DAVID BLAKE
Grey, grey mist
Over the old grey town,
A mist of years, a mist of tears,
Where ghosts go up and down;
And the ghosts they whisper thus, and thus,
Of the days when the world went with us.
A minute or two later Elizabeth Chantrey came into the room. She was a
very tall woman, with a beautiful figure. All her movements were strong,
sure, and graceful. She carried a lighted lamp in her left hand. Mr.
Mottisfont abominated electric light and refused obstinately to have it
in the house. When Elizabeth had closed the door and set down the lamp,
she crossed over to the window and fastened a heavy oak shutter across
it. Then she sat down by the bed.
“Well,” she said in her pleasant voice.
“H’m,” said old Mr. Mottisfont, “well or ill’s all a matter of opinion,
same as religion, or the cut of a dress.” He shut his mouth with a snap,
and lay staring at the ceiling. Presently his eyes wandered back to
Elizabeth. She was sitting quite still, with her hands folded. Very few
busy women ever sit still at all, but Elizabeth Chantrey, who was a very
busy woman, was also a woman of a most reposeful presence. She could be
unoccupied without appearing idle, just as she could be silent without
appearing either stupid or constrained. Old Edward Mottisfont looked at
her for about five minutes. Then he said suddenly:
“What’ll you do when I’m dead, Elizabeth?”
Elizabeth made no protest, as her sister Mary would have done. She had
not been Edward Mottisfont’s ward since she was fourteen for nothing.
She understood him very well, and she was perhaps the one creature whom
he really loved. She leaned her chin in her hand and said:
“I don’t know, Mr. Mottisfont.”
Mr. Mottisfont never took his eyes off her face.
“Edward’ll want to move in here as soon as possible. What’ll you do?”
“I don’t know,” repeated Elizabeth, frowning a little.
“Well, if you don’t know, perhaps you’ll listen to reason, and do as I
ask you.”
“If I can,” said Elizabeth Chantrey.
He nodded.
“Stay here a year,” he said, “a year isn’t much to ask—eh?”
“Here?”
“Yes—in this house. I’ve spoken about it to Edward. Odd creature,
Edward, but, I believe, truthful. Said he was quite agreeable. Even went
so far as to say he was fond of you, and that Mary would be pleased.
Said you’d too much tact to obtrude yourself, and that of course you’d
keep your own rooms. No, I don’t suppose you’ll find it particularly
pleasant, but I believe you’ll find it worth while. Give it a year.”
Elizabeth started ever so slightly. One may endure for years, and make
no sign, to wince at last in one unguarded moment. So he knew—had always
known. Again Elizabeth made no protest.
“A year,” she said in a low voice, “a year—I’ve given fifteen years.
Isn’t fifteen years enough?”
Something fierce came into old Edward Mottisfont’s eyes. His whole face
hardened. “He’s a damn fool,” he said.
Elizabeth laughed.
“Of course he must be,” and she laughed again.
The old man nodded.
“Grit,” he said to himself, “grit. That’s the way—laugh, Elizabeth,
laugh—and let him go hang for a damn fool. He ain’t worth it—no man
living’s worth it. But give him a year all the same.”
If old Mr. Mottisfont had not been irritated with David Blake for being
as he put it, a damn fool, he would not have made the references he had
done to his nephew Edward’s wife. They touched David upon the raw, and
old Mr. Mottisfont was very well aware of it. As David went out of the
room and closed the door, a strange mood came upon him. All the many
memories of this house, familiar to him from early boyhood, all the many
memories of this town of his birth and upbringing, rose about him. It
was a strange mood, but yet not a sad one, though just beyond it lay the
black shadow which is the curse of the Celt. David Blake came of an old
Irish stock, although he had never seen Ireland. He had the vein of
poetry—the vein of sadness, which are born at a birth with Irish humour
and Irish wit.
As he went down the staircase, the famous staircase with its carved
newels, the light of a moving lamp came up from below, and at the turn
of the stair he stood aside to let Elizabeth Chantrey pass. She wore a
grey dress, and the lamp-light shone upon her hair and made it look like
very pale gold. It was thick hair—very fine and thick, and she wore it
in a great plait like a crown. In the daytime it was not golden at all,
but just the colour of the pale thick honey with which wax is mingled.
Long ago a Chantrey had married a wife from Norway with Elizabeth’s hair
and Elizabeth’s dark grey eyes.
“Good-night, David,” said Elizabeth Chantrey. She would have passed on,
but to her surprise David made no movement. He was looking at her.
“This is where I first saw you, Elizabeth,” he said in a remembering
voice. “You had on a grey dress, like that one, but Mary was in blue,
because Mr. Mottisfont wouldn’t let her wear mourning. Do you remember
how shocked poor Miss Agatha was?—‘and their mother only dead a month!’
I can hear her now.” Mary—yes, he remembered little Mary Chantrey in her
blue dress. He could see her now—nine years old—in a blue dress—with
dark curling hair and round brown eyes, holding tightly to Elizabeth’s
skirts, and much too shy to speak to the big strange boy who was
Edward’s friend.
Elizabeth watched him. She knew very well that he was not thinking of
her, although he had remembered the grey dress. And yet—for five
years—it was she and not Mary to whom David came with every mood. During
those five years, the years between fourteen and nineteen, it was always
Elizabeth and David, David and Elizabeth. Then when David was twenty,
and in his first year at hospital, Dr. Blake died suddenly, and for four
years David came no more to Market Harford. Mrs. Blake went to live with
a sister in the north, and David’s vacations were spent with his mother.
For a time he wrote often—then less often—finally only at Christmas. And
the years passed. Elizabeth’s girlhood passed. Mary grew up. And when
David Blake had been nearly three years qualified, and young Dr.
Ellerton was drowned out boating, David bought from Mrs. Ellerton a
share in the practice that had been his father’s, and brought his mother
back to Market Harford. Mrs. Blake lived only for a year, but before she
died she had seen David fall headlong in love, not with her dear
Elizabeth, but with Mary—pretty little Mary—who was turning the heads of
all the young men, sending Jimmy Larkin with a temporarily broken heart
to India, Jack Webster with a much more seriously injured one to the
West Coast of Africa, and enjoying herself mightily the while. Elizabeth
had memories as well as David. They came at least as near sadness as
his. She thought she had remembered quite enough for one evening, and
she set her foot on the stair above the landing.
“Poor Miss Agatha!” she said. “What a worry we were to her, and how she
disliked our coming here. I can remember her grumbling to Mr.
Mottisfont, and saying, ‘Children make such a work in the house,’ and
Mr. Mottisfont——”
Elizabeth laughed.
“Mr. Mottisfont said, ‘Don’t be such a damn old maid, Agatha. For the
Lord’s sake, what’s the good of a woman that can’t mind children?’”
David laughed too. He remembered Miss Agatha’s fussy indignation.
“Good-night, David,” said Elizabeth, and she passed on up the wide,
shallow stair.
The light went with her. From below there came only a glimmer, for the
lamp in the hall was still turned low. David went slowly on. As he was
about to open the front door, Edward Mottisfont came out of the
dining-room on the left.
“One minute, David,” he said, and took him by the arm. “Look here—I
think I ought to know. Is my uncle likely to live on indefinitely? Did
you mean what you said upstairs?”
It was the second time that David Blake had been asked if he meant those
words. He answered a trifle irritably.
“Why should I say what I don’t mean? He may live three years or he may
die to-morrow. Why on earth should I say it if I didn’t think it?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Edward. “You might have been saying it just to
cheer the old man up.”
There was a certain serious simplicity about Edward Mottisfont. It was
this quality in him which his uncle stigmatised as priggishness. Your
true prig is always self-conscious, but Edward was not at all
self-conscious. From his own point of view he saw things quite clearly.
It was other people’s points of view which had a confusing effect upon
him. David laughed.
“It didn’t exactly cheer him up,” he said. “He isn’t as set on living as
all that comes to.”
Edward appeared to be rather struck by this statement.
“Isn’t he?” he said.
He opened the door as he spoke, but suddenly closed it again. His tone
altered. It became eager and boyish.
“David, I _say_—you know Jimmy Larkin was transferred to Assam some
months ago? Well, I wrote and asked him to remember me if he came across
anything like specimens. Of course his forest work gives him simply
priceless opportunities. He wrote back and said he would see what he
could do, and last mail he sent me——”
“What—a package of live scorpions?”
“No—not specimens—oh, if he could only have sent the specimen—but it was
the next best thing—a drawing—you remember how awfully well Jimmy drew—a
coloured drawing of a perfectly new slug.”
Edward’s tone became absolutely ecstatic. He began to rumple up his fair
hair, as he always did when he was excited. “I can’t find it in any of
the books,” he said, “and they’d never even heard of it at the Natural
History Museum. Five yellow bands on a black ground—what do you think of
that?”
“I should say it was Jimmy, larking,” murmured David, getting the door
open and departing hastily, but Edward was a great deal too busy
wondering whether the slug ought in justice to be called after Jimmy, or
whether he might name it after himself, to notice this ribaldry.
David Blake came out into a clear September night. The sky was cloudless
and the air was still. Presently there would be a moon. David walked
down the brightly-lighted High Street, with its familiar shops. Here and
there were a few new names, but for the most part he had known them all
from childhood. Half-way down the hill he passed the tall grey house
which had once had his father’s plate upon the door—the house where
David was born. Old Mr. Bull lived there now, his father’s partner once,
retired these eighteen months in favour of his nephew, Tom Skeffington.
All Market Harford wondered what Dr. Bull could possibly want with a
house so much too large for him. He used only half the rooms, and the
house had a sadly neglected air, but there were days, and this was one
of them, when David, passing, could have sworn that the house had not
changed hands at all and that the blind of his mother’s room was lifted
a little as he went by. She used to wave to him from that window as he
came from school. She wore the diamond ring which David kept locked up
in his despatch-box. Sometimes it caught the light and flashed. David
could have sworn that he saw it flash to-night. But the house was all
dark and silent. The old days were gone. David walked on.
At the bottom of the High Street, just before you come to the bridge, he
turned up to the right, where a paved path with four stone posts across
the entrance came into the High Street at right angles. The path ran
along above the river, with a low stone wall to the left, and a row of
grey stone houses to the right. Between the wall and the river there
were trees, which made a pleasant shade in the summer. Now they were
losing their leaves. David opened the door of the seventh house with his
latch-key, and went in. That night he dreamed his dream. It was a long
time now since he had dreamed it, but it was an old dream—one that
recurred from time to time—one that had come to him at intervals for as
long as he could remember. And it was always the same—through all the
years it never varied—it was always just the same.
He dreamed that he was standing upon the seashore. It was a wide, low
shore, with a long, long stretch of sand that shone like silver under a
silver moon. It shone because it was wet, still quite wet from the touch
of the tide. The tide was very low. David stood on the shore, and saw
the moon go down into the sea. As it went down it changed slowly. It
became golden, and the sand turned golden too. A wind began to blow in
from the sea. A wind from the west—a wind that was strong, and yet very
gentle. At the edge of the sea there stood a woman, with long floating
hair and a long floating dress. She stood between David and the golden
moon, and the wind blew out her dress and her long floating hair. But
David never saw her face. Always he longed to see her face, but he never
saw it. He stood upon the shore and could not move to go to her. When he
was a boy he used to walk in his sleep in the nights when he had this
dream. Once he was awakened by the touch of cold stones under his bare
feet. And there he stood, just as he had come from bed, on the wet
door-step, with the front door open behind him. After that he locked his
door. Now he walked in his sleep no longer, and it was more than a year
since he had dreamed the dream at all, but to-night it came to him
again.