NIMBUS
I see I have given the impression that Colonel Dover was the cloud. No.
He was only a roll of thunder behind the cloud. I have put off saying
more about the cloud because of the difficulty in making anyone else
understand the larger, vaguer threat on our horizon.
Those early days, as I have said, were happy and warmly sheltered. Yet
there was all about us, or hovering near ready to swoop down, a sense of
fear.
I hardly know how we came first to feel it as a factor in life. A
thousand impressions stamped the consciousness deep and deeper still. A
fear, older than the fear of Colonel Dover, and apart from any danger
with a name. A thing as close to life as the flesh to our bones.
We were safe there, on our island in the heathery sea, only as people
are safe who never trust themselves to the treachery of ships.
My mother seemed to hug the thought of home as those in old days who
heard a wolf howl gave thanks for the stout stockade.
More times than I can count I have seen her coming home from one of our
walks with that look, half dreaming, half vague apprehension. I have
seen her turn that look back on Bettina, lagging: "Soon home, now,
little girl. Soon safe in our dear home."
I remember the look of the heath, at dusk, on winter days. The
forbidding grey of the sky. The clammy chill. A white fog coming out of
the hollows--a level mist; not rising high at first, but rolling nearer,
nearer, like the ghost of an inundating sea. All the familiar things
taking on an unreal look. A silence, and a shivering. Sometimes the dull
oppression broken by a birds' note. Harsh and sudden. A danger signal.
I see us linking arms and, with our mother between us, so mend the pace
that she would reach home almost breathless. Nevertheless, we would
hurry indoors and shoot the bolt behind us like people who knew
themselves pursued.
Perhaps my mother's fear had grounds we children never knew. But we knew
that the sound of a door shut, and a bolt shot, was music in her ears.
Her changed "home" face was like summer come again. She would help us to
strip off our wraps, and, all in a glow, we would go flying to the haven
of our pretty fire-bright room with its gay chintzes, its lamps and
flowers. One of us would ring for tea; another would draw chairs about
the blaze. My mother's part was to close the heavy inside shutters, to
let down across the panels the iron bar, and draw the curtains.
"_Now_ we are safe and sound!" she would say.
I do not pretend to explain, for I do not know how it was that, though
we loved our walks, Bettina and I came to share her sense of danger.
In the beginning we may have felt the flight home to be merely a kind of
game. A playing at Prisoner's Base with the threshold of Duncombe House
for goal. When we reached there (and only in the nick of time!) we had
escaped our enemy, whether Colonel Dover or another. We had won. We had
barred him out.
That feeling lasted warm, triumphant, until bed-time. Then, heavy wooden
shutters, even with iron all across, were no avail. Another enemy,
craftier, deadlier than any that might haunt the heath at dusk, had got
into the house. He was in hiding all the cheerful part of evening, when
lights and voices were about. At bed-time, in dim passages, you felt his
breath on the back of your neck. He never faced you. Always he was
behind you. But he was never at his deadliest while you had your shoes
and stockings on. He waited behind curtains or under the bed, to clutch
at your bare feet as you jumped in.
I try not to read into the influences about our childhood more than was
there.
Perhaps our fears had no obscurer origin than the humble domestic fact
that my mother never trusted the servants with the locking-up of the
house. We saw her go the rounds each night, holding a candle high to
bolts, or low to locks and catches. I believe now she may have had only
some natural fear, in that lonely place, of robbery. But for us children
the Dread was harder to fight against, being bodyless.
As everyone knows, except those most in need of knowing--I mean
children--every old house is an orchestra of ghostly sound. One room at
Duncombe, in particular, was an eerie place to sit in when the winds
were out. You heard a kind of unearthly music played there on winter
evenings. Sounds so remote from any whistling, moaning, or other wind
instrumentality, that Bettina and I spoke of it in whispers: "Now the
organ's playing."
Our mother heard it, too. At the first note she would lift her eyes and
listen. We had an obscure feeling that she heard more than we--a
something behind the music. Something which we strained to catch, and
often seemed upon the verge of understanding.
There is no more characteristic picture of my mother in my mind than
that which shows her to me with needle arrested over work slipping off
her knee, or holding a page half-turned, her lifted face wearing that
look, listening, foreboding.
There is something more expressive in the white of certain eyes than in
the iris. The white of my mother's eyes was a crystalline blue-white. It
caught the light and glistened. It seemed to respond more sensitively,
to have more "seeing" in it than was in the pale blue iris. The contrast
of heavy dark lashes may have lent the eye that almost startling look
when the fringe of shadow lifted suddenly, and the eyeball answered to
the light.
There was nothing the least tragic about my mother's usual looks or
moods. She was merely gentle and aloof.
She helped us to be very happy children; and if she made us sometimes
most unhappy, she did so unconsciously. And she did so only at times
when she must have been unhappy, too.
She played for us to dance. And she played for us to sing. But after
Bettina and I had gone through our gay little action songs, and after we
had sung all together our glees and catches, we would be sent upstairs
to do lessons in the morning-room--which was our schoolroom under the
cheerfuller name.
Then, sitting alone, between daylight and dark, our mother would sing
for herself songs of such sadness as youth could hardly bear. I think we
were not expected to hear them. We would open the windows on that side
in mild weather to hear the better. But the songs were sadder when we
heard them faintly. Have you ever noticed that?
I would sit trying to fix my mind on lessons, listening to that music
she never made for us.
And I would look across at Bettina's face, all changed and overcast.
Then I would shut the window.
Bettina ought never to hear such music.
For myself I wondered uneasily what there could be in the beautiful
world to inspire a song like that, and to make a lady sit singing it
"between the lights."
As I say, when the sound was fainter the sadness of it pierced us deeper
still.
As we two sat there, formless fears crept in and crouched in the shadowy
places.
Oh, we were glad when Martha Loring's face appeared, with the lamp and
consolatory suggestions of supper.
Better still, the blessed times when the music was too sad even for our
mother--when she would break off and come to find us--help us to hurry
through our task, and then for reward (hers, or ours?... I never quite
knew) open the satinwood cabinet, and take out the treasures and let us
see and handle them. All but two. We had been allowed to hold our
father's order and his watch. We had turned over the pretty things he
had given her; we knew that I was to have the diamond star, when I grew
up, and Betty was to have the pearl and emerald pendant. Only the two
brass buttons we might never touch.
We never knew why the brass buttons were so precious. She held them
wonderfully--as though they were alive.
And we, too--we were always happier after we had seen them.
We knew that she felt, somehow, safer.
So did we.