Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/127

Rh outside message from the world came in gusts which shook the crazy bolts and fastenings. Presently she rose and loosed them, and pushing down the sash, braced herself to the wild air which somehow seemed to calm the harassing trend of her thoughts. In herself there was confusion, doubt, and misery, and, added to misery, a fearful misgiving she could not name. There was life and stir, in a sense hope, in that swaying world without. The vanishing mists, the larger horizons, the opening of unknown aerial spaces, all spoke of the expansion of external things. She could not put the thought into words, but it was God s open air, and spoke in some inexplicable way of life's larger and more wholesome purposes. It spoke of the virile satisfaction of accomplishment, of an existence in which endeavour is not fruitless, in which even a weary woman's output has some sort of reward. So she let the buoyant gusts sweep through the dingy little room, which it shook as autumn winds sway a rotting leaf. And here, too, was the sterility of autumn. Lifeless, empty and unreal, in the woman's eyes everything that had been born there was dead—all her ambition for her son, all her hopes of living with him in happy comradeship. The very round of effort which had kept her cribbed within those four walls seemed to show itself a vain thing. It had availed nothing. The boy for whom she had sacrificed her last sovereign would not work.

"Had she not been paying good money for an empty room this fortnight past?"; she asked herself in comical anti-climax to her forerunning mood. Worse than that—the thought took the very salt and flavour out of life—he had not been to the manufactory for seven weeks.

Rh