IIΙ

But one day in the Christmas holidays, when Georgie’s baby was three months old, the sisters planned a shopping expedition on his behalf. Already he was growing out of all his clothes and would presently be ready for short-coating.

The night before, Joanna had lain long awake thinking and thinking of her mother. Was it after all her death that had changed the face of the world? Was it not rather the manner of her death? She had gone without once attaining the full stature of her soul, without once uttering clearly the word it should have been hers to utter. With all her struggles, her nobility, her sacrifices, she was unfulfilled. She was like the sides of an arch that fall in together in a heap because the key-stone is missing. Yet who had faith if not she? What had been wrong?

All at once Joanna turned in accusation upon her dead father. In spite of the unkind childish dream she had kept his memory all these years as of some one good beyond question, almost god-like. Nor had Juley ceased to foster to the last this ideal image in her children’s minds. But now this with other security was gone from life; and in that quiet midnight hour Joanna asked herself if he was not greatly to be blamed. Was it not their father who had failed them all? Was the keystone of the arch of fulfilment not placed in the hands of the male?

She condemned him pitilessly, as only a woman can condemn a parent. It had all been wrong, that apparently happy and peaceful marriage – wrong from beginning to end. There had been no beginning and no end. There had been only a confused and accidental issue of wrongness, of which she, Joanna, was a part. She remembered the words – “In sin did my mother conceive me.” Why not – “In sin did my father beget me”? And in her very bones she could feel at work that reward of sin which is death.

She blamed her father. But amid the heat and misery of her indictment, Sholto’s face, so long vanished from earth, rose cold and sweet and patient before his daughter, and he refuted the charge. It was long years since she had shut the door against him in her dreams. Now it seemed as if he had been waiting and waiting there outside for her mature reproach. And was not this patience of his, his everlasting vindication? Oh, the patience – the heart-breaking, awful patience of the dead! Oh, that face with its sweet, sunshiny smile, and its eyes so puzzled and afraid, yet innocent, like the eyes of a child! Had not he also, he asked her, been denied fulfilment? If Juley’s soul through him had suffered a tragic negation, what of his own extreme, irremediable pathos of incapacity?

Weeping, Joanna turned on her face upon the bed. And weeping she forgave her father and begged his forgiveness.