CHAPTER XII

Theresa left school without regret. She had made no friends there, for a deep shyness overlaid the endearing qualities which she learnt, later, to use for the capture of hearts: she had not cared for the work she did easily, if without brilliance, and her ambitions had ignored and swept far beyond a schoolgirl's triumphs. Moreover, novelty was breath to her: if her heart had been torn at leaving, she would have welcomed the wrench for the sake of the new part she was to play. She was the martyr to domestic affliction and, accordingly, she smoothed the hair which the years were sobering to the colour of mingled autumn leaves, and fastened it austerely into a thick, swinging plait.

She was now the mistress of the household. She rose at seven, roused Bessie from her heavy slumbers, waiting outside the door until she heard the creaking of the bed and the subsequent thump of sleepy feet on the floor, before she ran downstairs for a plunge into chilly water. She and Grace, exiled from their old room by the arrival of Uncle George, now shared the one above, opposite their father's little sanctum, and, still higher up, Bessie slept in a long, low room under the roof. The maid complained of the numerous stairs but Theresa liked them. Rushing up them and down, she had a sensation of speed that excited her. She went two steps at a time, and when the flight was composed of an odd number she descended the last three, perilously, at a leap, and she learnt to do it so lightly that even Grace the agile was impressed.

"But you'll hurt yourself some day," she said.

"Oh, well, one must do something! I pretend there are wolves after me, or assassins. It makes life so much more interesting. I get through everything like that, except dusting. I can't make up anything about dusting, it's the dullest thing."

"I wish I had time to do it for you. I like the look of things afterwards."

"I can never see any difference. I'm not doing my natural work."

"What's that?"

"Oh, if you need telling----" She retired to the study and sat in the cold before a sheet of paper, with a pencil in her hand. The immortal poem was her natural work, but how could she find time to write it with a household of six people to care for? Her mother breakfasted in bed, Uncle George was fastidious about his meals. Grace needed them at any odd and inconvenient moment, and Theresa found herself a better cook than Bessie. With a cake in the oven it was not easy to compose her mind to the calm necessary for her first arresting lines: the family liked her cakes, and praise was dear to her; therefore the poem and, she feared, the public suffered, and sometimes at the thought of what circumstances would not let her do, her body became a vessel for hot, tumultuous anger. She felt it churning within her, and she longed to raise her hands and strike. At these times she hated Bessie, she chafed at her mother's weakness, she scorned Grace, she despised her father and she took pains to plan annoyance for her uncle. After all, was it not he who had caused this trouble? she would say, and somewhat against her will, for she liked a reputation for good management, she would forget to order the packet of dried cereals which formed his meal at supper-time, so that he would be forced to eat meat and have indigestion, or to go hungry. But a growing pride in her task soon disdained these tricks, and she became almost maternally interested in his appetite.

"You're not eating your cream," she told him one night. "I got it specially for you. That stuff looks so husky. It makes me think of the Prodigal Son."

He ignored the Biblical allusion and looked at her with a cold disregard for her juvenile irreverence.

"I must use my natural juices," he assured her. He looked singularly bereft of them. His face, clean-shaven but for short grey whiskers, was as dried and colourless as his cereals, his grey hair was stiff and dull, his hands were lean without nervousness.

Watching him, the twitching of her lips grew into a smile. She began to like him. In his nature there was something grim and uncompromising which enabled him to keep his teeth shut on speech and the expression of his religious convictions. She recognized that this gift, or his wisdom, had thwarted her. She had meant to tease him, to taunt him with his Seaman's Club, where, on Saturday nights, the strains of the harmonium he had carried there droned a melancholy yet compelling welcome to the loafers about the docks, but she was robbed of opportunity. He never spoke of his pursuits, seldom of himself, and she was startled into a friendly pity for him. He had wanted a home and, at last, unwillingly, he had been admitted into this one, yet here, in the place of his desire, he sat silent and reserved, carefully keeping even a mental aloofness from the doings of his relatives. Was this gratitude, or a fear of ejection? And did he find any happiness among them? She frowned, for her heart was softening, and she foresaw that when she had time, when that poem was written, she would have to turn her powers to the understanding of him. This was capitulation, she confessed, but then, she comforted herself, analysis of men and women was important for her future.

He looked up, caught her puzzled, eager stare, and smiled. Smiling, too, she nodded. Really, she thought, why has not someone fallen in love with him?

When the meal was over and Edward Webb had crept quietly to his study, and Uncle George had departed to his harmonium, Theresa stood before the fire and looked down at her mother, gently rocking in the old chair.

"Do you think he has ever been in love?" she said.

"Who?" Nancy asked.

"Uncle George, of course," said Theresa.

"I don't know, dear. I never heard of anyone."

"It's not lawful to marry one's uncle, is it?"

"I suppose not." Nancy's brows were raised.

"I'm coming to the conclusion that he's rather an attractive man--and very mysterious. If I ever marry, I shall marry a mystery."

"I shouldn't advise it, dear."

"I should tire of anyone else in a year--less! I must have excitement."

"There's a time of life when one longs for peace."

Theresa jerked her head upwards. "Not for me!" she cried, and clasped her hands behind her back. Like a young horse, not yet broken, she believed herself unconquerable.

Nancy smiled. "Where's Grace? She has no class to-night."

"No, I expect she has gone to see someone." A little dart of anxiety pierced her, for she was a shrewed guesser, her eye was quick, and Grace's symptoms during the last weeks had been disturbing and familiar ones. She sighed.

"Are you tired, dear?"

"No, thank you."

"Then I wish you'd see what Father's doing. He looks so white to-night. Just give me those new books off the sideboard, first, dearie."

Theresa went upstairs. She felt a vague irritation against her family, and tasted life's staleness in her mouth. It brought nothing but a round of common tasks for her, dreary labour to her father, a strange darkness of energy to Bessie, and ill-health to her mother; to Uncle George, an emptiness he tried to fill with a harmonium and a hymnal, and to Grace, a breathlessness of dancing, smiling, dressing, flirting. All efforts and all persons seemed so separate, yet so united, and she could find no meaning in them beyond that. The thought wearied her, her body and mind felt old, and, remembering that it was long since she had dreamed of mountains, she realized the cause of her unrest--that romance and excitement were easily forfeited if she might see the hills in sleep. She paused on the landing and drew breath sharply, as though it were the mountain air she gathered.

She opened the study door, and saw her father bowed over his desk. He was writing, but he stopped and looked up to welcome her.

"Are you busy? Writing letters? Shall I go?"

"No, my dear, stay."

She went to the window. The blind was up, and she could see the quiet, lamplit street.

"Houses and houses, and people in all of them, and they all have relatives, and friends, and troubles. And they all care so much more about themselves than about anything else. I can't get used to that. And when I see people crowding into tramcars, it's the same. Sometimes I like it; it's exciting"--she caught her lip over the word and laughed secretly--"and then sometimes the thought's too big--worrying. I like the other side of the house best. I feel that I can get out--to the sea."

He was enchanted by her unusual readiness to talk.

"Do you want to get to the sea?"

"On windy nights, when the ships call me. Do you hear them in your room?"

"Oh, yes!" he said.

"Does it make you want to go?"

He hesitated. "No, I'm a chilly person, but I admit it stirs me to think of others facing cold and danger. The sea--I'm afraid the sea frightens me a little."

Like a child who is too shy to speak of what it loves, she forced him to name it for her.

"You don't like the sea best, do you?"

"No, Theresa, it's the mountains that have snared me."

"Tell me about them."

"It's so long since I've been."

"Why?"

He showed his jaded face. "I can't get there for nothing, my dear, and I don't want to leave your mother. But some day, when she is better, I'll take you there. I think you would be happy."

"Should I?" she questioned innocently, hiding her smile. "Let's pretend we're on the way. You tell me what we're coming to. I'll shut my eyes." She chuckled delightedly at her own babyishness, but he seemed unaware of it, for this was the little girl who had always wanted stories and never been denied.

"We'd get out of the train," he began, "and smell the sea; and then we should smell a fresh and wonderful wind, and we should know it came from the mountains, and we'd hurry along the road. We're hurrying, Theresa, to the place where that wind was born. It's the spring, I think. There are primroses in the hedges, lots of them by the stream, but I expect we shall see some snow on the hills. It lies late in the gullies, and at night it falls up there, when it is almost warm in the valleys. It's a long walk, but we're going very fast because we are so eager, and now we're turning a corner, and the wind comes more smartly, stealing our breath, and it is hard work to raise our heads against it to see----"

Theresa's parted lips drooped sharply, without warning, and stopped his speech. "Don't!" she cried imploringly. "Don't tell me! I--I don't think I like this game. Pretending!" She hid her face and indistinctly murmured: "I don't think I can bear to talk about it."

"My dear!"

She looked up: there were tears in her eyes. He blinked.

"My dear," he repeated helplessly. "What is it?" She shook her head, laughing, and yielding to the persuasion of his hand, she sat on the arm of his chair, and leaned against him.

"I'm silly," she said.

But he would not allow that: he triumphed in her sensibility. "No, no," he said. The pressure of his encircling arm assured her that he understood, and she did not try to check her weeping, for she enjoyed it, and all the nameless troubles of her youth seemed to be finding solace. She was surprised at her emotion, and became interested in it: thought dammed the flood, and with the back of her hand she wiped her eyes. Edward Webb continued to hold her firmly while she stared before her, not guiltless of an occasional sniff which had for him the pathos of a cry. Considering herself, she decided that she was strange. Why had she silenced her father? Her glance fell, broodingly, to the papers on his desk. Was it because the hills were her religion, her love for them her form of worship? She liked the notion and saw herself enhanced by it. Her heart beat a little faster; there were depths in her she had not sounded, and her blurred gaze cleared itself in this excitement. Her mind looked inward while her eyes mechanically followed the lines of her father's writing. They were partly concealed by blotting-paper, but some of them she read over and over again, making accompaniment to her thoughts, until their meaning flashed and blinded her to all else. They were words of love, brilliant, coloured words that startled, horrified her. She had read such words in print, but to see them in her father's handwriting seemed to strike life out of her.

Her mind had a curious sensation of lop-sidedness; it was partly numbed, partly acute; she was incapable of remembering to shift her glance, but quite clearly she saw words which told her the letter was written to that woman in the hills. There was no doubt of that. Was he not comparing her face to a sun-bathed peak visible through cloud? She learnt this in half a minute's passing, and then she rose. She was cold, but her mind was once more a whole, and merciless in its conclusions and its indictment.

"Are you going, my dear?" He moved his papers into a little heap.

"Yes."

He did not look at her. "I wish," he said, beating a tattoo on the desk and speaking with an effort--"I wish you would always come to me, Theresa, when you are--when you are not happy."

"Oh!" she cried chokingly, and rushed away.

He found her confusion easy to understand, and he loved her for the reserves so seldom and so delightfully broken.

The icy darkness of her bedroom enclosed Theresa with the chill and colour of life itself. The future was cold and rayless; she groped towards it and was afraid, but she had the courage of anger and as she stumbled against the bedpost, she lifted her head. How could he? how could he? She saw her mother sitting down there by the fire, rocking gently, with that faint smile curving her lips; she remembered the shadow that had sometimes seemed to fall between her parents, and loyalty ran out towards her mother like a wave. And, on the other side of the landing, bending over his desk, that meek, uncertain father of hers wrote his love letters in secret. He wrote love letters because he could not afford to go to the mountains and the woman, because he would not leave his wife!

The terrible, sickly blackness of things covered her. She struggled under it, and with the effect of something magical, mockingly plain, yet distant, she saw, all the time, the lights of the docks, and heard the clanging of the tramcar bells in New Dock Road. Lights while she floundered in gloom, human sounds while she wandered in fear-inhabited caverns! She had rejoiced in the reading of such situations, she had fancied herself fitted to cope with them, but she found reality too real. Anger at something greater than a small personal injury was a bigger passion than she had imagined, and pity, doomed to voicelessness and impotence, tore her with strong hands.

She moved rapidly to and fro between the dressing-table and the bed's foot. She had loved her father, and now she saw him a deceiver. The thought hung on her as she walked. Surely truth had looked out of his kind eyes, love had shone there, and could deceit give a hand to each? She found it hard to distrust him utterly, for did he not believe in her? But she crushed this relenting in her clenched hands, and continued her restless pacing. That little grey man a lover! Had he been tall, and strong, and masterful, he had been easier to forgive, but that a small, meek man should be unfaithful made the insult to her mother doubly bitter. And that woman Alexander's mother! She came to a stand, holding her throat. Did Alexander know? He was her father's friend, but she hated him, and immediately she imagined him the abettor. Oh, how they sullied her glorious mountains, and, oh! was it possible that she was dull and prudish? Was she missing the grandeur of a hopeless love because she was too near to see it well? The question stilled her. In books--to these her judgments always turned--she was able to sympathize as much with the guilty as the innocent, but here----. Ah, well, she was not in a book, and she had loved her father, and downstairs her mother sat ill and miserable. She might die at any moment, and Theresa felt the pang of her father's remorse. Had he thought of that? Once more her heart seemed to stop its beating.

A knock came at her door. "Yes?" she said.

"It's me, Theresa. I want to show you something. May I come in?"

She opened the door to Edward Webb, and stood rigid, glaring fiercely at him out of her white face. Yet he was unchanged. The odour of sin was not upon him, and he blinked and smiled as he held a paper towards her.

"All in darkness? Look, my dear, this--this is something Alexander sent to-day. I should like you to look at it."

"Alexander!" Her low voice had turned shrill. "I don't want to see anything he has sent! I don't want to know anything about those people!" She pushed past him and ran down the stairs.

An hour afterwards, having tenderly seen her mother into bed, Theresa went to her own room, too heart-weary to be anxious about Grace. Everything seemed ruinous and wrecked, what matter if Grace fell, too? This was her mood as she slipped off her clothes and bravely stretched herself between the cold sheets, yet she kept her ears alert, and when she heard an unmistakable step she made a hurried movement of relief.

Grace flung herself into the wicker chair, which creaked dolefully.

"Oh, Terry!" The gas was turned low, but Theresa could see the beauty of her pose.

"You're very late."

"Don't be cross. I can't bear it. Terry! Theresa! I'm so happy that I want to cry!"

"Why don't you, then? I shan't mind. And for Heaven's sake be quick and come to bed."

"I did hope you would be in a nice temper, and you're horrid." She sat on the bed and laid her cheek against Theresa's. "You really must be good to me to-night."

"I suppose you've engaged yourself again?" Her tone was hard at the thought of love-making.

Grace withdrew her caress. "I have never been engaged before," she said distinctly.

"Then you've told me lies, twice. A good thing I didn't believe them!"

"You're hateful! You know the other times were only folly."

"Yes, I knew, but I didn't know you did. I shouldn't tell anyone else about this if I were you. It won't last long."

"It will last for ever and ever." She took off her hat. "Don't you want to know who it is?"

"Is it that Wilkinson with the undeveloped head?"

"It's a beautiful head--classic. Theresa, you are horrid. I thought you would understand."

"I do, and I'm not a bit disturbed. He will never be my brother-in-law. You've too much sense--somewhere. Now do your crying, and then get into bed. It's rather cold all alone."

"I'm burning," said Grace. She would not be snubbed, and she hummed gaily instead of weeping.

"Did he ask you to-night?" said Theresa, unwillingly curious.

"Yes."

"Where?"

"I'm not going to tell you."

"Oh, all right. I asked Bessie to leave out your milk and biscuits. Did you have them?"

"Milk! Biscuits! As if I could eat anything at a time like this! You are the most unromantic person."

"It's safer," said Theresa wearily. She made a deeper nest for her tawny head, and dismissed Grace's light affairs. They became negligible in the face of the tragedy she knew, and with the closing of her eyes she shut them from her mind. She prayed that sleep would bring the mountains, the clean mountains which, after all, could not be smirched by human beings, and they came to her. She saw them, tall, dark, superb, and inviolable, and she woke with something of their courageous peace.