THE MILL AND THE CHANGELING.
The outer appearance of the old mill in which we lived and grew up I
have touched upon; and now I take up my pen to paint in black and
white the old, moldering interior of the shell.
The building stood upon a triple arch of red brick that spanned the
stream, and extended from shore to shore, where, on each side, a house
of later date stood cheek to jowl with it. It looked but an
indifferent affair as viewed from the little bridge aforesaid, which
was dedicated to St. Swithun of watery memory, but in reality extended
further backward than one might have suspected. Moreover, to the east
side a longish wing, with a ridged roof of tiles, ran off at right
angles and added considerably to the general dimensions. To the west
stood a covered yard, where once the mill wagons were packed or
unloaded; but this, in all my memory of it, yawned only a dusty spave,
given over to the echoes and a couple of ancient cart wheels whose
rusty tires and worm-pierced hubs were mute evidence of an inglorious
decay.
These were for all to see--but behind the walls!
Was the old mill uncanny from the first, or is it only the ghosts with
which our generation of passions has peopled it that have made it so?
This I can say: That I never remember a time when Jason or I, or even
Zyp, dared to be in the room of silence alone--and in company never
for more than a few minutes. Modred had not the same awe of it, but
Modred’s imagination was a swaddled infant. For my father I will not
speak. Maybe he was too accustomed to specters to dread them.
This room was one on the floor above the water, and the fact that it
harbored the mill wheel, whose booming, when in motion, shook the
stagnant air with discordant sounds, may have served as some
explanation of its eeriness. It stood against the east wing and away
from the yard, and was a dismal, dull place, like a loft, with black
beams above going off into darkness. Its only light came from a square
little window in front that was bleared with dust and stopped outside
with a lacework of wire. Against its western wall was reared a huge
box or cage of wood, which was made to contain the upper half of the
wheel, with its ratchet and shaft that went up to the great stones on
the floor above; for the mill race thundered below, and when the great
paddles were revolving the water slapped and rent at the woodwork.
Now it behooves me to mention a strange fancy of my father’s--which
was this, that though no grain or husk in our day ever crumbled
between the stones, the wheel was forever kept in motion, as if our
fortunes lay in grinding against impalpable time. The custom was in
itself ghostly, and its regularity was interrupted only at odd
moments, and those generally in the night, when, lying abed upstairs,
we boys would become conscious of a temporary cessation of the
humming, vibrating noise that was so habitual to the place. To this
fancy was added a strange solicitude on the part of my father for the
well-being of the wheel itself. He would disappear into the room of
silence twice or thrice a day to oil and examine it, and if rarely any
tinkering was called for we knew it by the sound of the closing of the
sluice and of the water rush swerving round by another channel.
Now, for the time I have said enough, and with a sigh return to that
May afternoon and little Zyp, the changeling.
She followed me into the mill so quietly that I hardly heard her step
behind me. When I looked back her eyes were full of a strange
speculation and her hands crossed on her breast, as if she prayed. She
motioned me forward and I obeyed, marveling at my own submission. I
had no slightest idea what I was to say to my father or what propose.
We found him seated by the table in the living room upstairs, a bottle
and glass before him. The weekly demon was beginning to work, but had
not yet obtained the mastery. He stared at us as we entered, but said
nothing.
Then, to my wonder, Zyp walked straight up to the old man, pulled his
arms down, sat upon his knee and kissed his rutted cheek. I gave a
gasp that was echoed by Jason, who had followed and was leaning
against the lintel of the open door. Still my father said nothing and
I trembled at the ominous silence. At last in desperation I stammered,
and all the time Zyp was caressing the passive face.
“Dad, the girl fell into the water and I pulled her out, and here she
is.”
Then at length my father said in a harsh, deep voice:
“You pulled her out? What was Jason there doing?”
“Waiting for her to drown,” my brother answered for himself, defiantly
forestalling conviction.
My father put the girl from him, strode furiously across the room,
seized Jason by one arm and gave him several cruel, heavy blows across
his shoulders and the back of his head. The boy was half stunned, but
uttered no cry, and at every stroke Zyp laughed and clapped her hands.
Then, flinging his victim to the floor, from which he immediately rose
again and resumed his former posture by the door, pale but unsubdued,
my father returned to his seat and held the girl at arm’s length
before him.
“Who are you?” he said.
She answered, “A changeling,” in a voice soft as flowers.
“What’s your name?”
“Zyp.”
“Your other name?”
“Never mind; Zyp’s enough.”
“Is it? Where do you come from? What brings you here?”
“Renny brought me here because I love him.”
“Love him? Have you ever met before?”
“No; but he pulled me out of the water.”
“Come--this won’t do. I must know more about you.”
She laughed and put out her hand coaxingly.
“Shall I tell you? A little, perhaps. I am from a big forest out west
there, where wheels drone like hornets among the trees and black men
rise out of the ground. I have no father or mother, for I come of the
fairies. Those who stood for them married late and had a baby and they
delayed to christen it. One day the baby was gone and I was there.
They knew me for a changeling from the first and didn’t love me. But I
lived with them for all that and they got to hate me more and more.
Not a cow died or a gammer was wryed wi’ the rheumatics but I had done
it. Bit by bit the old man lost all his trade and loved me none the
more, I can tell you. He was a Beast Leech, and where was the use of
the forest folk sending for him to mend their sick kine when he kept a
changeling to undo it all? At last they could stand no more of it and
the woman brought me away and lost me.”
“Lost you?” echoed my father.
“Oh,” said Zyp, with a little cluck, “I knew all along how the tramp
was to end. There was an old one, a woman, lived in the forest, and
she told me a deal of things. She knew me better than them all, and I
loved her because she was evil, so they said. She told me some rhymes
and plenty of other things.”
“Well?” said my father.
“We walked east by the sun for days and days. Then we came to the top
of a big, soft hill, where little beetles were hopping among the
grass, and below us was a great town like stones in a green old
quarry, and the woman said: ‘Run down and ask the name of it while I
rest here.’ And I ran with the wind in my face and was joyful, for I
knew that she would escape when I was gone, and I should never see her
again.”
“And then you tumbled into the water?” said my father.
Zyp nodded.
“And now,” she said, “I belong to nobody, and will you have me?”
My father shook his head, and in a moment sobs most piteous were
shaking the girl’s throat. So forlorn and pretty a sight I have never
seen before or since.
“Well,” he said, “if nobody comes to claim you, you may stop.”
And stop Zyp did. Surely was never an odder coming, yet from that day
she was one of us.
What was truthful and what imaginative in her story I have never
known, for from first to last this was the most we heard of it.
One thing was certain. Zyp was by nature a child of the open air and
the sun. Flowers that were wild she loved--not those that were
cultivated, however beautiful, of which she was indifferent--and she
had an unspeakable imagination in reading their fanciful histories and
a strange faculty for fondling them, as it were, into sentient beings.
I can hardly claim belief when I say that I have seen a rough nettle
fade when she scolded it for stinging her finger, or a little yellow
rock rose turn from the sun to her when she talked to it.
Zyp never plucked a flower, or allowed us to do so if she could
prevent it. I well remember the first walk I took with her after her
establishment in the mill, when I was attracted by a rare little
blossom, the water chickweed, which sprouted from a grassy trench, and
pulled it for her behoof. She beat me savagely with her soft hands,
then fell to kissing and weeping over the torn little weed, which
actually appeared to revive a moment under her caresses. I had to
promise with humility never to gather another wild flower so long as I
lived, and I have been faithful to my trust.
The afternoon of her coming old Peg rigged her up some description of
sleeping accommodation in a little room in the attic, and this became
her sanctuary whenever she wished to escape us and be alone. To my
father she was uniformly sweet and coaxing, and he for his part took a
strange fancy to her, and abated somewhat of his demoniacal moodiness
from the date of her arrival.
Yet it must not be imagined, from this description of her softer side,
that Zyp was all tender pliability. On the contrary, in her general
relations with us and others as impure human beings, she was the
veritable soul of impishness, and played a thousand pranks to prove
her title to her parentage.
At first she made a feint of distributing her smiles willfully, by
turn, between Modred and me, so that neither of us might claim
precedence. But Jason was admitted to no pretense of rivalry; though,
to do him justice, he at once took the upper hand by meeting scorn
with indifference. In my heart, however, I claimed her as my especial
property; a demand justified, I felt no doubt, by her manner toward
me, which was marked by a peculiar rebellious tenderness she showed to
no other.
The day after her arrival she asked me to take her over the mill and
show her everything. I complied when the place was empty of all save
us. We explored room by room, with a single exception, the ancient
building.
Of course Zyp said: “There’s a room you haven’t shown me, Renny.”
“Yes,” said I; “the room of silence.”
“Why didn’t we go there?”
“Never mind. There’s something wicked in it.”
“What? Do tell me! Oh, I should love to see!”
“There’s nothing to see. Let it alone, can’t you?”
“You’re a coward. I’ll get the sleepy boy to show me.”
“Come along then,” I said, and, seizing her hand, dragged her roughly
indoors.
We crossed a dark passage, and, pushing back a heavy door of ancient
timber, stood on the threshold of the room of silence. It was not in
nature’s meaning that the name was bestowed, for, entering, the full
voice of the wheel broke upon one with a grinding fury that shook the
moldering boards of the floor.
“Well,” I whispered, “have you seen enough?”
“I see nothing,” she cried, with a shrill, defiant laugh; “I am going
in”--and before I could stop her, she had run into the middle of the
room and was standing still in the bar of sunlight, with her arms
outspread like wings, and her face, the lips apart, lifted with an
expression on it of eager inquiry.
What happened? I can find an image only in the poison bottle of the
entomologist. As some shining, flower-stained butterfly, slipped into
this glass coffin, quivers, droops its wings and fades, as it were, in
a moment before its capturer’s eyes, so Zyp faded before mine. Her
arms dropped to her sides, her figure seemed as if its whole buoyancy
were gone at a touch, her face fell to a waxen color and “Oh, take me
away!” she wailed in a thin, strangled voice.
I conquered my terror, rushed to her, and, dragging her stumbling and
tripping from the room, banged to the door behind us and made for the
little platform once more and the open air.
She revived in a wonderfully short space of time, and, lifting up her
head, looked into my eyes with her own wide with dismay.
“It was hideous,” she whispered; “why didn’t you stop me?”
Zyp, it will be seen, was not all elf. She had something in common
with her sex.
“I warned you,” I said, “and I know what you felt.”
“It was as if a question was being asked of me,” she said, in a low
voice. “And yet no one spoke and there was no question. I don’t know
what it wanted or what were the words, for there were none; but I feel
as if I shall have to go on thinking of the answer and struggling to
find it forever and ever.”
“Yes,” I whispered, in the same tone; “that is what everybody says.”
She begged me not to follow her, and crept away quite humbled and
subdued, and we none of us saw more of her that day. But just as she
left me she turned and whispered in awe-stricken tone, “Answer what
speaks to thee,” and I could not remember when and where I had heard
these words before.