“Well -- I don't know, Miss Bybegone.”
'Good gracious me, no.”
“Mrs. Mardy, then.”
“No, no -- somebody really most unlikely.”
“I really don't know, you tell me.”
“Who, who but Miss Rhoda Cantrip, standing on the bridge in the same old brown mackintosh she used to wear when they were here; I thought, that's Rhoda Cantrip I do believe, but couldn't be sure, as she had her back to me. But just as I came up she turned round and nodded at me, she must have known who I was.”
“But who is she?”
Mrs. Beer stood in the road, and turned on Kate a face full of astonishment.
“Why, who but daughter to old Mrs. Cantrip, that got to be Mrs. Pawley, your grandfather's second wife. Did you never hear your father speak of her?”
“Never he can't have known her very well. They weren't here when we came from London.”
“That's true, but I thought he might have known her before; but then, of course, he was at college in London, he wasn't often home. And she didn't live over to your place, she had the cottage all along. Her mother moved in with her later. But I'm surprised at her coming back; it can't have happy memories for her, this place.” Mrs. Beer paused panting, on the hill, and looked back along the way they had come. “But she must have passed you, surely, down Long Lead? She went along that road.”
“I suppose she must have, but I didn't see her. I was looking at the Wyatts' old cottage, actually; where they used to live, in fact.”
“There now, but of course she wouldn't know who you were. She must have walked just behind you, and passed when you'd your back turned. How very strange it is,” said Mrs. Beer, tackling the hill again, gasping a little. “And, now I come to think of it, I do believe I dreamed of Rhoda Cantrip, it must have been last night. I’m like that, I often dream, and I don't stop, but during the day I think on, and think on, and sooner or later, there, I say to myself, that's what that meant, and then I go on again, I've had my dream out.” They stopped once more to look back. Mrs. Beer's eyes were busy as she thought on about Rhoda Cantrip; but Kate saw the buttercup field where the bullocks had left the apple trees, and raced about for no reason, bucking, and butting each other, and twitching their tails.
“Did you know her well?”
“Oh no I hardly saw her. She never came to your house to visit her mother, though her mother would often be down at the cottage, which didn't please your grandfather. I met her once in the woods. She must have gone walking quite a lot, for her mother kept a big dog and she used to take it out.”
“What sort of a dog?” asked Kate, half against her will.
“Oh, I don't know I'm not good at names.” They had reached the front gate, and Mrs. Beer moved thankfully up the path. “It would have been a big, black dog, with pointed ears and a long nose a good watchdog, I’d say. But old Mr. Pawley didn’t think so -- he hated the thing -- I heard them fall out over it often.”
“Did it have very pale eyes?'
“There!” cried Mrs. Beer, flinging open the kitchen door, and startling her husband who was reading the paper by the table. “I daresay you thought I would never be home, but we've been talking on and on, and I take the hill easier when I've company.' She sat down breathlessly on the wooden chair opposite her husband, and described again her meeting with Rhoda Cantrip.
“But if they stayed on at the cottage after my grandfather died,” Kate said, when she could get a word in, “what made them suddenly go?”
“What that was,” said Mrs. Beer, sitting with coat buttons undone and legs apart, “I do not know, nor where they went, and nor does anyone in the village. And no one knows exactly when they went; but I can tell you what did happen, because I saw it happen. And very sudden and drastic it was, I can assure you.” She leaned forward, her stout forearms along the kitchen table, her face alight with the act of telling.
“It was a terrible night with wind in it, and a real storm got up, I don't remember ever having seen such a storm. My husband called me from the house because I was down at the bottom of our garden drawing a chicken, that's work I don't like to do indoors, and as you know I’ve a shed for it at the bottom of our garden. I heard him calling and I came out of the shed into the wind. And there before my very eyes I saw a dog, a great black dog, just standing there and perfect in every detail. 'Oh, look,' I cried to my husband, 'come and see, whoever's been letting Mrs. Cantrip's dog into our garden?' And I looked again and it had gone. 'Come inside the house, you foolish woman,' said my husband, 'there aren't any dogs in our garden; whatever will you think of next?' You remember that, Jem?”
“I thought you were imagining things,” he said, with a quiet smile.
“Well, I was in the house and turning to shut the door, and you know how from our back you get a view over your place, and the whole village. All this time there was that dreadful wind and I had difficulty shutting the door. Then I suddenly saw a great flash like a lightning flash, straight on to the cottage down Long Lead! and the whole thatch burst into flames, instantly. 'Oh,' said my husband, ‘poor Mrs. Cantrip and Miss Rhoda!' But there was nothing we could do, because it would have taken us a quarter of an hour to get down there. But in the firelight we could see people moving about after awhile and they got it under control. It burned a great hole in the roof, though, and old Mr. Wyatt never got it put on again, so it's all a ruin now. But there was one very strange thing, which struck me when I heard about it after.”
“What was that?”
“Well, young Walter Wyatt was there first, because it was his father's property, and, of course, he was under the imposition, like everybody else, that Rhoda Cantrip and her mother were upstairs in bed. So he knocked, and got no answer. He tried the door but it was locked fast, so he burst open a window and got inside. And there wasn't a stick of furniture in the place. He went upstairs and he was a brave man, because the thatch was already alight. There was nothing there, not even a dog bone, and there hadn't been for several weeks because the floors and windowsills were thick with dust.”
Mrs. Beer paused dramatically at the climax of her narrative. Her husband was lighting his pipe, frowning and puffing; Kate's eyes were fixed on hers, as she waited with bated breath.
“So the Wyatts tried to find out where they were at, because they owed the Cantrips some rent: old Mrs. Cantrip paid by the year and she'd a couple of months owing to her. Still, perhaps Miss Rhoda will want to settle that now she's here.”
“Where can she be staying?”
“I can't think -- she'd no friends here. Perhaps over to Middle Mow, there's that little hotel there, they put people up; she's perhaps got in there.”
“It's a strange story.”
“Oh yes, but then, a great many strange things happen to me. I could tell a lot about various things. I'm a child that was born in chime hours; that's to say, I've the power to see spirits. And people think, it's only her talk; but I know, and Jem knows; only we keep it to ourselves mostly.”
They had salad and cold meat for supper. Kate went up to bed before they left, because suddenly she did not want to be alone but for Thomas, with night all round the house. But she could not help repeating her question, before she said good night:
“You know the dog, that old Mrs. Pawley had, and Rhoda used to take for walks?”
“That's right, that I met one time, in the woods.”
“Had that dog got -- very pale eyes?”
She saw that Mr. Beer was looking at her through the smoke of his pipe.
“Well, I never, now you come to mention it, so it had; and you saying so puts me in mind of its name. I heard old Mrs. Pawley calling it, and I thought she called it Moonrise, and I remember thinking what a foolish name for any dog as black as that. One afternoon it got into the drawing room and it wouldn't come out. Mrs. Pawley was down at her daughter's, usually she took the dog with her, but not this time, I don't know why. Old Mr. Pawley was in a proper state. 'Get it out!' he was shouting;
he came shouting into the kitchen. I was there alone, it was Cook's afternoon out. He always called me Mary. 'Get it out of there, Mary! I won't have that beast in the drawing room.' I really thought he would have a fit. I went to the hall and called through the door, though true enough I was a bit nervous myself. ‘Moonrise!' I was calling, and at that moment the front door opened beside me and there was old Mrs. Pawley. She pushed past me quite rude. 'Moonrise, indeed,' I heard her muttering. 'Come, Moon Eyes, come, my bunting, my little master, come then, my dandiprat' or some such strange names she used to it. It fawned on her; but sometimes I thought that even she was a little afraid of it, it was so big and black.”
So the dog with strange eyes must be related to that one of old Mrs. Pawley's. It must belong to Rhoda Cantrip, Kate decided, as she climbed the stairs. She went quickly to bed, but did not go easily to sleep. There was something loose in the chimney (perhaps some mortar had fallen into a spider's web) that rattled with every breath of wind; later, she dreamed that a dog scratched and whined at her window all night, and she had no power either to let it in, or send it away.
There was another card from her father in the post next morning. Hope you are both well I am much better gorgeous sun down here thinking of staying on for a few more weeks love Father. He had scrawled his address at the top: Seaview, Milton-le-sands, Cornwall, which he seldom did, as he hated to be bothered while he was on holiday. He must be feeling a bit guilty about us, thought Kate, opening her boiled egg with satisfaction. A few more weeks, indeed! He's been away two months already. Later she put the postcard carefully between the black notebooks underneath her mattress.
“I'll have Thomas up with me after I've finished here,” said Mrs. Beer, as Kate stuffed her schoolbooks into her shoulder bag and wheeled out her bicycle from the larder where it lived during the holidays.
“Blast, it's got a puncture,” and she began desperately pumping the back tire.
“You ought to have looked it over yesterday,” retorted Mrs. Beer, clearing and stacking the plates. “Now you'll be late for school.”
“Well, it jolly well can't be helped. There, that'll have to do. I suppose it'll take me a few miles.” She kissed them goodbye and set off ; but she was very late, and her holiday task, “English Narrative Poetry in the Nineteenth Century,” which she handed in much crumpled, too brief and extremely messy, was not well received. The other girls looked cool and well groomed and their notes had been made in neat, even writing. She felt fat, hot and untidy; and the fact that she was an artist's daughter, so somehow different, was not this morning a comfort to her.
Miss Bybegone was a tall, gray and brown woman, with narrow shoulders and wide hips, and various eccentricities. Her eyesight was extremely bad and she had to use two pairs of spectacles, one for close and one for distant objects; usually she wore them simultaneously, the spare pair being cunningly balanced across her forehead. She hated Nature, although the house she shared with her mother was in a fine situation outside Scroop; she knew about flowers in theory, but did not really approve of them in fact, and her garden was small and pavemented, and had only two flowers in it. For relaxation she read Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and collected riddles which she noted carefully in an exercise book, including such gems as “When is a door not a door?” and “Which is the heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of stones?” They fascinated her because they were almost the only questions she could not answer.
“I know, Katherine, that you have to bicycle several miles along a horrid country road,” she remarked at the end of lessons. “Fresh air and scenery at that hour I concede to be sufficient to deaden any natural intelligence you may possess, but try at least to present yourself nearer the appointed hour, and in a more pleasing state of repair.”
“I'm terribly sorry, Miss Bybegone, my bike had a puncture.”
“Then it is a pity that it was not attended to yesterday, and that you had no time, during the four weeks' holiday I hope you have enjoyed, to make a fair copy of what work you managed to achieve.”
“I'm terribly sorry.”
The girls were dismissed with a regal nod, and collected their belongings around the polished table. Kate left as soon as she could.
“Oh hell, oh hell, oh, Helen, do be mine,” she shouted into the country as she pedaled along. But the clean green hedges, the running clouds, the birds that started up almost under wheel, improved her humor with every mile she went, until she was at the top of the hill above their valley. It was a glorious run down that hill, and she dismounted to pump up the back wheel for the last time. She was busy at this, red in the face, when a cool voice behind her said, “Good afternoon, Katherine.”
No one but Miss Bybegone called her Katherine. And the tone of the voice immediately made her conscious of her crumpled back view, the mud on her socks, her untidy hair and her blazer whose last button had gone that morning.
“Good afternoon,” she said. And turned round, to see who it was.
A woman stood in the road. She was tall, and held herself very straight. Her hair was black and she wore it in a bun at the nape of her neck; she had level black eyebrows, an aquiline nose and a wide mouth. In one hand she carried a suitcase, the sort that is sold quite cheaply, made of compressed paper: it did not seem to be heavy, or else she was strong. She was dressed in brogues, lisle stockings and a brown mackintosh belted tidily.
For all this camouflage she was still what Mrs. Beer had called a “very expressive sort of a girl” but now she was a woman. It was not only her brown mackintosh that told Kate who she was.
“Aren't you Rhoda -- Miss Cantrip?”
“I am.”
But all at once Kate noticed her eyes her very pale eyes, that looked even paler by the blackness of her hair.
She shut up her pump, and clipped it back onto her bicycle.
“I was coming to see you,” said Miss Cantrip. “Is your father at home?” And even while she answered her Kate was certain she knew already that he was not. “Who is looking after Thomas, then?”
“He's with Mrs. Beer. What I usually do is go home and do some work, and then I walk back up the hill and fetch him, about teatime. But how do you know our names?”
“I read the announcements of your births in the newspapers.”
“Have you come back to live here?”
“That depends,” said Rhoda Cantrip.
There was something very attractive about her, Kate felt, as they stood together on top of the hill. She was unusual, and cultured. Miss Bybegone was cultured, too, and unusual, but she was also faintly ridiculous, when one dared to notice it. There was nothing ridiculous about Rhoda Cantrip. Kate sloppy, lackadaisical Kate wanted to impress this woman.
“Come to our house; we could have some tea.”
“Thank you.”
They began to walk down the hill together.
“Shall I take your suitcase? I could balance it on the handlebars of my bike.”
“No -- I'll carry it. It isn't heavy.”
They passed Mrs. Beer's cottage. “Is that where Thomas is?”
“Yes, he loves being with Mrs. Beer.”
“Surely he will start school soon? He must be nearly five.”
“Yes, but we haven't decided yet where to send him.” That was another thing: she might know why Thomas didn't speak. She might know what to do. It was more difficult to go down the hill with the weight of the bicycle to hold back than it had been to push it up. They reached the front gate.
“You should have come to see us before.”
“Oh, I never go anywhere unless I'm invited.”
“Well, now you are.” And smiling, Kate opened the gate for her.
“But your dog doesn't wait for invitations,” she continued, as they went up the path.
Miss Cantrip stopped, and turned on her. “What do you mean?” Her voice was suddenly quite cold.
“Oh, it doesn't matter, it didn't do any damage; except it got on Mr. Beer's compost heap, which didn't please hi
m.”
“What dog?”
“I thought it must be yours: Mrs. Beer told me about the one your mother had and this was just like it. A big black dog, with very pale eyes, Moon Eyes. Do you mind coming in by the back? Mrs. Beer always bolts the front door.” She crouched down, reaching for the key in the niche behind the water butt. Miss Cantrip stood on the back doorstep, and Kate had a sudden fancy that she was glad not to be a beetle, with those strong brown shoes and legs towering above her head. “Isn't it your dog then? I wonder who it can belong to.”
“Yes, yes, of course it is mine. What was it doing?”
“Nothing, really, it was just around the house, hanging about as if it was waiting, for you I expect.” She opened the door and they went in.
PART TWO
Whistling
“So she's coming to stay here,” said Mrs. Beer in the middle of washing, frothy with soapsuds to the elbows. She spoke accusingly, admitting (what Kate had already guessed) that she was rather jealous of Rhoda Cantrip.
“Why not?”
“No reason, Kate, for sure; but what will your father say?”
“It won't be forever; besides, he's staying down in Cornwall for a few more weeks. He wouldn't mind, anyway; we've got the spare room, she isn't upsetting anything.”
“Why does she want to come and stay here?”
“Well, we are her relations; her only relations, she says.”
“You're no relations of hers.”
“Not by blood, I know, but by marriage. I asked her, anyhow.”
“Thomas doesn't like her.”
“Yes, he does; he resists her, that's all; he always does that if he gets a chance.”
“She makes him nervous, she's not good with little children --”
“Oh, Mrs. Beer, I am trying to do my homework, I can't concentrate.”
“You've your own room if you want quiet.”
“It's too cold up there.” She buried her head in her books, slouched over the kitchen table. Mrs. Beer got on with the washing, bristling with disapproval.
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