Geordie had stopped in his restless pacing to and fro.
“Mother!” he said. “You know I didn’t mean it. Mother! I’m sorry.”
“Very well, my boy!” she answered, in her composed way. “We’ll say no more about it.”
He came a few steps nearer, but halted; he hadn’t been bred to the habit of affection. A hundred thousand old impulses that had been stifled by cool common sense made a great barrier now, just there, a few steps away from his mother. He turned away again, and Mrs. Russell did not stir.
It was over; that was their sensible way of dealing with all such matters; not to[Pg 432] take them out into the daylight and destroy them, but to shut them up, to weigh down the heart for many and many a day. They had ten minutes more alone there in the dusk together, ten long minutes, and neither of them spoke.
They were, of course, waiting for their luckless guest, and both silently condemning her unpardonable delay. But, if they could have seen her just then, down on the floor on her knees beside the neat little bed in the neat, strange little room, not weeping, but very still, as if a ruthless hand had struck into quietude all her flutterings.
She had come downstairs, quite airy, quite gay, in a fresh blouse and a not too dingy skirt, and, standing unnoticed in the doorway, she had heard her nephew’s words. She had rushed up the stairs again, silent as a moth, except for the tinkle of countless small hairpins dropping from her riotous hair, and had sunk down on the floor like this, to taste failure again.
The clear chiming of the clock roused her. She got up, a little bewildered for a moment.
“I’ll go away!” she thought, at first. But, after all, her failure had taught her something. She put more pins into her hair, a little more powder on her nose; she tried a smile or two before the mirror, and down the stairs she went, airy as before.
“The only really terrible thing,” she said to herself, “is to fail because you haven’t tried.”