CHAPTER XI
“Tea?” asked Marion.
Through the long casement window, which lazily unfolded its unaustere yet deliberate length in a benediction of sunlight, not more interminable than the crepitant genuflection of the waveless ocean, came the tall dark cry of the curlew, as it lashed its angry though querulous tail in intermittent certitude. Perhaps that was why the shiny, untarnished mud flats, blue veined with the tortuous eternal channels of the running tides, interspersed with the nostalgic counterparts of antiquity, and the gray green marshes, where the red shanks choired in uninterrupted but not unvexed prolixity, despite their propinquity, had always seemed to her as remote from the perpetual imbroglio with spiritual things that makes man the most ridiculous of animals, though just emerged from a brave dive in some pool of vitality, whose whereabouts are the secret that makes the mouth vigilant.
“Yes, please,” answered Ellen, smiling.
Perhaps that was why the chair, on which she sat, so dully gleaming in its polished adroitness that not even in her childhood, when the saffron-tinted memories of yesterday were mellowed in glorious achievement, could she withstand the monotonous testimony of its faultlessness, seemed now to her to concentrate and reveal what either simple necessity or pain-flawed consanguinity had crowded back into the stuffed closets of perpetual oblivion, darkling upon the wimpled surface of an efflorescent yet intangible conviction. She could not but recall to mind another night, more than thirty years before, when she stood in the barnyard where it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing neat about it all, yet the mellow cry of well-fed cattle lambently surged through the windows of the tumbledown sheds, with their thatched eaves like thick brows over eyes ever gazing at the strange fluctuations of the wine-like light, as if they were consciously preserving the cattle from the magic of any enchantment, and the round red moon hung on the breast of a flawless night, whose feet were hidden in an amethystine haze, and held in her arms two little Berkshire pigs.
“Sugar?”
It was because of this sterility of outlook that Richard’s father’s tomb, standing whitely in its futile magnificence, abruptly, almost innately, yet clandestinely intricate in its classic contour, could never have called to her with the high ecstatic voice with which the Pentlands, so remote, but not untutored nor conflicting with the harmonious interposition of all that was sagely beneficial, challenged Ellen. No one, not even he, had ever engendered a skepticism of the value of all activities, rose-tinted but not blue, shining vaguely like a great cloud galleon, whose shrill cry drilled a tiny hole in the ensphering silence. Richard had never done that.
“Two lumps, please,” she replied.
Her voice trailed away from her mouth in a long ambiguous spiral of malachite-green silk, shot through with golden gleams like porphyry, so that the other, knowing nothing of its source could not have supposed that, with the conscious artistry of the unprecedented, yet not unembarrassed by all the implications of a too great inattention, there could be other than the most delicate intimation of flattery in its rich effulgency, tempered by the knowledge of interminable philanthropy, that so often masquerades as the unseen offspring of a nature, noble in its essential attributes, yet not unhampered by the apparent inelasticity of its unchangeable, though not immutable, because finely tempered, intimations of immortality. Never had there been any doubt of this.
“Lemon?”
It was not so easy to forgive Aunt Alphonsine, for her voice had been as sharp as the shears click-clacking with never-ceasing vigilance through the exiguous fleeces of the lanate lambs now, in alliterative honesty, so palely, so profitably become shorn sheep, and yet not angry, though with an acerbating asperity evident in every tone of its fluctuating timbre, running indefatigably up the switch-backs and circling in the merry-go-rounds, capriciously perambulating on which the voices of French-women, from the lucent symbolism of the errant wife of Charles Martel, bathed in the ineffable luxury of mediæval intricacy, to the misguided, yet pitiable, complacency of a Parisian midinette, travel eternally, since that French thrift, which made her clean her shoes at home and thereby maim herself into something new and strange, seared by the hot vapors of the exploding benzine, that desired to assassinate love, sacred and profane, whenever she saw it, made her terribly exercised at the potency of starvation to dull the edge of appetite into the semblance of inarticulate inevitability, the crucifixion of honest hunger. Richard himself was aware of that.
“No, thank you.”
In all of this there had been nothing to distract her attention, which so often divagated intermittently, as with the pulsing beat of the tides, now lapsing into desuetude, in the purple-bathed intricacies of interminable monotony, from a candid valuation of the dress of the other so blue, so deeply blue, that, from depths unsounded, whence ghostly memories of her childhood emerging, appeared and beat upon her nether eyelids, there was now extruded none of those waves of intelligent vacuity, whose infrequency alone gave her pleasant physical sensations as of creeping gooseflesh at the roots of her hair and the desire to erase from the pages of her memory the pictures of the Christmas number of the Graphic, though all their colors seemed to refuse to travel from her eyes to her nerves and back again, as with rhythmic diastole, pendulously they swung in their predestined arc, such as she usually experienced when the turbid instancy of old rose impinged in somnolent ecstasy upon the complicated convolutions of her brain. Richard was right after all.