I awoke in broad sunlight. The room was full of it, and the scent of
flowers floated in through the open windows and mingled with the faint
smell of drugs. For some time I lay there quietly, too languid to make
a movement or to speak. Then the door softly opened, and I saw Mrs.
Carroll come in and stand beside my bed. “Is he asleep?” I heard her
ask, for I had closed my eyes. I opened them and looked up at her.
“No,” I answered, smiling.
She smiled, too. “It’s time for you to take your medicine,” and the
nurse came forward to give it to me. When I had swallowed it, I lay
back among the soft pillows deliciously....
* * * * *
The memory of my convalescence is a strange one, for it came at a
time when certain physical changes were taking place within me, and I
seemed to myself to be somehow different from what I had been before
I fell ill. My voice had altered; my mind was coloured by vague and
happy dreams. Sometimes when I turned in bed or stretched myself, the
contact of the fine linen sheets against my skin gave me a peculiar
thrill, which ran all down my spine. It appeared I had been very ill,
that it had been a touch-and-go matter whether I should manage to pull
through; yet now I did not feel that I wanted to get well too quickly.
The flowers, the fruit, the brightness, the big delightful room――so
different from my room at home――the care everybody took of me, the
books that were read to me, the sense of being here so securely, with
everything just as I liked it, and with Mrs. Carroll to look after
me――all that was delicious. The one jarring note was my father’s
letter, which I read, and then put back in its envelope. It was about
my escape, how near to death I had been, and how he hoped the mercy
that had been shown me would make me think seriously. I did not want
to think seriously: I wanted to bask in the sunshine of these pleasant
days while they lasted. If I had died it would have been all over by
this time, and since I hadn’t, why should I be different? It seemed to
me hardly the time to talk of God’s mercy, seeing that I had barely
scraped through a severe illness. It was like thanking a man, who has
just broken your head with a stick, for not killing you outright. My
father talked of a miracle, but I had slender faith in miracles, and I
regret to say his entire letter struck me as amazingly unintelligent.
In a kind of lazy and sublime egotism I began to ponder on the oddity
of a man like my father having a son such as I was; and while I was
engaged with these speculations Mrs. Carroll sat beside me, playing
“patience.” She told me my father could not come to see me for fear of
carrying the infection to school, and I received these tidings with
an immense relief, for I had been dreading that he would want to talk
to me about death, and perhaps make me join in returning thanks for
my recovery. I watched her as she sat there, her plump hands drawing
out the cards, her eyes seriously scanning the faces of those already
turned up. She was a large, placid lady, stout and ruddy. She must
always, even in her earliest youth, have been plain, but her face
was filled with an extraordinary kindness that made it infinitely
pleasant. It was not the sort of kindness which can be simulated; it
was something that was a natural part of her, and was reflected in all
she did and said. It had moulded the expression of her countenance,
just as time and weather will alter the features of a statue. Her
eyes were small and gray, and she wore gold-rimmed spectacles, which,
somehow, were becoming to her. I never saw her dressed in anything but
black, and with a light lace cap on her gray hair. She was extremely
fond of me, and I knew it, and I’m afraid imposed upon it, though I
loved her sincerely. At that time it appeared to me perfectly natural
that she should be fond of me; it was simply a part of the order of
things; it had always been so, and I couldn’t have imagined anything
else. It never even occurred to me that I had no claim upon her, except
that which she herself had established; it never occurred to me that I
might, in my relation to her, have been just like any of the other boys
in the village. On the contrary, I looked upon Derryaghy quite as if it
were a second, and certainly much my best-loved, home.
The “patience” failed, and Mrs. Carroll swept up the cards. “Shall
I read to you?” she asked me, and, I having graciously given my
permission, she took up “Huckleberry Finn.” It was a book I rejoiced
in, but I don’t think Mrs. Carroll cared for it, I don’t think she even
found it funny. She spoke rather slowly, and it amused me infinitely
to hear her gentle voice reproduce the talk of Huck, or Pap, or the
King....
That same day, after lunch, the nurse left. I was getting on very well,
and was to be allowed up toward the end of the week. In the afternoon
Mrs. Carroll had gone out, and I found myself alone. I went on with
“Huck,” but a chapter or two brought me to the end. I began another
book, “Bevis,” but my eyes grew tired, and I let it drop on the bed
beside me. As I lay idle I was seized by a desire to get up. I resisted
it for a few minutes, and then I slid into a sitting posture, with
my legs hanging over the side of the bed. It struck me that they had
grown absurdly thin and long, and I felt wretchedly shaky. I stood
up, all the same, holding on to the bedpost till I got accustomed to
being on my feet, when I put on my dressing-gown, and walked somewhat
uncertainly as far as the door. I turned the handle and looked out
with a strange curiosity into the passage. It was as if I had been
ill for months, it all somehow seemed so queer and new. The long high
corridor, off which the rooms opened, was hung with tall portraits
that appeared, in the mellow sunlight of high far windows, to watch
me stiffly yet furtively. I liked them, I liked everything about the
place, I liked to look down the passage with its long row of closed
doors, which seemed so mysterious, reaching right on to the head of
the staircase. I listened for footsteps, but heard nothing. Miss Dick
probably was out, and the servants’ quarters were far away. I had a
feeling that I was really the son of the house, that everything about
it, its pictures, its ghosts, were mine. I went to my favourite picture
and stood beneath it. It was a portrait of a lady with dark hair and
dark blue eyes, and it was partly this peculiar contrast, I think, this
contrast of blue eyes and black hair, that had originally pleased me.
She was young and she had a strange quaint name――Prudence Carroll. The
artist had painted her as if she were just come in from the garden,
for she held still a bunch of flowers in her hand. She was standing
by a queer little piano――or was it a spinet?――the spinet I had now in
my room? It was open, and in a minute or two she would lay down her
flowers and play some air on it, or the accompaniment of some forgotten
ballad. Did the painter intend to show that these were the things she
was fondest of――music and flowers? Poor Prudence Carroll had been dust
these hundred years, the notes of her spinet were either cracked or
dumb, and her tardy lover had arrived a century too late, for she had
died unmarried, and but a year after this portrait was painted! Why
had no one cared for her? Perhaps some day, between twilight and dusk,
she would slip into my room and sing to me, “Rose softly Blooming,”
or “Voi che sapete!” A rustle of muslin, a ghostly scent of ghostly
flowers, the twangling notes of the spinet, and a voice singing a song
that would sound thin and far off, like the sound of wind――that is how
it would happen.
I was charmed with these fancies, but I stood there only a few
minutes, for there was something odd in that silence of closed doors
and listening portraits, and I returned to the sunshine of my room. I
went to the window and leaned my forehead against the pane and looked
out. Far away I could see a stretch of sand, streaked with streams and
pools of water, for the tide was out: and beyond the sand, clear in the
sunlight, was the sea, blue-green under the soft blue sky, marked with
indigo and purple where the bottom was formed of rocks and seaweed. At
the water’s edge some children――from this distance I could not make out
who they were――were sailing toy boats. With trousers and petticoats
well rolled up from bare brown legs, with their scarlet jerseys and
caps and striped cotton dresses, they formed a bright note of colour,
and brought me into touch again with life out of doors. On the left
horn of the bay’s crescent the sand-hills, with their sparse covering
of bleached, wan grass, were pale and iridescent in the sun.
A gardener was mowing the grass just below my window, and the sleepy
sound of the mowing-machine was delightful, and the smell of the fresh
green grass, turned over in bright cool heaps. I got back into bed
again, and took up “Bevis.”
I read for half an hour, when my eyes once more grew tired. The sound
of the mowing-machine had ceased, and a deep silence filled the
afternoon. I lay listening to the silence, half-asleep, half-awake,
when all at once I heard a sound of scraping under my window. It
flashed across my mind that I was alone here in this part of the
house, and that burglars were taking the opportunity to break in, and
perhaps they would murder me. The thing was utterly nonsensical, and
would never have occurred to me had I been in my normal health, but
it had hardly entered my head when I saw a ladder shoot up past the
window, and strike with a grating sound against the wall. My heart
began to thump. I heard steps on the ladder; somebody was mounting it.
The next moment Jim’s face, brown and ruddy and grinning, popped in,
and I gasped with relief. Jim was a boy who worked in the garden, and
was about the same age as I was. He smiled broadly, and his bright,
brown eyes gazed at me with evident pleasure. “How are you, Master
Peter?” he grinned. “They’re nobody about, so I thought I’d look in.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” I answered, “but you mustn’t stay there, or you’ll
be catching the infection.”
“I wanted to see the skin peeling off you. What like is it underneath?”
I felt disappointed at this callous explanation of what I had imagined
to be sympathy. “You can’t see it,” I answered crossly. “You’d better
clear out before somebody catches you.”
Jim disappeared, but I called after him, “I say ... Jim――――”
The round, ruddy-brown face bobbed up again.
“Will you do something for me?” I asked.
“Ay.”
“Will you play something to me. I’m sick of lying here, doing nothing.”
“I darn’t. Oul Thomas’d stop me, an’ I’d get in a row. I be to red up
all the grass, an’ rake the walk.”
“All right.”
I took no further interest in Jim, and he again vanished. There was a
further scraping noise, and the ladder, too, disappeared. I lay on in
a kind of waking-slumber till Mrs. Carroll came in, bringing me my tea.
When I had finished I once more fell into a doze, but opened my eyes in
the dusk, when I heard the notes of Jim’s flute under my window, in a
slow melancholy tune, with an occasional pause, as if the musician was
not very certain of his music. I recognised the air――the Lorelei. It
had a curious effect in the gathering twilight, as if the music and the
fading light were in some subtle way mingled. I knew that the unseen
musician was Jim, yet none the less the mournful notes, coming slowly
in a minor key, seemed the very soul of the deepening darkness, and
called up before me a world of imaginary sorrows, a passionate regret
for I knew not what, a kind of home-sickness for my dream-land. Tears
gathered in my eyes and ran down my cheeks. Fortunately nobody could
see them, but I was ashamed of them myself, though I knew they were
partly the result of my physical weakness. Still, it was ridiculous
that I should cry over Jim’s playing. Jim really couldn’t play at all.
It was stupid, idiotic; and the other day I had cried just in this same
senseless fashion over a book I had been reading; I had wept my soul
out in an ecstasy of love and misery.
When Jim’s serenade was ended I lay on in the darkness, my tears drying
on my cheeks, and thought what a fool I was. Why should I have cried?
What was the matter with me? It was not that I was unhappy; on the
contrary, I was extremely happy. Yet somehow I felt dimly that there
was a greater happiness than any I had ever experienced or probably
ever should experience. The meaning of my emotions and desires never
became quite clear, though I seemed on the verge of discovery. It was
as if there were something stirring within me to which I could not give
freedom, something which remained unsatisfied even in the midst of my
keenest pleasures....
On a bright morning early in June I was allowed out for the first time
since my illness, and I insisted on going alone. As I came out into
the warmth of the sun I felt a charm as of a mysterious new birth. I
went straight to the woods. The green alleys winding in front of me
amid tall old trees, in all the vivid richness of early summer, seemed
exquisitely beautiful. It was as if I had never realized before how
lovely the world was. I lay down on my back on the warm, dry moss and
listened to a skylark singing as it mounted up from the fields near
the sea into the dark clear sky. No other music ever gave me the same
pleasure as that passionately joyous singing. It was a kind of leaping,
exultant ecstasy, a bright, flame-like sound, rejoicing in itself. And
then a curious experience befell me. It was as if everything that had
seemed to me external and around me were suddenly within me. The whole
world seemed to be within me. It was within me that the trees waved
their green branches, it was within me that the skylark was singing,
it was within me that the hot sun shone, and that the shade was cool.
A cloud rose in the sky, and passed in a light shower that pattered on
the leaves, and I felt its freshness dropping into my soul, and I felt
in all my being the delicious fragrance of the earth and the grass and
the plants and the rich brown soil. I could have sobbed with joy, but
in the midst of it I heard the sound of footsteps, and looked behind
me quickly, to see the figure of one of the two idiots, who lived in
a hovel outside the village, approaching. This was the man; there was
a woman also, his sister. He was perfectly harmless, and he drew near
now with smiles meant to be ingratiating. He held an empty pipe in his
hand, and made guttural noises that I knew were asking me for tobacco.
I told him I had none, but he would not go away. He stood right over
me, a grin on his deformed face. The big, misshapen head, the horrible,
slobbering mouth, the stupid persistence, all filled me with a cold
rage. He had spoiled everything; I hated him, and I could have killed
him, for it. But he still stood there and jibbered with his ugly,
dripping mouth. It was only when I struck at him savagely with my stick
that he moved off, glancing back at every step. And when he was gone
I felt nothing but a kind of cold disgust and animosity, mingled with
shame at my own conduct. All the beauty had gone out of the woods, and
I got up and went home.