Simply Love

do not understand, Anne. There is the vision, but it flows down my right arm, which is not there. Am I to produce phantom paintings?”

“Perhaps,” she said, “you have allowed the vision to master you instead of bending it to your will.”

She was sitting very upright on the stone bench at the back of the folly, her feet together, her hands cradled in each other, palm-up, in her lap. She looked very much like the rather prim teacher she had been until a few days ago-and ever and always dazzlingly beautiful. He turned his head away.

“The vision is not like a muscle to be exercised,” he said softly. “I have lost an eye as well as an arm, Anne. I do not see properly. Everything is changed. Everything has narrowed and flattened and lost perspective. How could I even see accurately to paint?”

“Properly,” she said, picking up on the one word he had spoken. “How do we know what is proper or accurate vision?”

“That which involves two eyes?” he said rather bitterly.

“But whose two eyes?” she asked. “Have you ever watched a bird of prey hovering so high in the sky that it is almost indiscernible to the human eye and then diving to catch a mouse on the ground? Can you even begin to imagine the vision that bird has, Sydnam? Can you imagine seeing the world through its eyes? And have you seen a cat at night, able to see what is invisible to us in the darkness? What must it be like to see as a cat does? How do we know what is proper vision? Is there any such thing? Because you have only one eye, you see differently from me or from yourself when you had two. But is it therefore improper vision? Perhaps your artistic vision is great enough to see new meaning in things and to find a different way of expressing itself without in any way diminishing itself in the process. Perhaps it has needed the changes so that it may challenge you to do great things you never even imagined before.”

He stood looking out over the lake as she spoke, its surface gray and rough in the wind but nevertheless reflecting some of the myriad colors of autumn that the trees were sporting.

He felt a painful surge of love for her. She wanted so badly to help him, just as she had the night before last after he had woken from his nightmare. And yet there seemed no way he could help her.

“Anne,” he said, “I cannot paint again. I cannot. Yet I cannot live without painting.”

Those final words were wrenched unwillingly from him and horrified him. He had never dared even think such thoughts before. He dared not believe in the truth of them now. For if they were true, there was no real hope left in life.

Suddenly, without warning, he hit the very bottom of despair.

And then he was horrified anew as he sobbed aloud and, when he tried to strangle the sound, sobbed once more.

After that he could not stop the sobs that tore at his chest and embarrassed him horribly. He turned to stumble away, but two arms came about him and held him tightly even when he would have broken away from them.

“No,” Anne said, “it is all right. It is all right, my love. It is all right.”

Not once before now had he wept. He had screamed when he had been unable to stop himself, he had groaned and moaned and later raged and suffered in silence and endured. But he had never wept.

Now he could not stop weeping as Anne held him and crooned to him as if he were a child who had hurt himself. And like a child that had hurt itself, he drew comfort from her arms and her warmth and her murmurings. And finally the sobs turned to a few shuddering hiccups and stopped entirely.

“My God, Anne,” he said, pulling back from her and fumbling in his pocket for a handkerchief. “I am so sorry. What kind of a man will you take me for?”

“One who has conquered every aspect of his pain except the deepest,” she said.

He sighed and realized suddenly that it had started to rain.

“Come and shelter inside,” he said, taking her hand and drawing her back under the roof of the temple. “I am so sorry, Anne. This morning seriously discomposed me. But I am glad I did it. David was happy. And he is going to be good with oils.”

She had laced her fingers with his.

“You must face the final, deepest pain,” she said. “No, more than that. You have, in fact, just faced it. But you have looked at it with despair. There must be hope, Sydnam. There is your artistic vision and your talent, and there is you. They have to be enough to propel you onward even without your right arm and your right eye.”

He raised their hands and kissed the back of hers before releasing it. He tried to smile at her.

“I will teach David,” he said. “I will be a father to him in every way I can. I will ride with him. I will-”

“You must paint with him,” she said. “You must paint.”

But though he had calmed down considerably, there was still a coldness and a rawness at the core of his being, where he had not dared tread during all the years since he returned from the Peninsula.

“And you,” he said, realizing something suddenly with blinding clarity when he had not even been thinking about it, “need to go home, Anne.”

There was a brief, tense silence between them while the faint rushing sound of rain beyond the shelter mingled with the lapping sounds of the lake water.

“To Ty Gwyn?” she asked.

“To Gloucestershire,” he said.

“No.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “it is necessary to go back before we can move forward. At least I think that must be so, unwelcome as the thought is. I suppose we both need to go back, Anne. Perhaps if we do it, both of us, there will be hope. I cannot see it in my own case, but I must try.”

When he looked at her, he found her staring back, her face pale, her look inscrutable.

“It is what you want me to do,” he said.

“But…” She paused for a long moment. “I cannot and will not go home, Sydnam. It would change and solve nothing. You are wrong.”

“So be it, then,” he said, taking her hand in his again.

They sat in silence, watching the rain.

Anne eyed the horses apprehensively. They looked so very large and full of energy, and the stable yard seemed to be filled with them. It was some time since she had ridden. But she would do so this morning in a good cause. She glanced over to where Sydnam and Kit were supervising David as he mounted. Having accomplished the task successfully, her son gazed down, triumphant and happy, at both men-and then across the stable yard at her.

“Look at me, Mama,” he called.

“I am looking,” she assured him.

Kit had turned his attention to Lauren, helping her mount her sidesaddle, and lifting Sophia up to sit with her.

Sydnam came striding toward Anne.

“Riding is not something you forget,” he assured her, correctly interpreting the look on her face. He grinned at her in his attractive, lopsided way. “And Kit has chosen a good horse for you.”

“Meaning she is ancient and lame in all four legs?” she asked hopefully.

He laughed.

“Set your boot on my hand and you will be in the saddle in no time,” he said.

“Let me do that, Syd,” Kit suggested, coming toward them.

“I thought I broke you of that habit years ago,” Sydnam said, still grinning.

“Of underestimating you?” Kit said. “Go ahead, then, and show off for your bride. Impress all of us.” He was chuckling too.

Anne set her booted foot in Sydnam’s hand and found it as solid as a mounting block. A few moments later she sat in her sidesaddle, smiling down at him as she arranged her skirts about her. Kit had slapped a hand on his shoulder. They were both laughing.

“You have made your point,” Kit said. “No one needs two arms. The second one is superfluous.”

Just yesterday afternoon Anne had been in the depths of gloom, sitting in the temple folly by the lake while it