"It was a dream, of course," she thought, and said, a shade resentful still,
"I never slept--that way--before."
"It seems to suit you," said Ann briskly, "for you have never left your room till now."
Then it dawned on her suddenly.
"Why, I am well!" she said.
"Very nearly, I think," Hester answered her. "Will you have your breakfast under the tree, while sister picks the berries?"
To this she agreed gladly and found herself, still wondering at the new strength that filled her, under a pear-tree, in a pleasant patch of shadow, eating with relish from Hester"s morning tray. Ann knelt not far from her in the sun, not too hot at this hour for a hardy worker, and soon her low humming rose like a bee"s note from under her broad hat.
"The wash is all ready for you, sister, on the landing," she called.
"Tell mother her new towels bleached to a marvel: they are on the currant-bushes now. I"ll wet them down and iron them off while the syrup is cooking, I think--I know she"s anxious to handle them."
"Are you always busy, Miss Ann?" her guest inquired, for Ann"s fingers never stopped even while she looked toward the house-door.
"Always in the morning, of course," she answered, directly. "Every one must be, if things are to get done."
"But in the afternoon you are ironing, and Miss Hester tells me you do a great deal in the garden. When do you rest?"
"In my bed," said Ann briefly.
She was less sweetly grave than her sister, and it was easy to see that her tongue was sharper. She would not have been so soothing to an invalid, but the woman under the pear-tree had her nerves better in hand by now, and felt, somehow, upon her mettle to prove to this broad, curt Ann that there were tasks in the world beyond her st.u.r.dy rule-of-thumb.
"But surely every one needs time to think--to consider," she began gently. "Don"t you find it so?"
"To plan out the day, do you mean?" said Ann, moving to a new patch.
"I generally do that at night before I go to sleep."
"No, no," she explained, "not the day"s work--that must be done, of course--but the whole Scheme, life, and one"s relation to it..."
"I don"t feel any call to study that out," said Ann. "I haven"t the headpiece for it."
"No, but some people have, and so----"
"Have you?" said Ann.
She bit her lip.
"It is surely every woman"s duty to cultivate herself as far as she can," she began. "n.o.body denies that nowadays."
Ann was silent.
"Don"t you agree with me?" the woman persisted. "You surely know what I mean?"
"Oh, yes, I know what you mean, well enough," Ann said at last. "I know you have to cultivate strawberries, if you want to get more of "em--and bigger. The question is, what do you get out of it?"
A flood of explanations pressed to her lips, but just as they brimmed over, some quick surmise of Ann"s shrewd replies choked them back.
After all, what had she got out of it? What that she could show? She rose slowly and walked back to her room, where the bath, fresh, uncreased clothes, and Hester"s deft ministry waited ready for her.
Later, she lay again in the balcony chair, not so soothed by her little pile of books as she had looked to be. Beautiful, pellucid thought, deep-flowing philosophies, knife-edged epigrams and measured verse lay to her hand, but they seemed unreal, somehow, and their music echoed like meaningless words shouted, for the echo merely, in empty halls.
She drowsed discontentedly and woke from a dream of the grey lady to see her stretched in the companion chair, herself asleep, it seemed, for it was only after a long doubtful stare from the other that she opened her great dark eyes.
"And I almost thought I had dreamed of meeting you before! Wasn"t it absurd? I am only now realising how ill I have been--things were all so confused... I find that I can"t even reply to Miss Ann as I ought to be able to, when she scorns the effects of culture!"
"Does Ann scorn culture?" the grey lady asked in mild surprise. "I never knew that."
"She scorns the leisure that goes to produce it, anyway."
"Did you give her a concrete instance of any special culture?"
She moved uneasily in her chair.
"Oh--concrete, _concrete_!" she repeated deprecatingly. "Must I be as concrete with you as with her? Surely culture, and all that it implies, need not be forced to defend itself with concrete examples?"
"I"m afraid that I agree with Ann," said the soft voice in the shadow.
"I"m afraid that so far as I am concerned, culture needs just that defence."
She tried to smile the superior smile she had mustered for Ann, kneeling in her checked sunbonnet, but this was difficult, with a woman so obviously of her own cla.s.s and kind. Still the woman was clearly unreasonable, and she was able, at least, to speak forcibly as she replied,
"Aren"t you rather severe on the enormous majority of us, in that case?
We can"t all be great philosophers or productive artists, you know, and yet between us and Ann"s preserved strawberries and Hester"s scrubbing there"s a wide gulf--you must admit that!"
The stranger rose lightly from her chair and walked, with a swaying motion like a long-stemmed wild flower, toward the home-made window-door. At the sill she paused and fixed her great eyes on the stronger woman--stronger, plainly, for the frail white hand on the china k.n.o.b supported her while she stood, and she seemed to cling to the woodwork and press against it as she sank into the shadow of the eaves.
"A wide gulf, indeed," she said slowly, in her soft, breathless voice, with an intonation almost like a foreigner"s, her listener decided suddenly, "a gulf so wide that unless you can cross it with some bridge of honest accomplishment, it will swallow you all very soon--you women of culture!"
She slipped across the sill and presently Hester"s clear, firm voice was heard in the narrow hall,
"Yes, yes, I"m coming!" and the balcony was drowned in the dusk, and the woman on it yielded consciously to the great desire for sleep that possessed her. But before she drifted off, not afraid, this time, of night under the sky, it occurred to her dimly that Hester"s other patient must come through her own room whenever she used the little _loggia_.
"What is she--an anarchist? a socialist?" she thought. "I must surely ask Hester about her. "You women of culture," indeed! What does she call herself, I wonder?"
That next morning as she waited idly for bath and breakfast, the stranger possessed her thoughts more and more. Only in such an absolutely unconventional place, she told herself, could a completely unknown woman appear (in her own apartments, really) and discuss with her so nonchalantly such strange questions. In many ways this delicate creature"s words seemed to echo Dr. Stanchon"s, and this seemed all the more natural, now, since she was so obviously still his patient.
Hester had said that he sent many there--this one was perhaps too frail ever to leave them, and felt so much at home that no one thought to speak of her.
A healthy hunger checked these musings, and more amused than irritated at such unusual desertion, she bathed and dressed unaided and went down to the kitchen.
"They will soon see by the way I keep my temper, now," she thought, "and my strength, that I am quite able to go back. I really must see how the children are getting on."
Following the ways of her last journey through the house she found the kitchen, where an oven-door ajar and a half-dozen small, fragrant loaves in the opening showed her that though empty, the room was deserted only for a housewife"s rapid moment. She sat down therefore beneath the patient old clock, and waited. Soon she heard a quick, bustling step, unlike Hester"s lithe quietness or the heavier stride of Ann, and knew that the little old lady who entered, fresh and tidy as a clean withered apple, was their mother. She had a pan of new-picked peas in one arm and a saucer of milk balanced in the other hand, plainly the breakfast for the sleek black cat that bounded in beside her. This she set carefully on a flagstone corner before she noticed her visitor, it seemed, and yet she did not appear startled at company, and showed all of the younger women"s untroubled ease as she explained that a message from Dr. Stanchon had called them both away suddenly, very early.
"It was perhaps some other patient in the house?" the guest suggested curiously, with a vivid memory of the grey lady"s frail white hand and breathless voice.
"Perhaps," said the old woman equably, and tied a checked ap.r.o.n over the white one, the better to attack the peas.
From the shining pan she tossed the fairy green globes into the rich yellow bowl of earthenware at her side, with the quick ease of those veined, old hands that outwork the young ones, and her guest watched her in silence for a few minutes, hypnotised, almost, by the steady pit-pat of the little green b.a.l.l.s against the bowl.