"I am sorry!" Elizabeth had leaned forward and placed a hand over one of Helen's. "I do not mean to preach at you or be forever handing out unsolicited advice. I shall never refer to the matter again, Helen. Let us be friends and try to make each other happy here, shall we? I must finish writing to Robert and then I must visit John for a while-I have seen him only briefly this morning. After that, shall we go for a walk? It looks overcast and cold out there, but the fresh air will do us good. And the land around here is very picturesque. Perhaps you will get some ideas for painting again. If it is true that you have done none since leaving Yorkshire, I suspect that it is high time you got back to it."
And that is exactly what had happened, Elizabeth reflected rather ruefully a few days later. Helen had not actually done any painting yet, but she had made copious preparations. She had been hardly indoors, but had trudged around the grounds, sketchpad in hand, staring and touching, trying to get behind the outer surfaces to the reality within, she told a fascinated Elizabeth. The latter felt very much alone without her husband and without any companionship except that of her baby and the occasional meeting with her guest.
But she was pleased, nevertheless. Helen was clearly not the insipid, moody little girl that she had expected. In fact, Elizabeth suspected that she was a highly intelligent and artistic girl, whose talents had never been either appreciated or encouraged. And the change of scene was obviously doing her a great deal of good. There was a new sparkle in her eyes, fresh color in her cheeks, and a welcome intensity in her expression. Elizabeth was beginning to like her and she was beginning to understand why William had fallen in love with her. She even felt she had a glimmering of understanding of how those two had come to flout convention to such a shocking degree as to have created a child outside marriage.
She longed for the arrival of Robert at the end of the first week. She wanted to share her discoveries with him, and she wanted to discuss with him how they might best bring together again these two people who so clearly loved and needed each other.
Helen had indeed become absorbed again in her painting, but not quite to the extent that Elizabeth believed. She was enchanted by the scenery of the Hetherington grounds. There were no formal gardens, and Helen was glad. She could admire formality, but she could not love it. It seemed almost sacrilegious to take nature and try to subdue it to man's idea of beauty and symmetry. Nature was perfect in itself. Man could not improve on it. There seemed to her almost an absurdity about constructing little hedgerows, all carefully cut and shaped so that they lacked any spontaneity, and flower gardens, where flowers were given strict instructions to grow a uniform color and a uniform height. And marble statues of Greek gods or cherubs always seemed to her totally inappropriate in an English countryside. The rains and the temperate climate of England produced vegetation enough and color enough that it did not need embellishment. It was not that the Hetherington grounds were uncared for. She had discovered that the gardener had four helpers and that all five of them were constantly busy. But their efforts were used to aid nature rather than to distort it.
At this time of the year most people would have found the gardens drab. Most of the trees were already bare. There were no flowers remaining. Only greens and browns, Helen noted with satisfaction. The shadings of those two colors were almost infinite. One could spend days noticing the contrasts, undistracted by the gaudier colors of summer. She wandered, drinking in the late-autumn beauty of it all, forgetting for long stretches of time the cold, her obligations to her hostess, her pregnancy, and the uncertainty of her future. Soon she would beg paper and paints from Elizabeth and try to paint some of her feelings out of herself. She was almost ready.
But she was not always absorbed by such thoughts. Just as frequently, as she wandered over the lawns and among the trees, her eyes alone saw them. Her mind was wholly taken by the picture of a different landscape, of tall old trees and wild, untended undergrowth, of a dilapidated hut and a meandering stream. And of herself there, caught up in a dream world, unaware of the realities of life
As she leaned against an oak tree in the Hetherington grounds, her hands tracing the contours of its trunk, in her mind she felt the old oak tree by the stream, its bark older and rougher. And she felt William's hands above hers, William behind her. And in her imagination she turned to him as she had turned in reality several months before. She relived his kiss, his lovemaking. She relived each of their three meetings, remembering every look, word, and touch that had passed between them.
For the first days she refused to recall what had followed. She had resolved when she came here to put the pain behind her. For the sake of her unborn child she needed to achieve some sort of tranquility, and brooding on the wrongs that she had done and those that had been done her was not a way to achieve that aim. She concentrated wholly on those three afternoons, when she had fallen in love and when she had given her love freely without a thought of the consequences.
On one of those afternoons her child had been conceived. And for the first time Helen was fiercely glad that it had happened. Even if she had the choice now, she would not have things differently, she believed. For the rest of her life she would have her son or her daughter to remind her that at one time she had found her ideal. She had always wanted perfection in her life. Well, she had it once-a perfect love. She could never love William again as she had then, and she could certainly never trust him again, but once, for the space of a few days, she had loved. And she was glad that there would be a permanent and perfect memento of those days. What could be more perfect than a child? A child who would be part of him, who perhaps would look like him?
The shining eyes and the glowing cheeks that so pleased Elizabeth were due as much to this acceptance of the past as they were to the renewal of her determination to paint.
Although Helen sometimes forgot that she was a guest and that she should spend more time with her hostess, she did enjoy Elizabeth's company when they were together. She had been grateful to her for the invitation to Hetherington, but she had not really expected to like her hostess. Despite what Elizabeth had said to her about her own sufferings, Helen had labeled her as one of the privileged in this life, as one who had not really been made to face the harshness of life as most other people had.
She was pleasantly surprised, therefore, to find that Elizabeth had a warm personality and a keen intelligence. Her love for her husband and son were no affectation. She wrote to the marquess daily, though he was planning to come a week after their own arrival. She spent a large portion of each day with her son instead of abandoning his upbringing to the nurse. And her love was not confined to her own family. She told Helen about her brother John and his wife, Louise; and the affection she felt for them and their growing family-two children, soon to be three-was very obvious.
She talked sometimes with enthusiasm and amusement about her come-out Season in London, when she had met the marquess and when his eccentric grandmother had aided and abetted their growing love and their eventual elopement. And she spoke of the people of the village of Granby where she had lived for the six years of her separation from her husband, as a governess and companion. There was no bitterness in any of these stories, but there was a great deal of affection for the people she had known. And, of course, Helen could never forget that the marchioness had saved her from a nightmare situation.