“Many women are when they are interested. Oh, Leonard! what a happiness that there is always an end of everything—of sorrow, nay, of joy! There must come—at last—the end, even of Punishment or of Consequence.” She looked up and round. “The evening is so peaceful—look at the glories of the west—it is so peaceful that one cannot believe in storm and hail and frost. It seems to mean, for us, relief—and for him—forgiveness.”
Everything was, indeed, still—there was no sound even of their own footsteps as they walked across the springy turf of the park, and the house when they came within view of it was bathed in the colours of the west, every window flaming with the joy of life instead of the despair of death. Yet within was a dying man.
“Death is coming,” said Constance, “with pardon upon his wings.”
The news that there was a “change”—word meaning much—at the Hall had reached the village. The pride of the people, because no other village in England entertained a recluse who lived by himself in a great house and allowed everything to fall into decay, was to be taken from them. No more would strangers flock over on Sunday mornings from the nearest town and the villages round, to look over the wall at the tall stalwart figure pacing his terrace in all weathers with the regularity of a pendulum. In the village house of call the men assembled early to hear and tell and whisper what they had heard.
Then the old story was revived—the story which had almost gone out of men’s memories—how the poor gentleman, then young, still under thirty, with a fine high temper of his own—it was odd how the fine high temper had got itself remembered—lost in a single day his wife and his brother-in-law, and never held up his head again, nor went out of the house, nor took notice of man, woman, or child, nor took a gun in his hand, nor called his dogs, nor rode to hounds, nor went to church.
These reminiscences had been told a thousand times in the dingy little room of the village public-house. They reeked, like the room, of beer and tobacco and wet garments. For seventy years they had been told in the same words. They had been, so far, that most interesting form of imaginative work—the story without an end. Now the end had arrived, and there would be no more to tell.
The story was finished. Then the door opened, and the ci-devant scarer of birds appeared. He limped inside, he closed the door carefully; he looked around the room. He supported himself bravely with his two sticks, and he began to speak.
“We’re all friends here? All friends? There’s nobody here as will carry things to that young man? No.”
“Take half a pint, Thomas.”
“By your leave. Presently. I shall lend a hand to-morrow or next day to digging a grave. We must all come to it. Why not, therefore?”