Perception was beginning to return to me, bringing in its train a sense of defeat. I had often wondered how the people in a play or in a story continued to live their lives after the climax which parted spectator and actor for ever, I had often followed them in spirit, come down to breakfast with them next morning, so to speak, producing the situation into the region of inevitable anticlimax. Here I was, then, at the old game, an actor myself. I supposed that the play was at an end, and that this was the return to life. That the play should end happily or unhappily, was an accident proper to the play only; all that was certain, all that was inevitable, was that life must be gone on with after the play was over. You couldn’t stop; you were like a man tied on to the back of a traction-engine, willy-nilly you had to go on walking, walking, walking. The dreariness of it! I looked at the pieces of broken plate in my hand, the sum total of all that passion, all that great outburst of pent emotion. I threw back my head, and laughed long, loud, and bitterly.
Westmacott regarded me without surprise, scarcely with interest. He appeared cold and quite indifferent, entirely in possession of his faculties. I grew ashamed under his dispassionate gaze, my laughter ceased, and I laid the pieces of plate on the table. Then it occurred to me we were waiting for something. The movement overhead had died away, but as I listened I heard steps upon the stair, several sets of steps, light pattering steps as of children, and heavier steps, as of a grown person.
Then Westmacott stirred; he went across the room and opened the door. I saw Ruth standing in the passage with her children. She was hatless as she had arrived, but the glow of the lamp, hanging suspended from the ceiling, where it fell upon the curve of her little head, drew a line of light as upon a chestnut. Westmacott nodded curtly, passed out, and his family followed him in a passive and mournful procession.
I watched them go, across the little garden, through the swing-gate, and into the dusky fields beyond. They seemed to me infinitely gray, infinitely dreary, infinitely broken, the personages of a flat and faded fresco. All that pulsating passion had passed, like an allegory of life, leaving only death behind. Gone was the vital flame from the human clay. And nothing had come of it, nothing but a broken plate. What ever comes of men’s efforts, I thought bitterly? so little, that we ought to take for our criterion of success, not the tangible result, but the intangible ardour by which the attempt is prompted. So rarely is the one the gauge of the other! I looked again at the little train rapidly disappearing into the darkness, a funeral cortège, carrying with it the corpse of slain rebellion. I saw the years of their future, a vista so stark, so arid, that I physically recoiled from its contemplation. How hideous would be the existence of those children, suffering perpetually from a constraint they could not explain, a constraint which lacked even to the elements of terror, so dead a thing was it, in which terror, a lively, vivid reality, could find no place. Death and stagnation would be their lot.
The darkness of the fields had now completely swallowed them up, but I still stood looking at the spot where I had last seen them, and saying a final good-bye to the tale that place had unfolded to me. This time, I was certain, no sequel was still to come. On the morrow I should leave the Pennistans’ roof, with no hope that an echo of the strangely cursed, ill-fated, unconscious family would ever reach me again in the outer world.
A peace so profound as to be almost unnatural had settled over the land, one or two stars had come out, and I wondered vaguely why Amos and his people had not yet returned home from work. I supposed that they were making the most of a fine evening. The Pennistans would accept their daughter’s defeat, I was sure, with the usual stoic indifference of the poor. At last I turned slowly in the doorway, a great melancholy soaking like dew into my bones, so that I fancied I felt the physical ache.
Now I have but the one concluding incident to tell, before I have done with this portion of my cumbersome, disjointed story, an incident which has since appeared to me frightening in its appositeness, as though deliberately planned by some diabolically finished artist as a rounding of the whole. Malory had spoken of destiny and nature as being the only artists of any humour or courage, and upon my soul I am tempted to agree with him when I think over the events of that packed evening, of which I was the sole and baffled spectator. I said this incident appeared to me frightening; I repeat that statement, for I can conceive of no situation more frightening than for a man to find himself and other human beings shoved hither and thither by events over which he has no control whatsoever, the conduct of life taken entirely out of his hands, especially a man, like me, had always struggled resentfully against the imposition of fate on free-will, but never more so than in the past few weeks. Wherever I turned that night, mockery was there ready to greet me.
I went again, as I have said, into the house with the intention of waiting in the kitchen on Amos’s return. In this small plan as in my larger ones I was, it appeared, to be thwarted, for as I passed down the narrow passage I noticed that the door of old Mrs. Pennistan’s room was open. I paused at first with no thought of alarm. I longed to go in, and to tell the ancient woman of the futile suffering she had brought upon her hapless descendants. I longed insanely to shout it into her brain and to see remorse wake to life in her faded eyes. As I stood near her door she grew for me into a huge, portentous figure, she and her love for Oliver Pennistan, and I saw her, the tiny woman I had all but forgotten, as a consciously evil spirit, a malign influence, the spring from which all this river of sorrow had flowed. Then my steps were drawn nearer and nearer to the door, till I stood at last on the threshold, looking for the first time into the room. Some one, presumably the now invisible servant, had lit the two candles on the dressing-table, and these with the glow of the fire between the bars threw over the room a fitful light. I had, curiously enough, no sense of intrusion; I might have been looking at a mummy. Yet I should have remembered that the occupant was not a mummy, for the familiar smell of the chestnuts had greeted me even in the passage.
She was sitting in her usual place over the fire, her back turned to me, and a black shawl tightly drawn round her shrunken shoulders. Again I was struck by her look of fragility. I had a sudden impulse that I would speak to her, and would try to draw some kind of farewell from her, explaining that I was leaving the house the next day—though whether she had ever realised my presence there at all I very much doubted.
As I went forward the crackle of a chestnut broke the utter stillness of the room. I waited for her to pick it out of the grate with the tongs, but she did not stir. I came softly round her chair and stood there, waiting for her to notice me, as I had seen the Pennistans do when they did not wish to startle her. Indeed, so tiny and frail was she, that I thought a sudden fright might shatter her, as too loud a noise will kill a lark.