Somehow they knew in Bridnorth that Jane was thirty-six. She hid her
gray beneath the careful combing of her back hair.
There is a different attitude of mind in the woman who hides these
things successfully and her who still hides but knows that she fails.
Sharp antagonism and resentment, this is the mind of the latter. Not
only does she know that she fails. She knows how others realize that
she has tried. Yet something still urges in her purpose.
Jane knew she failed. That was bitter enough. But the greater
bitterness lay in the knowledge that had she succeeded it would have
been of no avail. For some years, unlike her sister Hannah, she had
relinquished hope, flung it aside in all consciousness of loss; flung it
aside and often looked her God in the face with the accusing glances of
unconcealed reproach.
To Jane that coming of the coach was the reminding spur that pricked her
memories to resentment. No Destiny for her was to be found in the
freight it carried. For each passenger as they descended outside the
Royal George, she had her caustic comment. Hers was the common but
forgivably ungenerous spirit, of the critic in whose breast the milk of
human kindness has grown sour from standing overlong in the idleness of
impotent ability.
Yet reminding spur that it was, and deeply as it hurt her, her eyes were
as swift and sharp as any to take note of the new arrivals. Perhaps it
was the very pain that she cherished. Life is a texture of sensations,
and if only the thread of pain be left to keep the whole together, there
are many who welcome it rather than feel the bare boards beneath their
feet.
Whenever a man, strange to them amongst the regular visitors to
Bridnorth, slipped off the coach at the Royal George, she knew his
arrival meant nothing in Destiny to her. Yet often she would be the
first to pick him out.
"He's new. Wonder if he's come with the Tollursts."
And having taken him in with a swiftness of apprehension, her glances
would shoot from Fanny to Mary and back again as though she could steal
the secrets of Fate out of their eyes.
It was Fanny she read most easily of all; Fanny who in such moments
revealed to the shrewdness of her gaze that faint acceleration of pulse,
to the realization of which nothing but the bitterness in her heart
could have sharpened her. It was upon Fanny then in these moments her
observation concentrated. Mary eluded her. Indeed Mary, it seemed, was
the calmest and serenest of them all. Sometimes if she were engrossed
in reading she did not even come to the window, but was content from her
chair to hear what they had to report.
And when there were no visitors descending from the coach, in language
their brother had long brought home from school and left behind him in
phrases when he went, it was Jane, with a laugh, who turned upon those
other three and said--
"What a suck for everybody!"
V
Then there was Fanny, whose age in Bridnorth was variously guessed to be
between thirty and thirty-three. No one knew. Her sisters never
revealed it. Jane had her loyalties and this was one.
Only Fanny herself, in those quiet moments when a woman is alone before
the judgment of her own mirror, knew that the gray hairs had begun to
make their appearance amidst the black. They were not even for
concealment yet. It was as though they tried to hide themselves from
the swift searching of her eyes. But she had found them out. Each one
as pensively she rolled it round her fingers, hiding it away or burning
it in the fire, was a thorn that pricked and drew blood.
Hope had not yet been laid aside by her. In that vivid if untrained
imagination of hers, Romance still offered her promise of the untold
joys and ecstasies of a woman's heart. She had not laid Hope aside, but
frettingly and constantly Hope was with her. She was conscious of it,
as of a hidden pain that warns of some disease only the knife can cure.
Always she was clutching it and only the writing of her ill-measured
verses of poetry could anesthetize her knowledge of its presence. Then,
when she was beating out her fancies in those uncomely words of almost
childish verse, the pain of the hope she had would lie still, soothed to
sleepfulness by the soporific of her wandering imagination.
What, can it be supposed, was the coming of the coach to her?
The vehicle of Fate it has been said it was, bringing a Destiny which
for thirty years and more had lingered on its journey, for never had it
been set down at the Royal George.
Already she knew that she was tired of waiting for it. Often that
tiredness overcame her. Through the long winter months when the
Bridnorth stream was languid and shallow in its flow, she became
listless when she was not irritable, and the look of those thirty-three
years was added in their fullness in her eyes.
A visit into the world amongst those friends they had, transitory though
those visits may have been, revived courage in her. And all through the
Spring and Summer season, she fought that fatigue as a woman must and
will so long as the hope of Romance has even one red spark of fire in
her heart.
It was not a man so much she wanted, as Romance. She alone could have
told what was meant by that. The one man she had known had almost made
her hate his sex. It was not so much to her a stranger who stepped down
outside the Royal George and trod her pulse to acceleration, as the
urgent wonder of what might happen in the weeks to come; of what might
happen to her in the very core of her being. He was no more than a
medium, an instrument to bring about those happenings. She knew in
herself what ecstasy she could suffer, how her heart could throb behind
her wasted breast, how every vein threading her body would become the
channel for a warmer race of blood.
It was not so much that she wanted a man to love as to feel love itself
with all its accompanying sensations of fear and wonder, yet knowing all
the time that before these emotions could happen to her, she must
attract and be found acceptable, must in another waken some strange need
to be the kindling spark in her.
Only once had it seemed she had succeeded. There had come a visitor to
the Royal George with whom in the ordinary course of the summer life of
Bridnorth, acquaintance had soon been made. None of them were slow to
realize the interest he had taken in Fanny. Before he left they twice
had walked over the moors to where on the highest and loneliest point of
the cliffs you can see the whole sweep of Bridnorth bay and in clear
weather the first jutting headland on the Cornish coast.
Many a love match in Bridnorth had been made about those heathered
moors. It was no love match he made with Fanny. What happened only
Mary knew. He had taken Fanny in his arms and he had kissed her. For
many months she had felt those kisses, not in the touch of his lips so
much as in waves of emotion that tumbled in a riot through her veins and
left her trembling in the darkness of night. For he had never told her
that he loved her.
In three weeks he had gone away having said no word to bind her. In two
months' time or little more, she read of his marriage in the London
papers and that night stared and stared at her reflection in the mirror
when she went to bed.
For in her heart and below the communicating consciousness of her
thoughts, she knew what had happened. Never could she have told
herself; far less spoken of it to others. But while he had held her in
his arms, she had known even then. She had felt her body thin and spare
and meager against his. Something unalluring in herself she had
realized as his lips touched the eagerness of her own.
That strange need of which in experience she had no knowledge, she knew
in that instant had not wakened in him as he held her. However
passionate his kisses in their strangeness had seemed, they lacked a
fire of which, knowing nothing, she yet knew all.
Still, nevertheless, she waited and the fatigue of that waiting each
year was added in her eyes.
The coming of the coach to her was like that of a ship, hard-beating
into harbor with broken spars and sails all rent. Yet with every
coming, her heart lifted, and with every new arrival, strange to
Bridnorth, her eyes would wear a brighter light, her laugh would catch a
brighter ring.
"Really, you'd never think Fanny was thirty-three!" Hannah once said on
one of these occasions.
"You wait for a week or two," retorted Jane.
And in a week or two when the visitor had departed, Jane would catch
Hannah's eyes across the breakfast table and direct them silently to
Fanny sitting there. There was no need to say--"I told you so." Jane
could convey all and more in her glance than that. She took charge of
Hannah's vision, as Hannah took charge of her children. That was
enough.