THE GREEN BOUGH by E. Temple Thurston.

PHASE I

I

The life of Mary Throgmorton, viewed as one would scan the chronicles of history, impersonally, without regard to the conventions, is the life of a woman no more than fulfilled in the elements of her being.

All women would be as Mary Throgmorton if they dared. All women would love as Mary Throgmorton loved--suffer as she suffered. Perhaps not all might yield, as she yielded towards the end; not all might make her sacrifices. But, in the lat.i.tudinous perspective of Time where everything vanishes to the point of due proportion, she must range with that vast army of women who have hungered, loved, been fed and paid the reckoning with the tears out of their eyes and the very blood out of their hearts.

It is only when she comes to be observed in the immediate and narrow surroundings of her circ.u.mstance that her life stands out tragically apart. She becomes then as a monument, set up on a high and lonely hill amongst the many of those hills in drowsy Devon, a monument, silently claiming the birthright of all women which the laws men make by force have so ungenerously circ.u.mscribed.

There is no woman who could look at that monument without secret emotions of a deep respect, while there were many in her lifetime who spurned Mary Throgmorton with tongue and with a glance of eye, and still would spurn her to-day in the narrow streets where it is their wont to walk.

The respect of one's neighbors is a comforting thing to live with, but it is mostly the little people who earn it and find the pleasure of its warmth. The respect of the world is won often by suffering and in the wild and open s.p.a.ces of the earth. It was on Gethsemane and not in Bethlehem that Christianity revealed its light.

In Bridnorth, the name of Mary Throgmorton was a byword for many a day.

They would have erased her from their memory if they could. It was in the hush of voices they spoke of her--that hush with which women m.u.f.fle and conceal the envy beneath their spite.

No one woman in Bridnorth, unless it was f.a.n.n.y Throgmorton, the third of her three sisters, could have had honesty enough in her heart to confess, even in silence, her real regard for Mary.

Who should blame them for this? The laws had made them and what is made in a shapen mold can bend neither to the left nor to the right. They were too close to her to see her beauty; all too personally involved to look dispa.s.sionately at the greatness of her soul.

Yet there in spirit, as it were some graven monument upon those hills of Devon, she stands, a figure of tragic n.o.bility. Had indeed they carved her in stone and set her there upon the hills that overlooked the sea, they would have recognized then in her broad brow, in the straight direction of her eyes, the big, if not beautiful then generous line of her lips, the full firm curve of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, how fine a mate she must have made, how strong a mother even in the weakest hour of her travail.

Stone truly would have been the medium for her. It was not in color that she claimed the eye. The fair hair, neither quite golden nor quite brown, that clear, healthy skin, neither warmed with her blood nor interestingly pale, these would have franked her pa.s.sage in a crowd and none might have noticed her go by.

There on the rising of that cliff in imagination is the place to see her with the full sweep of Bridnorth bay and that wide open sea below and all the heathered stretches of the moors behind her. There, had they carved a statue for her in rough stone, you must have seen at once the beauty that she had.

But because it was in stone her beauty lay and not in pink white flesh that makes a fool of many a man, they had the less of mercy for her.

Because it was in stone, man found her cold of touch and stood away. And yet again because it was in stone, once molten with the heat of life, there was no hand in little Bridnorth that could have stayed her fate.

Once stirred, the little pettiness of Bridnorth folk charred all like shavings from the plane at touch of her. Once stirred, she had in her pa.s.sion to defy them every one. Once stirred, herself could raise that monument to the birthright of women which, in fancy, as her tale is read, will be seen there over Bridnorth on the high cliff's edge.

II

Hannah, Jane, f.a.n.n.y and Mary, these were the four sisters of the Throgmorton family in the order of their respective ages. A brother they had, but he comes into no part of this history. The world had taken him when he was twenty-three. He left Bridnorth, the mere speck upon the map it was and, with the wide affairs of life at his touch, the mere speck it became in his memory. Stray letters reached Mary, his favorite sister. Read aloud at the breakfast table, they came, bringing strange odors of the world to those four girls. Vague emotions they experienced as they heard these infrequent accounts of where he was and what he did.

Silently f.a.n.n.y's imagination would carry her to the far places he wrote of. Into the big eyes she had would rise a haze of distance across which an untrained vision had power vaguely to transport her. Hannah listened in a childish wonder. Jane made her sharp comments. It was Mary who said--

"Why do men have the real best of it? He'll never come back to Bridnorth again."

He never did come back. From the time their father and mother died they lived in Bridnorth alone.

Theirs was the square, white early Victorian house in the middle of the village through which the coach road runs from Abbots...o...b.. to King's Tracey.

That early Victorian house, the furniture it contained, the narrow strip of garden in front protected from the road by low iron palings so that all who pa.s.sed could see in the front windows, the unusually large garden at the back surrounded by a high brick wall, all these composed the immediate atmosphere in which Mary and her three sisters had been brought up from childhood.

It must be supposed that that condition of being overlooked through the front windows was not without its effect upon their lives. If it takes all sorts to make a world, it is all the variety of conditions that go to make such sorts as there are. For it was not only the pa.s.sers-by who looked in at the Throgmorton windows and could have told to a fraction of time when they had their meals, when Hannah was giving lessons to the children she taught, those hours that f.a.n.n.y was sitting alone in her bedroom writing her verses of poetry. Also it was the Throgmorton girls themselves who preferred the occupation of the rooms fronting the road to those whose windows overlooked the shady and secluded garden at the back.

This was the attraction of the stream for those who walk in quiet meadows. There on the banks you will find the footpath of the many who have pa.s.sed that way. They sat at those front windows, sewing, reading, often writing their letters on blotting pads upon their laps, scarcely conscious that the little filtering stream of life in Bridnorth drew them there. For had they been questioned on these matters, one and all, severally or together they would have laughed, saying that for the greater half of the year there was no life in Bridnorth to pa.s.s by, and certainly none that concerned them.

Nevertheless it was the stream, however lightly they may have turned the suggestion away. The pa.s.sing of the postman, of the Vicar or the Vicar's wife, these were the movements of life, such as you see in a meadow stream and follow, dreaming in your mind, as they catch in the eddies and are whirled and twisted out of sight. So they had dreamt in their minds, in Bridnorth, these Throgmorton girls. So Mary had dreamed the twenty years and more that dreams had come to her.

For the greater half of the year, they might have said there was no life in Bridnorth. But from late Spring through Summer to the Autumn months they must have claimed with pride that their Devon village had a life of its own. The old coach with its four horses, beating out the journey from Abbots...o...b.. to King's Tracey, brought visitors from all parts; generally the same every year. For a few months they leased whatever furnished houses there were to be had, coming regularly every season for the joy of that quiet place by the sea where there was a sandy beach to bathe on, and lonely cliffs on which to wander their holidays away.

So the Throgmorton girls made friends with some whose lives lay far outside the meadows through which the Bridnorth stream flowed peacefully between its banks. To these friends sometimes they paid visits when the Summer was pa.s.sed. They went out of Bridnorth themselves by the old coach, later returning, like pigeons homing, with the wind of the outside world still in their wing feathers, restless for days until the dreams came back again. Then once more it seemed a part of life to sit at the window sewing and watch the postman go by.

There were regular visitors who came every summer, renewing their claim from year to year upon the few houses that were to be let, so that there was little available accommodation of that nature for any outsiders.

They called Bridnorth theirs, and kept it to themselves. But every year, they had their different friends to stay with them and always there was the White Hart, where strangers could secure rooms by the day or the week all through the season.

The Bridnorth stream was in flood those days of the late Spring where every afternoon the coach came rumbling up the hill past the Throgmortons' house to set down its pa.s.sengers at the hotel only a little farther up the road.

Like the Severn bore it was, for coming from Abbots...o...b.. down the winding road that had risen with the eminence of the cliffs, the coach could be seen descending by twists and turns and serpentine progressions to the bottom of Bridnorth village, crossing the bridge that spans the little river Watchett and climbing again with the contour of the cliffs once more on its way to King's Tracey.

Leaning far out of one of the upper windows of the square, white house or standing even at the gate in the iron paling, the little cloud of dust or, in rainy weather, the black speck moving slowly like a fly crawling down a suspended thread of cotton, could easily be seen two miles away heralding the coming of the coach.

She who leant out of the window might certainly retire, closing it slowly as the coach drew near. She who stood at the gate in the iron palings might return casually into the house. But once they were out of sight of those on the other bank of the Bridnorth stream, there would be voices crying through the rooms that the coach was coming.

Thus, as it pa.s.sed, there might four figures be seen at different windows, who, however engrossing their occupations, would look out with confessions of mild interest at the sound of the horses' hoofs on the stony road, at the rattle of harness, the rumbling of wheels and, casually, at the pa.s.sengers come to Bridnorth.

Any visitor catching sight of these temperate glances from his box seat on the coach might have supposed the eyes that offered them were so well-used to that daily arrival as to find but little entertainment in the event. From their apparent indifference, he would never have believed that even their hearts had added a pulse in the beating, or that to one at least that coach was the vehicle of Fate which any day might bring the burden of her destiny.

III

It is by the ages of these four they can most easily and comprehensively be cla.s.sified; yet the age of one at least of them was never known, or ever asked in Bridnorth.

Hannah might have been forty or more. She might well have been less.

But the hair was gray on her head and she took no pains to conceal it.

Hers, if any, was the contented soul in that household. With her it was not so much that she had given up the hope that every woman has, as that before she knew what life might be, that hope had pa.s.sed her by. She was as one who stands in a crowd to see the runners pa.s.s and, before even she has raised herself on tiptoe to catch a glimpse above the heads around her, is told that the race is over.

This was Hannah, busying her life with the household needs and, for interest, before all reward, teaching the little children of friends in Bridnorth and the neighborhood, teaching them their lessons every morning; every morning kissing them when they came, every morning kissing them when they left.

To her, the arrival of the coach was significant no more than in the unaccustomed pa.s.sage and hurry of life it brought. To her it was a noise in a silent street. She came to the windows as a child would come to see a circus go by. She watched its pa.s.sengers descend outside the Royal George with the same light of childish interest in her eyes.

Nothing of what those pa.s.sengers were or what they meant reached the communicating functions of her mind. They were no more than mere performers in the circus ring. What their lives were behind that flapping canvas of the tent, which is the veil concealing the lives of all of us, she did not trouble to ask herself. Like the circus performers, they would be here to-day and to-morrow their goods and chattels would be packed, the naphtha flares beneath whose light they had for a moment appeared would be extinguished. Only the bare ring over which their horses had pranced would remain in Hannah's mind to show where they had been. And in Hannah's mind the gra.s.s would soon grow again to blot it out of sight.

To Hannah Throgmorton, these advents and excursions were no more than this.