And at that the excitement, the exultation slowly passed from the face of my beloved, for there was no room there for more than motherhood. Though the wind still bugled and trumpeted outside, she heard it no more; the wildness of the dancing waves, grey-headed, growing waves, passed by outside her.... The blossom ready to drop filled her heart with the tenderness of the infinite deep love of the mother that shall be.
She sat there on the floor at my feet, with her arms round my knees and her head pillowed there.
‘I have got to confess, too,’ she said, ‘though I am not ashamed of my confession. But don’t allow yourself to be hurt, Jack. Just hold on for a minute without being hurt, and you will find that you are not. Now I shall hide my face, and speak to you like that. I have known it quite a long time: before Legs died I knew it.’
Well, I had to hold on for a minute or two, and not be hurt. If you think it over, you, will agree it was rather a hard task that I had been set. On the other hand, about big things, about things that really matter, you must take my word for it that Helen is never wrong. But I had not been forbidden to ask a question.
‘Then why did you not tell me?’ I said.
Her head with the sunlit billows just stirred a moment, but she did not look up, but spoke with a hidden face.
‘Because through all these weeks, my darling, you have been struggling against some bitterness of soul. You have made light of it to me, but I had to be quite sure it had gone from you before I told you this. I know what it was—it was the doubts you talked about to me when we sat one night at the edge of dear Legs’ grave—when it was dug, but empty. And I had to be quite sure it had all passed from you before I told you this. I have not been sure till now, and—and I wanted you so much to guess. You nearly guessed, I felt, when we arranged this heavenly nursery.’
Then again there was silence, and I think I never knew till then how desperately difficult it is to be honest with oneself. It is so much easier to be honest with other people. At the first glance I told myself I had got over the bitterness and blindness of which she had spoken when we talked together over Legs’ grave, but gradually I became aware that I had not. Somewhere deep down, so that while the days passed it concealed itself from me, that bitterness had still been there. In this book, which has tried to be honest, you will, I dare say, find no trace of it since that night, but I had not probed deep enough. It had been there, and I think the days when we arranged the nursery finally expelled it. To-night, at least, I believed it was gone, and since Helen believed so, too, perhaps we are right about it. She, the witch, the diviner, had known me so much better than I had known myself all along.
All this took time, for the processes of honesty with me are slow. But there is no difficulty about the matter, perhaps, if the head you love best in all the world is pillowed on your knee. That is a stimulant, one must imagine. So at last I said:
‘Yes, it’s done.’