Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  When he said this they thought for certain that he was going mad and they looked round the kitchen, and only Dan was quite calm.

  ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘I am going mad, only I know that I must go away.’

  Then he seemed as if he were holding something back, and they pressed him to speak, but he did not speak for a little while.

  ‘I know no more reason of all this than you. But it is to Africa I am going.’

  ‘Was it a fairy,’ said his mother, ‘that told you to go to Africa last night when you were at the top of the hill?’

  ‘No, mother, I saw no fairy; and you may think me mad if you like and Mary may think me mad if she likes.’

  He turned to go out of the door, but Mary stopped him. ‘I don’t think you mad. I will go to Africa with you if you think better of Africa than America.’

  He looked at her tenderly, like one who appreciates a sacrifice and is not able to accept it.

  At that moment a footstep was heard at the door, and the priest came in with a paper in his hand.

  ‘There’s war in Africa,’ he said, ‘or there soon will be. The Boers have broken out, and they say that they are going to drive the English into the sea.’

  Dan stood listening, the priest seemed to be telling him of a dream he had dreamed and had almost forgotten. He stood listening open-eyed, remembering the shapes he had seen in the clouds, how one cloud had seemed like a warrior, and how clouds had come up from the west, and how the wind had borne them southward in tumult. The priest told that loyal Irishmen were flocking to the standard of another captain, an inheritor of the great tradition, and Dan knew that he was drawn by the same impulse, and he said:

  ‘I knew of this war on the mountain. That is what the mountain was saying to me.’

  ‘But,’ said Mary, ‘if you go out there, you may be killed, and what shall I do if you are killed?’

  He did not seem to hear her.

  ‘But if you are not shot by the British they may take you prisoner and they will hang you.’

  ‘I shall not be taken a prisoner; they will take me dead if they take me at all.’

  ‘But if you come back you will marry me.’

  ‘I shan’t forget you, dear.’

  ‘But do you know if you will come back?’

  ‘My mind is full of going, I know nothing else.’

  Dan and Mary walked out of the house together, and for the first time for many weeks there was a happy look on Dan’s face. He walked with his arm about her, and, standing among the furze bushes, he told her it was here he had heard the voice of the mountain.

  ‘And you used to think that you hated this mountain and liked our snug fields far better.’

  ‘So I did, but we do not know what is in us until the time comes. I hated that hill, for it was the barest, and it was out of that hillside that the whisper came - and it was there - it was there everything happened.’

  He looked at her, wondering if she had understood him. She said that she had, and he went away very happy. But he did not leave her alone, the hills were henceforth her company. They were always responsive and always kind, and she did not look in the newspapers for news of Dan. She knew she would be the first to have news if anything were to happen to him. She knew that she would see him on the hillside.

  AT THE TURN OF THE ROAD

  An Irish Girl’s Love Story

  THE NIGHTINGALES HAD sung to within two hours of the dawn, and when the stars receded and the moon paled in the south, the owls returned to their belfries, the kites and nightjars to their perches; already the badger was rolled in sleep in his deep burrow, the hedgehog in his nest of leaves, but even at dawn the world is never wholly silent, and a belated vixen struggled with a chortling hen in the worn cart-track leading to the village of Brandlesbury, nearly losing her hold of the fowl, so surprised was she at the sight of a girl coming from the forest at such an hour; but perceiving quickly that the intruder was deep in thought, she gripped the fowl tighter and trotted away to her cubs, already forgetful of the interruption. And in an equal forgetfulness Cicely Wyatt pursued her way down the loose, crumbling track, her shoes gathering sand at every step, till she came to Wyatt’s grocery store.

  She had never seen the day breaking before, and for that reason or another she stopped to admire the ascending light, and after watching some rosy clouds gathering above the sun, yet unrisen, she put her key into the lock. It was then that a blackbird began to whistle from an apple bough across the way; not long after, a thrush from a naked ash commenced to sing little snatches of song, and for nearly two hours little else was heard but these two songsters.

  At six a jingle of harness jarred the sequence of sweet sounds as the carter’s whip cracked on his team to their daily labour. At eight o’clock dogs were let through the doorways and ran barking down the street, and almost at the same moment the shutters of the grocery store came down with a clang, and Fred Wyatt began to consider the best display he could make of his vegetables.

  His baskets of cabbages, onions, cucumbers, carrots and turnips gave him no trouble, and it was not till he came to a large sack of potatoes that he stopped to take breath.

  ‘Now, what ‘aste be thee in to open thy shop?’ asked a lusty fellow, a farrier, on the way to his forge. ‘A few minutes sooner than the Fitches open theirs will be all thou’lt get for thy pains.’

  ‘I open my store when it pleases me, without a thought for when the Fitches open theirs.’

  ‘As well thou mayst, for isn’t young Sidney to wed thy daughter and make one family and one store?’

  ‘He that has worked for forty year will work on till his breath stops altogether.’ And the little fat, colourless man, whose short cropped beard was already full of grey hairs, though he was not many more years than forty, began again his struggle with the sack.

  ‘I’d give thee a ‘and, Fred Wyatt, but thou’rt wasting thy strength over them potatoes without reason, I’m thinking, for who do I see in the distance but Tom Huggett, a-coming up with big strides as if he guessed as he couldn’t come fast enough to save thee from doing thyself a mischief.’

  ‘I thank thee kindly, and will wait for Huggett to get the potatoes into line for me.’

  The farrier bid the grocer good morning, and Fred Wyatt had recovered most of his breath when Tom Huggett was within speaking distance.

  ‘Thou ‘ast come none too soon, Huggett. I’m nigh gone for breath.’

  ‘Be’ant I five minutes afore my time, Master?’ Tom asked.

  ‘I’m not a-grumbling at thee, lad. Thee canst manage big sacks better than I, though in days gone by I was ‘andy enough with them. Now, Tom, the first thing I ‘ave to say to thee is that a letter come last night from Mrs James saying she’d be much obliged if I’d send her order, she not ‘aving been altogether herself these last few days.’

  ‘And what may the order be, Governor?’

  ‘A pound of bacon, a half of cheese, a half of the best fresh, and a dozen new-laid... We’re short of biscuits, Tom; we’re as low down as one tin. I’ll write to Reading for three more. Cocoa - we’ve enough to go round till the traveller calls, but go down t’other end and see how we are off for coffee and tea and sugar. I’ll say nothing about cheese and butter; I never likes to interfere with Mrs Wyatt’s counter. She’ll be down presently and no doubt will have her word to say on her own account. Oranges - we be out of them. All the Jaffas are gone, but the Sevilles will be coming in - ‘So thou hast got thyself down at last, ‘Arriet, and Tom would like to have it from thee if Mrs James wants potatoes and onions, for she ‘asn’t said nothing about them in her order. But what’s the matter, woman?’

  ‘Fred, I daren’t tell thee. I can’t say it. Go, look for thyself in the clothes closet.’

  ‘Hast met a ghost in the closet?’

  ‘No ghost, but thy daughter.’

  ‘My daughter!’

  ‘Aye, in closet, hanging by her apron strings.’

  ‘Art still in they dreams
? And last night she was out till midnight listening to the nightingales -’

  ‘Last night is to-day... Here comes Sidney; and a sad tale we have to tell thee, my poor lad. Hast lost thy sweetheart and wife that was to be.’

  ‘Something ‘as ‘appened to Cicely?’

  ‘I can’t speak -

  ‘Now, what’s the matter with your wife, Mr Wyatt?’

  ‘My wife has seen something in the closet. But sometimes people see things as others don’t see, for I’m thinking as a girl don’t hang herself three days before she’s to be married.’

  ‘I can’t bear it. Let me in. I must see her! Wyatt, wilt come with me?’ he called back from the foot of the stairs.

  Wyatt stood aghast, unable to speak, and he remained speechless long after the others had gone up-stairs, Tom Huggett waiting to get a word from him. At last he said: ‘Nail this on the door, Tom.’

  ‘Six pounds of potatoes,’ a customer cried from the doorway.

  ‘The master says no business will be done in the shop to-day. You must go down to Mr Fitch.’

  ‘No business will be done to-day at Mr Fitch’s no more than here,’ cried Wyatt. ‘Thou ‘ast no understanding of it, Tom. Somehow, I can’t get it into my ‘ead as Cicely is gone from us, nor can Sidney, and he is a ‘ard-’eaded lad... Thou ‘ast brought in everything - potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and the notice is on the door? Then shut it after thee... Ah, now they be coming down; but how slow! Is she alive, or dead, Mother?’

  ‘Sidney says as we must touch nothing till the doctor ‘as seen her and the sergeant of police. We’re going along to fetch them and will be back in a few minutes.’

  ‘If you meet any comers this day, tell them no business is being done here.’

  The cat jumped from the counter, startling him, and on her reappearance with a mouse in her grip, he said: ‘Something is always happening in this world,’ and moved towards the stairs; but lacking courage to look upon his dead daughter, he wandered about the shop, the ‘want’ book in his hand. Somebody knocked.

  ‘Can’t they read?’

  The customer knocked again, and to rid himself of whoever it might be, he called out: ‘Go to the Fitches; no business is being done here... But the Fitches, too,’ he reflected as he listened to retreating footsteps, ‘will shut up their shop, and Sidney will be sorry for Cicely just as we are; but nobody won’t grieve as I am grieving.’

  Once more his mind passed from thoughts into sensations, sympathies, of old time, going back to the day he saw his daughter open her eyes for the first time. A pretty thing she was to look at in her cradle, and soon after a gay, pleasant child running about the shop, always with a little tune on her tongue. And hearing her in his thoughts singing, he was moved to go up to her, but at the foot of the stairs his courage forsook him, and he began to mutter one of her songs till tears overflowed his eyes and obliged him to desist.

  ‘She had always a pretty ear for music, and a customer never got a wrong bill - more than the Fitches can say. Mrs Fitch -’

  A footstep outside roused him; but the passer-by didn’t even stop to read the notice on the door, and his thoughts ran on something like this:

  ‘Everybody liked Cicely, but she didn’t matter to them, nor they to her; not even to her mother did she matter as she does to me. A father’s love for his daughter is a wonderful, mysterious thing, though I wouldn’t say as her mother don’t love her very deep. We shan’t be able to carry on without her; the Fitches’ll get all the business.’

  But why, he asked, did this old jealousy intrude itself? And to excuse himself for such a thought at such a time, he muttered as he went about the shop: ‘They’ve been striving after the custom this long while, and I don’t begrudge it to them; why should I? Nothing matters now that Cicely is gone.’ And again he lost sight of everything past and present till a knocking at the door roused him and he opened it to his wife and Sidney, come back with the doctor and the policeman.

  ‘A sad story this is,’ said the doctor, a fine old man of eighty, unshrunken, still six feet two and without any grey to speak of in his beard. ‘A sad story, and we are all sorry for you.’

  ‘Yes, we are sorry for you, and all the village will be grieving with you when the news gets about, Mr Wyatt.’

  As Fred did not answer, the sergeant had to declare his errand.

  ‘We’ve come, Mr Wyatt, to view the body and make our report.’

  ‘The wife will take you up-stairs.’ The doctor plucked the policeman by the sleeve. ‘I’d liefer not see her till she is laid out.’

  At that moment the cat came to show her mouse to Mrs Wyatt, and Wyatt said incontinently that the mouse was caught soon after Mrs Wyatt and Sidney had left the shop. The doctor plucked the sergeant’s sleeve again, whispered, and Wyatt remained with the cat, thinking of the nestful of young mice behind the wainscot, till Mrs Wyatt called over the banisters:

  ‘We’ve laid her on her bed, and thou’lt put up a prayer with me?’ He ascended the stairs, and Doctor Morgan and Sergeant Hamblin knelt with the parents and Sidney; and on rising from their knees Doctor Morgan reminded Mrs Wyatt that Sergeant Hamblin would like to ask some questions, and spoke of an adjournment to the parlour. She turned the handle, and Doctor Morgan and the sergeant found themselves in a low-ceilinged room and their eyes quickly discovered the large assortment of fancy articles with which the flowered table-cloth was bestrewed - photograph albums, cruet stands, plated ware, knives and forks, brooches, necklaces and scent bottles.

  ‘No, no, Wife, not yet. I’ll not have her presents made away with, not yet.’

  ‘Nor is there need to remove them,’ said Hamblin. ‘I have my note-book with me.’

  There were enough chairs in the parlour for them all to be seated.

  ‘Doctor Morgan and I see no reason why anybody should doubt that Miss Wyatt took her own life -’

  Fred cried out that he could bear it no longer, and it was some time before he was able to tell that he had never noticed any change in his daughter up to eleven o’clock last night, when she asked leave to go to the forest to hear the nightingales.

  ‘She was the same cheerful, contented girl as always,’ said Mrs Wyatt, ‘and it was after finishing the shop accounts that she asked for leave to go to hear the nightingales. I was took aback, for it was, as Wyatt has told you, after eleven o’clock; but having a thought that she was to meet Sidney, I gave her the key of the front door. “You’ll be back afore midnight?” I said, and she answered: “Soon after, Mother. The birds are singing their best at midnight.”’

  ‘Was she partial to the forest, Mrs Wyatt?’ Sergeant Hamblin asked.

  ‘I can’t remember that she ever spoke of the forest before, though we live so near it.’

  ‘And you, Mr Sidney, did you ever take her for walks in the forest?’

  ‘I spoke to her once about the forest, but she said that a shady road was more cheerful.’

  ‘And you were not with her last night?’

  ‘No; and I can’t think how she come to know that nightingales sing best after midnight. Somebody must have told her, but who? Unless it was Grigg. I met him coming away from here after tuning the piano, and he told me there were more nightingales in the forest than he had ever known before, and better singers, and it may have been from Grigg that she got the idea of going to hear them when her accounts were finished.’

  ‘It is hard,’ the doctor remarked, ‘to find the crevice through which an idea enters the mind.’ And Hamblin, taking the hint, said: ‘You never heard your daughter speak of taking her own life, Mrs Wyatt?’

  ‘Never a word; did we, Fred?’

  ‘Never a word,’ Fred answered, ‘and we believed her to be as happy as the day is long.’

  ‘There is always a reason, Hamblin,’ said the doctor, ‘but very often - and much oftener than people think - the reason is unsearchable; yet search we must, for in the eyes of the law suicide or felo de se is a felony, and the law forbids Christian burial to all who take
their lives, unless it can be shown that they were suffering from a fit of temporary insanity at the time. A very unchristian law, I admit, for who shall look into a human mind and tell the alienation of the brain that compelled a man to take his life? You will remember, Sergeant, that she took her life three days before her marriage; and her marriage was of her own making - am I not right in saying so, Mrs Wyatt?’

  ‘You are indeed, Doctor. Sidney was her choice, and there was no waning since the day he pushed her bicycle up the hill for her.’

  ‘Three days ago we walked out together,’ said Sidney, ‘and parted looking forward to our marriage.’

  ‘We shall meet,’ said Hamblin, rising from his chair, ‘at the inquest in the big room of the Hare and Hounds, and it will be for the coroner to say whether we shall hear Grigg.’

  ‘But he’ll hear Grigg, and if he don’t, I say it will be no fair inquest but a hush-up.’

  Sergeant Hamblin could not allow the word ‘hush-up’ to pass unreproved.

  ‘We have no evidence against Grigg. You met him on his way to Lyndhurst after tuning the piano. We’re all sorry for you, and understand how grieved you must be, but the story will come out clear to-morrow.’

  ‘Come, Sidney,’ said Doctor Morgan, and taking Sidney by the arm he led him from the room. Sergeant Hamblin lingered to tell Mr Wyatt that an ambulance would be sent to remove Miss Wyatt, and when he was gone a distressing silence fell. But for a long time neither could find words to break it with.

  ‘Sergeant forgot to ask if Cicely was back afore twelve, ‘Arriet.’

  ‘She had the key, and I knew thou’d be restless if I didn’t turn in with thee, and never thinking she’d stay out later, I fell asleep; and thou’ast sleeping sound enough when I waked suddenlike, asking myself if Cicely had come in. And without waking thee I lifted my legs out of bed and went in search of Cicely, and not finding her in her bed, I sat myself down upon it to harken for her key. And it must have been three or four when I ‘eard it, for it was broad day at the time.