A SHADOW IN SPRING
With spring came trouble. The Saxtons declared they were being bitten
off the estate by rabbits. Suddenly, in a fit of despair, the father
bought a gun. Although he knew that the Squire would not for one moment
tolerate the shooting of that manna, the rabbits, yet he was out in the
first cold morning twilight banging away. At first he but scared the
brutes, and brought Annable on the scene; then, blooded by the use of
the weapon, he played havoc among the furry beasts, bringing home some
eight or nine couples.
George entirely approved of this measure; it rejoiced him even; yet he
had never had the initiative to begin the like himself, or even to urge
his father to it. He prophesied trouble, and possible loss of the farm.
It disturbed him somewhat, to think they must look out for another
place, but he postponed the thought of the evil day till the time
should be upon him.
A vendetta was established between the Mill and the keeper, Annable.
The latter cherished his rabbits:
“Call ’em vermin!” he said. “I only know one sort of vermin—and that’s
the talkin sort.” So he set himself to thwart and harass the rabbit
slayers.
It was about this time I cultivated the acquaintance of the keeper. All
the world hated him—to the people in the villages he was like a devil
of the woods. Some miners had sworn vengeance on him for having caused
their committal to gaol. But he had a great attraction for me; his
magnificent physique, his great vigour and vitality, and his swarthy,
gloomy face drew me.
He was a man of one idea:—that all civilisation was the painted fungus
of rottenness. He hated any sign of culture. I won his respect one
afternoon when he found me trespassing in the woods because I was
watching some maggots at work in a dead rabbit. That led us to a
discussion of life. He was a thorough materialist—he scorned religion
and all mysticism. He spent his days sleeping, making intricate traps
for weasels and men, putting together a gun, or doing some amateur
forestry, cutting down timber, splitting it in logs for use in the
hall, and planting young trees. When he thought, he reflected on the
decay of mankind—the decline of the human race into folly and weakness
and rottenness. “Be a good animal, true to your animal instinct,” was
his motto. With all this, he was fundamentally very unhappy—and he made
me also wretched. It was this power to communicate his unhappiness that
made me somewhat dear to him, I think. He treated me as an affectionate
father treats a delicate son; I noticed he liked to put his hand on my
shoulder or my knee as we talked; yet withal, he asked me questions,
and saved his thoughts to tell me, and believed in my knowledge like
any acolyte.
I went up to the quarry woods one evening in early April, taking a look
for Annable. I could not find him, however, in the wood. So I left the
wildlands, and went along by the old red wall of the kitchen garden,
along the main road as far as the mouldering church which stands high
on a bank by the road-side, just where the trees tunnel the darkness,
and the gloom of the highway startles the travellers at noon. Great
trees growing on the banks suddenly fold over everything at this point
in the swinging road, and in the obscurity rots the Hall church, black
and melancholy above the shrinking head of the traveller.
The grassy path to the churchyard was still clogged with decayed
leaves. The church is abandoned. As I drew near an owl floated softly
out of the black tower. Grass overgrew the threshold. I pushed open the
door, grinding back a heap of fallen plaster and rubbish and entered
the place. In the twilight the pews were leaning in ghostly disorder,
the prayer-books dragged from their ledges, scattered on the floor in
the dust and rubble, torn by mice and birds. Birds scuffled in the
darkness of the roof. I looked up. In the upward well of the tower I
could see a bell hanging. I stooped and picked up a piece of plaster
from the ragged confusion of feathers, and broken nests, and remnants
of dead birds. Up into the vault overhead I tossed pieces of plaster
until one hit the bell, and it “tonged” out its faint remonstrance.
There was a rustle of many birds like spirits. I sounded the bell
again, and dark forms moved with cries of alarm overhead, and something
fell heavily. I shivered in the dark, evil-smelling place, and hurried
to get out of doors. I clutched my hands with relief and pleasure when
I saw the sky above me quivering with the last crystal lights, and the
lowest red of sunset behind the yew-boles. I drank the fresh air, that
sparkled with the sound of the blackbirds and thrushes whistling their
strong bright notes.
I strayed round to where the headstones, from their eminence leaned to
look on the Hall below, where great windows shone yellow light on to
the flagged court-yard, and the little fish pool. A stone staircase
descended from the graveyard to the court, between stone balustrades
whose pock-marked grey columns still swelled gracefully and with
dignity, encrusted with lichens. The staircase was filled with ivy and
rambling roses—impassable. Ferns were unrolling round the big square
halting place, half way down where the stairs turned.
A peacock, startled from the back premises of the Hall, came flapping
up the terraces to the churchyard. Then a heavy footstep crossed the
flags. It was the keeper. I whistled the whistle he knew, and he broke
his way through the vicious rose-boughs up the stairs. The peacock
flapped beyond me, on to the neck of an old bowed angel, rough and
dark, an angel which had long ceased sorrowing for the lost Lucy, and
had died also. The bird bent its voluptuous neck and peered about. Then
it lifted up its head and yelled. The sound tore the dark sanctuary of
twilight. The old grey grass seemed to stir, and I could fancy the
smothered primroses and violets beneath it waking and gasping for fear.
The keeper looked at me and smiled. He nodded his head towards the
peacock, saying:
“Hark at that damned thing!”
Again the bird lifted its crested head and gave a cry, at the same time
turning awkwardly on its ugly legs, so that it showed us the full
wealth of its tail glimmering like a stream of coloured stars over the
sunken face of the angel.
“The proud fool!—look at it! Perched on an angel, too, as if it were a
pedestal for vanity. That’s the soul of a woman—or it’s the devil.”
He was silent for a time, and we watched the great bird moving uneasily
before us in the twilight.
“That’s the very soul of a lady,” he said, “the very, very soul. Damn
the thing, to perch on that old angel. I should like to wring its
neck.”
Again the bird screamed, and shifted awkwardly on its legs; it seemed
to stretch its beak at us in derision. Annable picked up a piece of sod
and flung it at the bird, saying:
“Get out, you screeching devil! God!” he laughed. “There must be plenty
of hearts twisting under here,”—and he stamped on a grave, “when they
hear that row.”
He kicked another sod from a grave and threw at the big bird. The
peacock flapped away, over the tombs, down the terraces.
“Just look!” he said, “the miserable brute has dirtied that angel. A
woman to the end, I tell you, all vanity and screech and defilement.”
He sat down on a vault and lit his pipe. But before he had smoked two
minutes, it was out again. I had not seen him in a state of
perturbation before.
“The church,” said I, “is rotten. I suppose they’ll stand all over the
country like this, soon—with peacocks trailing the graveyards.”
“Ay,” he muttered, taking no notice of me.
“This stone is cold,” I said, rising.
He got up too, and stretched his arms as if he were tired. It was quite
dark, save for the waxing moon which leaned over the east.
“It is a very fine night,” I said. “Don’t you notice a smell of
violets?”
“Ay! The moon looks like a woman with child. I wonder what Time’s got
in her belly.”
“You?” I said. “You don’t expect anything exciting do you?”
“Exciting!—No—about as exciting as this rotten old place—just rot
off—Oh, my God!—I’m like a good house, built and finished, and left to
tumble down again with nobody to live in it.”
“Why—what’s up—really?”
He laughed bitterly, saying, “Come and sit down.”
He led me off to a seat by the north door, between two pews, very black
and silent. There we sat, he putting his gun carefully beside him. He
remained perfectly still, thinking.
“Whot’s up?” he said at last, “Why—I’ll tell you. I went to
Cambridge—my father was a big cattle dealer—he died bankrupt while I
was in college, and I never took my degree. They persuaded me to be a
parson, and a parson I was.
I went a curate to a little place in Leicestershire—a bonnie place with
not many people, and a fine old church, and a great rich parsonage. I
hadn’t overmuch to do, and the rector—he was the son of an Earl—was
generous. He lent me a horse and would have me hunt like the rest. I
always think of that place with a smell of honeysuckle while the grass
is wet in the morning. It was fine, and I enjoyed myself, and did the
parish work all right. I believe I was pretty good.
A cousin of the rector’s used to come in the hunting season—a Lady
Crystabel, lady in her own right. The second year I was there she came
in June. There wasn’t much company, so she used to talk to me—I used to
read then—and she used to pretend to be so childish and unknowing, and
would get me telling her things, and talking to her, and I was hot on
things. We must play tennis together, and ride together, and I must row
her down the river. She said we were in the wilderness and could do as
we liked. She made me wear flannels and soft clothes. She was very fine
and frank and unconventional—ripping, I thought her. All the summer she
stopped on. I should meet her in the garden early in the morning when I
came from a swim in the river—it was cleared and deepened on
purpose—and she’d blush and make me walk with her. I can remember I
used to stand and dry myself on the bank full where she might see me—I
was mad on her—and she was madder on me.
We went to some caves in Derbyshire once, and she would wander from the
rest, and loiter, and, for a game, we played a sort of hide and seek
with the party. They thought we’d gone, and they went and locked the
door. Then she pretended to be frightened and clung to me, and said
what would they think, and hid her face in my coat. I took her and
kissed her, and we made it up properly. I found out afterwards—she
actually told me—she’d got the idea from a sloppy French novel—the
Romance of A Poor Young Man. I was the Poor Young Man.
We got married. She gave me a living she had in her parsonage, and we
went to live at her Hall. She wouldn’t let me out of her sight.
Lord!—we were an infatuated couple—and she would choose to view me in
an aesthetic light. I was Greek statues for her, bless you: Croton,
Hercules, I don’t know what! She had her own way too much—I let her do
as she liked with me.
Then gradually she got tired—it took her three years to be really
glutted with me. I had a physique then—for that matter I have now.”
He held out his arm to me, and bade me try his muscle. I was startled.
The hard flesh almost filled his sleeve.
“Ah,” he continued, “You don’t know what it is to have the pride of a
body like mine. But she wouldn’t have children—no, she wouldn’t—said
she daren’t. That was the root of the difference at first. But she
cooled down, and if you don’t know the pride of my body you’d never
know my humiliation. I tried to remonstrate—and she looked simply
astounded at my cheek. I never got over that amazement.
She began to get souly. A poet got hold of her, and she began to affect
Burne-Jones—or Waterhouse—it was Waterhouse—she was a lot like one of
his women—Lady of Shalott, I believe. At any rate, she got souly, and I
was her animal—son animal—son boeuf. I put up with that for above a
year. Then I got some servants’ clothes and went.
I was seen in France—then in Australia—though I never left England. I
was supposed to have died in the bush. She married a young fellow. Then
I was proved to have died, and I read a little obituary notice on
myself in a woman’s paper she subscribed to. She wrote it herself—as a
warning to other young ladies of position not to be seduced by
plausible “Poor Young Men.”
Now she’s dead. They’ve got the paper—her paper—in the kitchen down
there, and it’s full of photographs, even an old photo of me—“an
unfortunate misalliance.” I feel, somehow, as if I were at an end too.
I thought I’d grown a solid, middle-aged-man, and here I feel sore as I
did at twenty-six, and I talk as I used to.
One thing—I have got some children, and they’re of a breed as you’d not
meet anywhere. I was a good animal before everything, and I’ve got some
children.”
He sat looking up where the big moon swam through the black branches of
the yew.
“So she’s dead—your poor peacock!” I murmured.
He got up, looking always at the sky, and stretched himself again. He
was an impressive figure massed in blackness against the moonlight,
with his arms outspread.
“I suppose,” he said, “it wasn’t all her fault.”
“A white peacock, we will say,” I suggested.
He laughed.
“Go home by the top road, will you!” he said. “I believe there’s
something on in the bottom wood.”
“All right,” I answered, with a quiver of apprehension.
“Yes, she was fair enough,” he muttered.
“Ay,” said I, rising. I held out my hand from the shadow. I was
startled myself by the white sympathy it seemed to express, extended
towards him in the moonlight. He gripped it, and cleaved to me for a
moment, then he was gone.
I went out of the churchyard feeling a sullen resentment against the
tousled graves that lay inanimate across my way. The air was heavy to
breathe, and fearful in the shadow of the great trees. I was glad when
I came out on the bare white road, and could see the copper lights from
the reflectors of a pony-cart’s lamps, and could hear the amiable
chat-chat of the hoofs trotting towards me. I was lonely when they had
passed.
Over the hill, the big flushed face of the moon poised just above the
treetops, very majestic, and far off—yet imminent. I turned with swift
sudden friendliness to the net of elm-boughs spread over my head,
dotted with soft clusters winsomely. I jumped up and pulled the cool
soft tufts against my face for company; and as I passed, still I
reached upward for the touch of this budded gentleness of the trees.
The wood breathed fragrantly, with a subtle sympathy. The firs softened
their touch to me, and the larches woke from the barren winter-sleep,
and put out velvet fingers to caress me as I passed. Only the clean,
bare branches of the ash stood emblem of the discipline of life. I
looked down on the blackness where trees filled the quarry and the
valley bottoms, and it seemed that the world, my own home-world, was
strange again.
Some four or five days after Annable had talked to me in the
churchyard, I went out to find him again. It was Sunday morning. The
larch-wood was afloat with clear, lyric green, and some primroses
scattered whitely on the edge under the fringing boughs. It was a clear
morning, as when the latent life of the world begins to vibrate afresh
in the air. The smoke from the cottage rose blue against the trees, and
thick yellow against the sky. The fire, it seemed, was only just
lighted, and the wood-smoke poured out.
Sam appeared outside the house, and looked round. Then he climbed the
water-trough for a better survey. Evidently unsatisfied, paying slight
attention to me, he jumped down and went running across the hillside to
the wood. “He is going for his father,” I said to myself, and I left
the path to follow him down hill across the waste meadow, crackling the
blanched stems of last year’s thistles as I went, and stumbling in
rabbit holes. He reached the wall that ran along the quarry’s edge, and
was over it in a twinkling.
When I came to the place, I was somewhat nonplussed, for sheer from the
stone fence, the quarry-side dropped for some twenty or thirty feet,
piled up with unmortared stones. I looked round—there was a plain dark
thread down the hillside, which marked a path to this spot, and the
wall was scored with the marks of heavy boots. Then I looked again down
the quarry-side, and I saw—how could I have failed to see?—stones
projecting to make an uneven staircase, such as is often seen in the
Derbyshire fences. I saw this ladder was well used, so I trusted myself
to it, and scrambled down, clinging to the face of the quarry wall.
Once down, I felt pleased with myself for having discovered and used
the unknown access, and I admired the care and ingenuity of the keeper,
who had fitted and wedged the long stones into the uncertain pile.
It was warm in the quarry: there the sunshine seemed to thicken and
sweeten; there the little mounds of overgrown waste were aglow with
very early dog-violets; there the sparks were coming out on the bits of
gorse, and among the stones the colt-foot plumes were already silvery.
Here was spring sitting just awake, unloosening her glittering hair,
and opening her purple eyes.
I went across the quarry, down to where the brook ran murmuring a tale
to the primroses and the budding trees. I was startled from my
wandering among the fresh things by a faint clatter of stones.
“What’s that young rascal doing?” I said to myself, setting forth to
see. I came towards the other side of the quarry: on this, the moister
side, the bushes grew up against the wall, which was higher than on the
other side, though piled the same with old dry stones. As I drew near I
could hear the scrape and rattle of stones, and the vigorous grunting
of Sam as he laboured among them. He was hidden by a great bush of
sallow catkins, all yellow, and murmuring with bees, warm with spice.
When he came in view I laughed to see him lugging and grunting among
the great pile of stones that had fallen in a mass from the
quarry-side; a pile of stones and earth and crushed vegetation. There
was a great bare gap in the quarry wall. Somehow, the lad’s labouring
earnestness made me anxious, and I hurried up.
He heard me, and glancing round, his face red with exertion, eyes big
with terror, he called, commanding me:
“Pull ’em off ’im—pull ’em off!” Suddenly my heart beating in my throat
nearly suffocated me. I saw the hand of the keeper lying among the
stones. I set to tearing away the stones, and we worked for some time
without a word. Then I seized the arm of the keeper and tried to drag
him out. But I could not.
“Pull it off ’im!” whined the lad, working in a frenzy.
When we got him out I saw at once he was dead, and I sat down trembling
with exertion. There was a great smashed wound on the side of the head.
Sam put his face against his father’s and snuffed round him like a dog,
to feel the life in him. The child looked at me:
“He won’t get up,” he said, and his little voice was hoarse with fear
and anxiety.
I shook my head. Then the boy began to whimper. He tried to close the
lips which were drawn with pain and death, leaving the teeth bare; then
his fingers hovered round the eyes, which were wide open, glazed, and I
could see he was trembling to touch them into life.
“He’s not asleep,” he said, “because his eyes is open—look!”
I could not bear the child’s questioning terror. I took him up to carry
him away, but he struggled and fought to be free.
“Ma’e ’im get up—ma’e ’im get up,” he cried in a frenzy, and I had to
let the boy go.
He ran to the dead man, calling “Feyther! Feyther!” and pulling his
shoulder; then he sat down, fascinated by the sight of the wound; he
put out his finger to touch it, and shivered.
“Come away,” said I.
“Is it that?” he asked, pointing to the wound. I covered the face with
a big silk handkerchief.
“Now,” said I, “he’ll go to sleep if you don’t touch him—so sit still
while I go and fetch somebody. Will _you_ run to the Hall?”
He shook his head. I knew he would not. So I told him again not to
touch his father, but to let him lie still till I came back. He watched
me go, but did not move from his seat on the stones beside the dead
man, though I know he was full of terror at being left alone.
I ran to the Hall—I dared not go to the Kennels. In a short time I was
back with the squire and three men. As I led the way, I saw the child
lifting a corner of the handkerchief to peep and see if the eyes were
closed in sleep. Then he heard us, and started violently. When we
removed the covering, and he saw the face unchanged in its horror, he
looked at me with a look I have never forgotten.
“A bad business—an awful business!” repeated the squire. “A bad
business. I said to him from the first that the stones might come down
when he was going up, and he said he had taken care to fix them. But
you can’t be sure, you can’t be certain. And he’d be about half way
up—ay—and the whole wall would come down on him. An awful business, it
is really; a terrible piece of work!”
They decided at the inquest that the death came by misadventure. But
there were vague rumours in the village that this was revenge which had
overtaken the keeper.
They decided to bury him in our churchyard at Greymede under the
beeches; the widow would have it so, and nothing might be denied her in
her state.
It was a magnificent morning in early spring when I watched among the
trees to see the procession come down the hillside. The upper air was
woven with the music of the larks, and my whole world thrilled with the
conception of summer. The young pale wind-flowers had arisen by the
wood-gale, and under the hazels, when perchance the hot sun pushed his
way, new little suns dawned, and blazed with real light. There was a
certain thrill and quickening everywhere, as a woman must feel when she
has conceived. A sallow tree in a favoured spot looked like a pale gold
cloud of summer dawn; nearer it had poised a golden, fairy busby on
every twig, and was voiced with a hum of bees, like any sacred golden
bush, uttering its gladness in the thrilling murmur of bees, and in
warm scent. Birds called and flashed on every hand; they made off
exultant with streaming strands of grass, or wisps of fleece, plunging
into the dark spaces of the wood, and out again into the blue.
A lad moved across the field from the farm below with a dog trotting
behind him,—a dog, no, a fussy, black-legged lamb trotting along on its
toes, with its tail swinging behind. They were going to the mothers on
the common, who moved like little grey clouds among the dark grose.
I cannot help forgetting, and sharing the spink’s triumph, when he
flashes past with a fleece from a bramble bush. It will cover the
bedded moss, it will weave among the soft red cow-hair beautifully. It
is a prize, it is an ecstasy to have captured it at the right moment,
and the nest is nearly ready.
Ah, but the thrush is scornful, ringing out his voice from the hedge!
He sets his breast against the mud, and models it warm for the
turquoise eggs—blue, blue, bluest of eggs, which cluster so close and
round against the breast, which round up beneath the breast, nestling
content. You should see the bright ecstasy in the eyes of a nesting
thrush, because of the rounded caress of the eggs against her breast!
What a hurry the jenny wren makes—hoping I shall not see her dart into
the low bush. I have a delight in watching them against their shy
little wills. But they have all risen with a rush of wings, and are
gone, the birds. The air is brushed with agitation. There is no lark in
the sky, not one; the heaven is clear of wings or twinkling dot——.
Till the heralds come—till the heralds wave like shadows in the bright
air, crying, lamenting, fretting forever. Rising and falling and
circling round and round, the slow-waving peewits cry and complain, and
lift their broad wings in sorrow. They stoop suddenly to the ground,
the lapwings, then in another throb of anguish and protest, they swing
up again, offering a glistening white breast to the sunlight, to deny
it in black shadow, then a glisten of green, and all the time crying
and crying in despair.
The pheasants are frightened into cover, they run and dart through the
hedge. The cold cock must fly in his haste, spread himself on his
streaming plumes, and sail into the wood’s security.
There is a cry in answer to the peewits, echoing louder and stronger
the lamentation of the lapwings, a wail which hushes the birds. The men
come over the brow of the hill, slowly, with the old squire walking
tall and straight in front; six bowed men bearing the coffin on their
shoulders, treading heavily and cautiously, under the great weight of
the glistening white coffin; six men following behind, ill at ease,
waiting their turn for the burden. You can see the red handkerchiefs
knotted round their throats, and their shirt-fronts blue and white
between the open waistcoats. The coffin is of new unpolished wood,
gleaming and glistening in the sunlight; the men who carry it remember
all their lives after the smell of new, warm elm-wood.
Again a loud cry from the hill-top. The woman has followed thus far,
the big, shapeless woman, and she cries with loud cries after the white
coffin as it descends the hill, and the children that cling to her
skirts weep aloud, and are not to be hushed by the other woman, who
bends over them, but does not form one of the group. How the crying
frightens the birds, and the rabbits; and the lambs away there run to
their mothers. But the peewits are not frightened, they add their notes
to the sorrow; they circle after the white, retreating coffin, they
circle round the woman; it is they who forever “keen” the sorrows of
this world. They are like priests in their robes, more black than
white, more grief than hope, driving endlessly round and round,
turning, lifting, falling and crying always in mournful desolation,
repeating their last syllables like the broken accents of despair.
The bearers have at last sunk between the high banks, and turned out of
sight. The big woman cannot see them, and yet she stands to look. She
must go home, there is nothing left.
They have rested the coffin on the gate posts, and the bearers are
wiping the sweat from their faces. They put their hands to their
shoulders on the place where the weight has pressed.
The other six are placing the pads on their shoulders, when a girl
comes up with a jug and a blue pot. The squire drinks first, and fills
for the rest. Meanwhile the girl stands back under the hedge, away from
the coffin which smells of new elm-wood. In imagination she pictures
the man shut up there in close darkness, while the sunlight flows all
outside, and she catches her breast with terror. She must turn and
rustle among the leaves of the violets for the flowers she does not
see. Then, trembling, she comes to herself, and plucks a few flowers
and breathes them hungrily into her soul, for comfort. The men put down
the pots beside her, with thanks, and the squire gives the word. The
bearers lift up the burden again, and the elm-boughs rattle along the
hollow white wood, and the pitiful red clusters of elm-flowers sweep
along it as if they whispered in sympathy—“We are so sorry, so
sorry——”; always the compassionate buds in their fulness of life bend
down to comfort the dark man shut up there. “Perhaps,” the girl thinks,
“he hears them, and goes softly to sleep.” She shakes the tears out of
her eyes on to the ground, and, taking up her pots, goes slowly down,
over the brooks.
In a while, I too got up and went down to the mill, which lay red and
peaceful, with the blue smoke rising as winsomely and carelessly as
ever. On the other side of the valley I could see a pair of horses nod
slowly across the fallow. A man’s voice called to them now and again
with a resonance that filled me with longing to follow my horses over
the fallow, in the still, lonely valley, full of sunshine and eternal
forgetfulness. The day had already forgotten. The water was blue and
white and dark-burnished with shadows; two swans sailed across the
reflected trees with perfect blithe grace. The gloom that had passed
across was gone. I watched the swan with his ruffled wings swell
onwards; I watched his slim consort go peeping into corners and under
bushes; I saw him steer clear of the bushes, to keep full in view,
turning his head to me imperiously, till I longed to pelt him with the
empty husks of last year’s flowers, knap-weed and scabius. I was too
indolent, and I turned instead to the orchard.
There the daffodils were lifting their heads and throwing back their
yellow curls. At the foot of each sloping, grey old tree stood a family
of flowers, some bursten with golden fulness, some lifting their heads
slightly, to show a modest, sweet countenance, others still hiding
their faces, leaning forward pensively from the jaunty grey-green
spears; I wished I had their language, to talk to them distinctly.
Overhead, the trees, with lifted fingers shook out their hair to the
sun, decking themselves with buds as white and cool as a water-nymphs
breasts.
I began to be very glad. The colts-foot discs glowed and laughed in a
merry company down the path; I stroked the velvet faces, and laughed
also, and I smelled the scent of black-currant leaves, which is full of
childish memories.
The house was quiet and complacent; it was peopled with ghosts again;
but the ghosts had only come to enjoy the warm place once more,
carrying sunshine in their arms and scattering it through the dusk of
gloomy rooms.