‘A very different character,’ returned Aunt Ellen, ‘the gentlest soul! But it needed an understanding heart to appreciate her, although she was an heiress.
Dear John understood her worth. I always told him he would. It was hard he should lose her just when he realised her full value! You would be amused to know how diffident they both were. Lying in bed all day as I used, one sees things more clearly. It was I who told John the true state of her feelings. (Out of her kindness she sometimes came and brought me flowers,’ the old lady’s voice became bitter and then peculiarly soft, ‘but she was one of those silent, reserved people whose feelings you must guess.) And then I told her about poor John. She was quite startled, and blushed, poor thing! And then I told John again: and John blushed. So then I had to tell her. It really would seem funny if it were not a little pathetic. If it had not been for me how would these two poor silent souls ever have met ? You see invalids have their duties and their strength as well as the hale and hearty, dear Mr. Armstrong.’
‘I’m sure,’ replied he, ‘you have neglected none of your duties.’
‘Indeed, I hope not,’ she answered, moving on towards the shuttered windows, ‘nor have I repined at my want of strength since I was gradually struck down in my early girlhood. But then I have known how to rest on the strength of others.’ She smiled slowly. ‘Shall we open a window and see if there is any moon? How often I used to look across from our windows to these in my childhood, and wonder what lay behind! Little I thought that one day it would be my home,’ she sighed tenderly. ‘No one could love it more than I do.’ She stroked her lean hand along the surface of the curtains—the fingers had a grasping and covetous air. ‘Shall we open a window and see how the country looks in the moonlight?’
When he had thrown back the shutters and thrown up the sash she did not even thank him: she seemed to think that at least part of the act had been her own.
‘Even now,’ she continued, ‘I still feel the wonder of being mistress here.’
Her head could not come much above the level of the window ledge, seated as she was; but she raised herself a little and peered into the darkness.
The air was keen with a black frost, and that curious waiting feeling which hangs about a winter’s night covered the face of the land.
‘It was a pity for John there was not more money with it,’ she said drily and half to herself. ‘Shall we shut the window again? the cold freezes all the life out of one. Really, last summer I felt quite young again. Sometimes nothing seems impossible. But I forget you are not old enough to know. Let me show you the other rooms.’
Armstrong compliantly closed the window, and again followed the gliding chair and its nimbus into various other rooms which owned no particular interest, but in which Aunt Ellen produced some trifling ancient anecdote.
And all the time he pondered on that wisdom or cunning which made her the superior of her brother; having perceived that to buy with money is often to obtain a shell without the substance, but to buy with your body is to purchase more than a life-interest. Aunt Ellen had made her marriage by proxy. He disliked her more and more as their progress lengthened. At last the tour was completed, and having seen her borne away with triumphant reverence by Godfrey and Pym, he retired to his own room to read.
The letters were not as illuminating as he had hoped, or else he was in no mood for appreciation. The old lady and her tenacious fingers, her insistence on the redness of the summer, her curious version of her brother’s marriage, kept intruding between the crabbed lines of the old pages, disturbing his attention. He was still struggling with an untameable inattention when the dressing-gong sounded. He thought with joy how only one more complete day remained to him; perhaps he might possibly escape by the afternoon train tomorrow. Then suddenly the thought of Ape’s-face flashed across him, and he felt unutterably mean. Still, it is not to be expected that one should share in every stranger’s difficulties. Besides, every stranger might not thank you. There is a time to intrude and a time to retire—tactfully, of course.
Aunt Ellen was in great spirits during dinner; it seemed as if an undercurrent of secret mirth sparkled within her like a hidden spring. Mr Delane-Morton was still most visibly depressed. The others were of course mute. The old lady continued sprightly even after dinner, when the others showed signs of wishing to retire for the night, and Armstrong was again detained from his work by the persistence of her tongue; and yet he could not utterly dislike her.
‘Dear, dear!’ she said at length, ‘do you know that this is the shortest day, and we have actually turned it into the longest by sitting up so late ? Now that is entirely your fault, Mr Armstrong, and I declare I think it very wrong of you to corrupt our simple life.’
‘I was finishing a very interesting paragraph just now in the Morning Post,’ Mr Delane-Morton remarked languidly, looking round the corner of a paper which he had not been reading for the last half-hour, ‘all about the shortest day and Leap Year, and the winter solstice. I am not aware that I ever connected them together in my mind before. But it appears that the winter solstice may occur any time between the 21st and the 23rd of December, so that really the shortest day may be any of the three—without our quite knowing which, unless we are versed in these matters, which, to tell the truth, I cannot profess to be.’ At which he got a little breathless, red, and flurried, and, crumpling the paper, rose to assist his sister in her departure from the room.
Armstrong begged leave for another glance at the letters and manuscripts, aware that this would probably be his last chance, little as the others knew.
They all bade him ‘goodnight’ and left him. But though he was left so undisturbed, the same restless inattention assailed his thoughts, and it was with a keen sense of irritation that he at length flung down the books, and lit a cigarette. A gentle knock at the door made him realise that he had been expecting Ape’s-face all the time. A black silk cloak was wrapped tightly around her, showing the shape of her thin shoulders and the angularity of her form.
‘There is something in the passage more than the cold,’ she whispered, entering and shutting the door softly and with great care behind her. Now that she moved stealthily there was something almost graceful in her manner, in the same way that the lowering of the voice gave it a pleasing tone.
‘Nonsense,’ said Armstrong shortly.
She smiled slowly, and this time the smile was more feminine. Or rather more human.
‘Now you are more like me,’ she said, ‘now that you are honest. But still there is something about the house. Don’t you feel as if it were too small to hold what it contains?’ She suddenly looked over her shoulder and shuddered.
They both drew nearer to the fire.
‘I know what you mean,’ Armstrong conceded reluctantly.
‘It began in the summer,’ she said, lowering her voice still more; ‘do you remember how the heat commenced in May, and how all June it grew, then in July it gathered force until the heat of August was like a heavy red cloud on the face of the country? The downs seemed to heave in the heat. In the spring there had been a beautiful haze that went up from them like incense round a shrine. It was strange then but sweet. In August it was cruel, like being seared to death. There was something horrible in the atmosphere, as if a terrible thing gathered substance from the dying earth.’ Her voice almost faded out. ‘At first I only felt it out of doors, but presently it entered the house. In September it lessened a little, the cooler weather came. That was the time I fell ill, and I couldn’t notice anything. They said I nearly died. I wished to die.’ She said it quite naturally and passed on. ‘Then they sent me to Italy for three months. Suddenly I saw what was happening, and I made up my mind to live and come home. Even then I hoped it was all a dream, and that this house would be empty of that thing. I was sorry you were there to disturb my first impressions. That was why I got out at the gate. But as soon as I came into the house the thing was all about us. It had grown all the time I was away. And it seems to hav
e changed the people here too. Aunt Ellen is more cheerful, but so curiously cheerful. And then father! he seems to have become worried and older, like the old woman Aunt Ellen ought to be and is not. Godfrey, too, and Arthur, are quite different in a way. Godfrey used seldom to stir from father and Aunt Ellen; and Arthur used to sit reading in a lump in his chair most of the holidays: now neither of them are ever to be found, so father says. Not that he minds.’
‘Surely,’ said Armstrong, ‘you can explain all this by the mere fact that they are all growing older.’
‘I could,’ she replied, ‘if it were not for Aunt Ellen—who is younger than I have ever seen her in the whole of my life—and for this strange thing in the house. On the downs this afternoon you would not have questioned it.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘and what do you mean to do?’
She pressed her hands together against her brow. ‘I want to get the boys away,’ she answered,—’you saw them at tea today. What did all that mean?
There must be some one at the Drylches! I must find out! And yet it may happen tomorrow, or the day after, or even tonight. I can’t think what to do.
Somehow I am not afraid for father, and Aunt Ellen is paralysed—she doesn’t count. But the boys!’
‘And you,’ said Armstrong.
‘If they did kill me,’ she said, ‘I should not mind: except for them. One is as much dead here as if one had never been born.’ She did not wait for him to make any comment upon this speech, but continued rapidly: ‘Anyway, you are here, and it will not affect you. It’s like a miracle your having come just now: some one who understands.’
Armstrong felt guilty; but immediately he laughed at himself for crediting the possibility of such things as the girl suggested.
‘I suppose,’ she added, ‘one will just have to sit and wait.’
‘I suppose so,’ he agreed, ‘but you won’t wait up for it all night?’
‘You are tired,’ she cried, ‘I beg your pardon,’ and turned away from the fire towards the door. She moved with such softness that for some unreasoned cause Armstrong imitated her, and crossed on tip-toe to open it. His fingers lay about the handle, but they had not actually grasped it when he noticed that she suddenly paused in the middle of the room, listening intently. He stopped in his action at the extraordinary expression on her face. At first there was a white terror on every feature, rapidly followed by the intensest sadness of resignation. She gathered the cloak more closely about her and came on towards the door again, with a curious unseeing look in her eyes which comes to people in pain of mind or body.
It was at this moment, when his grasp had still not tightened upon the handle, that he felt it slowly turned within his fingers as by some person just outside. The latch thus released, the door began smoothly to open inwards.
A strange, cold feeling suddenly went shivering right through him. In a kind of desperate impulse he pulled the door swiftly open, and flung it wide.
There was nothing there except the deepest darkness, and a horrible sensation of emptiness as if something had but just moved away. And yet there was not time for a vanishing between the turning of the handle and his opening of the door.
He felt the muscles of his jaw slacken, and his eyelids stiffen—Ape’s-face was staring at him.
‘Good God!’ he said under his breath, passing his hand across his forehead,
‘I thought . . .’
She came to the threshold and began to pass out of the room. He suddenly laid hold on her arm.
‘Don’t go!’ he said.
‘I am not afraid,’ she replied, and disappeared into the depths of the hall.
For the first time in his life he was not pleased at being left alone.
IX
The Drylches
WHEN ARMSTRONG AWOKE the next morning—second and last of his visit—it was snowing gently, a fine white powder of snow that tinkled against the window panes in falling. A little had drifted in across the sill of his half-opened window, showing that it had begun some time ago: it lay against the glass like diagrams of the rise and fall in wealth or population of a country.
He was just on the point of finishing dressing when Pym knocked tenderly at the door and presented him with the expected telegram. The moment seemed opportune, for he could now enquire about the train-service at his ease. Pym solemnly informed him that a train would leave Bourne End in two hours’ time, an express with one stop at Salisbury. Nothing could have suited him more admirably. He gave orders for the packing of his luggage, and descended the stairs nimbly. As he went he found himself hoping that Ape’s-face might not be at the table when he announced his departure: her eyes would be a looking-glass for that meanness in himself which he refused to acknowledge. Honesty for breakfast is unsuitable fare and indigestible.
As if Fate meant nothing but smiles for him, he found that only Mr Delane-Morton and Aunt Ellen were at table. They both greeted him with effusion, as the fashion was, and then he broke his sad news. There was a great deal of consternation, real or feigned, but very pleasantly expressed, and the brougham was immediately ordered. Armstrong’s one object now was to avoid bidding goodbye to Ape’s-face. He really considered no obligation could be reckoned as negotiable on his part, and yet he felt that she had drawn rather freely on his sympathy. It was an unfair position in which to have placed a stranger: a practical man, busy and full of important affairs, could not be expected to plunge into knight-errantry, especially when his youth was no longer in full bloom, and the circumstances so peculiarly visionary. He argued thus with himself whilst consuming his breakfast with more haste and less wisdom, conversing agreeably with his host and hostess on the vagaries of a literary life, which could so call you from one end of England to another without a moment’s warning. They were both quite sympathetic. Feeling himself to be indeed the truly injured creature he had graphically represented, Armstrong soon excused himself on the score of that packing which he trusted was already completed, and vanished nimbly into the shelter of his own apartment, where he hoped for safety until the carriage should be announced for his departure. The greatest relief possessed him upon the accomplishment of this fact, and he found himself being slowly conveyed towards the station, without having set eyes again upon anyone but Mr Delane-Morton, Aunt Ellen, and the two boys.
The pleasure of having triumphantly escaped two more days in the old house made him feel younger and more successful than he had been for years. Even now he could scarcely credit his good fortune, as he looked through the little round window at the back of the carriage, watching the long grey building slowly merge with distance into the longer, greyer, and more overwhelming shape of the downs, flickering curiously in the scattered fall of the snow. They looked significantly remote and visionary under the influence of the shining flakes. And still he felt that some accident might draw him again into that grey place—that the horse would fall and cut his knees, the driver drop dead from his seat, or finally he might miss the train, the line become snowed up and he be forced to seek shelter at the Delane-Mortons’ threshold this night also. He vowed fiercely that nothing should make him endure the repetition of such combined boredom, distaste, and incomprehensible terrors.
The snow fell more thickly now, he could not see much from the windows of the dilapidated vehicle, and the inside space was darkened with that curious gloom which comes with a heavy fall. He could not but think of the darkness of two evenings ago and his strange companion. She must have heard long ago of his departure—his flight; he wondered if she would have divined it to be such. He could imagine her penetrating look, and the calm posture in which she would survey it, arms folded and elbow resting on hand. Well, if anything so impossibly strange as she expected should happen, he would be sure to see it through the medium of man’s universal friend—
the newspaper-correspondent. He laughed inwardly, and then checked himself with a feeling of having laughed too soon. Yet they had reached the station and his train was patiently steaming between the pla
tforms. Nothing untoward had occurred, even his luggage had not been left behind.
He had time leisurely to choose a third-class compartment, and the porter having placed his portmanteau beside him, Armstrong was left alone to his own thoughts. The compartment was stuffy, but the disregard of windows as a method of ventilation had not contrived to keep it warm. Yet even this cold was not so piercing as the atmosphere in the rooms of Burton Hall. Now that he was away from Ape’s-face he seemed to feel her presence more keenly than ever; the extraordinary honesty of meaning and purpose, which made her so unbending a conversationalist, stood out as a great rarity almost amounting to genius. It made her insight singularly pure, and her convictions vividly true. Her austerity of outlook, action, speech, appeared almost a grace. He acknowledged it in a flash, and just as the train began to move away from the platform, whistling shrilly as it went. It was at this moment—when he suddenly realised the truth that was in her, and consequently the truth of what she was probably about to face, together with the culpable fact of his leaving her alone—that a disturbance of voices made itself audible from the slowly receding station. For an instant Armstrong half hoped it might prevent his departure, and become one of those happy accidents which determine people’s actions without their own intervention.
A man’s head and shoulders suddenly appeared in the frame of the window, for a second he hung panting on the step, and then, having flung the door violently open, he as violently flung himself down upon the seat opposite Armstrong. Having closed the door after him, and blown his nose in a congratulatory manner on a cheerful-looking handkerchief, he grinned heartily at Armstrong and winked with a white-lashed lid over a very blue eye.
‘Warm work that,’ said he in a fairly broad speech, ‘but I had the start of them, and you can’t get much of a foothold in the snow. Left the porter and the stationmaster fairly in the lurch I did!’ whereupon he settled himself more comfortably in his coat, which appeared to have been slightly disarranged about the collar. ‘It’s not often I shave it so fine as that,’ he continued, shaking his head, which included a particularly round and pleasant countenance made shrewd by crowsfeet at the corners of his eyes. ‘But I have to let the horse go slow down the hill behind Burton house: a bad bit that in this kind of weather.’
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