She turned and stared at him. “Then it wasn’t that you didn’t approve of me?”
“What put that in your head?”
“Mamma. She told me you couldn’t ask anybody again because of me. She said I’d frightened Lindley Vickers away. Like Aunt Charlotte.”
Dan smiled, a sombre, reminiscent smile.
“You don’t mean to say you still take Mamma seriously? I never did.”
“But—Mark—”
“Or him either.”
It hurt her like some abominable blasphemy.
XVII
Nothing would ever happen. She would stay on in Morfe, she and Mamma: without Mark, without Dan, without the Sutcliffes. …
They were going. …
They were gone.
Chapter XXVIII
I
She lay out on the moor, under the August sun. Her hands were pressed like a bandage over her eyes. When she lifted them she caught the faint pink glow of their flesh. The light throbbed and nickered as she pressed it out, and let it in.
The sheep couched, panting, in the shade of the stone covers. She lay so still that the peewits had stopped their cry.
Something bothered her. …
And in the east one pure, prophetic star—one pure prophetic star—Trembles between the darkness and the dawn.
What you wrote last year. No reason why you shouldn’t write modern plays in blank verse if you wanted to. Only people didn’t say those things. You couldn’t do it that way.
Let the thing go. Tear it to bits and burn them in the kitchen fire.
If you lay still, perfectly still, and stopped thinking the other thing would come back.
In dreams He has made you wise,
With the wisdom of silence and prayer,
God, who has blinded your eyes,
With the dusk of your hair.
The Mother. The Mother. Mother and Son.
You and he are near akin.
Would you slay your brother-in-sin?
What he does yourself shall do—
That was the Son’s hereditary destiny.
Lying on her back under Karva, she dreamed her “Dream-Play”; saying the unfinished verses over and over again, so as to remember them when she got home. She was unutterably happy.
She thought: “I don’t care what happens so long as I can go on.”
She jumped up to her feet. “I must go and see what Mamma’s doing.”
Her mother was sewing in the drawing-room and waiting for her to come to tea. She looked up and smiled.
“What are you so pleased about?” she said.
“Oh, nothing.”
Mamma was adorable, sitting there like a dove on its nest, dressed in a dove’s dress, grey on grey, turning dove’s eyes to you in soft, crinkly lids. She held her head on one side, smiling at some secret that she kept. Mamma was happy, too.
“What are you looking such an angel for?”
Mamma lifted up her work, showing an envelope that lay on her lap, the crested flap upwards, a blue gun-carriage on a white ground, and the motto: “Ubique.”
Catty had been into Reyburn to shop and had called for the letters. Mark was coming home in April.
“Oh—Mamma—”
“There’s a letter for you, Mary.”
(Not from Mark.)
“If he gets that appointment he won’t go back.” She thought: “She’ll never be unhappy again. She’ll never be afraid he’ll get cholera.”
For a minute their souls met and burned together in the joy they shared.
Then broke apart.
“Aren’t you going to show me Mr. Sutcliffe’s letter?”
“Why should I?”
“You don’t mean to say there’s anything in it I can’t see?”
“You can see it if you like. There’s nothing in it.”
That was why she hadn’t wanted her to see it. For anything there was in it you might never have known him. But Mrs. Sutcliffe had sent her love.
Mamma looked up sharply.
“Did you write to him, Mary?”
“Of course I did.”
“You’ll not write again. He’s let you know pretty plainly he isn’t going to be bothered.”
(It wasn’t that. It couldn’t be that.)
“Did they say anything more about your going there?”
“No.”
“That ought to show you then. … But as long as you live you’ll give yourself away to people who don’t want you.”
“I’d rather you didn’t talk about them.”
“I should like to know what I can talk about,” said Mamma.
She folded up her work and laid it in the basket.
Her voice dropped from the sharp note of resentment.
“I wish you’d go and see if those asters have come.”
II
The asters had come. She had carried out the long, shallow boxes into the garden. She had left her mother kneeling beside them, looking with adoration into the large, round, innocent faces, white and purple, mauve and magenta and amethyst and pink. If the asters had not come the memory of the awful things they had said to each other would have remained with them till bedtime; but Mamma would be happy with the asters like a child with its toys, planning where they were to go and planting them.
She went up to her room. After thirteen years she had still the same childish pleasure in the thought that it was hers and couldn’t be taken from her, because nobody else wanted it.
The bookshelves stretched into three long rows on the white wall above her bed to hold the books Mr. Sutcliffe had given her; a light blue row for the Thomas Hardys; a dark blue for the George Merediths; royal blue and gold for the Rudyard Kiplings. And in the narrow upright bookcase in the arm of the T facing her writing-table, Mark’s books: the Homers and the Greek dramatists. Their backs had faded from puce colour to drab.
Mark’s books.—When she looked at them she could still feel her old, childish lust for possession, her childish sense of insecurity, of defeat. And something else. The beginning of thinking things about Mamma. She could see herself standing in Mark’s bedroom at Five Elms and Mamma with her hands on Mark’s books. She could hear herself saying, “You’re afraid.”
“What did I think Mamma was afraid of?”
Mamma was happy out there with the asters.
There would be three hours before dinner.
She began setting down the fragments of the “Dream-Play” that had come to her: then the outlines. She saw very clearly and precisely how it would have to
