There was a great hush in the still autumn afternoon—a strange quietness in the air. Phemie thought of that journey afterwards, and remembered how often a calm precedes a storm. She was travelling down into Norfolk, all unconsciously, to fulfil a mission; and as the train sped on she tried to account to herself for the desire she felt to revisit Marshlands and to spend a few weeks with Basil and his wife.
It was no love for Basil. She knew that. She had examined her heart, and found the idol in possession no longer. Her youth had gone, and the passionate attachment of her youth with it. And yet something remained—some tie of memory, or association, or affection, or pity, which was strong enough to bring the woman back to Marshlands—to the dear home where she had been so happy and so wretched.
There came a point in that journey, however—at Cambridge, I think—when Phemie, unable fully to analyse her own sensations, turned coward, and would fain have gone back again.
She dreaded the sight of the old place, of the familiar rooms, the resurrection of the thousand-and-one recollections. She did not know whether, after all, she could be quite brave when the pines and the elms appeared standing clear against the sky as of yore. One by one the details of the picture which had been blurred and destroyed a little by the lapse of years came out clearly and distinctly before her view.
Only one thing she could not realise fully. Basil master of Marshlands, Georgina mistress, she herself their guest; children’s voices echoing about the place, and those very children leaving their games and their amusements, their father and their mother, to come to her.
Was that the bait which lured the lonely woman back to her old home? I do not know how she could have blinded and deluded herself into ignorance on this point when she knew that the only gentle, womanly tears she had shed for years fell over the face of Basil’s little girl.
She had never desired children—she had always held them away from her at arm’s length, and yet now she would have liked to carry “Fairy,” as she called her, back to Roundwood, whether for love of the little creature, or for love of its father, or simply because she wanted to have something all to herself, who can say? Only one fact is certain—the only pleasant hours she passed in Marshlands were those when she and Fairy wandered about the grounds hand-in-hand—when the child came to her room and listened to story and legend and song—when the little feet came running to meet her, making sweet pattering music by the way—when the soft arms were stretched out to “Mamma Phemie,” to “dear, dear Mamma Phemie,” who came at last to the conclusion it was best for her to leave Marshlands before Basil saw what an idiot she had grown.
But Basil saw it all—saw how his children turned from his wife to the woman he still loved better than his wife, and he grew angry at Georgina for having asked Phemie to the house, and words at last waxed hot between them on the subject.
For ever and for ever they were quarrelling, so far as difference of opinion was concerned, and wrangling over their differences. Phemie’s presence or Phemie’s absence signified little, only the quarrels became more vehement. Basil accused Georgina of striving to hurt and annoy him, Georgina declared that he had by his temper driven away every old acquaintance they possessed, and that she was determined to have somebody to speak to.
“If Mrs. Stondon were the devil,” she remarked, with somewhat unladylike vehemence, “I would cultivate her. I mean to go and stay with her. I intend to be asked to her house in town, and I do not intend to live any longer with your mother.”