V
“MacPherson died that night about an hour before the doctor came; Marco and the doctor had missed each other, and had missed the trains, but the doctor reassured me that I had done all that was possible, and that had he arrived by midday he could not have saved MacPherson’s life.
“‘I suppose you will want to bring him down to the English cemetery at Smyrna?’ he said, with an offer of help tripping on the heels of his remark. He looked horrified when I told him of MacPherson’s wish and of my intention of carrying it out.
“‘But no priest, I am afraid, will consent to read the burial service over him under those conditions,’ he said primly.
“‘Then I will read it myself,’ I replied in a firm voice.
“‘You must please yourself about that,’ said the doctor, giving it up. His attitude towards me, which had started by being sympathetic, was now changing subtly to a slight impatience. He took out his watch. ‘I am afraid I ought to be going,’ he remarked, ‘if I am to catch the last train down to Smyrna, and there seems to be nothing more I can do for you here. There will have to be a certificate of death, of course; I will send you that. And if you like I will stop in the village on the way, and send some one up to you; you understand me—a layer-out.’
“I said that I should be much obliged to him, and, accompanying him as far as the front door, I watched him go with Marco and a lantern, the little parallelogram of yellow light criss-crossed with black lines, swaying to and fro in the night.
“I could not go to bed, and as I was anxious to leave Ephesus as soon as possible, I thought I would employ my time in going through poor MacPherson’s few possessions. As he said, there was nothing private. I sat downstairs in the sitting-room we had shared, with his tin box open on the table before me, shiny black, and the inside of the lid painted sky-blue. It was pitifully empty. His will was in a long envelope, a will making provision for his wife, and bequeathing the remainder of his income to an archæological society; there was also a codicil directing that his Ephesian fragments were to go, as he had told me, to the British Museum. The box also contained a diary, recording, not his life, but his discoveries; and a few letters from men of science. For the rest, there were his books, his clothes, his wrist-watch, his plaid rug, and a little loose cash in Turkish coins. And that was all. There was absolutely nothing else. Not a photograph, not a seal, not even a bunch of keys. Nothing private! I should think not, indeed.
“I sat there staring at the bleak little collection when Marco came in to say that he had returned with the layer-out. I went into the passage, and there I found our old negro post-woman, grinning as usual in her magenta wrapper; it seemed that she combined several village functions in her own person. I felt an instinctive horror at the thought of those black hands pawing poor MacPherson, but the thing was unavoidable, so I took her upstairs to where he lay in a repose that appeared to me enviable after the brief but terrible suffering he had undergone, and left her there, bending over him, the softer parts of her huge body quivering as usual under her mashlak. I went downstairs again, and stood outside to breathe the clean, cool air; the sky hung over me swarming with stars; I tried not to think of the old negress exercising her revolting profession on MacPherson’s body.
“Next day two men in baggy trousers and red sashes came up to the house carrying the hastily-made coffin. Then we set out, Marco, myself, and the two men with the coffin and MacPherson inside it. Providentially there were no tourists that day at Ephesus. Marco and I had been hard at work all the morning digging the grave, and as I drove my pick I reflected that this was, humanly speaking, the last time I should ever break up the flinty ground of Ephesus. After ten years! With regard to myself and my future, I dared not think; my present preoccupation was to have finished with MacPherson and his widow.
“Well, I buried him up there, and may I be hanged if I don’t think the man was better and more happily buried in the place he had loved, than stuck down in a corner of some unfriendly cemetery he had never seen. For myself—such is the egoism of our nature—I was thinking all the while that I would leave behind me a written request to be buried within sight of Westmacott’s farm in Kent. And after I had buried him, and had got rid of Marco and the two men over a bottle of raki in the kitchen, I took all the flowers from my garden and put them on his grave, and I dug up some roots of orchid and cyclamen and planted them at his head and at his feet; but I don’t suppose they ever survived the move, and probably to this day the tourists who wander far enough afield to stumble over the mound, say, ‘Why, some one has buried his dog out here.’
“A week later I was in London, on a blazing August day which seemed strangely misty to me, accustomed as I was to the direct, unmitigated rays of the sun on the Ephesian hills. I still hadn’t thought about my future, and I was resolved not to do so until, my interview with Mrs. MacPherson over, I could look upon the whole of the last ten years as an episode of the past. I had tried to forget that I was in the same country as Ruth; but this had been difficult, for the train from Dover had carried me through the heart of Ruth’s own county, a cruel, unforeseen prank of fortune; I had pulled down the blinds of my railway carriage, greatly to the annoyance of my fellow-travellers, but these good people, who might have been involved with Fate in a conspiracy against me, had their unwitting revenge and defeated my object utterly by saying, as we flashed through a station, ‘That was Hildenborough; now we have to go through a long tunnel.’
“Hildenborough! After ten years, during which I had consistently kept at least fifteen hundred miles between us, I was at last within two miles of her home. I nearly sprang out of the train at the thought. But I resolutely put it away, so resolutely that I found myself pushing with my hands and with all my force against the side of the railway carriage.
“It was too late, when I reached London, to do anything that day. I slept at my old club, where everybody started at the sight of me as of a ghost, and the following morning I went to the address MacPherson had given me. It was in a block of flats, a long way up. I was left stranded upon the tiny landing by the lift-boy, who, with his lift, fell rapidly down through the floor as though pulled from below by a giant’s hand. I rang the bell. It tinkled loudly; I heard voices within, and presently a woman came to open the door, with an expression of displeased inquiry on her face; a middle-aged woman, wearing a dingy yellow dressing-gown which she kept gathering together in her hand as though afraid that it would fall open.
“‘Can I see Mrs. MacPherson?’ I asked.
“She stared at me.
“‘There’s no Mrs. MacPherson here.’
“I heard a man’s voice from inside the flat,—
“‘What is it, Belle?’
“She called back over her shoulder,—
“‘Here’s a party asking to see Mrs. MacPherson.’
“‘Who is it?’ asked the voice.
“‘Who are you, anyway?’ said Belle to me.
“‘I have been sent here by Mr. MacPherson, Mr. Angus MacPherson, with a message for his wife,’ I said, ‘but as I have evidently made a mistake I had better apologise and go away.’
“She looked suddenly thoughtful—or was it apprehensive?
“‘No, don’t go away,’ she said. ‘You haven’t made a mistake. Come in.’
“I went in, and she closed the door behind me. I followed her into the sitting-room where, amid surroundings at once pretentious and tawdry, a man, also in a dressing-gown, lay stretched on the sofa smoking cigarettes. He was handsome in a vulgar way, with black wavy hair and a curved, sensuous mouth.
“‘Now,’ said Belle, ‘let’s hear your news of Mr. Angus MacPherson?’
“‘First of all,’ I answered, ‘may I know who I am talking to?’
“Belle and the man exchanged glances.
“‘Oh, well,’ she said then, I am Mrs. MacPherson all right enough. If you have really got a message for me, let’s hear it.’
“There was anxiety in her tone, and she edged nearer to the handsome man, and surreptitiously took possession of his hand.
“I did not think that the news of MacPherson’s death was likely to cause much grief to his widow. I therefore said without preamble,—
“I have come to tell you that he died a week ago of cholera. I was with him at the time, and I have brought you the certificate of his death, also his will. He left no other papers.’
“‘Angus dead?’ said Angus’s widow. ‘You don’t say! Poor old Angus!’
“She was relieved by my words; I know she was relieved. She began reading the will with avidity. If I could find nothing else to admire about her, I could at least admire her candour.
“‘He’s left me five hundred a year,’ she said abruptly, ‘and the rest to some archi—what is it? society. Five hundred a year, and he had a thousand!’
“‘Oh, come, Belle,’ said the handsome man, ‘that’s better than nothing.’
“She let her eyes dwell on his face with real affection, real kindliness.
“‘Let’s have a look at that will,’ he murmured lazily.
“She passed it across to him, sat down on a stool, clasped her knees, and became meditative.
“‘Poor old Angus!’ she repeated. ‘Fancy that! Well, he was rare fun in his day, wasn’t he, Dick?’
“‘No end of a dog,’ replied Dick without removing his eyes from the will.
“‘Perhaps, if there are no questions you want to ask me, I had better be going now,’ I began. I was bewildered, for MacPherson, in spite of his eccentricities, had undoubtedly been a scholar and a man of refinement.
“Dick stirred from his spoilt torpor.
“‘I suppose it is quite certain,’ he said, ‘that there is no mistake? I mean, it’s quite certain he’s dead?’
“‘Quite,’ I answered rather grimly, as certain visions rose before my eyes. ‘I buried him myself;’ and the flat with its dirty lace, its cheap pretension, melted away into the quiet beauty of Ephesus.
“I walked away from the building with an inexpressible loneliness at heart, faced with my own immediate and remoter future, a problem I had hitherto refused to consider, but which now rushed at me like the oncoming wave rushes at the failing swimmer and overwhelms him. I had finished with Ephesus and MacPherson, and with MacPherson’s wife, and to say that I felt depressed would give you no idea of my feelings: an immense desolation took possession of me, an immense desolation, and more: an immense, soul-destroying disgust and weariness at the cruelty of things, a lassitude such as I had never conceived, so that I envied MacPherson lying for ever at peace, away from strife and difficulties and things that would not go right, among beautiful and untroubled hills, with wild flowers blooming round his grave. Yes, I envied him, I that am a sane man and have always prized rich life at its full value.
“And as I walked I met two men I had known, who spoke to me by my name and stopped me.
“‘Why, it’s Malory,’ said one of them. ‘I haven’t seen you lately. Somebody told me you had gone to Scotland?’
“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I went to Scotland.’
“He asked me, ‘What part of Scotland?’
“‘To Aberdeen,’ I cried, ‘to Aberdeen!’ and laughed, and left them.
“I had been prepared to pass unrecognised after ten years, but for this friendliness, which had not ‘seen me lately,’ I was unprepared. I turned into a park, longing instinctively for the country as the only palliative for my loneliness and melancholy. In all London that day I think there was no lonelier soul than I. I would have sought you out, but in such crisis of world-sorrow as was mine, I could desire only one presence—a presence I might not have. She could have annihilated my sorrow by a word, could have made me forget the dirt, and the irony; all that hurt me so profoundly—though I don’t think myself a sentimentalist. For I was hurt as a raw sentimentalist is hurt, and this pain blended with my own trouble into a sea of despair. I wanted to find a haven of refuge, some beautiful gulf where the wind never blows, but where harmonious hills rise serenely from the water, and all is cultivated and easy and fertile.
“I sat for a long time under the trees, gazing immovably at the ground between my feet, and then I got up mechanically, without any plan in my head, and wandered as mechanically home towards my club. My club burst incongruously enough on my dreams of a beautiful gulf; that, again, was part of the irony on this most cruel of days. But I had nowhere else to go to.
“I began to write to MacPherson’s solicitors to inform them of their client’s death; the new life was so empty that I clung for as long as I was able to the old. As I wrote, the hall-boy came and stood at my elbow.
“‘Please, sir, there’s a young woman asking to see you.’
“A young woman? Could it be Belle? so equipped for the day’s battle as to pass for young?
“‘What’s her name? what does she want?’
“‘She won’t say, sir; she wants to see you.’
“I went out. Ruth was standing by the hall-door, plainly dressed in a dark coat and skirt, and a sailor hat, and holding a couple of faded red roses in her hand.
“I looked at her incredulously, and all the world stood still.
“She began, shyly and hurriedly,—
“‘Oh, I don’t want to bother you if you are busy....’
“That made me laugh.
“‘I am not busy,’ I told her.
“‘Oh, then perhaps I could speak to you for a few minutes? somewhere just quietly, and alone?’
“I glanced round. The porter was standing there with a face carved in stone.
“‘You can’t come in here,’ I said. ‘Where can I take you? Will you come to an hotel?’
“‘Oh, no!’ she said, shrinking, and I noticed her little gray cotton gloves.
“‘At any rate, let us get away from here. Then we can think where to go.’
“We went down the steps, across Piccadilly, and passed into the Green Park. There I stopped, but she would not sit on the chair I suggested. She stood before me, her eyes downcast, and her gloved fingers twisting the stems of her roses. I bethought myself to ask her,—
“‘How on earth did you find me, to-day of all days?’
“‘I came to ask,’ she answered, still in that shy, hurried tone, ‘whether they knew when you would be coming to London.’
“‘And they told you I was there?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘You came up from the Weald on purpose to ask that?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘But why?’
“She was silent.
“‘Why, Ruth?’
“‘Because I wanted to see you.’
“‘To see me?’
“‘To tell you something,’
“‘What is it?’
“‘I can’t tell you here,’ she murmured.
“‘Come to an hotel,’ I said again, ‘we can get a private sitting-room; we can talk.’
“‘Oh, no, not that. I suppose ... I suppose you wouldn’t ... I am sure you are busy.’
“‘No, no, on my honour, Ruth, I have absolutely nothing to do either to-day, or to-morrow, or the next day, or any day after that.’
“‘Sure?’ she said eagerly, raising her eyes for one moment to mine and then lowering them again.
“‘Quite sure.’
“‘Then,’ with sudden boldness, ‘will you come down to the Weald with me? now? at once?’
“‘To the Weald? Of course I will, I’ll do anything you like. We’ll go straight to Charing Cross, shall we?’
“‘Oh, yes, please, you are very good. And please, don’t ask me any questions till we get there.’
“My ten years’ training with MacPherson proved invaluable to me now, and I can say with pride that neither by direct nor indirect means did I seek to extract any information from Ruth. Indeed, I was content to observe her as she sat by me in the cab, no longer the girl I remembered, but a woman of ripe beauty, and yet in her confused manner there was a remnant of girlishness, in her lowered eyes, and her tremulous lips. I saw that she sat there full of suppressed emotion, buoyed up by some intense determination which carried her over her shyness and confusion as a barque carries its passenger over high waves. I was too bewildered, too numb with joy, to wonder much at the cause of her journey.
“At Charing Cross she produced the return half of her third-class ticket from her little purse, refusing to let me pay the excess fare which would allow us to travel first. I think she was afraid of being shut alone with me into a first-class carriage, knowing that in the humbler compartment she could reckon on the security of company. So we sat on the hard wooden benches, opposite one another, rocking and swaying with the train, and trying to shrink away in our respective corners from the contact of the fruit-pickers who crowded us unpleasantly: Ruth sat staring out over the fields of Kent, her hands in their neat gray cotton gloves lying on her lap, and the tired roses drooping listlessly between her fingers; she looked a little pale, a little thin, but that subtle warmth of her personality was there as of old, whether it lay, as I never could decide, in the glow under her skin or in the tender curves of her features. She looked up to catch me gazing at her, and we both turned to the landscape to hide our confusion.
“Ah! I could look out over that flying landscape now, with no need to pull down the window-blinds, and Penshurst station, when we reached it, was no longer a pang, but a rejoicing. The train stopped, I struggled with the door, we jumped out, the train curved away again on its journey, and we stood side by side alone on the platform.
“It was then about five o’clock of a perfect August day. Little white clouds stretched in a broken bank along the sky. Dorothy Perkins bloomed in masses on the palings of the wayside station. The railway seemed foreign to the country, the English country which lay there immovable, regardless of trains that hurried restless mankind to and fro, between London and the sea.
“‘Let us go,’ I said to Ruth.
“We set out walking across the fields, infinitely green and tender to my eyes, accustomed to the brown stoniness of Ephesus. We walked in silence, but I, for one, walked happy in the present, and feeling the aridity of my being soaked and permeated with repose and beauty. Ruth took off her jacket, which I carried for her, walking cool and slender in a white muslin shirt. In this soft garment she looked eighteen, as I remembered her.
“We took the short cut to Westmacotts’. There it was, the lath and plaster house, the farm buildings, the double oast-house at the corner of the big black barn, simmering, hazy and mellow, in the summer evening. A farm-hand, carrying a great truss of hay on a pitchfork across his shoulder, touched his cap to Ruth as he passed. There was no sign of Westmacott.
“‘Where ...’ I began, but changed my question. ‘Where are the children?’
“‘I left them over with mother before I came away this morning,’ she answered.
“We went into the house, into the kitchen, the same kitchen, unchanged.
“She took refuge in practical matters.
“‘Will you wait there while I take off my things and get the tea?’
“I sat down like a man in a dream while she disappeared upstairs. I was quite incapable of reflection, but dimly I recognised the difference between this clean, happy room of bright colours and shining brasses, and the tawdry, musty flat I had penetrated that morning, and the contrast spread itself like ointment over a wound.
“Ruth returned; she had taken off her hat and had covered her London clothes by a big blue linen apron with patch pockets. Her sleeves were rolled up to the elbow; I saw the smooth brown arm with the delicate wrist and shapely hand.
“‘You’ll want your tea,’ she said briskly.
“I had had nothing to eat since breakfast.
“You told me once in a letter that you had been to tea with Ruth, so you know the kind of meal she provides: bread, honey, scones, big cups, and tea in an enormous teapot. She laid two places only, moving about, severely practical, but still quivering with that suppressed excitement, still tense with that unfaltering determination.
“‘It’s ready,’ she said at length, summoning me.
“I couldn’t eat, for the emotion of that meal alone with her was too strong for me. I sat absently stirring the sugar in my cup. She tried to coax me to eat, but her solicitude exasperated my overstrained nerves, and I got up abruptly.
“‘It’s no good,’ I said, ‘I must know. What is it, Ruth? What had you to tell me?’
“The moment had rushed at her unawares; she looked at me with frightened eyes; her determination, put to the test, hesitated.
“I went over to her and stood before her.
“‘What is it, Ruth?’ I said again. ‘You haven’t brought me down here for nothing. Hadn’t you better tell me before your husband comes in?’
“‘He won’t come in,’ she said, hanging her head so that I could only see the wealth of her hair and her little figure in the big blue apron.
“‘How do you know?’ I asked.
“‘He isn’t here.’
“‘Where is he, then?’
“She raised her head and looked me full in the face, no longer frightened, but steady, resolute.
“‘He has left me,’ she said.
“‘Left you? What do you mean? For good?’
“‘Yes. He’s left me, the farm, and the children; he’s never coming back.’
“‘But why? Good Heavens, why?’
“‘He was afraid,’ she said in a low voice.
“‘Afraid?’
“‘Yes. Of me. Oh,’ she broke off, ‘sit down and I will tell you all about it.’