Part 32 (1/2)

He looked into her eyes, holding her hand, and she felt his body trembling. She knew he was about to speak, and held up a warning hand.

”That's all, my lad,” she said with a smile. ”My love to you, and G.o.d speed you.”

Mrs. Phillips progressed slowly but steadily. Life was returning to her, but it was not the same. Out of those days there had come to her a gentle dignity, a strengthening and refining. The face, now pale and drawn, had lost its foolishness. Under the thin, white hair, and in spite of its deep lines, it had grown younger. A great patience, a child- like thoughtfulness had come into the quiet eyes.

She was sitting by the window, her hands folded. Joan had been reading to her, and the chapter finished, she had closed the book and her thoughts had been wandering. Mrs. Phillips's voice recalled them.

”Do you remember that day, my dear,” she said, ”when we went furnis.h.i.+ng together. And I would have all the wrong things. And you let me.”

”Yes,” answered Joan with a laugh. ”They were pretty awful, some of them.”

”I was just wondering,” she went on. ”It was a pity, wasn't it? I was silly and began to cry.”

”I expect that was it,” Joan confessed. ”It interferes with our reason at times.”

”It was only a little thing, of course, that,” she answered. ”But I've been thinking it must be that that's at the bottom of it all; and that is why G.o.d lets there be weak things--children and little animals and men and women in pain, that we feel sorry for, so that people like you and Robert and so many others are willing to give up all your lives to helping them. And that is what He wants.”

”Perhaps G.o.d cannot help there being weak things,” answered Joan.

”Perhaps He, too, is sorry for them.”

”It comes to the same thing, doesn't it, dear?” she answered. ”They are there, anyhow. And that is how He knows those who are willing to serve Him: by their being pitiful.”

They fell into a silence. Joan found herself dreaming.

Yes, it was true. It must have been the beginning of all things. Man, pitiless, deaf, blind, groping in the darkness, knowing not even himself.

And to her vision, far off, out of the mist, he shaped himself before her: that dim, first standard-bearer of the Lord, the man who first felt pity. Savage, brutish, dumb--lonely there amid the desolation, staring down at some hurt creature, man or beast it mattered not, his dull eyes troubled with a strange new pain he understood not.

And suddenly, as he stooped, there must have come a great light into his eyes.

Man had heard G.o.d's voice across the deep, and had made answer.

CHAPTER XV

The years that followed--till, like some s.h.i.+pwrecked swimmer to whom returning light reveals the land, she felt new life and hopes come back to her--always remained in her memory vague, confused; a jumble of events, thoughts, feelings, without sequence or connection.

She had gone down to Liverpool, intending to persuade her father to leave the control of the works to Arthur, and to come and live with her in London; but had left without broaching the subject. There were nights when she would trapse the streets till she would almost fall exhausted, rather than face the solitude awaiting her in her own rooms. But so also there were moods when, like some stricken animal, her instinct was to shun all living things. At such times his presence, for all his loving patience, would have been as a knife in her wound. Besides, he would always be there, when escape from herself for a while became an absolute necessity. More and more she had come to regard him as her comforter.

Not from anything he ever said or did. Rather, it seemed to her, because that with him she felt no need of words.

The works, since Arthur had shared the management, had gradually been regaining their position; and he had urged her to let him increase her allowance.

”It will give you greater freedom,” he had suggested with fine a.s.sumption of propounding a mere business proposition; ”enabling you to choose your work entirely for its own sake. I have always wanted to take a hand in helping things on. It will come to just the same, your doing it for me.”

She had suppressed a smile, and had accepted. ”Thanks, Dad,” she had answered. ”It will be nice, having you as my backer.”

Her admiration of the independent woman had undergone some modification since she had come in contact with her. Woman was intended to be dependent upon man. It was the part appointed to him in the social scheme. Woman had hers, no less important. Earning her own living did not improve her. It was one of the drawbacks of civilization that so many had to do it of necessity. It developed her on the wrong lines--against her nature. This cry of the uns.e.xed: that woman must always be the paid servant instead of the helper of man--paid for being mother, paid for being wife! Why not carry it to its logical conclusion, and insist that she should be paid for her embraces? That she should share in man's labour, in his hopes, that was the true comrades.h.i.+p. What mattered it, who held the purse-strings!

Her room was always kept ready for her. Often she would lie there, watching the moonlight creep across the floor; and a curious feeling would come to her of being something wandering, incomplete. She would see as through a mist the pa.s.sionate, restless child with the rebellious eyes to whom the room had once belonged; and later the strangely self- possessed girl with that impalpable veil of mystery around her who would stand with folded hands, there by the window, seeming always to be listening. And she, too, had pa.s.sed away. The tears would come into her eyes, and she would stretch out yearning arms towards their shadowy forms. But they would only turn upon her eyes that saw not, and would fade away.

In the day-time, when Arthur and her father were at the works, she would move through the high, square, stiffly-furnished rooms, or about the great formal garden, with its ordered walks and level lawns. And as with knowledge we come to love some old, stern face our childish eyes had thought forbidding, and would not have it changed, there came to her with the years a growing fondness for the old, plain brick-built house.