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.