When the cook shut the door of the little room the house disappeared. The front rooms bathed in bright light and hot with the afternoon heat, the wide afterglow along the front, the vast open lid of the sky, were in another world.... Miriam pushed back the other half of the window and they sat down in a green twilight on the edge of the garden. If others had been there Mrs. Henderson would have remarked on the pleasantness of the situation and tried to respond to it and been dreadfully downcast at her failure and brave. Miriam held her breath as they settled themselves. No remark came. The secret was safe. When she lifted the cosy the little tea-pot shone silver-white in the strange light. A thick grey screen of sky must be there, above the trees, for the garden was an intensity of deep brilliance, deep bright green and calceolarias and geraniums and lobelias, shining in a brilliant gloom. It was not a seaside garden ... it was a garden ... all gardens. They took their meal quietly and slowly, speaking in low tones. The silent motionless brilliance was a guest at their feast. The meal-time, so terrible in the hopelessness of home, such an effort in the mocking glare of the boarding-house was a great adventure. Mrs. Henderson ate almost half as much as Miriam, serenely. Miriam felt that a new world might be opening.
6
“The storm has cleared the air wonderfully.”
“Yes; isn’t it a blessing.”
“Perhaps I shan’t want the beef-tea to-night.” Miriam hung up her dress in the cupboard, listening to the serene tone. The dreadful candle was flickering in the night-filled room, but mother was quietly making a supreme effort.
“I don’t expect you will”; she said casually from the cupboard, “it’s ready if you should want it. But you won’t want it.”
“It is jolly and fresh,” she said a moment later from the window, holding back the blind. Perhaps in a few days it would be the real jolly seaside and she would be young again, staying there alone with mother, just ridiculous and absurd and frantically happy, mother getting better and better, turning into the fat happy little thing she ought to be, and they would get to know people and mother would have to look after her and love her high spirits and admire and scold her and be shocked as she used to be. They might even bathe. It would be heavenly to be really at the seaside with just mother. They would be idiotic.
Mrs. Henderson lay very still as Miriam painted the acid above the unseen nerve centres and composed herself afterwards quietly without speaking. The air was fresh in the room. The fumes of the acid did not seem so dreadful to-night.
The Pawnbroker’s daughter was with them in the room, cheering them. The gay young man had found out somehow through her that “goodness and truth” were the heart of his life. She had not told him. It was he who had found it out. He had found the words and she did not want him to say them. But it was a new life for them both, a new life for him and happiness for her even if he did not come back, if she could forget the words.
Putting out the candle at her bedside suddenly and quietly with the match-box to avoid the dreadful puff that would tell her mother of night, Miriam lay down. The extinguished light splintered in the darkness before her eyes. The room seemed suddenly hot. Her limbs ached, her nerves blazed with fatigue. She had never felt this kind of tiredness before. She lay still in the darkness with open eyes. Mrs. Henderson was breathing quietly as if in a heavy sleep. She was not asleep but she was trying to sleep. Miriam lay watching the pawnbroker’s daughter in the little room at the back of the shop, in the shop, back again in the little room, coming and going. There was a shining on her face and on her hair. Miriam watched until she fell asleep.