But a child had been denied her.
She deemed her life to be already virtually finished. She would age from this moment: after a brief fever her mind would dim and even the desire for beauty would sink into oblivion. She tried to hope it would be soon, but the struggling youth in her cried out against the hope.
2
The struggling youth in her cried out, and, years later, the cry was answered. Beauty became incarnated in the person of Stephen Redshawe, whose son she later encountered in the house at Maadi. The past rose in sad loveliness, enveloping her with the fragrance of pressed flowers; but of all the memories that surged in her, this one alone broke in pitiless splendour over her consciousness. In that moment Stephen Redshawe lived again, less as a man and a lover than as a gleam, an ecstasy, a chord of divine music, a symbol of all that she had longed for and lost. Other things she could recall minutely, but Stephen remained a vague splendour. She recalled how, in her little cottage near Mundesley, she had waited for his promised coming; how she had looked again and again, in wonder, to find in her mirror the face he had called lovely. It was a face ravaged less by her thirty-three years than by discontent. His sisters and his mother she remembered only as so many bundles of feminine hostility. They disapproved of her, and no wonder: was she not a married woman, holiday-making alone, who yet suffered gladly the admiration of an infatuated boy? They called her adventuress, no doubt, and she, even in the midst of the adventure, made allowances for them. She had neither the strength nor the will to renounce the fairest gift that life offered.
‘May I come in?’ Stephen’s tall figure filled the doorway.
‘You must,’ Sheila answered, with a smile. ‘I’m not going to give you any tea while you stand there keeping the sunshine out.’
‘This is our last meeting,’ blundered Stephen. ‘I want to tell you....’
Suddenly dreading to hear the words for which she longed, Sheila fended them away. ‘Eat your pretty cake,’ she admonished him.
After tea they went out into the sandy paddock and talked for an hour of indifferent things, of trains, of luggage, of books and bad music ... until a stillness fell, heralding dusk. Evening became personal and urgent to enfold them: they could hear in the wash of the water, rhythmically plashing the sand, the rise and fall of her bosom; they could feel her breath sweeter than apples in the autumn air. And all the skies that during the past weeks of stolen companionship they had seen together, all the tides they had watched moving upon the shore, became fused with that sky, with that tide; all the hours of their comradeship were gathered up into that hour. They surrendered themselves to the embracing arms of silence.
To Sheila it was as if infinity had been spilled into time: the moments throbbed by, brimming with beauty, until the silence that these two guarded became a music, a poem, a flower of loveliness. It was a flower that budded and blossomed till their vision dimmed with the glory of it, a flower that burst and fell scattering pollen and perfume.