The Helpmate Part 18

She took up the flowers and tried them, now at her breast, and now at her waist.

"Where shall I put them?" said she. "Here? Or here?"

"Just there."

She let them stay there in the hollow of her breast.

He laid the box on the dressing-table close to her hand where it searched for pins.

"I've brought you this," he said gently.

She smiled that divine and virgin smile of hers. Anne was big, but her smile was small and close and shy.

"You remembered my birthday?"

"Did you think I should forget?"

She opened the lid with cool unhurried fingers. Under the wrappings of tissue paper and cotton wool, a shape struck clear and firm and familiar to her touch. A sacred thrill ran through her as she felt there the presence of the holy thing, the symbol so dear and so desired that it was divined before seen.

She lifted from the box an old silver crucifix. It must have been the work of some craftsman whose art was pure and fine as the silver he had wrought in. But that was not what Anne saw. She had always found something painful and repellent in those crucifixes of wood which distort and deepen the lines of ivory, or in those of ivory which gives again the very pallor of human death. But the precious metal had somehow eternalised the symbol of the crucified body. She saw more than the torture, the exhaustion, the attenuation. Surely, on the closed eyelids there rested the glory and the peace of divine accomplishment?

She stood still, holding it in her hand and looking at it. Majendie stood still, also looking at her. He was not quite sure whether she were going to accept that gift, whether she would hesitate to take from his profane hands a thing so sacred and so supreme. He was aware that his fate somehow hung on her acceptance, and he waited in silence, lest a word should destroy the work of love in her.

Anne, too (when she could detach her mind from the crucifix), felt that the moment was decisive. To accept that gift, of all gifts, was to lay her spirit under obligation to him. It was more than a surrender of body, heart, or mind. It was to admit him to a.s.sociation with the unspeakably sacred acts of prayer and adoration.

If it were possible that that had been his desire; if he had meant his gift as a tribute, not to her only, but to the spirit of holiness in her; if, in short, he had been serious, then, indeed, she could not hesitate.

For, if it were so, her prayer was answered.

She laid down the crucifix and turned to him. They searched each other with their eyes. She saw, without wholly understanding, the pain in his.

He saw, also unintelligently, the austerity in hers.

"Are you not going to take it, then?" he said.

"I don't know. Do you realise that you are giving me a very sacred thing?"

"I do."

"And that I can't treat it as I would an ordinary present?"

He lowered his eyelids. "I didn't think you'd want to wear it in your hair, dear."

She was about to ask him what he did mean then; but some instinct held her, told her not to press the sign of grace too hard. She looked at him still more intently. His eyes had disconcerted and baffled her, but now she was sheltered by their lowered lids. Then she noticed for the first time that his face showed the marks of suffering. It was as if it had dropped suddenly the brilliant mask it wore for her, and given up its secret unaware. He had suffered so that he had not slept. It was plain to her in the droop of his eyelids, and in the drawn lines about his eyes and mouth and nostrils. She was touched with tenderness and pity, and a certain unintelligible awe. And she knew her hour. She knew that if she closed her heart now, it would never open to him. She knew that it was his hour as well as hers. She felt, reverently, that it was, above all, G.o.d's hour.

She laid her hand on her husband's gift, saying to herself that if she took that crucifix she would be taking him with it into the holy places of her heart.

"I will take it." Her voice came shy and inarticulate as a marriage vow.

"Thank you," he said.

He wondered if she would turn to him with some sign of tenderness, whether she would stoop to him and touch him with her hand or her lips; or whether she looked to him to offer the first caress.

She did nothing. It was as if her intentness, her concentration upon her holy purpose held her. While her soul did but turn to him in the darkness, it kept and would keep their hands and lips apart.

He divined that she was only half-won. But, though her body yet moved in its charmed inviolate circle, he felt dimly that the spiritual barrier was down.

She turned from him and went slowly to the door. He opened it and followed her. On the stairs she parted from him and went alone into his sister's bedroom.

Edith's spine had been hurting her in the night. She lay flat and exhausted, and the embrace of her loving arms was slow and frail.

Edith was what she called "dressed," and waiting for her sister-in-law.

The little table by her bed was strewn with the presents she had bought and made for Anne. A birthday was a very serious affair for Edith. She was not content to buy (buying was nothing; anybody could buy); she must also make, and make beautifully. "I mayn't have any legs that can carry me," said Edith; "but I've hands and I _will_ use them. If it wasn't for my hands I'd be nothing but a great lumbering, lazy ma.s.s of palpitating heart." But her making had become every year more and more expensive. Her beautiful, pitiful embroideries were paid for in bad nights. And at six o'clock that morning she had given her little dismal cry: "Oh, Nanna, Nanna, my beast of a spine is going to bother me to-day, and it's Anne's birthday!"

"And what else," said Nanna severely, "do you expect, Miss Edith?"

"I didn't expect this. I do believe it's getting worse."

"Worse?" Nanna was contemptuous. "It was worse on Master Walter's birthday last year."

(Last year she had made a waistcoat.)

"I can't think," moaned Edith, "why it's always bad on birthdays."

But however badly "it" might behave in the night, it was never permitted to destroy the spirit of the day.

Anne looked anxiously at the collapsed, exhausted figure in the bed.

"Yes," said Edith, having smiled at her sister-in-law with magnificent mendacity, "you may well look at me. You couldn't make yourself as flat as I am if you tried. There are two books for you, and a thingummy-jig, and a handkerchief to blow your dear nose with."

"Edie--"

"Do you like them?"

"Like them? Oh, you dear--"

"Why don't you have a birthday oftener? It makes you look so pretty, dear."

Anne's heart leaped. Edie's ways, her very words sometimes were like Walter's.

"Has Walter seen you?"

Anne's face became instantly solemn, but it was not sad.

"Edie," she said, "do you know what he has given me!"

"Yes," said Edith. Her eyes searched Anne's eyes with pain in them that was somehow akin to Walter's pain.

"She knows everything," thought Anne, "and it was her idea, then, not his."