Suddenly my wondering fancy was visibly answered by sight of a slim old woman in black, who slowly came toward me by a narrow side-path. I stopped her with an elaborate apology, and we speedily fell into talk. She had been born on this island sixty years before, when the century was entering into middle life, and now at its close these had been the permanent limits of her vision. About a dozen times she may have crossed the bridge, or walked the streets of the city yonder, and only once had she gone down the river in a barge to have a peep at the real South—the ardent, rose and lavender-smelling South!
‘I pray you, Madame, tell me, who am a restless vagabond, never three months happy in the same place, how life looks to one like you, who have never left the boundary marks of birth, who have grown and lived amid unchanged scenes, and have been satisfied to look for sixty years upon these low grey walls and the spires and chimneys of that distant city?’ I asked, profoundly astonished.
In the old dame’s wrinkled parchment face gleamed a pair of singularly vivid brown eyes that held, I suspect, more wisdom than my dissatisfied and travelled glance. She eyed me curiously one long eloquent moment, and then remarked, with some astuteness and much benevolence, that change brought idle misery, and monotony its own reward of ignorance and content. Further questions about the island led to an offer from her to show me where she lived—an offer I accepted eagerly, and together we left the cemetery, now revealing all its melancholy charm in the last flushed smile of a lovely autumn sunset.
Save for the glimmer of gold upon an upper casement, the grey street was already cast into twilit gloom, and a faint ray here and there seemed to make its own pathway through the dim troubled blue of the atmosphere. Unmistakably evening was upon us, and the ghosts of the imagination would surely soon be abroad among these haunted scenes.
But nobody could be less spectral than my companion, both in speech and in looks. She was communicative to rashness, and when I asked where I could obtain lodging upon the island, for a week or a month, as long as the caprice pleased me—she fixed me in a mild interrogative way, and paused, as if equally in doubt of my discretion and of her own.
There was no hotel, no lodgings that she knew of, but if Madame really desired it—if, in fact, she could trust Madame to be discreet and reserved, she did not know that it might not be managed somehow. But she would not engage herself.
I pressed for an explanation, and so aflame was I with sharp interest and curiosity, that I know not what wild pledges of reserve and discretion and prudent behaviour I proffered. Willingly at that moment would I have undertaken to deny my whole past, and give the lie direct to nature. What more potent than passionate sympathy? and the old woman, I think, must have felt some desperate need for a willing ear in which to pour her pent-up confidences. The cup of silence to which experience had condemned her was full to overflowing, and my voice it seems shook the brim.
She told me then that she was the confidential servant and sole companion of a maiden lady who lived alone with a little niece in a big barrack of a house below the Benedictine monastery. There was a story, of course, which perhaps one day I should hear, if matters could be so arranged that I might sojourn a while beneath their roof. But this also was a promise withheld. Nothing depended on her, though she had influence—naturally, she added, with a look of meaning that set my heart in a flutter. I declare it made me feel young again, and full of thrilling alarm, on the heels of romance, in the quest of breathless adventure. I cannot explain how this old peasant had the knack of accentuating commonplace words, and of lending them a significance far beyond that with which we are accustomed to associate them. But she did so, and there was a nameless charm and tremor conveyed in her added ‘naturally,’ with its accompanying suppressed intimation of glance.
The Benedictine monastery lay in massive gloom below, reaching an aerial coldness of sharp point and spire along its jagged tops. Feudal gashes in the arches let in large slips of green sky and glimmering stars, and its rough stone wall along one side was the division between the convent and the garden of my companion’s mistress. No, not even the cemetery I had left could, in the dreariest hour, look more inexpressibly dark, and lifeless, and forsaken than that old garden. Its beauty was the beauty of death and sadness and neglect. There were rotten arbours and stone seats, and mossy, weed-grown paths. The underwood was impenetrably thick, and only the fine old trees lifted a calm front, indifferent to man’s unkindness. They needed no human hand to care them, and so they throve, and willingly gave grateful shade, and the splendour of their foliage, and the majesty of their form to the dead scene. But of flowers there were none. A coating of moss, bleached and faded, had grown over the old sun-dial, which now was hidden under the branching trees. Not a bird sang, nor did any live thing skurry into hiding upon sound of my footstep, as I wandered through the dusky alleys, while my guide went inside to consult her mistress.
The quiet of an empty garden, showing no sign of care or an active presence about it, while within view of smoke and fierce city activities, is surely not comparable with any other quiet in nature. Restriction adds to its intensity. The silence becomes almost palpable from the hum of existence afar, and the spirit of the place seems more vividly personal by reason of the narrowness of vision. You may walk along the loneliest beach man ever trod, and feel less alone than I did in that garden. The dimness of the biggest forest would be comforting after the intolerable motionlessness of its leaves and plumy weeds.