The Helpmate Part 58

"Oh! _Am_ I to suffer more?"

"I believe that's the only way your happiness can come to you--through great suffering. I'm only afraid that the suffering may come through Peggy, if you don't take care."

"Peggy--"

It was her own terror put into words.

"Yes. That child has a terrible capacity for loving. And for her that means suffering. She loves you. She loves her father. Do you suppose she won't suffer when she sees? Her little heart will be torn in two between you."

"Oh, Edith--I cannot bear it."

She hid her face from the anguish.

"You needn't. That's it. It rests with you."

"With me? If you would only tell me how."

"I can't tell you anything. It'll come. Probably in the way you least expect it. But--it'll come."

"Edie, I feel as if you held us all together. And when you've gone--"

"You mean when _it's_ gone. When it's 'gone,'" said Edie, smiling. "I shall hold you together all the more. You needn't sigh like that."

"Did I sigh?"

As Anne stooped over the bed she sighed again, thinking how Edith's loving arms used to leap up and hold her, and how they could never hold anything any more.

Of all the things that Edith said to her that afternoon, two remained fixed in Anne's memory: how Peggy would suffer through overmuch loving--she remembered that saying, because it had confirmed her terror; and how love was a provision for the soul's redemption of the body, or for the body's redemption of the soul. This she remembered, because she did not understand it.

That was in August. Before the month was out they were beginning to give Edith morphia.

In September Gorst came to see her for the last time.

In October she died in her brother's arms.

In the days that followed, it was as if her spirit, refusing to depart from them, had rested on the sister she had loved. Spirit to spirit, she stooped, kindling in Anne her own dedicated flame. In the white death-chamber, and through the quiet house, the presence of Anne, moving with a hushed footfall, was like the presence of a blessed spirit. Her face was as a face long hidden upon the heart of peace. Her very grief aspired; it had wings, lifting her towards her sister in her heavenly place.

For Anne, in the days that followed, was possessed by a great and burning charity. Mrs. Hannay called and was taken into the white room to see Edith. And Anne's heart went out to Mrs. Hannay, when she spoke of the beauty and goodness of Edith; and to Lawson Hannay, when he pressed her hand without speaking; and to Gorst, when she saw him stealing on tiptoe from Edith's room, his face swollen and inflamed with grief. Her heart went out to all of them, because they had loved Edith.

And to her husband her heart went out with a tenderness born of an immense pity and compa.s.sion. For the first three days, Majendie gave no sign that he was shaken by his sister's death. But on the evening of the day they buried her, Anne found him in the study, sitting in his low chair by the fire, his head sunk, his body bowed forward over his knees, convulsed with a nervous shivering. He started and stared at her approach, and straightened himself suddenly. She held out her hand. He looked at it dumbly, as if unwilling or afraid to take it.

"My dear," she said softly.

Then she knelt beside him, and drew his head down upon her breast, and let it rest there.

CHAPTER XXVII

It was a Thursday night in October, three weeks after Edith's death. Anne was in her room, undressing. She moved noiselessly, with many tender precautions, for fear of waking Peggy, and for fear of destroying the peace that possessed her own soul like heavenly sleep. It was the mystic mood that went before prayer.

In those three weeks Anne felt that she had been brought very near to G.o.d. She had not known such stillness and content since the days at Scarby that had made her life terrible. It was as if Edith's spirit in bliss had power given it to help her sister, to draw Anne with it into the divine presence.

And the dead woman bound the living to each other also, as she had said.

How she bound them Anne had not realised until to-day. It was Mrs.

Elliott's day, her Thursday. Anne had spent half an hour in Thurston Square, and had come away with a cold, unsatisfactory feeling towards f.a.n.n.y. f.a.n.n.y, for the first time, had jarred on her. She had so plainly hesitated between condolence and congratulation. She seemed to be secretly rejoicing in Edith Majendie's death. Her manner intimated clearly that a burden had been removed from her friend's life, and that the time had now come for Anne to blossom out and enjoy herself. Anne had been glad to get away from f.a.n.n.y, to come back to the house in Prior Street and to find Walter waiting for her. f.a.n.n.y, in spite of her intellectual rarity, lacked the sense that, after all, _he_ had, the sense of Edith's spiritual perfection. Strangely, inconsistently, incomprehensibly, he had it. He and his wife had that in common, if they had nothing else. They were bound to each other by Edith's dear and sacred memory, an immaterial, immortal tie. They would always share their knowledge of her. Other people might take for granted that her terrible illness had loosened, little by little, the bond that held them to her.

They knew that it was not so. They never found themselves declining on the mourner's pitiful commonplaces, "Poor Edie"; "She is released"; "It's a mercy she was taken." It was their tribute to Edith's triumphant personality that they mourned for her as for one cut off in the fulness of a strong, beneficent life.

For those three weeks Anne remained to her husband all that she had been on the night of Edith's burial.

And, as she felt that n.o.body but her husband understood what she had lost in Edith, she realised for the first time his kindred to his sister. She forced herself to dwell on his many admirable qualities. He was unselfish, chivalrous, the soul of honour. On his chivalry, which touched her more nearly than his other virtues, she was disposed to put a very high interpretation. She felt that, in his way, he acknowledged her spiritual perfection, also, and reverenced it. If their relations only continued as they were, she believed that she would yet be happy with him. To think of him as she had once been obliged to think was to profane the sorrow that sanctified him now. She was persuaded that the shock of Edith's death had changed him, that he was enn.o.bled by his grief. She could not yet see that the change was in herself. She said to herself that her prayers for him were answered.

For it was no longer an effort, painful and perfunctory, to pray for her husband. Since Edith's death she had prayed for him, as she had prayed in the time of reconciliation that followed her first discovery of his sin.

She was horrified when she realised how in six years her pa.s.sion of redemption had grown cold. It was there that she had failed him, in letting go the immaterial hold by which she might have drawn him with her into the secret shelter of the Unseen. She perceived that in those years her spiritual life had suffered by the invasion of her earthly trouble.

She had approached the silent shelter with cries of supplication for herself and for her child, the sweet mortal thing she had loved above all mortal things. Every year had made it harder for her to reach the sources of her help, hardest of all to achieve the initiatory state, the nakedness, the prostration, the stillness of the dedicated soul. Too many miseries cried and strove in her. She could no longer shut to her door, and bar the pa.s.sage to the procession of her thoughts, no longer cleanse and empty her spirit's house for the divine thing she desired to dwell with her.

And now she was restored to her peace; lifted up and swept, effortless, into the place of heavenly help. Anne's soul had no longer to reach out her hand and feel her way to G.o.d, for it was G.o.d who sought for her and found her. She heard behind her, as it were, the footsteps of the divine pursuing power. Once more, as in the mystic days before her marriage, she had only to close her eyes, and the communion was complete. At night, when her prayer was ended, she lay motionless in the darkness, till she seemed to pa.s.s into the ultimate bliss, beyond the reach of prayer. There were moments when she felt herself to be close upon the very vision of G.o.d, the beat.i.tude of the pure.

After these moments Anne found herself contemplating her own inviolate sanct.i.ty.

There was in Anne an immense sincerity, underlying a perfect tangle of minute deceptions and hypocrisies. She was not deceived as to the supreme event. She was truly experiencing the great spiritual pa.s.sion which, alone of pa.s.sions, is destined to an immortal satisfaction. She had all but touched the end of the saint's progress. But she was ignorant, both of the paths that brought her there, and the paths that had led and might again lead, her feet astray.

Each night, when she closed her bedroom door, she felt that she was entering into a sanctuary. She was profoundly, tenderly grateful to her husband for the renunciation that made that refuge possible to her. She accepted her blessed isolation as his gift.

This Thursday had been a day of little lacerating distractions. She had gone through it thirsting for the rest and surrender, the healing silence of the night.

She undressed slowly, being by nature thorough and deliberate in all her movements.

She was standing before her looking-gla.s.s, about to unpin her hair, when she heard a low knock at her door. Majendie had been detained, and was late in coming to take his last look at Peggy before going to bed.

Anne opened the door softly, and signed to him to make no noise. He stole on tiptoe to the child's cot, and stood there for a moment. Then he came and sat down in the chair by the dressing-table, where Anne was standing with her arms raised, unpinning her hair. Majendie had always admired that att.i.tude in Anne. It was simple, calm, cla.s.sic, and superbly feminine. Her long white wrapper clothed her more perfectly than any dress.

He sat looking at the quick white fingers untwisting the braid of hair.

It hung divided into three strands, still rippling with the braiding, still dull with its folded warmth. She combed the three into one sleek sheet that covered her like a veil, drawn close over head and shoulders.

Her face showed smooth and saint-like between the cloistral bands.

Majendie thought he had never seen anything more beautiful than that face and hair, with their harmonies of dull gold and sombre white.

"I like you," he said; "but isn't the style just a trifle severe?"

Anne said nothing. She was trying to forget his presence while she yet permitted it.

"Do you mind my looking at you like this?"

"No."

(They spoke in low voices, for fear of waking the sleeping child.)