Part 25 (2/2)
”Ishmael!” she said desperately; ”it's no good, I'm not the sort of woman who can throw up the whole of life for one thing. You will think me mercenary, worldly, but I'm not; the old ties are too strong for me, and I can't break them. It's my heart that breaks.... Oh, Ishmael, Ishmael, I loved you so!”
Through all the inconsistencies of her words two salient facts stood out to Ishmael--she was unhappy, and through him. His own pain lay numb, a thing to be realised when he roamed the fields alone, and still more intimately known when he had it for bed-and-hearth fellow in his dreary house. Nature has provided that a great blow shall always stun for a time; sensation stays quiescent as long as there still remains something to be done; it is in the lonely hours after all action is over that pain makes itself felt. Ishmael, if asked then, would have said his heart was broken, but long afterwards he would see that no such merciful thing had happened, and marvel how the cord of suffering can be strained to breaking-point and kept taut, yet never snap. He was yet to learn that no pain is unbearable, for the simple reason that it has to be borne.
”There's nothing to blame yourself about,” he said. ”You've given me the most beautiful things to remember, and it's not your fault you can't give more. When I think of what you are and what I have to offer I feel I couldn't let you give more even if you would....” Always unfluent of speech, he stopped abruptly, while a wheel of thought whirred round so swiftly in his brain that he only caught a blurred impression. Ishmael had had, perforce, to live as far as his mental life went in a world of books, and with a vague resentment he felt that books had not played him fair. Surely he had read, many times, of women who had thought the world well lost for love--the hackneyed expression came so readily to him.
”She cares for me,” he thought, with an odd mingling of triumph and pain, ”only she doesn't care enough. It's a half-shade, and the books don't prepare one for the half-shades. n.o.body can love without a flaw--we all fail each other somewhere; it's like no one being quite good or quite bad: nothing is black or white, but just varying tones of grey. They make life d.a.m.ned difficult, the half-shades!”
Giving his shoulders a little shake, he turned to Blanche. ”I must go,”
he said gently. ”Good-bye, Blanche!”
She held out both her hands, and he took them in his, repeating, ”Good-bye, Blanche!”
Then she made her only mistake; she swayed towards him, her face held up to his in a last invitation. Roughly he put her hands away.
”Not that, Blanche ... not that!” said a voice he hardly recognised as his own, and, wheeling, he went heavily through the little dead gardens.
Blanche, sick with disappointment, noted dully that he never turned his head as he pa.s.sed out of the last. A sob rose to her throat, and as she heard the choking sound she made, the swift thought came: ”That sounded real! I must be broken-hearted to sob like that....”; and she sobbed again. Then a flash of self-revelation ran over her, and she stood aghast.
”Nothing is real about me, nothing!” she cried despairingly, ”not even my sorrow at being so unreal.” Drying her eyes, she stared out at the pale gleam of the Atlantic glinting through the elders and began to think. She saw love, such love as she was capable of, had been ruled out of life for her; it became all the more necessary that she should capture other things that made life pleasant. If she let this new phase of sincerity become a habit, she was lost indeed; better to slip into the old self-deceiving Blanche once again. Deliberately she shut off thoughts of Ishmael, and barred them out until such time as she could think of him, without effort, from a point of view that in no way lowered her self-esteem. She had been artificial in her strivings after sincerity; now, for the last time, she was real in her acceptance of unreality. Lightly dabbing her eyelids with a pocket powder-puff, she went back to the cottage.
There she read through the letter again, then consulted a time-table; she could change at Exeter and catch a train that would enable her to reach home that evening. She could make up a story to her stepmother to account for her sudden appearance. Blanche began composing in her mind what she would say to her. She would pretend not to have had the letter; even her gentle, garrulous little stepmother's good opinion was dear to her. She would seal it up again and forward it on herself; it would reach her at home a day after her own arrival. Yes, thought Blanche, everything would dovetail excellently. She went into the kitchen where Mrs. Penticost was ironing and the pleasant smell of warm linen hung upon the air.
”I've decided I must go home, Mrs. Penticost,” she said. ”That letter was to say my father is very ill, and I was only waiting till I'd seen Mr. Ruan.... I've told him I must go to-morrow. I'm so sorry, but--”
”Ah!” interrupted Mrs. Penticost; ”'tes as well--'twould be dull for 'ee alone wi'out Mr. Ruan able to come so much about the place, and I wouldn' have had en here with Miss Judy gone and you alone. You was rare taken up wi' he!”
Blanche's vanity was too insatiable to spare Ishmael; she sighed pathetically.
”Oh, Mrs. Penticost! you make me feel horribly guilty, for I'm afraid it's all over,” she said with simple earnestness, ”but I couldn't prevent it; and poor Mr. Ruan--”
”Don't 'ee go for to tell I about it!” broke in Mrs. Penticost; ”'tes downright ondecent in 'ee!”
Blanche flushed. ”Horrid, insufferable woman!” she thought angrily as she went upstairs. ”How thankful I shall be to see the last of her!”
Opening her box, she began to throw her belongings in viciously. From without came the crunch of Billy Penticost's boots as he crossed the little yard and the clink of a pail set down; then the rhythmic sound of pumping, so like the stertorous breathing of some vast creature, rose on the morning air. A sudden loathing of country sights and sounds gripped Blanche, and, tearing off her faded frock, she began to dress herself in the one smart travelling gown she had brought with her.
”I don't care what Mrs. Penticost thinks!” she told her reflection in the blurred looking-gla.s.s as she pulled a gold-coloured ribbon round her waist; ”I don't care what any of them think--they're just country b.u.mpkins, with no ideas in their heads beyond crops and cows!”
Without warning, a throb of memory a.s.sailed her: was it only a month ago she had stood in this room in the moonlight, waiting to go and meet Ishmael in the field? Her fingers shook a little as she took a few blossoms of creamy-yellow toadflax he had picked for her out of their vase and laid them tentatively against her gown. They harmonised to perfection, but Blanche, after a moment's hesitation, flung them down.
”I'll buy some roses in Exeter,” she thought; ”they'll look more suitable than hedge-flowers.” It was her definite rejection of the country and all it stood for; but on a gust of sentiment she picked up the toadflax blossoms and stuck them in water again--her last tribute to the memory of Ishmael.
CHAPTER XVI
THE GREY WORLD
During the next few months pain became a habit of mind with Ishmael, a habit which was to grow into a blessing for him, preventing him ever again feeling with such acuteness. From time to time he fell into deadness of all sensation, when he hoped that the worst of his suffering was over; but always it struggled up out of the numbness again, as insistent as before. He fought his la.s.situde of spirit as stubbornly as the periods of active pain, but both with the same result, the opposition probably only making both last the longer. He would doubtless have pulled through more quickly if he had gone away, joined Killigrew in Paris, or gone on some tour with Boase. But partly from a stubborn sense of not deserting his post, partly because things were not doing well in the farming world just then, and partly because of the true instinct of the lover which bids him stay where the feet of his mistress have pa.s.sed, though the suffering thereby be doubled, he stayed on at Cloom. At Cloom--where there was no evading the thought of her amid the memories, where every stile and field held some fragrance from what he had thought her, where the very air that blew across his brow seemed as though it blew from her. If he had left he would have had to take with him the image of her as he now knew her; by staying he kept the ghost of the Blanche he had imagined her to be when she was still there.
There was a long time when it suddenly seemed to him as though she must repent, as though he could not be suffering so and she not share it, as though any post might bring a letter and any moment show her figure pausing at the gate. He learnt during that phase what poignancy is held by the cry of the wisest of men--that ”hope deferred maketh the heart sick.” During the weeks that he was thus obsessed there was not a click of the latch but sent his heart racing, while at the same time he did not dare look up because in his heart he knew it would not be she he saw. He slept little during this period, and looked a good six or seven years older than his real age. This was succeeded by one of the phases of numbness when partly reaction, because the mind cannot keep stretched too tautly, and partly sheer physical fatigue from the hard work he drove himself to every day, made for a merciful slough of the spirit in which it all the time deceitfully gathered itself together for the next onslaught.
<script>