With a shock the present reeled into its place; spiritual vision was past and physical vision lost keenness as her own blurred sight swam back to her; and, worn out, hardly conscious of her own life, but filled with peace, Sophia lay along the seat in the kindly dusk.
She was still to know month upon month of pain; sometimes acute as when she stayed out of doors all night and made sounds and hurt herself physically to distract her mind's distress; but mostly an ache that bore on her like a weight, sometimes invading dreams and always by her bedside when she awakened. She was to find that for the friendship she could have made so exquisite he had no gift; she was to feel the many hurts his lack of thoughtfulness inflicted; she was to bear the unhappiness of seeing him unworthy of all that might have been so good in him as he let himself drift into flirtations where not one of his finer senses was touched. She was to feel one sharpest hour of any, when the time came, which, if she had given herself would have seen his child in her arms. . . .
And through everything, through the dreadful London months of loneliness and the cruder physical hardships of extreme poverty; through her weary clear-eyed knowledge of him she was to come back perpetually to the refrain—that surprised herself after a few weeks of comparative calm when she hoped she was "getting over it"—of "How I love him." She had no high-flown theories of love; she knew he was not what is tritely called "the right man," he was more—he was the one she loved well enough to forgive for not being the "right one," and in those moments there was no evading the simple fact that she would have given all the rest of her life to have been his wife for one year and have borne him a child.
But, through and above and around all that, went the memory of Beata's vision which she too had seen. The vision itself was often dark and meaningless to her in the actuality of her love and pain, but of the knowledge that she had had it she was never bereft. Also, it was hers to create those pleasant fruits and chief spices of which the greatest love-song in the world tells as growing only in a garden enclosed.
THE MAN WITH TWO MOUTHS
On a grey day a girl was walking along a crescent of sand that curved at the cliff's base. As she went the water welled up in the slanting hollows left by her feet, and the fat, evil-looking leaves of the cliff plants glistened with spray moisture; even the swollen fingers of the marsh samphire, that all seemed to point at the girl as she passed, each bore a tremulous drop at the tip. At the end of the little beach the girl paused, and then turned to look out to sea, balancing herself on a slab of wet shiny granite, where the cone-shaped shellfish clustered and from which the long green weed floated out and in on the heave of the tide. The girl held back the red hair that whipped about her forehead and stared from under an arched palm.