May Sinclair

“ But the gods took care of Willie, and he was better before the doctor could arrive; and Aggie got all the credit of his cure.
Aggie couldn’t believe it. She was convinced the doctor was keeping something from her, he sat so long with Arthur in the dining-room. She could hear their voices booming up the chimney as she mended the fire in the nursery overhead. It was not, she argued, as if he ever cared to talk to Arthur. Nobody ever cared to talk to Arthur long, nor did he care to talk to anybody. ”

“ As for flirting, pretty Aggie couldn’t have flirted if she had tried. The manners of Queningford are not cultivated to that delicate pitch when flirtation becomes a decorative art, and Aggie would have esteemed it vulgar. But Aggie was very superior and fastidious. She wanted things that no young man in Queningford would ever be able to offer her. Aggie had longings for music, better than Queningford’s best, for beautiful pictures, and for poetry. ”

“ Yes, Susie was right about her John. There was no weak spot in him. He had not a great intellect, but he had a great heart and a great will. Aggie remembered how once, in her thoughtful 105maiden days, she had read in one of the vicar’s books a saying which had struck her at the time, for the vicar had underlined it twice. “If there is aught spiritual in man, it is the Will.” She had not thought of John as a very spiritual person. She had dimly divined in him the possibility of strong passions, such passions as make shipwreck of men’s lives. ”

“ Now, John Hurst was sadly akin to the young men of Queningford, in that he was unable to offer her any of the things which, Aggie felt, belonged to the finer part of her that she dared not show. On the other hand, he could give her (beside himself) , a good income, a good house, a horse to ride, and a trap to drive in. To marry him, as her mother pointed out to her, would be almost as good as “getting in with the county.” Not that Mrs. Purcell offered this as an inducement. ”

“ She cried out with joy over the cheap art serges, the brown-paper backgrounds, the 39blue-and-gray drugget, the oak chairs with their rush bottoms, the Borne-Jones photogravures, the “Hope” and the “Love Leading Life,” and the “Love Triumphant.” Their home would be the home of a material poverty, but to Aggie’s mind it was also a shrine whose austere beauty sheltered the priceless spiritual ideal.
Their wedded ardor flamed when he showed her for the tenth time his wonderful contrivance for multiplying bookshelves, as their treasures accumulated year by year. ”

“ Aggie knew that, in the old abominable Queningford phrase, he was “in with the county.” She saw her Arthur mixing in gay garden scenes, with a cruel spring sun shining on the shabby suit that had seen so 110many springs. Arthur’s heart failed him at the last moment, but Aggie did not fail. Go he must, she said. If the brother was the Mammon of Unrighteousness, all the more, she argued, should he be propitiated—for the children’s sake. (The Mammon was too selfish ever to marry, and there were no other nieces and nephews.) ”

“ In Queningford there were not many suitors for a young lady to choose from, but it was understood that, such as there were, Aggie Purcell would have her pick of them. The other young ladies were happy enough if they could get her leavings. Miss Purcell of the Laurels was by common consent the prettiest, the best-dressed, and the best-mannered of them all. To be sure, she could only be judged by Queningford standards; and, as the railway nearest to Queningford is a terminus that leaves the small gray town stranded on the borders of the unknown, Queningford standards are not progressive. ”

“ She paused, and then broke out again, triumphant in her justification: “No matter if there’s nothing left of me. They’re alive.”
She raised her head. Worn out and broken down she might be, but she was the mother of superb children. Something stronger and more beautiful than her lost youth flamed in her as she vindicated her motherhood. 104She struck even Susie’s dull imagination as wonderful.
Half an hour later Aggie bent her aching back again over her work. She had turned a stiff, set face to Susie as she parted from her. John had come and gone, and it had not been awkward in the least. ”

“ She had never grudged him his outbursts of irritability. It was his only dissipation. Aggie had always congratulated herself on being married to a good man.
Coffee, the beloved luxury they had so long renounced, was served with that supper. But neither of them drank it. Arthur said he wasn’t going to be kept awake two nights running, and after that, Aggie’s heart was too sore to eat or drink anything. He commented bitterly on the waste. He said he wondered how on earth they were going to pay the doctor’s bills, at that rate. ”

“ Aggie pondered. He had lain awake all night thinking of the doctor’s bills, had he? And yet that was just what they were to have no more of. Anyhow, he had been kept awake; and, 77of course, that was enough to make him irritable.
So Aggie thought she would soothe him to sleep. She remembered how he used to go to sleep sometimes in the evenings when she played. And the music, she reflected with her bitterness, would cost nothing.
But music, good music, costs more than anything; and Arthur was fastidious. Aggie’s fingers had grown stiff, and their touch had lost its tenderness. ”

“ Arthur Gatty. Mr. John Hurst was a young farmer just home from Australia, who had bought High Farm, one of the biggest sheep-farming lands in the Cotswolds. Mr. Arthur Gatty was a young clerk in a solicitor’s office in London; he was down at Queningford on his Easter holiday, staying with cousins at the County Bank. Both had the merit of being young men whom Miss Purcell had never seen before. She was so tired of all the young men whom she had seen.
Not that pretty Aggie was a flirt and a jilt and a heartless breaker of hearts. She wouldn’t have broken anybody’s heart for the whole world ”

“ He looked suspiciously at her, his heavy brain stirred by some foreboding of uncomfortable suggestion; she had been thinking of Barbara, perhaps.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He didn’t. The flame in the woman’s heart was not wholly dead, because he had kindled it, and it was one with her love of him. The dream they had dreamed together had lived on for her; first, as an agony, then as a regret. But the man had passed over into the sensual darkness that is seldom pierced by pain. ”

“ Gatty’s Easter holiday was near its end. On the Monday, very early in the morning, the young clerk would leave Queningford for town.
By Friday his manner had become, as Susie Purcell expressed it, “so marked” that the most inexperienced young lady could have suffered no doubt as to the nature of his affections. But no sooner had Aggie heard that he was going than she had begun to doubt, and had kept on doubting (horribly) up to Saturday morning. All Friday she had been bothering 19Susie. Did Susie think there was any one in town whom he was in a hurry to get back to? ”

“ Queningford would have considered that a young lady who could do all that had done enough to prove her possession of brains. Not that Queningford had ever wanted her to prove it; its young men, at any rate, very much preferred that she should leave her brains and theirs alone. And Aggie had brains enough to be aware of this; and being a very well-behaved young lady, and anxious to 7please, she had never mentioned any of her small achievements. Nature, safeguarding her own interests, had whispered to Aggie that young ladies who live in Queningford are better without intellects that show. ”

“ It was as if she had held her heart in her hand and looked at it, and, because she felt no fluttering, had argued that love had never touched it; for she did not yet know that love’s deepest dwelling-place is in the quiet 25heart. Aggie had never loved before, and she thought that she was in the sanctuary on Saturday, when she was only standing on the threshold, waiting for her hour. ”

“ From time to time a cry came from the nursery where the little ones were left alone. Outside, down the street, Arty and Catty ran hand-in-hand to fetch the doctor, their sobbing checked by a mastering sense of their service and importance.
And the man, more helpless than any child, clung to the woman’s hand and waited with her for her hour.
118As he waited he looked round the shabby room, and saw for the first time how poor a place it was. Nothing seemed to have been provided for Aggie; nothing ever was provided for her; she was always providing things for other people. ”

“ She could not bear Susie to be able to say that one of her children had given so gross a hint.
The children pressed round her, and her hands were soon at their proud and anxious work: coaxing stray curls into their place; proving the strength of the little arms; slipping a sock, to show the marbled rose of the round limbs.
“Just feel Emmy’s legs. She’s as firm as firm. And look at Baby, how beautifully he’s made. They’re all healthy. There isn’t an unsweet, unsound spot in one of them.”
“‘There isn’t an unsweet, unsound spot in one of them’”
“No, no, they look it. ”

“ Why, Aggie, if that was what you wanted, he’s as gentle as a woman. Gentler—there aren’t many women, I can tell you, who have the strength that goes with that.”
Aggie bent her head lower yet over her work. She thought she could see 97in Susie’s speech a vindictive and critical intention. All the time she had, Aggie thought, been choosing her words judicially, so that each unnecessary eulogy of John should strike at some weak spot in poor Arthur. She felt that Susie was not above paying off her John’s old scores by an oblique and cowardly blow at the man who had supplanted him. ”

“ He called at the Laurels again that evening after supper. And, while Mrs. Purcell affected to doze, and Susie, as confidante, held Kate and Eliza well in play, he found another moment. With a solemnity impaired by extreme nervousness, he asked Miss Purcell if she would accept a copy of Browning’s Poems, which he had ventured to order for her from town. He hadn’t brought it with him, because he wished to multiply pretexts for calling; besides, as he said, he didn’t know whether she would really care—
Aggie cared very much, indeed, and proved it by blushing as she said so. ”

“ He likes it. Doesn’t he? My beauty—my bird!”
“He’ll have blue eyes, Aggie.”
“No, they’ll change; they always do. And his nose is just like yours.”
“I only wish I had his head of hair.”
It was a terrible day for Arthur when the baby’s head of hair began to come off, till Aggie told him it always did that, and it would grow again.
50To-day they were celebrating the first birthday of the little son. At supper that night a solemn thought came to Aggie.
“Oh, Arthur, only think. On Arty’s birthday” (they had been practising calling him “Arty” for the last fortnight) “he won’t be a baby any more.” ”

“ A thin wisp of colorless mustache sheltered, without concealing, the irritability of his mouth. Under his high, sallow 58forehead, his eyes, once so spiritual, looked out on his surroundings with more indifference than discontent. His soul fretted him no longer; it had passed beyond strenuousness to the peace of dulness. Only the sounds made by his wife and children had power to agitate him. ”

“ We should see each other every evening, and every Saturday and Sunday. We should always be learning something new, and learning it together. We should have a heavenly time.”
But Arthur shook his head sadly. “It wouldn’t work, my sweetheart. We aren’t made like that.”
“I am,” said Aggie, stoutly, and there was silence. ”

“ She didn’t care a rap about the lectures, and thought they were mad to go traipsing all the way to Hampstead to harangue about things they could have discussed just as well—now, couldn’t they?—at home. Aggie, she said, would become completely undomesticated. Mrs. Purcell was never pressed to stay longer than 45a week. They had no further need of her, those two sublime young egoists, fused by their fervors into one egoist, sublimer still. Mrs. Purcell was a sad hinderance to the intellectual life, and they were glad when she was gone. ”

“ Aggie’s heart gave a great bound of recovery.
“But if,” the doctor went on, “as you say—”
“I know” cried Arthur, “you needn’t say it. You won’t answer for the consequences?”
“I won’t. For the consequences, a woman—in the weak state your wife is in—may answer herself—with her life.”
Aggie was immensely relieved. So 72they were only talking about her all the time!
That night her husband told her that her release had come. It had been ordained that she was to rest for two years. And she was to have help. They must have a girl.
“Arthur,” she said, firmly, “I won’t have a girl. ”

“ It was in Australia I learned sheep-farming.”
“So, of course,” said Aggie, frigidly, “you killed sheep, too?”
“For our own consumption—yes.”
He said it a little haughtily. He wished her to understand the difference between a grazier and a butcher.
“And lambs? Little lambs?”
“Well, yes. I’m afraid the little lambs had to go, too, sometimes.”
“How could you? How could you?”
“How could I? Well, you see, I just had to. I couldn’t shirk when the other fellows didn’t. In time you get not to mind.” ”