That fat London, however, had to be driven off its head without Edith’s direct assistance, though this morning she did indirectly what she could by inducing Hugh to go and practise, when he had finished breakfast, and refusing to allow him to sit with her in her room and talk. And even though she had declared it to be shameful that their last day in the country should be so wet, she was extremely well content to think of the privacy which this streaming gale would give them. Canon Alington, it is true, had proposed to drop in to lunch, since he would be on his way back from some district-visiting to cottages on the confines of his parish during the morning, but that most conscientious of men, she felt certain, would postpone even a duty to a slightly more propitious morning.
There was a compact between her and Hugh that when he was doing his lessons she also should do “lessons,” so that he should not feel that everybody else (which meant her) was leading a life of leisured ease while he sang over and over again some faulty phrase or arrived by endless repetition at a smooth enunciation of some half-dozen notes which Reuss had underlined, and this morning, with a sense of heroic effort and almost paralysing distaste, she saw that the nature of her lessons was clearly indicated for her by the very large pile of shiny American-cloth volumes that were stacked on her writing-table, and were clearly what is known as that most unattractive library “the books.” She remembered also with fatal and unerring distinctness, she was afraid, that they had been stacked there just a month ago on a morning of glorious sunny March weather—“daffodil weather,” as Hugh called it—and that she had in a moment of mortal weakness decreed that they should “run on” just because on the morning when they ought to have been settled she wanted to go out instantly with Hugh. So she took a large sheet of sermon-paper and wrote “Books. April 15th” at the top. That looked so businesslike that she was quite encouraged to proceed. So below she wrote “£. s. d.” high up on the right-hand margin of the paper and “Fishmonger” a little below on the left.
Fishmonger proved rather depressing, because it looked as if everybody lived exclusively on salmon, but there was no help for it, and down it went. Wine merchant, however, came next, which was Hugh’s affair, and it rather cheered her up to see how very much alcohol seemed to have been consumed, and—oh, delightful discovery!—Hugh had not paid that for ten weeks. Greengrocer came next, and again she would have guessed that, so far from living on salmon, everybody must have taken to vegetarianism of the most expensive kind; but the butcher’s book corrected this erroneous impression. But a glimpse at the stable-book made her feel again what an economical housekeeper she was. Dear, dear, she had married a spendthrift!
A great dash of rain at the window distracted her from these sordid details, and she heard the wind bellowing up the valley, while the gutters from the last squall of solid water gurgled and guffawed and overflowed. That, too, as well as the thought of her spendthrift husband, was in her mind, and her eyes lit and her mouth smiled with an inward pleasure that she would have found it hard to explain, except that instinctively this riot and want of calculation on the part of the elements struck a note that she answered to. The sluices and the doors of heaven were open, the wind rioted, and the floods descended; the clouds poured out water, the wind raced along irrespective of the amount of useful work its stored energy might have accomplished. It all came out of the infinite reservoir of God and of life and of eternal force, and was given to her and to any who could see the point of view and understand, however feebly, however infinitesimally, the significance of its hugeness to man, the immeasureable smallness of its relation to life—to It. It was spendthrift, was it—the word had been suggested to her by the sight of the total in the stable-book, and applied to Hugh—but how could the infinite be spendthrift, when no array of figures added and multiplied could approach the plane on which the infinite moved?
And then from the thought to which the wind and the wild rain had given rise she dropped, even as a bird drops through the air, and the wings that have battled with the wind are folded, and it lies close on its nest. Hugh,—Hugh! There was her infinite, and the more she knew him the more immeasurable became that which he was to her. She had not known that such happiness was possible as the happiness that had been and was hers, which sprang from his love, and the more she devoured it, the more she wrapped herself in it, the greater grew the warmth and the abundance of it. And this transfigurement of the world, this illumination of life, was no thing of squibs and fireworks, dazzling and cracking one moment, and leaving a darkness peopled with images of the blaze the next; it was a sun burning steadily, so that all the little employments of life were uninterrupted and went on quietly and harmoniously as before, but all were bathed in its light. She still gardened; she still wrote her play, and the interest in neither was one whit diminished. She still walked on the down and looked from above the beech-wood on to her red-brick house, and, as she had done one day to him, pictured the pleasure and tranquillity of the fortunate woman who lived there. Ambrose was to her, as to Hugh, the same unholy joy, and when the other day Hugh had picked up a pebble from the road, put a neat label on it, “Ye Walls of Jericho,” and substituted it for a pebble from somewhere else on his brother-in-law’s table, she had giggled quite as sillily as he over this childish absurdity, and because Hugh had done it it was not to her any piece of inspired humour; it did not cease to be the deed of a silly boy. He was often all he should not be, he was lazy sometimes, he was extravagant, he was dreadfully tactless, but he was Hugh. And to him she was Edith, just herself.
It was just in this that the essential youth and freshness of her soul lay. Last July when Hugh proposed to her she had, unshaken by Peggy’s remonstrance, known, as the compass knows the north, where her fulfilment lay, where was the road that led to the ultimate goal. Then, too, she knew why she had struggled all those years through the briars and thickets of the youth she had called “spoiled,” why she had gone on with brave and bleeding feet, and not sat down and drank of the waters of bitterness. At the time it had seemed to her that the commonest pluck, the most average ordinary bravery had been sufficient to account for this, for when she had plucked out the thorns and sat down to rest out of sight of the waters of Marah, she thought she had her reward in the fact that it was still pleasant to see the wild flowers of the down, to feel a shuddering interest in sliced potato, and to be sincerely and humbly pleased that a little of what she had learned should be able to touch others too in the play that had stormed London. Yet this, all this, had not satisfied the spirit of her compass; it still pointed north, and then, as she said to Peggy, “Hugh came.” Then once more, and more than ever, her soul showed itself young, for though from the foundation of the world men had loved and women had loved, it was the glory of the Golden Age that she firmly believed they had recaptured. Sober, wise, and tried by suffering as she was, there was only one belief to her possible, that never had love been like this. All that had been written, all lyrical utterance, seemed to her the shadow of the light she lived in. And, such was the unalterable miracle of it all, the little incidents of life still retained their value, the garden was entrancing still, the household books—and, oh, heaven, there was Hugh already singing that last most exacting exercise of all, eleven notes up and a long note, eleven notes down and a long note, and she had still only put down “Fishmonger”! But his presence, for he was sure to come in, was not—and this still seemed extraordinary—at all distracting. It was just as natural as the sun or this glorious roaring gale; he would sit by the fire (for this chimney did not smoke), and she really would add up fishmongers and butchers.
Hugh entered, and the door banged with frightful force behind him.
“Darling, it wasn’t me,” he said; “it was the wind. What are you doing? Oh, I say, those exercises! Why shouldn’t you and I go through the ‘Lohengrin’ duet instead, which I have to sing, instead of my singing ‘La—la—’ alone? Oh, Edith why haven’t you two decent vocal chords? Or why have I? I want—I want to garden and walk, and draw out Ambrose. And I’m in a devil of a funk about the whole thing. There! And I wish I hadn’t married you, because then there would have been some point in my squalling at the opera. Now there’s none.”
Edith laid down her pen.
“Shall I explain it all over again from the beginning?” she asked.