“Is that so, sir? Well, Mr. Malory always liked the mice, I don’t know why. He lived with us over a year, and maybe one takes on a manner of thinking in a year, I don’t know.”
Somehow I felt that the section of our conversation dealing with Malory was closed by that remark. We hung fire for a little. Then I asked her to show me over the place, which she did, and after that we had tea in the kitchen, brown bread cut from the big loaf, honey from her own hives, and jam of her own making. I watched her as she laid the cloth, noted her quick efficiency, was conscious of her quiet reserve and her strength, saw her beauty foiled and trebled by the presence of her children. After tea she made me smoke a pipe, sent the children out to play, and sat opposite me in a rocking chair with sewing in her hands and more sewing heaped near her on the floor. It was very pleasant in that warm interior, the fire crackled, the big clock ticked. I thought what a fool Malory had been.
I walked home in the dusk, hearing what he had never heard from those meadows: the thudding and bruising of the distant guns.
II
Little by little I learnt the details which linked the end of Malory’s story to the point where I was to take it up. Rawdon Westmacott, in spite of his wife’s entreaties to settle in another part of the country, had insisted on returning almost directly after their marriage to his farm, and there, ignored by her own family and by the whole horrified, scandalised countryside, Ruth had dwelt in a companionship more terrible than solitude. For Westmacott had followed unbridled his habitual paths of drunkenness and violence. How grim and disquieting must have been that situation: not two miles separated Pennistans’ from Westmacotts’, not two miles lay between the parents and the daughter, yet they were divided by league upon league of pride, across which their mutual longing quivered as heat-waves upon the surface of the desert. The mother, I think, would have gone, but Amos, with that Biblical austerity which Malory had noted in him, forbade any advance towards, any mention of, the prodigal. The ideal of decency, which is the main ideal of the country people, had been outraged, and this Amos, the heir of tradition, could not forgive. During the greater part of the first year, neither Ruth nor her mother can willingly have stirred far from their own garden door. The torment, the gnawing of that self-consciousness! The apprehension of that first Sunday, when Amos with set jaw forced his wife to church! with what tremulousness she must have entered the little nave, casting round her eyes in secret, dreading yet hoping, relieved yet disappointed. She bore traces of the strain, the buxom woman, in the covert glance of her eyes and the listening, searching expression of her face. I have seen her start at the sound of the door-latch, and look up expectantly as she must have looked in those days, afraid and longing to see the beloved figure in the door.
The tension came to an end at last, for Nancy, whose will might not be crossed, burst out with indignation at the treatment of her sister and set off angrily for Westmacotts’. She returned within an hour with the information that Rawdon was dead drunk in the kitchen and that Ruth’s child would surely be born before morning. Mrs. Pennistan had not known of the child; she leapt to her feet saying that she must go at once, and upbraided Amos for having withheld her so long from her own flesh and blood. Amos rose, and saying gloomily, “Do what you will, but don’t let me know of it,” he left the room.
I know nothing of the meeting between mother and daughter, but I imagine that the sheer urgency of the situation mercifully did much to smooth the difficulty of the moment. The crisis over, a new order of things replaced the old: relations were re-established, and Ruth henceforward came and went between her present and her former home. Only, the Pennistans’ door was barred to the son-in-law, as their lips were barred to his name. At the most, his phantasm hovered between them.
Now I have told all that I could reconstruct, and most of this I heard from Nancy, who was a frank, outspoken girl; common, I thought her, and ordinary, but good-hearted underneath her exuberance. She had lived at home since her husband had gone to fight. She was very different from her quiet sister, as different as a babbling brook from a wide, calm pool of water. I heard a great deal of abuse of Westmacott from her, even to tales of how he ill-treated his wife; and I also heard of her own happiness, confidences unrestrainedly poured out, for she was innocent of reserve. To this I preferred to listen, though, truthfully, she often bored and sometimes embarrassed me. I soon discovered that for all her fiery temper she was a woman of no moral stamina, and I didn’t like to dwell in my own mind upon her utter annihilation under the too probable blow of war.
The blow fell, and by the curse of Heaven I was there to see it; the reality of the danger had always seemed remote, even in the midst of its nearness, for such nightmares crawl closer and closer only to be flung back repeatedly by the force of human optimism. I had never before realised the depths of such optimism. Her first cry was “It cannot be true!” her first instinct the instinct of disbelief. In the same way she had always clung to an encouraging word, however futile, and had been cast down to an equal degree by an expression of pessimism. I suppose that when the strings of the human mind are drawn so taut, the slightest touch will call forth their pathetic music.... Poor Nancy! I had seen her husband on leave for ten days during which her eyes were radiant and her voice busy with song; he went; and was killed the day after his return to France.
Not very long afterwards I got a letter from Malory, forwarded and re-forwarded, which, coming out of the, so far as he was concerned, silence of years, reminded me forcibly of the day he had broken silence at Sampiero. It gave me a queer turn of the heart to see that the envelope I held in my hand had gone first of all to Sampiero, to our little lodging house, had been handled, no doubt, by the hunch-backed postman I had known so well. I could see him, going down the street, with his bag over his shoulder, and my letter in his bag. I could see my old landlady with the letter in her hand, turning it over and over, till light broke on her, and she remembered the Englishman, and hunted up his unfamiliar address, and wondered, perhaps, whether he, too, had fallen in the war.