Dolly drew in her breath quickly, and stared with round eyes at her friend, and then with a suspicious frown at her husband. “Where have you been?” she asked deliberately.
“Oh, nowhere in particular,” he answered. “Have a drink, Merrivall?”
“Thanks,” the other replied. “Whisky and water for me.”
Jim rang the bell; and presently, excusing himself by saying that he must change his clothes, left the room.
Now, anyone who had seen him, five minutes later, as he walked across the garden, would have thought him entirely mad; for he was carrying his guitar across his shoulder, drum uppermost, and his stealthy step might have suggested that he was about to use it as a weapon with which to bash in the head of some lurking enemy.
Actually, however, he was in the habit of strumming upon this instrument when his nerves were on edge; and, indeed, there was a melancholy charm in his playing, and a still greater in his singing. But to-day his desire thus to relieve his feelings was accompanied by an anxiety not to be overheard by his wife or Merrivall. Moreover, the twilight outside was as warm and mellow as a summer evening, whereas the interior of the manor was grey and dismal. He had therefore indulged an impulse, and was now slinking off, like a sick dog, to his beloved woods to bay to the rising moon.
Passing through the gates at the end of the lower garden, where the hedges of gorse in full flower formed a golden mass, he entered the silent shadow of the trees; and for some distance he pushed forward between the close-growing trunks until he had reached a favourite resort of his, where there was a fallen oak spanning a little stream. Here, through a cleft in the trees, he could see the moon, nearly at its full, rising out of the violet haze of the evening; and as he sat down, with his legs dangling above the murmuring water, he listened in silence to the last notes of a thrush’s nesting-song that presently died away into the hush of contented rest.
Around him the silent oaks were arrayed, their boughs extending outwards and upwards from the gnarled trunks in fantastic shapes, like huge claws and fingers and probosces, feeling for the departed sunlight. Little leaves were just beginning to appear upon the branches, and here and there beneath them, where the ground was free of undergrowth, bluebells and violets appeared amongst the dead bracken and foliage of last year, and the small white wood-anemones like stars were scattered in profusion. The primroses were nearly over, but bracken shoots, curled like young ferns, were pushing up through the brown remnants of a former generation; low-growing creepers and brambles were sprouting into greenness; and the moss and grasses were tender with new life.
Jim’s mood was melancholy, but not sorrowful. It seemed to him that his heart was dead, crushed flat by the flabby hand of that leering figure which personified domestic life, and responded not to the spring. He was so appallingly lonely that if there had been tears within him they now would have overflowed; but there were not. He had no self-pity, no desire to confide his misery to another, no power, it seemed, either to laugh at himself or to weep.