She was gone herself then, running across the gardens, jam-pot in hand, and Mattie waited until she had lost sight of her. Her lips had quivered a little at the warm pressure of Dolly’s cheek, but they did not quiver now. Her figure straightened itself slightly as she turned on her heel, and went back slowly, but with set purpose, into the darkening house.
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.