Mockery Gap by T. F. Powys

little aside and peeped in.
    He saw no night bird, but a young girl in a white frock pleasantly seated amongst the boughs, and fully as tempting, with her red lips and firm roundness—for Mr. Pattimore’s eyes strayed—as any maid since the world cooled. Her hair, not dark but brown enough for darkness, was pleasantly tumbled, so that Mr. Pattimore couldn’t help wishing that his fingers were in it, and her blush when she saw his eyes looking at her made the good gentleman glad to remember that he wasn’t settled in a Church that forbade marriage.
    As soon as Mr. Pattimore heard that the portrait of the Dean, towards which his high hopes lay as soon as he saw it, could go to Mockery as a wedding present with the young lady, he decided to marry her, and so he did.
    But Mr. Pattimore had no idea what the laurel bush had done to his chosen. Nellie used to take her book there, and the laurel, a maiden too, would tell her, as soon as she was safely settled, to think about pretty men.
    She may have had a fairy story in her mind, when she thought of her lover as a frog who hopped around her looking up with its large eyes asking a question, until it finally hopped into her lap. And after thinking of the man like that, she would think about the baby, and pull leaves from the laurel and pretend to make its clothes. ‘My baby‚’ she would whisper to herself every time now that she climbed into the bush, until Mr. Pattimore with the frog’s manners pulled her out, his hands a little more wantonly inclined than a clergyman’s should be.
    The Dean—not the portrait this time, but the carnal man—wrote to Nellie, as soon as she was safely at Mockery and the picture hung up and the honeymoon over, and Mr. Pattimore read the letter as proudly as if he had written it himself.
    The Dean said, ‘Remember St. Paul.’
    ‘He must have meant me,’ said Mr. Pattimore , ‘when he said that.’
    Mr. Pattimore began to take cold baths.
    But that wasn’t the worst.
    He now saw all women, his young wife included, as wholesale temptations to wanton naughtiness…. Two nights after the returnfrom the honeymoon, Mr. Pattimore stared for a full half-hour about bedtime at the picture, and fled to the attic.
    Mrs. Pattimore lay that night, in the pretty bedroom upon which so much money had been spent, alone and in tears.
    Her husband appeared the next day in a black garment that reached to his toes. He talked only at breakfast about the proposed sewing meeting, and Mrs. Pattimore could think only about the frog.
    When he asked her to pass the toast, he said: ‘The toast, please, Dorcas.’
    And Mrs. Pattimore, her eyes still dim with her night’s crying, exclaimed, ‘But I’m Nellie, you know—darling Nellie.’
    ‘You’re Dorcas now,’ replied her husband sternly.
    Mrs. Pattimore had been a little proud of the Dean too—he was her second cousin on her mother’s side—in bygone times, but now she could never look up at the picture without feeling what a great harm the Dean had done to her when he mentioned St. Paul in the wedding letter. ‘Cousin Ashbourne might have talked to him at the wedding instead of writing when that was over,’ she used to say sadly; ‘he wouldn’t have listened to him then.’
    Nellie Pattimore, changed now to a Dorcas, was as meek as a dove and just as loving. She would sit up in her bed in all her night fineryand pout a little because he wasn’t there; and though there didn’t seem to be the least hope of a baby coming, she couldn’t help imagining there might be, and was beginning to sew some tiny garments. She began with a christening gown, and as soon as she was sure that she couldn’t have a baby she tried to pretend that she was making the gown for some other mother’s little one; though she could hardly bear to think, for she so longed herself, that there were other mothers in the world.
    As each spring-time came—and Dorcas had only been married five years when Mr. Tarr and Miss Ogle