He sprang to his feet.
“Much better,” he said.
IX
She would not see him again that day. Dan was going to dine with him at the Buck Hotel.
When Dan came back from Reyburn he said he wouldn’t go. He had a headache. If Vickers could have a headache, so could he. He sulked all evening in the smoking-room by himself; but towards nine o’clock he thought better of it and went round, he said, to look Vickers up.
Her mother yawned over her book; and the yawns made her impatient; she wanted to be out of doors, walking, instead of sitting there listening to Mamma.
At nine o’clock Mamma gave one supreme yawn and dragged herself to bed.
She went out through the orchard into the Back Lane. She could see Nannie Learoyd sitting on the stone stairs of Horn’s granary, waiting for young Horn to come round the corner of his yard. Perhaps they would go up into the granary and hide under the straw. She turned into the field track to the schoolhouse and the highway. In the dark bottom the river lay like a broad, white, glittering road.
She stopped by the schoolhouse, considering whether she would go up to the moor by the high fields and come back down the lane, or go up the lane and come back down the fields.
“Too dark to find the gaps if I come back by the fields.” She had forgotten the hidden moon.
There was a breaking twilight when she reached the lane. She came down at a swinging stride. Her feet went on the grass borders without a sound.
At the last crook of the lane she came suddenly on a man and woman standing in her path by the stone wall. It would be Nannie Learoyd and young Horn. They were fixed in one block, their faces tilted backwards, their bodies motionless. The woman’s arms were round the man’s neck, his arms round her waist. There was something about the queer back-tilted faces—queer and ugly.
As she came on she saw them break loose from each other and swing apart: Nannie Learoyd and Lindley Vickers.
X
She lay awake all night. Her brain, incapable of thought, kept turning round and round, showing her on an endless rolling screen the images of Lindley and Nannie Learoyd, clinging together, loosening, swinging apart, clinging together. When she came down on Sunday morning breakfast was over.
Sunday—Sunday. She remembered. Last night was Saturday night. Lindley Vickers was coming to Sunday dinner and Sunday supper. She would have to get away somewhere, to Dorsy or the Sutcliffes. She didn’t want to see him again. She wanted to forget that she ever had seen him.
Her mother and Dan had shut themselves up in the smoking-room; she found them there, talking. As she came in they stopped abruptly and looked at each other. Her mother began picking at the pleats in her gown with nervous, agitated fingers. Dan got up and left the room.
“Well, Mary, you’ll not see Mr. Vickers again. He’s just told Dan he isn’t coming.”
Then he knew that she had seen him in the lane with Nannie.
“I don’t want to see him,” she said.
“It’s a pity you didn’t think of that before you put us in such a position.”
She understood Lindley; but she wasn’t even trying to understand her mother. The vexed face and picking fingers meant nothing to her. She was saying to herself, “I can’t tell Mamma I saw him with Nannie in the lane. I oughtn’t to have seen him. He didn’t know anybody was there. He didn’t want me to see him. I’d be a perfect beast to tell her.”
Her mother went on: “I don’t know what to do with you, Mary. One would have thought my only daughter would have been a comfort to me, but I declare you’ve given me more trouble than any of my children.”
“More than Dan?”
“Dan hadn’t a chance. He’d have been different if your poor father hadn’t driven him out of the house. He’d be different now if your Uncle Victor had kept him. … It’s hard for poor Dan if he can’t bring his friends to the house any more because of you.”
“Because of me?”
“Because of your folly.”
She understood. Her mother believed that she had frightened Lindley away. She was thinking of Aunt Charlotte.
It would have been all right if she could have told her about Nannie; then Mamma would have seen why Lindley couldn’t come.
“I don’t care,” she thought. “She may think what she likes. I can’t tell her.”
XI
Lindley Vickers had gone. Nothing was left of him but Mamma’s silence and Dan’s, and Nannie’s flush as she slunk by and her obscene smirk of satisfaction.
Then Nannie forgot him. As if nothing had happened she hung about Horn’s yard and the Back Lane, waiting for young Horn. She smiled her trusting smile again. As long as you lived in Morfe you would remember.
Mary didn’t blame her mother and Dan for their awful attitude. She couldn’t blink the fact that she had begun to care for a man who was no better than young Horn, who had shown her that he didn’t care for her by going to Nannie. If he could go to Nannie he was no better than young Horn.
She thought of Lindley’s communion with Nannie as a part of him, essential, enduring. Beside it, her own communion with him was not quite real. She remembered his singing; she remembered playing to him and sitting beside him on the bracken as you remember things that have happened to you a long time ago (if they had really happened). She remembered phrases broken from their context (if they had ever had a context): “Das man vom liebsten was man hat. …” “If you don’t know I can’t tell you—Dear.” … “And when—when—Then you won’t think, you’ll know.”
She said to herself, “I must have been mad. It couldn’t have happened. I must have made it up.”
But, if you made up things like
