At the opening of the door she stirred in her chair. She was glad when you came.
Catty brought in the lamp. When she turned up the wick the rising flame carved Mamma"s face out of the dusk. Her pretty face, delicately dinted, whitened with a powdery down; stained with faint bistres of age. Her little, high-bridged nose stood up from the softness, clear and young, firm as ivory.
The globed light showed like a ball of fire, hung out in the garden, on the black, gla.s.sy darkness, behind the pane. Catty drew down the blind and went. You heard the click of the latch falling to behind her. The evening had begun.
They took up their books. Mamma hid her face behind Anthony Trollope, Mary hers behind Thomas Hardy. Presently she would hear Mamma sigh, then yawn.
Horrible tension.
Under the edge of her book she would see Anthony Trollope lying in Mamma"s lap and Mamma"s fingers playing with the fringe of her shawl. She would put Thomas Hardy down and take up Anthony Trollope and read aloud till Mamma"s head began bowing in a doze. Then she would take up Thomas Hardy. When Mamma waked Hardy would go down under Trollope; when she dozed he would come to the top again.
After supper Mamma would be wide awake. She would sit straight up in her chair, waiting, motionless, ready. You would pick up your book but you would have no heart in it. You knew what she wanted. She knew that you knew. You could go on trying to read if you chose; but she would still sit there, waiting. You would know what she was thinking of.
The green box in the cabinet drawer.
The green box. You began to think of it, too, hidden, hidden in the cabinet drawer. You were disturbed by the thought of the green box, of the little figures inside it, white and green. You would get up and go to the cabinet drawer.
Mamma would put out her hands on the table, ready. She smiled with shut lips, pouting, half ashamed, half delighted. You would set out the green and white chequer board, the rows of p.a.w.ns. And the game of halma would begin. White figures leap-frogging over green, green over white. Your hand and your eyes playing, your brain hanging inert, remembering, forgetting.
In the pauses of the game you waited; for the clock to strike ten, for Catty to bring in the Bible and the Prayer-book, for the evening to end.
Old verses, old unfinished verses, coming and going.
In the long pauses of the game, when Mamma sat stone-still, hypnotised by the green and white chequers, her curved hand lifted, holding her p.a.w.n, her head quivering with indecision.
_In dreams He has made you wise With the wisdom of silence and prayer...._
Coming and going, between the leap-frogging of the green figures and the white.
_G.o.d, Who has blinded your eyes With the dusk of your hair...._
Brown hair, sleek and thin, brown hair that wouldn"t go grey.
And the evening would go on, soundless and calm, with soft, annihilating feet, with the soft, cruel feet of oblivion.
III.
One day, when she came in, she heard the sound of the piano. The knocking of loose hammers on dead wires, the light, hacking clang of chords rolling like dead drum taps: Droom--Droom, Droom-era-room.
Alone in the dusk, Mamma was playing the Hungarian March, bowing and swaying as she played.
When the door opened she started up, turning her back on the piano, frightened, like a child caught in a play it is ashamed of. The piano looked mournful and self-conscious.
Then suddenly, all by itself, it shot out a cry like an arrow, a pinging, stinging, violently vibrating cry.
"I"m afraid," Mamma said, "something"s happened to the piano."
IV.
They were turning out the cabinet drawer, when they found the bundle of letters. Mamma had marked it in her sharp, three cornered hand-writing: "Correspondence, Mary."
"Dear me," she said, "I didn"t know I"d kept those letters."
She slipped them from the rubber band and looked at them. You could see Uncle Victor"s on the top, then Maurice Jourdain"s. You heard the click of her tongue that dismissed those useless, unimportant things. The slim, yellowish letter at the bottom was Miss Lambert"s.
"Tt-tt--"
"Oh, let me see that."
She looked over her mother"s shoulder. They read together.
"We don"t want her to go.... She made us love her more in one fortnight than girls we"ve had with us for years.... Perhaps some day we may have her again."
The poor, kind woman. The kind, dead woman. Years ago dead; her poor voice rising up, a ghostlike wail over your "unbelief."
That was only the way she began.
"I say--I say!"
The thin voice was quivering with praise. Incredible, bewildering praise.
"Remarkable.--remarkable".--You would have thought there had never been such a remarkable child as Mary Olivier.
It came back to her. She could see Miss Lambert talking to her father on the platform at Victoria. She could see herself, excited, running up the flagged walk at Five Elms. And Mamma coming down the hall. And what happened then. The shock and all the misery that came after.
"That was the letter you wouldn"t let me read."
"What do you mean?"
"The day I came back. I asked you to let me read it and you wouldn"t."
"Really, Mary, you accuse me of the most awful things. I don"t believe I wouldn"t let you read it."
"You didn"t. I remember. You didn"t want me to know--"
"Well," her mother said, giving in suddenly, "if I didn"t, it was because I thought it would make you even more conceited than you were. I don"t suppose I was very well pleased with you at the time."
"Still--you kept it."
But her mother was not even going to admit that she had kept it.
She said, "I must have overlooked it. But we can burn it now."
She carried it across the room to the fire. She didn"t want even now--even now. You saw again the old way of it, her little obstinate, triumphant smile, the look that paid you out, that said, "See how I"ve sold you."
The violet ashen sheet clung to the furred soot of the chimney: you could still see the blenched letters.
She couldn"t really have thought it would make you conceited. That was only what she wanted to think she had thought.