Baltazar looked at his mistily outlined features and experienced, what was extremely unusual with him, a faint sense of apprehensive remorse. “Of course I remember,” he replied. “You mean those notes of yours—that book you’re writing?”
But Sorio did not hear him. All his attention was concentrated just then upon the attempt to burst another seaweed bubble. The bell from the unseen buoy rang out brokenly over the water; and between the side of their boat and the stake to which the man was clinging there came gurglings and lappings and whispers, as if below them, far down under the humming tide, some sad sea-creature, without hope or memory or rest, were tossing and moaning, turning a drowned inhuman face towards the darkened sky.
XVI
THE FENS
Nance was able, in a sort of lethargic obstinacy, to endure the strain of her feelings for Sorio, now that she had the influence of her familiar work to dull her nerves. She tried hard to make things cheerful for her not less heart-weary sister, devising one little scheme after another to divert and distract the child, and never permitting her own trouble to interfere with her sympathy.
But behind all this her soul ached miserably, and her whole nature thirsted and throbbed for the satisfaction of her love. Her work played its part as a kind of numbing opiate and the evenings spent among Letitia Pontifex’ flower-beds were not devoid of moments of restorative hope, but day and night the pain of her passion hurt her and the tooth of jealousy bit into her flesh.
It was worst of all in the nights. The sisters slept in two small couches in the same room and Nance found herself dreading more and more, as July drew to its close, that hour when they came in from their neighbour’s garden and undressing in silence, lay down so near to one another. They both tried hard, Linda no less than her sister, to put the thoughts that vexed them out of their minds and behave as if they were fancy-free and at peace, but the struggle was a difficult one. If they only hadn’t known, so cruelly well, just what the other was feeling, as they turned alternately from side to side, and like little feverish animals gasped and fretted, it would have been easier to bear. “Aren’t you asleep yet?” one of them would whisper plaintively, and the submissive, “I’m so sorry, dear; but oh! I wish the morning would come,” that she received in answer, met with only too deep a response.
One unusually hot night—it happened to be the first Sunday in August and the eve of the Bank Holiday—Nance felt as though she would scream out aloud if her sister moved in her bed again.
There was something that humiliated and degraded in this mutual misery. It was hard to be patient, hard not to feel that her own aching heart was in some subtle way mocked and insulted by the presence of the same hurt in the heart of another. It reduced the private sorrow of each to a sort of universal sex pain, to suffer from which was a kind of outrage to what was sacred and secret in their individual souls.