“Gosh!” he whispered, and then there was silence, a silence of such ecstasy that he might have been Dante seeing Beatrice for the first time, or Balboa upon the peak in Darien.
But John Adair got there first. In two strides he was across the room and had unhooked Horace. “Like him?” he asked, holding the skeleton at arm’s length for inspection. “My special property. Name of Horace. Not to be removed from this room without my permission, but may be examined under my eye in the interests of science whenever you like. Tommy, I presume?” And he held out his free hand.
“Yes, sir,” said Tommy, gripping it cordially and with his most disarming grin, a grin into which he could instill, when necessary, a certain pathos. “Thank you. I’m going to be a surgeon, you know, sir.”
“Certainly,” said John Adair heartily. “Whenever you like. But under my eye.”
“Of course, sir. Hello, Ben!”
The brothers smiled at each other with careful moderation, each surprised to find how glad he was to see the other, and each mortally afraid of showing it.
“Hello,” said Ben. “Got your bike, haven’t you? Thought from your post card you’d got hold of one somehow. Was the gate still open?”
“You opened the gate?” asked Tommy.
Ben nodded. Tommy swung round and stood shoulder to shoulder with him before his easel, contemplating the brown mess.
“Jolly,” he said. He didn’t think it was. He thought it was a mess. But it had been decent of Ben to open the gate.
But as he looked, comprehension dawned. “Why, it’s the staircase!” he said. “It looked just like that when I came home just now—like a man—I hadn’t noticed it before.” He gazed a bit longer, out of gratitude for the gate. “I like his face. Looks like Pickwick. Or Punch on the Christmas number. Or Johnny Walker. One of those jolly beery fellows.”
John Adair moved forward and stood behind the two boys, looking over their shoulders at the picture. It was now no longer a chalk sketch, but a fair-sized affair in oils. It was only during this last week that Ben had really got going on the face, and his inspection had not yet been invited. But Tommy having so to speak unveiled it, he could now take a look. He was pleased with Ben. He had not swung the picture round, as on the day when Nadine had come in unexpectedly, though he could see by Ben’s taut expression that the comparison with beery fellows was odious to him; but obeying instructions he was abiding by the consequences of what he had done. He even laughed. “Got the nose too red,” he said humbly. “And the smile too fatuous.”
“I don’t think so,” said John Adair quietly behind them. “That’s not the complexion of inebriation, but of a healthy middle-aged man who’s just come in from a tramp in the frosty woods. And the smile—it’s intoxicated, certainly, but not with beer, merely with the glory of what his artist’s eye has seen in the woods. It’s not fatuous. Glory doesn’t so much knock you silly as exuberant. What you do when you’re filled up with it and spilling it out again may look a bit silly at first sight, like those arms stretched out, like those vignettes of animals shoved in among the treetops in the chapel frescoes, but on a second glance, no. Take another look, Tommy.”
Tommy took another look. The man’s eyes were brown and very bright, with a penetrating look in them as though they saw a good deal, with the same sort of puckers about them that the eyes of sailors and countrymen have who watch the weather and find hidden meanings in the bending of the grass and the massing of the clouds. He had a comic brown beard that jutted forward in an eager sort of way. He was not actually laughing, but the humor that touched the eyes and lips made one feel that a great burst of kindly laughter was on the way, and gave his face that look of joviality that Tommy was accustomed to associate with Pickwick and Johnny Walker. But his surgeon’s eye noted now the width of the face from temple to temple, giving a look of peace, and the rugged strength of the cheekbones and jaw. And between the man’s bushy brown eyebrows there was a frown of deep concentration. Tommy felt respect for Ben as an artist. Now if he’d painted a frown it would have looked bad-tempered, but this frown was the frown of a chap who attended with his entire self to one thing at a time. He knew suddenly that this fellow hadn’t had his cheerfulness bestowed upon him at birth, like Johnny Walker; he’d fought for it and won it. No, joviality was all wrong. It was—
“Good will,” murmured John Adair. “No one ever stops to think what that means. Not an easy thing. Unregenerate man, had he the courage to inquire into what he is really willing right down below the surface, would get a very nasty shock. Very rare, as rare as peace. When a man has both, the angels make quite a song and dance about it. Was it not prophesied, Ben, that Christmas would show you the face of this man?”
“Christmas and the chapel walls,” said Ben. “He put his whole heart into the frescoes.” He paused, looking anxiously at the artist. “Is it all right?”
“Yes, it’s all right. That’s Mine Host of a pilgrim inn, and the painter as revealed in his work. The color needs toning down a bit here and there. Here, for instance—”
The conversation became technical, and Tommy left them to continue his home-coming tour of inspection. He ran down the turret stairs, opened the door of what had once been the storeroom, and went in. “Gosh!” he exclaimed in astonishment. The walls were finished now, and the little room was furnished as a chapel, though very simply, so as not to detract from the glory of the frescoes, merely with a plain old oak table beneath the painting on the east wall, and a few benches. A couple of beautiful old wrought-iron branched candlesticks stood upon the table, and a pot of winter greenery in whose perfect arrangement Tommy thought he detected his mother’s hand. He looked about the walls in amazement, laughing at the comic birds and animals, the extravagance of the flowers, yet awed by the beauty of what he saw, and the mystery of the knight on horseback and the deer holding up the crucifix. He wondered so much what it was all about that he sat down on one of the benches to wonder in greater comfort. That deer and the one in the alcove, Ben’s painting and the stairs, what the dickens did it all mean? He didn’t know, but the value of his home was greatly enhanced for him by the sense of depth that he was now conscious of in the Herb of Grace. It was as though he had had a friend but hadn’t known him very well, and now the man had suddenly shown him his heart. The man—the staircase—had put his heart into these frescoes, Ben had said. And this chapel was the heart of the house, as the place where the stag stood was the heart of the painted wood that was so like Knyghtwood. He suddenly jumped up. Mother was in Knyghtwood, looking for water cress to garnish the wild duck he had demanded for supper. He’d go and find her.
— 3 —
Nadine had waked up that morning feeling astonishingly lighthearted. Tommy was coming home today, and then she would have all her children gathered under her wing. She had always been glad to have them home, of course, but she had never before felt quite so passionately henlike as she did this morning. Was she at last becoming properly maternal? She wondered why. The final agonizing break with David might have something to do with it. Letting go of David she had let go of her youth, too, recognized herself for what she now was, a middle-aged woman in whom love out of wedlock was just painfully silly, but love within it profoundly sensible. Age meant deeper roots, and therefore more circumscribed affections. And then her roots were now in a house that had gradually become to her the best home she had ever known, more of a home than the one at Chelsea, which it had nearly broken her heart to leave, a house whose essential quality of protectiveness had no doubt fostered this imitative henlike attitude in herself. But most of all she thought her deepening maternity had something to do with Annie-Laurie. It was odd that another woman’s child had been able to do for her something that her own children had not been able to do. Perhaps Annie-Laurie’s need of her had been greater than she knew, greater than her own children’s present need. Perhaps there was some bond between them that she did not know of yet.
>
As she dressed she stopped thinking of herself and thought only of Annie-Laurie. Hilary had come over a few days ago to inspect the finished chapel, had sought her out, and deprecatingly rubbing his nose had humbly hoped that she would soon find some way of winning Annie-Laurie’s complete confidence. “You can’t force it, I know,” he said. “That would be fatal. But if you could find some way—I’ve been talking to Malony and I can see he’s anxious about her.”
“Would it be betraying his confidence to tell me what he told you?” she asked, and then, seeing his hesitation, “I’m trustworthy, you know.”
His charming smile flashed out at her. “I know. And I must certainly tell you the facts, for you’ll need them. But they won’t get you very far, for the thing that’s getting Annie-Laurie down is something that she’s not told Malony.”
He told her the facts and she listened attentively. “I’ll do my best,” she said.
But since then she’d had no chance to be alone with Annie- Laurie, and this morning she must go and find some water cress for Tommy. A couple of days ago Sally had told her that there was a stream in Knyghtwood, beyond Ben’s Brockis Island, and that she had a sort of feeling she’d seen water cress growing there. She had offered to go and see, but she had been busy packing for a few days’ visit to London to buy Christmas presents, and Nadine had told her not to bother, that she’d go herself; with Auntie Rose to do the cooking she was so much less tired and she had more time. She had never yet penetrated the depths of Knyghtwood, and she knew it was incumbent upon her to do so; not only was she haunted by that lyric of Meredith’s, but now that Knyghtwood had appeared in the house it was somehow a part of the house, and she must know her house through and through.
When she had put her household into order she put on thick shoes and her cherry-colored coat, took a basket, and prepared to sally forth. “Shall I come, too?” asked George, a little wistfully. She felt a brute at refusing him, but she knew she must go to Knyghtwood alone. “No, George. It’ll be damp and you’ll only get your asthma. I can’t have you with asthma over Christmas.”
“Let me come, Mummy,” implored Caroline. “You don’t know what water cress looks like.”
“Yes, I do. I’ve bought it in the shops.”
“It looks quite different growing to what it does in the shops.”
“My poppet, I’ve more intelligence than you give me credit for. I’m going quite alone.”
“Not even Mary?”
“Oh, yes, Mary, of course.”
From the front door George and Caroline watched her beautiful gay figure mount the steps to the green gate and enter the wood, Mary, her nose in the air, bouncing at her heels.
“I don’t like Mary,” said Caroline with a violence unusual to her gentleness.
George laughed, and slipped an arm round his daughter’s shoulders. “Your mother is rather a reticent sort of person, Elf, and the excellent thing about dogs is that they keep you company without asking questions, and afterwards they keep your counsel.”
“Are you reticent, Daddy?” asked Caroline. “Am I?”
“We’ve neither of us much to be reticent about,” said George, with a touch of gloom. “Simple sort of folk, you and I, Elf. That’s why we suit each other. Get your coat and come up to the Hard with me to see Hitchcock about the manure.”
Caroline departed singing to find her coat. She would enjoy herself much more, really, going with Daddy to see about the manure than with Mother to find water cress. She understood neither Mother nor Knyghtwood very well; they both scared her a little.
Nadine went swiftly through the wood, Mary now bounding delightedly ahead of her. The ground that had been so hard with the frost had now a delicious elastic softness beneath her feet, and the sun striking through the bare branches warmed her lifted face. Something to be said for a climate that can jewel midwinter with days like these, she thought. It’s Christmas, yet in this wood you’d never know it.
It struck her as she walked that the artist who had painted the chapel walls had not gone far astray when he set the flowers of all the seasons blooming together in his wood, for in this one today the colors were so gay and varied that spring and summer and autumn seemed all of them blooming in winter’s lap. The lichens about the tree roots might have been primroses, the deep azure shadows bluebell pools. The willow shoots were the color of a robin’s breast, and there were a few scarlet berries on the holly trees. As she passed beyond the fringe of the wood that she knew and came to a part that was new to her, she was astonished to find individual blossoms coming out all at the wrong season, the delicate stars of strawberry flowers, periwinkles, a few celandines, dog mercury, and one pale primrose. She saw too a plant of hellebore in full blossom, though it ought not to have been out until February. It reminded her of Christmas roses, and she stopped to look at it. She remembered that Ben had told her that hellebore is for the healing of mental illness. He had quoted “The Anatomy of Melancholy.”
Sovereign plants to purge the veins
Of melancholy, and cheer the heart
Of those black fumes which make it smart.
She looked at the flowers with elation; their winter flowering, though it was so sparse and fragile, was so triumphant. To her left, a kingfisher flashed against the dazzle of the river, and she could have laughed aloud. She had shrunk from this wood, and now she found to her surprise that she was enjoying it. Until today she did not think that she would have done so, but her new lightness of heart was in tune with its gaiety. She was glad that her coat matched the holly berries, that Mary was such a flowery-looking little creature, and that her brown suede shoes were the color of the kindly earth, whose elasticity seemed swinging her along as though it helped her journey. She was not a countrywoman, and she had not before felt quite this sense of comradeship with the earth. It made her very happy.
When she came to the oak tree with the leaves of the herb of grace growing around it and recognized the background that John Adair had chosen for her portrait, she felt, after the first moment of shock, a curious sense of home-coming. She stood still, her heart beating fast. She had caught up, now, with that woman in the picture. She had reached one of her milestones.
She covered her face with her hands for a moment and tried to capture the flashing vision that had come to her of life as a series of deaths and rebirths, each predestined, so that when you reached it you recognized it as something that had been waiting for you, and yet each at the same time the result of a matter of choice, so that you came to it with a joy or pain of your own making, a paradox whose mystery baffled the mind but whose truth the heart recognized. She remembered how the old masters in their paintings would sometimes represent the soul as a tiny child. Somewhere she had seen a picture by, she thought, Fra Angelico, of God standing behind a bier with a smiling baby in His arms. The old masters had known their business. They had had the boldness to express the inexpressible in terms of humanity, after the example of God Himself at Christmas.
She took her hands from her eyes, bent down, picked a few leaves of the herb of grace, and put them in the lapel of her coat. Sally, once, had done the same thing, but Sally had acted without thought, mechanically taking to herself something that was hers already, as a woman might take a trinket from her dressing table; Nadine picked the leaves deliberately, as an act of dedication. As she walked forward again she left behind her something buried, fallen into dust with the failing breath, and carried with her something born. “Should thy love die.” The old lusting love had died, and was buried under the foliaged sky. It was life that she would love now with this new love, life as it was held within the walls of her home. “The lover of life sees the flame in our dust and a gift in our breath.” She smiled as she walked, even as the baby in the picture had been smiling.
She went on until she came to Brockis Island with the wild fruit trees and the badger’s holt. This spot was the heart of
the wood to Ben because his painting of it had been the first he had done with John Adair’s encouragement, the first with full knowledge that it was to this art that he had given himself, and she marveled at its beauty, but it did not touch her as had the old tree trunk where the herb of grace grew. A second little bridge had now been placed by Ben from the island to the further bank, and she and Mary crossed by it and walked on and came to the stream in the clearing that was the heart of the wood to Sally, because here she had met David again. Though Nadine once more marveled at the beauty, it did not touch her deeply, for the heart of the wood, the place of vision and dedication, the white deer and the crucifix, was still for her the beech tree. . . . The Place Beyond, that was the heart of the wood to the twins, no one had been to except the twins. . . . Nadine, unaware that it even existed, walked no further, but turned and moved slowly upstream looking for water cress.
— 4 —
Annie-Laurie ran light-footed through the wood. She had already been a certain way into Knyghtwood, and she loved it, but she did not linger today because she wanted to get to Nadine as soon as possible with the joyous news of Tommy’s early arrival. She knew that he was Nadine’s favorite child, and her eyes were bright with happiness as she ran because she was bringing joy to Nadine. She loved Nadine with a happiness with which she had never yet loved anyone, except long ago her mother, and not so long ago her child. Her passion for Luke, that had changed for a while without her wish and past her control to such dreadful hatred, the mingled reliance and gratitude of her affection for Malony, had brought pain and humiliation. She had not been so happy in the relationship of sex as she had been in the relationship of daughter and mother. The latter she had recaptured again in her love for Nadine, the first she believed must be always a thing she would long for with unsatisfied anguish because of her promise to Luke.