But, when Gerald was gone, Helen found that she was no longer sleepy.
She lay, her eyes closed, straight and still, like an effigy on a tomb,
and she thought, intently and quietly. It was more a series of pictures
than a linking of ideas with which her mind was occupied--pictures of
her childhood and girlhood in Scotland and at Merriston House. It was
dispassionately that she watched the little figure, lonely, violent,
walking over the moors, hiding in the thickets of the garden, choking
with tears of fury, clenching teeth over fierce resentments. She almost
smiled at the sight of her. What constant resentments, what frequent
furies! They centred, of course, about the figure of her mother, lovely,
vindictive, and stony-hearted, as she had been and was. Helen's life had
dawned in the consciousness of love for this beautiful mother, whom she
had worshipped with the ardent humility of a little dog. Afterwards,
with a vehemence as great, she had grown to hate her. All her girlhood
had been filled with struggles against her mother. Sometimes for weeks
they had not spoken to each other, epochs during which, completely
indifferent though she was, Mrs. Buchanan had given herself the
satisfaction of smartly boxing her daughter's ears when her mute,
hostile presence too much exasperated her. There had been no refuge for
Helen with her father, a gloomy man, immersed in sport and study, nor in
her brother Nigel, gay and pleasant though he was. When once Nigel got
away to school and college, he spent as little time at home as possible.
Helen was as solitary as a sea-bird, blown far inland and snared. Then
came the visits to Merriston House--the cheerful, chattering houseful of
happy girls, the kind father and mother, and Gerald. Gerald! From the
time that he came into her life all the pictures were full of him, so
full that she hardly saw herself any longer; she was only some one who
watched and felt.
Her violent nature, undisciplined except by its own pride, did not
submit easily to the taming processes of a wholesome family life; she
dominated the girl cousins, and they only counted as chorus in the drama
of her youth. It was Gerald who counted, at once, counted for everything
else. She cared so much for him that, feeling her independence slipping
from her, she at first quarrelled with him constantly, as far as he
would let her quarrel with him. Her brooding bitterness amazed and
amused him. While she stormed, he would laugh at her, gaily and
ironically, and tell her that she was an absurd little savage. And,
after she had burst into a frenzy of tears and fled from him, he would
seek her out, find her hidden in some corner of the garden or
shrubberies, and, grieved and alarmed, put his arms around her, kiss her
and say: 'Look here, I'm awfully sorry. I can't bear to have you take
things like this. Please make up.'
He could not bear to see her suffering, ludicrous though he thought her
suffering to be. And it was this sweetness, this comprehension and
tenderness, like sunlight flooding her gloomy and petrified young heart,
that filled Helen with astonished bliss. She was tamed at last to the
extent of laughing with Gerald at herself; and, though the force of her
nature led him, the sweetness of his nature controlled her. They became
the dearest of friends.
Yes, so it had always been; so it had always looked--to all the rest of
the world, and to Gerald. Helen, lying on her divan, saw the pictures of
comradeship filling the years. It was her consciousness of what the real
meaning of the pictures was that supplied something else, something
hidden and desperate that pulsed in them all. How she remembered the
first time that she had drawn away when Gerald kissed her, putting up
between them the shield of a lightly yet decisively accepted
conventionality. They were 'growing up'; this was her justification. How
she remembered what it had cost her to keep up the lightness of her
smile so that he should not guess what lay beneath. Her nature was all
passion, and enclosing this passion, like a steady hand held round a
flame, was a fierce purity, a fierce pride. Gerald had never guessed. No
one had ever guessed. It seemed to Helen that the pain of it had broken
her heart in the very spring of her years; that it was only a maimed and
cautious creature that the world had ever known.
She lay, and drew long quiet breaths in looking at it all. The day of
reawakened memories had been like a sword in her heart, and now she
seemed to draw it out slowly, and let the blood come with a sense of
peace. She could even, as often, lend to the contemplation of her
tragedy the bitter little grimace of mockery with which she met so much
of life. She could tell herself, as often, that she had never outgrown
love-sick girlhood, and that she was merely in love with Gerald's smile.
Yet Gerald was all in his smile; and Gerald, it seemed, was made to be
loved, all of him, helplessly and hopelessly, by unfortunate her. She
felt her love as a misfortune; it was too strong and too unsatisfied to
be felt in any sense as joy, though it strung her nature to a painful
appreciation of joy. She saw life with a cold, appraising eye; it was
like a landscape robbed of all sunlight, and, so robbed, so bleak, and
so bereft, it was easy to appraise it, to see, since one could have no
warmth or light, what were the next best things to have. She had missed
the next best things again and again, when the moment had come for
taking them; she had drawn back sick, blanched, shaken with the throes
of desperate hope. Only in these last years, when next best things were
no longer so plentiful, had hope really died. Her heart still beat, but
it seemed to beat thinly, among all the heaped-up ashes of dead hopes.
She was free to go forth into the sunless world and choose what place
should be hers. She did not care much for anything that world had to
give her. But she intended to choose carefully and calmly. She was aware
in herself of firm, well-knit faculty, of tastes, sharp and sensitive,
demanding only an opportunity to express themselves in significant and
finished forms of life; and though Helen did not think of it in these
terms, saying merely to herself that she wanted money and power, the
background of her intention was a consciousness of capacity for power.
Reflecting on this power, and on the paths to its realisation, she was
led far, indeed, from any thought of Althea; and Althea was not at all
in her mind as, sleepy at last, and very weary, she remembered Gerald's
last words. It was the thought of Gerald that brought the thought of
Althea, and of Althea's pages. Fair and empty they were, she felt sure,
adorned only here and there with careful and becoming maxims. She smiled
a little, not untenderly, as she thought of Althea. But, just before
sinking to deeper drowsiness, and deciding that she must rouse herself
and go upstairs to bed, a further consciousness came to her. The sunny
day at Merriston had not, in her thoughts, brought them near to one
another--Gerald, and Althea, and her; yet something significant ran
through her sudden memory of it. She had moments of her race's sense of
second-sight, and it never came without making her aware of a pause--a
strange, forced pause--where she had to look at something, touch
something, in the dark, as it were. It was there as she roused herself
from her half-somnolent state; it was there in the consciousness of a
turning-point in her life--in Gerald's, in Althea's. 'We may write
something on Althea's pages,' was the thought with which, smiling over
its inappropriateness, she went upstairs. And the fancy faded from her
memory, as if it had been a bird's wing that brushed her cheek in the
darkness.