“I have been content all my life. Never was a man more content. And now! It’s treachery if you like. My faith’s gone, content gone, for why?”
He rose to go, and as he paused at the door to bid her good-night she took his hand and softly and tenderly said: “Why are you depressed? Don’t be so. Life is not dull, it is only momentarily unkind.”
“Ah, I’ll get used to it.”
“John Pettigrove, you must never get used to dullness, I forbid you.”
“But I thought Tull was beautiful,” he said as he paused upon the doorsill. “I thought Tull was beautiful....”
“Until I came?” It was so softly uttered and she closed the door so quickly upon him. They called “Good-night, good-night” to each other through the door.
He went away through the village, his mind streaming with strange emotions. He exulted, and yet he feared for himself and for the widow, but he could not summon from the depths of his mind what it was he feared. He passed a woman in the darkness who, perhaps mistaking him for another, said “Good-night, my love.”
The next morning he sat in the kitchen after breakfast. It wanted but a few days to Christmas. There was no frost in the air; the wind roared, but the day, though grey, was not gloomy; only the man was gloomy.
“Nothing ever happens,” he murmured. “True, but what would you want to happen?”
Out in the scullery a village girl was washing dishes; as she rattled the ware she hummed a song. From his back window Pettigrove could see a barn in a field, two broken gates, a pile of logs, faggots, and a single pollarded willow whose head was strangled under a hat of ivy. Beside a barley stack was a goose with a crooked neck; it stood sulking. High aloft in the sky thousands of blown rooks wrangled like lost men. And Pettigrove vowed he would go no more to the widow—not for a while. Something inside him kept asking, Why not? And he as quickly replied to himself: “You know, you know. You’ll find it all in God-a-mighty’s own commandments. Stick to them, you can’t do more—at least, you might, but what would be the good?”