Beautiful end

by Constance Holme

I

She put her hand to the curtain for the last time and drew back. Very reluctantly she admitted to herself that now there was nothing left to do. Here was the room really finished at last, and none of her wistful glances from side to side could find her a fresh task. She had lingered over it as long as she possibly could, but now the pleasant work had really come to an end. Everything had to come to an end so that other things might begin, but the hours of toil had been so sweet that she hated to let them go. The room seemed full of the tunes she had sung as she painted and scrubbed, full of plans and pleased thoughts and thrills of housewifely pride. It stood, of course, for so very much more than just a simply-furnished chamber in a simple house. It stood, for instance, for the end of a self-reproach marring a happiness otherwise complete. It meant the comforting of a hurt which still troubled her kind soul, however unwillingly it had been wrought. It meant return and renewal on better lines, the rebuilding of ancient things with better hands....

In the upstairs room of the marsh farmhouse there was a great pleasantness and peace. The early evening sun drove straight towards it from the west, and through its deep-set eyes sent shining ladders all across the floor. Only the corners of the room stayed dim and aloof.

Now that all was done, and so thoroughly done, she was puzzled to find herself depressed. Perhaps it was nothing more than the nervous doubt which foreruns every great moment just at the last. Perhaps it was just the regret that lies like a sigh under the chant of pride in a finished task. Certainly, nobody else would ever see the room exactly as it looked to herself. Nobody would see, as she could see, not only the finished whole, but the work and the joy that had made it what it was. That meant, of course, that when she passed out for the last time, the room’s own perfect moment would pass as well. Therefore she lingered and looked, hoping for the chance of a further touch, but however she looked, she could think of nothing else.

Even after she had ceased to wonder she could not tear herself away. The low room was not only a room, such as anybody might prepare for a guest; it was a refuge, a place for himself that she had made for a stray. She had stained the floor with her own hands, and washed the knitted quilt on the bed. She had made the white valances with their borders of knitted lace, the cloth rug by the bedside, the white window-curtains with their pleated frills. She had distempered the white walls and polished the chest of drawers so that the brass-bound Bible on its top was reflected deeply as in a pool. All the paint was white; perhaps she was proudest of the paint. The new bedstead was iron, with brass knobs crowning its slender posts. In a crinkly vase on one sill was a posy of coloured flowers.... Surely the old man would be able to rest here?

The windows of the room were so full of sun that they looked like translucent plates of beaten gold. Beyond them, the scene was so bright that it hurt the eye—the river shining and glinting close below the farm, the sands all sparkling as if they were sown with quartz, and the houses across the bay snow-white against the hill. The tide was dead out—at the end of the world it seemed; yet never at any time was it very far. Always, when you had forgotten it, it came stealing back, a thief in the night, a trespasser by day. Even now she had not grown used to the tides, though she did not look out of the windows all the time, as she had done when she first arrived on the marsh. But he, when he came, would look out of the windows all day long.... She stood in the long rays, staring round the room, her blue eyes frowning a little as she looked. Her young, firm figure was full of energy and strength. Her dark hair was ruffled and her cheek flushed with the final effort that was actually the last.

Very soon now the old man would be here, and the room that had once been his for so long would be his again. He would find things a good deal changed, it was true, but how much for the better, after all! No doubt the place had been well enough once, years and years ago, perhaps, when he was first wed, but it had been only a poor spot later on. It had had a neglected look from the outside, and the fields and hedges seemed to ask for a hand. At the last, of course, it had been a desolate place, indeed.... By accident, as it happened, she had seen the room before he left, and the desolation of it still haunted her mind. The old wooden bedstead had been rickety all through, and there was never a mat on the bare, unvarnished boards. In the quilt grown thin as a rag there was a jagged tear, and in each of the ceiling-corners a spider had spun a web. The once blue-washed walls had faded a dirty grey, and the plaster was crumbling away where the damp had driven in. The windows had broken hasps, and one had a broken pane; all dim they were, mysterious with crusted salt ... and by the bed had stood a pair of old woman’s shoes. She remembered the shoes because they had been his wife’s. It was weeks, she remembered—months—after she was dead.

A dismal room indeed it had seemed to the girl, a forlorn place thoroughly in tune with a forlorn human old age. She remembered how she laid hands on it, then as now, mending the quilt and fetching the spiders from their homes, spending a lusty scrubbing on the floor. Even then she had had a vision of what she would some day make of the place, plotting and planning and laughing as she toiled. She had never put her head inside that room, it seemed, but some web of contrival at once began to spin. Of course it was not exactly as she had planned, because every creation meddles with the tools, but it was near enough to satisfy her, nevertheless. It was inevitable somehow ... intended ... definitely right. It seemed inevitable, too, that she herself should be here, although she had questioned and delayed her fate so long. She felt sure, when she looked back, that she had known it to be inevitable all the time; that just the same personal interest had gone to that far-away putting of things to rights. But she had not been ready for Thomas, just then, and the future had had to take care of itself. Thomas’s father, however, had not been able to care for himself. In the midst of her indecision he had had to quit. The trouble had gone further than just an unswept room....

And yet, in spite of the intervening break, her fate and the room’s fate had fulfilled themselves in time. She had come in the end to the place ordained, just as the changes she had meant for the room had come about. Now it was all scoured clean, painted and stained, with a new iron bed that had full command of its legs, and four little knobs like four little globes of gold. Her second scrubbing had been so thorough that it almost seemed as if there was nothing of the old room left. Even the dust and dimness had had a character of their own, and both of them had been swept away. Even the windows looked a different shape now they were frames for those shining plaques of gold. They were like young eyes now, shining and clear, where before they were ancient and blurred with tears ... eyes with a whole world behind them under the sky, instead of blankness staring at nothing without sight.

Yet something lingered that belonged to the old room, something that was perhaps nothing more than a question in the air. That was the reason, perhaps, why she hesitated to call her work complete, since the room seemed to cry upon her for something else. It seemed to be waiting for something to come back; she wondered vaguely if it was the old woman’s shoes. She would have brought them back right willingly if she could, but she had never seen or heard of them since that day. Probably they had gone at the sale, or simply been lost or burnt or thrown away. It was out of the question, anyhow, to think of finding them now. If the room was waiting for that, it would have to do without.

She felt sure that, even in its best days, the room had never looked so fine, even in those far-off days when the house had freshened itself for another bride. There might have been curtains, perhaps—perhaps not upstairs—but almost certainly there had been no blinds. Little need for them, indeed, with windows facing the lone sands, and a white-sailed yacht at the flood the only passer-by. And she was certain that, not for years, if ever before, had roses been set upon the sill.

There was no doubt, however, that rooms, like folks, were growing smarter with the times. Old as he was, the old man would know that, and would feel, if only unconsciously, the finer touch. He would be proud of a son’s wife who had such ways; straight from his present home, indeed, how could he be anything but proud? And progress and new paint had not harried the old-time peace of the room, nor could she herself have done it real harm. The tradition behind her was too pure for that, the abiding spirit of the house too strong.

Rousing herself, she crossed the rays towards the door, but stopped on her way to run her hand along the quilt. The limbs that would lie under it would be snug enough, she thought, the head on the pillow would surely lie still. Stooping, she came on something soft to her foot, and started hastily aside. It was almost as if she had trodden and crushed the worn, old shoes.... But it was only the new cloth rug beside the bed.

Out on the landing she paused again, feeling the evening stillness warm through all the house. There were empty rooms right and left of her, empty, yet full of secrets, as empty rooms always are. When other things went out of the rooms, they filled them for themselves. Yet, in spite of their secrets, they seemed lonely sometimes, consciously waiting, like the room she had left; but to-night they were only full of the sunny peace. She looked into them, one after the other, and shut them up again, and then out in the passage stood gazing at the doors. It was strange to live in a house with so many empty rooms. It was like living with people who never spoke, but were busily thinking all the time. A house with empty rooms could never be at its best. Something might come out of that brooding silence, such things as come from a mind for ever feeding on itself. She was sure that, when the winter nights came, she would start thinking of those empty rooms upstairs, hear voices, perhaps, and steps ... if she left them too long to think things by themselves. She would put apples in one, she determined, when the fruit was ripe; cheeses in another, when she started making cheese. There would be other things after a while to fill the rest—other things, other people, other thoughts—so that the rooms would not have time to grow lonely and queer. And at least one of them would have finished with being lonely by to-night. She found herself turning again to the room where her work was done, and only stopped herself at the handle of the door. Then she heard her husband moving in the kitchen below, and her dreamy mood fell from her and she ran down. There was carpet under her feet, she thought, as she ran. How many years since the old man had seen new carpet on those stairs?

Thomas had been busy redding himself up, and turned towards her a tanned but shining face. He was still in his working clothes, but he had shaved, and slipped his jacket over his rolled-up sleeves. There was health in the clean lines of his jaw and the warm colours of his skin, and kindness and honesty in his tranquil eyes. Only his mouth, firmly-cut and set, showed that he could be obstinate if driven too far. This was a man who saw one road at a time, and when once he was set on it could not turn aside. Agnes had known that face when it was dogged and harsh, heard passion and bitterness in the slow, deep voice, seen tortured and angry strength in the broad, slow form. But that was long ago, of course, before she had come to her senses and seen clear. To-night, Thomas’s face shone as much with pleasure as with soap. Everything was an occasion for his smile, the slowly-broadening smile which thought before it came. He smiled as he turned instinctively towards the stair. He had not yet ceased to watch for her coming in. Often and often he had seen her in his mind before she was really there in front of his eyes. Now, as he watched, he saw her soft, blue gown paint itself clear on the dusk beyond the door.

The sun was in the kitchen, too, but in far greater power, because of the wider windows and the open porch, that was like some arching cave with a golden tide at the flood. Almost everything in the kitchen was new, and everything was scrubbed and polished as it had been upstairs. The dresser was as white as when the timber first yielded to the saw. The plates in the pot-rail were so many circular mirrors in the sun. And everything spoke of new housekeeping and newly-wedded pride. The legs of the table were shapely and smooth, unworn by the marks of large or little boots, unscarred by the clawings of generations of cats. There was an arm-chair to the side of the flashing fender and the modern range, an expensive-looking chair, with its castors shining and whole, its covers unfaded and its padding plump. The grandfather’s clock had not yet settled to his corner place. Behind the warming-pan with its flat gold face, there was never a mark on the pale-coloured wall.

Out in the little garden the box hedges and borders looked almost black, making the roses between them a warmer, deeper red, and whitening the white rose over the cavern that was the porch. Beside the parlour window a tall yew stood up, clipped like Cleopatra’s needle and as straight. The little garden had peculiarly the air of refuge and close, set as it was between the desolation of the sands and the lesser and different desolation of the marsh. The marsh was lonely, of course, but Nature was always there, growing her grass and plants and flowers, her acorns and cones fashioning into trees, her thorn hedges throwing up every year their close and towering screens; and, after Nature, man, with his cattle and thin ploughs, his barns and shippons, his clustered chimney-stacks. But out on the sand there were only sand and lost shells, and the goalless footprints of flown birds. It was enemy ground, where neither blown seed nor human hearth might take hold. The marsh had a peace of its own as well as its fear; but out on the sands there was only fear.

One window in the kitchen pretended to itself that there was neither sand nor fear. It looked across the square fields to the higher land behind the marsh, over tall hedges thick with rose to sloping meadowland and woods. Up in the sky was a climbing, high-hung road, and below it a hidden village with a seeking spire. On the marsh between the straight hedges all the roads ran straight.... It was to this window that Agnes crossed to look out.

“Hadn’t you best be getting off?” she enquired, pressing her face against the pane. “It’ll never do to be hanging about and miss your time. He’ll likely think he’s not wanted if you’re a bit behind.”

“Nay, there’s no call to be off yet,” Thomas replied tranquilly, without offering to move. “We’ll catch a sight on ’em on t’road, long afore they’re here.” He settled his jacket leisurely, looking at himself in the little kitchen glass, mottled and cracked in its worn mahogany frame. It looked old and strange on the new face of the wall—almost the only thing in the kitchen that wasn’t new. “’Twas half-past six, wasn’t it, they said? It wants a bit to that yet.”

“What was it you went and settled wi’ Bob, after all?”

“I was to meet ’em at meader gate so as to give the old man an arm. It’s over rough riding up for him, I doubt. He’ll be best on his feet by a deal.”

“Ay, old bones can’t abide being rumbled about. I shouldn’t wonder but he’s a bit shaky after his ride, so you mun be sure to be there on the tick.... Eh, well, we’ll have him as right as a bobbin afore so long!”

“It’ll take a while, will that!” Thomas frowned. Staring, he saw the face in the glass grow older and rather grim. “He’s been going downhill sharp, lately, has the old chap. Last time I was at the cottage he give me a fair fright. It was a bad job his having to gang to Marget an’ Bob.”

He could see his wife through the glass beyond himself, and the face that she turned to him was clouded, too.

“Nay, what...” she began quickly, her voice troubled and sore. “That’s by with, surely? You promised you’d let it bide.”

Their eyes met in the glass, and he threw her a repentant nod. “Ay, that’s so, and I mean to hold by it an’ all.” He drew a long breath, squaring his shoulders as if to an enemy threatening his peace. For a long moment he went on staring thoughtfully at himself, and when he spoke again it was with an obvious attempt at ease. “I reckon I don’t favour the old dad much in the face; nay, nor Bob, neither, for the matter o’ that.”

“You don’t take after him no way,” Agnes answered, turning back. She gave a little sigh of relief as she stared again at the marsh. “Folk’d be hard put to it to tell you’re the same breed. He’s the light sort, for one thing, and you’re that dark. He’s fond of music and terble forgetful-like, and you’re that set on your job, and wi’ no more tune than an old bull.”

Thomas laughed his good-tempered laugh.

“I’m not much in the singing line, I doubt, but I’m real fond o’ music, all the same. He was for ever trying to learn me the fiddle, but it wasn’t no use. All the music I’ve gitten is in my heels.”

“Ay, well, you’re a bonny dancer—I’ll give you that,” she agreed. “So was Bob, poor lad, afore he got wed, but he’s not much to crack on, nowadays, I doubt. All the spring’ll be out on him, by now. He’s been plagued and bothered over long.”

“A bad missis’ll do for a man quicker than a green Christmas,” Thomas said. “There’s nobbut once he’ll have rued, I reckon, and that’s all the time. He’d plenty o’ warning an’ all, if he’d nobbut took it, the daft fool! I never see such a time as she give him when they were courting—Marget an’ Bob. Same as cat and mouse it were, only worse, and yet he couldn’t frame to bide away. Come to that, he’d say we were a while about it, ourselves....”

He saw her stiffen again as he said that, but this time she did not turn. Only the back of her smooth head was visible in the glass. “Ay, well, I’m one as looks afore they leap,” she answered shortly, on a sharp note.... “Hadn’t you best be thinking o’ making a move?”

“It’s over soon, I tell ye ... there’s no sign o’ them yet.” Suddenly he left the glass and came over to her side, leaning his arms along the window-frame. All the windows in the kitchen were new, their sashes gleaming with fresh paint, broad windows that filled the place with pictures and the sun. “Seems like it couldn’t be true,” he went on, looking down at her cheek where it touched the stuff of his sleeve—“you an’ me wed and at the farm, and the old dad coming back, after all. Seems like I’m only dreaming it’s come true.... I doubt he’ll want seeing to a bit, at first. He’s not as young as he was, and he’s terble down. You an’ me we mun do for him all we can.”

“We’ll see to him, don’t you fret!” Agnes said cheerfully, in her firm tones. “We’ll have him so he won’t know himself afore long, wi’ nowt to cross him and the best to eat. It’s queer if we can’t shape better than Marget at the job. We ought to be shammed on ourselves if we can’t, that’s all!”

As if bent upon showing her willingness to begin, she left him to pick up the white cloth ready spread for a meal, and shook it on again with a hearty slap. Thomas, searching the roads of the marsh in her place, heard her busy behind him among the pots, her free step over the flags full of energy and goodwill. The clean air of the kitchen thrilled with kindly expectation and innocent pride. The sun and the cheerful room seemed the best setting in the world for the little scene of welcome that they had planned. Even the weather had kept the right sort of day for the old man’s coming home. Then it was evening, early evening, when all should go home by rights to rest and good food and cheerful voices and open doors—doors, flooded with sun which you took with you when you went in, yet left as much as they wanted for those outside; food, such as was being laid on the table behind; and a voice like his wife’s as she murmured over her job. “Father’ll think they forks right smart,” he heard her say; and, “It’s the bonniest china, I’m sure, I’ve seen for a while!” Between the setting of every two or three pots she asked for news of the trap.... “Likely they’ll have got off afore their time.”

“Nay, Marget’ll watch out for that!” Thomas scoffed. “It’s a deal more like to be the other way about. She was fair wild when she heard he meant coming to us, though I don’t see how she could ha’ looked for owt else. What, he was born here, to start wi’, and never stirred off the spot; and then, when his father give up, he took hold for himself. I’m sure it’s like enough he should want to come back.”

“He’s bound to hanker to be back on the marsh,” she agreed, admiring the plated tea-pot with an absent air.... “It was real kind of Aunt Martha Bainbridge to give us yon....”

“Ay, he’s hankered right enough!” Thomas said, with so much bitterness in his voice that it startled even himself. Agnes came out of her meditation with a jerk, and the little cloud settled again on her face. She looked anxiously at her husband’s back, which seemed to have taken on the sudden harshness of his mood. “’Tisn’t as if Marget had wanted him, neither,” he went on, in a sort of burst. “She’s no call to make a to-do because she’s going to be quit of him at last. She took him because she couldn’t for shame do owt else, and a bonny time he’s had wi’ her and her ways! What, it’s been the talk o’ the country-side, the life she’s led the poor old chap! Coming away from her’ll be like coming out o’ hell. Ay, she’s been bad to him, has Marget—she has that! She never let him play his fiddle or owt, and give him the back of her tongue from morn to night. Such a rare hand as he used to be wi’ the fiddle an’ all! There’s folks still ax after Fiddlin’ Kit.”

“Ay, well, poor old body, he’ll get nobody’s tongue here; and he can have his precious fiddle to bed and board. He can play till all’s black if he likes, and owt he likes—fiddle or toothcomb or big brass pan!”

“That’s right,” Thomas nodded. “That’s a good lass,” but she turned away almost brusquely and without a smile. “We mun do our best for the old folks, I’m sure,” she went on. “One o’ these days we’ll want seeing to ourselves.” She began to move about the table again, but with downcast eyes. “I’m rarely glad to have him, and that’s the truth.”

“Ay, an’ he’s suited as sheep in a turmut-field to come! Fair blubbered he did, the poor old chap, when it was fixed. I reckon he’d near give up hoping it would ever come off. Told me he couldn’t sleep for thinking on’t, he did that!”

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.”

“I’m not ready,” Thomas said doggedly. “I mun have a bit more time. Happen another year I could see my way....”

“A year’s neither here nor there, surely, if yon’s all?”

“It’d be two, happen—ay, and maybe more. I don’t rightly know. I can’t rightly say.”

“Ay, well, it’s now or never for the old dad,” Bob said. “A year or two’s no use to the old chap, wi’ notice to quit pinned to his jacket-tail. What’s gitten you, lad, to be hanging back like this?” He raised his voice and spoke more firmly, sure of his cause. “The spot’ll suit you, waint it, come to that?”

“Ay, I’d like it right well.”

“Well, then, whatever’s to do?” Bob peered at him curiously, struck by the mixture of longing and dogged resistance in his tone. “If it’s nobbut a matter of a pound or two, you can fetch up easy enough on yon. There’s a deal o’ folk’d lend you a hand, seeing how you’re placed. It’s more than time, too, you were starting on your own. It doesn’t do to stop in service over long. You get kind o’ fixed and feared o’ striking out.”

“I’ll strike right enough, never you fret—I will that. But it’ll be in my own time....”

“You can’t always suit things just to the tick.... Eh, I wish the chance had come my road, that’s all!” Bob sighed and frowned, depressed by the thought of what he had missed, and the folly which refused what he would so gladly have seized. “But it’s no use my thinking on’t, so that’s flat. Even if I could borrow the brass, I’d never catch up with it, I doubt, and there’s Marget to be suited in t’matter, as I said afore. Nay, I’m a broken reed, that’s what it is, and I mun just let be. It’s for you to say what you’ll do for the old man.”

“I can’t do owt—yet,” Thomas repeated. “I mun ha’ time....” and pushed his chair further into the concealing gloom. He felt trapped in a cunning snare, all the more cunning and cruel because it was simply his own plan of life twisted and tangled out of shape. He had never dreamed that his future hung by a hair, but then he had never imagined that John might die, or that Agnes might so incredibly change her mind. He felt not only trapped but mocked, and the mockery hardened him in his resolve. Difficult as he was to turn, he might yet have been driven to yield, if the whole business had not worn so ironic a leer. The rough hand of fate was thrust in among his careful plans. His faithfulness and self-denial, his patience and hard work, were all to be shuffled and risked in a hurried moment like this.

If only things had been right between him and his lass, how triumphantly simple the whole problem would have been! It was true that he would have liked another year to look round, but he would have let that go without hesitation for the chance of the farm. The place was in a bad state, of course, but that should mean an easier rental, and all the more credit to him when he pulled it round. He knew the little farm by stick and stone, and loved it well enough, too. He was content enough in his hired spot, but the marsh blood that was in him cried always to be settled within sight and sound of the sea. Even to-night, though his heart was pulling him back, and the marsh was a dripping waste with a trap at the farther end, he had drawn great breaths as the mountains dropped behind. To have had the old home with Agnes—why, it was better by far than he had planned! And in the event, as it had proved, how far it had fallen short!

He would have been glad, too, to keep the old man, just as the Agnes he had counted as his would also have been glad. Both had been bred to the sense of duty powerful in their class, and the fact that Kit had muddled his own chance would have made no difference to that duty in their eyes. He would have been welcome to their home as long as he lived, and indeed, there would have been no hardship about it, after all, for he was both lovable and kind, as well as the sort that made little trouble about the house. Thomas, in fact, would have been proud as well as glad to give him what he asked. He would have liked to have seen him daily in his chair, playing his fiddle in a patch of shade or pottering about the garden in the sun. The old man had always been rarely fond of flowers, and no matter what happened or did not happen on the farm, the garden, at least, was always bright and sweet. Flowers seemed to grow for him, indeed, under the mere caressing glance of his eye.... But at present Agnes was turned the other way, and he would not travel a road that was not hers as well. As long as he could he would stay within reach, doggedly waiting and waiting for the recoil, and if anything else called for his help, he must shut his ears and let it go to the wall. A few miles over the hill would have made little difference, perhaps, but he could not have endured those miles, and he did not mean to try. Without Agnes, he would let the farm go without even raising his hand. Without Agnes, he would let his father go, too.

There being little else he could do for the old man, Bob was roused to fight for him to the last. It was his brother’s duty, he pointed out, a duty that would have been a pleasure to other folks, not so far. Nobody could have had a better father, as they knew right well, and he was entitled to the little they could do. It wasn’t as if Thomas hadn’t the brass—what, he had more than once told them about it himself! If that was true—and it was like enough, after all these years—there could be nothing and less than nothing in the way. Supposing it did mean a year before he’d planned, why, surely to goodness there was no hitch in that? He’d never for shame let his father be turned out, like a come-day-go-day tenant that never meant to stop? He could have both bed and bite under his roof, Bob said, but it wouldn’t be much to crack on, after Beautiful End. There was only one right road, as anybody could see, and that was to put in at once for the offered farm.

Kit never spoke or stirred while Bob argued and Thomas denied, the deep, slow voices rising a little towards the end, but never once growing bitter or unkind. Abuse and bickering had always been strangers under that roof, and even Thomas’s sullen rage did not vent itself in speech. He spoke seldom, indeed, as seldom as he could, and then only dour refusals to consider the matter at all, retreating further and further out of the path of the moon. But throughout the whole scene Kit never said another word, and his sons did not think it strange. He was of the sort that makes its appeal and then stands aside, leaving others to argue and settle its fate. He had pleaded his case with a childlike certainty that somebody would step in, and the matter was fought to an end without his help. Even when Thomas had said nay for the last time—the hundredth, miserable, degrading time, so it seemed—his father had not spoken again. Perhaps even then he hoped and had faith, that faith in chance which dreamers carry to their graves; or perhaps he guessed the hold of the tie to which Thomas would give no name.

“Ay, well, happen you’ll sleep on’t,” Bob had said, rising at last, and speaking even to the end as if his father were not there. “There’s nowt else I can think on as’ll likely change your mind, and I doubt I’d ha’ been wiser not to say so much. But it’s hard to stand by when you can’t do nowt to help, and see as others as can all right but happen won’t. There’s a home for the old man at our house whenever he likes to come, and right welcome he’ll be under any roof of mine. As for Marget, she’ll likely kick a bit at first, but I’ll get her round to it after a deal o’ talk. She’ll come to it all right, same as other folks have done, and it’s queer if I can’t give my father a share of my own spot.”

“I’ll lend a hand wi’ the keep,” Thomas muttered, out of the dark, and Bob nodded in answer, turning to the door. He knew well enough what his offer of a home was worth, among weakly, ill-tempered children and under a nagging shrew. He knew as well as Thomas or Kit that it would only be a dismal waiting-place for death. It was bad enough to have to quit, to break ties and begin a feeble life again, to lose the sound of the tide awash at the sea-wall, but the worst to come was not the loss of the farm. It was Marget that was the dreadful thing to face, as they were all aware. It was the thought of Marget with the old man in her hands that almost defeated Thomas at the last. If only the poor old chap could have gone to somebody else!... “Now ye’ll mind ye can come to us, Father!” Bob repeated on the step, and Kit had simply thanked him and said no more. In the porch, Thomas, dismal as the night, managed to drag out a few ungracious words. “As soon as I’ve gitten things straight, Father ... just hold on....” And Kit had said thank you quite simply for that, too.

Once outside he was seized by a passionate impulse to return. Grasping at one thing still out of reach, he was more than probably risking the loss of all. Supposing Agnes should never be won back, no matter what he offered or threw away? It was on the cards, as he was forced to admit. Even without her he would still have the farm, and his payment of satisfaction in his father’s face. But, rough and unthinking as he was, he guessed that partial fulfilment was more to be dreaded than complete loss, that a heart’s desire is better rejected if it cannot be had whole. And indeed, this strife with himself was only a waste of energy, after all. He knew, as things stood, he would never come away.

The brothers found nothing more to say as they followed the muddy track to the meadow gate. Bob had tried his eloquence, such as it was, to a hopeless end, and his own position was doubtful, to say the least. At any moment Thomas might have turned, and with just cause. He was the youngest after all, and the only one that had stood on his own feet. John had not had enough courage even to live, and Bob, beaten and slack, was scarcely the one to preach burdens on to another’s back. He was tired, too, after a wearing day and a scream-riddled night; busy, moreover, with the problem of facing Marget with the news.

At the back of his mind was a vague idea that Thomas’s wooing was somehow going amiss. He had thought of it while he argued in the house, but Thomas had never thought fit to mention the lass, and it wasn’t his brother’s place to bring her in. The courting, he knew, had been a long one, like his own. He could have told Thomas a thing or two, he felt sure, only telling these things was never any use. In spite of his good sense and superior luck, Thomas must dree his weird like the rest.

They had parted where the roads parted on the marsh, and after them through the lifting curtain of the rain had looked the pale wraith that wanted to be the moon. And again, over their heads from the lone farm, now slipped away into the unbordered dark, there trembled the long flight of the violin.

Alone on the marsh, Thomas had once again nearly repented and turned back. It was not that the fiddle seemed to call him back. It had, on the contrary, the effect of shutting him out. It seemed to mark the final detachment of father from son, to emphasise the division of two who by rights should have held together, but were nevertheless going to drift apart. It was Kit’s swan-song to his own place, and as such it kept its ecstasy for himself and its poignancy for the listener on the waste. Thomas had an idea that he was hurrying back to the farm, plodding again through the meadow along the rutted track. He heard the little click of the garden gate, saw himself pushing gently at the door, met the sweet flood of music rushing out, and warmed to the old man’s welcome and relief. But always his feet were taking him away, and the pull of the farm and its trouble lessened with every mile. Now his thoughts reached forward rather than behind, fixed on a dweller in another house. In his mind he saw her home between gentle curves of the land, the night brooding over its walls that seemed as much grown out of the earth as the hedgerows in the fields. He saw the syringa over the porch lifting its star-faces to the moon. He saw faint candle-light in a room upstairs, and herself a moving shadow across the blind....

He was late at his own place, and found himself locked out, but even as he tried the door he heard stumbling on the stairs, and knew that his step had warned the folk across the yard. While he waited he said to himself that if there was any bother he would give in his notice right away. It only wanted some little thing like that to fix his mind. He tried to work himself into a fiercer mood, ready to lash out at the first suggestion of rebuke. It would be grand to be his own master after so long, instead of a hired man at beck and call. With a word he could alter the position when he liked. But when the bolts were unshot the farmer said nothing except that it was a dirty night, and Thomas took off his boots in silence and followed him upstairs. In the morning the porridge was badly burnt, and again he tried to drive himself to a break, but once again something put him off and he kept still. That evening, however, he met Agnes in the lane between the farm and her home, and the thing rose in him with a rush and he spoke out.

“You can take it or leave it, as suits you,” he said, “but there it be to your hand. The farm’s ready and waiting on you, and so’s the man. I’ve had enough o’ your putting off and keeping me hanging round. You’ve got to fix it up now or let me gang.”

“You must give me time,” she answered, using his own words of the night before. “I’m not ready—I don’t know my mind. As for keeping you hanging round, you’ve been free to go this many a long day, as you know right well. I’m not that anxious to get wed, not I. But if it’s me you’re wanting, as you seem to think, well, there’s nothing for it but to give me time.”

“You’ve had time and plenty, I’m sure!” he retorted with rough scorn. “Time to look round at all the lads and begin again. Time to look round at the married folk an’ all, and see who’s suited and who baint. But there’s got to be an end of your daft shilly-shally now. Seems to me you think it’s nobbut a game.”

“Nay, then, that’s just what I don’t!” she flashed back in wrath. “It’s because I take it so serious-like that I don’t mean to be pushed. There’s times it seems to me that serious I don’t know how folk ever come to it at all. ’Tisn’t as if it was just a bit of a bargain over a cow or a two-three sheep. It’s you and me beginning our lives right over again from the start, and maybe both on us finding we’re different folk from what we thought. I’m suited well enough as I am, and I’d be a fool not to stop and think. I’ll not wed till I’m that set on the lad I’ll find myself fair running to kirk, and I’m a long way off yet from being as nicked in the head as yon! I don’t say but what I think a deal of you, because I do. I’m not breaking my heart over you, that’s all. If you want to gang, you can gang, ay, and right off the reel, but I won’t stir finger or foot until I choose!”

“Ay, but there’s the old man, I tell ye!” Thomas had blurted out. “I’m in a cleft stick, seemingly, atween you and him. They’ll turn him out of his spot if I waint promise to take hold.”

“Eh, now, if that isn’t terble hard!” She fell silent, thinking after her passionate speech, studying his lowering, fretted face, and seeing all in a moment how they stood. “But there’s never two minds about it, surely?” she added, in a troubled voice. “You’ll have to see to your father one way or t’other, you and Bob. And you’ll never to goodness miss the chance o’ the farm?”

He turned his eyes on her with their dogged, miserable look.

“Ay, but I will, if I can’t have you an’ all.”

“You’ve had your answer to that till I’m fair tired.” She turned away from him, staring vexedly at the hedge.

“Ay, well, then, that’s all there is to it, I reckon. Father and farm’ll have to see to themselves.”

“You can have a housekeeper to do for you,” Agnes said.

“An’ a bonny makeshift an’ all, for a man as wants a wife!”

“Other folks do with them all right.”

“Well, I want nowt wi’ ’em, so that’s flat.”

“But you’ll have to do summat o’ the sort,” she protested angrily, troubled and also afraid. Her own particular cleft stick was becoming plainer with every minute that passed. “You’ll have to have somebody about the place, and it’s fair wicked to talk o’ missing the farm. What, you’ve been wanting a spot of your own for long enough, I’m sure, and now you can do what’s right by your dad at the same time.”

“You wouldn’t ha’ minded him about the house? If things was fixed, I’m meaning ... if we were wed....”

“Mind an old body settin’ on the hearth?” She turned to face him again with wonder in her eyes. “Nay, but you know me better than that by a deal! I’d ha’ been glad enough to see to him, that I would. I’ve always been rarely fond o’ Fiddlin’ Kit.”

“Ay, well, then,” Thomas insisted, “what’s in the road?”

“I’ve tell’t you what’s in the road. I can’t frame to make up my mind.”

“Seems to me it’s an easy enough job,” he answered her gloomily, staring at his feet, and she laughed in spite of her anger and dismay.

“Happen it is for some folk, but not me.... Hark ye! Show a bit o’ sense, do now,” she coaxed. “You go off to your farm, and likely I’ll throw my shoe after you, even yet. I reckon you’ll ha’ forgot all about me, by then.”

“’Tisn’t me as’ll do the forgetting!” he turned on her fiercely, breaking out at last. “It’s your sort, not mine, as doesn’t keep a friend in mind. It’s your sort as goes back on your word, and plays fast and loose and suchlike tricks. You’d be glad to be shot of me, I’ll be bound, and afore long there’d be somebody easier in my shoes, but I don’t mean to give you a chance o’ forgetting, don’t you fret! Am I like to put miles between us when I’m lile or nowt to you in the same lane? Nay, I’ll bide ... I’ll bide.... I’m used to your ways, and though I don’t think much on ’em, I reckon I can see it through. But it isn’t only me as is waiting on you now. You’re making me act bad to the old dad, and that’s what’s putting me about.”

“It’s no business of mine, I tell you!” she flung back, full of resentment at this shifting of loads. “It’s nowt to do wi’ me, anyway round.” They stood glaring at each other with frowning faces and hard eyes, blaming each other for the subtle net by which they were equally entrapped. “I’ve no call to wed just to give your father a home,” she went on. “I’m sorry for him, as I said, and I’d lend a hand if I could, but I don’t see as it’s fair to blame me because I can’t. You’ve not overmuch pride, I doubt, or you’d never put it like yon. It’s nobbut a poor sort o’ lad as’d take me at the price!”

He threw her a final look of helpless rage, and swung away from her, facing towards the farm. “Then he mun gang to Marget,” he flung over his shoulder, “Marget and Bob!” and at the terrible name of Marget she cried aloud. Thomas continued steadily on his way.

“Eh, Thomas, you don’t mean that!” she called after his retreating back. “She’ll be bad to him, will Marget—she’ll finish him right off. Bide a bit, can’t you?... Save us, man, can’t you bide? I never somehow thought of the old man going there.”

“Where else should he gang?” he demanded sullenly, stopping but still turned away. “Bob’s his own flesh and blood as well as me, and a long sight the oldest on us an’ all. There’s t’ Union, likely, might do for the old dad, but I doubt they won’t take him while there’s others to fill the job.”

“Nay, and why should it, I’d like to know!” she exclaimed. “You should think shame o’ yourself for suchlike selfish talk.” There was something desperate in her glance at the hedge on either side, as if the fences were hung with the net that would not let her through. From them she looked once more at Thomas, turning slowly on his heel, and slowly beginning at last to see his way.... “I’d wed him myself and work for him sooner than that!”

“I reckon there’s nowt agen you wedding me instead.”

“Nay, then, I can’t.... I’ve tell’t you.... I just can’t.”

“Then he’ll be at Marget’s afore you can say knife.”

They had changed places at last, as was clear to both; in the course of a few moments they had changed. At last he had found a way of blocking her escape, of putting a log in the path of her everlasting no. It was he who had the better hold now, and he did not mean to be stopped from winning the fall. He knew well enough that however hard she might be with a young man foolishly in love, she had the softest heart in the world for the weak and old. Perhaps he had no pride, as she said, but he meant to use his father’s cause to the full for the furthering of his own. He stood staring fixedly at her downcast head, and the old kindliness came back into his voice now that he saw his advantage clear. He put the whole case over to her again, but always with Marget looming largely at the end, and had the same satisfaction in the last effect. Agnes knew Bob’s wife as well as anybody else, and needed no enlightening as to her ways. His hopes rose and his face cleared as he saw the position he had cursed proving the door to his desire, and as his heart eased he became more eloquent, more tender, more difficult to resist. At the finish he gave her a rough picture of the lonely farm, and the fiddle singing into the night....

She yielded at last with wet eyes and a dismal shake of her drooped head.

“Nay, then, we mun just put a stop to it, that’s all. We can’t let him gang to Marget, poor old chap! If you waint stir without me, I mun wed you and take the risk, but I doubt we’ll make a mess o’ things, you an’ me. It’s nobbut a middlin’ sort of a bargain when folks don’t both jump on the tick.” She looked up at him suddenly with a laugh that was more than half a wail. “Eh, Thomas, but baint there some other lass’d do as well?”

And then, when he had what he wanted, he put it from him and turned away. As soon as the battle was over, he saw at once the futility of his success. He could think, now that he was no longer vexed and opposed, and thinking, could find nothing else to do but draw back. His father could have only a few years in front of him, after all, but this was for all his own life and hers. He had his pride, in spite of her taunt, and this was apparently where it stopped. It was a poor bargain, as she had said, appealing angrily to his common sense; a gift, if you could call it a gift, that wouldn’t be even his own. And it wasn’t much of a man who bullied a woman into saying yes, who needed so mighty a lever to get at her heart. He stood back once again as she wept, and heard his voice sending her away, heard himself seal his father into the mercy of Bob’s wife....

So Kit had gone to Marget’s, trustful to the end, even with his sold-up house behind him and a shrewish face before. Thomas attended the sale and bought in a few trifles at the old man’s wish, and when all was over he borrowed a trap and drove him away. Kit was cheerful and talkative throughout the drive, and they never so much as mentioned Marget’s name. Thomas had an insane idea that they would find his mother at the farther end, and kept seeing her waiting for them at the door. He never forgot the journey’s real end, the shut house full of eyes at every pane, the cold wait in the empty street, the colder opening to let them in. Marget had met them with silence at first, and then with a gathering flood of angry speech. Kit’s attempt at grateful thanks had been swallowed up in it as the channels out on the sands were swallowed by the winter wave. Thomas waited until Marget’s breath gave out, and then went away, feeling as though he had thrown a live thing to a cat. After that time he had gone as seldom as his sense of duty would allow. He never failed, however, to pay his share, and he managed to get news of the old man from Bob. Not that Bob ever had a very great deal to say, because he kept out of the house as much as he could. The old man was “ailing a bit,” or “right enough,” as the case might be, but that was all. Now it was nearly two years since Kit had gone to the unhappy place—the place where a pair of lovers had prisoned him in.

---

Agnes, returning, found him at the mirror again, so intent that he started when she spoke.

“Land’s sake! Why, you’re not off yet!... What’s come to you to be gaping in yon glass?” She stared at him wonderingly, and he turned a somewhat sheepish face. “You nobbut look at it once a week, as a rule, and that’s when you’re donning yourself for kirk.”

“I was nobbut taking a squint at the room,” he answered in a puzzled tone. “Glass makes it look different, I don’t know why.”

“Ay, I’ll be bound it’s different!” she exclaimed with pride. “I’d a sight on’t once, not long afore the sale, and a lost-looking, dismal spot it was, to be sure! Seems like as if it couldn’t possibly be the same. What wi’ new furniture and range and wall-papers an’ suchlike, it’s for all the world like some other place.”

“Ay, but I wasn’t meaning it like that. Seems as if it was the old room I can see in t’glass. It was the old kitchen glass, you’ll think on, as I bought at the sale. Father didn’t want it going to off-comers and suchlike, so I bought it to please the poor old chap. He’d a sort of idea as glasses knew a deal—said there was glasses remembered things they’d seen. Likely this here has got the old kitchen on its mind. Likely it’s looked that often at the old, it can’t frame yet to take a peep at the new.”

“Likely you’re blinded wi’ the sun!” She flung him a look of laughing scorn and went to the window again.... “What in the name o’ goodness can ha’ come to yon trap! D’you think owt’s gone amiss on the road?”

“More like they’ve been late in setting off, as I said afore. I’ll be bound Marget’s found summat to keep ’em back, if it’s only to put the poor old man about. Or likely they’ve been bothered wi’ folk stopping ’em on t’road. They’ll all be agog on the marsh to think as he’s coming home.”

“Folks say they’re glad the Sills isn’t quitting the marsh,” Agnes said. “They thought nowt o’ the man as come here after your dad. He seems to have been only a terble middlin’ sort—over fond o’ the drink and happen a bit daft. The place isn’t over lucky, Thomas, I doubt!”

“Folks make their own luck,” Thomas said doggedly, squaring his jaw, “and anyway round it’s brought me all the luck I want. There’s you here, as I never thought’d come, and brass enough to put the farm on its legs. And now there’s the old man coming home to-night. I reckon I’m suited as well as most. There’s nobbut one thing grubs me,” he went on, with a moody look, “and that’s that the old chap ever had to gang.”

“Eh, let it bide, can’t you?” Agnes cried aloud. She stole a glance at his face and her own drooped again. “Surely to goodness you’ve never been going over yon? Things is right enough now—as right as rain.”

“Ay, but they’re spoilt a bit for us, all the same.” His voice had dropped back into the bitter tone. “I still feel sort o’ shamed about the job, and I reckon you’re none so bright about it yourself. And yet, if it come back over again, I’d do same as afore.”

“I don’t see as we could ha’ done different,” Agnes said, and sighed. “I did say as I’d come if you couldn’t fix nowt else, but I doubt we wouldn’t ha’ made much out in the end.”

“It’d ha’ been hell for both on us afore so long.” He began to walk restlessly up and down behind her back, the old angry resentment blurring and troubling his face. “What beats me about it all is what come over you just then. You’d been right enough afore, and you’re suited well enough now. What, for the land’s sake made you act so strange?”

“Nay, I don’t know, I’m sure. I’m fair puzzled about it myself.” She laughed, but there were regretful tears behind the laugh. “Seems to me women don’t always know exactly what they’re at. Folks don’t always see their road clear in front o’ their feet. There’s a time for everything, I reckon, that’s what it is, and it hadn’t come just then for you and me.”

“Anyway, it’s come now, thanks be!” he said in a sudden burst, and he stopped his angry pacing and came to her side. “But all the same,” he persisted, “I’d ha’ liked it perfect all through. There’s things as hurt to look back on more than a deal. There’s times I’ve heard her rating the poor old chap, I’ve felt that bad I could ha’ shot myself right out. ’Twas summat like as if he’d been clapped in jail; as if you an’ me had gone and put him in quod.”

She put her hands on his shoulders, her eyes filling with tears.

“Nay, now—don’t—don’t! You make me feel that bad.”

“And him so kind,” he went on, as if unable to stop. “Ay, it makes you feel bad enough to swear.”

“It’s over ... it’s by wi’ ... we’ll make it up to him, you’ll see!” He put his arms about her, and her hands went up around his neck. “You’ll not be keeping a grudge agen me all our lives?”

“Nay, it’s myself I’m sore with, not you. I should ha’ done my duty by the old chap, and trusted you’d come to me in the end. But I wasn’t for taking the risk. I was over feared. And now I doubt I’ll always feel sort o’ shamed.”

“Things’ll sort themselves out, don’t you fret. They’ll right themselves sure as a bobbin, after a bit.”

“Likely they will.”

“It’ll make a sight o’ difference, once he’s back. You’ll never think twice o’ yon weary time no more.”

“Likely I waint.”

“And you’ll not throw it up at me when you’re mad?” she begged. “You’ll not forget just how it come about?”

“I tell you I blame myself,” he repeated, “and nobody else. Happen I wanted you that bad I’d to pay a bigger price than most. Or happen we were both on us driven, and couldn’t help ourselves at all. But like enough it’ll all come right, as you say, and it’s nobbut fools as frets themselves, looking back.”

“We’ve come out a deal better than we deserve!” She smiled and drew away from him, looking happy again. “We took a deal o’ risk, you an’ me, but we’ve bit on our feet, I reckon, after all....” She drifted back to the table, as to an altar on which their sacrifice of thanksgiving was set. “What can ha’ come to the trap, Thomas? Father’ll be wearied out afore they land.... I mind you said he liked a bit o’ ham to his tea. You said Marget wasn’t for giving him ham if she could help.”

“She’d ha’ given him nowt,” Thomas growled, “if it wasn’t she was feared o’ finishing him off. Brass she was getting for him was over good to lose. He never eat what I give her, I’ll be bound.... Ay, he’d always a fancy-like for ham, and when he’d finished he’d gang outside for his smoke. There’s a new pipe I bought him, somewheres. Marget took t’other off him, Bob said.... Ay, an’ there’s some of his pet bacca in a tin.”

“Have you finished yon seat you were making for him under t’hedge?”

“Ay, it’s finished right enough. A gradely seat it is an’ all—a sight better than t’other as used to be by t’door. If you’ll stop fidging over yon table you might take a look for yourself.”

She laughed and went out with him into the porch. Their figures divided the sun as they stood, so that they looked like swimmers deep in the streaming gold. Their heads leaned together as they nodded approval at the seat, a wooden bench in the arms of a well-laid fence. It was a grand seat, Agnes said, and a grand evening for anybody wanting to sit out. They pictured the old man sitting there, warming himself in the last of the sun. They were excited and full of plans again, like children preparing for a treat. She had her hand on his arm, peering across him round the porch, when the trap suddenly lumbered into sight. It might have been dumped out of space on the straight-ruled road, a languid object jolting over the flat. Thomas, meditating proudly upon the seat, turned about to a hasty prod.

“There it be, Thomas—there it be! Trap, I mean, man—look ye—can’t ye see? Be off now as smart as you can. They’ll be here afore you’ve made shift to start.”

She tried to push him out of the porch, deaf to his protest that the trap had a fairish piece to cover yet. “A bonny time it’ll take an’ all,” he added, “wi’ yon bag o’ bones atween the shafts. Seems like it meant liggin’ down for a bit of a nap.”

“Best be soon than late,” she urged. “Nay, now, be off, do!”—and he allowed himself to be shoved on to the path, grinning at her eager face. “I’ll have kettle singing by you’re back,” she went on, “and then there’ll be nowt to keep us from setting to, right off. Bob’ll have a bite o’ summat, likely, afore he makes off. Eh, but I’m right fain to see the old man’s face when he passes t’door.”

“He’ll find summat better than Marget to look at, and that’s sure!” he teased her, lingering, and she stamped her foot at him and cried:

“Get on, you gert soft!”

And he answered, “I is getting on!” and stood like a stock.

The farm, full of the evening sun, and with smiling figures at its door, made a gay enough welcome for the exile that was drawing towards it over the marsh. Thomas received a final wave of mingled speeding and threat, and then the blue gown vanished through the porch. “We mun do what we can,” he heard her call from within, “but if we don’t suit him better than Marget, I’ll shut up house!”

Then he was gone at last, his broad figure dwindling as he went, until the high hedges hid him and the wild roses closed above his head. Away on the road, coming to meet him, the trundling speck grew and grew in size. As he dwindled and disappeared, so it enlarged and sharpened into sight. There was something fateful, indeed, about its slow yet determined approach. One knew, without dreaming of asking, that its errand was for the farm. In spite of its slow and clumsy advance it reminded Agnes of a sailing-boat she had seen, coming on high water across the glancing bay. It had seemed to come straight from the village under the hill to the farm that stood alone on the edge of the sand. Wind and tide were both at its back, driving it on a flowing path that seemed to have no possible end except in the house itself. She had watched it from that upstairs room upon which she had been at work so long, and had seen it heaving towards her, purposeful and direct. As it drew nearer the shore without slackening its speed, she began to feel almost afraid. The tilted bowsprit seemed ruled to the last inch on the window of the room. It was like a racer, nearing the post, leaping ahead along the last stretch. It was like a child, hurrying to be home, heedless of any obstacle in the way. She could not see the man in charge for the sail, so that the boat seemed like a thing by itself, a toy launched by the impetus of some mighty hand. She felt certain it meant to try to sail to her in the room, and would dash itself on the sea-wall just below. There was even a moment when she leaned from the window to scream, because it looked as though nothing could stop it now it was so near. And then, just as it seemed that the bow was over the hedge, it had swung on its heel and forgotten and gone away.... Like swinging a reel on a thread, she thought to herself; as easy as turning the handle of a door. Now it was leaning over, beating into the wind, and she could see a figure in the sheets. Quickly, though more slowly than it had come, it went away, fretting and fuming where it had been smoothly intent, and fighting where it had almost seemed to fly. She watched it beating back and forth for a time, hoping it might return, but always it threshed away into the wind, and dwindled and lost meaning and never looked back. And it had never come since, however high the tide, in that spirit of leaping joy directed at the farm.

Of course there was nothing like it about the trap, heavy and crawling and jolting along the road. But it, too, seemed headed towards her as she stood, as if it saw what was coming and couldn’t by any chance be stopped. And if Bob wouldn’t come in to share the evening meal, the trap, like the boat, would never reach the farm. It, too, the moment it had arrived, would turn its back on the place, and go away....

A sense of loneliness came upon her in the sunny room, and the house that had been so full of expectation and content grew still and listened for old voices and called again upon its hidden ghosts. She wished now that she had gone with Thomas to the gate, to share in the home-coming from the first. Indeed, she started to run down the path and through the gate, and found herself out in the meadow before she scolded herself and returned with a laugh. This was Thomas’s father, not hers, who was coming to-day. Her own had been dead for ever so many years. She was only the son’s wife, and her place was to welcome him at the door. She remembered the kettle, too, as she hurried back, and was glad she had had the sense to turn in time. She couldn’t help wishing, however, that she might have been there. She would have known, in that first moment, whether her conscience might be at ease....

Back in the kitchen, she filled the kettle and set it on the fire, struggling with the temptation to take another peep at the room upstairs. She argued with herself that she wanted to make sure nothing had been missed, knowing all the while that she had been perfectly sure for hours. It could not be long now before she ushered the old man in, and surely she could manage to wait till then? The room would be all the fresher if she could bring herself to wait, would look to her something of what it looked to him.... Thomas’s reparation was through outward things, she thought—shelter and physical ease and a decent burying at the last; but hers was through things more subtle, touches that eased the heart.... More than comfort and look went to that carpet on the stairs.

She wondered, looking round, which of the changes would strike him first. Which of the new things would catch his eye—the range, the padded chair, the spoons, or the new pots? There was a shelf with reading of some sort, mostly about farming, she believed; and a gate-leg table, left her by an aunt, on which he could lay his fiddle if he chose. In the parlour, of course, there were treasures without price, wedding-presents and suchlike and sudden fancies at sales; but Sunday, she thought, would be time enough for those. They would have to be careful not to worrit the old man. The kitchen alone would be enough for to-night—that and the other surprises up above.

She had been puzzled to find in herself this sudden passion for a house. She had been willing and busy enough at home, but she had always been glad to get finished and go out. Now, when she went out, she had almost to tear herself away; her household gods might play her false while she was gone. All the inanimate things that made her work—furniture and pots and pans and the rest—they seemed strangely alive to her now, and capable of mischief if she left them too long alone. Even in church she thought of fire and moths, of dry-rot and damp and water-spouts gone wrong. When once the hay was in she felt sure she would never go out at all, but would spend her days watching for the first thread of smoke. There was that fire at Crookfield, only last year, when the dogs had awakened the folk in the pouring dark. They had pulled the furniture out into the yard, and set the pillows and beds along the wall. You did not want to do that every year with your best beds, and there was a wardrobe or so that never got out at all. Then, on the marsh, there was a further terror to fear—floods that swam into your rooms and left them damp for years. She could see she would fret herself thin before she was through! Of course the possessive fury would die down after a while, but she did not want it to die too soon. The new passion fretted her, but it braced her as well; made her feel strong and capable and rich and proud....

And just as she had not known of this feeling for a house, so she had not known that a man could count for so much. She puzzled sometimes, staring at Thomas, and thinking how strange it was that eyes should so alter their point of view. Why, there were things she loved about him now for which she had laughed at him before! He was still only the Thomas whom she had flouted so long, and from whom she had parted without a pang; yet now, when he turned his back, she had a sense of fear, as if he had left her straying in some lonely place.... But even now she did not know why she had ever rebelled, could find no clue, however vexed for the missed years. It could only be that it wasn’t the right time, as she had said. And, after all, Thomas was not the man she had known. She would never see that Thomas of hers again. The strange thing was that she sometimes wanted that Thomas back—angry and sullen, or awkward and afraid.

Sometimes she held her breath, remembering how narrowly her fortune had been reaped. Thomas had never asked her again after that dogged appeal for his father in the lane. He stayed at hand, it was true, he spoke when they met, and they danced together as before, but he had never again asked her to be his wife. And perhaps his drawing-back had worked the miracle at last, for it was certainly about that time that she had begun to change. Perhaps it was just the natural impulse to want the thing out of reach, or maybe she had a vision of life, of the part that burdens may bear in it and be sweet. Just possibly it was Marget who was the real factor in the change, setting the levers pity and jealousy to work.

Agnes had known Bob’s wife from a child, and needed no telling how Kit would fare at her hands. They had been at school together first, though Marget was much the elder of the two, and afterwards they had been rivals or friends as things had happened to run. But Marget had married early and grown old soon, or rather had reached the vinegary age and there remained. Agnes had tried to keep up the acquaintance for a while, but it was not long before her visits ceased. Marget had grown into a shrew as mushrooms grow between showers, and of a subtle variety before which Agnes shrank. She had known shrews before, and found them human enough, with hearts that were more or less kindly under their fretted nerves. They were not like Marget, venomous all through. She remembered something in Marget, as a child, that had given her even then a kind of power, something inhuman, implacable and cold, that edged her words and barbed the look in her eyes. It had won her a sort of distinction as a girl, so that others had wanted her as well as Bob, but time had soon shown it as merely the passion of a cold woman for riding others down. Agnes, warm-hearted, tolerant and gay, was frankly afraid of Marget by the end. Marget liked to talk of Thomas and hint and jeer, and if the other gave battle in his defence she was terrible indeed. In spite of her idleness and slovenly ways, she still contrived to be terrible and a power. Her methods made Agnes shiver in her chair—thin and insidious and trickling at the first, and then, at the point of contact, bursting forth. She was like an iceberg, chilling you from afar, and crushing and riving and blinding you when you struck. You felt her icy paralysis as you sank; you heard her shrill-voiced grindings as you drowned. Agnes fled from the combat and did not return, and the reports of her one-time rival worsened with the years. Yet it was up to this arctic terror she had delivered Kit.

But at the end of everything she had married Thomas just for himself, and not for his father or anybody else at all. The finish had come about at Appleton Hall, one of those old homes that, changing from manor-house to farm, have yet contrived to keep their dignity intact. Both she and Thomas were helping as usual at the boon-clip, which fell that year on the hottest day in June. It was always a long day and often hot, but this was the longest and finest she had ever known. Afterwards she divided her life into—life, and then “the clip.” If it was true that she had had to wait for the right time, the right time came royally enough on a day so splendid that it seemed bound to affect some destiny before it passed.

She went up to the farm early, before the heat, and was in time to see the sheep coming down from the fells. There was still a haze over the tops, and through it the complaining voices drove and dropped, reaching her long before she saw the flock. When they came out of the haze at last, with their heavy fleeces trailing to the ground, they had the effect of a drifting, woolly cloud. Slim, ghostly dogs darted in and out of the cloud, and behind them the slender silhouette of a horseman shaped itself through the mist. He had a lamb slung before him when he rode into the yard, a tiny, black-faced thing with dangling hoofs.

Other girls joined her as she went in through the arch, all of them splashes of cool colour in their fresh print gowns. The arch stood twenty feet high in the monster courtyard wall, and topping the wall was a crown of grass and fern. Fern and the dark velvet of old moss were so much a part of the wall that it might have been fashioned of them from the start. At present the yard was in deep shadow, and the house a mere breath of a house, a huddle of formless grey. The covered stone passage was lost and dark that ran along its side. The tall arched windows showed nothing but pools of gloom behind their diamond panes. In spite of voices through its rooms and clatter on its flags, the place seemed barely alive, an embryo slowly evolving with the day. But when the sun, in the wake of the woolly cloud, had climbed the fell and was full above the yard, the house would alter and gain body and stand up firm. Its thick walls would grow solid to the eye, and the lines of them spring out sharp and straight. Its roots would go down deep, and its chimneys would be massed like towers. Colour would come into the grey, and the weight of centuries lie heavy on its roof. Its vagueness would take on meaning and the unchanging speech of form, together with the aloof dignity of those whose times are other than man’s.

For some time she was at work indoors, helping to prepare the food for the day, passing in and out of the dim rooms, each of which seemed to have its own quality of shade, and through low doorways with sudden steps, and up and down curving, whitened stairs. In the high, flagged room that had once been the hall, tables were set on trestles for the afternoon feast. The great beam of the old chimney still showed above the hearth, and high in one of the blue-washed walls was a niche where the fiddler would sit to play. Often and often Agnes had seen old Kit perched aloft in the narrow place that had the look of some ancient shrine.

The stone passage beside the house had four arches opening on to the yard, and when the sun came they made inky frames for figures moving and standing in blinding light, shears that shone like the swords over Eden’s Gate, snowy fleeces and the pathetic faces of many sheep. The whole courtyard was full, after a while, set like a stage with the clippers on their creels. The sun beat clear upon them as they worked, carving the sheep, as it were, from shreds of the woolly cloud. Only under the south wall and the big horse-chestnuts was there any shade, and here in the sudden gloom the faces looked pale, and the cotton kytles of the men were like moths motionless in an evening dusk. Boys tugged the unwilling sheep from the pens and scuffled with them across the yard, or thrust them, clipped, through the wicket in the arch, to meet the branding-iron outside. They looked awkward and strange as they scuttled away, with the inky letters sharp on their close wool. The lambs came up with innocent eyes and open, wailing mouths. They reached out tentative noses, faintly surprised, and were suddenly satisfied and still.

Across the yard was another cool cavern with the yellow slits of open doors yawning in two of its black walls. This was the fleecing-room where the girls were at work, rolling the fleeces and flinging them into the loft. The lock-trimmer sat beside the door, trimming the fleeces as they came in. The soft whiteness of them lay across his knees, and the shears glanced and flashed and made lightnings in the sun.

It was a boon-clip, which meant that the farmers round had come to help, or had sent their sons or daughters or hired men, and one or two sons of squires were at work with the shears as well. There were certain clippers who always came, and who always sat in the same place, just as the lock-trimmer was always the “lock,” and the man with the tar-pot always had the tar. Thomas was one of those who always came, and his place was under the wall of the house facing the arch. Agnes knew why he had chosen this place, though it was one of the hottest in the yard. When he looked out through the arch and the steam of the tar rising misty in the air, he could see the land rolling westward to the sea. “I like to set looking towards the marsh,” he always said; “I don’t feel suited anywheres else,” and though he could not see the marsh for the curving land, he knew where it lay by the light in the sky, as all marsh-bred people know. Year after year he had sat there at the clip, and lifted his head when a pause came, and looked out. But to-day he had left the place for somebody else. To-day he was in the shade by the south wall.

Agnes brought him his first drink, and he took it without so much as a look or a word, and though she had lingered a moment after he took up his shears, they still had not spoken nor had their glances met. She knew well enough, of course, why he had moved; there was no need for him to be afraid that she might ask. All these years when he looked through the arch he had looked towards his home, and after all the years there was a stranger in his home. There was no point now in looking towards the place where it had been. His eye, as it travelled, would check itself in its flight, just as his body would stop and turn away at the door.

She thought about it all day as she went about her work, or studied him from some corner out of sight. For the first time he was pathetic in her eyes, forsaken, cast-off, a creature without a place. He had a lonely look, she said to herself—poor Thomas without a home! He was a lonely soul, to whom life was being unkind. He might have been master, for instance, and still was only man. He might have had father and wife as well as farm, and instead he had only his dour and dogged self. She, too, had contracted the habit of looking towards the marsh, and had wondered a little and put the wonder by. Now, when she looked, she, too, had a sense of wrong in the loss of a home that might so well have been hers. She began to think of the stranger from her lover’s point of view, as an intruder thrusting himself into settled lives. She felt fiercely towards him as towards a cuckoo in the nest, forgetting that she herself had brought the position about. The thing worked in her all the day, gradually weighting and tilting the scale of her heart. Protective affection sprang up in her full-grown. Thomas, successful and sure, had not been able to win her even in years, but Thomas the failure laid hold of her in an hour. She could not bear that his face should be turned from his own marsh!... From one point and another she watched him all day long.

She saw the sheep go back again to their heafs, soft, snowy woolballs on the shining green. Going up, as in coming down, they gave the same impression of moving cloud. They travelled up the fell like smoke blown from a giant’s pipe, with no hint of the toil of thousands of little feet. They were going fast, too, though they looked strangely slow on the vast expanse of ground. It was only when she marked them by the end of the long stone wall that she saw how rapidly they climbed. They were like a wave surging always up and up, smoothly, determinedly, drawn by invisible cords. While her eye still watched the corner at the top, they were near it, they were round it, they were all of them silently gone....

After the meal in the big hall there were the usual trotting races and sports. Thomas had always taken a leading part in these events, but to-day he kept dismally aloof, unconsciously helping his new impression on her heart. And at the end of the day there had been the usual dance.

She happened to be upstairs when the fiddle struck up, and in the cool of the evening she leaned out to hark. Through the windows below she caught the jollity of the reel, the thin cry of the strings and the stamp of feet on the flags. In the room behind her where the great four-posters were, the shadows were creeping and climbing and laying the draperies of the night. There were always shadows within the curtains of the beds, as if they had come for those who had lain there dead, and had never had time to lift and scatter away. With the night there were the shadows of night as well, so that in shadow on shadow those who slept in the beds must lie. On the house itself there was shadow, the mighty shadow of the fells, and suddenly she longed for a room on the edge of things, looking starkly out to sea. There, in the night, one could always breathe, at least. She leaned further until the roses came up about her face, and then she saw Thomas standing by the pens.

At once, as she looked, the veil of her long bewilderment fell away. Now she knew what she wanted, what she meant to do. The wind of that longing for air and space had swept the cloudy room of her mind, and there, with his face to herself and his back to the sea, Thomas was all that the sudden wind had left.... He moved, as if meaning to go, and almost in panic she turned and ran from the room, flying through twisting passages and over the sagging floors. Shafts of light rayed across her from deep-cut window-slits; polished oak doors gleamed at her back as she sped down the bowed and winding stairs. The flood of music and dance swelled up to her as she approached, and she paused for a moment as she passed the room. After the soft purples out of doors which the sun was leaving behind, the room seemed misty and full of a golden dusk, yellow with lamps resisting the dying day. High in the wall the sawing arm that held the bow flung the wild music over the crowd, whirling figures and brown faces and gowns that made streaks of colours under the lights. The mist and the music and the beat of the feet made her head spin as she stood and looked. Her face and gown were framed by the door and the dark behind, and a partner began to edge towards her round the crowd. He was still some distance away when he saw her disappear, like a ghost caught away from the door by hidden hands. Again the longing for space had seized her as she looked. She slid round the door and fled to Thomas in the yard.

They were well on their way to her home before either found anything to say; and then, “What made you quit so soon?” she enquired with a rush at last.

He answered her, staring gloomily at the road, that the place was overcrowded by a deal. He wasn’t as set on dancing as he used. “Likely I’m getting old,” he added; “that’ll be it.” And then, after minutes and minutes he let himself go.... “I couldn’t abide hearing yon fiddle played.’Twas fiddle as fetched me out, if you want to know.”

He turned his head as he spoke, and tried to look through the hedge, and it was west and not east of them where the Hall lay that he looked. Here in the lane, as in the yard, he seemed to hear a fiddle that was dumb, thin and trembling and clear from the edge of the sea. Standing outside the dance he had heard the two musics mingle and clash, and had turned from the sound in the hot room to the sound that drew over miles from the cool tide.

“What fetched you out?” he asked of her, in his turn.

They had stopped in the road as if at some word of command, and the swinging curves of the lane went winding before and behind, shutting them in together this way and hiding them safe together that. The sun, level on the fields as if smoothed by a hand, was below the thick barrier of the mounted hedge. Only through chinks or the eye of a gate could it find a way, to lie in patches on the hedgerow grass, or splash its pools on the heavily-rutted road. It was more restful than sleep in that cleft between the fields, where the roses, sprayed overhead, took a richer colour against the sky. There was green upon green on the background of dark wood—bramble and hazel, convolvulus and thorn. There were yellow and purple and white sweet peeping faces in the grass; ferns, emerald-fresh, stately in thick groups. And close in the hedge-side, where all else was new, lingered the old dead beech leaves of the year before, waiting for this year’s leaves to drift there, too....

Already, though the clippings were barely through, folk were getting to work at the hay. Away, as the land rose fast, they could see a cutter at work, and the flash of the horses’ sides as they turned in the sun. The sound of the cutter made sweeter their solitude and peace, yet the voice of it in the silence loosened their difficult tongues.

“I reckon I’ve made up my mind now,” Agnes said, facing him sturdily as he looked away. “Likely I’ve lost you wi’ keeping you hanging round so long. It’s nowt to wonder at if you’re tired, I’m sure. But if you’re still set on our getting wed, there’s nowt as I can see agen putting up the banns....

“It’s a bit sudden, happen,” she went on, as he did not speak, “and yet I don’t know as it’s sudden, after all. It’s been coming along for a goodish while, I doubt, and what finished it off was you changing your spot in the yard. It made me feel queer like, after all these years. The folks settin’ round you had all on ’em got homes, an’ there you were settin’ among ’em wi’ none at all. There was Tommy Todd, you’ll think on, as nobody need want, wi’ as good a missis as there is in the country-side. There was Neddy Gibbs—him as is near half-rocked—he’s a rare good home at the back of him as well. Bob Martin and Billy Dent—ay, an’ his brother, Willie George—they’ve all on ’em homes they can gang to if they want. I could see the doors open at their backs, set for ’em to come in, but I couldn’t see owt at the back o’ Thomas Sill. I could set a door wi’ the best on ’em, I’ll be bound! I’m sure an’ certain I’d be fain to try....”

But miracles under one’s eyes are the last things one believes. “It’s pity,” he muttered, refusing to look up. “I’m right enough where I be ... you’ve no call to fret. It’s pity ... same as you felt for him....”

“It’s nowt o’ the sort,” she exclaimed angrily, and then laughed. “I’ll learn you whether it’s pity if you get talking stuff like yon! If it’s pity, I reckon any lass would do, same as I rather think I said afore. But yon home as I’m wanting for you can’t be made by nobody but me—and—eh, you daft lad—I’m wanting it an all!”

It was the shortest lane in the world, just as the day was the longest in all time. Often enough, hurrying home, she had sighed at its length, but now it fled behind her while her feet were still. Every bend as it came was strange to her eyes, and, turning, she saw it new from the other side. The sun slid away from the fields like a curtain silently withdrawn, and up on the higher land the cutter whirred to a corner and was still. In the lane the night came long before it touched the land beyond—the visible, purple night that has no knowledge of the real dark. The roses, paled of their pink, showed whitened starry faces to the sky, shining above the road like blossoms laid on a pool. Only where some big tree leaned across was there any real night, and as they passed beneath it and so out, they lost each other for a moment in the dark, and found each other on the further side, just as in life they had lost each other for a time, and yet come together, after all. They heard the birds stir in sudden flutters and be still. They heard wild things in the hedgerow rustle and be still. Horses came to the fence and reached out shadowy heads, and through continual gates they caught the remnants of the lingering day. Sheep in the hedge-bottoms rose and scuttered away, the sound of their going ghostly in the dark. Cattle, lying heavy on the land, turned unaffrighted eyes at their approach. The night air pressed close, warm and a little damp, and there was dew on the long hedge-grass as well as the honeysuckle boughs.

“I doubt it’s over late for the farm,” Agnes murmured once. “Eh, if we could nobbut set the clock back a year!”

“There’s a chance we might get it yet,” Thomas replied, but with the new caution he had learned from life. Self-confident Thomas had grown to be careful how he tempted fate. “The new man’s shaping badly, so they say....”

She gave a little cry of excitement, and then sighed.

“I don’t deserve it, I’m sure; but eh, Thomas, if we should! We’d make it the best spot anywheres about, and we’d have your father to live with us right off. We’d do our best to make up to him all we could....”

But she had forgotten Kit once more when she found herself at her gate, and heard her lover’s step going from her down the lane. In her bedroom she watched the moon come up, over the road where they had walked, the patient moon that had not hurried or spied. Parts of the lane would be as bright as day where for their passing had been a velvet dusk. Folks who walked there now would have to whisper low, because voices carried so clearly under the moon. They would see their own shadows close about their feet, so that they would be four instead of two, and therefore never alone. Thomas and she had had no shadows at all, and even the shadows of their wasted years had been hidden by the night.

They had got the farm, after all, but they had had another year to wait. The new tenant’s fate had hung in the balance for some time, and though, when the end came, it came short and sharp, there had been much to do before they could move in. The new tenant, who had never had time to become an old tenant, had yet contrived to occasion many repairs. They had had to furnish, of course, and that meant visits to sales, and hours of pondering in Witham shops. There was also her mother to settle with a decent hired girl. The old woman’s house was her own, and she had no notion of coming to the farm. “The old man’ll keep you stirring, as it is,” she said to her daughter, when the point was raised. “Young folks as is newly-wed don’t want old folks hanging round their necks. It’ll make you feel what you’ll come to, if it doesn’t do nowt else....”

So she stayed in the house between the fields while Agnes went to the marsh, and though she paid her an afternoon visit now and then, she could not be coaxed to stop for as much as a night. Agnes would have been glad enough of her company, at times. She found the marsh very lonely at first, and the hours were long when Thomas was out on the land. She did not mind very much when the weather was fine, and she could see the houses winking across the sands, but it was dreary indeed when the bay was blotted out and there was nothing to break the shaken veil of the rain. That was one of her reasons for welcoming old Kit; they would be such cronies, she and the old man! She would see him about the garden while she was at work in the house, and could call to him from the windows if she felt inclined. Just to hear her own voice answered once in a while would give the place a feeling of fresh life. They would sit on the new seat shelling peas, or watching the fishing boats making home with their catch, their sails three-cornered blurs on the opal evening sky. They would sit on the white-stoned hearth of a winter’s night, and watch the fire burn red with the hardening of the frost. He would have tales to tell when the gales came out in the spring, and the narrow sea deepened and frothed into driven flood. Thomas would be out with the sheep, and she would want a tale to distract her from the storm. And sometimes, perhaps, Kit would play her the old, thin tunes, bringing the dance-itch back to her sober feet. That careless pleasure seemed to have dropped behind—not but what she could dance with the smartest yet. But she seemed to herself to have shut a door at her back, and behind that door were the strains of a violin.

She began to sing as she went about, and her voice escaped through the open windows and fled away through the door; yet it was in the house all the time as well. Down on the shore a man looked up as he stepped on the sands, hearing the voice that was both within and without. The house looked empty, he thought, with all its windows wide, and the voice that sang seemed a bodiless voice, making the house the emptier for its song. It followed him as he went leisurely out, making for the channel and the farm across. He did not hurry, for the tide would not be ready to turn for over an hour. Presently he was on the bank, hailing the farm for a boat, and his voice, shrill and lost-sounding in the open space, broke like a cry for help across the joy of the song. Thomas, down by the gate, heard both the song and the cry, but the old man coming in the trap heard only the fiddle singing on his knee.

She sang so long that she did not know when she stopped, but Thomas, down by the gate, felt as if a fiddle-string had snapped. He had the same sense as of something wounded and ceasing to be. It was just at that moment the trap checked at his side....

The wife in the house looked out and saw the marsh roads empty north and east and south. The crawling speck she had watched so long must have reached its stopping-place at last. She thought again of the yacht, swinging so eagerly over the tide, only to turn so suddenly at the end. Even the highest hopes, it seemed, met barriers they could not leap.... But the trap, when the time came for it to turn, trundling over land that had once been sailing-ground as well, would leave something behind it when it went away. It would leave a heart in haven, a spirit released, a wanderer come home. She wondered what they were saying to each other, away down there under the thick hedges by the meadow-gate. She wondered if Kit would notice the new gate, its new paint and how easily it swung. The other had been an ancient of days unwilling to be moved, protesting with rusty hinges and the creak of rotten wood. And, when once it was opened, you had to scurry through, so great was its haste to creak itself back to rest....

But of course he would never notice it to-night, after all the excitement of the ride. It was one of the grand new changes to be shown him later on. Thomas, trained in sound methods on a well-kept farm, seemed already to have changed the character of this. It was almost as if it had pulled itself together under the mere glance of his disapproving eye. Roots looked healthy, the corn was even and getting ahead; the hedgerows were clear of nettles and the meadows of thistles—on the whole. The hay was doing well and was thick at the roots; they hoped to be cutting in a week. The old man would be pleased with the new machines, the cutter and tedder in their brilliant coats of blue. There were the horses, too, bargains and rare good beasts. He would hardly know either stable or shippon, with all that the Squire had done in the way of repairs. And as for all the fine new things about the house—why, it would take a month of Sundays to see them all!

She had, in that last pause, one of those rare moments when joy is awaited fully prepared. All was swept and garnished about her for this hour, as perfect as she could make it in the time; perhaps it would never be as perfect again. Now she could put aside the work of the weeks and meet the occasion with a settled mind. Both to herself and to Thomas, hardly conscious of it though they were, there was something symbolic in the coming event. Both recognised, more or less, that they were owed a grudge by fate. In their search after happiness, they had made someone sad. In their groping after each other they had allowed somebody to be alone. Now that life had given them so much they were ashamed to think that somebody was poor. This coming of the old man stood for atonement on their part, resurrection on his. It meant the sanction of fate to hold their consciences clear....

So they had put into this home-coming everything that they knew of kindly work and pleasant conspiring and kindly thought. There was nothing within their compass that they had left undone, nothing omitted that held a welcome of its own. They meant him to walk straight into peace out of the passion through which he had passed, while they looked on with relieved hearts, not quite certain whether they were forgiven sinners or his guardian saints. Not that it mattered if only old Kit was pleased; if only their good but troubled souls might rest.

And still there was no sign of the guest, though she felt sure the splendid moment had begun. Of course they would wait for a final word with Bob, after Thomas had helped the old man down. Bob would be asked, of course, to come to the house, but if he had hired or borrowed the trap he would have to be getting back. She had never included Bob in the picture in her mind, except as a part of the trap as it lumbered away. And that parting crack would not be a long one, she felt sure. Kit would be tired and fretting to get indoors, and Thomas would know she was waiting for them—and tea. She was rarely glad she had got that ham for tea....

Again, as she waited, she felt a wish to go to the gate. There was no reason, really, why she shouldn’t run down. The old man would likely be glad of another arm. Folks getting up in years were easily upset, and joy was often a bit terrible to the old. He would be ready for bed before so long ... and she would wake in the night and wonder whether he slept. She forgot the gate in thinking of the room, and how it would never be quite the same again. Surely there was no harm in taking a last peep? Those folks at the gate wouldn’t be up yet. She would hear their voices coming up the field, and could be down in time to meet them at the door. She looked again and found nothing and made up her mind. She disappeared up the carpeted stair.