The Green Bough

by E. Temple Thurston

Now this much was accomplished in the schedule of her mind. They would all know. She left it to Hannah to tell them. The next day after this confession to her sister, she went to Yarningdale Farm, having made all arrangements to stay there two or three days and complete her plans for the future.

It had been a difficult moment to tell Hannah. She had not quite realized beforehand how difficult it would be. Pride she had calculated would have helped her from the first; pride of the very purposes of life that had passed her sisters by. But pride had not been so ready to her thoughts when the actual moment of contact had come. The habitual instincts of convention had intervened. Pride, when it had come to her aid, had not been pride of herself. It was proud she was of her sex when in the abruptness of that instant she had flung her confession before Hannah.

There would be no question of pride; no support could it give her when she came to tell Mrs. Peverell. To that simple farmer's wife it could only seem that here was one, pursued by the error of her ways, seeking sanctuary and hiding her shame in the remotest corner she could find.

Giving no reason to Jane or Fanny, but only to Hannah for her sudden departure, she went the next day into Warwickshire.

"You can tell them when I'm away," she said to Hannah. "It's no good thinking you needn't tell them. Hiding it won't conceal. They must know."

With an impulsive gesture she laid her hands on Hannah's shoulders and looked into those eyes that indeed, as she had said, even in those few short hours of knowledge, had grown conscious that she was old.

"I don't know how much you hate me for bringing all this trouble on you. It shan't be much trouble, I promise you. No one need know why I've gone away. But I sort of feel sure of this, Hannah, you don't hate me for the thing itself--not so much as you might have thought you would have done."

Hannah tried to meet the gaze of Mary's eyes. Her own held fast a moment, then faltered and fell. Something in Mary's glance seemed to have tracked down something in her. The one with her child had glimpsed into the heart of her who had none. It had been like a shaft of light, slanting into a cellar, some chamber underground that for long had been locked, the bolts on whose door were rusty and past all use, the floor of which was no longer paved for feet to walk upon.

For so many years untenanted had that underground chamber been that, as has been said, Hannah had forgotten its existence. Content had come to her with the house of life she lived in and now by the illumination of this ray of light, shooting through cellar windows, lighting up the very foundations of the structure of her being, she had been made aware, when it was all too late, of the solid and real substance upon which Nature had built the wasted thing she had become.

"Don't!" she muttered. "Don't--don't!" and almost in shame it might have been she hung her head as though it were Mary who might accuse, as though Mary it were who rose in judgment above her then.