It was like Jane, that remark. Suddenly Mary knew how like it was. But more she knew in that moment the change had not come to her sisters. They had not seen what she had seen. No vision such as hers had been vouchsafed to them. Still they were happy, contented, and at peace in their garden of Eden. It was she alone who had tasted of the fruit; she alone who now had knowledge of good and evil.
Already she felt the edge of the sword of the angel of God turned against her. The gates of that garden they lived in were opened. In the deep consciousness of her heart she felt she was being turned away. How it would difference her life, where she should go now that she had been driven forth, what even the world outside those gates might be, she did not know.
All she realized was that for twenty-nine years a Mary Throgmorton had been living in Bridnorth, that now she had gone and another Mary Throgmorton had taken her place.
Looking down at Jane beside her when she spoke, she saw for the first time a sad figure of a woman, shrivelled and dried of heart, bitter and resentful of mind. No longer was she the Jane who, with her sharp tongue, had often made them laugh, who, with her shrewd criticisms had often shown them their little weaknesses and the pettiness of their thoughts. In place of her she saw a woman wilted and seared, a body parched with the need of the moisture of life; one who had been cut from the tree to wither and decay, one, the thought then sprang upon her, who had never found favor with God or man.
XI
They came loitering to the square, white house, pausing at the gate and talking to friends, lingering over the removal of their goloshes indoors. The crisp air was in their lungs. There was the scent of cooking faintly in the hall. It rose pleasantly in their nostrils. They laughed and chatted like a nestful of starlings. Jane was more amusing than usual. Her comments upon the hat bought by the police sergeant's wife in Exeter and worn that Sunday morning for the first time were shrewd and close of observation; too close to be kind, yet so shrewd as to prick even the soft heart of Hannah to laughter she would have restrained if she could.
Even Fanny, with mind still beating out her meters, lost that far-off look in her eyes and lingered in the hall to listen to Jane's sallies, to every one of which Hannah would murmur between her laughter--
"Jane! Jane--how can you? Fancy your noticing that! Oh dear! we oughtn't to be laughing at all. Poor thing! She can't help her eye or her figure."
"If I were fat," said Jane, "I wouldn't go in stripes. You don't put hoops round a barrel to make it look thin."
Foolish though that might have sounded in London drawing-rooms, it found a burst of laughter in the square, white house.