When she did speak, her voice shook.
"You have never seen your father. He has never seen you. He and I parted
before you were born."
"But he writes to you."
"Yes, he writes to me," and for all that she tried, she could not
altogether keep a tone of contempt out of her voice. She added with some
cruelty: "But he never mentions you. He has never once inquired after
you, never once."
Sylvia looked very wistfully at the letter, but her purpose was
not shaken.
"Mother, I want to go to him," she persisted. Her lips trembled a little,
and with a choke of the voice, a sob half caught back, she added: "I am
most unhappy here."
The rarity of a complaint from Sylvia moved her mother strangely. There
was a forlornness, moreover, in her appealing attitude. Just for a moment
Mrs. Thesiger began to think of early days of which the memory was at
once a pain and a reproach. A certain little village underneath the great
White Horse on the Dorsetshire Downs rose with a disturbing vividness
before her eyes. She almost heard the mill stream babble by. In that
village of Sutton Poyntz she had herself been born, and to it she had
returned, caught back again for a little while by her own country and her
youth, that Sylvia might be born there too. These months had made a kind
of green oasis in her life. She had rested there in a farm-house, after a
time of much turbulence, with the music of running water night and day in
her ears, a high-walled garden of flowers and grass about her, and the
downs with the shadow-filled hollows, and brown treeless slopes rising up
from her very feet.
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