PROLOGUE
HE dropped the pen.... More strictly speaking, it fell as if weighted from his fingers. He had an extraordinary feeling that he would never use a pen again.
A flush came into Mattie’s face, but she said nothing. He had always expected that, if ever this moment arrived,—impossible as it had seemed that it ever should arrive,—she would meet it with a flood of joyful speech; but now she was silent. It was the second time this evening that she had surprised him by her silence,—this wan and weary early-spring evening which marked the finish of a bleak and soulless day. Searching vaguely, however, among recollections which had left impression without form, he remembered that people often did fall silent at the late fulfilment of a long desire....
Instead of speaking, she sighed. It was such a sigh, he thought, as the dying give just before they pass on into new life. In that last breath there is everything that they see before them, and everything that they leave behind. Mattie’s sigh was like that.
Not that she looked like dying, as she got to her feet at last, heavily a little, but pushing her chair from her more quietly than usual, not in the almost rough way she used sometimes, as if the very furniture of the house clogged and held her ardent spirit. She stood beside him a moment, looking down at the letter he had just written, a splendid woman, growing old,—and older in the evenings than in the mornings,—but still full of vitality and fire. Again he expected her to break out into some form of expression, either of satisfaction or relief, but still she said nothing. Sometimes, as he knew, on occasions of this kind, relief took the form of a recapitulation of past miseries, and he would not have been surprised if Mattie had shown hers in that fashion. But dumbness seemed to have fallen upon her. Even her face had grown strangely inexpressive. There was no hint in it that she was thinking either of old sorrow or new joy. It was simply blank, as if it was no longer able to register the workings of the mind that lay behind it.
Turning away from him, she moved almost aimlessly across the kitchen. It was as if she had been switched suddenly on to another plane, and did not know any longer what to do on this. Stooping, she put out her hand for the poker, as if meaning to stir the fire, but she put it out to the wrong side. That seemed to paralyse her more than ever. She seemed incapable of reaching across to it where it stood in its accustomed place, but remained stooping, her hand dropped loosely at her side. It was only after a long pause that she straightened herself slowly, and, swinging round, stared about the room with eyes which hardly seemed to recognise it.
He continued to watch her, fascinated. It was all so different, he was saying to himself; not in the least what he had expected. If only she would speak!... It couldn’t be that she was disappointed?—he found himself thinking, startled; and suddenly there came into his mind the absurd fear that, in giving her what she wanted, he had perhaps taken away from her something that she wanted more....
She moved away from the hearth, and as she did so the firelight shot up, so that her shadow on the wall shot up, too, and became huge and menacing in the kitchen. Too big for the room, it pressed itself against ceiling and walls, as if trying to force a way out of what was no longer able to contain it. He watched it struggle for a moment, saw it sink and leap in a still more furious effort, and then the fire dropped and it dropped with it. He waited for it to shoot up again, expecting every second to see it beat and battle afresh. But it did not shoot up again. Instead, there came presently into the stillness a little tinkling sound which showed that the fire had dropped still lower.
The window of the cottage had long since gone black, making a dark velvet background for the gold flower of the lamp at his elbow. The gardens outside were as blank as Mattie’s face, gone out as completely as if it was only in the daytime that they had any concrete existence. The letter on the table looked a white, untouched square, with the impress of his handwriting barely visible upon it.
There was very little in the letter, but it had taken a long time to put it down. They had been so long over it, indeed, that already it was time for bed. The kitchen clock told them that, breaking the silence almost impertinently, and Mattie started. And then she, too, broke silence.
“Eh, well! So that’s the end of that!” she said, from the stairfoot, speaking apparently not so much to him as to a hundred other things about her; and, turning determinedly towards the stairs without further comment, mounted them with her strong though heavy step, and vanished.
He sat still for some time after she had gone, feeling a little defrauded and more than a little exasperated. Even now, when she had spoken, her voice had told him nothing. It was rather unfair, he said to himself.... It seemed incredible that the great moment of her life should have come and gone, and that she should have had so few words,—and none too comprehensible words, either,—with which to greet it.
But she was glad,—he did not need telling that; so glad, perhaps, that only tears could really express her gladness. Probably she was crying upstairs, even now, weeping the tears which it is better not to stop. Because it was wiser to let her weep he stayed on where he was, watching the night deepen over the gardens and droop closer upon his cottage.
He was glad, too, he said to himself; relieved, too, even though he did not feel inclined to weep about it. He felt instead that lightness which comes with choice after a long and difficult approach to a parting of the ways. He told himself as he waited that he had only hesitated until now because he knew that the moment had not arrived. He had hesitated and rebelled, and therefore he had suffered; but he did not suffer now. On the contrary, in this curious, almost unbelievable way, he actually felt glad.
He got up, after a while, and on a sudden impulse went and opened the house-door. He knew that the gardens were there, the moment he did that. It was only through the window that they seemed to have faded away. He could feel them stretching about him on either hand; could see, without knowing how he saw, the actual shapes of bed and tree. But to-night he felt no thrilling link with the place which had been in his charge for the last forty years. He had passed on, as Mattie had long ago passed on. He had written the letter, and he was glad.
Without being conscious that he had done so, he left the door still open when he went upstairs to bed.