Marion, groaning, pressed the button of the electric clock that stood on the table by her bedside, and looked up at the monstrous white dial it threw on the ceiling. Half-past one. She rolled over and cried into the pillow, "Richard! Richard!" She had already been three hours in bed. There were six more hours till morning, six more hours in which to remember things, and memory was a hot torment, a fire lit in her brainpan.
When, three days later, she received Peacey's letter saying that he would not allow the child to go back to her she felt nothing but relief. It was disgusting, of course, to get that letter, to have to read so many lines in that loathsome, large, neat, inflated handwriting, but she took it that it meant that those toys which he had sent Roger every six months were not, as she thought, mere attempts to torture her by reminding her of his existence, but signs that he had really wanted to be a father to his son, and that now that Harry was dead he was declaring his desire freely. That made her very happy, for she knew that love from the worst man on earth would be more nourishing for the boy than her insincerity. She did not tell Richard, because she could not have borne to see how pleased he would look, but she went about the house light-heartedly for winter days, bursting with song, and then penitently checking herself and planning to send Roger extravagant presents for Christmas, until Susan Rodney's letter came. She had sat with it open on her lap, feeling sick and wondering in whose care she could leave Richard while she went down to Dawlish and fetched the poor little thing away, for quite a long time, before it occurred to her that Harry had never told her the secret by which he held Peacey in subjection. Immediately she realised that Peacey knew this. Out of his cold, dilettante knowledge he had known that when she and Harry met they would not be able to speak his name for more than one minute. She wished she were the kind of woman who fainted from fear. The clock ticked, and not less steadily beat her heart, and nothing came to distract her from looking into the face of this fact that she had now no power over Peacey and he knew it.
Then she huddled forward towards the fire, which no longer seemed to heat her, and Susan's letter fell from her lap into the fender. She picked it up, crying, "Oh, my baby, how little I care for you!" and struck herself on the forehead as she reflected how many expedients would have suggested themselves to her if it had been Richard who was being maltreated down at Dawlish. She sat down and wrote a lying letter to Peacey, threatening him with the disclosure of the secret she did not know, and then, because the grandfather clock twanged out three and she knew the post was collected five minutes past, she ran out into the windy afternoon bareheaded. The last part of the distance, down the High Street, she ran, but she got into the grocer's shop too late and found Mr. Hemming just about to seal the bag. "Oh, Mr. Hemming!" she gasped. The three women in the shop turned round and looked at her curiously, and she perceived that if she betrayed her agony now she would lose all the ground she had gained during the past few years by her affectation of well-being. If it leaked out, as it certainly would, unless she at once lowered the present temperature of the moment, that a few days after Harry's death she had been excitedly sending a letter to Peacey, the village people would go through her story all over again to try to find out what this could possibly mean, and would remember that it was a tragedy, and once more she would be the victim of that hostility which the happy feel for the unhappy. Yet she found herself making a queer distraught mask of her face and saying theatrically, "Oh, Mr. Hemming, please, please let this letter go ..." and, when he granted the favour, as she knew quite well he would have done to just half as much imploration, she went out of the shop breathing heavily and audibly.
"Why am I like this?" she asked herself. "Ah, I see! So that I can say afterwards that I did everything I could to get him back, even to the extent of turning people against me, and can settle down to being happy with Richard. Oh, Roger, I am a cold devil to you...." She was indeed. For when she received Peacey's letter saying blandly that there was nothing in his life of which he need feel ashamed, and realised that the game was up and she was powerless, she was glad. She sat down and wrote her bluffing answer, a warning that if the child was not sent back within a week she would come down to Dawlish and fetch it, with an infamous fear lest it might be efficacious. And when Peacey wrote back, pointing out that Richard was legally his child, and that he would be taken out of her custody if she went on making this fuss about Roger, she chose immediately. She tore the letter into small pieces and dropped them into the heart of the fire, and knelt by the grate until the flame died. Though the boy was still out at school she lifted up her voice and cried out seductively, serenely, "Richard! Richard!"
What is this thing, the soul? It blows hot, it blows cold, it reels with the drunkenness of exaltation for some slight event no denser than a dream, it hoods itself with penitence for some act that the mind can hardly remember; and yet its judgments are the voice of absolute wisdom. She did not care at all for Roger. When at nights she used to see in the blackness the little figure standing in his shirt, beating the dark air with his fists, as Susan told her he used to do when Peacey woke him suddenly out of his sleep to frighten him, her pity, was flavourless and abstract. That she had unwittingly sent the child to its doom caused her no earthquake of remorse but a storm of annoyance. Yet she knew every hour of the day that her soul had taken a decision to mourn the child in some way that would hurt her.
One afternoon, a month or so after their happy, lonely Christmas, when she was playing balls in the garden with Richard, the postman came up and handed her another letter from Susan Rodney. Though Peacey had forbidden her to write to Susan Rodney, so that she had never been able to explain why she did not come and fetch Roger, he allowed Susan to write to her. Weekly Marion received letters cursing her cruelly in not coming, written in an honest writing that made them hurt the more. She took it and smiled in the postman's face. "Well, how is Mrs. Brown getting on with the new baby?" When he had gone she gave it to Richard and told him to go and drop it in the kitchen fire. While he was away she stood and stared down at the acid green of the winter grass, and wondered what she had missed by not reading the letter, what story of blows delivered cunningly here and there so that they did not mark, or of petting that skilfully led up to a sudden feint of terrifying temper; and suddenly she was conscious of a fret in the air, and said wonderingly, "It is far too early for the Spring. We are hardly into February yet." But the fret had been not in the air but in herself, and the change of season it had foreboded had been in her own soul.
That very night she had begun to have bad dreams. Twice before the dawn she was stoned down Roothing High Street, even as seven years before men looked at her from behind glazed, amused masks; and she had put up her hand to her head and found that a stone had drawn blood; and Mr. Goode's kind voice said something about, "A bit of boys' fun, Mr. Peacey," and she had stared before her at a black, broadclothed bulk. In the morning she woke sweating like an overdriven horse, and said to herself, "This is the worst night I have spent in all my life. Pray God I may never spend another like it."
But henceforward half her nights were to be like that. By day her soul walked like a peacock on its green lawn, proudly, pompously, struttingly, because she was the mother of this gorgeous son. There was no moment of her waking life that he did not gild, for either he had not long gone out and had turned at the gate to wave good-bye with a gesture so dear that when she thought of it she dug her nails into her palms in an agony of tenderness, or he was just coming back and she must get something ready for him. Even after he had gone to school he built her a bulwark against misery which endured till the night fell, for in the few hours that remained after she had finished the work she had now undertaken on the farm she read his letters over and over again. They were queer and disturbing and delicious letters, and they hinted that there was a content in their relationship which had never yet been put into words, for they were full of records of his successes in class and at games.