“The wind is keen, though. It is time we turned back home.”
“Yes.”
“Good-bye, my child.”
He spoke the words in a whisper as they moved away from the corner.
Before them, seen dimly through a haze of rain, lay the colliery town, a vague splash of darkness in the valley. Here and there a tall chimney stood trailing smoke, or the faint glow of a fire gave a thin opalescence to the shell of mist. Sounds, faint and far, yet full of the significance of labor, drifted up the bleak slopes of the hillside, like the sounds from ships sailing a foggy sea. The rattle of a train, the shriek of a steam-whistle, the slow strokes of some great clock striking the hour.
James Murchison’s eyes were fixed upon this town beside the pit mouths, this pool of poverty and toil, where the eddies of effort never ceased upon the surface. It was strange to him, this colliery town, and yet familiar. Always would his manhood yearn towards it because of the dear dead, even though its memories were hateful to him, full of the bitterness of ignominy and pain.
Gwen’s death had come to Murchison as a sudden silence, a strange void in the hurrying entities of life. It was as though the passing of this child had changed the phenomena of existence for him, and given a new rhythm to the pulse of Time. He had become aware of a new setting to life, even as a man who has walked the same road day by day discovers on some winter dawn a fresh and unearthly beauty in the scene. He felt an unsolved newness in his being, a solemnity such as those who have looked upon the dead must feel. And no strong nature can pass through such a phase without creating inward energy and power. Sorrow, like winter, may be but a season of repose, troubled and drear perhaps, but moving towards the miracle of spring.
Wilton cemetery, with its zinc-roofed chapel, its yellow walls and iron gates, lay behind them, while the dim horizon ran in a gray blur along the hills. Husband and wife walked for a time in silence, for each had a burden of deep thought to bear.
It was the man who spoke first, quietly, and with restraint, and yet with something of the fierce spirit of an outcast Cain visible upon his face.
“I have been thinking of what I said to you last night.”