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.