If those kisses were hurtful to Jane, they were a sublime realization to
Mary. In the rush of them as they pressed against her lips, she felt a
consummation of all those forces of life which, with the Bridnorth
coach, had so often called to her as it came and passed with its message
out of the world.
Rightly or wrongly in the accepted standards of morality, Mary felt such
completed justification in those moments as to be sensitive of the
surging intentions of life triumphing within her. This, she knew then,
was the fullness of meaning in a woman's life. If it were pleasure, it
was not the pleasure of sensation; not even the pleasure of the promise
of gratification. None of the joys of amorous delay were mingled in
those kisses for her.
What she felt in the rushing torrent in her veins was all subsidiary to
the overwhelming sense of fulfillment.
He would have lingered there beside that gateway in the bracken, would
have dallied with the joy it was to him to feel her whole being in
response to his. But Mary had no need of that.
If this was what her mother had meant by concealment of her own
sensations, she surely had it then. This was not an hour of dalliance in
her life. It was the deep-sounding prelude to the realization of the
very spiritual substance of her being.
At her dictation they left that place in the bracken. In response to her
wish they turned from the gateway and sought the beaten path through the
heather again. In that moment she wanted no more of his kisses; partly
perhaps because in her emotions she could have borne no more; but mostly
it was that she wanted space and freedom for her thoughts; to speak them
to him if need be, certainly to review them in her mind. It was time
she demanded--time to touch the wonder that was coming to her, which,
from the power of those kisses, she somehow assumed could not be
withheld from her now.
"I could not help that," he said almost apologetically when she insisted
upon their going on. "Somehow or other--I don't know--honestly, I
couldn't help it, and I suppose I've offended you now."
For one instant she turned her eyes upon him with a searching glance.
"Offended?" she repeated. "Didn't you realize that I let you kiss
me--not once--but--" Suddenly she realized in a swift vision the Mary
Throgmorton that was; the Mary Throgmorton of the square, white Georgian
house; the sister of Hannah and Jane and Fanny, and she could not say
how many times he had kissed her. Her cheeks flamed.
"Don't talk about offense," said she almost hotly, and walked on with
him some time in silence, saying no more, leaving him in an amaze of
wondering what her thoughts could be and whether that denial of offense
was not merely a screen to hide from him the shame she felt at what had
happened.
Was she ashamed? It seemed to him then that she was. That probably was
the last time he would touch her lips, yet having touched them and felt,
not the eagerness as with Fanny, but the sureness of their response,
there had been awakened in him the full consciousness of desire to touch
them with his lips again. For now he felt, not master of her, but a
servant. At the mere utterance of her command, he must obey. With all
his eagerness to stay there longer at that gate there was no power in
him of conflict with her wishes when she expressed the desire to go on.
What was it she was thinking as she walked? Did really she hate him for
what he had done? The cry her nature had made to his in those moments
of the closeness of their bodies had redoubled and redoubled in its
intensity. Yet he was less sure of her than he had been before.
He felt like one struggling blindly through the storm of his emotions,
answering some call that was not for help but of command. Was that the
end of it all? Would he never again hold her in his arms? Tentatively
he took her hand which did not resist his holding as they walked.
"My dear," he said--almost below his breath--"I suppose I've seemed
weak--but--I love you. It was not weakness. I can't explain it, but if
you knew, really it was strength."
"Please don't say any more--not now," said she and lengthened her stride
and threw back her head that all the full sweep of the air might beat
upon her face and throat.
It never consciously occurred to her that a woman's throat and the fine
column of her neck could express her beauty to a man. Yet as they
walked, she knew that his eyes had seen such beauty in hers.
So it was, when Jane looked up again, they had gone. For another half
hour and more she sat there in her bed in the heather, trying to
appreciate all that it meant. But again and again the sequence of her
conventional thoughts was disturbed by the vision of those two as her
eyes turned to the gateway in the bracken and she saw them in her mind
with lips touching and heads close pressed together in that long
embrace.
With that vision all conventionality slipped from her control, even from
the very substance of her thoughts. Instinctively she knew she had been
witness of something she had neither power nor right to judge when,
forcing herself to regard it as all the years of habit and custom would
have her do, she shut her eyes to the sight of them in that bracken and
called upon her judgment to dispassionate her mind.
That evening she contrived to be alone with Mary after tea. They walked
in the garden, round the paths with their borders of thrift in heavy
cushions of growth.
In a tone of casual unconcern, Jane asked her about her game of golf.
Her pause in answering was significant. In full confidence, Jane
expected the lie and understood her sister still the less when, having
weighed the truth against expediency, she replied--
"We didn't play golf. We went up onto the moors above Penlock."
It gave Jane the opportunity she sought, but in the frankness of giving
confused her. So had her mind forestalled all the progressions of that
conversation, that for a moment she was silent.
What sort of woman was this Mary of theirs who seemed to have no
guiltiness of conscience, when from childhood she had been trained to
listen to the still, small voice? Did she not realize the enormity of
what she was doing? Jane's lips set to their thinnest line.
"Do you think it's wise," she began, and in that tone of voice which,
with a sharp edge, cut the plain pattern of her meaning--"Do you think
it's wise to go about so much with this man? Even if he weren't
married--do you think it's wise?"
The sharp glance which Jane stole at her sister then revealed Mary
possessed and unconcerned. So well had she known what Jane was going to
say that surprise had no power to disconcert her. But beyond that,
there was in some chamber of her mind a certain sureness of herself, a
steadying confidence in all she did. This it had also been even in the
high torrent of her emotion when she would have no more of his kisses
and seemed in that moment to him the substance of unyielding stone his
temperature of passion had heated but a moment and no more.
"I think," she replied, after a moment's silence; "I think that this
wisdom you talk about--worldly wisdom--is a very over-rated virtue. I
think we've lost a lot--all of us--by cultivating it. I find Mr.
Liddiard much more interesting than any one or any thing in Bridnorth.
Life after all is short enough--dull enough. Why shouldn't I take what
interest it offers when I can, while I can? He goes in a few days.
What's worldly wisdom to the feeling that your mind is growing instead
of stagnating? If you mean you think I ought not to go out with him
again, I can't agree with you."
She spoke like a woman addressing a community of women, not as one
sister to another. There was a note of detachment in her voice, Jane
had never heard before. In all that household, Jane always assumed she
had herself the final power of control. She felt it no longer here. So
long as Mary was speaking, it appeared to her as though she were one
listening to some authority far superior to her own. It was in Mary's
voice and yet seemed outside and beyond her as well. There was power
behind it. She could not sense the direction or origin of that power,
but it dominated her. She felt small beside it, and feeling small and
realizing that it was this Mary, their youngest, who was the voice of
it, she grew angry. All control of that situation she had intended to
conduct left her. It left her fretting with the sensation of her own
impotence.
"You can't agree with me, can't you!" retorted Jane hotly. "You
wouldn't agree, I suppose, if I said that, beside being unwise, I
thought it beastly and sinful and horrible altogether, to see a girl
kissing a married man, kissing him in a beastly way too?"
Never, even from the first moment of her discovery, had she ever meant
to say this. This was not Jane's method. What flood of emotion had
borne her thus far out of her course? Fully it had been her intention
to speak of Mary's friendship with Liddiard as though it were a flippant
and a passing thing; to belittle it until, in its littleness, she had
shown this foolish sister of hers what folly it was.
How had it happened she had thus exaggerated its importance by the heat
of her words? Something had pricked and spurred her. Something had
driven her beyond her control. Finding herself opposed by a force so
infinitely greater than her own, she had struggled and fought. It had
been a moment's hysteria in the sudden consciousness of her impotence.
Then what power was it? Not merely Mary herself. She could not submit
her mind to that admission. It was greater than Mary and yet, becoming
the voice of it, she felt that this sister of hers was greater than
herself.
To Mary, the shock of realization that Jane had seen them that moment in
the bracken was not one that seemed to tremble or emotionalize her at
all. If she felt any anger at the thought that she had been spied
upon--for swiftly recalling the place of that happening, she knew Jane
must have been in hiding,--it was an anger that burnt out, like ignited
powder, a flash, no more. It left no trace. All her consciousness
assembled in her mind to warn her that the meaning of Life which had
come in those last two weeks to her was in jeopardy of being made
meaningless. It did not frighten her, but set the beating of her heart
to a slow and deliberate measure.
Whatever Jane knew and however she intended to use her knowledge, Mary
determined to fight for this new-found purpose of her existence. If
they were fools, if theirs was the folly of waste, if they let all life
go by them to be worldly wise, she could not help or wait for them now.
Something had come with its promise of fulfillment to her, her nature
urged her not to ignore. What if he was married? There had been
moments in the inception and growth of their relationship when she had
thought first of his wife. She thought first of her no longer. She was
stealing no intrinsic thing. In a few days he would go back to his house
in Somerset and what he had given her of his mind, as she had seen, had
been his to give her; and, if he had kissed her, what had she stolen
from his wife in that? He would still kiss his wife. She knew that.
As plainly as if they were there before her, she could see their
embrace. It meant nothing to her. They would not be the same kisses he
had given Mary.
Whatever had been the call of Nature to him in that moment when passion
had spoken out of his lips, his eyes, the power she felt in his arms as
they crushed her, it had been not through the channel of his body, but
his mind.
Insensibly she was learning the multitudinous courses by which Nature
came to claim her own. She was stealing nothing from his wife. All that
was coming to her was her own and with the sudden realization of Jane's
knowledge of what had happened, her first sensation was a warning that
her very soul was in jeopardy.
There was nothing to be said then; no defense that she could, or cared
to, offer. She knew quite well from those long years of knowledge, how
horrible their kisses must have seemed to Jane. Once upon a time, she
might have thought them horrible herself. Now, there was nothing to be
said that might serve in her defense.
Taking a deep breath, she looked straight in Jane's eyes and stood
there, arresting their movement on the garden path to paint the defiant
attitude of her mind.
"Well--if you've seen," said she, "you've seen. There's no more to be
said about it. We've all lived together so long, I suppose it's hard
for any one of us to realize that our lives are really all separate
things. You talk about it as being beastly. I can assure you there was
nothing beastly in our minds. However, you must think whatever your
mind suggests to you to think, and you must start yourself all the talk
about us you say is bound to come when I'm seen about with him, if you
feel that way inclined. But I'll tell you just one thing--you can't
make me ashamed of myself. I'm twenty-nine."
She turned away, walked with all the firmness of her stride into the
house and left Jane, standing there, withered and dry between those
borders of spreading thrift and flowers all dropping their seed into the
mold that waited for them.