"There's no smoke in the chimney,
And the rain beats on the floor;
There's no glass in the window,
There's no wood in the door;
The heather grows behind the house,
And the sand lies before.
No hand hath trained the ivy,
The walls are gray and bare;
The boats upon the sea sail by,
Nor ever tarry there;
No beast of the field comes nigh,
Nor any bird of the air."
MARY COLERIDGE.
It was black dark inside the house, instead of the white darkness
outside.
Knocking Annette carefully against pieces of furniture, Roger guided her
down a narrow passage into what felt like a room. Near the ceiling were
two bars of white where the fog looked in over the tops of the shutters.
He struck another match, and a little chamber revealed itself, with
faded carpet and a long mirror. But no sooner was it seen than it was
gone.
"Did you see that chair near you?" said Roger. "I haven't many matches
left."
"There is a candle on the mantelpiece," she said.
Roger was amazed at Annette's cleverness. He had not seen it himself,
but she had. He exulted in the thought.
He lit it, and the poor little tall drawing-room came reluctantly into
view, with its tarnished mirror from which the quicksilver had ebbed,
and its flowered wall-paper over which the damp had scrawled its own
irregular patterns. The furniture was of the kind that expresses only
one idea and that a bad one. The foolish sofa, with a walnut backbone
showing through a slit in its chintz cover, had a humped excrescence at
one end like an uneasy chair, and the other four chairs had servilely
imitated this hump, and sunk their individuality, if they ever had any,
to be "a walnut suite." A glass-fronted chiffonier had done its horrid
best to "be in keeping" with the suite. On the walls were a few prints
of race-horses stretched out towards a winning-post; and steel
engravings of the Emperor of the French in an order and the Empress
Eugenie all smiles and ringlets served as pendants to two engravings of
stags by Landseer.
Annette took off Roger's coat and laid it on a chair.
"Some one has been very unhappy here," she said, below her breath.
Roger did not hear her. He was drawing together the litter of
waste-paper in the grate. And then--careful man!--having ascertained
with the poker that the register was open, he set a light to it.
The dancing, garish firelight made the sense of desolation acute.
"Who lived here?" said Annette.
Roger hesitated a moment, and then said--
"A Mrs. Deane."
"Was she very old?"
"Not very--not more than twenty-seven."
"And is she dead?"
Roger put some more paper on the fire, and held it down with the poker.
"No. She has left. Her child died here a month ago."
"Poor soul! Her only child?"
"Yes."
"And her husband? Is he dead too?"
Roger thought a moment, and then said slowly, "As good as dead."
He looked round the room and added, "Dick Manvers lent her the house. It
used to be the agent's, but no one has lived in it since I can remember.
It has always been to let furnished, but no one ever took it. People
seem to think it is rather out of the way."
The rollicking, busy flame died down and left them in the candle-light
once more. But after a few moments the ghostly pallor above the shutters
deepened. Roger went to them and opened them. They fell back creaking,
revealing a tall French window. The fog was eddying past, showing the
tops of the clump of firs, and then hiding them anew. He gazed intently
at the drifting waves of mist.
"The wind is shifting," he said. "It will blow from the land directly,
and then the roke will go. I shall run down to the farm and bring the
dogcart up here."
After all, he should have to propose in the dogcart. Men must have
proposed and have been accepted in dogcarts before now. Anyhow, he could
not say anything in this house when he remembered who had lived here,
and the recent tragedy that had been enacted within its walls.
"You must put on your coat again," she said, bringing it to him. "And
mayn't I come with you? Wouldn't that be better than bringing the cart
up here?"
"Oh, Merrylegs can see anywhere. Besides, there's the ford: I doubt you
could get over it dry-shod, and I shall have to go a couple of miles
round. And you've had walking enough. I shan't be gone more than half an
hour. I dare say by then the sun will be full out."
"I would rather come with you."
"You're not afraid to stay here, are you? There is nothing to hurt you,
and that candle will last an hour. I don't believe there's even a live
mouse in the place."
"I am sure there isn't. Everything here is dead and broken-hearted. I
would rather go with you."
Roger's face became the face of a husband, obstinacy personified. She
did not realize that they had been in danger, that he had felt anxiety
for her, and that he had no intention of being so acutely uncomfortable
again if he could help it.
"You will stay quietly here," he said doggedly. "This is the most
comfortable chair."
She sat down meekly in it at once, and smiled at him--not displeased at
being dragooned.
He smiled back, and was gone. She heard him go cautiously along the
passage, and open and shut the front door.
The light was increasing steadily, and a few minutes after he had left
the house the sun came pallidly out, and a faint breeze stirred the tops
of the fir trees. Perhaps this was the land breeze of which he had
spoken. A sense of irksomeness and restlessness laid hold on her. She
turned from the window, and wandered into the little entrance hall, and
unbarred a shutter to see if Roger were coming back. But no one was in
sight on the long, straight, moss-rutted road that led to the house. She
peered into the empty kitchen, and then, seeing a band of sunlight on
the staircase, went up it. Perhaps she should see Roger from one of the
upper windows. There were no shutters on them. She glanced into one
after another of the little cluster of dishevelled bedrooms, with
crumpled newspapers left over from a hurried packing still strewing the
floors. The furniture was massive, early Victorian, not uncomfortable,
but direfully ugly.
There was one fair-sized south bedroom, and on the window-sill was a
young starling with outspread, grimy wings. Annette ran to open the
window, but as she did so she saw it was dead, had died beating against
the glass trying to get out into the sunshine, after making black
smirches on the walls and ceiling.
Everything in this one room was gay and pretty. The curtains and
bed-hangings were of rosebud chintz. Perhaps the same hand that had made
them had collected from the other rooms the old swinging mirror with
brass rosettes, and the chest of drawers with drop handles, and the
quaint painted chairs. Annette saw the crib in the corner. This room had
been the nursery. It was here, no doubt, that Mrs. Deane had watched her
child die. Some of the anguish of the mother seemed to linger in the
sunny room with its rose-coloured curtains, and something, alas! more
terrible than grief had left its traces there.
A devastating hand, a fierce destructive anger had been at work. Little
pictures had evidently been torn down from the wall and flung into the
fire. The fireplace was choked high with half-burned debris--small
shoes, pinafores, and toys. A bit of a child's linen picture-book had
declined to burn, and hung forlornly through the bars, showing a comic
picture of Mrs. Pig driving home from market. A green wheel had become
unfastened, and had rolled into the middle of the room when the wooden
horse and cart were thrust into the fire.
"She must have cried all the time," said Annette to herself, and she
shivered. She remembered her own mad impulse of destruction.
"It's no use being angry," she whispered to the empty walls. "No use. No
use."
The photograph frames had evidently been swept into the fire too, all
but one, for there was broken glass in the fender and on the floor. But
one framed photograph stood on the mantelpiece, the man in it, smiling
and debonair, looking gaily out at Annette and the world in general.
Under it was written in a large clear hand, "Daddy."
It was Dick Le Geyt, but younger and handsomer than Annette had ever
known him. She looked long at it, slowly realizing that this, then, had
been the home of Dick's mistress, the Mary of whom he had spoken and her
child, to whom he had done a tardy justice in his will, the will she had
helped him to make. The child, Dick's child, was dead. Its empty crib
was in the corner. Its memorials had perished with it.
All that was left now of that little home was Dick's faded photograph
smiling in its frame, purposely, vindictively left when all the others
had been destroyed. Mary Deane had not cared to take it with her when
she cut herself adrift from her past. She had not had the clemency to
destroy it with the rest. She had left it to smile mockingly across the
ruins of the deserted nursery. While Annette stood motionless the fierce
despair of the mother became almost visible to her: the last wild look
round the room and at the empty crib, the eyes averted from the smiling
face on the mantelpiece, and then--the closed door and the lagging,
hurrying footfall on the stairs.
"It's no use being angry," she whispered again. "Even Dick knew that. No
use. No use."
And with pitying hands she took Dick's photograph out of the frame and
tore it up small, and thrust the pieces among the charred remains of his
child's toys. It was all she could do for him.
Oh! if she had but known Mary Deane, if she could but have come to her,
and put her arms round her and told her that Dick had not been as
heartless as she thought, that he had remembered her at the last, and as
far as he could had made a late amends for all the evil he had done her.
But the child was dead, and Mary Deane herself was gone. Gone whither?
She had flung away in anger and despair, as she, Annette, had once flung
away. Perhaps there had been no Mrs. Stoddart to care for Mary in her
hour of need.
Annette's heart sank as if a cold hand had been laid upon it.
The peaceful, radiant faith and joy of a few hours ago--where were they
now? In their place, into this close, desolate room with the dead bird
on the sill, came an overwhelming fear.
Men were cruel, ruthless creatures, who did dreadful things to women
under the name of love.
As at a great distance, far far away in the depths of childhood, she
heard her mother sobbing in the dark. Almost her only recollection of
her mother was being waked in the night by that passionate sobbing. The
remembrance of her father came next, sordid, good-humoured, mercenary,
and she shuddered. No wonder her mother had cried so bitterly! Close
behind it followed the sensitive, sensual face of the musician who had
offered to train her. And then, sudden and overwhelming, blotting out
everything else, came the beautiful young lover whom she had cast forth
from her heart with passion a year ago. All the agony and despair which
she had undergone then surged back upon her, seemed to rush past her to
join forces with the cold desolation lingering in the empty room.
Annette hid her face in her hands. She had put it all behind her. She
had outlived it. But the sudden remembrance of it shook her like a leaf.
In that grim procession Dick came last--poor, poor Dick! He had not been
wicked, but he had done wicked things. He had betrayed and broken faith.
He had made as much desolation and anguish as if he had been
hard-hearted. Oh! why did women love men? Why did they trust them?
Annette stood a long time with her face in her hands. Then she went out
and closed the door behind her. The sun was shining bravely, and she
longed to get out of this death-shadowed house into the warm, living
sunshine. She went back to the drawing-room, her quiet step echoing
loudly down the passage, and looked out of the long window. But the
outlook was not calculated to lessen her oppression.
Close at hand, as she knew, were gracious expanses of sea and sky and
gleaming river. But a stone wall surrounded the house, and on the top of
it a tall wooden fence had been erected, so high that from the ground
floor you could not look over it. This wooden fence came up close to the
house on every side, so close that there was only just room for the thin
firs and a walnut tree to grow within the narrow enclosure, their
branches touching the windows.
Annette did not know that the wall and the fence and the trees were
there to protect the house from the east wind, which in winter swept
with arctic ferocity from the sea.
In the narrow strip between the fenced wall and the house Mary Deane had
tried to make a little garden. Vain effort! The walnut tree and the firs
took all sun from the strip of flower-bed against the wall of the house,
where a few Michaelmas daisies and snap-dragons hung their heads. She
had trained a rose against the wall, but it clung more dead than alive,
its weak shoots slipping down from its careful supports. She had made a
gravel path beside it, and had paced up and down it. How worn and sunk
that path was! There was not room for two to go abreast in it. One
footfall had worn that narrow groove, narrow almost as a sheep track in
the marsh. And now the path was barely visible for the dead leaves of
the walnut, falling untimely, which had drifted across it, and had made
an eddy over the solitary clump of yellow snap-dragon.
Annette drew back the bolt of the window, and stepped out. The air,
chill with the mist which had silvered everything, was warm compared to
the atmosphere of the house.
She drew a long breath, and her mind, never accustomed to dwell long
upon herself, was instantly absorbed in freeing the snap-dragon from the
dead leaves which had invaded it. Two birds were bathing themselves
sedulously in the only sunny corner at the end of the garden. Annette
saw that their bath also was choked with leaves, and when she had
released the snap-dragon, she applied her energies to the birds' bath.
But she had hardly removed a few leaves from it when she stopped short.
It was a day of revelations. The birds' bath was really a lake: a
miniature lake with rocks in it, and three tin fishes, rather too large
it must be owned to be quite probable, and a tin frog spread out in a
swimming attitude, and four ducks all jostling each other on its small
expanse. It was a well-stocked lake. Tears rose in Annette's eyes as she
explored still farther, lifting the drifted leaves gently one by one.
They covered a doll's garden about a yard square. Some one, not a child,
had loved that garden, and had made it for a beloved child. The
enclosure with its two-inch fence had no grass in it, but it had winding
walks, marked with sand and tiny white stones. And it had a little
avenue of French lavender which was actually growing, and which led to
the stone steps on the top of which the house stood, flanked by shells.
It was a wooden house, perhaps originally a box; of rather debased
architecture, it must be conceded. But it had windows and a green door
painted on it, and a chimney. On the terrace were two garden-seats,
evidently made out of match-boxes; and outside the fence was a realistic
pigsty with two china pigs in it, and a water-butt, and a real
hay-stack. Close at hand lay a speckled china cow, and near it were two
seated crinkly white lambs.
Annette kneeling by the lake, crying silently, was so absorbed in
tenderly clearing the dead leaves from the work of art, and in setting
the cow on its legs again, that she did not hear a step on the path
behind her. Roger had come back and was watching her.
When she discovered the two lambs sitting facing each other, she seized
them up, and kissed them, sobbing violently.
Something in Annette's action vaguely repelled him as he watched her. It
was what he would have defined as "French." And though he had swallowed
down the French father, he hated all symptoms of him in Annette. It was
alien to him to kiss little china lambs. Janey would never have done
that. And Janey was the test, the touchstone of all that was becoming in
woman.
And then all in a moment the tiny wave of repulsion was submerged in the
strong current of his whole being towards her. It was as if some dormant
generous emotion had been roused and angered by his petty pin-prick
opposition to put out its whole strength and brush it away.
"Don't cry," said Roger gruffly. But there were tears in his small round
eyes as well as in hers.
"Oh, Roger," said Annette, speaking to him for the first time by his
Christian name, "have you seen it, the fishes and the ducks, and the
pigsty, and the little lambs and everything?"
Roger nodded. He had watched that property in course of construction. He
might have added that he had provided most of the animals for it. But if
he had added that, he would not have been Roger.
"And she's burnt everything in the nursery," continued Annette, rising
and going to him, the tears running down her face. "The toys and
everything. And she's torn down the little pictures from the wall and
broken them and thrown them on the fire. And I think she only left the
garden because--poor thing--because she forgot it."
Roger did not answer. He took her in his arms, and said with gruff
tenderness, as if to a child, "Don't cry."
She leaned against him, and let his arms fold her to him. And as they
stood together in silence their hearts went out to each other, and awe
fell upon them. All about them seemed to shake, the silvered firs, the
pale sunshine, the melancholy house, the solid earth beneath their feet.
"You will marry me, won't you, Annette?" he said hoarsely.
Remembrance rushed back upon her. She drew away from him, and looked
earnestly at him with tear-dimmed, wistful eyes.
The poor woman who had lived here, who had worn the little path on which
they were standing, had loved Dick, but he had not married her. She
herself, for one brief hour, had loved some one, but he had had no
thought of marrying her. Was Roger, after all, like other men? Would he
also cast her aside when he knew all, weigh her in the balance, and find
her not good enough to be his wife?
There was a loud knocking at the door, and the bell pealed. It echoed
through the empty house.
Roger started violently. Annette did not move. So absorbed was she that
she heard nothing, and continued gazing at him with unfathomable eyes.
After one bewildered glance at her, he hurried into the house, and she
followed him half dazed.
In the hall she found him reading a telegram while a dismounted groom
held a smoking horse at the door. At the gate the dogcart was waiting,
tied to the gate-post.
Roger crushed the telegram in his hand, and stared out of the window for
a long moment. Then he said to Annette--
"Janey has sent me on this telegram to say her brother Dick is dead. It
has been following me about for hours. I must go at once."
He turned to the groom. "I will take your horse. And you will drive Miss
Georges back to Noyes in the dogcart."
The man held the stirrup, and Roger mounted, raised his cap gravely to
Annette, turned his horse carefully in the narrow path, and was gone.