Mary rose to go. She was worried. "Queer goings on." That was just it. Nothing tangible, nothing that one could fight in the open.
She bade farewell to Mrs. Watts and walked home along the sunlit road.
It would be a fine day for the children. That was something. After all, there was nothing very wrong. Things had gone on the same in the past. They would be the same again. Ardently she tried to assure herself of this. For it meant nothing to any but a feverish and over-sensitive imagination that Mike should fight with Eli Waite, that old Deane should have omitted his customary greeting to her in the street, that Coast should refuse to cheer her and John when the waggons drove away.
Waite naturally was a cross-grained man. Mike was temperamentally unable to keep the peace. Coast and she were old enemies.
It was nothing, this shadow on the kingdom, only the ghost of her own brooding thoughts and frustrated longings.
She closed the gate behind her and paused in the blossoming garden. She needed new flowers for the dining-room table and there were roses on the prim standard bushes up the path to the house. She bent above their vivid fragrance, her fingers hovering, like the heavy-laden bees, from flower to flower.
Here at least she found tranquillity and assured possession. The anxiety died from her eyes, the strained lines from the corners of her mouth. She moved slowly about the garden.
Here, as though she were really a queen, the courtier yews cast cloaks of shade before her on the golden grass. Roses, peonies, starlike daisies against the night dark hedge of yew, delphiniums catching the blue of the sky on their delicate spears, these were gentler subjects than the men and women of Anderby.
If it were only in the village that she found her trouble, she might have sought comfort here. But she turned restlessly to the house and went to a desk in the drawing-room. Laying the roses on a table, she opened a drawer and took out a sheaf of newspaper cuttings, neatly dated and pinned together. Again she read them, though she knew their phrases by heart. "Organization of agriculture." "The beginning of a great campaign." "Yorkshire caution and progress."
"Progress." He was always talking of progress. Mary laid the papers down and looked through her window across the gold and green of the garden, but saw neither sunlight nor shadow.