But is not all silence figurative and relative, thought Emily, a mere hint at some magnificent placid experience, only possible in its purity to the inhabitants of outer space? Even the countryside was not still. Plump sparrows, dusting themselves in the road, never ceased their brawling. The shy brown thrush swerved across her path at intervals and bubbled his song from the thickets. The meadowlark left his tussock-hidden nest to greet the world proudly from the pasture rock, and far away the phoebe's plaintive utterance of his lost love's name pierced the sibilance of the trees.
"There's a loam for you," said an old gardener, spading an oval plot on a lawn. His bulbs and potted sproutings were arranged at one side. "Feel. 'Twouldn't soil a queen's hands. Dry as meal and brown as a berry. Same for two feet down."
Emily took up a handful to please the old man. It crumbled between her fingers like the soft brown sugar which grocers display in crocks, though not, as youthful customers sometimes think, to be scooped and paddled with by idle hands.
"I can see roses in that, miss," said the gardener, turning up a deep spadeful for her inspection. But time was precious and she shortened the commonplaces, breaking away toward Hillsborough.
All that was visible of Elmwood was a cluster of cottages about the station and a few outlying farms. A brick building crowning its highest hill was probably the academy to which her guides had referred. On both sides the country opened out in great reaches of level fertility, groves of dark trees rising at intervals where the pools lay that nourished their roots. Now they sprung up by the roadside and overarched her with drooping boughs.
Looking upward, as she walked, almost alone, Emily felt herself the center of a greater mystery, embracing, as it were, that in which her sweetheart was entangled. Nights of vigil had begun to overstring her nerves. That strange doubling of impressions which attacks us in such moods, making a kind of mirage of the mind, came over her. Everything about her seemed familiar, as old as her infancy, as the world itself. Elmwood! She had babbled the name in her cradle days, her earliest rambles had been through its grassy paths. Yonder silver-birch, whose delicately scalloped foliage rose and drooped in long strings, as if the foamy spurt of a fountain should be frozen in its fall, had it not printed itself on her memory somewhere a thousand times before? The three urchins passing her from behind, surely their faces were not strange.
It may be Emily was right about the urchins and that there was no mirage in her recollection of them. She had been present on the morning when Ellen's body was found and they may have stood by her side in the crowd.
"I'm stiff, Whistler," said one of them in the broad drawl of the city gamin.
"Don't expect to be limber after ridin' twenty miles on a car truck, do yer, Turkey? What place is this, anyway?"
"I'll stump yez to come over in the swamp and get some little frogs," said urchin number three, who was no other than our crabbed young acquaintance, Toot Watts.