3
Aunt May appeared after a long interval—a thin, brown-faced woman of forty or so. She wore a very short skirt, a man’s jacket and an old deerstalker hat, and she carried a pitchfork. She must have brought the pitchfork as an emblem of authority, but she did not handle it as the other woman had handled her broomstick. The murderous pitchfork appeared little more deadly in her keeping than does the mace in the House of Commons, but as an emblem the pitchfork was infinitely more effective.
Aunt May’s questions were pertinent and searching, and after a few brief explanations had been offered to her she drove off the young woman, her niece, whom she addressed as “Allie,” to perform the many duties which were her share of the day’s work.
Allie went, laughing.
“You can sleep here to-night,” announced Aunt May. “We shall have a meal all together soon after sunset. Till then you can talk to my sister, who’s an invalid. She’s always eager for news.”
She took charge of them as if she were the matron of a workhouse receiving new inmates.
“You’d better bring your truck into the garden,” she said, “or Alice will be turning everything over. Inquisitive brute!” she added, snapping her fingers at the cow, who had returned, and stood within a few feet of them, eyeing the Goslings with a slow, dull wonder—a mournfully sleepy beast whose furiously wakeful tail seemed anxious to rouse its owner out of her torpor.
The invalid sister sat by the window of a small room that faced west and overlooked the luxuriance of what was still recognizably a flower-garden.
“My sister, Mrs Pollard,” said Aunt May sharply, and then addressing the woman who sat huddled in shawls by the window, she added: “Three more strays, Fanny—from London, Allie tells me.” She went out quickly, closing the door with a vigour which indicated little tolerance for invalid nerves.
Mrs Pollard stretched out a delicate white hand. “Please come and sit near me,” she said, “and tell me about London. It is so long since I have had any news from there. Perhaps you might be able——” she broke off, and looked at the three strangers with a certain pathetic eagerness.
“I’ll take me bonnet off, ma’am, if you’ll excuse me,” remarked Mrs Gosling. She felt at home once more within the delightful shelter of a house, although slightly overawed by the aspect of the room and its occupant. About both there was an air of that class dignity to which Mrs Gosling knew she could never attain. “I don’t know when I’ve felt the ’eat as I ’ave to-day,” she remarked politely.
“Has it been hot?” asked Mrs Pollard. “To me the days all seem so much alike. I want you to tell me, were there any young men in London when you left? You haven’t seen any young man who at all resembles this photograph, have you?”
Mrs Gosling stared at the silver-framed photograph which Mrs Pollard took from the table at her side, stared and shook her head.
“We haven’t seen a single man of any kind for two months,” said Blanche, “not a single one. Have we, Millie?”
Millie, sitting rather stiffly on her chair, shook her head. “It’s terrible,” she said. “I’m sure I don’t know where they can have all gone to.”
Mrs Pollard did not reply for a moment. She looked steadfastly out of the window, and tears, which she made no attempt to restrain, chased each other in little jerks down her smooth pale cheeks.
Mrs Gosling pinched her mouth into an expression of suffering sympathy, and shook her head at her daughters to enforce silence. Was she not, also, a widow?
After a short pause, Mrs Pollard fumbled in her lap and discovered a black-bordered pocket-handkerchief—a reminiscence, doubtless, of some earlier bereavement. Her expression had been in no way distorted as she wept, and after the tears had been wiped away no trace of them disfigured her delicate face. Her voice was still calm and sweet as she said:
“I am very foolish to go on hoping. I loved too much, and this trial has been sent to teach me that all love but One is vain, that I must not set my heart upon things of the earth. And yet I go on hoping that my poor boy was not cut off in Sin.”
“Dear, dear!” murmured Mrs Gosling. “You musn’t take it to ’eart too much, ma’am. Boys will be a little wild and no doubt our ’eavenly Father will make excuses.”
Mrs Pollard shook her head. “If it had only been a little wildness,” she said, “I should have hope. He is, indeed, just and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, but my poor Alfred became tainted with the terrible doctrines of Rome. It has been the greatest grief of my life, and I have known much pain....” And again the tears slowly welled up and fell silently down that smooth, unchanging face.
Mrs Gosling sniffed sympathetically. The two girls glanced at one another with slightly raised eyebrows and Blanche almost invisibly shrugged her shoulders.
The warm evening light threw the waxen-faced, white-shawled figure of the woman in the window into high relief. Her look of ecstatic resignation was that of some wonderful mediæval saint returned from the age of vision and miracle to a recently purified earth in which the old ideas of saintship had again become possible. Her influence was upon the room in which she sat. The sounds of the world outside, the evening chorus of wild life, the familiar noise of the farm, seemed to blend into a remote music of prayer—“Kyrie Eleison! Christe Eleison!” Within was a great stillness, as of a thin and bloodless purity; the long continuance of a single thought found some echo in every material object. While the silence lasted everything in that room was responsive to this single keynote of anæmic virtue.
Mrs Gosling tried desperately to weep without noise, and even the two girls, falling under the spell, ceased to glance covertly at one another with that hint of criticism, but sat subdued and weakened as if some element of life had been taken from them.
The lips of the woman in the window moved noiselessly; her hands were clasped in her lap. She was praying.