Ellen was still on her knees fiddling with the lock of the French window
in an effort to discover why Marion had found it so difficult to open
and shut, when she saw through the lacquer of reflection which the lit
room painted on the uncurtained glass that a dark mass had come to a
halt just outside. It moved, and she perceived that it was a skirt. She
stood up to face the intruder and looked through the glass into Marion's
eyes. For a moment she stared back in undisguised anger. Of course, if
the woman had had any sense she would never have formed this daft idea
of going for a dander on the marshes at this hour of the night, whether
her nerves were troubling her or not; but she never ought to have
pretended to be so set on it, and let a body feel sure of having the
evening alone with Richard as soon as he had finished with those beastly
papers, if she was going to turn back in five minutes. Then she
remembered that this was Richard's mother, and that for some reason he
set great store by her; and she tried to smile, and laid her fingers on
the doorknob to open it. But Marion shook her head and put out a
prohibitory hand with so urgent a gesture that the unlit lantern which
hung by a strap from her wrist bumped against the glass.
Yet she remained for some seconds longer with her face pressed close to
the window. She was peering into the room with an expression of wanting
to fix its contents and its appearance in her memory, which was odd in
the owner of the house. Ellen moved aside in order not to impede her
vision, and stood disliking her for her pervasive inexplicability and
for her extreme plainness. She had been very ugly all that evening since
she came down to dinner, and now the shining glass in front of her face
was acting in its uncomeliness like a magnifying lens. Her hair had
suddenly become greasy during the last few hours, and it showed in lank
loops where her hat had been carelessly jammed down on her head. In the
same short space of time her face seemed to have grown fatter, and her
skin had taken on the pallor of unhealthy obesity. Against it the dark
down on her upper lip looked like dirt. Her eyes were not magnificent
to-night. After she had stared round the room she looked again at Ellen,
and gave her a forced smile that looked the more unpleasant because the
corners of her mouth were joined to her nose by deep creases. It so
manifestly did not spring from any joy, that Ellen could not answer it
save by just such another false grin. Her honesty hated this woman who
had thus negotiated her into insincerity, and she turned away. When she
looked back the face had gone.
She went back to the fire and sat thinking bitterly what a daft thing it
was for a wife to go wandering round her own house in the night like a
thief. But Marion was altogether an upsetting woman. She had kept the
dinner waiting for nearly a quarter of an hour, and when she came down
it was revealed that she had caused this delay, which must have
inconvenienced the kitchen and was sheer cruelty to Richard, who had
made next to nothing of a tea, by dressing herself up in a black and
gold brocade affair that it was sheer madness to waste wearing when
there was no company, and putting on jewels which made her stricken
plainness look the more soiled and leaden. Then, once they sat down to
the meal she had done her best to spoil, she had eaten so slowly that it
dragged on interminably; and all the while had kept her great eyes fixed
on Richard's face, so that though he sometimes turned aside and spoke to
Ellen, he was always drawn away from her by his sense of that strong,
exigent gaze. The minute they had finished, when there seemed a chance
of their settling down in some more easy grouping by the fire, Marion
had curtly and disagreeably asked him if he had gone through the papers
about the mortgage; and when he answered that he had not been able to
keep his mind on them she had told him to go upstairs and finish them
just as if he were a child.
Ellen raised her upper lip over her teeth at the thought of Marion's
subsequent awkwardness. There had not, when she announced her plan of
taking Richard and Ellen up to town the next morning and spending the
day shopping and going to a theatre, been the least real party-giving
joy in her tone. Her will seemed to be holding her voice in its hands
like a concertina and waving it to and fro and squeezing out of it all
sorts of notes; but the sound of generous happiness would not come. And
when Ellen tried to tell her that it was very kind of her, but for
herself she would rather stay quietly in the country and go for a walk
with Richard, the woman had simply lifted her voice to a higher pitch
and said: "Oh, but it'll be great fun. We must go before Sunday is on
us." She was evidently one of those managing bodies who are accustomed
to ride rough-shod over the whole world, and often do it under the
pretence of kindness. It was most cunning the way she rang for the cook
to try and make it seem that there was a pressing domestic reason for
her taking this jaunt. But cook had let her down badly, staring in such
ingenuous amazement, and blurting out: "Oh Lor', mum, I don't want no
aluminium set now. All I said was I thought our copper saucepans would
need re-coppering in a year or so, and that, considering the trouble and
expense that meant, we might as well restock with aluminium." There had
been a hysterical stridency about the way in which Marion had flouted
the woman's protests by repeating over and over again: "Yes, you shall
have them now. There's not the smallest reason why you should wait for
them. I shall go up to Harrod's to-morrow morning."
Indeed, Marion was a queer woman in all respects, from her broad face
and squat body to her forced, timbreless voice and her unconvincing
gestures. It was only her clumsiness that had prevented her from opening
the French window; the lock was all right. Ellen felt that she would die
if she did not have an hour alone with Richard to relearn that life
could be lived easily and with grace. But it would be just like the
creature's untimeliness and awkwardness to be still hanging about the
garden in readiness and pop in just when everything was being lovely.
Ellen crossed to one of the small leaded windows which were on each side
of the French window and looked out of the open pane in its centre. It
was as she feared. The light streaming from the room showed her Marion
standing half-way across the lawn, looking up at the top storey of the
house. As the ray found her she lowered her head and made a jerky,
embarrassed movement in the direction of Ellen, who, feeling merciless,
continued to hold back the curtain. Marion drew her cloak collar up
about her ears and stepped aside into the darkness. Ellen went and sat
down by the fire. From something in Marion's bearing, she knew that she
would not be back for some time.
It would be beautiful when Richard came down to her. Now that the room
was purged of its late occupant she felt herself becoming again the
miracle that Richard's love had made her in the days before they left
Edinburgh. Her heart beat quicker, she was sustained by a general mirth
and needed no particular joke to make her smile. She felt the equal of
the tall flame that was driving through the fire. It did not worry her
that Richard was not with her, for she knew that at each moment she was
recovering more and more of that joy in life which had previously come
to her every morning, though those were greyer than here: which had been
a real possession, since Richard had often, when he was tired, found
such restoration in reading its signs on her as a footsore man might
find in throwing himself in long grass: which had been gradually going
from her ever since the house had begun to draw her into its affairs.
Now she was regaining it; though, indeed, ever to have become conscious
of it, as she had during the time of being without it, was to have lost
the glad essence of it. She quailed and rejoiced like a convalescent who
sets out to put his strength to the test, when she heard the slamming of
a door overhead.
He did not come to her at once, but looked round the room and said:
"Where's Marion?"
It would be as well not to speak of the plain face pressed against the
window, of the dark loiterer in the garden. Murmuring, "Oh, she'll be
back in a minute," she opened her arms to him.
He swung her out of the chair and sat down himself, gathering her very
close. "Oh, my Ellen, you are the very colour of that red deer I saw run
across the road!" he whispered in her ear. She knew immediately, from
the peace that fell on his deep, driving breath, from the way that his
lips lifted and let the splendour of his eyes shine out again, that he
too was aware of her recovery of normal joy and was refreshing himself
with it. She drooped down towards his mouth, but at the last minute he
avoided her kiss and said irritably: "I wonder if Roger made an awful
ass of himself preaching to-night?"
"I've no doubt," answered Ellen, "that he made Jesus most dislikeable.
But with all the attention Christianity gets, it can put up with a
setback here and there."
"It's not that I'm worrying about," he told her. "I can't bear having
mother's name bandied about again after the hell of a time she's had."
He stared in front of him with obsessed eyes.
Ellen shifted uneasily on his knee. She would have liked to take his
face between her hands and tilt it down till his eyes looked into hers;
but that was no use, for however she tilted it, his eyes would shift
from her face to focus themselves on some blankness which he could fill
with his obsession. She folded her arms round his neck and clung closer,
closer. It would be all right if she could have a little time alone with
him. The thudding of his heart made her think of the engine of a
steamer; and so of the voyage which they had planned to make when they
were married, landing only where the sea beat on a shore as lovely as
itself. She sat forward on his knee and picked up a copy of the Times
which lay on a small table near them, and turned it over till she found
the mails and shipping columns; and she began to chant what her eye
first saw.
"'Lamport and Holt. _Bruyère_, passed Fernando Noronha, 21st, Clyde, for
Rosario. _Lalande_, left Santos 20th, Liverpool for Rio Grande.
_Leighton_, arrived Buenos Aires 20th from Liverpool. _Vestris_, left
Pernambuco 17th for New Orleans.' Richard, have you ever been to
Pernambuco?"
"Once," he said.
"What like is it?" she said in her Scotch way.
"Oh, I don't know.... It's supposed to be like Venice."
"Like Venice? Why?"
"Oh, there are waterways ... and all that sort of thing...."
She looked at him as one might at a friend whom one had supposed to be
suffering from some mild ailment, but who mentioned casually some
symptom which one knows the mark of a disease which has no cure. If he
had lost his pleasure in prohibiting time to be a thief by recreating
past days when the earth had shown him its beauty, his mother's woes had
made him grievously sick in his soul. "Ah, well!" she said; and let the
silence settle.
After a while he asked impatiently: "Where is mother?"
She put her hand to her head. Of course trouble would come of this, as
it did of all that Marion did or that was done to her. "She's gone out,"
she said timorously.
"Gone out! At this time of night? Do you mean into the garden?"
"Yes, into the garden," she temporised. "She said her head was bad and
that she felt she'd be the better for a blow."
"Excuse me," he said curtly, and lifted her from his knee, and went to
the window and drew back the curtains. An elm-tree in a grove to the
east held the moon in its topmost branches like a nest builded by a bird
of light. It showed the garden an empty silver square, trenched at the
end by the soot-black shadow of the hedge. "She's not there!" he
exclaimed.
"Well, she did say something about going down on the marshes." Ellen
felt a little sick as she saw his face whiten. She had known when the
woman announced her daft intention that trouble would come of it. There
was going to be more of this Yaverland emotion, quiet and unhysteric and
yet maddening, like some of the lower notes on the organ.
"Going down on the marshes at nine o'clock on a freezing night!" He
turned on her with a sharpness that she felt should have been
incompatible with their relationship. "Why didn't you come and tell me
she was doing this?"
Her temper spurted. "How should I know there was anything unusual in it?
You are all strange in this house!" For a second they looked at each
other in hatred; then eyes softened and they looked ashamed, like
children who have quarrelled over a toy and have pulled it to pieces.
She thought jealously of the woman who was the cause of all this
trouble, walking down there in the quietness of the marshes, where all
day she herself had longed to be. Despairingly, she moved close to him,
slipping her hand inside his, and said, trying to hold back the thing
that was drifting away: "I'm sorry. But she said she wanted to clear her
head after the day she'd had. And I could never think she was a woman
who'd be afraid of walking in the dark. And it seemed natural enough.
Because it has been a day for her, hasn't it?"
He agreed grimly: "Yes, it's been a day," and looked over his shoulder
at the quiet silvern garden, and shivered. "Tell me," he asked, with a
timidity that filled her with fear, since it was the last quality she
had ever expected to colour his tone to her, "what was she like, before
she went out?"
"Oh, verra bright," said Ellen, with conscious acidity. "She was all for
making arrangements for you and me to go up to town with her to-morrow
and see a play, and I don't know all what. And she had the cook in to
tell her about some aluminium saucepans that we're going to buy
to-morrow if we go."
"Oh!" He was manifestly relieved. "Well, I suppose it's all right."
"Yes, it's all right," she told him pettishly; and then tried to make
amends by speaking sympathetically of Marion. "I can understand why your
mother thought it would do her good to go out. If you've lived all your
life in a place I expect every field and tree gets a meaning for you. No
doubt," she went on, unconscious of any feeling but contentment that she
was so successfully taking cognisance of Marion's more pathetic aspect,
"the poor thing's gone for a walk to some place where she can get a bit
of comfort by remembering the time when she was very young. Richard,
Richard, what have I said?"
He looked at her coldly. "Nothing. What could you have said?" But he
went to the window as if he had been told something that had made him
hasten, and opened it and stepped outside. Against the moonlight he was
only a silhouette; but from the hawkishness of the profile he turned to
the west she knew that he was allowing himself to wear again that awful
look of rage which had made her cry aloud. He stepped in again and said:
"I'm sorry, Ellen, but I must go and look for her."
She might have known that she would not have her evening alone with
him. "May I come with you?" she asked through tears.
"No, no, it wouldn't be any fun for you," he answered fussily,
"scrambling about these fields in the dark."
"Let me come with you!" she begged; and guilefully, seeing his brows
knit sullenly, she waved her hand round the room, which she knew must be
to him sombre with the day's events, and cried: "I shall feel afraid,
waiting here."
"Very well. Go and put your things on. But be quick."
He had his hat and coat and stick when she came down; and he had grudged
the time spent in waiting for her. Wearily she followed him out of the
window. From what her mother had told her about men, she had always
known that even Richard, since he was male, might forget his habit of
worship towards her and turn libellous as husbands are, and pretend that
she was being tiresome when she was not. But she would never have
believed that it could come so soon. And it was spoiling her. She no
longer felt possessed of the perfect control of her actions, nor sure of
her own nobility. Only a second or two ago she had betrayed her sex by
pretending to be frightened by assuming one of the base qualities which
tradition lyingly ascribed to women, because she had to be in his
presence no matter at what price. There was no knowing where all this
would end.
But in the inventive beauty of the night she found distraction, for it
had wrought many fantastical changes in the dull world the day had
handed it. The frost had made the soil that had been sodden metal-hard,
while preserving its roughness, so that to tread the paths was like
walking on beaten silver. Since its rising, the moon had sown and raised
a harvest of new plants in the garden; for the rose-trees, emaciated
with leaflessness, had each a shadow that twisted on the earth like
ground-ivy or climbed the wall like a creeper. Through an orchard
piebald with moonbeams and shadow, and a gate, glaring as with new white
paint, set in a lichen-grey hedge, they passed out on the grizzled
hillside. He did not take her down the path by which she and Marion had
gone on to the marshes the previous afternoon, but plunged forward into
the short grey fur of the moonlit field, where there was no path, and
led her up in a slanting course towards the top of the elm-hedge that
striped the hill. It was rough walking over the steep frozen hummocks,
and she wished he would not walk so fast. But it was lovely going up
like this, and with every step widening the wide, whitely-blazing view.
The elm trees stood like chased toys made by silversmiths where the
light struck them; and in the darkness seemed like harsh twiggy nets
hung on tall poles to catch the stars. Scattered over the polished
harbour, the black boats squatted on their shadows and the tide licked
towards them with an ebony and silver tongue. But far out in the fairway
a liner and some lesser steamers carried their spilling cargo of orange
brightness, and the further fringe of the night was spoiled by the
comprehensive yellow wink of a lighthouse; and these things tainted the
black and white immaculacy of the hour. It was not on earth but overhead
that the essence of the night displayed itself. Light rushed from the
moon into the sky like a strong wind, carrying before it some shining
vapours that might have been angels' clouts blown off a heavenly line.
It was as if some horseplay was going on among the ethereal forces; for
the stars, dimmed by the violent brilliance of the moon, were like
tapers seen through glass, and were held, perhaps, by invisible beings
who had been drawn to their windows by the sound of carnival. To its
zenith the night was packed with gaiety.
"Richard, Richard, is it not beautiful?" she cried.
"Yes, yes," he answered.
They reached the topmost elm in the row, and opened a gate into a field
which stretched inland from the hill's brow. Under the shadow of its
seaward edge they still walked westerly, the ploughed earth looking like
a patch of grey corduroy lying to their right. It struck her that he was
moving now like a hunter stalking his quarry, as if the lightness of his
feet were a weapon, as if he were looking forward to an exciting kill.
At the corner of the field they stopped before a gap in the hedge.
Triple barbed wire crossed a vista of close-cropped grass running to
trees that lifted dark spires against the pale meridian starlight.
"Wait," said Richard.
He went forward and stamped down the long grasses at one side of the
gap, and then bent nearly double and seemed to be pressing against
something with his hands and his knee. The barbed wire began to hum, to
buzz excitedly; there was the groan of cracking wood, and the grunt of
his deep, straining breath. She found herself running her hands over her
face and down her body and thinking, "Since he is like that, and I am
like this, all will be well." That was quite meaningless; it must be
true that one of the moon's rays was unreason. The barbed wire danced
and fell to the ground, singing angrily. Richard had broken in two the
stake which supported it.
"Come on," he ordered her, and lifted her over the tangle of wires. They
walked forward, again on the hilltop's unscreened edge. The harbour was
hidden by the elms, but below lay the frosted marsh and islands, girdled
by the glistening sea-walls and their coal black shadows, and great wide
Kerith, its expanse jewelled here and there by the lights of homesteads.
It was beautiful, but she did not say anything about it to Richard, who
was walking on ahead, though there did not seem any reason why they
should walk in single file, for the ground was level and the grass
short. There was indeed a suavity about this place which was not to be
found in fields or commons. The line of trees towards which they were
going was only a spur of a dense wood that stretched inland, and light
from some moonflooded place beyond outlined their winter-naked bodies
and showed them beautiful with a formal afforested grace.
"Is this a park?" she whispered, running forward to his side.
"Yes. My father's park."
"Oh!" she breathed in surprise; then, flaming up in loyalty, cried:
"What a shame it isn't yours!"
He made an exclamation of anger and disgust, and said coldly: "Can't you
understand that I am glad that nothing which was his is mine?"
Meekly she murmured: "That's natural, that's natural," and fell behind.
They passed the lacy clump of withered bracken, casting a shadow much
more substantial than itself, which was the last dwindled outpost of
the screen of trees; and Richard hissed over his shoulder, "Hush!"
though she had not spoken. But nothing could spoil this. The silver
forest waited in a half circle round a clearing that looked marshy with
moonbeams; and in the centre of the arc, set forward from the trees,
shone a small temple, looking out to sea. It had four white pillars,
which were vague with excessive light, columns of gleaming mist; and
these upheld a high pediment, covered with deep stone mouldings which
cast such shadows and received such brightness that it looked like a
rich casket chased by some giant jeweller. That it should last longer
than a sigh did not seem possible.
But it endured, it endured; until the urgent advocacy of romance which
was somehow inherent in its beauty, and which was not likely to be
fulfilled, caused an ache. She caught her breath in a sob.
"You think it beautiful?" asked Richard, close to her ear.
"Oh, yes! Oh, yes!"
"I had a summer-house in that villa of mine at Rio," he said, hotly and
defiantly, "which was just like this, but much more beautiful."
He stepped forward and began to move towards the temple with that air of
stalking a quarry. She followed him wearily, feeling that it was not
right that they should have come here like this. They should have come
in some different way. At each step the temple grew higher before them,
more candid, more immaculate, but its beauty did not soften his
inexorable aspect. When they could see the pale wedges which the moon
drove in between the columns he paused and stared, and drew from his
pocket something dark which lay easily in his hand. "What's that? What's
that?" she asked in panic. "Only an electric torch," he muttered,
without surprise at her suspicion, and went with springing, silent,
detective gait up the three steps of the temple.
She remained without, drooping. Would he find his mother there? She
hoped so, for then they could all go home and leave this place, which
she felt despised her. The tall trees of the forest, lifting their bare
branches like antlers against the stars, seemed to be holding their
heads high in contempt of her defeat. For so to be forgotten was defeat.
No sounds came from the temple, and she timidly went up the steps and
passed into the interior, which was cut by the colonnade into narrow
chambers of shadows and broader chambers of light. At first she could
not see him anywhere, and cried in alarm: "Richard!"
"I'm here," he answered. He was standing beside her, leaning against a
pillar, but put out no hand to soothe her fear.
"Have you not found her?" she quavered.
He let the yellow circle of the electric torch travel over the cracked
stucco-wall that faced them, the paintless door at its left extremity,
the drift of dead leaves on the stone floor.
"What does that door open on to?" asked Ellen, forgetting the reason for
their search in the queerness of the place.
"A staircase up to the room above."
"What a lovely place," she cried joyfully, trying to remind him of the
existence of happiness, "to play in in the summer! Could one sleep up
there, do you think?"
He switched off the light. "I daresay," he said gruffly in the darkness.
"And look!" She pointed to a moonlit niche in the middle of the wall
high and deep enough to hold a life-sized statue. "It would be fun if I
stood up there, wouldn't it?"
There was silence; and then amazingly, his voice cracked out on her like
a whip. "Why do you say that? Did anybody tell you about this place? Has
she told you anything about it?"
"Why, no!" she stammered. "Nobody's told me a thing of it! I just
thought it would be fun if I were to stand up there like a statue. You
take me up too quick."
His passion died suddenly. "No," he said weakly, exhaustedly. "Of course
she wouldn't tell you. I was stupid. Yes, you're quite right. That's
what a man would do with a woman, wouldn't he, if they were here
together and they were lovers? He'd make her stand up there." Insanely
he switched on the electric torch and flashed it up and down the niche,
though in the dazzling moonlight its rays were but a small circular
soilure.
"But it's not summer now," she reminded him tenderly, laying her hand
on his sleeve. "Since she's not here, let's go home. Think of those
bonny fires burning away and nobody the better for them!"
"That's what he'd do, he'd make her stand up there," he muttered,
sending the light up and down the niche very slowly, as if in time to
slow thoughts.
She turned and went down the steps and walked away, holding her hands,
close to her eyes like blinkers, so that she might be the less afflicted
by the night, whose beauty was a reproach to her. A desire to look out
towards the sea and the flatlands came on her. This temple set among the
woods was a human place; men had laid the stones, men had planted the
trees, men had thought of it before it was. It was the stage for a scene
in the human drama, which she had not been able to play. But the sea and
the flatlands were not made by men; they made humanity seem a little
thing, and human success and failure not reasonable causes for loud
laughter or loud weeping. At the hill's edge she leaned against a tree
and gazed down on the moon-diluted waters, on the moon-powdered lands,
and was jealous of the plain, disturbing woman who kept herself covered
with the quietness of the marshes to the distress of others; and saw
suddenly, on the path at the foot of the slope, the far, weak ray of a
dancing lantern.
She ran back to the temple. All she cared for really was pleasing him.
"Richard, Richard! I've found her! She's down there on the marshes!"
He was out beside her in a second. "Where? How do you know?"
"I saw her lantern down on the marshes!"
When they got back to the hill's edge the light was still to be seen,
bobbing along towards the elm brow. Richard clipped Ellen's waist to
show her how well pleased he was with her. "Ah, that'll be Marion!" he
said. "Nobody else would be on the marshes at this hour." Then a little
wind of anger blew over his voice. "Has she been to his tomb? Can she
have been to his tomb in the time? It's a steep climb for her. I
wonder.... I wonder...."
The lantern bobbed out of sight behind the elm row. Feeling that they
were again alone together, Ellen raised her lips to be kissed, but he
had already turned away. "Let's go home now!" he said urgently. "I want
to know where she's been."
The place seemed far more beautiful to her than it had done before. "Oh!
Now you're sure she's quite safe, mayn't we stay here a little?" she
begged.
"No, no. Some other night. I'll bring you to-morrow night. But not now,
not now."
She followed laggingly, looking about her with infatuation. There was
something religious about the scene. Rites of some true form of worship
might fitly be celebrated here. All appeared more majestic and more
sacred than in the strained, bickering moments before she showed him the
lantern. Now she perceived that it was the silver circle of trees which
was the real temple, and that the marble belvedere was but a human
offering laid before the shrine. It was in there, along the ebony paths
which ran among the glistening thickets, that one would find the
presence of the divinity.
"Oh, Richard! It will never be so beautiful as this on any other night!
Let us stay!"
"No. It will be just as good any moonlit night. I swear I'll bring you.
But now I want to get back home."
He slipped her arm through his to make her come. She stumbled along,
turning her face aside towards those mystic woods. At the end of those
paths was another clearing, wide but smaller than this, and girdled all
sides by the forest; and there was something there.... Another temple? A
statue? An event? She did not know. But if they found it, they would be
happy for ever....
"Richard--"
"No."
He swung her over the tangled wires, and they hurried through the
ploughed field. When they came to the gate at the top of the elm-row
they saw below them, on the path up from the marshes to the orchard
gate, the bobbing lantern.
"She's going fairly quickly," he said softly, speculatively. "I wonder
if she's been to his tomb? Do you think she's had time?"
"I don't know," Ellen murmured, disquieted that he should ask her when
he must be aware she could not tell.
"Oh, well!" he exclaimed, with a sudden change to loudness and
bluffness, switching on the electric torch and turning it on the earth
at their feet. "We'll find out when we get home. Let's hurry back."
They ran across the hillside, Ellen following desperately, with a dread
that if she tripped and delayed him he might not be able to behave quite
nicely, the circle of light he cast on the ground for her guidance. The
humped and raw-edged frozen earth hurt her feet. The speed they went at
shook the breath out of her lungs. At an easy, comfortable pace, the
lantern bobbed its way into the orchard and up towards the garden. She
was the lucky woman, Marion.
"Good," said Richard, as they passed through the gate. "You did that in
fine style."
"Why do you need to hurry so?" she protested. "You have all night now to
ask her where she has been."
"I want to find out if she has been to his tomb," he repeated with dull,
drilling persistence.
When they came to the end of the garden he drew up sharply. "Why is she
standing by the servant's door? Why the devil is she always doing such
extraordinary things?"
Ellen saw in front of her, through a screen of bushes that ran from the
left-hand corner of the house to the left wall of the garden, the steady
rays of the lantern come to rest. "You'd better go and ask her," she
said pettishly.
He crossed the lawn quickly and halted before a trellis arch which
pierced this screen, and motioned her to go before him. At that moment
there came the sound of knocking near by. He caught his breath, pressed
on her heels impatiently, and when they entered the tiled yard brushed
past her and walked towards the lantern, which was close to the door in
the side of the house, calling querulously: "Mother! Mother!"
The light swung and wavered. "What is the woman up to?" thought Ellen
crossly. The strong yellow rays of the lantern dazzled before them and
prevented them from seeing anything of its bearer, though the moonlight
beams were still unclouded.
"Mother!" Richard cried irascibly, and levelled the torch on her like a
revolver.
Its brightness showed the dewy roundness, towsled with perplexity, of a
doe-eyed girl of Ellen's age.
"Ach!" said Richard, shouting with rage. "Who are you? Who are you?"
It struck Ellen that his refusal of any recognition of the girl's
sweetness was unnatural; that it would have been more sane and
wholesome, though it would have pricked her jealousy, if he had shown
some flush of pleasure at this gentle, bucolic, nut-brown beauty.
"Please, sir," gabbled the girl with her wet, foolish, pretty lips, "I'm
Annie Brickett, and your cook's my auntie, and I come over to say my
married sister's had a little baby, and it's before her time, so would
auntie give us the clothes she was making?"
The door opened, and aproned figures looked out of the kitchen
brightness at them.
"Where is your mistress?" Richard asked them, cutting into the girl's
sweet, silly speech. "Has she come back?"
The servants all started making twittering, consequential noises. "No,
sir, she isn't." "We didn't know, any of us, you was out till the lady
and gentleman come."
"What lady and gentleman?"
The two younger women shrunk back and left the cook to answer. "Mr.
Roger Peacey, sir, and the lady." From the hindmost girl there came a
giggle.
That was why they had not heard the knocking at the door. They had all
been sitting laughing at his mother's other son and going over the
family history. Ellen shrank back from the light. Marion's misfortunes
made things very ill to deal with; they seemed to bring out the worst in
everybody. And how the whole affair was hurting Richard! He turned on
his heel and walked back to the trellis arch and went through it without
waiting for her. By the time she had followed him round the corner of
the house he was opening the French window into the dining-room. He
found it quite easy to open; again she thought with rage and contempt of
the way that Marion had fumbled with the handle. She had to run along
the path lest in his forgetfulness he shut her out into the night.
She found him halted just within the room, pulling off his gauntlets
and forcing a white smile towards Roger, who was standing swaying on the
hearthrug, his cheeks dribbled with tears. Poppy stood beside him,
staring sullenly at a blank wall, her mouth a little open with distaste
for him.
"So you're giving us another visit," said Richard, in that hollow
conscientious tone of kindness he had used to them in the afternoon.
Roger opened his mouth but could not speak; then flapped his hands to
make it plain this was an occasion of importance, and cried bleatingly:
"I've come to say that I forgive you all."
"Forgive us!" exclaimed Richard, swept away to the bleak extremity of
rage. Then checked himself. "Oh, for not coming to your meeting. We
hoped you would. Ellen was tired."
"I couldn't bear to think of you p'raps going to bed and feeling that I
was harbouring ill thoughts towards you, not realising that now I've got
Jesus I'll forgive anything that anybody does against me!" His voice
wallowed rhapsodically. "So Poppy and I just nipped in here instead of
going straight back to the Colony."
Poppy wriggled her body about in her clothes in an agony of desire to
disassociate herself from him, from the situation.
"That was good of you," said Richard.
"And now"--the whistling tone came back in his speech--"I want to tell
mother!"
"You can't do that. She isn't in."
"What, weren't you all out together? Didn't she come home with you?"
"No."
"Then, love o' goodness, where is she at this time of night?"
"Down on the marshes," said Richard casually. "She had a headache. She
thought a walk in the night air would do her good." Slowly and
deliberately he smoothed out his gauntlets and laid them down on the
table.
"Oh," murmured Roger, and was silent until Richard put out his hand and
straightened the gloves, making them lie parallel with the grain of the
wood. Then suddenly he ran round the table and looked up into his
brother's face. "Here! What's the matter with mother?"
"Nothing! Nothing!" exclaimed Richard in exasperation. "She's down on
the marshes, having a walk."
"Oh, but you can't take me in that way!" the pallid creature cried,
wringing his hands. "I can see you're frightened about mother!"
"I'm not," said Richard vehemently.
"You needn't try to fool me. I'm stupid about everything else, but not
about mother! And I could always feel what was going on between you two.
Many's the time I've had to leave the room because you two were loving
each other so and I felt out of it. And now I know you're frightened
about her! You are! You are!"
"I'm not!" shouted Richard.
Roger shrank back towards Poppy, who seemed to like the loud noise, and
had raised eyes skimmed of their sullenness by delight. "If you'd got
Jesus," he said tartly, "you'd learn to be gentle. Like He was." He
recovered confidence by squeezing Poppy's hand, which she tendered him
deceitfully, looking at Richard the while as if she were waiting for
orders. "Now you'd better tell me what it is about mother that's making
you frightened. She'd not be pleased, would she, if she came in and
found you treating me like this, as if I hadn't a right to know anything
about her, and me her own son just as much as you are?"
That argument moved Richard, Ellen could see. He looked down at his
white knuckles and unclenched his hands. "It's really nothing," he told
Roger in that false, kind voice. "I went upstairs after dinner to look
over some papers for mother and left her and Ellen down here. When I
came back Ellen told me she'd gone out for a walk on the marshes. It
struck me as rather an odd thing for her to do at this hour, so we went
out and had a look round, but couldn't see her anywhere. There's not the
slightest occasion for worry."
Roger stared at him, sucking his front teeth. "But you're frightened!"
he said explosively.
"I am not."
"You are. You think she's come to some harm down on the marshes." He
slipped past him and flung open the French window, calling in a thin,
whistling voice that could not have been heard fifty yards away:
"Mummie! Mummie!"
A convulsion of rage ran through Richard. With one hand he jerked Roger
back into the room by his coat-collar, with the other he slammed the
French window. "Be quiet. I tell you she's all right. I know where she's
gone."
"Where, then?"
"Never mind."
"Where? Where?" His hands fumbled for the doorhandle again.
"Oh, stop that!" Richard loosed hold of him with the expression of one
who had grasped what he thought to be soft grass and finds his palms
scored by a fibrous stalk. He said, and Ellen could see that he liked
saying it as little as anything that he had ever said all his life long:
"If you must know, I think she's gone up to my father's tomb."
Roger shook his head solemnly. "No. You're wrong. She hasn't gone there.
And she's come to harm."
"Why in God's name do you say that?" burst out Richard.
"I know. I've known all the evening. That's really why I came back here
after the service. That talk about forgiveness was just something I made
up as an excuse. I knew quite well that something was wrong with
mummie." His pale eyes sought first Richard and then Ellen. "Don't you
believe a person might know if something happened to another person," he
asked wistfully, "if they loved them enough?"
There was indeed such an infinity of love in that weak gaze that Richard
and Ellen exchanged the abashed look that passes between lovers when it
is brought to their notice that they are not the sole practitioners of
the spiritual art. Richard murmured "Oh ... perhaps ... but really,
Roger, she was quite bright before she went out. Ellen, tell Roger...."
But Roger stared out at the empty silver garden and whimpered
inattentively: "I can't help it. I want to go down to the marshes and
look for her."
"Very well," agreed Richard, blinking. The sight of the love in those
weak eyes made his voice authentically kind. "We'll go down. She ought
to be easy to find as she's carrying a lantern. You're quite sure she
has got a lantern with her, Ellen?"
"Oh yes," said Ellen. "It bumped against the glass when she came back
and looked through the window."
"When she came back and looked through the window? What do you mean?"
"Why," Ellen explained diffidently, not wanting to enlarge on his
mother's eccentricity. "She said good-bye and went out and shut the
door. Then in a minute or two I looked up and saw her face against the
glass.... I offered to open the door, but she shook her head and went
away."
"But, Ellen! Didn't that strike you as very strange?" She stared in
amazement that his eyes could look into hers like this. He choked back a
reproach. "Ellen ... tell me everything ... everything she said before
she went out."
She passed her hand over her forehead, shading her face. It shamed her
that he was going to be interested in what she told him and not at all
in her manner of telling it. "I've told you. She was full of plans about
us all going up to-morrow. To a theatre. And she sent for the cook and
talked to her about saucepans."
"What saucepans?"
"Aluminium saucepans."
"But what about them?"
She laughed aloud in the face of his displeasure. An image of the temple
in the wood mocked her mind's eye. Instead of standing in one of the
narrow chambers of shadow that lay behind its pillars with his lips on
hers, she was being cross-examined about saucepans. "She reckoned to get
them in the forenoon before we went to the theatre."
For a second he pondered it; then asked with an accent that pierced her
because it was so infantine, so shamelessly mendicant of comfort: "She
really was all right, Ellen?"
"Cross my heart, Richard, she was that."
Their hands stole into one another's; from the warm, fluttering pressure
of his fingers she knew that his heart was feeling numberless adoring
things about her. If everything had not happened as she wished, it was
not because the dispensation of love had come to an end, but because it
had not endured long enough. There was a golden age ahead. She leaned
towards him, but was arrested by the change in his expression. His face,
which had been a white mask of grief, became vulpine. "Yes, she will
most probably be up there ... at his tomb...."
Roger, behind him at the window, fluted miserably: "Mummie! Mummie!" He
turned on him with a gesture of irritation and opened the door. "Here,
Roger, let's go now." The glance he shot backwards into the room was so
preoccupied that it held no more intimate message for Ellen than for
Poppy. "Well, I don't expect we'll be long...."
They crossed the lawn, their short shadows treading it more gaily than
their tall, striding selves. There seemed to be some mishap at the gate
into the orchard. Apparently Roger squeezed his finger in the hinge; but
he was very brave. The two women stood at the window and watched him hop
about, shaking the injured hand, while his shadow parodied him, and
Richard waited with a stoop of the shoulders that meant patience and
hatred. Then again the silver garden was empty.
Poppy and Ellen went and sat down at the hearth; and Poppy said with an
extravagant bitterness: "Well, that's that. He knows as well as I do
that the Army expects us officers to be in by eleven."
"No doubt Mr. Yaverland'll go round in the morning and explain the
exceptional circumstances," murmured Ellen.
"I'm sure I don't care. I'm fed to the teeth with the Army, fed to the
teeth...." She stared into the fire as if she saw a picture there, and
drew a little tin box from her pocket and offered it to Ellen, saying:
"Take one. They're violet cachous." Sucking one, she sat forward with
her feet in the fender and her head near her knees until, as if the
flavour of the sweet in her mouth was reminding her of a time when life
was less flavourless than now, she started up and began to walk
restlessly about the room. She halted at the window and asked thickly:
"That place over the other side of the river. Where there's a glow in
the sky. Is that Chatham?"
With awe, with the lifting of the hair, the chilling of the skin that
those suffer who see the fulfilment of a prophecy, Ellen remembered
what Marion had said that afternoon about the handsome young sailor in
Chatham High Street. She murmured tremulously: "I think Richard said it
was."
"Ah, Chatham's a nice place," said Poppy in a surly voice. She pressed
her face against the glass like a beast looking out of its cage. It was
quite certain, as the silence endured, that she wept.
Then Marion had been right. A wave of terror washed over Ellen. What
chance had she of playing any part on a stage where there moved this
woman of genius, who was so creative that she had made Richard, and so
wise that she could see through the brick wall of this girl's
brutishness? She stammered, "Well, good-night, I'll away to my bed," and
ran upstairs to her room and undressed furiously, letting her clothes
fall here and there on the floor. In the first moments after she turned
out the lights the darkness was brightly painted with pictures of the
moonlit temple; one everywhere she turned her eyes. And once, when she
was far gone into drowsiness, she woke herself by sitting up in bed and
crying acidly: "And do you think we will have to spend every night
searching for your mother, Richard?" But very soon she slept.
She woke suddenly and with her mind at attention, as if someone had
whispered into her ear. She sat up and looked through the great window
into that not quite full-bodied light of a day that was overcast and
advanced past its dawn only by an hour or two. There was no one in the
farmyard. Yet it came back to her that she had been called by the sound
of men's voices; of Richard's voice, she could be almost sure, for there
was a filament of pleasure trailing across her consciousness. There was
no reason why he should be out of doors at this hour, before the family
had been called to breakfast, unless the search for Marion had been
unsuccessful. She jumped out of bed and washed and dressed and ran
downstairs, leaving her hair loose about her shoulders because she
begrudged the time for pinning it when he needed her comfort. Mabel, the
parlour-maid, was coming out of the dining-room with an empty tray in
her hand. One corner of her apron-bib flapped loose and there was a smut
on her face. Ellen knew that Marion had not been found, for if she had
been in the house, alive or dead, the girl would not have dared to look
like that. They passed in silence, but exchanged a look of horror.
There was no one in the dining-room but Roger and Poppy. Poppy was
sitting in an armchair at the hearth, where she had evidently spent the
night. Her uniform was unbuttoned half-way down her square bust; and on
the arms of the chair there rested two objects that looked like sections
of dried viscera, but which Ellen remembered to have seen labelled as
pads in hair-dressers' windows. Roger was kneeling before her, his head
on her lap, and weeping bitterly. She was stroking his hair kindly
enough, though her eyes were dwelling on the teapot and ham on the
breakfast-table. The French window was swinging open, admitting air that
had the chill of dawn upon it; and outside on the gravel path stood
Richard, listening to a bearded old fisherman in oilskins. She hovered
about the threshold and heard the old man saying: "'Tes no question o'
you putting yourselves about to look for her now. Mostly you don't hear
nothin' of them for three weeks, and then they comes out where they went
in. Till the tide brings them back you can't fetch them." Richard said:
"Yes, yes," and held out money to him. She saw he wanted to send the
fisherman away, that he could not bear to hear these things; but he was
held rigid by the obsession, which he and Marion had followed as if it
were a law, that one must not betray emotion. His inhibited hand became
more and more talonlike, more and more incapable of making the gesture
of dismissal. To aid him Ellen showed herself at the open door in her
wildness of loose hair and called: "Richard! Richard!"
That made the old man take his money and go away, and Richard stepped
back into the room. He evaded her embrace. "This ghastly light!" he
muttered, and went to the corner of the room and turned on the electric
switch. Then he let her take his old, grief-patterned face between her
hands.
"My dear, my dear, what has happened?"
"There's a place ... there's a place ... there's a place on the
sea-wall...." He drew his hand across his forehead. "He is finding it
difficult," her heart told her sadly, "to explain it to a stranger." "In
the train, when you came, you must have seen a brick-kiln ... on the
right of the railway ... deserted.... A trolley-line runs from there
over a bridge to the sea-wall ... to a jetty. It hasn't been used for
years. The planks are half of them rotted away. The high tide runs right
up among the piers. We found her lantern down there on the mud."
Her heart sickened. "Oh, poor, poor Marion!" she wept, and asked
foolishly, incredulously, as if in hopes of finding a flaw in the story,
"But when did you find the lantern?"
"An hour ago. We looked for her last night till two. We went all the way
along to Canfleet. They took us in at the signal-box there. Then as soon
as it was light we walked back along the sea-wall. And we found the
lantern. Look, it's out on the lawn."
They gazed at the dark object on the edge of the grass as if at any
moment it might move or speak.
"But, my dearest, she may not be in the water! She may have dropped the
light and been feared to go further without it, and gone into one of
those wee byres on the marshes till the morning, and not have wakened
yet!"
He laughed sleepily, softly. "Yes, certainly she's not wakened yet."
"But, my own dear, it may be so! She may be with us at any moment now!"
He shook his head obstinately. "No. She's dead. I know she's dead.
There's something like silence lying over everything. It means she's
dead."
It was her impulse to throw her arms about his neck and bid him weep if
he wished on her breast, but feeling his stillness, his nearly
unbreathing immobility, she kept herself from him. To those who fall and
hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously
stricken by a disease one sits and waits.
"Sit down and take a bit of breakfast," she bade him softly. He sank
into a chair at the table, lumpishly, as if his limbs had grown thick
and lithic, while she poured out a cup of tea and cut some ham. Her
flesh was weeping for Marion, who had been quick, who now was dead; but
the core of her was a void. She cut him a nice feathery slice, unbroken
all the way from the bone to the outer rim of bread-crumb-freckled fat;
and through the void there shot the thought, trivial yet tremendously
exultant: "Now that Marion is gone I shall always look after his food."
He drew his brows together and groaned softly. Hawkishly she looked
round to see what was distressing him. It was, of course, Roger howling
in Poppy's lap.... "Oh, my darling mummie!" It must be stopped.
"Roger," she said kindly, "sit forward for your breakfast."
He raised a dispirited nose, red with weeping, and shook his head
mournfully. "No, thank you. It wouldn't be of any use. I couldn't keep a
thing on my stomach."
"But what about Miss Poppy?" she asked guilefully. "She must be wearying
for her breakfast after the night she's spent in that chair."
That brought him off his feet, as she had known it would. "Oh, poor
Poppy!" he cried. "Oh, poor Poppy!" and led her to the table.
Richard ate and drank for some moments; he seemed very hungry. Then he
laid down his knife and fork and said: "Ellen, when your mother died did
you feel like this? As if ... the walls of your life had fallen in?"
"Yes, yes, my love, so terribly alone."
"Alone, alone," he repeated. "I am so selfish. I can think of nothing
but my own loneliness. I can't think of her."
"Well, never heed, my dear, my own dear. She wouldn't want you to
worry."
"Oh, but I must think this out!" he exclaimed in a shocked, dreary tone.
"It's so important...." He looked up at the electric light and grumbled:
"Oh, that damned light makes it worse!" and rose to restore the room to
the sallowness of the morning.
When he sat down again he would not eat, but leaned his head on his
hands and his elbows on the table and watched the other two. Poppy was
saying in tones half-maternal, half-disagreeable: "Eat up your 'am, you
silly cuckoo. You know if you don't you'll have one of your sick turns,"
and Roger was obeying. Tears and the ham collided noisily in his throat.
Richard withdrew his eyes from them and looked secretively at Ellen.
"She killed herself, of course," he said in an undertone.
"Oh no!" she cried. "Oh no!"
But there sounded through the room a thunderclap of memory. There had
been words drawled there the night before that now detonated in Ellen's
mind.... "What am I to do, Ellen, to keep my sons from quarrelling over
me?"
"Oh no!" she cried again, lest he should take notice that she was
deafened and dizzied and ask why. "Never think that of her, my dearie."
She had thought the woman strident and hysterical and thoughtless for
persisting in her plans for the next day in face of her own faint,
barely acquiescent smiles, and a poor, feckless, fashionless housewife
for thrusting those unwanted saucepans on the cook. But these had been
alibis she had sought to establish that she might clear her soul of a
charge of lingering at the brink of dark waters, lest Richard should
understand her sacrifice and grieve.
"Her heel may have caught in the rotting wood," she nearly shrieked, so
that he should not overhear the thoughts that rushed in on her silence.
"She wore high heels for her age--"
That was why Marion had come back and looked in through the window. She
was to shed one by one the shelters that protected her soul from the
chill of the universe: her house, her clothes, her flesh, her skeleton.
This first step had cost her so much that for one shuddering moment she
had gone back on it.
"And things looked so strange last night. If there was a skin of ice on
the wood it'd be hard to tell it from the moonlit water...."
Oh, pitiful dark woman that had stood on the lawn looking up at the room
where sat her son, whom she would never see again. "If I had not gone to
the window then," thought Ellen to herself, "she might have looked much
longer."
"She was very ugly last night," muttered Richard. "She was always ugly
when she was unhappy."
His speculative tone made her perceive that, unlike herself, he did not
know for certain that Marion had committed suicide. She must conceal
her proofs, bury them under a heap of lying counterproofs. "My dear,
you'd never think it if you'd seen her last night...."
"Tell me everything. All she did after I went upstairs."
Grimly she remembered the former rich traffic of their minds.
Henceforward he would do nothing but ask that question; she would do
nothing but answer it. It was the third time she had told this story in
the twelve hours. "She was as bright as could be. Talked of going to a
theatre, but said you cared for a good music-hall as much as
anything...." Her voice was thin, as liars' voices are. Surely he must
notice it and feel distaste. Oh, fatal Marion! Even in her complete and
final abnegation of her forcefulness she had used such an excess of
force that the world about her was shattered. For Ellen perceived that
never again would the relationship of Richard and herself be the perfect
crystal sphere that it had been before they came here, but must always,
till they died, be flawed with insincerity. She would never dare tell
him how, thought over, those trivial plans for the next day's pleasuring
were revealed, themselves, as devices of a tremendous hammering
nobility; how, seen with the intelligence of memory, the face at the
window had been the greasy mask of a swimmer in the icy waters of the
ultimate fear; how there had stood on the lawn for a long time what had
seemed a loiterer, but was in truth a pillar of love. If she let his
inherited excessiveness learn this he would go mad; and he would hate
her for not reading these signs when they had been given her. All her
life she would have to keep silence concerning something of which he
would speak repeatedly. She would become queer and jerky with strained
inhibitions ... charmless.... Perhaps he would go from her to unburdened
women....
"Perhaps you're right," he said wearily when she had finished; "maybe it
was an accident." He began to eat again, but soon pushed away his plate
and stood up looking down on the hearth. "Where did she sit? Which
chair?"
"Yon, at your hand."
He drooped over it, caressing the velvet cover. "Will I ever get him out
of this house, where everything will always remind him of her?" she
wondered savagely. Really Marion was magnificent, but she was very
upsetting. She was like a cardinal in full robes falling downstairs. And
for what inadequate reason she had caused all this commotion! Just
because her two sons quarrelled! She could have prevented that easily
enough if she had brought them up properly and skelped them when they
needed it. Ellen curled her lip as she watched him stroking the soft
velvet, laying his cheek against it.
"And the desk? You say she sat there while she talked to cook?"
"Yes."
She hated the way he sat down in front of it; in a heap, like a tired
navvy. By her death Marion deprived her of her beautiful lightfooted
lover. But she must wait. He would come back. She became aware that
Roger was speaking to her. It appeared that he had sobbed in his cup and
had sent jets of tea flying over the tablecloth, and he was now
apologising.
"Never heed," she told him comfortingly; "we'll have a clean one for
lunch." "I didn't mean to," he quavered piteously, but she checked him.
Richard had turned over his shoulder a white face.
"She sat here?..."
"Yes. While the cook stood talking to her, she sat there."
"She ... You didn't notice ... when she was sitting there ... if she was
scribbling on the blotter?"
"Yes, she did. I noticed that."
"Ah ... ah...."
* * * * *
She was beside him in the time of a breath. But he had not fainted,
though his head had crashed down on the wood, for his fingers, buried in
his hair, still laced and interlaced. She did not dare touch him; but
she grovelled for the blotter, which at the moment of his groan had
fallen to the floor, and stood staring at it. For a second her attention
was dispersed by a shudder of disgust, for she felt Roger's noisy
mouth-breathing at her ears. Then the proof leapt to her eyes. There was
a rim of plain paper round the calendar on the inside of the cover, and
this was covered with words and phrases written in the exquisite small
script of Marion. "This is the end. Death. Death. Death. This is the
end. I must die. Give him to Ellen. I must die."
Roger tumbled back towards Poppy. "The awful sin of self-destruction!"
he wailed.
This proof struck through her with an awful, unifying grief. She had had
evidence of Marion's intention which had convinced her mind, but it was
all derived from ugliness: from the awkwardness of the woman's talk, the
plainness of the face against the glass, the intrusive loitering of a
squat figure in the garden. The soul had hearkened to these ugly
messengers from reality since it had desired to know the truth, but it
had made them cry their message from as far off as possible and as
briefly as might be. But this lovely black arabesque of letters had the
power of beauty. It ran into the core of her soul and told its story at
its leisure. Her flesh, which before had grieved as any that is living
might grieve for any that is dead, now knew the sorrow appropriate to
the destruction of Marion's wide, productive body. For what her spirit
learned and admitted it had always known of that burning thing which had
been Marion she looked round the room in reverence, since she had lived
there. The light on the handle of the French window caught her eye, and
she wept. She had been annoyed with Marion because she could not turn
it. But who would not find it difficult to open a door if it was death
on which it opened?
"Richard, I love your mother!" she sobbed. "I love your mother so!"
He muttered something. In case he was speaking to her she bent down and
listened. But he was repeating over and over again in accents of irony:
"Give him up to Ellen. Give him up to Ellen. Oh, mother, mother...."
By the passion for Marion that was wringing her she could measure the
flame that must be devouring him. There was a strong impulse in her to
feel nothing but pity for him; to apprehend with resignation that there
might be a period ahead during which he might feel hatred for her,
loathing her for being alive when his mother, who deserved so well, was
dead. She stepped backward from the desk so that he need not be vexed by
any sense of her. Yet she had a feeling as she moved that she was
taking a step infinitely rash, infinitely dangerous....
She became aware that behind her Roger was shaking words out of his
weeping body. "You ought to be on your knees, you two! You've killed my
mummie with your wickedness!"
"What's that?" she murmured, turning on him. "What's that?" She was not
quite attentive. A picture was forming in her consciousness which, when
it was clear, would tell her why it was perilous to leave Richard to his
grief....
"Aw, shut up!" hissed Poppy, and tugged at his arm.
But he faced Ellen bravely and cried: "Yes, you've killed my mummie! She
saw there was something wrong going on between you two. She found out
what you'd been doing up there in the bedroom when Poppy and me caught
you. It must have been an awful shock to her. It was to me," he said
pathetically and with relish. "I could hardly believe it myself till
Poppy said, 'Well, what would they be doing together in a bedroom if it
wasn't that?' How could you do such filthiness...."
Shame swept over Ellen's body, over Ellen's mind. It was not sexual
shame, but shame that they should both be human, she and this. But when
she turned her eyes away from him in loathing she came on something far
worse in Poppy's florid and skull-like face. It would have been
appalling if she had been quite attentive, but she was dreamy, because
there was this picture forming in her consciousness which would explain
the danger to her.... Round Poppy's eyes and mouth there was playing a
thirsty look which she seemed to be trying to suppress, for she was
glancing about the room with an expression of prudence as if she were
reminding herself that not lightly must she run the risk of being
evicted from this comfort. But the thirst triumphed. She gave herself
the gratification she had desired, and turned on Ellen eyes on whose
dull darkness there floated like oil a glistening look of lewd
accusation. It took the form of a wet, twitching smile. But behind it
was every sort of beaten, desolate envy: the envy of the happy which is
felt by the unhappy: the envy of the woman who has a strong and glorious
man which is felt by the woman who cannot disguise from herself that in
her arms lies weakness and ignobility: the envy of one to whom love has
come as love which is felt by one to whom it has come as a deception and
a sentence to squalor. And she could not be pitied. One cannot weep over
the dead when they have begun to rot: and she was rotten with
resentments. Ellen stared at her in anger and in misery that there
should be one so sad and ill-used whom she could not comfort; and
perceived why at seeing her she had been reminded of an open space round
which stood figures. It was of nothing in art she had been thinking, but
of John Square in Edinburgh, where after nightfall women had leaned
against the garden railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery
of groves and lawns, their faces turned to the line of rich men's houses
which mounted into the night like tall, impregnable fortresses. If she
had not been preoccupied with the picture rising in her mind she would
have felt fear, for the ultimate meaning of those women she had always
suspected to be danger....
"Making me think evil of my poor mummie too!" Roger sobbed on. "I
thought the reason she didn't come to my meeting this evening was that
she was ashamed to see her son professing Jesus. I thought hardly of her
for not bringing you two along as she promised, because I didn't see you
weren't there, and I preached on the sin of impurity specially for you,
and it was a real sacrifice for me to do it, because the officers
thought it was a forward subject for me to choose, and it my first
service here. I had to wrestle to forgive her for it."
It was growing clearer in Ellen's mind, this picture which would tell
her why she must not allow Richard to abandon himself to his grief, to
his passion.
"But, of course, I see it all now. Oh, my darling, darling mummie! I
suppose you two wouldn't come to my meeting because you wanted to stay
here and play your tricks, and she saw through you and wouldn't leave
you alone in the house. To think I blamed my mummie!"
Now she saw the picture. It was her own mother, her own old mother,
shuffling about the kitchen in Hume Park Square in the dirty light of
the unwarmed morning; poking forward into the grate with hands on which
housework had acted like a skin disease; pulling her flannel
dressing-gown about a body which poverty and neglect had made as ugly
as the time, the place, the task. She was too tired to see it vividly,
but she understood the message. That was what happened to women who
allowed themselves to be disregarded; who allowed any other than
themselves to dwell in their men's attention.
"Richard! Richard!" She beat on his shoulder to make him listen. "Hark
what your brother's saying of us!"
He stirred. He sat up.
"He says we're bad."
He turned round and looked down on Roger. At the sight of his face,
though it was still, Ellen wished she had not roused him.
"It's no use you looking at me like that," said Roger tearfully but
resolutely. "I'm as good as you. In fact, I'm better now that I've got
Jesus. And I tell you straight, you've killed my mummie with your
beastly lust. Mind you," he cried, in a tone of whistling exaltation
inappropriate to his words, "I'm not pretending I'm without sin myself.
I did evil once with a woman at Blackburn, but I saw the filthiness of
my ways. Old man, I do understand your temptations!"
What was Richard's hand searching for on the breakfast table? She bent
forward to see, so that she might give it to him.
Richard had found what he wanted. His fingers tightened on the handle of
the breadknife.
"Let's put an end to this," he said.
He drove the knife into Roger's heart.
"Mummie!" breathed Roger. Meekly, but with no sign that he had any other
quarrel with the proceedings save that they were peremptory, he sank
down on the chair beside him and fell forward, his head lying untidily
among the tea-cups. This, no doubt, was the disorder which Marion had
always foreseen; to prevent which she had practised her insane tidiness.
He held the attention much less than one had thought a dead man could.
"God," said Poppy, "this is a copper's business. I'm off before they
come. They think I know something about a thing that happened down in
Strood last Easter, though God help me I don't. They kind of mixed me
up with someone else. Let me go."
"Right," said Richard, and put his hand into his pocket and brought out
a fistful of coins. "Take this. Good luck."
She snatched it, and with no further look at any of the company, ran out
by the French window.
They stood looking down on Roger. Death revealed no significance in him.
The smallness of his head, the indefinite colour of his hair, palliated
what had occurred and made them feel incredulous of their knowledge that
presently much importance would be attached to it.
Richard breathed a deep sigh of relief. "Well, it's all cleared up now,"
he murmured. "It is as if she had never seen Peacey...."
Ellen broke into sobs. "'Tis I who made you do it. I thought of my poor
mother and how she'd suffered through not making my father think of her
first and last--and you were sitting there thinking of nothing but
Marion--and I knew if you heard what Roger was saying about us you'd
think of me, so I made you listen. If I hadn't given you yon dunts on
your shoulders you never would have heard him and never would have
killed him. Oh, my love, what I have done to you, and me that would have
died rather than hurt you! But I saw my mother plain--"
"Oh, between our mothers ..." he said wearily, and hushed her in his
arms. Bitterly he broke out: "If we could have lived our own lives!"
"My love, my love, don't spoil our little time together...."
"But there's nothing left."
"There's nothing left, Richard, so go on kissing me."
"Wait." He drew away from her and held up his forefinger. "There's
something still."
He looked, Ellen thought, very like Marion as he stood there, his eyes
roving about her face. Because his shoulders were bowed his body looked
thick like a tree-trunk; his swarthiness had the darkness of earth in it
and the gold of ripe corn; and his gaze lay like a yoke on its object.
"There's something still," he whispered. A sudden joy flamed in him.
There came over him another aspect of Marion. He looked awkward and
contemptuous, as she had done when she had told Ellen how in Richard's
infancy she had been obliged to be nice to people whom she did not like
for the sake of a placid social atmosphere. He muttered, "I'll go to the
kitchen ... tell the servants that Roger's fallen asleep ... they're not
to disturb him.... That'll ... give us time...."
At the door he turned.
"You're not afraid?" He pointed to the dead man.
She shook her head and he went on his errand. With a sense of leisure,
as if she had strayed into a cul-de-sac of time, and since there is no
going backwards must stay there for ever, she sat down and looked about
her. Roger did not frighten her at all. If his spirit was in the room it
was sickly and innocuous, like the smell of a peardrop. But the horror
of all that had happened to her, and its refusal to be anything but
horror, viewed from whatever aspect, had begun to be agony when there
broke on her that which is the reward of tragedy. She perceived the
miraculous beauty of the common lot. Men and women taking children home
in trams ... people on summer afternoons going into the country in
brakes ... that wedding-party she and her mother had seen long ago
dancing by the River Almond, led by a bride and bridegroom middle-aged
but gravely glad.... Ah, that wedding-party.... She wept, she wept.
He had returned to the room, and was holding open the French window.
"Come," he said. "Come."