She seemed in some strange way to resent any lifting of the heavy folds of the pall of fate and with a kind of obstinate weariness, to lean to the darker and more sombre aspect of every possibility.
She carried in her hands a bunch of faded flowers brought from the grave she had visited and which she seemed reluctant to throw away, and Nance never forgot the appearance of her black-gowned drooping figure and white face, as she stood there, by the edge of the misty, sun-illumined fens, holding those dead stalks and withered leaves.
As they parted, Nance whispered hesitatingly some little word about Baltazar. She half expected her to answer with tears, but in place of that, her eyes seemed to shine with a weird exultant joy.
“When you’re as old as I am, dear,” she said, “and have seen life as I have seen it, you will not be sad to lose what you love best. The better we love them, the happier we must be when they are set free from the evil of the world.”
She looked down on the ground, and when she raised her head, her eyes had an unearthly light in them. “I am closer to him now,” she said, “closer than ever before. And it will not be long before I go to join him.”
She moved slowly away, dragging her limbs heavily.
Nance, as she went on, kept seeing again and again before her that weird unearthly look. It left the impression on her mind that Mrs. Renshaw had actually secured some strange and unnatural link with the dead which made her cold and detached in her attitude towards the living.
Perhaps it had been all the while like this, the girl thought. Perhaps it was just this habitual intercourse with the Invisible which rendered her so entirely a votary of moonlight and of shadows, and so unsympathetic towards the sunshine and towards all genial normal expressions of natural humanity.
Nance had the sensation—when at last, with Linda at her side, she returned dreamily to the village—of having encountered some creature from a world different from ours, a world of grey vapours and shadowy margins, a world where the wraiths of the unborn meet the ghosts of the dead, a world where the “might-have-been” and the “never-to-be-again” weep together by the shores of Lethe.
The little party which assembled presently round a table in the bow-window of the Rodmoor confectioner’s proved a cheerful and happy one. The day was Saturday, so that the street was full of a quiet stir of people preparing to leave their shops and begin the weekly holiday. There was a vague feeling of delicate sadness, dreamy yet not unhappy, in the air, as though the year itself were pausing for a moment in its onward march towards the frosts of winter and gathering for the last time all its children, all its fading leaves and piled-up fruits and drooping flowers, into a hushed maternal embrace, an embrace of silent and everlasting farewell.