by Tanith Lee
But when he was out of the awful chair and standing, a compunction seized him as if he had only just become aware of things.
“Are you quite alone here? Is everything all right with you? Shall I –?”
“Everything’s well,” she said.
That was all.
But when he gazed down at her, she was smiling. He thought she seemed happy and at ease. And so he only offered another farewell and left her, walking down through the garden, and closing the gate with elaborate care.
Once over the river and on the road, he turned again to signal goodbye, but the sun had reached just that point to dazzle away the images of the veranda. Indeed, the whole building appeared curiously to float like a bubble, suspended in the air. He could not make her out at all, and perhaps anyway she had now gone inside.
Carey reached the Hannifer house in the last of the dusk. He was struck at once by its bustle and life. Kerosene lamps hung along the veranda, every window was lit behind its lace rosy yellow, and men and horses came and went through the pastures behind.
Soon enough all the cousins swelled out in a swarm. His hand was wrung, a large beaming woman embraced him. He was led into a parlour with a rose lamp in its window, and presently into supper under a chandelier, with two rough and massive dogs lying for contrast by the hearth.
They were as hungry for his stories of the world as any people he had ever come across. He had to tell them anecdotes of a ship in Africa, and of a French village, and even about the great city he had just left, which most of them had never seen. Between whiles they poured him wine, and loaded his plate of pleasing brown and white china with potatoes, vegetables, pie and relishes. Afterwards there was a lemon dessert, and cigarettes and brandy were brought, and he sat alone with the men in an up-country English sort of way, hearing the women’s bright laughter in another room.
All this time there had been no opening to speak of anything close to home. Even the omission of the station horse they had swept quickly away with an, “Of all the lousy shows!” But as he and the men now lounged, with the veranda doors wide, and the crickets sounding in their silver night chorus, counterpart to the croak of frogs in the swamp beyond the river, Carey turned to his new cousin, Joseph.
“Before I reached your house, there was another. Just off the road. About three, four miles back. A white house, with a tower.”
Joseph Hannifer nodded idly enough. “Yes, that’s the Collins place. Run down now.”
“I thought I might paint it,” said Carey. It was as if something whispered to him, the crickets perhaps, that he must beware what he said. “Who lives there?”
“No one at present. It was Tappy Collins’ place, but he moved away years ago.”
“Tappy Collins? Now the man at the station mentioned him, I think,” lied Carey nimbly, sipping his brandy. A great moth, large as a dollar bill, had come from the night and hovered over the veranda rail above the lamps. The flicker of its wings was like one more warning. “The man said Collins had a sister – or do I have it wrong?”
“Old Ned’s a rare old gossip. Right enough, Tappy had a sister.”
Carey waited, and as he did, considered the tense of the word had.
“Had he? I thought –”
“Oh, it’s a sad story. A bad story.”
Old Uncle Someone – Carey did not yet grasp all the names – had fallen asleep. Two male cousins mildly joked about this. Two others had gone out to see to something in the outbuildings and stables, the dogs padding after them.
From the women’s parlour winged up more laughter, and the notes of a tinny but game piano.
“Can I know the tale?” asked Carey.
“We’re not proud of it,” said Joseph. “But there. You’ll make a painting of it, maybe.” And Carey was alerted to the first hint of acrimony in Joseph Hannifer, his cousin.
Then Joseph told him the story, and the other men were, mostly silent, but for the mild-snoring uncle. Now and then, one added something. They shook their heads. The room was warm, and smoky from the pipes, and outside stood the black walls of the night, into which the giant moth flew away.
Tappy Collins had had the house from his father. The mother was long dead, though it was she had given the property its queer and fanciful name. It was the title of some poet’s poem – Carey forbore to speak the other name of Tennyson – a crazy notion that was talked about.
Lady-of-Shalott the house was called, after this ballad about a damsel who drowned herself. And Carey forbore to correct them, since the Lady of Shalott had not drowned but only lain down in a magic boat and died of love.
“Well Tappy kept his sister – Maudra, the mother had called her – to look after the house, and it was a downright waste of her. She was a pretty thing, but day-dreamy – perhaps too much that way for some. But she could have made a marriage, no doubt of that. Tappy, though, he shut her up at home, and she never saw another soul but him and the maids. They said he promised her, ‘When I get wed then you can do as you like’. But perhaps he never said that.”
“The man at the station – Ned – told me she had strange-coloured hair.”
“Orange,” said Joseph, and one of the other cousins added, “Yes, Orange as marmalade. But apart from that, she had good looks.”
Joseph continued. He said that a day came when a man rode out to the house on business with Tappy Collins, and he took one look at Maudra and wanted her, body and soul. And it was the same with her.
“Trouble was,” said Joseph, “the fellow was married already, hard and fast, and no getting out of it.”
Carey listened, until the cigarette burned his fingers and the men laughed slyly at him. But his hands were as hard from paint as theirs from manual work, and he did not mind.
He was seeing Maudra and her dreaming eyes, seeing her in love. The man they did not much describe – he had a shock of thick blond hair, enough to turn any silly woman’s head. Enough money as well to dress elegantly and smell of cologne. Edmund Dyle was his name.
“Well, he had his way with her. Tappy was off in the city, and they used his house to their own advantage.”
“I heard,” said another cousin, “they lay down in every room.”
Joseph said, “You’ve got a course tongue, Matt. But so they did, probably.”
“What happened then?” said Carey softly.
“Once he’d had his fill, Dyle ran back to his wife,” said Joseph. His was, thought Carey, a cruel voice, judgmental and now slightly shrill.
Carey no longer liked Joseph. He said nothing.
Joseph said, “He’s stayed with the wife, too, though off and on he has another fling with some girl or other, with her head on backwards and not got the sense she was born with.”
The cousin who had also spoken said, “But Maudra died.”
Carey breathed out a long sigh. “Did she?”
“Died of a broken heart,” said the other cousin.
“Poor little thing. She was twenty-five years old.”
“She took a fever,” said Joseph. “Brain fever. That was how she died. There was a story she drowned herself like the girl in the ballad. But she didn’t.”
Yet, Carey Pearce thought, Maudra had died rather in the way of the Lady of Shalott after all, if she had died of love, breaking her imprisonment. He said, after a moment, lighting a cigarette, attending the advice of the cautioning crickets, “Ned told me there was some idea the house was haunted. Now I see why.”
“Tappy went off soon enough,” said Joseph. “But Tappy was a fool.”
The Hannifer uncle had woken. He spoke without emphasis. “Two or three persons have seen Maudra Collins sitting on her veranda, since her death, in the old rocker. She looks out to the road.” He seemed to watch Carey acutely; maybe it was only the light on his spectacles. “If you wave, she may wave back to you. She’s a polite little creature still.”
Carey said, “How long ago did she die? Was it recent?”
“Fifteen years,” said the uncle
. “Sixteen, next March.”
Later, Carey climbed the stairs and found a milk-white bedroom, washed himself, and got into bed. He blew out the lamp; there was no gas here, let alone electricity.
In the night peculiar sounds came from the hills beyond the house of the Hannifers. Carey knew, from all the alien nights he had slept and lain through, in russet little rooms up under thatch, in barns and empty styes, in the wide chambers of hollow, dark hotels, where golden beetles ran about the floors, that the noises of unknown night are always uncanny. He was not alarmed. Nor did the ghost of Maudra dismay him. He had been privileged to get so much more than a wave, to come so close. And he was glad she had not seemed afraid or sad, or shown any vestige of her pitiful, lonely unloved death. She was peaceful now, hopeful almost. Yes, he was glad.
The next day Joseph Hannifer wanted to ride with his Cousin Carey to the town, ten miles east. The women cousins protested that Carey was too tired, but Carey was not tired, and he was intrigued by Joseph, even not liking Joseph, because Joseph had mostly told him the story of Maudra Collins.
They started early enough, and the sun was white, and the sky that unique brazen sheet that is not blue at all, and the parched hills rolled round them, with their tufts of trees, and the occasional groves of farms, and the woods, and the swampland with its spears of razorous grass and muggy lilies. The horses were strong and courteous. But Cousin Joseph still kept expecting Carey Pearce to make some mistake. When a rabbit bolted across the road, for example, Joseph looked at Carey, all crinkled up in the face, to see the horse shy and throw him. But Carey and the horse were quite calm. Joseph seemed to have made up his mind that a man who painted pictures would be able to do nothing else. Soon Joseph began to talk about illnesses of the region, brainstorms and ailments of the bowel from poisoned water, and about renegades and thieves. All this, it seemed, to see if Carey would get nervous. But Carey only listened and asked reasonable questions.
They were about four miles from the town when Joseph said, almost violently, “Why, see that fellow walking down there, on the road?”
“Yes, I do.”
“See his hair?”
Carey looked more fully, and saw the man was flaxen fair, which was not very uncommon here.
Joseph said, “From the style of him, he goes on like that wretch I told you of, Edmund Dyle, Maudra’s fancy. Only I’d expect him to be riding.”
The sun was going over from the zenith, and it shone from behind them all down the road, and made it, but for their shadows, white and polished as glass. The man appeared half there and half not in this devouring light. He came on at a steady pace, striding west as they rode east, to meet them.
“Edmund Dyle,” said Joseph. “It could be. Maybe that rich wife of his got sick of his escapades and threw him out at last.”
They rode on, and the man who might be Edmund Dyle drew closer. Carey was interested. He wanted to gaze into the face of Maudra’s betrayer, wanted to scan it for future use on canvas. Judas has always been of artistic value, in whatever form.
Even so, Carey felt a little ashamed. Because he thought he understood already that something of Maudra was drawing Edmund Dyle, if so the man was, drawing him to her despite himself. For him she watched the road. For him the best chair waited, unwelcoming of any other – and for him it would be comfortable. And the decanter and the crystal jug would sparkle full of wine and lemonade.
The countryside was empty here, excepting the stands of umbrous trees. Soon enough they came up with the walking man, and when they were some thirty feet from him, Joseph swore. “It’s him. I tell you,” he added, as if Carey had argued, “it’s Dyle.”
Joseph reigned in. And so Carey copied him.
“Hey, Dyle! Is it you?”
The walker came on, then stopped. He was near. He looked up at Joseph’s face, and as if finding the paucity of it, his eyes continued until they found Carey.
“Sir,” said the man on the road, “I’ve lost my way. I used to know these parts, and yet... I’m searching for the Collins house.”
Joseph vented another curse. But along Carey Pearce’s spine there moved upwards a pale, quiet, electric tremor, as when grass turns before the wind and whitens.
“Follow the road,” said Carey. “Just follow the road and you’ll come to it. But it’s a long way.”
“Yes, a long way,” said Edmund Dyle. “But I’ve come a long way already.”
Carey meant to say something else, but the words stuck in his mouth. Then, as the man walked by him in his elegant dusty coat, he found to his surprise he said, “God bless you. God bless you both.”
Joseph sat his horse, snorted, and kicked its shanks. They rode on again.
“He’s gone daft,” said Joseph. “It was him, all right, but addled. His tie was all undone. His gloves were stained. And that’s no coat to go trekking in.”
Carey glanced back. He watched Edmund Dyle walk west along the road, the white sun blazing above and before him. But when Joseph half turned and said angrily, “What’s up now?” Carey only answered, “Nothing.”
“Is he still there, the idiot?”
“No.” To deflect Joseph, Carey lied. “I think he’s gone off the road into the trees.”
“Good riddance,” said Joseph. His face bulged now with malevolence and scorn, and for a while, though never looking back as Carey Pearce had done, Joseph Hannifer railed against the Dyles, all of them.
But when they came to the town and went into a bar there, he had to alter his tune.
So Joseph got drunk, until he had to hurry into the yard, and Carey held his shoulders as he threw up, and then supported Joseph when he sank down.
“We never met that bastard,” said Joseph, through his fits of shaking. “Never. Not us. For Christ’s sake,” said Joseph, as though they had committed a crime on the road, “don’t tell a soul we met him.”
For Edmund Dyle had, the previous evening, shot himself point blank through the heart and dropped dead in his wife’s fine house. He left a letter, which was now common property, that is, what it said, for he told her he had only ever loved one, and that one not her, but Maudra Collins who had died because of him.
Fifteen years and more the worm of regret had gnawed through Edmund Dyle, and in the end, to stop the pain, he had fired into himself the worst pain of all, which ends all others.
At sundown, Joseph begged Carey that he would not speak of any of this to the family in the Hannifer house, and Carey agreed to be silent.
But in the end, Carey Pearce was not silent at all, for he painted those two pictures, which anyone may see, where they hang in the gallery, or in reproduction. And the pictures speak loudly enough.
The first is the landscape with figure, which he called The Lady-of-Shalott House, a rich study of terrain, but mostly of a girl with extraordinary hair, seated in a rocking chair on a veranda, above the wild garden, and the black river with marigolds.
The second picture is more simple, and stranger. This is called only Going Home.
It shows a sun-blasted track, which carves between pale hills, and on the track a man, walking away, his back turned to the onlooker.
It is either the worm of regret, or the bullet of a pistol, which has cut right through him, showing what Carey Pearce saw so clearly on the road: how the sun shines straight as a spear through Edmund Dyle’s body, at the area of the heart, forming one blinding ray of otherwise inexplicable light.
The Minstrel’s Tale
It’s true, I live by the making of songs, and of stories, too. And sometimes by the making of a fine good lie. But this is none of those, and so I swear, by any saint or angel that was ever kind to me. It happened not long ago, a little less than a year, and stays clear in my mind, though I’m thinking it will stay clear as the rich glass in a lord’s church window, till my death day. Certainly, I’m a young man, and a year younger then, a vagabond, a trickster, though never yet, by God, a thief. But in the end, youth and honesty and trade make small odds. L
isten, and judge for yourselves.
I’d sung a well-paid month in a town, for the castle folk and the plump folk in the houses, and I’d had my stomach full of that, and come walking away up into the heart of the land, to sing in the villages and the inns, where you get a pot of ale and a kiss for your work, and the sweeter for that, sometimes. Here was a place I’d never journeyed before, the country they call Dark Hills. And well named, its deep curved shoulders sombre as old smoke at their tops, brown and green as baked apple at their bases. While, in the long shining gloaming of the North, each peak and valley seems to swim away, growing ever farther off, like rings spreading in a pool after the flint is thrown in it, and I that flint.
In such a gloaming, between such hills, I passed a well. A may tree grew there, snowed with blossom, and below I saw the little stone cot with its stone-piled wall, and some tangled sheep sat cat-fashion, with their legs tucked under, on the slope above.
Now it’s a fact, no matter how long the twilight, it must end in a night. I had been thinking of a grass bed, and still thought of it, for not every wayside dwelling welcomes a fellow with a harp on his back. But I went to the door and knocked.
Vapour came from the chimney, which was not much more than a central hole, the old way, such as you find here. But being at home was no promise of admitting another. Then the door was opened, and a man stood before me.
I’ve heard it said: The shepherd resembles his flock, and- surely this one did. His face was dark and long, his eyes black, his long nose in the flattened Roman manner. His beard and hair might well have been a grizzled fleece. His hands and feet were tapering and miniature. To have him greet me on all fours would not have amazed me, nor to hear him go “baaa”. But instead he looked in my face and he said to me: “Aye?”
“God’s evening to you,” I replied. “My trade is harping and songs, but I lack shelter. Can we bargain on that, or shall I be off?”
He went on looking me over, and I looked at him in a way I’ve learned. Sometimes you must offer more than songs in the back hills, or seem to offer more.