by H. F. Heard
She was sitting in the Deanery parlor. It was a beautiful room built as the whole house had been by Gibbs in the mid-eighteenth century, looking west with large stately windows reaching down almost to the polished oak floor. The sun’s western light poured in. The slanting rays seemed almost as solid as the great carved gilt “Glory” which, before the Tractarian-cum-Gothic counter-attack, had stood over the Cathedral altar and now had been placed as a chandelier-pivot on this room’s ceiling. She was waiting for her brother to come in from Evensong and watched idly the steady drift of motes—moving specks of brighter gold passing across the belt of deeper unmoving gold. As he came in she saw the motes swirl as though wheeling to salute his passage. His remark, too, kept the tone of the place and hour.
“Well, this is peace at last.” He sat down and looked about him. “I feel”—he was speaking with almost as much unguarded ease as if he were by himself—“as though I had arrived, after a stiff and tiresome pull, where one can sit and take in the view. And it is a fine prospect, a fine prospect.”
His eye ranged round from the great window set in the south wall and through which the North-west Tower of the Cathedral could be seen, and then down the three stately west windows. Their upper panes were flooded with the oncoming sunset. The lower showed the red and white of the brick and portland stone walls of the lovely formal garden and the tops of the topiary-trained yew hedges that a century of shaping had made into green walls and towers.
“I shall work well here,” he added. And then his pleasure making him wish to show graciousness, “This place suits you, too. It is a house worthy of that care which you have a remarkable ability to yield. That such a spot should have so long housed a living corpse—I mean a suspended animate—and then.…”
“Dear,” she interrupted, “don’t.… It’s all turned out well, hasn’t it? Why …?”
He was not vexed with her check. His attention had strayed for a moment and when he did look back to her he was smiling. “I thought your domestic drill had produced a staff so armed and agile with mop and turk’s head that no cobweb however high could escape, no ball of fluff however close-clinging to the nether wainscot avoid the sweep of their brooms!”
As he spoke with facetious eloquence she glanced to where his eye had again gone. He was watching with a half-amused, half-puzzled look where the panel which was under the farthest of the west window-seats met the floor. The sunlight, pouring down diagonally onto the polished floor-boards, made here, an angle of shadow into which one had to look through a haze of golden shifting motes.
“I think,” he continued, “I perceive that a witness against your cleaners has stolen out to disprove their thoroughness. There is a small gossamer ball of ‘sweepings’ at this moment availing itself of a favourable ground draft to coast along the wainscot, seeking, no doubt, to gather contributors to itself.”
“The light,” she remarked getting up. “I can’t see through it into that shadow.”
He rose too, came beside her and then said, “Oh, it was only a trick of the cross-lighting. Queer!” he added, taking again his chair. “My eyes, in spite of Arabic and forty years of study, seldom give a mistaken diagnosis.”
However, twice again during the following ten days, variations of the little incident occurred. First he asked her to see that his study, also a stately room with polished floor, should be floor-polished every day. She consented and just in time prevented herself adding, “Has Mary’s cleaning been perfunctory?” She knew it had not. For not only did she herself inspect and praise each room as it was tided; she had trained her maids in her own concern. Besides, some sub-twinge of anxiety checked her; Her brother, though something of a martinet, had never been of the fussy, meticulous, “house-proud” type. Indeed, like most thorough scholars he did not like his room too ordered, saying that a good maid’s sense of order and a good mind’s were each good but different. This fussiness was, then, out of character. It began far down in her heart to restir her misgivings.
The second incident made more restless the roused uneasiness, but offered them no explanation. It was a repetition of the first incident, when they had been together in the parlor toward sunset. This time, however, they were dining. Candles had been lit. But as the evening was very still and warm the curtains had not been drawn. The last sign of a clear sunset remained in the west, a quiet lake of cloudless green, into which, from above, the deep blue of full night was percolating.
She had been resting her eyes on that vast tranquil distance when, glancing back, she noticed that he was, as before, looking in a slightly puzzled way at the floor by the wainscot. All he said, however, was, “I haven’t seen Tissaphernes for some while?”
“I’m afraid,” she answered, “he didn’t like the move. Cats are like that. Houses and not their human hosts seem their real friends. He wandered away, going back to his old haunts twice. And now I’ve had to send him to the veterinary. Cook thinks that’s the real cause of his restlessness and when he comes back he’ll be all right.”
“Can a veterinary minister to a mind diseased—or even distressed—and cure a cat’s nostalgia?”
“Oh, I thought I’d said—she says she found that he had mange coming on.”
“I must say then that I’m glad he had the considerateness to cease using you as a cushion.”
He laughed. Then again his eye wandered and he glanced at the floor, before continuing. “If the veterinary cannot cure him, as we lack an Elisha nowadays, we had better, get another mouse-warden.”
“Oh, we must give him every chance, don’t let’s be heartless!”
“Oh, don’t be sentimental!” A sudden flaw of irritation sounded in his voice.
“Besides,” she added conciliatorily, “Cook would perhaps be unsettled. She says she’s not seen a mouse in the place. And she’d certainly complain if she did. She says the smell of a cat, just in itself, will keep mice away for weeks.”
“Well perhaps they respect the quarters where he dined and slept, but not elsewhere.”
“Have you seen any?”
“If my eyes haven’t deceived me, I saw one not two minutes ago, there!” He pointed to the wainscot under the central window-seat.
She was only just in time to stop herself saying, “But that’s the spot where you thought you saw the ball of sweepings.” All she actually said was to ask him to tell her if he saw a mouse again.
He did not. Indeed the next uneasiness she experienced was provoked by something that happened to herself, or she thought happened—she could not be sure which, and she had no one to ask. She had not told her brother that, some days before Cook had uttered the banishing word “mange,” she had found Tissaphernes unpleasant olfactorily. Indeed it was because she had found that she could, by this crude sense alone, be aware of his presence in the room, that she had asked Cook to diagnose. Now about a week after her brother’s suspicion of mouse, it was her turn to suspect. But she suspected the cat.
She was coming back from Cook’s quarters, through the passage that led to the front of the house. The passage was dark—darker really in the day, when a distant fan-light was all its lighting, than at night, when it had its own lamp. The passage, for the same reason that it had no window of its own, did not ventilate very well. But it was not cabbage water, the standard ground of complaint between dining room and kitchen, that offended her. She drew a guarded breath through her nostrils, enough to be sure, but not enough, she hoped, to prove unhealthy. Yes, there could be no doubt. Tissaphernes had come back and returned uncured.
She re-entered the kitchen. Cook, however, was clear. Tissaphernes was still at “the vet’s”:
“If you’ll forgive me Ma’am for shortening that long word. I never could get all those letters spoken. And the people I was last with always just called the horse doctor ‘the vet’ and they certainly always had him round the place.” Then from the light airs of reminiscence Cook modulated to news, “I myself having the greengrocer to take too, the vegs not being what they
should be and it being high summer still, I took my way home by the vet’s—I ask pardon—and he told me I might see him. Poor fellow—why I didn’t dare even give him a pat, and he mewing for it as for milk. There’s not a doubt of it, he’s worse. The vet’s a real kind man, but he fears the worse.…” Cook’s voice took on a quaver.
Miss Throcton regretted loosing the floods of foreboded bereavement, so retired toward her own quarters. Still, passing through the close passage she once again felt she had undeniable sensory proof of the cat or a cat—in any case a very uncured cat.
However, the unpleasant smell only lasted a day more and her brother made no complaint. She was determined not to ask him if he noticed anything. And the day the smell completely faded, so that she herself could no longer detect a hint of it, Cook’s tears came on in earnest. Tissaphernes had had to be helped out of his body, which, once his glory, had become his shame. Again she said nothing to her brother and he did not inquire.
The second experience was also olfactory. But here she was surprised into action that did involve her brother. She was sitting with a book by her reading lamp when she felt sure it must have begun to smoke. Hardly looking up she turned the flame down a fraction. The smell did not lessen, rather increased. She looked closely at the wick but saw that it was well trimmed. No fume was going up the glass chimney. The smell, now unpleasantly strong, was, she realized, more like a candle-end left smouldering. Could one of the servants …? She went to the door. It did come from the passage, but not from that part of it that led to the back of the house. It was floating down from the front of the house, from the direction of her brother’s study. Quite a sharp attack of alarm took her. He might have fallen into a doze among his papers and his lamp …! She went along the passage. The smell was now very strong.
She had never dared to interrupt him; this, however, might be a matter of life and death. She did listen for a moment at the door. There was no sound of any movement the other side of it. She took hold of the handle. The latch had caught or the door was locked. She twisted at the handle with both hands.
Suddenly she heard a movement, a quick stride, “Who’s there!”
In spite of the thickness of the door-panels the voice sounded strained, more strained than she had ever heard her brother’s. As she hesitated, the handle turned of itself in her loosening fingers and they were face to face.
“Well!” he called—that strange protean word for challenge, dismissal, protest—“Well?”
“I thought,” she began.
“Please never come unless I should call for you.” He said it quietly, looking at her carefully all the while. Then the door was closed in her face.
The smell of burning followed her, however, back to her room. It too, as had the cat aroma, hung about for a couple of days. Then it was gone. No one else seemed to have perceived it. She thought—with what grounds she was never sure—that she had ceased any longer to be able to perceive the taint of singeing when once more her brother drew her attention to a minute domestic incident. She had expected him to be distant after her intrusion, and he had not disappointed her.
In fact he held her at arms’ length and without any courtesy conversations until he needed her services. It came as a little criticism of her province. She was glad of it, though, for it served to establish, if only on a single-plank bridge, their friendliness.
“Have you been changing the laundress?”
She told him No, and asked Why? “Oh, a small thing but a sign of carelessness. I have found one of my handkerchiefs stained and then, I suppose, in some effort to redeem the first blunder, scorched.”
Naturally no laundress is immaculate. But she saw that such a remark would not fit the case. She was correct, but the evidence of her correctitude gave her no reassurance. On the contrary.
13
It was from that day that they seemed to enter another epoch or zone, leaving behind the security of routine commonplace living. It was as though till then—as on the Cathedral’ clock a tune was first picked out and, after that, all the bells came clashing in making variations on the theme—it was as though an outline had been dotted in and now all the same incidents—which could be interpreted as normal—came back together making any further explaining away useless. She had longed that her brother would become intimate and give her his confidence. They were, it was now clear, to be driven together into a closer relationship than she had ever expected by a force more alien than ever she had suspected.
The onset was made without further warning. Nature was so calm that she seemed to desire to soothe “her creature, man.” The moon was over the garden in the early night. “It is so still out-of-doors,” he remarked as they stood looking out after dinner, “we might take a turn on the lawn.”
“Yes, it is perfectly dry too,” she replied as they stepped through the end window which an early nineteenth century Dean, caring more for garden convenience than architectural correctitude, had cut, down through the window-seat, making a two-leaf glazed door. With almost a sombre dignity the moon lit the hedge-enclosed place perfectly, beautifully, so that it looked far larger than by day. The night-smelling stocks and pinks sent out a perfume so heavy that the skeins of vapour seemed almost palpable. Almost palpable, too, in that still, heavy air was the purr of the ghostly night-moths flitting from one heavy flower to another. The whirr of their furred wings’ gave a muted note, so hushed and low that the ear felt actually touched by the whirring, not the ear-drum vibrated by the sound of it.
“Scent and sound, the world seems composed of them now, with sight only as a dim adjunct,” she remarked.
His more practical mind, glancing about for a reply-comment that might not too stiffly challenge hers, remarked, “The moon—look at it. It’s clear enough!”
“But it, too,” she countered, “looks now as though it were a mask held in front of an invisible face.”
“Do you know what is the proper name for it,” he asked a little hurriedly, “when it is in this phase?” And then not waiting he told her, “Gibbous,” adding, “but I see you are not interested in seeing nor in instruction, only in feeling and intuition.”
True, she was not looking at the sky. She was drawing in deep breaths of the almost anaesthetic scent, and her reply was irrelevant, “Those night-smelling flowers are really too strong, aren’t they. Their scent is hardly any longer that of blossoms, fresh and gay. They remind one more of the aroma of.…”
“I was remarking to you about the moon,” he answered.
His tone had sharpened and in his impatience he put his hand on her shoulder to make her attend. As he did so he glanced at her face. The moonlight, no doubt, would make it pale. It was clear, however, that her attention was not wandering. Her expression was fixed, rigid. She said nothing to his reproof but actually took his fingers in hers—an intimacy that now startled him. She must be frightened. With her other hand she was pointing at the foot of the hedge. He saw what had caught her attention. He felt also the tremor of her fear run through him like a current. For the sight, at least at first glance, should not have shaken both of them so severely. Three yards away, at the base of the towering yew bridge, and just beyond the wide herbaceous border at which they stood, there shone up at them, almost at ground level, two small green-silver spots, like small fragments of reflected moonlight.
They stood still, trying to make out what in the yew-hedge’s shadow could so catch the moonlight. Then as they watched, the two points moved, trailing after them a smear of black. It was as though the shadow of the hedge at this point began to protrude, until passing across the cultivated earth of the flower-bed, the black wedge touched the ghostly green of the mown grass-path on which they were standing. As the black smear moved toward them the dense scent of the stocks seemed to clot until it was rancid. No flower was ever so rank—it was animal ammonia at its sourest, the odor of an ill-kept civet’s cage. The shadow, now having touched the lawn at a couple of yards from their feet—it had passed obliquely across
the flower-bed—ceased to move further. Instead it began to sink down until the oblong black area, that in outline had looked like a slinking animal, was resting flat on the ground. The ammoniacal odor now took on the nauseating stench of decay. The ground, however, seemed to be sopping up this blot of corruption and gradually the stifling gas of rotting flesh became again the strong animal ammonia that has in it the tang of burning hair and of scorched linen. Then as the grey-green of the lawn absorbed the last stain of black, the ammonia modulated and was lost once more in the heavy scent of the stocks.
The Dean found that he was clinging to his sister’s arm as convulsively as she to his. Without a word they turned to the house. But, just as they were about to gain the threshold, his arm gave hers a wrench painful enough to rouse her from her numb fear. With his free arm he was striking at something. As she was twisted round by his grip she glanced at his face. He was looking up at the ceiling corner of the high window through which they were just going to pass. He snatched and tore with his free hand at what for a moment she couldn’t see. Then he broke out,
“Can’t the house be kept free of pests! Every corner has something weaving or spinning in it!”
Against the upper cornice of the French window, the light striking out and down from the chandelier within, showed her, as she took one more step forward, the outer anchor-strands of a big night spider’s web. Her brother’s face had brushed against and torn one of the lowest of these threads as he stepped over the threshold and some of the remainder of the web had wound round his forehead. He stumbled across the step, called out to her to close the leaves of the window, himself continuing to wipe his face and head with his handkerchief.
