Moor Fires Part 67

"No, it's not my affair," she told him.

"It will be," he said sharply.

"Of course," she said in a high voice, "I should never dream of living in the same house with her, but then," she went on, and her tones loosened, there was an irritating kind of humour in them, "I don't suppose I shall ever live there at all."

She did not know why she spoke so; her wish to hurt him was hardly recognizable by herself, but when she saw him stung, she was delighted.

The colour rushed up to his eyes. "What d'you mean by that? What d'you think you're going to do?"

She raised her eyebrows, and answered lightly, "I'm sure I don't know."

He put a heavy hand on her knee. "But I do," he said, and her mouth drooped and quivered. She knew she had laid herself open to an attack she could not repel.

"He'll get me this way," she found herself almost whispering, and aloud she said, "George, let's wait and see. Tell me some more about when you were little."

Things went smoothly after that, and when she went to bed, she talked to Jane.

"We mustn't have any pauses," she said. "We can feel each other then. We must talk all the time, and, oh, Jane, I'm so fond of silence!"

That night a voice waked her from a dreamless sleep.

"Helen, are you there?"

"Yes. Do you want something?"

"I have been thinking." Her tongue seemed too thick for her mouth. "Is the dog on the landing?"

"Yes. He's always there. You haven't been afraid?"

"No. It's a big house for two women."

Helen sat up and, putting her feet into her slippers, she opened the door. Jim was sleeping in the darkness: he woke, looked up and slept again. It was a quiet night and not a door or window shook.

"I didn't say I heard anything. Go back to bed."

Helen obeyed, and she was falling softly into sleep when the voice, like a plucked wire, s.n.a.t.c.hed her back.

"Helen! I want to tell you something."

"I'm listening." She stared at the corner whence the voice was struggling, and gradually the bed and Mildred's body freed themselves from the gloom.

By a supreme effort, the next words were uttered without a blur and with a loudness that chased itself about the room.

"I am to blame."

"To blame?" Helen questioned softly.

"It was my fault, not Edith's--not your mother's."

"I don't know what you're talking about, Notya dear."

"Your mother." The voice was querulous. "I was--unkind to your mother.

Oh--worse than that!" The bed creaked, and a long sigh gave place to the halting speech in which the sibilants were thickened into lisping sounds.

"She was my friend. She was beautiful. You are all like her. Miriam and Rupert--" The voice dropped like a stone falling into a well without a bottom, and Helen, listening for the sound of it, seemed to hear only the echoes of Mildred Caniper's memory, coming fainter and fainter from the past where the other woman made a gleam.

"Miriam--" she began again. "I haven't seen her."

"No. Uncle Alfred has taken her away."

"Ah!" Mildred said, and there was a silence.

After a time, her voice came back, thin and vague, a ghostly voice, speaking the thoughts of a mind that had lost its vigour.

"Alfred was in love with Edith. They all were. She was so pretty and so gay. But she was not unfaithful. No. I knew that. She told me and she trusted me, but I said nothing. That's what has worried me--all the time." Heavily she sighed again, and Helen drew herself to a sitting posture in her bed. She dared not ask the questions which tramped over each other in her mind; she hardly drew a breath lest the sound should change the current of the other's thought.

"She did silly things. They vexed me. I was jealous, I suppose. Take care of Miriam. Oh--but she's gone. Edith--she made men love her, and she couldn't help it, and then one night--but it's too long to tell.

Philip thought she wasn't faithful, but I knew. She wouldn't tell him.

She was angry, she wouldn't say a word, but she trusted me to tell him.

And you see, I--didn't. He wouldn't go and see her. If he had seen her he would have found out. And soon she died--of measles." The woman in the bed laughed softly.

"That was so foolis.h.!.+ And then I married him. I got w-what I wanted. But there's a verse about leanness in the soul, isn't there? That's what I had. He wanted some one to look after the children, and I looked after you--no more. The struggling hasn't been worth while."

"No." The word came from Helen like a lost puff of wind.

"And then Philip went away, and I came here. That's all. I wanted to tell somebody. Now perhaps I can have peace. I meant to tell him, too, but I was too late. That worried me. All these years--"

Leaning on her elbow, Helen looked at the narrow bed. It had some aspect of a coffin, and the strangely indifferent voice was still. She felt an intolerable pity for the woman, and the pain overcame her bewilderment and surprise, yet she knew she need not suffer, for Mildred Caniper had slipped her burden of confession and lay at rest.

Beyond the relief of tears, Helen slid into her place. The dead, distant mother was not real to her: she was like the gay shadow of a b.u.t.terfly that must soon die, and Philip Caniper was no more than a name. Their fate could hardly stir her, and their personal tragedy was done; but now she thought she could interpret the thoughts which cl.u.s.tered in the dining-room. This was Mildred Caniper's secret, and it had been told without shame. The irony of that made her laugh silently to the shaking of her bed. She had no words with which to clothe her feelings, the sense of her own smallness, of unhappiness so much the common lot that it could almost pa.s.s unheeded. There was some comfort in the mingling of her own misery with all that had been and was to be, but she felt herself in the very presence of disintegration: the room was stirring with fragments of the life which Mildred Caniper could not hold together: mind and matter, they floated from the tired body in the corner and came between Helen and the sleep that would have kept her from thinking of the morrow, from her nightly vision of Zebedee's face changing from that of happy lover to poor, stricken man. Turning in the bed, she left him for the past of which Mildred Caniper had told her, yet that past, as parent of the present, looked anxiously and not without malice towards its grandchildren. What further tragedy would the present procreate?

Answers to that question were still trooping past Helen when dawn came through the windows, and some of them had the faces of children born to an unwilling mother. Her mind cried out in protest: she could not be held responsible; and because she felt the pull of future generations that might blame her, she released the past from any responsibility towards herself. No, she would not be held responsible: she had bought Miriam, and the price must be paid: she and Miriam and all mankind were bound by shackles forged unskilfully long ago, and the moor, understanding them, had warned her. She could remember no day when the moor had not foretold her suffering.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

A person less simple than Helen would have readjusted her conception of herself, her character and circ.u.mstances, in the light of her new knowledge; but with the pa.s.sionate a.s.sertion that she could not be held altogether responsible for what her own children might have to suffer, Helen had made her final personal comment. For a day, her thoughts hovered about the distant drama of which Mildred Caniper was the memento, like a dusty programme found when the play itself is half forgotten, and Helen's love grew with her added pity; but more urgent matters were knocking at her mind, and every morning, when she woke, two facts had forced an entrance. She was nearer to Zebedee by a night, and only the daylight separated her from George and what he might demand and, outside, the moor was covered with thick snow, as cold as her own mind.

A great fire burned in Mildred Caniper's room, another in the kitchen; the only buds on the poplars were frozen white ones, and the whiteness of the lawn was pitted with Halkett's footsteps. Since the first day of snow he had climbed the garden wall close to the kitchen door so that he should not make another trail, but the original one still gaped there, and Helen wished more snow would fall and hide the tracks. She saw them every morning when she went into her own room to dress, and they were deep and black, like open mouths begging the clouds for food.

One day, John, looking from the kitchen window, asked who had been tramping about the garden.

"Doesn't it look ugly?" Helen said. "I can't bear snow when it's blotched with black. Is there going to be more of it?"

"I think so."