The Rainbow

He had various folios of reproductions, and among them a

cheap print from Fra Angelico's "Entry of the Blessed into

Paradise". This filled Anna with bliss. The beautiful, innocent

way in which the Blessed held each other by the hand as they

moved towards the radiance, the real, real, angelic melody, made

her weep with happiness. The floweriness, the beams of light,

the linking of hands, was almost too much for her, too

innocent.

Day after day came shining through the door of Paradise, day

after day she entered into the brightness. The child in her

shone till she herself was a beam of sunshine; and how lovely

was the sunshine that loitered and wandered out of doors, where

the catkins on the big hazel bushes at the end of the garden

hung in their shaken, floating aureole, where little fumes like

fire burst out from the black yew trees as a bird settled

clinging to the branches. One day bluebells were along the

hedge-bottoms, then cowslips twinkled like manna, golden and

evanescent on the meadows. She was full of a rich drowsiness and

loneliness. How happy she was, how gorgeous it was to live: to

have known herself, her husband, the passion of love and

begetting; and to know that all this lived and waited and burned

on around her, a terrible purifying fire, through which she had

passed for once to come to this peace of golden radiance, when

she was with child, and innocent, and in love with her husband

and with all the many angels hand in hand. She lifted her throat

to the breeze that came across the fields, and she felt it

handling her like sisters fondling her, she drank it in perfume

of cowslips and of apple-blossoms.

And in all the happiness a black shadow, shy, wild, a beast

of prey, roamed and vanished from sight, and like strands of

gossamer blown across her eyes, there was a dread for her.

She was afraid when he came home at night. As yet, her fear

never spoke, the shadow never rushed upon her. He was gentle,

humble, he kept himself withheld. His hands were delicate upon

her, and she loved them. But there ran through her the thrill,

crisp as pain, for she felt the darkness and other-world still

in his soft, sheathed hands.

But the summer drifted in with the silence of a miracle, she

was almost always alone. All the while, went on the long, lovely

drowsiness, the maidenblush roses in the garden were all shed,

washed away in a pouring rain, summer drifted into autumn, and

the long, vague, golden days began to close. Crimson clouds

fumed about the west, and as night came on, all the sky was

fuming and steaming, and the moon, far above the swiftness of

vapours, was white, bleared, the night was uneasy. Suddenly the

moon would appear at a clear window in the sky, looking down

from far above, like a captive. And Anna did not sleep. There

was a strange, dark tension about her husband.