Part 2

A sudden jocose gust of wind swept the leaves along the untidy earthen borders, whirled under Mrs. Greene's cape, and set all the branches rustling and all the tree tops tossing madly.

"You're sure this isn't too much for you?" asked Miss Dorset anxiously.

Everything was in motion; trees, bushes, and tatterdemalion flower heads. Even the earth seemed to move under the restless scattering leaves.

"I like it," she announced stoutly, and breathed deep of the rich odour of decay that rose like a miasma from the ground. "I like autumn; it's the time for adventures and fine deeds; it's the bravest season of all."

"That's quite true; I should like to die in the autumn."

Miss Dorset's answer was as totally unexpected as was the intensity with which she spoke. Mrs. Greene looked at her for a moment.

"You're still young," she said. "Death isn't the only adventure left for you as it is for me. You ought to like spring best, when the celandines come out."

Miss Dorset relapsed into her usual quiet apologetic manner, so strangely at variance with the uncompromising ferocity of her sentiments.

"Spring always seems to me a little silly," she asserted. "It's all so hopeful and promising, and hope and promise are such callow things and fall so soon in ruins."

Suddenly realising that she had broken one of her inviolable rules in betraying so intimate a glimpse of her personality, Miss Dorset hastily turned into a less personal channel.

"I think the word 'jejune' expresses what I feel about spring, but, as you say, the autumn is a fine season, and to-day is really beautiful."

Mrs. Greene held her peace. She had always possessed too much sensibility to frustrate anyone's means of escape from a conversational predicament. She had never pressed for a confidence. But as they walked down the path and out at the further gate from garden to wood it struck her as strange that there should be this kinship of thought between Miss Dorset and her.

The inequalities of life are very marked, she thought. Most of us arrive at the same conclusion, but the ways in which we reach it are as many as the leaves scuttling at my feet. I lived for seventy-five good years, then Geoffrey died and the lean years came. All that was left was to do the best I could from day to day, trying to be a little stoical, and not getting too whining and senile. But here's this poor dried-up creature. She never had a spring time and yet she lives like me from day to day getting a little pleasure here and a little comfort there, but really only living towards the grave.

Her heart stirred with pity as she thought of the glowing human relationships that had been her happiness and delight for seventy-five years, contrasted with the absolute emptiness of Miss Dorset's thirty-eight years.

"The trouble is I've lived too long; three years too long; but she's never lived at all."

Inadvertently she spoke aloud, but Miss Dorset was quite unaware of the trend of thought that had led to the remark.

"I beg your pardon," she said mechanically, more as a warning to her employer that she was thinking aloud, than in expectation of a reply.

Mrs. Greene, however, answered abruptly:

"There's a ruby and diamond brooch in the safe that I'm going to give you when we go through my things this afternoon. I meant to leave it to you anyhow, but you might as well have it now. I'd like to see you wearing it."

She hardly heard Miss Dorset's surprised and nervous thanks. She was again lost in thought, appreciating with painful clearness her motive in making this impulsive gesture. Life had given nothing to Clara Dorset, so she, Margaret Greene, was giving her a diamond and ruby brooch. It seemed somehow inadequate; Mrs. Greene smiled at the thought of how inadequate it was, but she sighed sharply at the tragic futility of all human endeavours to compensate, to strike a balance between loss and gain.

The day had changed for her. The fitful kindly wind was no longer kindly. It tugged at her hat and made her bones ache cruelly. The white clouds blowing across the sky seemed harbingers of rain, threatening to overcast the sun. She felt frail and impotent, and when she said, "I should like to turn back now," there was a quaver in her voice that she tried in vain to conceal.

As they retraced their slow steps Miss Dorset recited in detail her preparations for Mrs. Hugh's arrival.

"I've put two big vases of leaves in her bedroom," she said. "There really aren't any flowers left worth picking and the leaves are a beautiful colour."

"Sarah's garden at Lynton will be full of flowers. They bloom for her all the year round, but I'm no gardener."

Mrs. Greene was regaining her serenity.

"What are we giving her for dinner?" she asked. "Sarah pays no attention to what she eats, but I'd like to give her such a good dinner that she'll be bound to notice it."

"Well, I had thought of a good clear soup, some stuffed fillets of sole, a pheasant, and a nice apricot cream," said Miss Dorset tentatively, "but that can easily be changed if you would like something more elaborate."

"I don't like elaborate things," answered Mrs. Greene, "but Sarah never thinks of anything so mundane as food and it's good for her to meet a materialist like me."

She reflected for a moment and then pronounced decisively.

"Yes, that's a good dinner. But not apricot cream. Tell cook to make a peach tart with our own bottled peaches, and to give us a good hot savoury after it, and tell her to put enough sherry in the soup. I don't know why, but when there's no man to cook for, they won't put sherry in the soup or rum in the trifles."

Mrs. Greene spoke energetically. Careless herself as to what she ate, she had always held it important not only that her glass and silver should be beyond reproach, but that the food served to guests should be delicately chosen and delicately cooked.

"There's a lot to be learnt from food," she continued in a ruminating vein. "Take Sarah, for instance. After a dinner at Lynton you can't help knowing she's a good gardener because of her fruit and vegetables, but you can't help seeing she isn't discriminating; she gives you nourishment without quality. And think of Edith. Every meal I've eaten in that house has stamped her afresh as a practical, unimaginative, uninteresting woman."

"I hadn't really thought of it, but I'm sure there's a lot in what you say," agreed Miss Dorset. "Here we are back again. Shall we go in now or would you like another little turn?"

"I would not," Mrs. Greene replied crisply. "I'll go in and warm myself till lunch time; this wind chills my bones."

The warm atmosphere of the house after the tang of the fresh November air brought a gentle consciousness of fatigue that did not dissipate during lunch time, and Mrs. Greene was not reluctant to go upstairs for her afternoon rest.

Sometimes the indignity of returning to the habits of childhood struck deep into her soul; occasionally she indulged in a rare petulance, but generally she accepted philosophically the restrictions of her narrow life.

"You understand what I want you to do, don't you?" she asked Miss Dorset on the way up to her room. "Open the safe, and get out all the leather cases, and take down my jewel case from my bedroom and put everything ready for me in the library."

"Very well, I'll see to that," answered Miss Dorset; and with the anticipation of a pleasant task to be performed when she awoke, Mrs. Greene fell asleep.

III

When the time came to waken Mrs. Greene lest a prolonged sleep should spoil her night's rest, Miss Dorset experienced a tremor of the heart looking at the old face on the pillow.

She perceived more clearly than anyone the ravages wrought by the three years since Geoffrey Greene's death in the body that encased Margaret Greene's ardent but flickering vitality.

Sometimes it was impossible to believe that Mrs. Greene was only sleeping; her face seemed too old, too small, too hollow of cheek and temple, ever to waken to a semblance of life. These stiff brittle-looking eyelids could surely never lift again, the body outstretched under the eiderdown in a rigid and comfortless abandon could never reassemble itself into the familiar contours of trunk and limbs. Miss Dorset endured a moment's prevision of the inevitable day when she would touch a hand and find it cold; every day she flinched at the thought, but every day she marshalled her resources and bent down to Mrs. Greene with the invariable remark:

"I think perhaps you would like to waken now, and get up."

Mrs. Greene wakened slowly and with difficulty. Her first consciousness was of the past. She wakened in the period of her early marriage when her children were young--often with their names on her lips--and she would look vacantly at Miss Dorset for a few moments while her brain went roaming down the long years past the familiar landmarks of marriages, births and deaths, till it fetched up at last with a consciousness of her present situation, recognition of Miss Dorset, and with a final detailed knowledge of the month, the day, and her immediate plans.

Even so, for a little while her conversation was disjointed; she referred to her grandchildren by her children's names, and it seemed a cruelty to expect her to re-assume the burden of rational thought.

To-day the struggle was not so prolonged as usual.

"Yes, I would like to get up now," she said, still lying motionless but collecting her forces for the effort. "Edith will be here soon and I mustn't be late for tea."

"It's Mrs. Hugh who is coming, not Mrs. Rodney," Miss Dorset corrected gently.

"Yes, yes, I know it is; that's what I said," replied Mrs. Greene testily. "Get me up now. I'll put on my good blue dress and the shawl Lavinia gave me."

Changing in the afternoon was a much simpler matter than dressing in the morning. Some of the troubled vagueness and docility of interrupted sleep still hung about Mrs. Greene, and she hardly noticed that her body was being turned this way and that, her hair brushed, and her frock fastened.

"Everything is ready for you if you still feel you would like to go over your jewels," suggested Miss Dorset on the way downstairs.

"Of course I would; I hadn't forgotten," snapped Mrs. Greene, whose irritability proclaimed clearly that she had forgotten.

Miss Dorset opened the library door and disclosed the thin November sunlight streaming over the open cases laid out on the table, setting the diamonds a-glitter and shining into the heart of rubies and sapphires.

Mrs. Greene stopped in the doorway and drew a quick breath of pleasure.

"They look very fine," she said excitedly, "I didn't know I had so much. Of course there are some of my mother's jewels there, as well as Geoffrey's mother's, and all the things he gave me."

She moved over to the table and sat down, lifting up her diamond necklace and pendant to pore over its intricate but austere design.

"Isn't this beautiful?" she asked, not waiting for an answer. "Geoffrey gave it me after his first very successful book. We took a house in the country so that he could be free to finish it without interruptions, and he wrote all the summer. It was a lovely summer too, although Edwin's engagement in the autumn upset us all rather. We didn't think it very wise. However, Mr. Greene got his book finished, and it came out in November and was very successful indeed, and this is what he gave me the Christmas after. I remember thinking it was terribly extravagant of him, but of course I didn't know then that his book would go so well in America."

"It is a wonderful necklace," said Miss Dorset, holding it up to the sunlight.

"Well, that's not the way to look at it. Put it against a piece of dark stuff if you want to see it properly."

She drew a pair of slender emerald ear-rings towards her.

"These would do nicely for Lavinia some day," she began, but broke off and picked up a little gold ring set with an insignificant sapphire.

"Miss Dorset, look at this," she exclaimed. "That's what Geoffrey gave me after his very first book was published."

She looked at it reminiscently, not hearing Miss Dorset's comment of "Indeed, how very interesting."

"It was not long after we were married," she said presently. "We married young, you know, and old Mr. Greene was very angry with Geoffrey for making writing his career. He had been in his father's engineering works first of all and then found he was too unhappy to go on with it. I was engaged to him then and I encouraged him to go on with his writing. I said I'd marry him as soon as he liked and not mind about being poor, but he wasn't to start on a career he didn't care for. So I went to Papa and said I was going to marry Geoffrey at once and would do it more happily if I had his permission."

Mrs. Greene laughed her quiet infrequent laugh as she added contentedly:

"I was a bold young thing, you know. In those days it was a different matter to beard your father. But I didn't care for anything but Geoffrey, and Papa behaved very nicely to me. He gave me this as one of my wedding presents."

She groped among the cases, opened one, and displayed an old-fashioned round brooch consisting of a large amethyst surrounded by pearls in an elaborate gold setting.

"It looks clumsy now," she said, touching it with kindly fingers. "But round brooches were all the fashion then and I was very pleased with it. Mamma was very angry about my marriage, but then she was a very narrow woman; she never moved with the times."

Miss Dorset enjoyed a momentary flash of insight. She perceived that the old lady sitting beside her, herself a great-grandmother, was speaking of her mother, whose memory would normally be blurred by the clouds of half a century, in just the tones of clear resentment that any young woman might employ to-day.

Mrs. Greene was back in the past, and even Miss Dorset caught something of the combined fire and delicacy that must have inspired such independence, such courage, and--according to the standards of 1870--such immodesty as to enable a betrothed young girl to arrange her own marriage in the teeth of her mother's disapproval.

For a moment it was all so vivid to Miss Dorset that she gave way to a spasm of indignation and admiration.

"Parents were far too harsh," she said. "It was shocking of the old father to try and push Mr. Greene into a business he didn't care for, but it must be splendid for you to think how you helped Mr. Greene to succeed."

Mrs. Greene only answered by a vague: "What do you say?"

She had leaped thirty years and was fingering rather sadly a star sapphire beautifully set in diamonds to form a brooch. Presently she laid it down and sitting with her hands folded in her lap fell into one of those wideawake trances that ended too often in melancholy.

"What a beautiful brooch that is," ventured Miss Dorset.

There was no answer and no indication that Mrs. Greene had even heard the remark.

Miss Dorset tried again.

"Is it a star sapphire?" she asked. "I don't think I've ever seen one like that."

Mrs. Greene roused herself, but she spoke heavily and limply.

"Yes, it's a star sapphire, Geoffrey gave it to me." There was a long pause. "We had a quarrel," she said at last, "nothing very much; it began just as a disagreement of opinion, but I was very hot-tempered; I always said more than I meant. So Geoffrey gave me this brooch," she ended, inconsequently, a little furrow of pain forming between her eyebrows at the recollection.

Miss Dorset murmured something inaudible, unable to offer any comfort for a quarrel which had begun and ended probably thirty years ago. Rather awkwardly, anxious to make a diversion, she moved come cases nearer to Mrs. Greene. By chance one of them contained the brooch which had been spoken of in the morning.

"That's what I want," said Mrs. Greene triumphantly, her depression completely banished. "That's the brooch I want you to have; it was another of my wedding presents and I used to wear it a great deal, but I never wear rubies now, and I would like you to have it."

It was a very fine ruby. The sun lit up its dark wine-coloured heart and turned to fire the diamond pentacle in which it was set.

Miss Dorset caught something of its glow and radiance.

"I can't possibly thank you," she said, "I've never had anything so lovely before; it will give me real happiness."

With an unusually impulsive and graceful movement she lifted Mrs. Greene's hand and kissed it.

The old lady was amazed at the happiness she had caused. She remembered her thoughts of the morning. The brooch had seemed then a cold and trivial thing. Now, lying on Miss Dorset's hand, enriched by her unconcealed pleasure, it became a warm symbol of affection and gratitude.

Mrs. Greene thought of services rendered, of fine discretions, of considerateness carried far beyond the borders of duty into the realm of intuition, and she was filled with immense satisfaction. There were good things in life: loyalties, restraints, disinterested devotion. One lived from day to day, from year to year, and at the end it was bitten deep into the mind that baseness was transitory, but that good quality endured.

Mrs. Greene braced herself.

"Miss Dorset," she said sternly, "all my life I've cared for the quality of things and people. I'm old now; old enough to know the truth that lies in platitudes, but if you see me slipping into an easy tolerance, and putting up with the second rate, you'll know that I'm dead, though my body lives on."

Miss Dorset was startled. Inadvertently she expressed her crude and simple opinion, speaking as to an equal, happily forgetful of the responsibility of youth towards age; a responsibility that leads to concealments and subterfuges, to the elimination from conversation of anything that might be unpalatable or alarming; to the whole softening process that makes for safety and, presumably, content.

"Oh, no, Mrs. Greene," she said confidently. "You'll never become tolerant. Young Mrs. Geoffrey often says you live on your critical faculty and that it's my duty to give you something to pull to pieces every day."

Mrs. Greene was delighted. She laughed with pure pleasure.

"Helen says that, does she? Well, she's quite right; I'm a malicious intolerant old woman, and I don't suppose I'll change now."

At that moment there was the sound of a car drawing up at the front door. Mrs. Greene looked in consternation at Miss Dorset.

"There's Sarah," she said. "And I've done nothing that I meant to. I haven't even decided whether my necklace needs cleaning or not. You'll have to put all these away now, Miss Dorset, and get them out again to-morrow. But it doesn't matter; I've had a very happy afternoon and now I'll go into the drawing-room and wait for Sarah."

IV

Mrs. Hugh Greene arrived with a characteristic absence of fuss and impedimenta. She greeted Miss Dorset in the hall with a friendly smile, chatted to her for a moment and then said:

"I'll find Mrs. Greene in the drawing-room, I suppose?"

"Wouldn't you like to take your coat off, and have a little rest?" suggested Miss Dorset.

"No thank you. I'm not tired; it's nothing of a journey; less than two hours in the train."

Mrs. Hugh spoke briskly and appeared quite fresh and trim in her small, old-fashioned hat and the neat dark coat and skirt of a mode which she had first worn ten years ago, and had simply caused to be repeated ever since.

Eight years younger than her sister-in-law, she was at a different stage of life; still active and independent, able to make plans, carry out her arrangements, and work indefatigably in her garden regardless of wind and weather. Miss Dorset, however, looking at her with an eye trained by experience to note each subtle stage of increasing frailty, thought that Mrs. Hugh was beginning to show her age, and watching her walk through to the drawing-room she decided that her air of youthfulness was deceptive; it was more an effect of manner than of physique. Later, when she rejoined the two old ladies for tea, she was confirmed in her opinion. They were both quite definitely old ladies; one apparently well, the other obviously in broken health, but certainly of the same generation.

She placed a little table beside each of their chairs and busied herself with the tea things.

As she poured out, she was keenly aware of Mrs. Greene's mood, sensitive to the incisive alertness of her speech without actually hearing what she was saying. All this expenditure of energy would have to be paid for by extra rest. Mrs. Greene's personality might over-ride her bodily ills and lend her a moment of spurious strength, but the consequent nervous reaction would be all the more merciless.

Miss Dorset sighed as she refilled the tea cups. The alternatives were so clear. Mrs. Greene could either relax her grip on life and slide into a state of comfortable coma, with no ups and down, no painful efforts and no particular alleviations, or she could live on for a few years paying a heavy toll for her good moments in hours of depression and physical malaise. There was no choice; the first was temperamentally impossible.

Miss Dorset sighed again, and then resolutely set herself to join in the conversation.

Mrs. Greene's expression was so deliberately blank as to be provocative.

"Yes," she was saying, "Jessica and Hugh get home on Tuesday, but I shan't be seeing them till the party on Friday, I expect."

"What party do you mean?" asked Mrs. Hugh innocently.

"Oh, you haven't had your invitation yet?" Mrs. Greene replied with feigned surprise. "Well, it's a little dinner Edith is giving for the six Mrs. Greenes. It will be so nice to have a reunion that we can all enjoy."

Mrs. Hugh looked aghast.

"I never heard you say anything so fantastic in all your life," she said decisively. "You may have something in common with your daughters-in-law, but I certainly have not. I never agree with Edith, and I disapprove of Dora."

"I knew you would say that," said Mrs. Greene triumphantly. "You've got some sense, Sarah. It's a shocking plan, but when Edith gets an idea into her head you know very well nothing will get it out again."

"Do you mean to say you're taking the trouble to go up to town just to fall in with a whim of Edith's?"

Mrs. Greene looked a little helpless, and Miss Dorset interposed quickly.

"Mr. Rodney is coming in the car to fetch Mrs. Greene. He is very anxious to have her up in town again, even if it's only for a night."

Mrs. Hugh's rather stern face softened.

"Rodney is a good boy," she said. "You know, Margaret, the last time I saw him it struck me that he was looking very like Geoffrey did at that age."