A small poplar tree growing at the village end of the bridge had already lost some of its leaves and a few of these came drifting, one by one, along the raised stone pathway to the girl’s feet. Over the misty marsh lands in the other direction, she could see the low tower of the church. The gilded weather-vane on the top of it shimmered and glittered in a vaporous stream of sunlight that seemed to touch nothing else.
Dreamily she looked at the Doctor, too weary of the struggle of life to make an effort to leave him and yet quite hopeless as to his power to help her. Fingal Raughty continued to discourse upon the instinctive wisdom of maternity.
“Women who’ve had children,” he went on, “are the only people in the world who possess the open secret. They know what it is to find the ultimate virtue in exquisite resignation. They do not only submit to fate — they joyfully embrace it. I suppose we might maintain that they even ‘love it’—though I confess that that idea of ‘loving’ fate has always seemed to me weird and fantastic. But I laugh, and so do you, I expect, when our friends Sorio and Tassar talk in their absurd way about women. What do they know of women? They’ve only met, in all their lives (forgive me, Nance!) a parcel of silly young girls. They’ve no right to speak of life at all, the depraved children that they are! They are outside life, they’re ignorant of the essential mystery. Goethe was the fellow to understand these things, and you know the name he gives to the unutterable secret? The Mothers. That’s a good name, isn’t it? The Mothers! Listen, Nance! All the people in this place suffer from astigmatism and asymmetry. Those are the outward signs of their mental departure from the normal. And the clever ones among them are proud of it. You know the way they talk! They think abnormality is the only kind of beauty. Nance, my dear, to tell you the truth, I’m sick of them all. My idea of beauty is the perfect masculine type, such as you see it in that figure they call ‘the Theseus’—in the Elgin marbles — or the perfect feminine type as you see it in the great Demeter. Do you suppose they can, any of them, get round that? Do you suppose they can fight against the rhythm of Nature?”
He pulled out his tobacco pouch and gravely lit his pipe, swinging his head backwards and forwards as he did so. Nance could not help noticing the shrewd, humorous animalism of his look as he performed this function.
“But what can be done? Oh, Fingal, what can be done about Linda?” she asked with a heavy sigh.
He settled his pipe in his mouth and blew violently down its stem, causing a cloud of smoke to go up into the September air.
“Take her to Mrs. Renshaw,” he said solemnly. “That’s what I’ve been thinking all this time. That’s my conclusion. Take her to Mrs. Renshaw.”
Nance stared at him. “Really?” she murmured, “you really think she could help?”
“Try it — try it — try it!” cried Dr. Raughty, flinging a bit of moss at the fish in the water below them.
“It’s extraordinary,” he added, “that these dace should come down so far as this! The water here must be almost entirely salt.”
That afternoon Nance went to Mr. Traherne’s vesper service. She found Mrs. Renshaw in the church and invited both her and the priest to come back with them to their lodgings. She did this under the pretense of showing them some new designs of a startling and fascinating kind that she had received from Paris. The circean witcheries of French costumery were not perhaps precisely the right attraction either for Mrs. Renshaw or Hamish Traherne, but the thing served well enough as an excuse and they both took it as such. She was careful to hurry on in advance with Mr. Traherne so as to make it inevitable that Linda should walk with Mrs. Renshaw. The mistress of Oakguard seemed unusually pale and tired that afternoon. She held Linda back in the churchyard until the others had got quite far and then she led her straight to Rachel Doorm’s grave. They had buried the unhappy woman quite close to the outermost border of the priest’s garden. Nothing but a few paces of level grass separated her from a row of tall crimson hollyhocks. The grave at present lacked any headstone. Only a bunch of Michaelmas daisies, placed there by Linda herself, stood at its foot in a glass jar. Several wasps were buzzing round this jar, probably conscious of some faint odour clinging still about it from what it had formerly contained. Mrs. Renshaw stood with her hand leaning heavily on Linda’s shoulder. She seemed to know, from the depths of her own fathomless morbidity, precisely what the young girl was feeling.
“Shall we kneel down?” she said. Linda began trembling a little but with simple and girlish docility, free from any kind of embarrassment, she knelt at the other’s side.
“We mustn’t pray for the dead,” whispered Mrs. Renshaw. “He,” she meant Mr. Traherne, “tells us to in his sermons, but it hurts me when he does for we’ve been taught that all that is wrong — wrong and contrary to our simple faith! We mustn’t forget the Martyrs — must we, Linda?”
But Linda’s mind was far from the martyrs. It was occupied entirely with the thing that lay buried before them, under that newly disturbed earth.
“But we can pray to God that His will be done, on earth, even as it is in Heaven,” murmured Mrs. Renshaw.
She was silent after that and the younger and the elder woman knelt side by side with bowed heads. Then in a low whisper Mrs. Renshaw spoke again.
“There are some lines I should like to say to you, dear, if you’ll let me. I copied them out last week. They were at the end of a book of poetry that I found in Philippa’s room. She must have just bought it or had it given to her. I didn’t think she cared any more for poetry. The pages weren’t cut and I didn’t like to cut them without her leave but I copied this out from the end. It was the last in the book.”
She hesitated a moment while Linda remained motionless at her side, trembling still a little and watching the movements of a Peacock butterfly which was then sharing with the wasps their interest in the ancient honeyjar.
Mrs. Renshaw then repeated the following lines in a clear exquisitely modulated voice which went drifting away over surrounding marshes.
“For even the purest delight may pall,
And power must fail and the pride must fall,
And the love of the dearest friends grow small,
But the glory of the Lord is all in all.”
Her voice sank. A slight gust of wind made the trees above them sigh softly as though the words of the kneeling woman were in harmony with the inarticulate heart of the earth.
Linda stopped trembling. A sweet indescribable calm began slowly to pervade her. Gently, like a child, she slipped her hand into her companion’s.
“Do you remember the Forty-third Psalm, Linda?” Mrs. Renshaw continued and her clear dramatic voice, with a power of feeling equal to that of any great actress, once more rose upon the air.
“Our heart is not turned back, neither have our steps declined from thy way.
Though thou hast sore broken us, in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death.”
Once more she was silent but with a slight veering of the wind, the sound of the waves beyond the sand-dunes came to them with pitiless distinctness. It seemed to mock — this voice of the earth’s antagonist — mock, in triumphant derision, the forlorn hope which that solemn invocation had roused in the girl’s heart. But in contending against Mrs. Renshaw’s knowledge of the Psalms even the North Sea had met its match. With her pale face uplifted and a wild light in her eyes, she continued to utter the old melodious incantations with their constant references to a Power more formidable than “all thy waves and storms.” She might have been one of the early converts to the faith that came from the sacred Desert, wrestling in spiritual ecstasy with the gods and powers of those heathen waters.