretary as being able to give him as good a game as
many of the members.
For the first half, they had played with little interchange of
conversation. As they left the ninth green, she was two up. Then he
had looked at her with an increasing interest, seeing what most men saw,
the strong shoulders, the straight line of her back, the full strength
of her figure, the firm stance she took as she played her game.
It was not until after the game was over and they sat at tea in the Club
Room, that he noticed her face with any interest. Had this observation
been denied him, he would have gone away from Bridnorth, describing her
as a girl of the country, bred on sea air; the type of mother for sons
of Englishmen, if ever she found her proper mate.
But across that tea-table, his mind saw more. He saw in flashes of
expression out of the gray eyes that faced him, that soul which Mary had
only so lately discovered in herself. He saw a range of emotion that
could touch in its flight the highest purpose; he heard in her voice the
laughter his mind could laugh with, the thoughts his mind could think
with.
"Well, we've had a good game," he had said steadily. "Do you think I've
a chance of beating you if we play again to-morrow?"
"I like to win," said she, "if there's a chance of being beaten. I
expect you'll beat me next time. You don't know the course yet."
"We'll play to-morrow," he said.
And it had been arranged.
III
This time they played in the morning. They had a simple lunch of boiled
eggs such as the Club provided. It was a common occurrence for Mary to
stay on the links all day.
Hannah thought nothing of her absence at the mid-day meal. Fanny
thought a great deal, but said no word. Jane, thinking little, casually
questioned why it was always married men who came to Bridnorth.
"And invariably married men who play golf," she added. Indeed in those
days the younger men somewhat left the game to their elders. "I believe
Mary's a bit of a fool," she went on. "If she really wanted to marry,
she'd play tennis or sit on the beach at bathing time. That girl Hyland
got married last year throwing pebbles at an old bottle. We've all
thought marriage was a serious business. That was the way they brought
us up." She looked at her mother's portrait. "That's what's been all
wrong with us. It isn't the one who sits quietest who's chosen. It's
the one who fusses about and chooses for herself. You've got to be able
to throw pebbles at glass bottles now. Crochet hooks aren't any good.
All our chances have been lost in two purl and one plain. It's their
fault, both of them--it's their fault."
Jane spoke so terribly near the truth sometimes that it was agony for
those others to listen to her. To Hannah it was sacrilege almost,
against the spirit of those still ruling in that house. To Fanny it was
no sacrilege. She too knew it had been their fault. But the truth of
it was a whip, driving her, not that she forgot her fatigue, but so as
to urge her on, stumbling, feeling the hope in her heart like harness
wearing into the flesh.
Almost visibly she aged as she listened. Her expression drooped. Her
eyes fixed in a steady gaze upon Jane's face while she was speaking as
though the weight of lead were holding them from movement.
"Don't speak like that, Jane!" Hannah exclaimed. "How can you say it's
their fault? They did the very best they knew for us. Wouldn't you
sooner be as you are than like that girl Hyland?"
"She's got a baby now," Jane replied imperturbably. "She'll steady down.
She's contributed more than we have. It isn't much when all you can say
is that you've given a few old clothes to jumble sales."
"I know what Jane means," said Fanny. Her memory had caught her back to
that late evening on the cliffs when she felt again, like an internal
wound, that spareness of her body in the arms which for those few
moments had held her close. "I know what Jane means," she repeated, and
rose from the table, leaving the room, not waiting for her coffee.
At the Golf Club over their boiled eggs and the gritty coffee while
Liddiard smoked, they talked of Wenlock Hall, the history of it, the
farm and lands surrounding it, the meaning that it had for him.
"How many children have you?" asked Mary.
"None," said he.
It was a question as to whether they should play the final match that
afternoon. Each had won a game.
"Why get through good things all at once?" said he. "That's a sky for
sketching--my sort of amiable sketching. The view across the bay from
that Penlock hill will be wonderful."
Her readiness to part with his company for the afternoon was simple and
genuine.
"Of course," she said, "you're here for a holiday. I was getting
selfish. I don't often get a good game, you see. We've plenty of
opportunity if, as you say, you don't go till next week."
"Oh, I meant you to come if you would," he explained quickly. "Not much
fun, I know. But there's the walk out there and back and I like being
talked to while I'm painting. Not much of a conversationalist then, I
admit. I'm doing all the selfishness--but one doesn't often get the
chance of being talked to--as you talk."
It was the first time she had ever been told that any power of
interesting conversation was hers. She felt a catch of excitement in
her breath. When she answered him, she could not quite summon her voice
to speak on a casual note. It sounded muffled and thick, as though her
heart were beating in her throat and she had to speak through it. Yet
she was not conscious that it was.
"I'll come if you really want me to," she said, and her acceptance was
neither eager nor restrained. She went as freely as she walked and she
walked with a loose, swinging stride. It became a mental observation
with him as they climbed the cliff path, that their steps fell together
with even regularity.
His sketch was a failure. The atmosphere defied him, or the talk they
made distracted his mind. He threw the block face downwards on the
grass.
"Oh! why do you do that?" she asked, regretting consciously that which
she did not know she was glad of--"It looked as if it were going to be
so nice."
"It had got out of hand," said he. "They do, so often. I know when I
can't pull 'em together. Besides, talking's better, isn't it? You can't
give your whole interest to two things at once."
How long had they known each other? Two days--less! He felt he had been
talking to her constantly, over a long period of time. She knew he felt
that and was kept in wonder as to what her interest could be to him.
Once definitely having put his sketch out of his mind, he lay back on
the close, sharp-bitten grass, looking no more across the bay, but
talking to Mary about herself. Tentative and restrained as his questions
were, they sought her out. She felt no desire for concealment, but sat
there, upright, as one would most times find her, drawing a thread of
sea grass backwards and forwards through her fingers, answering the
questions he asked, sometimes briefly, sometimes with far excursion into
her mind, expressing thoughts she scarcely had been conscious of till
then.
"You make me a great egotist," she said presently, with a laugh.
"Isn't yours the age for egotism?" he answered. "Why shouldn't you think
about yourself when you're young, and all's in front of you? When you
come up with it you'll have no time."
"When I'm young," she laughed. "You'd better guess how old I am," and
she laughed again, knowing what Hannah or Jane would think to hear her.
"I don't want to guess," said he. "Suppose you were twenty-eight--or
even thirty, I say all's in front of you. That's your age. That's the
impression you give me."
"I'm twenty-nine," said she, and her eyebrow lifted with suppressed
laughter as he sat up in his surprise to look at her.
"Twenty-nine?" he repeated. "What have you been doing with your life?
Why are you here, playing an occasional game of golf, attending mothers'
meetings, going to your little church every Sunday to listen to that
fool of a parson you have? It's waste--waste--utter waste!"
"Have you ever thought how many women do waste in the world?" she asked
and then of a sudden felt the hot sweep of blood into her face. How had
it happened she had come to talk to a man and a stranger like this? Yet
wasn't it true, and wasn't there some sort of exciting satisfaction in
saying it? She could not have said that to Hannah, to Jane, not even to
Fanny. Why was it possible to exchange such intimate thoughts with a man
and he, an utter stranger she had met only the day before?
Suddenly, in the speaking of that thought, she had learnt something
about herself and not herself only but about all women and the whole of
life. All that her mother had taught her was wrong. Concealment,
deception, fraud, these were not the outward symbols of modesty. Just
as for the ailments of her body she could not have gone to a woman
doctor, so with the smoldering fever of her inmost thoughts, it was only
to a man she could speak.
Then did men understand? With the rest of her sex she had always argued
that they did not. If it was not for understanding, then why had she
spoken? It must be that they understood; but not with their minds, not
cruelly, scorchingly, calculatingly, as women did, judging shrewdly the
relation between character and the fact confided, but more spiritually
than this; the inner meaning, the deeper purpose, relating that
confidence to the soul of the woman who made it, rather than to her
conduct.
In that moment she had learnt the indefinable complement between the
sexes. In that moment, Mary Throgmorton had for the first time in her
life answered to the cry of Nature calling mate to mate.
The heat of the blood lifted in temperature in her cheeks as she came
upon her knowledge, but he said nothing of the flush that lingered in
them. A woman would have noticed that and to her shrewd observation
they would have burnt the more. As he sat there, not looking at her,
but staring through the pine trees across the bay, she found a feeling
of comfort in being with him as her cheeks grew cool again.
Never looking at her, he asked if women were conscious of that sense of
waste, and the tone of his voice was neither searching nor inquisitive.
It had no suggestion of personal curiosity behind it. He spoke from
inside himself, from inner purposes and from the inner purposes within
herself she answered him, feeling no sense of restraint.
"Do you imagine they wouldn't be?" she replied. "Not perhaps in their
everyday life, but in moments in those days when even in a crowd you
suddenly drop out of existence, like a star falling, and find yourself
alone. Of course they feel it. Every energy of man it seems to me has
been to keep women from the touch of life. But sometimes they find a
loophole and get out and find the sense of it, if it's only in the tips
of their fingers. They may be only moments, but every woman has them."
She had never talked like this to any one before. Had there been any one
to talk to? Would she have spoken to them in such a fashion if there
had? It was only since that sermon, the Christmas before, she had been
aware such thoughts were in the composition of her mind and never had
they expressed themselves so definitely as this.
Yet her wonder was more of him than of herself. Until that moment she
could never have believed a man could have understood. And it was not
from what he said that she felt he did. He was sitting up now and he
was nursing his knees as he gazed out across the bay towards Kingsnorth.
It was in the abstract penetration of his gaze, the silence about him as
he listened that she sensed his understanding.
Yet had she known it, he was thinking more of himself than of her.
Something echoed in him with all she had said. It was not that he had
never gained, but that he had lost his touch with life. The spirit in
him was wandering and alone and it had chanced upon hers, wandering
also.
This sense of mutual understanding was merely the call of Nature. The
hazard of all things had tumbled them together in the crowd of the
world. Something had touched. They knew it that second day. She was
answering some purpose in him--he in her. And the explanation that
Nature vouchsafed to her was that he understood women; and the
explanation that Nature vouchsafed to him was that he was beginning to
understand himself, and that there was much in him that needed much in
her.
It was too soon to think that. It was too upheaving.
He rose quickly to his feet, saying, half under his breath, but loud
enough for her to hear, "It's odd--it's all odd."
And she knew what he meant.
IV
The bay at Bridnorth is inclosed by two headlands of sandy stone. That
to the east rises irregularly with belts of pine wood and sea-bent oaks,
opening later in heathered moors that stretch in broad plateaus, then
sink to sheltered hollows where one farm at least lies hidden in its
clump of trees.
It is always a romantic world, that land which lies to the cliff edge
beside the sea. The man who farms it is forever at close grips with the
elements. He wrestles with Nature as those inland with their screening
hedgerows have little knowledge of. The hawthorn and the few scattered
trees that grow, all are trained by the prevailing winds into fantastic
shapes no hand of man can regulate. Sheep may do well upon those windy
pastures, but the cattle, ever at hiding in the hollows, wear a
weather-beaten look. Crops are hazardous ventures and, like the sower,
scattering his grain, must plant their feet full firmly in the soil if
they would stand until their harvest time against the winds that sweep
up from the sea.
Up through the belt of pine wood and across the heathered moors, Mary
came often those days with her friend. The views from countless places
called for his brush. Once she had brought him there to show him her
Devon, he sought the golf links no more. They never played their final
match.
On the first two occasions of their excursions beyond Penlock Hill, he
painted assiduously. Mary brought a book and read. Long whiles between
her reading she watched him, smiling, when, with almost childish
distress, he assured her he had done pictures that at least were worth
glancing at in a portfolio, if not a permanent frame.
For either it was, as in the first instance, that the atmosphere of a
strange country defeated him and tricked his sense of color, or his mind
was bent on other things, but both days were fruitless of results. On
each of these occasions, as before, he threw the sketches down,
unfinished, and fretted at his lack of skill.
"This Devon of yours," said he, "has got more color than I can get out
of my box. What really is the matter is that it has more color than
I've got in my eyes. If it's not in your eyes, it's not in your box.
You can't squeeze a green field out of a tube of oxide of chromium.
Paint's only the messenger between you and Nature."
Her sympathy was real. Notwithstanding that it gave her more of his
attention, she fretted for him too. When the next day they met at the
foot of Penlock Hill and she found him without his satchel, she was
genuinely disappointed and unhappy.
"Aren't you sufficiently selfish," he asked, "to be sensible of the
obvious fact that I'd far sooner talk to you than spend my time in
useless efforts?"
"Perhaps it isn't in the nature of women to be really selfish," she
said, with a laugh to lighten her meaning.
That set them at discussion upon the comparative selfishness of the
sexes as they mounted the hill and took the beaten path across the
heather.
For a man, he had strange points of view to her. With an honest
bitterness, he complained about the selfishness of men.
"But what else can we be?" said he. "As things are, what else can we
be? We run the world and this civilization's our conception of the
measures on which it has to be run, and this civilization is built up on
a solid rock of egotism and selfishness, with brute force to insist upon
the upholding of the standard. I wonder what would happen," he went on,
"if fair women, as Meredith visioned, rose in revolt. I wonder what
would happen if they suddenly combined to refuse to give the world the
material it builds its civilization with. I wonder where our brute force
would come in then. What sort of children should we have if women had to
be taken by brute force? And should we so take them if really they were
to resist? Brute force has been opposed only with brute force. Our
highest conception is that the strongest brute force wins. I wonder
what brute force would do if it were opposed with the force of the
spiritual ideals that women have and scarcely are awake to even yet.
Are you awake to the spiritual ideals in you?"
He looked at her suddenly as they walked and as suddenly and as firmly
she said--
"Yes."
"By Jove!" he exclaimed. "You're the first woman I've ever met who
would have answered as straight and direct as that. All the rest would
have hedged and shilly-shallied. Some would have giggled. Half of them
would frankly not have known what I meant."
"I know very well what you mean," she replied. "But if you're surprised
at a woman knowing, I don't think you're any more surprised than I am at
a man asking the question. How did you know to begin with that women
have spiritual ideals at all, strong enough ever to think of their being
ranged against brute force?"
She paused, but it was so obvious she had still more to say that he
waited rather than interrupt the train of her thought.
"I expect your wife's a very wonderful woman," she said.
In that pause she had wrestled with herself.
It had been the first time she had mentioned his wife in all their
conversation. Well she knew what would be the effect of it. It would
call her there between them. Inevitably it would thrust him a little
away from her to give his wife room in their minds.
It had been an irresistible thought, yet why should she spoil the
contact of mind between them by speaking it? Was it incumbent upon her
in any way to remind him of his wife?
Yet partly she was curious to know, and wholly she was honest to speak.
There was his wife. Nothing in Mary's thoughts would be reckoned
without her. Did he find a deep interest in speaking to her? She
believed he did, but there was his wife. She knew there was no
attraction of physical beauty in her, yet had he not made it obvious in
the last ten days that still she had attraction for him? It seemed
certain to her that he had; but there was his wife.
At every turn in their conversation, at the end of every steadied
glance, this woman she had never seen effected some intervention in
thought or vision in Mary's mind. More plainly a thousand times it
seemed she felt her presence than did he. There were moments when
enthusiasm caught him and it appeared he had forgotten every one and
everything but Mary there before him.
It became imperative then for her to summon that vision before her mind.
She did it with an effort. But later, when alone at night before she
turned to sleep, it came without call, trembling her with emotion at the
thought that a moment might happen upon them when they would both forget
or come to memory too late.
And what did she mean by that--too late? In all frankness and honesty,
she did not know. It were better explained, she would not allow herself
to know. Reaching that issue in her conscious thought about it all,
emotion would sweep like a hot wind upon her. She would lie, half
trembling in the darkness, pressing her hand upon her breast to frighten
herself into some sort of terrible joy at the rapid beating of her heart
and then, driving all conscious thought away from her, she would
straighten her limbs in the bed, exerting her physical control, as when
she nerved herself to play her game, thus forcing herself to quietude
and ultimately to sleep.
So she came always consciously to a point of thought which, bringing her
the vision of his wife and the sense of her own emotion, drifted her
towards that subconsciousness of being wherein the pattern of so many a
woman's life is made. She thought no more but, had she permitted it,
would have lain, silent-minded in an ecstasy. It was no less than
physical control, the straightening of her limbs, the clenching of her
hands, the beating of her pillow into new resting places for her head,
that put the ecstasy away.
Here, in some likeness, was that same moment, in the broad light of day
with him beside her and the crisp heather roots beneath their feet. It
was almost a physical effort in her throat that gave her strength to
say--
"I expect your wife's a very wonderful woman."
She meant him to realize that in her thoughts it was through his wife he
had become possessed of such knowledge about women; that there was his
wife; that she was there between them; that if he had for the instant
forgotten her, she had not. It was as though, in a violent muscular
effort, Mary had seized her by the wrist and jerked her into step with
them. Almost was she catching for her breath when she had done it.
"My wife is a wonderful woman," said he quietly. "She has as big a heart
as all this stretch of acres and that breadth of sea, but to-day is her
to-morrow. I didn't learn about the spiritual ideals of women from
her."
"Where did you learn it then?" asked Mary.
"Now you're asking me something I couldn't possibly tell you," said he,
and then he smiled. He had seen the look leap slanting across her eyes
as she thought of the other woman who had taught him.
"Because," he added--"I don't know."
V
If it were Fanny who first had sense of what was happening, it was Jane
who, when she discovered it, spoke out her mind about the matter.
Fanny knew by instinct, long before the first suspicions had fermented
her elder sister's thoughts. She detected a sharper, brighter look in
Mary's eyes; she calculated a greater distance in Mary's meditative
glance.
At first it was as subtle a detection as the record of that weightless
rider one straddles on the balance arm. Faintly the scales of her
suspecting answered to the application of the signs which she observed.
Faintly the weight of a thought was registered upon her consciousness.
If it was not as yet that Mary was in love, at least her mind was
centering on that which any moment might turn to burning thoughts.
They occupied the same room together, these two. This had been a habit
from childhood. Since the death of Mr. and Mrs. Throgmorton, the
accommodation of that house did not necessitate it. But they had grown
used to each other's company. They would have missed the sound of each
other's voices those moments before the approach of sleep, the exchange
of more lucid conversation in the mornings as they dressed.
It was in unaccustomed pauses as she undressed at night that Fanny's
mind found the first whispers of her instinct about Mary. It was not
that she said to herself--"I used to sit on my bed like that--I used to
stare at the wall--I can just remember what I used to think about." Far
more it was that, at the sight of Mary doing these things, there came,
like an echo into Fanny's pulses, the old emotions through which she had
passed when she had been walking round those cliff paths waiting for the
destiny that should declare itself for her.
She watched her sister, even more closely than she knew. It was
emotional, not conscious observation. Once the matter had fastened
itself upon her imagination, the whole spirit of it emotionalized her.
She noted all the indications of Mary's condition of mind, without
looking for them; almost without knowing she had seen them.
The processes of her thought during that first fortnight when at the
last Liddiard was meeting Mary every day, were subtle, subliminal and
beyond any conscious intent. Often watching her sister as, regarding
herself in the mirror while she did her hair, with those indefinite
touches of greater care and more calculating consideration, she found a
pain fretting at her heart--a hunger-pain as of one who is
ill-nourished, keeping life together but no more.
In this it was as also in the choice of the skirts and blouses Mary
wore. It needed no great selection of wardrobe to trace this to its
source.
Fanny could never have dreamt of expressing the knowledge that women
dress to the dictation of their emotions even if it be something that is
never revealed, the color of a ribbon on their undergarments, even the
choice of those undergarments themselves. That which touches their skin
means insensibly something to them when their emotions are astir. It
was not that Fanny had learnt this; she knew it. But it was not that
she could speak of her knowledge.
All that happened with Fanny those days was that the observation of
these things in Mary emotionalized her. Lying in bed there, watching
her sister as she dressed, she found her pulses beating more quickly.
She felt a restlessness of body as well as mind. She threw the
bedclothes from her and got up, not because she wanted to be dressed
herself, but because she could not stay in bed any longer.
And then, when one morning, Mary said--
"I've been thinking, Fanny--why shouldn't I turn that room looking over
the garden into a bedroom? We're awfully cramped here. It's just like
us to go on with the same arrangements, merely because we're used to
them."
Then Fanny knew, and her knowledge was more of an upheaval in her mind
than any thought of this revolution against the placid routine of their
existence. So much greater was it that she could not even bestir herself
to resentment against Mary for preferring to be alone.
The thought crossed her mind--
"How do I interfere with her? It's awfully selfish of her to want to be
alone. It isn't as if we hadn't shared the same room for years."
Such thoughts as these would have been poignant at any other time. Mary
was prepared for the assertion of them. But they seemed idle to Fanny
then--foolish and utterly devoid of purpose.
She sat on the side of her bed, staring at Mary busily engaged in doing
her hair. And she knew so well what the meaning of that centered
occupation was. Such a moment she would have chosen herself for an
announcement of that nature.
Mary was in love, and with a man who had a wife already. She was
surprised in her own soul at the littleness of weight the second half of
that realization carried in her thoughts. She did not ask herself
what--this being so--Mary was going to do about it. As a problem of
impenetrable solution, it meant scarcely anything to her. All that kept
repeating itself in her mind was just the knowledge that Mary was in
love--Mary was in love.
She felt a sickness in her throat. It was not of fear. It was not
exactly of joy. She might have been seized of an ague, for she
trembled. The sensation was like waves breaking over her; as though she
were in water, fathoms deep, and were struggling to keep her lips above
the surface that she might breathe freely. But she could not breathe;
only in stolen moments, as if breath were no longer hers to hold.
Mary was in love. She wanted that room by herself so that at night she
could lie alone with her thoughts and none could touch or spoil them
with their presence. She wanted that room alone so that in the morning
she could wake with none but her thoughts beside her. She was in love.
Suddenly the world to Fanny seemed bitter and black and cold. She was
out of it. It had gone by. She was left there on the
roadside--trembling.
Love was the magic by which she herself could be revealed to herself
when, coming upon this sudden knowledge of Mary, it was that she
realized there was no magic in the world for her.
She was alone, unloved, unloving. In that there was merely
consciousness, a staring, hungry consciousness of herself. Only in the
abandonment of generosity that came with love could she find any meaning
in her soul. Only by giving could she gain.
The tragedy of Fanny Throgmorton and the countless women that are like
her was that she had none to whom she could give.
All this, without a word in her thoughts that could have given it
expression, was what she felt about Mary as she sat on her bedside that
morning and watched her sister doing her hair.
VI
Jane made the discovery for herself, but by chance.
One morning when Mary had gone out, indicating the likelihood of her
playing a game of golf, Jane put on her oldest hat, took the path
through the marshes which avoided the necessity of going through the
village where she would be seen and criticized for her clothes, and went
alone up onto the cliffs beyond Penlock.
These were rare, but definite, occasions with her. She felt the
necessity of them at unexpected intervals as a Catholic, apart from
Saints' days and Holy days, feels the necessity of confession and
straightway, in the midst of business hours or household duties, seeks
out the priest and speaks his mind.
To Jane, those lonely walks with the solemn solitude of those cliffs,
were confessional moments when, setting herself at a distance which that
wide environment could lend her, she could look on at herself, could
calmly inspect and almost dispassionately criticize.
She went without knowledge of her purposes. It was just for a walk, she
said, and if questioned why she insisted upon going alone, she would
find herself becoming angry at their curiosity.
"Mayn't I sometimes like my own company better than anybody else's?" she
would ask shortly and that was about all she knew definitely of these
confessional calls. If she was aware of any mental exercise during
those walks, it was in momentary observations of Nature, a lark soaring,
a flight of gulls upon the water, the life of that farm in the hollow
above Penlock. Of that inquisitorial examination of herself,
practically she knew nothing. It took place behind the bolts of doors,
all sound of it shut out, barring admittance to her conscious self.
Coming back for the midday meal she would say to Hannah across the
table--
"How you can stick in the house all day, one week after another, beats
me. It was perfectly lovely this morning up there on the moors. We all
make life so automatic here that one might as well put a penny in the
slot and have finished with it. It's only a pennyworth we get."
From this they received the impression she had also given to herself,
that she had been drinking in the beauties of the countryside. If she
had, it was but a sip of wine at the altar where she had been kneeling
in inmost meditation.
This morning, feeling the sun too hot for energy, she had found for
herself a sheltered bed in the heather where, through a gap in the
jungle it became as she lay in the midst of it, she could see the farm
in its hollow, the sea of cerulean beyond and, nearer in the foreground,
a belt of pine trees standing up amongst their surrounding gorse and
bracken.
It was there upon a path leading through the bracken to a gate in one of
the farmer's hedges, she caught her first glimpse of Mary and Liddiard.
The mere fact of her not being on the golf links as she had said drove
the suspicion hot, like a branding iron, on Jane's thoughts.
She watched them pass by below the hill on which she had found her bed
and her eyes followed them like a bird's, alert and keen. When they
stopped at the gate and Liddiard seated himself on it with his feet
resting on the bar beneath while Mary stood below him, Jane made for
herself a window in that secreting wall of heather and lay there,
watching them, with all her blood fermenting to a biting acid that
tasted in her mouth and smarted in her eyes, becoming even, as it were,
a self-righteous irritation beneath her skin.
To her it was obvious enough. Their Mary who read so many books, who
seemed to care so little what destiny the fateful coach to Bridnorth
brought her, was sport of Fate and surely now. Their Mary was in love.
Jane angered at the realization of it to think what a fool her sister
was. It would be talked about the whole village over, especially then,
during the holidays when the summer visitors were there. One visitor
there was in particular who came every year and spent most of her
mornings after bathing drying her hair on the beach and talking scandal
till hunger and the mid-day meal called her homewards.
What a fool she was! This story of herself and a married man would
linger long whiles in Bridnorth. They had not much to talk of. They
preserved their gossipings with assiduous care. Each year it would be
whispered about her and men would keep her at a greater distance than
ever.
They talked there together for an hour and more. For an hour and more,
Jane lay and watched them. What were they talking of? Sometimes by the
way he spoke, leaning down and riveting each word upon Mary's attention,
it seemed as though their conversation were of the most serious nature.
How could it be serious? What a fool she must be if she thought it was!
It was an idle flirtation with him, a married man, alone on his
holidays, amusing himself with the most likely girl that offered
herself. Yet never with all her astuteness would Jane have considered
that Mary was the most likely. Always Mary had seemed, except for her
games, insensible to the attractions of men. What had come over her?
Fanny was the one whom men with inclination for harmless passing of
their time had singled out for semi-serious interchange of ideas. Fanny
was romantic. Men liked that when it did not become too serious to
interfere with the free pursuit of their enjoyments.
But this, as she watched them there through her curtain of heather,
looked more romantic than anything she could ever have imagined about
Fanny. Had they been strangers and had she come across them thus she
would have felt herself in the presence of something not meant for her
to see and, passing them by, she would have given all impression of
looking the other way, however covertly she might have observed.
Yet here it was her own sister and, to herself, calling it her duty, she
watched them both with every sense stretched forth to clutch each sign
or movement that might give evidence to her impulsive mind how far the
thing had gone between them.
She was not long in learning the utmost truth. After a long silence,
Liddiard slipped down off the gate and stood in the bracken looking
directly into Mary's eyes. Jane felt that look. She held her breath as
it pierced into her own eyes. Then, when he laid his hands upon Mary's
shoulders and for an instant held her so as he spoke, Jane swallowed in
her throat and against the roots of heather felt her heart beating like
a trapped bird in her breast.
At that distance, more sure than Mary, she knew what was going to
happen. More sure than either of them, she knew. When suddenly, as
though some leaping power had swept upon him unexpectedly, he took her
in his arms and their heads were one together, linked with his kisses,
Jane had known of it more surely than he.
Feeling those kisses on her own lips, on her eyes, her throat, and like
hammers beating in her heart, Jane buried her face in the heather but
did not know that she moaned with pain.
When she looked up, they had gone.
VII
If those kisses were hurtful to Jane, they were a sublime realization to
Mary. In the rush of them as they pressed against her lips, she felt a
consummation of all those forces of life which, with the Bridnorth
coach, had so often called to her as it came and passed with its message
out of the world.
Rightly or wrongly in the accepted standards of morality, Mary felt such
completed justification in those moments as to be sensitive of the
surging intentions of life triumphing within her. This, she knew then,
was the fullness of meaning in a woman's life. If it were pleasure, it
was not the pleasure of sensation; not even the pleasure of the promise
of gratification. None of the joys of amorous delay were mingled in
those kisses for her.
What she felt in the rushing torrent in her veins was all subsidiary to
the overwhelming sense of fulfillment.
He would have lingered there beside that gateway in the bracken, would
have dallied with the joy it was to him to feel her whole being in
response to his. But Mary had no need of that.
If this was what her mother had meant by concealment of her own
sensations, she surely had it then. This was not an hour of dalliance in
her life. It was the deep-sounding prelude to the realization of the
very spiritual substance of her being.
At her dictation they left that place in the bracken. In response to her
wish they turned from the gateway and sought the beaten path through the
heather again. In that moment she wanted no more of his kisses; partly
perhaps because in her emotions she could have borne no more; but mostly
it was that she wanted space and freedom for her thoughts; to speak them
to him if need be, certainly to review them in her mind. It was time
she demanded--time to touch the wonder that was coming to her, which,
from the power of those kisses, she somehow assumed could not be
withheld from her now.
"I could not help that," he said almost apologetically when she insisted
upon their going on. "Somehow or other--I don't know--honestly, I
couldn't help it, and I suppose I've offended you now."
For one instant she turned her eyes upon him with a searching glance.
"Offended?" she repeated. "Didn't you realize that I let you kiss
me--not once--but--" Suddenly she realized in a swift vision the Mary
Throgmorton that was; the Mary Throgmorton of the square, white Georgian
house; the sister of Hannah and Jane and Fanny, and she could not say
how many times he had kissed her. Her cheeks flamed.
"Don't talk about offense," said she almost hotly, and walked on with
him some time in silence, saying no more, leaving him in an amaze of
wondering what her thoughts could be and whether that denial of offense
was not merely a screen to hide from him the shame she felt at what had
happened.
Was she ashamed? It seemed to him then that she was. That probably was
the last time he would touch her lips, yet having touched them and felt,
not the eagerness as with Fanny, but the sureness of their response,
there had been awakened in him the full consciousness of desire to touch
them with his lips again. For now he felt, not master of her, but a
servant. At the mere utterance of her command, he must obey. With all
his eagerness to stay there longer at that gate there was no power in
him of conflict with her wishes when she expressed the desire to go on.
What was it she was thinking as she walked? Did really she hate him for
what he had done? The cry her nature had made to his in those moments
of the closeness of their bodies had redoubled and redoubled in its
intensity. Yet he was less sure of her than he had been before.
He felt like one struggling blindly through the storm of his emotions,
answering some call that was not for help but of command. Was that the
end of it all? Would he never again hold her in his arms? Tentatively
he took her hand which did not resist his holding as they walked.
"My dear," he said--almost below his breath--"I suppose I've seemed
weak--but--I love you. It was not weakness. I can't explain it, but if
you knew, really it was strength."
"Please don't say any more--not now," said she and lengthened her stride
and threw back her head that all the full sweep of the air might beat
upon her face and throat.
It never consciously occurred to her that a woman's throat and the fine
column of her neck could express her beauty to a man. Yet as they
walked, she knew that his eyes had seen such beauty in hers.
So it was, when Jane looked up again, they had gone. For another half
hour and more she sat there in her bed in the heather, trying to
appreciate all that it meant. But again and again the sequence of her
conventional thoughts was disturbed by the vision of those two as her
eyes turned to the gateway in the bracken and she saw them in her mind
with lips touching and heads close pressed together in that long
embrace.
With that vision all conventionality slipped from her control, even from
the very substance of her thoughts. Instinctively she knew she had been
witness of something she had neither power nor right to judge when,
forcing herself to regard it as all the years of habit and custom would
have her do, she shut her eyes to the sight of them in that bracken and
called upon her judgment to dispassionate her mind.
That evening she contrived to be alone with Mary after tea. They walked
in the garden, round the paths with their borders of thrift in heavy
cushions of growth.
In a tone of casual unconcern, Jane asked her about her game of golf.
Her pause in answering was significant. In full confidence, Jane
expected the lie and understood her sister still the less when, having
weighed the truth against expediency, she replied--
"We didn't play golf. We went up onto the moors above Penlock."
It gave Jane the opportunity she sought, but in the frankness of giving
confused her. So had her mind forestalled all the progressions of that
conversation, that for a moment she was silent.
What sort of woman was this Mary of theirs who seemed to have no
guiltiness of conscience, when from childhood she had been trained to
listen to the still, small voice? Did she not realize the enormity of
what she was doing? Jane's lips set to their thinnest line.
"Do you think it's wise," she began, and in that tone of voice which,
with a sharp edge, cut the plain pattern of her meaning--"Do you think
it's wise to go about so much with this man? Even if he weren't
married--do you think it's wise?"
The sharp glance which Jane stole at her sister then revealed Mary
possessed and unconcerned. So well had she known what Jane was going to
say that surprise had no power to disconcert her. But beyond that,
there was in some chamber of her mind a certain sureness of herself, a
steadying confidence in all she did. This it had also been even in the
high torrent of her emotion when she would have no more of his kisses
and seemed in that moment to him the substance of unyielding stone his
temperature of passion had heated but a moment and no more.
"I think," she replied, after a moment's silence; "I think that this
wisdom you talk about--worldly wisdom--is a very over-rated virtue. I
think we've lost a lot--all of us--by cultivating it. I find Mr.
Liddiard much more interesting than any one or any thing in Bridnorth.
Life after all is short enough--dull enough. Why shouldn't I take what
interest it offers when I can, while I can? He goes in a few days.
What's worldly wisdom to the feeling that your mind is growing instead
of stagnating? If you mean you think I ought not to go out with him
again, I can't agree with you."
She spoke like a woman addressing a community of women, not as one
sister to another. There was a note of detachment in her voice, Jane
had never heard before. In all that household, Jane always assumed she
had herself the final power of control. She felt it no longer here. So
long as Mary was speaking, it appeared to her as though she were one
listening to some authority far superior to her own. It was in Mary's
voice and yet seemed outside and beyond her as well. There was power
behind it. She could not sense the direction or origin of that power,
but it dominated her. She felt small beside it, and feeling small and
realizing that it was this Mary, their youngest, who was the voice of
it, she grew angry. All control of that situation she had intended to
conduct left her. It left her fretting with the sensation of her own
impotence.
"You can't agree with me, can't you!" retorted Jane hotly. "You
wouldn't agree, I suppose, if I said that, beside being unwise, I
thought it beastly and sinful and horrible altogether, to see a girl
kissing a married man, kissing him in a beastly way too?"
Never, even from the first moment of her discovery, had she ever meant
to say this. This was not Jane's method. What flood of emotion had
borne her thus far out of her course? Fully it had been her intention
to speak of Mary's friendship with Liddiard as though it were a flippant
and a passing thing; to belittle it until, in its littleness, she had
shown this foolish sister of hers what folly it was.
How had it happened she had thus exaggerated its importance by the heat
of her words? Something had pricked and spurred her. Something had
driven her beyond her control. Finding herself opposed by a force so
infinitely greater than her own, she had struggled and fought. It had
been a moment's hysteria in the sudden consciousness of her impotence.
Then what power was it? Not merely Mary herself. She could not submit
her mind to that admission. It was greater than Mary and yet, becoming
the voice of it, she felt that this sister of hers was greater than
herself.
To Mary, the shock of realization that Jane had seen them that moment in
the bracken was not one that seemed to tremble or emotionalize her at
all. If she felt any anger at the thought that she had been spied
upon--for swiftly recalling the place of that happening, she knew Jane
must have been in hiding,--it was an anger that burnt out, like ignited
powder, a flash, no more. It left no trace. All her consciousness
assembled in her mind to warn her that the meaning of Life which had
come in those last two weeks to her was in jeopardy of being made
meaningless. It did not frighten her, but set the beating of her heart
to a slow and deliberate measure.
Whatever Jane knew and however she intended to use her knowledge, Mary
determined to fight for this new-found purpose of her existence. If
they were fools, if theirs was the folly of waste, if they let all life
go by them to be worldly wise, she could not help or wait for them now.
Something had come with its promise of fulfillment to her, her nature
urged her not to ignore. What if he was married? There had been
moments in the inception and growth of their relationship when she had
thought first of his wife. She thought first of her no longer. She was
stealing no intrinsic thing. In a few days he would go back to his house
in Somerset and what he had given her of his mind, as she had seen, had
been his to give her; and, if he had kissed her, what had she stolen
from his wife in that? He would still kiss his wife. She knew that.
As plainly as if they were there before her, she could see their
embrace. It meant nothing to her. They would not be the same kisses he
had given Mary.
Whatever had been the call of Nature to him in that moment when passion
had spoken out of his lips, his eyes, the power she felt in his arms as
they crushed her, it had been not through the channel of his body, but
his mind.
Insensibly she was learning the multitudinous courses by which Nature
came to claim her own. She was stealing nothing from his wife. All that
was coming to her was her own and with the sudden realization of Jane's
knowledge of what had happened, her first sensation was a warning that
her very soul was in jeopardy.
There was nothing to be said then; no defense that she could, or cared
to, offer. She knew quite well from those long years of knowledge, how
horrible their kisses must have seemed to Jane. Once upon a time, she
might have thought them horrible herself. Now, there was nothing to be
said that might serve in her defense.
Taking a deep breath, she looked straight in Jane's eyes and stood
there, arresting their movement on the garden path to paint the defiant
attitude of her mind.
"Well--if you've seen," said she, "you've seen. There's no more to be
said about it. We've all lived together so long, I suppose it's hard
for any one of us to realize that our lives are really all separate
things. You talk about it as being beastly. I can assure you there was
nothing beastly in our minds. However, you must think whatever your
mind suggests to you to think, and you must start yourself all the talk
about us you say is bound to come when I'm seen about with him, if you
feel that way inclined. But I'll tell you just one thing--you can't
make me ashamed of myself. I'm twenty-nine."
She turned away, walked with all the firmness of her stride into the
house and left Jane, standing there, withered and dry between those
borders of spreading thrift and flowers all dropping their seed into the
mold that waited for them.
VIII
Liddiard was returning to Somerset in three days' time. Before their
parting that day above Penlock, he had urged for their next meeting as
soon as she was free of household duties the following day.
"Only three more chances," said he, "of being with you, and when I
thought most I understood you, understood you so well that my arms
seemed the only place in which to hold you, I find I understand you less
than ever. You don't ask what it means. You don't say "What are we
going to do?" I've told you I love you, but you don't appear to want to
know anything about the future. It seems to me that any other girl
would be wanting to know what was to become of her. You're so quiet--so
silent."
Climbing back down the cliffs, holding on to one of the pine trees in
her descent, Mary had turned and smiled at him. It was an inscrutable
smile to Liddiard. It was not that he tried to understand it. It was,
as it penetrated his mind, that he knew it to be quite impossible of
comprehension. More it was as if Nature had smiled upon him, than the
mere bright light of the parting of a woman's lips. In its illumination
it seemed to reveal to him the vision of himself in a strange
powerlessness. He felt like some tool of a workman as it lies idle on
the bench, waiting the moment for those hands to pick it up and give it
purpose. So it appeared to him might a carpenter have smiled with
pleasure at the chisel he knew his hands could wield for perfect work.
All the more that he had meant to say dried into silence on his lips.
"I don't want to know anything about the future," said Mary as she
walked on, "I know you love me and I think I understand what you love
and why you love. I know I'm not sophisticated. I've no experience of
the world. I don't pretend to understand these things in the light of
experience. I haven't got any wisdom about it, but I feel it's not
unreal or impossible for you to love me and love your wife as well. I
don't feel I want you to say you don't love your wife in order to prove
that you love me. I think it would finish everything in my mind if you
said you didn't love her. I'm not thinking about the future, because
there is no future as you used the word. I don't ask what we're going
to do, because I know what we're going to do."
"What are we going to do?" he asked.
"In two days' time," she replied, "you're going home to Somerset and I'm
going to stay on here in Bridnorth."
Suddenly she turned again swiftly and barred his passage as he came
along down the cliff path behind her.
"Why don't you understand me?" she asked abruptly. "It all seems so
plain. Don't you realize how I've been brought up? I know there's a
certain sacredness in marriage. I've been trained to regard it as one
of the most unbreakable ties in the world. I wouldn't dream of expecting
or claiming anything from you, however much you said you loved me.
Whatever happened, I shouldn't dream of that. You're half afraid of it.
I can see you are. I don't love you any the less because I see it. It
seems natural you should be afraid. It seems to me most men would be
with most women. But you needn't be."
She had let him be drawn close to her again. He put his hands on her
shoulders and looked with all his passion into her eyes.
"That's the first time you've said you loved," he whispered. "Do you
know what it sounded like to me?"
She shook her head.
"Like an organ playing in an empty church. My God! You're wonderful."
Then she had let him kiss her again; again, herself, being the one to
draw away when emotion rose to stifling in her throat. Again was he
obedient to her wishes.
They had arranged to meet the next morning on the cliffs. Liddiard had
promised he would bring lunch.
"They'll think we're up at the Golf dub," he had said, for already in
their minds had appeared that urgency for deception which should secure
for them the certainty of their meeting.
But the next morning, after her conversation with Jane, Mary dispatched
a note to Liddiard at the White Hart Hotel.
He tore it open with fingers that had dread in them.
"Meet me on the beach at 11.30," she had written, "near the bathing
tents. Don't bother about lunch."
With a sudden chill it struck him. It was all over. The night had
brought her calmer thoughts. Emotion was steadied in her now. She was
not going to trust herself alone with him again. It was all finished.
On an impulse he took a piece of paper and wrote on it--
"Have been called back to Somerset this morning; so sorry I shall have
no opportunity to say good-by."
When he had written, he stared at it, reading it again and again.
Was not this the best? It was too wonderful to be true; too wonderful
to last. He knew himself well enough to realize that any prolonged
deception with his wife would be impossible. He had the honesty of his
emotions; the courage of his thoughts. He could not practice deception
with any ease. Wonderful as it was, could any wonder compensate for the
utter wrecking of his home? It was not as though in the wonder that had
come to her, she refused to recognize his wife. That was what brought
him such amaze of her. Any other woman he would have expected to be
jealous, exacting, cruel. She appeared to be none of these.
What, in the name of God, was it she wanted? The sudden wish to
understand, the sudden curiosity to find out communicated with the
energy in his fingers. He tore up the note he had written and flung the
pieces away, sending back the messenger without a reply.
It was playing with life, a sport that in other men earned for them his
deepest contempt. It was playing with life, yet the call to it was
greater than he could or cared to resist.
At half-past eleven, he went down to the beach where all the inhabitants
of Bridnorth sat and whiled away their time till the midday meal, and
there he found her, dressed with more care and more effect than she had
ever been before. She was lying down under the warm shade of a
brilliantly colored parasol and, as he approached her, it seemed to him
that there was a deeper beauty in her then than in any other woman in
the world.
"Why this?" he said as he sat down. "Here of all places? Do you know
very nearly I didn't come?"
"Yes, I was afraid of that," she replied. "Afraid for a moment. Not
really afraid. But I couldn't explain in my note."
"What is it then?"
"We were seen yesterday."
"Who by?"
"My sister--Jane."
"Seen where?"
"By that gate in the bracken."
He screwed up his mouth and bit at a piece of loose skin on his lip.
"What's she going to do?" he asked.
"Nothing. What can she do? No one must know if we meet again--that's
all. We must be more careful."
He stared at her in bewildered astonishment.
"I don't understand you," he muttered. "Sometimes you seem like adamant
when your voice is softest of all."
She looked at him and with her eyes told him that she loved him and with
a little odd twist of her lips, which scarcely she herself knew of, she
kissed his lips and at that distance at which he sat from her, he felt
the kiss like a leaf falling with a flutter to the ground.
"What do you mean--we must be more careful?" he said thickly. "What do
you mean by that? How can we be more careful? Where else could we hope
to be more alone than on those cliffs--unless--unless--" His breath
clung in his throat. He swallowed it back and went on in a hoarse
voice--"Unless it were the time we went there."
"What time?" she asked.
"Night," said he. "Midnight and all the hours of early morning."
She lay back on her cushion beneath the warm shadow of her parasol and
closed her eyes, saying nothing while he sat staring at the curved line
of her throat.
IX
It was no difficult matter to rise unheard at midnight in her room,
unheard to creep quietly downstairs, to open and close the kitchen door
into the yard. Having accomplished that, it was but a few steps to the
door through the wall into the road.
Now that she slept alone in that room at the back of the house, Mary had
no fear of discovery. Nevertheless her heart was beating, an even but
heavy throb, nor settling to the normal pulse, even when she found
herself out in the lane and turning towards the path across the marshes
by the mouth of the River Watchett that leads a solitary way to Penlock
Head.
She questioned herself in nothing that she did. Her mind was made. It
was no moment for questioning. All questions such as there had been, and
doubtless there were many, she had answered. It was no habit of hers to
look back over her shoulder. She fixed her destination with firm
resolve, and, once the fear of immediate discovery was left behind, she
walked with a firm stride. Imagination played no havoc with her nerves.
Already her heart was in their meeting place.
A restive heart it was, all bounding at sudden visions, leaping, shying;
at moments in riot almost at thought of lying in his arms. Sometimes
even there was fear, a fear, not of the thing she would fly; not a fear
that made the heart craven. Rather it was a fear that steeled her
courage to face whatever might befall.
Some sense undoubted she had of the mad riot of passion, that it could
terrify, that it was frightening like sudden thunder bursting. But just
as she would lie still in her bed at home through the fiercest storm, so
now she knew, however deep her fear, that she would not complain.
She walked that way through the marshes to their meeting place at the
foot of Penlock Hill like one, firm in her step, who went to a glorious
death. Death was terrible, but in all the meaning it had, she felt no
fear of it.
In such manner as this did Mary Throgmorton go to the confirmation of
her faith in Life, and behind her, in the square, white house, she left
one to the bitterest of its realizations.
Fanny could not sleep that night. Near midnight, she lit a candle and
began to read. But no reading could still the unsettled temper of her
mind. Again and again her eyes lifted from the printed page, seeking
corners of the room where, in that candlelight, the shadows gathered,
harbor for the vague wandering of her thoughts.
Long after midnight, in the communicating silence which falls about a
sleeping house, she heard a sound and sat up in bed. Some one had
opened and shut the gate into the lane. She got up and went to the
window. If any one passed into the road in front of the house, she must
see them. No one came. All was silence again.
Yet something within her insisted upon her conviction that she had not
been mistaken. Some one had left the house and, if they had turned the
other way, could not possibly have been seen by her.
In that midnight silence, the fantastic shapes the beams of the candle
cast, the heavy darkness of the night outside, slight as the incident
was, grossly exaggerated it in her mind. She felt she must tell some
one. Jane was the person to tell. Jane's fancies were slowly stirred.
She might turn it all to ridicule, but if anything were the matter, she
would be practical at least.
Slipping her arms into her dressing gown, she went out onto the landing.
The door of Jane's room was at the further end. As she passed Mary's
door on her way, something came out of the recesses of her mind and took
her heart and held it fast.
Mary's door was open. She stood there staring at it while all the
pulses in her body accelerated to the stimulus of her imagination.
Always Mary slept with her door closed. It was not to be understood how
she had departed from that habit now that she slept alone. Why had she
chosen to sleep alone? Was it more definite a reason than Fanny had
supposed? What more definite than thoughts of love?
Scarcely aware of the change of her intentions or that Jane for the
instant had dropped completely out of her thoughts, Fanny pushed open
the door and softly entered Mary's room.
Just within the threshold, she stopped, half held by darkness and
whispered Mary's name.
"Mary--Mary--"
There was no reply. There was no sound of breathing. Never had the
whole world seemed so still. She was faintly conscious that her eyes
were staring wide in that darkness, staring to find softly what she knew
now the dazzling glitter of a light would reveal to her in all its
startling truth. All beating of her heart appeared to be arrested as
she felt her way across the room to the bedside table where she knew the
box of matches lay. Something fluttered in her thin breast, like a
thing suspended in mid-air, but it had no relation to the passage of the
blood through her veins. It seemed to need purchase, a solid wall
against it before it could beat again. Yet no solid wall was there.
Flesh and bones in all her substance, Fanny felt as though in those
moments her body were a floating thing in an ether of sensation. She
found the matches. With fingers that were damp and cold, she struck
one. It flamed up with blinding brightness into her staring eyes. She
closed them swiftly and then she looked.
The bed was empty. Their Mary was away. With trembling fingers, she lit
the candle; then gazed down at the crumpled bedclothes, the sheets
thrown back, the pillow tossed.
With automatic calculation she leant down and felt the bedclothes with
her hand as one feels a thing just dead.
They were warm--still warm. And where now was the body that had warmed
them?
With a sudden catch in her throat that was not a sob and had no more
moisture of tears in it than a thing parched dry with the sun, she flung
herself down on the bed and leant her body against the warm sheets and
buried her head in the warm pillow, fighting for her breath like some
frightened beast that has been driven to the last of all its hiding
places.
X
They met in silence on the worn path at the foot of Penlock Hill; two
black figures joining in the darkness and, without word of greeting,
without question of the way, turning by common consent towards the moors
and vanishing into the pine trees.
Never was their silence broken while they climbed the hill. They had
breath for that ascent, but no more. Coming to a steep place, he
offered his hand to help her and then still held it till they reached
the moors.
It was a late rising moon that crept up, shimmering wet with its pale
light out of the sea. They stood with the heather about their knees and
watched it, hand in hand, still silent; but he felt her trembling and
she heard when he swallowed in his throat.
"It had to be a night like this," he said presently when the moon at
last rose clear and the light seemed to fall from her in glittering
drops that splashed like pieces of silver into the sea. "I know this is
the one night of my life," he went on. "I know there'll never be
moments like it again as long as I live. Perhaps you don't believe that.
You'll think I've said such things before; yet the whole of my
existence, past, present and future, is all crowded into this hour. I
know I shall realize it the more fully as I grow older and Time wipes
Time away."
She clung to his arm. It was now she was most afraid. The moors were
so still about them. Down in its hollow amongst the firs and the
misshapen oaks, the farm lay silent and black. No light was there. She
thought of them asleep in their beds. So sleeping, she thought of
Hannah, Jane, and Fanny. Only they two were awake in all the world it
seemed. Only for some vague yet impelling purpose did the world exist at
all and alone for them.
She did not feel at his mercy. She was not afraid of him. Indeed she
clung to his arm as they stood in the heather, clung to his arm,
trembling, appealing as though he alone were left between herself and
Fate to soften it; as though to less terrible a note, he could still the
sound of voices shouting in her ears.
These were sensations she had no words for.
"You stand there trembling," he said in a whisper. "What are you
thinking of, my dear?"
"It's all so quiet," she whispered in reply, and a short laugh with no
mirth in it escaped from her throat. "I don't know why I should expect
or want it to be anything else."
"And do you want it to be anything else?"
"I suppose I must, or I shouldn't have said that."
"My dear, are you afraid?"
She jerked her head, reluctant to give assent to that.
No wonder, he thought. My God, no wonder women are afraid. If anything
should happen, she'll have the brunt of it. Wouldn't I be afraid if I
were her?
Such thoughts as these caught him to hesitation a moment stronger than
the urging passion in his blood.
Was it fair to her? This girl, who in that stagnating corner of the
world knew so little, was it fair? Hadn't he strength to resist it even
now; to turn their steps back; to let her go, the great-hearted thing
she was, as he had found her? If it might be the one moment in his life
to him, would it be the less for letting it pass by? Would realization
make it the greater? Might it not make it the less?
A surging desire to be master of himself swept over him. A rushing
inclination to protect her from the forces of Nature in himself took
louder voice than all his needs. She was too wonderful to spoil with
the things that might happen in a sordid world.
For what would they say and think, those sisters of hers, and what sort
of hell would life become for her in those narrow streets of little
Bridnorth?
It was no good saying things might not happen.
What right had he to subject her to chance? She was too fine, too great
of heart for that. With all the generosity of her soul she had placed
herself in his hands, it was for him to save her even now, before it was
too late. She was afraid. Then if there were a God who gave men
strength, he could be strong enough to let her go.
He held her even the tighter with his fingers as in his mind he set her
free.
"Mary," he said, "I told you it was strength, not weakness that made me
kiss you. I expect you didn't believe that. It was true. And I feel
stronger now than then. We're going back again, my dear, now, without
waiting, I couldn't stay here longer. We're going back."
"Where?"
She said it in her breath.
"Back to Bridnorth--to our beds. I love you, my dear, that's why we're
going back."
She felt a sudden chill and shivered.
"Back?" she whispered. No other word but that could her mind grasp.
As swiftly then the chill blew by. She felt as though she stood in
scorching flames, as if the very heather were alight about her. There
was pain and it gave her a fierce power she never thought she had
possessed. It brought her anger to think she could suffer so much for
such return.
Back? They could not go back! Not now! She had been through it all.
This that must happen was just a moment. It was nothing to the hours
her mind had lived till then.
She took off her hat and flung it down beside her in the heather.
"It's stifling, this heat," she muttered. "Everything seems burning."
He saw her throw down her hat. He heard what she said. The blood that
had been strong like a courageous wine, turned all to water in his
veins. He felt his limbs trembling. Something in her was stronger than
the greatest purpose he had ever had in his life. It was a purpose he
felt might be even stronger than she, yet knew he could not make it so.
It occurred to him, with an ironical laugh in the thought, that she was
master of their moments and not he. And yet not she herself. Men were
the stronger sex. That was an inherent thought, whatever might be said
in abstract argument. Coming to such a moment in life as this, it was
the man who must direct. With all the violence of his passions, he
could still control.
This, with a loud voice, he told himself in his mind. Yet there was her
hat lying in the heather and there in his ears were the sounds of her
breathing as she stood beside him. His eyes fell upon her breast that
rose and fell as her heart beat beneath it and he knew the current he
had breasted with such confidence of power was bearing him back. In all
his bodily consciousness then, it was as though his will were failing.
One last effort he made. Stooping, he picked up her hat.
"Shall we go now?" he said.
She swung in an instant's unsteadiness as she stood before him, but made
no movement otherwise. One fear had gone in her, thrusting another in
its place. Something terrified her now, a fear in her heart that
over-rode all bodily fear.
If he should win in purpose now, the world were such an empty mockery of
life as she well knew she had no strength to face. Hannah, Jane, Fanny,
they might have survived the hollow meaninglessness of it all. They
might have taken place in the senseless procession of Time, puppets of
women, wasted lives in the thrusting crowd. Never could she fall in
with them now.
Yet what was it she was struggling against? Something that had its
purpose as well as she? Somehow she sensed it was the laws that men had
made for the best of women to live by. He was attempting the best that
was in him. But she had no pity for that. If love and contempt,
passion and disgust can link in one, they met together in her then.
She never knew she thought all this. It was not in words she thought
it. But those laws were wrong--all wrong. Possession was the very
texture of them and all through the intricate fabric of life, she knew
possession did not count. In instinct, reaching back, beyond the most
distant consciousness of mind, she felt there was no possession in the
world. No more would she belong to him than he to her. It was he who
must give that which she most needed to take. And why had it resolved
itself into this struggle, when all she had ever heard or known of men
was nothing but the eagerness of passion to express desire?
These were not thoughts. Through all her substance they swept, a stream
of voiceless impulses that had more power than words.
"We're not going now," she said in a strange quietness. "We didn't come
here to go back. Not as we came."
Suddenly she put her hands upon his shoulders. He could feel her breath
warm and though her voice was so close, it came from far away like the
voices of the sirens calling which he knew would always call and which
he knew a man must stop his ears and bind his limbs to resist.
"Do you want me to say it?" she whispered. "I'm yours--this moment I'm
yours. For God's sake take me now."
It all was darkness then. The moon had no light for them. The very
stars were blotted out and far away across the moors, with its insistent
note, a night-jar whistled to its mate.
PHASE III
I
Many times Fanny tried to speak of that night and of the night that
followed before Liddiard went away, but there was a strange serenity in
Mary's face in those days which suppressed all Fanny's emotions of
sympathy, confidence and vital curiosity.
There were times when she hoped Mary might speak herself, if not of what
actually had happened, at least in some measure of Liddiard and herself.
Ever since their youth, being much of an age together, sharing the same
room, they had had few secrets from each other. If she were to ask no
more than Fanny's opinion of Liddiard, it would have afforded loophole
for confidence. One discussion would have led to another. If
necessary, Fanny would even have revived in her memory all that she had
told Mary about her own little tragedy on those cliffs. To have gained
that confidence every sense in her needed so much, she would have
suffered the crudest flagellation of memory; the more cruel it was, the
more exquisite would have been her pain.
But never had Mary been more aloof. Never had she been more distant and
reserved. To Hannah perhaps, if to any, she showed an even closer
affection, sometimes helping her with the teaching of her children and
every day spending an hour and even more in their prattling company.
For long walks she went alone. Frequently at night, when she had
retired to her room and Fanny on some feminine pretext came to her door,
she found it locked.
"What is it?" asked Mary from within.
"Just Fanny."
"What do you want?"
"Oh--nothing! I wondered if you'd finished with that book." Such as
this might be her excuse.
"Yes, I have. I left it downstairs in the dining-room."
"Well--good-night, Mary."
"Good-night, Fanny."
No more than this. That locked door seemed symbolical of Mary in those
days. So had she barred all entrance to her soul from them and like the
Holy of Holies behind the locked gates of the Temple was inapproachable
to their unsanctified feet.
And all this seeming was no less than the actual truth. To Mary her
body had indeed become the sanctuary, the very chalice of the Host of
sacred things. She knew she was going to have a child. Such knowledge
was pure folly and had no foundation upon fact. It lay only in her
imagination.
Yet lying awake at night and waking early in the mornings with the first
light the sun cast into her room, she had sensations, inventions only of
the fancy, that were unmistakable to her.
Already she was conscious of the dual life of her being. Such had
happened to her as indeed had separated her in difference from them all
in that house.
Her thoughts of Liddiard were glowing thoughts. Sometimes as she lay,
half sleeping in her bed, she felt him there beside her. But in all her
fully conscious moments, she had no need of his return.
Their meetings upon the cliffs those two nights before he had gone from
Bridnorth, had left her calm rather than excited. Almost she would have
resented his actual presence in her life just then. In the distance
which separated them, she felt the warm sense of that part of her being
he had become; but his absence was not fretting her with the need of his
embraces. No furnace of sexual inclination had there been set alight in
her. In this respect he had not differenced her. She was the same Mary
Throgmorton of outwardly passionless stone, only the hidden flame he had
set light within her was that, unquenchable, which the stress of
circumstance in time would burn with such a fervid purpose as none of
them could stay.
Behind that locked door of her bedroom the night after his departure,
she sat and wrote to him. A short letter it was, free of restraint, as
though across some narrow space dividing them, she had just called out
of her heart to him and laughed.
"I love you," she wrote. "Don't let it interfere with life. You have
given some greater thing than you could ever dream of, and need not
think of breaking hearts or things that do not happen in a healthy
world. I am not thinking of the future. For just these few moments,
the present is wonderful enough. Just because I belong to you, I sign
myself--YOUR MARY."
Herself, with jealous hands, that morning she posted it and when she
came back to the house a letter from him was awaiting her.
Both Jane and Fanny watched her as, with an amazing calmness, she picked
it up and put it in her lap.
Both, knowing what they knew, were swift to ask themselves again, was
this their Mary who had grown so confident with love.
A smile of expectation twitched about Jane's lips as Hannah, simple as a
child, inquired who it was had written.
This would confuse her, Jane thought, and almost with the eagerness of
spite, she waited for the flaming cheeks, for all the discomfort of her
lip and eye.
Mary looked up quietly from her plate. Almost she felt sorry for them
then that they were ignorant of all she knew. What was there to hide in
telling them that? She realized Jane knew. She felt her waiting for
those signs of the distressing confusion of a guilty heart. She had no
guilt in her heart. She was not ashamed. They had no power to shame
her.
"It's from Mr. Liddiard," she replied openly.
"Mr. Liddiard!" repeated Hannah. "What's he writing to you about?"
"I shall know when I read the letter," replied Mary quietly.
"I wonder how you can manage to wait till then," said Jane.
"I don't suppose it's very important," said Hannah, and Jane laughed,
but Fanny could bear it no longer. None of them knew what she knew.
She left the room.
II
Alone to her room, Mary brought her letter. That room had become the
chapel of her most sacred thoughts. There, in that house, she was
alone. There, as though it were the very script of her faith, she
brought her letter and, locking the door, took it across to her chair by
the window and sat down.
There was something she needed in this message from him. Courage had
not failed her. No pricks of conscience fretted her peace of mind.
More it was that in the conventional outlook of that house, in the
atmosphere indeed of all Bridnorth, she felt set aside. Nor did she fear
to be thus separated. Only it was at moments that it was chill. At
times she shivered as though the cold edge of a draught through
unsuspected chinks had found her out and for the moment set back the
temperature of her courage.
Merely momentary were these misgivings. With a shaking of her
shoulders, she could dispel them. The touch of his hand across that
distance which separated them, the sound of his voice, all to be
contained in her letter, these would drive them utterly away.
Alone there in that house, she needed her letter and her fingers were
warm and her heart was beating with a quiet assurance as she tore open
the envelope.
"Mary--" it began. She liked that. Her heart answered to it. It was
not the passionate embrace she sought; rather it was the firm touch of a
hand in her own. This simple use of her name fully gave it her.
"Mary--I have been wanting to write to you, my dear, ever since I came
home. I even tried in the train coming back when, not only my hand on
the paper, but it seemed my mind as well, were so jolted about that I
gave it up as a bad job.
"I want you to believe, my dear, that I know my own weakness, but only
for your sake do I honestly regret it. For myself, I have no real
regrets at all. Knowing you, as I have done, has made a greater
fullness in my life. Knowing me, as you have done, can only have brought
bitterness and, I am ashamed to think of it, perhaps shame to yours."
Mary laid the letter down in her lap. Fingers of ice were touching on
her heart. He thought he had brought her shame. Shame? What shame?
If with his wife it were greater fullness to him, what fullness must it
not be to her with none other than him beside her? She picked up the
letter and the pupils of her eyes as she read on were sharpened to the
finest pinpoints.
"I blame myself utterly and I blame myself alone. Life was all new to
you. It was not new to me. I should have had the courage of my
experience. If my character had been worth anything at all, I ought to
have had the will of restraint even to the last. I wonder will you ever
forgive me, for believe me, my dear, it is a great wish in my heart,
always to be thought well of by you. I suppose thoughts are prayers and
if they are, then you do not know how often I pray that nothing may
happen to you. But if my thoughts are not answered and you have to
suffer, for my weakness, you may know I will do all I can. None need
ever know. With care that could be achieved, but we will not talk of
that yet, or will I think of it if I can help it until you let me know
for certain. Not once did you mention it, even after the first time we
were alone in the wonderful still night on those cliffs. So many another
woman would. So many another would have reckoned the cost before she
knew the full account. You said nothing. You are wonderful, Mary, and
if any woman deserves to escape the consequences of passion, it is you."
Again she laid the letter down. For a while she could read no more.
The consequences of passion! Reckoned the cost! The full account! God!
Was that the little mind her own had met with?
None need ever know! With care that could be achieved! She started to
her feet in sudden impulse of feeling that her body held a hateful
thing. Instinctively she turned to the mirror on her dressing table,
standing there some moments and looking at her reflection, as though in
her face she might find truly whether it were hateful or not.
Seemingly she found her answer, for as she stood there, without the
effort of speech or conscious motion of the muscles of her throat, the
words came between her lips--"Fear not, Mary--" Scarcely did she know
she had said them, yet, nevertheless, they were the voice of something
more deep and less approachable than the mere thoughts of her mind.
It was not hateful. There was all of wonder and something more
beautiful about it than she could express.
Had she been told she was to receive such a letter, she would have
feared to open it lest it should destroy courage and make hideous the
very sight of life. But in trust and confidence having opened it, and
in gradual realization having read, its effect upon her had been utterly
different from what she might have anticipated.
Such an effect as this upon any other woman it might have had. But this
Mary Throgmorton was of imperishable stone, set, not in sheltered
places, or protected from the winds of ill-repute, but apart and open
for all the storms of heaven to beat upon with failing purpose to
destroy.
It may have alienated her that letter. Indeed it cut off and put her
consciously alone. She knew in that moment she no longer loved. She
knew how in the deepest recesses of her soul there did not live a father
to her child. It was hers. It was hers alone. If this was a man, then
men were nothing to women. Two nights of burning passion he had been
with her and for those moments they had been inseparably one. But now
he had gone as though the whole world divided them. The future was
hers, not his. With that letter he had cancelled all existence in the
meaning of life. There was no meaning in him. A mere shell of empty
substance had fallen from her. To herself she seemed as though she were
looking from a great height down which that hollow thing fluttered into
the nothingness of space, leaving her in a radiant ether that none could
enter or disturb.
Then of a sudden and in all consciousness now, there came with rushing
memory into her mind, the thought of that sermon at Christmas time.
"Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God."
She repeated the words aloud; hearing them now as she spoke them in her
throat and knowing, with all the fullness of its meaning to her, the
realization it gave expression to when she voiced the thought which that
day in church had followed it.
"Who was the father of the Son of Man?"
Might there not indeed, as here with her, have been no father at all?
The mere servant of Nature, whipped with passion to her purpose, then
feared by the laws he and his like had made to construct a world; feared
by them, disemboweled by them and by Nature herself driven out and cast
aside.
It was not that these ideas had any definite substance of thought in her
mind. Those few words she repeated aloud. The rest had merely stirred
in her like some nebulous form of life, having neither shape nor power
of volition.
She did not know to what plane of thought she had raised herself. She
did not appreciate any distinct purpose that it brought. All she knew
and in a form of vision, was that she was alone; that it was not a
hateful thing her body held; that she was possessed of something no
power but tragic Fate could despoil her of; that it was something over
which she had direct power of perfecting in creation; that in the
essence of her womanhood, she was greater than he who at the hands of
Nature had been driven to her arms and left them, clasping that air
which, in her ears, was full of the voices of life, full of the greatest
meaning of existence.
III
For three days she left this letter unanswered, tempted at moments to
misgiving about herself and the future that spread before her, yet
always in ultimate confidence, rising above the mood that assailed her.
On the third day, receiving another letter of the same remorseful
nature, begging her to write and say she was not in her silence thinking
the worst of him, she sent her reply. To the sure dictation of her
heart, she wrote--
"I have never thought about forgiveness, not once. I can scarcely
believe you wrote these two letters which I have received. Do you
remember once we talked about women wasting their lives beneath the
burden of prejudice? You were the one man I had ever met, you were the
one man, I thought, in all the world, who understood the truth about
women. But I suppose there is something in the very nature of men that
makes it impossible for them to realize the simple forces that make us
what we are. All they see are the thousand conventionalities they have
set about us to complicate us. We are not complicated. It is only the
laws that make us appear so.
"That first of our two nights on the cliffs, did you find me complicated
or difficult of understanding? I showed, as well as gave you myself and
this is how you have treated that revelation. I will not let it make me
unhappy. It could so deeply if I allowed it to get the upper hand. If I
need anything now, now that I know I am going to have a child--don't be
frightened yet, I only feel it in my heart--do you think it is help or
advice for concealment? Do you think it is any assistance to me to know
that all the world will be ashamed of me, but only you are not?
"Why do you even hint about shame to me? Did you think I shared what
you call your weakness? Did you think for those moments that, as you
say of yourself, I forgot or lost restraint?
"Never write to me again. Unfortunately for me, it is you most of all
who could succeed in making me feel ashamed and I will not be ashamed.
What lies before me is not to be endured but to be made wonderful. Will
shame help me to do that?
"Perhaps you think I am an extraordinary woman. You say to yourself,
'Well, if that's her nature, it can't be helped, we've got to go through
with it.' You would not believe me if I told you that all women in
their essence are the same. It is only with so many that the prize of
self-advancement, the hollow dignity of social position, the chimera--I
don't know if I've spelt it right--of good repute, all of which you
offer them if they obey the laws you have made to protect your property,
are more attractive and alluring than the pain and discomfort and
difficulty of bringing children into a competitive world. But you call
this the line of least resistance.
"Because you find the majority of women so ready to be slaves to your
laws do you imagine that they are not in essence the same as me? But
starve one of those women as I and my sisters have been starved by
circumstance, deny to her the first function which justifies her
existence by the side of men with their work, as thousands and thousands
are denied, taking in the end any husband who will fulfill their needs
of life, and you will find her behave as I behaved.
"I have to thank you for one thing. Since I met you, my mind has opened
out and in a lot of things, such as these which I am writing, I can
think in words what a lot of women only feel but cannot express. I have
to thank you too, that for those moments I loved. So many women don't
even do that, not as they understand love.
"All that time together, playing golf, walking and talking on the
cliffs, I felt our minds were at one. That with a woman is the
beginning of love. All unities follow inevitably after that. It is not
so with men. Your letters prove it to me. Perhaps this is why the
formality of marriage is so necessary to make a screen for shame. I
wonder if you realize in how many married women it is a screen and no
more. I know now that to my own mother it was no more than that.
"I had no shame then. I loved. Loving no longer, I still now have no
shame because, and believe me it is not in anger, we have no cause to
meet again. I know I am going to have a child. I know he is going to
be wonderful if I can make him so. I shall get my love from him as he
grows in years and I am sure there is only one love. Passion is only an
expression of it. My life will be fuller than yours with all the
possessions you have. Bringing him up into the world will absorb the
whole heart of me.
"Oh, my dear--I feel a great moment of pain to think what we have lost
and truly I do not forget my gratitude for what I have gained. Never
worry yourself in your thoughts by what you imagine I shall have to
face. I know what my sisters will say, but what they will say will be
no expression of the envy they will feel. I am quite human enough to
find much courage in that.
"When it comes, I expect I shall leave Bridnorth. I confess I am not a
Bombastes. I shall hide my shoes in my cupboard, but none shall step
into them, nevertheless.
"I hate to say this and do not say it in any backbiting spirit. I know
you will think you have to support me. You have not. Fortunately my
share of what we girls have is enough to support me and enable me to
bring him up as I mean him to be brought up. So please send me nothing.
It would hurt me to hurt you by returning it.
"I do not think I can say any more. I count them up--six sheets of
paper. Yet I believe you will read them all.
"Good-by."
IV
In the appointed time, Mary knew that the reality of her life had come
to her. At the first opportunity after the sureness of her knowledge,
she attended Holy Communion in Bridnorth church. It was not so much to
pray she went, as to wait in that silence which falls, even upon the
unimaginative mind, during the elevation of the host and all the
accompanying ceremony of the rubric.
She asked no favor of her God. She waited. She said no prayers. She
listened. It was a spiritual communion, beyond the need of symbols,
above the necessity of words. Psychology has no function to describe
it. It was her first absolute submission of both mind and body to the
mystery of life. Here consciously, she felt she could do nothing.
Here, as it might be, was the instant of conception. Whatever it was,
whether it were God or Nature, this was the moment in which she held
herself in suspension, feeling she had no conscious part to play.
When she rose from her knees, it was with an inner and hidden knowledge
of satisfaction that she had passed successfully through some ordeal of
her soul; that whatever it was within her, it had not failed in the
supreme test of her being; that, in a word, she was a woman at last and
that life had justified itself in her.
If such a moment there be as this instant of conception; if in her soul
where no words conceal and no thoughts have substance, a woman can
spiritually be aware of it, such an instant this was in the life of Mary
Throgmorton.
From this moment onward, she set her mind upon definite things. In two
months' time she had planned everything that she was to do.
Passing once through Warwickshire lanes one summer when she had been
staying with friends in Henley-in-Arden, a storm of rain had driven them
for shelter. They had come to the towpath of the canal near by where it
flows into the lock at Lonesome Ford when the clouds that had been
threatening all day heaped up to thunder and broke above them with a
sudden deluge of rain.
Sharply from the towpath where they walked, the ground rose in high
banks of apple orchard, through the trees of which, on the top of the
hill, could just be seen the half-timbered gables of an old farmhouse.
Taking a gap in the hedge and climbing the orchard hill, they had
hastened there for shelter. It was close upon tea-time. The farmer's
wife had let them in.
She was a sour-visaged woman, slow and sparing of speech, yet in the
silent, considerate way she gave them welcome and tended to their wants,
there had been something intangible yet inviting that attracted Mary to
her.
With an expression upon her long, thin and deeply lined face that
suggested resentment to them all, she showed them into the best parlor,
the room that had its black horsehaired sofa, its antimacassars on all
the chairs, its glass cases containing, one a stuffed white owl, the
other a stuffed jay; the room where the family Bible lay on a
home-worked mat reposing on a small round table; the room that had
nothing to do with their lives, but was an outward symbol of them as
God-fearing and cleanly people.
In time Mary came to learn that with those who work upon the land, there
are no spare moments; that the duties and demands of the earth know no
Sabbath day of rest. That afternoon, she pictured them on Sundays in
that room, with hands folded in their laps, reading perhaps with quaint
intonations and inflections from the massive volume on its crocheted
mat. It was never as thus she saw them.
As they went by, catching a glimpse of the parlor kitchen with its heavy
beams of oak in the ceiling, she had wished they might have had their
tea there. But the old lady was too unapproachable for her to ask such a
favor then. In the best parlor they sat, eating the bread and butter
and homemade bullace jam which she had brought them, commenting upon the
enlarged photographs in their gilt frames on the walls.
One picture there was of a young girl, a very early photograph which had
suffered sadly from unskillful process of enlargement. Yet unskillful
though it had been, the photograph had not been able to destroy its
certain beauty. Mary had called her friends' attention to it, but it
seemed they could not detect the beauty that she saw.
"I don't think a long face like that is beautiful in a woman," one of
them had said.
"I didn't mean the features," replied Mary. "She looks--"
She stopped, words came in no measure with her thoughts in those days.
But when the farmer's wife had returned later to inquire if they wanted
any more bread and butter cut, she questioned her with an interest none
could have resented as to who the girl might be.
"Is she a daughter of yours?" asked Mary.
"Darter?" She shook her head and where another woman might have smiled
at the compliment of Mary's interest, she merely turned her eyes upon
the portrait as though she looked across the years at some one who had
gone away. "That was me," said she. "It was took of me three days afore
I was married. My old man had it out a few years ago and got it made big
like that. Waste of money I told him."
And with that, having learnt their needs, she went out of the room.
It was later, when they had finished tea, and the sun was striking
through the lace curtains into that room, almost obliterating its
artificialities, when indeed they knew the storm was over, they left the
parlor and finding the farmer with his wife in the kitchen, came there
asking what they must pay.
"We beant settin' out to provide teas," she replied with no gratuity of
manner in her voice.
"I guess you didn't come lookin' for tea," said the farmer, who had
evidently talked it over with her and decided what they should do and
say--"The storm drove 'ee."
While her friends stood arguing upon the issue, Mary had looked about
her, observing the warm color of the brick-paved floor, the homely sense
of confidence in the open chimney with its seats at either side, the jar
of wild flowers, all mingled, that stood upon the window sill, the
farmer's gun on its rest over the mantel-shelf; then the farmer and his
wife themselves.
Once having seen that enlarged portrait, she knew well what it was that
attracted her to the sour visage, the uninviting expression and the
attenuated features of the farmer's wife. The girl she had been, the
wistful creature she had set out for company with through life,
somewhere, lurking, was in company with her still. She needed the
finding, that was all.
"Waste of money," she had told him. There lay much behind that
accusation; much that Mary if she had had time would have liked to find
out.
The farmer himself, at first glance, would have taken the heart of any
one. He smiled at them as he spoke with an ingenuous twinkle of good
humor in his eyes. A mere child he was; a child of the land. Such
wisdom as he had, of the land it was. The world had nothing of it. His
thoughts, his emotions, they were in the soil itself. Adam he was,
turned out of his garden, scarce conscious of the flaming sword that had
driven him from the fruitful places, but seeking the first implement his
hands could find to toil with and bring the earth to good account.
Unable to persuade these two that they should give any return for the
meal they had had, they expressed their gratitude as best they could and
went away. It was not until they had come back through the sloping
orchard and were again upon the towing path of the canal, that Mary
thought of the possibility of returning there at some other time.
The simplicity of the life of those two, the sense she had had of that
nearness to the earth they lived on had touched her imagination deeper
than she knew.
"Just wait for me a moment," said she. "I must go back--" when, before
they could ask her reason, she had left them and was running back
through the orchard.
The door which led into the parlor kitchen was opened to her knocking by
the farmer's wife. Face to face with her purpose, she stammered in
confusion as she spoke.
"I know you don't think of supplying teas or anything like that," she
said awkwardly--"but I do so like your--your farm, your house here, that
I wondered if there'd ever be any chance of coming back again for a
little while; staying here I mean. I wondered if you would let me a
room and--if there'd be any trouble about providing me with meals, then
let me get them for myself. I should like to come here so much that I
had to come back, just to ask."
With no change of expression, no sign of pleasure at Mary's appreciation
of their home, the farmer's wife looked round at her husband still
seated at his tea and said,
"Well--what do 'ee think, Mr. Peverell?"
His mouth was full. He passed the back of his hand across it in the
effort of swallowing to make way for words and then, as best he could,
he mumbled,
"'Tis for you to say, Missis. 'Twon't stop me milking cows or cuttin'
barley."
She turned to Mary.
"'Ee'd have a mighty lot to do for 'eeself," she had said--"If 'ee come,
'twould be no grand lodging. 'Ee'd be one of us."
What better, she had thought. To be one of them was to be one with
everything about them, the fruit trees in the orchards, the dead leaves
and the new. Even then, although she never knew it clearly, the fruitful
scents of the earth had entered and for long were to linger in her
nostrils.
It was not that she had any knowledge of the soil, or could have
explained to herself how one crop should follow another. She knew
nothing of the laws a farmer lives by, the servant of Nature that he is,
or the very earth he grows to be a part of and learns to finger as it
were the very ingredient of his being.
She had not been trained to reason. All that she felt of the attraction
of that place did not suggest itself in the direct progression of
purposes to her mind. There were the odors of life in the air. She
took them in through her senses alone. Through her senses alone she
knew their fecundity. That fruitfulness it was which filtered like
drops of some magic elixir into her blood.
It had been two years since she went that day to Yarningdale Farm, yet
the odors still lingered, calling some sense and purpose in her soul
which, until the sermon at that Christmas-time and following her meeting
with Liddiard, had been all vague, illusive and intangible.
Now, with more assurance, she knew. In that old farmhouse, if they
would have her, she was going to bring her child into the world. There,
in what seemed not the long but the speedy months to her, she was going
to breathe in the scents of the earth, absorbing the clean purposes of
life as they are set forth in the tilling of the soil, the sowing of the
seed, the reaping of the harvest.
It was to be close to the very earth itself she needed. There is no
clear line of argument to trace in a woman's mind. Her marriage bed had
been the heathered moors. The scent of the earth had been all about her
as she lay in Liddiard's arms. No soft or spotless pillows had there
been for her head to rest on. In no garments had she decked herself for
his embrace. No ceremony had there been, no formalities observed.
There was nothing that had happened to associate it in her mind with the
conventional wedding night, blessed by the church, approved of by all.
If blessing there had been, and truly she felt there had, then the stars
had blessed them, the soft wind from off the sea across the heather
roots had touched her with its fingers; the dark night with all its
silence had been full approval in her heart.
And he who was to come out of such a union as that, what else could he
be but a wild, uncultivated thing? A seed falling from the tree, not
sowed by the hand of man in exotic places; a young shoot finding its
soil in the rotting fibers of earth that only Nature had prepared; a
green bough that Nature only in her wildest could train, fighting its
way upwards through the forest shades to the clear brilliance of the
eternal light.
Such she felt he was. As such she meant him to be. There was no
science in her purpose, no clear argument of thought. No reason other
than this first impression she had had can be traced to justify the
determination to which she came.
To Mrs. Peverell she wrote asking if they could let her have their
little room beneath the eaves of the thatch when, hearing it was vacant,
she replied that she would come down for a day or two and see them
first.
But before she went, one thing had she set herself to perform. Now her
sisters must know. Her mind was prepared. It was Hannah she determined
to tell.
V
It was a morning in the middle of the week, after the children's lessons
were over. With eyes that recorded intangible impressions to her mind,
Mary watched her eldest sister kissing each one as they went. With each
one, it was not merely a disposal, but a parting; not a formality but an
act, an act that had its meaning, however far removed it might have been
from Hannah's appreciation of it.
"What do you feel about those children?" she asked her, suddenly and
unexpectedly when the last one had gone and the door had closed.
"Feel about them?"
Hannah looked up in surprised bewilderment.
"I've never thought what I felt," she added. "They're darlings--is that
what you mean?"
"No--that's not quite what I mean. Of course they're darlings. Do you
ever think what you feel, Hannah?"
"No."
"Never think in words--all higgledy-piggledy and upside-down, of
course--but words that explain to you, even if they couldn't explain to
anybody else?"
"No."
"I don't believe any of us have ever done that," Mary continued--"unless
perhaps Jane. She thinks in words sometimes, I believe, but I'm sure
they hurt her when she does, so she probably does it as little as
possible. Just to say they're darlings doesn't convey what you feel.
You don't know what you do really feel--do you?"
"No--I suppose I don't."
"I expect that's why, when you have to deal with real things where words
only can explain, they come like claps of thunder and are all
frightening. I've got something to tell you that will frighten you,
Hannah. But it wouldn't have frightened you so much if you'd ever
thought about those children in words. I don't believe it would
frighten Jane. It would only make her angry."
"What is it?" asked Hannah. She was not frightened as yet. Mary's
voice was so quiet, her manner so undisturbed and assured, that as yet
no faint suspicion of what she was to hear was troubling her mind.
"Let's come out into the garden," said Mary.
Even there, with that issue, she felt she wanted the light of open air,
the growing things about her, the environment her whole body now was
tuned to. That room was confined, and suffocating to her. There were
the two portraits on the wall, who never, with all their love, would be
able to understand what she had to tell. There were the echoes of
countless family prayers that had had no meaning. There was all the
atmosphere of conventional formality in which she felt neither she nor
her child had any place. It was of him she was going to tell. She
could not tell it there.
"Come out into the garden," she repeated and herself led the way, when
there being something to hear which already Mary had wrapped in this
mystery of introduction, Hannah could do no less than follow with
obedience.
It was between those borders, now massed white with double pinks,
softening the air with the scent of them as they breathed it in, that
they walked, just as Jane and she had done before.
"Do you ever wish you'd had a child, Hannah?" Mary asked presently, and
Hannah replied--
"I don't think I've ever really wanted to be married."
So much was it an answer that would have satisfied her once, that Mary
smiled to think how different she had become. Not for one moment had it
been her meaning that Hannah should see that smile. Not for one moment
would she have understood it. Yet she saw. The sudden seizing of her
fingers on Mary's arm almost frightened.
"You smiled," she whispered--"Why did you smile?"
The honest simplicity of her brought Mary to a sudden confusion. She
could not answer. Seeing that smile, Hannah had caught her unawares in
her thoughts. She knew then she was going to hurt this gentle creature
with her simple view of life and her infinite forbearance of the world's
treatment of her.
Here was the first moment when truly she felt afraid. Here was the
first time she realized that pain is the inevitable accompaniment of
life. She tried to begin what she had to say, but fear dried up the
words. She moistened her lips, but could not speak.
"Tell me why you smiled," repeated Hannah importunately. "What is it
you've got to say?"
Mary had thought it would be easy. So proud, so sure she was, that
abruptness had seemed as though it must serve her mood. She tried to be
abrupt, but failed.
"Oh, Hannah, I've got such a lot to say," she began, and with an impulse
took her sister's arm and of a sudden felt this gentle, gray-haired
woman might be as a mother to her when all the world, as now she was
realizing with her first confession of it, would be turned against her.
"I don't know how to begin. I know you must understand, and I think I
want you to understand, more than anybody else. No one else will. Of
course I can be sure of that."
She had succeeded, as well she knew she would, in frightening Hannah
now. She was trembling. Leaning on her arm, Mary could feel those
vibrations of fear. So unused to all but the even flow of life, and
finding herself thus suddenly in a morass of apprehension, the poor
creature's mind was floundering helplessly. One step of speculation
after another only left her the more deeply embedded in her fears.
"Tell me what it is," she whispered--"Tell me quickly. Was it that Mr.
Liddiard?"
How surely she had sensed the one thing terrible in her life a woman can
have to tell. Never having known the first thrilling thoughts of love,
her mind had reached at once to this. Countless little incidents
during the time that Liddiard was in Bridnorth, incidents that had
attracted her notice but which she had never observed, had come now
swiftly together as the filings of iron are drawn to a magnet's point.
The times they were together, the letters she had received, sometimes a
look in Jane's face when she spoke of him, sometimes a look in Fanny's
when she was silent. One by one but with terrible acceleration, they
heaped up in her mind to the pinnacle of vague but certain conclusion.
"Was it that Mr. Liddiard?" she repeated.
"Yes."
"I felt it was. I felt it was. Don't say you're in love with him--a
married man--Oh, Mary, that would be terrible."
"I'm not in love," said Mary.
The deep sigh that drew through Hannah's lips made her afraid the more.
How could she tell her? Every moment it was becoming harder. Every
moment the pride she felt was not so much leaving her as being crowded
into the back of her mind by these conventional instincts, the habit of
affection for her family, the certain knowledge of their shame, the
disproportionate value of their thoughts of her.
A few hours before she had asked herself what mattered it if they
thought the very worst, if they had no sympathy, if with their contempt
of her they turned her from the house. In any case she was going.
Never could she stay there. Never could this child of hers breathe
first the stifling air that she had breathed so long.
Yet now when her moment of confession was upon her, pride seemed a
little thing to help her through. The piteous fear in Hannah weakened it
to water in her blood. She felt sorry for her sister who had done
nothing to deserve the shame she was sure to feel. Conscious of that
sorrow, she almost was ashamed of herself. Nothing was there as yet to
whip her pride to life again. With mighty efforts of thought, she tried
to revive it, but it lay still in her heart. This fear of Hannah's, her
deep relief when the worst she could think of proved untrue, kept it
low. With all the strength she had, Mary could not resuscitate her
pride.
"What is it then?" Hannah continued less tremulously--"What is it if
you're not in love? Was he a brute? Did he make love to you?"
With all the knowledge she had gained, Mary now found herself amazed at
this simplicity of mind which once quite well she knew had been her own.
For an instant it gave her courage. For an instant it set up this new
antagonism she had found against the laws that kept her sex in the
bondage of servitude to the needs of man. So in that instant and with
that courage, she spoke it out, abruptly, sharply as she had known she
must. The swift, the sudden blow, it made the cleanest wound.
"I'm going to have a child, Hannah," she said, and in a moment that
garden seemed full of a surging joy to her that now they knew; and in a
moment that garden seemed to Hannah a place all horrible with evil
growing things that twined about her heart and brought their heavy,
nauseating perfume, pungent and overbearing to her nostrils.
She dropped Mary's arm that held her own. With lips already trembling
to the inevitable tears, she stood still on the path between those rows
of double pinks, now bearing up an evil, heavy scent to her, as she
stared before her.
It could not be true! How could it be true? She fought with that, the
refusal to believe its truth.
"He was only here a fortnight," she muttered oddly. "You didn't know
him. You'd never met him before. You only played golf with him, or you
walked on the cliffs. You didn't know him. How can you expect me to
believe it happened--in a fortnight? Mother was engaged to father for
two years. I--I wasn't born till fourteen months after they'd been
married!"
She laughed--a thin crackle of laughter.
"You're a fool, Mary. You don't know what you're talking about. He was
only here a fortnight."
"It's quite true, Hannah," said Mary quietly. "I'm going to have a
child."
Her heart was beating evenly now. They knew. Pride was returning with
warming blood through her veins. Less and less she felt the chill of
fear.
Swiftly Hannah turned upon her.
"But you said you weren't in love!" she exclaimed.
How quickly she was learning! Already love might have explained,
excused, extenuated.
"I'm not in love," said Mary--"I know now I'm not in love. I was at the
time. At least I know what love is. The thing you love doesn't destroy
love when it goes. Once you love, you can't stop loving. The object
may alter. Your love doesn't. If there's no object then your love just
goes on eating your heart away. But it's there."
"Oh, my God!" cried Hannah--"Where did you learn all this--you! Mary!
The youngest of all of us! Whom do you love then if you don't love him?
Oh, it's horrible! Is your heart eating itself away?"
"No."
"Then what? What is it? I don't understand! How could I understand? I
am an old woman now. Somehow you seem to make me know I'm an old woman.
What is it? What do you love?"
"I told you I'm going to have a child," whispered Mary--"Isn't that
something to love? It's here with us as I'm talking now. There are
three of us, Hannah, not two. Isn't that something to love?"
For a long moment, Hannah gazed at her, then, suddenly clasping her
hands about her face she turned and with swift steps ran, almost, down
the path and disappeared into the house. It was as she watched her
going, that Mary had a flash of knowledge how deep the wound had gone.
VI
Now this much was accomplished in the schedule of her mind. They would
all know. She left it to Hannah to tell them. The next day after this
confession to her sister, she went to Yarningdale Farm, having made all
arrangements to stay there two or three days and complete her plans for
the future.
It had been a difficult moment to tell Hannah. She had not quite
realized beforehand how difficult it would be. Pride she had calculated
would have helped her from the first; pride of the very purposes of life
that had passed her sisters by. But pride had not been so ready to her
thoughts when the actual moment of contact had come. The habitual
instincts of convention had intervened. Pride, when it had come to her
aid, had not been pride of herself. It was proud she was of her sex
when in the abruptness of that instant she had flung her confession
before Hannah.
There would be
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