Emily was shaken with agitation.
‘Mother!’ she exclaimed, ‘why have you both insisted on keeping silence before me about your difficulties? There was no kindness in it; you have done me the cruelest wrong. Had I not money in plenty beyond what I needed? What if the future be uncertain? Has not the present its claims, and can your needs be separated from mine? Because you have succeeded in keeping me apart from the troubles of your life, you—you and father—have thought you had done a praiseworthy thing. Is it not bad enough that one human being should be indifferent to the wants of another, just because they call each other strangers? Was it right to bring such a hateful spirit of independence into a home, between parents and child? If the world is base and unjust, is not that a reason the more why we should draw ever more closely to each other, and be to each other all that our power allows? Independent! Because I earned money and could support myself, you have told me I must be independent, and leave you the same. That is the lesson that life has taught you. It is well to have understanding for lessons of a deeper kind.’
‘Well, my child,’ protested the mother, to whom the general tenor of such reasoning was well-nigh as dark as its special application, ‘we have always felt we were doing our duty to you. At your age it is only right you should have your money for yourself; who knows when you may want it? I don’t think you should be angry with us, just because we’ve felt we’d rather put up with a little hardship now and then than have you feel some day we’d been a burden on you. I haven’t complained, and I’m not complaining now. I’m sorry I came to speak to you about such a thing. It seems as if you could never take a thing as I mean it. It’s like the potatoes at dinner; I meant to do you a kindness by giving you the choice, and you flew out as if you hadn’t patience with me.’
Emily kept her eyes upon the window.
‘How you can say,’ went on Mrs. Hood, ‘that we’ve been cruel to you and done you a wrong—I know we’ve very different ways of looking at most things, but where we’ve wronged you is more than I can understand.’
‘You have taken from me,’ replied Emily, without moving her eyes, ‘the power to help you. I might have done much, now I can do nothing; and your loss is mine.’
‘No, indeed, it isn’t, and shan’t be, Emily. Your father and I have always said that one thing, that you shouldn’t suffer by us. What did your father always say years ago? “Emily,” he said, “shall have a good education, however we stint ourselves; then, when she grows up, she’ll always be able to keep herself from want, and our poverty won’t matter to her.” And in that, at all events, he was right, and it’s come about as he said. No, Emily, we’re not going to be a burden to you, so don’t fear it.’
‘Mother, will you let me be by myself a little? I will come down to you presently.’
‘Aren’t you well, my dear?’ the mother asked, with a mixture of offended reserve and anxiety occasioned by the girl’s voice and aspect.
‘I have a headache. I will rest till tea-time.’
Mrs. Hood had for a long time been unused to tend Emily with motherly offices; like her husband, she was not seldom impressed with awe of this nature so apart from her own. That feeling possessed her now; before Emily’s last words she moved away in silence and closed the door behind her gently.
The irony of fate, coming out so bitterly in all that her mother had said, was like a cold hand on Emily’s heart. She sat again in the chair from which she had risen, and let her head lie back. Her vitality was at a low ebb; the movement of indignation against the cruelty which was wrecking her life had passed and left behind it a weary indifference. Happily she need not think yet. There were still some hours of respite before her; there was the night to give her strength. The daylight was a burden; it must be borne with what patience she could summon. But she longed for the time of sacred silence.
To a spirit capable of high exaltations, the hour of lassitude is a foretaste of the impotence of death. To see a purpose in the cold light of intellectual conviction, and to lack the inspiring fervour which can glorify a struggle with the obstacles nature will interpose, is to realise intensely the rugged baldness of life stripped of illusion, life as we shall see it when the end approaches and the only voice that convinces tell us that all is vanity. It is the mood known by the artist when, viewing the work complete within his mind, his heart lacks its joy and his hand is cold to execute. Self-consciousness makes of life itself a work of art. There are the blessed moments when ardour rises in pursuit of the ideal, when it is supreme bliss to strive and overcome; and there are the times of aching languor, when the conception is still clear in every line, but the soul asks wearily—To what end? In Emily it was reaction after the eagerness of her sudden unreasoning hope. Body and mind suffered beneath a burden of dull misery. Motives seemed weak; effort was weary and unprofitable; life unutterably mean. It could scarcely be called suffering, to feel thus.
She was roused by voices below, and, immediately after, her mother came to her door again.
‘Isn’t it vexatious?’ Mrs. Hood whispered. ‘Here are Jessie and Geraldine. I’m obliged to ask them to stay tea. Do you feel well enough to come down?’
Emily went down at once, almost with a sense of relief, and presented herself to the girls very much in her usual way.
‘Now, I know very well you don’t want us,’ said Jessie, with her sprightly frankness. ‘We shouldn’t have thought of coming if it hadn’t been that we met Mr. Hood just this side of the bridge, and he forced us to come on; he said it wouldn’t be very long before he was back himself. But of course we shan’t stay tea, so it’s no use—’
‘Oh, of course not,’ put in Geraldine. ‘We know Mrs. Hood’s always far too busy on a Saturday afternoon. I didn’t want to come; I told Jessie it would be far better to put it off till tomorrow—’
‘All the same,’ resumed her sister, ‘she wanted to see you very much. She’s got something to tell you. Now you may as well get it out and done with, Jerry; you needn’t expect I’m going to help you.’
The two giggled together.
‘What is it,’ inquired Mrs. Hood. ‘I daresay I could guess if I tried very hard. Couldn’t you, Emily?’
‘Now then, Jerry, for the awful news,’ urged her sister.
‘No, you’ll have to tell, Jessie,’ said the other, giggling and blushing.
‘Well, I suppose one of us must. She’s been and engaged herself to Mr. Baldwin. Of course we all knew—’
‘Now, Jessie, you knew nothing of the kind!’
‘Didn’t I, though! Oughtn’t she to be ashamed of herself, at her age, Mrs. Hood! I know what Emily’s opinion is; she’s simply disgusted. Look at her, and see if she isn’t.’
The gabble of the two girls was worthy of the occasion their tongues went like mill-clappers. Whilst her mother busied herself in preparing tea, Emily sat and listened; fortunately there was little need for her to talk. To herself she seemed to be suffering a kind of trance, without detriment to her consciousness. The chattering and grimacing girls appeared before her as grotesque unrealities, puppets animated in some marvellous way, and set to caricature humanity. She tried to realise that one of them was a woman like herself, who had just consented to be a man’s wife; but it was impossible to her to regard this as anything but an aping of things which at other times had a solemn meaning. She found herself gazing at Geraldine as one does at some singular piece of mechanism with a frivolous purpose. And it was not only the individuals that impressed her thus; these two represented life and the world. She had strange, cynical thoughts, imaginings which revolted her pure mind even whilst it entertained them. No endeavour would shake off this ghastly clairvoyance. She was picturing the scene of Geraldine’s acceptance of the offer of marriage; then her thoughts passed on to the early days of wedded life. She rose, shuddering, and moved about the room; she talked to drive those images from her brain. It did but transfer the sense of unreality to her own being. Where was she, and what doing? Had she not dreamed that a hideous choice had been set before her, a choice from which there was no escape, and which, whatever the alternative she accepted, would blast her life? But that was something grave, earnest, and what place was there for either earnestness or gravity in a world where Geraldine represented womanhood wooed and about to be wedded? There was but one way of stopping the gabble which was driving her frantic; she threw open the piano and began to play, to play the first music that came into her mind. It was a passage from the Moonlight Sonata. A few moments, and the ghosts were laid. The girls still whispered together, but above their voices the pure stream of music flowed with gracious oblivion. When Emily ceased, it was with an inward fervour of gratitude to the master and the instrument, To know that, was to have caught once more the point of view from which life had meaning. Now let them chatter and mop and mow; the echo of that music still lived around.