Sam turned to Effle immensely heartened by this virulence. “You see!” he appealed, calling to witness the hopeless bias of his mother. It was, he wished to imply, this blind hatred of Anne for Ada which accounted for his mother’s attitude, her exalting of—well—the mistress over the wife, her flagrant unmorality. He tried to put all this into his gesture. “And you,” he reinforced it, “you sent me to her, Effie.”
She bowed her head, admitting it, but Anne was not prepared to let it go at that. “Even Effie,” she said “can make a mistake. She would not send you now.”
And, looking at Effie, he saw that it was true. He had seen it from the first and it bothered him profoundly. Effie had changed: there was, in all they said, this noticeable stressing of the “now,” to differentiate them from the “then.” What was it? Anne’s arguments, or the baby, or had Effie, uninfluenced by either, really changed her mind about the Marbeck treaty? he couldn’t believe that last. Marbeck was infallible and he was dogged in the faith. He responded to the Marbeck creed like the needle of a compass to the meridian, and if with this needle also there was deflection it was corrected by his racial stubbornness. He had his people’s queer, infatuated pride in the contemplation of their own tenacity, even when, perhaps mostly when, it hurts to be tenacious.
Whereas Effie had known ever since Dubby Stewart brought her back from cloud-land that Marbeck was very fallible indeed, or, rather, Marbeck was one thing and living up to Marbeck was another. If he had said, instead of only thinking, that she was a lower Effie now, she would not have contradicted him, though she did not want a wedding ring of either metal. She wanted Sam. She was changed from the idealist who thought she could be happy as a sign-post and a spiritual guide. She had come down to Mother Earth where men and women live. At Marbeck they were on an altitude where the air was too rarefied for human lungs, and she wanted to fall with Sam from selflessness to mere humanity.
“No,” she agreed again with Anne, “I should not send you now.”
“I shall have to think this out,” he said. Effie admitted to being earthly, and he was horribly dismayed! “Effie,” he cried in pain, “don’t you see?” he wanted desperately to be understood by her, if not by Anne.
“I see,” she said, and not without pride either. Whatever was fine in him, whatever reacted from an Eflie come to earth, was due to her, and she was proud of him even when, as now, he used her tempered steel against her.
Anne watched with a grim appreciation his anxiety to make a pikestaff plain. “We all see,” she said. “You’re none so deep and we’re none so daft as all that. You’ve got a maggot in your brain, and I know the shape of it. I’ve had the same in mine, and if you’ll think back ten years, you’ll know what I mean. We’re the same breed, Sam, and we can both do silly things and stand by then and suffer for them. I flitted from you to Madge, and I didn’t set eyes on you from that day till last night. That’s what I mean by suffering.”
And there, in those few words, the tragedy of ten years stood confessed. Parted from Sam, she lived in exile, suffering, and, of course, he had known it and deliberately forgot it, so that the point of her revelation was not its truth, but the amazing fact that she should speak of it at all. Anne had the pride which suffers silently.
“Mother!” he said, distressed for her.