The Green Bough. E. Temple Thurston
Mary and back again as though she could steal the secrets of Fate out of their eyes.
It was Fanny she read most easily of all; Fanny who in such moments revealed to the shrewdness of her gaze that faint acceleration of pulse, to the realization of which nothing but the bitterness in her heart could have sharpened her. It was upon Fanny then in these moments her observation concentrated. Mary eluded her. Indeed Mary, it seemed, was the calmest and serenest of them all. Sometimes if she were engrossed in reading she did not even come to the window, but was content from her chair to hear what they had to report.
And when there were no visitors descending from the coach, in language their brother had long brought home from school and left behind him in phrases when he went, it was Jane, with a laugh, who turned upon those other three and said--
"What a suck for everybody!"
V
Then there was Fanny, whose age in Bridnorth was variously guessed to be between thirty and thirty-three. No one knew. Her sisters never revealed it. Jane had her loyalties and this was one.
Only Fanny herself, in those quiet moments when a woman is alone before the judgment of her own mirror, knew that the gray hairs had begun to make their appearance amidst the black. They were not even for concealment yet. It was as though they tried to hide themselves from the swift searching of her eyes. But she had found them out. Each one as pensively she rolled it round her fingers, hiding it away or burning it in the fire, was a thorn that pricked and drew blood.
Hope had not yet been laid aside by her. In that vivid if untrained imagination of hers, Romance still offered her promise of the untold joys and ecstasies of a woman's heart. She had not laid Hope aside, but frettingly and constantly Hope was with her. She was conscious of it, as of a hidden pain that warns of some disease only the knife can cure.
Always she was clutching it and only the writing of her ill-measured verses of poetry could anesthetize her knowledge of its presence. Then, when she was beating out her fancies in those uncomely words of almost childish verse, the pain of the hope she had would lie still, soothed to sleepfulness by the soporific of her wandering imagination.
What, can it be supposed, was the coming of the coach to her?
The vehicle of Fate it has been said it was, bringing a Destiny which for thirty years and more had lingered on its journey, for never had it been set down at the Royal George.
Already she knew that she was tired of waiting for it. Often that tiredness overcame her. Through the long winter months when the Bridnorth stream was languid and shallow in its flow, she became listless when she was not irritable, and the look of those thirty-three years was added in their fullness in her eyes.
A visit into the world amongst those friends they had, transitory though those visits may have been, revived courage in her. And all through the Spring and Summer season, she fought that fatigue as a woman must and will so long as the hope of Romance has even one red spark of fire in her heart.
It was not a man so much she wanted, as Romance. She alone could have told what was meant by that. The one man she had known had almost made her hate his sex. It was not so much to her a stranger who stepped down outside the Royal George and trod her pulse to acceleration, as the urgent wonder of what might happen in the weeks to come; of what might happen to her in the very core of her being. He was no more than a medium, an instrument to bring about those happenings. She knew in herself what ecstasy she could suffer, how her heart could throb behind her wasted breast, how every vein threading her body would become the channel for a warmer race of blood.
It was not so much that she wanted a man to love as to feel love itself with all its accompanying sensations of fear and wonder, yet knowing all the time that before these emotions could happen to her, she must attract and be found acceptable, must in another waken some strange need to be the kindling spark in her.
Only once had it seemed she had succeeded. There had come a visitor to the Royal George with whom in the ordinary course of the summer life of Bridnorth, acquaintance had soon been made. None of them were slow to realize the interest he had taken in Fanny. Before he left they twice had walked over the moors to where on the highest and loneliest point of the cliffs you can see the whole sweep of Bridnorth bay and in clear weather the first jutting headland on the Cornish coast.
Many a love match in Bridnorth had been made about those heathered moors. It was no love match he made with Fanny. What happened only Mary knew. He had taken Fanny in his arms and he had kissed her. For many months she had felt those kisses, not in the touch of his lips so much as in waves of emotion that tumbled in a riot through her veins and left her trembling in the darkness of night. For he had never told her that he loved her.
In three weeks he had gone away having said no word to bind her. In two months' time or little more, she read of his marriage in the London papers and that night stared and stared at her reflection in the mirror when she went to bed.
For in her heart and below the communicating consciousness of her thoughts, she knew what had happened. Never could she have told herself; far less spoken of it to others. But while he had held her in his arms, she had known even then. She had felt her body thin and spare and meager against his. Something unalluring in herself she had realized as his lips touched the eagerness of her own.
That strange need of which in experience she had no knowledge, she knew in that instant had not wakened in him as he held her. However passionate his kisses in their strangeness had seemed, they lacked a fire of which, knowing nothing, she yet knew all.
Still, nevertheless, she waited and the fatigue of that waiting each year was added in her eyes.
The coming of the coach to her was like that of a ship, hard-beating into harbor with broken spars and sails all rent. Yet with every coming, her heart lifted, and with every new arrival, strange to Bridnorth, her eyes would wear a brighter light, her laugh would catch a brighter ring.
"Really, you'd never think Fanny was thirty-three!" Hannah once said on one of these occasions.
"You wait for a week or two," retorted Jane.
And in a week or two when the visitor had departed, Jane would catch Hannah's eyes across the breakfast table and direct them silently to Fanny sitting there. There was no need to say--"I told you so." Jane could convey all and more in her glance than that. She took charge of Hannah's vision, as Hannah took charge of her children. That was enough.
VI
It was to Mary Throgmorton in those days that this coming of the Abbotscombe coach is most elusive of all to define. So much less of the emotions of hopefulness, of curiosity, or even of childish interest did she betray, that there is little in action or conduct to illuminate her state of mind.
In those days, which must be understood to mean the beginning of this history, and in fact were the final decade of the last century, Mary was twenty-nine.
That is a significant age and, to any more versed in experience than she, must bring deep consideration with it. By then a woman knows the transitoriness of youth; she realizes how short is the span of time in which a woman can control her destiny. She sees in the eyes of others that life is slipping by her; she discovers how those who were children about her in her youth are gliding into the age of attractiveness, claiming attention that is not so readily hers as it was or as she imagines perhaps it might have been.
In such a state of mind must many a woman pause. It is as though for one instant she had power to arrest the traffic of time that she might take this crossing in the streets of life with unhampered deliberation. For here often she will choose her direction in the full consciousness of thought. No longer dare she leave her destiny to the hazard of chance. It has become, not the Romance that will happen upon her in the glorious and unexpected suddenness of ecstasy, but the Romance she must find, eager in her searching, swift in her choice lest life all go by and the traffic of time sweep over her.
This choice she must make or work must save her, for life has become as vital to women as it is to men. At twenty-nine this is many a woman's dilemma. Yet