Chapter XII

Jane carved. As their father had always done, she still gave them just portions of fat so that the joint might evenly be consumed. There was not the same necessity to eat it when it was hot as there had been when Mr. Throgmorton was alive; yet even still, Fanny with an unconquerable distaste for it, did her best to leave a clean plate.

When Mary came in, they were already seated at the table. Hannah had said grace. They all asked where she had been.

"Tidying up," said she, and pulling out her chair, sat down, beginning her meal at once with her eyes steady upon her plate. Fanny was opposite to her. Being the eldest, Hannah sat at the head of the table. With the new vision of mind that had come to her, there were long moments before Mary could determine to raise her head and look at them. It was sufficient to hear them talking. The subject of Christmas presents was monopolizing the conversation. They were all going in to Exeter for a day's shopping if the roads permitted. Mary found herself caught in astonishment at the apparent note of happiness in their voices.

Were they happy after all? Had she herself become morbid and supersensitive with the sudden unexpectedness of her revelation? Was it all a mood? Would she wake on the morrow after a night of sleep, finding the whole aspect of life set back again to its old focus?

In a sudden hope and expectancy that it might be so, she raised her head and looked across the table at Fanny seated there with the full light of the window on her face.

It was a moment when, in a pause of the conversation, Fanny's thoughts had slipped back to the labor of her verses.

"Were ever the trees so green to you
As they were green to me?"

The strained expression of fretted composition was settled on her forehead. The far-off look of a memory clutching at the past was a pain in her eyes. In every outline and feature of her pale, thin face were the unmistakable signs of the utter weariness of her soul.

In that one glance, Mary knew her vision was true. It was no mood. All those signs of fatigue she had seen in Fanny's face again and again. It was her health, she had often said to herself. Fanny was not strong. Ill-health it might have been, but the root of the evil was in her spirit, not in her blood.

Sitting there opposite, as in all the countless times from childhood upwards she had seen her, it was another Fanny--the real Fanny--she beheld, just as she knew now it was the real Jane. These three sisters of hers, suddenly they had all become real. Hannah with her heart more in the flow of the Bridnorth stream, to the smooth round edges of contentment, each one of them in her turn they were presented with their new significance in her eyes.

But it was Fanny most of all in whom she felt full sense of the tragedy of circumstance. That episode of the visitor to Bridnorth came now with a fresh meaning upon Mary's mind. They had all felt deeply sorry for Fanny at the time, but one and all they had agreed she had had a lucky escape.

Was it such a lucky escape after all? Did Fanny regard it in that light? Could they be considered fortunate who escaped from life however it might wound and ill-treat them?

Mary realized as she sat there, fascinated by the terribleness of her thoughts, that they all had escaped from life. Not in one of them had there been the moment's fulfillment of their being. They were women, but it was not as women they had lived. One by one the purpose of life was running slower in their veins. She with the rest of them. Her turn would come. First she would become a Fanny, tired with waiting. That eager look of a spirit hunger would come into her eyes, alternating as events came and passed her by with those dull, dead shadows of fatigue. Hope she would cling to as a blind man to the string that is knotted to the collar of his dog. Hope, becoming fainter and weaker year by year, would lead her until, as with Jane, bitter and seared and dry of heart, she sought its services no more. Still like the blind man then she would beat with her stick up and down the unchanging pavements of her life till at last with Hannah she found a numbed contentment in her lot.

Something indeed, as she had cried up there alone in her room, something was wrong. She had come as just a few women do to that conscious realization. But her vision had not power to show her what it was. In those moments it never occurred to her to raise her eyes to the portrait of her father on the wall. She was not didactic enough of mind to argue it with herself or trace the origin of those conventions which had bound and still were binding the lives of those three women her eyes were watching.

Something was wrong. Vaguely she sensed it was the waste of life. It was beyond the function of her mind to follow the reason of that wastage to its source. Her process of thought could not seek out the social laws that had woven themselves about the lives of women until, so much were they the slaves of the law, that they would preach it, earnestly, fervently, believingly as her mother had done.

Something was wrong. That was just all she knew; but in those moments, she knew it well. There were those three women about her to prove how wrong it was. There was she herself nearing that phase when the wrong would be done to her, and she would be powerless as they had been to prevent it.

"Fear not, Mary--" it was as though she heard a voice beckoning within her--"Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God."

Ever since they had come to an age of understanding, their spirits had been warped and twisted with the formalities of life. To fit the plan of those laws man makes by force, they had been bent in their growing to the pattern of his needs. It was those needs of his that had invented the forced virtues of their modesty and self-respect, beneath the pressure of which he kept them as he required them, trained and set back to fulfill the meaning of his self-centered purpose.

Modesty and self-respect, surely these were qualities of all, of men as well as women. By unnatural temperatures to force them in their growth was to produce exotic flowers having none of the simple sweetness of sun-given odors in their scent.

As life was meant, it grew in the open spaces; it was an upright tree, spreading its green boughs under the pure light of heaven. There was nothing artificial about life. It was free.

It was the favor of God. That was the truth she had come by and with her eyes marking that weary look of resignation in Fanny's face, she knew she would not fear it whenever or however it came.

This was the seed, planted in the heart of Mary Throgmorton, which in its season was to bring forth and, for the life of the woman she was, bear the fruit of her being.

PHASE II