The sheep-dog couldn’t get the sheep along, and they began to grow stupid with the snow. They had lost their way along the track before nightfall.
‘That day and the next went by. It snowed without stopping until mid-way through the second day. At nightfall the shepherd hadn’t come home.
The day before Christmas Eve the brothers went out to look for him, and they found him dead with the sheep in a drift ten miles away. They brought him home and buried him.
‘After that the sister grew more and more sad and silent than before; she scarcely spoke, or even looked at her brothers. She would sit all through a meal quite mute and sometimes without eating, so that they could hardly bear at last to be with her. It angered them so much to see her grief. At length they got a bailiff to look after the place, and both of them went away, leaving her alone. They were away close upon a year, and when they came home again at the end of the autumn they saw a great change in her. She had grown very thin and pale, but she often smiled, seemed almost cheerful, and would talk quite freely with them. But if they tried to kiss her, or even touch her hand, she shivered and turned cold. They hated that most of all, worse than her silence. The elder brother almost loathed her: he would watch her from the corner of the hearth, and spy at her every movement.
‘It was a week before Christmas that he noticed she seemed more cheerful than usual, and as he could see no visible cause he watched her more carefully than ever. Then at last it struck him to watch her by night as well as by day.
He would pretend to go to bed, but in reality sit up listening to hear if she left her room; till one night he heard her steal out gently and go to the side-door there. He followed her at a safe distance right up on to the downs, where the winter before the sheep had been penned, but now there was nothing between the trenches. She walked up and down, seeming to talk to herself, making strange gestures: then again after some time she would go away again home.
The second night he took the younger brother with him. They crept nearer, and they could hear her seeming to talk to some other person, but they could see no one. The third night they went, and this time they fancied they saw the form of a shadowy man. They shuddered and went away afraid. The fourth night was the same. The fifth night they determined she should see the shepherd neither living nor dead; and they waited outside her door in the passage upstairs. She came out of her room noiselessly and ran past them, unseeing. They sprang upon her and caught her as she ran. But she escaped and got down to the door; again they nearly caught her as she passed. But she ran shrieking up the downs with them after her. As the elder brother came up with her he distinctly saw the figure of the shepherd standing in the shadow of the trenches. She called to him bitterly as the brother caught her by the arm. The brother made as if to strike the figure with his dagger; crying she flung herself between and he struck her instead. I think that he struck at her again, for she cries out several times. He must have meant to kill her. I believe he thought her a shame to them all, and he was a very proud man.’
She stopped speaking. Armstrong noticed at once the intense cold of the house, and the curious earthen smell that seemed to pervade the entire place.
It spread more and more through the room, until he could almost see it as a palpable substance.
‘What a tragedy,’ he said at last. ‘Do you know, you have almost made me feel afraid to go to bed!’ and he laughed a little, but certainly his hands felt very cold and rather uncertain.
‘I don’t think you would ever see anything,’ she said, replacing the books, and afterwards handing him a candle. They went silently upstairs together, leaving the house below in darkness; the earthen smell and cold ascended with them.
IV
Green Growth
CURIOUSLY ENOUGH ARMSTRONG was glad when morning came. As a rule he was untroubled by sleeplessness, being a healthy individual and leading a healthy existence. He could not even plead the extenuating circumstances of a banging door, or windows creaking in the wind. There had been no wind, the house had been utterly quiet; yet all the night through he had been convinced of something passing up and down noiselessly in the passage outside. Once he opened the door to look and listen. There was nothing but an intensifying of the feeling, and yet no tangible conviction. The piercing cold sent him hurrying back to bed.
He counted jumping sheep, he imagined clouds and watched them melt into one another, he repeated a single poem over to himself several times: nothing would do. He grew angry and argued with himself, but something watchful in his brain refused all intercourse with slumber. His fire was burning pleasantly still, and he watched the pleasant shadows bow and bend across the ceiling in agreeable, sidling movements. The room was warm and comfortable; he could enjoy that at least. He luxuriated in it, he plunged himself deep in comfort, and a gentle drowsiness invaded his senses. He watched sleep approaching warily, out of one eye as it were. Then suddenly he found that the door was standing wide open. It had announced its intention in no way whatever, not a creak, not the suspicion of a sound.
Simply it disclosed a gloom of impenetrable depths. It seemed almost as though the house were full of something larger than it could contain. He half expected the walls to expand and fall outwards, yet again there was no sound, no visible or audible sign of pressure, nothing but a piercing cold and a certain suspicion of that earthen smell. There was something so strange about the odour that he could match it with nothing in his remembrance, try as he might. It was like several things and then again like none. It was not actually unpleasant, and yet it certainly was not desirable: certainly it was not unclean. He got up and shut the door. He was tired and yet wide awake; this angered him, but so it continued until the grey of morning, when a heavy sleep came over him, and made him late for breakfast. He went down feeling that he disliked the house and should send himself a telegram to summon him away on urgent business the day after next.
All the family, including Aunt Ellen, were assembled at breakfast, although several of them had finished—namely, the three younger members. Mr Delane-Morton, however, was still actively employed, and expressed his pleasure at having a companion. Miss Ellen pecked at some hot scones which seemed to be under her especial patronage. She had that protective air indeed over everything at her end of the table, which takes away one’s appetite.
At length, when even she had finished, Armstrong begged that no one might be kept waiting on his account. The idea was repudiated with horror.
‘We always wait for our guests!’ cried Mr Delane-Morton.
In consequence of which Armstrong hurried, choked, and chafed.
After breakfast he sat down and enclosed a copy of the telegram which was to be sent to him the day after next, to his man in London. With the integrity of an angry conscience he deposited the letter guilelessly within the letter-box on the hall table. After which act he felt resigned in a greater degree.
Everybody seemed to live in the library. Aunt Ellen had her large chair placed somewhere conveniently between the window and the fireplace, whence she chatted amiably with Armstrong and Godfrey. Mr Delane-Morton’s favourite barometer figured on a table near by, which he contemplated profoundly until Pym summoned him away on some affair of state. Arthur sat disconsolately in a corner, turning the pages of a book with one hand, and rumpling his hair with the other. Ape’s-face was the only one absent: now and again Miss Ellen would cast captious glances round the room, as if she resented anyone’s absence from attendance upon her.
‘I am never quite at my best in the mornings,’ she said, smiling pathetically, ‘so you must let me show you the house this afternoon, Mr Armstrong. Perhaps you would take our guest down into the village, Godfrey, and show him our interesting church.’ Godfrey smiled his willingness and went off to put on his boots. ‘Such a dear fellow,’ she said affectionately. ‘Arthur, it would do you good to go also.’ Arthur collected his limbs together and arose.
‘A good bit younger than the others, and rather a spoiled child still, perhaps,
’
was the label fixed on his departure.
‘We are all like that at his age,’ rejoined Armstrong, somewhat annoyed at the discredit of the boy which her tone implied.
‘Godfrey was always charming; so graceful too.’
Here Mr Delane-Morton reappeared. There was something ruffled in his manner, and a disturbance of all the fleshy curves on his face. Armstrong noticed how the old lady noticed this also.
‘Godfrey and Arthur are taking Mr Armstrong to see the church,’ she said.
‘Ah, ah!’ said he absently, ‘I think I will come too. You will be alone, Ellen?’
‘Yes,’ she replied suavely, ‘but please do not think of my loneliness.’
‘No, no, of course not,’ he answered hurriedly; ‘no, decidedly I think I had better go with them,’ and he rambled out of the room, ostensibly to get his hat, on which quest Armstrong followed him. The four men assembled in the hall, but Mr Morton still had no hat. He came out on to the doorstep with them; looking with an unseeing eye upon the clouds, and then shot back again into the house, saying:
‘I think I had better sit with your Aunt Ellen,’ during which time he gazed abstractedly at Armstrong. So the three set out together without him.
The day was mild for December, but a dampness hung about the atmosphere and added a flat tone to the landscape that was at once depressing and distasteful. The great down behind the house looked dense and sullen, all curves and edges were blurred; the elm trees which stood on either side the drive, leafless though they were, seemed borne down with their own weight.
It looked as if, like Samson, they would readily have involved others in their own ruin—revengeful giants.
The place was much as Armstrong had expected, entirely flat except for the ridges of the downs; but to say flat is not to suppose it featureless. The lines of trees disposed along the hedgerows, a strange dispersal of thatched cottages amongst the fields, the sudden intervention of a stream—all these combined in a curious suggestiveness which tickled the imagination.
The village was not very far from the lodge-gates: grey-walled, grey-tiled, with now and then a thatch, now and then a staring contrivance of red bricks and blue slate, the houses clustered round the church. There were strangely narrow lanes between high walls winding in and out without visible ending, over which would peer a clipped yew or a denuded pear-branch. The church stood enclosed between a double quadrangle of grey stone houses of a monastic appearance, and pollarded limes on which the moss grew green: upon the stone it had grown yellow. A battered cross stood near the porch, an empty niche with elaborately carved canopy overhung the entrance. The church belonged to St Michael still. An enormous shadow of wings seemed to make twilight in the place. That feeling of extreme antiquity, which is a contradiction to old age, hung heavily about the chancel. A fretted screen of dark carving stood like a deep-meshed veil across the aisles, shrouding two chapels and forming the rood-loft: above it stood the cross. In one of these chapels was a dimness like the shadow of eternity.
Godfrey had been murmuring information the while with the suavity of a guide-book; but Armstrong could not listen. Godfrey said there was a fine brass in the chapel and urged him to enter. Armstrong felt a reluctance to cross the threshold. Someone, a woman, was saying her prayers within.
‘It’s only my sister,’ he said in a lowered tone. But Armstrong shook his head. He had always the feeling that it was unfair to watch people at their prayers—that is, when they were really praying: it seemed like looking through a keyhole. Still there was something in the girl’s attitude that riveted his glance. Her body had sunk almost to the floor, and her head sunk low between her shoulders so that only the nape of the neck was visible: her hands showed white and strained, raised high above her body, the elbows fixed rigidly upon the desk at which she knelt. There was something extraordinary about the limpness of her attitude contrasted with the intensity of those clasped hands. All the time that they remained in the church he could think of nothing else, although, archaeologically speaking, there were far more interesting things to be observed. The shadow of strange things only left them as they passed out again.
Godfrey’s conversation was so polite that Armstrong could scarcely support it; he tried to probe beneath, but there seemed no depth to probe; he was like some fourth dimension with all the other three omitted. Arthur suggested returning by a longer route which lay across the meadows, Godfrey was all for the smoother road through the village. Godfrey’s method of dispute was simply to smile, say nothing, and continue his way: it wrought Arthur to desperation. From where they argued the entire ridge of the downs showed itself against the heavy grey sky. One solitary figure, could be seen to move along it; so far away was it that one could scarcely tell whether it were man or beast. Presently it descended a little along the grass slope, and the flash of a scarlet garment proclaimed it a woman. Armstrong, abstracted from the dispute, watched the object; he found that Godfrey was covertly watching it also. Arthur was immersed in the pursuit of his argument.
‘Suppose,’ said Godfrey, smiling gently, ‘that you take Mr Armstrong home your way, and I will take my own.’
Armstrong affirmed his willingness for the meadow-path, and the two went off together. He was thankful to be quit of Godfrey, and it appeared that Arthur experienced the same relief.
‘The fellow never went to school,’ said he wisely, ‘and that is all the trouble. Aunt Ellen brought him up with a tutor: she said he was too delicate for school.’
‘He looks thriving enough now.’
‘Oh, he’s all right,’ said Arthur with conviction; and the strides which Godfrey was taking in the direction of home seemed to say so much.
If grumbling is conversation there was no lack of converse on Arthur’s part as they went across the meadows. It did not appear in the least strange to Armstrong that he should do so; younger men were perpetually using him as a father confessor, and he had humour or sympathy enough to enjoy the office. It was not often that he forgot himself so far as to offer advice in return.
That, except in very rare cases, is the last thing that youth requires from its elders. Armstrong had an excellent memory, and he was not forgetful of his own youth.
Arthur’s plaint was his father’s desire that he should take Orders; but the difficulty of the situation lay in the fact that he had no alternative career to offer, and that not only did his father wish to see him a clergyman, but also Aunt Ellen had expressed her will upon the subject. It struck Armstrong as curious that the little old lady should have usurped such an ascendency over the Delane-Morton family.
‘Miss Delane-Morton is not easy to persuade then?’ he said.
‘Aunt Ellen, do you mean?’ he asked; ‘she’s only Delane, you know. That is where she comes from—try as she may to forget it.’ He pointed with his hand across the fields.
They had come now to a long valley which lay between two slight folds of ground; it lay very low and a stream cut through it to go winding down beneath heavy swathings of green weeds and slime into the distance. The eye lost itself in an expanse of verdure that was restful, not to say enervating, in its reposeful monotony of tone. In summer it would be green beyond endurance, when the heavy elm trees, which rose on either side of the stream, would unfurl clouds of foliage against the wide expanse of sky and blot it out.
A long high building stood over the stream where it bent and took a plunge, forming a small cataract. The face of the building was lined with shuttered windows, though in some cases the shutters had fallen away, leaving bare casements innocent of glass. The place was forbidding though vacant in expression. Not a soul was to be seen anywhere along the whole expanse of the valley or in any of the fields near by; a decayed cottage, covered with a battered thatch, stood as an emblem of desertion. The silence of desolation covered it.
‘Those were the Delane silk-mills,’ continued Arthur with evident contempt. ‘They were French refugees, you know, who settled here, and made quite a thrivi
ng business of the concern. There were quite a number of French people around here at one time, and you’ll find buried French names amongst some of the cottagers still. My father sold the business. It hadn’t been paying so well since the time when large factories started. Do you see that mound with a small tree growing on it ? That is where their house stood.
My father pulled it down after he married mother, and Aunt Ellen came to live with us. She always hated the mills. It wouldn’t let because no one wanted to live near those empty barracks, and people said it wasn’t healthy.
Our house and theirs used to look across at one another once upon a time.’
Armstrong noticed that Arthur considered himself more Morton than Delane: an inherited trait. It amused him.
They both turned from the mills to gaze across the meadows to the higher ground on which the old house stood. At this time of the year it was distinctly visible through the trees, spreading itself firmly along the slopes of the down. The green growth of the valley surged to its feet, but receded from the chalk ramparts that defended the approach. To any one looking up from the windows of the destroyed house in the valley to its fellow opposite, Armstrong could imagine the sensation that an envious and only half comprehending mind would evoke at the sight. Generations of Delanes envying generations of Mortons for something they had not and could never acquire, and which they would not know how to use if they came into possession. Traditions being heritable and not purchasable the Delanes had probably failed to grasp the fact. They had put some one else’s hat on their own head, and did not realise their misfit. You may pay as much as you please for a hat but it does not follow that it will fit you. He could not be sure if the Morton hat was too big for the Delane, or the Delane too big for the Morton.
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