Chapter IX

It was no difficult matter to rise unheard at midnight in her room, unheard to creep quietly downstairs, to open and close the kitchen door into the yard. Having accomplished that, it was but a few steps to the door through the wall into the road.

Now that she slept alone in that room at the back of the house, Mary had no fear of discovery. Nevertheless her heart was beating, an even but heavy throb, nor settling to the normal pulse, even when she found herself out in the lane and turning towards the path across the marshes by the mouth of the River Watchett that leads a solitary way to Penlock Head.

She questioned herself in nothing that she did. Her mind was made. It was no moment for questioning. All questions such as there had been, and doubtless there were many, she had answered. It was no habit of hers to look back over her shoulder. She fixed her destination with firm resolve, and, once the fear of immediate discovery was left behind, she walked with a firm stride. Imagination played no havoc with her nerves. Already her heart was in their meeting place.

A restive heart it was, all bounding at sudden visions, leaping, shying; at moments in riot almost at thought of lying in his arms. Sometimes even there was fear, a fear, not of the thing she would fly; not a fear that made the heart craven. Rather it was a fear that steeled her courage to face whatever might befall.

Some sense undoubted she had of the mad riot of passion, that it could terrify, that it was frightening like sudden thunder bursting. But just as she would lie still in her bed at home through the fiercest storm, so now she knew, however deep her fear, that she would not complain.

She walked that way through the marshes to their meeting place at the foot of Penlock Hill like one, firm in her step, who went to a glorious death. Death was terrible, but in all the meaning it had, she felt no fear of it.

In such manner as this did Mary Throgmorton go to the confirmation of her faith in Life, and behind her, in the square, white house, she left one to the bitterest of its realizations.

Fanny could not sleep that night. Near midnight, she lit a candle and began to read. But no reading could still the unsettled temper of her mind. Again and again her eyes lifted from the printed page, seeking corners of the room where, in that candlelight, the shadows gathered, harbor for the vague wandering of her thoughts.

Long after midnight, in the communicating silence which falls about a sleeping house, she heard a sound and sat up in bed. Some one had opened and shut the gate into the lane. She got up and went to the window. If any one passed into the road in front of the house, she must see them. No one came. All was silence again.

Yet something within her insisted upon her conviction that she had not been mistaken. Some one had left the house and, if they had turned the other way, could not possibly have been seen by her.

In that midnight silence, the fantastic shapes the beams of the candle cast, the heavy darkness of the night outside, slight as the incident was, grossly exaggerated it in her mind. She felt she must tell some one. Jane was the person to tell. Jane's fancies were slowly stirred. She might turn it all to ridicule, but if anything were the matter, she would be practical at least.

Slipping her arms into her dressing gown, she went out onto the landing. The door of Jane's room was at the further end. As she passed Mary's door on her way, something came out of the recesses of her mind and took her heart and held it fast.

Mary's door was open. She stood there staring at it while all the pulses in her body accelerated to the stimulus of her imagination.

Always Mary slept with her door closed. It was not to be understood how she had departed from that habit now that she slept alone. Why had she chosen to sleep alone? Was it more definite a reason than Fanny had supposed? What more definite than thoughts of love?

Scarcely aware of the change of her intentions or that Jane for the instant had dropped completely out of her thoughts, Fanny pushed open the door and softly entered Mary's room.

Just within the threshold, she stopped, half held by darkness and whispered Mary's name.

"Mary--Mary--"

There was no reply. There was no sound of breathing. Never had the whole world seemed so still. She was faintly conscious that her eyes were staring wide in that darkness, staring to find softly what she knew now the dazzling glitter of a light would reveal to her in all its startling truth. All beating of her heart appeared to be arrested as she felt her way across the room to the bedside table where she knew the box of matches lay. Something fluttered in her thin breast, like a thing suspended in mid-air, but it had no relation to the passage of the blood through her veins. It seemed to need purchase, a solid wall against it before it could beat again. Yet no solid wall was there. Flesh and bones in all her substance, Fanny felt as though in those moments her body were a floating thing in an ether of sensation. She found the matches. With fingers that were damp and cold, she struck one. It flamed up with blinding brightness into her staring eyes. She closed them swiftly and then she looked.

The bed was empty. Their Mary was away. With trembling fingers, she lit the candle; then gazed down at the crumpled bedclothes, the sheets thrown back, the pillow tossed.

With automatic calculation she leant down and felt the bedclothes with her hand as one feels a thing just dead.

They were warm--still warm. And where now was the body that had warmed them?

With a sudden catch in her throat that was not a sob and had no more moisture of tears in it than a thing parched dry with the sun, she flung herself down on the bed and leant her body against the warm sheets and buried her head in the warm pillow, fighting for her breath like some frightened beast that has been driven to the last of all its hiding places.