But the old people began to speak, and the flowers lost their power over her. She had to listen while they proposed that she should marry her lover's butler. He had made the offer most handsomely, it appeared, and was willing to do it at once and treat the child as if it were his own. "What, Peacey?" she had cried, raising herself up on her elbow, "Peacey? Ah, if Harry were here you would not dare to tell me this!" And Aunt Alphonsine had said "Hush!" at the squire's name, being to the core of her soul a dame de compagnie; and Grandmother had said, with that use of the truth as an offensive weapon which seems the highest form of truthfulness to many, "Well, Sir Harry seems in no great haste to come back to protect you. He could come back if he liked, you know, dear."
That was, of course, quite true. He could have come back. It was true that his return from the Royal tour would have meant the end of his career at Court; but that consideration should have seemed fatuous compared with his duty to stand beside his woman when she was going to have his child. She covered her face with the sheet and lay so still that they left her. Till the evening fell she remained so, keeping the linen close to her drawn about brow and chin like an integument for her agony which prevented it from breaking out into physical convulsions and shrieked lamentations. It seemed a symbol of her utter desolation that such a proposal should have been made to her when she should have been sacred to her child: but there was not the least fear in her heart that it would ever come to pass. She had not known how often the old people would come and sit by her bed, looking terrible.
Yes, they had looked terrible, but not, seen across the years, inexplicable. Grandmother had spent all her life being the good wife of Edward Yaverland, and she had not liked him, for in the days when she had ransacked her memory for pretty tales to tell her little grandchild she had never spoken of any place she had visited with him; and indeed the daguerreotype on the parlour wall showed a man teased by developing prosperity as by an inward growth, whose eye would change pink apple-blossom to a computable promise of cider. It is not in the nature of any human being to admit that they have wasted their whole life, and since she had certainly gained no treasure of love from her forty years with her husband it was necessary that she should invent some good purpose which that tedious companionship had served. The theory of the sanctity of marriage came in handy; it comforted her to believe that by merely being a wife she had fulfilled a function pleasing to God and necessary to the existence of society. But she had so often been assailed by moments when it had seemed that during all her living life had not begun, that she had to believe it passionately to quiet those doubts. To have asked her to stay away from the bedside would have been to ask her to admit that her life was useless, and that it would have been better if she had not been born. "Lord have mercy on us all!" thought Marion, and forgave her.
It was not so easy to forgive Aunt Alphonsine, for her voice had been as sharp as it could be without being honestly angry, like bad wine instead of good vinegar, and had run indefatigably up the switchbacks on which the voices of Frenchwomen travel eternally. She was the most responsible for the defeat of Marion's life. And yet Aunt Alphonsine too was not malignant of intent. The worst of illicit relationships is the provocation they give to the minds that hear of them. When it is said of a man and woman that they are married, the imagination sees the public ceremony before the altar, the shared house, the children, and all the sober external results of marriage; but when it is said of a man and woman that they are lovers, the imagination is confronted with the fact of their love. The thought of her niece night after night shut up with love in the white belvedere all the long time the moon required to rise from the open sea, fill all the creeks with silver, and drain them dry again as she sunk westwards, must have been torment to one whose left cheek, from the long pale ear to the inhibited mouth, was one scar. That scar was an epitome of all that was pathetic and mischievous about the poor faint woman, this being formed to be a nun who had not been blessed with any religion and so had to dedicate herself to the ridiculous god of decorum. "Your aunt," Marion's mother had said to her, "burned her face cleaning a pair of white shoes with benzine for me to wear at my first Communion. It was a pity she did it. And a pity for me too, since I have had to obey her ever since in everything, though I wanted neither the white shoes nor the Communion." In that speech were all the elements of Alphonsine's tragedy, and therefore most of the causes of Marion's. The French thrift that had made her clean the shoes at home, and thereby maim herself into something that desired to assassinate love whenever she saw it, made her terribly exercised at the possibility that the family might have to support a fatherless baby. The affection for her sister Pamela which had made her perform these services had enabled her to bring up that lovely child through all the dangers of a poverty-stricken childhood in Paris, in spite of a certain wildness in her beauty which might, if unchecked, have been a summons to disorder; and her triumph in that respect had made it the most heartbreaking disappointment when the temptations she thought she had baulked for ever in Paris twenty years before returned and claimed so easily Pamela's child, whom she thought quite safe, since to her French eyes Marion's dark brows, perpetually knit in preoccupation with the movements of her nature, were not likely to be attractive to men.
That must have added to her bitterness. It must have seemed very cruel to Alphonsine that she, with her smooth brown hair which she coiffed perfectly, her long white hands, and her slender body with its hour-glass waist, which had a strange air of having been filleted of all grossness, could never know the joy that could be obtained even by this black untidy girl. That would account for the passion with which she forced Marion to do the thing she did not want to; and any suspicion that she was actuated by a desire to punish the girl for her happiness she would be able to dismiss by recollecting that certainly she had served her little sister's welfare by crossing her will. Oh, there was much to be said for Alphonsine. But all the same, it was a pity that the old people had interfered. She had loved Richard so much that it would not have mattered to her or to him that he was fatherless, since from the inexhaustible treasure of her passion for him she could give him far more than other children receive from both parents. They might have been so happy together if the old people had not made her marry Peacey.
"But this is different," she said to herself. "They compelled me to unhappiness. I am forcing happiness on Richard and Ellen. It is quite different."
But she looked anxiously at the girl. They smiled at each other with their eyes, as if they were friends in eternity. But their lips smiled guardedly, for it might be that they were enemies in time.
CHAPTER II
The land, which from the time they left London had been so ugly as to be almost invisible, suddenly took form and colour. To the south, beyond a creek whose further bank was a raw edge of gleaming mud hummocks tufted with dark spriggy heaths and veined with waterways that shone white under the cold sky, there stretched a great quiet plain. It stretched illimitably, and though there were dotted over it red barns and grey houses and knots of trees growing in fellowship as they do round steadings, and though its colour was a deep wet fertile green, it did not seem as if it could be a human territory. It could be regarded only as a place for the feet of the clouds which, half as tall as the sky, stood on the far horizon. They passed a station, built high above the marsh on piles, and looked down on a ford that crossed the mud bed of the creek to a white road that drove southwards into the plain. A tongue of the creek ran inwards beside it for a hundred yards or so; above its humpy mud banks the road protected itself by white wooden railings, and on its other side a line of telegraph poles ran towards the skyline.