Chapter III: Part I: HIS (2)

The garden was in the letter, too, needless to say; in fact, it might almost be said that it was more garden than letter. It was almost as if the writer had posted a piece of the actual soil.... Kirkby, holding it in his earth-sensitive hand, found it an amulet transporting him so far that he lost all sense of his present surroundings.

He looked up after a time to find his wife’s gaze fixed upon him, and the teapot suspended in her hand. Apparently she had been about to speak, and then had been checked by a realisation of the importance of the moment. He stared at her as if he found some difficulty in focussing her, and she lowered the teapot slowly to the table.... He tapped the letter.

“Mattie,” he said. “We’d likely best go....”

It was really the garden which had beaten him in the end.

V

He came back from re-tracing the slow trend which had led to the writing of the letter to find Machell staring at his open doorway from across the garden. From that distance, as he knew, the man could see nothing of what was happening inside; yet he bestirred himself sharply and moved away from the table. Len’s attitude affected him unpleasantly, just as his coming early had done; so that, when he went out at last to join him and give him his orders for the day, he had an uncomfortable feeling that this morning he was an enemy rather than a friend.

The feeling passed, however, as soon as he came into contact with him. Len was apparently his usual genial self, with nothing more sinister at the back of his mind than the preparations for peas and potatoes. The rest of the men arrived presently, and the gardens fell into their usual routine. By the time the sun had broken through, Kirkby was again beginning to wonder whether the letter and all that it stood for had been anything more than a dream.

The very weather of yesterday, that soul-troubling weather which had helped so largely towards his decision, now seemed like a dream, too. Looking at the fresh yet quiet colouring of to-day, at outlines diamond-clear and yet soft as human breath, he found it impossible to re-imagine it. But that was the worst of weather, as he knew, even although at the same time it was the wonder of it. You were happy on the good days, feeling that they would go on for ever; but, on the other hand, the bad days seemed as if they would go on for ever, too. And the bad days were very dangerous, because they were apt to make you lose heart. On the bad days, if you were not careful what you were doing, you might find yourself signing the whole of your life away....

Yesterday had been a destructive day, so bitter and killing that it seemed as if this morning everything should have been withered; but instead of being withered things were pulsing with new vigour. Even where there was no life showing above the soil, life spoke to him from below. The air, vivifying yet soft, had that baptismal touch which comes only at one time of the year. And running all through Nature was the thrill which comes out of nowhere, like the Spirit, so that the quiet land seemed to heave and thrill like sunlit waves of sea.

It came to him now that, next year, when the thrill was in the air, he would be in Canada. It would be the same thrill, he told himself hurriedly, because Nature’s magic was the same everywhere; and yet it would not be quite the same. On the soil where you had been born and bred there was always something more. Not only did you feel the thrill of the spring that was coming, but the thrill of the springs that were gone; so that, with each fresh spring on your native ground, the thrill deepened because of the past.

_That_ thrill, at least, if he went to Canada, he would never feel again....

He had been right about Machell, he discovered later.... He discovered it after breakfast,--a breakfast which seemed to him more like a meal in a railway station than anything else. Beyond removing a few things from the mantelpiece, and routing a few other things out of a cupboard, Mattie had not actually begun her preparations for packing, but she managed to give the impression, nevertheless. The ebb and flow of her talk, rising and falling as she passed between kitchen and larder, came to him like the signals of approaching or departing trains.... Finishing his meal more hurriedly than usual, he went out to find Len again standing staring at the cottage.

This time, however, Machell made no attempt at concealment. Instead, he came forward to meet his chief awkwardly but eagerly.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” he began hastily, as if unable to contain himself any longer, “but there’s something I’d like to ask you. It’s all over the place you’re giving up your job, and I thought happen you’d put in a word for me if I was to apply for it.”

For a moment or two after he had spoken Kirkby did not know how to answer. He should have been prepared for the shock, he knew, but the fact remained that he was not prepared for it. Absurd as it seemed, it had not yet occurred to him that this sort of thing would follow naturally upon his “notice.” It would have come to him, of course, with the actual sending of the letter, but so far he had not progressed beyond the actual writing of it. His intuition had been trying to warn him, it was true, but he had not been able to grasp what it wished to tell him. But it was clear enough to him now why Len had seemed to him like a stranger who might possibly do him harm....

“What makes you think I’m meaning to give up?” he enquired at last, evading the question, and shifting his gaze from the man’s face to the greenhouse behind him.

Len wriggled uncomfortably.

“Nay, I don’t know ...” he began, looking down. “But it’s been all over the spot for a long while now. They’ve got it down at the village, too. Mrs. Kirkby’s always talked a deal about leaving, you see,” he added, rather more confidently, “and lately it’s seemed to me you were leaning that way yourself.”

“How d’you mean--‘leaning’?” Kirkby questioned him a second time, and Machell wriggled again.

“Well, sir, you haven’t been like yourself for a bit now, if you’ll excuse my saying so. Absent-minded and such-like, and not hearing when folks spoke.... And, begging your pardon again, sir,” he finished, with a nervous burst, “but you’re getting on. It’s only in reason you should be thinking of retiring before so long....”

He found himself presently on the further side of the greenhouse, without quite knowing how he had got there, or what he had said to Machell before he went. He felt pretty sure, however, that he must have promised him his support, for he could still see the smile on the man’s face, though distorted by panes of glass. But he had got away quickly because he had not felt equal to smiling at him in return. Indeed, never in his life had he come so near to experiencing the emotion of positive hate.

He understood now that he had never known how much he had valued his position until he was on the point of losing it. He had done well at his job, of course, arriving early, and achieving a horticultural reputation, not only in his own immediate neighbourhood, but in a wider district. Visitors to the Hall treated him with deference, and consulted him as an authority. He was invited to lecture, to judge at flower-shows, to sit on the committees of various societies. He had also written pamphlets,--one, upon an Alpine plant which nobody else in England had been able to grow, but which grew quite simply and easily for Kirkby, merely, as far as one could make out, because he wished it to do so.

Successful, however, as he had been in his own little world, he had never allowed it to upset him. He had never been over-elated about his doings, or tried to create an impression. Indeed, he had hardly ever thought about himself at all. He had taken the rewards of life, when they came, as simply as he took the fact of the pollen in the ripened flower.

But he had grown used to the situation, all the same. He had grown to expect the deference and the recognition, without knowing that he expected them. They had ended by creating a special atmosphere of his own in which he moved and breathed as naturally as in the air around him.

That atmosphere would be one of the things which he would have to leave behind him when he went to Canada. He would be nobody,--out there. People might be kind to him, of course, might even like him, but they would know nothing about him. If they thought of him at all, it would probably be only as somebody’s father, old-fashioned and rather a nuisance. They would never know that he had done anything or been anything,--out there.

He felt ashamed of himself at first for caring so much about the loss of a thing like that, but as he pondered the question further, he saw deeper. It was not just conceit and vanity that made people want recognition when they were old. What they were looking for when they asked for it was a definite confirmation of their personality,--a vital necessity, without which they were apt to wither away. They were like cut flowers, he thought, once they had lost their special identity. That was why so many lingered on in the place where they had lived and worked, feeling that they would die if they were taken away from it. Even those who had been neither pleasant nor useful in their lives received some sort of recognition in the place where they had lived. The new folks whom you met when you were old often seemed tacitly to deny that you had ever lived at all. You fought against it, at first, but you could do nothing about it. Presently, perhaps, you even came to see yourself through their eyes as a sort of ghost,--a ghost who would never have any future, and who had never had any past....

And along with your life, of course, they denied your work,--that work which was part of you and yet was so much bigger than you, and which you had fondly imagined would still live on in people’s minds, even after you, who mattered so much less than the work, were dead and crumbled away....

One of the several garden-cats appeared at that moment around a corner of the greenhouse, and twined itself lovingly about his legs. He could see another inside the greenhouse, sitting on one of the stages, and still another sunning itself happily inside one of the frames. They were an old breed now, which had been in the gardens for years--so old, indeed, that he had ceased to distinguish between the generations. For the same reason, and because of their puzzling likeness to one another, they had no individual names, but were known collectively as The Cat.

They were an ugly breed, he supposed, although he admitted it grudgingly,--brindled, with the darker spots of the brindling appearing invariably in the wrong places,--but he liked to see them about. It gave him a sense of pleasure to watch the sun bringing out on their glossy sides the tawny hues which went so well with wood and soil. He had grown so accustomed to them, indeed, that a cat of any other description about the place would have offended his artistic eye.

The Cat was another of the things which he would have to leave behind him when he went to Canada,--the things which already he was beginning to count over and to weigh before the time came to let them go. He wondered for a moment or two whether it would be possible to take one of the breed with him, but came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t do. Mattie might not like it; the people at the other end might not like it; and most certainly the cat wouldn’t like it. No, it would never do.

He pulled himself together, after a while, and went off about his business, but the beauty of the young spring day was largely spoiled for him. He even shrank from it, now, especially when it called to him, attracting his attention with scent and sigh in the fashion peculiar to the spring. Instead of soothing and heartening him, as it had always done before, it now seemed almost to attack him. He shrank from The Cat, too, especially from the sight of the sun touching it as it stalked across the gardens; and, going into his little office to examine his post which had just arrived, he shrank when he found catalogues and circulars addressed to “The Head Gardener.”

But most of all he found himself shrinking when he had to approach any of his men, fearing to find some other of them with Len’s petition ready upon his lips. As it happened, indeed, not one of them as much as hinted at his going, let alone applied for his post; but he continued to shrink from them, nevertheless. Self-conscious with his staff for almost the only time in his life, he felt that they talked about him when they saw him coming, and talked again when he went away.

He felt sure, at all events, that they knew what was happening or about to happen, together with the fact of Machell’s application. Discreet as they might choose to be on their own account, they must at least be aware of that. He wondered how long the question of his retirement had been discussed among them, and how much time they had given him. It humiliated him to think that the struggle between himself and his wife should apparently be common knowledge. Perhaps they had even betted upon the contest, he said to himself, bitterly, backing first one and then the other? Or, perhaps, he added, with a cynicism which was very foreign to him, they, too, had known that he would be defeated from the start?...

VI

The impending change, he found, was already at work upon the house when he went in to his dinner. The whole place was upset. Cupboards and doors stood open; shelves had been stripped; while the contents of the parlour looked as though they had been having a waltzing competition. There was a large packing-case in the coal-hole, and another in the larder. Things which were usually upstairs had somehow managed to get down, while other things, which he had not seen for years, were strewn about the kitchen. The very atmosphere of the house seemed to have been shaken and churned,--to have been stirred up as violently as Mattie stirred her puddings. If he had felt at breakfast as though they were already at the station, he was now absolutely convinced that they were actually on the steamer.

Only in one instance, however, did he make any comment upon the upheaval. Mattie, as far as he could see, had moved almost every piece of furniture in the house, merely, it would appear, in order to prove that it was possible to move it. He ventured to point out that some time would have to elapse before they could even hold their sale, and she answered him rather curiously as they sat down to their meal.

“Nay, I know it looks rather silly to be moving the stuff so soon, but I’d a reason for doing it. We’ve got to settle what we’re going to take, you’ll think on, and what we’re going to sell; and I thought the sooner I started in at the job, the better. But I found when I came to think about it that I couldn’t _see_ the things in any spot but this! In fact, it wasn’t till I’d started pushing and pulling ’em about that I could do anything with ’em at all!”

“You do get used to seeing things in the same spot,” Kirkby said, feeling at the sight of the “pushed and pulled” objects surrounding him much as he would have felt before a bed of uprooted flowers.

“You do that!” Mattie agreed, passing a hand over her heated face. “That used you forget what they’re like altogether. Why, I found I didn’t even know the shapes and sizes of things when I came to look at them!”

“They get part of a place,--that’s what it is,” Kirkby said. “You don’t see them as if they were by themselves, but as if they were built in.”

“Ours seemed built in right enough, this morning, anyhow,--I know that! I never remember them taking such a lot of managing before. It was almost as if they knew what it was all about, and didn’t mean to budge if they could help it!”

It was warmer this morning, Kirkby said, and likely she was feeling it a bit,--looking out as he spoke at the thin, young, spring-glow lying over the gardens, and wondering again how yesterday could have been so different.

“Nay, it wasn’t that altogether, though I’m not saying it mightn’t have something to do with it....” Getting up, Mattie set an open tart, light as an autumn leaf, on the table between them. “But I can tell you I was real taken aback when I found I didn’t even know my own furniture! I made sure, for instance, as that dresser of ours would be first-class for the new house, but now that I’ve had a right good look at it, I doubt it’s over-big. Then I thought as how that corner-cupboard we bought would do nicely for our pots, but as soon as I got it down I saw it was too small. It’s a queer thing, it seems to me, when you’re so far out with your own stuff! It’s like living with folks that long you don’t even know their faces.”

“They get part of you,” Kirkby said once more, as he had said about the house. “Faces or furniture, it’s the same thing. They get that much part of you, after a while, you don’t rightly seem to notice them.”

Mattie looked about her at the disordered fittings with a mixture of affection and distaste, much as a mother might look at a host of unruly children. “Ay, they do get part of you,” she agreed reluctantly. “I never thought I should mind parting with anything in this house. I never liked the things, as you don’t need telling, even though we bought ’em together; nay, nor the house, neither. But I found, when it came to it, that I wasn’t over-keen on letting any of ’em go. It seemed sort of cruel, somehow, to go leaving them behind.”

“You’ll not think twice about ’em,” he assured her, “once they’re out of the road. There’s no need to go fretting yourself over a thing like that.”

“I’m not fretting myself, not I,--nor likely to be!...” She laughed across at him, her lips curving and her eyes shining. She had always been a woman of a fluid temperament, easily up and down, but of late years it had seemed to him that she had grown a little dry. “Dry” seemed particularly the right word, he thought, looking at her to-day, reminding him as she did of a thirsty plant that was lifting its head in the rain.

“I’d be likely to fret, wouldn’t I, on a day like this?”... She leaned towards him, laying her arms on the table, and emanating so much sheer radiance of spirit that it almost seemed as if there were an actual halo round her. “Why, I’ve been rubbing my eyes half the morning thinking it couldn’t be true! That was why I was in such a hurry to get things sorted out. It seemed as if it helped to bring it all that much nearer.”

“It’s near enough, as it is,” he answered, in perfectly good faith, and then looked up guiltily, startled by something in his tone which he had not intended to be there. But she was too busy thinking to notice it.

“You’re right there! In fact, it beats me how we’ll ever be ready if we’re to get off, this spring. Old folks like us can’t afford to be kept waiting about.... It won’t be too soon for them Over There, anyhow,--I know that!” She laughed contentedly, looking past him over his shoulder as if she saw welcoming hands reaching towards her, and welcoming eyes turned her way. “They’ll be sending word, like enough, as we’re to go by flying-machine!”

“You’ve not got word written to them yet we’re meaning to come?” Kirkby asked. “We ought to let ’em know by the first mail.”

“Well, I’ve not got as far as putting pen to paper, yet, if you mean that; but the letter’s written all right! What, I had it off as pat as you like before ever I’d had my breakfast!... Come to that,” she added, “I’ve written that letter many a time in my head during these last ten years,--ay, and set it down as well, just to liven myself with the sight of it!... In fact, I’ve done it that often, it seems almost as if there’d be no need to do it now.”

“If you go thinking about it like that, you’ll likely never get it done at all,” he warned her, but she only smiled.

“There’s no fear of that! I’ve never had a bonnier job to do before, and I’ll likely never have as good again!... Every spring when it came round I’ve prayed as this might happen, and it’s happened at last. It was always worse in the spring. You can stand a deal of things in the winter when you’re comfortable like, and you’ve your own hearth-fire; but you want to be stirring in the spring.”

He did his best to nod sympathisingly at the wistfulness in her tone, but he could find no answer to give her. He had never known what it was to be afflicted by the fever of spring-wandering. He had never wanted to leave his gardens at any time, but especially not in the spring. Leaving a garden before the spring-sowing was finished would have seemed to him like leaving a child before it was able to walk....

It was true, of course, that last night he had signed his gardens away, and that, too, in the spring. But he had only signed them away in exchange for another garden, and the work would be well on its way before he went. It was not restlessness but weariness which had forced him to a reaching-out towards new life; not the spring-fret but the overwhelming pressure of years which was driving him overseas.

“I just can’t believe we’re really going!” he discovered Mattie to be saying, when his mind returned to her. “It don’t seem possible. To think we’re going to see the lads once more, and hear ’em speak! They’ll have altered a deal, I reckon, especially Joe. I always said Joe would make something to look at, if he once got going, and it’s queer if he hasn’t, out there. They say the air’s that grand, it’s like fine wine. I don’t know much about wine, but I’ve always hankered after the sort of air that sounded like it. I’ve sometimes thought I could breathe a bit of it, after reading the letters.... Then there’s the girls, too,--I fair ache to set eyes on ’em. Maggie, now,--she was always a good sort; but I don’t know how I’ll contain myself when I see Ellen. I thought a deal of ’em all, as you know, and lads is always lads, but I’ve sometimes thought I kept the softest spot of all for my little Ellen!”

He heard the words at first as one hears a familiar tune played from afar off, familiar but unmeaning; but presently the intensity of her feeling got home to him, and his outlook brightened. He had been troubled when he first came into the house, jarred both by its chaotic state and by the events of the morning, but as the meal proceeded he found himself calming gradually. It was impossible, in any case, not to find something infectious in Mattie’s attitude; to feel, if only as a pale reflection, something of her ecstasy. With a deliberate effort he adjusted his angle of mind, setting aside his preoccupation with the things that he must lose, and forcing himself to turn his attention to the things that he would gain.

“They’ll be taken aback, Over There, when they hear we’re coming!” he contributed presently, more cheerfully. “I doubt they won’t credit it, at first, we’ve been so long about it!”

“Nay, they’ll credit it all right!” Mattie laughed contentedly. “Many’s the time Maggie’s told me she’s dreamt we were on the road. All the same, they’ll be on pins till we’ve actually arrived. They’ll be thinking every day as we might go and change our minds.”

He shook his head without looking at her.

“Nay, we’ll not do that. It’s too big a thing, is this, to go playing about with.”

“Too big a thing, and too short of time. It’s got to be yes or no with folks when they get to our time of life. Just yes or no.... Anyway, they’ll know it won’t be _me_ as’ll be likely to change,” she added, with a touch of defiance. “It’s you they’ll be afraid of, if it’s anybody.”

“They’ve no call to be afraid, nor you, neither. I’ve passed my word, and I’m going to keep it. I shouldn’t have written that letter if I hadn’t meant it.”

“There’s many a letter gets written as is never sent,” Mattie said, half-mischievously, dallying, as human nature loves to do, on the very threshold of happiness. “I was saying something of the sort only just now.”

“This here’ll get sent right enough, don’t you fear....” He straightened himself a little, and his mouth set firmly. “Where’s it got to, by the way? I’ll be making the round of the place, this afternoon, and I could leave it as I pass.”

She nodded a trifle vaguely in the direction of one of the cupboards.

“I sided it away, so it wouldn’t get lost.... I could likely run down with it for you if you’re busy?”

He said “no” to that, however, speaking with the same air of determination which sat so strangely upon him. It might be Mattie who, in the long run, had brought about the present position, but dignity demanded that at least he should hand in his own notice.

“I’d best see to it myself,” he told her, getting up from the table. “Mind and give it me before I go.”

“Likely I’d forget to give it you, isn’t it?” she laughed; and then, still laughing, shivered.... “It fair gives me the creeps to think how, if that letter never went, things’d be just the same as before!”

“They wouldn’t be quite the same, no matter what happened. Folks pass on, somehow. Even _trying_ to do things makes a difference.”

“A deal o’ difference it’d make to me, I’m sure,” Mattie answered him cynically, “if I found myself still landed in this one-eyed spot!... Ay, well, I won’t go fretting about things, just when they’re shaping so nicely,” she corrected herself quickly. “Anyway, I’m glad you’ve seen your way to facing the job at last.”

There was a hint of interrogation in her tone as to how he had arrived at his decision, together with another and fainter one as to how he was taking it. Standing, he looked away from her through the window while he answered her unspoken questions.

“It just came over me, as it were, that I might never see the lads again if I didn’t do something about it. You go on thinking there’s time enough and to spare, and then all of a sudden there comes a day when you think there’s no time. That was how it was, yesterday. I just sort of felt I’d be rare and glad to see ’em all again.”

The tears came into Mattie’s eyes.

“You’ll never know _how_ glad till you _do_ see ’em!” she said, with a break in her voice. “There’s nothing like your own flesh and blood, when all’s said and done. And there’s the grandchildren an’ all.”

“Ay, and the garden....” He turned to her then, smiling a little shyly, a little shamefacedly. “I’ve never let on to you about it, Mattie, but I’ve been fair wild to see that garden!”

She laughed back at him and his hesitation, triumph and good-humoured affection mingled on her countenance.

“You’d no need to let on.... It was plain enough, I’m sure! I’ve known for a long while now you were thinking a deal about it.”

“Ay, well, it’d be queer if you hadn’t, I suppose,--you’re that sharp! But I’ve often thought I’d like to take a look in and see how the lads were framing.”

“You’ll be seeing how all right before you’re a couple of months older!...” She got to her feet, too, and began sweeping the pots together in a series of joyous movements. “Eh, but I hardly know how to hold myself in about it! I was fair tongue-tied, last night, when you said as we’d best go, but I’m that full of it all to-day, I can’t keep it from wagging! What, I’ve been clacking to the furniture all morning for want of anything better,--telling it all about it as if it was human beings! You’d have laughed fit to crack if you’d seen the way I went on. Len Machell popped in for a word and catched me doing it, and he looked scared out of his life!”

He stiffened a little at Machell’s name, feeling a cold wind blow in upon him and his manufactured enthusiasm. As before, the situation had remained more or less in the air until Len touched it; but as soon as he laid a finger upon it, it became concrete.... He said “Machell?” after her, not as a question, but as if weighing a sound which, in the space of a morning, had grown sinister and threatening. But she took no notice.

“I was making pretence this house was Over There, and the furniture was the lasses and lads. ‘Eh, Ellen, my girl,’ says I, hugging the grandfather clock, ‘I’m that glad to see you I could cry!’... ‘And is this little Sally?’ I says, kissing yon little stool. ‘She’s grown rarely since her last photo!’ Right daft I must have looked, and no mistake, but I couldn’t help it. I was that chock with it all I had to get shot of it, one way or another.”

She was laughing and crying as she talked, busy living over again the absurd scene which had yet been so vivid and poignant, but for once she did not receive the kindly smile with which he usually rewarded her attempts at humour. Instead, he turned away from her again, almost as if he had been wounded and wished to hide it.

“What was Len doing, hanging about the place?” he enquired, surprising her both by his words and by his faintly-sharp tone, for he was a lenient master with his men.

“Nay, what, he was only in the house half a minute or so! You’ve no call to be vexed with him, I’m sure. He just looked in to say you’d told him we were leaving, and to ask if there was anything he could do. He said his missis would be glad to come up any time to lend a hand with the packing, so I said the sooner we set about it, the better.”

“I never told him we were going,” Kirkby said, in the same almost angry tone, making her stare again. “It was him as said it.... He said it was all over the spot, and had been for long; and he wanted to know if it was true.”

She answered him soothingly as she carried off the pots to be washed in the back kitchen.

“Ay, well, it doesn’t matter, does it, one way or t’other? He’d have had to know, anyway, before so long. I must say I was a bit surprised to find you’d been so glib about it, but it makes no odds. He didn’t tell _me_ it was all over the spot, but I might have guessed it. Folks always seem to know what you’re meaning to do a deal sooner than you do yourself!”

He picked up his hat from a side table, and moved towards the door. The impulse was strong in him to tell her of Machell’s application, but he restrained it, being uncertain of her attitude. He was longing for sympathy on the subject, despising himself as he did for the bitterness in his heart, and knowing that sympathy would assuage it. But she had never seemed to value his position as head gardener,--had, indeed, constantly made him feel that it was something to be ashamed of,--and he dared not risk the reference. Yet he lingered before going out, still playing about the question, as if hoping that something or other might occur to ease the trouble in his mind.

“I can’t say I’m best pleased to think Len’s been settling our business for us,” he said, as she came back into the kitchen. “He’s paid to attend to his own job, and not to go prying into ours.”

“He hasn’t settled it for us,--not he! We’ve settled it ourselves. And as for a bit of gossip and such-like, I don’t see how you’re going to keep folks from taking an interest in those about them.”

“I don’t look for Machell and the rest of the staff to go taking an interest in my private affairs.” He lifted his voice a little, and felt a flame rise in him as she laughed. This was the second time to-day that he had felt that sudden spurt of hate, and in his horror at its recurrence his bitterness deepened. He hastened to get outside the door in case the hate should suddenly decide to vent itself in angry words.

Mattie followed him to the threshold.

“It’d be queer if the whole place didn’t know I’d wanted to go!” she said briskly. “There’s been times, I’m sure, when I’ve felt like telling it all round England. It isn’t a crime, anyway,--not as far as I know. We’d a right to go if we liked. As for Machell, he’s a decent-enough lad. I don’t see why you’re so mad with him. Mrs. Machell’s a good little soul, too, though she hasn’t much about her. Let ’em talk if it pleases ’em! A deal o’ difference it’ll make to us what they’re saying and doing here, once you and me are a thousand miles away!”

She stopped to draw breath both for fresh laughter and fresh speech, and in the pause he managed to break away from her. He went slowly, it is true, still longing for the consolation which he had been denied, and bowed by her last words as though she had set a weight upon him. The thousand miles of which she had spoken were laid like lead about his neck. But he went, all the same.... By the time she was speaking again he had rounded the corner of the greenhouse and was lost to her. He heard her voice continuing for a moment, as if not even the consciousness of his departure could force it into silence, and then break as if something had snapped it. He walked on blindly, not heeding where he was going.

And neither of them had remembered the letter.

VII

He had intended to set off on his round as soon as he had finished his dinner, but in the end it was half-past two and after before he finally started out. Something seemed to detain him, whispering in his ear that this was the last time, and he could not bear that it should be the last time. It was not true, of course, since he would be certain to make the round of the gardens many times yet before he left, but he felt as if it was true. It _was_ true, in point of fact, in so far as it was the last round of his period of settled service. In any case, he shrank and lingered a little before setting out, as a man shrinks and lingers a little before starting upon a world-circling journey from which he may never return.

Yet all the time he was longing to be gone, and to be able to ease the strain upon his nerves by fresh scenes and steady movement. He was still nervous of the men; the kitchen garden still irked him; the sight of The Cat stealing softly across the soil still foolishly made him ache. But it was not until the gilded freshness of the short spring day began to dim a little that he roused himself to action, hurrying now where he had loitered and fretted, as if in a sudden panic lest he should be too late.

Passing the last of the greenhouses, he crossed between borders of box to an arch in the high wall, where there were cherry-trees nailed flat to left and right like the sticks of so many fans. There was a little wicket-gate beneath the arch, and as he laid his hand upon it he turned. Even from that distance he could discern the figure of Machell in one of the houses, and by the stillness of his attitude he could tell that he was watching him. Watching to see the last of him, he said to himself, bitterly!... Watching as he would watch him on that last day, when he saw him leave the home of his youth for ever.

Even when he had passed along to the right, so that the wall came between him and Len, he could still feel his eyes fixed upon him, following him. They troubled him, making him nervous and uncertain in his movements, conscious that his back was bent and his step not altogether steady. He became so obsessed by them, at last, that suddenly he swung round, certain that Len had followed him across the garden, and was watching from the gate. There was no one under the arch, however, and he moved on again, feeling hot and foolish; yet nevertheless the intolerable sensation of being spied upon remained.

Down the steep rush of the hill he went beneath tall, splendidly-spaced trees, the smooth grass between which would presently be coloured and starred by daffodils and wild white hyacinths. Under the leafless boughs of beech he could see the hills,--the mountain-land and moorland which ring in all this part of the country, except where, on the one side, it runs rolling to the sea. In the natural arches to his right were framed the long slopes of the park, and almost beneath his feet as he came down were the massed roofs of the Hall.

He had never thought very much about the Hall before, even though the greater part of his life had been spent in its vicinity. He had accepted it, of course, as the central fact of the situation, the reason for which he and his work existed at all; but he had not thought much about it. The gardens were his world, especially the kitchen garden, and once outside their limits things were apt to seem a little blurred. There were many days when the Hall, empty and still, and wrapped in rain or mist, seemed almost as far away from him as his lads in Canada.

But to-day he looked at it as he came down, trying to see it, to take it in, so that, once safely photographed on his memory, it should never afterwards escape him. And at once he found, as Mattie had found with the furniture, that he could not see it. Instantly association was upon him, refusing to allow his mind to focus on shape or size. He could not decide whether the house were beautiful or ugly, dignified or insignificant, of this period or that. As he had said to Mattie of her household gear, it was no more possible to judge it than it was to judge a familiar face.

He had, it is true, an impression of fine stone, of moulded windows and doors, a wide courtyard, pillars, steps, and soft-coloured, slated roofs. But always he found it impossible to see it as it would have looked unclad and without its background. Always his eye went to the creepers which he had tended upon it, to the shelter of the woods behind it, the run of the park before it, to the long lawns and the gravel sweep and the curving boundary of the river. And even those he could not see as another person would have seen them, for he had looked at them so long that it was only the spirit he saw, and never the bodily forms which contained and expressed that spirit....

Yet this place, grown so impalpable to him that he could not even focus it, had him closely welded to it. He knew vaguely that you could not separate him from it without hurting him, any more than you could strip the creepers from the walls without leaving a scar. House and land had grown impalpable to him because between him and them moved the pictures of his past, so that you could not sever him from them without damaging him, because what you would really be separating him from was his own life.

There was a centralising power about the mansion of a big estate of which those who had never been connected with one could have no knowledge. It was like a huge buoy to which you were attached,--so safely attached that, no matter what came or went on the ocean outside, you, at least, could never slip away. Those outside must often feel a little lost, he had sometimes thought, shrinking from that possible isolation even in his mind. But, anchored to a place like the Hall, you had no fear of getting lost. Although you could not see it because you knew it so well, it was at all events a background against which you could see yourself,--as small, indeed, and comparatively unimportant, but still more or less plainly. Once broken away from that background, however, and out in the open,--in Canada, for instance,--it seemed highly probable that you would not be able to see yourself at all.

He spoke to one or two of his men who were busy about the grounds, rolling the gravel or trimming the turf, but always with the same anxiety and suspicion which had afflicted him all the morning. They were not Machell, it was true, but each one of them seemed to him to represent Machell, and, when he left them, he felt that they followed him with Machell’s searching eyes.... It seemed an incredible thing that he, who had always taken his fellow-beings so simply and so kindly, should now be unable to meet them with an open mind. It made him ashamed and angry, so that his glance refused to meet theirs, and his voice sharpened when he spoke to them, as it had done with Mattie during the scene in the cottage. Even the Hall servants he would have regarded doubtfully if he had chanced to come across them, feeling sure that they, too, knew what was about to happen to him, and would spring their knowledge upon him before he was ready to meet it.

But he saw nobody as he passed in front of the house, walking with what he felt to be a furtive step which he was yet unable to alter, and pausing only to inspect the rose-bushes fronting the long line of the low terrace. Nobody opened the door and came to him, or hailed him from the stone verandah. He glanced nervously at the windows over his shoulder, but nobody looked out. The whole place, indeed, had a strangely hushed appearance, almost as if it had veiled its eyes while this its servant went on his last round.

Hurrying in the same almost slinking fashion along the central walk, he came to the cliff-side, and stood looking across the beautiful, dangerous stream to the mountain-wall beyond. He could scarcely remember a time when, passing through the grounds, he had not paused just there, with the great trees around and above him, and the rocky river below. The wide view, passing over the wooded cliff across, and rising by green and russet slopes to that last long line of loveliness above, sometimes many-coloured and strong, and sometimes faint and phantasmal as a cloud, had been all that he had ever wanted by way of “escape.” It seemed impossible now that, yesterday, when he had needed it so much, he should never even have thought of it. One look at the open fells, at the swift river running black between its carved banks, at the endless crossing and re-crossing of fine bough-traceries against the colourless sky, and his sudden revolt against his environment would have been as suddenly stilled. Just that one look, and things would have found their proper balance again; one look, and he would never have dreamed of writing the letter....

He swung round on his heel when he remembered the letter, and stood staring towards the Hall as if through its solid structure he could see Mattie waving to him from the hill beyond. Mattie would think that he had forgotten the letter on purpose, and he did not want her to think that. He could hardly believe that, having spoken of it just as he was on the point of leaving the house, he could yet have managed to come away without it. He even searched his pockets, as if feeling that, by sheer determination, he could persuade it to materialise; stared at his hands, as if thinking that they might contain it without his knowledge. But it was obvious that he had not got it, and with a curious inconsistency he felt furious and frustrated. He said to himself that he wanted the matter over and done with,--that he could not bear to have it hanging on like this. He even retraced his steps for a short distance, as if meaning to climb the hill again in order to fetch the letter. If he had discovered it in his possession at that particular moment, he would have thrust it in at the Hall not only with relief but with actual triumph.

But almost at once he turned again as though somebody had tugged at his jacket. He was tired, this afternoon, and knew that he would regret the extra effort before he was half-way up the hill. Time was getting on, too, and if he lingered much longer it would be dusk before he was back from across the river. And Machell could take the letter.... He smiled a wry little smile as he reflected with what keen delight Machell would take the letter!...

He cast another glance at his view as he came back, remembering how often he had tried to persuade Mattie to find in it the release which he found in it himself, and how dismally he had failed. Mattie had had no use for it either as a view or as an outlet. She had liked the space and the height, but she had disliked the hills. For her they had merely been other and greater walls, which she could not push away. And she had hated the river.... Besides, nearly the whole of the view was to the north and east, and Mattie had spent the greater part of her life with her heart turned towards the west....

Also she had not cared much for being seen about the Hall grounds, even at those times when the owners happened to be away. It was only with difficulty that he had induced her to attend any of the Hall functions,--the cottage-garden show, the tenants’ garden-party, or the servants’ ball,--and then she had only appeared under protest. His employers had sensed the protest, he felt sure. In as close and delicately-dovetailed a corporation as that of an estate, it was always easy to detect the person who deliberately stood outside.

Nor had she ever attempted to make intimate friends of any of the people in the district. They would have accepted her all right, for she was both amusing and clever, as well as a hard worker. But right from the first she had either rejected her neighbours’ overtures, or accepted them against her will, and gradually they had come to acknowledge the situation, and to realise that they could get no further.

He had spoken to her quite early upon the subject, seeing where she was drifting, but he had not succeeded in changing her mind.

“What’s to do you won’t take tea with Mrs. Grisedale?” he had enquired one afternoon, as he came in. “I met her just now when I was down at station after some weed-killer as hasn’t turned up, and she was right grieved about it. They’re having a few friends in, she says, for that christening-party of theirs, and she’s keen for you to be there.”

“I just didn’t fancy it, that’s all,” Mattie had said, although taking care not to meet his eye. “It’s a bit of a trial, I always think, talking to folks as you don’t know.”

“Well, that’s easy mended, isn’t it, and the sooner you start in at it the better? Mrs. Grisedale, for one, ’ll not take you long. She seems a decent little soul.”

“Oh, ay, she’ll do.”

“There’s Mrs. Ellwood an’ all,--she’s asked you time and again. She told me she’d never taken to anybody as she’s taken to you.”

“And she’ll do, too.”

“Well, then, what’s to do you can’t make friends with the pair of them?” Kirkby had blundered on. “You couldn’t have a nicer couple of folks than them two, and you’ll be wanting somebody.”

But he had had to probe for some time before she would give him the explanation.

“It’s like this,” she had said at last, half-ashamed, as he could see, and yet determined upon her line of action. “It just isn’t worth while. Making friends takes a deal of time and a deal of patience, and once you’ve got ’em made, it takes a deal of getting over if you’ve got to leave them. Well, it isn’t worth it. I’m set on getting away from this spot, as you don’t need telling, and if I take up with any of the folk, it’ll all be wasted.”

“Nay, what, friendship and such-like is never wasted, surely!” he had affirmed stoutly. “I don’t hold with gardeners getting too thick with folks, nor their wives, neither. There’s some as’ll seek you out just for the sake of what’s behind you. But it isn’t good, all the same, to be always by yourself, and a few nice friends’d likely help you to settle down.”

But, unfortunately for his cause, he had hit on the one plea that was least likely to weigh with her.

“Nay, but that’s just what I don’t want to do,” she had said, looking past him, with the effect, which he was later to know so well, of seeing beyond him into great distances. “I don’t know how to put it, but it would be wrong for me, would that. It’d be losing something as is right down necessary to me. If making friends with folks is going to mean settling down, then I’m best without it.”

That part of the explanation he had been quite unable to understand, so he had concentrated upon the other.

“I don’t see there’ll be that much wasted just by you going to Mrs. Grisedale’s christening-party!” he had said humorously. “It seems a real pity you shouldn’t have a pill-gill now and then. I’ve always thought you were just cut out for going amongst folks and keeping ’em all lively.”

At all events he had succeeded in making her laugh at that, changing her, to his relief, from the far-gazing woman who chilled him with her strangeness to the brisk, cheerful girl whom he had sought in marriage.

“Ay, I generally manage to make a stir, wherever I am!” she had said gaily. “I’m not one for sitting mum in corners, and never was. If I’d had luck to hit on a spot I liked, I’d have done as much as anybody to keep things going; but it’s no use thinking about it here.”