Oswald had to confess he wasn’t.
The little servant looked sorry for him.
And that was in truth the inexorable law now of The Ingle-Nook. Aunt Phœbe was taking herself very seriously—as became a Thinker whose Stitchwoman papers, deep, high, and occasionally broad in thought, were running into a sale of tens of thousands. So she sat hard and close at her writing-table from half-past nine to twelve every morning, secluded and defended from all the world, correcting, musing deeply over, and occasionally reading aloud the proofs of the third series of Stitchwoman papers. (Old Groombridge, the occasional gardener, used to listen outside in awe and admiration. “My word, but she do give it ’em!” old Groombridge used to say.) Oswald perceived that there was nothing to do but wait. “I’ll wait,” he said, “downstairs.”
“I suppose I ought to let you in,” said the little servant, evidently seeking advice.
“Oh, decidedly,” said Oswald, and entered the room in which he had parted from Dolly six years ago.
The door closed behind the little servant, and Oswald found himself in a house far more heavily charged with memories than he could have expected. The furniture had been but little altered; it was the morning time again, the shadow masses fell in the same places, it had just the same atmosphere of quiet expectation it had had on that memorable day before the door beyond had opened and Dolly had appeared, subdued and ashamed, to tell him of the act that severed them for ever. How living she seemed here by virtue of those inanimate things! Had that door opened now he would have expected to see her standing there again. And he was alive still, strong and active, altered just a little by a touch of fever and six short years of experience, but the same thing of impulse and desire and anger, and she had gone beyond time and space, beyond hunger or desire. He had walked between this window and this fireplace on these same bricks on which he was pacing now, spitting abuse at her, a man mad with shame and thwarted desire. Never had he forgiven her, or stayed his mind to think what life had been for her, until she was dead. That outbreak, with gesticulating hands and an angry, grimacing face, had been her last memory of him. What a broken image he had made of himself in her mind! And now he could never set things right with her, never tell her of his belated understanding and pity. “I was a weak thing, confused and torn between my motives. Why did you—you who were my lover—why did you not help me after I had stumbled?” So the still phantom in that room reproached him, a phantom of his own creation, for Dolly had never reproached him; to the end she had had no reproaches in her heart for any one but herself because of their disaster.
“Hold tight to love, little people,” he whispered. “Hold tight to love.... But we don’t, we don’t....”
Never before had Oswald so felt the tremendous pitifulness of life. He felt that if he stayed longer in this room he must cry out. He walked to the garden door and stood looking at the empty flagstone path between the dahlias and sunflowers.
It was all as if he had but left it yesterday, except for the heartache that now mingled with the sunshine.
“Pat—whack—pat—whack”; he scarcely heeded that rhythmic noise.