For a second he pondered it; then asked with an accent that pierced her because it was so infantine, so shamelessly mendicant of comfort: "She really was all right, Ellen?"

"Cross my heart, Richard, she was that."

Their hands stole into one another's; from the warm, fluttering pressure of his fingers she knew that his heart was feeling numberless adoring things about her. If everything had not happened as she wished, it was not because the dispensation of love had come to an end, but because it had not endured long enough. There was a golden age ahead. She leaned towards him, but was arrested by the change in his expression. His face, which had been a white mask of grief, became vulpine. "Yes, she will most probably be up there ... at his tomb...."

Roger, behind him at the window, fluted miserably: "Mummie! Mummie!" He turned on him with a gesture of irritation and opened the door. "Here, Roger, let's go now." The glance he shot backwards into the room was so preoccupied that it held no more intimate message for Ellen than for Poppy. "Well, I don't expect we'll be long...."

They crossed the lawn, their short shadows treading it more gaily than their tall, striding selves. There seemed to be some mishap at the gate into the orchard. Apparently Roger squeezed his finger in the hinge; but he was very brave. The two women stood at the window and watched him hop about, shaking the injured hand, while his shadow parodied him, and Richard waited with a stoop of the shoulders that meant patience and hatred. Then again the silver garden was empty.

Poppy and Ellen went and sat down at the hearth; and Poppy said with an extravagant bitterness: "Well, that's that. He knows as well as I do that the Army expects us officers to be in by eleven."

"No doubt Mr. Yaverland'll go round in the morning and explain the exceptional circ.u.mstances," murmured Ellen.

"I'm sure I don't care. I'm fed to the teeth with the Army, fed to the teeth...." She stared into the fire as if she saw a picture there, and drew a little tin box from her pocket and offered it to Ellen, saying: "Take one. They're violet cachous." Sucking one, she sat forward with her feet in the fender and her head near her knees until, as if the flavour of the sweet in her mouth was reminding her of a time when life was less flavourless than now, she started up and began to walk restlessly about the room. She halted at the window and asked thickly: "That place over the other side of the river. Where there's a glow in the sky. Is that Chatham?"

With awe, with the lifting of the hair, the chilling of the skin that those suffer who see the fulfilment of a prophecy, Ellen remembered what Marion had said that afternoon about the handsome young sailor in Chatham High Street. She murmured tremulously: "I think Richard said it was."

"Ah, Chatham's a nice place," said Poppy in a surly voice. She pressed her face against the gla.s.s like a beast looking out of its cage. It was quite certain, as the silence endured, that she wept.

Then Marion had been right. A wave of terror washed over Ellen. What chance had she of playing any part on a stage where there moved this woman of genius, who was so creative that she had made Richard, and so wise that she could see through the brick wall of this girl's brutishness? She stammered, "Well, good-night, I'll away to my bed," and ran upstairs to her room and undressed furiously, letting her clothes fall here and there on the floor. In the first moments after she turned out the lights the darkness was brightly painted with pictures of the moonlit temple; one everywhere she turned her eyes. And once, when she was far gone into drowsiness, she woke herself by sitting up in bed and crying acidly: "And do you think we will have to spend every night searching for your mother, Richard?" But very soon she slept.

She woke suddenly and with her mind at attention, as if someone had whispered into her ear. She sat up and looked through the great window into that not quite full-bodied light of a day that was overcast and advanced past its dawn only by an hour or two. There was no one in the farmyard. Yet it came back to her that she had been called by the sound of men's voices; of Richard's voice, she could be almost sure, for there was a filament of pleasure trailing across her consciousness. There was no reason why he should be out of doors at this hour, before the family had been called to breakfast, unless the search for Marion had been unsuccessful. She jumped out of bed and washed and dressed and ran downstairs, leaving her hair loose about her shoulders because she begrudged the time for pinning it when he needed her comfort. Mabel, the parlour-maid, was coming out of the dining-room with an empty tray in her hand. One corner of her ap.r.o.n-bib flapped loose and there was a s.m.u.t on her face. Ellen knew that Marion had not been found, for if she had been in the house, alive or dead, the girl would not have dared to look like that. They pa.s.sed in silence, but exchanged a look of horror.

There was no one in the dining-room but Roger and Poppy. Poppy was sitting in an armchair at the hearth, where she had evidently spent the night. Her uniform was unb.u.t.toned half-way down her square bust; and on the arms of the chair there rested two objects that looked like sections of dried viscera, but which Ellen remembered to have seen labelled as pads in hair-dressers' windows. Roger was kneeling before her, his head on her lap, and weeping bitterly. She was stroking his hair kindly enough, though her eyes were dwelling on the teapot and ham on the breakfast-table. The French window was swinging open, admitting air that had the chill of dawn upon it; and outside on the gravel path stood Richard, listening to a bearded old fisherman in oilskins. She hovered about the threshold and heard the old man saying: "'Tes no question o'

you putting yourselves about to look for her now. Mostly you don't hear nothin' of them for three weeks, and then they comes out where they went in. Till the tide brings them back you can't fetch them." Richard said: "Yes, yes," and held out money to him. She saw he wanted to send the fisherman away, that he could not bear to hear these things; but he was held rigid by the obsession, which he and Marion had followed as if it were a law, that one must not betray emotion. His inhibited hand became more and more talonlike, more and more incapable of making the gesture of dismissal. To aid him Ellen showed herself at the open door in her wildness of loose hair and called: "Richard! Richard!"

That made the old man take his money and go away, and Richard stepped back into the room. He evaded her embrace. "This ghastly light!" he muttered, and went to the corner of the room and turned on the electric switch. Then he let her take his old, grief-patterned face between her hands.

"My dear, my dear, what has happened?"

"There's a place ... there's a place ... there's a place on the sea-wall...." He drew his hand across his forehead. "He is finding it difficult," her heart told her sadly, "to explain it to a stranger." "In the train, when you came, you must have seen a brick-kiln ... on the right of the railway ... deserted.... A trolley-line runs from there over a bridge to the sea-wall ... to a jetty. It hasn't been used for years. The planks are half of them rotted away. The high tide runs right up among the piers. We found her lantern down there on the mud."

Her heart sickened. "Oh, poor, poor Marion!" she wept, and asked foolishly, incredulously, as if in hopes of finding a flaw in the story, "But when did you find the lantern?"

"An hour ago. We looked for her last night till two. We went all the way along to Canfleet. They took us in at the signal-box there. Then as soon as it was light we walked back along the sea-wall. And we found the lantern. Look, it's out on the lawn."

They gazed at the dark object on the edge of the gra.s.s as if at any moment it might move or speak.

"But, my dearest, she may not be in the water! She may have dropped the light and been feared to go further without it, and gone into one of those wee byres on the marshes till the morning, and not have wakened yet!"

He laughed sleepily, softly. "Yes, certainly she's not wakened yet."

"But, my own dear, it may be so! She may be with us at any moment now!"

He shook his head obstinately. "No. She's dead. I know she's dead.

There's something like silence lying over everything. It means she's dead."

It was her impulse to throw her arms about his neck and bid him weep if he wished on her breast, but feeling his stillness, his nearly unbreathing immobility, she kept herself from him. To those who fall and hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously stricken by a disease one sits and waits.

"Sit down and take a bit of breakfast," she bade him softly. He sank into a chair at the table, lumpishly, as if his limbs had grown thick and lithic, while she poured out a cup of tea and cut some ham. Her flesh was weeping for Marion, who had been quick, who now was dead; but the core of her was a void. She cut him a nice feathery slice, unbroken all the way from the bone to the outer rim of bread-crumb-freckled fat; and through the void there shot the thought, trivial yet tremendously exultant: "Now that Marion is gone I shall always look after his food."

He drew his brows together and groaned softly. Hawkishly she looked round to see what was distressing him. It was, of course, Roger howling in Poppy's lap.... "Oh, my darling mummie!" It must be stopped.

"Roger," she said kindly, "sit forward for your breakfast."

He raised a dispirited nose, red with weeping, and shook his head mournfully. "No, thank you. It wouldn't be of any use. I couldn't keep a thing on my stomach."

"But what about Miss Poppy?" she asked guilefully. "She must be wearying for her breakfast after the night she's spent in that chair."

That brought him off his feet, as she had known it would. "Oh, poor Poppy!" he cried. "Oh, poor Poppy!" and led her to the table.

Richard ate and drank for some moments; he seemed very hungry. Then he laid down his knife and fork and said: "Ellen, when your mother died did you feel like this? As if ... the walls of your life had fallen in?"

"Yes, yes, my love, so terribly alone."

"Alone, alone," he repeated. "I am so selfish. I can think of nothing but my own loneliness. I can't think of her."

"Well, never heed, my dear, my own dear. She wouldn't want you to worry."

"Oh, but I must think this out!" he exclaimed in a shocked, dreary tone.

"It's so important...." He looked up at the electric light and grumbled: "Oh, that d.a.m.ned light makes it worse!" and rose to restore the room to the sallowness of the morning.

When he sat down again he would not eat, but leaned his head on his hands and his elbows on the table and watched the other two. Poppy was saying in tones half-maternal, half-disagreeable: "Eat up your 'am, you silly cuckoo. You know if you don't you'll have one of your sick turns,"

and Roger was obeying. Tears and the ham collided noisily in his throat.

Richard withdrew his eyes from them and looked secretively at Ellen.

"She killed herself, of course," he said in an undertone.

"Oh no!" she cried. "Oh no!"

But there sounded through the room a thunderclap of memory. There had been words drawled there the night before that now detonated in Ellen's mind.... "What am I to do, Ellen, to keep my sons from quarrelling over me?"

"Oh no!" she cried again, lest he should take notice that she was deafened and dizzied and ask why. "Never think that of her, my dearie."

She had thought the woman strident and hysterical and thoughtless for persisting in her plans for the next day in face of her own faint, barely acquiescent smiles, and a poor, f.e.c.kless, fashionless housewife for thrusting those unwanted saucepans on the cook. But these had been alibis she had sought to establish that she might clear her soul of a charge of lingering at the brink of dark waters, lest Richard should understand her sacrifice and grieve.

"Her heel may have caught in the rotting wood," she nearly shrieked, so that he should not overhear the thoughts that rushed in on her silence.

"She wore high heels for her age--"

That was why Marion had come back and looked in through the window. She was to shed one by one the shelters that protected her soul from the chill of the universe: her house, her clothes, her flesh, her skeleton.

This first step had cost her so much that for one shuddering moment she had gone back on it.

"And things looked so strange last night. If there was a skin of ice on the wood it'd be hard to tell it from the moonlit water...."

Oh, pitiful dark woman that had stood on the lawn looking up at the room where sat her son, whom she would never see again. "If I had not gone to the window then," thought Ellen to herself, "she might have looked much longer."

"She was very ugly last night," muttered Richard. "She was always ugly when she was unhappy."

His speculative tone made her perceive that, unlike herself, he did not know for certain that Marion had committed suicide. She must conceal her proofs, bury them under a heap of lying counterproofs. "My dear, you'd never think it if you'd seen her last night...."