When the time came to waken Mrs. Greene lest a prolonged sleep should
spoil her night's rest, Miss Dorset experienced a tremor of the heart
looking at the old face on the pillow.
She perceived more clearly than anyone the ravages wrought by the
three years since Geoffrey Greene's death in the body that encased
Margaret Greene's ardent but flickering vitality.
Sometimes it was impossible to believe that Mrs. Greene was only
sleeping; her face seemed too old, too small, too hollow of cheek and
temple, ever to waken to a semblance of life. These stiff
brittle-looking eyelids could surely never lift again, the body
outstretched under the eiderdown in a rigid and comfortless abandon
could never reassemble itself into the familiar contours of trunk and
limbs. Miss Dorset endured a moment's prevision of the inevitable
day when she would touch a hand and find it cold; every day she
flinched at the thought, but every day she marshalled her resources
and bent down to Mrs. Greene with the invariable remark:
"I think perhaps you would like to waken now, and get up."
Mrs. Greene wakened slowly and with difficulty. Her first
consciousness was of the past. She wakened in the period of her
early marriage when her children were young--often with their names
on her lips--and she would look vacantly at Miss Dorset for a few
moments while her brain went roaming down the long years past the
familiar landmarks of marriages, births and deaths, till it fetched
up at last with a consciousness of her present situation, recognition
of Miss Dorset, and with a final detailed knowledge of the month, the
day, and her immediate plans.
Even so, for a little while her conversation was disjointed; she
referred to her grandchildren by her children's names, and it seemed
a cruelty to expect her to re-assume the burden of rational thought.
To-day the struggle was not so prolonged as usual.
"Yes, I would like to get up now," she said, still lying motionless
but collecting her forces for the effort. "Edith will be here soon
and I mustn't be late for tea."
"It's Mrs. Hugh who is coming, not Mrs. Rodney," Miss Dorset
corrected gently.
"Yes, yes, I know it is; that's what I said," replied Mrs. Greene
testily. "Get me up now. I'll put on my good blue dress and the
shawl Lavinia gave me."
Changing in the afternoon was a much simpler matter than dressing in
the morning. Some of the troubled vagueness and docility of
interrupted sleep still hung about Mrs. Greene, and she hardly
noticed that her body was being turned this way and that, her hair
brushed, and her frock fastened.
"Everything is ready for you if you still feel you would like to go
over your jewels," suggested Miss Dorset on the way downstairs.
"Of course I would; I hadn't forgotten," snapped Mrs. Greene, whose
irritability proclaimed clearly that she had forgotten.
Miss Dorset opened the library door and disclosed the thin November
sunlight streaming over the open cases laid out on the table, setting
the diamonds a-glitter and shining into the heart of rubies and
sapphires.
Mrs. Greene stopped in the doorway and drew a quick breath of
pleasure.
"They look very fine," she said excitedly, "I didn't know I had so
much. Of course there are some of my mother's jewels there, as well
as Geoffrey's mother's, and all the things he gave me."
She moved over to the table and sat down, lifting up her diamond
necklace and pendant to pore over its intricate but austere design.
"Isn't this beautiful?" she asked, not waiting for an answer.
"Geoffrey gave it me after his first very successful book. We took a
house in the country so that he could be free to finish it without
interruptions, and he wrote all the summer. It was a lovely summer
too, although Edwin's engagement in the autumn upset us all rather.
We didn't think it very wise. However, Mr. Greene got his book
finished, and it came out in November and was very successful indeed,
and this is what he gave me the Christmas after. I remember thinking
it was terribly extravagant of him, but of course I didn't know then
that his book would go so well in America."
"It is a wonderful necklace," said Miss Dorset, holding it up to the
sunlight.
"Well, that's not the way to look at it. Put it against a piece of
dark stuff if you want to see it properly."
She drew a pair of slender emerald ear-rings towards her.
"These would do nicely for Lavinia some day," she began, but broke
off and picked up a little gold ring set with an insignificant
sapphire.
"Miss Dorset, look at this," she exclaimed. "That's what Geoffrey
gave me after his very first book was published."
She looked at it reminiscently, not hearing Miss Dorset's comment of
"Indeed, how very interesting."
"It was not long after we were married," she said presently. "We
married young, you know, and old Mr. Greene was very angry with
Geoffrey for making writing his career. He had been in his father's
engineering works first of all and then found he was too unhappy to
go on with it. I was engaged to him then and I encouraged him to go
on with his writing. I said I'd marry him as soon as he liked and
not mind about being poor, but he wasn't to start on a career he
didn't care for. So I went to Papa and said I was going to marry
Geoffrey at once and would do it more happily if I had his
permission."
Mrs. Greene laughed her quiet infrequent laugh as she added
contentedly:
"I was a bold young thing, you know. In those days it was a
different matter to beard your father. But I didn't care for
anything but Geoffrey, and Papa behaved very nicely to me. He gave
me this as one of my wedding presents."
She groped among the cases, opened one, and displayed an
old-fashioned round brooch consisting of a large amethyst surrounded
by pearls in an elaborate gold setting.
"It looks clumsy now," she said, touching it with kindly fingers.
"But round brooches were all the fashion then and I was very pleased
with it. Mamma was very angry about my marriage, but then she was a
very narrow woman; she never moved with the times."
Miss Dorset enjoyed a momentary flash of insight. She perceived that
the old lady sitting beside her, herself a great-grandmother, was
speaking of her mother, whose memory would normally be blurred by the
clouds of half a century, in just the tones of clear resentment that
any young woman might employ to-day.
Mrs. Greene was back in the past, and even Miss Dorset caught
something of the combined fire and delicacy that must have inspired
such independence, such courage, and--according to the standards of
1870--such immodesty as to enable a betrothed young girl to arrange
her own marriage in the teeth of her mother's disapproval.
For a moment it was all so vivid to Miss Dorset that she gave way to
a spasm of indignation and admiration.
"Parents were far too harsh," she said. "It was shocking of the old
father to try and push Mr. Greene into a business he didn't care for,
but it must be splendid for you to think how you helped Mr. Greene to
succeed."