Hugh jumped out on to the road.
“Through pleasures and palaces though we may roam,” he remarked, “there’s no place like Chalkpits. I’m going to come and sit behind with you. How clean and empty it all is! Just think of the wood-dust and the smell and the crowd of Piccadilly at this hour! Yes, Dennison, you drive, please!”
Hugh stepped over the low door into the body of the car, and sat down by Edith, while the car gathered speed again. Soon they came to the top of the long incline that led without break down to their very gates, and the driver stopped the engines and in silence they slid down the empty, unhedged road, like some great bird dropping through the viewless slopes of air toward its nest. Every moment Edith’s content broadened and deepened; here in the gentler activities of the country, in long garden-hours, in the absence of crowds, in days spent quietly, and nights that did not begin with dawn, she felt that there would be no need of making those continuous efforts, which Hugh must never know to be efforts, and which had so tired her. They had tired her body and mind alike; the effort had been physically exhausting, but the mental force, the willpower to make them appear spontaneous, the natural expression of an abundant vitality had been even more tiring. And now the thought that they and all need of them was over, unloosened from her neck completely for the first time those fingers of nightmare which had touched her on that morning of gray dawn, and though but lightly pressed had always been there. Often indeed their touch had been scarcely perceptible, but she had known all those tiring weeks of London that had followed, that at any moment they might tighten to a strangling hold. She had fought and wrestled with them incessantly and successfully, in so far that she had not yielded an inch, and that Hugh had never so much as suspected that they were there. But now, when they had stopped at the top of the ridge, when home came in sight, and Hugh climbed in beside her, it seemed that the possession dropped off her, and that they left it behind on the road, a malignant little figure, silent, and still watching them as they bowled down the smooth incline, but unable to come further, exorcised by the sight of the home in which it had never yet shown its face. And as a bend in the road cut them off from the sight of the ridge where they seemed to have left it, she turned to Hugh with a sigh of utter content.
“Oh Hughie, what a home-coming!” she said. “I like to think that the trees are all decked out in their midsummer clothes to receive us, and the sun has been specially polished up to welcome us. Oh! and there’s the copse above which we climbed one morning, when I told you who Andrew Robb was. Do you remember?”
“No,” said Hugh gravely. “And there is the terrace where I told you something the next morning, and I can’t remember what that was, either.”
“And here’s the motor-car in which I tell you that there now sits the silliest boy in the world!” remarked his wife.
It was within a week of midsummer, and after they had dined they strolled out again into the garden to find that the reflections of sunset still lingered in the west, in bars and lines of crimson cloud floating like burning islands on a lake of saffron yellow. In that solemn and intense light everything seemed to glow with a radiance of its own: the huge, sunburned shoulder of the down above them seemed lit from within by some living flame and smouldered in the still evening air. An intenser green than ever the direct sunlight kindled burned in the towers of elm, and westward the river lay in pools of crimson. Then gradually, but in throbs and layers of darkness, the night began to flow like some clear incoming tide over the scene, drinking up the colours, as Edith had seen it once at Cookham, like some shy, wild beast. Stars were lit in the remote zenith, and again over the water-meadows below the skeins of mist spread their diaphanous expanses. And in the soft, confidential dusk Edith spoke of the event which was coming to the father of her child. New secrets of her woman’s sweet soul were given him; one thing only she kept back, that which Peggy had guessed, and was even now thinking of as the two walked gently up and down the garden-paths between the fragrance of the night-scented beds.
“And it will be then,” she said, “that our souls will be absolutely one, and I think it is that more than anything which a first-born child means to its mother. At least, so it seems to me. I cannot imagine two people being nearer to each other than we are, dear, but I know we shall be nearer yet. Hughie, I want you to promise me one thing.”
“It is promised.”
“That you won’t be afraid, you won’t be nervous about it. That would just blunt the edge of the joy that these few weeks of waiting hold for me, if I thought that anxiety and suspense were to be yours just when my joy was being fulfilled.”