A month later Annie's religiosity, which had been increasing in violence, unmistakably took the form of mania. She became very violent, and for her own sake as much as for her family's she was removed to a doctor's establishment for such cases in Devonshire. The whole affair left the three at home very untouched—John-James because he was of a stolid habit, Vassie because she was never in sympathy with her mother and had borne much from her of late, and Ishmael because it seemed to him to have really no more to do with him intimately than if she had been a stranger woman living in his house. Both he and Vassie felt guiltily on the subject, not realising that reaction from strain was at the bottom of their seeming impassivity. To be able to take definite action instead of having merely to put up with the thing day by day was, when it came, a blessing to both of them, although it took what might conventionally have been assumed to be such a terrible shape. They were both very honest people, their strongest quality in common, and kept up no pretence even in outward appearance, unlike most people who keep it up even to themselves. They hardly spoke of the matter beyond making the necessary arrangements, and when Vassie had a fit of weeping in her room it was for the mother she remembered from her childhood, the mother of stormy tendernesses that nevertheless were sweet to her at the time, and whom she thought of now instead of letting her mind dwell on the woman who had been growing more and more distorted these last few years.
Nevertheless the fabric of their daily lives was torn up, and Ishmael began to see that things could not go on as they were. Vassie badly needed not only a rest, but a complete change and new interests; she had been living a life of strain lately, and her vigorous personality, unaccustomed to being swamped in that of others and only forced to it by her strong will, began to assert its needs. For the first time her bloom showed as impaired—something of her radiance had fled. Ishmael saw it, and knew that her affection for him would prevent her telling him as long as flesh could bear it. A Vassie grown fretful was the last thing he wanted, and her marred bloom hurt him; he always, in some odd way, looked on Vassie as a superior being even when he saw her little faults in style—so much more devastating than faults of character—most clearly. It somehow got itself settled that Vassie was to take a charming though impoverished maiden lady, whom the Parson had known for years in Penzance, as chaperon, and was to go and spend the summer at some big seaside place such as she delighted in. Vassie seemed to glow afresh at the mere notion, at the feel of the crisp bank notes which Ishmael gave her, and which represented all the old ambitions that swelled before her once more like bubbles blown by some magic pipe. She departed in a whirl of new frocks and sweeping mantles and feathery hats, and a quietness it had never known settled upon Cloom.
For the first few days, even a week or so, Ishmael enjoyed it. The scenes with Annie had been violent enough to fray the nerves more than he knew, but they had done him the service of putting other thoughts out of his head for the time being. Now these thoughts came back, but, as the days wore on, with a difference.
In his relations with Blanche the physical side had been hardly counted by him; he had felt passion for the first time, but so refined by his boy's devotion that he had not given it place. He had been so aware of what she must have had to confront from other men, and had besides thought her so much younger than she was, that the idea of desire in connection with her, though in the nature of things not entirely eliminated, had yet been kept by him in the background even to himself. He had loved Blanche as unselfishly as only a woman or a boy can love, and now he began to suffer from it in a manner he had not at the time.
In London he had never felt any temptation to go with Killigrew when that young man frankly announced his intention of making a night of it with some girl he had picked up at the Café Riche or Cremorne; distaste had been his dominant instinct, yet many of the suggestive things he had apparently passed through unscathed came crowding back on him now. When he was not actually driving himself to physical labour his mind would fill with pictures that he was able to conjure up without knowing how; sometimes Blanche would partner him in those imaginings, sometimes some stranger woman of his invention. He felt ashamed of these ideas, but that did not prevent them coming, and sometimes he would deliberately give way and allow himself hours to elaborate them, from which he would rouse himself worn out and fevered. From these mental orgies he would feel so intense a reaction of disgust that he knew how keenly he would feel the same if he gave way actually, in some hidden house by Penzance harbour, where men that he knew sometimes went. Physical satisfaction and the fact that Nature had been allowed her way would not have saved him from the aftermath, and he did not delude himself that it would. He looked sometimes at John-James, sitting so placidly opposite him at meals, and wondered about him, whether his physical nature did not perhaps follow his mental and remain untroubled. Yet this thing seemed in every man…. He wondered, but never asked, and, by dint of hard work and a resolute cleansing of his mind, kept the thing at bay.
The summer was a singularly perfect one, and the contrast between its emptiness and that time only a year ago when he came down from London and was expecting Blanche to follow, pricked him at every turn. He felt convinced he no longer cared for Blanche; he was regaining interest in the world without, but she had left this legacy of reaction behind her. He told himself that this too must be borne with, but all the time his youth and natural disposition to get all that was possible out of life were preparing him for fresh enterprise. He could no longer be happy over nothing but the sheer joy of life, yet simple pleasures began to appeal to him once more, as Boase noted thankfully. The daily expectation, that absurd delicious hope, that "something" would happen, had not yet deserted him, and once again he began to live on it.
One day there arrived a letter from Vassie—a letter written in superlatives, a letter that made Ishmael and John-James both feel relief in their different ways and that made the Parson very glad. Vassie had achieved her end, the great end of mid-Victorian womanhood, and more vital to her even than most—she was engaged to be married, and to a man whose social position seemed, as far as her judgment could be trusted, satisfactory. Mr. Daniel O'Connell Flynn was, according to Vassie, more than she could have dared hope for, and if she said little as to any personal feelings for him, Ishmael knew how unimportant that would be to her compared with the satisfaction of her ambitions. For, as his name denoted, he was engaged in politics—an Irish-Canadian, a Free Trader, a Home Ruler, perhaps even a Chartist, for all Vassie said to the contrary. The third Derby Ministry was in power, and Mr. Flynn was for the time agitating in the Opposition; but at least he was a member of Parliament, and what glory that was to Vassie.
Poor Vassie! What, after all, was her ambition but to attain what should have come to her by right as daughter of the Squire of Cloom? She had had to make it the end of her desires, for it she had had to appear what she was not—what she ought to have been without any striving. If Mr. Flynn were a man to whom Vassie's beauty outweighed her defects, and if it were nothing but that with him, then was the outlook for her ultimate happiness poor; but she was her own mistress and had to be judge of that. At least she had not deceived him, for there came a postscript to the rather worldly raptures. "P.S.—He knows about it all, and says it does not matter; what he wants is me."
After Ishmael, the person most affected by the news, both in herself and her prospects, would be Phoebe. Ishmael put the letter in his pocket, though he guessed she too would have had one, and went over to Vellan-Clowse, Wanda at his heels.
As he went the realisation of how this would affect him grew upon him; losing Vassie, his life at Cloom would not only be lonely, but, without her resolute insistence on the niceties, might all too easily slip into some such slough of boorishness as had overtaken it in his father's day. If Blanche had only been different, if she had been the Blanche he once thought her, how sweetly would the whole problem—of loneliness and a standard of decency and of this tormenting thing that pricked at him—have been solved. Even the removal of his mother, though a relief, added to the sense of total disruption which weighed on him. Cloom, the old Cloom that had been so jolly in spite of everything, the Cloom of the first three contested, arduous years, then the delightful Cloom glorified by that summer of Blanche and Killigrew and Vassie and little Judith, was dead, and everyone else had flown to other fields while he alone was left among the ruins. Of all the old atmosphere Phoebe was the only one remaining—little, soft, admiring Phoebe, whom he had hardly noticed all this past winter.
Ishmael was one of those to whom the ending even of a not altogether congenial atmosphere was fraught with sadness; had he been left to himself he would probably never have moved far out of an accustomed circle, thus much of the peasant was potent in his blood. Now he felt, with the finality of youth, that everything had been stripped from around him, and that no new scheme of life formed itself before his eyes.
When he came to the top of the cliff above his plateau he turned off down the narrow goat-track that led to it, and when there flung himself on his face upon the turf, chin on hands, and brooded. His thoughts took no definite shape; rather were they the vague unsettled desires for he knew not what. Just that "something," anything, would happen.
He lay staring at the grass, covered with tiny blossoms of self-heal and rest-harrow: behind and a hundred feet below him the sea swirled, its deep peacock hue patterned with milky wreaths of foam; half around him reared a semi-circle of pale cliff. He stared at the miniature forest of blade and leaf beneath his eyes, and could hear faint rustlings as tiny insects thrust their way through it or climbed aimlessly up stalks that only led them into air. On the fragile curve of a feathery bent a pair of Spotted Burnet moths were at their mating—lovely creatures of the iridescent green of lapis-lazuli, their folded wings of greyer green decorated with splashes of purest crimson, their long glossy antennæ shining in the sunlight. Immobile they clung together for what must have been, in their measuring of time, hours of love. Beyond them, on other grass-stems, orange-hued flies took their pleasure, and the whole air was quick with the wings of butterflies and moths. The quiet little circle of turf was athrill with life; the air, the warm soil, the clumps of bracken whence the hidden crickets shrilled, the pinkish grasses which bore the tiny interlocked bodies of the mating flies—everything told of life, life, life. This place seemed an amphitheatre for the display of the secret of Nature—life, and yet more life, in splendid prodigality. Ishmael watched and wondered. Was this, then, the blind end of creation—to create again? If life were only valuable for the production of more, then what it created was not valuable either, and the whole thing became an illogical absurdity. There must be some definite value in each life apart from its reproductive powers, or the reproductions were better left in the void. Blind pleasure, like blind working, was not a possible solution to one of his blood and habit of mind.
Yet he knew as he lay there that not for ever would he be able to go on as so far he had. He told himself that if it were possible to stamp on desire now it would continue to be possible; that if one were not put into the world to get what one wanted at least it should be possible to grit the teeth on the fact. It was childish enough to cry for the moon—it was pitiable to hanker after its reflection in a cesspool. Chastity to Ishmael, by the nature of his training and his circumstances, was a vital thing; the ever-present miseries of home resulting from his father's offence, the determination to keep clean himself and bring clean children to the inheritance, had grown with him. If he lost it he lost far more than most men, because to him it had been more.
Not for the first time some words of the Parson's came back to him: "Casual encounters where no such question arises …" That seemed to him more horrible, more unsound, now, as he lay looking at the inevitable matings of the winged creatures, than ever before; something ages old in him revolted at the fruitless squandering.
The fact remained that there was no one he wanted to marry, that he no longer wanted to marry at all; his wish to marry Blanche had been an exigency of the situation; in himself his instinct against inroads on privacy would never have inclined him towards it. Also there was no one girl he wanted, and he told himself there never would be again; all personal emotion was drained away from him. The only girl he even knew at all was Phoebe, and at the idea of her in connection with himself he smiled. That would indeed be giving the lie to all he had struggled after—to the vision of the Cloom to be that he had built up with much work and many dreams.
Suddenly as he lay on the grass he felt tired, so tired that it seemed to him he did not so very much want anything after all, and that a leaden weariness was the worst thing he would have to fight against. He laid his face in the warm fragrant grass and let his hands lie out on either side of him, then stretched to the extent of his limbs, and rolled on his back. Wanda, eager to be bounding on once more, licked his cheek with her warm, quick-moving tongue, and he rubbed her head against him and told her she was becoming a fussy old lady. Still, it was time he went on to Vellan-Clowse; the sun was near the rim of the burning sea, and far below the foam was tinged with fire. He scrambled to his feet and went on.
At the mill he found he had been wrong in his conjecture and Phoebe had not yet heard from Vassie. She was looking pale and thin; there were shadows under her soft eyes, and her mouth drooped at the corners. Ishmael's news stung her to interest and to enthusiasm for Vassie, but seemed, when she had cooled down, only to make her melancholy deeper. At supper—to which Ishmael needed little pressing to stay, for in talk and companionship he forgot his vacant house—she was obviously trying to make herself pleasant and bright; she would not have been Phoebe if she had allowed her own comfort to come before that of others.
Phoebe was changed in this past year; she was no longer so sprightly in her little flirtations, her tongue had lost its rustic readiness, her eyes held a furtive something, as though she were always watching some memory. Her prettiness had gained in quality however, and her charm, though more conscious, was more certain. Curiously enough, the charm struck Ishmael for the first time now that he saw her subdued, not troubling to exert it save mechanically. He was sorry for that lassitude of hers, and after supper, walking under the elms down the lush valley, he tried to fathom it.
"It's nothing," said Phoebe. "I'm lonely, I suppose. You know, there's no one I'm really friends with, only Vassie and you, and I shan't see her any more now. And you never come near me…."
Ishmael felt a guilty pang as he realised this was true; he cast about to lead the talk elsewhere.
"You were great friends with Archelaus while he was at Botallack last autumn, I've heard," he said teasingly. "Indeed, I did think that even when I lost Vassie I might have another sister…."
"Him …!" cried Phoebe; "never, never! You're being cruel to me, Ishmael, so you are! If you've only come to tease me you can go home to your old manor-house again!"
"Why—Phoebe! What's the matter; what have I said to hurt you?" askedIshmael. "Why, I wouldn't do that for the world! Phoebe, dear, tell mewhat it is that's the matter. Surely you can trust me! Is it becauseArchelaus has gone?"
Phoebe burst into tears. Ishmael was alarmed, embarrassed, even irritated, yet somehow she was nestling against him and his arms were holding her while he consoled her. She sobbed on, her warm little body pressed convulsively against him; his words "surely you can trust me …" had caught at her heart. After months of furtive meetings with Archelaus, after being drawn into a whirlpool of passion which she could not resist and yet always resented, hating something in Archelaus even when his ardour pursued her most, hating the thought of him at every moment before and after, when his lips were not actually upon hers—after all this she felt she wanted nothing but to fling herself on this quieter, kinder, younger man, on whom she still felt the freshness she had lost. It was only fair, she told herself; if Ishmael had cared for her a year ago she would have been armed against Archelaus and her own nature. Slowly her sobs grew less frequent—they became the faint sniffs of a tired child; but she still lay in his arms, snuggling closer, one hand, very small and smooth, creeping up to lie against his neck. Ishmael looked down, and through the dusk he could see how wet were the lashes on her pale cheek; the curve of her throat and bosom was still troubled by sobbing breaths. He drew her closer; then his clasp of her began to change, grow fiercer; she felt it and thrilled to it, lifted her mouth that looked so childish, and which he told himself through the clamour of his pulses there would be no harm in kissing, as though she were the child she looked. But it was not a child's kiss he gave her; nor, as he could but feel, was it a child's return she tendered.
"Phoebe …!" he began; "Phoebe …!" He never knew himself what he was trying to say, whether it were protest or excuse or a mere stammer of passion. She interrupted him with a low cry.
"Oh, Ishmael! it was always you—really, always you … I didn't know.It'll be always you…!"
That which Lenine had hoped for some twelve years, which the Parson and Vassie had first feared and then laughed at, which Ishmael himself had hardly thought of, and then merely to dismiss with a smile, had come to pass—so simply, with such a logical though quiet following of effect on various causes, that it was no wonder Ishmael felt enmeshed in the web of something it was not worth fighting to cut away. At first, on the heels of the miller's rejoicing and Phoebe's clinging content, he had been overwhelmed by a dense cloud of depression—a sense as of being caught in something soft and too sweet that would not let him go and into which he sunk the more deeply for his instinctive protest. Also the sheer impossibility of the thing affected him with a dream-like belief that it could not really have happened, or that at least something must occur to dissolve it. Yet nothing did, not even the Parson's frankly-expressed dismay.
Ishmael was very young, and in no sense a man of the world, and when he thought of what lay behind that kiss he had given Phoebe he felt her innocence had a right to demand of him that at least he should not retract what she had built upon it. Also, Penwith being a very narrow and intimate track of land, the scandal for her if he had withdrawn and let the miller blaze his version abroad would have never been lived down. A country which is a blind-alley has the advantage of immunity from tramps, but it has the disadvantages also of a place which cannot be a highway to other places. Talk, interest, all the thoughts and emotions of life, of necessity beat back on themselves instead of passing on and dying, or being swamped in the affairs of the great world. Phoebe, as the miller knew, was already the subject of censure among the stiffer matrons, whose sons were wont to hang round the mill like bees, and in his expressions of approval to Ishmael was mingled a subtle strain of warning, almost of menace. And to himself as the days went by and Phoebe was always there for him to see and caress when he felt inclined, her yielding sweetness ever ready for him to draw on, her gentle stupidity hidden under her adoration, he admitted that he did not altogether want to withdraw. After all, what did it matter? Phoebe had many refinements of heart and temper which surely could be held to outweigh her little ignorances, and now that, with the removal of Blanche, the outer world was, he told himself, cut off from him, he refused to see that to ally himself with the Lenines of the mill mattered as much as the Parson, in his old-fashioned Toryism, seemed to think. A woman takes her husband's position; and as to that, what, he asked bitterly, was his position that any woman should want to share it? Phoebe did want to; she had shown all her heart so plainly in that cry—genuine in that she believed it herself; and Phoebe was kind and perilously sweet…. The days went on, and Vassie's letter of argument and protest was less determined than it would have been if she herself had not been engrossed in her own affairs. And stronger even that the dread of hurting Phoebe, of the terrible scenes that would of necessity occur, than his own loneliness, was the enemy within himself that every time he caressed Phoebe mounted to his brain and told him it was, after all, well worth while.
It fell to the Parson's bitter lot to marry them in the early autumn of that year. Archelaus had now been away a year, and he had neither come back nor written, and not till several months later did he suddenly reappear, after the habit of the born rover.
They were months of mingled wonder and dismay for Ishmael. He had married a girl who had only one talent, but that was the oldest in the world—she was a born lover. She, who in many ways was so startlingly lacking in refinement, had a genius for the little lures, the ways with hand and eye, of voice and gesture, that make of love an art. In the ordinary intimacies of marriage, the blunting intimacies of daily life, she had no discrimination; Ishmael, had he been inclined to idealise her, would not have been spared the realisation that even as the grosser male she looked unbeautiful at times, needed to send clothes to the wash, and was warned every few weeks, by an unbecoming limpness in her hair, that it was time for soap and water to combat natural greasiness. She made no attempt to keep up the illusion which, even while it is admitted to be such, yet achieves its object. She would have thought it silly. But when it came to the rites of love she was inspired and could not make a false move. A thousand little ways of her own, cat-like rubs of her sleek head, turns of her limbs, inspirations of withheld kisses and in the same breath approaches that held an eternally child-like quality in their submission—there was no faint tone of the age-old gamut to which she did not give its keenest value.
The month spent at the genteel resort of Torquay was to Ishmael a fevered medley. His days were full of distaste—at her predilections for the young clerks who eyed her on the sea-front, for cheap jewellery and casual friends picked up at the hotel, at the bland superficiality of her mind; and now and again this distaste was shot through with moments of acute fears when he realised, startled to it by some blunt display of the ugly things of life, that to this he must accustom himself for the rest of his days; and that he would grow only too deadly accustomed, to the stifling of other ideals, he foresaw. These were his days, yet he felt remorseful at his own spirit of criticism, because she thought him so god-like, and in many little womanly ways showed an unselfish consideration that humbled him in his own eyes and exalted her. Of the nights, even when there was no passion between them, she made such a delight with her childish clinging, her soft nestling against him, that he would hold his breath to listen to her quiet breathing and move a little away as though in sleep, so as to feel her kitten-like, half-unconscious wriggle into the curve of his arm again. It was sweet at such times to feel such utter dependence upon him as the protective male, and the best in him was stirred to response. The next morning she might jar again from the hour of getting up in their ugly hotel room, through the expedition with which they would try and beguile the day, to the dinner, at which her conversation was always most noticeably trifling; but he always, to her surprise, let her go to bed alone, and came up much later to find the old magic upon her once more like dew.
It was late autumn when they went back to Cloom, and under John-James' watchful care the harvest was all in; he awaited them at the station in the smart new trap that had been a present from the miller, and Katie Jacka, with a tight-lipped smile upon her face and a heart full of contempt for a mistress whom privately she considered no better than herself, was hovering between kitchen and passage when they drove up, with a large bouquet of bought flowers swaddled in a stiff paper frill ready as an offering. Boase came over after supper, and when Phoebe, piqued by a conversation which she could not share and—what she resented still more—by the efforts of the two men to include her in it, had gone upstairs, then Ishmael and the Parson sat and smoked and chatted, and for the first time all the past month lifted its deadweight and life seemed more as it had been in the old days.
It was in the winter that Archelaus reappeared, and the first that Cloom heard of it was a casual word dropped by Katie as she waited at table. "So Cap'n Arch'las is back among us," she remarked cheerfully, after the manner of Cornish servants, who see no harm in imparting items of gossip as they hand a dish; "they do say he'm rare and changed, though 'zackly how I don't knaw. Simme 'tes enough to make a man come home a nigger, going so much to the lands where the folk are all black."
Ishmael was startled by the news, but, to hide the fact, began to joke Katie on her ideas of the population of the American continent, when a little sound from Phoebe caught his attention. She had gone very white, and she tried to push her chair away from the table, making a gesture as though she wanted to be free of its confining edge; but her hands seemed too weak to accomplish the act, and she let them fall into her lap. Ishmael sprang up and went round to her, sharply bidding the staring Katie to bring cold water; in a moment or two Phoebe had conquered her faintness and was smiling timidly at him. When he was alone and out of doors he thought over the incident, but without exaggerating it to himself. He had always guessed that Archelaus had at one time been attracted by Phoebe; he supposed that her refusal of him was at the back of the former's departure. Now that Archelaus had returned it was not unnatural, considering her marriage and the bad blood between himself and his brother, that she should feel nervous. He was sorry for her, and wondered, not for the first time, whether it would not be possible, now he himself was less green and prickly, and had settled into a scheme of life that need not, ill-feeling apart, exclude Archelaus, to become better friends or at least more tolerant of each other. He suggested his idea to Phoebe, though characteristically he did not refer to her attack of faintness. She looked at him in a scared way and then murmured something about thinking it was best to wait till Archelaus made the first advance, and to this Ishmael rather reluctantly agreed.
They had not long to wait; the next evening saw Archelaus at Cloom. An oddly-altered Archelaus, so much was soon plain. Even in appearance he seemed changed; something of his golden beauty had tarnished at last, and a faint grizzle showed here and there in his curly hair, while the ruddy face had become weather-beaten. He talked a good deal—about his adventures in California, his bad luck with the gold, and the beauty of the Californian women, especially those with a Spanish strain. Of these last he spoke so freely, notably of some camp-followers, that Ishmael reminded him sharply of Phoebe's presence. Archelaus glanced from one to the other, from Ishmael's irritated eyes to Phoebe's averted cheek, with a slight smile, before answering.
"Ah! I forgot that Phoebe's not like that kind o' women a man gets used to out there," he said slowly. "Besides, of course, she'm a lady now…."
The apology was worse than the offence; but Ishmael swallowed his anger for Phoebe's sake, though he was vexed with her too for staying there to hang upon Archelaus's doubtful talk. Soon after, when Phoebe had brewed hot milk-punch and it had been drunk by the two men, Archelaus rose to go. He went out to see if his trap were ready, and Ishmael went also. The boy had gone home for the night, and Ishmael lit a lantern and went into the stable to fetch the horse. He supposed Archelaus was with him, but found he had not followed so far; neither was he by the cart. Ishmael put the horse in and brought it through into the courtyard, and the same moment saw Archelaus appearing from the kitchen door.
"Just haven a bit of chat wi' Katie," said Archelaus. "She'm a rare one for gossip, she is." Then, as he pretended to busy himself with something at the horse's head, he spoke again.
"Ishmael," he began, "I knaw how it is wi' you. You think on when my fancy was took by your lil' missus, and you don't knaw how I'm thinken about things. Well, I'm a rough chap, but I'm honest, b'lieve, and I can tell 'ee there's no wound in my heart, and the soreness there was against 'ee has gone in the sun out in those lands…. Will 'ee shake hands and let I be a friend to you and your missus as a brother should?" He held out his hand as he spoke, and Ishmael found himself staring at it in the uncertain light of the lamps. The next moment a flood of self-reproach at his own hesitation swept over him; he put out his hand and took his brother's. Archelaus gave such a vigorous wringing that Ishmael could not keep back a little exclamation, and his fingers were numb when they were released.
"Bit too strong, am I?" asked Archelaus with a friendly laugh. "My muscles have got so tough I don't rightly knaw how hard I grip." He swung himself up into the cart, and from that elevation looked down at Ishmael with a nod of farewell.
Ishmael went into the house, where he found Phoebe still sitting in the parlour, her hands folded on her lap, staring in front of her. She gave a start when he spoke to her, and when he told her of his pact with Archelaus chilled him by her scant enthusiasm. They went to bed, and as they lay side by side in the darkness there was a constraint between them there had not been even when they had quarrelled or his occasional fits of irritation had made her rail at him.
As the weeks wore on they both seemed to become used to the occasional but unwonted presence of Archelaus about the place, though Phoebe always resented it oddly. Yet it was a friendly presence; he was ready to help on the farm with advice and even with his strong muscles if need be, and the world at large was much edified by the reconciliation.
"A gentle little wife like that is such a softening influence" was the general verdict … and Ishmael, irked by the strain between them to a sudden passion of distaste for what he felt had been his weakness, had instituted what was for those days a startling innovation—that of a separate bedroom for himself. He guessed that Phoebe almost hated him for it, yet he had come suddenly to that point when he sickened at over-intimacy, when he realised that the passion in him had betrayed him, so that he felt the only salvation for his mind lay in crushing it. He had sold himself, but at least he could refrain from taking his price. So he told himself and so he meant, yet when, as on a night when Phoebe, shedding resentment for a wistful tenderness, had won him to a triumph of passion once again, there was mingled with his sense of having failed himself a certain relief in the acknowledgment that this thing still held sweets for him….
With the spring the affairs on the farm took up Ishmael's interest more and more, and he was able to find solace for the deadening knowledge of his mistaken marriage in the things that lay so near his heart. He told himself that it was here, in the soil, and the warm, gentle cattle and the growing things, that his keenest as well as his truest joys were to be found, not knowing that even while he thought it Phoebe held that which was to thrill him as never yet anything in life had had power to do.
She told him of it one night when he went up to bed late, thinking and hoping she would be asleep. But she called out to him as he passed her door. He went in and found her sitting up, looking like a child among the big white pillows, her brown hair about her wide eyes. He was struck by it and spoke to her gently, telling her to lie down and go to sleep. Instead of obeying she held out her hands and drew him down towards her.
"I want to whisper, Ishmael," she said, as she had been wont to say when a little girl and she had had something of tremendous interest to impart. He humoured her, and, putting his arm round her, gathered her against him and said that he was listening. She kept a shy silence for a second after that and then whispered. Ishmael caught the few words, and at first they seemed to him to convey something incredible, though he had often thought about this very thing, wondered if and when he should hear of it. He was very gentle with her, but said little, only he stayed by her till she had fallen asleep, and then he disengaged himself and, going quietly out of the room, opened the front door and went out into the garden.
It was the darkest hour of the night, only the stars shone brightly, and not till he was upon the pale clouds of the drifted narcissi could he tell they were there, not till their scent came up at him. The night was very still as well as dark, but Ishmael noted neither circumstance. His own soul held all of sound and colour and light for him, and he recked of nothing external. This news, the simplest, oldest thing in the way of news that there is, seemed to him never to have been told to anyone before—never, at least, to have been so wonderful. All the beauties of Cloom, of life, all the trouble his own short span had felt, all the future held, seemed to fall into place and be made worth while. This was what he had lived for without knowing it—not to make Cloom finer for himself, not to save his own soul or carve out a life for himself, but this—to make of himself this mysterious immortality. Always he had waited for "something" to happen, always at moments of keenest pleasure he had been conscious there was more he did not feel: depths unplumbed, heights unscaled, some master-rapture that would explain all the others and that he never came upon. Even beauty had had this sting for him; he had always felt that, however lovely a thing were, there was something more beautiful just round the corner, for ever slipping ahead, like a star reflected in a rain-filled rut. Now for the first time he was aware of a dizzying sensation as though for one moment the gleam had stayed still, as if Beauty for a flash were not withdrawing herself, as though time for one moment stood, and that moment was self-sufficient, free of the perpetual something that was always just ahead—more, actually capturing that something. The moment had the quality of immortality, although it reeled and was caught up again in the inexorable march, but, drunken with it, he stayed tingling in the cold dawn.
And if, mixed with that draught, there were this much of venom—that he rejoiced at having at last so ousted Archelaus, in the fact that indeed flesh of his flesh should inherit after him and Archelaus be outcast for ever, at least in that first rapture he was unaware of it.
Spring waxed full, buds burst into flower, then petals dropped and the hard green fruit began to swell, and the blades of the corn showed perceptibly higher every week. Summer, warm and lazy, big with all her ripening store, brooded upon the land, and Phoebe Ruan, guarding the growing life she held, seemed, with all the care taken of her, to lose vigour and gaiety. She seemed to wish to withdraw from everyone, from Ishmael most of all, as though she only wished to sit and commune with the secret soul of the child beneath her heart. She was almost beautiful these days, touched by a gravity new to her, and with an added poise. For the first time it was as though she found sufficient support in her own company and did not need to be for ever following and leaning upon other people. To look at, sitting so withdrawn, her eyes watching something unseen of human gaze, she was perfect; even in intercourse she would have been more nearly so than ever before had it not been for the fits of irritability gave unwonted bitterness to her tongue. There were days when nothing would please her, when she showed all her common strain in the taunts she found to fling at Ishmael and the rest of her little world. Only Archelaus was immune, and in his presence she maintained a sullen silence, so marked that a third person with them could, if he were sensitive, feel her ever-deepening resentment emanating from her.
Archelaus himself was as though unaware of it, for he came to the house with increasing frequency. About this time he began to walk out with a Botallack girl, the daughter of a mine captain, and indeed asked Ishmael's congratulations on the match. But, in his brotherly fashion, he was always eager to do anything to help Phoebe, whether it were to ride into Penzance and buy her anything she wished for, or to wait on her at home, adjusting a hammock at exactly the right height and carrying out cushions. Only Phoebe knew the taunt that underlay every word, the subtle scheme for making her uncomfortable that he carried on under cover of his solicitude. And she was not clever enough to combat it; when he told her she had ruined his life by marrying Ishmael, she was not brave enough to retort that he had had opportunity enough to marry her and never breathed the wish; when she hinted as much, he retorted that he had only been waiting to make more money so that she could have a position worthy of her. He declared that all she had married Ishmael for was to get the position that should by rights have belonged to him, Archelaus. That there had been a month of terror when she would, if he had not already left, have begged him to marry her she never told him. That fear had been groundless and had passed, but she never forgave it him.
Since his return she could not have told what swelled her resentment the more—that he should dare to come back at all, or that his fascination for her, the plainer to her since intimacy with another man had proved so much less wonderful, should prick at her perpetually in spite of her dislike of him. Ishmael she still regarded as a superior being whom she admired, but the touch of Archelaus's casual hand had power over her that was more intensified than stilled both by her resentment and her distrust.
So the months went by, and the time drew nearer, and all seemed more peaceful at Cloom than it had ever been. One day Phoebe happened to be alone; Ishmael and John-James were in the fields, and Phoebe lay on a plush sofa in the parlour. Ishmael had bought that sofa for her in Penzance when she admired its glossy crimson curves. She had not been at all grateful; she had merely told him that he bought it, as he did everything else for which she expressed a wish, because he wanted to do everything possible to ensure a healthy and happy child, and there was enough of truth in her accusation to justify it. Now she lay upon the sofa, staring at the mahogany arm that ran along one side of it and wishing that she were dead or that Archelaus would go away and not torment her with his taunts and his kisses—his whole presence that made her feel so helpless. While she lay there thus thinking he came in, walking straight into the hall as of right, whistling carelessly; and she heard his stick, flung against the wall, go sliding and clattering down upon the stone flags.
The next moment he was in the room and standing looking down at her with a smile. She did not move, but lay looking back at him like a small bird stricken motionless and staring beneath a hawk. Wanda, who was curled up by her feet, growled softly. What strange twist it was in Archelaus, what sardonic cruelty, inherited perhaps from the old Squire, that made him take pleasure in tormenting the helpless Phoebe it would have been hard to say. Though always latent in him, it may have been waked to activity by the wound on his head which had left the scar. Some nice balance may have been overset in his brain, though there was bitterness enough in his sense of grudge to stimulate him to a perpetual nagging at this vulnerable part of Ishmael. He had lately discovered a new way to frighten her; in addition to his passionate urgings of what he called his love, he vowed that he would not be able to bear his life much longer, that in losing Cloom he had been sent out to wander the earth a disappointed man, but in losing her he had lost all that had made his life worth living. He threatened to kill himself, with so many picturesque details and so much grim emphasis, that there were moments when he could almost have deceived himself, let alone poor simple Phoebe. His feeling for her had been of the most animal even at its strongest, but he had to the full the primitive instinct for possession; he had made her his woman, and, though he might have felt a mere blind jealousy if she had married any other man, to find her taken by Ishmael, the younger brother who had dispossessed him of all, awoke in him a surge of anger stronger than any emotion he had ever known.
He stooped down and deliberately took a long kiss from her mouth, hitting the back of his hand against Wanda's sensitive nose to stop her growling. She whimpered and slunk off the sofa, and Archelaus helped her departure with his boot. Phoebe was too taken up with his cruelty to herself to reproach him on behalf of the dog.
"You ought to be ashamed, Archelaus!" she complained. "Oh, sometimes I think you're the wickedest man in the world, that I do…!"
"Who's made me so, then? Who went and wed another man as soon as I'd gone off to make a fortune for her, eh? Tell me that!"
"I don't believe it; if it had been that you'd have told me."
"How could I tell 'ee? Wouldn't you, wouldn't any woman, have bidden me hold my tongue till I'd shown what I could do? Would your Da have looked at I for a son?"
"Well, you can't be heart-broken, anyway, or you wouldn't be going to marry Senath Pollard…."
He came and bent over her again, bringing his face very close to hers and trying to hold her eyes with his look, as only a liar does.
"You knaw why I be walking out with Senath … so as to be able to come here and have no one thinkin' anything. You knaw that as well as my tongue and heart can tell 'ee. Look at me … don't 'ee knaw it, Phoebe? Don't 'ee?"
She turned her head this way and that to avoid his insistence, but at last she yielded as on that night long ago beside the stile and met look and lips. "I don't believe it," she murmured in a choked whisper, her mouth against his; "but I'm a sinful woman, and there's something in me wishes I could…."
She had come thus far, she whose total lack of moral sense had not suggested to her any reason why, having been the lover of one brother, she should not be the wife of the other; but her stereotyped views, missing the essentials, did revolt, though vainly, against his kisses when she was a wife, even while she burned beneath them. She really was very miserable. Suddenly he released her and leant back with a dark look on his face, a look she knew and dreaded. She resorted to her little wiles to make him shake it off.
"Archelaus!…" she breathed, sliding her hand across his eyes; "don't look like that…. To please me!" She pulled his head towards her and dropped light kisses on his lids to charm the expression out of his eyes, but he remained impassive. She was in a condition when wiles leave a certain kind of man very untouched, and hate for Ishmael, not any charm left for him in her, urged his cunning love-making.
"I can't go on weth it," he declared; "it's no good, Phoebe. What does life hold for I now? Last week I was down in the mine when there was a fall of rock, and for a bit we thought we'd never get out, and I said to myself what did it matter?… it'll only save I the trouble of doen it for myself."
"Archelaus!…"
"I put the barrel of my gun against my head t'other day and pulled the trigger, but it missed fire. And then I dedn't try again, because I thought all of a sudden that I must see you once more, Phoebe, and tell 'ee plain all about it—what you and that husband of yours have driven a man to."
"Don't talk to me about Ishmael! At least he's a good man, so he is, and we're neither of us fit to live along of him!"
"Good, is he? Yes; but is he the man for 'ee? Do 'ee ever feel your lil' heart beating the quicker against his? If he'm a man, why don't 'ee tell him everything and let him kick me out, eh?"
"You know I can't tell him—that I couldn't ever."
"He'll knaw when I'm dead, because I'll lave word to show all men how one brother took everything in life from another…. He'll knaw then."
"I don't believe you; I don't believe anyone would be so wicked, even you."
"Ah! there's things in life even you don't knaw anything about, though you'm so wicked yourself," said Archelaus grimly; "but you too 'll knaw a bit more by-and-bye. I won't be able to keep off it for long, Phoebe. Maybe it'll take me suddenly when I'm here one day. You'll hear my life-blood running away, lil' 'un, and think for a minute it's water drippen' somewhere. Or perhaps I'll just take a rope and hang myself, and you'll hear I choken'. I saw a man hung in Australy once for stealen' another man's gold, and he took an awful time to die, he did. You could hear the choken' of him loud as bellows…." Phoebe had turned sickly pale, she screamed out, and thrust him away from her. "Katie!" she called. Archelaus went to the door and shouted into the kitchen. "Your missus is feelen' faint," he informed the maids. "I just looked into the parlour and saw her lyen' all wisht like." Katie bustled past with an odd look at him, and Phoebe was taken up to bed. She was better again next day, but she feared after that to leave her room, and in spite of Ishmael's protests stayed in bed, pleading that she felt giddy whenever she stood up. Twice Archelaus came to the house and had to be content with calling to her through the door, and each time she replied she was not well enough to see him.
He began to fume that his hidden delight of torment, which in his distorted mind was part of his scheme for revenge against Ishmael, was being thwarted; and day by day as he brooded to himself, his thoughts ever on the same theme, the end of all his anger and her fear began to loom, as he had planned. It was chance that eventually played into his hands, but the will and the cunning that made him ripe to catch at it were his already.
Phoebe lay in her big bed, her arms straight out upon the coverlet, listless palms upwards, her eyes closed, and her dim thoughts—the unformed blind thoughts of a resentful child—her only company. A week earlier Ishmael had been called up to Devon to see his mother, who had taken a turn for the worse: she had died a few hours after his arrival; he had had to stay and see to the funeral, and was not due back till that evening. John-James was in the fields and the maids were all in the dairy, working hard to finish the butter for market. Phoebe did not mind—for the first time in her life she preferred to be alone; she found it more and more difficult to control herself in the presence of others, to hide or account for the terror that possessed her. Only when she thought of the little life that in another month she would have brought into the world, that would be nestling against her, did she feel a glow of comfort. Nothing disturbed her joy in that, which she had perforce to pretend was the cause of her depression. As she lay now, with the wrongs done to her and by her stirring in her slow bewildered brain, she banished them by thoughts of that which was to be hers—that solace so far sweeter than the little animals with which she had hitherto filled her days. Poor Wanda, who from much petting had grown to fawn on her almost as much as upon Ishmael, was neglected now, and did not even stretch her woolly length beside the bed, but roamed, alone and melancholy, in the passage, waiting for the well-known loved footstep of her master.
Phoebe curved over in bed, and began to pretend to herself, as when a small child she had been wont to do for the first hour in bed every evening—planning small pleasures, triumphs over the other children she knew—and as when a girl she had been used to lie and imagine thrilling episodes with some dream lover. Now she pretended her baby had already come and was lying beside her; she bunched a fold of bedclothes to make her pretence the more real, and lay cuddling it, her eyes closed so that the sense of sight should not dissipate her dreams. No man had any part in her vision of the future with her baby; it was to be hers alone, and she pictured a blissful period when she played with it, dressed and undressed it, lived for it. Somehow she imagined that all her difficulties would cease with its birth, and both the torment of Archelaus and the presence of Ishmael, which now left her so unstirred it wearied her, faded away. Although she told herself she hated men and the harm they did, she hoped her child would be a boy, because she was of the type of woman, even as Annie had been, that always wants a boy.
She kept her eyes shut and caressed the bundle she had made beside her, and tried to forget her physical condition and her mental worry in the joy she was forecasting.
"Phoebe … lil' 'un … I'm come," said a voice from the other side of her bedroom door. Her lids flew up; a great spasm of terror shot through her, making her sick and setting her heart pounding. She saw the last warm glow of the evening in the square of sky, its light tingeing the white bedroom with fire; she saw the bundle in the curve of her arm was only a roll of sheet and blanket whose striped edge of pink and blue somehow for an irrational moment engaged her attention, so vivid had her dreaming been, so incongruous was this sudden recall. Then she turned over in bed towards the door, panic in her breast, and her whole body swept by the hot waves of fear. She had locked the door, as she always did now, but the tones, soft as they were, had power to frighten her even through the stout wood.
She lay silent, hoping he would think she was asleep, not making a sound.
"I do want to see 'ee that bad," came the voice. She paid no heed, but clenched her hands under the bedclothes; her heart had settled into an even thunderous beating that to her ears almost deafened the voice that provoked its action.
"I've come to say good-bye," went on the voice. "Won't 'ee just say good-bye to I? I'm going to another world this time, not to Australy or Californy. I can't stand life any longer, Phoebe; you'll just wish I a good journey for the last? 'Tes a hard voyage, I fear."
Her self-control broke; she could no longer hold her tongue, a sick belief in his words struggling with the conviction, born of her wish, that he would never carry out his threat.
"Go away, Archelaus! I wish you'd go away and leave me in peace. I don't believe you'll do no such wickedness; you're only trying to frighten me, and it's wicked, with me so near my time and no one with me. Go away, Archelaus!"
"You don't believe me …? Just lie there in your soft bed and listen, then," said Archelaus through the door. "You'll soon knaw whether I'm a man to be believed or not. Good-bye, lil' Phoebe!"
She heard him go downstairs, caught the well-known creak of two of them—one at the top, the other near the bottom, which always creaked; she could gauge his descent by them. Then came the harder ring of his boots upon the nags of the passage. Then for a while all was quiet, while she lay with straining ears trying to ignore the sound of her own heart that she might better hear any sounds below.
Upon her incredulous senses came a faint scrabbling noise, a scuffling sound, clearly audible through the old worn boarding of the floor; it was followed by the sharp clatter of an overturned chair. Then came to her a noise so often described by him that for one moment it seemed she had heard it before, as sometimes in a day after a vivid dream the events dreamed of seem for an irrational recurring moment actually to have happened. A noise of choking….
It went on and on, a sound no acting could have counterfeited—a wild choking, a frenzy of protest made by compressed lungs and windpipe. The choking went on and then grew fainter; at last it died away. Phoebe lay soaked in sweat, her hands clutching the side of the bed, her rising beats of pulses and heart confusing the sense of sound so much that she hardly knew when the suggestive noise from below had really ceased.
It might have only been a few minutes she stayed there, it might have been an hour or more, for all she could have told; but at last, driven by her fear, she half-fell from the bed and found the door. She drew the bolt with fingers that did not feel it, opened the door, and crept to the head of the stairs. Not a sound came up to her. She put one bare foot forward, drew it back, then impelled by something stronger than her own will, she began the descent, holding on by the wall. She went down the first flight, turned the corner—without looking up, for she felt very giddy—and then went on down the stairs, still groping. At their foot she took a step or two along the passage and suddenly felt the shock of something solid and hairy against her face. She screamed out and looked up and saw what it was that had made those ominous sounds, that had choked out life swinging from a beam of the hall. Poor Wanda hung dead, her head limply to one side, her tongue out, her furry paws, that had pattered with so much energy and glee in her master's service, dangling helplessly.
When Ishmael returned a few hours later no one had thought to cut down the body of Wanda. Everyone was too occupied with Phoebe, and those people who had come in by the hall had merely thrust the dangling obstruction aside and hurried on, with only a thought to it as the cause of the trouble upstairs. Ishmael, finding his beloved dog hanging thus, coming on it without a word of warning, felt a shock, a sense of unbelievable outrage that made him for a moment or two think he must be dreaming or out of his mind. He put out a hand and touched the pitiful thing before conviction came upon him, and with a shout of rage and pain he gathered Wanda in his arms, calling her name, hoping for a twitch of life. Then he whipped out his knife and sawed through the cord and lowered the body upon the floor, felt for the heart, turned up the dropped eyelids, even shook the inanimate stiffening form of his pet. He knew it was in vain—that never again would she jump trustingly upon him, never again would she appear absurdly with one of his slippers in her wide mouth that always seemed to smile at the joke, coming down the drive to greet him; that never again would he have her for his untiring companion on his walks or upon the plateau where he was wont to lie and look into her wise eyes and talk to her without fear of contradiction, receiving that full measure of admiration and belief that only a dog gives. So much was his grief, but overpowering that simpler emotion was a sick rage. The knowledge that rough, brutal hands must have carried out this outrage, that in an agony of fear and astonishment she must have yielded up her breath, struck at his heart. He got to his feet, and carrying the body into the parlour, laid it down, then went through to the kitchen. The dairymaid was standing over a kettle of water that was heating on the fire; the other maid stood near her. They had evidently been talking together earnestly when he burst in upon them; they had not even heard his approach. Both girls seemed excited, charged with portent beyond the ordinary. They stood staring at Ishmael, mouths open.
"What is the meaning of it?" he shouted at them. "How is it you are both in here like this, and with—that left in the passage? Has everyone gone mad? What has happened?"
"Oh, maister!" ejaculated one of them, "havn't 'ee heard?"
"Heard what? I come in and find my poor dog—" He broke off; he could not bring himself to utter the words that would tell what he had come upon.
"Missus got out of the bed and found someone had hung the dog, and her was took all of a sudden, and the doctor is overstairs weth her now," the girl informed him; and through all her commiseration the ghoulish delight of her kind in misfortune showed. "She'm mortal bad, they do say," she added.
Ishmael stood still where he was. His mind had been subjected to too violent an onslaught for this fresh news to break upon it with much added weight. Dimly aware that the standard of these other people would expect him hardly to notice the death of his dog when his wife was in danger, he did not speak again of Wanda, but all his loyalty of affection went out to the furry body lying helplessly in the deserted parlour, as all his sense of horror had been absorbed by the finding of it. After that everything seemed to him more or less dreamlike; an impersonal pity and anxiety he felt and deeply, but it was as though he stood and looked on at Phoebe from outside of himself as much as from outside of her.
He was first stirred to active realisation by the expression of her physical pain; when he heard her cries, rising and falling, piercing the calm autumn night, he went into the garden and tried to stop his ears, but the thin poignancy of those cries still rang in them. He went back to the parlour, and picking up the body of poor Wanda, carried it out to a spot of the garden where the sun fell the longest, and there, beneath a rambler rose bush, began to dig her grave furiously. Suddenly it struck him as rather awful that it should be a grave he was busy over at such a moment, and he stopped. Then his deadly sense of proportion that never would leave him alone for long told him how little it really mattered, and he went on with his work. Wanda was covered by a smoothed patch of earth—he wanted no mound to bring the memory of the pity of her before him—by the time the flame in his lantern had flickered and died, and the late moon was riding high in the sky. He put on his coat and went again to the house.
Phoebe's ordeal was not over till broad day had appeared and the usual sounds of farm-life had perforce begun again. With them there mingled a fresh note—the cry of the new-born child, insistent, wailing, plaintive; but the cries of its mother had ceased. She lay silent in her exhaustion, amid the dim looming of the horror that had encompassed her, and she showed no interest even in the desired babe that had been laid in the curve of her arm as she had pictured him not twelve hours before.
The ordeal had been too much for Phoebe in her weak condition; she was never to recover from the terror of that minute or hour when she had lain and listened, as she thought, and as he had meant her to think, to Archelaus hanging himself in the passage below. The child, though born prematurely and for the first few weeks a sickly little creature enough, gradually strengthened, but Phoebe's life flickered lower each hour. She did not seem frightened at the approach of death, if she realised it, which was doubtful. It was as though she had used up all of emotion before and had no strength left to indulge in any now. That was how Ishmael too had felt all those first hours after his homecoming; but with a short spell of heavy, irresistible sleep the power to feel returned to him, and he was even surprised at the depth to which he felt a pang. He had not "loved" Phoebe in the sense in which that much-abused word is generally used; he had felt for her a passion which was in itself a reaction and an affection which had diminished and not augmented in their life together. But intimacy and custom go far towards producing that sense of knowledge of another human being which makes the imagination translate what the other is suffering into terms of self, and that is after all the method by which the most vivid human sympathy is evoked. He felt he knew her so well—her aims and ideas, her likes and little gusty hates, her sweetnesses and her pettiness—that he suffered with her now more acutely than she for herself.
Also, as her life drew out, and that feeling of something focussing, of many tangled threads all being drawn together, which the approach of death gives, took hold of the watchers, all the external things which go to make life fell away from him and the stark roots of it stood out. This had been his mate, this fragile little thing lying there, her listless eyes not meeting his, her limp fingers not responding to any touch. She had been nearer to him physically than any other human being, and that she had been further mentally was swamped in that thought in the hour when she was dying of the nearness…. For he had the guilty feeling of the man whose wife dies in childbirth, and though he told himself that whatever passing brute had wantonly hung the harmless dog had brought about this tragedy, that could not altogether absolve him. His poor little Phoebe—he had always known her soft heart for animals, but even he had not guessed that the tragedy of Wanda would affect her so—she who had seen so many animals killed with much less sickening than he himself.
As he sat by the bed there flashed on him an irrational memory of that day in the field when the girls had found a wounded toad amidst the oat-sheaves, and how he had come up to them as they clustered round it in their pale gowns. It had been Blanche who had been most articulate in her pity, and yet Blanche had not scrupled to hurt him when it suited her. Phoebe, till these months of irritation and the dislike which had seemed to spring in her, had never wilfully hurt anyone. He felt he knew all of Phoebe there had been to know, and his heart softened over her as she slipped away from any power of his to tell her so.
That flattened little form under the crumpled coverlet was Phoebe's, was the same body with which she had given him so much delight. This was the Phoebe who had hung about his neck in the valley and smothered his words upon his lips with kisses—she who had taught him her own knowledge of love, that instinctive knowledge of Aspasia and her sisters; it was through her he had become a man. So he felt now looking at her.
With dawn, the day after the child's birth, it became plain that she could hold the frail thread of her life no longer. The nurse sat on one side of the bed; the doctor had not yet come back after leaving to attend another case. The child lay beside her, because the only time she spoke or showed any interest that night she had asked for it. Now she lay either asleep or already unconscious, her hair all pushed away from her face, which had fallen into hollows. She looked far older than her years—older than it would have been possible to imagine she ever could look.
Ishmael sat very still, his mind as quiescent as his body; it was as though it had been hypnotised by its steady concentration on her approaching death as by the steady keeping of the eyes fixed on some one glittering object. All around that one point thought had ceased; impalpable walls shut off from consciousness everything else in the scheme of things. The focussing in the quiet room sharpened, grew more intense; the liquid light of dawn began to flood the air, and a bright shaft shot across the hill as the sun swam up over the rim of the moor. It fell across the bed, and Phoebe stirred and opened her eyes. Their gaze rested blankly on Ishmael, wandered round the room, then fell to the round head against her shoulder.
The shaft of sun lay upon the baby's reddish fair fluff of hair, and the brightness of it seemed to arrest Phoebe's look, as it might have the unreasoning gaze of a child. She put out one wavering hand and tried to touch it; her direction was uncertain, and the hand fell again without reaching more than the outskirts of the beam. Thinking she wished to touch the child, the nurse guided her hand, and as Phoebe felt her fingers fall about the curve of its head a faint look of content passed across her face. Then she tried to make as though to lift her hand, but it fell sideways. The nurse moved the baby nearer her, but it was not that that Phoebe wanted; she kept trying to touch the gleam of sun upon the white quilt. Ishmael felt a pang go through him as he remembered the girl who had once before tried to pick the sun….
A few moments later the child, as though stirred by some prescience, began to whimper and make little struggling movements—Phoebe had died as simply as she had lived, and as secretively.