Moor Fires Part 77

"You and Daniel will have a fine talk, I suppose. The walls of that house are very thin. Be careful."

"Yes, my dear. I can't help wishing I had not left home."

She stood up. "I don't wish anything undone. If you begin undoing, you find yourself in a worse tangle."

"You're not unhappy?"

"Do I look it?"

"You always answer one question with another. You didn't look it. You do now."

She sighed. "I almost wish you hadn't come, Rupert. You made beauty seem so near."

CHAPTER x.x.xV

She had another reason for her wish. She knew that Rupert had but delayed what was inevitable, and when it came one night, a few weeks later, she had no feeling beyond relief that the fight was over, that she need no longer scheme to outwit George with her advances and retreats. Afterwards, she suffered from a black anger that she must serve the man she did not love, a dull despair from the knowledge that, while both lived, the tie would hold. Her mind tried, and failed, to make nothing of it; by nature she was bound to him who took most from her, and when George had played the husband, he left her dest.i.tute. That Zebedee would always have the best of her had been her boast, but for a time, there was nothing he could have. She was George Halkett's woman.

The day was fogged with memories of the night, yet through that fog she looked for his return. She was glad when she heard his step outside and, going to the kitchen door, felt herself lifted off her feet. She did not try to a.n.a.lyze the strange mingling of willingness and shrinking that made up her feeling for him, but she found mental safety in abandoning herself to what must be, a primitive pleasure in the fact of being possessed, a shameful happiness in submission.

Nevertheless, it was only in his presence that she lost her red sense of shame, and though she still walked n.o.bly, looked with clear eyes, and carried a high head, she fancied herself bent by broken pride, blinded and dusty-haired. Zebedee's books helped her to blot out that vision of herself and the other of Mildred Caniper still sitting by the fire and refusing the fulness of the sun. What she read amazed her with its profundity and amused her with its inconclusiveness. She had an awed pity for men whose lives were occupied in these endless questionings, and while Mildred idly turned the pages of periodicals she once had scorned, Helen frowned and bit her lips over the problems of the ages.

They gave her and Zebedee something impersonal to talk of when he came on his weekly visit.

"It's no good telling me," she warned him firmly, "that my poplars are not really there. I can feel them and see them and hear them--always hear them. If they weren't there, they would be! If I exist, so do they."

"Quite so. You're doing very well. I told you the medicine would turn to food."

"It's not food. What is it that nasty people chew? Gum? Yes, chewing-gum. It keeps me going. I mean--"

He helped her over that abyss. "It's a most improper name for wisdom."

"This isn't wisdom. Wisdom is just going on--and--keeping the world clean."

"Then," he said slowly, "you may count among the sages."

They stood together by the schoolroom window and watched the windy sunshine darting among the laurel bushes and brightening the bra.s.s on the harness of the patient horse outside the gate.

"I wonder," Helen said, speaking as if she were not quite awake, "whether Mr. Pinderwell ever read philosophy."

"No," Zebedee answered in the same tones; "he took to wood-carving."

This time she leapt the abyss unaided and with a laugh.

"But then, he never had a stepmother nodding beside the fire. What is going to happen to her?"

"She has very little strength."

"But she isn't going to die?"

"Not yet, I think, dear." The word slipped from him, and they both listened to its echoes.

"I wish you'd go," she whispered.

"I'm going." He did not hesitate at the door or he would have seen her drop into a chair and let her limp arms slide across the table as she let out a noisy sob of happiness because his friendliness was still only a cloak that could sometimes be lifted to show the man beneath.

Almost gaily, she went to Mildred Caniper's room.

"Zebedee stayed a long time today. I could hear you talking."

"Yes."

"Isn't he busy now?"

"He works all day and half the night."

"Oh." Mildred's twisted face regained a semblance of its old expression and her voice some of its precision. "Then you ought to be looking after him."

"I can't manage both of you."

"No, but Mrs. Samson could look after me." The words were slovenly again; the face changed subtly as sand changes under water. It became soft and indefinite and yielding, betraying the slackening of the mind.

"Mrs. Samson is a nice woman--very kind. She knows what I want. I must have a good fire. I don't need very much. She doesn't bother me--or talk. I don't want to be bothered--about anything. I'm still--rather tired. I like to sit here and be warm. Give me that magazine, Helen.

There's a story--" She found the place and seemed to forget all she had said.

Helen left the room and, as she sat on the topmost stair, she wished Mr.

Pinderwell would stop and speak to her, but he hurried up and down as he had always done, intent on his own sad business of seeking what he had lost. It was strange that he could not see the children who were so plain to Helen. She turned to speak to them, but she had outgrown them in these days, and even Jane was puzzled by her grief that Mildred Caniper wanted to be kept warm, and, with some lingering faculty, wished Helen to be happy, but needed her no longer.

Helen whispered into the dimness because her thoughts were unwholesome and must be cast forth.

"She only wants to be kept warm! It was sweet of her to try to think of me, but she couldn't go on thinking. Oh, Jane, Mrs. Samson and I are just the same. She doesn't mind who puts coals on the fire. I wish she'd die. I always loved her very much, and she loved me, but now she doesn't. She's just a--bundle. It's ugly. If I stay here and look at her, I shall get like her. Oh--she wants me to go and live with Zebedee.

Zebedee! He wouldn't like me to go on like this. The philosophers--but that old bishop can't make me think that Notya isn't dying. That's what she's doing, Jane--dying. But no, dying is good and death is splendid.

This is decay." She stood up and shuddered. "I mustn't stay here," she murmured sensibly.

She called to Jim in a loud voice that attempted cheerfulness and alarmed her with its noise in the silent house of sorrow and disease.

"The moor, Jim!" she said, and when she had pa.s.sed through the garden with the dog leaping round her, she shook her skirts and held up her palms to get the freshness of the wind on them.

"We'll find water," she said, but she would not go to the stream that ran into the larch-wood. Today, the taint of evil was about Halkett's Farm, as that of decay was in Mildred Caniper's room.

"We'll go to the pool where the rushes are, Jim, and wash our hands and face."

They ran fleetly, and as they went she saw George at a distance on his horse. He waved his hat, and, before she knew what she was doing, she answered with a grimace that mocked him viciously and horrified her with its spontaneity. She cried aloud, and, sinking to the ground, she hid her dishonoured face.

"No, no," she moaned. She hated that action like an obscenity. Surely she was tainted, too.

Jim licked her covering hands, and whined when she paid no heed.