Wastralls: A Novel

by C. A. Dawson Scott

More than once that evening when the young people, singing the old hymns to the old tunes were gathered about the harmonium, the good woman's thoughts returned to the friend of her youth. What a fine woman Sabina had been, putting them all in the shade yet unaware of it and what happy times they had had. She remembered childhood's days and how often she had waited at the cross-roads for Sabina, so that they might walk the length of the way together. The fish-seller's daughter would bring a pasty for her school dinner and there being nine at home, it was generally more pastry than meat; but Sabina had supplemented it with red apples and cold sausages and other delectable foods. Sabina had also supplemented the other's wardrobe, perhaps even her prospects.

Mrs. Tom, thinking of the lonely figure at the gate, was glad her own days were passed at Hember, in rooms that led out of each other and were crowded with children. Wastralls, silent and old, depressed her. Not all the fires Sabina lighted could warm its bones and do away with the faint but pervading smell of mould. Life that had been thinned to ghostliness, drifted through the passages; and the rooms lay in a brooding hush. She thought of the place with a dim prevision, too dim for her to grasp, a prevision of calamity.

"Somebody digging my grave!" she said and drew nearer to the fire.

The wind which blew in gusts, dropping now and again into a deceitful lull, sent a cold breath up the valley and Sabina, lingering by the gate, drew the shawl closer about her shoulders. The shadow that rested on Wastralls, a shadow to which she was as a rule wholesomely indifferent, had grown a little, grown till it included her. Though her perceptive faculty was slight, she was in no hurry to leave the clean sanity, the freshness of the night.

Above the black oblong of the mill the rim of the moon was showing golden, that wonderful West-country moon, which hangs, a clear lamp of light, far above cloud and mist. The beams falling across the yard, across the ricks, had not yet reached Wastralls. The house stood withdrawn below the hills and, for the first time, Sabina felt her home to be remote from the warm friendliness of the world. She saw it that night approximately as it appeared to others, a place cut off by its situation. The valley being far from the main highway, strangers were unaware of it. The road through, led to nothing but the teeth of the devouring sea and, as the hamlet of Cottages was the most cheerful spot in Trevorrick, so Wastralls was the most lonely and the most lost. Hember windows were always aglow. The sun found them by day and the moon by night. They glowed from within, from the fires of driftwood and sea-coal, from lamps swinging under the dark rafters, from the fires of life. Sabina, reluctantly returning to the house, could not but contrast the light and music of Hember, its continual coming and going, with the dark desolation, the stagnant peace of Wastralls. Never had it been otherwise. Her earliest recollections were of long hours when, her father being at the Dolphin, the servant would take advantage and be 'walking out.' The child, given the run of the empty rooms and left to her own devices, had peopled the place with imaginary figures. Even at this distance of time she could recall their 'names and attributes—Tinkle Minkle who was black and made of sugar, Creekuk and Clokuk the eiderdown men, and Tinkle Farg who, still more absurd, had been 'shy with a buffalo!' Naturally social she had liked to imagine a face at every window, children playing under the 'grubby elms' of the avenue and among the animals in the yard. She had looked forward to the time when she should be grown up and married. "One child is a misfortune," she had told her father at the ripe age of ten, "I'm going to 'ave lots when I marry. I'm going to full the rooms."

The sound of a harmonium came to her through the stillness, but so faint was it she could hardly distinguish the tune. At Hember they were singing the familiar hymns in which all could join. The sound drew the listening woman. How often when weary of imaginary companions had she run up the lane and joined her cousins at their play! Hember had been a bright spot in her life. All that she knew of sewing and housewifery, her aunt had taught her; and Tom had wanted to marry her, yes—Tom and Constantine. Poor old Constantine, he had tried his best. But Tom, the rascal, Tom had been looking two ways at once. She sighed, the gusty sigh of a stout middle-aged woman who wishes the hot cake of youthful joys, with its plums and its citron and its spice, was once more whole in her hand.

A puff of wind, increasing the volume of sound, enabled Sabina to recognize the hymn. She could almost see the happy group, Isolda knitting in her chair by the range, Tom opposite to her and, about the harmonium, the bright heads and smiling faces of the girls. Ah, if only one of them had been born to herself! She, who had been going to 'full the rooms,' had had neither the full quiver nor the faithful mate; she had had, as she realized at last, nothing in all her life but hope; and from her, time had stolen, even that which she had.

In the kitchen, absorbed in brooding thought, Byron, a thicker shadow in the growing gloom, was awaiting her return. Her mind, from wandering far afield, circled to the present, to the slight repugnance she felt at entering the house. She was not a 'nervy' woman, indeed, in a countryside peculiarly susceptible to the so-called supernatural, had been known to declare, "Out at all times, night and day, and never see nothing worse than myself." Her unwillingness to go back, an unwillingness which, in truth, was but another of the warnings which had been tolling like death-bells all the day, seemed to her foolish.

"'Tis owin' that we've been bad friends for so long," she said. "I'm feelin' awkward as tho' 'e'd been a stranger. The sooner I take an' go in the better."

The door of the glass porch stood wide in a yawn of blackness, a blackness so thick that Mrs. Byron felt as if she were pushing her way in against a resistance intangible and, on the whole, yielding but which could yet be felt. Afraid of what might be lurking in the depths of that gloom she forced herself to move noisily and, making a greater effort, to break the silence.