She had seen enough; she had learnt enough. Now to get home.
She would have taken one of the cabs, of which two or three still stood by the Cross, but she had no money. There were two pennies, it is true, in the pocket of her jacket, but the trams had ceased running for the night. There was nothing for it but to walk, and she had no idea of the way. Her two first experiences of asking it, one entailing immediate flight from insult, were not encouraging. So the clocks were chiming half-past three ere, utterly worn out, draggled beyond belief, she stood in the hall of her own house again, thankful to find from the darkness that Ted had not yet returned. He might be back any moment, however, so she must make haste and remove her garments. She flung them all soiled and stained with the grime of the city, on the top of Myfanwy Jones' creation, the beginning and the end together.
Then, as she stood in her white dressing-gown, she paused to listen.
Was that a sound in Ted's study? Could he have come in already? come in without seeing how she was?
She went downstairs. There was a light beneath the door; she opened it.
The room seemed to her to be full of smoke, making all things in it unreal, almost fantastic. And was that her husband looming large, jovial, content through this new atmosphere? She shrank back from it.
"Hullo, little woman! Aura! I've such news for you. I've turned up trumps with a vengeance. I'm a hundred thousand pounds richer than I was yesterday. I found the telegram when I came home half an hour ago, and I've been dreaming ever since. Such dreams! You shall have the best time a woman ever had--frocks, jewels, everything--and by and by----"
"There may be no by and by," she said quickly. "Ted--oh Ted! be good to me."
CHAPTER XXVII
"It is May," said Ned Blackborough in rather a strained voice, "and you promised to come to Cwmfaernog in May. You look as if you needed a holiday. Come!"
Yes, it was May. Four whole months had passed since Myfanwy Jones'
dress had upset Aura's cosmogony, and she had fled to find some foothold in the slums of the city. She had found a faith there, and had spent four months in trying to put that faith into practice.
It had been up-hill work, but her courage had not wavered.
Her eyes were clear as she looked back at Ned, who had come in to find her, as she so often was nowadays, alone. For Ted's first great success had been but a preliminary to months of daily excitement spent in gaining, losing, gaining again, in the midst of which he seemed to have lost sight of the future altogether. And for the present he was too busy to care. Then underlying all things was his consciousness of youth. The outlook before him was long; he could not but see that chance might come into it. Why! in five years time he would be just reaching the age at which it was prudent for a business man to marry; for, of course, his marriage to poor dear Aura had been grossly imprudent, though, but for this one disappointment,--which naturally meant more to her than to him--it had turned out very well. If only she would have condescended to amuse herself like other girls--like Rosa Hirsch, for instance--they might have had a jolly time together in the various European capitals whither his business took him. But what was the use of taking her when the only places in which Aura was not shy and ill at ease were musty fusty old picture galleries and dreary botanical gardens. And "the Zoo," of course; she had always been at home in "the Zoo"; but then there was that beastly smell of smaller mammals all over the shop. So he had gone his way, kindly, quite affectionately, wholly without sympathy. To Aura it was rather a relief; it gave her time to rearrange her world.
She was looking a little weary over a pile of household accounts.
There was no need nowadays for heartburnings as to expense; but none the less Ted expected a properly-balanced book, and the items were terribly numerous. It was the herring-and-a-half problem expressed in pounds instead of pence, and there was quite a wrinkle of thought between Aura's eyebrows, for she was no arithmetician.
To Ned that wrinkle was a tragedy; but then it is always a tragedy for a man to watch from a distance the woman he loves trying to reconstruct her life, and reconcile herself to the lack of what he knows he could give her; and the greater her success the greater--in a way--is the tragedy.
Ned had felt this every instant of those four months during which the memory of that pitiful protest, "Not you Ned. Ah! Ned, not you!" had come between him and even apology. When he had gone back that evening to fling himself into a chair and gloom over the fire for a few minutes, he had told himself he was a fool. He had told himself so hundreds of times since that evening, until there had grown up in him the conviction that this sort of thing could not possibly last for ever. Why should it? Why should three human beings be sacrificed? And in heaven's name to what? Not to a marriage of either soul or body.
They all needed something which they had not got. Ted needed, or would need, a wife and children. These might be his if Aura were taken away.
She needed the old, free, natural life. This Ned could give her in that island on the southern seas. And how much more? Ye gods! how much more of love--true love, and tenderness and truth! As for his own needs, they were simple, being summed up in that one word--Aura. He needed her every instant of the day and night. He could not be content without her. Love had left his body; it had invaded his mind; it had not yet touched his soul. The personal element was still too strong for him, so by degrees he had brought himself to believe that perhaps the best way out of the _impasse_ for all the three actors in the tragedy would be for him to beguile her away--if he could.
"You know you promised me last year," he reiterated.
"Yes! I promised," she said sadly, and he knew where her thoughts had fled. He used to see her so often in his dreams, wandering through great drifts of purple iris, the flower which brings the messages of the gods, leading a little child by the hand. She was there now, and a sudden dread came over him again lest nothing short of that would ever make her really happy. But the next moment he had roused himself. "I should love to go, of course," she went on. "Fancy seeing Cwmfaernog and the floor of heaven! Only I can't, can I? till Ted returns, and that may be----"
"Never, perhaps!" interrupted Ned sarcastically. "He hasn't been much at home lately, has he?"
She flushed up hastily. "Why should he be? he is not like you--you are an idle man; besides----" she paused, her pride refusing to justify her husband even to Ned. "It may not be for a fortnight," she went on coldly, "he never can tell. And by that time the hyacinths will be over, and it would be no good. So--so it is no use thinking of it."
But her very readiness in the self-defence of this refusal to blame her husband, decided him. If that went on much longer, the tragedy would become permanent. A sudden weariness of the whole foolish muddle seized on him. He was not going to have Aura spend her days in saintliness and martyrdom, growing more and more dignified and gracious, more and more motherly in the look of brimming affection she never failed to give to him--to him her lover!
It was beyond bearing. He would break down the prison walls at all costs. He was tired to death himself of civilisation; they would go into the wilderness and be happy.
"I will ask Mrs. Ramsay to come with us," he said, knowing that he had not the slightest intention of so doing; but if he was to take the law into his own hands, he would require a few days to mature his plans.
"She can't come," he said two days afterwards; "she isn't quite up to it."
Aura looked for a moment as if she were back in the iris fields. "I'm sorry," she began.
"But," went on Ned coolly, "I believe I could take you there and back by the four-cylinder Panhard in a day--if you don't mind starting rather early. Do come. I--I want a holiday too--badly."
He looked like it.
"Poor Ned," she said softly, for she had begun to realise her responsibilities towards him also. That was the worst of life; the great hidden tie between all creatures could so seldom be felt or seen until some wound stripped the quivering flesh, and left the ligaments bare. "Yes! I will come," she said after a pause, making up her mind that there, standing on the floor of heaven, she would try and make him understand that she was worth no man's passionate love. "When shall we go?"
Something seemed to rise in his throat and choke him. "The first fine day. Shall we say to-morrow? But we must start at five; and breakfast by the way."
"At five!" she echoed joyously, looking more like herself than she had done for months. "Oh Ned! how jolly! I haven't been up at five for ages and ages. It disturbs Ted so--and then," she hurried on--"the servants loathe it. They hate you to know how late they are."
She was ready waiting for him, with quite a colour in her cheeks when he drove up. It was a delicious morning, cool, clear, full of shafted lights and shadows from the rising sun. Aura tilted back her head triumphantly and gazed up at the little white fleecy clouds that were drifting steadily overhead before the westerly breeze.
"I'm not going to look at anything grimy to-day," she said with a laugh; "and even Blackborough can't soil those! They are too gladly far away. Do you know that often when I've nothing else to comfort me, I lie on my back in the garden and dream they are just feathers out of a great, soft pillow where I am finding rest!"
He felt a pang for her innocent self-betrayal, but he retorted gravely, "That is your fault for not being contented with a good civilised wire-mattress."
She laughed out loud. "How nice of you to talk nonsense! It is exactly like old times; exactly!" she cried. "Ned! do you think we were made to forget? I don't."
"Some things," he said soberly, "are best forgotten."
"Not many," she replied cheerfully. "Sometimes, Ned, I seem to get at the meaning of so much by remembering, and then I see how all these little lives of ours work into one big whole; and then--and then." She was silent, her eyes still upon the clouds.
"If her Majesty will deign to look upon this poor world," said Ned Blackborough after quite a long while, "she will see primroses."
They were beyond the grime. The skies were blue, the trees, the grass were green, and far away the distant hills showed purple through the blossoming apple orchards.
What need was there for more?
Not once, not twice, but many times that day, as the car sped almost noiselessly through lanes and past homesteads and fields where the lambs lay white like little clouds dropped from heaven, Ned told himself joyfully that this was but the beginning of an end which would never come.
"Why are you putting on your goggles?" she asked, as, by the low road round the coast--for the straight hilly pitch over the head of the valley was too bad for the motor--they came within measurable distance of Dinas.
"There are a lot of slate spiculae on the road," he replied coolly, "and one got into my eye once. You had better put on a veil too. I brought one on purpose."
"You think of everything, Ned," she replied gaily. "I never knew any one like you."
Except Guy Fawkes, or some arch traitor of that sort, he felt with a pang; but one had to take precautions, and if you set yourself up as a _Deus ex machine_ to get people out of a muddle--why, some mud was likely to stick.
So, disguised out of all recognition, they swept through the village of Dinas, and, passing the staring schoolhouse, took the turn towards Cwmfaernog.
The villagers looked after them with slack curiosity, for Dinas was, as it had always been, immersed in its own trivialities. The revival had passed away, leaving its traces physical and mental no doubt, but ceasing to bring any new interest into life. At the present moment, however, the village had an absorbing interest of its own; for in two days time the Reverend Hwfa Williams was to marry Alicia Edwards, and all the other young women in the place were in that curious state of mingled spitefulness and vicarious nervous excitability which a wedding so often provokes in the feminine sex.
"They will not find any one at Cwmfaernog, whatever," said Isaac Edwards at his door, "for Martha Bate and her husband went for a jaunt the day before yesterday. It is only old Evans from the shepherd's hut that is to milk the cows and feed the cocks."