It was true that Sarah had already rejected her offer—brutally, almost, in her determination that May should suffer no further for her son. But May had already almost forgotten the rough sentences which for the time being had slammed the opening door in her eager face. Sarah was strong, she knew, but she herself, because of love in the past and pity in the present, felt stronger still. She said to herself, smiling, that sooner or later she would find an argument that would serve. Sooner or later Sarah would yield, and share with secret delight in the surprise that they would so gaily prepare for the old man. Sooner or later the boat would put out from port that carried the lost lad—Geordie, with his pockets empty but his heart full, and every nerve of him reaching towards his home.
Now she had turned the end of the bay, and was running along the flat road that hugged the curve of the shore. Below on her right were the sands, almost within flick of her whip, with the river-channel winding its dull length a hundred yards away. Beyond it, the sand narrowed into the arm of the marsh, until the eye caught the soft etching of the Thornthwaite farm, set on the faint gold and green of the jutting land.
The inn, low, white-faced, dark, with all the light of it in the eyes that looked so far abroad, was very quiet when she came to it about three o’clock. The odd-job man was waiting about to take her horse, and she paused to have a word or two with him in the yard. Then she went briskly into the silent place, and at once the whole drowsy air of it stirred and became alive. The spotlessness of the house seemed to take on a sparkling quality from the swift vitality of her presence. The very fire seemed to burn brighter when she entered, and the high lights on the steels and brasses to take a finer gleam. Her father called to her from the room where he lay upstairs, and her buoyant tread, as she went up, seemed to strengthen even his numb limbs and useless feet.
She sat by his bed for some time, telling him all the news, and conveying as much as she could of the hiring and marketing stir combined. This particular person had wished to know how he was; the other had sent him a message to be delivered word for word. One had a grandmother who had died in similar case; another a remedy that would recover him in a week. Bits of gossip she had for him, sketches of old friends; stories of old traits cropping up again which made him chuckle and cap them from the past. By the time she had finished he was firmly linked again to life, and had forgotten that deadly detachment which oppresses the long-sick. Indeed, he almost forgot, as he listened, that he had not been in Witham himself, hearing the gossip with his own ears and seeing the familiar faces with his own eyes. For the time being he was again part of that central country life, the touchstone by which country-folk test reality and the truth of things, and by contact with which their own identity is intensified and preserved.
But her eyes were turned continually to the window as she chatted and laughed, dwelling upon the misty picture even when they were not followed by her mind. Only her brain answered without fail when her gaze travelled to the farm on the farther shore. Gradually the picture shadowed and dimmed in line, but still she sat by the bed and laughed with her lips while her heart looked always abroad. Neither she nor her father ever drew a blind in the little inn. They had lived so long with that wide prospect stretching into the house that they would have stifled mentally between eyeless walls.
She talked until he was tired, and then she made his tea, and left him happy with the papers which she had brought from Witham. Her own tea she ate mechanically, with the whole of her mind still fixed on the promise of the day, and when she had finished she was drawn to the window again before she knew. The Thornthwaites would be home by now, she concluded, looking out. Tired and discouraged, they would be back again at the farm, feeling none of the quivering hope which lifted and thrilled her heart. Sarah would not even dwell on the offer, having put it by for good, and Simon did not as much as know that there had been an offer at all. They would creep to bed and sleep drearily, or wake drearily against their will, while she would wake of her own accord in order to clasp her purpose and find it still alive. She could not bear the thought of the long, blank night which would so soon be wrapping them round; even a stubborn refusal of her hope would be a better friend to them than
