Theresa left school without regret. She had made no friends there, for a deep shyness overlaid the endearing qualities which she learnt, later, to use for the capture of hearts: she had not cared for the work she did easily, if without brilliance, and her ambitions had ignored and swept far beyond a schoolgirl's triumphs. Moreover, novelty was breath to her: if her heart had been torn at leaving, she would have welcomed the wrench for the sake of the new part she was to play. She was the martyr to domestic affliction and, accordingly, she smoothed the hair which the years were sobering to the colour of mingled autumn leaves, and fastened it austerely into a thick, swinging plait.
She was now the mistress of the household. She rose at seven, roused Bessie from her heavy slumbers, waiting outside the door until she heard the creaking of the bed and the subsequent thump of sleepy feet on the floor, before she ran downstairs for a plunge into chilly water. She and Grace, exiled from their old room by the arrival of Uncle George, now shared the one above, opposite their father's little sanctum, and, still higher up, Bessie slept in a long, low room under the roof. The maid complained of the numerous stairs but Theresa liked them. Rushing up them and down, she had a sensation of speed that excited her. She went two steps at a time, and when the flight was composed of an odd number she descended the last three, perilously, at a leap, and she learnt to do it so lightly that even Grace the agile was impressed.
"But you'll hurt yourself some day," she said.
"Oh, well, one must do something! I pretend there are wolves after me, or assassins. It makes life so much more interesting. I get through everything like that, except dusting. I can't make up anything about dusting, it's the dullest thing."
"I wish I had time to do it for you. I like the look of things afterwards."
"I can never see any difference. I'm not doing my natural work."
"What's that?"
"Oh, if you need telling——" She retired to the study and sat in the cold before a sheet of paper, with a pencil in her hand. The immortal poem was her natural work, but how could she find time to write it with a household of six people to care for? Her mother breakfasted in bed, Uncle George was fastidious about his meals. Grace needed them at any odd and inconvenient moment, and Theresa found herself a better cook than Bessie. With a cake in the oven it was not easy to compose her mind to the calm necessary for her first arresting lines: the family liked her cakes, and praise was dear to her; therefore the poem and, she feared, the public suffered, and sometimes at the thought of what circumstances would not let her do, her body became a vessel for hot, tumultuous anger. She felt it churning within her, and she longed to raise her hands and strike. At these times she hated Bessie, she chafed at her mother's weakness, she scorned Grace, she despised her father and she took pains to plan annoyance for her uncle. After all, was it not he who had caused this trouble? she would say, and somewhat against her will, for she liked a reputation for good management, she would forget to order the packet of dried cereals which formed his meal at supper-time, so that he would be forced to eat meat and have indigestion, or to go hungry. But a growing pride in her task soon disdained these tricks, and she became almost maternally interested in his appetite.
"You're not eating your cream," she told him one night. "I got it specially for you. That stuff looks so husky. It makes me think of the Prodigal Son."
He ignored the Biblical allusion and looked at her with a cold disregard for her juvenile irreverence.
"I must use my natural juices," he assured her. He looked singularly bereft of them. His face, clean-shaven but for short grey whiskers, was as dried and colourless as his cereals, his grey hair was stiff and dull, his hands were lean without nervousness.
Watching him, the twitching of her lips grew into a smile. She began to like him. In his nature there was something grim and uncompromising which enabled him to keep his teeth shut on speech and the expression of his religious convictions. She recognized that this gift, or his wisdom, had thwarted her. She had meant to tease him, to taunt him with his Seaman's Club, where, on Saturday nights, the strains of the harmonium he had carried there droned a melancholy yet compelling welcome to the loafers about the docks, but she was robbed of opportunity. He never spoke of his pursuits, seldom of himself, and she was startled into a friendly pity for him. He had wanted a home and, at last, unwillingly, he had been admitted into this one, yet here, in the place of his desire, he sat silent and reserved, carefully keeping even a mental aloofness from the doings of his relatives. Was this gratitude, or a fear of ejection? And did he find any happiness among them? She frowned, for her heart was softening, and she foresaw that when she had time, when that poem was written, she would have to turn her powers to the understanding of him. This was capitulation, she confessed, but then, she comforted herself, analysis of men and women was important for her future.
He looked up, caught her puzzled, eager stare, and smiled. Smiling, too, she nodded. Really, she thought, why has not someone fallen in love with him?
When the meal was over and Edward Webb had crept quietly to his study, and Uncle George had departed to his harmonium, Theresa stood before the fire and looked down at her mother, gently rocking in the old chair.
"Do you think he has ever been in love?" she said.
"Who?" Nancy asked.
"Uncle George, of course," said Theresa.
"I don't know, dear. I never heard of anyone."
"It's not lawful to marry one's uncle, is it?"
"I suppose not." Nancy's brows were raised.
"I'm coming to the conclusion that he's rather an attractive man—and very mysterious. If I ever marry, I shall marry a mystery."
"I shouldn't advise it, dear."
"I should tire of anyone else in a year—less! I must have excitement."
"There's a time of life when one longs for peace."
Theresa jerked her head upwards. "Not for me!" she cried, and clasped her hands behind her back. Like a young horse, not yet broken, she believed herself unconquerable.
Nancy smiled. "Where's Grace? She has no class to-night."
"No, I expect she has gone to see someone." A little dart of anxiety pierced her, for she was a shrewed guesser, her eye was quick, and Grace's symptoms during the last weeks had been disturbing and familiar ones. She sighed.
"Are you tired, dear?"
"No, thank you."
"Then I wish you'd see what Father's doing. He looks so white to-night. Just give me those new books off the sideboard, first, dearie."
Theresa went upstairs. She felt a vague irritation against her family, and tasted life's staleness in her mouth. It brought nothing but a round of common tasks for her, dreary labour to her father, a strange darkness of energy to Bessie, and ill-health to her mother; to Uncle George, an emptiness he tried to fill with a harmonium and a hymnal, and to Grace, a breathlessness of dancing, smiling, dressing, flirting. All efforts and all persons seemed so separate, yet so united, and she could find no meaning in them beyond that. The thought wearied her, her body and mind felt old, and, remembering that it was long since she had dreamed of mountains, she realized the cause of her unrest—that romance and excitement were easily forfeited if she might see the hills in sleep. She paused on the landing and drew breath sharply, as though it were the mountain air she gathered.
She opened the study door, and saw her father bowed over his desk. He was writing, but he stopped and looked up to welcome her.
"Are you busy? Writing letters? Shall I go?"
"No, my dear, stay."
She went to the window. The blind was up, and she could see the quiet, lamplit street.
"Houses and houses, and people in all of them, and they all have relatives, and friends, and troubles. And they all care so much more about themselves than about anything else. I can't get used to that. And when I see people crowding into tramcars, it's the same. Sometimes I like it; it's exciting"—she caught her lip over the word and laughed secretly—"and then sometimes the thought's too big—worrying. I like the other side of the house best. I feel that I can get out—to the sea."
He was enchanted by her unusual readiness to talk.
"Do you want to get to the sea?"
"On windy nights, when the ships call me. Do you hear them in your room?"
"Oh, yes!" he said.
"Does it make you want to go?"
He hesitated. "No, I'm a chilly person, but I admit it stirs me to think of others facing cold and danger. The sea—I'm afraid the sea frightens me a little."
Like a child who is too shy to speak of what it loves, she forced him to name it for her.
"You don't like the sea best, do you?"
"No, Theresa, it's the mountains that have snared me."
"Tell me about them."
"It's so long since I've been."
"Why?"
He showed his jaded face. "I can't get there for nothing, my dear, and I don't want to leave your mother. But some day, when she is better, I'll take you there. I think you would be happy."
"Should I?" she questioned innocently, hiding her smile. "Let's pretend we're on the way. You tell me what we're coming to. I'll shut my eyes." She chuckled delightedly at her own babyishness, but he seemed unaware of it, for this was the little girl who had always wanted stories and never been denied.
"We'd get out of the train," he began, "and smell the sea; and then we should smell a fresh and wonderful wind, and we should know it came from the mountains, and we'd hurry along the road. We're hurrying, Theresa, to the place where that wind was born. It's the spring, I think. There are primroses in the hedges, lots of them by the stream, but I expect we shall see some snow on the hills. It lies late in the gullies, and at night it falls up there, when it is almost warm in the valleys. It's a long walk, but we're going very fast because we are so eager, and now we're turning a corner, and the wind comes more smartly, stealing our breath, and it is hard work to raise our heads against it to see——"
Theresa's parted lips drooped sharply, without warning, and stopped his speech. "Don't!" she cried imploringly. "Don't tell me! I—I don't think I like this game. Pretending!" She hid her face and indistinctly murmured: "I don't think I can bear to talk about it."
"My dear!"
She looked up: there were tears in her eyes. He blinked.
"My dear," he repeated helplessly. "What is it?" She shook her head, laughing, and yielding to the persuasion of his hand, she sat on the arm of his chair, and leaned against him.
"I'm silly," she said.
But he would not allow that: he triumphed in her sensibility. "No, no," he said. The pressure of his encircling arm assured her that he understood, and she did not try to check her weeping, for she enjoyed it, and all the nameless troubles of her youth seemed to be finding solace. She was surprised at her emotion, and became interested in it: thought dammed the flood, and with the back of her hand she wiped her eyes. Edward Webb continued to hold her firmly while she stared before her, not guiltless of an occasional sniff which had for him the pathos of a cry. Considering herself, she decided that she was strange. Why had she silenced her father? Her glance fell, broodingly, to the papers on his desk. Was it because the hills were her religion, her love for them her form of worship? She liked the notion and saw herself enhanced by it. Her heart beat a little faster; there were depths in her she had not sounded, and her blurred gaze cleared itself in this excitement. Her mind looked inward while her eyes mechanically followed the lines of her father's writing. They were partly concealed by blotting-paper, but some of them she read over and over again, making accompaniment to her thoughts, until their meaning flashed and blinded her to all else. They were words of love, brilliant, coloured words that startled, horrified her. She had read such words in print, but to see them in her father's handwriting seemed to strike life out of her.
Her mind had a curious sensation of lop-sidedness; it was partly numbed, partly acute; she was incapable of remembering to shift her glance, but quite clearly she saw words which told her the letter was written to that woman in the hills. There was no doubt of that. Was he not comparing her face to a sun-bathed peak visible through cloud? She learnt this in half a minute's passing, and then she rose. She was cold, but her mind was once more a whole, and merciless in its conclusions and its indictment.
"Are you going, my dear?" He moved his papers into a little heap.
"Yes."
He did not look at her. "I wish," he said, beating a tattoo on the desk and speaking with an effort—"I wish you would always come to me, Theresa, when you are—when you are not happy."
"Oh!" she cried chokingly, and rushed away.
He found her confusion easy to understand, and he loved her for the reserves so seldom and so delightfully broken.
The icy darkness of her bedroom enclosed Theresa with the chill and colour of life itself. The future was cold and rayless; she groped towards it and was afraid, but she had the courage of anger and as she stumbled against the bedpost, she lifted her head. How could he? how could he? She saw her mother sitting down there by the fire, rocking gently, with that faint smile curving her lips; she remembered the shadow that had sometimes seemed to fall between her parents, and loyalty ran out towards her mother like a wave. And, on the other side of the landing, bending over his desk, that meek, uncertain father of hers wrote his love letters in secret. He wrote love letters because he could not afford to go to the mountains and the woman, because he would not leave his wife!
The terrible, sickly blackness of things covered her. She struggled under it, and with the effect of something magical, mockingly plain, yet distant, she saw, all the time, the lights of the docks, and heard the clanging of the tramcar bells in New Dock Road. Lights while she floundered in gloom, human sounds while she wandered in fear-inhabited caverns! She had rejoiced in the reading of such situations, she had fancied herself fitted to cope with them, but she found reality too real. Anger at something greater than a small personal injury was a bigger passion than she had imagined, and pity, doomed to voicelessness and impotence, tore her with strong hands.
She moved rapidly to and fro between the dressing-table and the bed's foot. She had loved her father, and now she saw him a deceiver. The thought hung on her as she walked. Surely truth had looked out of his kind eyes, love had shone there, and could deceit give a hand to each? She found it hard to distrust him utterly, for did he not believe in her? But she crushed this relenting in her clenched hands, and continued her restless pacing. That little grey man a lover! Had he been tall, and strong, and masterful, he had been easier to forgive, but that a small, meek man should be unfaithful made the insult to her mother doubly bitter. And that woman Alexander's mother! She came to a stand, holding her throat. Did Alexander know? He was her father's friend, but she hated him, and immediately she imagined him the abettor. Oh, how they sullied her glorious mountains, and, oh! was it possible that she was dull and prudish? Was she missing the grandeur of a hopeless love because she was too near to see it well? The question stilled her. In books—to these her judgments always turned—she was able to sympathize as much with the guilty as the innocent, but here——. Ah, well, she was not in a book, and she had loved her father, and downstairs her mother sat ill and miserable. She might die at any moment, and Theresa felt the pang of her father's remorse. Had he thought of that? Once more her heart seemed to stop its beating.
A knock came at her door. "Yes?" she said.
"It's me, Theresa. I want to show you something. May I come in?"
She opened the door to Edward Webb, and stood rigid, glaring fiercely at him out of her white face. Yet he was unchanged. The odour of sin was not upon him, and he blinked and smiled as he held a paper towards her.
"All in darkness? Look, my dear, this—this is something Alexander sent to-day. I should like you to look at it."
"Alexander!" Her low voice had turned shrill. "I don't want to see anything he has sent! I don't want to know anything about those people!" She pushed past him and ran down the stairs.
An hour afterwards, having tenderly seen her mother into bed, Theresa went to her own room, too heart-weary to be anxious about Grace. Everything seemed ruinous and wrecked, what matter if Grace fell, too? This was her mood as she slipped off her clothes and bravely stretched herself between the cold sheets, yet she kept her ears alert, and when she heard an unmistakable step she made a hurried movement of relief.
Grace flung herself into the wicker chair, which creaked dolefully.
"Oh, Terry!" The gas was turned low, but Theresa could see the beauty of her pose.
"You're very late."
"Don't be cross. I can't bear it. Terry! Theresa! I'm so happy that I want to cry!"
"Why don't you, then? I shan't mind. And for Heaven's sake be quick and come to bed."
"I did hope you would be in a nice temper, and you're horrid." She sat on the bed and laid her cheek against Theresa's. "You really must be good to me to-night."
"I suppose you've engaged yourself again?" Her tone was hard at the thought of love-making.
Grace withdrew her caress. "I have never been engaged before," she said distinctly.
"Then you've told me lies, twice. A good thing I didn't believe them!"
"You're hateful! You know the other times were only folly."
"Yes, I knew, but I didn't know you did. I shouldn't tell anyone else about this if I were you. It won't last long."
"It will last for ever and ever." She took off her hat. "Don't you want to know who it is?"
"Is it that Wilkinson with the undeveloped head?"
"It's a beautiful head—classic. Theresa, you are horrid. I thought you would understand."
"I do, and I'm not a bit disturbed. He will never be my brother-in-law. You've too much sense—somewhere. Now do your crying, and then get into bed. It's rather cold all alone."
"I'm burning," said Grace. She would not be snubbed, and she hummed gaily instead of weeping.
"Did he ask you to-night?" said Theresa, unwillingly curious.
"Yes."
"Where?"
"I'm not going to tell you."
"Oh, all right. I asked Bessie to leave out your milk and biscuits. Did you have them?"
"Milk! Biscuits! As if I could eat anything at a time like this! You are the most unromantic person."
"It's safer," said Theresa wearily. She made a deeper nest for her tawny head, and dismissed Grace's light affairs. They became negligible in the face of the tragedy she knew, and with the closing of her eyes she shut them from her mind. She prayed that sleep would bring the mountains, the clean mountains which, after all, could not be smirched by human beings, and they came to her. She saw them, tall, dark, superb, and inviolable, and she woke with something of their courageous peace.
Theresa had not the prophetic gift, but she garnered her experiences; she had good judgment and, when it pleased her, she could use wisdom in her dealings with her kind, so that, two months later, when Grace came to her, sore over the sufferings of the young man with the undeveloped head, yet still determined to be cruel to him, Theresa received her without surprise or any reference to the promised eternity of Grace's love.
"It was a great mistake," Grace said ingenuously. "I'm afraid I like admiration, and I can't help liking people who give it me."
"You must like the whole world, then. What a big heart to carry!"
"It's not quite as big as that, and you take up a lot of room in it, Terry, though you think I'm such a silly."
"You'll improve," said Theresa cheerfully.
She was able to be cheerful, for two months is a long time at seventeen, and the pain of her spirit was dulled: she had become used, though not reconciled, to the sight of a familiar figure, branded with shame. She no longer compared his every word and action with the truth she knew of him, for the beautiful green growth of custom was hiding the staring ugliness of her discovery. It was there, underneath, but now and then she was able to forget it, and that capacity almost persuaded her sometimes that her imagination had played her false. She watched him. He was the same man, it appeared, but for the shrinking wonder with which he looked at her, hurting her, striking doubt into her young criticism of things beyond her. Was it his guilt or her cold treatment which had cast this visible shadow over him? It should have been his guilt, but he had offended and yet gone clear of cloud before she found him out. It was her frowns that troubled him, and while she hated the immature self-righteousness which forced them from her, she could not keep them back; a smooth brow would have been disloyalty to the woman over whom he bent with a hypocrisy so perfect that it seemed impossible. She had hard work to restrain articulate scorn, but her curled lips did duty, exiling him to that desert place whence he could not see her smiles. In these days his shoulders became more bent, and Theresa learnt how he had looked in the shops where he was afraid of people's eyes. The knowledge shook her; he was like a frightened child who longs for kindness, and only by repeating those beating words could she forbear from putting her arms round his neck and kissing him under the brows. She longed to do it; her love fluttered and struggled in her breast, so that she had to quiet it with the pressure of her hand, and this was the beginning of a habit which never left her.
She watched the postman, too. Letters, addressed in Alexander's writing, came from the farm among the hills: they were thick and sometimes sealed, and the eagerness with which her father took them to his room convinced her that they held enclosures. At such times he seemed to her like an animal secreting food, and the striving love lay still.
On an evening when this had happened, she sat with her mother by the breakfast-room fire. It was May, but a cold wind rattled the windows, and Nancy had her feet inside the fender and a shawl round her shoulders. Theresa was sewing, as a silent protest against the ardent letter-reading upstairs. Her lips were tightened, and conscious virtue enveloped all of her but the hair that flamed in love's own colour. She was now eighteen, and the hair was massed on her head, overweighting it, strengthening the pallor of a face where only a few golden freckles broke the white.
She shivered. "May is the worst month of all," she said, and threw down her sewing. "Such light, long evenings, and spring's news almost old. It makes me miserable."
"I wish you would go out more, dear."
"I took Uncle George for a walk yesterday, and Father the day before."
"That's not what I mean. Why will you never go with Grace?"
"I don't fit in. I feel like a great piece of furniture when I'm with her friends. I can't talk as they do. They have a way of making jokes—all about nothing and really not a bit funny—that turns me dumb. I don't know how they can think of such imbecilities." She did not add that she envied their facility, that their gay scraps of talk, their ease in each other's company, the way in which they wore their clothes and did their hair, shamed her for her silent awkwardness and robbed her of any comfort in the belief that she was alien because she was unique. Her eyes were quick, but they did not see that though she lacked the loveliness she had always wanted, her face had the beauty of her swift and vivid spirit, she had the pliant grace of a larch, the freshness of its early green and the courage which has caused that tree to be set in wild and desolate places. She thought the more highly of the intellect, and in this region she was aware that she overtopped the women of her acquaintance and the men with whom they danced, and laughed, and talked with such incomparable ease.
Nancy uttered a platitude serenely. "It takes all sorts to make a world," she said.
"I know, but there don't seem to be any of my sort—and I could be a friend!"
"You are a friend, dear, to me and Father and Uncle George and Grace. Since you began to take care of us all, I think I've never been so happy. You mustn't think I haven't seen, and now I want to tell you in case I never have another chance. My heart was very bad last night—but don't tell Father. Don't worry him. The attacks must come, and one of them will take me with it. I don't want to tell anyone but you, Terry, and I tell you because you're strong."
The colour rushed over Theresa's face, and she stammered as she spoke; but it was fear, not pride, that swamped her; though, in after silences, the words echoed back to her thrillingly.
"You must let me sleep with you. I can't let you have attacks all alone in the dark like that. Pain"—she breathed the word—"must be so terrible alone. Doesn't Father wake? I should, if you moved."
"So would he, but I don't move, you see. And I'm not going to be parted from him for the time that may be so short. And I've endured worse pangs, Theresa, far worse. Thank God, they're over." The faint smile deepened, the corners of her mouth were reminiscent, her lips had the softness of a girl's. "Where you give love, give trust, Theresa, when your great time comes."
The wavering colour came back to Theresa's cheeks. She looked pityingly, adoringly, at her mother, and then her brain seemed to swell with reckless anger.
"I'll never love!" she cried, "because I must trust where I love, and men—men are so faithless! Oh, I know!" She ceased, trembling, watching her slim, shaken wrists. She heard laughter.
"Is this books, or Bessie?" And then, as Theresa raised her face, "Terry! What has happened? Nothing to you—or Grace?"
"No, no, dear, it's just the things I hear about. Truly." She was on her knees, stroking her mother's face, aghast at her own carelessness. "It's Grace who is unfaithful, and no one gives a thought to me!"
"You are so dramatic, dear! Don't give way to the temptation."
"I know," Theresa murmured. "It's wicked of me." But this time her outburst had had no impulse but what came from her own indignant heart.
"You're not always sure, are you, of what you really feel?"
"Oh, how did you know? But is anybody?"
"Lots of people, I think. This—this may be my farewell sermon, Terry, so be attentive!"
"I won't listen if you talk like that."
"I won't, then, and I'm not going to preach. I only want to tell you to go on taking care of them all for me. You do it better than I ever did, and it has been a sacrifice."
Had it? Theresa looked back through the months. What would she have done with them if they had been hers to use? The thought of the immortal poem rose up in a cloud of dust. It would never be anything more than dust, offensive to eyes and nose, choking her. With a defiant movement of the arms she scattered it, yet still its odour remained, mocking her with its dry offence. She spurned the idea of herself as poet, her head was unaccountably humbled, yet through it there darted swiftly the vision of herself as novelist. It was a vision easier to live with, and she welcomed it, straightening her back.
"There's Grace," her mother was saying softly; "she is so pretty. Don't let her marry the wrong person, Terry."
"She's rather clever at dodging the mistakes. She has a lot of commonsense. I'm much more likely to do something insane, in spite of my looks! Being plain makes one so independent!"
"You're not plain, dear. Father thinks you're beautiful."
"Oh, Father!" The old allegiance and the new scorn were fairly mingled.
"Yes," said Nancy, twisting her lips, "it is rather like that, I know. And there's Uncle George. He's much nicer near than at a distance. Theresa, do you mind him very much?"
"I rather like him," she answered, reddening.
"Aren't we being good?" said Nancy gaily. "And you'll keep Bessie. I know she's not much use, but she's a friend. I shouldn't like you to have a stranger. And—and there's Father." Tears dropped straight and unheeded into her lap. "Theresa, he loves you so much, and he'll need you. Be kind to him. He's so unhappy when you're not."
The appeal could only throw his treachery into black relief, but in an illuminating flash that went violently through her head, and left her weak and giddy, she thought she understood it, understood all things, and she promised, weeping, too, that she would care for him.
Her mother's gentleness stole through Theresa and stayed there: she felt in herself a largeness of forgiveness that astonished her, and she looked on her father without rancour, with the wide gaze, she thought, of one who sees beyond the flesh. And the mood, unnatural, but not false, imposed by another's tenderness, lasted, uninterrupted, for the short time before her mother died. Theresa was glad that inward peace, as well as that outer one of a June night, surrounded the pale, still figure on the bed, as she gave the little sighing breath which lightly sent her spirit across the border, glad that she felt no resentment at her father's tears. She had time to think these things before there came over her a terrible quiet which was not peace but desolation, wherein worlds broke God's rules and changed their course, and, amidst their bewildered going, she thought her mother tried to find a place. Her discarded lodging lay in the bed still bearing the imprint of her spirit, but what was essentially she was racing perilously among uncertain worlds. She steadied herself. She refused to visualise a thing she could not understand, and she found strength. The wandering worlds dropped back into their circuits, she heard the dreadful catch and outlet of her father's breathing, and, as though this were but part of her daily task, she stroked her mother's cold, soft hands, and touched a little wavering lock of hair that had fallen across her brow.
She lived and ate, and slept through the medium of a body which had no connection with herself. She would rather have suffered tortures, but she could not regain her personality or any of the emotions it would have felt. While Uncle George went gloomily about the house and Bessie sobbed in the kitchen and Grace lay prone upon her bed, Theresa, feeling ashamed of her coldness, seemed to live a life whose normality was only broken now and then by the sight of a fleeting, ghostlike figure that could not find rest. When she woke in that first night she heard its hurrying, ceaseless steps, and the sound of doors opened by its unbelieving, eager hands, and she knew that her father's body, uninformed by his numbed mind, was searching and researching the house for a living Nancy who would defy the stark evidence of her death.
She sat up in bed. Grace was in the deep sleep that follows weeping, and she drew herself carefully out of the sheets, set her feet on the rough carpet of the stairs, and pattered after him. She found him on the landing below, and she touched his sleeve and patted it.
"You must go to bed," she said very soothingly.
He turned on her, and in the darkness she saw the glistening whites of his eyes. "Whose bed?" he demanded, and again, "Whose bed? I have none," he added on a sob.
She had not thought of that. Only the half of Uncle George's couch offered him shelter, and the awful pathos of that carefully preserved space set her chin and her lips trembling.
"We'll go into the breakfast-room. We'll light the fire. I'll stay with you." And by that fire they sat together, cheek against cheek.
Day comes early in June, and the birds were singing before Theresa had stiffened in her chair, or their hands had refused to hold each other any more. In the white light one white face gazed into another.
"You've only got your nightgown on," he told her; and then, inconsequently, "but I've got you back."
"Yes," she said. She had never felt closer to him, and the guilt which she could not forget had become no more than a thin film of smoke.
In the afternoon of that day, when she entered her mother's room to put fresh flowers in her hand, she saw her father already filling them, but not with flowers. It was a sheet of paper he fixed between those strangely unresponsive fingers.
Across the bed he looked at Theresa, and frowned in his piteous need to speak.
"It's all I have to give her," he said, "and she would have liked it. She hadn't seen it because I never showed her anything until it was as good as I could make it, but she must have it now. It's hers."
She bent over the paper. She saw the regular lines of verse, and, starting out of them, the words that haunted her. Her mouth fell open, and she looked at him through an immeasurable distance, before she dropped to her knees under the unbearable weight of her abasement.
On the last Saturday of that month, the sun, waking Theresa to the great emptiness of the world, robbed Alexander of the sleep which was his by right of holiday and, a moment later, the clamour of an energetic and triumphant hen dispersed his drowsiness.
As he lay and looked through the window and felt the wind on his face, he heard a kind of music in the noise, for in its unconscious, harsh insistence, there was a glorifying of life, joy in a creative gift, and praise for the wise use of it. It held, moreover, a call for energy, and Alexander, who had been born loving pre-eminence, could not consent to lie in bed while a hen prated of accomplishment. Murmuring gentle maledictions on the creature, he threw off his coverings and thrust his head and shoulders through the window.
It was six o'clock, and the earth seemed to have dipped its face in its own running water, and now, still glistening with drops, it was holding up its head that the wind might dry it. It was a light and frolic wind, taking pleasure in the vast spaces of the world and the youth of morning, whirling about the hill-tops, daring the dark and dripping gullies that rent the cliffs, yet not disdaining the rose-tree on the house wall, nor the points of Alexander's flannel collar and the roughness of his hair. Sharp at his throat it sent its cool, long fingers, and after them came the sunshine with a warm caress.
The ceasing of the hen's exultation brought a startling quiet, and through it there came softly a consciousness of water falling. From the Steep Water and the Broad Beck it was heard, a sound half of melancholy and half of joy, and sometimes it was loud, and again had a note so fading that silence caught at it.
There was a cap of cloud on the Spiked Crags, but the Blue Hill stood broad and clear, and when Alexander turned his head and looked seaward, he saw that shining thread of water, and the lake, and the lower hills lying under a pale and lofty sky.
Vague scents of flower and tree, of soil and wind, rose to his nostrils or went past him: he thought he smelt the very essence of the earth, he thought he felt God breathing on His world. Peace was spread on it like a hand, and in that blessing Alexander shared.
A homely sound drew him from the heights to which contemplation had carried him, and looking down, he saw a procession of brown and speckled hens, who lifted their feet delicately from the dust of the road, but did not refuse to peck in it. Dappling the little throng with white, three solemn ducks waddled heavily, and, last of all, like marshalls of the flock, the grey geese came, craning their necks and gobbling gently. They paused at the gate that lead into the field, argued for a while, and slipped, one by one, under the lowest bar.
Alexander followed them over the wet fields. He left his slippers at the gate, and went barefooted, for he was in love with the morning, and greedy of all it had to give: the damp earth was pressed into the arches of his feet, and the long grasses shook down their hanging drops. A blackbird sang to him as he swished by, and when he reached the pool under the birches, he thought it waited for him like a mistress who had no life but his. Not yet quite wakened from the night, it stirred languorously and spread dark arms to hold him, while the thin birch leaves fluttered on their stalks, quivering in a selfless joy.
He raised his eyebrows with a humorous, unequal lift, and looked deeply into the water he thus appropriated. He was amused, a little dismayed by a mood in which he tuned the world's music to his own key. His ambition might have seen men and things alike conquerable by his mind, but his vanity had never heard them as a refrain to the song of self, yet now a sparkling morning, a whistling bird, and wet grasses brushing on his feet, had made a coxcomb of him. That was the epithet he chose to use, for his proud youth would not confess the power of a summer morning on his austerity; yet, as he took the plunge into water which still held a memory of the snows, he was grateful to a cold that vanquished sentiment, and gave back freedom to the mountain stream. He felt he ought to ask its pardon on his knees, but he did not pause in his drying: the feeling, he thought characteristically, was enough, and, lifting his brows again and twisting his lips in company, he decided to keep the kneeling posture for the time when he should have learnt to pray, and with the remembrance that he had been at worship, if not at prayer, as he stood by his window and divined the immeasurable presence of God, he walked home soberly, absorbed in the problems of his own spirit, and heedless of the geese that cackled after him.
He found his mother kindling the kitchen fire and he watched her as he sat on the table and dried his hair. He had, for everything concerning her, an eye as keen as that of a woman or a lover: he took pleasure in the sure quickness of her hands, and the clear skin on the cheek she turned to him, yet his gaze had that parental quality which, still unsuspected, had influenced his dealings with her from boyhood. He saw how the brave back defied the grey that crept unwillingly through her hair, and he knew that neither age nor sorrow would ever daunt her, because love had given her an invincible supremacy. Years ago, with the wisdom of the threatened, her heart had challenged her mind to combat, and had beaten it, and thereafter she had made of it an ally, so that her defences were unassailable and her fears at rest. He understood. Had he not watched it all? At first he had seen her little shifts with scorn, he had felt pity for her determined blindness, and then his own sight had been cleared, and he looked straight into a maternal heart that awed him, though it pulsed so eagerly for the father that there was hardly room for the son. His training had been a hard and useful one, and his passions were well chained: he was rarely resentful: what was noble in him was truly glad of her captured happiness, and he had learnt to use towards her the indulgent tenderness which she kept for his father.
He laid aside his towel and stood up. "Let me do that for you."
She gave the laugh, not to be silenced by experience or proof, of the capable woman who hears man offering to do her work.
"No, it's alight at last. The sticks were damp. You forgot to bring them in last night."
"I'm sorry."
"I'll see to them in future."
"Oh, isn't that just you! I forget, once in three months, perhaps, and you talk as though it were only that once that I'd remembered."
She sat on her heels and smiled at him. "Nonsense! I'm juster than you, my son! And I like doing my own work."
"But this is mine. I gathered kindling wood for you as soon as I could walk, and I used the chopper before most children are allowed a table-knife. The smell of the woodshed and the fear I had of it at night! The door has the same creak yet, when there's a strong wind from the sea. I've suffered torments, crossing the yard in the dark, and I have my reward in remembering them. I'm going to get the wood for you till the end of time. It's bound up with the thought of the geese, and the smell of earth, and the sound of bees in the heather, and the wonder if I'll see my father striding out into the black when I'm coming in with my arms full. And it's queer how you end by loving the bad memories best. I think it will be because we're all proud to look back on trouble."
She heard disloyalty in his words. "Trouble! How much of it have you had? You've had your way in everything, you've never been thwarted." Her voice dared him to speak his thoughts. He was silent, but he had a vision of a small and solitary boy's figure moving always under a cloud that might open to let out thunderbolts. How he had feared, hated, and at last, when it failed to do more than darken his days, how he had despised it!
He looked in a kind of wonder at his mother. Her hands were folded in her lap in a pretence of calm, but he knew she held them tightly, that her heart went a little faster in her anger. Had she been unaware of his sufferings, or had she chosen to ignore them? Now, it did not matter. The horror was over: it had helped to make him what he was, and, were that good or bad, he answered truthfully when she turned to him with a sharp: "Well, why don't you speak?"
He was smiling faintly. The lips which had been petulant in boyhood had taken on firmer, straighter lines that refused the indignity of easy rage. "I'd not change a day of my life for that of any other man," he said cheerfully.
She was a little suspicious of his meaning, but she had to take it at its best. She rose and put a hand on his arm.
"Out of my way, Alexander, if you want breakfast. Why did you get up so early on a Saturday?"
"Ask the sun."
"Shall I give you a dark curtain?"
"No; I'll go without sleep rather than have my window blinded. What would I do when I waked in the night if I couldn't see my hills?"
"Sleep again the sooner, perhaps. No wonder I can't make my candles last. Alec, you're not to touch a book to-day."
"Come for a walk with me, then."
"Get Janet."
"No, she can't walk like you. Come."
"I mustn't." His flattery loosened her tongue. "He wouldn't like it. Go and get dressed, my son. I'll have your porridge heated in ten minutes."
So after breakfast he set off alone, with a packet of sandwiches in one pocket and the forbidden book in the other. He followed the little track amidst the bracken, and, having mounted, looked down on the watered valley and across it at the opposing hills, and his love and need of the place leaped in him like a thing alive, and mingled with the steady happiness of doing his chosen work.
He remembered the summer evening of the year before, when he had come home from Oxford for the last time. He returned, having done the thing he meant to do, and his degree was not a disappointment even to himself, but neither was it a surprise; and if it was possible to have a deeper satisfaction than that of holding the thing for which he had reached out, it was in the sure knowledge of the use to which that thing must be put. An earlier generation might have made a preacher of him, his own pointed to the school and not the church. He believed he had been born to teach; he found his most potent temptation in his lust for giving knowledge, and though not the least worthy of desires, it was none the less a self-indulgence. But its gratification was not always pleasant, and after suffering some of the sharp pangs that youth knows how to inflict on youth, he learnt to hold his tongue among his peers. He had that cruel lesson in his first year, and for the other three he contented himself with listening. The power of observation taught by loneliness was turned on the men who seemed so light-heartedly young to him. He liked them, he had a kind of envy of them, and watched the gambols of their minds and bodies with the melancholy pleasure of an old sheep looking on the lambs of spring. He had the good sense not to try imitation, but he spent on them the study which he was incapable of withholding from anything that fronted him, and if he saw little of women during those years, he had, at the end of them, as good an understanding of men as his youth could compass, and one that steadied his belief that there was no higher calling than the one he meant to follow. The contest in his mind, as he walked homeward that night, a year ago, had been between ambition and a duty whose existence he did not disclaim. Here was his mother and her need of a sane being in her house, and beyond there was a large world with a place in it for his ability. With all the garnered control of his strength he wanted to find that place and fill it, yet it seemed the gods willed otherwise, for in his pocket there lay a letter offering him a mastership at his old Grammar School, and it was pressing against his side with the urgency of a command, pricking him with a pointed question. Was it the personal ambition or the impersonal ideal on which his eyes were set? It was easy to entangle the two so that the answer fitted with his will, and he walked bewildered. He found there were many sides to duty, that inclination is not perforce opposed to it, and he was still struggling for clearness when he turned the corner of the road and saw the hills. Their calm mocked his restlessness, and their splendour made a little thing of him. He stood and fed on them.
Against the tender colour of the sky they held the darkness of the coming night, and soon their arms would open to let forth a dusky coverlet for the world. Proud of that burden, they lifted serene heads above it and waited for the stars, and after them the day, and then the night once more, and all the buffetings that time, and wind and rain might bring them. Their beauty and strength and patience were holy to Alexander, and at the sight of them he was ready for any sacrifice of his ambition, while his mind was confused with longing to express his gratitude and praise. This was more than the appeal of the æsthetic: through nature he was half consciously trying to find God, and his troubles left him and went like winged things to the heights.
He walked on: he had a conviction that his way would be made clear. This was strange to a mind that only came to its conclusions after fierce wrestling; but he did not question it, and, rejoicing in this new submission and in the clang of his boots on the hard road, he marched on until the hills drew more closely round him and the lake narrowed to receive its feeding streams. Green rushes grew in the shallows and were stirred by the water's gentle surge, and among them, unseen, Alexander thought the reedy pipe was played. The music woke such echoes in his heart that his stern self-control tried to refuse it hearing; but the hour was victor and the hills were its allies. In the perfection of impulse they swept upwards from the valley, and it was amazing that the dark and stunted yews round the little church, the scattered houses and the grazing cattle should have been allowed to keep the places men had given them, for the curves of the mountain's mysterious sides had the fatality of a wave. But they had the placidity of their own strength: themselves the victims of Nature's ruthlessness, they had learnt ruthlessness from her, yet remained benign, and in the face of their serenity the man was willing to distrust the efforts of his own mind. But only for this moment was he the yielding child of these numerous and mighty parents, ready to let his future be what they decreed: and only because he was aware of his waiting will, did he find this happiness in obedience to the evening and the hills.
With the fluty song beguiling him, he left the road and walked by the banks of the Broad Beck, until his bathing pool shone out among the birches. He saw himself mirrored dimly in the water, and the blurred image appeared to him as the true presentment of the thing he was, vague and incomplete, the rough shape his soul must perfect. The trees, in their drooping, veiled the fading light and curtained Alexander from the rest of the world, but he felt the Blue Hill behind him and fancied he could hear its breathing.
He had meant to take the bath that was always like a new baptism into the life of the hills, but the shadowy form prayed him not to shatter it, and the hanging stillness of the wood forbade disturbance, so he shouldered the knapsack he had laid aside, and treading softly, struck across the fields for home.
He found Janet sitting on the horse-block.
"You're here!" she said. "What way did you come?"
"By the beck. The water drew me."
"And I've been listening for the sound of your feet on the road. More than an hour I've been here."
"Where's my mother?"
"Over the hills, somewhere, after that man of hers. He's like a bad child: runs for the pleasure he gets in seeing her follow, I believe."
"Was he drunk?" he asked, and looking round, he saw a tragedy in every shadow.
"He'd been drinking. She sent for me."
His look sharpened. "For the first time?"
"The third," she owned.
"It's like that?"
"You see, there've been long years of it."
"I know! Do I not know!"
"He slept till morning, but when the light came he went, and she after him. It's oftenest at night he goes, and then she cannot always follow. It's bad, Alexander. You'll not be leaving her again? Or will you?"
He crossed the rutted lane and leaned on the wall. Here was the solving of his problem ready to his hand as he had foretold, but now he was rebellious. He stared across the field to where the birches stood about his pool, and he saw the brilliance of his future sadden and fade as though a star had drowned itself there, in the water among the trees. He made a movement as if to follow and bring it back, yet he stayed by the wall: his hands gripped the stones, but his heart had gone after the glowing treasure, lost and sunken, and as yet he had no wish to kindle the little rushlight of his faith, blown out by his own gasping breath.
He faced the blackness and turned to Janet. "I'm staying," he said. He had made his decision, but, as though he looked at himself from afar off, he saw all the pitiful struggling of his youth and felt its loneliness, and his mind swung forward to the years when he should have ceased to suffer from the unbearable throb of his own being. And though he was no easy smiler, his mouth widened. Life and his conception of it were things too mysterious for anger, or sorrow, or speculation, and for an instant he was glad to think himself splendidly delivered from free will. But that thought passed swiftly, and he became proud in the possession of those qualities that make life difficult.
"Janet," he said, and the smile lingered, "you've played me false. Here I've been thinking you'd save us from the toils; I've been thinking you were a witch, and I find you're nothing but a common woman after all!"
She had no merriment to give back.
"I've been delivered out of temptation, so far," she said, "but I may fall yet. How often do you think I've said the Lord's Prayer when I've known that poor soul was bleating all over the mountains like a lost sheep, and your mother after him with the lantern in her hand? 'Deliver us from temptation, deliver me from temptation,' I've said over and over, to keep back the thoughts. I could say charms over him. I brought him to my door once—only once—when I knew the drink was crying out in him; but not again. It wasn't a face that I was meant to see, the one he showed me that night, so now I say my prayers. I'll do no more, Alexander."
He drew near. "Ah, but if I wanted you to, Janet? If I needed help?"
"Ah, then." She brushed a hand across her face. "Pray that the day won't come," she said.
He remembered how he took Janet home through the soft darkness, and returned to find his father and mother in the kitchen. She was kneeling at her husband's feet, and though she turned and smiled, she did not speak. The light of the single candle showed her white face patched with shadow; her clothes were disordered, her hair fell in wisps on each side of her face.
"This is a fine welcome," Alexander said. He pushed her aside, and pulled off the heavy, sodden boots.
"So you're back," said James Rutherford.
Alexander made no answer. With his hands in his pockets he stood and looked at the smouldering fire. Clara lighted the lamp. "It looks so cheerless," she complained. Her fingers moved stiffly: she wasted several matches. "Would you like anything to eat, Jim?"
"No, I'm sleepy. I'll go to bed." His eyes looked glazed. He lifted himself from his chair and laid an awkward hand on Alexander's shoulder. "I'm glad you're back," he said, and passed out. Alexander did not move until the creaking of the stairs had ceased, and his mother spoke.
"Alec, you didn't say good-night—or anything."
"If I'd said what I was thinking——" The red light in his eyes flickered as he saw how she drooped against the table. "Why are you not sitting down? Come here. How many miles have you tramped to-day? Let me have your boots. Why will you do it? Why will you do it?" He chafed her stockinged feet.
She leant forward to touch his face. "Alec, I'm sorry we weren't here when you came home. My heart was here."
"No, no!"
"Part of it, then."
"As much as that? I was thinking you'd be in the porch, with the light from the kitchen creeping round the passage corner; and there was Janet on the horse-block, like a great black bird. Couldn't you have let him run by himself for this one day?"
"I daren't." She shivered.
"If you did it once he'd stop."
"No, it's like a disease. It's inherited, Alexander."
"Ay, that's his excuse. It gives him the kind of pleasure a child gets when it's ill." He thought it was the first time he had heard her sigh.
"You'll have to be patient with us, Alec. And could you stir the fire up a bit? I'm cold, my son."
"Are you? Ah, you're killing yourself!" He felt her hands. They were of a clinging cold that frightened him. "I'll have a blaze in a minute," he said; but as he would have risen he felt her limp arms round his neck and her cheek against his.
"Such miles, and miles, and miles," she sobbed; "such miles and miles! And to have you angry at the end of it! You mustn't be angry, Alec."
"I'm not; I'm not."
"You must help me."
"I want to." His own voice was as strange in his ears as her appeal. "I shan't leave you again. I'm going to stay with you."
She started back from him and sat straight in the chair.
"No! How can you? I'll have no idle son." She wiped her eyes and smoothed back her hair. "Let me see to the fire," she said briskly. "What do you mean, Alexander?"
"When did you eat last?"
"I don't know. I won't have you doing things out of pity. I don't need pity, or you, or anyone. I was tired to-night; and yes, perhaps I do need some food. Alec, you're not going to live here, buried."
"Will you have your milk hot or cold?" he said. "And here's a rice-pudding."
"You've never known me behave like that before. I'm getting old, but, still, I'm strong—very strong."
"Or would you rather have some meat? The pudding will be better at this time of night."
"You must forget it, Alexander. It seems as if I was complaining—unhappy. There's no woman happier than I am—and have always been. Remember that. But the sight of you, and being tired, and cold, and hungry——"
"I won't listen till you've had your supper," he said, and filled a pipe.
She ate quickly under the whip of her thoughts.
"If anyone but you had seen me just now——"
"But no one did. And I've forgotten it, very nearly." He raised that droll left eyebrow, and she smiled at him.
"A night's rest is a very good thing for a memory that's too thorough," she said.
"I expect to find it so."
"Then, Alexander, what did you mean by saying that? It's not fair to take advantage of a woman's crying, and the only time you've ever seen her do it—or shall."
"I shall remember again if you're not careful. I'd decided before I saw you. Read that."
She read, and handed back the letter. "You'd never dream of it," she said.
"Why not?" Her indignation was the mirror that reflected his own late despair, seen now as a small and foolish thing; and as he gathered the thoughts which were to silence his mother's protests, the ideal came floating back to him, with pinions spread, so near and beautiful that he almost touched it.
"You with your degree! You could go anywhere."
"I don't know. I'm not a social success. I've lived these four years in fear of being called one of Nature's gentlemen."
"Alexander, I'm not a worldly woman, but to go to that little place would be wasting you. Why, you're brilliant! And anybody would do to teach those lumps of boys. I could do it myself."
"I was one of them once. Oh, Mother!" he stood up and let out the passion of his past restraint and the hopes he wanted to keep uppermost. "Oh, Mother, does it matter whom I teach? It's not the learning I'll get into their thick heads—there'll be little enough of that; it's the men I want to make of them, whether they belong to the tinkers, and tailors, and the rest, or to the cabinet ministers! Do you think that God has different values for different folks?"
"Well, I'm not in His counsels, but from the way He makes some of them, you'd think He had a grudge against them. But you were made whole, Alexander, and you've got to do something great with yourself."
"And isn't it a grand thing to think you're going to fashion men?"
"I'm sure you'll enjoy the feeling," she said drily; "but I doubt if you'll do much." She saw the familiar tightening of his lips.
"I'm going to try, anyway," he said.
"Your father won't be pleased."
"That's the last thing I'd expect."
"It's a waste. What did you go to Oxford for? It's a waste of time, and money, and talent."
"It shan't be, Mother."
"Well, I suppose you'll please yourself; but I won't have you thinking you've done this for my sake."
"I'm doing it for its own," he said, and spoke the truth, for in opposing his design, Clara had shown him all its beauty.
A year later, as he strode upward amid high-growing bracken, on that Saturday in June, he saw the same beauty, and it was undimmed, untarnished by labour and disappointment. The joy of knowing had been Alexander's all his life, and he had suffered sincerely at the discovery that most boys were dull to its delight, and spent their energies in escaping it. He had lived through some haggard months in trying to lure them with careful morsels, but he had ended by administering learning like medicine and under no disguise. But if here he felt himself cheated, there still lived and grew in him the early belief that in all he did and was he would be helping to fashion men, and, as he stood to give a lesson, he knew that the character of Alexander Rutherford was of more importance to these indifferent listeners than the words of Virgil. There was a cause for humility, and an inspiration, and if, in that first year, Alexander watched his soul and his thoughts overmuch, it was but the fault of his earnestness and his youth, and, outside his work, he was not given to self-analysis, that frequent offspring of self-pity. He was not sorry for himself: the brooding time of his boyhood was past, and now, even when anxiety had its claws in him, and he hurried home from school in fear of what he should find, he was conscious of an underflow of happiness as ceaseless as the streams he loved, whose voices were always with him as he followed the track his own feet had made. The sound came in changing volume through the curtain of the mist as though, behind that grey wrapping, doors were opened and then shut. On these days of dripping quiet, the water cried, but there were others when it chuckled between its babbling sentences, or roared in its fury to reach the sea.
The thin figure of trouble might walk with Alexander and lie beside him when he slept, but it could not rob him of content. Roused in the night by the opening of a door and stealthy feet on the stairs, he would pull on his clothes and follow his father into the darkness, and hardly regret his bed when the freshness of falling rain met his cheek, or the night smell of flowers assailed him; or, when he waited in the kitchen while the coals slipped in the fireplace and lost their red, and he strained his ears for a voice or a footstep, they were comforted by the singing of the larches. At those times, when he could not read, he made a comrade of Theresa, who looked down from the mantelpiece. A new picture of her stood there, with her hair upturned, and a smile that had no tiresome permanence: it came and went, he thought, according to her mood or his, and always the eyes looked at him with friendship. He would nod to her as he filled his pipe, and be glad of her companionship. He spoke to her sometimes, but his thoughts never went to Radstowe and made her solid. That would have been to spoil his vague conception of a girl who gave all he wanted and asked for nothing, who was there when he desired her and absent when he chose, who was no more and no less real than he would have her be; and when Edward Webb wrote of his Theresa, it was of another than this pictured girl that Alexander thought: it was of the spoiled child of a fond father, fixed by him in a false pose of genius, and unrelated to the sexless being who looked and smiled at him on lonely nights, and was as fine, and free, and formless as the wind.
Alexander walked far that day, and came back with the stars. His steps were loud on the stony path, and through the soft and palpable darkness he heard the stirring of the creatures in the henhouse and the dog's welcoming bark.
There was peace in the kitchen. His father and mother sat close together before the small wood fire, and the lamp, lighting the book from which he read to her, strengthened the colour of her hair. The murmuring voice stopped as Alexander entered, and the book was closed. He felt intrusive, out of season, like one who has come upon lovers unawares.
"There's a letter for you," said Clara, and rose to put food on the table. "Is it from Edward Webb?"
"Yes."
It was not the usual bulky package: the envelope held no verse for Alexander's criticism, but a thin sheet of paper, hardly covered. He read the letter, walked into the yard, and back again.
"His wife's dead," he said.
"Oh, Alexander! Oh, poor soul!" Clara stood in the middle of the room, seeing the desolation of that man without a mate. "What will he do?" She set the plates down gently. "There'll be nobody to take care of him," she said.
"We could ask him to come here."
"We could."
"I'll write to him."
"There's no post till Monday."
"Time enough."
"Let him be, let him be!" Rutherford said. "He's a poor little stick of a man, and he's here too often. Why can I never have the house to myself?"
"It's a long time since he has been here, Jim." She had one of his hands in hers. "Ask him, Alexander. And tell him to bring that girl of his, if he will."
"Need we have the girl?"
"He'll be happier with her."
Her glance went to the mantelpiece, and Alexander's followed. He was near crying out, "But that's not the one he'll bring!" and then the thought flashed: "But she must be like that, or how did we ever get her picture?" The reality and the dream jostled each other, merged, and separated with all their outlines blurred. Discomfort was in his breast like a snake in grass.
"I'm against asking the girl," he said firmly.
James Rutherford lifted his head. "And I'm for it. You don't consult me—either of you. Isn't this my house? We'll have the girl; but aren't there two of them? Let's have them both. Two of them, aren't there, Clara? Well, then, Alexander—both." He stood before the fire and stroked his beard.
"They shall be asked. There is also an uncle."
"Oh, never mind him! Three's enough."
Alexander went away laughing, but he was uneasy until he had the letter in which Edward Webb accepted the invitation for himself, and refused it for both his daughters.