The Rainbow

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.