Pamela walked home thoughtfully. There was, then, nothing stationary in life—outside a happy marriage. The family had combined to drive her from Folly Corner or into Jethro’s arms. The family did not know the cold, sad repugnance that they both had for love-making—the dread avoidance of it, as a poignant, heart-wrenching thing. Aunt Sophy might suspect, but she would never be sure.
She walked through the woods which she had once trodden with Edred on a spring day. Crisp frost—like the icing of Maria’s cakes: Maria’s forte was iced cake—spread over the thick, dead leaves. Every point on which her eye dwelt was glittering and white. When she reached Folly Corner she stopped to look at the cows, standing in golden straw and fenced by a gray paling on which serpent-green moss stood in a thick pile. Why wouldn’t the family let them alone—she and Jethro? They were happy—slow, peaceful, like their cattle: their cattle—she had come to believe that everything was hers, without the burning, binding tie of marriage. They were happy. The pensive melancholy and roundness of the old place, which no builder could inspire with modern feeling, had eaten into them. They only wanted to be left alone.
She went round the house, meaning to enter, as she usually did, by the garden door. As she passed beneath the window of her old room she looked up. It stood open. Gainah was indifferent to temperature: she was stitching at her interminable quilts. All she had kept of her sane days was the feverish energy, which now wrought itself on snipping up stuff and sewing it together again. She wore the same old gown of blue—they could not take it from her; her hair bunched out on each side of her chalky face in the absurd bunches of corkscrew curls. The velvet band across her head was tightly strained: it had made a bald spot in the middle of the parting—a spot which was rapidly spreading. Pamela saw her plainly: the restless fingers, distorted by rheumatism, but quite clean and yellow-white, now that she did not do any housework or cooking; the worn, blank face, the constantly moving lips. She stood looking up, not knowing why she stopped, lost in speculation which had little enough to do with this dormant Gainah.
As she stood there Gainah suddenly looked down. She met the upturned eyes and gave a terrified baby’s cry. She tried to move, to scuttle out of sight. But her stricken limbs refused their aid; she began to whimper with fright at the sight of her victim. A flash of anger lighted on Pamela’s face. She had never forgiven.
She held up her finger and shook it threateningly.
“Go back,” she cried, “go back to the fire at once,” forgetting in her irritation that the old woman could not move across the room without help.
The parlormaid came forward to the window. She caught Gainah by the shoulder, none too gently, and pulled her away, shutting the casement with an impatient click.
Jethro was in the field beyond the garden. Pamela went to him over the border of crisp, crunching grass which edged the furrows. She loved that field in all its moods. She had watched it, consulted it so often from the shadow of the deep bay window. She remembered just how it appeared at each particular crisis of her life at Folly Corner—half shorn of its yellow corn on that first day; mystic with clearing mist and great green moon the night she came back; dull brown to-day with thin ice on the upturned tips of its even furrows.
He was near the hedge, talking to Buckman, who was ditching. She went up and hooked her hand through his arm without saying a word. They had grown into that attitude—the affectionate, silent attitude of long, dear familiarity. Sometimes they would sit without speech for a whole evening, until he suddenly looked up from the paper with a tender look and stretched his big hand out to touch her fingers.
The ditch was clean, the hedge hacked. Small heaps of black leaf mold spotted the fringe of grass.