“I should hear Slinker singing along with me. He had a voice, you remember—a queer sort of voice like an owl squawking in the night! Christian—suppose that window opened up there, and Slinker’s face looked out—Slinker’s face—Christian——!”
He gave her a peremptory little shake.
“Stop that at once—do you hear? And you’re just coming back with me this instant, so you can make up your mind to do as you’re told for once, instead of twisting the whole world round your little finger!”
She shook her head, pulling herself together with a trembling sigh and a smile.
“No, I’m going on. It’s all right, Youngest One. I’m quite sane, and perfectly fit to be loose. Go in and wait for me in the hall, and brew me some nice warm gruel to drink when Christmas comes in. I’m going to the place where I’m safest in the whole world. Oh, if I’d only guessed it, long ago!”
He watched her disappear up the avenue, a dark speck on the purity of the white track, walking firmly and with purpose, and then he returned reluctantly to thaw himself, keeping an eye on the half-open door the while. No sound came to him from any part of the house but the creak of the stairs and the running talk of the fire. In the oak chair with the high back he looked very young and very lonely—the new master sharing his shadowed home with his ghosts.
Slinker’s wife walked fast—fast, like a woman going to meet her lover—and her heart beat and the colour burned in her cheek. She clasped her hands tight in the wide sleeves of Christian’s coat, and her breath came unevenly on the frosty air. Leaving the arch of the avenue for the full moonlight, she saw beneath her a wide sheet of bright ice, and, to the right, the long, low buildings of Dockerneuk Farm. She stopped then as if a hand had barred her way, trembling violently and leaning against the stoup of the gate.
Work was long done at the farm. The clash of milk-pails was still, long before. The cattle had had their extra Christmas feed, and the men had gone home. The blinds were drawn. The kitchen had red blinds through which lamp and fire glowed warm. From the parlour a piano tinkled a Christmas hymn.
Slinker’s wife, leaning against the stoup, needed no open doors for her sad eyes. She knew so well the wide kitchen with its open range and oak settle, the spotless stone of the floor, the shining pans, the queer things that hung from the oak rafters, hams and Christmas puddings and great, dry bunches of sage. She knew the parlour, too, with its yellow-keyed, silk-faced piano, its pot dogs, wool mats and vases of honesty, but it was to the kitchen that the passionate eyes of her mind strayed and stayed. For Dixon would be in the kitchen.
She saw him as she had seen him often in the old days, when the tie of a distant relationship through her mother had brought her to Dockerneuk for many a long week; saw him in his deep wooden chair by the steel fender, his dog’s head against his knee, as they listened together to the little hymn played by his sister’s child. The door would be open between the rooms, she knew. Dixon loved both children and music.