Septimus | Page 2

wild explorer, a tornado of a man, had been killed by a buffalo. She was afraid that Zora took after her father. Her younger daughter Emmy had also inherited some of the Oldrieve restlessness and had gone on the stage. She was playing now in musical comedy in London.
"I don't see why you should not be happy here, Zora," she remarked, "but if you want to go, you must. I used to say the same to your poor, dear father."
"I've been very good, haven't I?" said Zora. "I've been the model young widow and lived as demurely as if my heart were breaking with sorrow. But now, I can't stand it any longer. I'm going out to see the world."
"You'll soon marry again, dear, and that's one comfort."
Zora brought her hands down passionately to her sides.
"Never. Never--do you hear, mother? Never. I'm going out into the world, to get to the heart of the life I've never known. I'm going to live."
"I don't see how you are going to 'live,' dear, without a man to take care of you," said Mrs. Oldrieve, on whom there occasionally flashed an eternal verity.
"I hate men. I hate the touch of them--the very sight of them. I'm going to have nothing more to do with them for the rest of my natural life. My dear mother!" and her voice broke, "haven't I had enough to do with men and marriage?"
"All men aren't like Edward Middlemist," Mrs. Oldrieve argued as she counted the rows of her knitting.
"How am I to know that? How could anyone have told that he was what he was? For heaven's sake don't talk of it. I had almost forgotten it all in this place."
She shuddered and, turning to the window, stared into the sunset.
"Lavender has its uses," said Mrs. Oldrieve.
Here again it must be urged on Zora's behalf that she had reason for her misanthropy. It is not cheerful for a girl to discover within twenty-four hours of her wedding that her husband is a hopeless drunkard, and to see him die of delirium tremens within six weeks. An experience so vivid, like lightning must blast something in a woman's conception of life. Because one man's kisses reeked of whisky the kisses of all male humanity were anathema.
After a long spell of silence she came and laid her cheek against her mother's.
"This is the very last time we'll speak of it, dear. I'll lock the skeleton in its cupboard and throw away the key."
She went upstairs to dress and came down radiant. At dinner she spoke exultingly of her approaching freedom. She would tear off her widow's weeds and deck herself in the flower of youth. She would plunge into the great swelling sea of Life. She would drink sunshine and fill her soul with laughter. She would do a million hyperbolic things, the mention of which mightily confused her mother. "I, my dear," said the hen in the fairy tale, "never had the faintest desire to get into water." So, more or less, said Mrs. Oldrieve.
"Will you miss me very dreadfully?" asked Zora.
"Of course," but her tone was so lacking in conviction that Zora laughed.
"Mother, you know very well that Cousin Jane will be a more sympathetic companion. You've been pining for her all this time."
Cousin Jane held distinct views on the cut of under-clothes for the deserving poor, and as clouds disperse before the sun so did household dust before her presence. Untidiness followed in Zora's steps, as it does in those of the physically large, and Cousin Jane disapproved of her thoroughly. But Mrs. Oldrieve often sighed for Cousin Jane as she had never sighed for Zora, Emily, or her husband. She was more than content with the prospect of her companionship.
"At any rate, my dear," she said that evening, as she paused, candle in hand, by her bedroom door, "at any rate I hope you'll do nothing that is unbecoming to a gentlewoman."
Such was her benison.
Zora bumped her head against the oak beam that ran across her bedroom ceiling.
"It's quite true," she said to herself, "the place is too small for me, I don't fit."
* * * * *
What she was going to do in this wide world into whose glories she was about to enter she had but the vaguest notion. All to her was the Beautiful Unknown. Narrow means had kept her at Cheltenham and afterwards at Nunsmere, all her life. She had met her husband in Ipswich while she was paying a polite visit to some distant cousins. She had married him offhand, in a whirl of the senses. He was a handsome blackguard, of independent means, and she had spent her nightmare of a honeymoon at Brighton. On three occasions, during her five-and-twenty years of existence, she had spent a golden week