2
On the next evening, about five o'clock, Olva went to the house in Rocket Road. He went through a world that, in its frosty stillness, held beauty in its hands like a china cup, so fragile in its colours, so gentle in its outline, with a moon, round and of a creamy white, with a sky faintly red, and stiff trees, black and sharp.
Cambridge came to Olva then as a very lovely thing. The Cambridge life was a lovely thing with its kindness, its simplicity, its optimism. He was penetrated too with a great sadness because he knew that life of that kind was gone, once and for ever, from him; whatever came to him now it could never again be that peace; the long houses flung black shadows across the white road and God kept him company. . . .
Miss Margaret Craven had not yet come in, but would Mr. Dune, perhaps, go up and see Mrs. Craven? The old woman's teeth chattered in the cold little hall. "We are dead, all of us dead here," the skins on the walls seemed to say; "and you'll be dead soon . . . oh! yes, you will."
Olva went up to Mrs. Craven. The windows of her room were tightly closed and a great fire was blazing; before this she lay stretched out on a sofa of faded green—her black dress, her motionless white hands, her pale face, her moving eyes.
She had beside her to-day a little plate of dry biscuits, and, now and again, her hand would move across her black dress and break one of these with a sharp sound, and then her hand would fall back again.
"I am very glad to see you. Draw your chair to the fire. It is a chill day, but fine, I believe."
She regarded him gravely.
"It is not much of life that I can watch from this room, Mr. Dune. It is good of you to come and see me . . . there must be many other things for you to do."
He came at once to the point.
"I want your permission to ask your daughter to marry me, Mrs. Craven."
There was a long silence between them. He seemed, in his inner consciousness, to be carrying on a dialogue.
"You see," he said to the Shadow, "I have forestalled you. I shall ask Margaret Craven this evening to marry me. You cannot prevent that . . . you cannot."
And a voice answered: "All things betray Thee Who betrayest Me."
"You have known us a very short time, Mr. Dune." Mrs. Craven's voice came to him from a great distance.
He felt as though he were speaking to two persons. "Time has nothing to do with falling in love, Mrs. Craven."
He saw to his intense amazement that she was greatly moved. She, who had always seemed to him a mask, now was suddenly revealed as suffering, tortured, intensely human. Her thin white hands were pressed together.
"I am a lonely, unhappy woman, Mr. Dune. Margaret is now all that is left to me. Everything has been taken from me. Rupert—" Her voice was lost; very slowly tears rolled down her cheeks. She began again desperately. "Margaret is all that I have got. If I were left alone it would be too much for me. I could not endure the silence."
It was the more moving in that it followed such stern reserve. His own isolation, the curious sense that he had that they were, both of them, needing protection against the same power (it seemed to him that if he raised his eyes he would see, on the opposite wall, the shadow of that third Presence); this filled him with the tenderest pity, so that suddenly he bent down and kissed her hand.
She caught his with a fierce convulsive movement, and so they sat in silence whilst he felt the pulse of her hand beat through his body, and once a tear rolled from her cheek on to his wrist.
"You understand . . ." she said at last. "You understand. I have always seen that you know. . ." Then she whispered, "How did you know?"
"Know?" He was bewildered, but before she could speak again the door opened and Margaret Craven came in.
She moved with that restrained emotion that he had seen in her when he had first met her. She was some great force held in check, some fire that blazed but must be hidden from the world, and as she bent over her mother and kissed her the embrace had in it something of passionate protest; both women seemed to assert in it their right to quite another sort of life.
He saw that his moment with Mrs. Craven had passed. That fire, that humanity had gone from her and she lay back now on her sofa with the faint waxen lids closed upon her eyes, her hands thinly folded, almost a dead woman.
Margaret kissed her again—now softly and gently, and Olva went with her from the room.