Part 6

It was on the same unpropitious evening that Silas’s only son returned to his home from Canada.

The train discharging him at Spalding, he fought his way against wind and rain, along the lonely road on the top of the dyke. He trudged with his hands in his pockets and a bundle on his back, the peculiar bleakness of the road returning familiarly to him after his absence of seven years. It was dark, but through occasional rifts the moon appeared, showing him the floods; they were familiar too,—their wide flat stretches lying on either side of the high dyke, and swept by the East Anglian wind straight from the North Sea,—he knew in his very bones the shape and sensation of the Fens; this was homecoming. There was a knowledge, a grasp of the size, shape, and colour—almost of taste and smell—a consciousness that marked off home from any other place.

When he reached the village, he felt in similar manner the presence of the factory on the one hand, and of the abbey on the other, with the village lying between them. His boots rang on the stone of the pavements. That was the school, and this the concert-room.... He reached the double cottage of his father and his uncle; he thought he would surprise his father and mother, so without knocking he turned the door-handle and went in.

Nan was still sitting by the table on which her zither lay; her hands were clasped and drooped listlessly. Her whole attitude betrayed her dejection. Morgan stood by the range talking. They were alone, and young Dene recoiled, thinking he had broken in upon strangers, though the smile was still broadly upon his face, with which he had prepared to greet his parents’ surprise.

“I’ve made a mistake,” he muttered, “this used to be Silas Dene’s cottage ... my name’s Martin Dene.”

He was a bronzed young man, with thick black hair, a Roman nose, and a fine curved mouth; a proud face, like the face upon a coin.

“Can you tell me where my father lives now?” he added. He looked at them frankly; he took them for a young married couple.

“Why, Martin!” cried Nan, recognising him.

“Why, it’s Nancy Holden,” he said almost at the same moment. They greeted one another gladly. “You’re married? living here?” he asked, with a glance at Morgan.

“Married to your uncle Gregory....”

“No! He could be your father!” exclaimed young Dene naïvely, and again he glanced at Morgan.

“Oh, no,” said Nan, flushing, and she hurried on with an explanation, “Your father lives here still, but he went out a little time back; he said he was going to the abbey. He’ll be in presently. Sit down; I’ll get you a cup of tea.”

“But where’s mother?” asked Martin Dene, and in his impulsive, attractive manner he strode across the room, flung open the door that led to the staircase, and shouted “Mother!”

II

“What’s that?” cried Silas, startling them all.

They had not heard him come in. He stood on the threshold, his hand outstretched, the likeness between himself and his son strongly apparent. “What’s that?” he repeated; “who’s that, calling ‘Mother’ here?”

“Silas, it’s Martin come home,” said Nan, who was trembling and who had gone, quite unwittingly, closer to Morgan.

“Martin? it’s suited him to come back, after seven years?” Silas uttered a derisive “Ho!” He added, “It’s too late, my boy, to come here calling ‘Mother.’ That’s rich, that is—eh, Nan?”

“What d’you mean?” said Martin Dene, swinging round.

“Your mother’s dead, that’s what I mean.”

“Dead?”

“Yes, dead three months ago.”

“Dead! Mother dead? why? how?”

“Tell him, Nan.”

“Look here,” said Morgan, speaking for the first time, “I’m sorry you’ve got to learn this news....”

“Oh, smooth it over! water it down! I didn’t know you were there, Linnet,” interrupted Silas. “I’ll tell him myself. Your mother was killed in an accident—picked up unrecognisable—run over by a train—now you know. Got anything to say?”

“My God!” said young Dene, covering his face. Nan went up to him and began to whisper to him; he heard her half through with horribly staring gaze, but then, disregarding her, he cried in a hoarse voice to his father, “Accident be damned! you drove her to it. I know your ways—they drove me away to Canada, and Elsie to London—I’ve seen her there—and they drove mother to _that_—come, own up! it was suicide, wasn’t it?” He made a movement towards his father, but Nan clung to his arm.

“No, I swear it wasn’t,” replied Silas, full of a grim amusement at his suggestion.

“Well, how did it happen, then? What’s your account of what happened? Did any one see?”

As neither of the others answered, Morgan said, “Nobody saw it happen.”

Martin leapt on to that. “So it was never explained?”

“No,” said Morgan, “the coroner’s inquest gave Accidental Death.” Martin laughed.

“You’re going now, I suppose?” said Silas, “Morgan’s answered you, and his answer can hardly satisfy you. Suspicion’s a sleepless guest in the mind.”

“You’re alone now, father?” asked the son. His tone altered as a sort of pity and repentance overcame him, and as he remembered his father’s blindness. “Perhaps I spoke too hasty, father; see here, I’ll stop on with you if you like.”

“I don’t like; you can get out,” said Silas. Morgan and Nan gave an exclamation.

“I’ll stop to-night; we’re not calm, either of us.”

“I don’t remember you calm, somehow?” Silas sneered. Martin’s temper, which he had controlled, rose again.

“I’ll get out, then,” he said, moving towards the door. Nan, through her terror, thought him very handsome,—bronze and black, his bony cheeks still glistening from the rain.

“You needn’t bother to come back, after another seven years.”

“Don’t you worry, father; I won’t come back.”

“Martin!” cried Nan. This flare of quarrel between father and son troubled her greatly; it was a disturbance of harmony, and she longed for the re-establishment of peace, at the same time dreading further questionings, further possible accusations; Martin would probe and examine, Silas might lose his head,—Nan, knowing the truth, lived in the perpetual terror of a frenzied outburst of candour on Silas’s part.... He was, she knew, quite capable of such an outburst. Life, and the harmony of life, would be less endangered with Martin out of the way. But this was an unkind greeting for Martin at his home—poor Martin! after seven years’ absence and a trudge in the rain, to find his mother dead and his father ferocious!—Nan’s fund of pity overflowed, and she tried to compromise: “Martin! you can’t walk back to Spalding through this awful night; stop till to-morrow with Gregory, and me.”

“Not he!” said Silas, unexpectedly, and as though he spoke with pride.

“You’re right, father,—though I thank you, Nan; you mean it kindly.”

“They mean everything kindly, Martin,” said Silas, indicating the other two. He continued to speak with the same curious understanding towards his son. Nan and Morgan, separately, stood repudiated and estranged.

Martin Dene nodded, his eyes meditatively upon them.

“Won’t you stop, Martin?” urged Nan’s timid voice.

“I’ve said an unforgivable thing to father,” he said, turning to her, in patient explanation.

“But you didn’t think it, Martin; tell your father you didn’t think it.”

“I did think it; I still think it; father knows that. I shall always think it. That’s why I can’t stop. So long,” he said, shouldering his bundle; he nodded to them again and went out.

III

“Are you satisfied now, Silas, are you satisfied?” Silas kept mumbling to himself later as with haste he tore his clothes off in the dark.

He would tell Lady Malleson—tell her that he had wantonly thrown out his own son. What would she think of that? Once she had said he was terrible; he hoped that she would say it again. The words had crowned him with a rare reward. Surely he had earned their repetition?

He scrambled into his bed; lay there with his muscles jerking. He tautened them, trying to keep them still, but could not. Martin, yes; he had thrown out Martin. That was a resolute thing to do. It was all of a piece with what had gone before; Hannah had ministered to his comfort; in a rough and ready way, it was true, often more rough than ready; but still she had ministered; and Hannah, along with his personal comfort and convenience, had been sacrificed when necessity dictated. (If he chose to consider in the light of a necessity the suspicion of an outrage upon his own sensitive dignity which another man might have dismissed as negligible, even inevitable, that was his own business; nobody else’s.) Hannah had gone. Now Hannah’s son, for a quick, intuitive suspicion of his father, had gone too—thrown out to founder, possibly, though the sequel was now no concern of Silas’s; Martin was proud, Martin would not return, least of all to appeal for help. Lying awake in the night that to him was no more deeply night than midday, Silas fought his regret for Martin. Martin had come, his memory rich with what garnered tales of peril? he had led a hunter’s life among red men, bony, painted, feathered men; he had tracked wounded beasts, either great-horned or soft-footed; he had dared the great solitudes, blazed his way through forests, and taken his chance of the rapids; with all this, Martin, a fine young man, would have beguiled his father’s ears and opened new horizons to his insatiable fancy. Bringing all this with him, like a pedlar’s pack, Martin had tramped along the dyke from Spalding; no doubt with a certain pitiful eagerness he made his way home from the incredible distance of that rough primitive world. Tears forced themselves out from Silas’s sightless eyes. He had never wept for Hannah, he had hated Hannah, even when through her death she became, poor woman, an object of satisfaction to his insecure vanity; an object, too, of allurement to his prowling cowardice. But for Martin he wept, for Martin and all that Martin stood for. Then envy shook him, that Martin, free, young, keen-sighted, and, above all, fearless,—fearlessness was the only true freedom,—should be returning to that worthy life, in more ways than one a hunter of big game. Big game! to the simple, eager nature all life was big game. The actual quarry; the stake in a hazardous enterprise; the test of endurance; or the interlude of women,—all that was big game; a big, audacious, masculine game. The hint, the mere passing suggestion, of enterprise acted as a sufficient stimulant, under which his imagination flamed at once as a torch, widening a bright, lit space in the darkness, populating it with figures full of splendour, heroically proportioned. He reached out to another and more ardent life, away from the security in which he so carefully preserved himself. He was pierced through by the sheer valour of man, as a shaft of light might on a sudden have pierced his darkness. He beheld man, small, imperfect, but dauntless; sustained by a spirit of extraordinary intrepidity, intent upon the double mastery of his planet and of his own soul; man, stern against his own weakness, checked here and thwarted there by the inner treachery of his own heart, foiled in his ambitions, cast down from such summits as he had attained, but ever fighting forward in the pursuit of an end perhaps undistinguishable, to which the path of conquest, so difficult, so jeopardous, was in itself a measure of recompense. So he was blind, as blind as Silas himself; the more honourable because, despite his blindness, he still wrought undeterred.

How various were his pursuits, his methods of conquest! to maintain and advance himself in the supreme captaincy; so diverse the images of vigour which the labourer in his activity was too simple to suspect. There were men who wrested from the earth the last guarded secrets, pitting their limbs against forest, mountain, ice, or waterless plain; only their soft limbs against the giant sentries of unhandseled nature; those who scored the monotonous sea with the rich and coloured roads of commerce, heaping in the harbours of the world the strangeness of cargoes, always strange because always exotic; those who tilled the responsive soil; the hunters, the fighters, and the princes; others who, living their true life, sequestered and apart by reason of their austere calling, through a patience so immense that the profound darkness of the mysteries with which it dealt was punctuated by reward of fresh light only here and there along the wide-spaced generations, gained fragment by fragment the knowledge of the ordering of distant worlds; the women who bore the burden of fresh lives,—he could feel himself alien to none of these, neither to the law-givers nor the law-breakers; the acquiescent nor the rebellious; no, nor the spare anchorite who aspired through lonely frugality and penance towards the same summit of domination; he stretched out his hand, alike to king and prostitute, and with the falling strove still to uplift the tattered standard, and with the multitude of the triumphant marched upon the road of pride. All this he saw with a clarity, a wholeness that was in the nature of actual beholding far more than of the blurred confusion of a vision. He had his landscape under sharp sunlight, precision of detail allying itself with breadth of horizon. He saw, too, skulking in and out amongst the pageantry rich with legend that went its way under windy banners, he saw dark, puny, ignoble figures; not one of them bore the tool of an honest craft, but small forked tongues darted between their lips; and in his abasement he included himself in their number, and questioned whether the rest of them, damned spirits, worshipped in secret, as he did, the magnificence they must envenom because they could not share?

IV

Then with a rush of incredulous disgust the constituents of his own existence stood out in the same white light; confused, craven, petty; a tangle that he despised and loathed with a weak fury, the more that he could not extricate himself. Envy without emulation, spite without hatred, violence without strength! Then the personages: Hambley, the lick-spittle go-between; Christine Malleson, whose pretended mental companionship with him disguised the claw of cruelty; inanimate objects, the floods, the gale; Hannah, a ghost now, not a personage, a ghost that gave him no rest, try as he would to weld the whole incident to his own uses, to the furtherance of his own self-confidence; Martin, sacrificed for the same purpose; Nan, the object of an as yet ill-defined, floating malevolence that crouched ready for a spring on to the back of the first poor pretext; all the men, his fellows, in whom he amused himself by fostering dissatisfaction; and, lastly, he found that he must include an animal in this lamentable population,—the donkey on the green, that, no less than the others, had, that evening, fallen a victim to his need for mischief; the coarse pelt was still vivid under his fingers, as he had slid his hand down the leg, till he came to the fetlock, and he remembered now the sharp puncture of the knife into the sinew, and the animal’s start of pain—to this, to this had he sunk! when he crept out from the abbey, his soul seething with blasphemy, and his fingers closing over the penknife in his pocket! A small, mad deed,—all that his soul in travail could bring forth. In this deed, tinily terrible, had his exaltation culminated; the exaltation engendered by storm, by the disaster on the dyke, by the organ swelling in the ruined abbey, by the suggestion of the Black Mass.

He rolled from side to side in his bed, tearing at the blankets with his teeth.

He directed his despair and fury then against Christine Malleson, making her responsible for this ruthless savagery which always possessed him, without system or goal beyond a need to damage everything that was happy, prosperous, and entire. True, she was partly responsible; she was responsible for the pranks of experiment that she played upon him, stirring and poking his mind, his ambitions, into a blaze, and the chill “Don’t forget yourself,” with which she quenched the flame. He raged against Christine: she had him at a disadvantage; he must strive always to compete with her serenity of class; she drew him out from his own class, aroused his angry socialism, laughed at the gaps in his knowledge, gave him glimpses of a life whose significance and habit he could never encompass, but which he burnt with an envious hatred to destroy; then she would laugh at him again,—she, who had come down from her heights to walk curiously in his valleys,—she would laugh, and he would fling away into fresh magniloquence, seeking to impress her; and when the time came for him to take his leave, the excitable irritation provoked by her remained still unappeased, consuming his vitals. But this he believed she did not suspect. So far as he knew, he had deceived her; he had passed off upon her the old fraud of making her believe him strong when he was, in reality, the bewildered, unhappy prey of his own weakness. The thought that he had so deceived her gave him a little satisfaction. He would tell her about Martin; she would catch her breath. He would not tell her about the donkey. And he swayed again from the paltry tangle of his own life to the bright heroic visions that alone contented him, weeping with an incurable sorrow, but whether for Martin or the vague grandeur of the unattainable, he could not well have said.

VIII

I

If the floods would but retreat! If the winter would but dissolve and allow spring to break over the land! Then the rich black loam of the fields would appear in the place of the water,—that flat and cruel, unprofitable water,—and the country under the blush of green would cease to be so mournful, rayless, and forbidding. The floods were so dead; dead brown, dead level; there was no life in them, except sometimes under the red sun, a fierce, angry sort of life, and sometimes when the wind beat them; but now gray rainy day succeeded gray rainy day, mild indeed, but not spring, not the spring of clear sunlit showers and rainbows! It would be a dark, fertile country that came to light, curiously un-English in its effect of unboundaried acreage, wide ditches marking off the fields in the place of hedges. Ditches and dykes would remain as the scar and testimony of the floods, the dykes that like some Roman aqueduct stretched away into the flat and misty distances.

Yearly Nan lived through the winter in the hope of such a spring, and almost yearly it failed her. She was drawn towards spring with an instinct of unsatisfied youth. It appeared to her like a vista cut in the darkness of the life she led between Silas and Gregory.

The population of her world was so restricted; in very early days she had been sharply taught that Gregory would neither welcome his wife’s friends at his fireside, nor allow her to go to theirs. She had never forgotten the written message he had left for her on the table in the first week of their marriage, having found her laughing in the kitchen with another girl: “No _prying eyes_ here, missis.” The Denes, she learnt, were as sensitive as they were savage and solitary, and, so strong was the legend that they had created around themselves, that she had found herself quickly alienated from the rest of the village and definitely regarded as of the company inhabiting the lonely cottage. Silas, Gregory, Linnet Morgan, Donnithorne sometimes, Mr. Calthorpe. That was all. The two dominating figures were Silas and Gregory; she was more frightened of Silas than of Gregory, because of her secret knowledge, but Gregory was like a stranger to her; she was submissive to him but felt no nearness, no intimacy; he was more closely allied to Silas than to her. Of Linnet Morgan she thought with shy and oddly pleasurable evasion. Of Calthorpe, with confidence; she liked his well-brushed hair, precisely parted down one side, and the close pointed beard that gave him a certain robust dignity and rather the appearance of a sailor; thinking of Calthorpe was like leaning up against a solid and stable building. He looked at her with great kindliness now, when she talked to him; she had always wanted somebody to look at her like that. It awoke, too, in her a certain pride: she had trained this big man in the part she wanted him to play; she, so small, had taught him, so large, a trick, and whenever she brought him her confidences, and he responded with that look so full of kindliness, he was doing the trick she had trained him, against his will, to do. This gave her a proprietary sense in him. She found him very docile. He, on his part, loved her for her little domineering manner.

It was only when she returned to Silas and Gregory that she was made to realise her own futility. Against the weak pushing of her hands they remained immovable....

Then she fell sometimes into despair, and her courage crumpled. For days she would be silent, then with an effort she would bring out her zither and sing, until before their contempt her voice would trail away again miserably into silence.

She longed for the retreat of the floods and the end of the winter, because now the country and the year seemed to be conspiring with Silas and Gregory.

II

Once she tried to bring about a complete revolution in all their lives; only once. She was really half-crazy with despair when she made the attempt; nothing else could have given her the courage. As it was, she was intimidated by her own audacity, for by nature she accepted circumstances without questioning. Inaugurations terrified her; yet here was she, Nan, inaugurating.

She sat at the table, under the lamp, Silas and Gregory on either side of her, the remains of supper before them. She sat twisting her hands; swallowing hard.

She began, “Shall we be here always?” then stopped, then plunged on again, “living always here, with the floods every winter, all the winter through? Why shouldn’t we go away, somewhere else, if we choose? Why shouldn’t we?” she cried suddenly, in a frightened voice, as nobody answered.

She looked at Silas and Gregory; Silas was smiling, and Gregory was smiling too, in a twisty, derisive way, as though he knew what she had been talking about. Yet he couldn’t know. Silas had a look of surprise and amusement; grateful surprise, as though she had provided him with an unexpected amusement in an hour of boredom.

“Go on!” he said to her.

At that she felt all her source of boldness, of inventiveness, dried up within her. What was the good of this struggle for escape when she was hemmed in, not only by the floods and the dykes, but by those two immovable men who owned her? But her terror urged against her hopelessness; and was the stronger.

“Can you _like_ living here?” she appealed to Silas, trying to touch him upon his own inclinations.

“As well here as anywhere else,” he answered. “I work here.”

She knew the bitterness that edged his voice whenever he mentioned his work.

“You tie up parcels in a packing-shed,” she said, “always the same,—work that a half-wit could do. Yes, a poor wanting creature could do your work. Why don’t you bestir yourself? Why don’t you come away?” She talked so, knowing that she strained to pull a weight that lay solid against her small strength.

If only Silas or Gregory would get up, she thought that with that insignificant display of mobility her hope would revive; but they sat on either side of her, cast in bronze. If they were doomed men, then they made no effort to escape their doom. Too proud, perhaps. They sat and waited. They seemed too indifferent to care.

“Nobody’s put you in prison into Abbot’s Etchery,” she murmured.