AS a matter of fact (one has often to take one’s stand on fact when
thinking about Vera), it’s I who am the gardener; it’s I, that is to
say, who draw the plans and compute the cost and give the orders and see
that the men carry them out. I often lend a hand at carrying them out,
too, for I love planting seedlings and staking plants and tweaking out
weeds here and there when I’ve the chance. That wonderful blue border
Vera had on the south terrace last summer,--it was just going over when
the war broke out,--I put in all the new blue larkspurs myself, three
hundred of them,--the larkspurs that Mrs. Thornton was to remind me
of,--and I designed and planted and with my own hands helped to lay out
the dream-garden, Vera’s special garden. It was she, certainly, who had
had the idea, standing on the site of the little, old, abandoned sunken
garden in its circle of stone wall and cypresses, and saying, “I see a
dream-garden here, Judith; a place where one can come and sit alone and
dream dreams.” She often has charming ideas, Vera, but she knows nothing
about gardening. I sound already as if I were crabbing her, I know; and
perhaps I am. Certainly I never think of her relation to her garden
without a touch of irony, and this story, which begins in the
dream-garden, isn’t to her advantage. It was there that I felt my first
definite irascibility in regard to Vera and little Mrs. Thornton, and
felt the impulse, as far as I was able, to take Mrs. Thornton under my
wing.
It’s a rather clipped and confined wing, and yet I can do pretty much as
I choose at Compton Dally; I don’t quite know why, for Vera doesn’t
exactly like me. Still, she doesn’t dislike me, and I think she’s a
little bit afraid of me; for I am as definite and determined as a pair
of garden shears, and my silence is often only the good manners of the
dependant, and Vera knows it.
I am her cousin, an impecunious cousin, my mother a sister of her
father’s, old Lord Charleyford, who died last year. Vera herself was
very impecunious until she married Percival Dixon; impecunious, but
always very lovely and very clever, and she was on the crest of every
wave, always, and never missed anything, except ready money and a really
good offer, even before Percival Dixon came along--he came _via_ South
Africa--and gave her all the money that even she could spend, and bought
back Compton Dally for her. Compton Dally had been in the family for
hundreds of years, and it was our grandfather, Vera’s and mine, who had
ruined us all and finally sold it. It was everything for Vera to get it
back, even if she had to take Percival Dixon with it; and I confess that
for Compton Dally I could almost have taken Percival Dixon myself; but
not quite, even for Compton Dally.
Well, she has always been fairly decent to me; not as decent as she
might have been, certainly, but more decent than I, at all events,
expected, whatever may have been poor mother’s hopes and indignations. I
always thought mother unfair; there was no reason why Vera should go out
of her way to give me a good time, and it showed some real consideration
in her to have suggested, when mother died and while Jack was reading
for the bar, that, until he and I could set up housekeeping in London
together, I should come and be her companion and secretary and general
odd-job woman; and for people like Vera to show any consideration is
creditable to them. I am five years older than Jack, and our plan has
always been to live together. I intend, of course,--though Jack at
present doesn’t, dear lamb!--that he shall marry; but until then I’m to
live with him and take care of him and help him with his work. All this
if he ever comes back again. He is fighting at the front as I write, so
that it remains to be seen whether I’m to go on always with Vera. If
Jack doesn’t come back I shan’t find it more difficult than anything
else. We have always been all in all to each other, he and I; but that
is quite another story and one that will never be written. This one is
neither about Jack nor me, but about Vera and her garden and little Mrs.
Thornton and her husband and her clothes.
Vera had thrown open Compton Dally to wounded Tommies and wounded
officers, and the Thorntons came in that way. He’d only been back from
the Boulogne hospital for a week, was badly crippled, and had a very
gallant record. Most of Vera’s officers before this had been colonials
who had no homes to go to. The Thorntons weren’t colonials, but they had
no home and were very poor, so that the arrangement for them to spend
six weeks or two months at Compton Dally while Captain Thornton got back
his strength--as far as he was able to get it back, poor man!--seemed an
admirable one.
They came on a hot June afternoon both very tired, while we were all
having tea on the west terrace. The Tommies--there were over a dozen of
them, with two Red Cross nurses to take care of them--had their tea in
the billiard-room, which is made over to them for their games and meals
and almost constant gramophone, and the accurate laughter of Harry
Lauder is wafted out to us on various music-hall strains at most hours
of the day. He was laughing loudly and richly as the Thorntons arrived.
After tea Vera led them about the garden. Vera’s garden is merely a part
of her toilette, and plays almost as important a part as her clothes in
her general introduction of herself; and that she intended to introduce
herself gracefully to Captain Thornton was evident; and that I was to
pilot Mrs. Thornton, I had known after Vera’s glance at her imitation
Panama hat, her blue linen skirt, of an obsolete cut and a bad one at
that, and her white blouse, shrunken in washing. Vera placed her swiftly
as dull and dowdy, and it was my part, always, to pilot the dowdy and
the dull.
I don’t mind that, however; even now, after three years of it, I always
enjoy going over Compton Dally and the gardens with newcomers. It’s such
a beautiful old place, so grave and so serene, its splendid Tudor front
lifted high on stone terraces, and its courts and corners behind
breaking out into all sorts of unexpected and enchanting antiquities. It
symbolizes, if you begin with the Saxon arches in the cellars, the
whole history of England, and means so much more than any person who has
ever lived there, or who ever will live there, can ever mean. It’s worth
the sacrifice of generations of younger sons and myriads of marriageable
daughters. What could they all do better than to keep it going? I always
recalled this when I wondered how Vera could have married Percival
Dixon, and felt almost as much satisfaction as she could feel in the
fact that two robust little boys, still at their preparatory school,
stood reassuringly behind her and Percival; the elder, too, a thorough
Compton, with hardly a trail of Dixon apparent on his ingenuous young
countenance. I have the whole history of Compton Dally at the tips of my
fingers, and if people give me an opening and show that they care about
it, I can talk to them for hours as I take them round, feeling, for my
little part and share in it, that, even if Vera weren’t as decent as she
is, I should put up with a great deal to stay in it and take care of it.
We didn’t go about the house to-day. The Thorntons saw the big
herbaceous border and the rose-garden, the rock-garden, tinkling with
its little rivulet, the moat, and the lime-tree alley; and then Vera,
trailing her gossamer draperies along the flagged path between the
cypresses,--for Vera, even at this epoch of shortened petticoats,
manages always to trail,--murmured, as I’ve heard her murmur, when she’s
at Compton Dally, at least once a week, “And this is my dream-garden,
where I come and sit alone and dream dreams.”
She led Captain Thornton down among the cypress boughs. He had a
splinted leg and an unaccustomed crutch, and found the steps a
difficulty; but Vera put a hand under his elbow and let him lean
heavily on her shoulder, and he reached the dream-garden without, I
hope, too many twinges.
It is really very lovely. I don’t like hearing it called a dream-garden,
naturally; but I do feel always, when I come into it, that it is like
sinking into the stillness and magic of a happy dream. The gypsophila
wasn’t out yet, but it made a mist, like drowsiness; white peonies, grey
santolina, white roses and silver sea-thistle, the dreamy spires of
white foxgloves, low, purple pansies, and tall irises, white and grey
and purple--these, in their twilight colours, were massed against the
grey stone walls, and there were four bay-trees in stone urns at the
corners. The beautiful old stone seat (I found it in Brompton Road, but
it might have been made for Compton Dally three hundred years ago in
Italy) was heaped with grey and purple cushions. In the centre rose the
fluent shaft of the fountain, falling, with a musical rustle and murmur
into the stone basin where pale goldfish move among the water-lilies.
We sat down, and Vera went on to say, as always:
“The other gardens are for friends. I plan them for them. I see them
there. This is for loneliness, for my very self; and to me it is the
heart of the whole, as solitude should be the heart of life.”
Vera, as a matter of fact (you see, the phrase recurs constantly), is
never alone. If she is wan and strange and wistful, it isn’t from
dreaming dreams, but from not having enough sleep and doing five times
too many things and seeing five times too many people in the day. Vera,
too, I may say it here, isn’t in the least an ass, though she may, on
occasions she finds suitable, talk like one. Occasions are often
suitable, so that, as I once told her, she’s in danger of making a habit
of it. She looked at me, when I told her this, with the pausing,
penetrating, ironic gaze she is so capable of, and finally, with a
slight grimace, said, “I’ll be careful, Judith.”
I have moments of feeling fond of her and this was one of them. She is
careful; I’ve very rarely heard her talk like an ass when the occasion
was unsuitable; but so many people are stupid that these are rare, and I
foresee that, as she gets on and sinks by degrees into the automatism
that overtakes so many artificial people, it may become a habit, just as
the touch of rouge on her pale lips is already becoming more emphasized.
Captain Thornton, I saw at once, as she did,--for she saw most
things,--was not stupid; but he was very simple. There was a certain
bewilderment on his handsome, sturdy face, wistfulness rather than
delight, such as a soul newly arrived in Paradise might feel, unable to
forget the passes of death and the companions left behind in suffering.
He wasn’t forgetting; I felt that as I looked at him. So many of them
forget. Vera, I am sure, hardly ever remembers what it all really
means--all these wounded heroes. Perhaps it is natural that she
shouldn’t; she has no one near in it.
Captain Thornton gazed about him quietly, and from the garden looked
back at the angel who had led him there. Of course Vera must have looked
like an angel to him. I haven’t described Vera, and she is difficult to
describe. To say that she is pale and dark, with attenuated features and
dwelling, melancholy eyes, is only the beginning of it. Of course she
is getting on now,--she is nearing forty-five,--but she’s still lovely;
her smile makes me think of a pearl dropped in wine, and behind the
melancholy of her eyes is that well of waiting irony. She looks as soft,
as tenderly encompassing, as a summer night; but she is really sharp,
sharp, sharp. Thwart or vex her, and out leaps the stiletto; or, rather,
it would be more exact to say, out come the claws. But women of the Vera
type will always, to young men like Captain Thornton, be angels pure and
simple. I don’t suppose, for one thing, that he’d ever talked intimately
with any one quite like her. He came, I was to learn, from a remote
country rectory where the great ladies of the neighbourhood had been
unfashionable, matter of fact, and clothed for the most part in tweed
and leather, and none of them would have been likely to make much,
before the war, of a young soldier. Vera was making much of him, and a
fashionable angel is an angel doubly equipped. He would not know what it
was that made her so strange in her sweetness; but fashion of that
achieved and recondite kind is like a soft incense wafted around a
woman. She is first, everywhere, always, without an effort; and people
who are first, if they also look like angels, win hearts as easily as
they run and twist their fingers among their ropes of pearls, as Vera
was doing now. She always wore her pearls; they fell together in a milky
heap in her lap, and long earrings glimmered in the shadows of her hair.
Vera’s way of talking, too, is like a spell. Her voice is rather like
the fountain, so low, so inarticulate, yet so expressive. She murmurs
rather than speaks, with now and then a pause that is almost a soft
gurgle. Sometimes it exasperates me to hear her, but sometimes even
cross-grained I am charmed.
The voice purled and rippled and gurgled over Captain Thornton now. He
sat on Vera’s farther hand, and Mrs. Thornton sat between Vera and me.
Already, at tea-time, Mrs. Thornton had interested me. She had remained
silent without seeming shy. Superficially, no doubt, she was dowdy, and
superficially she looked dull, or, as I saw it, dulled; and dull and
dowdy is what at tea they all put her down for. It’s curious, how in a
group of highly civilized people, a newcomer, without a word or glance
exchanged between them, is in a moment assessed and placed and
relegated. Everybody was going to be very kind to Mrs. Thornton, that I
saw, and everybody was going to relegate her; only the highly civilized
can manage the combination.
Mrs. Thornton, from one point of view, had a pallid, podgy little face,
with wide lips and short nose and a broad, infantile brow above eyes
singularly far apart. All the same, and the more I looked at her the
more I saw it, it was a delicious face; squared here, stubborn there,
sweet by turns and glances. And she was of the loveliest colour, with a
skin silver-white, and thick, shining, pale-gold hair, and eyes of a
deep, dense, meditative blue. All her attributes, however, were
invisible to Vera, and I was fully prepared for the glance with which,
over Mrs. Thornton’s imitation Panama, she presently said to me:
“Darling, do take Mrs. Thornton round the water-garden. It’s so lovely
at this hour. Captain Thornton must wait for it till to-morrow. He’s too
tired to go farther now.”
Mrs. Thornton got up at once, with her air of vague acquiescence in
anything proposed, and I led her up and out and down the lime-tree alley
and through the copse, where Vera, in spring, has her wild garden, to
the banks of the river, the clear, wandering little stream, bridged and
islanded, golden in the afternoon light under its willows and reflecting
irises and meadow-sweet.
“Now we can sit down,” I said, and on a bench under a willow we did sit,
Mrs. Thornton with an involuntary sigh of weariness. “I expect your
husband will soon get all right here,” I said presently. “It’s such good
air. Is his leg badly damaged?”
“Well, you see, he can already get about quite well with it,” said Mrs.
Thornton; “but I’m afraid he’ll never be able to do any of the things he
most cares for again--riding and cricket, and his soldiering, of course.
He will have to give up the army. I am afraid it’s afterwards one will
begin to feel all the things that one must give up. Just now all that I
can think about is that he has come back alive. Have you any one out
there?” she asked.
I told her about Jack and how he had got a commission at the beginning
of the war and gone out in January.
“It must be even more of a wrench to have them go when they aren’t
already in the army,” said Mrs. Thornton. “A soldier’s wife ought not to
feel it so much of a wrench. I’m afraid I did, though.”
I saw already that Mrs. Thornton had taken to me. It was natural that
she should. I had taken to her quite tremendously, and she must have
felt it; and, besides, a great many women do feel confidence in me at
once. I, to be sure, look like anything but an angel, though I, like
Vera, have small, pale features and dark hair. But mine’s not a
melancholy or mysterious face. My eyebrows dip together over my nose,
and my mouth is at once placid and irascible. I look, in my straight,
austere clothes,--the silver buckles on my shoes and the fob of old
trinkets at my waist for all adornment,--like a cross between a young
priest in his soutane and a Blue-Coat boy; and I think it is the boyish
woman, curt and kind and impersonal, who gains the confidence of others
of her sex.
“I don’t know that it was more of a wrench,” I said. “I expect that you
and I felt pretty much the same sort of thing on that Victoria platform
when we said good-bye to them. What do you and your husband intend
doing, now that he has to give up his profession?”
“Well, we had thought of having a chicken-farm somewhere. We are both so
fond of the country, and I’ve a cousin who has a chicken-farm, and I’ve
helped her with it, and she has made it pay. Even if Clive’s leg stays
so bad, I am very strong. But we’ve had, really, no time yet to talk
things over.”
“You don’t look very strong,” I observed, “but that may be because you
are over-tired. You look very tired. I should say that you got up at six
this morning, and raced around London shopping in the heat, and packed,
and had no lunch, and a journey on top of it all. So no wonder you are
tired.”
“How clever of you!” Mrs. Thornton cried, laughing. “That is exactly
what I have been doing. And I’ve been in a Belgian refugee hostel ever
since Clive went, and that is tiring, though it keeps one going, too.
Don’t you find it difficult just to go on from day to day?” She was
leaning forward on her knee now to look up into my face while I knitted.
“I mean, when one wakes in the morning, for instance, to think that one
has to get up and brush one’s teeth and do one’s hair and all the rest
of it. It seems impossible when what one is feeling is that one wants to
be chloroformed till it is all over. It was then that the hostel was so
sustaining; one had to get up whether one felt like it or not.”
“I know; yes,” I said, nodding. “I’ve work, too, though it’s not so
sustaining as a hostel. I’m my cousin’s secretary, and we have all these
Tommies now; they take up a good deal of time. It must be curious,
having it all over, all that weight of anxiety.”
“It is, it is,” said little Mrs. Thornton, eagerly, with her look of
gratitude for finding some one with whom to talk about it. “It’s almost
like losing a limb. I feel crippled, as well as Clive. Isn’t it absurd?
But it’s almost like loss. And one is dazed with the relief of it.”
“How long have you been married?” I asked.
“Only a year and a half,” she told me, and that Clive’s mother and hers
had been great friends, and that she had often gone to stay with his
people in the country, so that she had always known him. Her mother had
died when she was a child and her father only two years ago. She had
lived in London with her father, who had been an artist. She was just
twenty. And after she had told me about herself, she asked me about
Jack, and I found myself telling her all about him and about those plans
of ours for living together in London if he ever comes back.
The party at Compton Dally was small, and they were all there (except
Sir Francis who was an old family friend and who was paying a long
visit), to help Vera with her Tommies. The only other officer besides
Captain Thornton was poor Colonel Appleby, a pale, frightened,
middle-aged man invalided home with nervous shock. At dinner that night
Lady Dighton, who is the embodiment of lassitude and acquiescence, had
him, and Mrs. Travers-Cray had Sir Francis, and Vera had Captain
Thornton, so that Percival fell to the share of Mollie Thornton, and I
wondered how she liked him. If she was already feeling herself out of
it, to have Percival at dinner wouldn’t make her feel herself in; quite
the reverse. Percival’s appearance is always summed up to me by the back
of his head: the wedge of fat, red neck above his high collar, the
sleek, glittering black hair, and the rims of his red ears curving
forward on each side. The back of his head seems really as
characteristic as the front, though that is jovial and not unkindly.
Percival looks sly over his food, and looks over his wine like the sort
of man who is going to tell a story that no one else will find at all
amusing. He told Mollie several such stories that night, I inferred,
though she was evidently neither shy nor shocked; it was in the quality
of her smile that I read her kindly endurance.
Milly, Vera’s girl, just seventeen and just promoted to late dinner, sat
on Mollie’s other hand and did not, as far as I observed, address her
once during the meal. But, then, Milly never makes efforts unless they
are plainly useful. All Vera’s beauty had been spoiled in her by the
Dixon admixture, and yet she is a most engaging-looking little minx,
with broad, bold, black, idle eyes and a blunted nose, auburn hair and a
skin of roses and carnations. Vera had seen to that. Poor Vera is quite
fond of the child, a half-vexed, half-ironic constantly rebuffed
tenderness. But Milly says to me, “Mother is such a bore, you know,” and
likes me far better, who make no claim upon her and who, she must feel,
like her very little. She will soon take flight, however, when a
sufficiently advantageous occasion presents itself. The war has been a
sad blow to her projects, and what I like in Milly is the fact that she
has never uttered a word of complaint as to the shattering of her
girlish gaieties. However, to get back to Mollie Thornton, I don’t think
she could have enjoyed her companions at dinner.
After dinner I go and amuse the Tommies and talk to the nurses until
bedtime, but, before I went, I observed that Vera, after her wont with
the detrimental belongings of a guest, had placed Mollie in a corner
with a book and the urgent, smiling murmur: “By a friend of mine. Quite,
quite beautiful. I know you’ll love it.” It is a book called “Spiritual
Control,” with a portrait of its author, who is a stock-broker, a sleek,
stalwart, satisfied person whom Vera characterizes, why I can’t think,
except that she had him once to stay after hearing his lecture, as her
“friend.” A great many people find the book inspiring; Vera, as a matter
of fact, doesn’t, and she found Mr. Cuthbert Dawson a terrible bore. It
was plain from her giving poor Mrs. Thornton “Spiritual Control” to
read, where she placed her.
When I came back an hour later she was still in her corner with
“Spiritual Control,” but she wasn’t reading it. She had drawn the
curtain at the window where she sat, and was looking out at the
splendid, dramatic moonlight. Sir Francis and Colonel Appleby were
reading the evening papers, Lady Dighton and Leila Travers-Cray talked
together while they knitted, Milly had disappeared, and at the farthest
end of the great room, on its farthest sofa, Vera, pale and pearly, was
talking to Captain Thornton.
“Well,” I said, “how is your spirit? Is it more controlled?”
Mrs. Thornton looked up at me, and after a moment her smile of
understanding merged into one of friendly enjoyment.
“How do you manage,” she said, “to be so austere in the daytime and so
splendid at night? You make me think of a Venetian princess in that
brocade.”
“It is nice, isn’t it?” I said. “And made by the littlest of
dressmakers. I’m clever at clothes. But tell me how you like Mr.
Cuthbert Dawson.”
“Well, he is very cheerful and sincere,” said Mrs. Thornton, kindly;
“but I don’t seem to get much out of it. I’m really too tired and stupid
to read to-night.”
“And it’s time your husband was in bed,” I said. “One of the nurses is
coming for him.”
Mrs. Thornton looked down the long room at her husband.
“If only I’d had the Red Cross training,” she said, “I could have taken
care of his leg then. I suppose I mustn’t ask to be allowed to. Isn’t it
quite early?” she added. “He’s enjoying the talk with Lady Vera.”
“It’s half-past ten, and we are strict with our invalids. Here is nurse
now. I’ll come up with you and see that you are comfortable.”
No one could have said that there was any creature comfort lacking in
Mrs. Thornton’s reception at Compton Dally. Captain Thornton, as the
invalid, had a larger room, but Mrs. Thornton’s room, next it, was quite
as charming a one, pink and grey, with old French prints and hangings of
_toile de Jouy_. She went up to the prints for a moment of silent
appreciation before turning to me with a sigh, half pleasure and half
wistfulness.
“How lovely everything is here! Papa would have been in rapture over
those Cochins. I shall enjoy my sleep to-night.” And then,--it was her
only sign of awareness,--“I suppose I’m to be allowed to go and say
good-night to Clive when nurse has done with him.”
* * * * *
My study at Compton Dally, where I type and write and do accounts, opens
on the west terrace, and from my bureau I seemed, at most hours of the
days that followed, to have a view of Mollie Thornton’s little figure
wandering, as it were, on the outskirts, not plaintive,--there was never
a touch of plaintiveness,--but passive. With her sewing or knitting or a
book she sat a good deal under the shade of the cedar that stands at the
corner of the terrace, and she spent a good deal of time drifting up and
down the vistas of the lawns and park watching birds, a binocular in her
hand. She was certainly a most comfortable person to relegate, since she
never looked melancholy and usually contrived to seem occupied, and
Vera, when she passed behind her on the terrace on her way to the
dream-garden, Captain Thornton beside her, would pause and put her hand
on her shoulder and say, “Happy, dear?” in the most dulcet tone. And
when Mrs. Thornton, lifting those meditative eyes, answered, “Yes, thank
you,” Vera, all bland benevolence, would say, “That’s right,” and pass
on. Leila Travers-Cray and Lady Dighton sometimes exchanged a few
friendly remarks with her, and she read the morning papers to Colonel
Appleby when his eyes hurt him; but she was relegated far, far away, as
completely as any human being could be who could in any way count as a
guest.
I was very busy and had not much time to be with her, though all the
time I had was hers; but I knew accurately what she was feeling. I
related it always with that dreadful Victoria platform, with those
moments of pain and yet of rapture which we had both known, when we had
felt ourselves, in our suffering, stand for England, lifted up in
accepting sacrifice to the august and beautiful spirit that claimed our
dearest. One would expect, after that transcendent suffering, to find as
transcending a joy; but how was joy possible to a young wife caught into
what might be to her husband a fairyland or a paradise, but to her was a
cruel and complicated machine where her only part was to turn round with
the other wheels and pretend to like it? I knew that it must not be
taken too seriously. It was only to last for six weeks, and then she
would have her Clive back again; yet while it lasted it must make the
months of suffering passed through seem happy by comparison. There had
then been nothing between them but distance and the fear of death; and
now everything was between them--everything Vera stood for; her house,
her friends, her smile, her pearls, her dream-garden.
On morning after morning I saw Vera leading him away to it, with her
armful of books, and Chang, her Pekinese, trotting at her heels. I
perfectly understood Vera’s state of mind in regard to Captain Thornton.
There was no occasion for commonplace jealousy. He merely made her feel
cheerful and rejuvenated. Everything she had to show and tell him was
new to him. She became new to herself, poor old Vera! and gained from
the quiet regard of his sane and simple eyes--handsome eyes under
straight, dark brows--a sense of freshness and worth in everything. She
liked him better than any of the wounded heroes she had yet had. Some of
them had been merely stupid, and one or two had been gloomy, sardonic
men--men of her own world, to whom nothing she had to say would seem
new. Clive Thornton was neither stupid nor sardonic, and he was simple
enough to accept Vera’s fancy tricks--her talk of dreaming dreams and
solitude--as part of an angel’s manner, and he was just clever enough to
be able to appreciate anything she had to say. I could quite see how
endearing Vera must find his steady gaze and his considering silences.
Even with my vigorous espousal of his wife’s side I never felt angry
with him. His not seeing that she was unhappy was part of the same
innocence that made him not see that Vera was a cat. Mollie, besides,
took quite as much care to conceal her unhappiness as Vera to behave
like an angel. It never crossed his mind that his wife was relegated; it
never crossed his mind that they were separated. He did not feel
separated; they were both, as far as he knew, in fairyland together. And
yet I knew it might not all be so trivial and transient as it seemed. A
new standard was being formed for him; a new idea of what it was to be
an angel. It was possible that all unconsciously he would no longer
think of Mollie as one when he left Compton Dally; and when I took this
in I began to gather up my weapons.
I found Mollie one afternoon sitting on the bench under the willow-tree
where we had had our first talk. She had her knitting, but her hands
were still, and she was gazing before her at the water. If she were not
a tragic figure, it was only because there are some things sadder than
tragedy. She had faced everything, been through everything, she had gone
down into the Hades where so many of us were still living, and now she
found herself baulked and menaced by commonplace daylight. Tragedy is,
in some ways, an easy thing to bear.
“Well, what are you doing here by yourself?” I asked her, advancing.
There was a look on her face, startled and steadied, that showed me what
she had been thinking about in the fancied security of her solitude. But
she managed at once the vague smile that concealed so much, and said
that she had been, as usual, resting. “I seem to find out every day more
and more how tired I was,” she added.
“You didn’t care to go with the others, motoring?” I took my place
beside her. “You’d have liked Marjorams. It’s a lovely old place. Some
people think it beats Compton Dally, though, naturally, I’m not one of
them.”
“I’m sure you’re not,” said Mollie, laughing a little. “That was one of
the things that first struck me about you--how you loved it. I felt that
you were a fiercely loyal person.”
“I think I am--narrow loyalties, but fierce ones,” I said. “But you
haven’t answered my question.”
“About motoring? I don’t care much about it, you know. And there really
wasn’t room enough for me.”