“Would that content you?” asked Edith—“the things, I mean, that made my happiness a month ago?”
“No; how could they, dear, if it meant that for the rest of my life Toby and the children and all were to be lost to me?”
“Nor could they content me now,” said Edith, “if this had to be lost to me.”
Then she got up, and stood by her sister again.
“Ah, don’t you see how almost all you have said tells the other way?” she said, speaking quickly. “It is just because there is no renewal for us, just because age comes so quickly when youth is over that I cannot miss it. I have missed too much already, and I cannot miss more. I rage for life, and when I can have it, I must. If some dreadful blow should take everything from you, Peggy, and leave you just with a garden and a brain of a kind, as I was left, it would be more reasonable for you to be content than it would for me. You have had all these things—the love of your husband, the love of your children, they would be memories to you, and rose-gardens where any woman might wander happily. But what are my memories? The best I can do is to have none. And now Love come—what further memory should I be left with if I rejected it?”
Edith caught hold of her sister’s hands and drew her down by her side on to the sofa. Her hands, Peggy felt, were trembling, that beautiful mouth was trembling too, but those tremours, and the moisture that stood in her eyes, were not the signs of sorrow; they were but tokens of the love and the joy that had so taken possession of her, of the eternal youth that invaded and held her. And the eternal youth of love transformed her; it was the rapture of a girl’s first love that trembled on her lips and fell in hesitating speech.
“Oh, Peggy, think what it means to me,” she said. “The years and the bitterness of them it seems now that I had but covered up, but Hugh has cancelled them, swept them away. I can’t think of them any longer; I can’t conceive of them having existed.”
She gave a gentle little laugh as she caressed Peggy’s hand.
“How laboriously I used to sweep and dust in my mind,” she said. “How I used to struggle and determine to forget! And then he came and said, ‘Du meine Seele,’ and there had been no struggle at all—there had been nothing. I had been waiting for Hughie all these years, and had been dreaming, I suppose. He woke me.”
It was then, for the first time, as she looked into the soft, eager face, that Peggy saw how hopeless was remonstrance or argument. But there was just one word more she could say.