She watched from the sick-room the snow whirl past, like
flocks of shadows in haste, flying on some final mission out to
a leaden inalterable sea, beyond the final whiteness of the
curving shore, and the snow-speckled blackness of the rocks half
submerged. But near at hand on the trees the snow was soft in
bloom. Only the voice of the dying vicar spoke grey and
querulous from behind.
By the time the snowdrops were out, however, he was dead. He
was dead. But with curious equanimity the returning woman
watched the snowdrops on the edge of the grass below, blown
white in the wind, but not to be blown away. She watched them
fluttering and bobbing, the white, shut flowers, anchored by a
thread to the grey-green grass, yet never blown away, not
drifting with the wind.
As she rose in the morning, the dawn was beating up white,
gusts of light blown like a thin snowstorm from the east, blown
stronger and fiercer, till the rose appeared, and the gold, and
the sea lit up below. She was impassive and indifferent. Yet she
was outside the enclosure of darkness.
There passed a space of shadow again, the familiarity of
dread-worship, during which she was moved, oblivious, to
Cossethay. There, at first, there was nothing--just grey
nothing. But then one morning there was a light from the yellow
jasmine caught her, and after that, morning and evening, the
persistent ringing of thrushes from the shrubbery, till her
heart, beaten upon, was forced to lift up its voice in rivalry
and answer. Little tunes came into her mind. She was full of
trouble almost like anguish. Resistant, she knew she was beaten,
and from fear of darkness turned to fear of light. She would
have hidden herself indoors, if she could. Above all, she craved
for the peace and heavy oblivion of her old state. She could not
bear to come to, to realize. The first pangs of this new
parturition were so acute, she knew she could not bear it. She
would rather remain out of life, than be torn, mutilated into
this birth, which she could not survive. She had not the
strength to come to life now, in England, so foreign, skies so
hostile. She knew she would die like an early, colourless,
scentless flower that the end of the winter puts forth
mercilessly. And she wanted to harbour her modicum of twinkling
life.
But a sunshiny day came full of the scent of a mezereon tree,
when bees were tumbling into the yellow crocuses, and she
forgot, she felt like somebody else, not herself, a new person,
quite glad. But she knew it was fragile, and she dreaded it. The
vicar put pea-flower into the crocuses, for his bees to roll in,
and she laughed. Then night came, with brilliant stars that she
knew of old, from her girlhood. And they flashed so bright, she
knew they were victors.