I had Malory’s bedroom. It was bare, whitewashed, monastic, and appeared to me peculiarly suitable as a shrine to his personality. I wondered whether he had spent any part of his wandering life in the seclusion of a cloister, and as I wondered the realisation came over me that Malory was in spirit nearly allied to those mediæval scholars, so unassuming, so far removed from the desire of fame, as to dedicate their anonymous lives to a single script, finding in their own inward satisfaction the fulfilment of personal ambition. And as I thought on Malory, in that clean, bare room, I came to a closer understanding of his kinship with many conditions of men, of his sympathy with life, nature, and craft—Malory, the man who had not been my friend.
As the week passed, I found myself greatly moved by the prospect of seeing, of speaking with Ruth. As I drew near to Westmacotts’, I felt the physical tingling of intense excitement run over me. I was about to meet a dear companion, to hear the sound of her voice, and to look into the familiarity of her eyes. Another picture swam up out of the mist to dim my vision, a babbling music filled my ears like the sound of waves in a shell, and the faintest scent quivered under my nostrils; gradually as these ghosts emerged from the confusion I defined the Italian hill-side, the rushing stream, and the dry, aromatic scent of the ground. Was this, then, the setting in which Ruth walked and spoke for me? I was startled at the vividness of the impression, and at the incredibly subtle complexity of the ordinary brain.
Although Malory had never, so far as I could remember, given me any description of Westmacott’s farm, whether of impression or detail, I recognised the place as soon as I had emerged from a little wood and had seen it lying in a hollow across the ploughed field, a connecting road which was little more than a cart-track running from it at right angles into the neat lane beyond. I recognised the farm-house, of creamy plaster heavily striped by gray oak beams, its upper story slightly overhanging, and supported on rounded corbels of the same bleached oak, rough-hewn. I was prepared to see, as I actually saw, the large barn of black, tarred weather-boarding, terminated by the two rounded oast-houses, and should have missed it had I not found it there.
And I knocked, and the sense of reality still failed to return to me. Some one opened the door. I saw a young woman in a blue linen dress, with a child in her arms, and other children clinging about her skirts. My first impression was of astonishment at her beauty; Malory had led me to expect a subtle and languorous seduction, but I was not prepared for such actual beauty as I now found in her face.
“Are you Mrs. Westmacott?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” she said, “are you the gentleman that’s stopping with father?”
“I see you know about me.”
“Yes, sir; mother was over yesterday, and said you’d likely be coming. Won’t you come in, sir? if you’ll excuse the children. There’s only me to look after them to-day.”
I went into a clean and commonplace kitchen, and Ruth wiped a chair for me with her skirt, and put the baby into its cradle. She then sat down beside it, and with her foot kept the cradle moving on its rockers. I glanced round, and on the window-sill, among the pots of red geranium, I espied a wire cage with some little mice huddled in a corner.
“Mrs. Westmacott,” I said, feeling that the beginning of the conversation rested with me, “you and I are quite old friends though you may not know it.” I hated myself for my jocularity. “You remember Mr. Malory? He has spoken to me about his life here, and about you.”