Part 12 (1/2)

The girl waited a moment, hoping for a word, and then, though rather reluctantly, turned towards the door. She wanted to hear still more about the marvellous news, but the old woman looked so tired that she did not like to ask. She was anxious, too, to get back to the kitchen to keep an eye on Mary Phyllis. Yet still she lingered, puzzled and curious, and still touched by that unusual sense of awe. An exotic beauty had pa.s.sed swiftly into the musty air of Eliza's parlour, a sense of wonder from worlds beyond ... the strong power of a dream.

”You're over-tired, aren't you, Aunt Sarah?” she repeated, for want of something better to say. She spoke rather timidly, as if aware that the words only brushed the surface of deeper things below.

Sarah answered her without opening her eyes.

”Ay, my la.s.s. Just a bit.”

”You'd best stop here quietly till Uncle Simon's yoked up. I'll see n.o.body bothers you if you feel like a nap. I'd fetch you a drop of cowslip wine, but mother's got the key.”

”Nay, I want nowt wi' it, thank ye,” Sarah said. ”I'll do all right.”

She lifted her hands contentedly, and folded them in her lap. ”Likely I'll drop off for a minute, as you say.”

”Ay, well, then, I'd best be getting back.” She moved resolutely now, but paused with her hand on the latch. ”Aunt Sarah,” she asked rather breathlessly, ”was all that about Cousin Geordie true?”

Sarah's lids quivered a little, and then tightened over her eyes.

”Ay. True enough.”

”It's grand news, if it is! ... I'm right glad about it, I'm sure! I've always thought it hard lines, him going off like that. And you said he'd done well for himself, didn't you, Aunt Sarah? ... Eh, but I wish Elliman could make some bra.s.s an' all!”

”There's a deal o' power in bra.s.s.” The words came as if of themselves from behind the mask-like face. ”Folks say it don't mean happiness, but it means power. It's a stick to beat other folk wi', if it's nowt else.”

”I don't want to beat anybody, I'm sure!” Sally laughed, though with tears in her voice. ”I only want what's my own.”

”Ay, we all on us want that,” Sarah said, with a grim smile. ”But it's only another fancy name for the whole world!”

She sat still for some time after the girl had gone out, as if she were afraid that she might betray herself before she was actually alone.

Presently, however, she began to rock gently to and fro, still keeping her hands folded and her eyes closed. The good chair moved easily without creak or jar, and the good cus.h.i.+ons adapted themselves to every demand of her weary bones. Geordie should buy her a chair like this, she told herself as she rocked, still maintaining the wonderful fiction even to herself. She would have cus.h.i.+ons, too, of the very best, covered with silk and cool to a tired cheek. A footstool, also, ample and well stuffed, and exactly the right height for a pair of aching feet.

But though one half of her brain continued to dally with these pleasant fancies, the other was standing amazed before her late stupendous act.

She was half-aghast, half-proud at the ease with which she had suddenly flung forth her swift, gigantic lie. Never for a moment had she intended to affirm anything of the kind, never as much as imagined that she might hint at it even in joke. She had been angry, of course, bitter and deeply hurt, but there had been no racing thoughts in her mind eager to frame the princely tale. It had seemed vacant, indeed, paralysed by rage, unable to do little else but suffer and hate. And then suddenly the words had been said, had shaped themselves on her lips and taken flight, as if by an agency with which she had nothing to do.

It was just as if somebody had taken her arm and used it to wave a banner in the enemy's face; as if she were merely an instrument on which an angry hand had suddenly played.

So she was not ashamed, or even really alarmed, because of this inward conviction that the crime was not her own. Yet the voice had been hers, and most certainly the succeeding grim satisfaction and ironic joy had been hers! She allowed herself an occasional chuckle now that she was really alone, gloating freely over Eliza's abas.e.m.e.nt and acute dismay.

For once at least, in the tourney of years, she had come away victor from the fray. No matter how she was made to pay for it in the end, she had had the whip-hand of Blindbeck just for once. Indeed, now that it was done,--and so easily done,--she marvelled that she had never done it before. At the back of her mind, however, was the vague knowledge that there is only one possible moment for tremendous happenings such as these. Perhaps the longing engendered by the Dream in the yard had suddenly grown strong enough to act of its own accord. Perhaps, as in the decision about the farm, a sentence lying long in the brain is spoken at length without the apparent a.s.sistance of the brain....

She did not trouble herself even to speculate how she would feel when at last the truth was out. This was the truth, as long as she chose to keep it so, as long as she sat and rocked and shut the world from her dreaming eyes. From pretending that it was true she came very soon to believing that it might really be possible, after all. Such things had happened more than once, she knew, and who was to say that they were not happening now? She told herself that, if she could believe it with every part of herself just for a moment, it would be true. Up in Heaven, where, as they said, a star winked every time a child was born, they had only to move some lever or other, and it would be true.

A clock ticked on the mantelpiece with a slow, rather hesitating sound, as if trying to warn the house that Sunday and the need of the winding-key were near. There was a close, secretive feeling in the room, the atmosphere of so many objects shut together in an almost terrible proximity for so many days of the week. She was so weary that she could have fallen asleep, but her brain was too excited to let her rest. The magnitude of her crime still held her breathlessly enthralled; the glamour of it made possible all impossible hopes. She dwelt again and again on the spontaneity of the lie, which seemed to give it the unmistakable stamp of truth.

She had long since forgotten what it was like to be really happy or even at peace, but in some sort of fierce, gloating, heathenish way she was happy now. She was conscious, for instance, of a sense of importance beyond anything she had ever known. Even that half of her brain which insisted that the whole thing was pretence could not really chill the pervading glow of pride. She had caught the reflection of her state in Eliza's voice, as well as in others less familiar to her ear. She had read it even in Sally's kindly champions.h.i.+p and support; through the sympathy she had not failed to hear the awe. The best proof,--if she needed proof,--was that she was actually here in the sacred parlour, and seated in the precious chair. Eliza would have turned her out of both long since, she knew, if she had not been clad in that new importance as in cloth of gold.

The impossible lies nearer than mere probability to the actual fact; so near at times that the merest effort seems needed to cross the line.

Desire, racking both soul and body with such powerful hands, must surely be strong enough to leap the slender pale. The peculiar mockery about ill-luck is always the trifling difference between the opposite sides of the s.h.i.+eld. It is the difference between the full gla.s.s and the gla.s.s turned upside-down. But to-day at least this tired old woman had swung the buckler round, and laughed as she held the gla.s.s in her hand and saw the light strike through the wine.

In this long day of Simon's and Sarah's nothing was stranger than the varying strata of glamour and gloom through which in turn they pa.s.sed.

Their days and weeks were, as a rule, mere grey blocks of blank, monotonous life, imperceptibly lightened or further shadowed by the subtle changes of the sky. But into these few hours so closely packed with dreadful humiliations and decisions, so much acc.u.mulated unkindness and insult and cold hate, there kept streaming upon them shafts of light from some centre quite unknown. For Simon there had been the unexpected stimulant of his Witham success, and later the new interest in life which Will's proposal had seemed to offer. For Sarah there was the wistful pleasure of her morning with May, as well as the unlawful but pa.s.sionate pleasure of her present position. The speed of the changes kept them over-strung, so that each as it came found them more sensitive than the last. They were like falling bodies dropping by turn through cloud and sunlit air. They were like total wrecks on some darkened sea, catching and losing by turn the lights of an approaching vessel.

The slow clock dragged the protesting minutes on, and still no one disturbed her and the dream widened and grew. Tea would be brought in soon, she told herself in the dream,--strong, expensive, visitor's tea, freshly boiled and brewed. The silver teapot would be queening it over the tray, flanked by steaming scones and an oven-new, home-made cake.

Eliza herself would appear to entertain her guest, always with that new note of reverence in her voice. When the door opened they would hear another voice,--Geordie's, laughing and talking in some room beyond.