During the journey she spoke little, thought little, still brooding furiously over the morning’s incident. Arriving at Exeter, naked there of the dignity which clothed her on the platform of her own railway station, she was for a moment aware of herself as a spectacle: an English lady travelling with a little black boy. Her mind waved a grim acknowledgment towards Uncle Julius Rathbone, who managed the affairs of his heart so competently. At St. Austell the railway ceased, for the rest of the journey they must drive. They drove in a small closed waggonette, cold as the tomb. It was strange to look out of this mouldy box and see the blazing landscape through which they moved. Armies of ravelled late-summer foxgloves grew beside the stone walls; as the day wore on their purple turned melancholy and discoloured against the hues of a flaming sunset. She leaned her head out of the window, interrogating the air, searching for the romance of her previous visit. It was there still, but the long summer’s warmth had changed it, and now it was turned from an excitement to a menace. With something like fear she felt that her body was heavy, her mind slow, that she was strong and helpless as a stone, strong only to be trampled on and to endure. The boy beside her, so quick, so vulnerable, was better equipped for life than she. Now she would have been glad to talk to him, would have clutched at any expedient which might carry her away from this obsession of being cold and heavy and helpless; but he was listless, half-asleep, and doleful, gone crumpled and dead as suddenly as a tropical blossom.
“Here is Caspar Rathbone,” she said at last, standing before the smouldering peat-fire which seemed to be identical with the fire she had noticed on Mr. Gulliver’s hearth six months ago. She had done her errand, now she could say good-bye, drive back to the Half Moon, fall exhausted into the strange uncomfortable bed. It was all something done by rote, done before and quite unreal. As she looked back from the waggonette, and saw that Caspar had already been swallowed up by the Trebennick Academy, the sense of doom and pre-destination which had, all the journey long, rested so leaden upon her sharpened suddenly into the thought:
The child will die there. I shall never see him again
. But this a moment after she drove out as sentiment; and she knew also that, even without this expunging explanation, she could not, for the life of her, have turned back then to rescue him, or to make any attempt to turn destiny aside, so deeply had this hallucination of puppetry and rote enforced itself upon her.
Shivering and stupefied, she sat alone in the dining-parlour of the Half Moon Inn, unable to eat the food set down before her. “I believe I am going to be ill,” she said to herself; and rousing, she ordered a glass of hot brandy-and-water. It was cold before she remembered to drink it; and having drunk it she sat on, staring at a glass picture of Britannia, and a bunch of dying foxgloves in a white jug, sat until a tap on the door aroused her as though with a thunder-clap, and the landlady came in, awkward and timid, to say that it was past midnight, and would the lady be sitting up much longer.
Almost the next thing that she knew was another tap, which roused her to morning, and the recollection that of the day’s two eastward trains from St. Austell she was catching the earlier. The boxlike waggonette was waiting for her, it had spent the night at Trebennick also, the same ravelled foxgloves awaited her along the hilly winding roads. But yesterday’s cloud had evaporated. With renewed delight she smelt the exciting soulless air, and watched the shaggy contours of the hills. She was in Cornwall, unknown, and without responsibilities. Her body rejoiced and grew impatient, chafing at the joggling waggonette; and telling the man he should spare his horse she alighted, and walked up a hill. The rough road underfoot delighted her, the dust flew up like an incense, the light of morning seemed spilled on the lonely country for her alone. At St. Austell she paid off the man, and saw her dressing-case put in the office. She would travel by the later train. It would harm neither man-flesh nor horse-flesh to make two journeys to the station. Thence she went on to a tobacconist, and bought some cheroots. She had four hours to spend, four hours in which her soul could be at liberty.
Any road would do, and the road she chose took her out of the town, and past a slated farmhouse under a group of sycamores, and over a suddenly humped stone bridge. The stream was small, brilliant and swift-running; she left the road and followed it through the steep small fields towards a dome of rough moorland. Here, scrambling over the last stone wall, she sat down in the sun, settled herself against an outcrop of granite, and lay basking, stripping bracken fronds between her fingers, and listening to the chatter of the brook. Its waters were exquisitely cold and sweet. She drank, at first from her hand, then, stretching herself along the warm turf, from the stream itself, where the water arched, glassy and smooth, over a rock. It ran so strongly that at the first essay she plunged her mouth too deeply into the flow, and spattered her face and hair. She was hungry now, and glad of the parcel of sandwiches put up by the Half Moon Inn. Then she took out a cheroot, lit it, and began to smoke. It was not such a good cheroot as those she had stolen, long ago, from Papa’s cabinet. But it was passable, and had this advantage over the others, that she would not be whipped for it.
The cheroot was half finished when a company of gipsies crossed the shoulder of the moor, not seeing her in her shelter of rock and fern. They loped along in single file, picking their way over the waste as though they followed a scent. They were at home in the landscape like animals. Yet though I should like to stay here for ever, she thought, spreading out her palms to feel the sun, I should never want to be a gipsy. But I would build a house here, no larger than that ruined cottage I passed, live alone, and do everything for myself. Perhaps a woman coming in to do the cooking and make the bed. But everything else I would do, and at night sit by a fire of wood that I had chopped myself. Her mind went back to the hours she had spent with old Saunders, the estate woodman, and to the day when, suddenly yielding to her persuasions, he had allowed her to fell a tree. The noise of the axe chiming through the silent plantation was in her ears, and the cry and harsh rustle of the falling tree. That afternoon her parents had given a dinner-party, and she had been allowed to sit with the ladies in the drawing-room, pulling the silk mittens over her blistered palms, thinking to herself, To-day I felled a tree. Saunders, no wonder, had kept his own counsel, and no one else had ever known. Now she went the round of her woods with young Saunders, nodding her agreement as he chalked the trees due for felling; but still her glance could find the mossy hollow whence the root of her tree had been stubbed out. “For it is my own mark I want to leave,” she exclaimed, striking her hand against the rock. “Not always to work my will through others.”
She had still more than an hour of liberty before she must remember the second train and walk back; yet already a liberty in which she had nothing to do was irksome to her. Should she walk further, paddle her feet in the stream? The one was pointless, the other childish. It was boring to be a woman, nothing that one did had any meat in it. And her peculiar freedom, well-incomed, dis-husbanded, seemed now only to increase the impotence of her life. Free as she might be to do as she pleased, all her doings were barrened. Should she have her horse saddled in the middle of the night, ride through the dark and the rough weather till morning, she rode to no end. Should she enforce her will over convention, go out into her woods and cut down another tree, the deed would only be granted to her on the terms that it was a woman’s whim, a nonsense to be tidied up as soon as possible by the responsible part of the world. If she were to shoot a poacher, the Justices of the Peace would huddle it away as an accident. Yes, they would say that she was frightened, a timid female acting in fear of her life. She could do nothing out of doors, a woman’s sphere was the home. Yet there, what could she do to appease her desire to leave a mark? The cook made the jams, which anyhow were eaten by the following summer, she had no talent for painting in watercolours, and certainly she could not write a novel. Needlework and embroidery? Often her longing had turned to these, and fingering the quilts and bed-hangings worked by the bygone women of her race she had most passionately envied them their power to leave behind them something solid and respectable, envied them the solace which could accompany them through the long idleness of a woman’s life. Her bureaux were filled with beginnings: lace-pillows with rusty pins, crumpled canvases with half a parrot’s wing embroidered; but her hands, so strong and shapely, could not manage a needle, bungled and grew weak before their natural employment.
In thoughts like these her last hour of liberty trailed by, and at last she was glad to get up, shake out her skirts, tie on her bonnet and go. The stream kept her company down the valley, an idle influence, turning no mill-wheels, running happily to waste. She had drunk of it; but she could not drink of its brilliant peace.
During the journey she stared sometimes at the landscape through the mesh of her veil, sometimes at the mesh itself, eyeing this needle-run entanglement as though it were something alien and inexplicable, a puzzle set before her in a dream. At Exeter a young woman got into the carriage who carried a baby and was in tears. As soon as the train started she broke into conversation. Her talk was perfectly insipid, alternately self-pity and brag, and Sophia found herself listening with pleasure, glad of any distraction from her own thoughts. For any forward thinking travelled only to boredom, and she would not let her thoughts turn backward, lest they should recall the events of yesterday, the iron sense of doom which had so oppressed her, that terrifying evening at the Half Moon Inn.
Mrs. Henry Woolby, daughter of the late Canon Pawsey, lasted till Dorchester, where Sophia got out, hearing as she did so that life was so cruelly full of partings, and that Mrs. Woolby’s address was 7 Marine Terrace, Dawlish.
Her groom was beside her, holding the dressing-case. She turned to give him her ticket.
“Good-evening, Roger. Is all well?”
She heard him catch his breath, and now looked at him. His face was flushed, she thought he had been drinking.
“Master Damian, madam, and Miss Augusta. They’re queer.”
“What?”
“Miss Augusta, madam, she was took queer late last night. And this morning Master Damian was queer, too.”
“Has the doctor been sent for?”
“Yes, madam. Grew fetched him this morning.”
“What did he say?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, madam. But I understand he said it might be the smallpox.”
She saw again the blank face of the Trebennick Academy, the staring sunset, the empty porch whence Caspar had already been whisked. But it was not he whom she would never see again. It was her own children, the fruit of her forsaken womb.
Once I am at the house, she thought, driving between the ripened cornfields, I can get to work. I am only a little late, four hours’ delay cannot count for so much. Already she felt the need to exculpate herself; and since destiny cannot be wheedled, and since in any crisis her nature turned, not to God but to destiny, she would brazen it out. Yet in turning rather to destiny she was like one who seeks shelter. God, an enormous darkness, hung looped over half her sky, an ever-present menace, a cloud waiting to break. In the antipodes of God was destiny, was reason — a small classical temple in a clear far-off light, just such a temple as shone opposed to a stormcloud in the landscape by Claude Lorraine that all her life long had hung in the dining-room. Small and ghostly were the serene figures that ministered there, a different breed to the anxious pilgrims who in the foreground rested under the gnarled tree, turning, some to the far-off temple, some to the cloud where lightnings already flashed. God was a cloud, lightnings were round about his seat; and though the children must pray to Jesus, and Mrs. Willoughby support the Church of England, Sophia, even in her childhood, had disliked God exactly as she disliked adders, earthquakes, revolution — anything that lurked and was deadly, any adversary that walked in darkness. For God, her being knew, meant her no good. He had something against her, she was not one of those in whom he delighted. Now in his cloud he had come suddenly close, had reared up close behind her — at her back, as usual, for God was not an honest British pugilist. But once at the house, she thought — and already the carriage was turning in at the lodge gate — she could get to work.
Seeing the children, all her sense of competence fell off her. They were not her children who lay there, her children biddable and comprehensible. They were the fever’s children, they were possessed; devils had entered into them, and looked with burning sullen glare from their heavy eyes. A devil strengthened Augusta’s hand to strike at her when she bent down to smooth the damp curls; a devil with a thick strange voice answered her from Damian’s mouth — mocking her with answers at random.
The doctor was there, waiting for her arrival. He had sent for a Mrs. Kerridge, who would do everything, who understood these cases.
“The less you see them,” said he, “the better.”
“Infection? I don’t fear it. I never catch anything,” she answered.
He shook his head. “Even so, a stranger is best. In any fever, the essential is discipline.”
His voice was grim, but his eyes pitied her.
“Have you no one to be with you?” he said.
She shook her head. She knew what would come next — a hint, an enquiry, about Frederick. She put out her will and stopped it. Later that evening, wearing a flustered mixture of everyday clothes and a best pelisse and gloves, came the doctor’s wife — a flimsy little boarding-school creature, much too young and genteel, thought Sophia, to be any good to the broad-backed bottle-nosed doctor, a man as stolidly cunning as his hairy-legged hunter. And she could hear the conversation between them. “You must go, my dear. You’re at home in a drawing-room, you’ll understand her better than I.” And then, “Oh no, Henry, I couldn’t dare such a thing. I’m far too shy.” However, the faculty had prescribed her — or perhaps she was the pink colouring. Anyhow, there she sat, crumpling a lace pocket-handkerchief, staring at Sophia and hurriedly averting her gaze to the tea-urn. “I do so feel for you. It is so terrible that you should be alone,” was as far as she got. Yet, silly, common, timid as she might be, there was a certain reviving quality about her company. Like a glass of
eau sucrée
, thought Sophia. It is deplorable that one should find solace in such wash, yet in that year of being finished in Paris under the guardianship of great-aunt Léocadie she had often found pleasure in
eau sucrée
. And those were beautiful eyes, eyes that could be admired without any social embarrassment, for eyes are enfranchised from any question of breeding, a variety of flesh so specialised as to transcend what else conditions a face into being well-bred or common, worn, a precious jewel, in any head. The lips might simper, the hands twist uneasily; but the beautiful eyes dwelt on her with an attention beyond curiosity or adulation. I never want to see you again — thought Sophia, duly begging her visitor to stay a little longer — but I shall never forget your eyes.