The bay at Bridnorth is inclosed by two headlands of sandy stone. That
to the east rises irregularly with belts of pine wood and sea-bent oaks,
opening later in heathered moors that stretch in broad plateaus, then
sink to sheltered hollows where one farm at least lies hidden in its
clump of trees.
It is always a romantic world, that land which lies to the cliff edge
beside the sea. The man who farms it is forever at close grips with the
elements. He wrestles with Nature as those inland with their screening
hedgerows have little knowledge of. The hawthorn and the few scattered
trees that grow, all are trained by the prevailing winds into fantastic
shapes no hand of man can regulate. Sheep may do well upon those windy
pastures, but the cattle, ever at hiding in the hollows, wear a
weather-beaten look. Crops are hazardous ventures and, like the sower,
scattering his grain, must plant their feet full firmly in the soil if
they would stand until their harvest time against the winds that sweep
up from the sea.
Up through the belt of pine wood and across the heathered moors, Mary
came often those days with her friend. The views from countless places
called for his brush. Once she had brought him there to show him her
Devon, he sought the golf links no more. They never played their final
match.
On the first two occasions of their excursions beyond Penlock Hill, he
painted assiduously. Mary brought a book and read. Long whiles between
her reading she watched him, smiling, when, with almost childish
distress, he assured her he had done pictures that at least were worth
glancing at in a portfolio, if not a permanent frame.
For either it was, as in the first instance, that the atmosphere of a
strange country defeated him and tricked his sense of color, or his mind
was bent on other things, but both days were fruitless of results. On
each of these occasions, as before, he threw the sketches down,
unfinished, and fretted at his lack of skill.
"This Devon of yours," said he, "has got more color than I can get out
of my box. What really is the matter is that it has more color than
I've got in my eyes. If it's not in your eyes, it's not in your box.
You can't squeeze a green field out of a tube of oxide of chromium.
Paint's only the messenger between you and Nature."
Her sympathy was real. Notwithstanding that it gave her more of his
attention, she fretted for him too. When the next day they met at the
foot of Penlock Hill and she found him without his satchel, she was
genuinely disappointed and unhappy.
"Aren't you sufficiently selfish," he asked, "to be sensible of the
obvious fact that I'd far sooner talk to you than spend my time in
useless efforts?"
"Perhaps it isn't in the nature of women to be really selfish," she
said, with a laugh to lighten her meaning.
That set them at discussion upon the comparative selfishness of the
sexes as they mounted the hill and took the beaten path across the
heather.
For a man, he had strange points of view to her. With an honest
bitterness, he complained about the selfishness of men.
"But what else can we be?" said he. "As things are, what else can we
be? We run the world and this civilization's our conception of the
measures on which it has to be run, and this civilization is built up on
a solid rock of egotism and selfishness, with brute force to insist upon
the upholding of the standard. I wonder what would happen," he went on,
"if fair women, as Meredith visioned, rose in revolt. I wonder what
would happen if they suddenly combined to refuse to give the world the
material it builds its civilization with. I wonder where our brute force
would come in then. What sort of children should we have if women had to
be taken by brute force? And should we so take them if really they were
to resist? Brute force has been opposed only with brute force. Our
highest conception is that the strongest brute force wins. I wonder
what brute force would do if it were opposed with the force of the
spiritual ideals that women have and scarcely are awake to even yet.
Are you awake to the spiritual ideals in you?"
He looked at her suddenly as they walked and as suddenly and as firmly
she said--
"Yes."
"By Jove!" he exclaimed. "You're the first woman I've ever met who
would have answered as straight and direct as that. All the rest would
have hedged and shilly-shallied. Some would have giggled. Half of them
would frankly not have known what I meant."
"I know very well what you mean," she replied. "But if you're surprised
at a woman knowing, I don't think you're any more surprised than I am at
a man asking the question. How did you know to begin with that women
have spiritual ideals at all, strong enough ever to think of their being
ranged against brute force?"
She paused, but it was so obvious she had still more to say that he
waited rather than interrupt the train of her thought.
"I expect your wife's a very wonderful woman," she said.
In that pause she had wrestled with herself.
It had been the first time she had mentioned his wife in all their
conversation. Well she knew what would be the effect of it. It would
call her there between them. Inevitably it would thrust him a little
away from her to give his wife room in their minds.
It had been an irresistible thought, yet why should she spoil the
contact of mind between them by speaking it? Was it incumbent upon her
in any way to remind him of his wife?
Yet partly she was curious to know, and wholly she was honest to speak.
There was his wife. Nothing in Mary's thoughts would be reckoned
without her. Did he find a deep interest in speaking to her? She
believed he did, but there was his wife. She knew there was no
attraction of physical beauty in her, yet had he not made it obvious in
the last ten days that still she had attraction for him? It seemed
certain to her that he had; but there was his wife.
At every turn in their conversation, at the end of every steadied
glance, this woman she had never seen effected some intervention in
thought or vision in Mary's mind. More plainly a thousand times it
seemed she felt her presence than did he. There were moments when
enthusiasm caught him and it appeared he had forgotten every one and
everything but Mary there before him.
It became imperative then for her to summon that vision before her mind.
She did it with an effort. But later, when alone at night before she
turned to sleep, it came without call, trembling her with emotion at the
thought that a moment might happen upon them when they would both forget
or come to memory too late.
And what did she mean by that--too late? In all frankness and honesty,
she did not know. It were better explained, she would not allow herself
to know. Reaching that issue in her conscious thought about it all,
emotion would sweep like a hot wind upon her. She would lie, half
trembling in the darkness, pressing her hand upon her breast to frighten
herself into some sort of terrible joy at the rapid beating of her heart
and then, driving all conscious thought away from her, she would
straighten her limbs in the bed, exerting her physical control, as when
she nerved herself to play her game, thus forcing herself to quietude
and ultimately to sleep.
So she came always consciously to a point of thought which, bringing her
the vision of his wife and the sense of her own emotion, drifted her
towards that subconsciousness of being wherein the pattern of so many a
woman's life is made. She thought no more but, had she permitted it,
would have lain, silent-minded in an ecstasy. It was no less than
physical control, the straightening of her limbs, the clenching of her
hands, the beating of her pillow into new resting places for her head,
that put the ecstasy away.
Here, in some likeness, was that same moment, in the broad light of day
with him beside her and the crisp heather roots beneath their feet. It
was almost a physical effort in her throat that gave her strength to
say--
"I expect your wife's a very wonderful woman."
She meant him to realize that in her thoughts it was through his wife he
had become possessed of such knowledge about women; that there was his
wife; that she was there between them; that if he had for the instant
forgotten her, she had not. It was as though, in a violent muscular
effort, Mary had seized her by the wrist and jerked her into step with
them. Almost was she catching for her breath when she had done it.
"My wife is a wonderful woman," said he quietly. "She has as big a heart
as all this stretch of acres and that breadth of sea, but to-day is her
to-morrow. I didn't learn about the spiritual ideals of women from
her."
"Where did you learn it then?" asked Mary.
"Now you're asking me something I couldn't possibly tell you," said he,
and then he smiled. He had seen the look leap slanting across her eyes
as she thought of the other woman who had taught him.
"Because," he added--"I don't know."
V
If it were Fanny who first had sense of what was happening, it was Jane
who, when she discovered it, spoke out her mind about the matter.
Fanny knew by instinct, long before the first suspicions had fermented
her elder sister's thoughts. She detected a sharper, brighter look in
Mary's eyes; she calculated a greater distance in Mary's meditative
glance.
At first it was as subtle a detection as the record of that weightless
rider one straddles on the balance arm. Faintly the scales of her
suspecting answered to the application of the signs which she observed.
Faintly the weight of a thought was registered upon her consciousness.
If it was not as yet that Mary was in love, at least her mind was
centering on that which any moment might turn to burning thoughts.
They occupied the same room together, these two. This had been a habit
from childhood. Since the death of Mr. and Mrs. Throgmorton, the
accommodation of that house did not necessitate it. But they had grown
used to each other's company. They would have missed the sound of each
other's voices those moments before the approach of sleep, the exchange
of more lucid conversation in the mornings as they dressed.
It was in unaccustomed pauses as she undressed at night that Fanny's
mind found the first whispers of her instinct about Mary. It was not
that she said to herself--"I used to sit on my bed like that--I used to
stare at the wall--I can just remember what I used to think about." Far
more it was that, at the sight of Mary doing these things, there came,
like an echo into Fanny's pulses, the old emotions through which she had
passed when she had been walking round those cliff paths waiting for the
destiny that should declare itself for her.
She watched her sister, even more closely than she knew. It was
emotional, not conscious observation. Once the matter had fastened
itself upon her imagination, the whole spirit of it emotionalized her.
She noted all the indications of Mary's condition of mind, without
looking for them; almost without knowing she had seen them.
The processes of her thought during that first fortnight when at the
last Liddiard was meeting Mary every day, were subtle, subliminal and
beyond any conscious intent. Often watching her sister as, regarding
herself in the mirror while she did her hair, with those indefinite
touches of greater care and more calculating consideration, she found a
pain fretting at her heart--a hunger-pain as of one who is
ill-nourished, keeping life together but no more.
In this it was as also in the choice of the skirts and blouses Mary
wore. It needed no great selection of wardrobe to trace this to its
source.
Fanny could never have dreamt of expressing the knowledge that women
dress to the dictation of their emotions even if it be something that is
never revealed, the color of a ribbon on their undergarments, even the
choice of those undergarments themselves. That which touches their skin
means insensibly something to them when their emotions are astir. It
was not that Fanny had learnt this; she knew it. But it was not that
she could speak of her knowledge.
All that happened with Fanny those days was that the observation of
these things in Mary emotionalized her. Lying in bed there, watching
her sister as she dressed, she found her pulses beating more quickly.
She felt a restlessness of body as well as mind. She threw the
bedclothes from her and got up, not because she wanted to be dressed
herself, but because she could not stay in bed any longer.