Beautiful end

by Constance Holme

She thought about it all day as she went about her work, or studied him from some corner out of sight. For the first time he was pathetic in her eyes, forsaken, cast-off, a creature without a place. He had a lonely look, she said to herself—poor Thomas without a home! He was a lonely soul, to whom life was being unkind. He might have been master, for instance, and still was only man. He might have had father and wife as well as farm, and instead he had only his dour and dogged self. She, too, had contracted the habit of looking towards the marsh, and had wondered a little and put the wonder by. Now, when she looked, she, too, had a sense of wrong in the loss of a home that might so well have been hers. She began to think of the stranger from her lover’s point of view, as an intruder thrusting himself into settled lives. She felt fiercely towards him as towards a cuckoo in the nest, forgetting that she herself had brought the position about. The thing worked in her all the day, gradually weighting and tilting the scale of her heart. Protective affection sprang up in her full-grown. Thomas, successful and sure, had not been able to win her even in years, but Thomas the failure laid hold of her in an hour. She could not bear that his face should be turned from his own marsh!... From one point and another she watched him all day long.

She saw the sheep go back again to their heafs, soft, snowy woolballs on the shining green. Going up, as in coming down, they gave the same impression of moving cloud. They travelled up the fell like smoke blown from a giant’s pipe, with no hint of the toil of thousands of little feet. They were going fast, too, though they looked strangely slow on the vast expanse of ground. It was only when she marked them by the end of the long stone wall that she saw how rapidly they climbed. They were like a wave surging always up and up, smoothly, determinedly, drawn by invisible cords. While her eye still watched the corner at the top, they were near it, they were round it, they were all of them silently gone....

After the meal in the big hall there were the usual trotting races and sports. Thomas had always taken a leading part in these events, but to-day he kept dismally aloof, unconsciously helping his new impression on her heart. And at the end of the day there had been the usual dance.

She happened to be upstairs when the fiddle struck up, and in the cool of the evening she leaned out to hark. Through the windows below she caught the jollity of the reel, the thin cry of the strings and the stamp of feet on the flags. In the room behind her where the great four-posters were, the shadows were creeping and climbing and laying the draperies of the night. There were always shadows within the curtains of the beds, as if they had come for those who had lain there dead, and had never had time to lift and scatter away. With the night there were the shadows of night as well, so that in shadow on shadow those who slept in the beds must lie. On the house itself there was shadow, the mighty shadow of the fells, and suddenly she longed for a room on the edge of things, looking starkly out to sea. There, in the night, one could always breathe, at least. She leaned further until the roses came up about her face, and then she saw Thomas standing by the pens.

At once, as she looked, the veil of her long bewilderment fell away. Now she knew what she wanted, what she meant to do. The wind of that longing for air and space had swept the cloudy room of her mind, and there, with his face to herself and his back to the sea, Thomas was all that the sudden wind had left.... He moved, as if meaning to go, and almost in panic she turned and ran from the room, flying through twisting passages and over the sagging floors. Shafts of light rayed across her from deep-cut window-slits; polished oak doors gleamed at her back as she sped down the bowed and winding stairs. The flood of music and dance swelled up to her as she approached, and she paused for a moment as she passed the room. After the soft purples out of doors which the sun was leaving behind, the room seemed misty and full of a golden dusk, yellow with lamps resisting the dying day. High in the wall the sawing arm that held the bow flung the wild music over the crowd, whirling figures and brown faces and gowns that made streaks of colours under the lights. The mist and the music and the beat of the feet made her head spin as she stood and looked. Her face and gown were framed by the door and the dark behind, and a partner began to edge towards her round the crowd. He was still some distance away when he saw her disappear, like a ghost caught away from the door by hidden hands. Again the longing for space had seized her as she looked. She slid round the door and fled to Thomas in the yard.

They were well on their way to her home before either found anything to say; and then, “What made you quit so soon?” she enquired with a rush at last.

He answered her, staring gloomily at the road, that the place was overcrowded by a deal. He wasn’t as set on dancing as he used. “Likely I’m getting old,” he added; “that’ll be it.” And then, after minutes and minutes he let himself go.... “I couldn’t abide hearing yon fiddle played.’Twas fiddle as fetched me out, if you want to know.”

He turned his head as he spoke, and tried to look through the hedge, and it was west and not east of them where the Hall lay that he looked. Here in the lane, as in the yard, he seemed to hear a fiddle that was dumb, thin and trembling and clear from the edge of the sea. Standing outside the dance he had heard the two musics mingle and clash, and had turned from the sound in the hot room to the sound that drew over miles from the cool tide.

“What fetched you out?” he asked of her, in his turn.

They had stopped in the road as if at some word of command, and the swinging curves of the lane went winding before and behind, shutting them in together this way and hiding them safe together that. The sun, level on the fields as if smoothed by a hand, was below the thick barrier of the mounted hedge. Only through chinks or the eye of a gate could it find a way, to lie in patches on the hedgerow grass, or splash its pools on the heavily-rutted road. It was more restful than sleep in that cleft between the fields, where the roses, sprayed overhead, took a richer colour against the sky. There was green upon green on the background of dark wood—bramble and hazel, convolvulus and thorn. There were yellow and purple and white sweet peeping faces in the grass; ferns, emerald-fresh, stately in thick groups. And close in the hedge-side, where all else was new, lingered the old dead beech leaves of the year before, waiting for this year’s leaves to drift there, too....