Theresa had not the prophetic gift, but she garnered her experiences;
she had good judgment and, when it pleased her, she could use wisdom in
her dealings with her kind, so that, two months later, when Grace came
to her, sore over the sufferings of the young man with the undeveloped
head, yet still determined to be cruel to him, Theresa received her
without surprise or any reference to the promised eternity of Grace's
love.
"It was a great mistake," Grace said ingenuously. "I'm afraid I like
admiration, and I can't help liking people who give it me."
"You must like the whole world, then. What a big heart to carry!"
"It's not quite as big as that, and you take up a lot of room in it,
Terry, though you think I'm such a silly."
"You'll improve," said Theresa cheerfully.
She was able to be cheerful, for two months is a long time at seventeen,
and the pain of her spirit was dulled: she had become used, though not
reconciled, to the sight of a familiar figure, branded with shame. She
no longer compared his every word and action with the truth she knew of
him, for the beautiful green growth of custom was hiding the staring
ugliness of her discovery. It was there, underneath, but now and then
she was able to forget it, and that capacity almost persuaded her
sometimes that her imagination had played her false. She watched him. He
was the same man, it appeared, but for the shrinking wonder with which
he looked at her, hurting her, striking doubt into her young criticism
of things beyond her. Was it his guilt or her cold treatment which had
cast this visible shadow over him? It should have been his guilt, but he
had offended and yet gone clear of cloud before she found him out. It
was her frowns that troubled him, and while she hated the immature
self-righteousness which forced them from her, she could not keep them
back; a smooth brow would have been disloyalty to the woman over whom he
bent with a hypocrisy so perfect that it seemed impossible. She had hard
work to restrain articulate scorn, but her curled lips did duty, exiling
him to that desert place whence he could not see her smiles. In these
days his shoulders became more bent, and Theresa learnt how he had
looked in the shops where he was afraid of people's eyes. The knowledge
shook her; he was like a frightened child who longs for kindness, and
only by repeating those beating words could she forbear from putting her
arms round his neck and kissing him under the brows. She longed to do
it; her love fluttered and struggled in her breast, so that she had to
quiet it with the pressure of her hand, and this was the beginning of a
habit which never left her.
She watched the postman, too. Letters, addressed in Alexander's writing,
came from the farm among the hills: they were thick and sometimes
sealed, and the eagerness with which her father took them to his room
convinced her that they held enclosures. At such times he seemed to her
like an animal secreting food, and the striving love lay still.
On an evening when this had happened, she sat with her mother by the
breakfast-room fire. It was May, but a cold wind rattled the windows,
and Nancy had her feet inside the fender and a shawl round her
shoulders. Theresa was sewing, as a silent protest against the ardent
letter-reading upstairs. Her lips were tightened, and conscious virtue
enveloped all of her but the hair that flamed in love's own colour. She
was now eighteen, and the hair was massed on her head, overweighting it,
strengthening the pallor of a face where only a few golden freckles
broke the white.
She shivered. "May is the worst month of all," she said, and threw down
her sewing. "Such light, long evenings, and spring's news almost old. It
makes me miserable."
"I wish you would go out more, dear."
"I took Uncle George for a walk yesterday, and Father the day before."
"That's not what I mean. Why will you never go with Grace?"
"I don't fit in. I feel like a great piece of furniture when I'm with
her friends. I can't talk as they do. They have a way of making
jokes--all about nothing and really not a bit funny--that turns me dumb.
I don't know how they can think of such imbecilities." She did not add
that she envied their facility, that their gay scraps of talk, their
ease in each other's company, the way in which they wore their clothes
and did their hair, shamed her for her silent awkwardness and robbed her
of any comfort in the belief that she was alien because she was unique.
Her eyes were quick, but they did not see that though she lacked the
loveliness she had always wanted, her face had the beauty of her swift
and vivid spirit, she had the pliant grace of a larch, the freshness of
its early green and the courage which has caused that tree to be set in
wild and desolate places. She thought the more highly of the intellect,
and in this region she was aware that she overtopped the women of her
acquaintance and the men with whom they danced, and laughed, and talked
with such incomparable ease.
Nancy uttered a platitude serenely. "It takes all sorts to make a
world," she said.
"I know, but there don't seem to be any of my sort--and I could be a
friend!"
"You are a friend, dear, to me and Father and Uncle George and Grace.
Since you began to take care of us all, I think I've never been so
happy. You mustn't think I haven't seen, and now I want to tell you in
case I never have another chance. My heart was very bad last night--but
don't tell Father. Don't worry him. The attacks must come, and one of
them will take me with it. I don't want to tell anyone but you, Terry,
and I tell you because you're strong."
The colour rushed over Theresa's face, and she stammered as she spoke;
but it was fear, not pride, that swamped her; though, in after silences,
the words echoed back to her thrillingly.
"You must let me sleep with you. I can't let you have attacks all alone
in the dark like that. Pain"--she breathed the word--"must be so
terrible alone. Doesn't Father wake? I should, if you moved."
"So would he, but I don't move, you see. And I'm not going to be parted
from him for the time that may be so short. And I've endured worse
pangs, Theresa, far worse. Thank God, they're over." The faint smile
deepened, the corners of her mouth were reminiscent, her lips had the
softness of a girl's. "Where you give love, give trust, Theresa, when
your great time comes."
The wavering colour came back to Theresa's cheeks. She looked pityingly,
adoringly, at her mother, and then her brain seemed to swell with
reckless anger.
"I'll never love!" she cried, "because I must trust where I love, and
men--men are so faithless! Oh, I know!" She ceased, trembling, watching
her slim, shaken wrists. She heard laughter.
"Is this books, or Bessie?" And then, as Theresa raised her face,
"Terry! What has happened? Nothing to you--or Grace?"
"No, no, dear, it's just the things I hear about. Truly." She was on her
knees, stroking her mother's face, aghast at her own carelessness. "It's
Grace who is unfaithful, and no one gives a thought to me!"
"You are so dramatic, dear! Don't give way to the temptation."
"I know," Theresa murmured. "It's wicked of me." But this time her
outburst had had no impulse but what came from her own indignant heart.
"You're not always sure, are you, of what you really feel?"
"Oh, how did you know? But is anybody?"
"Lots of people, I think. This--this may be my farewell sermon, Terry,
so be attentive!"
"I won't listen if you talk like that."
"I won't, then, and I'm not going to preach. I only want to tell you to
go on taking care of them all for me. You do it better than I ever did,
and it has been a sacrifice."
Had it? Theresa looked back through the months. What would she have done
with them if they had been hers to use? The thought of the immortal poem
rose up in a cloud of dust. It would never be anything more than dust,
offensive to eyes and nose, choking her. With a defiant movement of the
arms she scattered it, yet still its odour remained, mocking her with
its dry offence. She spurned the idea of herself as poet, her head was
unaccountably humbled, yet through it there darted swiftly the vision of
herself as novelist. It was a vision easier to live with, and she
welcomed it, straightening her back.
"There's Grace," her mother was saying softly; "she is so pretty. Don't
let her marry the wrong person, Terry."
"She's rather clever at dodging the mistakes. She has a lot of
commonsense. I'm much more likely to do something insane, in spite of my
looks! Being plain makes one so independent!"
"You're not plain, dear. Father thinks you're beautiful."
"Oh, Father!" The old allegiance and the new scorn were fairly mingled.
"Yes," said Nancy, twisting her lips, "it is rather like that, I know.
And there's Uncle George. He's much nicer near than at a distance.
Theresa, do you mind him very much?"
"I rather like him," she answered, reddening.
"Aren't we being good?" said Nancy gaily. "And you'll keep Bessie. I
know she's not much use, but she's a friend. I shouldn't like you to
have a stranger. And--and there's Father." Tears dropped straight and
unheeded into her lap. "Theresa, he loves you so much, and he'll need
you. Be kind to him. He's so unhappy when you're not."
The appeal could only throw his treachery into black relief, but in an
illuminating flash that went violently through her head, and left her
weak and giddy, she thought she understood it, understood all things,
and she promised, weeping, too, that she would care for him.
Her mother's gentleness stole through Theresa and stayed there: she felt
in herself a largeness of forgiveness that astonished her, and she
looked on her father without rancour, with the wide gaze, she thought,
of one who sees beyond the flesh. And the mood, unnatural, but not
false, imposed by another's tenderness, lasted, uninterrupted, for the
short time before her mother died. Theresa was glad that inward peace,
as well as that outer one of a June night, surrounded the pale, still
figure on the bed, as she gave the little sighing breath which lightly
sent her spirit across the border, glad that she felt no resentment at
her father's tears. She had time to think these things before there came
over her a terrible quiet which was not peace but desolation, wherein
worlds broke God's rules and changed their course, and, amidst their
bewildered going, she thought her mother tried to find a place. Her
discarded lodging lay in the bed still bearing the imprint of her
spirit, but what was essentially she was racing perilously among
uncertain worlds. She steadied herself. She refused to visualise a thing
she could not understand, and she found strength. The wandering worlds
dropped back into their circuits, she heard the dreadful catch and
outlet of her father's breathing, and, as though this were but part of
her daily task, she stroked her mother's cold, soft hands, and touched a
little wavering lock of hair that had fallen across her brow.
She lived and ate, and slept through the medium of a body which had no
connection with herself. She would rather have suffered tortures, but
she could not regain her personality or any of the emotions it would
have felt. While Uncle George went gloomily about the house and Bessie
sobbed in the kitchen and Grace lay prone upon her bed, Theresa, feeling
ashamed of her coldness, seemed to live a life whose normality was only
broken now and then by the sight of a fleeting, ghostlike figure that
could not find rest. When she woke in that first night she heard its
hurrying, ceaseless steps, and the sound of doors opened by its
unbelieving, eager hands, and she knew that her father's body,
uninformed by his numbed mind, was searching and researching the house
for a living Nancy who would defy the stark evidence of her death.
She sat up in bed. Grace was in the deep sleep that follows weeping, and
she drew herself carefully out of the sheets, set her feet on the rough
carpet of the stairs, and pattered after him. She found him on the
landing below, and she touched his sleeve and patted it.
"You must go to bed," she said very soothingly.
He turned on her, and in the darkness she saw the glistening whites of
his eyes. "Whose bed?" he demanded, and again, "Whose bed? I have none,"
he added on a sob.
She had not thought of that. Only the half of Uncle George's couch
offered him shelter, and the awful pathos of that carefully preserved
space set her chin and her lips trembling.
"We'll go into the breakfast-room. We'll light the fire. I'll stay with
you." And by that fire they sat together, cheek against cheek.
Day comes early in June, and the birds were singing before Theresa had
stiffened in her chair, or their hands had refused to hold each other
any more. In the white light one white face gazed into another.
"You've only got your nightgown on," he told her; and then,
inconsequently, "but I've got you back."
"Yes," she said. She had never felt closer to him, and the guilt which
she could not forget had become no more than a thin film of smoke.
In the afternoon of that day, when she entered her mother's room to put
fresh flowers in her hand, she saw her father already filling them, but
not with flowers. It was a sheet of paper he fixed between those
strangely unresponsive fingers.
Across the bed he looked at Theresa, and frowned in his piteous need to
speak.
"It's all I have to give her," he said, "and she would have liked it.
She hadn't seen it because I never showed her anything until it was as
good as I could make it, but she must have it now. It's hers."
She bent over the paper. She saw the regular lines of verse, and,
starting out of them, the words that haunted her. Her mouth fell open,
and she looked at him through an immeasurable distance, before she
dropped to her knees under the unbearable weight of her abasement.