Peggy had brought her season to an end on the same day on which Hugh had
gone down to St. Olaf’s, and had retired with the sense of a child home
from its holidays to spend a whole week with the children at Cookham,
before taking her husband out to Marienbad for three weeks’ cure. She
had taken Arthur Crowfoot down with her for the Sunday, but he did so
much deep breathing (for in the cycle of things that had come up again)
and wanted such very extraordinary things to eat that he was as bad as a
party in the house. Even that, though she had come down in order to do
nothing, she would not have minded, had he not insisted on talking quite
continuously about the impossibility of preserving even the semblance of
decent health if your diet comprised anything outside nuts, cheese, and
brown bread. Indeed, on Sunday evening, when he had sent for a pair of
goloshes to put over his shoes, for they were dining in the tent, and
the second thickest of his Angora wool rugs to put over his knees, she
clapped her hands in his face.
“You are getting tiresome, Arthur,” she said, “and as a friend I warn
you. Nobody cares about your waste products or nuts, nor whether you
catch cold; but they care very much whether you bore them or not. People
always consider a bore a waste product.”
Arthur pushed back his rather thin and scanty hair, for the sake of
which he never wore a hat. This clapping of Peggy’s hands in his face
had considerably startled him.
“How violent you are!” he said, “and how unfair! I think it is one’s
duty to keep oneself as well as possible.”
“Yes, I daresay it is,” said she; “but it is no part of your duty to
tell me about it. I am charmed that you feel well, and you may eat
anything you choose, only I don’t want to know about it. Personally I
eat somewhat large quantities of meat, and feel extremely well, but I
don’t tell everybody about it. I dare say also it’s your duty to be kind
and thoughtful, but that would form a very poor subject of
conversation!”
Arthur Crowfoot’s goloshes and second thickest rug had come by this
time, and this probably restored any loss of equanimity that Peggy’s
criticisms could have produced.
“Well, let us talk about somebody else’s virtues,” he said.
“Mine,” suggested Toby, who had not yet spoken, from the other side of
the table.
“Your virtues are that you are going off to Marienbad on Thursday, like
a good boy,” said Peggy.
“I know I am. What a filthy hole! Are you sure you’ll come, Peggy?”
“Quite certain, otherwise you will eat all the things you shouldn’t, and
drink none of the things you should, and lie in bed instead of getting
up at six, and sit up instead of going to bed at ten!”
Toby groaned slightly, and made a sign to a servant that he wanted more
chocolate soufflée.
“Let me eat and drink, for to-morrow I go to Marienbad,” he said.
“Peggy, if we are going, let’s go to-morrow, and get it over soon.”
“I can’t; I promised to go to the fiftieth performance of ‘Gambits’ with
Hugh on Wednesday.”
Arthur Crowfoot drew the rug a little closer over his knees.
“Talk of waste products,” he said, “or of my talking of them! Why, the
last time I saw Hugh he quoted me large chunks of ‘Gambits.’ I can’t
think of anything more intensely waste product than that, especially if
one hasn’t seen the play!”
“But won’t the forty-ninth performance do?” asked Toby.
“No, because the author, Andrew Robb, whom nobody knows who he is, if
you will excuse the grammar, is going to appear that night,” said Peggy,
“and we are all dying to see him.”
Arthur gave a short and scornful laugh.
“Why, it’s clearly Hugh,” he said. “Will you bet?”
“Yes,” said Peggy precipitately.
Then she considered the case.
“No, I won’t,” she said, “because I know it is not Hugh. Oh, dear!
here’s a telegram.”
A servant handed it to her, and she tore it open in that silence which
always takes possession of a small party when a telegram is opened, even
when addressed to a person like Peggy, with whom correspondence was
chiefly conducted by such means.
“Edith,” she announced. “She wants to come down here to-morrow for the
night to see me particularly, and wants no reply unless not. What a
curious parsimony of words people have over telegrams. No answer,” she
said to the man.
“Where is she?” asked Toby.
“Down at Mannington; I heard from her yesterday. She said she meant to
stop there for months and not stir.”
“Something at Mannington has stirred her,” remarked Mr. Crowfoot. “That
is the sort of thing that always happens. One goes up to town and is
fearfully busy all the week, and nothing happens, and then goes into
the country for the week-end and finds nothing to eat except beef and--I
beg your pardon,” he added.
Toby had finished his second helping of soufflée, refused dessert, and
drank a glass of strictly forbidden port.
“I see Hugh Grainger will sing at the opera next year,” he said; “it was
announced in the _Daily Something_.”
Peggy, on whose tongue remonstrance with regard to the port was rising,
threw off at this.
“What!” she said. “Hugh is going to sing? Why, only a few weeks ago he
told me that he had made up his mind not to!”
“Ah, but Hugh is one of those people to whom an enormous number of
things happen in a few weeks,” said he.
For one moment Peggy felt a little hurt that Hugh had not told her. She
hated that public papers should be the means of communication between
herself and her friends. But on the instant she smothered her
resentment.
“That is splendid news!” she said. “I must remember to tell Edith. Hugh
told us that the syndicate had approached him, and she was so frantic at
the idea of his refusal. I wonder what has made him change his mind.”
Then she recollected something.
“I dare say he has already told her,” she added; “I know he was going
down to Mannington last Friday.”
“To stay with her?” asked Arthur.
“Oh, no! with his sister, Mrs. Alington. But probably he and Edith met.
In fact, he promised to go and see her! They are great friends.”
Peggy heard nothing more of her sister, and so could not meet any train
for her at Cookham next day. Both Arthur Crowfoot and her husband, who
was going to attend something grandly masonic, went up to town next
morning, and as Toby would not be back that night she planned a
gorgeously inactive day for herself, intending in the morning to punt
herself up not quite so far as Cookham lock, and to tie up under the
trees there till lunch-time, with a book that had to be first cut, and
then read. She meant to lunch with the children, and to take them down
the river toward Maidenhead, and make tea in the punt. The lighting of
the spirit-lamp, indeed, would be the only effort she would be called
upon to make in the afternoon, for Jim and Daisy, with shrill
recrimination, and a good deal of circular movement in mid-Thames, would
be responsible for the locomotion, and also for the setting out of tea,
all except this lighting of the spirit-lamp, while she would sit still,
and be splashed, at not infrequent intervals, for paddles, not punt
poles, which were too sensational, were the implements to be applied by
the children. And even though their verdict had been that she did not
“play” nearly as well as Hugh, this depreciatory criticism did not spoil
her own pleasure in being alone all the afternoon with these darling
children, and in being real again herself, their mother. London, of
course, with its friends, its manifold businesses into which all her
time and energies went, was quite real too, but after the months and the
fatigue of it, the incessant rush, the froth and bubble in which she so
delighted, she felt more real somehow when Jim at the prow and Daisy at
the helm abused each other in shrill trebles and appealed to her for
decision. Woman of the world as she was to her finger-tips, she was yet
woman of the home, and when all was said and done, and all her energies,
which were so much a part of her, relaxed, there was still nothing so
much a part of her as the children. Often for days together in town she
hardly set eyes on them; but that was a fault not of hers, but of her
environment, and to live in accordance with that, to slave and toil for
that, was her duty also.
And then in the evening, by the dinner-train probably, arriving here
after the children had gone to bed, would come the woman she loved most
in all the world, to whom she would have given so much of her own
happiness if out of that gift there could be made even a little for her,
to make up to her for those years during which with all the materials
and potentialities for happiness in herself, and with all the birthright
of it, Edith had found only bitterness and terror. For somehow, in spite
of all Edith’s huge delight at the success of her play, in spite of the
eagerness with which she had flung herself into her garden-making at
Mannington, her absorption in that and in this new work of her brain
which occupied her so greatly, Peggy could not believe that the inward
happiness of the heart could spring from this soil if the soil was a
woman’s heart. With a man it was different; husbandhood was not to a man
of the same essentiality as was wifehood to a woman, and a thousand
times more, surely, fatherhood was nothing compared to motherhood. She
longed to see Edith married again, she longed to see her with a child in
her arms before the envious years took these priceless possibilities
from her.
Peggy had punted herself up to the little tree-sheltered corner where
she had designed to spend her morning, first cutting and then reading
this very interesting work on the internal affairs of Russia, but having
tied up, she sat for some little while lost in these thoughts. All
around her the life of Nature eternally renewed from year to year
rioted and flourished, fed by the imperishable river and these summer
suns. All the murmurs of the forest were in her ears, birds called to
each other, bees were busy drinking from honey-laden chalices of the
meadow flowers, and the melodious rush and plunge of the weir just above
seemed the very sound of the outpouring of life. But somehow there was a
great change in the face of things since the last time she had been here
with Hugh and Edith. June was not over then, and the river banks were
sprayed with the pink of the briarrose or their springy leaping
tendrils. Blue mists of forget-me-not lay on the margin of the stream,
lit as it were by the bold yellow suns of the marsh-marigold, and waved
upon by the purple of the loose-strife. The flowers of the lime-trees,
so much the colour of the foliage that the bees, small wonder, must find
their way to them by scent alone, were over, and though the year was
still at its height, it was impossible not to remember that after this
came autumn, whereas after the other came summer. It was the same with
people too; some had their summer still in front of them, to others----
A wave of pity, intense and very tender, swept over Peggy. Youth was so
short, and to women, if not to men, in youth was all the honey of life.
It was capable to some extent, no doubt, of being stored, of being
enjoyed afterward, when children and children’s children, maybe, grew up
round one, but could anything be like the first mornings of spring when
one gathered it oneself from the dewy flowers? And some poor dears had
never known the sweetness of those May-dews, and to some their sweetness
had but been bitterness. That bitterness, too, like the honey, was
garnered and eaten afterward and though, even as the garnered honey was
not so sweet as the May-dew, so the garnered bitterness was not so sharp
in the gall of its wormwood, yet how could it be right that this should
be a woman’s harvesting? No doubt, as Peggy fully believed, there would
be a readjustment, a compensation in the house of many mansions, but
that, she added to herself without any touch of irreverence, is not the
same thing.
Then she gave a great sigh, took up her book and an immense ivory
paper-cutter, and began to travel in the realms of gold, as Canon
Alington would have said. Then for a moment she paused, and, book in one
hand and paper-cutter in the other, she held them up in front of her as
if in supplication.
“Dear God, make everybody very happy always!” she said aloud.
Russia seemed to Peggy a very terrible but rather vague place, since she
certainly did not devote to it an undivided attention, and the quality
of her information about it took a decided turn for the worse when,
before very long, this ivory paper-cutter, which she had mistakenly laid
down on the side of the punt while she was turning over a few severed
leaves (the book was one of those tiresome ones which require to be cut
now at the side, now at the top, now apparently in every possible
direction), slipped with a loud splash into the bosom of Father Thames,
and was lost in him. Thereafter her knowledge of Russian affairs grew
more scrappy and disjointed, for after a short attempt to supply the
place of the paper-cutter with a hairpin, she had to glean her
information by peeping between leaves, while others remained sealed to
her. Soon, in fact, she abandoned the attempt altogether.
Summer, summer everywhere! Summer on these green Thames-side woods and
in the water in which she dabbled her hand, warm almost with its long
leisurely travel through so many noons of July since it left the spring
of its uprising, where the winter rains had stored it. And very notably
was it summer in her own heart, for growth and life she felt were at
their fullest there. She was happy in her friends, happy in the
multitudinous activities of her busy life, and, above all, happy in her
home, her husband, and her children. Nor was her happiness of the stolid
brooding order, for just as heat in summer weather always roused her
body to greater exertion, so this summer of her heart made her reach out
to all the world in a benevolence that longed for the happiness of
others. And then, fearing for one brief and terrible moment that she was
becoming like Ambrose, of whom Hugh had sent her a perfectly fair or
even flattering description, she untied her punt and pushed out into the
stream again.
The afternoon was all that it should be, and a story she told the
children earned the remarkable distinction of being considered by Jim as
of a merit equal to some of Hugh’s, and though Daisy snorted scornfully
at such a notion, Peggy felt humbly gratified that in the opinion of one
of her children she was getting on. Daisy, however, afraid that the
snorting was not quite kind to her mother, explained the position.
“Darling mummy,” she said, “I love you more than anybody, and you make
tea ever so much better than Hughie does--oh, he makes it so badly and
generally spills--but if I was to tell you you sang better than Hughie,
it would be silly, wouldn’t it?”
Jim slapped the water with the flat of his paddle.
“Oh, you goose,” he said, “you’re trying to--to---- What was it that
nurse did to me when I had to go to the dentist?”
“Put on your hat?” suggested Peggy.
“No,” squealed Jim, “I had my hat on. I know, break it to me. Daisy’s
trying to break it to you that she doesn’t think you tell stories as
well as Hugh, and so she tells you you make tea better. She’s a girl.
Now, when I think a thing I say it straight out.”
“Yes, darling, I know you do,” remarked his mother, with certain vivid
passages in her mind.
“Oh, Jim, shut up!” said Daisy. “You see, mummy darling, you make tea
better because you are so much older than Hugh--oh, ever so much
older!--and I think he tells stories better because he’s only a boy. You
can’t have everything, can you? If you’re old and go in to dinner you
can’t eat the ices on the stairs.”
Jim again belaboured the unoffending Thames.
“When I grow up I shall have everything,” he exclaimed. “I shall go in
to dinner and eat everything, and then go out and eat ices on the
stairs. And spotted-dog!” he added.
But Daisy was regarding her mother with a frown on her wise little face.
“You see, don’t you?” she said. “Of course, Aunt Edith can tell
beautiful stories, but then she’s so frightfully clever that she can
make believe to be young, so that you really do believe it.”
“Yes, darling, I see,” said Peggy.
“Two helpings of spotted-dog!” shrieked Jim, finding his ultimatum had
not received an answer.
“Then you’ll have pains in your inside,” said his mother, “and have to
go to bed till next Friday.”
“Saturday!” screamed Daisy, with a sudden lapse from the philosophic.
“Now, darlings, take care don’t tip up the punt. Have you both finished
your tea?”
“Ages ago,” said Jim.
“Very well, put all the things back into the tea-basket.”
“And may I pour the rest of the tea into the river?” asked Daisy.
“Yes, and Jim shall give the rest of that bun to the swans.”
“And then will you tell us another story? Please!”
“Yes, if you like, and then we shall have to get home, to be there when
Aunt Edith comes.”
Daisy was pouring the tea away very slowly to make it last longer.
“If I was Aunt Edith,” she said, “I should marry Hughie.”
“Pooh, that’s because you’re a girl!” said Jim. “Catch Hughie marrying
anybody! Besides, he’s promised to live with me in the cave underneath
where the water comes out of the weir.”
Daisy paused in her occupation.
“Oh, Jim, did he? When?” she asked.
“Oh, on one of the Sundays! And the frog-footman’s going to say we’re
not at home to anybody.”
“As if anybody would want to come!” said Daisy scornfully, but rather
hurt in her mind.
“Well, they wouldn’t if they did!”
A short silence, and Daisy yielded.
“I shall come,” she said.
“Not you!”
“Then I shall turn the water off, and what’ll happen to your silly old
cave then?” she asked.
Relations were getting a little strained, and Peggy interposed.
“No, Daisy and I will live in the kingfisher’s nest,” she said, “and Mr.
Kingfisher will peck anybody who ever looks in. And Aunt Edith shall
live with us.”
This was too much for Jim.
“Perhaps we had all better live together,” he said. “I vote we do, and
then we can have two houses each!”
Edith arrived as her sister had expected by the dinner-train, and a
brain less quick and eyes less loving than Peggy’s could easily see that
something had happened. But since Edith did not at present speak about
this reason for which she particularly wanted to see her, Peggy, with
the respect for the confidence of friends that with her extended even
into the region of thought and conjecture, forbore from exercising her
mind at all over what it was. She merely registered the fact that Edith
looked splendid. So they dined outside in the tent by the river, and
while the servants were in attendance talked not indeed of indifferent
things, but of a hundred things that interested them both, until they
should be alone and this “particular” thing come on the board of talk.
And in process of time the table was cleared, and the evening papers put
out, and then coffeecups were jingled away on the tray to the house.
Peggy, still with the idea of not wishing even to seem to hurry a
confidence, had taken up some pink sheet or other, but Edith suddenly
rose and stood before her.
“Put down your paper, dear Peggy,” she said, “and listen to me. I have
something to tell you, that for which I wanted to see you. Oh, Peggy,
Hugh has asked me to marry him.”
The paper slid from Peggy’s knees, and she stared for one moment in
sheer astonishment. At the instant the exclamation “Oh, poor Hughie!”
had risen to her lips at the thought of what Edith’s answer must surely
be, and almost passed them, but as instantaneously she saw how utterly
off the mark was any thought of pity for Hugh. Again and again she had
longed for the happiness of love and the light of it to come to her
sister’s face, and she saw it there now. But that it should come like
this and for him was so utterly unexpected that when Daisy had suggested
the same thing this afternoon it had been no more real than Jim’s
announcement that Hugh was going to live with him in the cave of water
at the weir.
But now it was real; here were her sister’s hands stretched to her for
congratulation, her face bent to hers for her kiss. But before she need
grasp her hands or kiss her there was a reasonable question to ask.
“And what did you say, dear?” she asked.
“I told him how unexpected it was, that I could not answer him at once.
But he knows, I think,” she added softly.
Peggy looked round quickly.
“Let us go indoors,” she said. “We can’t talk here, it is too open. The
trees will hear, or the servants, and it’s dark. Come Edith!”
For one moment the brightness of Edith’s face faded, as if a cloud had
passed over it, but it cleared again, and the two sisters, Peggy walking
in front, entered the drawing-room that looked on to the lawn. And with
the same instinct for privacy, Peggy closed the windows. Then she turned
to her sister.
“Oh, Edith, what are you going to say to him?” she asked. “Surely it was
possible to give him his answer at once--and you said he knew!”
But these words were only half-uttered, for even before they were spoken
Peggy knew the futility of pretence like this. But even that only dimmed
the brightness of Edith’s face as some light film of mist may dim the
apparent brightness of the sun--ever so little a distance up in air, the
films are below.
“Yes, I think he knew,” she said, “and it was stupid of me. For I knew
too!”
“Then do you mean you are going to accept him?” asked Peggy.
“I have, in all but telling him so.”
For one moment Peggy felt utterly helpless, but then there came to her
aid that passion for the happiness of others that was so urgent within
her, and which had prompted that sincere little heart’s-cry in the punt
this morning--and it was that and that alone that prompted her to speak.
“Yet you came here to tell me before you answered him,” she said. “Why?”
Edith looked grave for a moment--searching, indeed, for the reason that
had prompted what had been an instinct to her.
“I think one always wants to consult a person one loves and trusts
before taking any step at all,” she said quite simply.
“Ah, you dear,” said Peggy, impulsively kissing her, “and all I say, all
I think, you know, is said and thought by such a one.”
That filmy mist had thickened, for whatever love beckons it cannot
quench that love which has sprung from common blood, and has been
deepened and strengthened through years of affection and esteem. If the
one is irresistible, the other clings ivy-hard, and though both sisters
knew that it was impossible that that cord of love which had begun at
birth between them could be severed, yet there was no doubt that it
would be stretched and strained.
Peggy sat down.
“You came to consult me,” she said, “and so it would be futile if I did
not give you all that is most sincere in me. Oh, Edith, it would be
madness in you to do this! While one is in this life, and bounded by the
limitation of years, one has to use common sense, and not go
trespassing, and--and masquerading. You are a beautiful woman, dear, and
Heaven knows, and I do, how lovable. You are clever, you have knowledge
of life----”
Edith just moved in her chair.
“By the way, I told him I wrote ‘Gambits,’” she said; “it was after that
that he proposed to me!”
Peggy shook her head.
“That is nothing,” she said; “he would soon have known, and next week
makes no difference. But it was with you he fell in love, with the mind
that made that and the hand that wrote it, and the clear eye that saw so
much of human things and was so pitiful and kind--oh, me, Edith, if only
we poor women were kindly and painlessly put away at the age of fifty
how much better for everybody. No, I don’t really think that, because
there are lots of things which can only be done by women over fifty,
like--like understanding people, which no man ever did, and no woman
till she was old. And to understand is so much, and, having understood,
to smile and be kind, and----”
“And cease to be oneself,” said Edith quietly.
“No, not that, but to be one’s children, to----”
Edith got up quickly, with the sun shining again.
“But I have no children, dear Peggy,” she said. “Look at my point of
view for a moment. Indeed, all the time that the years were passing so
beautifully for mothers, for people like you, what was I? You know. And
then, when the chains were broken, I did live down those years, I tell
you that, and it is true. I hunted every piece of bitterness out of my
heart. By God’s grace I cleansed and renewed it, and it is ready--I say
it--for the man who loves me. Oh, how often I rebelled, and said that my
life had been spoiled, that the years that should have been beautiful
had been a succession of days on each of which I wished that I was dead.
But He chose that I should not die. Why? I was prepared for other
things; God knows that if this had never come into my life I should have
continued to live pleasantly and very far from complaining, with a
hundred interests, a hundred schemes, and in one’s infinitesimal way
trying to make people on the whole glad that one is alive. But now how
can I help seeing that all that was in twilight? Hugh came!”
Peggy clasped her hands together.
“Oh, it is hard,” she cried, “I can guess how hard. For I know Hugh, and
I love him as I love the sun and the trees, and if one loved him as a
man, I can guess, I can imagine what that would be. But think, my
darling, just think--what of ten years from now; the years that will but
still be bringing nearer his prime of life. What will he be in ten
years? Just thirty-five, with five thirties and ten forties still in
front of him. And then what? Fifty still! And you? Why, you are
seventeen years older than he! What does that matter now? Nothing, of
course. But then--his life will be in full swing, the best of its
activities still in full force. He will be singing at the opera still.
And you? At home, too! It is that which matters. He planning still for
the future, and you able only to answer his plans with memories of the
past. Yes, perhaps it is grotesque to look forward twenty-five years.
But look forward ten only.”
Peggy went to the window she had shut when they came in and flung it
open again.
“Ah, if only one was renewed like the night and the river,” she said,
“it would be different. But one is not; age comes so quickly when youth
is over. And our tragedy is that we feel young still! Have pity on Hugh,
dear. Even more have pity on yourself; spare yourself the endless,
ceaseless struggle that you will make for yourself in the years to come
if you marry him. Oh, Edith, I do want you to be happy so much, and a
month ago you were so happy--you looked forward to such happy years.”
“Would that content you?” asked Edith--“the things, I mean, that made my
happiness a month ago?”
“No; how could they, dear, if it meant that for the rest of my life Toby
and the children and all were to be lost to me?”
“Nor could they content me now,” said Edith, “if this had to be lost to
me.”
Then she got up, and stood by her sister again.
“Ah, don’t you see how almost all you have said tells the other way?”
she said, speaking quickly. “It is just because there is no renewal for
us, just because age comes so quickly when youth is over that I cannot
miss it. I have missed too much already, and I cannot miss more. I rage
for life, and when I can have it, I must. If some dreadful blow should
take everything from you, Peggy, and leave you just with a garden and a
brain of a kind, as I was left, it would be more reasonable for you to
be content than it would for me. You have had all these things--the love
of your husband, the love of your children, they would be memories to
you, and rose-gardens where any woman might wander happily. But what are
my memories? The best I can do is to have none. And now Love come--what
further memory should I be left with if I rejected it?”
Edith caught hold of her sister’s hands and drew her down by her side on
to the sofa. Her hands, Peggy felt, were trembling, that beautiful mouth
was trembling too, but those tremours, and the moisture that stood in
her eyes, were not the signs of sorrow; they were but tokens of the love
and the joy that had so taken possession of her, of the eternal youth
that invaded and held her. And the eternal youth of love transformed
her; it was the rapture of a girl’s first love that trembled on her lips
and fell in hesitating speech.
“Oh, Peggy, think what it means to me,” she said. “The years and the
bitterness of them it seems now that I had but covered up, but Hugh has
cancelled them, swept them away. I can’t think of them any longer; I
can’t conceive of them having existed.”
She gave a gentle little laugh as she caressed Peggy’s hand.
“How laboriously I used to sweep and dust in my mind,” she said. “How I
used to struggle and determine to forget! And then he came and said,
‘_Du meine Seele_,’ and there had been no struggle at all--there had
been nothing. I had been waiting for Hughie all these years, and had
been dreaming, I suppose. He woke me.”
It was then, for the first time, as she looked into the soft, eager
face, that Peggy saw how hopeless was remonstrance or argument. But
there was just one word more she could say.
“I asked you to have pity on yourself just now,” she said. “But have
pity on Hugh. Edith, don’t be selfish.”
The moment she had said it she wished she had not. Edith winced as if
she had struck her.
“Ah!” she said, and that was all, but she dropped Peggy’s hand. But
Peggy, though she felt brutal, though she felt torn in two, went on.
“Yes, selfish,” she said. “You are taking so much, you are taking all
the best years of a young man’s life, and giving him a life from which
youth is past. It isn’t fair. It is selfish.”
She looked up at Edith, who sat quite still; next moment she flung
herself on the ground and knelt beside her, for she saw the uselessness
of this also.
“Oh, my darling, I can’t go on,” she said. “Forget that I said it. I
have known you so long, and loved you so much, and you never did a
selfish thing, and could not. Do forgive me!”
Edith took her hands again in hers.
“Dear, how can you ask me to forgive?” she said. “As if you could do
anything to me that needs forgiveness? So go on!”
“But I can’t. Besides, that is all; I have said it all,” whispered
Peggy.
“But it seems to you that I am being selfish,” repeated Edith.
“I don’t know,” said Peggy. “I can’t imagine you selfish. But blind
then.”
Then Edith smiled at her.
“Ah, yes, blind,” she said. “I will willingly allow that I may be. But
then is not Hugh blind also? And as long as we both remain blind I think
we shall be very content.”
She drew Peggy close to her and kissed her.
“I had to tell you, Peggy,” she said, “not only because you are what you
always have been to me, but because it was through you and here that I
met him. He sang that Schumann song then, singing it into the desert,
as it were, letting the wind take it where it chose. And now it is not
to the desert he sings it. At least, the desert has blossomed!”
Once again the glory and the eternal youth of love so shone from Edith’s
face that Peggy felt that there could be no mistake about this; whatever
had lit that beacon there must be meant for her.
“Then it is to be?” she asked.
“Yes, dear Peggy. I wanted to see you first, as I told you. But
otherwise--for all you have said I thought of before, the night before
in fact--I only wonder now why I did not say ‘Yes’ to him at once. But
it was so unexpected and so wonderful, and I wanted to cry too, which I
did.”
“Then God bless you and him and your life,” said Peggy with something
like a sob in her voice, “and give you both all happiness, my darling.”
* * * * *
Such a talk had to be framed in silence, but it was not long before they
spoke not of other things, for that could scarcely be, but of the more
practical side of this. Edith had told Hugh that she would tell him her
answer as soon as she could, and the telegram to be sent next morning
added Peggy’s congratulations, and begged him to come down here for a
night. But before long the two parted to go to bed. There was no more to
say, and it was frankly useless to attempt to speak of anything else.
But Peggy lay long awake. She turned from one side to the other and
found no rest for her body or her thoughts. All her love for her sister
desired her happiness, but all her wisdom told her that she could not
find it permanently here. How could she? In the nature of things how
could she? And Hugh?