Mrs. Dockeray and Francey were there to welcome them, and had brought a cheerful homeliness into the isolated cottage, setting a kettle singing in the kitchen, and a bowl of Ladyford snowdrops on the wooden table. The old couple’s chairs were in their usual places at the hearth. Wolf’s patchwork cushion was ready to his shoulders, and the last week’s Gazette put to his hand. On the wall, Mrs. Whinnerah’s proud “Peter” hung in all his glory of burnished copper, and a set of cherished willow-pattern stood to attention in the little pot-rail. A thick cloth hearthrug promised comfort to the dogs. On the miniature oak-floored landing the Ninekyrkes “grandfather,” an ancient Whinnerah name on his brass face, swung a deep, almost human note down the shallow stairs.
The mantelpiece held a tobacco-jar and a tin or two, and, cheek by jowl with a Sheffield candlestick, was a photograph of Lup, looking very black and white and square and fierce and awkward and dull. In the waiting moments before they caught the slow footsteps, Francey looked long at this travesty of the original, and knew that, just as the cold negative had ignored his living, breathing humanity, so her own cold, critical sense had robbed him of sympathy and glamour. They should have no eyes to see, she thought bitterly, who have not also wide, tolerant hearts to feel, brewing their own transmuting elixir of love. Yet she had thought to taste it, once, had stooped her head to it to drink, before Wolf, at that fatal supper, had coarsened it on her lips.
She heard her mother in the passage, sweeping in the outcasts on a breeze of cheer that made even the dogs lift depressed ears, but she herself stayed rather nervously on the hearth, stirring the brisk fire into a mighty “low,” and filling the pot as soon as the wayfarers were snug in their seats. Over the cups a little consolation crept up and took hold, and now and then there was actually weak laughter in the lonely little house. The afternoon died, and presently, when Wolf began to nod in his chair, when the dogs had finished exploring and settled on the rug with great, sleepy sighs of satisfaction, the comforters took their leave.
There were other visitors, though, even then; Michael, looking in for a short chat, and Denny, flying over with a few pounds of apples and a present of twist; even their late cowman, “just to see if they were settling-like”; but when the last figure had passed the window and melted into the dusk, the vast loneliness came down upon the Pride, swallowing it as before.
The soothing sounds within—Wolf’s quiet breathing, the soft snoring of the dogs, the crackle of the fire, the patient speech of the clock—seemed to intensify the mighty silence without. There was no voice from shippon or dairy to give a sense of warm nearness and surrounding companionship. Facing the still-glimmering window, the wakeful woman gathered no feeling of protection from the well-built walls; seemed, rather, to be out unsheltered in the green emptiness, with the chill night settling heavily down. She could still mark the Lugg, dark against the paler sky, but the tide beyond it had been gone more than an hour; she knew it, though she could not see it. She folded her hands and laid her head against the woollen antimacassar, looking back over the years. The time for looking forward was past. Gradually, the pain of exile drew away. Here, in the very shadow of her great dread, it ceased to hold her, leaving her lapped in peace. There came to her, too, the consciousness of power, of victory almost, in the mere fact of having lived, which gives to old age, however humble, its own peculiar dignity. “My life!”—says every soul—“that sum of happenings which is mine and mine alone, that wonderful and dreadful pilgrimage that I have made with Time. Whatever the record, I have lived, finished the course, bound myself to Eternity by the tendrils of experience and growth.”
Her eyes closed slowly as the Lugg faded from view. The fire sank a little; the dogs turned and sighed; the shadows crept in. On the flickering hearth the old man and the old woman slept, dreamless.
CHAPTER XVI
SPURS TO GLORY
Slowly, very slowly, the faintly-shifting kaleidoscope of the months adjusted Dandy to her new conditions. The first sense of stagnation, following on the hurry of Halsted, was replaced gradually by a feeling of steady movement and expansion. The days were alive but never feverish. She came to see that rampant activity does not always mean progression, that the stimulant of rush may finally produce stupefaction, and flying feet carry one over all the great truths of life. The country’s gift was hers—time to grow.
But the gift came gauntleted, she found. It had its Judgment Book, its Black List, its Penal Code. There were long evenings with nobody at hand to deliver her from herself, long, hopeless days with a heart like a spurless steed, and long, terrible nights when the ghosts of the place woke her to clamour in cold hate at her presence. For Watters would not always own her. It had its brutal hours, when the very garden was sinister and the eyes of the house had no soul, and terror waited at every turn of the stair. She came to know, too, the penalty of identifying her mood with that of the weather—the cruel relentlessness of storm, the utter soullessness of glaring heat, the cynicism of an edged wind, the inquisition-beat of hail.
Yet for these what exquisite consolation! Exhilaration of frost, peace of still days swung on a soft, low wind, inspiration of light and shade and mist and evening sun. She learned, too, to look on the rain as a dominant personality ruling great issues. At Halsted, after scorching days of tennis, a healing drizzle soft as down, blotting out the day and whispering through the night, brought no comment except—“Filthy weather! Shut it out!”—but here they said of it: “It’s doing rarely—coming down nicely—doing grand!” thinking in the dark of tarns filling in the lonely hills, and listening to the drinking earth with a sense of personal benefit, and almost of personal achievement. And when the big winds came, so that the lights quivered and the beds shook and the carpets flapped like bunting, you did not say, as at Halsted: “Just the night for ‘Everybody’s Doing It’—what? Somebody order the closed car!” but you wondered under which hedge the sheep had gathered, and whether the tide was over the road at Sandfoot, and if, by some miracle of endurance, the frail old ash would live till morning.