my husband's laboratory window she asked whether he wanted the letter at once, or would wait to open it at dinner time. "I am only cleaning my instruments," he answered, "let me have the letter now." His voice, as I hear it through all those years, sounds so happy and boyish. It was altered, and it seemed at the time naturally enough, when he presently came down to the laundry and said very briefly, "My brother is dead . . . it is supposed a stab from a drunken sailor at Bristol. A shocking business. It is my Uncle Hubert who writes." He had sat down by the ironing table and spoke in short, dry sentences.
There was something extraordinary about his voice, not grief, but agitation, which somehow made it utterly impossible for me to do what would have been natural under the circumstances, to put my arms round his neck and tell him I shared his trouble. Instead of which every word he uttered seemed to ward me off as with the sword's point, and to cover himself, as a fencer covers his vitals.
"Get some brandy for him, Penelope. He is feeling faint," said my mother, tossing me her keys. I obeyed, feeling that she understood and I did not, as often happened between us. I was a few minutes away, for I had to cross the yard to the dwelling house, and then I found that my mother had given me the wrong keys. I filled a glass from a jar of cherries we had just put up, and returned to the laundry. My husband was white, but did not look at all faint. He was leaning his elbow on the deal table covered with blanket, and nervously folding and stretching a ruffle which lay by the bowl of starch. When I came in he suddenly stopped speaking, and my mother saw that I noticed it.
"Eustace was saying, my dear," she said, "that he will have to go—almost immediately—to England, on account of the property. He wanted to go on alone, and fetch you later, when things should be a little to rights. But I was telling him, Penelope, that I felt sure you would recognise it as your duty to go with him from the very first, and help him through any difficulties."
My dear mother had resumed her ironing; and as she said these last words, her voice trembled a little, and she stooped very attentively over the cap she was smoothing.
Eustace was sitting there, so unlike himself suddenly, and muttered nervously, "I really can see no occasion, Maman, for anything of the sort."
I cannot say what possessed me; I verily think a presentiment of the future. But I put down the plate and glass, looked from my mother to my husband, and burst into a childish flood of tears. I heard my husband give a little peevish "Ah!" rise, leave the room, and then bang the door of his laboratory upstairs behind him. And then I felt my dear mother's arms about me, and her kiss on my cheek. I mopped my eyes with my apron, but at first I could not see properly for the tears. When I was able to see again what struck me was the scene through the long window, open down to the ground.
It was a lovely evening, and the air full of the sweetness of lime blossom. The low sunlight made the plaster of our big old house a pale golden, and the old woodwork of its wooden eaves, wide and shaped like an inverted boat, as is the Swiss fashion, of a beautiful rosy purple. The dogs were lying on the house steps, by the great tubs of hydrangeas and flowering pomegranates; and beyond the sanded yard I could see the bent back of Vincent stooping among the hives in the kitchen garden. The grass beyond was brilliant green, all powdered with hemlock flower; and the sun made a deep track in the avenue, along which the cows were trotting home to be milked. I felt my heart break, as once or twice I had foolishly done as a child, and in a manner in which I have never felt it again despite all my later miseries. I suppose it was that I was only then really ceasing to be a child, though I had been married two years. It was evidently in my mother's thoughts, for she followed my glance with hers, and then said very solemnly, and kissing me again (she had not let go of me all this while), "My poor little Penelope! you must learn to be a woman. You will want all your strength and all your courage to help your husband."
That was really the end, or the beginning. There were some weeks of plan-making and preparations, a bad dream which has faded away from my memory. And then, at the beginning of August of that year—1772—my husband and I started from Grandfey for St. Salvat's.
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