Chapter 2 The Shades o（2 / 2）

“This was the countess’s chair,” she said in low tones.“I found her scissors down here between the padding.”

“Did you?Whereare they?”

Quickly, with a lilt in her movement, she fetched her work basket, and together they examined the long shanked old scissors.

“What a ballad of deal ladies!”he said, laughing, as he fitted his fingers into the round loops of the countess’s scissors.

“I knew you could use them,” she said, with certainty.He looked at his fingers, and at the scissors.She meant his fingers were fine enough for the small looped scissors.

“That is something to be said for me,” he laughed, putting the scissors aside.She turned to the window.He noticed the fine, fair down on her cheek and her upper lip, and her soft, white neck, like the throat of a nettle flower, and her fore arms, bright as newly blanched kernels.He was looking at her with new eyes, and she was a different person to him.He did not know her.But he could regard her objectively now.

“Shall we go out awhile?” she asked.

“Yes!” he answered.But the predominant emotion, that troubled the excitement and perplexity of his heart, was fear, fear of that which he saw.There was about her the same manner, the same intonation in her voice, now as then, but she was not what he had known her to be.He knew quite well what she had been for him.And gradually he was realizing that she was something quite other, and always had been.

She put no covering on her head, merely took off her apron, saying, “We will go by the larches.”As they passed the old orchard, she called him in to show him a blue tit’s nest in one of the apple trees, and a sycock’s in the hedge.He rather wondered at her surety, at a certain hardness like arrogance hidden under her humility.

“Look at the apple buds,” she said, and he then perceived myriads of little scarlet balls among the drooping boughs.Watching his face, her eyes went hard.She saw the scales were fallen from him, and at last he was going to see her as she was.It was the thing she had most dreaded in the past, and most needed, for her soul’s sake.Now he was going to see her as she was.He would not love her, and he would know he never could have loved her.The old illusion gone, they were strangers, crude and entire.But he would give her her due she would have her due from him.

She was brilliant as he had not known her.She showed him nests:a jenny wren’s in a low bush.

“See this jinty’s!” she exlaimed.

He was surprised to hear her use the local name.She reachedcarefully through the thorns, and put her fingers in the nest’s round door.

“Five!” she said.

“Tiny little things.”

She showed him nests of robins, and chaffinches, and linnets, and buntings; of a wagtail beside the water.

“And if we go down, nearer the lake, I will show you a kingfisher’s...”

“Among the young fir trees,” she said, “there’s a throstle’s or a blackie’s on nearly every bough, every ledge.The first day, when I had seen them all, I felt as if I mustn’t go in the wood.It seemed a city of birds:and in the morning, hearing them all, I thought of the noisy early markets.I was afraid togo in my own wood.”

She was using the language they had both of them invented.Now it was all her own.He had done with it.She did not mind his silence, but was always dominant, letting him see her wood.As they came along a marshy path where forget me nots were opening in a rich blue drift:“We know all the birds, but there are many flowers we can’t find out,” she said.It was half an appeal to him, who had known the names of things.

She looked dreamily across to the open fields that slept in the sun.

“I have a lover as well, you know,” she said, with assurance, yet dropping again almost into the intimate tone.

This woke in him the spirit to fight her.

“I think I met him.He is good looking also in Arcady.”

Without answering, she turned into a dark path that led up hill, where the trees and undergrowth were very thick.

“They did well,” she said at length, “to have various altars to various gods, in old days.”

“Ah yes!” he agreed.“To whom is the new one?”

“There are no old ones,” she said.“I was always looking for this.”

“And whose is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, looking full at him.

“I’m very glad, for your sake,” he said, “that you are satisfied.”

“Aye but the man doesn’t matter so much,” she said.There was a pause.

“No!” he exlaimed, astonished, yet recognizing her as her real self.

“It is one’s self that matters,” she said.“Whether one is being one’s own self and serving one’s own God.”

There was silence, during which he pondered.The path was almost flowerless, gloomy.At the side, his heelssank into soft clay.