Chapter I (3)

The stone passage beside the house had four arches opening on to the yard, and when the sun came they made inky frames for figures moving and standing in blinding light, shears that shone like the swords over Eden’s Gate, snowy fleeces and the pathetic faces of many sheep. The whole courtyard was full, after a while, set like a stage with the clippers on their creels. The sun beat clear upon them as they worked, carving the sheep, as it were, from shreds of the woolly cloud. Only under the south wall and the big horse-chestnuts was there any shade, and here in the sudden gloom the faces looked pale, and the cotton kytles of the men were like moths motionless in an evening dusk. Boys tugged the unwilling sheep from the pens and scuffled with them across the yard, or thrust them, clipped, through the wicket in the arch, to meet the branding-iron outside. They looked awkward and strange as they scuttled away, with the inky letters sharp on their close wool. The lambs came up with innocent eyes and open, wailing mouths. They reached out tentative noses, faintly surprised, and were suddenly satisfied and still.

Across the yard was another cool cavern with the yellow slits of open doors yawning in two of its black walls. This was the fleecing-room where the girls were at work, rolling the fleeces and flinging them into the loft. The lock-trimmer sat beside the door, trimming the fleeces as they came in. The soft whiteness of them lay across his knees, and the shears glanced and flashed and made lightnings in the sun.

It was a boon-clip, which meant that the farmers round had come to help, or had sent their sons or daughters or hired men, and one or two sons of squires were at work with the shears as well. There were certain clippers who always came, and who always sat in the same place, just as the lock-trimmer was always the “lock,” and the man with the tar-pot always had the tar. Thomas was one of those who always came, and his place was under the wall of the house facing the arch. Agnes knew why he had chosen this place, though it was one of the hottest in the yard. When he looked out through the arch and the steam of the tar rising misty in the air, he could see the land rolling westward to the sea. “I like to set looking towards the marsh,” he always said; “I don’t feel suited anywheres else,” and though he could not see the marsh for the curving land, he knew where it lay by the light in the sky, as all marsh-bred people know. Year after year he had sat there at the clip, and lifted his head when a pause came, and looked out. But to-day he had left the place for somebody else. To-day he was in the shade by the south wall.

Agnes brought him his first drink, and he took it without so much as a look or a word, and though she had lingered a moment after he took up his shears, they still had not spoken nor had their glances met. She knew well enough, of course, why he had moved; there was no need for him to be afraid that she might ask. All these years when he looked through the arch he had looked towards his home, and after all the years there was a stranger in his home. There was no point now in looking towards the place where it had been. His eye, as it travelled, would check itself in its flight, just as his body would stop and turn away at the door.

She thought about it all day as she went about her work, or studied him from some corner out of sight. For the first time he was pathetic in her eyes, forsaken, cast-off, a creature without a place. He had a lonely look, she said to herself—poor Thomas without a home! He was a lonely soul, to whom life was being unkind. He might have been master, for instance, and still was only man. He might have had father and wife as well as farm, and instead he had only his dour and dogged self. She, too, had contracted the habit of looking towards the marsh, and had wondered a little and put the wonder by. Now, when she looked, she, too, had a sense of wrong in the loss of a home that might so well have been hers. She began to think of the stranger from her lover’s point of view, as an intruder thrusting himself into settled lives. She felt fiercely towards him as towards a cuckoo in the nest, forgetting that she herself had brought the position about. The thing worked in her all the day, gradually weighting and tilting the scale of her heart. Protective affection sprang up in her full-grown. Thomas, successful and sure, had not been able to win her even in years, but Thomas the failure laid hold of her in an hour. She could not bear that his face should be turned from his own marsh!... From one point and another she watched him all day long.

She saw the sheep go back again to their heafs, soft, snowy woolballs on the shining green. Going up, as in coming down, they gave the same impression of moving cloud. They travelled up the fell like smoke blown from a giant’s pipe, with no hint of the toil of thousands of little feet. They were going fast, too, though they looked strangely slow on the vast expanse of ground. It was only when she marked them by the end of the long stone wall that she saw how rapidly they climbed. They were like a wave surging always up and up, smoothly, determinedly, drawn by invisible cords. While her eye still watched the corner at the top, they were near it, they were round it, they were all of them silently gone....

After the meal in the big hall there were the usual trotting races and sports. Thomas had always taken a leading part in these events, but to-day he kept dismally aloof, unconsciously helping his new impression on her heart. And at the end of the day there had been the usual dance.

She happened to be upstairs when the fiddle struck up, and in the cool of the evening she leaned out to hark. Through the windows below she caught the jollity of the reel, the thin cry of the strings and the stamp of feet on the flags. In the room behind her where the great four-posters were, the shadows were creeping and climbing and laying the draperies of the night. There were always shadows within the curtains of the beds, as if they had come for those who had lain there dead, and had never had time to lift and scatter away. With the night there were the shadows of night as well, so that in shadow on shadow those who slept in the beds must lie. On the house itself there was shadow, the mighty shadow of the fells, and suddenly she longed for a room on the edge of things, looking starkly out to sea. There, in the night, one could always breathe, at least. She leaned further until the roses came up about her face, and then she saw Thomas standing by the pens.

At once, as she looked, the veil of her long bewilderment fell away. Now she knew what she wanted, what she meant to do. The wind of that longing for air and space had swept the cloudy room of her mind, and there, with his face to herself and his back to the sea, Thomas was all that the sudden wind had left.... He moved, as if meaning to go, and almost in panic she turned and ran from the room, flying through twisting passages and over the sagging floors. Shafts of light rayed across her from deep-cut window-slits; polished oak doors gleamed at her back as she sped down the bowed and winding stairs. The flood of music and dance swelled up to her as she approached, and she paused for a moment as she passed the room. After the soft purples out of doors which the sun was leaving behind, the room seemed misty and full of a golden dusk, yellow with lamps resisting the dying day. High in the wall the sawing arm that held the bow flung the wild music over the crowd, whirling figures and brown faces and gowns that made streaks of colours under the lights. The mist and the music and the beat of the feet made her head spin as she stood and looked. Her face and gown were framed by the door and the dark behind, and a partner began to edge towards her round the crowd. He was still some distance away when he saw her disappear, like a ghost caught away from the door by hidden hands. Again the longing for space had seized her as she looked. She slid round the door and fled to Thomas in the yard.

They were well on their way to her home before either found anything to say; and then, “What made you quit so soon?” she enquired with a rush at last.

He answered her, staring gloomily at the road, that the place was overcrowded by a deal. He wasn’t as set on dancing as he used. “Likely I’m getting old,” he added; “that’ll be it.” And then, after minutes and minutes he let himself go.... “I couldn’t abide hearing yon fiddle played.’Twas fiddle as fetched me out, if you want to know.”

He turned his head as he spoke, and tried to look through the hedge, and it was west and not east of them where the Hall lay that he looked. Here in the lane, as in the yard, he seemed to hear a fiddle that was dumb, thin and trembling and clear from the edge of the sea. Standing outside the dance he had heard the two musics mingle and clash, and had turned from the sound in the hot room to the sound that drew over miles from the cool tide.

“What fetched _you_ out?” he asked of her, in his turn.

They had stopped in the road as if at some word of command, and the swinging curves of the lane went winding before and behind, shutting them in together this way and hiding them safe together that. The sun, level on the fields as if smoothed by a hand, was below the thick barrier of the mounted hedge. Only through chinks or the eye of a gate could it find a way, to lie in patches on the hedgerow grass, or splash its pools on the heavily-rutted road. It was more restful than sleep in that cleft between the fields, where the roses, sprayed overhead, took a richer colour against the sky. There was green upon green on the background of dark wood—bramble and hazel, convolvulus and thorn. There were yellow and purple and white sweet peeping faces in the grass; ferns, emerald-fresh, stately in thick groups. And close in the hedge-side, where all else was new, lingered the old dead beech leaves of the year before, waiting for this year’s leaves to drift there, too....

Already, though the clippings were barely through, folk were getting to work at the hay. Away, as the land rose fast, they could see a cutter at work, and the flash of the horses’ sides as they turned in the sun. The sound of the cutter made sweeter their solitude and peace, yet the voice of it in the silence loosened their difficult tongues.

“I reckon I’ve made up my mind now,” Agnes said, facing him sturdily as he looked away. “Likely I’ve lost you wi’ keeping you hanging round so long. It’s nowt to wonder at if you’re tired, I’m sure. But if you’re still set on our getting wed, there’s nowt as I can see agen putting up the banns....

“It’s a bit sudden, happen,” she went on, as he did not speak, “and yet I don’t know as it’s sudden, after all. It’s been coming along for a goodish while, I doubt, and what finished it off was you changing your spot in the yard. It made me feel queer like, after all these years. The folks settin’ round you had all on ’em got homes, an’ there you were settin’ among ’em wi’ none at all. There was Tommy Todd, you’ll think on, as nobody need want, wi’ as good a missis as there is in the country-side. There was Neddy Gibbs—him as is near half-rocked—he’s a rare good home at the back of him as well. Bob Martin and Billy Dent—ay, an’ his brother, Willie George—they’ve all on ’em homes they can gang to if they want. I could see the doors open at their backs, set for ’em to come in, but I couldn’t see owt at the back o’ Thomas Sill. I could set a door wi’ the best on ’em, I’ll be bound! I’m sure an’ certain I’d be fain to try....”

But miracles under one’s eyes are the last things one believes. “It’s pity,” he muttered, refusing to look up. “I’m right enough where I be ... you’ve no call to fret. It’s pity ... same as you felt for him....”

“It’s nowt o’ the sort,” she exclaimed angrily, and then laughed. “I’ll learn you whether it’s pity if you get talking stuff like yon! If it’s pity, I reckon any lass would do, same as I rather think I said afore. But yon home as I’m wanting for you can’t be made by nobody but me—and—eh, you daft lad—I’m wanting it an all!”

It was the shortest lane in the world, just as the day was the longest in all time. Often enough, hurrying home, she had sighed at its length, but now it fled behind her while her feet were still. Every bend as it came was strange to her eyes, and, turning, she saw it new from the other side. The sun slid away from the fields like a curtain silently withdrawn, and up on the higher land the cutter whirred to a corner and was still. In the lane the night came long before it touched the land beyond—the visible, purple night that has no knowledge of the real dark. The roses, paled of their pink, showed whitened starry faces to the sky, shining above the road like blossoms laid on a pool. Only where some big tree leaned across was there any real night, and as they passed beneath it and so out, they lost each other for a moment in the dark, and found each other on the further side, just as in life they had lost each other for a time, and yet come together, after all. They heard the birds stir in sudden flutters and be still. They heard wild things in the hedgerow rustle and be still. Horses came to the fence and reached out shadowy heads, and through continual gates they caught the remnants of the lingering day. Sheep in the hedge-bottoms rose and scuttered away, the sound of their going ghostly in the dark. Cattle, lying heavy on the land, turned unaffrighted eyes at their approach. The night air pressed close, warm and a little damp, and there was dew on the long hedge-grass as well as the honeysuckle boughs.

“I doubt it’s over late for the farm,” Agnes murmured once. “Eh, if we could nobbut set the clock back a year!”

“There’s a chance we might get it yet,” Thomas replied, but with the new caution he had learned from life. Self-confident Thomas had grown to be careful how he tempted fate. “The new man’s shaping badly, so they say....”

She gave a little cry of excitement, and then sighed.

“I don’t deserve it, I’m sure; but eh, Thomas, if we should! We’d make it the best spot anywheres about, and we’d have your father to live with us right off. We’d do our best to make up to him all we could....”

But she had forgotten Kit once more when she found herself at her gate, and heard her lover’s step going from her down the lane. In her bedroom she watched the moon come up, over the road where they had walked, the patient moon that had not hurried or spied. Parts of the lane would be as bright as day where for their passing had been a velvet dusk. Folks who walked there now would have to whisper low, because voices carried so clearly under the moon. They would see their own shadows close about their feet, so that they would be four instead of two, and therefore never alone. Thomas and she had had no shadows at all, and even the shadows of their wasted years had been hidden by the night.

They had got the farm, after all, but they had had another year to wait. The new tenant’s fate had hung in the balance for some time, and though, when the end came, it came short and sharp, there had been much to do before they could move in. The new tenant, who had never had time to become an old tenant, had yet contrived to occasion many repairs. They had had to furnish, of course, and that meant visits to sales, and hours of pondering in Witham shops. There was also her mother to settle with a decent hired girl. The old woman’s house was her own, and she had no notion of coming to the farm. “The old man’ll keep you stirring, as it is,” she said to her daughter, when the point was raised. “Young folks as is newly-wed don’t want old folks hanging round their necks. It’ll make you feel what you’ll come to, if it doesn’t do nowt else....”

So she stayed in the house between the fields while Agnes went to the marsh, and though she paid her an afternoon visit now and then, she could not be coaxed to stop for as much as a night. Agnes would have been glad enough of her company, at times. She found the marsh very lonely at first, and the hours were long when Thomas was out on the land. She did not mind very much when the weather was fine, and she could see the houses winking across the sands, but it was dreary indeed when the bay was blotted out and there was nothing to break the shaken veil of the rain. That was one of her reasons for welcoming old Kit; they would be such cronies, she and the old man! She would see him about the garden while she was at work in the house, and could call to him from the windows if she felt inclined. Just to hear her own voice answered once in a while would give the place a feeling of fresh life. They would sit on the new seat shelling peas, or watching the fishing boats making home with their catch, their sails three-cornered blurs on the opal evening sky. They would sit on the white-stoned hearth of a winter’s night, and watch the fire burn red with the hardening of the frost. He would have tales to tell when the gales came out in the spring, and the narrow sea deepened and frothed into driven flood. Thomas would be out with the sheep, and she would want a tale to distract her from the storm. And sometimes, perhaps, Kit would play her the old, thin tunes, bringing the dance-itch back to her sober feet. That careless pleasure seemed to have dropped behind—not but what she could dance with the smartest yet. But she seemed to herself to have shut a door at her back, and behind that door were the strains of a violin.

She began to sing as she went about, and her voice escaped through the open windows and fled away through the door; yet it was in the house all the time as well. Down on the shore a man looked up as he stepped on the sands, hearing the voice that was both within and without. The house looked empty, he thought, with all its windows wide, and the voice that sang seemed a bodiless voice, making the house the emptier for its song. It followed him as he went leisurely out, making for the channel and the farm across. He did not hurry, for the tide would not be ready to turn for over an hour. Presently he was on the bank, hailing the farm for a boat, and his voice, shrill and lost-sounding in the open space, broke like a cry for help across the joy of the song. Thomas, down by the gate, heard both the song and the cry, but the old man coming in the trap heard only the fiddle singing on his knee.

She sang so long that she did not know when she stopped, but Thomas, down by the gate, felt as if a fiddle-string had snapped. He had the same sense as of something wounded and ceasing to be. It was just at that moment the trap checked at his side....

The wife in the house looked out and saw the marsh roads empty north and east and south. The crawling speck she had watched so long must have reached its stopping-place at last. She thought again of the yacht, swinging so eagerly over the tide, only to turn so suddenly at the end. Even the highest hopes, it seemed, met barriers they could not leap.... But the trap, when the time came for it to turn, trundling over land that had once been sailing-ground as well, would leave something behind it when it went away. It would leave a heart in haven, a spirit released, a wanderer come home. She wondered what they were saying to each other, away down there under the thick hedges by the meadow-gate. She wondered if Kit would notice the new gate, its new paint and how easily it swung. The other had been an ancient of days unwilling to be moved, protesting with rusty hinges and the creak of rotten wood. And, when once it was opened, you had to scurry through, so great was its haste to creak itself back to rest....

But of course he would never notice it to-night, after all the excitement of the ride. It was one of the grand new changes to be shown him later on. Thomas, trained in sound methods on a well-kept farm, seemed already to have changed the character of this. It was almost as if it had pulled itself together under the mere glance of his disapproving eye. Roots looked healthy, the corn was even and getting ahead; the hedgerows were clear of nettles and the meadows of thistles—on the whole. The hay was doing well and was thick at the roots; they hoped to be cutting in a week. The old man would be pleased with the new machines, the cutter and tedder in their brilliant coats of blue. There were the horses, too, bargains and rare good beasts. He would hardly know either stable or shippon, with all that the Squire had done in the way of repairs. And as for all the fine new things about the house—why, it would take a month of Sundays to see them all!

She had, in that last pause, one of those rare moments when joy is awaited fully prepared. All was swept and garnished about her for this hour, as perfect as she could make it in the time; perhaps it would never be as perfect again. Now she could put aside the work of the weeks and meet the occasion with a settled mind. Both to herself and to Thomas, hardly conscious of it though they were, there was something symbolic in the coming event. Both recognised, more or less, that they were owed a grudge by fate. In their search after happiness, they had made someone sad. In their groping after each other they had allowed somebody to be alone. Now that life had given them so much they were ashamed to think that somebody was poor. This coming of the old man stood for atonement on their part, resurrection on his. It meant the sanction of fate to hold their consciences clear....

So they had put into this home-coming everything that they knew of kindly work and pleasant conspiring and kindly thought. There was nothing within their compass that they had left undone, nothing omitted that held a welcome of its own. They meant him to walk straight into peace out of the passion through which he had passed, while they looked on with relieved hearts, not quite certain whether they were forgiven sinners or his guardian saints. Not that it mattered if only old Kit was pleased; if only their good but troubled souls might rest.

And still there was no sign of the guest, though she felt sure the splendid moment had begun. Of course they would wait for a final word with Bob, after Thomas had helped the old man down. Bob would be asked, of course, to come to the house, but if he had hired or borrowed the trap he would have to be getting back. She had never included Bob in the picture in her mind, except as a part of the trap as it lumbered away. And that parting crack would not be a long one, she felt sure. Kit would be tired and fretting to get indoors, and Thomas would know she was waiting for them—and tea. She was rarely glad she had got that ham for tea....

Again, as she waited, she felt a wish to go to the gate. There was no reason, really, why she shouldn’t run down. The old man would likely be glad of another arm. Folks getting up in years were easily upset, and joy was often a bit terrible to the old. He would be ready for bed before so long ... and she would wake in the night and wonder whether he slept. She forgot the gate in thinking of the room, and how it would never be quite the same again. Surely there was no harm in taking a last peep? Those folks at the gate wouldn’t be up yet. She would hear their voices coming up the field, and could be down in time to meet them at the door. She looked again and found nothing and made up her mind. She disappeared up the carpeted stair.