Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (308 page)

“Oh, Puritan,” she said, “shall God enter into your highest joys?”

Magdalena went slowly towards the packet, she took a little pair of scissors that hung at her girdle.

“God has given me great joys,” she said, and slowly she cut the threads of twine near the seals, uttering at the same time, “Surely such great joys that I am the happiest woman on earth.”

Anne Jeal came very close to her, hanging over the table so that it was almost into her ears that she whispered —

“How can you say that when Edward Colman is across the seas?”

Magdalena looked into her eyes.

“Anne,” she said, “it is not the corporeal presence of him that can make him more mine, for I have his heart and he mine, and neither tempests, nor death, nor yet the powers of darkness can shake this union that God hath blessed.”

Her slow fingers drew aside the wrappings, but this speech of hers had so enraged Anne Jeal that she took a turn down the room that she might not seek to strangle the woman before her.

There fell out from the parcel many rough things — a hammer of stone, with two points bound with leather thongs to a leathern-bound stick; a strip of hide with dark eagle feathers attached to it; a little knife of green stone with a handle of painted wood; a necklet of white beads, and a little rattle, made of a sort of osier-withing in basket-work, and a letter wrapped in a green cloth.

Magdalena fingered all these things slowly and thoughtfully, dwelling for a long time on the little rattle. Anne Jeal came near again, and looked at these things too. She sneered that such trash was the best that Edward Colman could find to send his wife, and then her fingers closed round the little knife. She felt the edge, and the point was so sharp that it pricked her finger. She shuddered, having heard that these Indian knives had poison in them; hot smoulderings of light crept across her dark pupils.

Magdalena unwrapped the letter from the green cloth, and at the sight of its superscription a great light went over her fair, large face. She looked at it for a long time, holding it away from Anne Jeal’s eyes, then slowly she went over to the window.

It was quite dusk in the room where Anne Jeal stayed beside the feathers and stone implements, but near the window there was light, and Magdalena’s motions were very visible and all her face. She held the letter in her fingers for a long time and gazed at it, then she put it to her lips and her forehead, and then pressed it to her heart-place.

With a sudden swiftness, in that dusk, Anne Jeal’s left hand sought the pocket in her farthingale; she drew out a little bundle wrapped in cloths, and, with a bitter mockery on her face, she pressed it first to her lips, then her forehead and then her heart. She laid the little green knife down on the table whilst she unswathed the parcel. She averted her eyes from Magdalena Colman and looked at the shadows on the dim floor.

Magdalena’s letter rustled, and when Anne Jeal looked at her again there was such a light of pleasure on her face as she had never seen before. She seemed to be intolerably fair — so intolerably fair that, to Anne Jeal in the shadow, there came a despair that made her cry out. She could never be as fair as that!

Magdalena looked round into the room. Anne Jeal was holding in one hand the little image of wax, and in the other the little green knife, but it was so dark that Magdalena could not see what it was she held. She looked back to her letter, and there escaped from her a little “Ah!” of ecstasy.

Then Anne Jeal aimed the point of the knife at the waxen head; but, because her hand trembled, it missed and went home in the soft wax of the shoulder. Anne Jeal fell back against the table, panting, and her eyes wide open.

Suddenly she screamed out in triumph.

There came, as if from a metal disk, a glow of red light that shed no illumination into the room. Then she saw that it was a cuirass upon which sunlight seemed to fall, and there, all in his armour, with his sword in his hand, she saw Edward Colman, with that sunlight from another world flecked all over him as if it fell from trees. His eyes, beneath the long metal flap of his helmet, appeared alone to be shadowy, and they were fixed upon her, eyes without joy and without reproach.

She opened her arms to run to him, and she cried out, “Ah, you come to me!”

But she could not come up against him.

“Ah, you come!” she cried out. “You surrender. You are mine!”

Magdalena looked back into the room from the window and her letter.

“What is that you say?” she asked.

Anne Jeal fell back against the table; she looked at Magdalena, her eyes wide open, her lips apart.

“Do you not see him?” she whispered. “He is here.”

Magdalena widened her eyes to peer back into the gloom.

“I do not see anything,” she said; “I think you are ill.” She let down her letter for a minute and came towards Anne Jeal. Anne Jeal caught her by the shoulder, and leaning upon her, pointed one hand out.

“Do you not see?” she whispered.

“I see the chimney-piece,” Magdalena said, “and the blue hangings.”

Anne Jeal clung to her.

“The sunlight is all over him,” she whispered. “There is a knife in the soft part of his throat.”

Edward Colman stood there very still; his lips did not move. Anne Jeal put her fingers in her ears. But she heard him thinking the thoughts that seemed to fill the room and whisper from all the dusk.

“I
have come to you,”
they said. “
This is indeed death.”
She screamed out.
“This is indeed death; but I am not afraid
,
for I have done my best for this town, and this house of mine, and for this my wife, and for my son that shall be one day the leader of legions yet to be!”

Anne Jeal pressed her fingers yet more tightly into her ears; Magdalena, with her large eyes, looked from her face to her feet; near her right foot she saw the little waxen image, and she stooped to pick it up.

“It was a cruel death to die,”
the thoughts went on, “
for I was but a young man in the flower of my years. But so God willed it that no more I shall suffer.
...”

The thoughts grew fainter; she heard, “
Now I am dead!
” and no more.

The simulacrum, making no motion, save only that it averted its eyes from her in an awful reproach, seemed to fade back, further and further. When it was very small and distant, so that it appeared to be receding through a forest glade, she knelt down and stretched out both her hands. “Come back!” she cried out. “For an hour, for an instant, once more—”

Then it was all dark.

She sprang to her feet, and said harshly to Magdalena, “Why, we are both widowed. He is dead. And you never heard him!”

She tore the dress from her throat, she beat her breast, she took wood ashes from the fireplace — because the nights had been cold they had a fire there that night — and she cast them upon her head.

“Aye!” she cried out, and she stretched her fist to Magdalena, “judge if he be the more mine or thine. It was I that killed him in his sin, and with me he will live in hell for evermore.”

Magdalena eyed her unmoved and placid.

“It was all lies,” she asked, “that you told me when you said you loved him no more and had got another lover? I had thought it was all lies.” Anne Jeal cried out, “It was to me he came, not thee. And how should he come to thee, who sat and sewed and waited and never sighed? I loved him so that I slew him. Could you do that? What are you? What is your love?”

Magdalena looked at her face and then at the little image she held.

“Is it with this you claim to have slain my husband?” she said. “I do not believe that this can be done.”

“What was your love to mine?” Anne Jeal said again.

“Anne Jeal,” Magdalena said, “such was my love that I could wait for him — and that you could not do.”

Anne Jeal cast up her hands.

“Must you always have the best, even in words?” she said. A frightful passion of weeping passed over her, and at the thought that even by means of the image that she had made and annealed with her blood — even by means of that she should never hear his voice again, she sprang towards Magdalena Colman. But Magdalena was so strong that, with one hand, she held her very easily back, whilst with the other she crumbled the dried wax into little fragments. She cast them into the ashes.

“I will not believe that you have killed my husband with this gewgaw,” she said. “But, if you have, because I was so rich in my husband’s love I pardon you who were so starved.”

Anne Jeal fell to her knees before the fireplace; she dug her hands into the soft ashes to find the little fragments of her image; a light dust went up, and her eyes were filled with scalding tears so that she could no longer see. Suddenly she turned upon her knees.

“God help you with your pardons,” she said. “Wait till you have learned the worst. You are an Anabaptist and a foreigner. Very soon the King shall make a law that all the goods and gear of you and your folk shall be taken from you. You shall be cast out from this house, you shall starve, you shall be a beggar. Starve I You have said I starved! Why, you shall be a starveling and an outcast, without a husband, or a name, or a home, or a crust, or a clout to your back, or a grave for your bones, or—”

Magdalena’s thoughts had gone back to one of her earlier speeches.

“If that my husband be dead,” she said, “and even if he died in sin, yet he will go to heaven to await my coming, for he was a good man all his life. So till the coming of the saints upon the earth and beyond it and for ever he will be with me and not with thee. You shall never see him again unless you repent.”

Anne Jeal looked round to the place where it had seemed to her that Edward Colman’s shining simulacrum had disappeared; she imagined that there she might see a point of light that would grow larger until he was there again. But it was all dusky and dark, for the hangings were of a dark green.

“Why, get you gone from my house, Anne Jeal,” Magdalena said, “for though I pardon you yet it is not seemly that you remain here where you have sought to work evil against the house of my lord.”

Anne Jeal closed her lips and remained kneeling. At last she uttered —

“Why, I repent that I have killed my love, for it has taken out of my hands the power to kill him again in the future.”

She remained kneeling, looking at the floor desolately; she scratched the boards with her finger-nail.

Magdalena took up the stone axe and the little rattle and the eagle’s feathers and the little knife into her arms. She held the letter in her hand, and she was going to a room where there was a light by which she might read it.

“Get you gone when you will, Anne Jeal,” she said. “But, since I will never speak word with you again, I will read you some lessons.” She was almost invisible in the dusk by the door, and she paused to arrange her thoughts. “You have said that I was an Anabaptist and a foreigner; that is not true, since for love of my husband I will never again be one. But these things I know, that they have taught me that of all things in the world the strongest are patience and love.” She paused again, for she thought a little slowly. Anne Jeal remained motionless. “And,” Magdalena Colman answered, “just as with patience my father’s people await the second coming of the saints on the earth, so have I awaited the coming of my lord and love. And if he be dead I will so await his coming back to earth with the saints as the Anabaptists believe, or I will strive so to live that I may be taken up to him where he is among the elect in heaven.”

She paused again, and then, “And this, too, I have learned of them; that it is all one where that waiting is done, and whether it be done in purple and fine linen and good houses and many honours, or whether in rags and hunger, so long as you be assured of the perfect love either of the saints or of him who is my husband in God’s good eyes. For the Anabaptists have been driven over the earth till they came here, and they are still steadfast and wait. And if — as very truly it may — new persecutions strike them and me in this land, so they will wander again and without doubt to that New World where my husband is. And so, if he be dead, I will await his coming till all earthly hope of his return be lost and until my little child be born. And then, if there is no more hope and they be persecuted and I, so I, and they with me, will beget ourselves to that New World. For, certainly, it is no further from there to heaven than from here, since one sky covers those regions and this. And may be, if my husband is dead there, it is nearer from there to the part of heaven in which my husband is....”