Rebecca West
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.