The Green Bough

Cover

THE GREEN BOUGH

BY
E. TEMPLE THURSTON

AUTHOR OF "THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL NONSENSE,"
"THE WORLD OF WONDERFUL REALITY," ETC.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK
MCMXXI

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
E. F. COWLIN

PHASE I

The life of Mary Throgmorton, viewed as one would scan the chronicles of history, impersonally, without regard to the conventions, is the life of a woman no more than fulfilled in the elements of her being.

All women would be as Mary Throgmorton if they dared. All women would love as Mary Throgmorton loved--suffer as she suffered. Perhaps not all might yield, as she yielded towards the end; not all might make her sacrifices. But, in the latitudinous perspective of Time where everything vanishes to the point of due proportion, she must range with that vast army of women who have hungered, loved, been fed and paid the reckoning with the tears out of their eyes and the very blood out of their hearts.

It is only when she comes to be observed in the immediate and narrow surroundings of her circumstance that her life stands out tragically apart. She becomes then as a monument, set up on a high and lonely hill amongst the many of those hills in drowsy Devon, a monument, silently claiming the birthright of all women which the laws men make by force have so ungenerously circumscribed.

There is no woman who could look at that monument without secret emotions of a deep respect, while there were many in her lifetime who spurned Mary Throgmorton with tongue and with a glance of eye, and still would spurn her to-day in the narrow streets where it is their wont to walk.

The respect of one's neighbors is a comforting thing to live with, but it is mostly the little people who earn it and find the pleasure of its warmth. The respect of the world is won often by suffering and in the wild and open spaces of the earth. It was on Gethsemane and not in Bethlehem that Christianity revealed its light.

In Bridnorth, the name of Mary Throgmorton was a byword for many a day. They would have erased her from their memory if they could. It was in the hush of voices they spoke of her--that hush with which women muffle and conceal the envy beneath their spite.

No one woman in Bridnorth, unless it was Fanny Throgmorton, the third of her three sisters, could have had honesty enough in her heart to confess, even in silence, her real regard for Mary.

Who should blame them for this? The laws had made them and what is made in a shapen mold can bend neither to the left nor to the right. They were too close to her to see her beauty; all too personally involved to look dispassionately at the greatness of her soul.

Yet there in spirit, as it were some graven monument upon those hills of Devon, she stands, a figure of tragic nobility. Had indeed they carved her in stone and set her there upon the hills that overlooked the sea, they would have recognized then in her broad brow, in the straight direction of her eyes, the big, if not beautiful then generous line of her lips, the full firm curve of her breasts, how fine a mate she must have made, how strong a mother even in the weakest hour of her travail.

Stone truly would have been the medium for her. It was not in color that she claimed the eye. The fair hair, neither quite golden nor quite brown, that clear, healthy skin, neither warmed with her blood nor interestingly pale, these would have franked her passage in a crowd and none might have noticed her go by.

There on the rising of that cliff in imagination is the place to see her with the full sweep of Bridnorth bay and that wide open sea below and all the heathered stretches of the moors behind her. There, had they carved a statue for her in rough stone, you must have seen at once the beauty that she had.

But because it was in stone her beauty lay and not in pink white flesh that makes a fool of many a man, they had the less of mercy for her. Because it was in stone, man found her cold of touch and stood away. And yet again because it was in stone, once molten with the heat of life, there was no hand in little Bridnorth that could have stayed her fate.

Once stirred, the little pettiness of Bridnorth folk charred all like shavings from the plane at touch of her. Once stirred, she had in her passion to defy them every one. Once stirred, herself could raise that monument to the birthright of women which, in fancy, as her tale is read, will be seen there over Bridnorth on the high cliff's edge.

Hannah, Jane, Fanny and Mary, these were the four sisters of the Throgmorton family in the order of their respective ages. A brother they had, but he comes into no part of this history. The world had taken him when he was twenty-three. He left Bridnorth, the mere speck upon the map it was and, with the wide affairs of life at his touch, the mere speck it became in his memory. Stray letters reached Mary, his favorite sister. Read aloud at the breakfast table, they came, bringing strange odors of the world to those four girls. Vague emotions they experienced as they heard these infrequent accounts of where he was and what he did.

Silently Fanny's imagination would carry her to the far places he wrote of. Into the big eyes she had would rise a haze of distance across which an untrained vision had power vaguely to transport her. Hannah listened in a childish wonder. Jane made her sharp comments. It was Mary who said--

"Why do men have the real best of it? He'll never come back to Bridnorth again."

He never did come back. From the time their father and mother died they lived in Bridnorth alone.

Theirs was the square, white early Victorian house in the middle of the village through which the coach road runs from Abbotscombe to King's Tracey.

That early Victorian house, the furniture it contained, the narrow strip of garden in front protected from the road by low iron palings so that all who passed could see in the front windows, the unusually large garden at the back surrounded by a high brick wall, all these composed the immediate atmosphere in which Mary and her three sisters had been brought up from childhood.

It must be supposed that that condition of being overlooked through the front windows was not without its effect upon their lives. If it takes all sorts to make a world, it is all the variety of conditions that go to make such sorts as there are. For it was not only the passers-by who looked in at the Throgmorton windows and could have told to a fraction of time when they had their meals, when Hannah was giving lessons to the children she taught, those hours that Fanny was sitting alone in her bedroom writing her verses of poetry. Also it was the Throgmorton girls themselves who preferred the occupation of the rooms fronting the road to those whose windows overlooked the shady and secluded garden at the back.

This was the attraction of the stream for those who walk in quiet meadows. There on the banks you will find the footpath of the many who have passed that way. They sat at those front windows, sewing, reading, often writing their letters on blotting pads upon their laps, scarcely conscious that the little filtering stream of life in Bridnorth drew them there. For had they been questioned on these matters, one and all, severally or together they would have laughed, saying that for the greater half of the year there was no life in Bridnorth to pass by, and certainly none that concerned them.

Nevertheless it was the stream, however lightly they may have turned the suggestion away. The passing of the postman, of the Vicar or the Vicar's wife, these were the movements of life, such as you see in a meadow stream and follow, dreaming in your mind, as they catch in the eddies and are whirled and twisted out of sight. So they had dreamt in their minds, in Bridnorth, these Throgmorton girls. So Mary had dreamed the twenty years and more that dreams had come to her.

For the greater half of the year, they might have said there was no life in Bridnorth. But from late Spring through Summer to the Autumn months they must have claimed with pride that their Devon village had a life of its own. The old coach with its four horses, beating out the journey from Abbotscombe to King's Tracey, brought visitors from all parts; generally the same every year. For a few months they leased whatever furnished houses there were to be had, coming regularly every season for the joy of that quiet place by the sea where there was a sandy beach to bathe on, and lonely cliffs on which to wander their holidays away.

So the Throgmorton girls made friends with some whose lives lay far outside the meadows through which the Bridnorth stream flowed peacefully between its banks. To these friends sometimes they paid visits when the Summer was passed. They went out of Bridnorth themselves by the old coach, later returning, like pigeons homing, with the wind of the outside world still in their wing feathers, restless for days until the dreams came back again. Then once more it seemed a part of life to sit at the window sewing and watch the postman go by.

There were regular visitors who came every summer, renewing their claim from year to year upon the few houses that were to be let, so that there was little available accommodation of that nature for any outsiders. They called Bridnorth theirs, and kept it to themselves. But every year, they had their different friends to stay with them and always there was the White Hart, where strangers could secure rooms by the day or the week all through the season.

The Bridnorth stream was in flood those days of the late Spring where every afternoon the coach came rumbling up the hill past the Throgmortons' house to set down its passengers at the hotel only a little farther up the road.

Like the Severn bore it was, for coming from Abbotscombe down the winding road that had risen with the eminence of the cliffs, the coach could be seen descending by twists and turns and serpentine progressions to the bottom of Bridnorth village, crossing the bridge that spans the little river Watchett and climbing again with the contour of the cliffs once more on its way to King's Tracey.

Leaning far out of one of the upper windows of the square, white house or standing even at the gate in the iron paling, the little cloud of dust or, in rainy weather, the black speck moving slowly like a fly crawling down a suspended thread of cotton, could easily be seen two miles away heralding the coming of the coach.

She who leant out of the window might certainly retire, closing it slowly as the coach drew near. She who stood at the gate in the iron palings might return casually into the house. But once they were out of sight of those on the other bank of the Bridnorth stream, there would be voices crying through the rooms that the coach was coming.

Thus, as it passed, there might four figures be seen at different windows, who, however engrossing their occupations, would look out with confessions of mild interest at the sound of the horses' hoofs on the stony road, at the rattle of harness, the rumbling of wheels and, casually, at the passengers come to Bridnorth.

Any visitor catching sight of these temperate glances from his box seat on the coach might have supposed the eyes that offered them were so well-used to that daily arrival as to find but little entertainment in the event. From their apparent indifference, he would never have believed that even their hearts had added a pulse in the beating, or that to one at least that coach was the vehicle of Fate which any day might bring the burden of her destiny.

III

It is by the ages of these four they can most easily and comprehensively be classified; yet the age of one at least of them was never known, or ever asked in Bridnorth.

Hannah might have been forty or more. She might well have been less. But the hair was gray on her head and she took no pains to conceal it. Hers, if any, was the contented soul in that household. With her it was not so much that she had given up the hope that every woman has, as that before she knew what life might be, that hope had passed her by. She was as one who stands in a crowd to see the runners pass and, before even she has raised herself on tiptoe to catch a glimpse above the heads around her, is told that the race is over.

This was Hannah, busying her life with the household needs and, for interest, before all reward, teaching the little children of friends in Bridnorth and the neighborhood, teaching them their lessons every morning; every morning kissing them when they came, every morning kissing them when they left.

To her, the arrival of the coach was significant no more than in the unaccustomed passage and hurry of life it brought. To her it was a noise in a silent street. She came to the windows as a child would come to see a circus go by. She watched its passengers descend outside the Royal George with the same light of childish interest in her eyes. Nothing of what those passengers were or what they meant reached the communicating functions of her mind. They were no more than mere performers in the circus ring. What their lives were behind that flapping canvas of the tent, which is the veil concealing the lives of all of us, she did not trouble to ask herself. Like the circus performers, they would be here to-day and to-morrow their goods and chattels would be packed, the naphtha flares beneath whose light they had for a moment appeared would be extinguished. Only the bare ring over which their horses had pranced would remain in Hannah's mind to show where they had been. And in Hannah's mind the grass would soon grow again to blot it out of sight.

To Hannah Throgmorton, these advents and excursions were no more than this.

Somehow they knew in Bridnorth that Jane was thirty-six. She hid her gray beneath the careful combing of her back hair.

There is a different attitude of mind in the woman who hides these things successfully and her who still hides but knows that she fails. Sharp antagonism and resentment, this is the mind of the latter. Not only does she know that she fails. She knows how others realize that she has tried. Yet something still urges in her purpose.

Jane knew she failed. That was bitter enough. But the greater bitterness lay in the knowledge that had she succeeded it would have been of no avail. For some years, unlike her sister Hannah, she had relinquished hope, flung it aside in all consciousness of loss; flung it aside and often looked her God in the face with the accusing glances of unconcealed reproach.

To Jane that coming of the coach was the reminding spur that pricked her memories to resentment. No Destiny for her was to be found in the freight it carried. For each passenger as they descended outside the Royal George, she had her caustic comment. Hers was the common but forgivably ungenerous spirit, of the critic in whose breast the milk of human kindness has grown sour from standing overlong in the idleness of impotent ability.

Yet reminding spur that it was, and deeply as it hurt her, her eyes were as swift and sharp as any to take note of the new arrivals. Perhaps it was the very pain that she cherished. Life is a texture of sensations, and if only the thread of pain be left to keep the whole together, there are many who welcome it rather than feel the bare boards beneath their feet.

Whenever a man, strange to them amongst the regular visitors to Bridnorth, slipped off the coach at the Royal George, she knew his arrival meant nothing in Destiny to her. Yet often she would be the first to pick him out.

"He's new. Wonder if he's come with the Tollursts."

And having taken him in with a swiftness of apprehension, her glances would shoot from Fanny to Mary and back again as though she could steal the secrets of Fate out of their eyes.

It was Fanny she read most easily of all; Fanny who in such moments revealed to the shrewdness of her gaze that faint acceleration of pulse, to the realization of which nothing but the bitterness in her heart could have sharpened her. It was upon Fanny then in these moments her observation concentrated. Mary eluded her. Indeed Mary, it seemed, was the calmest and serenest of them all. Sometimes if she were engrossed in reading she did not even come to the window, but was content from her chair to hear what they had to report.

And when there were no visitors descending from the coach, in language their brother had long brought home from school and left behind him in phrases when he went, it was Jane, with a laugh, who turned upon those other three and said--

"What a suck for everybody!"

Then there was Fanny, whose age in Bridnorth was variously guessed to be between thirty and thirty-three. No one knew. Her sisters never revealed it. Jane had her loyalties and this was one.

Only Fanny herself, in those quiet moments when a woman is alone before the judgment of her own mirror, knew that the gray hairs had begun to make their appearance amidst the black. They were not even for concealment yet. It was as though they tried to hide themselves from the swift searching of her eyes. But she had found them out. Each one as pensively she rolled it round her fingers, hiding it away or burning it in the fire, was a thorn that pricked and drew blood.

Hope had not yet been laid aside by her. In that vivid if untrained imagination of hers, Romance still offered her promise of the untold joys and ecstasies of a woman's heart. She had not laid Hope aside, but frettingly and constantly Hope was with her. She was conscious of it, as of a hidden pain that warns of some disease only the knife can cure.

Always she was clutching it and only the writing of her ill-measured verses of poetry could anesthetize her knowledge of its presence. Then, when she was beating out her fancies in those uncomely words of almost childish verse, the pain of the hope she had would lie still, soothed to sleepfulness by the soporific of her wandering imagination.

What, can it be supposed, was the coming of the coach to her?

The vehicle of Fate it has been said it was, bringing a Destiny which for thirty years and more had lingered on its journey, for never had it been set down at the Royal George.

Already she knew that she was tired of waiting for it. Often that tiredness overcame her. Through the long winter months when the Bridnorth stream was languid and shallow in its flow, she became listless when she was not irritable, and the look of those thirty-three years was added in their fullness in her eyes.

A visit into the world amongst those friends they had, transitory though those visits may have been, revived courage in her. And all through the Spring and Summer season, she fought that fatigue as a woman must and will so long as the hope of Romance has even one red spark of fire in her heart.

It was not a man so much she wanted, as Romance. She alone could have told what was meant by that. The one man she had known had almost made her hate his sex. It was not so much to her a stranger who stepped down outside the Royal George and trod her pulse to acceleration, as the urgent wonder of what might happen in the weeks to come; of what might happen to her in the very core of her being. He was no more than a medium, an instrument to bring about those happenings. She knew in herself what ecstasy she could suffer, how her heart could throb behind her wasted breast, how every vein threading her body would become the channel for a warmer race of blood.

It was not so much that she wanted a man to love as to feel love itself with all its accompanying sensations of fear and wonder, yet knowing all the time that before these emotions could happen to her, she must attract and be found acceptable, must in another waken some strange need to be the kindling spark in her.

Only once had it seemed she had succeeded. There had come a visitor to the Royal George with whom in the ordinary course of the summer life of Bridnorth, acquaintance had soon been made. None of them were slow to realize the interest he had taken in Fanny. Before he left they twice had walked over the moors to where on the highest and loneliest point of the cliffs you can see the whole sweep of Bridnorth bay and in clear weather the first jutting headland on the Cornish coast.

Many a love match in Bridnorth had been made about those heathered moors. It was no love match he made with Fanny. What happened only Mary knew. He had taken Fanny in his arms and he had kissed her. For many months she had felt those kisses, not in the touch of his lips so much as in waves of emotion that tumbled in a riot through her veins and left her trembling in the darkness of night. For he had never told her that he loved her.

In three weeks he had gone away having said no word to bind her. In two months' time or little more, she read of his marriage in the London papers and that night stared and stared at her reflection in the mirror when she went to bed.

For in her heart and below the communicating consciousness of her thoughts, she knew what had happened. Never could she have told herself; far less spoken of it to others. But while he had held her in his arms, she had known even then. She had felt her body thin and spare and meager against his. Something unalluring in herself she had realized as his lips touched the eagerness of her own.

That strange need of which in experience she had no knowledge, she knew in that instant had not wakened in him as he held her. However passionate his kisses in their strangeness had seemed, they lacked a fire of which, knowing nothing, she yet knew all.

Still, nevertheless, she waited and the fatigue of that waiting each year was added in her eyes.

The coming of the coach to her was like that of a ship, hard-beating into harbor with broken spars and sails all rent. Yet with every coming, her heart lifted, and with every new arrival, strange to Bridnorth, her eyes would wear a brighter light, her laugh would catch a brighter ring.

"Really, you'd never think Fanny was thirty-three!" Hannah once said on one of these occasions.

"You wait for a week or two," retorted Jane.

And in a week or two when the visitor had departed, Jane would catch Hannah's eyes across the breakfast table and direct them silently to Fanny sitting there. There was no need to say--"I told you so." Jane could convey all and more in her glance than that. She took charge of Hannah's vision, as Hannah took charge of her children. That was enough.

It was to Mary Throgmorton in those days that this coming of the Abbotscombe coach is most elusive of all to define. So much less of the emotions of hopefulness, of curiosity, or even of childish interest did she betray, that there is little in action or conduct to illuminate her state of mind.

In those days, which must be understood to mean the beginning of this history, and in fact were the final decade of the last century, Mary was twenty-nine.

That is a significant age and, to any more versed in experience than she, must bring deep consideration with it. By then a woman knows the transitoriness of youth; she realizes how short is the span of time in which a woman can control her destiny. She sees in the eyes of others that life is slipping by her; she discovers how those who were children about her in her youth are gliding into the age of attractiveness, claiming attention that is not so readily hers as it was or as she imagines perhaps it might have been.

In such a state of mind must many a woman pause. It is as though for one instant she had power to arrest the traffic of time that she might take this crossing in the streets of life with unhampered deliberation. For here often she will choose her direction in the full consciousness of thought. No longer dare she leave her destiny to the hazard of chance. It has become, not the Romance that will happen upon her in the glorious and unexpected suddenness of ecstasy, but the Romance she must find, eager in her searching, swift in her choice lest life all go by and the traffic of time sweep over her.

This choice she must make or work must save her, for life has become as vital to women as it is to men. At twenty-nine this is many a woman's dilemma. Yet at twenty-nine no such consciousness of the need of deliberation had entered the mind of Mary Throgmorton. Perhaps it was because there were no younger creatures about her, growing up to the youth she was leaving behind; perhaps because in the quietness of seclusion, by that Bridnorth stream, the gentle, rippling song of it had never wakened her to life.

In the height of its flood, that Bridnorth stream had never a note to distress the placidity of her thoughts. She had heard indeed the Niagara of life in London, but as a tourist only, standing for a moment on its brink with a guide shouting the mere material facts of so-called interest in her ears. It was all too deafening and astounding to be more than a passing wonder in her mind. She would return to Bridnorth with its thunder roaring in her ears, glad of the quiet stream again and having gained no more experience of life than does an American tourist of the life of London when he counts the steps up to the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral and hurries down to catch the train to the birthplace of Shakespeare.

At twenty-nine, Mary Throgmorton was in many respects still the same girl as when at the age of eighteen she had first bound that fair hair upon her head and looked with all the seriousness of her gray eyes at the vision the reflecting mirror presented to her. Scarcely had she noticed her growth into womanhood for, as has been said, her beauty was not that of the flesh that is pink and white. It was in stone her beauty lay and even her own hands did not warm to the touch of it. But where in Bridnorth was there kindling enough to light so fierce a fire as she needed to overwhelm her?

This is the tragedy of a thousand women who pass through life and never touch its meaning; these thousand women who one day will alter the force-made laws for a world built nearer to the purpose of their being; these thousand women to whom the figure of Mary Throgmorton stands there by Bridnorth village in her monument of stone upon the Devon cliffs.

With all this unconsciousness of design in the pattern of her life, the coming of the coach to Mary is well-nigh too subtle to admit of capture in the rigid medium of words. Truly enough, if deeply engaged in one of the many books she read, there were times and often when, from those front windows of the square, white house, she would let her sisters report upon the new or strange arrivals set down outside the Royal George.

Even Jane, with her shrewdness of vision, was misled by this into the belief that Mary cared less than them all what interest the Abbotscombe coach might bring for the moment into their lives.

"I wonder what his handicap is," she had said when they had described a young man descending from the box seat with a bag of golf clubs.

Notwithstanding all Mary's undoubted excellence at that game or indeed at any game to which she gave her hand, Jane, disposed by nature to doubt, would sharply look at her. But apparently there was no intention to deceive. If the book was really engrossing, she would return to its pages no sooner than the remark was made, as though time would prove what sort of performer he was, since all golfers who came to Bridnorth found themselves glad to range their skill against hers on the links.

And when, as it happened, she joined them at those front windows, consenting to their little deceptions of casual interest in the midst of more important occupations--for Jane would say, "Mary, you can't just stare"--it was with no more than calculation as to what amusement the visitors would provide that Mary appeared to regard their arrival.

Not one of them, however, not even Fanny, knew that there were days in those Spring and Summer months, when Mary, setting forth with her strong stride and walking alone up on to the heathered moors would, with intention, seat herself in a spot where the Abbotscombe coach could be seen winding its way down the hill into Bridnorth. It was one spot alone from which the full stretch of the road could be observed. By accident one day she had found it, just at that hour when the coach went by. She had known and made use of it for six years and more.

At first it was the mere interest of a moving thing passing in the far line of vision to its determined destination; the interest of that floating object the stream catches in its eddies and carries in its flowing out of sight.

So it was at first, until in some subconscious way it grew to hold for her a sense of mystery. She would never have called it mystery herself--the attraction had no name in her mind. No more did she do than sit and watch its passage, dimly conscious that that little moving speck upon the road, framed in its aura of dust, was moving into the horizon of her life and as soon would move out again, leaving her the same as she was before.

Habit it was to think she would be left the same; yet always whilst it was there in the line of her eyes, it had seemed that something, having no word in her consciousness, might happen to her with its passing.

So vividly sometimes it appeared to be moving directly into her life. So vividly sometimes, when it had gone, it appeared to have left her behind. She would have described it no more graphically or consciously than that.

For during those six years, nothing indeed had happened to her. The passing of the coach along that thread of road had remained a mystery. Companions and acquaintances it had brought and often; women with whom she had formed friendships, men with whom she had played strenuously and enjoyably in their games of golf.

Never had it brought her even such an experience as her elder sister's. She had never wished it should. There was no such readiness to yield in her as there was in Fanny; no undisguised eagerness for life such as might tempt the heartlessness of a man to a passing flirtation.

She treated all men the same with the frank candor of her nature, which allowed no familiarity of approach. Only with his heart could a man have reached her, never with his arms or his lips as Fanny had been.

Perhaps in those brief acquaintanceships, mainly occupied with their games, there was no time for the deeper emotions of a man's heart to be stirred. But most potent reason of all, it was that she had none of the superficial allurements of her sex. Strength was the beauty of her. It was a common attitude of hers to stand with legs apart set firmly on her feet as she talked. Yet there was no masculinity she conveyed. Only it was that so would a man find her if he sought passion in her arms and perhaps they feared the passion they might discover.

It was the transitoriness not only of hers but of all those women's touch with life that made the pattern of their destiny. No man had stayed long enough in Bridnorth to discover the tenderness and nobility of Mary Throgmorton. In that cold quality of her beauty they saw her remotely and only in the distances in which she placed herself. None had come close enough to observe that gentle smile the sculptor had curved about her lips, the deep and tender softness of her eyes. It was in outline only they beheld her, never believing that beneath that firm full curve of her breast there could beat a heart as wildly and as fearfully as a netted bird's, or that once beating so, that heart would beat for them forever.

It was just the faint knowledge of this in herself which made that passing coach a mystery to Mary. It was not as with Fanny that she thought of it as a vehicle of her Destiny, but that, as she sat there on the moors above Bridnorth, it was a link with the world she had so often read of in her books.

It came to her out of the blue over the hill, as a pigeon come with a message under its wing. Detaching that message again and again, she read it in a whisper in her heart.

"There is life away there beyond the hill," it ran. "There is life away there beyond the hill--and life is pain as well as joy and life is sorrow as well as happiness; but life is ours and we are here to live."

That message somewhere in the secrets of her heart she kept and every time the coach passed by when she was in the house the horses' hoofs on the village road beat in her thoughts--"Life is ours, we are here to live."

VII

Portraits in oil of Mr. and Mrs. Throgmorton hung on the walls of the dining-room in their square, white house. Though painted by a local artist when Mary was quite a child, they had one prominent virtue of execution. They were arresting likenesses.

It is open to question whether a man has a right to impose his will when he is gone upon those who follow after him. With Mr. and Mrs. Throgmorton it was not so much an imposition of will. Their money had been left without reservation to be divided equally amongst the four girls. If any imposition there might be, it was of their personality. Looking down at their children from those two portraits on the wall, they still controlled the spirit of that house as surely as when they had been alive.

Every morning and evening, Hannah read the prayers as her father had done before her. No more could she have ceased from doing this than could any one of them have removed his portrait from its exact place in the dining-room.

It was the look in her father's and her mother's eyes more than any comment of her sisters' that Fanny feared to meet after her episode with the visitor to Bridnorth.

For in their lifetime, Mr. and Mrs. Throgmorton had been parents of that rigid Victorian spirit. Love they must have given their children or their influence would never have survived. Love indeed they did give, but it was a stern and passionless affection.

Looking down upon their four daughters in those days of the beginning of this story, they must have been well satisfied that if not one of them had found the sanctity of married life then at least not one of them, unless perhaps it was Fanny, had known the shame of an unhallowed passion.

Fanny they might have had their doubts about. After that episode she often felt they had; often seemed to detect a glance not so much of pity as of pain in her mother's eyes. At her father, for some weeks after the visitor's departure, she was almost afraid to look. In his life he had been just. He would have been just in his condemnation of her then. Self-control had been the measure of all his actions. Of self-control in that moment on the cliffs she knew she had had none. She had leant herself into his arms because in the violent beating of her breast it had seemed she had no strength to do otherwise. And when he kissed her, it had felt as though all the strength she had in her soul and body had been taken from her into his.

Had her father known such sensations as that when he talked of self-control?

Well indeed did she know what her mother would have said. To all those four girls she had said the same with parental regard; and to each one severally as they had come to that age when she had felt it expedient to enlighten them.

"God knows," she had always begun, for the use of the name of God hallowed such moments as these to her and softened the terribleness of all she had to say, "God knows, my dear, what future there is in store for you. If it is His will you should never marry, you will be spared much of the pain, much of the trouble and the penalties of life. I love your father. No woman could have loved him more. He is a fine and a good man. But there are things a woman must submit to in her married life--that is the cross she must bear--which no words of mine can describe to you. Nevertheless, don't think I complain. Don't think I do not realize there is a blessed reward. Her children are the light of life to her. Without them, I dread to think what she must suffer at the hands of Nature when the mercy of God has no recompense in store. Eve was cursed with the bearing of children, but they brought the mercy of God to her in their little hands when once they were born."

This usually had been her concluding phrase. This without variation she repeated to all of them. Of this phrase, if vanity she had at all, she was greatly proud. It seemed to her, in illuminating language to comprise the whole meaning of her discourse.

Hannah, Jane, Fanny, all in their turn had accepted it in silence. It had been left to Mary to say--

"It seems hard on a man that he should have to suffer, because he doesn't get the reward of having children like the woman does. Of course they're his--but he doesn't bring them into the world."

At this issue, Mrs. Throgmorton had taken her daughter's hands in hers and, in a tone of voice Mary had never forgotten, she had replied--

"I never said, my dear, that the man did suffer. He doesn't. If it were not for the sanctity of marriage, it would have to be described as unholy pleasure to him. That pleasure a woman must submit to. That pleasure it is her bitter duty to give. That's why I say I dread to think what she must suffer, as some unfortunately do, when the mercy of God does not recompense her with the gift of children."

Closely watching her daughter's face in the silence that followed, Mrs. Throgmorton had known that Mary's mind was not yet satisfied with the food for thought and conduct she had given it. She became conscious of a dread of what this youngest child of hers would say next. And when Mary spoke at last, her worst fears were realized.

"Can a woman," she said, "give pleasure to the man she loves when all the time she is suffering shame and agony herself? If he loves her, what pleasure could it be to him?"

Mrs. Throgmorton had closed her eyes and doubtless in that moment of their closure she had prayed. So confused had been her mind in face of this question that for the instant she could do no more than say--

"What do you mean?"

"Well--simply--" replied Mary in a childlike innocence--"simply that it seems to me if a woman is giving pleasure to a man she really loves, she must be getting pleasure herself. If I give you a present at Christmas and you like it and it gives you pleasure, I'm not sure it doesn't give me more pleasure than you to see you pleased, because--well, because I love you. Why do you say 'It's more blessed to give than to receive'?"

That little touch of affection from her daughter had stirred Mrs. Throgmorton's heart. Unable to restrain herself, she had taken Mary's hands again with a closer warmth in her own.

"Ah, more blessed, dear--yes--there is of course the pleasure of blessedness, the satisfaction of duty uncomplainingly done. I have never denied that."

She had spoken this triumphantly, feeling that light at last had been shown in answer to her prayer. Not for a moment was she expectant of her daughter's reply.

"I don't mean that, mother," Mary had said. "Satisfaction seems to me a thing you know in your own heart. No one can share it with you. Of course I don't know the feelings of a man, how could I? I'm not married. But if I were a man it wouldn't give me any pleasure to think that the woman I loved was just satisfied because she'd done her duty. I should want to share my pleasure with her, not look on at a distance at her satisfaction. If a man ever loves me, I believe I shall feel what he feels and if I do, I shall be glad of it and make him glad too."

She had said it all without emotion, almost without one note of feeling in her voice; but the mere words themselves were sufficient to strike terror into Mrs. Throgmorton's heart. That terror showed itself undisguised in her face.

"My dear--my dear--" she whispered--"I pray God you never do feel so, or if it be His will you should, that you will never forget your modesty or your self-respect so much as to reveal it to any man however much you may love him."

To these four girls in that square, white house in Bridnorth, this was such an influence as still reigned in undisputed sway. The eyes of their parents from those portraits still looked down upon them at their prayers or at their meals. Still the voice of Mrs. Throgmorton whispered in Mary's ears--"I pray God you will never forget your modesty or your self-respect." Still, even when she was twenty-nine, Mary's eyes would lift to her father's face gazing down from the wall upon her, wondering if he had ever known the life she had suspicion of from the books she read. Still she would glance at them both, prepared to believe that, however dominant it was in their home, the expression of their lives had been only the husk of existence.

And then perhaps at that very moment the coach might pass by on its way to the Royal George and the horses' hoofs would sing as they beat upon the road--"Life is ours--we are here to live--Life is ours--we are here to live."

Yet there in Bridnorth at twenty-nine, no greater impetus had come to her to live than the most vague wonderings, the most transient of dreams.

VIII

It was the Sunday before Christmas of the year 1894. No coach had come to Bridnorth for three weeks. The snow which had fallen there was still lying six inches deep all over the countryside and on the roads where it had been beaten down at all, was as hard as ice. Footmarks had mottled it. It shone in the sun like the skin of a snow leopard.

The hills around Bridnorth and all the fields as far as eye could see were washed the purest white. Every hedge had its mantle, every tree and every branch its sleeves of snow. The whole world seemed buried. Scarce one dark object was to be seen. Only the sea stretched dark and gray like ice water, the little waves in that still air there was, falling on the beach with the brittle noises of breaking glass.

Only for this, a silence had fallen everywhere. Footsteps made no sound. The birds were hidden in the hearts of the hedges and even when hunger drew them forth in search of berries, it was without noise they went, in swift, dipping flights--a dark thing flashing by, no more.

Every one put on goloshes to climb or descend the hill to church. The Vicar and his wife came stepping over from the Vicarage close by like a pair of storks and when the bell stopped ringing it was as though another cloak of silence had been flung over Bridnorth village. The Vicar felt that additional silence as acutely as any one. It seemed to him it fell to prepare the way for worship in the house of God and the sermon he was about to preach.

The attendance that morning was no different from what it would have been had the roads been clear. Going to church in the country is a comfortable habit. At their midday meal afterwards the subject of the attendance would crop up at the Vicar's table as it always did, ever full of interest as is the subject of the booking-office returns to a theatrical manager. He would congratulate himself upon the numbers he had seen below him from that eminence of the pulpit and would have been hurt beyond degree had any one suggested it was largely habit that brought them there.

The Throgmorton family would no more have thought of staying away because of the weather than they would have thought of turning the two portraits in the dining-room with their faces to the wall.

They collected in the square hall of the square, white house. They put on their gloves and their goloshes; they held their prayer books in their hands; they each looked for the last time to see that their threepenny bits were safe in the palms of their gloves. Then they set off.

The church in the country is a meeting place in a sense other than that of worship. You may desire at most times the quietness of your own home, but you like to see the world about you in a public place.

They worshipped God, those people in Bridnorth. Who could hope to maintain that they did not? They were close enough to Him in all conscience and fact on those Devon hills. But that worship was more in the silence of their own hearts, more on the floor at their own bedside than ever it was at the service conducted by the Vicar as so many services are conducted by so many Vicars in so many parishes throughout the length and breadth of the whole country.

The interest of seeing a fresh face, of even seeing an old face if it be under a new hat; the mere interest of human contact, of exchanging a word as they went in or mildly criticizing as they came out; the mild necessity of listening to what the Vicar said from the pulpit, the sterner necessity of trying to understand what he meant; the excitement of wearing a new frock, the speculations upon the new frock worn by another, these were more the causes of a good attendance in the worst of weather, these and that same consciousness of being overlooked, of having one's conduct under the gaze of all who chose to satisfy themselves about it.

As the Vicar climbed the pulpit steps, the congregation settled themselves down with that moving in their pews with all customary signs of that spirit of patience every priest believes to be one of interest. Leaning her square, strong shoulders against the upright back of the Throgmorton pew, Mary composed her mind with mild attention. Fanny shifted her hassock to the most restful position for her feet. That sharp interrogative look of criticism drew itself out in the line of Jane's lips and steadied itself in her eyes. Hannah was the only one upon whose face a rapt expression fell. With all her gray hair and her forty years, she was the youngest of them all, still cherishing her ideals of the infallible priest in the man of cloth; still believing that the voice of God could speak even through the inferior brain of a country Vicar. Above all there were her children who the next morning would ask her what the sermon meant. It was necessary if only for their sakes she should not lose a word that was said.

After that pause on his knees when the Vicar's head was bent in prayer, he rose to his feet and, as he spread out the pages of his sermon before him, cast a significant glance around the church. This was preliminary to every sermon he preached. It was as though he said--"I cannot have any signs of inattention. If your minds have wandered at all during the service, they must wander no more. I feel I have got something to say which is vital to all of you."

All this happened that December morning, just as it had occurred every morning for the twenty years he had been the shepherd of their souls. It was almost as long as Mary could remember.

Having cast that glance about him, he cleared his throat--the same sounds as Jane once caustically remarked they had heard one thousand times, allowing two Sundays in the year for a locum tenens.

Then he gave out his text: "And the Angel said unto her--'Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.'"

Perhaps it was the sound of her own name there amongst all those people which stirred her mind and added a quicker beat of the pulse to Mary Throgmorton's heart. The full significance of the text, the circumstance to which it referred, these could not have reached her mind so swiftly, even though Fanny with a sharp turn of the head had looked at her.

"'Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.'"

It was at first the sound of her name, the more as he repeated it. Listening to that habitual intonation of the Vicar's voice, it meant nothing to her as yet that Mary had found favor with her God. The only effect it had was the more completely to arrest her mind in a manner in which she had never been conscious of its arrest before. She folded her hands in her lap. It was a characteristic sign of attention in her. She folded her hands and raised her eyes steadily to the pulpit.

"There are some things," began the Vicar, "which it is necessary for us to understand though they are completely outside the range of our comprehension."

Involuntarily her interest was set back. It was the delivery of such statements as these with which the Vicar had fed the mind of his congregation for the last twenty years. For how could one understand that which was completely outside the range of comprehension? Insensibly Mary's fingers relaxed as they lay in her lap. She drew a long breath of disappointment.

"The immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary," he continued, "is one of those mysteries in the teaching of the Church which passes comprehension but which it is expedient for us to understand, lest we be led away by it towards such false conceptions as are held by the Church of Rome."

There was scarcely a sermon he preached in which the Vicar lost opportunity for such attacks as these. He seemed to fear the Roman Catholic Church as a man fears the alluring attractions of an unscrupulous woman. From the eminence of his pulpit, he would have cursed it if he could and, firmly as she had been brought up to disapprove of the Romish doctrines, Mary often found in her mind a wonder of this fear of his, an inclination to suspect the power of the Roman Catholic Church.

From that moment, fully anticipating all they were going to be told, her mind became listless. She looked about her to see if the Mainwarings were in Church. Often there were moments in the sermon when she would catch the old General's eye which for her appreciation would lift heavenwards with a solemn expression of patient forbearance.

They lived too far out of Bridnorth. It was not to be expected they would have walked all that distance in the snow. Her eyes had scarcely turned back from their empty pew when the Vicar's words arrested her again.

"Because Mary was the sinless mother of Our Lord," he was saying, "is no justification for us to direct our prayers to her. For this is what it is necessary for us to understand. It is necessary for us to understand that Mary was the mother of Our Lord's manhood. His divinity comes from God alone. What is the Trinity to which we attach our faith? It is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the three in one. Mary, the Virgin, has no place here and it is beyond this in our thoughts of worship we have no power or authority to go.

"The Roman Catholic Church claims the mediation of the Virgin Mary between the hearts of its people and the divine throne of God. Lest we should drift into such distress of error as that, let us understand the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, however much as a mystery we allow it to be beyond our comprehension. Being the Son of God, Christ must have been born without sin, yet being the Son of Man, He must, with His manhood, have shared all the inheritance of suffering which is the accompaniment of our earthly life. How else could He have been tempted in the Wilderness? How else could He have passed through His agony on the Cross?

"To what conclusion then are we thus led? It is to the conclusion that Mary, the Mother of that manhood in Christ, must have suffered as all women suffer. She had found favor with God; but the Angel did not say she had found immunity from that nature which, being born in sin as are we all, was her inevitable portion.

"So, lest we fall into the temptation of raising her in dignity to the very throne of God, lest we succumb to the false teaching of those who would address their prayers to her, it becomes incumbent upon us to see the Virgin Mary in a clear and no uncertain light. Mystery in her conception there must always be, but in her giving birth in that manger of Bethlehem, it is as Mary the wife of Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, we must regard her."

To all those present in the congregation this was no more than one of the many tirades the Vicar had so often preached against the Roman Catholic Church. They listened as they had always listened before, with patience but without interest. It was no real matter of concern to them. They had no desire to be converted. They had not in the silence of their homes been reading the works of Roman Catholic authorities as the Vicar had done. They did not entertain the spirit of rivalry or feel the sense of competition as he felt it. They listened because it was their duty to listen and one and all of them except Mary, thinking of their warm firesides, hoped that he would soon make an end.

Only Mary amongst them all sat now with heart and mind attentive to what he said, pursuing not the meaning he intended to convey, but a train of thought, the sudden illumination of an idea which yet she dared not find words in her consciousness to express.

"We must think of her," the Vicar continued, "as a woman passing through the hours of her travail. We must think of her brought in secret haste by the fear of consequence and the expedience of necessity to that manger in Bethlehem, where, upon her bed of straw, with the cattle all about her in their stalls, she gave birth to a man child in all the suffering and all the pain it is the lot of women to endure. For here is the origin of that manhood in which we must place our faith if we are to appreciate the fullness of sacrifice our Savior made upon the Cross. It was a woman, as any one of you, who was the mother of Our Lord. A woman, blessed above all women to be the link between the divinity of God the Father and the manhood of God the Son. It was a woman who had found favor in the eyes of her Creator, such favor as had sought her out to be the instrument of the will and mercy of God.

"And the Angel said unto her--'Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.'"

So often had Mary's name been repeated that by now no association was left in Fanny's mind with her sister. She turned and looked at her no more. But to Mary herself, with this last reiteration of all, the sound of it throbbed in every vein and beat in violent echoes in her heart. For now no longer could she keep back the conscious words that sought expression of those thoughts in her mind. She knew beyond concealment the idea which had forced itself in a suspicion upon her acceptance.

In all his eagerness to lead their minds away from worship of the Virgin Mary, the Vicar had destroyed for her every shred of that mystery it had been his earnest intention to maintain. Now indeed it seemed she did understand and nothing was left that lay beyond her comprehension.

It was the woman, as he had urged them, whom she saw, the woman on her bed of straw, with that look in the eyes, the look of a woman waiting for her hour which often she had seen in the eyes of others it had been her duty to visit in Bridnorth. It was the woman, eager and suffering, with that eagerness she sometimes had felt as though it were a vision seen within herself. He had substituted a woman--just such a woman it might be as herself.

And here it was then that the thought leapt upon her like some ambushed thing, bearing her down beneath its weight; beating at her heart, lacerating her mind so that she knew she never in any time to come could hide from herself the scars it made.

"If she had suffered," Mary asked herself--"must she not also have known?" And then, shaking her with the terror of its blasphemy, there sprang upon her mind the words--

"Who was the father of the Son of Man?"

"In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost!" a voice intoned in a far distance and with all the others she rose automatically to her feet. Her eyes were glazed. She scarcely could see the Vicar as he descended from the pulpit. Her heart was thumping in her breast. She could hear only that.

They walked home in groups and in couples when the service was over. Only Fanny kept alone. A verse of poetry was building itself in her mind. One couplet already had formed a rounded phrase. It had been revolving in her thoughts all through the sermon. Round and about she had beaten it as with a pestle in a mortar until she had pounded it into shape.

"Were all the trees as green to you

As they were green to me?"

It was not so much what rhymed with "you" or "me" that was troubling her as what more she could continue to make the full matter of her verse. She could think of no more. The whole substance of life was summed up in those two lines to her. She walked alone that morning, cutting words to a measure that would not meet and had no meaning.

Mary walked with Jane. The sound of the voice and the laughter of others behind her in that sharp air was like the breaking of china falling upon a floor as hard as that beaten snow beneath their feet. She was still in an amaze with the bewilderment of what she had thought. Every long-trained sense in her was horrified at the knowledge of its blasphemy. She tried to believe she had never thought it. To induce that belief, she would have persuaded herself if she could that the Vicar had never preached his sermon, that it was not to church they had been, that it was all a dream, horrible and more vivid than life itself, but a dream.

For life was peaceful and sweet enough there in Bridnorth. Notwithstanding the song the hoofs of the coach horses had always beaten out for her on the roads, she had been well content with it. Often doubtless the call of life had come to her there beyond the hill; it came with its cry of pain and joy, its voice of sorrow as well as happiness. But now, here amongst the peace and the sweetness, where none of these vital contrasts had ever existed, there had come something more terrible than pain, more cruel and relentless than sorrow.

In moments she was astonished at herself that she did not dismiss it all with one sweep of her mind, dismiss it all as lies and blasphemy, as machinations of the Devil himself. For what was the good just of telling herself it was a dream, of pretending to hide her thoughts from it as though it were not there? It was there! She had thought it and so had the thought come to her like a light suddenly in dark corners, that she knew it was true. Never now could she cast out its significance from the processes of her mind. In the desperate fear that the very foundations of her religious beliefs were shaken, she might buttress her faith with the determined exclusion of all blasphemy in her thoughts. Never again might she allow her mind to dwell upon the origin of the manhood of that figure of Christ, still dearer to her than life itself. With persistent effort of will, she knew she could make blind her vision of that scene in the manger at Bethlehem which the Vicar in his ignorance and the pettiness of his apprehensions had conjured forth so clearly in her sight.

All this she might do, clinging to the faith in which she had been brought up; but never could she efface the change which in those few moments had been made in her. How could she know so soon what that change might be? She knew only it was there. She was a different being. Already she felt apart and aloof from her sisters. Even Jane, walking there beside her, appeared at a strange distance in which was a clearer light for her to see by, a crystal atmosphere through which she could distinguish nothing but the truth.

Suddenly as they walked together, these two in silence, Jane looked up and said--

"I wish some one would kill that bee in the Vicar's bonnet. As if there was the slightest chance of any of us becoming Roman Catholics!"

It was like Jane, that remark. Suddenly Mary knew how like it was. But more she knew in that moment the change had not come to her sisters. They had not seen what she had seen. No vision such as hers had been vouchsafed to them. Still they were happy, contented, and at peace in their garden of Eden. It was she alone who had tasted of the fruit; she alone who now had knowledge of good and evil.

Already she felt the edge of the sword of the angel of God turned against her. The gates of that garden they lived in were opened. In the deep consciousness of her heart she felt she was being turned away. How it would difference her life, where she should go now that she had been driven forth, what even the world outside those gates might be, she did not know.

All she realized was that for twenty-nine years a Mary Throgmorton had been living in Bridnorth, that now she had gone and another Mary Throgmorton had taken her place.

Looking down at Jane beside her when she spoke, she saw for the first time a sad figure of a woman, shrivelled and dried of heart, bitter and resentful of mind. No longer was she the Jane who, with her sharp tongue, had often made them laugh, who, with her shrewd criticisms had often shown them their little weaknesses and the pettiness of their thoughts. In place of her she saw a woman wilted and seared, a body parched with the need of the moisture of life; one who had been cut from the tree to wither and decay, one, the thought then sprang upon her, who had never found favor with God or man.

They came loitering to the square, white house, pausing at the gate and talking to friends, lingering over the removal of their goloshes indoors. The crisp air was in their lungs. There was the scent of cooking faintly in the hall. It rose pleasantly in their nostrils. They laughed and chatted like a nestful of starlings. Jane was more amusing than usual. Her comments upon the hat bought by the police sergeant's wife in Exeter and worn that Sunday morning for the first time were shrewd and close of observation; too close to be kind, yet so shrewd as to prick even the soft heart of Hannah to laughter she would have restrained if she could.

Even Fanny, with mind still beating out her meters, lost that far-off look in her eyes and lingered in the hall to listen to Jane's sallies, to every one of which Hannah would murmur between her laughter--

"Jane! Jane--how can you? Fancy your noticing that! Oh dear! we oughtn't to be laughing at all. Poor thing! She can't help her eye or her figure."

"If I were fat," said Jane, "I wouldn't go in stripes. You don't put hoops round a barrel to make it look thin."

Foolish though that might have sounded in London drawing-rooms, it found a burst of laughter in the square, white house.

On her knees above, upstairs in her bedroom, Mary heard the noise of it. She could guess well the kind of remark from Jane that had evoked it. Until those moments Jane had been a source of amusement to her as much as to any of them. She was a source of amusement no longer. Even there on her knees with the sound of their laughter far away in the distance of the house, it was that sad figure of a woman, shrivelled and dried, bitter with the need of sun to ripen her, that came before her eyes.

Then what were the others? With this new vision, she dreaded to think that she in time must look at them. What thoughts to have on one's knee! What thoughts to bring into the sight and mind of God!

She had come there alone to her bedroom to pray--but what for? How could prayer help? Could she by prayer make numb and dead the motion of her mind? By prayer could she silence her thoughts, inducing oblivion as a drug could induce sleep?

Hastening away alone to her bedroom, she had hoped she could. Even then she cherished the belief of all she had been taught of the efficacy of prayer. But having fallen upon her knees at her bedside, what could she pray? Nothing.

"Oh--God, my heavenly Father," she began, and staring before her with rigid eyes at the pillow on her bed it became a twisted bundle of straw on which for poor comfort rested the pale face of a woman patient and enduring in her hour.

How could prayer put away such visions as these? With conscious muscular effort she closed her eyes and began repeating in a voice her ears could hear--"Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name."

So she would have decoyed herself into the attitude of mind of prayer, but the sound of laughter in the house broke in upon the midst of it. She saw that thin, withered woman in whom the sap of life had dried to pith, and, casting away the formula of supplication, her voice had cried out for understanding of it all.

"Something's all wrong!" she said aloud as though one were there in the room beside her to hear and oppose her accusations. "I don't know what it is. I've never thought it was wrong before. And perhaps after all it's I who am wrong."

She knew what she meant by that. Wrong she might insist it was for her to have thought what she thought in church. And yet some quality of deliberation seemed necessary to compose the substance of evil. What deliberation had there been in her? Out of the even and placid monotony of life had shrilled this voice into her heart.

"Who was the father of the Son of Man?"

She had not beckoned the voice. It had lifted out of nowhere above the soulless intonation of the Vicar's sermon. But what was more, now once she had heard it, it appeared as though it long had been waiting to cry its message in her ears. She wondered why she had never heard it before. For twenty-nine years she realized as she knelt there on her knees, she had been little more than a child. Now in the lateness of the day she was a woman, knowing more of the world than ever she would have learnt by experience.

The deeper purposes of life they were that had come without seeking upon her imagination. It was not this or that she knew about women, not this or that which had come in revelation to her about men. Only that there was a meaning within herself, pitiably and almost shamefully unfulfilled. Something there was wrong--all wrong. Half she suspected in herself what it was. For those few moments as they walked back from church, she had caught actual sight of it in her sister Jane.

Would she discern it in the others? Discovering it in them would she know what it was in her? Why was she on her knees for thoughts like this? This was not prayer. She could not pray.

The sound of the bell downstairs raised her slowly to her feet. She took off her hat and laid it on the bed. Automatically she crossed to the mirror and began to tidy her hair.

Was there anything in her face that made her heart beat the faster? She stood looking at her reflection, pondering that there was not. What beauty of color was there in her cheeks? What line of beauty in her lips? And why did she look for these things and why, when behind her eyes she saw something in her mind she dared not speak, did her heart set up a beating in every pulse?

With a gesture of impatient self-rebuke, she turned away and went downstairs.

XII

Jane carved. As their father had always done, she still gave them just portions of fat so that the joint might evenly be consumed. There was not the same necessity to eat it when it was hot as there had been when Mr. Throgmorton was alive; yet even still, Fanny with an unconquerable distaste for it, did her best to leave a clean plate.

When Mary came in, they were already seated at the table. Hannah had said grace. They all asked where she had been.

"Tidying up," said she, and pulling out her chair, sat down, beginning her meal at once with her eyes steady upon her plate. Fanny was opposite to her. Being the eldest, Hannah sat at the head of the table. With the new vision of mind that had come to her, there were long moments before Mary could determine to raise her head and look at them. It was sufficient to hear them talking. The subject of Christmas presents was monopolizing the conversation. They were all going in to Exeter for a day's shopping if the roads permitted. Mary found herself caught in astonishment at the apparent note of happiness in their voices.

Were they happy after all? Had she herself become morbid and supersensitive with the sudden unexpectedness of her revelation? Was it all a mood? Would she wake on the morrow after a night of sleep, finding the whole aspect of life set back again to its old focus?

In a sudden hope and expectancy that it might be so, she raised her head and looked across the table at Fanny seated there with the full light of the window on her face.

It was a moment when, in a pause of the conversation, Fanny's thoughts had slipped back to the labor of her verses.

"Were ever the trees so green to you

As they were green to me?"

The strained expression of fretted composition was settled on her forehead. The far-off look of a memory clutching at the past was a pain in her eyes. In every outline and feature of her pale, thin face were the unmistakable signs of the utter weariness of her soul.

In that one glance, Mary knew her vision was true. It was no mood. All those signs of fatigue she had seen in Fanny's face again and again. It was her health, she had often said to herself. Fanny was not strong. Ill-health it might have been, but the root of the evil was in her spirit, not in her blood.

Sitting there opposite, as in all the countless times from childhood upwards she had seen her, it was another Fanny--the real Fanny--she beheld, just as she knew now it was the real Jane. These three sisters of hers, suddenly they had all become real. Hannah with her heart more in the flow of the Bridnorth stream, to the smooth round edges of contentment, each one of them in her turn they were presented with their new significance in her eyes.

But it was Fanny most of all in whom she felt full sense of the tragedy of circumstance. That episode of the visitor to Bridnorth came now with a fresh meaning upon Mary's mind. They had all felt deeply sorry for Fanny at the time, but one and all they had agreed she had had a lucky escape.

Was it such a lucky escape after all? Did Fanny regard it in that light? Could they be considered fortunate who escaped from life however it might wound and ill-treat them?

Mary realized as she sat there, fascinated by the terribleness of her thoughts, that they all had escaped from life. Not in one of them had there been the moment's fulfillment of their being. They were women, but it was not as women they had lived. One by one the purpose of life was running slower in their veins. She with the rest of them. Her turn would come. First she would become a Fanny, tired with waiting. That eager look of a spirit hunger would come into her eyes, alternating as events came and passed her by with those dull, dead shadows of fatigue. Hope she would cling to as a blind man to the string that is knotted to the collar of his dog. Hope, becoming fainter and weaker year by year, would lead her until, as with Jane, bitter and seared and dry of heart, she sought its services no more. Still like the blind man then she would beat with her stick up and down the unchanging pavements of her life till at last with Hannah she found a numbed contentment in her lot.

Something indeed, as she had cried up there alone in her room, something was wrong. She had come as just a few women do to that conscious realization. But her vision had not power to show her what it was. In those moments it never occurred to her to raise her eyes to the portrait of her father on the wall. She was not didactic enough of mind to argue it with herself or trace the origin of those conventions which had bound and still were binding the lives of those three women her eyes were watching.

Something was wrong. Vaguely she sensed it was the waste of life. It was beyond the function of her mind to follow the reason of that wastage to its source. Her process of thought could not seek out the social laws that had woven themselves about the lives of women until, so much were they the slaves of the law, that they would preach it, earnestly, fervently, believingly as her mother had done.

Something was wrong. That was just all she knew; but in those moments, she knew it well. There were those three women about her to prove how wrong it was. There was she herself nearing that phase when the wrong would be done to her, and she would be powerless as they had been to prevent it.

"Fear not, Mary--" it was as though she heard a voice beckoning within her--"Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God."

Ever since they had come to an age of understanding, their spirits had been warped and twisted with the formalities of life. To fit the plan of those laws man makes by force, they had been bent in their growing to the pattern of his needs. It was those needs of his that had invented the forced virtues of their modesty and self-respect, beneath the pressure of which he kept them as he required them, trained and set back to fulfill the meaning of his self-centered purpose.

Modesty and self-respect, surely these were qualities of all, of men as well as women. By unnatural temperatures to force them in their growth was to produce exotic flowers having none of the simple sweetness of sun-given odors in their scent.

As life was meant, it grew in the open spaces; it was an upright tree, spreading its green boughs under the pure light of heaven. There was nothing artificial about life. It was free.

It was the favor of God. That was the truth she had come by and with her eyes marking that weary look of resignation in Fanny's face, she knew she would not fear it whenever or however it came.

This was the seed, planted in the heart of Mary Throgmorton, which in its season was to bring forth and, for the life of the woman she was, bear the fruit of her being.

PHASE II

It was in the summer of 1895 that Julius Liddiard came to Bridnorth. He came alone, having engaged rooms at the White Hart.

From the Throgmorton windows he was observed descending at the George Hotel when, with a glance at Mary, it was announced by Jane that he played golf. As he slung a bulky satchel over his shoulder, Fanny surmised him to be an artist, entertaining for a swift moment as it sped across her mind, a vision of herself sitting beside him, watching his sketches with absorbing interest as they came to life beneath his brush.

It remained with Jane to make the final observation as, accompanied by a man carrying his trunk, he passed the windows on his way back to the White Hart.

"Has his suit case polished," she said. "He's not an artist. Paints for fun. Probably has a valet. Too wealthy for the likes of Bridnorth. Comes here to be alone."

If judging the facts of appearance leads to a concept of truth, these observations of Jane were shrewdly accurate. Time, during the first week, proved the soundness of their deduction.

He was seen by Fanny on the cliff's edge above the bay, painting with pleasing amateurish results and so engrossed in his work as scarcely to notice her presence. She had looked over his shoulder as she passed. She was no critic but had, what is more common to find, the candor of ill-formed opinion.

"It was not bad," she said--"rather slobbery. It was running all over the paper. P'r'aps he pulls it together. Course I didn't stop."

Jane's eyes narrowed. It was superfluous to say she did not stop. That was one of Fanny's lies; one of the lies all women tell which record their conscious intentions while they belie the subconscious things they do. She had not meant to stop. It was obvious to Jane that she did. Her next words proved it.

"Can't understand," she said, "how any one can become so engrossed, messing about with paints on a piece of paper."

She had stopped and he had not noticed her. After a week had passed, Mary came back one evening from the golf club. They were all having tea.

"His name's Liddiard," she said casually in the midst of a silence, and they all knew to whom she alluded and what had occurred.

Questions poured upon her then from all but Hannah, who went on eating her pieces of bread and butter, letting her eyes wander from one to another as they spoke.

She informed them of all she had gathered about him during their game of golf, but gave her information only under pressure of their questioning.

Ever since her eyes had penetrated the veil that for so long had hidden her sisters from her, Mary had resented, while so well she understood, their curiosity about the visitors who came to Bridnorth. There were times when it almost had a savor of indecency to her; times when she felt her cheeks grow warm at the ill-hidden purpose of their interest; times when it seemed to her as though Fanny, revealing her soul, had dressed it in diaphanous garments which almost were immodest in their transparent flimsiness.

She knew Fanny's soul now. She knew the souls of all of them. She knew her own and often she prayed that however Fate might treat her, even if as it now treated them, she still would keep it secret and hidden from eyes that were not meant to see.

"He comes from Somerset," she told them. "He has a large estate there. Something like two thousand acres and I suppose a big house. No--does nothing. I expect looking after a place like that is work enough. Farms himself, I believe--the way he speaks about it. Yes--married."

Jane thought the annoyance with which she gave it out was upon her own account. There was a smile in her eyes when Mary admitted it, as though her rejoinder might have been--"What a suck for you."

Such good nature as she had kept the words from utterance. But as well it was that Mary's annoyance had really had nothing to do with herself. Their question, chimed from Fanny and Jane together, had made the blood tingle in her cheeks. Why did they expose themselves like that? She would sooner have seen them with too short a skirt or too low a bodice. Scarcely conscious of this shame in Mary, it yet had had power to hold back the words from Jane's lips. Nevertheless she credited it to her virtue.

"They say I'm bitter," she thought. "They don't know how bitter I could be."

"Why isn't his wife with him?" she asked.

Mary professed complete indifference and ignorance.

"Do you suppose I asked him?" she said. "Marriage isn't a grazing in one field, is it? Life isn't one acre to everybody."

How interestingly he must have talked about his estate and farming. That came leaping at once into Jane's mind. A grazing in one field--that was a new-learnt phrase for Mary. There was little she knew about grazing and could not tell an acre from a rood.

"How does he play golf?" she inquired.

"Fairly well."

"How many strokes did he give you?"

"None--we played level."

"What did he win by?"

"I did--two and one."

"So you're going to play again?"

"Well, of course. It was a tight match."

Jane rose from the table to go and make out the linen for the laundry. Fanny sat staring at the tea leaves in the bottom of her cup. Hannah inquired in her gentle voice if any one wanted the last piece of bread and butter.

It was a closer observation than she knew when Jane said that Julius Liddiard came to Bridnorth to be alone.

He was a lonely man. There is that condition of loneliness more insuperable than others, the loneliness of mind in a body surrounded by the evidences of companionship. In this condition he suffered, unable to explain, unable to express.

Much as he loved it, in his own home at times he felt a stranger, whose presence within its walls was largely upon sufferance. Mastery, he claimed, exacting the purpose of his will, but in the very consciousness that it must be forced upon those about him, he felt his loneliness the more.

Authority was not his conception of a home. He had looked for unity, but could not find it. His wife and her sister who lived with them, the frequent visits of their friends and relations, these were the evidences of a companionship that served merely to drive him further and deeper into the lonely companionship of himself.

She had her right to life, he was forced in common justice to tell himself, and if she chose the transitory gayeties, finding more substance of life in a late night in London than an early morning on Somersetshire downs, that was her view of things to which she was fully entitled.

Of his own accord, he had invited her sister to live with them, seeking to please her; hoping to please himself. She made her home there. It was too late actually to turn her away when he had discovered the habit of her life was an incurable laziness which fretted and jarred against the energies of his mind.

"We make our lives," he said, enigmatically to Mary, that first day when they were playing golf. "Lord knows what powers direct us. I may make the most perfect approach on to this green, but nothing on earth can tell me exactly which way the ball is going to kick."

He had approached his life with all the precision of which he was capable, but the kick had come and it had come the wrong way. There was no accounting for its direction. It was obvious to him he could not see the world through his wife's eyes. After some years it had become no less obvious that she could not see it through his.

He wandered through the rooms of his own house, a stranger to the sounds of meaningless laughter that echoed there. He took his walking-stick, called a dog and strode out on to the downs, glad to be in fact alone.

Gradually such laughter as there was in him--he had his full share of it--died out of him. Much as he loved his wife, much as she loved him, he knew he was becoming more and more of a disappointment to her. In the keener moments of consciousness of his loneliness, she found him morose, until, unable to sing or laugh with the songs and laughter of that house, he came at times to believe he was morose himself.

"What's happening to me," he would say when he was alone; "what's happening to me is that I'm losing the joy of life."

Yet the sight of the countryside at Springtime seemed to himself to give him more sense of joy than all the revels in London that made his wife's eyes dance with youth.

He had laughed inordinately once; had won her heart by the compound of his spirits, grave and gay. It was quite true when she accused him of becoming too serious-minded. He heard the absence of his laughter and sometimes took himself away and alone that she might notice it the less.

There were times when it seemed she had lost all touch with his mind that once had interested her. He took his mind away and left his heart there at Wenlock Hall behind him.

What can happen with a man's mind when he holds it alone in his keeping is what happened to Julius Liddiard.

Jane was more accurate than she knew when she declared that he had come to Bridnorth to be alone.

It was his intention to sketch and play golf with the professional until such time as the longing for his home again would urge him back with a mind ready to ignore its disappointments in the joy of mating and meeting with his heart again.

Upon his first appearance on the golf links, the professional had disappointed him. Mary Throgmorton had stepped into the breach, recommended by the secretary as being able to give him as good a game as many of the members.

For the first half, they had played with little interchange of conversation. As they left the ninth green, she was two up. Then he had looked at her with an increasing interest, seeing what most men saw, the strong shoulders, the straight line of her back, the full strength of her figure, the firm stance she took as she played her game.

It was not until after the game was over and they sat at tea in the Club Room, that he noticed her face with any interest. Had this observation been denied him, he would have gone away from Bridnorth, describing her as a girl of the country, bred on sea air; the type of mother for sons of Englishmen, if ever she found her proper mate.

But across that tea-table, his mind saw more. He saw in flashes of expression out of the gray eyes that faced him, that soul which Mary had only so lately discovered in herself. He saw a range of emotion that could touch in its flight the highest purpose; he heard in her voice the laughter his mind could laugh with, the thoughts his mind could think with.

"Well, we've had a good game," he had said steadily. "Do you think I've a chance of beating you if we play again to-morrow?"

"I like to win," said she, "if there's a chance of being beaten. I expect you'll beat me next time. You don't know the course yet."

"We'll play to-morrow," he said.

And it had been arranged.

III