"Mah wod! It 's a caution, yon!"
For a second octave of days.
And then a strange happening, to check the buoyant current of the Spawer's activity.
Very late one night the shadow of his head lingered upon the figured print blind, drawn loosely down over the wide-opened window, and the piano poured its unceasing treasury into night's immeasurable coffers. Already, in the long musical decade since Dixon's departure, he had risen to readjust the smouldering wicks, and gone back to a new lease of light at the keyboard. The light was failing for the second time as his fingers, slowing dreamily, sought the final shelter of Chopin. By many winding ways they came at length to the hushed haven of the seventeenth prelude, with the muffled A-flat bell booming its solemn death-message over the waters, and the little tear-laden boat of melody cradling its grief to silence on the ripples below.
The bell tolled no more; the little boat lay tremulous upon the echoes, and in the lingering stillness that followed, before yet the player's fingers had dared to break that sacred communion with the keys, fell all abruptly a sudden human sob.
A sudden human sob out of the darkness beyond the blind. So near and real and necessitous that the Spawer's elbows kicked backward from the keys, and the pedals went off like triggers under his feet as he spun round to the window. And yet, so far, so remote in probability, that even while he turned, he found far easier to account for it as some acute, psychical manifestation of his own emotions, rather than the expression of any agency from without. Through faith in this feeling, and no fear of it, he flung up the blind abruptly, and thrust forth his head with a peremptory "Who's there?"
Outside, the world lay wrapped in a great breathing stillness. Night's ultramarine bosom was ablaze with starry chain of mail. From the far fields came faint immaterial sounds, commingled in the suspended fragrance of hay, in warm revelations of ripening corn, in the aromatic pungency of nettles, and all the humid suffocation of herbs that open their moist pores at even. Distant sheep, cropping in ghost-like procession across misty, dew-laden clover, contributed now and again their strange, cutting, human cough. Came, as the Spawer listened, the slow, muffled thud-thud of some horse's hoofs on the turf, as it plodded in patient change of pasture, and the deep blowing of kine along the hedge-bottoms. But these, with the soft sound of the sea, spreading its countless fans of effervescing surf upon the sandy shore, were the only answer to his challenge.
He threw it out again, with the mere indolent amusement of casting pebbles into a pool, and swung one leg over the sill. Night allured him with all her mystic altar lights. He was of a mind to sit there and fling open his soul like a lattice to her seductive minstrelsy; drain deep draughts of celestial gladness from the overflowing tankard of stars. In the dead black porch of flowering tea, with one pale planetary flame shining through its tabernacled branches, no stir. No stir in the square black rug of long grass, softened in its centre to grey silver-point. No stir in the massed shadow of trees, uprising rigid like dim marine growths in a dense ocean of azure.
"Well?" he asked of the stillness, swinging his leg with a complacent tattoo of heel against the brickwork, and smiling indulgence at his own little extension in folly. "For the last time! One ... two ... three. Or must I fire?"
The stars twinkled him in irresistible summons to the sea. Even the sea itself raised its supplicative song a little louder, he thought, as he listened, and called "Come!" The night was too full of blessings to be suffocated untimely beneath the blankets; all his senses were making outcry for its bounty, and the soul of him hearkened. Just one stroll to the edge of the water and back before bed. It was no new thing for him to do. He reached his hat from its insecure slant upon the pile of music topping the piano, and clasped the sill with both hands for descent.