V
HE was playing chess on the afternoon before his departure. Tea was over and Mrs. Baldwin had gone out. Guy had noticed that she had been perhaps a little stiller than usual that day, when he had seen her, and that he had seen her little. The game did not go very well; they were neither of them keen on it; and when the old gentleman had won an easy victory, he leaned back in his chair, the board still on its little table between them, and said, “Poor Effie! She’s still in the church, or in the churchyard, I expect.”
Guy felt the shock of a great surprise. Strangely enough, though Mrs. Baldwin had spoken of her husband and of his death, and though his books were there, he did not associate him with Thatches, nor with the churchyard. And with the word, “churchyard,” a painful anxiety rose in him.
“Is it an anniversary?” he asked.
“Yes,” Mr. Haseltine nodded, sighing and rubbing his hand over his head. “September twenty-ninth. I’d forgotten myself till just a little while ago. Oliver died on this day. Her husband. Poor Effie!”
“They lived here?” Guy asked. He had imagined that it had been after her bereavement that she and her father had found and made a home of Thatches.
“Oh, yes. They lived here. All their married life,” said Mr. Haseltine. “Ten years or so. It was a great love-match. They were very happy. I never saw a happier couple—until the end.”
“Did anything part them?”
Mr. Haseltine had put his hands into his pockets and was gazing at the board as if with a painful concentration, and though he shook his head he answered, “It was the malady. Cancer, you know. Cancer of the face. Such a handsome fellow, too: beautiful, bright, smiling eyes; beautiful mouth. All gone. All disfigured, cruelly disfigured, and with horrible suffering.”
Guy felt his breath coming thickly. “Was it long?” he asked.
“Yes. Long. Eighteen months, I think. Morphia did little good at last. He couldn’t swallow; could hardly speak; begged to be killed and put out of his torment. She was with him in it all. She never left him, day or night; nor could he have borne it if she had. Nothing quieted him except her hand in his. But at the end,” said Mr. Haseltine, pushing away the table and rising, “at the end, it attacked his brain and then he raved at her. She couldn’t go into the room at the last.”
The old man, with step lagging, as if weighted, walked away to the window and stood looking out, while Guy, at the table, felt his heart turn to stone.
“Poor Effie!” Mr. Haseltine repeated after a little while. He came back into the room and moved up and down, pausing to look at the books and pictures. “She has never been the same since. For a long while we were afraid she couldn’t live. She hardly slept for months; and when she did sleep, she used to wake crying, crying, always for him. When she became stronger, she used to walk up and down those meadows, sometimes for hours at a time. Very gentle; no complaint; always ready to talk to people, to go on with things as best she could; but changed; completely changed. We speak very little of him; but when we do, it’s quite naturally. She goes to the church sometimes, and there are always flowers on his grave; but I don’t think she has any orthodox beliefs; I don’t know that she has any beliefs at all. Still, she seems helped. She is a very dear, unselfish woman; a dreamer, she was always a dreamer; but always meaning well; and she does good in her quiet way. And I think she likes this plan of having people come and stay and seeing after them; especially now that they are so often people who have had a bad time. Dear me, dear me!” Mr. Haseltine again shook his head, stationed again at the window and looking out. “You would hardly have recognized her had you seen her ten years ago. She had bright hair and a charming colour; and full of gaiety and mischief. You’d hardly believe it now.”
“I’m so sorry,” Guy heard himself saying. He remembered that those were the words Mrs. Baldwin had used to him about Ronnie.
“Yes, it’s very sad,” said Mr. Haseltine. “Life is certainly very difficult for some of us, and Effie has had her share. Somehow one doesn’t remember it when one is with her. I only recalled the day by chance.”
Guy was walking in the meadows when Mrs. Baldwin returned. He saw her in the garden, reading the letters that the evening post had brought, and his first impulse was to remove himself as speedily as might be from her sight, to cross the bridge and the farther meadow, and turn into the lane that led away from it. But then he saw, as he stood irresolute, that she was coming down to him, and he stood there, helpless, watching her approach in the soft radiance of the late afternoon. She wore one of the lavender-coloured dresses and the little knitted jacket. In her hand were the opened letters. Her face was tranquil. She was, of course, unaware of what had happened to him.
She joined him. “You are having your last look at the crocuses?”
It was their last look together. That, of course, was why she had come, full of care and of kindness.
“Yes. Yes. My last look for the year.” He heard that his voice was strange. And his heart seemed to lie like a cold hard block in his side.
“Aren’t you feeling well?” she asked.
He walked beside her in silence. What could he say? But how was it possible not to tell her?
They had turned towards the sunset and came now to the bridge. She was looking at him, with solicitude. He stopped before they crossed.
“I must say something to you,” broke from him. “I must. I can’t go away without your knowing—my shame—my unutterable remorse.”
She looked at him with the look he knew so well. Kindly, firmly, if with anxiety, she prepared to hear him thrust some new torment upon her.
“Shame? Remorse?” she murmured.
“About my poems. About my griefs. What I’ve said to you. What I’ve given you to bear. I thought I’d borne so much. I thought you unfeeling, without experience. I thought I’d been set apart—that all of us had been set apart, who suffered in the war. Stop me at once if you won’t hear it from me. But your father told me, just now, about your husband’s death.”
She became very pale. She looked away from him, but she said nothing.
“That’s all,” said Guy after a long silence. He saw that there was nothing more to tell her. She had understood.
“Let us walk up and down,” said Mrs. Baldwin.
They crossed the bridge. He saw the stream sliding brightly below them between the old, black planks. In the farther meadows the crocuses grew more thickly and opened widely their pale purple chalices.
“We have all suffered,” said Mrs. Baldwin. “You mustn’t have remorse or shame. Nothing is harmed between us.”
The horrible stricture around his heart relaxed, and as they went very slowly up and down he felt his throat tighten and tears rising, rising to his eyes. He could not keep them back. He wasn’t really quite strong enough for this. They fell and fell, and from time to time he put up his hand to brush them away.
“We have all suffered,” Mrs. Baldwin repeated gently.
“Some, more! some, more!” he said brokenly. “Some, most of all!”
They came back to the bridge, but though they crossed over, they did not pass out through the high gate that barred the other end. The gate was closed, and Guy stopped at it and leaned on it and put his face on his hands. Mrs. Baldwin stood at the gatepost beside him, her hand holding it and her head leaned against her hand.
“He would have liked you,” she said. “He was so interested in young men, young poets. He was not old himself; and he wrote, too, did you know? All those books in the living-room are his. He used to work there. I will give you his two books if you care to have them. They were thought very good; I think you will like them.—It was because of the crocuses we came here,” she went on. “We found them one September, just like this, and the three little ruined cottages, and we knew at once that we must live here. He so loved them. When he was very ill—but before the very end when nothing could come to him any longer, when he was quite shut away—he used to lie at the window and look out at them—that big window above the living-room.”
Divinely she was helping him. It was as if, taking him by the hand, she led him again away from his darkness and into her own light.
Yes, brokenly it came to him, it was there, secure; how won, he knew not. Through her he had found it; but that was because her feet had passed before him up the calvary. She had gone through everything; and she knew everything.
And, to his new hearing, something of the infinite weariness of that ascent was in her voice when she next spoke, although it was a voice as peaceful as the evening air around them. “Are they not beautiful?” she said.
He raised his head and looked at the flowers through his tears. They had never been so beautiful. “They make me think of you,” he told her.
“Do they?” Mrs. Baldwin still leaned her head against her hand, still looked out over the meadows. “But there are so many of them,” she said. “So many. That is what I feel first of all about them. I could not think of them as like one person. Multitudes. Multitudes.—And so silent! They make me think always of the souls of the happy dead.”
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS
U. S. A.
| Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: |
| embody the spendour=> embody the splendour {pg 105} |
| in spite of Florre’s good cheer=> in spite of Florrie’s good cheer {pg 136} |
