“He is nice. Em, dear.... Say you’d have done the same!”
Emmy gave Jenny a great hug, kissing her as if Jenny had been her little girl. To Emmy the moment was without alloy. Her own future assured, all else fell into the orderly picture which made up her view of life. But she was not quite calm, and it even surprised her to feel so much warmth of love for Jenny. Still holding her sister, she was conscious of a quick impulse that was both exulting and pathetically shy.
“It’s funny us both being happy at once. Isn’t it!” she whispered, all sparkling.
vi
To herself Jenny groaned a sufficient retort.
“I don’t know that I’m feeling so tremendously happy my own self,” she thought. For the reaction had set in. She was glad enough to bring about by various movements their long-delayed bedward journey. She was beginning to feel that her head and her heart were both aching, and that any more confidences from Emmy would be unbearable. And where Emmy had grown communicative—since Emmy had nothing to conceal—Jenny had felt more and more that her happiness was staled as thought corroded it. By the time they turned out the kitchen gas the clock pointed to twenty minutes past two, and the darkest hour was already recorded. In three more hours the sun would rise, and Jenny knew that long before then she would see the sky greying as though the successive veils of the transformation were to reveal the crystal grotto. She preceded Emmy up the stairs, carrying a candle and lighting the way. At the top of the staircase Emmy would find her own candle, and they would part. They were now equally eager for the separation, Emmy because she wanted to think over and over again the details of her happiness, and to make plans for a kind of life that was to open afresh in days that lay ahead. Arrived at the landing the sisters did not pause or kiss, but each looked and smiled seriously as she entered her bedroom. With the closing of the doors noise seemed to depart from the little house, though Jenny heard Emmy moving in her room. The house was in darkness. Emmy was gone; Pa lay asleep in the dim light, his head bandaged and the water slowly soaking into the towel protectively laid upon his chest; in the kitchen the ailing clock ticked away the night. Everything seemed at peace but Jenny, who, when she had closed the door and set her candle down, went quickly to the bed, sitting upon its edge and looking straight before her with dark and sober eyes.
She had much to think of. She would never forgive herself now for leaving Pa. It might have been a more serious accident that had happened during her absence; she could even plead, to Emmy, that the accident might have happened if she had not left the house at all; but nothing her quick brain could urge had really satisfied Jenny. The stark fact remained that she had been there under promise to tend Pa; and that she had failed in her acknowledged trust. He might have died. If he had died, she would have been to blame. Not Pa! He couldn’t help himself! He was driven by inner necessity to do things which he must not be allowed to do. Jenny might have pleaded the same justification. She had done so before this. It had been a necessity to her to go to Keith. As far as that went she did not question the paramount power of impulse. Not will, but the strongest craving, had led her. Jenny could perhaps hardly discourse learnedly upon such things: she must follow the dictates of her nature. But she never accused Pa of responsibility. He was an irresponsible. She had been left to look after him. She had not stayed; and ill had befallen. A bitter smile curved Jenny’s lips.
“I suppose they’d say it was a punishment,” she whispered. “They’d like to think it was.”
After that she stayed a long time silent, swaying gently while her candle flickered, her head full of a kind of formless musing. Then she rose from the bed and took her candle so that she could see her face in the small mirror upon the dressing-table. The candle flickered still more in the draught from the open window; and Jenny saw her breath hang like a cloud before her. In the mirror her face looked deadly pale; and her lips were slightly drawn as if she were about to cry. Dark shadows were upon her face, whether real or the work of the feeble light she did not think to question. She was looking straight at her own eyes, black with the dilation of pupil, and somehow struck with the horror which was her deepest emotion. Jenny was speaking to the girl in the glass.
“I shouldn’t have thought it of you,” she was saying. “You come out of a respectable home and you do things like this. Silly little fool, you are. Silly little fool. Because you can’t stand his not loving you ... you go and do that.” For a moment she stopped, turning away, her lip bitten, her eyes veiled. “Oh, but he does love me!” she breathed. “Quite as much ... quite as much ... nearly ... nearly as much....” She sighed deeply, standing lone in the centre of the room, her long, thin shadow thrown upon the wall in front of her. “And to leave Pa!” she was thinking, and shaking her head. “That was wrong, when I’d promised. I shall always know it was wrong. I shall never be able to forget it as long as I live. Not as long as I live. And if I hadn’t gone, I’d never have seen Keith again—never! He’d have gone off; and my heart would have broken. I should have got older and older, and hated everybody. Hated Pa, most likely. And now I just hate myself.... Oh, it’s so difficult!” She moved impatiently, and at last went back to the mirror, not to look into it but to remove the candle, to blow it out, and to leave the room in darkness. This done, Jenny drew up the blind, so that she could see the outlines of the roofs opposite. It seemed to her that for a long distance there was no sound at all: only there, all the time, far behind all houses, somewhere buried in the heart of London, there was the same unintermittent low growl. It was always in her ears, even at night, like a sleepless pulse, beating steadily through the silences.