CHAPTER XXIX

On that long journey she thought hardly at all of what lay before her. She tried to feel anxiety, and could not. Her mind was occupied with little things. She became interested in her fellow-travellers, and talked to them; they told her their family histories as surely as they looked at her, and sometimes, across their narratives, there dropped the cloud of her distress. It lived in her consciousness, vague and impenetrable, and she was aware of it as one is aware of thunder in the air. She was amazed at her own callousness. Something dreadful had happened; some horror was awaiting her among the quiet hills, but she hardly feared it, and, having splashed a few rough and lurid pictures on her brain, her imagination rested, and she was content to see how the trees were budding and the flowers sprinkling the fields.

But when she stood on the little windswept station and saw the sea, grey and cold in the evening light, and heard the wind whistling through the coarse grass growing on the sand, fear took her by the heart. For an instant she stood stock still, then, straightening herself in vindication of her courage, she approached the burly station-master.

"Where can I get a trap?" she said.

"I think that one outside will be for you."

She recognized Janet's little cart and horse, and the youth lolling against the wheel smiled sheepishly.

"Get in, miss."

"You drove me last time, didn't you?" He nodded, gave an inarticulate assent, and shook the reins.

The road was dim and the fields bordering it were like a darker sky where the primroses were stars, and slowly the other stars came out, while the cold green of the spring sky slipped, as at their bidding, into a matchless, immeasurable blue. The trees, and the hedges, and the houses lost their colours; all were but different shades of the dark except when a whitewashed building challenged the night. The glow of lighted lamps shone behind people's windows, dogs gave the travellers greeting, and voices and the clinking of pots came through the opened doors. The vision of a red-frocked child standing in a doorway flamed like a beacon in Theresa's memory.

And slowly they drew away from habitations: the road was no longer enclosed by hedges; the land stretched black and free on either hand, and with the turn of the road they were beside the lake. It glistened, and its ripples stirred the reeds, and with every fiercer gust of wind its shining surface was troubled. The precipice on its farther shore was one great shadow streaked with the white of late-lying snow, and there was the sound of many little streams draining the moorland and trickling below the road to join the lake. The road, growing faint and thin, was threatened afar off by the spreading shoulders of the hills.

Theresa tightened her muscles until they ached. She had no lack of feeling now, and a dumb exaltation at every breath of air she breathed was tangled with her horror and her happiness. Her pulses refused to keep time with the terrible slow sameness of the horse's pace and they leapt until she thought her very frame was shaken. She may have shuddered, or he may have felt her quiver, for the boy offered her another rug.

"Here, miss," he said in his soft voice.

She thanked him. "We are not very far from the lake's head, are we?"

He was slow in answering, and his tones fell among the loose beating of the hoofs. "About a half a mile."

"It is a long way."

The hills were closing on them. The air seemed darker, and she could hear more water running to the lake--water wider and quicker than the little streams which had kept them company.

The cart rumbled across a little bridge, and left the lake, and, as they went carefully along the rutted lane, Theresa could look into the fields where lambs were sleeping. At their passing, a sheep cried out with a loud and bitter melancholy, voicing a dumb, bewildered world, and it was like waking from a long dream when the jolting ceased. The driver was speaking to someone in the road; she could not distinguish the words, and she sat passive, huddled in her coat and rugs, until the cart should move on again. It seemed impossible that it should have stopped; her body was still conscious of the movement, and she was swaying lightly.

The boy's unwrapping of the rugs aroused her. She heard the unseen person pass behind the cart, and saw a man's figure standing by the wheel.

"Is that you, Theresa?"

"Yes."

"I want you to get out here."

"Yes." She took his hand and stepped stiffly to the ground.

"Give me the bag, Jack. You can turn here, can't you? Good-night."

They stood together near the churchyard yews, and the stars lighted their faces. They did not speak. For Theresa, the world had fallen away, and nothing remained but this patch of earth on which she and Alexander stood. That isolation passed, the trees came back and the hills, and while he was still looking at her, she touched him lightly on the sleeve.

"Tell me."

"It's your father. My father--I told him not to come."

"I know. I didn't know until last night. I read your letter. Please will you tell me everything? I want to know at once if he is dead."

"Yes, he's dead."

"It's all right. I am not going to fall."

"My father shot him. Then himself. I--he was mad. It is my fault; but I didn't know how mad--and I warned him. They're both dead, two of them. I saw my father fall. And yours spoke to me as I passed. He said: 'Send for Theresa.'"

"I think I'd like to hold your hand. Thank you. Are you sure he's dead?"

"Quite sure. And he died happy. He was smiling. It seemed--it seemed as if it were what he had been wanting. It may be that the dead are always glad."

"When was it?"

"Last night. He was with my mother in the kitchen. I didn't know my father had a pistol, but then, I ought to have known. We've lived with it so long, it has seemed part of life. I didn't understand how bad he was. Theresa, my father's murdered yours."

"Yes, yes. Never mind." She held very tightly to his hand. "Never mind. He wouldn't like you to be sad. Oh"--her voice quavered on the stillness, and she dropped against him--"oh, Alexander, take care of me for a little while."

Her face was against the rough fabric of his sleeve. He loosed her hand and put his arm about her, holding her steadily, and so they stood beneath the yews.

Each stirred at the same moment, and, without a word, walked on. At the house end Alexander stopped and spoke quietly.

"Janet is with my mother. She is afraid to leave her. You are to have my room. Tread softly: she may be sleeping."

In the little front-room supper was spread, and a fire was burning. Alexander pushed her gently into a low wicker chair, and knelt to unlace her boots, and when he took them off he rubbed her feet.

"Was there no straw in the cart? I told him to have plenty. Let me push you nearer to the fire."

"Alexander, can't I go and see him?"

"When you have had some food. Here's Mrs. Spencer with the coffee. No, sit still. I'll serve you."

But for the small homely sounds of cup against saucer and knife on plate, Theresa sat, and Alexander moved between her and the table, in a silence that held no discomfort.

Suddenly she looked up, frowning. "I can't feel unhappy. I wish I could, but I seem to have come into the very home of peace! Are you unhappy?"

"It seems as if I've killed a friend," he said.

"No, no, not you." The light fluttered from her face. "I think, if you look back far enough, I did it."

"You!"

She turned to look into the fire, and from the stillness of the room she could tell how fiercely he was thinking, and though she, too, had much to think of, she found herself waiting on his thoughts.

But when he spoke it was to say with a quickness that, made him rough: "Would you like a message sent to Mr. Morton? I could send that lad early in the morning."

He saw the blank widening of her eyes. "No, thank you." The faculties of her mind rushed together, and cleared themselves, and even while she was thinking, "Shall I tell him?" she was saying calmly: "I am not going to marry Mr. Morton."

"Oh!" There was a certain foolishness in his tone. "I hadn't heard." The silence was now busy and thick with thoughts.

She went upstairs to make herself fit to look upon her dead, and, taking her lighted candle, she entered the room where he was lying. She had no fear of him. She went and turned back the sheet as though she only went to rouse him in the morning, and the familiarity of his striped flannel garment was like a mockery of death. How could he be dead when his thin hands protruded from the wristbands she had mended? But he was dead, for he neither opened his eyes nor smiled at her. She looked down, waiting.

"I'm here," she said aloud, but very low--"I'm here, Father."

But he was not there to answer her.

The lips which had smiled in dying had fallen stern, and the cheeks she kissed were of a bitter cold. She sank to her knees and laid her hands on his.

"Well, we loved each other, didn't we?" she said, and her swollen tears fell into the lips parted to speak to him. "We loved each other, didn't we?"

She knelt there, crying because he would not look at her, and, for the first time, had no kind word. It seemed impossible that she should go on living in a world without his voice, but she knew he had meant to silence it so that he might give her something else. And she was not, in truth, unhappy. She knew she was in the presence of a love infinitely greater than any death, enduring when even the signs of death had crumbled into dust and been gathered in to feed the eager body of earth, and by that love she was ennobled beyond grief.

She dried her tears, smoothed back the grey wisp of hair her breathing had disturbed, and went to the chair where Alexander had neatly laid her father's clothes. She thought there might be a letter for her there, but she found only the book of Shakespeare's sonnets which she had given him, and inside it the latest picture of herself and one of Nancy's youth.

She knelt by the widely opened window, and sensed the night. She thought his spirit must be out there among the hills he loved; that he saw her by the window, and could hear what she was telling him; knew what she was thinking, and felt the swamping pain of her regrets. She stretched her hands over the window-sill, forgetful of the figure on the bed, appealing only to the departed spirit companioning the stars.

"You need not have done it," she said, "if I hadn't been so proud. But I didn't tell you. Did you think you would never manage for us to meet? And all the time, all the time, I loved him. Oh, why did I not tell you? Forgive me, dear, forgive me. I was unfaithful to him and cruel to you, and now----But how could I reckon with anyone as good as you?" Her head drooped and rested on the woodwork, and she looked down the long avenue of people she had loved and hurt. She lifted her head and beat her hands upon the sill. "But I did love you, and you knew it--at least, I never failed in giving love."

A low tap came on the door, and she opened it to Alexander.

"Won't you come downstairs?"

"Yes, I'm coming now." She kissed her father. "Say good-night to him."

He, too, stooped and kissed him. "He was the first man that was ever kind to me."

Speaking seldom, they sat together in the parlour. They were both idle, but Alexander smoked, and now and then they would lift their eyes from the fire and look across the little space dividing them, and through the smoke wreaths Alexander's eyes would soften at the sight of Theresa's smiles. His memory was already stored with them. There was the frank one for friendship, the slow one for thought; the little, twisted, mocking one, the quick one that was an affirmation; and now this wavering one that came with a pale flood of colour, and would not be stilled, and stirred his heart as the lake water stirred the reeds.

Looking at his watch, he bade her to bed at last, and she rose with a strange pleasure in obedience.

"You won't be afraid?" he asked.

"No. Will you be very far away?"

"At the end of the passage in what we call the store-room. They've put a bed for me there. Theresa, you are not blaming me?"

"How could I?"

"Do you think he understood?"

"I know he did," she said firmly.

"Then why----"

Again there came the questioning and again her words outran the answer. "I'll tell you in the morning--in the sunlight, please."

"You know?" She nodded. "In the morning, then. Good-night."

He lighted her to her bedroom door but when she had shut it and heard him go down the stairs she wished the house were not quite so still, and with the wish she heard a low, shuddering moan, and then another. That was Clara Rutherford crying for her dead.

She undressed with fumbling, nervous fingers, and, stealing into bed, she covered her ears to shut out the dreadful quiet punctuated by that sound, yet she sat up again, compelled to listen while, with a regular insistence, the moaning invaded the night. A little later there came a stealthy, bumping sound along the passage, and she was ready to leap out and bolt her door, when Alexander's voice came low and clear.

"It's me, Theresa. I'm sleeping just outside your door."

"Oh, is it you?" she cried.

"You won't be lonely now?"

"Oh no, I won't be lonely."

"You must go to sleep."

But she did not try to do that. She lay awake for the joy of being near him.