‘Dear heart, for a few weeks only.’
She trembled violently for a moment, and then became rigid with scorn. ‘I agree with you perfectly. I had better go.’
The door slammed behind her before Wyvern recovered his wits. He ran forward a few steps as if to pursue her ... and stopped. ‘My God, I shall never see her again!’ He buried his face in his hands. ‘Perfect harmony, complete understanding, all lost. That was the moment, the moment of my life, and I let it pass. Como ... I shall never bear to look on Como again.’ Painful as his sensations were, they were undeniably interesting. If ever he wrote a novel he would make that incident the pivot of the plot, the crisis, the turning-point. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men.... By Jove there is!’ Why had he not taken it at the flood? It was all too sudden—no arrangements made, and a picture half-finished. Marion—he must forget Marion. Perhaps he had been mistaken in her. Her scorn for him had been so undeserved; he writhed at the recollection of it. He yearned now for some haven of refuge. Bruised and broken by life, his heart cried out for comfort. Ah, Elsie—she did not scorn him. A stab of fear lest the impossible had happened, lest he had alienated his wife’s love, sent him flying out of the studio and on the road for home. Forsaken by both women, he would be homeless indeed, and with no balm for his wounds. What if it were his fate to be misunderstood again? He began rehearsing the speeches he would make to Elsie. He conjured up the scene: Elsie in her night-dress, sitting up in the rumpled bed, just disturbed out of sleep. Perhaps she would be a little cruel at first: women were like that. ‘If my little wife is not kind to me now I shall go mad with the pain of it all.’ At that she would relent, and weep upon his breast. And she would love him more dearly than ever for having been so near to losing him.
MISS LETTICE
MISS LETTICE
NEEDING some stakes for my new fruit trees, I called on Saunders, who knows everything, to ask him where they could be obtained. Saunders is something more than a rector: he is a shepherd of souls. He has an extraordinary capacity for listening, and listening, he tells me (without any irony), is the most important of his duties—far more important than preaching church doctrine Sunday by Sunday. This is fortunate, for in my belief Saunders’s orthodoxy would not survive a very minute scrutiny. The villagers go to him with their most secret troubles, their most lurid sins, and come away with hearts eased, comforted by a platitude or two or by wordless sympathy. His mind must be quite a filing-cabinet of what are called human documents. With so much silent listening to do, perhaps he finds me as useful as I find him interesting; for I am always willing, when he is with me, to keep my ears open and my mouth shut. He is a good talker but not a garrulous one: it is the things he leaves unsaid, or half-unsaid, that interest me most in his discourse.
As I had expected, he put me at once in the way of getting my stakes. ‘Bowers, of Yew Tree Farm, is the best man. He’s a good fellow, Bowers. For your own soul’s sake you’ll have to keep an eye on his charges: they’re generally much too low. Yew Tree Farm—you know the place? It’s not really a farm at all: it’s a ramshackle wooden house standing by the side of a timber-yard. Near poor Miss Lettice’s cottage.’
‘Why do you call her poor?’ I asked. For Saunders was not in the habit of using that epithet without cause.
‘Ah, haven’t you heard? She has been taken away, you know. You spend too much time among those books of yours, my friend. Why, it happened over a week ago. Pitiful affair. She lapsed suddenly into a kind of grotesque babyhood.’
I can never hear of such an event without shuddering. ‘But she wasn’t an aged woman!’ Already one spoke of her in the past tense as of the dead.