"H'm, does it? Well, nothing reminds me of old times in this horrible place. Nothing—not even you. You're just the outsides of what you were, Sigrid—a sort of husk. I don't know where you are—but the real you isn't here at all—and a good job too." She paused and then wistfully, rather shyly: "You don't even play nowadays, my dear."
Sigrid got up slowly.
"Smithy, one couldn't play in this room. I could play in a garret or in the streets, but not here. Fancy Beethoven and that marble atrocity! Even Elgar! No, no, I couldn't." She went out past Mrs. Smithers on to the verandah and there lingered for a moment. "Look at the sunshine!" she said dreamily. "That, at least, is always the same for the just and the unjust, the happy and the unhappy. Doesn't that console you?"
Mrs. Smithers shook her head.
"It isn't the same. It's an awful thing here. They say if it goes on beating down like that it will mean thousands and thousands of deaths. It's cruel. But, such as it is, it don't come inside this place, Sigrid. It beats down on the road out there, but it don't touch us. We're walled in—the Lord knows by what—but we're walled in."
Sigrid took her lace parasol and went down the steps to the wide avenue which swept round in a semicircle to the road. She still moved with her smooth, tigerish elasticity, but she herself was conscious of an overwhelming fatigue. It was as Smithy said—the spirit of the place had triumphed. Little by little it had overpowered the garish, incongruous splendours with which Barclay had sought to change its character. The life and gaiety which he had schemed for had never crossed the threshold, and now he no longer fought, but in sullen acquiescence watched gloom and decay rise like a sombre tide over its old ground. The place was moribund. The people in it moved softly and spoke instinctively in hushed voices as though somewhere in those empty rooms some one lay dead.
Sigrid reached the compound gates. It was still early in the morning, but the heat burnt down on the white road with the reflected fierceness of a near and monstrous fire. The air was thick and tasted metallic. A bullock-wagon toiled up towards Gaya, came to an exhausted halt, and then, in response to listless imprecations, creaked heavily on its way. The mingled sweat and dust lay in ridges on the animals' heaving flanks and scored the dark faces which were turned for a moment in Sigrid's direction. Man and brute were curiously allied in that blank and yet piteous stare. It was as though both visaged suffering and visaged it dumbly, patiently, accepting it as the decree of life.
Then all was still again.
A man on horseback turned the bend of the road and came at a lumbering walk down-hill towards the bungalow. She stood and watched him and an odd, unsteady smile of recognition played with the corners of her lips. No other man in Gaya rode such a lank, spindle-legged mare, no other man cut so quaint a figure, no other man could have worn those clothes and borne himself so bravely. For, despite that touch of the grotesque, there was something splendid and royal about him, something in his bigness, in the grand lines of his body, in his freedom and unconsciousness that made him physically kin to those giants whose fearless, joyous living glimmers through history and legend—to the Siegfrieds and the Beowulfs and the Parsifals, men of the forest and the mountain, who drank deep of life at its source and died on heights which our day has forgotten.
He carried a yellow-haired dog under one arm and an ordinary covered wicker basket was tied to his saddle, and despite his efforts jolted somewhat to the plaintive protests of a cat's mewing.