At her dictation they left that place in the bracken. In response to her wish they turned from the gateway and sought the beaten path through the heather again. In that moment she wanted no more of his kisses; partly perhaps because in her emotions she could have borne no more; but mostly it was that she wanted s.p.a.ce and freedom for her thoughts; to speak them to him if need be, certainly to review them in her mind. It was time she demanded--time to touch the wonder that was coming to her, which, from the power of those kisses, she somehow a.s.sumed could not be withheld from her now.

"I could not help that," he said almost apologetically when she insisted upon their going on. "Somehow or other--I don't know--honestly, I couldn't help it, and I suppose I've offended you now."

For one instant she turned her eyes upon him with a searching glance.

"Offended?" she repeated. "Didn't you realize that I let you kiss me--not once--but--" Suddenly she realized in a swift vision the Mary Throgmorton that was; the Mary Throgmorton of the square, white Georgian house; the sister of Hannah and Jane and f.a.n.n.y, and she could not say how many times he had kissed her. Her cheeks flamed.

"Don't talk about offense," said she almost hotly, and walked on with him some time in silence, saying no more, leaving him in an amaze of wondering what her thoughts could be and whether that denial of offense was not merely a screen to hide from him the shame she felt at what had happened.

Was she ashamed? It seemed to him then that she was. That probably was the last time he would touch her lips, yet having touched them and felt, not the eagerness as with f.a.n.n.y, but the sureness of their response, there had been awakened in him the full consciousness of desire to touch them with his lips again. For now he felt, not master of her, but a servant. At the mere utterance of her command, he must obey. With all his eagerness to stay there longer at that gate there was no power in him of conflict with her wishes when she expressed the desire to go on.

What was it she was thinking as she walked? Did really she hate him for what he had done? The cry her nature had made to his in those moments of the closeness of their bodies had redoubled and redoubled in its intensity. Yet he was less sure of her than he had been before.

He felt like one struggling blindly through the storm of his emotions, answering some call that was not for help but of command. Was that the end of it all? Would he never again hold her in his arms? Tentatively he took her hand which did not resist his holding as they walked.

"My dear," he said--almost below his breath--"I suppose I've seemed weak--but--I love you. It was not weakness. I can't explain it, but if you knew, really it was strength."

"Please don't say any more--not now," said she and lengthened her stride and threw back her head that all the full sweep of the air might beat upon her face and throat.

It never consciously occurred to her that a woman's throat and the fine column of her neck could express her beauty to a man. Yet as they walked, she knew that his eyes had seen such beauty in hers.

So it was, when Jane looked up again, they had gone. For another half hour and more she sat there in her bed in the heather, trying to appreciate all that it meant. But again and again the sequence of her conventional thoughts was disturbed by the vision of those two as her eyes turned to the gateway in the bracken and she saw them in her mind with lips touching and heads close pressed together in that long embrace.

With that vision all conventionality slipped from her control, even from the very substance of her thoughts. Instinctively she knew she had been witness of something she had neither power nor right to judge when, forcing herself to regard it as all the years of habit and custom would have her do, she shut her eyes to the sight of them in that bracken and called upon her judgment to dispa.s.sionate her mind.

That evening she contrived to be alone with Mary after tea. They walked in the garden, round the paths with their borders of thrift in heavy cushions of growth.

In a tone of casual unconcern, Jane asked her about her game of golf.

Her pause in answering was significant. In full confidence, Jane expected the lie and understood her sister still the less when, having weighed the truth against expediency, she replied--

"We didn't play golf. We went up onto the moors above Penlock."

It gave Jane the opportunity she sought, but in the frankness of giving confused her. So had her mind forestalled all the progressions of that conversation, that for a moment she was silent.

What sort of woman was this Mary of theirs who seemed to have no guiltiness of conscience, when from childhood she had been trained to listen to the still, small voice? Did she not realize the enormity of what she was doing? Jane's lips set to their thinnest line.

"Do you think it's wise," she began, and in that tone of voice which, with a sharp edge, cut the plain pattern of her meaning--"Do you think it's wise to go about so much with this man? Even if he weren't married--do you think it's wise?"

The sharp glance which Jane stole at her sister then revealed Mary possessed and unconcerned. So well had she known what Jane was going to say that surprise had no power to disconcert her. But beyond that, there was in some chamber of her mind a certain sureness of herself, a steadying confidence in all she did. This it had also been even in the high torrent of her emotion when she would have no more of his kisses and seemed in that moment to him the substance of unyielding stone his temperature of pa.s.sion had heated but a moment and no more.

"I think," she replied, after a moment's silence; "I think that this wisdom you talk about--worldly wisdom--is a very over-rated virtue. I think we've lost a lot--all of us--by cultivating it. I find Mr.

Liddiard much more interesting than any one or any thing in Bridnorth.

Life after all is short enough--dull enough. Why shouldn't I take what interest it offers when I can, while I can? He goes in a few days.

What's worldly wisdom to the feeling that your mind is growing instead of stagnating? If you mean you think I ought not to go out with him again, I can't agree with you."

She spoke like a woman addressing a community of women, not as one sister to another. There was a note of detachment in her voice, Jane had never heard before. In all that household, Jane always a.s.sumed she had herself the final power of control. She felt it no longer here. So long as Mary was speaking, it appeared to her as though she were one listening to some authority far superior to her own. It was in Mary's voice and yet seemed outside and beyond her as well. There was power behind it. She could not sense the direction or origin of that power, but it dominated her. She felt small beside it, and feeling small and realizing that it was this Mary, their youngest, who was the voice of it, she grew angry. All control of that situation she had intended to conduct left her. It left her fretting with the sensation of her own impotence.

"You can't agree with me, can't you!" retorted Jane hotly. "You wouldn't agree, I suppose, if I said that, beside being unwise, I thought it beastly and sinful and horrible altogether, to see a girl kissing a married man, kissing him in a beastly way too?"

Never, even from the first moment of her discovery, had she ever meant to say this. This was not Jane's method. What flood of emotion had borne her thus far out of her course? Fully it had been her intention to speak of Mary's friendship with Liddiard as though it were a flippant and a pa.s.sing thing; to belittle it until, in its littleness, she had shown this foolish sister of hers what folly it was.

How had it happened she had thus exaggerated its importance by the heat of her words? Something had p.r.i.c.ked and spurred her. Something had driven her beyond her control. Finding herself opposed by a force so infinitely greater than her own, she had struggled and fought. It had been a moment's hysteria in the sudden consciousness of her impotence.

Then what power was it? Not merely Mary herself. She could not submit her mind to that admission. It was greater than Mary and yet, becoming the voice of it, she felt that this sister of hers was greater than herself.

To Mary, the shock of realization that Jane had seen them that moment in the bracken was not one that seemed to tremble or emotionalize her at all. If she felt any anger at the thought that she had been spied upon--for swiftly recalling the place of that happening, she knew Jane must have been in hiding,--it was an anger that burnt out, like ignited powder, a flash, no more. It left no trace. All her consciousness a.s.sembled in her mind to warn her that the meaning of Life which had come in those last two weeks to her was in jeopardy of being made meaningless. It did not frighten her, but set the beating of her heart to a slow and deliberate measure.

Whatever Jane knew and however she intended to use her knowledge, Mary determined to fight for this new-found purpose of her existence. If they were fools, if theirs was the folly of waste, if they let all life go by them to be worldly wise, she could not help or wait for them now.

Something had come with its promise of fulfillment to her, her nature urged her not to ignore. What if he was married? There had been moments in the inception and growth of their relationship when she had thought first of his wife. She thought first of her no longer. She was stealing no intrinsic thing. In a few days he would go back to his house in Somerset and what he had given her of his mind, as she had seen, had been his to give her; and, if he had kissed her, what had she stolen from his wife in that? He would still kiss his wife. She knew that.

As plainly as if they were there before her, she could see their embrace. It meant nothing to her. They would not be the same kisses he had given Mary.

Whatever had been the call of Nature to him in that moment when pa.s.sion had spoken out of his lips, his eyes, the power she felt in his arms as they crushed her, it had been not through the channel of his body, but his mind.

Insensibly she was learning the mult.i.tudinous courses by which Nature came to claim her own. She was stealing nothing from his wife. All that was coming to her was her own and with the sudden realization of Jane's knowledge of what had happened, her first sensation was a warning that her very soul was in jeopardy.

There was nothing to be said then; no defense that she could, or cared to, offer. She knew quite well from those long years of knowledge, how horrible their kisses must have seemed to Jane. Once upon a time, she might have thought them horrible herself. Now, there was nothing to be said that might serve in her defense.

Taking a deep breath, she looked straight in Jane's eyes and stood there, arresting their movement on the garden path to paint the defiant att.i.tude of her mind.

"Well--if you've seen," said she, "you've seen. There's no more to be said about it. We've all lived together so long, I suppose it's hard for any one of us to realize that our lives are really all separate things. You talk about it as being beastly. I can a.s.sure you there was nothing beastly in our minds. However, you must think whatever your mind suggests to you to think, and you must start yourself all the talk about us you say is bound to come when I'm seen about with him, if you feel that way inclined. But I'll tell you just one thing--you can't make me ashamed of myself. I'm twenty-nine."

She turned away, walked with all the firmness of her stride into the house and left Jane, standing there, withered and dry between those borders of spreading thrift and flowers all dropping their seed into the mold that waited for them.

VIII

Liddiard was returning to Somerset in three days' time. Before their parting that day above Penlock, he had urged for their next meeting as soon as she was free of household duties the following day.

"Only three more chances," said he, "of being with you, and when I thought most I understood you, understood you so well that my arms seemed the only place in which to hold you, I find I understand you less than ever. You don't ask what it means. You don't say "What are we going to do?" I've told you I love you, but you don't appear to want to know anything about the future. It seems to me that any other girl would be wanting to know what was to become of her. You're so quiet--so silent."

Climbing back down the cliffs, holding on to one of the pine trees in her descent, Mary had turned and smiled at him. It was an inscrutable smile to Liddiard. It was not that he tried to understand it. It was, as it penetrated his mind, that he knew it to be quite impossible of comprehension. More it was as if Nature had smiled upon him, than the mere bright light of the parting of a woman's lips. In its illumination it seemed to reveal to him the vision of himself in a strange powerlessness. He felt like some tool of a workman as it lies idle on the bench, waiting the moment for those hands to pick it up and give it purpose. So it appeared to him might a carpenter have smiled with pleasure at the chisel he knew his hands could wield for perfect work.

All the more that he had meant to say dried into silence on his lips.

"I don't want to know anything about the future," said Mary as she walked on, "I know you love me and I think I understand what you love and why you love. I know I'm not sophisticated. I've no experience of the world. I don't pretend to understand these things in the light of experience. I haven't got any wisdom about it, but I feel it's not unreal or impossible for you to love me and love your wife as well. I don't feel I want you to say you don't love your wife in order to prove that you love me. I think it would finish everything in my mind if you said you didn't love her. I'm not thinking about the future, because there is no future as you used the word. I don't ask what we're going to do, because I know what we're going to do."

"What are we going to do?" he asked.

"In two days' time," she replied, "you're going home to Somerset and I'm going to stay on here in Bridnorth."

Suddenly she turned again swiftly and barred his pa.s.sage as he came along down the cliff path behind her.

"Why don't you understand me?" she asked abruptly. "It all seems so plain. Don't you realize how I've been brought up? I know there's a certain sacredness in marriage. I've been trained to regard it as one of the most unbreakable ties in the world. I wouldn't dream of expecting or claiming anything from you, however much you said you loved me.

Whatever happened, I shouldn't dream of that. You're half afraid of it.

I can see you are. I don't love you any the less because I see it. It seems natural you should be afraid. It seems to me most men would be with most women. But you needn't be."