CHAPTER XIII

Theresa had not the prophetic gift, but she garnered her experiences; she had good judgment and, when it pleased her, she could use wisdom in her dealings with her kind, so that, two months later, when Grace came to her, sore over the sufferings of the young man with the undeveloped head, yet still determined to be cruel to him, Theresa received her without surprise or any reference to the promised eternity of Grace's love.

"It was a great mistake," Grace said ingenuously. "I'm afraid I like admiration, and I can't help liking people who give it me."

"You must like the whole world, then. What a big heart to carry!"

"It's not quite as big as that, and you take up a lot of room in it, Terry, though you think I'm such a silly."

"You'll improve," said Theresa cheerfully.

She was able to be cheerful, for two months is a long time at seventeen, and the pain of her spirit was dulled: she had become used, though not reconciled, to the sight of a familiar figure, branded with shame. She no longer compared his every word and action with the truth she knew of him, for the beautiful green growth of custom was hiding the staring ugliness of her discovery. It was there, underneath, but now and then she was able to forget it, and that capacity almost persuaded her sometimes that her imagination had played her false. She watched him. He was the same man, it appeared, but for the shrinking wonder with which he looked at her, hurting her, striking doubt into her young criticism of things beyond her. Was it his guilt or her cold treatment which had cast this visible shadow over him? It should have been his guilt, but he had offended and yet gone clear of cloud before she found him out. It was her frowns that troubled him, and while she hated the immature self-righteousness which forced them from her, she could not keep them back; a smooth brow would have been disloyalty to the woman over whom he bent with a hypocrisy so perfect that it seemed impossible. She had hard work to restrain articulate scorn, but her curled lips did duty, exiling him to that desert place whence he could not see her smiles. In these days his shoulders became more bent, and Theresa learnt how he had looked in the shops where he was afraid of people's eyes. The knowledge shook her; he was like a frightened child who longs for kindness, and only by repeating those beating words could she forbear from putting her arms round his neck and kissing him under the brows. She longed to do it; her love fluttered and struggled in her breast, so that she had to quiet it with the pressure of her hand, and this was the beginning of a habit which never left her.

She watched the postman, too. Letters, addressed in Alexander's writing, came from the farm among the hills: they were thick and sometimes sealed, and the eagerness with which her father took them to his room convinced her that they held enclosures. At such times he seemed to her like an animal secreting food, and the striving love lay still.

On an evening when this had happened, she sat with her mother by the breakfast-room fire. It was May, but a cold wind rattled the windows, and Nancy had her feet inside the fender and a shawl round her shoulders. Theresa was sewing, as a silent protest against the ardent letter-reading upstairs. Her lips were tightened, and conscious virtue enveloped all of her but the hair that flamed in love's own colour. She was now eighteen, and the hair was massed on her head, overweighting it, strengthening the pallor of a face where only a few golden freckles broke the white.

She shivered. "May is the worst month of all," she said, and threw down her sewing. "Such light, long evenings, and spring's news almost old. It makes me miserable."

"I wish you would go out more, dear."

"I took Uncle George for a walk yesterday, and Father the day before."

"That's not what I mean. Why will you never go with Grace?"

"I don't fit in. I feel like a great piece of furniture when I'm with her friends. I can't talk as they do. They have a way of making jokes--all about nothing and really not a bit funny--that turns me dumb. I don't know how they can think of such imbecilities." She did not add that she envied their facility, that their gay scraps of talk, their ease in each other's company, the way in which they wore their clothes and did their hair, shamed her for her silent awkwardness and robbed her of any comfort in the belief that she was alien because she was unique. Her eyes were quick, but they did not see that though she lacked the loveliness she had always wanted, her face had the beauty of her swift and vivid spirit, she had the pliant grace of a larch, the freshness of its early green and the courage which has caused that tree to be set in wild and desolate places. She thought the more highly of the intellect, and in this region she was aware that she overtopped the women of her acquaintance and the men with whom they danced, and laughed, and talked with such incomparable ease.

Nancy uttered a platitude serenely. "It takes all sorts to make a world," she said.

"I know, but there don't seem to be any of my sort--and I could be a friend!"

"You are a friend, dear, to me and Father and Uncle George and Grace. Since you began to take care of us all, I think I've never been so happy. You mustn't think I haven't seen, and now I want to tell you in case I never have another chance. My heart was very bad last night--but don't tell Father. Don't worry him. The attacks must come, and one of them will take me with it. I don't want to tell anyone but you, Terry, and I tell you because you're strong."

The colour rushed over Theresa's face, and she stammered as she spoke; but it was fear, not pride, that swamped her; though, in after silences, the words echoed back to her thrillingly.

"You must let me sleep with you. I can't let you have attacks all alone in the dark like that. Pain"--she breathed the word--"must be so terrible alone. Doesn't Father wake? I should, if you moved."

"So would he, but I don't move, you see. And I'm not going to be parted from him for the time that may be so short. And I've endured worse pangs, Theresa, far worse. Thank God, they're over." The faint smile deepened, the corners of her mouth were reminiscent, her lips had the softness of a girl's. "Where you give love, give trust, Theresa, when your great time comes."

The wavering colour came back to Theresa's cheeks. She looked pityingly, adoringly, at her mother, and then her brain seemed to swell with reckless anger.

"I'll never love!" she cried, "because I must trust where I love, and men--men are so faithless! Oh, I know!" She ceased, trembling, watching her slim, shaken wrists. She heard laughter.

"Is this books, or Bessie?" And then, as Theresa raised her face, "Terry! What has happened? Nothing to you--or Grace?"

"No, no, dear, it's just the things I hear about. Truly." She was on her knees, stroking her mother's face, aghast at her own carelessness. "It's Grace who is unfaithful, and no one gives a thought to me!"

"You are so dramatic, dear! Don't give way to the temptation."

"I know," Theresa murmured. "It's wicked of me." But this time her outburst had had no impulse but what came from her own indignant heart.

"You're not always sure, are you, of what you really feel?"

"Oh, how did you know? But is anybody?"

"Lots of people, I think. This--this may be my farewell sermon, Terry, so be attentive!"

"I won't listen if you talk like that."

"I won't, then, and I'm not going to preach. I only want to tell you to go on taking care of them all for me. You do it better than I ever did, and it has been a sacrifice."

Had it? Theresa looked back through the months. What would she have done with them if they had been hers to use? The thought of the immortal poem rose up in a cloud of dust. It would never be anything more than dust, offensive to eyes and nose, choking her. With a defiant movement of the arms she scattered it, yet still its odour remained, mocking her with its dry offence. She spurned the idea of herself as poet, her head was unaccountably humbled, yet through it there darted swiftly the vision of herself as novelist. It was a vision easier to live with, and she welcomed it, straightening her back.

"There's Grace," her mother was saying softly; "she is so pretty. Don't let her marry the wrong person, Terry."

"She's rather clever at dodging the mistakes. She has a lot of commonsense. I'm much more likely to do something insane, in spite of my looks! Being plain makes one so independent!"

"You're not plain, dear. Father thinks you're beautiful."

"Oh, Father!" The old allegiance and the new scorn were fairly mingled.

"Yes," said Nancy, twisting her lips, "it is rather like that, I know. And there's Uncle George. He's much nicer near than at a distance. Theresa, do you mind him very much?"

"I rather like him," she answered, reddening.

"Aren't we being good?" said Nancy gaily. "And you'll keep Bessie. I know she's not much use, but she's a friend. I shouldn't like you to have a stranger. And--and there's Father." Tears dropped straight and unheeded into her lap. "Theresa, he loves you so much, and he'll need you. Be kind to him. He's so unhappy when you're not."

The appeal could only throw his treachery into black relief, but in an illuminating flash that went violently through her head, and left her weak and giddy, she thought she understood it, understood all things, and she promised, weeping, too, that she would care for him.

Her mother's gentleness stole through Theresa and stayed there: she felt in herself a largeness of forgiveness that astonished her, and she looked on her father without rancour, with the wide gaze, she thought, of one who sees beyond the flesh. And the mood, unnatural, but not false, imposed by another's tenderness, lasted, uninterrupted, for the short time before her mother died. Theresa was glad that inward peace, as well as that outer one of a June night, surrounded the pale, still figure on the bed, as she gave the little sighing breath which lightly sent her spirit across the border, glad that she felt no resentment at her father's tears. She had time to think these things before there came over her a terrible quiet which was not peace but desolation, wherein worlds broke God's rules and changed their course, and, amidst their bewildered going, she thought her mother tried to find a place. Her discarded lodging lay in the bed still bearing the imprint of her spirit, but what was essentially she was racing perilously among uncertain worlds. She steadied herself. She refused to visualise a thing she could not understand, and she found strength. The wandering worlds dropped back into their circuits, she heard the dreadful catch and outlet of her father's breathing, and, as though this were but part of her daily task, she stroked her mother's cold, soft hands, and touched a little wavering lock of hair that had fallen across her brow.

She lived and ate, and slept through the medium of a body which had no connection with herself. She would rather have suffered tortures, but she could not regain her personality or any of the emotions it would have felt. While Uncle George went gloomily about the house and Bessie sobbed in the kitchen and Grace lay prone upon her bed, Theresa, feeling ashamed of her coldness, seemed to live a life whose normality was only broken now and then by the sight of a fleeting, ghostlike figure that could not find rest. When she woke in that first night she heard its hurrying, ceaseless steps, and the sound of doors opened by its unbelieving, eager hands, and she knew that her father's body, uninformed by his numbed mind, was searching and researching the house for a living Nancy who would defy the stark evidence of her death.

She sat up in bed. Grace was in the deep sleep that follows weeping, and she drew herself carefully out of the sheets, set her feet on the rough carpet of the stairs, and pattered after him. She found him on the landing below, and she touched his sleeve and patted it.

"You must go to bed," she said very soothingly.

He turned on her, and in the darkness she saw the glistening whites of his eyes. "Whose bed?" he demanded, and again, "Whose bed? I have none," he added on a sob.

She had not thought of that. Only the half of Uncle George's couch offered him shelter, and the awful pathos of that carefully preserved space set her chin and her lips trembling.

"We'll go into the breakfast-room. We'll light the fire. I'll stay with you." And by that fire they sat together, cheek against cheek.

Day comes early in June, and the birds were singing before Theresa had stiffened in her chair, or their hands had refused to hold each other any more. In the white light one white face gazed into another.

"You've only got your nightgown on," he told her; and then, inconsequently, "but I've got you back."

"Yes," she said. She had never felt closer to him, and the guilt which she could not forget had become no more than a thin film of smoke.

In the afternoon of that day, when she entered her mother's room to put fresh flowers in her hand, she saw her father already filling them, but not with flowers. It was a sheet of paper he fixed between those strangely unresponsive fingers.

Across the bed he looked at Theresa, and frowned in his piteous need to speak.

"It's all I have to give her," he said, "and she would have liked it. She hadn't seen it because I never showed her anything until it was as good as I could make it, but she must have it now. It's hers."

She bent over the paper. She saw the regular lines of verse, and, starting out of them, the words that haunted her. Her mouth fell open, and she looked at him through an immeasurable distance, before she dropped to her knees under the unbearable weight of her abasement.