“Friendly loike? You aren’t going for to do him any hurt?”
“No, oh, no.”
“Well,” said Joan, as she turned the handle and took her portly person slowly round the door, “if so be you had, you might ha’ done it an’ welcome! Ah wouldn’t have stopped ye. Good-neght, sir.”
“Good-night, Joan.”
She went out, and Bram was left alone. The sound of her footsteps died away, until he felt as if he was the only living thing about the farm. Even the noises that usually came across from the sheds and the stables where the animals were kept seemed to be hushed that evening. No sound reached his ears but the moaning of the rising wind, and the scratching of the mice in the old wainscotting.
Never before had he felt so utterly, hopelessly miserable and castdown. In the old days, when he had lived one of a wretched, poverty-stricken family in a squalid mean way, ill-kept, half-starved, he had had his daydreams, his vague ambitions, to gild the sorry present. Now, on the very high-road to the fulfilment of those ambitions, he was suddenly left without a ray of hope, without a rag of comfort, to bear the most unutterable wretchedness, that of shattered ideals.
Not Claire alone, but Chris also had fallen from the place each had held in his imagination, in his heart, and Bram, who hid a spirit-world of his own under a matter-of-fact manner and a blunt directness of speech, suffered untold anguish.
While he watched the embers of the fire in profound melancholy, with his hands on his knees, and his eyes staring dully into the red heart of the dying fire, he heard something moving outside. He raised his head, expecting to hear the sound of Mr. Biron’s voice.
But a shadow passed before the window in the faint daylight that was left; and with a wild hope Bram sat up, his heart seeming to cease to beat.
The shadow, the step were those of a woman.