Moor Fires Part 25

She lived there with them happily, not thwarted by moods and past miseries, and though she had not yet seen the father of those children about the house, tonight, as she stood in the covering darkness, she thought she heard his footsteps in the garden where the children played among the trees.

She moved abruptly, slipped, and sat down with a thud. Her laughter, like a ghost's, trickled through the stillness, and even while she laughed a door was opened and John appeared, holding a lighted candle in his hand.

"It's only me," Helen said.

"What the devil are you up to?"

"I'm not up to anything. I'm on the floor."

"Ill?"

"No."

"I thought I heard some one prowling about."

"Couldn't you sleep either?"

He put his fingers through his hair. "No, I couldn't sleep."

"The house is full of--something, isn't it?"

"Fools, I think," he answered, laughing a little. "Look here, you mustn't sit there. It's cold. Get up."

"Help me."

"Why didn't you put on your dressing-gown?"

"You didn't."

"I don't wear this flimsy rubbish. Go back to bed."

"Yes. What's the time?"

"One o'clock. The longest night I've ever known!"

Rather wistfully she looked at him. "What's the matter, John?"

"I'm waiting for tomorrow," he said almost roughly.

"So am I," she said, surprising herself so that she repeated the words slowly, to know their meaning. "So am I--and it's here."

"Not till the dawn," he said. "Go to sleep."

Together their doors were softly closed and Helen knew now whose footsteps were in the children's garden. She went to the window and nodded to the poplars. "And you knew, I suppose; but so did I, really, all the time."

She slept profoundly and woke to a new wonder for the possibilities of life, a new fear for the dangers which might a.s.sail those who had much to cherish; and now she descried dimly the truth she was one day to see in the full light, that there is no gain without loss and no loss without gain, that things are divinely balanced, though man may sometimes throw his clumsy weight into the scale. Yet under these serious thoughts there was a song in her heart and her pleasure in its music shone out of her eyes so brilliantly that Rupert, watching her with tolerant amus.e.m.e.nt, asked what had befallen her.

"It's only that it's Sunday," the quick-witted Miriam said and Helen replied with the gravity which was more misleading than a lie: "Yes, that's all."

Nevertheless, when Zebedee arrived on the moor, her brightness faded.

Already the desire of possession hurt her and Miriam had attached herself to him as though she owned him. She was telling him about Philip Caniper's death, about the money which was to come to them, and a.s.serting that Daniel now wanted to marry her more than ever. Daniel was protesting through his blushes, and Zebedee was laughing. It all seemed very foolish, and she was annoyed with Zebedee for even pretending to be amused.

"Oh, don't," she murmured and lay back.

"Be quiet, prig!"

"She's not that, is she?" Zebedee asked, his strangely flecked eyes twinkling.

"Oh, a bad one. She disapproves of everything she doesn't like herself."

"Helen, wake up! I want to know if this is true."

"Do you think it is?"

"I'm afraid it's very likely."

"Oh, dear!" she sighed, "I don't know what to do about it. A person without opinions is just nothing, and you really were being very silly just now. I hate jokes about marrying."

"H'm, they are rather feeble," Zebedee owned.

"Vulgar, I think," she said, with her little air of Mildred Caniper.

"Ah," said Rupert, tapping Daniel lightly on the head, "a man with a brain like this can't develop a taste for the real thing. I've seen him shaking over jokes that made me want to cry, but you mustn't expect too much of him. He does very well. Come along, my boy, and let's have some reasonable talk."

"He doesn't want to go!" Miriam cried.

"But he must. I know what's good for him."

"He looks just like an overgrown dancing bear," Miriam said as she watched the two figures stepping across the moor.

Helen continued her own gloomy thoughts. "No one can like a prig."

"Oh, yes," Zebedee a.s.sured her cheerfully, "I can. Besides, you'll grow out of it."

"She never will! She's getting worse, and it's with living here. As a doctor, I think you might prescribe a change for her--for all of us.

What will become of us? I can't," she added bitterly, "be expected to marry a dancing bear!"

"If you're speaking of Daniel--" Zebedee began sharply.

"Oh, don't you be cross, too! I did think I had one friend!"

"Daniel's a good man. He may be queer to look at, but he's sound. You only hurt yourself, you know, when you speak like that."

Miriam pouted and was silent, and Helen was not sure whether to be angry with Zebedee for speaking thus to her who must be spoiled, or glad that he could do it to one so beautiful, while he could preserve friendliness for a prig. But her life-long loyalty refused this incipient rivalry; once more she decided that Miriam must have what she wanted, and she lay with clenched hands and a tranquil brow while she listened to the chatter which proclaimed Miriam's recovery.

Helen could see nothing but a sky which was colourless and unclouded, and she wished she could be like that--vague, immaterial, without form.

Perhaps to reach that state was happiness; it might be negation, but it would be peace and she had a young, desperate wish to die and escape the alternations of joy and pain. "And yet this is nothing," she said with foresight, and she stood up. "I'm going home."

"No!" Zebedee exclaimed in the middle of one of Miriam's sentences.