PART THE SECOND
Sheila Dyrle
1
SOMEWHERE, no doubt, in Sheila’s personality, the story was written down; and she could have turned for young Redshawe the pages that she so seldom and so reluctantly turned for herself. She was an emotional but not a sentimental woman, and retrospect was a melancholy luxury that for the most part she denied herself. So far as she could she denied it to herself now, although the young man had troubled the deep waters of her mind. If for a moment she looked back her life appeared to her as a fruitless quest for something—who knows what?—for beauty, for happiness, for an absolute and harmonious intimacy, for everlasting fulfilment in a love that is the answer to all questions. Intimations of such a reality had again and again quickened desire within her. But, even in the moment of stretching out the hands to clasp it, ‘beauty vanishes, beauty passes’....
Half a century before, in her early teens, Sheila had emerged from her sister’s bedroom into the green distempered corridor of the school infirmary, hotly denying in her heart that Helena was dying. She wondered at the obtuseness of these people who had seen the sweet bloom of Helena’s cheeks and the lustre of her eyes, and yet drained their vocabulary of euphemisms hinting at death. Weak and wasted indeed she was, but full, still, of the serene joy that was her peculiar gift to the world. God couldn’t be so foolish or so cruel as to let Helena die. That would surely have been too sorry a joke even for the deity of Aunt Hester’s imagination.
‘Why is every one so silly?’ she complained to Aunt Hester, who had waited in trembling silence till her coming. ‘Helena’s getting better. Of course she is.’
‘Yes, dear,’ agreed Aunt Hester submissively. ‘Did you have a nice talk?’
‘We couldn’t let her talk much. She’s still so weak. But she said she would soon be out and about again.’
Tears began trickling down the lined leathery cheeks of Aunt Hester: cheeks that had suddenly the grotesque air of having been corrugated for the sole purpose of being wept upon. ‘Poor darling! Did she say that?’
‘Oh, aunt, why will you believe those silly people?’ Sheila’s voice rang out. ‘She must get well—she must!’