V

Sally led her aunt to the grand but unused parlour in which so many expensive and handsome things were doomed to spend their lives. There was a piano, of course, which none of the Blindbeck folk knew how to play, in spite of Eliza’s conviction that the gift was included in the price. A Chippendale bookcase made a prison for strange books never opened and never named, and the shut doors of a cabinet kept watch and ward over some lovely china and glass. There was a satinwood table with a velvet sheen, whose polished mirror never reflected a laughing human face. There was an American rocking-chair, poised like a floating bird, with cushions filled with the finest down ever drawn from an heirloom of a featherbed. Sarah would not have taken the rocking-chair, as a rule; she would have thought herself either too humble or too proud. But today she went to it as a matter of course, because of the false pomp that she had drawn to herself like a stolen royal robe. With a sigh of relief that was half physical and half mental, she let herself gently down, dropped her rusty bonnet against the silk, and peacefully closed her eyes.

Sally stood looking at her with an expression of mingled pity, curiosity and awe. She had pitied her often enough before, but she had never before seen her through the slightest veil of romance. Sometimes, indeed, the tale of the damaged wedding-day had touched her imagination like the scent of a bruised flower, but it was so faint and far-off that it passed again like a breath. Today, however, she had that sudden sense of exquisite beauty in the old, which all must feel who see in them the fragile storehouses of life. The old woman had known so much that she would never know, looked on a different world with utterly different eyes. There was romance in the thought of the dead she had seen and spoken to and laughed with and touched and loved. And even now, with the flower of her life apparently over and withered back again to its earth, this sudden splendour of Geordie had blossomed for her at the end.

The girl waited a moment, hoping for a word, and then, though rather reluctantly, turned towards the door. She wanted to hear still more about the marvellous news, but the old woman looked so tired that she did not like to ask. She was anxious, too, to get back to the kitchen to keep an eye on Mary Phyllis. Yet still she lingered, puzzled and curious, and still touched by that unusual sense of awe. An exotic beauty had passed swiftly into the musty air of Eliza’s parlour, a sense of wonder from worlds beyond⁠ ⁠… the strong power of a dream.

“You’re overtired, aren’t you, Aunt Sarah?” she repeated, for want of something better to say. She spoke rather timidly, as if aware that the words only brushed the surface of deeper things below.

Sarah answered her without opening her eyes.

“Ay, my lass. Just a bit.”

“You’d best stop here quietly till Uncle Simon’s yoked up. I’ll see nobody bothers you if you feel like a nap. I’d fetch you a drop of cowslip wine, but mother’s got the key.”

“Nay, I want nowt wi’ it, thank ye,” Sarah said. “I’ll do all right.” She lifted her hands contentedly, and folded them in her lap. “Likely I’ll drop off for a minute, as you say.”

“Ay, well, then, I’d best be getting back.” She moved resolutely now, but paused with her hand on the latch. “Aunt Sarah,” she asked rather breathlessly, “was all that about Cousin Geordie true?”

Sarah’s lids quivered a little, and then tightened over her eyes.

“Ay. True enough.”

“It’s grand news, if it is!⁠ ⁠… I’m right glad about it, I’m sure! I’ve always thought it hard lines, him going off like that. And you said he’d done well for himself, didn’t you, Aunt Sarah?⁠ ⁠… Eh, but I wish Elliman could make some brass an’ all!”

“There’s a deal o’ power in brass.” The words came as if of themselves from behind the mask-like face. “Folks say it don’t mean happiness, but it means power. It’s a stick to beat other folk wi’, if it’s nowt else.”

“I don’t want to beat anybody, I’m sure!” Sally laughed, though with tears in her voice. “I only want what’s my own.”

“Ay, we all on us want that,” Sarah said, with a grim smile. “But it’s only another fancy name for the whole world!”

⸻—

She sat still for some time after the girl had gone out, as if she were afraid that she might betray herself before she was actually alone. Presently, however, she began to rock gently to and fro, still keeping her hands folded and her eyes closed. The good chair moved easily without creak or jar, and the good cushions adapted themselves to every demand of her weary bones. Geordie should buy her a chair like this, she told herself as she rocked, still maintaining the wonderful fiction even to herself. She would have cushions, too, of the very best, covered with silk and cool to a tired cheek. A footstool, also, ample and well stuffed, and exactly the right height for a pair of aching feet.

But though one half of her brain continued to dally with these pleasant fancies, the other was standing amazed before her late stupendous act. She was half-aghast, half-proud at the ease with which she had suddenly flung forth her swift, gigantic lie. Never for a moment had she intended to affirm anything of the kind, never as much as imagined that she might hint at it even in joke. She had been angry, of course, bitter and deeply hurt, but there had been no racing thoughts in her mind eager to frame the princely tale. It had seemed vacant, indeed, paralysed by rage, unable to do little else but suffer and hate. And then suddenly the words had been said, had shaped themselves on her lips and taken flight, as if by an agency with which she had nothing to do. It was just as if somebody had taken her arm and used it to wave a banner in the enemy’s face; as if she were merely an instrument on which an angry hand had suddenly played.

So she was not ashamed, or even really alarmed, because of this inward conviction that the crime was not her own. Yet the voice had been hers, and most certainly the succeeding grim satisfaction and ironic joy had been hers! She allowed herself an occasional chuckle now that she was really alone, gloating freely over Eliza’s abasement and acute dismay. For once at least, in the tourney of years, she had come away victor from the fray. No matter how she was made to pay for it in the end, she had had the whip-hand of Blindbeck just for once. Indeed, now that it was done⁠—and so easily done⁠—she marvelled that she had never done it before. At the back of her mind, however, was the vague knowledge that there is only one possible moment for tremendous happenings such as these. Perhaps the longing engendered by the Dream in the yard had suddenly grown strong enough to act of its own accord. Perhaps, as in the decision about the farm, a sentence lying long in the brain is spoken at length without the apparent assistance of the brain.⁠ ⁠…

She did not trouble herself even to speculate how she would feel when at last the truth was out. This was the truth, as long as she chose to keep it so, as long as she sat and rocked and shut the world from her dreaming eyes. From pretending that it was true she came very soon to believing that it might really be possible, after all. Such things had happened more than once, she knew, and who was to say that they were not happening now? She told herself that, if she could believe it with every part of herself just for a moment, it would be true. Up in Heaven, where, as they said, a star winked every time a child was born, they had only to move some lever or other, and it would be true.

A clock ticked on the mantelpiece with a slow, rather hesitating sound, as if trying to warn the house that Sunday and the need of the winding-key were near. There was a close, secretive feeling in the room, the atmosphere of so many objects shut together in an almost terrible proximity for so many days of the week. She was so weary that she could have fallen asleep, but her brain was too excited to let her rest. The magnitude of her crime still held her breathlessly enthralled; the glamour of it made possible all impossible hopes. She dwelt again and again on the spontaneity of the lie, which seemed to give it the unmistakable stamp of truth.

She had long since forgotten what it was like to be really happy or even at peace, but in some sort of fierce, gloating, heathenish way she was happy now. She was conscious, for instance, of a sense of importance beyond anything she had ever known. Even that half of her brain which insisted that the whole thing was pretence could not really chill the pervading glow of pride. She had caught the reflection of her state in Eliza’s voice, as well as in others less familiar to her ear. She had read it even in Sally’s kindly championship and support; through the sympathy she had not failed to hear the awe. The best proof⁠—if she needed proof⁠—was that she was actually here in the sacred parlour, and seated in the precious chair. Eliza would have turned her out of both long since, she knew, if she had not been clad in that new importance as in cloth of gold.

The impossible lies nearer than mere probability to the actual fact; so near at times that the merest effort seems needed to cross the line. Desire, racking both soul and body with such powerful hands, must surely be strong enough to leap the slender pale. The peculiar mockery about ill-luck is always the trifling difference between the opposite sides of the shield. It is the difference between the full glass and the glass turned upside-down. But today at least this tired old woman had swung the buckler round, and laughed as she held the glass in her hand and saw the light strike through the wine.

In this long day of Simon’s and Sarah’s nothing was stranger than the varying strata of glamour and gloom through which in turn they passed. Their days and weeks were, as a rule, mere grey blocks of blank, monotonous life, imperceptibly lightened or further shadowed by the subtle changes of the sky. But into these few hours so closely packed with dreadful humiliations and decisions, so much accumulated unkindness and insult and cold hate, there kept streaming upon them shafts of light from some centre quite unknown. For Simon there had been the unexpected stimulant of his Witham success, and later the new interest in life which Will’s proposal had seemed to offer. For Sarah there was the wistful pleasure of her morning with May, as well as the unlawful but passionate pleasure of her present position. The speed of the changes kept them overstrung, so that each as it came found them more sensitive than the last. They were like falling bodies dropping by turn through cloud and sunlit air. They were like total wrecks on some darkened sea, catching and losing by turn the lights of an approaching vessel.

The slow clock dragged the protesting minutes on, and still no one disturbed her and the dream widened and grew. Tea would be brought in soon, she told herself in the dream⁠—strong, expensive, visitor’s tea, freshly boiled and brewed. The silver teapot would be queening it over the tray, flanked by steaming scones and an oven-new, homemade cake. Eliza herself would appear to entertain her guest, always with that new note of reverence in her voice. When the door opened they would hear another voice⁠—Geordie’s, laughing and talking in some room beyond. All the happy young voices of the house would mingle with his, but always the youngest and happiest would be Geordie’s own. Hearing that voice, she would make mock of herself forever having feared Eliza’s tongue, still more forever having cared enough to honour her with hate. A small thing then would be the great Eliza, in spite of her size, beside the mother for whom the dead had been made alive. She would talk with Eliza as the gods talk when they speak with the humble human from invisible heights. So strong was the vision that she found herself framing the godlike sentences with gracious ease. The silver teaspoons clinked against the cups, and the visitor’s tea was fragrant in the musty room. She spread a linen handkerchief across her knee⁠ ⁠… a snowy softness against her silken knee.⁠ ⁠… And always, always, as the meal progressed, the voice of her ecstasy sang in her happy ear.⁠ ⁠…

She had that one moment of clear beauty unprofaned by hate, with Geordie’s face swimming before her in a golden haze. Then her hand, going out to the silk and linen of the dream, encountered the darned and threadbare serge of dreary fact. The dream rent violently all around her, letting her out again into the unlovely world. Even her blindness had been forgotten for the time, for in the dream she was never blind. Now the touch of the darns under her hand brought back the long hours of mending by candlelight which had had their share in despoiling her of her sight. She would never be able to darn by candlelight again, and the loss of that drudgery seemed to her now an added grief, because into this and all similar work, as women know, goes the hope of the future to emerge again as the soul of the past.⁠ ⁠… Sarah knew that her hand would ache for her needle as the sailor’s hand aches for the helm, or the crippled horseman’s for the feel of the flat rein. She felt, too, a sudden desperate anger against the woman who would have the mending of Simon’s clothes. Geordie’s, she knew, she would simply have wrenched from any stranger’s hands, but since there was no Geordie she need not think of that. The Dream had been merely the make-believe of the bitterly oppressed, who had taken to desperate lying as a last resort. Yet still the sweetness lingered, keeping her serene, like the last scent of a passed garden or the last light upon darkening hills.

She smoothed her hands on the arms of the precious chair, and reached out and smoothed the satin of the table. Through the dimness the solid piano loomed, the rosewood coffin of a thousand songs. The carpet under her feet felt elastic yet softly deep. There were ornaments in the room, good stuff as well as trash, trifles pointing the passions of Eliza’s curious soul. But for once, after all these years, Eliza’s soul would be sorrowful in spite of her great possessions. Back in the kitchen she would be gritting her teeth on the fact that it was Sarah’s son who was coming home, coming with money to burn and a great and splendid will to burn it. She would exact payment, of course, when the truth was known, but even the last ounce of payment could not give her back this hour. For this hour, at least, it was hers to suffer and Sarah’s to reign. For this hour, at least, the heavily-weighted tables of destiny were turned.