"Oh, she likes you well enough." Mrs. Timberlake was counting some dropped stitches. "She wasn't thinking about you a minute. I doubt if she ever in her life thought as long as that about anybody except herself. The curious part is," she supplemented presently, "that considering how shallow she is, so few people ever seem to see through her. It took David five years, and then he had to be married to her, to find out what I could have told him in ten minutes. Most of it is the way she looks, I expect. It is so hard for a man to understand that every woman who parts her hair in the middle isn't a Madonna."
"I knew she was hard and cold," confessed Caroline sadly, "but I thought she was good. I never dreamed she could be bad at heart."
Mrs. Timberlake shook her head. "She isn't bad, my dear, that's where you make a mistake. I believe she'd let herself be burned at the stake before she'd overstep a convention. When it comes to that," she commented with acrid philosophy, "I reckon all the bad women on earth could never do as much harm as some good ones—the sort of good ones that destroy everything human and natural that comes near them. We can look out for the bad ones—but I've come to believe that there's a certain kind of virtue that's no better than poison. It poisons everything it touches because all the humanity has passed out of it, just like one of those lovely poisonous flowers that spring up now and then in a swamp. Nothing that's made of flesh and blood could live by it, and yet it flourishes as if it were as harmless as a lily. I know I'm saying what I oughtn't to, but I saw you were getting hurt, and I wanted to spare you. It isn't that Angelica is wicked, you know, I wouldn't have you believe that for a minute. She is sincere as far as her light goes, and if I hadn't seen David's life destroyed through and through, I suppose I shouldn't feel anything like so bitterly. But I've watched all his trust in things and his generous impulses—there was never a man who started life with finer impulses than David—wither up, one after one, just as if they were blighted."
The sunset had faded slowly, and while Caroline sat there in the big chair, gazing out on the wintry garden, it seemed to her that the advancing twilight had become so thick that it stifled her. Then immediately she realized that it was not the twilight, but the obscurity in her own mind, that oppressed and enveloped her with these heavy yet intangible shadows. Her last illusion had perished, and she could not breathe because the smoke of its destruction filled the air. At the moment it seemed to her that life could never be exactly what it was before—that the glow and magic of some mysterious enchantment had vanished. Even the garden, with its frozen vegetation and its forlorn skeletons of summer shrubs emerging from mounds of snow, appeared to have undergone a sinister transformation from the ideal back to the actuality. This was the way she had felt years ago, on that autumn day at The Cedars.
"And he never defended himself—never once," she said after a silence.
"He never will, that's not his way," rejoined Mrs. Timberlake. "She knows he never will, and I sometimes think that makes matters worse."
As Caroline brooded over this, her face cleared until the light and animation returned. "I know him better," she murmured presently, "but everything else has become suddenly crooked."
"I've thought that at times before I stopped trying to straighten out things." Mrs. Timberlake had put down the muffler, and while she spoke, she smoothed it slowly and carefully over her knee. In the wan light her face borrowed a remote and visionary look, like a face gazing down through the thin, cold air of the heights. She had passed beyond mutable things, this look seemed to say, and had attained at last the bleak security of mind that is never disappointed because it expects nothing. "I reckon that's why I got into the habit of keeping my mouth shut, just because I was worrying myself sick all the time thinking how different things ought to be." A chill and wintry cheerfulness flickered across the arid surface of her manner. "But I don't now. I know there isn't any use, and I get a good deal of pleasure just out of seeing what will happen. Now, you take David and Angelica. I'm wondering all the time how it will turn out. David is a big man, but even if Angelica isn't smart, she's quick enough about getting anything she wants, and I believe she is beginning to want something she hasn't got."
"When I came I didn't like Mr. Blackburn." Though the barriers of the old lady's reserve had fallen, Caroline was struggling still against an instinct of loyalty.
"Well, I didn't like him once." Mrs. Timberlake had risen, and was looking down with her pitiful, tormented smile. "It took me a long time to find out the truth, and I want to spare you all I suffered while I was finding it out. I sometimes think that nobody's experience is worth a row of pins to any one else, but all the same I am trying to help you by telling you what I know. David has his faults. I'm not saying that he is a saint; but he has been the best friend I ever had, and I'm going to stand up for him, Angelica or no Angelica. There are some men, my poor father used to say, that never really show what they are because they get caught by life and twisted out of shape, and I reckon David is one of these. Father said, though I don't like heathen terms, that it was the fate of a man like David always to appear in the wrong and yet always to be in the right. That's a queer way of putting it, but father was a great scholar—he translated the "Iliad" before he was thirty—and I reckon he knew what he was talking about. Life was against those men, he told me once, but God was for them, and they never failed to win in the end." With the last words she faltered and broke off abruptly. "I have been talking a great deal more than I ought to, but when once I begin I never know when to stop. Angelica must have come home long ago." Bending over she laid her cheek against Caroline's hair. "You won't think of going away now, will you?"