Elizabeth came back to her surroundings.
“Oh, Molly, what a goose you are, and what a monster you make me out. What is it, Mollykins, tell me?”
“I 've a great mind not to. I don't believe you really care. I would n't tell you a word, only I can't help it. Oh, Liz, I 'm going to have a baby, and I thought I never should. I was making myself wretched about it.”
She caught Elizabeth 's hand and squeezed it.
“Oh, Liz, be glad for me. I 'm so glad and happy, and I want some one to be glad too. You don't know how I 've wanted it. No one knows. I 've simply hated all the people in the Morning Post who had babies. I 've not even read the first column for weeks, and when Sybil Delamere sent me an invitation to her baby's christening-she was married the same day I was, you know-I just tore it up and burnt it. And now it 's really coming to me, and you 're to be glad for me, Liz.”
“Molly, darling, I am glad-so glad.”
“Really?”
Mary looked up into her sister's face, searchingly.
“You 're thinking of me, really of me-not about David, as you were just now? Oh, yes, I knew.”
Elizabeth laughed.
“Really, Molly, may n't I think of my own husband?”
“Not when I 'm telling you about a thing like this,” said Mary. “Liz, you are the first person I have told, the very first.”
Elizabeth did not allow her thoughts to wander again. As they talked, the rain beat heavily against the windows, and they heard the rush of it in the gutters below.
“What a pity,” Mary cried. “How quickly it has come up, and last night was so lovely. Did you see the moon? And to-night it is full.”
“Yes, to-night it is full,” said Elizabeth.
Edward and Mary came down to see their guests off. Edward shut the door behind them.
“What a night!” he exclaimed. But Mary came close and whispered:
“I 've told her.”
“Have you?”
Edward's tone was just the least shade perfunctory. He slid home the bolt of the door and turning, caught Mary in his arms and hugged her.
“O Mary, darling!“
Mary glowed, responsive.
“O Mary, darling, it really is a new spider,” he cried.
David and Elizabeth walked home in a steady downpour. Mary had lent her overshoes, and she had tucked up her dress under a mackintosh of Edward's. There was much merriment over their departure with a large umbrella between them, but as they walked home, they both grew silent. Elizabeth said good-night in the hall, and ran up to her room. To-night he would not come. Oh, to-night she felt quite sure that he would not come. It was dark. She heard the rain falling into the river, and she could just see how the trees bent in the rush of it. And yet she sat for an hour, by her window, in the dark, waiting breathlessly for that which would not happen.
The time went slowly by. The rain fell, and it was cold. Elizabeth lay down in the great square bed, and presently she slept, lulled by the steady dropping of the rain. She slept, and in her sleep she dreamed that she was sinking fathoms deep in a stormy, angry sea. Far overhead, she could hear the clash of the waves, and the long, long sullen roar of the swelling storm. And she went down and down into a black darkness that was deeper than any night-down, till she lost the roar of the storm above, down until all sound was gone, and she was alone in a black silence that would never lift or break again. Her soul was cold and blind, and most unendurably alone. Then something touched her, something that was warm. There came upon her that strange sense of home-coming, which comes to us in dreams, when love comes back to us across the sundering years, and all the pains of life, the pains of death, vanish and are gone, and we are come home-home to the place where we would be.
In her dream Elizabeth was come home. It was so long, so long, that she had wandered-so many years, so many lands-such weary feet and such a weary way. Now she was come home.
She stirred and opened her eyes. The rain had ceased. The room was dark, but the moon shone, for a single shaft struck between the curtains and lay above the bed like a silver feather dropped from some great passing wing.
Elizabeth was awake. She saw these things. She was come home. David's arms were about her in the darkness.
CHAPTER XX. THE WOMAN OF THE DREAM
Oh, was it in the dead of night,
Or in the dark before the day;
You came to me and kneeling, knew
The thing that I would never say?
There was no star, nor any moon,
There was no light from pole to pole,
And yet you saw the secret thing,
That I had hid within my soul.
You saw the secret and the shrine,
You bowed your head and went your way-
Oh, was it in the dead of night,
Or in the dark that brings the day?
FOR the next fortnight Elizabeth lived in a dream from which she scarcely woke by day. The dream life-the dream love-the dream itself-these became her life. In the moments that came nearest the waking she trembled, because if the dream was her life, the waking would be death. But for the rest of the time she walked in a trance. Earth budded, and the birds built nests. The green of woodland places went down under a flood of bluebells. The children made cowslip balls. All day long the sun shone out of a blue sky, and at night David came to her. Always he came at night, and went away in the dawn. And he remembered nothing.
Once she put her face to his in the darkness, and said:
“Oh, David, won't you remember-won't you ever remember? Am I only the Woman of the Dream? When will you remember?”
Then David was troubled in his dream, and stirred and went from her an hour before the time of his going.
Towards the end of the fortnight her trance wore thin. It was then that everything she saw or read seemed to press in upon one sore spot. If she went to the Mottisfonts', there was Mary with her talk of Edward and the baby. Edward!- Elizabeth could have laughed; but the laughter went too. If there were not much of Edward, at least Mary had all that there was. And the child-did not she, too, desire children? But the child of a dream. How could she give to David the child of a dream already forgotten? If she walked, there were lovers in every lane, young lovers, who loved each other by day and in the eye of the sun. If she took up a book-once what she read was:
Come to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again! For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day.
and another time, Kingsley's Dolcino to Margaret. Then came a day when she opened her Bible and read:
“If a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him.”
That day she came broad awake. The daze passed from her. Her brain was clear, and her conscience-the inner vision rose before her, showing her an image troubled and confused. What had she done? And what was she doing now? Day by day David looked at her with the eyes of a friend, and night by night he came to her, the lover of a dream. Which was the reality? Which was the real David? If the David of the dream were real, conscious in sleep of some mysterious oneness, the sense of which was lost in the glare of day-then she could wait, and bear, and hope, till the realization was so strong that the sun might shine upon it and show to David awake what the sleeping David knew.
But if the David of the dream were not the real David, then what was she? Mistress and no wife-the mistress of a dream mood that never touched Reality at all.