On Saturday afternoons they always went down to the marshes together, and they were glad that now was the ebbing of the year, for both found the beauty of bad weather somehow truer than the beauty of the sunshine. They loved to walk under high-backed clouds that the wind carried horizonwards in pursuance of some feud of the skies. They liked to see Roothing Castle standing up behind a salt mist, pale and flat as if it were cut out of paper. They liked to sit, too, at the point where there met together the three creeks that divided Roothing Marsh, the Saltings, and Kerith Island. That was good when the tide was out, and the sea-walls rose black from a silver plain of mud, valleyed with channels thin and dark as veins. They would wait until the winter sunset kindled and they had to return home quickly, looking over their shoulders at its flames.
Lovely it was to find that he liked all the things she did: loneliness and the sting of rain on the face and the cry of the redshanks; and lovely it was to find in watching his liking what a glorious being it was that she had borne. The eyes of his soul glowed like the eyes of his body. She had loved Harry's love for her because it made him quick and unhesitant and unmuddied by half-thought thoughts and half-felt feelings as ordinary people are, but this child was like that all the time. Pride ruled his life, so that she never had to feel anxious about his behaviour, knowing that he would pull himself up into uncriticisable conduct just as he always held his head high, and all the forces of his spirit were poured out into his passion for her. She had always known these things, and now the knowledge of them was not balanced by the knowledge that her faith held weight for weight of infamy and glory. For now that Roger was not here there was nothing to remind her that the man to whom she had given her virginity had not come to her help when she was going to have his child and had left her to be trodden into the mud by the fat man Peacey. Now she only knew that she was the beloved mother of this splendid son. What had happened to the man with whom, according to the indecent and ridiculous dispensation of nature, she had had to be enmeshed in a net of hot excitements and undignified physical impulses in order to obtain this child, mattered nothing at all. He had been so much less splendid than his son.
She grew well with happiness. She became plumper, and there was colour on her cheeks as well as in her lips. People ceased to treat her with the hostility that the happy feel for the unhappy. Presently she knew that she would soon regain complete self-control and would be able to keep shut the trap-door of her hidden self, and that it would be quite safe for her to have Roger back at the end of three months. She began to speak of it to Richard. "Roger will be with us for Xmas," she used to say. "We must think out some surprises for him...." To which Richard would answer tensely, "I s'pose so." That always chilled her, and she would drop the subject, feeling that after all there was no need to speak of it just yet. But once, as the days passed into December, she tried to have it out with him, and followed it up by saying: "You might try to be a little more pleased about it. I do want you and Roger to be nice to each other." He answered, looking curiously grown up, "Oh, Roger will always be nice to me—you needn't worry about that."
As she heard the tone, with its insolent allusion to Roger's natural slavishness, she realised why the vicar and the teachers in the village school, and many of the other people with whom he came in contact, disliked him. There was something terrifying about this cold-tempered judgment coming from a child. She had wondered, looking at the beauty of his contemptuous little face and at the extraordinary skill with which his small brown hands were whittling a block of wood into a figure, whether it was not a sound instinct on the part of the race to persecute illegitimate children. Either they were conceived more lethargically than other children, of women who yielded through feeble-wittedness or need of money to men who did not love them enough to marry them, and so were born below the average of the race, dullards that made life ugly, or parasites that had to be kept on honest people's money in prisons or workhouses. Or, like, Richard, they had been conceived more intensely than other children, of love so passionate that it had drawn together men and women separated by social prohibitions. So they were born to rule like kings over the lawfully begotten, so that married folk raged to see that, because they had known no more than ordinary pleasure, their seed was to be penalised by servitude. Richard would always be adored by all but the elderly and the impotent.
Because vitality itself had been kneaded into his flesh by his parents' passion he would not die until he was an old, old man and needed rest after interminable victories; and because it played through his mind like lightning, he would always have power over men and material, and even over himself. Since he had been begotten when beauty, like a strong goddess, pressed together the bodies of his father and mother, she would disclose more of her works to him than to other sons of men with whose begetting she was not concerned. Even now, every time Marion let him take her to the turn of the road past Roothing, where he could show her the oak cut like a club on a playing-card and aflame with autumn that stood on the hill's edge, against the far grey desolation of Kerith Island and the sunless tides, he knew such joy as one would have thought beyond a child's achievement. He would get as much out of life as any man that ever lived. At the thought of the contrast between this heir to everything and the other child, that poor waif who all his life long would be sent round to the back door, tears rushed to her eyes, and she cried indignantly, "Oh, I do think you might be nice to Roger." Richard looked at her sharply. "What, do you really mind about it, mummie?" The surprise in his tone told her the worst about her forced and mechanical kindnesses to Roger. "Oh, more than anything," she almost sobbed. "Very well, I'll be nice to him," he answered shortly, adding after a minute, with a deliberate impishness, as if he hated the moment and wanted to burlesque it, "After all, mums, I never do hit him...." But for the rest of the evening the golden glow of his face was clouded with solemnity, and when she was tucking him up that night he said, in an off-hand way, "You know prob'ly Roger's got much older while he's been away, and I'll be able to play with him more when he comes back." She laughed happily. If he was going to help her to frustrate her unnatural hatred of Roger, she would succeed.
CHAPTER VI
Then, a week later, Harry died. That might have meant grief, wrecking and inexpressible, for she discovered that she was still his. Love lay in her, indestructible as an element. It was true that passion was gone from her for ever, but that had been merely an alloy added to it by nature when she desired to use it as currency to buy continuance, and love itself had survived. She might have lacerated herself with mourning for the fracture of their marriage and the separation of their later years had it not been for the beautiful thing that had happened the afternoon before he died. It was so beautiful that she hardly ever rehearsed its details to herself, preferring to guard it in her heart as one guards sacred things, preserving it immaculate even from her own thoughts. It had lifted the shame from her destiny. She perceived that the next day, when Richard came in and stood stumbling with the handle of the door, instead of running to the table, though she had arranged it specially, as if this were a birthday, with four candles instead of two, and had baked him a milk loaf for a treat, and had cut the last Michaelmas daisies from the garden and set them in blanched mauve clouds about the dark edges of the room.
"Mother, the squire's dead," he said at length. That she knew already. She had divined it early in the afternoon, when the village people began to go past the house in twos and threes, walking slowly and turning their faces towards her windows. "Yes, dear," she answered evenly. "Mother, is it true that the squire was my father? All the other boys say so." She had anticipated this moment for years with terror, because always before it had seemed to her that when it came she must break down and tell him how she had been shamed and abandoned and cast away to infamy, and she had dreaded that this might make him frightened of life. But because of what had happened the day before she was able to smile, as if they were talking of happy things, and say slowly and delightedly, "Yes, you are his son." He walked slowly across the room, knitting his brows and staring at her with eyes that were at once crafty and awed, as children's are when they perceive that grown-ups are concealing some important fact from them, and harbour at once a quick, indignant resolution to find out what it is as soon as possible, and a slow, acquiescent sense that the truth must be a very sacred thing if it has to be veiled. At her knee he halted, and shot sharp glances up at her. But the peace in her face made him feel foolish, and he said in an off-hand manner: "Mummie, Miss Lawrence says my map of the Severn is the best," and then turned to look at the tea-table. "Ooh, mums, milk-loaf!" She could see as he continued that all was well with him. The squire had been his father: but it evidently was not anything to make a fuss about; it seemed funny that he and mother hadn't lived together, but grown-ups were always doing funny things; anyway, it seemed to be all right....
As she sat and teased him for making such an enormous meal, and rejoicing silently because he had passed through this dangerous moment so calmly, it struck her that Roger also would participate in the benefits brought by the beautiful happening of the day before. Now that her past life had been made not humiliating, but only sad, she would no longer feel angry with him because he reminded her of it. That night she wrote to Susan Rodney and asked her to bring him back during the week before Christmas.