Summer Will Show Read Online Free PDF Page B

fourth page — the four pages on which she had stated to her husband her exact reasons for wishing not to live with him again, her exact decision never to do so. She could remember everything: the look of the winter room, the fire rosy on the white marble hearth, the yellow flames of the candles she had lit, and the uncurtained window reflecting them, presenting its illusion of bright fire and sallow candle-flames alight in the dusky February garden where the evergreens bent toppling under the rainy wind. She could remember the dress she wore, the bracelet on her wrist with its staring onyx, the new scratch, raw and blatant, on the green leather of the escritoire. With a veer of wind the rain had spattered against the windows, and on that streaming surface the reflection of the fire and the candle-flames had brightened. She could remember the smell of the sealing-wax, and the exact imprint of the seal, and the look of the letter, lying sealed, stamped, and addressed, on the summit of the other letters she had written that afternoon.
    Frederick Willoughby, Esquire.
          Hôtel de l’Étoile,
                rue Ste Anne,
                      Paris.
    So clear, so authentic was the recollection that walking along the road between the dusty hedgerows and the parched fields she yet had a feeling of a rainy afternoon and of the safe pleasure of being within doors by a fire. It was only what she had said that she could not remember. Out of all that letter, so swimmingly written, so clear-headedly willed, that letter which was to decide the remainder of her life, she could not remember a single phrase, a single sentence.
    If I had been jealous, thought Sophia, if the last angry embers of love had smouldered in me when I wrote, I should remember my letter still. And if there had been a twinge of hope left, I should have kept a copy of it. But as it was, I wrote it as one writes a business letter, a letter dismissing a servant, or refusing an application.
    Now the lodge gates had swung to behind her, and the shade of the avenue dappled her progress. I go to my house, she said to herself, alone. I rule and order it alone. And no one doubts my sufficiency, no one questions my right to live as I do. I am far safer than if I were a widow. For at my age, and in my position, I should be pestered with people wanting to marry me, I should have to live as cautiously as a girl. But now I can stand up, and extend my shade, my suzerainty, unquestioned as a tree. No cloistered fool of a nun could live freer from the onslaught of love than I, and no queen have a more absolute sway.
    She turned off to the stables, to order the carriage which was to fetch Hannah and the children. While the horse was being put in she stood by, making desultory conversation with the coachman, and looking round the stable-yard. Here she had run as a child, to strut over the cobbles with her legs apart in an imitation of old Daniel, to plunge her bare arm into the bins of corn and oats, to sniff saddle-soap and the bottles of liniment and horse-medicine, to dabble in the buckets and, when no one was looking, to lick the polished metal on the harness, so cold and sleek to the tongue. Again she felt the sense of escape; for here everything was clean, bare, and sensible; there was no untidiness, and no doubt. Her horses (she did not admit it but the thought was there) were everything that her children should have been: strong, smooth-skinned, well-trained, well-bred. The texture of the muzzle searching her hand for sugar, so delicately smooth, so dry and warm and supple, satisfied something in her flesh which the kisses of her children left unappeased. To them she responded with tenderness, with pity, with conscience, with a complicated anguish of anxiety, devotion and solicitude. Even in bending to kiss Damian the thought would spring up:
His forehead is very hot. Has he a fever?
But to this contact her own vigorous well-being could respond