"Haven't I said enough?"
"You needn't be afraid of hurting. I shall be glad of it."
She nodded comprehension. "I had a fight last night. I had to give you all my confidences or none, and I wanted to keep you because I like you, and because I'd entangled you with some of my dearest thoughts. But it was hard to tell you what I was going to tell you, and then you wouldn't listen, and you made me laugh, and I saw—oh, clearly—that you would never have understood, and I felt—oh, must I tell you?—I felt I'd saved something very precious from destruction. And so there was an end."
He was sitting on the dusty, wooden bench, staring before him.
"If only there weren't any people," she said for him. He started. "It's hateful for you, dear. All those good friends of yours, looking so sorrowful and being so curious. Oh, I am sorry! You can tell them anything you like about me, and nothing will be bad enough."
"Please don't, Theresa."
She began to count the cobwebs hanging from the roof.
"Why don't you have this place kept clean?"
"I do, in the summer."
Over and over again she counted them. She made calculations of the height of the walls, the length and breadth of the floor, while the sight of Morton sitting there, inert and miserable, roused her to an irritated, helpless pity.
"Do you think I could go home this morning, please?" she asked softly.
"I'll see about it."
"You won't want to tell Mrs. Morton, will you? I'll do it."
"Be kind to her, Theresa."
"My dear, she'll thank God for an escape."
"Ah, don't——"
"No. Good-bye."
He stood up. He seemed very tall and broken, resting one hand heavily on the little rustic table.
"Basil," she said thoughtfully, "did you come into my room last night?"
"Your room? Your bedroom?"
"Yes, long after I had left you?"
"No dear. Of course not! Why?"
"I had a queer feeling that someone was in the room."
He stumbled over his words. "I—I dreamt of you last night."
Her mouth drooped; he saw the quiver of her nostril. "Oh—don't dream of me any more," she said. "Good-bye."
"Good-bye, Theresa."
"May I kiss you? Stoop down. Lower, lower. How tall you are!" She kissed him on each cheek. "I always liked that little hollow place," she said, and left him with the sound of her sobbing breath for company.
George and Edward Webb, eating their hybrid meal at seven o'clock, were startled by the entrance of Theresa. Above her coat collar and below the veil banded across her forehead, her eyes were luminous and black-rimmed.
Edward Webb sprang up and, forgetting the restricting presence of his brother, exclaimed anxiously: "My dear, my dearest! what is the matter?"
"Nothing, dear. It's nice to see you."
"You look ill, Theresa."
"I've had a journey, and the train jolted so."
"Where's Basil?"
"In his home, I hope." She became flippant for the benefit of Uncle George. "I'd better tell you. I have resigned the situation. Do you think I can have some of your tea?"
"H'm, and now, I suppose, you'll be wanting another?"
"Will you find me one, Uncle George? If not, I've no doubt Mr. Smith will take me back."
Edward Webb still held Theresa's hand. "I think," he said with dignity, "we need not discuss the matter until Theresa has had some tea. You're cold, my dear."
"Desperately," she said.
He seated her by the fire, and brought her tea, and ordered Bessie to bring hot toast.
"Lots of it, please, Bessie," said Theresa.
"And more coal, and perhaps we'd better have Miss Grace."
"No, not Miss Grace until to-morrow."
"But, my dear, I'm afraid you're going to be ill. You're shivering."
"It's just a cold. I want to be alone with you to-night."
"Well, I'm going to finish my tea, anyhow," said Uncle George.
She nodded at him, laughing. He nodded back, in his grim way. This was how they always told each other of their friendship.
"And there was a time when I didn't like you!" she exclaimed involuntarily.
He ducked his head again. "I'm quite aware of that, my girl."
He went to his harmonium, and Bessie, with a thousand fancies in her romantic heart, retired to wash up the dishes.
"Now tell me," said Edward Webb.
"It was only because I didn't love him enough," she said, and burst into a foolish weakness of tears.
He was pacing behind her chair, and she heard him muttering: "Thank God! thank God! Are you crying, Theresa? You mustn't do that, my dear. You've come home. I've got you back again. You must be happy." He patted her clumsily on the shoulder, and she dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief. "It's good to have you back. We've missed you. Even George admitted that."
"Don't tell me such things," she said. "They've been the ruin of me. And you must let me be miserable for a little while! It's all I can do for Basil. I think I'll go to bed."
"Not yet. I told Bessie to light the fire."
"But what extravagance!"
"You don't come home every day," he said, and he spoke as though she had come on a far journey.
Afterwards, when she lay warm and comforted in bed, he came to see her. He made up the fire, he altered the opening of the window by an inch, he felt the heat of the hot-water bottle, and hovered on the threshold to find more to do.
"I wish I had a thermometer," he murmured.
"I'm glad I broke it. I refuse to have my temperature taken. I'm much too sleepy. Good-night, dear. I'm so comfortable."
"Good-night, my child," he said, and crept down the stairs in a great happiness of hope.
Very late, on a dark and moonless night in March, when the larches were stiff and silent under the frost that bound the hills, and the air was of an imprisoned stillness, Janet, sewing by lamplight, heard a dog's bark cut through the quiet, and then hurried footsteps that were Alec's.
Her fingers lost their steadiness for an instant, but as he opened the door she peered round the lamp and said sharply: "So you're here at last! You've not touched my doorstep for four weeks, and now you come at this time of night and expect a welcome! What made you think I would be up?"
"I didn't think," he said. "I just came."
He was within the circle of the lamplight, and she looked at him. He was frost-powdered from head to foot, from ruffled hair to heavy boots, and his eyes were dull in a face the whiter for the tan it had to conquer. She went on with her sewing:
"Where have you been?" she said.
"God knows."
"That'll be why I didn't go to bed," she said quietly.
"I've been walking since dark, nearly." He moved away into the gloom, and there he went back and forth, across the kitchen's width, with a restlessness like his father's.
"And I've had the devil for company."
"Well, you're here now," she said. The years had slipped away from her, and Alexander was the gloomy, passionate boy again, come to her for comfort, and she had a tremulous sensation of delight.
"Ay, but the devil's here, too."
"Had you not better tell me?" she said.
His language, also, was that of his youth. "Janet, d'you mind when I wanted to kill him? D'you mind me telling you to wish him over a cliff side? Well, you've got to pay for all your evil, and I'm paying for mine this day." His boots on the stone floor marked the hurry of his thoughts. "It comes back on you when you think you've strangled it. I hated him, I would have laughed to see him dead, and then I learnt a thing here and there, and I wouldn't hate him any more. Well, I couldn't hate him. He seemed too poor a thing. He'd just got to be cared for like a child. And things went well with me for a bit, and there's no doubt but what I was pleased with the state of my soul. It's a pity man was ever taught the name of it," he cried violently.
She sewed on. There was no sound but the rasp of her needle through the coarse stuff, for Alexander was standing still.
"I thought I'd killed him this afternoon," he said, and moved on again. He spoke through the noise of his walking. "I cannot get it off my mind," he said, "that there've been men hanged for less than I did to-day. It's something beyond me that's saved my neck. It was as good as murder. I know how men feel when they've killed. I'll never get my hands clean of it. And while I've been tramping over these white hills that should have spurned me, I've felt like a man hunted, with that grisly death behind him. And I didn't know the rage was in me. I thought it died ten years ago, but it came back like a flood, and blinded me, and felled him. God! I'm nothing but a savage. I that thought myself walking a little above the earth! Well," he said grimly, "I'm learning yet!"
"If you'll tell me——," she began. "But wait a bit. We'll have some broth. D'you know it's twelve o'clock? And you've school in the morning."
He frowned heavily and pushed his fingers through his hair.
"It smells good, and I'm hungry," he said.
They sat by the fire, each with a bowl of soup, and Janet watched him as he drank. There were lines in his face that had not come there in a day.
"These four weeks," she said, "I've waited for you every night. That's what women spend their time in doing. Your mother for James, and me for you. And you come running to us when you want us. And neither she nor I would have it different! But for all that, I'm not going to have you getting like your father, my man, running about the hills at night, and tumbling into a woman's lap!"
He flushed, and tried to cover shame with emphasis. "You'll have my blood to change, then. It's black, Janet—black."
"And that's like him, too! I'm this, and I'm that, and I'll never be anything else! Black blood! His isn't black—it's white! He's just a coward. He's never finished running away from himself, and crying out he cannot help it, and getting behind your mother's skirts. And all she should have done was to have skelped him well."
"I'm willing to take my skelping, if you'll cure me."
She laughed with a kind of girlishness that startled him.
"I've frightened you—that's enough. You're not much more like your father than I am, but when you've done wrong you've got to stand on the wrong and climb up."
"I'm trying to," he said. "If I talk like this to you it's because it's you, and there's only you that wants to hear. Only you and one other I'd tell it to."
Another listener might have heard her take a breath.
"Who's that?" she asked.
He faced her, troubled but unflinching. "You've seen her," he said, and his utterance of the words was like a song in praise of her.
"Yes," she said quietly, and covered her hands with her work.
He lay deeper in his chair, and watched the fire. His hands were thrust into his pockets, and his chin was dropped; his face had the lost look of one who has forgotten his bodily existence. He had forgotten Janet, but she, looking on him with a kind of hatred, loved every curve and line of him with a pure jealousy of passion. This was the son she had never had, yet felt she must have borne. She looked back, and believed she had held him naked to her breast. Yet it was with a sharp cruelty that she spoke. "Well, can you not get her?"
"No," he said, "not unless I stole her."
"You'd never be called thief. Could you not do it?" she tempted him, taking pleasure in her own pain.
"She's not a piece of goods," he said, and fell into a silence; but the muscles of his cheek were twitching, and at the sight of that her heart ached with a sickness of pity for him. She was all compassionate mother now, and she would have rent the world to get Theresa for him.
She broke the stillness with a laugh he did not like to hear.
"There's me," she said. "I'd get her for you." And her voice was venturesome, half afraid, ashamed of its own shame.
She saw the quick red leap to his eyes.
"Leave her alone!" he cried in anger. All the influences of his youth were strong on him. "But you'd never move her," he said, and his faith and his scorn stung her to a pang she hid from him.
"Eh, would I not?" she answered coolly. "This'll be why you've not been here, then?"
"I think it's why I nearly killed my father. It's easy blaming myself for nearly doing murder, but I see now that all these days I've been feeling murder towards that man she's going to marry. D'you know I've not seen the sky for weeks? I've been walking through a visible blackness. It's the truth I'm telling," he said simply. "And then to-day I came home, and found him drunk or mad, raving against my mother because she'd had a letter from old Webb, and one she'd read to him, as innocent and clean as Webb himself. And she stands there, smiling at him, stroking his hand, talking to him, as if he had a fever. If she'd had half a dozen children it would have been better for them both. Janet, it's pure self-indulgence in her, or was, and now it's just a habit. She's mothered him, and mothered him, because she has an endless power of giving, and he's gulped it all down, and will go on doing it till the end."
"But you didn't knock him down for that?"
"No; it was when he took Theresa's picture, and threw it on the fire, and said bad things about her. I saved it first, and then he went. I know he didn't mean it, I know he'd never think it—he's not that kind of beast—but he said it. And he was on the floor before I knew it, white, and with blood trickling. And I think my mother hated me that minute."
"She'll be wondering where you are."
"No; she'll be thinking of nothing in the world but him. She might have cared for half a dozen of us, but one seems to have been worse than useless!"
"That's because you gave help, instead of asking it."
He bent his lips into a wry smile. "But I feel I've been cheated, all the same. And I'm a nasty, evil-tempered brute, but I've had the grace to thank God for delivering Theresa from my hands."
"And the day may come when she reproaches Him for it. Is the lass blind or daft?"
"Now, Janet!"
"It's time you went to bed."
"I'm going. I think I'll have to tell old Webb he mustn't come here. I was going to stay with him this Easter, but—well, I've changed my mind! I'll have to let him know I can't leave home, and tell him not to come here. I hardly think it's safe for him. Heaven knows what he'll do next. Good-night."
"Good-night, Alec."
"I don't know what I'd do without you," he said awkwardly.
She waited until she could hear his footsteps no longer, and then she put out the light. In a little while the window-pane emerged from the darkness, square and grey, and on it the austere larches were chiselled blackly. She rocked herself in her seat. She saw Alexander's face, lined by a fierce craving and repression, and pitifully overlaid with patience. He seemed to have looked bitter disappointment in the eyes, and made a comrade of it. His own eyes were dulled that had been so bright. She saw the painful twitching of his cheeks, and how his hands, which he had thought were hidden, clenched themselves in his pockets. She felt a masterful indignation against Theresa, who could love another than this man, and a yearning over Alexander like a mother's over a hungry child whom she is powerless to help. But Janet was not powerless.
She sat immobile, and she had first a strange ecstasy of physical lightness, as though her mind had soared easily beyond her body, and was rejoicing in the freedom, and looked distantly on the numb husk it had left, and then, with a leap, it was back in its place again, grinding at all the memories it had stored, bringing them from the corners where she had covered them in the dark, forcing them into the light. And she saw them. They were put into her hands, and she turned them over and over, knowing them again, and the power she had resisted in her clean youth swooped on her like an evil, moulting bird, and under its spread and meagre wings she sat, rocking now in pitilessness, in place of pity, dead to everything but the one thing she meant to do.
The fire dropped in the grate, the flames that had illumined her clasped hands and played fitfully on the moving body lost their power to leap, and the coals were grey, when a dog outside howled at the night.
That sound of an inexpressible woe, challenging the peaceful hour of sleep, wrenched Janet from the dark place of her wandering. She started, crossed herself, and murmured words she did not understand. She stood up, shivering, and stretched out her hands. She passed them across her eyes.
"God keep my soul from sin!" she said aloud.
She went to the door, and let the frosty cold clean her of evil.
"He mustn't get her that way," she muttered as she lit her candle. "I was lost—lost. God guard me!" And again, unknowingly, she made the sign on breast and brow, for this was what her ancestors had done.
For the first time since her school days Theresa had to stay in bed.
"You need not think I'm overcome with grief," she said, when Grace peeped round the door. "And don't whisper, and don't be tenderly tactful. I'm in bed of an aching body, not a broken heart."
"And a sharp tongue, I should think. Let me look at it. Oh, that's all right."
"No, it isn't. I don't believe you know anything about it. It's that colour because I've been eating those pink lozenges that Uncle George keeps in his waistcoat pocket. There are knives sticking into me everywhere."
Grace seated herself on the bed, and eyed her with the judicial air befitting one who is a mother. "You've taken cold," she said soothingly.
"I have indeed. I'm surrounded by hot-water bottles, and I can't get warm. It seems to be a mistake to stand on the doorstep in one's nightgown."
"What on earth did you do that for?"
"I'm trying to find out. I don't know whether I was asleep or awake, but there I was. I must have been awake, for I can remember running down the stairs. I had to do it."
With a little crease between her brows Grace said easily: "You must have been over-tired."
"That's a comfortable solution. We'll leave it at that. Would you mind tucking the clothes into my back? No, don't touch my pillows. How nice you look! Like a pretty apple. Can you stay with me?"
"No, dear; I'm going to a lesson. Would you like Baby?"
"I don't think I feel equal to a baby. Come and see me on your way back. How's Phil?"
Grace's cheeks could still flush at the sound of his name.
"I think he is going to leave the theatre. He has so many pupils now, and it's torture to him to play the same trash night after night. We shall manage quite well, and he wants more time for composing."
"Oh, poor me! I shall have to hear the writhings of his genius all of every night. Tell him to come and see me. That will keep him quiet for a little while. Will you pull down the blind, and tell Bessie I'm going to sleep? She comes in every five minutes with something on a plate, and it grows a little monotonous."
"If you're not better to-night, I shall send for the doctor."
"Then I shall be better. I'm glad I'm at home again."
"So am I. I didn't like him, Terry."
"I like him very much."
"I mean, I didn't like him for you, and I feel—I feel as if you've escaped out of an ogre's castle!"
"Ah, if he had been more ogreish, I might have stayed for the fun of it. Let's thank God he is just a man."
The ministrations of an adoring family speedily cured Theresa without a doctor's help, and a few days after her return Neville appeared as emissary of Simon Smith.
"We want you to come back," he said.
"I don't think Mrs. Morton would consider it etiquette. Of course I'll come, Jack. When?"
He stroked his chin. "Well, we haven't given the present good person notice yet. She got the post through sheer force of character, for we both hated her at sight. There'll be a difficulty in turning her out. The old gentleman is afraid to do it, and I tell him it's not my business. It will come to writing her a note and enclosing a cheque during the Easter holidays."
"What's the matter with her?"
"Oh, she's horrid. I let her have the office to herself. The old gentleman is certainly a sportsman. He just gave a nod when I carried my things into his room. Ah well, trouble has drawn us more closely together!"
"Does she do her work properly?"
"I don't know! Oh yes, I suppose she does, in a mechanical kind of way. We don't let her go outside the house. You know, you have a spark of genius, Theresa, and you've spoilt us."
"Anybody could do what I did, if they used my methods."
"I don't believe it; but what are they?"
She shook her head. "I'm trying to forget them."
"Then you'll be no further use to us."
"Yes, I shall. I'm not so limited as that. Jack, why do you love your work?"
"I don't know. I can't help loving it."
"For its own sake?"
"I imagine so."
"That's what I'm going to do."
"Didn't you?"
"No."
"Why, then?"
"Chiefly for mine, but not altogether—not nearly altogether. I am not made of stone, but I have eyes that are turned inwards. A mental squint!"
"It never showed."
She laughed. "Oh, I'm an expert in my profession, but I'm very sick of it, so don't say nice things to me. Don't help me to think about myself."
He raised his brows in a comical dubiety. "This sounds a little morbid."
"And I want to think it's the beginning of health." She turned quietly to stand by the window, and as she looked out on the street, where spring was coming, he found a new dignity in her pose, one born of some dignity of the mind, and her thinness, the manner in which her hand hung by her side, something in the lift of her head, impressed him with a sense of pathos hitherto alien to his thoughts of her. Yet, when she faced him, she was vivid again, and sparkling. He noticed how the words seemed to come upon her lips before she spoke them.
"You'll tell me when you have evicted the lady?"
"Yes," he said mournfully. "It's quite likely she'll refuse to go quietly. We may have to invent a rich relative who dies and leaves her with a competency."
"A little courage would be cheaper."
"But that's what we haven't got."
"You begin to make me wonder if your compliments are more than sops."
"Compliments in their relation to you are barred as topics of conversation. Good-bye. Oh, I was to ask you if you would like any salary in advance."
"No, thank you. I'm a thrifty soul. I must have quite ten shillings."
"But, I say, Theresa——"
"My good man, you've no idea how long ten shillings can be made to last. I can assure you that my stockings are no rivals to your socks, and I don't have a new tie every week. I'm not going to have any money I haven't earned."
"Bless the child! It will be quite a month, you know, before we get rid of the Gorgon."
"I don't mind. I want a rest. I'm tired, Jack."
He drew a step nearer, and looked kindly down at her.
"Theresa, I'm rather worried about you. Have you some disease lurking?"
"No; but I've been in such a hurry all my life, and done so little. I have a weary spirit. I wish I could go riding on the clouds for a week of these March winds. I should look down and see the earth so small, and people of my size not visible at all, and the heavens so infinite."
"But if you know all that——"
"Knowing is not enough," she said. "That's one of the easy things, I find. It's feeling I have to cultivate."
He nodded curtly. "You're quite right. I do believe you're growing up. Good-bye, my dear."
The weariness she confessed to was in her face, the taste of humiliation was in her mouth, but hope was in her heart, like a low sound of singing. She would not listen to it frankly, but it murmured there like the noise of constant water, hardly acknowledged, yet filling life with meaning. It sang through her dreams at night and mingled with the talking of the dark lake's water, for she was restored to her place under the mountain, and now, while she waited, she had no doubt of whose footfall she expected, whose hand she wished to grasp, and, when the morning came, flashing truth on her receptive mind, she had to own her need of Alexander. But, indeed, she was glad to own it. She had gone past a state in which pride could be greater than her love and, as if to make amends for her disloyalty, she acclaimed him. It was not love she tried to disavow, but hope, and even there she failed.
He was coming at Easter, and Easter was not far off, yet she looked for a letter. If he knew the truth—and when had her father kept it from him?—he would surely write; but she did not hear from him, and the tiredness in her face overcame the secret joy. With a little twist of bitterness about her lips, she looked back at her girlhood and saw a fiercely independent Theresa stretching out hands to a future made glorious only by her own powers, subject only to her own genius, and here was Theresa, grown a woman, wearing out her strength with longing, conscious that her whole life had been bound by human beings, that she had no genius but that of drawing people to her and giving them of herself. There was to be no widespread fame for her, but there might be happiness and growth; and Alexander was the soil in which she knew her roots could deepen, he was the sun and the rain, yet he denied her everything. Oh, why did he not write? she cried within herself. Since the coming of that one letter he had sent her, filled with the breath of the hills and his own being, she had believed in Alexander's love; yet he was silent, though he must know her to be free. Did he scorn her fickleness, or had he changed? She tortured herself with questions, then cast them from her and stilled herself, glad to give love without reward.
"You are not grieving, not regretting?" her father asked her one night.
It was a few days before Easter, the time which was to bring Alexander, yet the marks of trouble were fretted under her eyes and hollowed in the shadowy places of her cheeks, for hope and despair and dread were battling for her heart.
"Yes, I'm regretting many things. No, I don't want Basil back, but I want my—my wholeness back. I had no right to give him anything, poor soul! and I feel there are little bits of me strewed everywhere." She laughed. "It's not that I set so high a value on those little bits, but it doesn't seem quite fair on a possible other person!"
Without the usual hesitation of his emotions, he asked a direct question, looking her in the eyes. "Would you like some other person?" He seemed to hold his breath until he heard.
She coloured, but looked smiling back at him. "Of course I should. A satisfactory one. I'm human—and I want the human gifts. Look—I'm twenty-five, and I have done none of the things you wanted me to do. Have I? Have I?"
"My dear, you have been nearly all the world to me."
"But you wanted me to be more, and so did I. And I find I'm just an ordinary person, and I want—I want—oh, I may as well say it—I want love. To have it and to give it. I have been feeding on myself all these years, and I am so weary of the taste of me. It's as though I had grown old since New Year's Day. I wonder if I'm any wiser. I feel to-day as if you couldn't teach me anything, but to-morrow—oh, to-morrow, I may be young and brave again! It's strange," she went on thoughtfully, "I have had a very humdrum life, and yet I feel that I have lived through great adventures. It's quite an effort to convince myself of their unreality. I have been loved, and I have loved; I have had children, and seen them die. I've heard men shouting as they fight, and giving grunting, gasping breaths under the shriek of steel, and I have gone on long voyages and seen far countries. I know how they smell. Why is it? Why is it?"
He made no answer, and they both gazed in the fire, and, defying the habits of youth and age, it was Theresa who saw the scrolls of the past, and Edward Webb who looked towards the future.
"I want you to promise me something," he said at last.
"What is it?"
"You'll marry no one whom you do not love with your best self; you will try not to be the servant of your imagination. Teach it to serve you, Theresa."
"I'll promise that," she said.
"And, Theresa, while—while we are speaking of serious things, I want to tell you I made my will long ago, of course, and it is in the desk with the rest of my papers. Those are all yours. There are your mother's letters to me, mine to her, and all the letters you ever wrote to me, and Grace's, too. You will find I have been very methodical; everything is ticketed and dated; and there are all my poems, Theresa, with Alexander's criticisms, and his letters. You can do what you like with them."
She put her hand on his knee, and he saw how thin she was.
"Why are you telling me all this? I won't have you giving these instructions. It's what Mother did. You are not ill, are you? Don't have secrets from me.
"I am not ill, my dear. I am very well and happy. But there is never any knowing what may happen. The train might run off the lines when I go to the farm on Easter Saturday."
She took her hand away and held it. She would not let it shake.
"But," she said—and in the effort to steady her voice, it came loudly—"but what about Alexander?"
"He cannot come. I heard last night—only last night. And I—I have decided to go there instead."
"Why can't he come?" she asked, and she seemed to hear the thudding drop of her heart.
"He cannot leave his mother. He is a good son."
She was silent. Then, "I'm glad you're going," she said. "It will do you good."
"I have no doubt it will do me good." He gave a secret smile she did not see.
She waited for the request he had made so often, which she must refuse again, but it did not come. Was he tired of asking for a companionship she would not grant? Through the blackness of her disappointment she looked at him, wondering how often she had given him pain, and, as if in answer, he spoke, fidgeting with his hands.
"You mustn't think because you have not done all we hoped, you mustn't think yourself a failure. It is not given to many daughters to be what you have been to me. I want you to remember that—try to remember that."
"Do you think I could forget it?" she cried, in a voice that broke into harshness. "You put all your own goodness into me, and call it mine!"
She could not see for tears. She made a little fluttering movement with her hands and dropped her head against his shoulder. He slipped his arm about her waist, and so they sat, in an according silence.
On the Thursday before Good Friday, George Webb packed a small black bag and started off on a solitary holiday, and a few hours later Chesterfield Row was animated by the departure in a cab of Grace and the baby, Phil and the violin, sundry packages, and a puppy.
"Heaven knows how we'll get there," Grace said cheerfully to Theresa, from the depths of the musty cab. "We have to change three times, and this wretched animal always wants to eat people's feet, but I dare not leave him behind. He's as strong as a lion, and would be sure to kill something. And I thought he would be a sort of plaything for Baby!"
"I hope Phil's mother will appreciate him."
"That entirely depends on her affection for her boots. What's Phil doing? We shall lose the train."
"Tearing his hair. He can't find something. It's his umbrella. It's here, Phil, in the cab. What a family! And fancy troubling about an umbrella!"
"He never touches it except when he is going on a journey. Men——Oh, do get in, Phil."
"And don't tread on Grace's toes! Good-bye, good-bye!"
Theresa went indoors, laughing. These people were so perennially young and beautiful.
Early on Saturday morning it was Edward Webb's turn to go.
"Will you be very lonely with all of us gone?" he asked.
"No. There's Bessie; and I shall read your poems. May I?"
"Of course, my dear, of course. They are all yours. I hope you won't think the less of me for them."
"I can't think any more, dear, if they are the most marvellous ever written. You are not eating any breakfast."
"I have had some coffee."
"I shan't let you go unless you eat a lot."
"I'll try, my dear, but before a journey, and so early in the morning——"
"That's dyspepsia, worthy of Uncle George!" She took him by the chin and turned his face to the light. "You don't look well. Didn't you sleep?"
"Oh yes, yes." He ate hastily, guiltily, and she was not deceived, but she did not know the reason for his sleeplessness, nor that he had sat long by her bed that night, watching her quiet features and the shades of dreams passing across her face.
He held her in farewell as though he could not let her go; he said good-bye, and kissed her on each cheek, and hurried into the street, but only to come back again and look dumbly in her face, while she looked into his.
"You'll see the hills to-night," she said, "and hear all those sounds of water, and the sheep crying, and the little lambs. Will you think of me? I shall be thinking of you."
"Will you, my child? Will you, Theresa? Ah! I'm glad of that."
"I don't think you understand," she said, "how much I like you. And I like the hills. When you see them, will you wave your hand to each one and tell them you are doing it for me? And will you look at all the other things and give them messages?"
He nodded. His lips were twitching, and there was a long ridge of pain across his brow.
She brought back her thoughts to him. "Dear, do you think you ought to go? You don't look well. Do you want to go?"
"I always want to go, my child. It's only leaving you I do not like."
"But you'll soon come back to me, and if you can wait just a minute longer I'll get my hat and come to the station to take care of you."
"No, Theresa—no, my darling," he said firmly. "I want to say good-bye to you here, not in that dark station, where I cannot see you."
She stood on the pavement with the spring wind ruffling her hair and the spring sunshine delighting in its ruddy gold and, standing very straight and proud, she waved her hand to him as his small bent figure turned the corner. He was the message she sent to Alexander, and he carried no lesser treasure than her heart.
That night, when she and Bessie had supped together in the kitchen, Theresa went upstairs to her father's room, and, sitting before his desk, unlocked the drawers. She wanted Alexander's letters and finding them, neatly arranged in order of their dates, she read them one by one. The correspondence had not been heavy, but it had lasted for nearly fifteen years, and time was swallowed as she sat there.
Her hand was on the last letter when Bessie knocked at the door.
"Miss Terry, it's half-past eleven. You ought to be in bed. I've locked up and put out all the lights, so just drink this milk and go."
"Yes, yes, Bessie, in a minute. How you do fuss!"
"The master said I was to see to you."
"I'm going to read this letter. Then I'll go."
She read it twice, and looked up with so dazed and wild a look that Bessie cried aloud in wonder.
"What is it, Miss Theresa? Are you ill?"
"No." Her hand went to her forehead. "I'm just thinking. Wait a bit. There's rather a lot to think about. Don't talk to me."
Memories and half-memories rushed and whirled about her. She saw her father's pallid face and felt his kisses. She remembered his silences as clearly as his words, and to all she fitted meanings, and fitted them again. She was afraid, yet the very immensity of her suspicion was its best derision, and so the wheels of her mind turned and clanked until the room went round with them, and meanwhile she sat very still, resting her head on her hands.
"Is it all right, Miss Terry?"
"Yes, all right, Bessie."
"Then good-night, my dear."
"Good-night."
The door was closed; she heard Bessie tramp higher up the stairs, and she rose stealthily to her feet. She was in that state of fear when to breathe is to court danger, and noiselessly she turned and took the time-table from its shelf. The leaping of her heart seemed to confuse her sight, but soon she had made sense of the narrow print and turned down the page.
She locked the desk and put out the gas, and crossed the dark landing to her dark room. Standing before her window, with the twinkling dock lights to comfort her, she was able to believe herself fanciful and absurd. Yet he had been told danger lay in wait for him among the hills, and he had gone without asking for her company, and he had gone strangely, and those letters she had read so eagerly seemed to have been given to her with his dying breath.
But she would not think it. She refused the horror of her thoughts, and, jumping into bed, she forced herself to sleep.
Easter morning came strong and sunny, with the sound of many bells that scattered fear relentlessly in their pealing joy, yet they had not done their ringing when the summons came. "Will you come at once?" it said, and it bore Alexander's name.
On that long journey she thought hardly at all of what lay before her. She tried to feel anxiety, and could not. Her mind was occupied with little things. She became interested in her fellow-travellers, and talked to them; they told her their family histories as surely as they looked at her, and sometimes, across their narratives, there dropped the cloud of her distress. It lived in her consciousness, vague and impenetrable, and she was aware of it as one is aware of thunder in the air. She was amazed at her own callousness. Something dreadful had happened; some horror was awaiting her among the quiet hills, but she hardly feared it, and, having splashed a few rough and lurid pictures on her brain, her imagination rested, and she was content to see how the trees were budding and the flowers sprinkling the fields.
But when she stood on the little windswept station and saw the sea, grey and cold in the evening light, and heard the wind whistling through the coarse grass growing on the sand, fear took her by the heart. For an instant she stood stock still, then, straightening herself in vindication of her courage, she approached the burly station-master.
"Where can I get a trap?" she said.
"I think that one outside will be for you."
She recognized Janet's little cart and horse, and the youth lolling against the wheel smiled sheepishly.
"Get in, miss."
"You drove me last time, didn't you?" He nodded, gave an inarticulate assent, and shook the reins.
The road was dim and the fields bordering it were like a darker sky where the primroses were stars, and slowly the other stars came out, while the cold green of the spring sky slipped, as at their bidding, into a matchless, immeasurable blue. The trees, and the hedges, and the houses lost their colours; all were but different shades of the dark except when a whitewashed building challenged the night. The glow of lighted lamps shone behind people's windows, dogs gave the travellers greeting, and voices and the clinking of pots came through the opened doors. The vision of a red-frocked child standing in a doorway flamed like a beacon in Theresa's memory.
And slowly they drew away from habitations: the road was no longer enclosed by hedges; the land stretched black and free on either hand, and with the turn of the road they were beside the lake. It glistened, and its ripples stirred the reeds, and with every fiercer gust of wind its shining surface was troubled. The precipice on its farther shore was one great shadow streaked with the white of late-lying snow, and there was the sound of many little streams draining the moorland and trickling below the road to join the lake. The road, growing faint and thin, was threatened afar off by the spreading shoulders of the hills.
Theresa tightened her muscles until they ached. She had no lack of feeling now, and a dumb exaltation at every breath of air she breathed was tangled with her horror and her happiness. Her pulses refused to keep time with the terrible slow sameness of the horse's pace and they leapt until she thought her very frame was shaken. She may have shuddered, or he may have felt her quiver, for the boy offered her another rug.
"Here, miss," he said in his soft voice.
She thanked him. "We are not very far from the lake's head, are we?"
He was slow in answering, and his tones fell among the loose beating of the hoofs. "About a half a mile."
"It is a long way."
The hills were closing on them. The air seemed darker, and she could hear more water running to the lake—water wider and quicker than the little streams which had kept them company.
The cart rumbled across a little bridge, and left the lake, and, as they went carefully along the rutted lane, Theresa could look into the fields where lambs were sleeping. At their passing, a sheep cried out with a loud and bitter melancholy, voicing a dumb, bewildered world, and it was like waking from a long dream when the jolting ceased. The driver was speaking to someone in the road; she could not distinguish the words, and she sat passive, huddled in her coat and rugs, until the cart should move on again. It seemed impossible that it should have stopped; her body was still conscious of the movement, and she was swaying lightly.
The boy's unwrapping of the rugs aroused her. She heard the unseen person pass behind the cart, and saw a man's figure standing by the wheel.
"Is that you, Theresa?"
"Yes."
"I want you to get out here."
"Yes." She took his hand and stepped stiffly to the ground.
"Give me the bag, Jack. You can turn here, can't you? Good-night."
They stood together near the churchyard yews, and the stars lighted their faces. They did not speak. For Theresa, the world had fallen away, and nothing remained but this patch of earth on which she and Alexander stood. That isolation passed, the trees came back and the hills, and while he was still looking at her, she touched him lightly on the sleeve.
"Tell me."
"It's your father. My father—I told him not to come."
"I know. I didn't know until last night. I read your letter. Please will you tell me everything? I want to know at once if he is dead."
"Yes, he's dead."
"It's all right. I am not going to fall."
"My father shot him. Then himself. I—he was mad. It is my fault; but I didn't know how mad—and I warned him. They're both dead, two of them. I saw my father fall. And yours spoke to me as I passed. He said: 'Send for Theresa.'"
"I think I'd like to hold your hand. Thank you. Are you sure he's dead?"
"Quite sure. And he died happy. He was smiling. It seemed—it seemed as if it were what he had been wanting. It may be that the dead are always glad."
"When was it?"
"Last night. He was with my mother in the kitchen. I didn't know my father had a pistol, but then, I ought to have known. We've lived with it so long, it has seemed part of life. I didn't understand how bad he was. Theresa, my father's murdered yours."
"Yes, yes. Never mind." She held very tightly to his hand. "Never mind. He wouldn't like you to be sad. Oh"—her voice quavered on the stillness, and she dropped against him—"oh, Alexander, take care of me for a little while."
Her face was against the rough fabric of his sleeve. He loosed her hand and put his arm about her, holding her steadily, and so they stood beneath the yews.
Each stirred at the same moment, and, without a word, walked on. At the house end Alexander stopped and spoke quietly.
"Janet is with my mother. She is afraid to leave her. You are to have my room. Tread softly: she may be sleeping."
In the little front-room supper was spread, and a fire was burning. Alexander pushed her gently into a low wicker chair, and knelt to unlace her boots, and when he took them off he rubbed her feet.
"Was there no straw in the cart? I told him to have plenty. Let me push you nearer to the fire."
"Alexander, can't I go and see him?"
"When you have had some food. Here's Mrs. Spencer with the coffee. No, sit still. I'll serve you."
But for the small homely sounds of cup against saucer and knife on plate, Theresa sat, and Alexander moved between her and the table, in a silence that held no discomfort.
Suddenly she looked up, frowning. "I can't feel unhappy. I wish I could, but I seem to have come into the very home of peace! Are you unhappy?"
"It seems as if I've killed a friend," he said.
"No, no, not you." The light fluttered from her face. "I think, if you look back far enough, I did it."
"You!"
She turned to look into the fire, and from the stillness of the room she could tell how fiercely he was thinking, and though she, too, had much to think of, she found herself waiting on his thoughts.
But when he spoke it was to say with a quickness that, made him rough: "Would you like a message sent to Mr. Morton? I could send that lad early in the morning."
He saw the blank widening of her eyes. "No, thank you." The faculties of her mind rushed together, and cleared themselves, and even while she was thinking, "Shall I tell him?" she was saying calmly: "I am not going to marry Mr. Morton."
"Oh!" There was a certain foolishness in his tone. "I hadn't heard." The silence was now busy and thick with thoughts.
She went upstairs to make herself fit to look upon her dead, and, taking her lighted candle, she entered the room where he was lying. She had no fear of him. She went and turned back the sheet as though she only went to rouse him in the morning, and the familiarity of his striped flannel garment was like a mockery of death. How could he be dead when his thin hands protruded from the wristbands she had mended? But he was dead, for he neither opened his eyes nor smiled at her. She looked down, waiting.
"I'm here," she said aloud, but very low—"I'm here, Father."
But he was not there to answer her.
The lips which had smiled in dying had fallen stern, and the cheeks she kissed were of a bitter cold. She sank to her knees and laid her hands on his.
"Well, we loved each other, didn't we?" she said, and her swollen tears fell into the lips parted to speak to him. "We loved each other, didn't we?"
She knelt there, crying because he would not look at her, and, for the first time, had no kind word. It seemed impossible that she should go on living in a world without his voice, but she knew he had meant to silence it so that he might give her something else. And she was not, in truth, unhappy. She knew she was in the presence of a love infinitely greater than any death, enduring when even the signs of death had crumbled into dust and been gathered in to feed the eager body of earth, and by that love she was ennobled beyond grief.
She dried her tears, smoothed back the grey wisp of hair her breathing had disturbed, and went to the chair where Alexander had neatly laid her father's clothes. She thought there might be a letter for her there, but she found only the book of Shakespeare's sonnets which she had given him, and inside it the latest picture of herself and one of Nancy's youth.
She knelt by the widely opened window, and sensed the night. She thought his spirit must be out there among the hills he loved; that he saw her by the window, and could hear what she was telling him; knew what she was thinking, and felt the swamping pain of her regrets. She stretched her hands over the window-sill, forgetful of the figure on the bed, appealing only to the departed spirit companioning the stars.
"You need not have done it," she said, "if I hadn't been so proud. But I didn't tell you. Did you think you would never manage for us to meet? And all the time, all the time, I loved him. Oh, why did I not tell you? Forgive me, dear, forgive me. I was unfaithful to him and cruel to you, and now——But how could I reckon with anyone as good as you?" Her head drooped and rested on the woodwork, and she looked down the long avenue of people she had loved and hurt. She lifted her head and beat her hands upon the sill. "But I did love you, and you knew it—at least, I never failed in giving love."
A low tap came on the door, and she opened it to Alexander.
"Won't you come downstairs?"
"Yes, I'm coming now." She kissed her father. "Say good-night to him."
He, too, stooped and kissed him. "He was the first man that was ever kind to me."
Speaking seldom, they sat together in the parlour. They were both idle, but Alexander smoked, and now and then they would lift their eyes from the fire and look across the little space dividing them, and through the smoke wreaths Alexander's eyes would soften at the sight of Theresa's smiles. His memory was already stored with them. There was the frank one for friendship, the slow one for thought; the little, twisted, mocking one, the quick one that was an affirmation; and now this wavering one that came with a pale flood of colour, and would not be stilled, and stirred his heart as the lake water stirred the reeds.
Looking at his watch, he bade her to bed at last, and she rose with a strange pleasure in obedience.
"You won't be afraid?" he asked.
"No. Will you be very far away?"
"At the end of the passage in what we call the store-room. They've put a bed for me there. Theresa, you are not blaming me?"
"How could I?"
"Do you think he understood?"
"I know he did," she said firmly.
"Then why——"
Again there came the questioning and again her words outran the answer. "I'll tell you in the morning—in the sunlight, please."
"You know?" She nodded. "In the morning, then. Good-night."
He lighted her to her bedroom door but when she had shut it and heard him go down the stairs she wished the house were not quite so still, and with the wish she heard a low, shuddering moan, and then another. That was Clara Rutherford crying for her dead.
She undressed with fumbling, nervous fingers, and, stealing into bed, she covered her ears to shut out the dreadful quiet punctuated by that sound, yet she sat up again, compelled to listen while, with a regular insistence, the moaning invaded the night. A little later there came a stealthy, bumping sound along the passage, and she was ready to leap out and bolt her door, when Alexander's voice came low and clear.
"It's me, Theresa. I'm sleeping just outside your door."
"Oh, is it you?" she cried.
"You won't be lonely now?"
"Oh no, I won't be lonely."
"You must go to sleep."
But she did not try to do that. She lay awake for the joy of being near him.
Theresa had slept at last, but she had waked often out of dreadful dreams and lain in a sweat of terror in spite of Alexander's nearness, and so her mind had passed to picturing the manner of her father's death. She saw it as a confusion of noise, and smoke, and fallen bodies; she heard his last three piteous words, and felt strength fading from her as it must have dropped from him, and the stern beauty of death was lost in the welter she made of it.
She rose more wearied than she had gone to bed and had a white and hollow face for Janet and Alexander when she descended to the kitchen. She had gone down with no thought about herself, but when she looked at Alexander a trembling shyness took her.
Through the kitchen door the sun came strongly, and the smell of the larches was blown in. She hardly knew what she did as she stepped across the threshold and held her palms upwards to the clean air; whether she went for cleansing from the night or for refuge from Alexander, she did not know nor did she question; she knew only that for the first time, and in the house where her father and his were lying dead, Alexander's presence shook her like a wind. But she had always loved the wind and she had courage, and her shadowed eyes were steady when she sat opposite to him at table, with a sunbeam shining on his head and hers, joining them as by a bar.
They hardly spoke, and when the meal was over and Theresa had done what household tasks she could, she went out to the horse-block and sat there. Behind her there were violets growing in the little garden, and they sent their sweetness up to her for comfort, and around were the hills, assuring her of life's loveliness and truth.
The world was coloured with brilliant greens and blues, veiled by the passing winds; the earth smelt of dampness and of growth; every tree and bush was budding, and the streams were roaring with the energy of spring; the impulse of all living things was leaping towards the sun; the voices of wind, and water, and singing trees, and of the sheep bleating on the hills, were praising life and the life-giver, while upstairs her father's hands had stiffened in the fold of death. She tried to teach herself that he was dead, but to that lesson she was dull and deaf. She felt him near her in every brushing of the wind and every scratching sound of the rose branches on the porch, so that she could only shake her head and say he lived.
She looked up at the sound of footsteps, and saw Alexander in the lane.
"Will you come with me a little way," he said, "while it's still early? Soon there will be people I'll have to see, and things to do. We'll both be wanted, but now, while the world's so fresh and empty, can we be together?"
She slipped from the horse-block and stood beside him.
"Which way?" she said.
"To the Broad Beck, but not under the trees. I want the sun."
They followed the grassy track and struck across the new green of the bracken to the stream that rioted among the rocks, teasing itself into foam, lashing itself into waterfalls, or lying in still pools. By one of these, on a broad slab of stone, Theresa and Alexander halted. The sun struck on the water and on them; it gilded the purple of Theresa's gown until it was illuminated like a missal; it found the lurking red in Alexander's hair, it turned hers to flame, and to each one it showed the suffering of the other.
"Theresa," he said, "the sun is shining. You said you would tell me in the sunshine, but if you cannot I will wait."
"No, I must tell you, because I said so, and because you must not blame yourself." She held her hands behind her back, twisting them there, and she looked up at him, frowning a little, with a rare appeal in her unflinching eyes.
"He always wanted us to meet," she said. "I believe he did this so that we might meet."
"And we had met."
"But then, I did not tell him."
"Why did you not?"
"Because I knew how much he wanted it. Can you not see? Oh, why must I always speak the truth to you? But I do not care. It is the truth, and you must make what you can of it." She was flushed with the colour of pride, and pride had stilled her hands. "And even now I have not told you all the truth. There is no need to tell you this, but I choose to do so. It was not only because I saw what it was he wanted; it was because I could not speak of that one day we had together, when I knew what it was to have a friend and to forget myself. I wanted to keep that secret, like a treasure, and it is a secret that has killed him. And these are things I think I might have been forgiven for not telling you, but I tell you because that day made you my friend. And there should be no—no falseness between us."
He laughed, and caught suddenly at her hand, and let it go.
"I love the truth of you," he said. "Theresa, let me tell you now. There shall be no shadows between you and me, unless you put them there. The day on which you called me friend made me your lover. Theresa, can you love me back? I am not satisfied with serving. I will not say I am. I want all I have ever seen, or heard, or dreamt of you, and all I do not know, all you may grow to be. Last night, when I was lying outside your door, listening for the sound of you, I did not think about my mother; I did not think about my father or yours. I remembered how you had put your head against my arm, under the yews, and how you had smiled at me in the firelight, and I could not sleep for hoping, and I thought you must have heard me crying out to you; that perhaps the door would open, and I should see you, like a moonbeam, and you'd put your hand in mine. But the door kept shut——"
"Oh," she said on a long, low note, "do you think I did not want to open it? Were you awake, too? Oh, Alexander, we've wasted half a night! We shall never make it up. Here are my hands now." She put them shaking into his, then snatched them from him. "No," she said, and knelt beside the water. "Look, I'm washing them in water from the hills because I once lent them to someone else. I only lent them, Alexander, but I wasn't true. Oh, do you think they're clean?" She held them up, glistening with drops.
"I cannot see unless you give them to me."
With one swift movement she was on her feet and he had her hands.
"These are all the diamonds you'll ever get from me," he said.
She laughed, throwing back her head. "You know you wouldn't give them to me if you could."
"I should, I should. I'd give you all that man could give you."
"Ah! don't," she said soberly. "That's a silly kind of jealousy, but I like it."
"And I am jealous. Do you think I'll ever forgive him for having touched you, and put a ring on your finger, and set you on a horse, and promised himself to give you all the beauty he could buy? Do you think I don't want to outdo him a hundred times in those as in all other ways?"
"I did not think you were so simple," she said, smiling. "Oh, Alexander, I want to cry. I needed you. I needed someone strong to lift me up and understand those crying voices in me, and you have given me yourself! Oh, will you let me cry?"
He was smiling at her in a way she had not seen before, teasingly and with possession. "We'll have to get a place to sit comfortably in first," he said, so that they laughed together.
"Let us sit on this stone," she said. "I promise not to cry, because I've laughed instead, and the water seems to be making noises for me. Let me have your hand. Isn't it wonderful? There's no need to talk, but I want to do it. And there's nothing to explain. It's like being born and knowing all about it—coming into the world grown up. I don't like looking back into the dark."
She laid his hand against her eyes; he felt the twitching of her eyelids, and when she showed her face, he saw it puzzled, reminiscent.
"Alexander, something happened the night before I told Basil I wouldn't marry him. Were you thinking of me?"
He spoke in his queer, toneless voice. "Did I ever stop?"
She gave the laugh that no one else had heard, and clasped her hands round his. "Oh, but you are the man I wanted! I mean, thinking very specially. It was the tenth of March."
"What happened?"
"Someone woke me and drove me down the stairs into the night. Alexander, was it you?"
"It wasn't me. Would I have meddled? Do you remember how you said you must be free?"
"And you said I never could be, and it's true!"
"And was that all?"
"Yes, I went back to bed, but therewassomeone. What is it?" She felt how he had stiffened. "Your hand's not loving me. What is it?"
"It's Janet, the witch—the witch! It was that night I told her, and she threatened me with her tricks. Theresa, was it then you knew you didn't love that man? Could you not learn it for yourself?"
"I did, I did." He saw the swift lines of her throat as she raised her head. He knew how she would look when she was angered.
"I had your letter for a pillow. Before I slept I knew I couldn't marry him. I was only waiting to tell him in the morning, and I was yours that night. It happened—that strange thing happened, after I knew—after! How dare you think I didn't choose to do it!"
For a long time he looked at her. He had forgotten nothing of her face.
"It's not easy to believe you're all you are," he told her slowly.
She laughed again on her low note of joy.
"You always say the perfect thing. Here are my hands again. Oh, you poor soul, you can't be half as happy as I am, for you have never been engaged to someone you did not love. Or have you?"
"No. I wish you would not talk about that man. Theresa, I've got a bad, black temper. I ought not to let you marry me."
"And I have a bright blazing one. There will be thunder and lightning among these hills. Do you think I am afraid of your tempers?" Her lips and her eyelids drooped, her grasp tightened, and she drew closer to him. He felt her body tremble. "I'm afraid of nothing but your love," she said; and at the words he crushed her to him so that she felt the hard and hurried beating of his heart and the fury of his kisses on her hair.
"Oh, my heather flower," he said—"my heather flower!"
And the water babbled by, and a bird hung with spread wings like a canopy above them, and the sheep cried to their young, and the wind blew a strand of Theresa's hair across Alexander's face—a strand of quivering gold, smelling of sun, and wind, and earth.
He took a deep strong breath, and put her from him. "We must go back," he said.
She looked quickly in his face "You are not thinking we should not feel like this?"
"No, my heart, no."
"Because it's what he wanted us to feel. Oh, he knew. How could he know so well? I am not ashamed of being happy, though he's dead. And this day, and the sunshine, and all the beauty of the hills, are much more my father than the one that's—that's lying on the bed. I'm sorry for your sadness, but, except that, I haven't any of my own. Oh yes, I feel as if I have just been born, and the world is new, too, and life is beginning for you and me, and we are going to do things! But, Alexander, it isn't only mothers who die in bearing children." She checked a sob, dropping her head to her knees, and, looking past her, Alexander watched the shadows on the hills.
"To-morrow Grace will come, and Uncle George. They wouldn't understand if we looked happy, would they? Nobody would understand that death could be so beautiful." She rose and stood beside him. "Alexander, why don't you speak to me?"
He gave her the quick look she had loved to remember through the years. "Theresa, do you see what he has done? He's joined us with a seal we dare not break."
"Why should we want to break it?" she asked on a breath.
"Because we're frail and stupid, my beloved. Yes, you with your temper and your pride, and me with the evil in me like a weed. We've got to be more finely faithful than other folks. Do you think he had not seen that? He had a poet's soul. Common kindnesses and loyalty will not be memorial enough for him. We can give him nothing but the highest. Ah! you mustn't think I wouldn't want to give it to you, that you don't shine for me until I feel it's sacrilege to touch you, but though we may live all our lives in more worship of each other than we dream of yet, there'll be other things, Theresa. Hard work, and trouble, and weariness, and poverty, and they may breed anger, and hard words, and that unfaithfulness of the mind that's worse than any fleshly one. All these might come, even to lovers such as you and me; but what wouldhethink? If we feel him in the wind and among the hills where you and I are to live and work together, we'll live and work so that he need never suffer for us. That's what he's done for us, Theresa. He might have joined us in some other way, but not so surely, not so fast."
Her eyes were filled with awe and wonder for the man who had done this thing and the one who understood. "I had a dream of waiting for you among the hills," she said, "and now it has come true; but do you remember that dream of Janet's—the one about the birds, the little ones that grew to eagles? We've got to make that one come true as well. Oh, Alexander, shall we ever do it?"
He shook his head as he bent to kiss her. "No, most dear," he said.
She gave that laugh which was of happiness. Their glances met and rested in each other, and there was no shadow lying between their souls, and so they entered again into the house where Life had clothed itself in the quiet garments of Death.