But she felt better. If it had done her good to see him, it had done her all the good in the world, she thought, to laugh at him.
What Justin thought, History does not say.
CHAPTER XXXIV
The spring and summer passed like one of those interminable nightmares whose horror is in the fact that it is ever about to be revealed, and never is revealed, to the dreamer. Mrs. Cloud and Laura opened their papers at breakfast, to read and shudder and murmur mechanically, “Their poor wives—God help them!” but the guilty sense of reprieve would be gone before the meal was ended. Fear was to be their portion rather than fact: and Mrs. Cloud, for one, broke under the burden. She spoke little, never of herself; but she grew visibly older, turning under Laura’s anxious eyes into a silent old woman, content to sit in the sun. But gradually Laura realized that she was aware of her own failing strength, that she husbanded it of set purpose, that her very quietude was deliberate. When it was necessary she had words and counsel.
She never missed writing to her son—quiet, cheerful letters in a firm hand. And the answers she would read aloud to Laura.
“A good boy, Laura—to write so often. Three nights without sleep again—but he writes!”
Laura had her secret marvel at it, at these letters, so like and so unlike Justin. Their frequency amazed her: their familiar matter-of-factness made her smile; but there were touches in them beyond her knowledge of him. He did not take his discomforts seriously. There was actually humour—a trifle crude, more than a trifle grim—but humour. Once he made fun of himself. And he was anxious about his mother—eloquent in each letter on the absurdity, nay, the sin, of worrying. And he wanted to know how she slept. Once he said, ‘Tell Laura to look after you!’ He said that! He trusted her, you see, in spite of everything. He trusted her.
She lived on that phrase for weeks.
And indeed she looked after Mrs. Cloud. She spent more and more of her time at the Priory, bringing her war-work with her, and gradually the control of the reduced household slipped into her hands. Mrs. Cloud’s small ailments increased in frequency, and it was natural that the driven doctor and the anxious maid should turn to Miss Laura rather than to the invalid. And there was Timothy. Timothy, rising five, with ideas of his own (Coral cropping up freakishly in the sound Cloud soil) Timothy, embarrassingly devoted, and a great deal too much for his grandmother, had become a problem: and until the ideal nurse who did not quarrel with Mary and did not want special attention had been discovered (but they were all at munitions) he was inevitably Laura’s business. She undertook, at any rate, to tire him out for a couple of hours every day, after which ‘the temporary,’ a hare-eyed child with adenoids, was supposed to be able to cope with him.