XX
Outside, in the lighted street, Anne called a cab, and gave the address of the nearest florist.
Her thoughts dwelt upon Madge, as the carriage rattled down the boulevard.
“I’m scarcely sorry,” was the outcome of her grave reflection. “It will make a woman of her. She needed a great shock, or a great sorrow to take her out of herself, and make her realize what it would mean to lose her husband.”
It was only while she was choosing flowers for her, that the part of Madge’s confession which concerned herself, came back confusedly to her mind. It gathered greater clearness as she drove towards her hotel, and by the time she reached it, and was sitting by her bedroom fire after dinner, she found herself wondering what would be the outcome of the matter.
That she might be sure of Madge Dakin, her instinct satisfied her. Yet the results of Madame Didier’s inquiries would in allprobability, from other sources, reach Dymfield. What then?
Anne’s thoughts flitted from Mrs. Carfax to Mrs. Willcox, the solicitor’s wife, a lady who was interested in Church Missions, and Rescue Homes for Fallen Women. The memory of Miss Goldie, a maiden lady of substantial means, and views of life which even Dymfield considered rigid, came to her, and forced a smile. She saw her sitting in the front pew in church, her black bonnet with two purple pansies upon it, tied tightly under her chin. She saw her angular elbows, under the short mantle of black silk adorned with bugle trimming. She heard her rasping voice, which seldom softened even for Anne, who as a rule affected insensibly the voices of her neighbours.
She remembered Mr. Willcox, stiff, erect, lean-faced Mr. Willcox, loud in his denunciation of the present age, which he considered lax and immoral to the last degree.
She thought of the Vicar, with his blustering attempts at modernity, and his violently expressed scorn of everything but muscular Christianity and common sense.
Dymfield was the typical English village, with its types indigenous to the soil, firmly rooted, impervious to criticism, profoundly self-satisfied.
Dymfield for Anne would be impossible.
But Dymfield meant Fairholme Court, to which her heart was inextricably linked. The garden that she had planted, the garden that was full of fragrant memories of the blossoming time of her life. The bare idea of leaving it sent a pang of desolation to her heart.
She got up and began to walk restlessly about the room.
The absurdity of such an outcome of malicious gossip, struck her with a pathetic desire to laugh.
“After all these years! At my age,” she murmured.
She thought of her three years of happiness, the little space of time which had opened like a flower in her grey life, and wondered pitifully why any one should grudge it to her. But most of all, she shrank from the thought that people should talk about it. It had been for so many years her secret possession, the memory that had sweetened all her later days.
It would be insupportable to know that her acquaintances were gossiping about her. About her and René.
A painful flush rose to her face as she sat down again by the fire.
After her talk with Madge Dakin, her old life seemed too near. She thought of theparting with René in the morning—the morning he left her for his three days’ work at Fontainebleau.
The agony of making that parting a light one! She remembered that he turned at the door, and came back to kiss her again. The sun was on his hair, as he crossed the room.
Involuntarily to-night, twenty years after the words were spoken, Anne put her hands over her ears, that she might not hear his voice. But she knew what he had said. She remembered how, when he was gone, her resolution wavered.
Without question he loved her still. Wasn’t it too soon? Might she not stay a little longer? Just a little while longer? And then thebonnehad brought the letters of the second post, and among them there was one for René in a handwriting she knew. Within the past month they had been coming very often, these letters. Lately, every day.
She remembered how the sunshine had streamed upon the envelope at which she sat staring, till at last she moved to make her preparations.
Then the long train journey, and the agony which feared to betray itself in some insane fashion which might cause her to be stopped—forciblyprevented from reaching her destination.
She wanted to shriek aloud, to rave and cry, like the madwoman she half feared she might in fact have become.
Of the next few weeks she recalled nothing but a confused nightmare impression of unfamiliar rooms, strange faces, strange voices. Of people who for some mad reason were going about as usual, occupied with the ordinary business of life; talking, laughing, eating and drinking, unmoved, unconcerned.
One book on every hotel table drew her like a magnet. She would sit down anywhere with aBradshawbefore her, and at once, mechanically plan her journey back to Paris.
Over and over again, she looked out trains, studied connections, pictured the moment of her arrival.
It would be tea-time. The lamps just lit. René sitting by the fire—René leaping to his feet to meet her.
Or it would be early morning. She would open his bedroom door softly....
And then the realization of her madness; more sleepless nights, fresh strange hotels, new cities up and down whose streets she wandered wondering why she should be there, why she should enter one building rather than another,why the day never passed, and when the night came, thinking would God that it were morning.
So terribly near seemed her past torture, that with all her strength Anne tried to stem the flood of reminiscence.
Thank God, little Madge Dakin had never known, would never know, misery such as hers! In the midst of her whirl of memories Anne gratefully considered this.
With an effort at diversion, she tried to recall the names of the cities in which she stayed, through which she had passed during the first few months of her exile.
In vain. She had only a confused impression of scorching streets, of palm trees against a hot blue sky; of seas hatefully, mockingly calm and blue.
She was in Athens when the news of his death reached her, and with it a packet of letters written during the first few weeks after her departure. They were letters from René, never sent, because she had left no address. Letters written in the frenzied hope that some day soon he must hear from her.
It was then that she tasted her first moment of peace.
She remembered sitting in a little walled garden somewhere within the city, and for thefirst time seeing that the blue sky overhead was beautiful.
She noticed the broad leaves of a fig-tree clambering upon the wall opposite, and listened to the dripping of a little stream which flowed from a stone trough into a well whose mouth was fringed delicately with ferns and wild flowers. And for the first time came to her a premonition of the calm and peace, and even happiness of her later years.
Her emotional life was over. No man as a lover would ever exist for her again. But she had experienced the love for which she had been willing to pay. She had paid, and some day she would be content.
René dead, had become hers once more—this time for ever.
Later in the year she met François at Antibes, and heard calmly, with scarcely a stab of pain, what she was prepared to hear. She had been right to go. But René had died before he ceased to love her.
Afterwards, her true wander years began. And then at last, the thought of the house and the garden at Dymfield became dear to her, and she went to them as a child goes home.
Anne let her mind dwell gratefully upon the quiet happy years she had spent at Dymfield.
She thought of her work among her flowers, and the paradise of beauty it had produced. She thought of the poorer village people whose lives she knew, whose children she loved, to whom for years she had been a friend. She remembered her little plans for their welfare, all the pleasant trifles which made up the sum of her daily existence.
And as she mused, came a wondering recognition of the healing of time, the passing of all violent emotion, whether of joy or of despair.
From some recess of her memory there sprang the words of an Eastern sage, who as a motto true alike in times of sorrow and times of delight, told his disciple to grave upon his signet ring, one sentence—This too will pass.