David left early next morning; a stiff, genteel little letter of thanks came from him to the Doña, and then, for most of them, he might never have been.
Each day life at Plasencia became more and more focused on the approaching wedding; and the Doña and Jollypot spent hours in the morning-room making lists of guests and writing invitations.
As soon as David had gone Teresa began to write—the mediæval books had done their work and were no longer needed.
St. Ignatius de Loyóla, in his esoteric instructions to his disciples, gives the following receipt for conjuring up a vision of Christ Crucified: to obtain a vision, he says, one must begin by visualising the background—first, then, conjure up before you a great expanse of intensely blue sky, such as the sky must be in Palestine, next, picture against this sky a range of harsh, deeply indented hills, red and green and black, then wait; and suddenly upon this background will flash a cross with Christ nailed to it.
Teresa had got her background; and now the vision came.
But she was doubtful as to whether it was a vision of the Past such as De Quincey had had in his dream, or Monticelli shown in his picture; for one thing, she found an almost irresistible pleasure in intagliating her writing with antiquarian details, and indeed it was more a vision of a situation, a situation adorned by the Past, than a vision of the Past itself.
She wrote all day; neither thinking nor reading, but closely guarding her mind from the contamination of outside ideas.
The play—the plot—was turning out very differently from what she had expected; and as well as being a transposing of life at Plasencia, it was, she realised with the clear-sightedness of her generation, performing the function assigned to dreams by Freud—namely, that of expressing in symbols the desires of which one is ashamed.... Though, for her own reasons, she shrank from it, she was keenly aware of Concha’s sympathy these days. It seemed that Concha had that rare, mysterious gift that Pepa had had too—the gift of loving.
Guy came down in June for a week-end; with Teresa he was like a sulky child, but she saw that his eyes were haggard, and she felt very sorry for him.
“What about that Papist—I mean Roman Catholic, the stolid Scot?” he asked at tea.