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.

This was the beauty of bleakness, but not as she had known it on the Pentlands. That was like tragedy. Storms broke on the hills, spread snow or filled the freshets as with tears, and then departed, leaving the curlews drilling holes with their cries in the sphere of catharised clear air; and the people there, men resting on their staves, women at their but-and-ben doors, spoke with magnificent calm, as if they had exhausted all their violence on certain specific occasions. But this plain was like a realist mind with an intense consciousness of cause and effect. There would blow a warning wind before the storm. It would be visible afar off in its coming, as a darkness, a flaw on the horizon; and when it had scourged the plain it would be seen for long travelling on towards the mainland. There would be no illusion that anything happens suddenly or that anything disappears. Here the long preparation of earth's events and their endurance would be evident. It would breed people like Marion, in whom a sense of the bearing of the past on the present was so powerful that it was often difficult to know of what she was speaking, and whether the tale she was telling of Richard referred to yesterday or his boyhood; that it was impossible to say whether she smiled because of memory or hope when she leaned forward and said, "This is Kerith Island."

"Mhm," said Ellen, since it was not her own country; "it's verra flat." And then, realising that she was belittling beauty, she exclaimed, "I must have said that for the sake of being disagreeable. I think it's fine, though very different from Scotland. But after all, why should everything be like Scotland? There's no real reason. I don't see where Richard's going to work, though."

"Three miles along the road and two to the right. You can see the works from our windows."

"Of course you could," said Ellen sourly; and explained, "When I couldn't see the works I made up a sort of story for myself, about the works being new ones, and the firm not being able to get them finished in time for Richard to start work, so that we had him hanging about the house all to ourselves. That was silly. Of course. But I am silly about him. I suppose I will soon get over it."

"I will hate you if you do," answered Marion, "for I never have."

The island and its creek fell away to the south. The train ran now across the marshes, flat and green, chequered with dykes, confined to the right by the steep brim of a sea-wall. To the left a line of little hills gained height. They fell back in an amphitheatre, and a farmhouse turned to the sun a garden more austere with the salt air than farmhouse gardens commonly are, and behind it, in the shelter of the curved green escarpment, some tall trees stood among the pastures. The hills rose again to an overhanging steepness and broke down to a gap full of the purples of bare woods, before which stood the cathedralesque ruins of a brick-kiln, with its tall tower and apse-like ovens, on a green platform of levelled ground scored with the red of rusted trolley-lines. The hill grew higher and stood sheer like a turfed cliff, and was surmounted by four tall towers of grey stone. It would have been impressive if the fall of the cliff had not been disfigured by a large shed of pink corrugated iron with "Hallelujah Army" painted on its roof, which was built on a shelf where some hawthorn trees and bramble bushes found a footing.

Then for a time, after an oblique valley had cleft the range, an elm-hedge ran along the crest, till there looked down a grey church with a squinting spire and grey-black yews set about it, and something white like a monument standing up on a mound beside it. Woods appeared and receded, leaving the hilltop bare, and returned; there was a broken hedge of hawthorn; a downward line of trees scored the gentler slope of the escarpment, and from a square red brick house on the skyline there fell an orchard.

"That is our house up there. That is Yaverland's End," said Marion; "and look on the other window, that is Roothing Harbour." But all Ellen could see was a forest of slim straight poles leaning everywhere above the sea-wall. "Those are the masts of the fishing-boats," said Marion indifferently, even grumbling, as was her way when she spoke of the things she loved. "Don't laugh at this place, though it is all mud. I can tell you the Elizabethan adventures drew most of their seamen from here and Tilbury." The sea-wall stopped, and beyond a foreshore of coal-dust and soiled shingle and tarred huts, such as is found always where men go down to the sea in ships, lay a bare harbour basin in which fishing-boats lolled on their sides in silver mud. Further out, smaller boats lay tidily on a bar of coarse grass that ran out from a sea-walled island that lay alongside the marsh the train had just crossed, with a farm and its orchard lying at the end it thrust into the harbour.

Now the train ran slower, and it could be seen that the line had been driven violently through the high street with no decent clearance, for to its left it could be seen that it was overhung by the backs of cottages, and on its right was the cobbled roadway on which walked bearded men in jerseys and top boots and women with that look of brine rather than bloom which is characteristic of fishing-villages. It was a fairly continuous street of huddled houses and drysalters' shops, with their stock of thigh-long boots and lanthorns and sou'-westers heaped behind small dark panes, and here and there came quays, with whitened cottages and trim gardens facing dingy wharf-offices over paved squares set about the edge with capstans, and beyond a Thames barge showing its furled red sail against a vista of shining mud-flats and the vast sky that belonged to this district. This hard, bright, clouded day, which dwelt on the grey in all things, even in the rough grass, made all look brittle and trivial and, however old, still unhistoric. It could be imagined that the people who lived under this immense sky might come to lose the common human sense of their own supreme importance, and to suspect themselves as being of no more account than the fishes which lie at the bottom of the channel; and might look up at the great cloud galleons floating above and wonder if these had not for ship's company beings that would be to them as men are to fishes. It was a place, Ellen saw, that might well have engendered such a curious vigorous lethargy as Marion's. Its breezes were clean enough to nourish strength, but there was something about the proportions of the scene that would breed scepticism concerning the value of all activities.

To see things in terms of Marion was weak, and a distraction from delight. She could neither behold things for their own sake, as she had up till this autumn, nor for Richard's sake, as she had till yesterday evening. But she was forced to wonder about this woman who had been able to be Richard's mother and who was yet so little what one approved of, and who yet again was so picturesque that one had to watch her with pleasant intensity that was not usually associated with dislike. Even when she looked on the astonishing scene that lay before her when they stepped on to the platform at Roothing station she was distracted from her astonishment by a sense that she would afterwards maintain an argument on the subject with Marion. The surroundings were ignobly ugly, as eggshells and scraps of newspaper trodden into waste ground are ugly. She was prepared to tell Marion so, though it was her own town. There had not been sufficient space to build a station with the up and down platforms facing each other, so the up platform was further back, facing the harbour, and this down platform was overshadowed on its landward side by smoke-grimed cottages and tenements which rose on high ground in a peak of squalor. Seawards one looked over a goods-siding, where there stood a few wagons of cockle-shells and a cinderpath esplanade on to a vast plain of mud.

It could not be beautiful. A plain of mud could not be beautiful. Yet the mind could dwell contentedly on this new and curious estate of nature, this substance that was neither earth nor water, this place that was neither land nor sea. It had its own colours: in the shadow of the great couchant cloud whose mane was brassy with sunshine that had lodged in the upper air it was purple; otherwise it was brown; and where the light lay it was as bright as polished steel, yet giving in its brightness some indication of its sucking softness. It had its own strange scenery; it had its undulations and its fissures, and between deep, rounded, shining banks, a course marked here and there by the stripped white ghosts of sapling trees, a winding river flowed out to the far-off channel of the estuary which lay a grey bar under the dark line of the Kentish hills.

It supported its own life; hundreds of black fishing-boats and some large vessels leaned this way and that, high and dry on the mud, like flies stuck on a window-pane, and up on the river, whose waters were now flowing from the sea to the land, men came in dingeys, not rowing, but bending their bodies indolently and without effort, because they were back-watering with the tide, so that their swift advance looked as if it were made easy by sorcery. They slackened speed before they came to the wharf, which just here by the station jutted out in a grey bastion surmounted by the minatory finger of a derrick, and some of them climbed out and put round baskets full of shining fish upon their heads, and, walking struttingly to brake their heavy boots on the slippery mud, followed a wet track up to the cinderpath. They looked stunted and fantastic like Oriental chessmen. It was strange, but this place had the quality of beauty. It laid a finger on the heart. Moreover, it had a solemn quality of importance. It was as if this was the primeval ooze from which the first life stirred and crawled landwards to begin to make this a memorable star.

Again the place seemed curiously like Marion. It might well have been that to make her a god had modelled a figure in this estuary mud and breathed on it, so much, in her sallow colouring and the heavy impassivity which was the equivalent of the plain's monotony, did she partake of its qualities. Her behaviour, too, was grand like the plain and yet composed of material that, as stuff for grandeur, was almost as uncompromising as mud.

She took the girl to the railings and made her look out to the sea, saying, "It is rather fine in a queer way, isn't it? When I was a girl I could run dryshod to the very end of the channel, and I daresay Richard could still."

Ellen shivered. "Is it not terribly lonely out there, just under the sky?"

"Oh, no, it's pleasant to be on innocent territory, with no human beings living on it. There was a feeling, so far as I can remember it, of extraordinary freedom and lightness." She spoke with a sincere cynicism, an easy grimness that appeared quite dreadful to Ellen. The girl looked appealingly at her, asking her not to give the sanction of her impressive personality to such hopelessness about life, but had the ill luck to catch her in the act of a practical demonstration of her dislike for her fellow-creatures. Now that the train had puffed out of the station the station-master, a silver-haired old man with a red face on which amiability clung like a lather, had come to Marion's side and was saying that he had not seen her for a long time, and asking how Richard was and when he was coming back. Ellen thought this was very kind of him, but Marion evidently found it tiresome, and hardly troubled to conceal the fact, walking rather more quickly along the platform than the old man could manage and giving no more answer to his questions than a vague smiling "Hum." Ellen hoped that the poor old man was not offended.

She found something dubious, too, about the lack of apology with which Marion led her into the squalor outside the station, over the level crossing, with its cobblestones veined with coal-dust, past the fish-shop hung with the horrid bleeding frills of skate, and the barber's shop that also sold journals, which stood with unreluctant posters at the exact point where newspapers and flypapers meet; and up the winding road, which sent a trail of square red villas with broken prams standing in unplanted or unweeded gardens up the hill in the direction of the church and the castle they had passed in the train. But surely she ought to have apologised for bringing a girl reared in Edinburgh to a place like this. On one of the gates they passed was written "Hiemath," and there was something very characteristic of the jerry-built and decaying place in the cheap sentiment that had been too slovenly to spell its own name correctly. Yet to the left, over the housetops of foul black streets running upwards from the railway-lines, there shone the great silver plain, and afar off a channel set with white sailing-ships and steamers, and dark majestic hills. But because of the quality of the place, and perhaps of her guide, she did not want to recognise its beauty.

When they came to a cross-roads that followed westward along the crest of the hill she would hardly admit to herself that this was better, that this was indeed right in a unique way, and that the dignified houses of white marl and oak on one side of the road and the public lawns on the other were quite good for England. She was not softened by Marion's proud mutter: "It's jolly in spring, seeing the blue sea through the gap in the may hedge. And on the other side of the hedge there's one of those old grass roads. They used to say they were Roman, but they're far older. Older than Stonehenge. This used to run all the way to Canfleet—that's where Kerith Island touches the mainland—but it's all gone but this part here...." She disliked the road when it took a disclaiming twist and left the houses out of sight and travelled between low oaks, because it was the road home, and she would never have chosen a home in this strange place, whose lack of meaning for herself could be measured by its plentitude of meaning for this woman who was so unlike her.

Certainly she would never have chosen this home. Very thick, trim hedges gave the long garden the look of a pound; the standard rose-trees which grew in round flower-beds on the lawn, which was of that excessively deep green that grass takes on in gardens with a north aspect, had the air of being detained in custody, and the borders on each side of the broad gravel path showed that extreme neatness which is found in places of detention. The red brick farmhouse at its end was very small, and its windows such mere square peep-holes among a strong growth of ivy that one conceived its inhabitants as being able to see the light only by pressing their faces close against the glass.

"Oh, I know it's ugly!" muttered Marion, holding back the gate for her. "I should have had it pulled down when I built on the new rooms. But it's been here two hundred years, and there are some of the beams of the house that was here before in it, and we have lived here all the time, so it was too great a responsibility to destroy it." She looked sideways at the girl's clouded face, and explained desperately, "I couldn't, you know. When people don't understand why you did things, and say you did them because you had no respect for good old established decencies of life, you become most carefully conservative!"

But confidence could not be maintained for long at this awkward pitch, and she went on to the front door. "You'll like our roses," she said hopefully, as they waited for it to open; "they grow wonderfully on this Essex clay." But although there was evident in that an amiable desire to please, Ellen was again alienated by the cool smile with which Marion greeted the maid who opened the door, the uninterested "Good morning, Mabel." The girl looked so pleased to see them. Marion returned, too, to this curious idea of hers about not being able to destroy ugly things just because they are old, although of course it is one's plain duty to replace ugly things with beautiful whatever the circumstances, when they stepped in, through no intervening hall or passage, to a little dark room furnished, as farm parlours are, with a grandfather clock, an oak settle, a dresser, a gate-leg table with a patchwork cloth over it, and samplers hanging on wallpaper of a trivial rosebud pattern. "I hate this English farmhouse stuff," she said. "Heavy and uninventive. The Yaverlands have been well-to-do for at least four hundred years, and they never took the trouble to have a single thing made with any particular appositeness to themselves. But I have left this room as it was. To have it disturbed would have been like turning my grandmother's ghost out of doors, and I troubled her enough in her lifetime. But look! It's all right in the rooms I've built on." She held back a door, and they looked into a shining room lined with white panels and lit by wide windows that admitted much of the vast sky. "But I'll take you to your room. It's in the old part of the house. But I think you will like it. It's a room I'm fond of...."

They climbed a steep dark staircase, and Marion opened a low thatched door in which the light, obscured by drawn chintz curtains, fell on cream walls and a bed, with its high headpiece made of fine wood painted green, and a great press made of the same. "There's a step down," she said, "and the floor rakes, but I'm fond of the room. I slept here when I was a girl; but all the things are new—I got them down from London; and I had the walls done. So you have a fresh start." She went to the chintz curtains and pulled them back, disclosing a very large window that came down to within two feet of the floor and looked on to a farmyard. "It's a good-sized window, isn't it?" she said. "There's a story about that. They say my great-grandfather, William Yaverland, was as mean as he was jealous, and as jealous as he was mean, and in middle life he was crippled by a kick from a horse and bedridden ever after. He'd a very pretty young wife, and a handsome overseer who was a very capable chap and worth hundreds a year to the farm, and it struck him that in his new state he'd probably not be able to keep the one without losing the other. So he had this window knocked out so that he could lie in his bed and keep his eye on the dairy where his wife worked and see who went in and came out. Well, now it'll let the morning sun in on you."

She sat down on the windowseat, and with a sense of fulfilment watched the girl move delightedly among the new things, touching the little white wreaths on the embroidered bedspread and tracing the delicate grain with her forefinger, and coming to a stop before the mirror and looking at her face with a solemn respectful vanity because it had pleased her beloved. Marion found this very right and fitting, because to her, in spite of the story of this window, this room had always been sacred to the spirit of young love. She turned her head and looked out into the farmyard. When the land had been let out to neighbouring cultivators the byres and outhouses had all been pulled down, and the yard was now only a quadrangle of grey trodden earth, having on its further side a wall-less shed in which there were stacked all the billets that had been cut from the spinneys on the land they retained, bound neatly with the black branches fluting together and a fuzz of purple twigs at each end.

But she could remember another day, more than thirty years before, when it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing neat about it at all, and the mellow cry of well-fed cattle came from the dark doors of tumble-down sheds, and she was standing in the sunshine with two of the Berkshire piglets in her arms. She had brought them out of the stye to have a better sight of their pretty twitching noses and their silken bristles and their playfulness, which was unclouded, as it is in the puppy by a genuine fear of life, or in the kitten by a minxish affectation of the same; and Goodtart, the cattleman, had drawn near with a "Wunnerful, ain't they, Miss Marion?—and them not born at four o'clock this morning," when she heard the clear voice that was sweet and yet hard, like silver ringing on steel, calling to the dogs out in the roadway, "Lesbia! Catullus! Come out of it!" The greyhounds had, as usual, got in among the sheep on the glebe land opposite. She ran forward into the darkness of the stye and put down the two piglets among the sucking tide of life that washed the flanks of the great old sow, but she could not stay there for ever. Goodtart, who, being in the sunlight, could not see that she was looking out at him from the shadow, turned an undisguised face towards the doorway, and she perceived that the dung-brown eyes under his forelocks were almost alive and that his long upper lip was twitching from side to side.

She walked stiffly out, hearing the voice still calling "Catullus! Lesbia!" and went in to the house. But Peggy was baking in the kitchen and Grandmother was reading the Prittlebay Gazette in the parlour, and she went upstairs and threw herself on the bed. She thought of nothing. Her heart seemed by its slogging beat to be urging some argument upon her. Presently she realised that he was no longer calling to his dogs, and she turned on her pillow and looked out of the big window into the farmyard. He was there. Cousin Tom Stallybrass, who had been managing the farm ever since Grandfather's death, had come out and was talking to him, and from his gestures was evidently telling him of the recent collapse of the dairy wall, but he was not interested, for he did not point his stick at it, and in him almost every mental movement was immediately followed by some physical sign. There was something else he wanted. When the greyhounds licked up at him he thrust them away with the petulance of a baulked man, and whenever Tom turned his head away to point at the dairy he cast quick glances at the farm door, at the gate into the road, at the other gate into the fields. She could see his face, and it was dark, and the lips drawn down at the corners. What could it be that he wanted?

She rose from her bed and went to the window, and knelt down by it, pressing her face and the white bib of her apron close to the glass. Instantly he saw her, and his face was filled with worship and happiness as with light. At last she knew that she was loved, that the things he said when they met on the marshes were not said as they had been when she was a child, and that there had lately been solemnity throned in his eyes' levity. He made no motion for her to come down, nor when Tom turned his head again did he throw any furtive look at the window. It was enough for him to have seen her; and soon he went away with bent head followed by his forgotten dogs.

Well, now this girl should sleep here, and the place should be revisited by a love as sacred as that, and one which would not commit sacrilege upon itself. She gave a soft laugh, and in a haze of satisfaction that prevented her seeing that Ellen was beginning to tell her how much she liked the furniture she went out and passed to her own room. For a moment she stood at the side windows, looking out on the show of sky and sea and green islands that lay sealed in the embankments from the grey flood which was now running across the silver plain and trying at them treacherously through the creeks that lay loverlike beside them. Then she turned approvingly to the litter which betokened that this was a bedroom visited by insomnia more often than by sleep: the half-dozen boxes of different sorts of cigarettes, the plate of apples and figs, the pile of books, the portfolio of prints. It had been dreadful, that night at the hotel, with nothing to read. She was very glad to come home.

It would not have seemed credible to Ellen that anyone should feel like this about this house. The things in her room were very pretty, but it was spoiled for her by that large window, not because she was afraid that anyone would look in, but because Marion had told her that someone had once looked out. Since that person had been kin to this woman who was dark with unspent energy, she figured him as being not quite extinguishable by death and therefore still a tenant of the apartment. The jealousy of one of his stock would probably have more dynamic power than her most exalted passions, so she would not be able to evict him. She thought these things quite passionately and desperately while at the same time she was placidly brushing her hair and thinking how nice everything was here. Her mind continued to perform this duet of emotions when they went downstairs and had lunch. It was very pretty, this white room with the few etchings set sparsely on the gleaming panels, each with a fair field of space for its black-and-white assertion; the deep, bright blue carpet, soft as sleep, on the mirror-shining parquet; the long low bookcases with their glass doors; the few perfect flowers, with their reflection floating on polished walnut surfaces as if drowned in sherry.

The meal itself pleased as being in some sense classical, though she could not see why that adjective should occur to her. There was no white cloth, and the bright silver and delicate wineglasses, and the little dishes of coloured glass piled with wet green olives, stood among their images on a gleaming table. The food was all either very hot or very cold. She had two helps of everything, but at the same time she was being appalled by the bareness of the room. Her intuition informed that if a violent soul became terrified lest its own violence should provoke disorder it would probably make a violent effort towards order by throwing nearly everything out of the window, and that its habitation would look very much like this. She knitted her brows and said "Imphm" to herself; and her doubts were confirmed by Marion's vehement exclamation, "Oh, when will Richard come! I wish he would come soon." Her perfect, her so rightly old mother would have said, "It'll be nice for you, dear, when Richard comes," and would not have clouded her dreams of his coming with the threat of passionate competition for his notice.

She said stiffly, looking down on her plate, "We're awful reactionary, letting our whole lives revolve round a man."

"Reactionary?" repeated Marion. It had always been Ellen's complaint that grown-up people took what the young say contemptuously, but to have her remarks treated with quite such earnest consideration filled her for some reason with uneasiness. "I don't think so. If I had a daughter who was as wonderful as Richard I would let my life revolve round her. But I don't know. Perhaps I'm reactionary. Because I don't really believe that any woman could be as wonderful as Richard; do you?"

Ellen had always suspected that this woman was not quite sound on the Feminist question. "Maybe not as wonderful as Richard is," she said stoutly, "but as wonderful as any other man."

"Do you really think so?" asked Marion. "Women are such dependent things. They're dependent on their weak frames and their personal relationships. Illness can make a woman's sun go out so easily. And then, since personal relationships are the most imperfect things in the world, she is so liable to be unhappy. These are handicaps most women don't get over. And then, since men don't love us nearly as much as we love them, that leaves them much more spare vitality to be wonderful with."

Ellen sat in a polite silence, not wishing to make this woman who had failed in love feel small by telling her that she herself was loved by Richard just as much as she loved him.

"I don't know. I don't know. It's annoying the way that one comes to the end of life knowing less than one did at the beginning." She stood up petulantly. "Let's go upstairs." Ellen followed Marion up to the big sitting-room with a sense that, though she had not seen it, she would not like it. She was as disquieted by hearing a middle-aged woman speak about life with this agnostic despair as a child might if it was out for a walk with its nurse and discovered this being whom it had regarded as all-knowing and all-powerful was in tears because she had lost the way. She had always hoped that the old really did know best; that one learned the meaning of life as one lived it.

So she was shaken and distressed by the fine face, which looked discontented with thinking as another face might look flushed with drinking, and by the powerful yet inert body which lay in the great armchair limply but uneasily, as if she desired to ask a question but was restrained by a belief that nobody could answer, but for lack of that answer was unable to commit herself to any action. Her expression was not, as Ellen had at first thought, blank. Nor was it trivial, though she still sometimes raised those hands with the flashing nails and smoothed her eyebrows. It showed plainly enough that doubt was wandering from chamber to chamber of her being, blowing out such candles of certitude as the hopefulness natural to all human beings had enabled her to light. The fact of Richard streamed in like sunshine through the windows of her soul, and when she spoke of him she was evidently utterly happy; but there were some parts of her life with which he had nothing to do, as there are north rooms in a house which the sun cannot touch, and these the breath of doubt left to utter darkness. "You're imagining all this, Ellen," she said to herself; "how can you possibly know all this about her?" "It's true," herself answered. "Well, it's not true in the sense that it's true that she's dark and her name's Mrs. Yaverland, is it?" "Ellen, have you nothing of an artist in you?" herself enquired with pain. "You might be a business body, or one of the mistresses in John Square, the crude way you're talking. It's not a fact that ye can look up in a directory. But it's perfectly true that this woman's queer and warselled and unhappy. But you're losing your head terribly on your first encounter with tragedy, and you fancying yourself a cut above the ordinary because you enjoyed a good read of 'King Lear' and 'Macbeth.'" "Well, I never said I wanted to take rooms with Lady Macbeth," she objected.

But Marion was asking her now if she liked this room, or if she found it, as many people did, more like a lighthouse than a home, and because she spoke with passionate concern lest the girl should not be at ease in the place where she was to spend her future life, Ellen immediately answered with a kind of secondary sincerity that she liked it very much. Yet the room was convincing her of something she was too young and too poor ever to have proved before, and that was the possibility of excess. All her delights had been so sparse and in character so simple that no cloying of after-taste had ever changed them from being finally and unquestionably delights; they stood like a knot of poplars on the edge of a large garden whose close resemblance to golden flame could be enjoyed quite without dubiety because there was no fear that the lawns or flowers would be robbed of sunlight by their spear-thin shadows. She did not know that one could eat too many ices, for she had never been able to afford more than one at a time; in rainy Edinburgh the stories of men whose minds became sick at dwelling under immutably blue skies had seemed one of the belittling lies about fair things that grown-up people like to tell; and since she had had hardly anybody to talk to till Richard came, and had never had enough books to read, it had seemed quite impossible that one could feel or think past the point where feeling and thinking were happy embarkations of the soul on bracing seas.

Yet here in this room the inconceivable had happened, and she recognised that there was present an excess of beauty and an excess of being. For indeed the room was too like a lighthouse in the way that all who sat within were forced to look out on the windy firmament and see the earth spread far below as the pavement of the clouds on which their shadows trod like gliding feet. The walls it turned to the south and west were almost entirely composed of windows of extravagant dimensions, beginning below the cornice and stopping only a couple of feet above the floor, so that as the two women sat by the wood fire they looked over their shoulders at the leaning ships in the harbour and the tide that hurried to it over the silver plain, and the little house with its orchard at the island's end, not a stone's throw from the boats and nets, so marine in its situation that one could conceive it farmed by a merman and see him working his scaly tail up the straight path that drove through the garden to the door, a sheep-fish wriggling at his heels. They saw too the pastures of the rest of the island, of a rougher brine-qualified green, and the one black tree that stood against them like the ace of clubs; and past them lay the channel where the white sail of a frigate curtseyed to the rust-red rag of a barge, and the round dark hills beyond mothering a storm. And if they looked towards the window in the right-hand wall they saw a line of elms going down the escarpment to the marshes like women going down to a well; and between their slim purple statures, the green floor of Kerith Island stretched illimitably to the west. And everywhere there were colours, clear though unsunned, as if the lens of the air had been washed very clean by the sea winds.

She had never before been in a room so freely ventilated by beauty, and yet she knew that she would find living on the ledge of this view quite intolerable. All that existed within the room was dwarfed by the immensity that the glass let in upon it, like the private life of a man dominated by some great general idea. Because the clouds were grey with a load of rain and were running swiftly before an east wind the flesh became inattentive to the heat of the fire and participated in the chill of the open air, and though it is well to walk abroad on cold days, one wants to be warm when one sits by the hearth. Behind the glass doors of the bookcases were many books, with bindings that showed they were the inaccessible sort, modern and right, that one cannot get out of the public library. But one would never be able to sit and read with concentration here, where if the eye strayed ever so little over the margin it saw the river and the plain changing aspects at each change of the wind like passionate people hearing news; yet there are discoveries made by humanity that are as fair as the passage of a cloud-riving spot of sunlight from sea to marsh and from marsh to creek, and more necessary for the human being to observe. But when Ellen tried to rescue her mind from mersion into this excess of beauty and to fix it on the small, warmly-coloured pattern of the domestic life within the room it was lost as completely and disastrously, so far as following its own ends went, in the not less excessive view of the spiritual world presented by this woman's face.

Marion should not have lived in a room so full of light. The tragic point of her was pressed home too well. The spectator must forget his own fate in looking on this fine ravaged landscape and wondering what extremities of weather had made it what it was, and how such a noble atmosphere should hang over conformations not of the simple kind associated with nobility but subtle as villainy. Ellen knew that she would never have a life of her own here. She would all the time be trying to think out what had happened to Marion. She would never be able to look at events for what they were in themselves and in relation to the destiny she was going to make with Richard; but would wonder, if they were delights, whether their delightfulness would not seem heartless as laughter in a house of mourning to this woman whose delight lay in a grave, and if they were sorrows, whether coming to a woman who had wept so much they would not extort some last secretion more agonising than a common tear.

"But she is old! She will die!" she thought, aghast at this tragic tyranny. "Mother died!" she assured herself hopefully. Instantly she was appalled at her thoughts. She was ashamed at having had such an ill wish about this middle-aged woman who was sitting there rather lumpishly in an armchair and evidently, from her vague wandering glance and the twist of her eyebrows and her mouth, trying to think of something nice to say and regretting that she failed. And as she looked at her and her repentance changed into a marvel that this stunned and stubborn woman should be the wonderful Marion of whom Richard spoke, she realised that her death was the event that she had to fear above all others possible in life. For she did not know what would happen to Richard if his mother died. He cared for her inordinately. When he spoke of her, black fire would burn in his eyes, and after a few sentences he would fall silent and look away from Ellen and, she was sure, forget her, for he would then stretch out for her hand and give it an insincere and mechanical patting which, though at any other time his touch refreshed her veins, she found irritating. If his mother died his grief would of course be as inordinate. He would turn on her a face hostile with preoccupation and would go out to wander on some stupendous mountain system of vast and complicated sorrows. Not even death would stop this woman's habit of excessive living.

Ellen shivered, and rose and looked at the bookcases. The violent order characteristic of the household had polished the glass doors so brightly that between her and the books there floated those intrusive clouds, the aggressive marshes. She went and stood by the fire.

"You look tired," said Marion timidly.

"Yes, I'm tired. Do you know, I'm feeling quite fanciful.... It's just tiredness."

"You'd better go and lie down."

"Oh no, I would just lie and think. I feel awful restless."

"Then let's go for a walk." She shot a furtive, comprehending look at the girl. "This really isn't such a bad place," she told her wistfully.

They separated to dress, smiling at each other kindly and uneasily. Ellen went into her room, and stood about, thinking how romantic it all was, but wondering what was the termination of a romance where curtains do not fall at the act's end, until her eyes fell upon her reflection in the mirror. She was standing with her head bowed and her cheek resting on her clasped hands, and she wished somebody would snapshot her like that, for though of course it would be affected to take such a pose in front of a camera, she would like Richard to have a photograph of her looking like that. Suddenly she remembered how Richard delighted in her, and what pretty things he found to say about her without putting himself out, and how he was always sorry to leave her and sometimes came back for another kiss, and she felt enormously proud of being the dispenser of such satisfactions, and began to put on her hat and coat with peacocking gestures and recklessly light-minded glances in the mirror. The reflection of a crumpled face-towel thrown into a wisp over the rail of the washstand reminded her in some way of the white-faced wee thing Mr. Philip had been during the last few days when she had gone back to the office, and this added to her exhilaration, though she did not see why. She was suddenly relieved from her fear of being dispossessed of her own life.



CHAPTER III

They went out of the house by the French window of the dining-room, and crossed a garden whose swept lawns and grass walks and flower-beds, in which the golden aconite, January's sole floral dividend, was laid out to the thriftiest advantage. It showed, Ellen thought, the same wild orderliness as the house. Through a wicket-gate they passed into an orchard, and followed a downward path among the whitened trunks. "This is all the land I've kept of the old farm," said Marion. "The rest is let. I let it years ago. Richard never wanted to be a farmer. It was always science he was keen on, from the time he was a boy of ten."

"Then why did he go to sea?" asked Ellen. The path they were following was so narrow that they had to walk singly, so when Marion did not answer Ellen's question she thought it must be because she had not spoken loudly enough. She repeated it. "Why did he go to sea, if he was so keen on science?"

But Marion still took some seconds to reply, and then her words were patently edited by reserve. "Oh, he was sixteen ... boys need adventure...."

"I do not believe he needed adventure so much," disputed Ellen, moved half by interest in the point she was discussing and half by the desire to assert that she had as much right as anybody to talk about Richard, and maybe knew as much about him as anybody. "It's not possible that Richard could ever have been at his ease in a life of action. He'd be miserable if he wasn't always the leader, and he couldn't always be the leader when he was sixteen. And then he'd not be happy when he was the leader because he thinks so poorly of most people that he doesn't feel there's any point in leading them anywhere, so there couldn't have been any pleasure in it even when he was older. Isn't that so?"

"I suppose so," muttered Marion uncommunicatively.

"Then why did he go to sea?" persisted Ellen.

"I don't know, I don't know," murmured the other, but her face, as she paused at a gate in the orchard hedge, was amused and meditative. She knew quite well.

It was one of those days of east wind that are clear and bright and yet at enmity with the appearances they so definitely disclose. The sea, which had now covered all the mud and had run into the harbour and was lifting the ships on to an even keel, was the colour of a sharpened pencil-point. The green of the grass was acid. Under the grey glare of the sky the soft purples of the bare trees and hedges became a rough darkness without quality. Yet as they walked down the field-path to the floor of the marshes Ellen was well content. This, like the Pentlands, was far more than a place. It was a mental state, a revisitable peace, a country on whose soil the people and passions of imagination lived more intensely than on other earth. There was a wind blowing that was as salt as sea-winds are, yet travelled more mildly over the estuary land than it would have over the waves, like some old captain who from old age had come to live ashore and keeps the roll and bluster of his calling though he does no more than tell children tales of storms.

And through this clear, unstagnant yet unturbulent air there rose the wild yet gentle cry of a multitude of birds. It was not the coarse brave cry of the gull that can breast tempests and dive deep for unfastidious food. It was not the austere cry of the curlew who dwells on moors when they are unvisitable by men. This was the voice of some bird appropriate to the place. It was unhurried. Whatever lived on the plain saw when the sun rose on its edge shadows as long as living things ever see them, and watched them shrink till noon, and lengthen out again till sundown; and time must have seemed the slower for being so visible. It had the sound of water in it. Whatever lived here spent half its life expecting the running of waveless but briny tides up the creeks, through mud-paved culverts into the dykes that fed the wet marshes with fresh wetness; and the other half deploring their slow, sluggish sucking back to the sea. Sorrow or any other intemperance of feeling seemed a discourteous disturbance of an atmosphere filled with this resigned harmony.

Her mind, thus liberated from its own burdens, ran here and there over the landscape, inventing a romantic situation for each pictorial spot. Under the black tree on the island she said good-bye to a lover whom she made not in the least like Richard, because she thought it probable later in the story he would meet a violent death. A man fled over the marsh before an avenger who, when the quarry tripped on the dyke's edge, buried a knife between his shoulders; and, as he struck, a woman lit the lamp in the window of the island farm, to tell the murdered man that it was safe to come. Indeed, that farm was a red rag to the imagination. Perhaps a sailor's widow with some sorceress blood had gone to live there, so that the ghost of her drowned husband might have less far to travel when he obeyed her nightly evocations.

"Who lives in that little house on the island?" she called out to Marion.

"The one on the Saltings? No one. It has been empty for forty years. But when I was a child George Luck still lived there. George Luck, the last great wizard in England."

"A wizard forty years ago! Well, I suppose parts of England are very backward. You've got such a miserable system of education. What sort of magic did he do?"

"Oh, he gave charms to cure sick cattle, and sailors' wives used to come to him for news of their absent husbands, and he used to make them look in a full tub of water, and they used to see little pictures of what the men were doing at the time." She laughed over her shoulder at Ellen. "You see, other women before us have been reactionary."

"Reactionary?" repeated Ellen.

"They have let their lives revolve round men," said Marion teasingly, and Ellen returned her laughter. They were both in high spirits because of this wind that was salt and cold and yet not savage. Their glowing bodies reminded them that the prime necessities of life are earth and air, and the chance to eat well as they had eaten, and that in being in love they were the victims of a classic predicament, the current participators in the perpetual imbroglio with spiritual things that makes man the most ridiculous of animals.

They were walking on the level now, on a path beside the railway-line, again in the great green platter of the marshes. The sea-wall, which ran in wide crimps a field's width away on the other side of the line, might have been the rim of the world had it not been for the forest of masts showing above it. The clouds declared themselves the inhabitants of the sky and not its stuff by casting separate shadows, and the space they moved in seemed a reservoir of salt light, of fluid silence, under which it was good to live. Yet it was not silence, for there came perpetually that leisurely, wet cry.

"What are those birds? They make a lovely sound," asked Ellen, dancing.

"Those are the redshanks. They're wading-birds. When Richard comes he will take you on the sea-wall and show you the redshanks in the little streams among the mud. They are such queer streams. Up towards Canfleet there's a waterfall in the mud, with a fall of several feet. It looks queer. These marshes are queer. And they're so lonely. Nobody ever comes here now except the men to see to the cattle. Even though the railway runs through, they're quite lonely. The trains carry clerks and shop-assistants down from their work in London to their houses at New Roothing and Bestcliffe and Prittlebay at night; and they leave in the morning as soon as they've had breakfast. On Sundays they're too tired to do anything but sit on the cliff and listen to the band playing. During the week the children are all at school or too young to go further than the recreation grounds. There's nothing to bring these people here, and they never come."

She again struck Ellen as terrifying. She spoke of the gulf between these joyless lives and the beauty through which they hurled physically night and morning, to the conditions which debarred them from ever visiting it spiritually, with exhilaration and a will that it should continue to exist as long as she could help it. "But, Ellen, you like lonely country yourself," she addressed herself. "You liked the Pentlands for being so lonely. There's no difference between you really...." But indeed there was a difference. She had liked places to be destitute of any trace of human society because then a lovelier life of the imagination rushed in to fill the vacuum. Since the engineer had erred who built the reservoirs over by Carlops and had made them useless for that purpose, better things than water came along the stone waterways; meadowsweet choking the disused channel looked like a faery army defiling down to the plains, and locks were empty and dry and white, like chambers of a castle keep, or squares of dark green waters from which at any moment a knight would rise with a weed-hung harp in his arms and a tale of a hundred years in faery-land.

But to this woman the liked thing about loneliness was simply that nobody was there. Unpeopled earth seemed to her desirable as unadulterated food; the speech of man among the cries of the redshanks would have been to her like sand in the sugar. They came presently to a knot of trees, round which some boys wrangled in some acting game in which a wigwam built between the shining roots that one of the trees lifted high out of earth evidently played an important part. Ellen would have liked to walk slowly as they passed them, so as to hear as much as possible of the game, for it looked rather nice, but Marion began to hurry, and broke her serene silence in an affectation of earnest and excited speech so that she need pay as little response to the boys' doffing of their caps. There was something at once absurd and menacing about the effect of her disinclination to return these children's greetings; to Ellen, who was so young that all mature persons seemed to have a vast capital of self-possession, it was like seeing someone rich expressing serious indignation at having to give a beggar a penny.

To break the critical current of her thoughts she asked, "What's that church up there?"

"It's Roothing Church. It's very old. It's a famous landmark."

"But what's that white thing beside it?"

"Oh, that!" said Marion, looking seawards. "That is the tomb of Richard's father."

"Indeed," breathed Ellen uncomfortably. "He must," she said, determined not to be daunted by an awkward situation, "have been well thought of in the neighbourhood."

"Why?" asked Marion.

"It has the look of something raised by public subscription; Was it not?"

"No, but you are right. It has the look of something raised by public subscription." She shot an appreciative glance at the girl, then flung back her head and looked at the monument and laughed. Really, Richard had chosen very well. Always before she had averted her eyes from that white public tomb, because she knew that it had been erected not so much to commemorate the dead as to establish the wifehood of the widow who seized this opportunity to prison him in marble as she had never been able to prison him in her arms. Now that this girl had expressed its architectural quality in a phrase, the sight of it would cause amusement and not, as it had done before, anger that a woman of such quality should have occupied the place that by right belonged to her. That secondary and injurious emotion would now disappear, and far from remembering what Ellen had said, and how young and pretty and funny she had looked when she said it, she would pass on to thoughts of the time when she was young like that, and how in those days she had lived for the love of the man who was under that marble; and her mind would dwell on the beauty of those days and not on the long, the interminable horror that followed them. Even now she knew a more generous form of grief than hitherto, and was sorrowing because he who had liked nothing better than to walk on the marshes and listen to the cry of the marsh birds and smile into the blue marsh distances, lay deaf in darkness, and was not to be brought back to life by any sacrifice. Her love ran up the hillside and stood by his tomb, and in some way the fair thing that had been between them was recreated. She had turned smilingly to Ellen, and found the girl fixing a level but alarmed stare. She was facing the situation gallantly, but found it distasteful. "What is this?" Marion asked herself angrily, with the resentment of the elderly against the unnecessary excitements of the young. "What is this fuss? Ah, she thinks it is dreadful of me to look at Richard's father's tomb and laugh." There was nothing she could say to explain it, though for a moment she tried to find the clarifying word, and looked, she knew, disagreeable with the effort. "Let's come on. Round this bend of the bank there's a bed of young osiers. How fortunate that the sun has just come out! They'll look fine.... You know what osiers are like in the winter? Or don't they grow up North?..."

They came, when the path had run past a swelling of the bank, to the neck of a little valley that cleft the escarpment and ran obliquely inland for half a mile or so. The further slope was defaced by a geometric planting of fruit-trees, and ranged in such stiff lines, and even from that distance so evidently sickly, that they looked like orphan fruit-trees that were being brought up in a Poor Law orchard. Among them stood two or three raw-boned bungalows painted those colours which are liked by plumbers. But the floor of the valley was an osier-bed, and the burst of sunshine had set alight the coarse orange hair of the young plants.

"Oh, they are lovely!" cried Ellen; "but yon hillside is just an insult to them."

Marion replied, walking slowly and keeping her eye on the osiers with a look that was at once appreciative and furtive, as if she was afraid of letting the world know that she liked certain things in case it should go and defile them, that it was the Labour Colony of the Hallelujah Army, and that they had bought nearly all the land round Roothing and made it squalid with tin huts.

"But don't they do a lot of good?" asked Ellen, who hated people to laugh at any movement whose followers had stood up in the streets and had things thrown at them.

It was evident that Marion considered the question crude. "They even own Roothing Castle, which is where we're going now, and at the entrance to it they've put up a notice, 'Visitors are requested to assist the Hallelujah Army in keeping the Castle select.' ... Intolerable people...."

"All the same," said Ellen sturdily, "they may do good."

But to that Marion replied, grumblingly and indistinctly, that style was the only test of value, and that the fools who put up that notice could never do any good to anybody, and then her eyes roved to the path that ran down the green shoulder of the escarpment on the other side of the valley's neck. "Ah, here's Mrs. Winter. Ellen, you are going to come in contact with the social life of Roothing. This is the vicar's wife."

"Is she our sort of pairson?" asked Ellen doubtfully.

"For the purpose of social intercourse we pretend that she is," answered Marion without enthusiasm.

They met her on the plank bridge that crossed the stream by which the osier beds were nourished, and Ellen liked her before they had come within hailing distance because she was such a little nosegay of an old lady. Though her colours were those of age they were bright as flowers. Her hair was white, but it shone like travellers' joy, and her peering old eyes were blue as speedwell, and her shrivelled cheeks were pink as apple-blossom. She bobbed when she walked like a ripe apple on its stem, and her voice when she called out to them was such a happy fluting as might come from some bird with a safe nest. "Why, it's Mrs. Yaverland. I heard that you'd gone up to town."

"I came back this morning. This is Miss Melville, whom I went to meet. She is going to marry Richard very soon." Marion did not, Ellen noticed with exasperation, make any adequate response to this generous little trill of greeting. The best she seemed able to do was to speak slowly, as if to disclaim any desire to hurry on.

"Oh, how do you do? I am pleased I met you on the very first day." The old lady smiled into Ellen's eyes and shook her hand as if she meant to lay at her disposal all this amiability that had been reared by tranquil years on the leeward side of life. "This will be a surprise for Roothing. We all thought Mr. Yaverland would never look at any woman but his mother. Such a son he is!" Ellen was annoyed that Marion smiled only vaguely in answer to this mention of her astonishing good fortune in being Richard's mother. "I hope Mr. Winter will have the pleasure of marrying you."

"I'm afraid not," said Ellen with concern. "I'm Presbyterian, and Episcopalianism does not attract me."

"Oh dear! Oh dear! That's a pity," said the old lady, with a pretty flight of hilarity. "Still, I hope you'll ask us to the wedding. I've known Richard since he was a week old. Haven't I, Mrs. Yaverland? He was the loveliest baby I've ever seen, and later on I think the handsomest boy. Nobody ever looked at my Billy or George when Richard was about. And now—well, I needn't tell you, young lady, what he's like now. I'm glad I've met you. I've just been up at Mrs. More's."

"Who is Mrs. More?" asked Marion heavily.

"The new people who have the small-holding at Coltsfoot the Brights had before. I think he used to be a clerk, and came into a little money and bought the holding, and now they're finding it very difficult to get along."

"This small-holding business ought to be stopped."

"Why?" asked Ellen peevishly. Marion seemed to reject everything, and she was sure that she had seen small-holdings recommended in Labour Party literature. "I thought it was sound."

"Not here. Speculators buy up big farms and cut them into small-holdings and sell them to townspeople, who starve on them or sell them at a loss. The land's wasted for good, and all because it can't be farmed again once it's been cut up. To all intents and purposes it's wiped off the map. It's a scandal."

"It is a shame," agreed the old lady. "I often say that something ought to be done. Well, the poor woman's lost her baby."

"Bad business," said Marion.

"Such a pretty little girl. Six months. I've been up seeing them putting her in the coffin. The mother was so upset. I was with her all day yesterday."

"I've seen the place," said Marion. "As ugly as one of the Hallelujah Army shanties. What this bit of country's coming to! And Coltsfoot was a good farm when I was a girl."

"It isn't very nice now certainly. You see, now that the other people have failed and gone away, it's difficult for them to get loads taken down as there isn't a proper road. Before, they did it co-operatively among themselves. But this winter they say they've been without coal quite often, and the baby's been ill all the time. I think Mrs. More's been terribly lonely. Poor little woman, she's got no friends here. All her people live in the Midlands, she tells me. I don't think they can afford a holiday, so the next few months will be hard for her, I'm afraid."

"Incompetent people, I should think, from what you can see of the garden. Annoying to think that that used to be good wheat-land."

"They've never liked the place. They were terrified of losing the child because of the damp from the moment it came. She's quite broken by it all, poor thing."

Marion began to draw on the ground with the point of her stick.

"Ah, well, you'll be wanting to get on," said the old lady. "Now, do bring your future daughter-in-law to tea with us some day. I've got a daughter-in-law staying with me now. I should like you to meet Rose. She plays the violin very nicely. And we have a garden we're rather proud of, though of course this is the wrong time of the year to see it. Yet I'm sure things are looking very nice just now. Just look at it! Could anything," she asked, looking round with happy eyes, "be prettier than this? Look at the sunlight travelling over that hill!" She cast a shy glance at Marion, who was continuing to watch the point of her stick, and bravery came into her soft gay glance. "It's passing over the earth," she said tremulously but distinctly, "like the kindness of God."

A silence fell. "The wee thing has courage," thought Ellen to herself. "It's plain to see what's happened. Marion's often sneered at her religion, and she's just letting her see that she doesn't mind. I like people who believe in something. Of course it might Le something more useful than Christianity, but if she believes it...."

Marion lifted her head, stared at the hillside, and said, "Yes. And look. It is followed by the shadow, like His indifference."

Tears came into the old lady's eyes. "Good-bye. We must settle on an afternoon for tea. I'll send somebody round with a note. Good-bye." She pushed past them, a grieved and ruffled little figure, a peony-spot of shock on each cheek, and then she looked back at Ellen. "We'll all look forward to seeing you, my dear," she called kindly; but feared, Ellen saw, to meet the hard eyes of this terrible woman, who was staring after her with a look of hostility that, directed on this little affirmation of love and amiability, was as barbarous as some ponderous snare laid for a small, precious bird.

"Let's get on," said Marion.

They climbed the hill and went along a path that followed the skyline of the ridge, over which the sea-borne wind slid like water over a sluice. To be here should have brought such a stinging happiness as bathing. It should have been wonderful to walk in such comradeship with the clouds, and to mark that those which rode above the estuary seemed on no higher level than this path, while beneath stretched the farm-flecked green pavement of Kerith Island, and ahead, where the ridge mounted to a crouching summit, stood the four grey towers of the Castle. But the quality of none of these things reached Ellen because she was wrapped in fear of this unloving woman who was walking on ahead of her, her stick dragging on the ground. She was whistling through her teeth like an angry man; and once she laughed disagreeably to herself.

They came to a broken iron railing whose few standing divisions ran askew alongside the footpath and down the hillside towards the marshes, rusted and prohibitive and futile.

"Look at them! Look at them!" exclaimed Marion in a sudden space of fury. "The Hallelujah Army put them up. It's like them. Some idea of raising money for the funds by charging Bank Holiday trippers twopence to see the Castle. It was a fool's idea. They know nothing. The East End trippers that come here can't climb. They're too dog-tired. They go straight from the railway-station to Prittlebay or Bestcliffe sands and lie down with handkerchiefs over their faces. Those that push as far as Roothing lie don on the slope of the sea-wall and stay there for the day." She kicked a fallen railing as she stepped over it into the enclosed land. "The waste of good iron! You're not a farmer's daughter, Ellen; you don't know how precious stuff like this is. And look at the thistle and the couch-grass. This used to be a good sheep-feed. The land going sick all round us, with these Hallelujah Armies and small holdings and such-like. In ten years it'll be a scare-crow of a countryside. I wish one could clear them up and burn them in heaps as one does the dead leaves in autumn." Fatigue fell upon her. She seemed exhausted by the manufacture of so much malice. With an abrupt and listless gesture she pointed her stick at the Castle. "It isn't much, you see," she said apologetically. And indeed there was little enough. There were just the two towers on the summit and the two on the slope of the hill whose bases were set on grassy mounds so that they stood level with the others, and these had been built of such stockish material that they had not had features given them by ruin. "I'm afraid it's not a fair exchange for Edinburgh Castle, Ellen. But there's a good view up there between the two upper towers. Where the fools have put a flagstaff. I won't come. I'm tired...."

She watched the girl walk off towards the towers and said to herself, "She is glad to go, half because she wants to see the view, and half because she wants to get away from me. I was a fool to frighten her by losing my temper with Mrs. Winter. But the blasphemy, the silly blasphemy of coming from a woman who has just lost her baby and talking of the kindness of God!..." The tears she had held back since they had parted with the vicar's wife ran down her cheeks. It must, she thought, be the worst thing in the world to lose an only child. Surely there could be nothing worse in all the range of human experience than having to let them take away the thing that belongs to one's arms and put it in a coffin. There would be a pain of the body as unparalleled, as unlike any other physical feeling, as the pains of birth, and there would be tormenting fundamental miseries that would eat at the root of peace. A woman whose only child has died has failed for the time being in that work of giving life which is her only justification for existence, and so her unconscious mind would try to pretend that it had not happened and she would find herself unable to believe that the baby was really dead, and she would feel as if she had let them bury it alive. All this Marion knew, because for one instant she had tried to imagine what it would have been like if Richard had died when he was little, and now this knowledge made her feel ashamed because she was the mother of a living and unsurpassable son and there existed so close at hand a woman who was having to spend the day in a house in one room of which lay a baby's coffin.

And it was such a horrid house too. Sorrow there would take a sickly and undignified form. For the Coltsfoot bungalow was unusually ugly even for an Essex small-holding. A broken balustrade round the verandah, heavy wooden gables, and an ingeniously large amount of inferior stained timbering gave it an air of having been built in order to find a last fraudulent use for a suite of furniture that had been worn out by a long succession of purchasers who failed to complete agreement under the hire system. There were Nottingham lace curtains in the windows, the gate was never latched and swung on its hinges, nagging the paint off the gate-post, at each gust of wind. If one passed in the rain there was always some tool lying out in the wet. Ugliness was the order of the day there, and it was impossible to believe that the owners were anything but weak-eyed, plain people.

The baby had not really been pretty at all. Mrs. Winter's tribute to it had only been the automatic response to all aspects of child life which is cultivated by the wives of the clergy. And the parents would take the tragedy ungracefully. The woman would look out from her kitchen window at her husband as he pottered ineffectively with the goat and the fowls and all the gloomy fauna of the small-holding, which had, as one would not have thought that animals could have, the look of being underpaid. Perhaps he would kneel down among those glass bells which, when they are bogged in Essex clay on a winter afternoon, are grimly symbolical of the end that comes to the counter-meteorological hopes of the small-holder. The fairness and weedy slenderness which during their courtship she had frequently held out to her friends as proof of his unusual refinement, would now seem to her the outward and visible signs of the lack of pigment and substance which had left him at the mercy of a speculator's lying prospectus. When he came in to the carelessly cooked meal there would be a quarrel. "Why did you ever bring me to this wretched place?" She would rise from the table and run towards the bedroom, but before she got to the door she would remember the coffin, and she would have to remain in the sitting-room to weep. She would not look pretty when she wept, for she was worn out by child-birth and nursing and grief and lean living on this damp and disappointing place. Presently he would go out, leaving the situation as it was, to potter once more among the glass bells, and she would sit and think ragingly of his futile occupation, while an inner region of her heart that kept the climate of her youth grieved because he had gone out to work after having eaten so small a meal.

Marion rose to her feet that she might start at once for these poor souls and tell them that they must not quarrel, and warn the woman that all human beings when they are hurt try to rid themselves of the pain by passing it on to another, and help her by comprehension of what she was feeling about the loss of the child. But immediately she laughed aloud at the thought of herself, of all women in the world, going on such an errand. If she went to Coltsfoot now the anticipation of meeting strangers would turn her to lead as soon as she saw the house, and the woman would wonder apprehensively who this sullen-faced stranger coming up the path might be; when she gained admittance she would be able to speak only of trivial things and her voice would sound insolent, and they would take her for some kind of district visitor who intruded without even the justification of being a church worker and therefore having official intelligence about immortality. Her lips were sealed with inexpressiveness when she talked to anyone except Richard. She could not talk to strangers. She could not even talk to Ellen, with whom she ought to have been linked with intimacy by their common love for Richard, with whom she must become intimate if Richard's future was to be happy.

Her eyes sought for Ellen in the ruins, but she was not visible. Probably she had gone into one of the towers where her dreams could not be overseen and was imagining how lovely it would be to come here with Richard. It must be wonderful to be Richard's sweetheart. Marion had seen him often before as the lover of women, but he had never believed in his own passion for any of them, and therefore there had always been something desperate about his courtship of them, like the temper of a sermon against unbelief delivered by a priest who is haunted by sceptical arguments. But to a woman whom he really loved he would be as dignified as befitted one who came as an ambassador from life itself, and gay as was allowed to one who received guarantees that the fair outward show of the world is no lie; in all the trivialities of courtship he would show his perfect quality without embarrassment. She was angered that she would not be able to see him thus. There struck through her an insane regret that being his mother she could not also be his wife. But this was greed, for she had had her own good times, and Harry had been the most wonderful of sweethearts.

There had been a June day on this very hill.... She had been standing by the towers talking to Bob Girvan for a few minutes, and when she had left him she had felt so happy at the show of flowering hawthorn trees that stood red and white all the way down the inland slope of the ridge that she began to run and leap down the hill. But before she had gone far, Harry had walked out towards her from one of the hawthorns. She had felt confused because he had seen her running, and began to walk stiffly and to scowl. "Good morning, Marion," he had said. "Good morning," she had answered, feeling very grown-up because she had no longer bobbed to the squire. He told her, looking intently at her and speaking in a queer, strained voice, that he had found a great split in the trunk of the white hawthorn, and asked her if she would like to see it. She said, "Yes." It struck her that she had said it too loudly and in an inexpressibly foolish way. Indeed, she came to the conclusion as she followed him down the hillside that nobody since the world began had ever done anything so idiotic as saying "Yes" in that particular manner, and she became scarlet with shame.

When they came to the dazzling tree he advanced to it as if he cared nothing for its beauty, and showed her with a gruff and business-like air a split in the trunk. She could not understand how he had not seen it before, as it had been there for the last four months. Then he had pointed up to the towers with his stick. "Who's that you were talking to up there?" "Bob Girvan," she had answered; "did you want to speak to him, sir?" He seemed, she thought, cross about something. "No, no," he answered impatiently, "but he's a silly fellow. Why do you want to talk to him?" She told him that Bob had stopped to ask if his father could come over and look at the calf her grandmother wanted to sell, and that seemed to please him, and after that they had talked a little about how the farm had got on since Grandfather's death. Then he said suddenly, "I suppose that if you don't go about with Bob Girvan there's some boy who does take you out. Isn't there?" She whispered, "No." But he had gone on in a strange, insistent tone, "But you're getting-quite a big girl now. Seventeen, aren't you, Marion? There'll be somebody soon."

At that, paralysis fell on her. She stared out of the scented shadow in which they stood together at the masts of Roothing Harbour far away, wavering like upright serpents in the heated air. Her heart seemed about to burst. Then she heard a creaking sound, and looked about for its cause. He had put up his arm and was shaking the branch which hung over her head so that the blossom was settling on her hair. When she looked at him he stopped and muttered, "Well, good-bye. It's time I was getting along," and walked away. From the shadow she had watched him with an inexplicable sense of victory rising in her heart, coupled with a disposition to run to someone old and familiar and of authority. A year later they had stood once more under that hawthorn tree, and again he had shaken the mayblossom down on her, but this time he had laughed. He murmured teasingly, "Maid Marion! Maid Marion!" and laughed, and she had looked up into his eyes. Like many rakes, he had bright, innocent grey eyes; and indeed, again like many rakes, he was in truth innocent. It was because he had remained as ignorant as a child of the nature of passion that he had experimented with it so recklessly.

With her he had delightedly discovered love. Indeed, she had had such a courtship that she need envy no other woman hers. For all about her days with Harry there had been the last quality the world would have believed it possible could pervade the seduction of a farmer's daughter of seventeen by a squire who was something of a rip: the quality of a fair dawn seen through the windows of a church, of a generous spring-time that synchronised with the beginning of some noble course of action. She should have been well pleased. Yet she knew now that the occasion would have been more beautiful if, standing under that may-tree, she had looked up into Richard's eyes. They would not have been innocent, they would not have sparkled like waters running swiftly under sunshine. But they would have told her that here was the genius who would choose good with the vehemence with which wicked men choose evil, who would follow the aims of virtue with the dynamic power that sinners have, who would pour into faithfulness the craft and virility that Don Juan spent on all his adventures. Besides, Richard's eyes were so marvellously black.... She reminded herself in vain that Harry had possessed far beyond all other human beings the faculty of joy, that uninvited there had dwelt about him always that spirit which men labour to evoke in carnival, that there had been a confidence about his gaiety as if the gods had told him that laughter was the just final comment on life. But she knew quite well that the woman who was chosen by Richard would be loved more beautifully than she had ever been.

She started to her feet and looked urgently towards the ruins to see if Ellen was returning, because she felt that if she did not commit herself to affection by making some affectionate demonstration from which she could not withdraw she might find herself hating this unfortunate girl. Having once known the bitterness of moral defeat, she dreaded base passions as cripples dread pain, and she knew that this irrational hatred would be especially base, a hunchback among the emotions. It would be treason against Richard not to love anything he loved; and besides, it would be most wrong to hate this girl, who deserved it as little as a flower. Yet the emotion seemed independent of her and now nearly immanent, and to escape from it she hurried across the sloping broken ground, calling out, "Ellen, Ellen!"

She could see that there was no one on the level platform by the flagstaff, so she took the footpath where it fell below the two lower towers, and as soon as she had passed the first and could look along the hillside to the second she stopped. Now she could see Ellen. The girl was standing on the very top of the grassy mound that supported the tower, her back resting against the wall, her feet on a shelf that had formed where the earth had been washed away from the masonry foundations by the dripping from a ledge above. It was the very place where Marion had been standing ever so long ago at the moment when Richard had first moved within her. She had dragged herself up the hill to escape from the bickerings at Yaverland's End, and had been resting there, looking down on the peace of the marshes and listening to the unargumentative cry of the redshanks, and wishing that she might dwell during this time among such quiet things; and suddenly there came a wind from the sea, and it was as if a little naked child had been blown into her soul. All that she felt was a tremor feeble as the first fluttering of some tiny bird, and yet it changed the world. In that instant she conceived Richard's spirit as three months before she had conceived his body, and her mind became subject to the duty of awaiting him with adoration as her flesh and blood were subject to the duty of nourishing him. Harry, who had been lord of her life, receded rushingly to a place of secondary importance, and she transferred her allegiance to this invisible presence who was possessed of such power over her that even now, when it could not be seen or touched or heard or imagined, it could make itself loved. She had stood there in an ecstasy of passion until the sun had fallen beyond Kerith Island. Then her cold hands had told her that she must go home for the child's sake; and as if in recognition of this act of cherishing there had come as she climbed the hill another tremor that made her cry out with joy.

Ellen must not stand there, or she was bound to hate her. It was intolerable that this girl who was going to be Richard's wife should intrude into the sacred places of the woman who had to be content with being his mother. "Ellen, Ellen!" she shouted, and waved her stick. The girl clambered down and came towards her with steps that became slower as she came nearer. She was, Marion saw, looking at her again under faintly contracted brows, and she realised that because she wept about the child at Coltsfoot her eyes were small and red, and that had added to her face a last touch of ruin which made it an unfavourable place for the struggles of an unspontaneous expression of amiability. Of course the girl was alarmed at being called down from her serene thoughts of Richard by grotesque wavings of a woman whose face was such a queer mask. But there was nothing to be said that would explain it all. She took refuge in silence; and knew as they walked home that that also was sinister.



CHAPTER IV

It struck Marion that it was very beautiful in this room that night. The white walls were bloomed with shadows and reflections, and the curtains of gold and orange Florentine brocade were only partly drawn, so that at each window there showed between them an oblong of that mysterious blue which the night assumes to those who look on it from lit rooms. On the gleaming table, under the dim light of a shaded lacquer lamp, dark roses in a bowl had the air of brooding and passionate captives. Different from these soft richnesses as silk is from velvet, the clear flame of the wood fire danced again in the glass doors of one of the bookcases: and at the other, choosing a book in which to read herself to sleep, stood Ellen, her head a burning bush of beauty, her body exquisitely at odds with the constrictions of the product of the Liberton dressmaker. She held a volume in one hand and rested the other on her hip, so that there was visible the red patch on her elbow that bespeaks the recent schoolgirl, and all that could be seen of her face was her nose, which seemed to be refusing to be overawed by the reputation of the author whose work she studied. In the swinging glass door beside her there was a diffusion of reflected hues that made Marion able to imagine what she herself looked like, in her gown of copper-coloured velvet, sitting in the high-backed chair by the fire. She was glad that sometimes, by night, her beauty crawled out of the pit age had dug for it, and, orienting her thoughts as she always did, she rejoiced that Richard would find such an interior on his return.