Far to the west, beyond a barrier of gleaming snow, she saw a murky cloud of smoke where the foul boot of industrialism stamps on the Lakeland Coast—a message and a call. It spoke, to her of natural dirt in this great waste of unstained purity; it made her sick for home and the thing she had to do.
Effie and Sam stood gazing at the hills, spell-hound by loveliness, and when they tore their dancing eyes away it was to look into each other’s. They had no need of words: their eyes exulted in the burnished splendour of the scene, and with a doubled exultation each in the other’s joy. Then Sam turned hopefully to Anne and saw that she was looking with a rapt intensity at the west. At last, it seemed, the hills had touched her.
“Where’s yon?” she asked, “yon smoke?”
His face fell as he told her, but he saw that this explained Anne’s failure. She had not relished Marbeck because she had not seen it. She had not been looking at Marbeck, but all the while at something else.
And why, he questioned, why, now that things had so admirably arranged themselves, must Anne still live in thought in Manchester? There seemed to him to be no law, nothing which could conceivably distract her attention, nothing which had not with genial finality been neatly finished off. Of course they had stupid legal business to come, but that was well ahead and, in any case, was not to worry them.
She could not, surely, be troubling about Ada. It was he who had made the trouble there, insisting that Ada was “his job.”
He insisted to the point of almost literally forcing himself upon her in Peter Struggles’ house, and remembered now with a twinge that desolating interview, if interview it could be called, and its liberating end; how Ada had looked at him, and answered nothing to his abject and passionate appeals (he wondered how he could have made them, but he was despairingly sincere): how he had pleaded and apologized for the past and supplicated for the future, all in the mastering grip of his Marbeck faith, and how she had kept silent till she turned on Peter and told him she must leave a house which did not shelter her from the deadly insult of this man’s presence. He remembered the good woman, Mrs. Grandage, who had carried Ada to a Hydro at Southport, and wrote to Peter that Ada seemed quite happy there, “nursing her grievance like a child,” and was looking for a house. He had found something mystifying about the intervention of Mrs. Grandage: good nature fortified by a bad conscience was his attempt to explain her attitude, but what emerged clearly from the letters she wrote to Peter was that Ada had no intention of returning to Manchester: and when he thought of Southport, he realized its quintessential rightness as her home. He had not shirked his job; he had eaten dirt before her in his anxiety to do his job; and he was not allowed. What she was she must remain, and Southport seemed the aptest place for her. “Only,” as Mrs. Grandage wrote, “she mast have money.”
That was not difficult, and the money might have come in many ways: it came actually in a way which Effie hated and Sam thought exquisitely right. It came through Stewart, that faithful ally of the publishing business in its early days.
Dubby was in Effie’s room, “which is where,” he said, “your brother has a right to be.”
“You keep that up,” she smiled.