VI
SHE went back into the kitchen and sat down at the table from which the tea-things had been removed, and which now wore its evening glory of crimson cloth. The sight of the cloth reminded her that Kirkby had not yet come in for his meal, and she wondered what had become of him. But she forgot him again in the urge for settlement with herself which had suddenly seized her. Sinking herself in the problems which beset her, she lost all consciousness of time and place.
She sat heavily in her chair, with the heaviness of exhaustion, but with less of that air of lowered vitality which had frightened Mrs. Machell. A little force had returned to her joined hands, laid loosely along the table. Her face, lifted and looking straight before her, was the face of one who at the same time sits in judgment and awaits the decision of some tribunal.
She was still numb from the shock of Dolly’s communication, but she was bracing herself all the time. She was trying to make herself understand that she had still to decide about Canada, still to set the balance dipping one way or the other. She had thought the choice made long since, clinched long ago beyond all possible change. But the truth was that you could neither test nor be tested by a situation which had not as yet arisen. She saw now that the decision had never really been made at all; that it never could have been made until Kirkby had written the letter....
She had forgotten, too, that, while she waited, time had been at work, busily adding its make-weights on this side or on that. She had forgotten that people alter ... that places alter ... that she herself, even in the iron mould of her obsession, might possibly alter.... Behind her set face she was filled with fear that some still-unnoticed change might tip the scale against her.
So many ages seemed to have fled since the joy of the morning that she peered back at it with dim eyes as at some memory of childhood. Yet the steps by which she had come to this pass had been so swift that her brain swam at their mere remembrance. But they had only seemed swift because of the suddenness with which revelation after revelation had been sprung upon her. The truths lying behind those changes of thought and scene must have been growing in secret for many a long year.
It was not only the whinings of Cousin Jessie which had taken her courage from her, stealing it, hour by hour, as if it was her very life-blood that they drained. The dream itself had undermined it, puzzling and depressing her even while it glorified and exalted. She remembered the Questions, and shrank from the finger of warning which they so obviously had pointed. And she remembered that Ellen ... but she was still too bruised and shocked to dare to dwell upon Ellen.
And after the dream there had been other portents and signs, each of them, as it were, putting out an unseen arm in order to stay her. All day long she had been called to attention by the things about her, as well as by the sudden, unwished-for rising of old memories. Both within and without, as it were, she had been attacked, and before each attack had retreated a step further. All day long it had been brought home to her that she was exchanging the substance for the shadow, and that, in her insistence upon Canada, she was cutting herself off from the things which really mattered.
She said to herself angrily, as if accusing some outside power, that she had not known that places and houses could hold you against your will. She had tried to keep herself free, like a soldier awaiting his orders, and she had never once been free. Not only that, but it was she herself who had been forced to betray herself. Even while she was nursing and keeping warm her hatred of her surroundings, her heart was beginning to love them. Even while she had imagined herself to be facing steadily forward, she was already beginning to look back.
Dick Nelson had been right in saying that, no matter how you might fight against it, you were bound to settle, in the end. She had been angry about it, at the time, angry and contemptuous, but she saw what he meant now. The gardens had grown no wider for her as time went on, but they had grown deeper. She had taken root.... It seemed as if the place where you had suffered held you as surely in the end as the place where you had been content....
And in the same way people got hold of you, after a while ... even those you disliked, let alone people like Mrs. Grisedale and Mrs. Ellwood. In spite of yourself they became part of your life,—that life which you had not wanted, perhaps, which had either been thrust upon you, or which you had chosen by mistake, but which nevertheless you had steadily gone on living. You could not keep yourself away from people, no matter how you tried. Even if you shared nothing else with them, you shared the same countryside. Your life was marked by the milestones of their happenings, just as their lives were marked by yours. And when the time came to die, you lay down together to sleep in the same soil....
She was too old for Canada, she said to herself, accepting the fact calmly because as yet it had not come home to her. Not too old in body, perhaps, in spite of her age, but almost certainly in spirit. You could not fret and fight, year after year, as she had fretted and fought, without something wearing out in you. And even her body felt too old to-night for the land of which she had always thought as a place of vivid youth. She would feel better in the morning, of course,—better and more equal to things,—because you always did feel better in the morning. It was one of the lessons of life that you could face things in the morning which you could not face at night. But always the night came again.... In any case, something told her that to-day she had touched what was for her the highest point of living. After to-day she would begin definitely to grow old.
Safety was what you needed most when you were beginning to get on; not to be high adventurers and pioneers. Pioneers and adventurers weren’t safe,—couldn’t be, in the nature of things. Whatever happened, she and Kirkby would have certain dangers to face, even though they were not going actually into the wilds. Dangers from people and food, from climate and travel and strain.... There were dangers everywhere, of course,—even here; but long custom had taught them how to avoid them. You got used to most of your dangers, except for those unforeseen; and when you were used to your dangers they were no longer very dangerous.
Safety and peace and quiet, and a certain amount of ease; not hen-hulls and yelling children, such as Cousin Jessie had pictured. Jessie, of course, had been drawing the long bow, even if she had not been telling absolute untruths. But it would be different from England, nevertheless. Whatever Luke’s home might be like, it would not have the settled dignity of the home in which he had been reared. As for their own, which had yet to be built, it would have even less than Luke’s. It would have no dignity because it would have no memories and no past. It would be empty, and they would not have time to fill it. They would barely have grown used to it, and it to them, before death, with a crooked finger, would beckon them both out.
It was too late, she said to herself again, and felt through her calm the upstriking pang which the words inevitably evoke. It was true, as Dick said, that you could wait too long, so that, when the time came, and the chance offered, you were not able to take it. And the reason you were not able was because you had nothing left with which to meet it. The strength which you needed for new conditions had been squandered long ago, frittered away, day by day, in striving and rebellion.
The children thought it too late, too.... Her heart contracted as she remembered that, and she drew in her breath sharply. They had ceased to look for her long since,—if it was true what Jessie had told Dolly. It seemed a betrayal beyond pardon that they should not have gone on hoping as long as they could; at all events until she, who had lived on that hope, had finally resigned it. But she had never hinted at such a thing, not even in the latest of her letters. Perhaps they had laughed at the letters, she thought, shrinking; had mocked, even if ever so kindly, at the old mother who would not own herself defeated....
At least they had not mocked her when they wrote, nor had they ever implied that they had ceased to expect her. They had kept it up, just as she had kept it up, and with all the old happy anticipation. And for long enough now it had been just pretence ... that is, if you could believe Jessie. She felt suddenly that she hated letters and the things that they could do.... Jessie’s letters, which had brought about this present trouble ... the letters from the children, without which she might possibly have settled down long since....
She came at last to the thought of Ellen, and forced herself to meet it. It was Ellen who had hurt her most,—Ellen, who had been nearest to her, and had always understood her. Not only had she ceased to believe that she would come, but, with the plan for her own visit growing in her mind, she must also have ceased to hope for it. She had told a complete stranger that she was breaking her heart, longingly looking back to the home she had left so gladly. She had not told her mother that she was breaking her heart.... Mattie felt the desolation of one who, dedicated to some cause, finds that the comrade with whom he has travelled has secretly turned back.
She remembered Ellen’s packet now, and, getting up to look for it, returned with it resolutely to the table. She opened it slowly, fumbling with paper and string, and without any interest in what she was doing. Her mind, persistently turned inward upon its sorrow, refused to focus for more than a second upon any external object. All that she could think of at the moment was the hard fact of Ellen’s backsliding, and the breaking of the bond which had so long existed between them.
There was a photograph in the packet, as she had thought, and presently she had unwrapped it and had it lying before her. There was no accompanying letter that she could find; but there was nothing in that, as she had had one only yesterday. Taking the picture in her hands, she made a determined effort to fix her attention upon it.
After that first glance at it, however, she made as if to throw it down, for the woman in it was not Ellen. This was a middle-aged stranger, with traces of hard work in her face and hands, a little droop to her head and a slight stoop to her shoulders. The lips smiled, it was true, but behind the attempt at gaiety the face was tired. Even the clothes she wore had something a little strange about them to Mattie’s English eyes.
Yet for all that it was still Ellen.... Even as she looked she saw the likeness stand out, first, in the curve of the cheek, and then in the curve of the mouth. They were Ellen’s eyes, when she came to study them, though the laughing and dancing in them had sunk deeper. They were Ellen’s hands, too, which, even to this day, had kept their old childish habit of clutching at her gown.
Her heart swelled as she looked, both on her own account and on her daughter’s, thinking of the light, laughing thing that had gone out of the cottage, to return to her in this guise. She had known that she would look older, of course, and, as far as she could, had taught herself to expect it. But she could never have believed that the years would make so much difference. She remembered that Ellen was younger than Dolly,—Dolly, with her plump, straight, little figure and cheerful, unlined face,-and felt the tears that were in her heart rise up and fill her throat.
A horror of Canada seized her,—horror and fear of the land which had played such havoc with Ellen, and which had taken her away from her in more senses than she knew. For it was neither the added years nor the look of endurance which troubled her, after the first. People grew older in England, as well as anywhere else, and Ellen had never been very strong.... What frightened her was the unmistakable air of another country, turning her daughter into a stranger.
She sat for a long time trying to will the young Ellen back into the picture, and saw the youth come into it by degrees as the spring green comes upon the hedgerows. And presently, when she had her again, the longing to see her grew greater than she could bear. Silently and unknown to her, as she stared, the tears ran down her face....
She must see her, at all costs, she said to herself, in spite of Ellen’s lack of confidence and the bitterness of betrayal. It would be harder to go now, both because of her own clearer vision of things, and because of the fading impulse from Over There which had done so much to sustain her. The glamour had gone out of the enterprise for ever. But she could not afford to wait until Ellen should find both money and opportunity for her visit. At all costs, she must go to Canada.
But even as she made her decision she remembered the sea, and shrank from it in her mind as if from an actual presence. It had frightened her even in her morning freshness; in her evening weariness it became a stalking horror. Her passion for size and space, together with her power of visualisation, turned upon her now to her own undoing. The Atlantic rose up against her in its sullen depth and strength, in chain upon chain of endless, rolling mountains. Presently, as it seemed, the advancing terror was in the garden and in the house, and under the waves of her huge vision she saw herself sink and drown....
She came back at last to find herself twisted in her chair, with her eyes fixed upon some half-seen but definitely soothing object. As her mind cleared she found that she was looking through the open larder door, and out through the window beyond which vignetted the privet hedge. She could see the lawn, too, shadowy and mysterious with the evening, and the rosebush, slimmed and thinned to almost elfin proportions. Over the hedge-top there still lingered a segment of silvered, tranquil sky....
Her heart stopped pounding as she looked, and the choking terror which had sprung on her out of the ocean slowly loosed its grip. The peace of the garden reached her even in the house, making an exquisite stillness where the sea had roared and rolled. She sat drinking in the quiet, watching the sky fade and the lawn dim as veil after veil was laid upon them.... And then again she remembered Ellen.
She would never be able to get to Ellen if she could not face the sea, and she knew now that she could not face it. There was no deliverance, after all. All that she could do was to sit and wait for Ellen to come, and Ellen might never come.... She sprang to her feet, crying aloud that she was trapped, as Kirkby, down in the garden, was crying that he was trapped. She could neither go nor stay, she said to herself, get to Ellen nor remain here. Life, after all these years of bitterness and despair, could do nothing better for her than to get her into this trap....
With the supreme terror upon her of those who see themselves caught by life she ran to the door, and beheld the bowed figure of Kirkby, dusky and ghost-like in the distance. Leaving the house, as if it was her own self that she left, she went running and stumbling towards him across the gardens.