Yet, up to the last few years, he had had no doubt about them at all. They would follow, he thought, as naturally as harvest followed seed-time or summer fulfilled spring. Nature’s checks to the plans of man had, as a rule, some form of logic at their back, and were generally rectified in Nature’s time. Checks in his own scheme, if they came, would follow the same lines, and his practised country patience would be able to see them through. And then suddenly and with lasting amazement he discovered that life was not like that—that it was more complicated and subtle than Nature, more idiotic, incomprehensible and perverse. It threw things awry without purpose or natural law, wrecked, and did not renew, robbed, and did not repay. His way had been blocked, as if by logs piling terribly in a stream, and there had been nothing for it but to hack himself out.
Two years ago he had been just two years behind his plans. His savings were not yet quite full-grown, his wife was still to secure. Not but what things were more or less fixed between Agnes and himself, and had been, indeed, for long. It had been a kindly courting, too, with never a quarrel of any sort to break its charm, and scarcely a casual look or impatient word. Most certainly it had not resembled in any degree the cat-and-mouse exhibition presented by Marget and Bob. He had never imagined that they might slip apart until the thing was on the point of coming about, still less ever dreamed that they might do so with the end of the road actually in sight. Nevertheless, when the changes had begun with a rush, the first of them had announced itself just here. Suddenly she had turned from him, half hesitating, it was true, but turning away from him, all the same. She was not certain, she said, that she could marry him, after all, and it was better to think now than on the other side of the ring. She had no reason to give except that she wasn’t sure, and all his wrath and persuasion could not change her mind. He was free to leave her, she told him, if he thought it best, or welcome to wait for the puzzle to come right. He had chosen to wait, if the impossibility of doing anything else might be dignified by the name of choice. Sometimes it seemed to him that they had already waited too long, but he was unable to tear himself from his settled course. Months of bewildered argument and rage brought him no nearer the solution of the point. Perhaps, after all, they had not been suited, in spite of the pleasant years. Perhaps it was just that the sight of the end, which sent him pressing on, had startled her to a halt and a springing aside.
Thomas, for whom nothing had ever gone amiss, found it hard to believe that fate was really playing him false. His disgust, when the truth was finally forced upon him, was that of a man seeing for the first time the other side of the shield. The trouble and dread of his threatened loss had all the freshness of first pain and dread. It seemed to him that, if he lost Agnes, everything else in his scheme of life might possibly go as well; and while he was passing through this uncertain time, trying hard to regain his old security of belief, the trouble at home threatened afresh the ground beneath his feet.
He had been fond of his mother, and was shaken by her loss, and he was hit, as well, by his brother’s accident and death, yet neither calamity seemed for the moment to threaten either his future or his present way of life. Yet he must have known what would happen if his thoughts had not been entirely fixed elsewhere. Kit had muddled along for a while with the help of a hired man, and then one night he sent for his two remaining sons.
Standing there in the caressing sun, with achievement behind him and the crown of achievement before, Thomas looked back on the long walk in the rain, the dull sands and the grey and sodden marsh. Under the waning light and the veil of the wet they had looked all one, all an untouched waste, unclaimed of any but the sea. And to-night even the sea seemed to refuse a thing so desolate and bare, leaving it lying as if accursed between heaving water and the richer land. The younger brother, tramping the dyked road, had come upon Bob, slouching slowly ahead, a dreary figure still drearier than the day. The farm, when it stood up to them on the flat, looked lonely and helpless beyond words, a lost and futile thing of no account. They could have sworn that it was empty and that no one moved in the rooms, either human or ghost; that neither chair nor bed nor old press held a trace of souls that were gone. Only those who loved it would not mock at its name to-night. But as they came nearer by degrees, and its blank face took something of meaning and shape, they heard the thin voice of a violin.
They had stopped, he and Bob, by the meadow-gate, and listened awhile to the trembling sweetness charming the sad marsh. It had seemed the smallest thing in the world between the vastness of earth and sky, and perhaps also the bravest thing in the world as well. They had forgotten for a moment how the rain was beating over the fence. They had forgotten the untended fields and neglected home. They had even forgotten the probable errand on which they were bent, the oppression of which had clogged their feet as they came. They remembered together little things out of the past ... a wooden cradle with carved sides ... apples in the orchard ... long paddles on warm sands ... skating ... the red light of a hearth ... an aproned form with a face that was always looking out, set for them at every window, watching for them at each door. Every picture they saw was bathed in sun or fire, because the notes of the fiddle were touching it with gold. Thomas forgot while he listened that life was twisting itself into knots in his helpless hands. Out there, while the fiddle spoke, Agnes still loved him and had never looked aside. And perhaps Bob, too, found an old dream waiting on the desolate road.
The life of the house seemed to sink when the fiddle stopped, and as they came towards it across the field with heavy, squelching steps, it had the effect of retreating instead of drawing near. Even when the door opened at the click of the garden gate, showing their father’s figure in the square, the impression was that of a shadow opening in a shadow’s face. They had gone in silently, their mood gentled by that singing voice over the marsh, and the door closing behind them had shut out the rain but nothing else. The dusk and sadness claiming both land and sea were all through the lost farmhouse as well.
The three of them sat in the kitchen without fire or light, and the younger men said nothing while the old man put his case. They stared at him dumbly in the dusky place, seeing little through the gloom but the silver of hair and whisker round his head, and hearing his voice, when they looked away, as if it came from nobody at all, the vibrating old voice that had mostly been used for greeting and song and seemed to have borrowed a sweetness from the violin. There were only the three of them in the shadowed room, but it always seemed possible that there might be more. Sometimes, indeed, Thomas forgot that John was no longer there, and strained his eyes towards the corners to make sure. He had always been so still and rare of speech that death did not seem to have taken him away. Afterwards, it seemed to Thomas that many had sat in judgment on the case, for shame can multiply a face or two into a crowd. The wettest moon he had ever seen had suddenly appeared at a pane, like a stranger walking and staring round the house; and where the waves were breaking below the farmyard wall was the dismal wash of a rain-whipped, lifeless tide.
Old Christopher Sill had not beaten about the bush; indeed, he was disconcertingly direct. He told them quite simply that he had had notice to quit, making no attempt at either excuse or complaint. Both, of course, had guessed that the end was getting near, but it came as a shock when finally declared. The thing was common enough, indeed, in such lives as theirs, but it had not happened to the Sills for more than a hundred years. They had just gone on, father and son, until they chanced to come to Kit, and, if John had lived, he might very possibly have gone on, too. They had often wondered, Thomas and Bob, why he had never pressed his father to resign, but they guessed at the double reason now. John’s feet had long been set on a different road, and the money behind the farm had been dwindling every year. Money vanished with Kit as the notes of his fiddle fluted out to sea, and he troubled as little about it as about the music-gold that he could so easily recreate. The steady downgrade on which he had lived had not been able to push the lesson home. It had never seemed possible that he could leave the farm, and the bare formality of a notice to quit could not make it possible now. Surely there could be nothing more right than that a man should spend his last breath where he was born, and especially one of the rooted, marsh-bred Sills? He only asked for a year or two at the end of all that had gone; couldn’t Thomas and Bob see that he had that? A year or two, happen—and happen not so much. He wouldn’t be long at his dying, he felt sure.
“But ye’ve gitten your notice,” Bob observed, staring at the floor, and Thomas had looked out of the window at the sky. Neither needed telling what was coming next, and each was getting ready to meet it in his way.... All those generations of Sills had kept Kit on the place long after a less tie-bound landlord would have turned him out, and they gave him a further chance of rescue now. The Squire was willing to let the farm to one of the lads, provided he could show a reasonable guarantee. “Then happen you’d let me bide wi’ ye till I was finished,” Kit said at the end. “I partly what think it wouldn’t be so long.”