Part 137

To-night she wrote: "I have done all I can for you, or, if you like, for Laura. She's at the breaking point. If you think there's anything you can do for her yourself you'd better do it and lose no time."

She wrote brutally; for mixed with her jealousy there was a savage anger with Owen as the cause of Laura's suffering. She hated the Kiddy, but she couldn't bear to see her suffer.

There were two days yet before the mail went; but she posted her letter at once, while her nerve held out. The thing done, she sat up till midnight brooding over it. It had taken all her nerve. For she did not want Prothero to come back, and that letter would bring him. Bodily separation from Owen had not killed her; it had become the very condition of her life; for there was a soul of soundness in her. Her blood, so vehement in its course, had the saving impetus of recoil.

She dreaded its dominion as the whipped slave dreads the lash.

Latterly she had detached herself even spiritually from Owen. She remembered what she had been before, without him, and what, without him, she had possessed. Her genius was a thing utterly removed from her, a thing that belonged to Owen rather than to her, since he had said it was his youth. She thought of it tenderly, as of a thing done for and departed; for it was so that she had come to think of Owen's youth. She was not like Jane, she felt no hatred of it and no jealousy. It had not given her cause. It had not stood in her way. It had not struggled in her against her passion. If it had, she knew that she would have swept it aside and crushed it. It had lain always at the mercy of her passions; she had given it to her passions to destroy, foreseeing the destruction. But now she relented. She felt that she would save it if she could.

It was in her hour of sanity and insight that she had said virginity was the law, the indispensable condition. Virginity--she had always seen it, not as a fragile, frustrate thing, but as a joyous, triumphing energy, the cold, wild sister of mountain winds and leaping waters, subservient only to her genius, guarding the flame in its secret, unsurrendered heart.

Her genius was the genius of wild earth, an immortal of divinely pitiful virgin heart and healing hand; clear-eyed, swift-footed, a huntress of the woods and the mountains, a runner in the earth's green depths, in the secret, enchanted ways. To follow it was to know joy and deliverance and peace. It was the one thing that had not betrayed her.

There had been moments, lately, when she had had almost the assurance of its ultimate return; when she had felt the stirring of the old impulse, the immortal instinct; when she longed for the rushing of her rivers, and the race of the wind on her mountains of the Marches. It would come back, her power, if she were there, in the place where it was born; if she could get away from streets and houses and people; if she got away from Laura.

But Laura was the one thing she could not get away from. She had to be faithful to her trust.

It would be seven weeks, at the least, before Owen could come back. Her letter would take three weeks to reach him, and he would have to make arrangements. She wondered whether the Kiddy could hold out so long.

All night she was tormented by this fear, of the Kiddy's not holding out, of her just missing it; of every week being one more nail hammered, as she had once said, into the Kiddy's little coffin; and it was with a poignant premonition that she received a message from Addy Ranger in the morning. Miss Ranger was down-stairs; she had something to say to Miss Lempriere; she must see her. She couldn't come up; she hadn't a minute.

Addy stood outside on the doorstep. She was always in a violent hurry when on her way to Fleet Street, the scene for the time being of her job. But this morning her face showed signs of a profounder agitation. She made a rush at Nina.

"Oh, Miss Lempriere, will you go to Laura?"

"Is she ill?"

"No. He is. He's dying. He's in a fit. I think it's killing her."

The blinds were down when Nina reached the house in Camden Town.

The fit--it was apoplexy, Mrs. Baxter informed her--had not been long. It had come on, mercifully, in his sleep. Mercifully (Mrs. Baxter leant on it); but Miss Lempriere had better go up at once to Miss Gunning.

Nina went without a word.

The bed had been drawn into the middle of the small back room. The body of the old man lay on it, covered with a sheet. His head was tilted a little, showing the prone arch of the peaked nose; the jaw was bound with a handkerchief. Already the features were as they had been in the days before disease had touched them. Death had constrained them to their primal sanity. Death dominated them like a living soul.

The death-bed and its burden filled the room. In the narrow space between it and the wall little Laura went to and fro, to and fro, looking for a pair of white socks that were not there and never had been. She must find, she was saying, a pair of white socks, of clean white socks. They had told her that they were necessary.

XXXIX

It was on the thirtieth of July that Laura's father died. Three weeks later Laura was living in the room in Adelphi Terrace which had been Owen Prothero's. Nina had taken her away from the house in Camden Town, where she had sat alone with her grief and remorse and the intolerable memory of her fear. They said that her mind would give way if she were left there.

And now, secretly and in a night, her trouble had passed from her. Lying there in Owen's room, on his bed, held as in shelter by the walls that had held him, there had come to her a strange and intimate sense of his presence. More strangely and more intimately still, it assured her of her father's presence and continuance, of it being as Owen had said. The wind from the river passed over her, lying there. It fell like an aura of immortality.

After that night the return of her bodily health was rapid, a matter of three days; and they said of her that this marvellous recovery was due to the old man's death, to her release from the tension.

Late one afternoon she was sitting by herself at Owen's window that looked out to the sky. Outside the rain streamed in a grey mist to the streets and the river. At the sound of it her heart lifted with a sudden wildness and tremor. She started when Nina opened the door and came to her, haggard and unsmiling.

Nina was telling her twice over to go down-stairs. There was somebody there who had come to see her. When she asked who it was, Nina answered curtly that she, Laura, knew.

Laura went down to Nina's room, the room that looked over the river.

Prothero stood by the window with his back to the light.