Only at night had he respite for a while. Two of the children slept in his little room, and even they, incredibly curious as they were, were forced to close their peering eyes at times. The old man, kept awake when he might have slept, could not always sleep later on, and often sat for hours by his window, looking out into the night. Up there, it almost seemed as though he were in the chestnuts over the road, only out in the branches where the birds slept it was cool, and full of a rocked and murmuring peace. Sometimes, though, on the stillest nights, not a leaf moved or shook on the giant boughs, but more often there was a little breeze that whispered busily all the time. There was a wind, too, that did nothing but sigh, and another that hissed in angry little gusts. The one that sighed meant that thunder was about, and the fretted one was the herald of change and rain. And another wind rolled in a long, soft soughing all the way through the trees, like the long, smooth waves of a very far-off tide. It would swell and rise while he listened for it to break, but always it ebbed and died without breaking at all. Sometimes it stopped in the midst of the downward curve, like a sentence softly suspended without cause. He liked this wind because it took him back to the marsh, but best of all he liked the big gales that came to him straight from the west. The wind that thrashed and tramped on the great trees, that hammered the little window of his room and sent great draughts down chimneys and through keyholes, and flung the blue slates spinning into the street, came to him straight from the place where he belonged. Sometimes, when it was very dark and wild, he was sure the street was full of the sea. He thought of it rolling and pushing at all the doors.... There was a meadow beyond the chestnuts over the road, and often he heard the water under the wall, like the tide that beat at the banks along the marsh.
He was fond of that meadow beyond the trees, with its shimmering levels golden in the sun, yet cool to the eye because of the shadow in between. At first he spent his time by the leaning wall, talking to people as they came along, but that was another thing Marget couldn’t abide. Strangers stared at his violin, and asked questions, and that vexed her pride. It was like a beggar-man, she said, to be seen with a fiddle in the street. Folks would be giving him coppers before so long, and shaming them all and pulling them all down. Kit held to his talking-ground for a while, but after one dreadful episode he gave way. Sometimes people asked if the old man were dead, the old man with the fiddle beside the wall.
He liked the meadow best of all in the dawn, when it took on the look of parkland wrapped in early mist. Right across, through a break in the chestnuts, he could see another tree stand up, a tree that, because of the haze, looked tiny as a toy. The shadow of it, black when the sun got up, was at first no more than a darker veil of mist along the sward. There was magic about this little vignette in which there was only a tree. It was so tiny and grey and tender, so light, so delicately soft. Yet, small as it was, it suggested infinite space, stretches of wander-room, pleasaunces without end. There were no barriers about it that had to be pushed away. You knew that from under its branches you could see the world.
Even when the sun was up at last, and the tree was strong wood and the earth firm soil, when the leaves had found colour and the boughs taken their shape, the little vista kept its promise still. Still it was growing in enchanted air, amid the far distances of the soul’s desire.
And then the house around him would come awake. The children would fight each other in their beds. All through the house would pierce the edginess of Marget’s morning voice....
He lost his vignette when the chestnuts lost their leaves, and through the stripped boughs the picture was not the same. But the chestnuts themselves were enough for him, just then, with their straight-grown limbs cut black against the sky, and every delicate filament of twig sparkling and dazzling with the frost. In the winter, too, he could see the moon through the trees, a flat and silver face laid to the open spaces as to a pane. Star after star he saw balancing on a bough.
At the end of the village was the river that he had known only where it ran out over the sand. It was dear to him, because it went towards the marsh, but otherwise it was not the river he knew. Out there it was silver or thin blue, sometimes a dull and hurrying grey, but always it held the mirror of its face wide open to the sky. Here it was black, because of the high banks and the old bridge and the big trees leaning right across. It was a glorious black, velvet-smooth, with underneath it the colours of weeds and stones and darting fish, and the reflection of other colours overhead. There were trees in the water, too, as real as those above; he could not always tell which was which. They had the same vivid, wide-spreading green, the same ribbed and splendid trunks. It was like looking down into a forest from a bird’s wing, only the forest was overhead as well. It seemed as far to look down as it was to look up. He thought the mirror-picture the daintier of the two—cleaner, as it were, for the water washing over its face; like the forests one sees through the polished glass of a dream. There was only one other difference that he could see. When the trees above stood perfectly still, the trees in the water seemed to wave and dance. But it was only the ripple across the river’s face. Beneath it the painted picture was still and serene.
He was fond of the bridge, too, and liked to wait for the sun dipping under its curve, but it was not often that he had a chance of that. The children were in league with Marget to hunt him down, and could spy him out in the most unlikely spots. Then they would harry him back along the street, beating at him with dirty little hands, and though he felt dreadfully ashamed and hurt, it was better than being fetched by Marget herself. “Grandpa” added zest to the children’s lives, gave them a sense of drama, a heady taste of power. Their days would lack a certain excitement when Marget’s bone was gone.... In the end he gave up the bridge as he had yielded the wall, because the pleasure was not worth the risk. The river under the bridge was not his own river, after all. Safe in his mind he had it where he liked it best, pale on the brown waste as it swam to sea.
There were other things strange to him in Marget’s house, besides the absence of room and peace. He found, for instance, that he could not love the tables and chairs. He could not even love his rickety bed, which carried him homeward when he slept, and was the stall to his fairyland through the trees. Certainly he could not love Marget’s pots, which were never whole or clean, or the kettle which poured boiled cockroaches from its spout. Nor could he like the propped-up chests of drawers into which it was never safe to put a hand, for fear of upright needles or relics of bacon fat. It was not wise to look too closely at the kitchen sink or into the few battered pans used by the children in their play. The clock was stuffed with rags and boots, and had a sinister face which he disliked. The oilcloth on the stairs was full of holes.
Of course, he did not hate the things just because they were old. The house on the marsh, as Agnes knew, had been very neglected before the last. The old things around him were falling to pieces under his eyes, but they were not being kicked and battered to their end. They were really old, peacefully grown old, not abused into miserable age before their time. There were dust and cobwebs and broken furniture and torn clothes, but the sun or the wind was cleansing the place every hour. There was no dirt in dark corners or refuse under the stairs. There were no slimy walls or messes in doubtful pots. In the old chests of drawers were no mysteries save those that a tidy old woman’s hands had folded away. The things had been lovable in that house, because in spirit they were clean. They had lived an honest life, and they were not dying an obscene death. Always about the furniture lingered the sweetness of the tree.