It was to Mary Throgmorton in those days that this coming of the
Abbotscombe coach is most elusive of all to define. So much less of the
emotions of hopefulness, of curiosity, or even of childish interest did
she betray, that there is little in action or conduct to illuminate her
state of mind.
In those days, which must be understood to mean the beginning of this
history, and in fact were the final decade of the last century, Mary was
twenty-nine.
That is a significant age and, to any more versed in experience than
she, must bring deep consideration with it. By then a woman knows the
transitoriness of youth; she realizes how short is the span of time in
which a woman can control her destiny. She sees in the eyes of others
that life is slipping by her; she discovers how those who were children
about her in her youth are gliding into the age of attractiveness,
claiming attention that is not so readily hers as it was or as she
imagines perhaps it might have been.
In such a state of mind must many a woman pause. It is as though for one
instant she had power to arrest the traffic of time that she might take
this crossing in the streets of life with unhampered deliberation. For
here often she will choose her direction in the full consciousness of
thought. No longer dare she leave her destiny to the hazard of chance.
It has become, not the Romance that will happen upon her in the glorious
and unexpected suddenness of ecstasy, but the Romance she must find,
eager in her searching, swift in her choice lest life all go by and the
traffic of time sweep over her.
This choice she must make or work must save her, for life has become as
vital to women as it is to men. At twenty-nine this is many a woman's
dilemma. Yet at twenty-nine no such consciousness of the need of
deliberation had entered the mind of Mary Throgmorton. Perhaps it was
because there were no younger creatures about her, growing up to the
youth she was leaving behind; perhaps because in the quietness of
seclusion, by that Bridnorth stream, the gentle, rippling song of it had
never wakened her to life.
In the height of its flood, that Bridnorth stream had never a note to
distress the placidity of her thoughts. She had heard indeed the Niagara
of life in London, but as a tourist only, standing for a moment on its
brink with a guide shouting the mere material facts of so-called
interest in her ears. It was all too deafening and astounding to be
more than a passing wonder in her mind. She would return to Bridnorth
with its thunder roaring in her ears, glad of the quiet stream again and
having gained no more experience of life than does an American tourist
of the life of London when he counts the steps up to the dome of St.
Paul's Cathedral and hurries down to catch the train to the birthplace
of Shakespeare.
At twenty-nine, Mary Throgmorton was in many respects still the same
girl as when at the age of eighteen she had first bound that fair hair
upon her head and looked with all the seriousness of her gray eyes at
the vision the reflecting mirror presented to her. Scarcely had she
noticed her growth into womanhood for, as has been said, her beauty was
not that of the flesh that is pink and white. It was in stone her
beauty lay and even her own hands did not warm to the touch of it. But
where in Bridnorth was there kindling enough to light so fierce a fire
as she needed to overwhelm her?
This is the tragedy of a thousand women who pass through life and never
touch its meaning; these thousand women who one day will alter the
force-made laws for a world built nearer to the purpose of their being;
these thousand women to whom the figure of Mary Throgmorton stands there
by Bridnorth village in her monument of stone upon the Devon cliffs.
With all this unconsciousness of design in the pattern of her life, the
coming of the coach to Mary is well-nigh too subtle to admit of capture
in the rigid medium of words. Truly enough, if deeply engaged in one of
the many books she read, there were times and often when, from those
front windows of the square, white house, she would let her sisters
report upon the new or strange arrivals set down outside the Royal
George.
Even Jane, with her shrewdness of vision, was misled by this into the
belief that Mary cared less than them all what interest the Abbotscombe
coach might bring for the moment into their lives.
"I wonder what his handicap is," she had said when they had described a
young man descending from the box seat with a bag of golf clubs.
Notwithstanding all Mary's undoubted excellence at that game or indeed
at any game to which she gave her hand, Jane, disposed by nature to
doubt, would sharply look at her. But apparently there was no intention
to deceive. If the book was really engrossing, she would return to its
pages no sooner than the remark was made, as though time would prove
what sort of performer he was, since all golfers who came to Bridnorth
found themselves glad to range their skill against hers on the links.
And when, as it happened, she joined them at those front windows,
consenting to their little deceptions of casual interest in the midst of
more important occupations--for Jane would say, "Mary, you can't just
stare"--it was with no more than calculation as to what amusement the
visitors would provide that Mary appeared to regard their arrival.
Not one of them, however, not even Fanny, knew that there were days in
those Spring and Summer months, when Mary, setting forth with her strong
stride and walking alone up on to the heathered moors would, with
intention, seat herself in a spot where the Abbotscombe coach could be
seen winding its way down the hill into Bridnorth. It was one spot
alone from which the full stretch of the road could be observed. By
accident one day she had found it, just at that hour when the coach went
by. She had known and made use of it for six years and more.
At first it was the mere interest of a moving thing passing in the far
line of vision to its determined destination; the interest of that
floating object the stream catches in its eddies and carries in its
flowing out of sight.
So it was at first, until in some subconscious way it grew to hold for
her a sense of mystery. She would never have called it mystery
herself--the attraction had no name in her mind. No more did she do
than sit and watch its passage, dimly conscious that that little moving
speck upon the road, framed in its aura of dust, was moving into the
horizon of her life and as soon would move out again, leaving her the
same as she was before.
Habit it was to think she would be left the same; yet always whilst it
was there in the line of her eyes, it had seemed that something, having
no word in her consciousness, might happen to her with its passing.
So vividly sometimes it appeared to be moving directly into her life.
So vividly sometimes, when it had gone, it appeared to have left her
behind. She would have described it no more graphically or consciously
than that.
For during those six years, nothing indeed had happened to her. The
passing of the coach along that thread of road had remained a mystery.
Companions and acquaintances it had brought and often; women with whom
she had formed friendships, men with whom she had played strenuously and
enjoyably in their games of golf.
Never had it brought her even such an experience as her elder sister's.
She had never wished it should. There was no such readiness to yield in
her as there was in Fanny; no undisguised eagerness for life such as
might tempt the heartlessness of a man to a passing flirtation.
She treated all men the same with the frank candor of her nature, which
allowed no familiarity of approach. Only with his heart could a man
have reached her, never with his arms or his lips as Fanny had been.
Perhaps in those brief acquaintanceships, mainly occupied with their
games, there was no time for the deeper emotions of a man's heart to be
stirred. But most potent reason of all, it was that she had none of the
superficial allurements of her sex. Strength was the beauty of her. It
was a common attitude of hers to stand with legs apart set firmly on her
feet as she talked. Yet there was no masculinity she conveyed. Only it
was that so would a man find her if he sought passion in her arms and
perhaps they feared the passion they might discover.
It was the transitoriness not only of hers but of all those women's
touch with life that made the pattern of their destiny. No man had
stayed long enough in Bridnorth to discover the tenderness and nobility
of Mary Throgmorton. In that cold quality of her beauty they saw her
remotely and only in the distances in which she placed herself. None
had come close enough to observe that gentle smile the sculptor had
curved about her lips, the deep and tender softness of her eyes. It was
in outline only they beheld her, never believing that beneath that firm
full curve of her breast there could beat a heart as wildly and as
fearfully as a netted bird's, or that once beating so, that heart would
beat for them forever.
It was just the faint knowledge of this in herself which made that
passing coach a mystery to Mary. It was not as with Fanny that she
thought of it as a vehicle of her Destiny, but that, as she sat there on
the moors above Bridnorth, it was a link with the world she had so often
read of in her books.
It came to her out of the blue over the hill, as a pigeon come with a
message under its wing. Detaching that message again and again, she
read it in a whisper in her heart.
"There is life away there beyond the hill," it ran. "There is life away
there beyond the hill--and life is pain as well as joy and life is
sorrow as well as happiness; but life is ours and we are here to live."
That message somewhere in the secrets of her heart she kept and every
time the coach passed by when she was in the house the horses' hoofs on
the village road beat in her thoughts--"Life is ours, we are here to
live."