Mary Olivier: a Life Part 85

"Mamma. She told me you couldn't ask anybody again because of me. She said I'd frightened Lindley Vickers away. Like Aunt Charlotte."

Dan smiled, a sombre, reminiscent smile.

"You don't mean to say you still take Mamma seriously? _I_ never did."

"But--Mark--"

"Or him either."

It hurt her like some abominable blasphemy.

XVII

Nothing would ever happen. She would stay on in Morfe, she and Mamma: without Mark, without Dan, without the Sutcliffes....

They were going....

They were gone.

XXVIII

I.

She lay out on the moor, under the August sun. Her hands were pressed like a bandage over her eyes. When she lifted them she caught the faint pink glow of their flesh. The light throbbed and nickered as she pressed it out, and let it in.

The sheep couched, panting, in the shade of the stone covers. She lay so still that the peewits had stopped their cry.

Something bothered her....

_And in the east one pure, prophetic star_--one pure prophetic star--_Trembles between the darkness and the dawn_.

What you wrote last year. No reason why you shouldn't write modern plays in blank verse if you wanted to. Only people didn't say those things. You couldn't do it that way.

Let the thing go. Tear it to bits and burn them in the kitchen fire.

If you lay still, perfectly still, and stopped thinking the other thing would come back.

_In dreams He has made you wise, With the wisdom of silence and prayer, G.o.d, who has blinded your eyes, With the dusk of your hair_.

The Mother. The Mother. Mother and Son.

_You and he are near akin.

Would you slay your brother-in-sin?

What he does yourself shall do_--

That was the Son's hereditary destiny.

Lying on her back under Karva, she dreamed her "Dream-Play"; saying the unfinished verses over and over again, so as to remember them when she got home. She was unutterably happy.

She thought: "I don't care what happens so long as I can go on."

She jumped up to her feet. "I must go and see what Mamma's doing."

Her mother was sewing in the drawing-room and waiting for her to come to tea. She looked up and smiled.

"What are you so pleased about?" she said.

"Oh, nothing."

Mamma was adorable, sitting there like a dove on its nest, dressed in a dove's dress, grey on grey, turning dove's eyes to you in soft, crinkly lids. She held her head on one side, smiling at some secret that she kept. Mamma was happy, too.

"What are you looking such an angel for?"

Mamma lifted up her work, showing an envelope that lay on her lap, the crested flap upwards, a blue gun-carriage on a white ground, and the motto: "_Ubique_."

Catty had been into Reyburn to shop and had called for the letters. Mark was coming home in April.

"Oh--Mamma--"

"There's a letter for you, Mary."

(Not from Mark.)

"If he gets that appointment he won't go back." She thought: "She'll never be unhappy again. She'll never be afraid he'll get cholera."

For a minute their souls met and burned together in the joy they shared.

Then broke apart.

"Aren't you going to show me Mr. Sutcliffe's letter?"

"Why should I?"

"You don't mean to say there's anything in it I can't see?"

"You can see it if you like. There's nothing in it."

That was why she hadn't wanted her to see it. For anything there was in it you might never have known him. But Mrs. Sutcliffe had sent her love.

Mamma looked up sharply.