_"I SHALL SEE HER BUT NOT NOW."_
Below, as vivid as the inscription, there stood out the maker's name,
and of the town where he lived.
* * * * *
So she lay there, reflected Maggie. It had ended in that. A mound of
earth, cracking a little, and sunken. She lay there, her nervous
fingers motionless and her stammer silent. And could there be a more
eloquent monument of what she was...? Then she remembered herself, and
signed herself with the cross, while her lips moved an instant for the
repose of the poor girlish soul. Then she stepped up again on to the
path to go home.
It was as she came near the church gate that she understood herself,
that she perceived why she had come, and was conscious for the first
time of her real attitude of soul as she had stood there, reading the
inscription, and, in a flash, there followed the knowledge of the
inevitable meaning of it all.
In a word it was this.
She had come there, she told herself, to triumph, to gloat. Oh! she
spared herself nothing, as she stood there, crimson with shame, to
gloat over the grave of a rival. Amy was nothing less than that, and
she herself--she, Margaret Marie Deronnais--had given way to jealousy
of this grocer's daughter, because ... because ... she had begun to
care, really to care, for the man to whom she had written that letter
this morning, and this man had scarcely said one word to her, or given
her one glance, beyond such as a brother might give to a sister. There
was the naked truth.
Her mind fled back. She understood a hundred things now. She perceived
that that sudden anger at breakfast had been personal disappointment--not
at all that lofty disinterestedness on behalf of the mother that she had
pretended. She understood too, now, the meaning of those long contented
meditations as she went up and down the garden walks, alert for
plantains, the meaning of the zeal she had shown, only a week ago, on
behalf of a certain hazel which the gardener wanted to cut down.
"You had better wait till Mr. Laurence comes home," she had said. "I
think he once said he liked the tree to be just there."
She understood now why she had been so intuitive, so condemnatory, so
critical of the boy--it was that she was passionately interested in
him, that it was a pleasure even to abuse him to herself, to call him
selfish and self-centered, that all this lofty disapproval was just
the sop that her subconsciousness had used to quiet her uneasiness.
Little scenes rose before her--all passed almost in a flash of
time--as she stood with her hand on the medieval-looking latch of the
gate, and she saw herself in them all as a proud, unmaidenly,
pharisaical prig, in love with a man who was not in love with her.
She made an effort, unlatched the gate, and moved on, a beautiful,
composed figure, with great steady eyes and well-cut profile, a model
of dignity and grace, interiorly a raging, self-contemptuous, abject
wretch.
It must be remembered that she was convent-bred.