Neil suggested that they leave the car at the bottom of the meadow and walk up. “Teresa may be sleeping. She won’t be expecting to hear a car at this time of day, anyway, and it might startle her. The milkman brings the groceries along with his milk once a day and that’s the only car except mine that ever comes. We didn’t tell her I was bringing you. We didn’t know you could get away. We thought we’d wait to explain—”
The doorstep, a flat stone, had beguiled the doorsill to follow its own smooth sunken curve. The door stood open into a passage which appeared nothing but transition to clearer, finer country, for it was open at its farther end onto long rows of crooked old bare apple trees twisted by many years of bearing into mysterious contours of beauty. And through the orchard one saw the rounded, mellow slope of the hilltop, outlining a horizon.
There is an orchard, old and rare,—
I cannot tell you where,—
With green doors opening to the sun.
Green doors! This was the green doors that Clare had hoped to hymn—and missed the note. “I cannot tell you where!” Cannot because there is no telling it. In this moment of remembering the lines which had given Clare her inspiration for Green Doors, and which she often quoted, Lewis’ antipathy for Clare was transmuted into unalloyed pity. Clare wanted the beautiful and good in her life. Sincerely wanted it. But she thought it was necessary to spin it out of herself somehow,—industriously, cleverly spin, spin, spin. It never occurred to her to search for the Beautiful Good, or to love It for Itself in Its objective reality. She was too busy, all times, manufacturing its semblance out of fancy.
Yes. As Lewis stepped over the sill into the little old passage to the crooked, beautiful orchard, a kaleidoscope shift took place in his sympathy. And at the same moment the experience of the early morning was upon him again; he had been through all this before. He knew this passage, that orchard, by heart. He knew, too, that grief (he had been wrong in this much of the morning’s prevision: it was grief but never tragedy) was waiting him here at the real Green Doors.
Miss Frazier came through a door halfway down the passage and met them. She said in a lowered voice, “You’ve come! Everything will be all right now. I knew you’d come. Go into the living room, please, and I’ll explain to Teresa. Or Neil, you come with me. You will be better than I. We haven’t told her Neil was bringing you, you see, Doctor.”
“Where’s Petra?” Lewis asked quickly.
“She took a rug and her coat and went up into the orchard to sleep. She took your sedative first. But she wants to know when you come. I promised. She wouldn’t have rested unless. She doesn’t know about the second hemorrhage, or what Father Morris has said. She thinks Teresa is better.”