"Oh, between our mothers ..." he said wearily, and hushed her in his arms. Bitterly he broke out: "If we could have lived our own lives!"

"My love, my love, don't spoil our little time together...."

"But there's nothing left."

"There's nothing left, Richard, so go on kissing me."

"Wait." He drew away from her and held up his forefinger. "There's something still."

He looked, Ellen thought, very like Marion as he stood there, his eyes roving about her face. Because his shoulders were bowed his body looked thick like a tree-trunk; his swarthiness had the darkness of earth in it and the gold of ripe corn; and his gaze lay like a yoke on its object.

"There's something still," he whispered. A sudden joy flamed in him.

There came over him another aspect of Marion. He looked awkward and contemptuous, as she had done when she had told Ellen how in Richard's infancy she had been obliged to be nice to people whom she did not like for the sake of a placid social atmosphere. He muttered, "I'll go to the kitchen ... tell the servants that Roger's fallen asleep ... they're not to disturb him.... That'll ... give us time...."

At the door he turned.

"You're not afraid?" He pointed to the dead man.

She shook her head and he went on his errand. With a sense of leisure, as if she had strayed into a cul-de-sac of time, and since there is no going backwards must stay there for ever, she sat down and looked about her. Roger did not frighten her at all. If his spirit was in the room it was sickly and innocuous, like the smell of a peardrop. But the horror of all that had happened to her, and its refusal to be anything but horror, viewed from whatever aspect, had begun to be agony when there broke on her that which is the reward of tragedy. She perceived the miraculous beauty of the common lot. Men and women taking children home in trams ... people on summer afternoons going into the country in brakes ... that wedding-party she and her mother had seen long ago dancing by the River Almond, led by a bride and bridegroom middle-aged but gravely glad.... Ah, that wedding-party.... She wept, she wept.

He had returned to the room, and was holding open the French window.

"Come," he said. "Come."

CHAPTER XI

Surely, surely he was asking too much of her?...

Yet he had felt no doubt that she would comply. There had been indeed no tinge of supplication in his bearing when he had halted with her on the seaward slope of the sea-wall and pointed to the other wall on the further side of the creek, and he had told her that on the island it confined there was a hut which the cattlemen used when the herds pastured there; where there would be a store of furze with which they could build a fire; where they could be safe until the people came to take him. Rather had he spoken triumphantly, as if he had found a hidden staircase leading out of destiny. And when he left her to see if they could bribe the fishermen who were painting the keel of a boat on the gra.s.s two hundred yards away to hand over their waders, so that he and she might walk across dryshod to the island, he did not look over his shoulder, but walked straight ahead, utterly confident that she would be there when he returned.

But surely this was far too much to ask of her, who had learned what life was; who knew that, though life at its beginning was lovely as a corn of wheat, it was ground down to flour that must make bitter bread between two human tendencies: the insane s.e.xual caprice of men, the not less mad excessive steadfastness of women. Roger had died, Richard was about to die, because of the grinding together of these male and female faults--Harry and Marion ... Poppy and her sailor ... her own mother and father.... And love, which she had trusted to resolve all life's disharmonies, was either ineffectual or dangerous. Her love had not been able to reach Richard across the dark waters of his mother's love; and how like a doom that love had lain on him.... Since life was like this, she would not do what Richard asked. She tried to rise that she might flee from him, from these marshes, back to the hills where the red roofs of safe human houses showed among the tended fields.

But she could not move. Although her mind was still arguing the matter, all the rest of her being had consented. She was going to do this thing.

In panic she looked along the wall at Richard, wishing he would come back to her. But he was going on talking to the fishermen, though he held their waders in his hand. She quite understood why he was doing that, and watched him through tears. This was the last time he would be able to exercise that charm of which he was a little vain, since on all his few future days his intercourse with his fellows would be strictly specialised; so he was taking the opportunity. In watching him and the reflection of his magnificence in the fishermen's smiling subjugation, she was shot through by a pang of pride and exultation. Though the night should engulf Richard and Marion, the triumph was not with the night. In throwing in her lot with them and with the human race which is perpetually defeated, she was nevertheless choosing the side of victory....

She leaned back against the slope and waited. This was a good place to wait. The call of the redshanks, the cloud shadows that moved over the marshes like the footprints of invisible presences, made her feel calm.

Nevertheless her heart could not help but beat quick with fear. She wished that he would come and comfort her. But though he had left the fishermen he was not coming straight to her. He had climbed the sea-wall and was looking out to the east, to the open sea, over the country of the mud. He was thinking of Marion, and wondering where the tide had carried her. The inexorable womb was continuing to claim its own. She wanted to start up and cry out to him and hail him noisily from his obsession; but something in the place, in the call of the redshanks, in the procession of the shadows, reminded her that when she had cried out before she had brought death upon her lover. This quietness was the safer way. She would wait patiently until he came to make his exorbitant demand.

She sat and looked at the island, and wondered whether it was a son or daughter that waited for her there.