When they were standing under the dark eaves of the boathouse, looking up at the gleaming tawny sides of the motor-launch, one of the old men pointed at the golden letters that spelt "Gwendolen" at the prow, and said, "Well, Yaverland, I suppose you'll have forgotten who she is these days." Another added: "He'd better, if he's going to marry a Suffragette." And all broke into clear, frosty laughter. She cried out in protest, and told them that Suffragettes were not really fierce at all, and that the newspapers just told a lot of lies about them, and that anyway it was only old-fashioned women who were jealous, and they listened with smiling, benevolent deference, which she enjoyed until her eyes lighted on Richard, and she saw that he was more absorbed in her effect on his friends than in herself.

For a moment she felt as lonely as she had been before she knew him, and she looked towards the boat and stared at the reflection of the group in the polished side and wished that one of the dim, featureless shapes she saw there had been her mother, or anyone who had had a part in her old life in Edinburgh. She turned back to the men and brought the conversation to an end with a little laughing shake of the head, giving them the present of an aspect of her beauty to induce them to let her mind go free. Again she felt something that her commonsense forbade to be quite fear when he did not notice for a minute that she was wistfully asking him to take her away. It was all right, of, course.

When they had said good-bye to the happy old men and were walking along the promenade, he asked: "What was the matter, darling? Didn't you like them? They're really very good old sorts"; and understood perfectly when she answered: "I know they are, but I don't want anybody but you." There was indeed vehemence in his reply: "Yes, dear, we don't want anybody but ourselves, do we?" Undoubtedly there was a change in the nature of the attention he was giving her. Instead of concentrating in that steady delighted survey of herself to which she was accustomed, he alternated between an almost excessive interest in what she was saying and complete abstraction, during which he would turn suddenly aside and drive his stick through the ice on the little pools at the sagging outside edge of the promenade, his mouth contracting as if he really hated it. She hovered meekly by while he did that. If one went to see a dear friend, whose charm and pride it was to live in an exquisitely neat and polished home, and found him pacing hot-eyed through rooms given up to dirt and disorder, one would not rebuke him, but one would wait quietly and soothingly until he desired to tell what convulsion of his life explained the abandonment of old habit. But her eyes travelled to the luminous, snow-sugared hills that ran by the sea to the summit where Roothing Church, an evanescent tower of hazily-irradiated greyness, overhung the shining harbour; and her thoughts travelled further to the hills hidden behind that point, and that orchard where there sat the squat woman who was so much darker and denser in substance than anything else in the glittering, brittle world around her.

Ellen drooped her head and closed her eyes; the crackle of the ice under Richard's stick sounded like the noise of some damage done within herself. She found some consolation in the thought that people were always more moderate than the pictures she made of them in their absence, but she lost it when she went back into the high, white, view-invaded dining-room at Yaverland's End. For Marion stood by the hearth looking down into the fire, and as Richard and Ellen came in she turned an impa.s.sive face towards them, and asked indifferently, "Have you had a nice walk?" and fell to polishing her nails with the palm of her hand with that trivial, fribbling gesture that was somehow more desperate than any other being's outflung arms. She was all that Ellen had remembered, and more. And she had infected the destiny of this house with her strangeness even to such small matters as the peace of the midday meal. For Mabel came in before they had finished the roast mutton, and said: "Please, ma'am, there's a man wanting to see you." And Marion asked, with that slightly disagreeable tone which Ellen had noticed always coloured her voice when she spoke to the girl: "Who is he?" Mabel answered contemptuously: "He won't give his name. He's a very poor person, ma'am. His boots is right through, and his coat's half off his back. And he says that if he told you his name you mightn't see him.

Shall I tell him to go away?"

But Marion had started violently. Her eyes were looking into Richard's.

She said, calmly: "Yes, I'll see him. Tell him I'll come through in a minute."

Mabel had left the room. Marion and Richard continued to stare at each other queerly.

She murmured indistinctly, casually: "It may be. Both Mabel and cook haven't been with me long. They never saw him here. They probably haven't seen him since he was a boy."

"It is the kind of thing," said Richard grimly, "that Roger would say at the back door to a servant just to make his arrival seem natural and unsuspicious."

Marion's head drooped far back on her throat; her broad, dark face suffused with the bloom of kind, sad pa.s.sion, and lifted towards her son's pitying eyes, made Ellen think of a pansy bending back under the rain. But her mouth, which had been a little open and appealing, as if she were asking Richard not to be bitter but to go on being pitiful, closed suddenly and smiled. She seemed to will and to achieve some hardening change of substance. An incomprehensible expression irradiated her face, and she seemed to be brooding sensuously on some private h.o.a.rd of satisfaction. Lightly she rose, patting the hand Richard had stretched out to her as if it were a child's, and went out into the kitchen.

"Richard!" breathed Ellen.

He went on eating.

"Richard," she insisted, "why did she look like that? So happy. Does she want it to be Roger?"

"G.o.d knows, G.o.d knows," he said in a cold, sharp-edged voice. "There are lots of things about her that I don't understand."

Some moments pa.s.sed before Marion came back. Her face was easy, and she said placidly: "My purse, my purse. I want my purse."

"It's on the desk," said Richard, and rose and found it for her. He stood beside her as she opened it and began taking out the money slowly, coin by coin, while she hummed under her breath. "Mother!" he burst out suddenly. "Who is it?"

"A ten-shilling piece is what I want," she murmured. "Yes, a ten-shilling piece. I thought I had one.... Oh, who is it? Oh, it's Henry Milford. Do you remember poor Milford? He was the last cattleman but one in the old days when we ran the farm. I had to send him away because he drank so terribly. Since then he's gone down and down, and now he's on the road. I must give him something, poor creature. Such a nice wife he had--he says she's in Chelmsford workhouse. I'll send him on to old Dawkins at Dane End; I'll get him to give the poor wretch a few days' work."

Ellen disliked her as she left the room. She looked thick and ordinary, and was apparently absorbed in the mildly gross satisfaction of a well-to-do woman at being bountiful. Moreover, she had in some way hurt Richard, for his face was dark when he came back to the table.

But an amazement struck Ellen as she thought over the scene. "Richard,"

she exclaimed excitedly, "is it not just wonderful that this man should come to your mother for help after she'd put him to the door? I'm sure she'd make a body feel just dirt if she was putting them to the door. It would be a quiet affair, but awful uncomfortable. But she's such a good woman that, even seeing her like that, he knew she was the one to come to when he was really in trouble. Do you not think it's like that?"

"Oh yes," he almost groaned. "Even when she's at her worst you know that she's still better than anyone else on this earth."

When Marion came back she sat down at the table without noticing what seemed to Ellen his obvious dejection, and began to talk about this man Milford, telling of the power he had over his beasts and how a prize heifer that they then had, by the name of Susan Caraway, had fretted for three weeks after he had left. She said that he gained this power over animals not by any real love for them, for he was indifferent to them except when he was actually touching them, and would always scamp his work without regard for their comfort, but simply by some physical magnetism, and pointed out that there it resembled the power some men have over women. It surprised Ellen that she laughed as she said that, and seemed to find pleasure in the thought of such a power. When the meal was over she sat for a moment, gathering together the breadcrumbs by her plate, and said pensively: "Yes, it might quite easily have been Roger." Ellen wondered how it was that Richard had always spoken of his mother as if she needed his protection, when her voice was so nearly coa.r.s.e with the sense of being able to outface all encounterable events, and she felt a flash of contempt for his judgment. She wished, too, that when Marion rose from, the table he had not followed her so closely upstairs and hovered round her as she took up her stand on the hearthrug, with her elbow on the mantelpiece and her foot in the fender, and kept his eyes on her face as she settled down in an armchair. It was just making himself cheap, dangling after a woman who was perched up on herself like a weatherc.o.c.k.

When she said, "I'm going to walk over to Friar's End. Old b.u.t.terworth wants me to do some repairs which I don't feel inclined to do, so I want to have a look at the place for myself," the announcement was so little tinged by any sense of the persons she was addressing that she might as well have held up a printed placard. Ellen thought he was a little abject to answer, "So far as I can remember, b.u.t.terworth's rather a rough specimen. Wouldn't you like us to come with you?" and almost deserved that she did not hear. Such deafness argued complete abstraction; and indeed, as she turned towards them and stood looking out towards the river, her face again wore that incomprehensible expression of secret and even furtive satisfaction. The sight of it fell like a whip on Richard. He lowered his head and sat staring at the floor. Ellen cried out to herself, "She's an aggravating woman if ever there was one. It's every bit as bad as not saying what you feel, this not saying what you look," and tried to pierce with her eyes the dreamy surface of this gloating. But she could make nothing of it, and looked back at Richard; and shuddered and drew her hands across her eyes when she saw that he had lifted his head and was turning towards her a face that had become the mirror of his mother's expression. He, too, was wrapped in some exquisite and contraband contentment. She raised her brows in enquiry, and mockingly he whispered back words which he knew she could not hear.

"I think I'll go now," said Marion, from her detachment, and left them.

Ellen stretched out her arms above her head and cried shudderingly: "Why are you looking at me like that?" But he would not answer, and began to laugh quietly. "Tell me!" she begged, but still he kept silence, and seemed to be fingering with his mind this pleasure that he knew of but would not disclose. It struck her as another example of Marion's dominion over the house that her expression should linger in this room after she had left it and that it should blot out the son's habitual splendid look, and she exclaimed sobbingly: "Oh, very well, be a Cheshire cat if you feel called to it," and went and pretended to look for a volume in the bookcase. It was annoying that he did not come after her at once and try to comfort her, but he made no move from his seat until there sounded through the house the thud of the closing front door.

She saw, a second after that, the reflection of his face gleaming above the shoulder of her own image in the gla.s.s door of the bookcase, and was at first pleased and waited delightfully for reconciling kisses; but because the brightness of its gleam told her that he was still smiling, she wished again, as she had that morning when she had stood beside the smooth, sherry-coloured boat, that among the dim shapes of the mirrored world might be one that was her mother. She knew that it was too much to ask of this inelastic universe that she should ever see her mother again in this world, standing, as she had lived, looking like a brave little bird bearing up through a bad winter but could not understand how G.o.d could ever have thought of anything as cruel as snow. "And quite right too," she said to herself. "If there were ghosts we would spend all our time gaping for a sight of the dead, and we'd not do our duty by the living. But surely there'd be no harm just for once, when I'm so put about with this strange house, in letting me see in the gla.s.s just the outline of her wee head on her wee shoulders...." But there was nothing.

She sobbed and caught at Richard's hands, and was instantly rea.s.sured.

For the hand is truer to the soul than the face: it has no moods, it borrows no expressions, and she read the Richard that she knew and loved in these long fingers, stained by his skeely trade and scored with cuts commemorative of adventure and bronzed with golden weather, and the broad knuckles that were hollowed between the bones as usually only frail hands are, just as his strong character was fissured by reserve and fastidiousness and all the delicacies that one does not expect to find in the robust. "You've got grand hands!" she cried, and kissed them. But he wrested them away from her and closed them gently over her wrists, and forced her backwards towards the hearth, keeping his body close to her and shuffling his feet in a kind of dance. She was astonished that she should not like anything that he did to her, and felt she must be being stupid and not understanding, and submitted to him with nervous alacrity when he sat down in the armchair and drew her on to his knee and began to kiss her.

But she did not like it at all. For his face wore the rapt and vain expression of a man who is performing some complicated technical process which he knows to be beyond the powers of most other people, and she had a feeling that he was not thinking of her at all. That was absurd, of course, for he was holding her in his arms, and whispering her name over and over again, and pressing his mouth down on hers, and she told herself that she was being tiresome and pernickety like the worst kind of grown-up, and urged herself to lend him a hand in this business of love-making. But she could not help noticing that these were the poorest kisses he had ever given her. Each one was separate, and all were impotent to constrain the mind to thoughts of love; between them she found herself thinking clearly of such irrelevancies as the bare, bright-coloured, inordinate order of the room and the excessive view of tides and flatlands behind the polished window-panes. The kisses had their beauty, of course, for it was Richard who was giving them, but it was the perishing and trivial beauty of cut flowers, whereas those that he gave her commonly had been strongly and enduringly beautiful like trees.

Always when he took her in his arms and she lifted her mouth to his it was like going into a wood, or, rather, creating a wood. For at first there was darkness, since one closed one's eyes when one kissed as when one prayed; and then it seemed as if at each kiss they were being a tree, for their bodies were pressed close together like a tree-trunk, and their trembling, gripping arms were like branches, and their faces where love lived on their lips were like the core of foliage where the birds nest. She would see springing up in the darkness around her the grove of the trees that their kisses had created: the silver birches that were their delicate, unclinging kisses; the st.u.r.dy elms that were their kisses when they loved robustly and thought of a home together; the white-boled beeches with foliage of green fire that they were when they loved most intensely. But to-day they did not seem to be making anything; he was simply moving his lips over her skin as a doctor moves his stethoscope over his patient's chest. And, like the doctor, he sometimes hurt her. She hated it when he kissed her throat, and was glad when he thought of something he wanted to say and stopped.

"Next time I go to London," he said, "I'm going to buy you a jade necklace, or malachite if I can get it. The green will look so good against your white, white skin."

"That's verra kind of you, but the money may as well lie by," she told him wisely, "for I couldn't go wearing a green necklace when I'm in mourning."

"But you won't be in mourning much longer."

"Six months in full mourning, six months half. That's as it should be for a mother."

"But what nonsense!" he exclaimed irascibly. "When you're a young little thing you ought to be wearing pretty clothes. It doesn't do your mother any good, your going about in black."

"I know well it doesn't, but, remember, mother was old-fashioned Scotch, and she was most particular about having things just so. Specially on melancholy occasions. I remember she was most pernickety about her blacks after my father's death. And though she's entered into eternal life, we've no guarantee that that makes a body sensible all at once."

She saw on his face an expression which reminded her that he had been careful never to acquiesce when she spoke of the possibility of a future life, and she cried out: "You needn't look so clever. I'm sure she's going on somewhere, and why you should grudge it to the poor woman I don't know. And your mother thinks there's something after death, too.

She told me this morning in the garden that she was quite certain of it when your father died. She said that all the trees round the house seemed to know where he had gone."

"Oh, she said that, did she?" His arms released her. He stared into her face. "She said that, did she?" he repeated in an absent, faintly malevolent murmur; and clasped her in his arms again and kissed her so cruelly that her lips began to bleed.

"Let me go, let me go!" she cried. "You're not loving me, you're just taking exercise on me!"

He let her go, but not, she knew from the smile on his face, from any kindness, but rather that he might better observe her distress and gloat over it. She moved away from the heat of the fire and from that other heat which had so strangely been engendered by these contacts which always before engendered light, and went to the window and laid her forehead against the cold gla.s.s. The day had changed and lost its smile, for the sky was hidden by a dirty quilt of rain-charged clouds and the frost had seeped into the marshes and left them dark, acid winter green, yet she longed to walk out there in that unsunned and water-logged country, opening her coat to the cold wind brought by the grey, invading tides, making little cold pools where she dug her heels into the sodden ground, getting rid of her sense of inflammation, and being quite alone.

That she should want not to be with Richard, and that she should not be perfectly pleased with what pleased him, seemed to her monstrous disloyalty, and she turned and smiled at him. But there was really something wrong with this room and this hour, for as she looked at him she felt frightened and ashamed, as if he were drunk, though she knew that he was sober; and indeed his face was flushed and his eyes wet and winking, as if smoke had blown in them. For some reason that she could not understand he reminded her of Mr. Philip.

She cried out imploringly. "Take me down to the marshes, Richard!"

He shook his head and laughed at some private joke. She felt desolate, like a child at school whom other children shut out from their secrets, and drooped her head; and heard him say presently: "We are going out this afternoon, but not on the marshes."

"Where?"

He was overcome with silent laughter when she stamped because he would not answer. She ran over to him and began to slap him, trying to make a game of it to cover her near approach to tears. Then he told her, not because he was concerned with her distress, but because her touch seemed to put him in a good humour. "We're going to the registrar, my dear, to fix up everything for our marriage in three weeks' time."

The sense of what he had said did not reach her, because she was gazing at him to try and find out why he was still reminding her of Mr. Philip.

He was, for one thing, wearing an expression that would have been more suitable to a smaller man. Oh, he was terribly different to-day! His eyes, whose wide stare had always worked on her like a spell, were narrow and glittering, and his lips looked full. She screamed "Oh, no!

Oh, no!" without, for a second, thinking against what thing she was crying out.

He laughed and pulled her down on his knees. He was laughing more than she had ever known him laugh before. "Why, don't you want to, you little thing?"

Her thoughts wandered about the world as she knew it, looking for some reason. But nothing came to her save the memory of the cold, wet, unargumentative cry of the redshanks that she had heard on the marshes.

She said feebly, as one who asks for water: "Please, please take me down to the sea-wall."

His voice swooped resolutely down with tenderness. "But why don't you want to come and see about our marriage? Are you frightened, dear?"

Now, strangely enough, he was reminding her of Mr. Mactavish James, as he used to be in those long conversations when he seemed so kind, and said: "Nellie, ma wee la.s.sie, dis onything ail ye?" and yet left her with a suspicion that he had been asking her all the time out of curiosity and not because he really cared for her. She was dizzied.

Whoever was speaking to her, it was not Richard. She muttered: "Yes, a little."