Part 2

Tears came into his wife’s eyes, so that the pots in front of her melted into a shining blur. “Ay, well, he’ll sleep right enough to-night, I’ll take my oath! I’ve made him a grand bed, wi’ a piller as soft as soft, and a bit of a rug alongside for his poor feet. Rarely snod an’ heartsome the room looks, to be sure. You’d best slip up and take a peep for yourself.”

He cast a glance at the new white-faced clock, which the uncertain old grandfather was trying to talk down. “Happen I’ll have a look after I’ve gitten back. I’ll likely miss the trap if I gang now. Any road, mind and see you hap him up warm. He’s shivered many a time at Marget’s, I’ll be bound!”

“There’s plenty blankets on the bed, and I’ve put him yon quilt as we bought at Wilson’s sale. It’s as good a quilt as ever I see. I mind Maggie Wilson making it herself. As for t’ blankets, they’re the best there is in t’house.”

“Ay, ay,” Thomas nodded, “hap him up. Give him the best we’ve got, and you’ll not be wrong.”

“I’d think shame o’ myself to give a visitor owt else.” There was a stress in her voice that made him turn his head, but she was going away from him into the scullery and he could not see her face. Her last words, however, were flung back with the crisp cheerfulness to which he was used. “I’ll be getting they scones buttered while you’re off.... Now don’t be mooning about and miss your time!”

She disappeared through the open door, and he was left to his vigil over the marsh. His mind, released from the tie of another in the room, began slowly and toilsomely to go back over old events. Once he sighed sharply, as if oppressed, but it was simply with extraordinary relief. He knew now, from his sudden sense of mental ease, how he had worried and fretted about the old dad. It was as if something he had ignored had been tugging at his coat, and now he could look behind him without fear of what he might see. He was free, or thought himself free, of that troubling episode at his back ... yet wondered ever so vaguely why there should still be a sore place at his heart. It was not as if he regretted anything he had done, or that he would not have been ready to do that particular thing again. There had been only one way for him, and he had taken it, and if it had happened a thousand times he would have taken it still, but nevertheless it had left him with a latent fear of life, a darkening sense of indebtedness to fate. Even now, with the whole business right at last, and the road clear as the stars before his feet, he suffered a faint oppression of the mind. He supposed he would always have a bitter memory of the breaking up of the old home. Even an outsider must have felt it to some extent, an outsider who had had nothing to do with the cause. The old man had taken it so hard and yet with scarcely a word, so painfully like a hurt but yielding child; and he himself had done nothing but stand by, because just at that time he had not been able to help.... When he came to that word “able,” it somehow stuck in his throat.... Anyhow, able or no, he had not helped, that was sure; and so the old man and the home had had to go....

That was after his mother’s death, of course, and after his eldest brother’s death, too; not that matters had ever been very grand at Beautiful End. Kit had never been a practical man at any time of his life, had never known the substance from the shadow or the business from the dream. He would be off playing his fiddle while crops waited and stock starved. Not but what he had played it rarely—everybody admitted that. There was not one of his sons but was proud of his gift, however awkward the moment of demonstration and the certainty of its cost. Even among themselves they allowed no criticism of his method of life, and certainly they never allowed it from anybody else. They had the strong filial feeling natural to their breed, and, added to that, a vague sense of something helpless and wonderful entrusted to their care. Lacking the gift on their own account, they yet shared an artistic strain which bade them pay tribute to the glamour, and worship, if they could not follow, the gleam. They had no quarrel with music if there was also daily bread. It was only that farming and suchlike didn’t agree.

Perhaps things might have been better if Kit had gone to a new spot instead of following his father on the farm where he was bred. For once, in the shock of change, he might have seen both place and life in a practical light, and begun, at least, on normal, practical lines. But on the marsh, where he had dreamed as a lad, and which he had never left, he had never had even the vestige of a chance. For him it was saturated with wonderment, tuned to the first magic of his fiddle, set in the light that never was on sea or land. It was impossible for him to reduce his particular enchantment to sound commercial terms. The place wasn’t even real to him in the sense that it was real to others. It was the land of faery, and he had never come out of that land until—well, if the truth were known, he had never really come out. Spiritually, he had gone on living as he had lived as a youth. Life had not altered for him even when he succeeded to the farm, except that the rent which had stood in his father’s name now stood in his own.

Not that Thomas, brooding as he watched, worked things out for himself like this. He only said to himself that his father, when he was young, might have done better with a bit of stirring up. It was right enough for a man to come back to his own place, as he himself had done, but it did him no harm to have a look at other methods first. Rooted and grooved in a spot, he might never grow up, and so throw the whole chain of existence out of gear. This bother, for instance, of the last few years—why, it should never have been allowed to happen at all. If Kit could have framed a little better at his job ... if he could have hung on a bit longer ... made a little brass ... but where was the use of thinking about that now? Farther than this little mental growl, Thomas neither argued nor blamed. He accepted his father and his doings as he had accepted them all his life, and traced the shadow that lay on the evening’s joy no further than himself.

The three sons had been dark, silent men, caring for little beyond their work and the ordinary pastimes of their class. They had been cradled in music, but, as Thomas said, its only expression through them was in their heels. They were all good dancers, and had been known as such far and near, appearing at every gathering with their serious faces and light feet. They were wrestlers as well, though here Bob was easily first, just as in the dancing Thomas was easily first. John might have been better than either, but he had not tried or not cared. Both the younger sons had gone out to service as lads, while John stayed to help his father at home. John had never married, never gone away to stay, never moved one day out of the groove into which he had been born. He had worked hard, but without zest, and in his work had kept to the old ways, instead of moving with the times. It was almost as if he had known his life would end at thirty-eight, and so the travail of progress had not seemed to him worth while. He never talked of the future as the others did when they met, even unlucky Bob, with all the weights he had made such haste to fasten about his neck. Thomas remembered him moving alone about the level fields, a melancholy figure in spite of his youth and strength. He had been most at home with the stock, friends, whose lives, like his own, were ruled from without and had but a little day. But as long as he lived he had kept things going on the farm, just as his mother had kept things going in the house. And then, just over two years ago, the pair of them had died within a month; he, of a slipping ladder on a stack; she, in the new-established order of change. Shortly after had come the final change of all, when the living had followed the dead from out the house.

John had been only a negative sort of success, but Bob had been a failure all along the line. He had not liked his first situation from the start, and it was not long before the situation ceased to care about him. He had taken to changing places very soon, and, as is usually the case, the changes were mostly towards a lower grade. Marriage had anchored him, after a fashion, but at the same time it had finished his chance of ever rising higher. He now lived in the village across the marsh, acting as odd-job man to a cattle dealer in the place. His cottage was an abode of tempest and wrath, slatternly beyond belief, full of crawling and screaming children and the loud alarums of a nagging woman’s voice. It was easy to see where Bob would probably end, with a public-house almost cheek by jowl with his own. And yet, as Agnes had just said, he had been a smart enough lad....

Thomas, indeed, was the only one who had made out, unless John’s translation from a workaday world might be counted a higher achievement still. At his first hiring he had found for himself a rare good spot, and had stayed there solidly all through. Bob’s flights of fancy in the way of new jobs did not appeal to his farther-seeing mind; never, indeed, stirred him to anything but a sort of wondering contempt. He knew what he wanted, and, once set upon the course that led to it direct, could not be forced from it or lured aside. He had his settled programme of life long before it came anywhere within his reach. He would save enough brass to start comfortably on his own; he would take a farm on the marsh, and he would marry Agnes Black. But he was thirty-five before any of these things came to pass.

Yet, up to the last few years, he had had no doubt about them at all. They would follow, he thought, as naturally as harvest followed seed-time or summer fulfilled spring. Nature’s checks to the plans of man had, as a rule, some form of logic at their back, and were generally rectified in Nature’s time. Checks in his own scheme, if they came, would follow the same lines, and his practised country patience would be able to see them through. And then suddenly and with lasting amazement he discovered that life was not like that—that it was more complicated and subtle than Nature, more idiotic, incomprehensible and perverse. It threw things awry without purpose or natural law, wrecked, and did not renew, robbed, and did not repay. His way had been blocked, as if by logs piling terribly in a stream, and there had been nothing for it but to hack himself out.

Two years ago he had been just two years behind his plans. His savings were not yet quite full-grown, his wife was still to secure. Not but what things were more or less fixed between Agnes and himself, and had been, indeed, for long. It had been a kindly courting, too, with never a quarrel of any sort to break its charm, and scarcely a casual look or impatient word. Most certainly it had not resembled in any degree the cat-and-mouse exhibition presented by Marget and Bob. He had never imagined that they might slip apart until the thing was on the point of coming about, still less ever dreamed that they might do so with the end of the road actually in sight. Nevertheless, when the changes had begun with a rush, the first of them had announced itself just here. Suddenly she had turned from him, half hesitating, it was true, but turning away from him, all the same. She was not certain, she said, that she could marry him, after all, and it was better to think now than on the other side of the ring. She had no reason to give except that she wasn’t sure, and all his wrath and persuasion could not change her mind. He was free to leave her, she told him, if he thought it best, or welcome to wait for the puzzle to come right. He had chosen to wait, if the impossibility of doing anything else might be dignified by the name of choice. Sometimes it seemed to him that they had already waited too long, but he was unable to tear himself from his settled course. Months of bewildered argument and rage brought him no nearer the solution of the point. Perhaps, after all, they had not been suited, in spite of the pleasant years. Perhaps it was just that the sight of the end, which sent him pressing on, had startled her to a halt and a springing aside.

Thomas, for whom nothing had ever gone amiss, found it hard to believe that fate was really playing him false. His disgust, when the truth was finally forced upon him, was that of a man seeing for the first time the other side of the shield. The trouble and dread of his threatened loss had all the freshness of first pain and dread. It seemed to him that, if he lost Agnes, everything else in his scheme of life might possibly go as well; and while he was passing through this uncertain time, trying hard to regain his old security of belief, the trouble at home threatened afresh the ground beneath his feet.

He had been fond of his mother, and was shaken by her loss, and he was hit, as well, by his brother’s accident and death, yet neither calamity seemed for the moment to threaten either his future or his present way of life. Yet he must have known what would happen if his thoughts had not been entirely fixed elsewhere. Kit had muddled along for a while with the help of a hired man, and then one night he sent for his two remaining sons.

Standing there in the caressing sun, with achievement behind him and the crown of achievement before, Thomas looked back on the long walk in the rain, the dull sands and the grey and sodden marsh. Under the waning light and the veil of the wet they had looked all one, all an untouched waste, unclaimed of any but the sea. And to-night even the sea seemed to refuse a thing so desolate and bare, leaving it lying as if accursed between heaving water and the richer land. The younger brother, tramping the dyked road, had come upon Bob, slouching slowly ahead, a dreary figure still drearier than the day. The farm, when it stood up to them on the flat, looked lonely and helpless beyond words, a lost and futile thing of no account. They could have sworn that it was empty and that no one moved in the rooms, either human or ghost; that neither chair nor bed nor old press held a trace of souls that were gone. Only those who loved it would not mock at its name to-night. But as they came nearer by degrees, and its blank face took something of meaning and shape, they heard the thin voice of a violin.

They had stopped, he and Bob, by the meadow-gate, and listened awhile to the trembling sweetness charming the sad marsh. It had seemed the smallest thing in the world between the vastness of earth and sky, and perhaps also the bravest thing in the world as well. They had forgotten for a moment how the rain was beating over the fence. They had forgotten the untended fields and neglected home. They had even forgotten the probable errand on which they were bent, the oppression of which had clogged their feet as they came. They remembered together little things out of the past ... a wooden cradle with carved sides ... apples in the orchard ... long paddles on warm sands ... skating ... the red light of a hearth ... an aproned form with a face that was always looking out, set for them at every window, watching for them at each door. Every picture they saw was bathed in sun or fire, because the notes of the fiddle were touching it with gold. Thomas forgot while he listened that life was twisting itself into knots in his helpless hands. Out there, while the fiddle spoke, Agnes still loved him and had never looked aside. And perhaps Bob, too, found an old dream waiting on the desolate road.

The life of the house seemed to sink when the fiddle stopped, and as they came towards it across the field with heavy, squelching steps, it had the effect of retreating instead of drawing near. Even when the door opened at the click of the garden gate, showing their father’s figure in the square, the impression was that of a shadow opening in a shadow’s face. They had gone in silently, their mood gentled by that singing voice over the marsh, and the door closing behind them had shut out the rain but nothing else. The dusk and sadness claiming both land and sea were all through the lost farmhouse as well.

The three of them sat in the kitchen without fire or light, and the younger men said nothing while the old man put his case. They stared at him dumbly in the dusky place, seeing little through the gloom but the silver of hair and whisker round his head, and hearing his voice, when they looked away, as if it came from nobody at all, the vibrating old voice that had mostly been used for greeting and song and seemed to have borrowed a sweetness from the violin. There were only the three of them in the shadowed room, but it always seemed possible that there might be more. Sometimes, indeed, Thomas forgot that John was no longer there, and strained his eyes towards the corners to make sure. He had always been so still and rare of speech that death did not seem to have taken him away. Afterwards, it seemed to Thomas that many had sat in judgment on the case, for shame can multiply a face or two into a crowd. The wettest moon he had ever seen had suddenly appeared at a pane, like a stranger walking and staring round the house; and where the waves were breaking below the farmyard wall was the dismal wash of a rain-whipped, lifeless tide.

Old Christopher Sill had not beaten about the bush; indeed, he was disconcertingly direct. He told them quite simply that he had had notice to quit, making no attempt at either excuse or complaint. Both, of course, had guessed that the end was getting near, but it came as a shock when finally declared. The thing was common enough, indeed, in such lives as theirs, but it had not happened to the Sills for more than a hundred years. They had just gone on, father and son, until they chanced to come to Kit, and, if John had lived, he might very possibly have gone on, too. They had often wondered, Thomas and Bob, why he had never pressed his father to resign, but they guessed at the double reason now. John’s feet had long been set on a different road, and the money behind the farm had been dwindling every year. Money vanished with Kit as the notes of his fiddle fluted out to sea, and he troubled as little about it as about the music-gold that he could so easily recreate. The steady downgrade on which he had lived had not been able to push the lesson home. It had never seemed possible that he could leave the farm, and the bare formality of a notice to quit could not make it possible now. Surely there could be nothing more right than that a man should spend his last breath where he was born, and especially one of the rooted, marsh-bred Sills? He only asked for a year or two at the end of all that had gone; couldn’t Thomas and Bob see that he had that? A year or two, happen—and happen not so much. He wouldn’t be long at his dying, he felt sure.

“But ye’ve gitten your notice,” Bob observed, staring at the floor, and Thomas had looked out of the window at the sky. Neither needed telling what was coming next, and each was getting ready to meet it in his way.... All those generations of Sills had kept Kit on the place long after a less tie-bound landlord would have turned him out, and they gave him a further chance of rescue now. The Squire was willing to let the farm to one of the lads, provided he could show a reasonable guarantee. “Then happen you’d let me bide wi’ ye till I was finished,” Kit said at the end. “I partly what think it wouldn’t be so long.”

Even in the dusk, and doggedly turned away, they had been conscious of his eyes, moving enquiringly from face to face. Both of them, staring either at the sky or at the floor, saw equally the gleam of the white head turning and pausing and always turning again. In the house, in spite of its dumb ghosts, there was still the strange emptiness that stays so long after a death, as if out of a full cup some portion has been spilled. The silence enfolding the brothers seemed to beg to speak for itself, to deplore and refuse the harsh necessity of words. But still the old man’s eyes travelled and begged; and at last the slack-shouldered elder moved his head in a dreary shake.

“I’m no use to you that way, Father, I doubt,” Bob said. “What this place wants is brass, and I’ve none o’ that at my back. It takes me all my time and more to shift along as it is, as folks in plenty’ll tell you if you ax. It’s no manner o’ use my thinking o’ the farm.”

There was a second pause after that, and with it a sense in the air that the question had passed on, but nobody answered it except by that silence which resisted and refused. Then Bob spoke again, with a sort of half-shamed urging in his tone. “The lad here mun ha’ saved a bit by now. Happen Thomas could see to help you out.”

Undoubtedly Thomas had seemed the one to help—the youngest, the strongest, and the man who had the brass. It was well enough known that he had saved, had been careful and patient, anxious to lay by. They knew, too, that he meant to take a farm, and here was Beautiful End for the lifting of a hand. What could he possibly want that would be more likely than that? Bob, who could as well have taken the Hall itself as the little farm, envied his younger brother with all his heart. It was on Thomas the old man had relied, never on Bob; that was perfectly clear to the one who had not made out. The asking of them together had been only a form, a polite concession to conservative family dues. Thomas was the right and proper person to respond; to put it plainly, he was the only one who could. But the claim on his help had come at the worst possible time, and his natural kindly instinct smothered in revolt.

“Not but I doubt Marget would never ha’ come,” Bob was drawling on in his tired voice. “There’s over much work on a farm to suit her by a deal. I reckon she’d ha’ thought it a dreary spot an’ all. She’s one as likes seeing folks go by, and a sight o’ clattin’ an’ suchlike in the street. But the lad here isn’t bothered wi’ a missis just yet, nor like to be, as far as we know. There’s nowt to keep him from throwing up his job. He’s free to do as suits him, is Tom.”

And still Thomas did not speak, ashamed of himself and yet holding himself hard. The aversion with which he had set out to meet this probable demand arose in him again in a fierce flood and all but forced him to his feet. It was a wet night, or he might never have come at all, but on an evening like this Agnes would be sure to be fast at home. There would be no chance of meeting her about the fields or lanes. He could never have brought himself to come so far, while the hope of her face was behind each turn and hedge.... Yet here he was being asked to leave the spot for good—he, whose uncertainty could not stay one hour!

Suddenly he spoke, without preamble or excuse, long after the question seemed to have fainted away and died, ashamed. “I’m no use, neither,” he heard himself saying at last, his voice sounding dull and cold over the wrath and shame within. He was still staining at the sky while he spoke. Failure may look at the floor because of the burden on its back, but success, when it makes its refusal, must look up. It was then that the moon slid round the corner, and drew nearer, and looked in. He felt a spasm of rage against it, as at another spectator of the ignoble scene.

“Ay, but you’ve the brass saved all right!” Bob exclaimed, twisting his head to get a glimpse of his brother’s face. His discomfort at his own position in the affair seemed for the moment to be swallowed up in surprise. “Many’s the time you’ve tellt me on’t, I’ sure, and how you meant taking a farm afore so long. I’d ha’ thought this had fallen in for you just right.”