How the Great Wind Went from Beacon House
Mary was walking between Diana and Rosamund slowly up and down the
garden; they were silent, and the sun had set. Such spaces of daylight
as remained open in the west were of a warm-tinted white, which can be
compared to nothing but a cream cheese; and the lines of plumy cloud
that ran across them had a soft but vivid violet bloom, like a violet
smoke. All the rest of the scene swept and faded away into a dove-like
gray, and seemed to melt and mount into Mary’s dark-gray figure until
she seemed clothed with the garden and the skies. There was something
in these last quiet colours that gave her a setting and a supremacy;
and the twilight, which concealed Diana’s statelier figure and
Rosamund’s braver array, exhibited and emphasized her, leaving her the
lady of the garden, and alone.
When they spoke at last it was evident that a conversation long fallen
silent was being revived.
“But where is your husband taking you?” asked Diana in her practical
voice.
“To an aunt,” said Mary; “that’s just the joke. There really is an
aunt, and we left the children with her when I arranged to be turned
out of the other boarding-house down the road. We never take more than
a week of this kind of holiday, but sometimes we take two of them
together.”
“Does the aunt mind much?” asked Rosamund innocently. “Of course, I
dare say it’s very narrow-minded and—what’s that other word?— you know,
what Goliath was—but I’ve known many aunts who would think it—well,
silly.”
“Silly?” cried Mary with great heartiness. “Oh, my Sunday hat! I should
think it was silly! But what do you expect? He really is a good man,
and it might have been snakes or something.”
“Snakes?” inquired Rosamund, with a slightly puzzled interest.
“Uncle Harry kept snakes, and said they loved him,” replied Mary with
perfect simplicity. “Auntie let him have them in his pockets, but not
in the bedroom.”
“And you—” began Diana, knitting her dark brows a little.
“Oh, I do as auntie did,” said Mary; “as long as we’re not away from
the children more than a fortnight together I play the game. He calls
me ‘Manalive;’ and you must write it all one word, or he’s quite
flustered.”
“But if men want things like that,” began Diana.
“Oh, what’s the good of talking about men?” cried Mary impatiently;
“why, one might as well be a lady novelist or some horrid thing. There
aren’t any men. There are no such people. There’s a man; and whoever he
is he’s quite different.”
“So there is no safety,” said Diana in a low voice.
“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Mary, lightly enough; “there’s only two
things generally true of them. At certain curious times they’re just
fit to take care of us, and they’re never fit to take care of
themselves.”
“There is a gale getting up,” said Rosamund suddenly. “Look at those
trees over there, a long way off, and the clouds going quicker.”
“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Mary; “and don’t you be silly
fools. Don’t you listen to the lady novelists. You go down the king’s
highway; for God’s truth, it is God’s. Yes, my dear Michael will often
be extremely untidy. Arthur Inglewood will be worse—he’ll be untidy.
But what else are all the trees and clouds for, you silly kittens?”
“The clouds and trees are all waving about,” said Rosamund. “There is a
storm coming, and it makes me feel quite excited, somehow. Michael is
really rather like a storm: he frightens me and makes me happy.”
“Don’t you be frightened,” said Mary. “All over, these men have one
advantage; they are the sort that go out.”
A sudden thrust of wind through the trees drifted the dying leaves
along the path, and they could hear the far-off trees roaring faintly.
“I mean,” said Mary, “they are the kind that look outwards and get
interested in the world. It doesn’t matter a bit whether it’s arguing,
or bicycling, or breaking down the ends of the earth as poor old
Innocent does. Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries
to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the
window and tries to understand you. When poor old Adam had gone out
gardening (Arthur will go out gardening), the other sort came along and
wormed himself in, nasty old snake.”
“You agree with your aunt,” said Rosamund, smiling: “no snakes in the
bedroom.”
“I didn’t agree with my aunt very much,” replied Mary simply, “but I
think she was right to let Uncle Harry collect dragons and griffins, so
long as it got him out of the house.”
Almost at the same moment lights sprang up inside the darkened house,
turning the two glass doors into the garden into gates of beaten gold.
The golden gates were burst open, and the enormous Smith, who had sat
like a clumsy statue for so many hours, came flying and turning
cart-wheels down the lawn and shouting, “Acquitted! acquitted!” Echoing
the cry, Michael scampered across the lawn to Rosamund and wildly swung
her into a few steps of what was supposed to be a waltz. But the
company knew Innocent and Michael by this time, and their extravagances
were gaily taken for granted; it was far more extraordinary that Arthur
Inglewood walked straight up to Diana and kissed her as if it had been
his sister’s birthday. Even Dr. Pym, though he refrained from dancing,
looked on with real benevolence; for indeed the whole of the absurd
revelation had disturbed him less than the others; he half supposed
that such irresponsible tribunals and insane discussions were part of
the mediaeval mummeries of the Old Land.
While the tempest tore the sky as with trumpets, window after window
was lighted up in the house within; and before the company, broken with
laughter and the buffeting of the wind, had groped their way to the
house again, they saw that the great apish figure of Innocent Smith had
clambered out of his own attic window, and roaring again and again,
“Beacon House!” whirled round his head a huge log or trunk from the
wood fire below, of which the river of crimson flame and purple smoke
drove out on the deafening air.
He was evident enough to have been seen from three counties; but when
the wind died down, and the party, at the top of their evening’s
merriment, looked again for Mary and for him, they were not to be
found.
The End