“Yes ... it’s about all he has. Eileen breaks his heart with her irreverent flings. I spare him. Not because I am more considerate than she. More selfish, perhaps. I can’t take the consequences of inflicting pain. You’ll call it crass spiritual weakness—a flaw in the casting. I’ve tried to overcome it. I couldn’t have endured....” His voice wavered, “Last night I heard my father praying for Eileen. It was ghastly. I wanted to tell her how she is torturing him. But it would only provoke a fresh outburst of scoffing.”
“Lary, will you give Eileen into my hands—stop worrying about her—you and your father? Will you persuade him that I have been sent ‘from on high’ to guide her through this wilderness? I may fail; but I have her confidence.”
“Papa was afraid, because you were rich, that you would share her mother’s view. Oh, not that Eileen took refuge in your sympathy. She’s too proud, too good a sport, for that. She only told him that money, per se, was no obstacle—vide Mrs. Ascott. Before she was through with it, she told him that if he kept on, she would go to the devil with Hal Marksley. It was after that that he carried his trouble to the God who is said to answer prayers.”
“As a substitute for the Deity.... But at least, Lary, I know the premises. And at the worst, it is only the working out of her own nature. No one can live Eileen’s life for her, not even her father. But there’s the tower clock, striking six. You will be late for dinner—and we haven’t looked at that inglenook.”
XII The Poem Judith Read
I
From her vine-screened retreat in the summer house, Judith Ascott looked out on the fairest May Day she had ever known. It was the morning after ... and the promise she had made to Lary hung sinister and foreboding over her spirit. Everything around her was vibrant with coming summer. At home the buds would be opening timorously, while here the perennial climbers were in full leaf. An aureate splendour, seductive as Danae’s rain, rippled through the open structure of the pergola, transmuting the pebble walk to a pavement of costly gems; but within the widening of the arbour—that David had converted into an outdoor living-room—the frightened shadows sought refuge from the shafts that would presently destroy them. To the cool umbrageous corner nearest the house, where the light was faint, the woman had taken her world-weary body, yearning for the relaxation her bed had denied her.
It was all so insistent, this new life that had come to her, its music keyed to a pitch she had never realized, a tempo beyond the reach of her experience. The Trenches. Were there other families in the universe like this one? Before her coming to Springdale she had viewed the world through a thick forest of people, most of them intolerably tiresome. In the main they were contented ... such contentment as is to be derived from a favourable turn in the market or the balm of Bermuda to beguile a winter’s day. Happy lives, she had read, make uninteresting biographies. Her life had been far from happy, and her biography would be utterly stupid. Mrs. Trench was—she realized with a stab of astonishment—a desperately unhappy woman, and her life story was made up of a propitious marriage and six abnormally interesting children. And then ... Theo appeared at the other side of the garden wall, discerned the white-clad figure among the verdant shadows of the summer house, and scaled the low barrier with the nimbleness of a squirrel. In the folds of her skirt she held something, and a furtive air pervaded her small person.