She went off at last with unnecessary last words to Coral and Mrs. Cloud, and glanced back, as she went down the drive, at the friendly house with the lamplight streaming from its big bay windows and Justin’s shadow on the blind of his den, as if in leaving it she left behind her, safety.
The gate clashed at her heels.
The night was soft, very quiet, neither warm nor cold. There was no star in the sky and her only guide between the vague hedges was the dim earth-shine of the chalk road, stretching out ahead of her like the silvery track of a snail. She pulled her cloak about her, huddling into herself. Her body was warm, but the loneliness of the night had put out cold fingers and touched her throat. She could hear the little human sounds she made, of breath and movement, rippling out and being smothered in that ocean of silence.
Presently she descended into the deeper darkness of tree-thatched Wisdom Lane, where the banks were steep and a huge chestnut put a period to the run of the brambles. It was half circled by a seat that was unsightly enough in the daytime, littered with paper and orange-peel and the whirled siftings of the road—a wind’s dust-pan, a perch for the birds, an urchins’ parliament. But at night lovers sat there.
Laura, who had so often passed by with a smile or a shrug of cool wonder at the ways of ‘poor people,’ content to court in public, swerved suddenly off the path and into the road, slipping by the dark seat like a shadow. Yet she had, unwillingly, a glimpse of the couple that, since she could remember, always seemed the same, sitting as they always sat, clasped, motionless, the woman’s head on the man’s breast, the faces grey-white like the road beyond the shadows.
Laura, in that glance, half recognized their own maid, doubtfully, as a goodwife eyes a changeling. She knew—her common sense told her—that at ten o’clock Ellen would slip through a back door and appear five minutes later, capped and decent and respectful, with a tray and glasses in her hand, and no inexplicable glory on her common face. But at this moment, she, Laura, the mistress, was ignored: was not even seen. She knew that she might pass and repass a dozen times and they would not stir. She was inconsiderable, invisible, impalpable. She did not exist.
She went her way, humbly, filled with awe and wonder and intolerable envy. What was this transmuting force, this holy spirit that could draw a magic circle about a housemaid and a groom in which to sit out their hour in a public way, inviolate, divine?... What was it?... What did it mean?... What did it all mean?... And why should she, Laura, feel herself ignorant, shut out, and desperately lonely?... She was of all women fortunate.... She was alive.... She was engaged to Justin.... But this new thing—what was it?... What was it that he and she had not yet found—what gift of God that (as she saw with sudden clearness) they could in no wise find, save together?... Life and she herself and Justin had become, since the morning, mysterious and mutually inexplicable.... Why was she feeling so strangely?... Why had she to hurry past those enchanted yokels as one proved negligible, incomplete, a half creature?... Why was not Justin with her that she might carry herself as one justified, oblivious of the world as the world of her?...
She came out into the broad road again and again the silence of the wide fields surged in upon her, and her soul clung to her terrified, like a wrecked sailor clinging to a spar.
She should have asked Justin to come with her.... If she had asked he would have come.... It was only that it had not occurred to him.... The stubbornness that would ask nothing, that would accept nothing of him that was not spontaneous, was receiving its just reward....
It was such a silence, such a loneliness of soul—so achingly intensified by her consciousness of the two behind her in the shadows, that she felt it like a leaden cope pressing her down, crushing into shapelessness the pitiful resistance of her pride. If Justin had come to her then, she could have besieged him like any wanton for the dole of a kind look, of an arm about her shaken body.