The Green Bough. E. Temple Thurston
at those front windows, sewing, reading, often writing their letters on blotting pads upon their laps, scarcely conscious that the little filtering stream of life in Bridnorth drew them there. For had they been questioned on these matters, one and all, severally or together they would have laughed, saying that for the greater half of the year there was no life in Bridnorth to pass by, and certainly none that concerned them.
Nevertheless it was the stream, however lightly they may have turned the suggestion away. The passing of the postman, of the Vicar or the Vicar's wife, these were the movements of life, such as you see in a meadow stream and follow, dreaming in your mind, as they catch in the eddies and are whirled and twisted out of sight. So they had dreamt in their minds, in Bridnorth, these Throgmorton girls. So Mary had dreamed the twenty years and more that dreams had come to her.
For the greater half of the year, they might have said there was no life in Bridnorth. But from late Spring through Summer to the Autumn months they must have claimed with pride that their Devon village had a life of its own. The old coach with its four horses, beating out the journey from Abbotscombe to King's Tracey, brought visitors from all parts; generally the same every year. For a few months they leased whatever furnished houses there were to be had, coming regularly every season for the joy of that quiet place by the sea where there was a sandy beach to bathe on, and lonely cliffs on which to wander their holidays away.
So the Throgmorton girls made friends with some whose lives lay far outside the meadows through which the Bridnorth stream flowed peacefully between its banks. To these friends sometimes they paid visits when the Summer was passed. They went out of Bridnorth themselves by the old coach, later returning, like pigeons homing, with the wind of the outside world still in their wing feathers, restless for days until the dreams came back again. Then once more it seemed a part of life to sit at the window sewing and watch the postman go by.
There were regular visitors who came every summer, renewing their claim from year to year upon the few houses that were to be let, so that there was little available accommodation of that nature for any outsiders. They called Bridnorth theirs, and kept it to themselves. But every year, they had their different friends to stay with them and always there was the White Hart, where strangers could secure rooms by the day or the week all through the season.
The Bridnorth stream was in flood those days of the late Spring where every afternoon the coach came rumbling up the hill past the Throgmortons' house to set down its passengers at the hotel only a little farther up the road.
Like the Severn bore it was, for coming from Abbotscombe down the winding road that had risen with the eminence of the cliffs, the coach could be seen descending by twists and turns and serpentine progressions to the bottom of Bridnorth village, crossing the bridge that spans the little river Watchett and climbing again with the contour of the cliffs once more on its way to King's Tracey.
Leaning far out of one of the upper windows of the square, white house or standing even at the gate in the iron paling, the little cloud of dust or, in rainy weather, the black speck moving slowly like a fly crawling down a suspended thread of cotton, could easily be seen two miles away heralding the coming of the coach.
She who leant out of the window might certainly retire, closing it slowly as the coach drew near. She who stood at the gate in the iron palings might return casually into the house. But once they were out of sight of those on the other bank of the Bridnorth stream, there would be voices crying through the rooms that the coach was coming.
Thus, as it passed, there might four figures be seen at different windows, who, however engrossing their occupations, would look out with confessions of mild interest at the sound of the horses' hoofs on the stony road, at the rattle of harness, the rumbling of wheels and, casually, at the passengers come to Bridnorth.
Any visitor catching sight of these temperate glances from his box seat on the coach might have supposed the eyes that offered them were so well-used to that daily arrival as to find but little entertainment in the event. From their apparent indifference, he would never have believed that even their hearts had added a pulse in the beating, or that to one at least that coach was the vehicle of Fate which any day might bring the burden of her destiny.
III
It is by the ages of these four they can most easily and comprehensively be classified; yet the age of one at least of them was never known, or ever asked in Bridnorth.
Hannah might have been forty or more. She might well have been less. But the hair was gray on her head and she took no pains to conceal it. Hers, if any, was the contented soul in that household. With her it was not so much that she had given up the hope that every woman has, as that before she knew what life might be, that hope had passed her by. She was as one who stands in a crowd to see the runners pass and, before even she has raised herself on tiptoe to catch a glimpse above the heads around her, is told that the race is over.
This was Hannah, busying her life with the household needs and, for interest, before all reward, teaching the little children of friends in Bridnorth and the neighborhood, teaching them their lessons every morning; every morning kissing them when they came, every morning kissing them when they left.
To her, the arrival of the coach was significant no more than in the unaccustomed passage and hurry of life it brought. To her it was a noise in a silent street. She came to the windows as a child would come to see a circus go by. She watched its passengers descend outside the Royal George with the same light of childish interest in her eyes. Nothing of what those passengers were or what they meant reached the communicating functions of her mind. They were no more than mere performers in the circus ring. What their lives were behind that flapping canvas of the tent, which is the veil concealing the lives of all of us, she did not trouble to ask herself. Like the circus performers, they would be here to-day and to-morrow their goods and chattels would be packed, the naphtha flares beneath whose light they had for a moment appeared would be extinguished. Only the bare ring over which their horses had pranced would remain in Hannah's mind to show where they had been. And in Hannah's mind the grass would soon grow again to blot it out of sight.
To Hannah Throgmorton, these advents and excursions were no more than this.
IV
Somehow they knew in Bridnorth that Jane was thirty-six. She hid her gray beneath the careful combing of her back hair.
There is a different attitude of mind in the woman who hides these things successfully and her who still hides but knows that she fails. Sharp antagonism and resentment, this is the mind of the latter. Not only does she know that she fails. She knows how others realize that she has tried. Yet something still urges in her purpose.
Jane knew she failed. That was bitter enough. But the greater bitterness lay in the knowledge that had she succeeded it would have been of no avail. For some years, unlike her sister Hannah, she had relinquished hope, flung it aside in all consciousness of loss; flung it aside and often looked her God in the face with the accusing glances of unconcealed reproach.
To Jane that coming of the coach was the reminding spur that pricked her memories to resentment. No Destiny for her was to be found in the freight it carried. For each passenger as they descended outside the Royal George, she had her caustic comment. Hers was the common but forgivably ungenerous spirit, of the critic in whose breast the milk of human kindness has grown sour from standing overlong in the idleness of impotent ability.
Yet reminding spur that it was, and deeply as it hurt her, her eyes were as swift and sharp as any to take note of the new arrivals. Perhaps it was the very pain that she cherished. Life is a texture of sensations, and if only the thread of pain be left to keep the whole together, there are many who welcome it rather than feel the bare boards beneath their feet.
Whenever a man, strange to them amongst the regular visitors to Bridnorth, slipped off the coach at the Royal George, she knew his arrival meant nothing in Destiny to her. Yet often she would be the first to pick him out.
"He's new. Wonder if he's come with the Tollursts."
And having taken him in with a swiftness of apprehension, her glances would shoot from Fanny