They had preserved as by a compact a perpetual silence on the subject of
Owen Prothero. But always, after seeing Laura, Nina had forced herself
to write to him that he might know she had been true to her trust.
To-night she wrote: "I have done all I can for you, or, if you like, for
Laura. She's at the breaking point. If you think there's anything you
can do for her yourself you'd better do it and lose no time."
She wrote brutally; for mixed with her jealousy there was a savage anger
with Owen as the cause of Laura's suffering. She hated the Kiddy, but
she couldn't bear to see her suffer.
There were two days yet before the mail went; but she posted her letter
at once, while her nerve held out. The thing done, she sat up till
midnight brooding over it. It had taken all her nerve. For she did not
want Prothero to come back, and that letter would bring him. Bodily
separation from Owen had not killed her; it had become the very
condition of her life; for there was a soul of soundness in her. Her
blood, so vehement in its course, had the saving impetus of recoil.
She dreaded its dominion as the whipped slave dreads the lash.
Latterly she had detached herself even spiritually from Owen. She
remembered what she had been before, without him, and what, without him,
she had possessed. Her genius was a thing utterly removed from her, a
thing that belonged to Owen rather than to her, since he had said it was
his youth. She thought of it tenderly, as of a thing done for and
departed; for it was so that she had come to think of Owen's youth. She
was not like Jane, she felt no hatred of it and no jealousy. It had not
given her cause. It had not stood in her way. It had not struggled in
her against her passion. If it had, she knew that she would have swept
it aside and crushed it. It had lain always at the mercy of her
passions; she had given it to her passions to destroy, foreseeing the
destruction. But now she relented. She felt that she would save it if
she could.
It was in her hour of sanity and insight that she had said virginity was
the law, the indispensable condition. Virginity--she had always seen it,
not as a fragile, frustrate thing, but as a joyous, triumphing energy,
the cold, wild sister of mountain winds and leaping waters, subservient
only to her genius, guarding the flame in its secret, unsurrendered
heart.
Her genius was the genius of wild earth, an immortal of divinely pitiful
virgin heart and healing hand; clear-eyed, swift-footed, a huntress of
the woods and the mountains, a runner in the earth's green depths, in
the secret, enchanted ways. To follow it was to know joy and deliverance
and peace. It was the one thing that had not betrayed her.
There had been moments, lately, when she had had almost the assurance of
its ultimate return; when she had felt the stirring of the old impulse,
the immortal instinct; when she longed for the rushing of her rivers,
and the race of the wind on her mountains of the Marches. It would come
back, her power, if she were there, in the place where it was born; if
she could get away from streets and houses and people; if she got away
from Laura.
But Laura was the one thing she could not get away from. She had to be
faithful to her trust.
It would be seven weeks, at the least, before Owen could come back. Her
letter would take three weeks to reach him, and he would have to make
arrangements. She wondered whether the Kiddy could hold out so long.
All night she was tormented by this fear, of the Kiddy's not holding
out, of her just missing it; of every week being one more nail hammered,
as she had once said, into the Kiddy's little coffin; and it was with a
poignant premonition that she received a message from Addy Ranger in the
morning. Miss Ranger was down-stairs; she had something to say to Miss
Lempriere; she must see her. She couldn't come up; she hadn't a minute.
Addy stood outside on the doorstep. She was always in a violent hurry
when on her way to Fleet Street, the scene for the time being of her
job. But this morning her face showed signs of a profounder agitation.
She made a rush at Nina.
"Oh, Miss Lempriere, will you go to Laura?"
"Is she ill?"
"No. _He_ is. He's dying. He's in a fit. I think it's killing her."
The blinds were down when Nina reached the house in Camden Town.
The fit--it was apoplexy, Mrs. Baxter informed her--had not been long.
It had come on, mercifully, in his sleep. Mercifully (Mrs. Baxter leant
on it); but Miss Lempriere had better go up at once to Miss Gunning.
Nina went without a word.
The bed had been drawn into the middle of the small back room. The body
of the old man lay on it, covered with a sheet. His head was tilted a
little, showing the prone arch of the peaked nose; the jaw was bound
with a handkerchief. Already the features were as they had been in the
days before disease had touched them. Death had constrained them to
their primal sanity. Death dominated them like a living soul.
The death-bed and its burden filled the room. In the narrow space
between it and the wall little Laura went to and fro, to and fro,
looking for a pair of white socks that were not there and never had
been. She must find, she was saying, a pair of white socks, of clean
white socks. They had told her that they were necessary.