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THE DRAGON IN SHALLOW WATERS

BY

V. SACKVILLE-WEST

AUTHOR OF “HERITAGE”

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

The Knickerbocker Press

1922

Copyright, 1922

by

V. Sackville-West

Made in the United States of America

To L

The dragon in shallow waters became the butt of shrimps.—Chinese Proverb.

The Dragon in Shallow Waters

I

An immense gallery, five hundred feet long, occupied the upper floor of the main factory-building. Looking down the gallery, a perspective of iron girders spanned the roof, gaunt skeletons of architecture, uncompromising, inexorably utilitarian, inflexible, remorseless. A drone of machinery filled the air, neither very loud nor very near at hand, but softly and unremittingly continuous; the drone of clanking, of loosely-running wheels and leather belts, muffled by the intervening floor into a not unpleasant murmur. Outside the windows three chimneys reared their heads side by side, emitting three parallel streams of smoke, gigantic black plumes that floated horizontally away over the flooded country, and that at night were flecked with red sparks as they flowed out from the red glare at their base.

All these things, the chimneys and the girders, were crushingly larger than the men who laboured amongst them. The men seemed of pigmy size as they pushed their hand-trucks along the floor of the big gallery. They pushed them down the narrow passage-ways left between the vats. The gallery was full of vats, set in pairs down the whole length of the building; square vats twenty feet each way, as large and as deep as an ordinary room. Some of the vats were empty, temporarily not in use; some were only half full; but in most the hot, liquid soap boiled and bubbled right up to the rim.

The smell which filled the gallery was the smell of the soap, pungent and acrid on the surface, but fat and nauseating underneath, rasping the throat of the chance visitor before it penetrated deeper with its hot, furry smell that tickled and disgusted the sensitiveness at the back of his nose. The chance visitor rarely lingered long in the gallery. He would stand for a few moments watching the men that came and went in their splashed overalls, indifferent to his presence; then he would turn to go carefully down the steep iron stair into the pleasanter rooms where white powder was heaped on the floor in miniature mountains, and where lines of girls seated on high stools were occupied in tying ribbons with the twist of dexterity round the necks of scent bottles, and the room was filled with scent like a garden of orange-trees in blossom.

Up in the gallery, the soap in the vats moved uneasily with the motion of an evil quicksand. The soap was yellow, and its consistency one of slimy liquidity. If the vat were not sufficiently full, the quantity increased mysteriously from below, the level rising thanks to the unseen source of supply. It was not hard to believe that the recesses of the vat were inhabited by some foul and secret monster whose jaws emitted the viscid, yellow stream to conceal his abode. The soap moved restlessly, boiling and bursting into little craters, which subsided, leaving wrinkles and circles on the surface. Quiet for a moment, it heaved in another place; heaved slowly and deliberately, but did not break; heaved again; broke with a spout of steam and a sluggish splash as the walls of the crater fell in. It was never altogether still. It seemed alive, because it swelled and breathed and vomited, or at least it seemed as though some live creature dwelt within, occasioning by its movements the disturbances and eruptions of the slime.

In other vats a wrinkled brown skin had formed over the cooling soap, a skin puckered and broken up into valleys and chasms, plains and ridges, so that of all things it most resembled the physical map of a country. The parallel was exact as to colour, even to the greenish stretches at the bottom of the valleys. Mountain ridges three inches high, chasms three inches deep, plateaux six inches across, the landscape of some dead but perpetually changing world. For here the slime moved also, but with a difference; it did not seethe, it did not erupt; it rather subsided; was a dead, rather than a living thing. The monster that dwelt in those depths had died, and lay at the bottom, a heap of corruption the imagination would not willingly picture.

Other vats were empty, and if the hot boiling soap resembled a shifting quicksand, and the cooling soap the desolation of a dead world, the empty vats resembled the sea-bottom. The others, with their hint of greed and evil, might be more terrifying; these empty vats were infinitely more fantastic. Their sides were caked with the dry soap, brown-yellow, and their depths were surprisingly revealed; ending in a blunt point, like the point of a cone; they were sunk lower than the floor of the gallery into an unlighted chamber of corresponding size below. In these empty vats, various portions of apparatus were brought to light: immense chains, caked and corroded, hung like ship’s cables and were lost in the deposit at the bottom; vast strainers swung against the sides; ropes, stiffened hard as wood, spanned diagonally from side to side; and, emerging from the tapering depths, stumps of wreckage stood up, transformed from their original shape to stalagmites of dry frangible matter, that would chip away, crisp and powdery, betraying the nature of their kernel,—was it a shovel? was it an anchor? was it the decaying bones of the ancient monster?—and the low parapets of the vats were coated with the same brittle dryness that yellowed the walls of those grotesque and extraordinary pits.

II

I

The workers were subordinate to the factory; it was a giant, a monster, that they served. At night the red glow from the chimneys,—the glow from the fires that must never flag or die,—accentuated the disregard of man’s convenience. To keep alive that red breath of activity, men must forego their privilege of sleep.

The tragedy in the household of the Denes was not allowed to interrupt the general work of the factory, but the overseer, Mr. Calthorpe, offered Silas Dene a week, and Gregory Dene a day,—the day of the funeral,—as a concession to their mourning. He thought the offer sufficiently generous.

The brothers Dene, however, refused it.

They lived in a double-cottage; Gregory with his wife in one half; Silas and his wife, before her sudden death, in the other. Although situated in the village street, it was a lonely cottage, for “the black Denes” did not encourage neighbourly communion, nor did the neighbours trouble them with unwelcome advances. This was not surprising, for they were indeed a sinister race to whom affliction seemed naturally drawn. Nature cursed them from the hour of their birth with physical deficiencies and spiritual savagery; whether or no, as some said, the latter was only to be expected as the outcome of the former, the name of Dene remained the intimidation of the village.

Others again said that Nature was not so much to be held responsible as the Denes’ father, whom everybody had known as a rake, and who never ought to have married, much less begotten children.

Of the two brothers, Gregory had been deaf and dumb from birth, and Silas blind. Their physique, however, was full of splendour, and they were accounted two of the most valuable workers in the factory,—magnificent men, tall, muscular, and dark.

Calthorpe came to their cottage directly he was told of the accident. It was then evening, and the accident had occurred in the earlier part of the afternoon. Calthorpe knew no details beyond the bare fact that Silas Dene’s wife had been discovered, a mass of almost unidentifiable disfigurement, lying across the railway line after the passage of the little local train. He had been told this much by the men who had come running with the news to his office; they had come breathless, shocked, mystified; he had understood at once that they were mystified; they had made no comment, but Calthorpe had been quick to catch the hint of mystery; any concern of the Denes was always luscious with mystery.

He found Silas, the blind man, sitting in his kitchen, chewing an unlighted pipe. He appeared to be strangely indifferent. A little man named Hambley, Silas Dene’s only crony, sat in a dark corner, not speaking, but observing everything with bright furtive eyes, like the eyes of a weasel. He hugged himself in his corner; a sallow faced little man, with a red tip to his thin nose. Gregory Dene was in the kitchen too, and Gregory’s wife, with frightened eyes, was laying the table for supper; she moved quickly, placing cups and plates, and casting rapid glances at the two men.

“I’m terribly distressed, Silas,” Calthorpe began.

“What, you too, Mr. Calthorpe, come to condole?” cried the blind man, laughing loudly. “Well, it takes an accident to make me popular, it seems; I haven’t had so many callers in the last four years as in the last four hours. Sit down, Mr. Calthorpe; I ask ’em all to sit down. Nan, give a chair.”

Calthorpe sat down uneasily, beneath the silent scrutiny of Gregory and the quick glances of Gregory’s wife. The burning and sightless eyes of Silas were also bent upon him.

“I have only just heard the news,” he began again, “or I would have come sooner....”

“That’s all right. The neighbours ran to help, and to nose out what they could; the parson came too, he’s upstairs now. All very helpful,” said Silas, with another burst of laughter. “Gregory, my brother, too, though he isn’t much company, but we understand one another. Don’t we, Gregory? He can’t hear, but I always talk to him as though he could. I trust him with my secrets, Mr. Calthorpe. They say dead men tell no tales; I say deaf and dumb men tell no tales either. We understand one another, don’t we, Gregory?” He looked without seeing at the deaf mute who had listened without hearing, aware only that Silas was speaking by the movement of his lips. “One’s always sorry to have told a secret,” Silas said, nodding at Calthorpe; “always sorry sooner or later, but Gregory, my brother, he’s safe with any secret. I only tell them to him. Never to Nan, and I never told one to Hannah. Only to Gregory. All my secrets,” and he fell silent, and began biting his lips, pressing them between his teeth with his fingers, that were surprisingly long and nervous.

Calthorpe did not know how to answer; he looked at Gregory’s wife, trying to establish a bond of helpful sympathy between himself and her, the two normal people in that room, but she immediately looked away in her scared and nervous fashion. Calthorpe then saw that Gregory was watching him with a malicious sarcasm that startled Calthorpe for a moment into the belief that he was actually grinning, although no grin was there. Thus startled, he began to speak, hurriedly, confining himself to the practical.

“Of course, you must take some time off, Silas; this week will be very trying for you, and very busy too; there will be the inquest and the funeral.” (“Why did I say that?” he thought to himself.) “We shall all want to make it as easy as possible for you, and the men will be glad to take turns at your job. You mustn’t worry about that. Supposing I give you a week?” Seeing that Silas’s lips curled with what he took to be disdain, he thought that perhaps his offer had been inadequate, and added to it, “and your brother of course would be given the day of the funeral, and if at any other time you want him, Silas, you have only to ask me; I shouldn’t be hard on you.”

“We don’t want any time off,” Silas replied ungraciously.

“You know that it is customary ...” said Calthorpe. Customary! he clung to the word; it gave him a sense of security. “It is customary,” he repeated, “in the case of death, or sickness, or accident, to release such near relatives as are employed at the factory. You needn’t think you would be accepting a special favour.”

“Why should I think that, Mr. Calthorpe?”

Calthorpe knew from the instant defiance in the blind man’s tone that he must make no allusion to Silas’s disability; he said, “Well, the sad circumstances of your wife’s death....”

“She brought me my dinner as usual,” said Silas suddenly; “she sat with me in the shed while I ate it, down by the railway, like she always did, because afterwards she used to bring me back to my work, and then carry the plate and things home. Just like every other day. When I’d done she took me back and left me in the shops; I didn’t know anything more. After I’d been there two or three hours they came and told me. They said she’d been found on the railway line. I don’t know how long she’d been there, or why she didn’t start off for home at once. Perhaps she’d been waiting for the fog to lift; there was a fog to-day, wasn’t there? and anyway I could feel it in my breath without her telling me so. It was extra thick down on the railway. Perhaps she waited for it to lift. Or perhaps she was waiting to meet somebody in the shed.”

“Waiting to meet somebody, Silas?”

“I’m a blind man, Mr. Calthorpe, and she was a blind man’s wife.”

Calthorpe saw that Gregory’s wife had ceased her little clatter with the supper-things, and was standing as though stupefied beside the supper table, her fingers resting on its edge. Now she moved again, setting a kettle on the range.

“I knew nothing till hours after she left me—two or three hours,” Silas reverted. “Nothing until they came and told me. I’d been working all the afternoon. She left me at the door of the shops, Mr. Calthorpe,” he said; “she didn’t come in with me.”

“No, no; I see,” said Calthorpe.

“Sometimes she’d come in for a chat; she was friendly with my mates, friendly with Donnithorne specially. He’d come here sometimes, Sundays, wouldn’t he, Gregory? But to-day she didn’t come in. No. She said she had a bit of mending to do at home; that’s it, a bit of mending. She wanted to get home quick.”

“Then why should you think she waited to meet anybody in the shed?” asked Calthorpe.

“That’s only my fancy; I’m a blind man, Mr. Calthorpe; I couldn’t have seen who she waited for, or who she met. Gregory could have seen. But I couldn’t, and Gregory wasn’t there. You know he works inside the factory, Mr. Calthorpe, and I work in the shops down by the railway-sheds, tying up the boxes.”

“I know; you’re a grand worker,” said Calthorpe. He was afraid of Silas. He saw with relief that the clergyman had come down from the upper room, and was standing on the lowest step of the stairs where they opened into the kitchen.

“I knew nothing,” Silas went on with a rising voice. “Funny, that a man’s wife should be lying across railway lines, and the man not know it. Husband and wife should be one, shouldn’t they? But I never told her my secrets. Women don’t understand men’s secrets. I don’t hold with women, Mr. Calthorpe, they’re lying and deceitful animals; you can’t trust them out of your sight, and as I haven’t any sight it stands to reason I can’t trust them at all. But husband and wife should be one all the same, so they say. Dutiful and patient and faithful, that’s what women ought to be, but they’re only artful. Perhaps I’ll be better without one. I’ll get a man to share the house with me, and lead me about when I need it; I know a nice young chap who’d be glad.”

II

“My poor friend, your sorrow has thrown you off your balance,” said the clergyman as he came forward and laid his hand upon Silas’s shoulder.

“That’s you, Mr. Medhurst?” said Silas, instantly recognising the voice, which indeed was unmistakable. “You’ve prayed over her; well, I hope she’s the better for it. Heaven send me a parson to pray over me when my turn comes, that’s all I say.”

“My poor friend,” the clergyman said again, “pray rather to Heaven now that you be not embittered by your affliction. Let us call forth our courage when the test comes upon the soul; let us pray to be of those whose courage is steadfast even unto death. The lot of man is trouble and affliction, and He in His Mercy hath appointed our courage as the weapon wherewith to meet it.”

“That’s a help, isn’t it, Mr. Calthorpe?” said Silas, “that’s a great help, that thought. Is that what you say, Mr. Medhurst, to a man that’s going to the gallows? What do you tell him—to feel kindly towards his jailers, the judge who condemned him, the jury that found him guilty, the police that arrested him, the man or woman he murdered, the teacher that taught him, the mother that bore him, and the father that begot him? You tell him not to curse them all,—eh? You tell him to feel kindly and charitable like you’ve told me to be long-suffering under my blindness and to have courage now my wife’s dead,—eh? you tell him that?”

“I am not a prison chaplain, Dene,” said Mr. Medhurst, stiffly, removing his hand which, however, he immediately replaced, saying with compassion, “My poor friend, my poor friend! you are sorely tried.”

“There’s worse things than death, Mr. Medhurst,” Silas exclaimed, and he sprang up as though the clergyman’s touch were unendurable to him, and stood in front of the range, having felt his way rapidly across the room. Mr. Medhurst followed him, but Silas heard him coming, and moved away again, behind the table. Mr. Medhurst turned to Calthorpe with a gesture of resignation, saying in a low voice, “These poor fellows! we must be tolerant, Calthorpe,” and Gregory continued to watch the movements and gestures, which he could understand, although he could not hear their speech. “Look here, sir,” Silas began again, “I didn’t know of the accident, not till hours afterwards, as I’ve been telling Mr. Calthorpe,—is Mr. Calthorpe still here?”

“Yes, Silas, I’m still here,” said the overseer.

“Ah, I thought I hadn’t heard the door. Well, I was in the shops, and they told me at five o’clock. When they came to tell me, I asked what time it was, and they told me, five o’clock. Now it was two o’clock when I finished my dinner; I asked Hannah, and she told me, two o’clock. That’s three hours, sir. Mark that. She’d been on that line three hours before her husband knew it. Is that right, when husband and wife should be one?”

“They told you directly she was found, Dene,” said the clergyman. “No one is to blame.”

“I’m blaming no one,” said Silas sullenly, “I only ask you to mark it, sir: three hours. Three hours before I knew.”

“Why does he insist on that point?” thought Calthorpe.

“I’m alone now, a lonely man and a blind one. The inquest now,—must you have an inquest?”

“We are all equal before the law,” said Mr. Medhurst in a gentle and reproving voice.

“And I have to go to it?”

“I am afraid so, Dene.”

“Well, I’ll tell them what I told you: it was three hours before I knew. She was alive at two o’clock, when she left me,” said Silas with great violence, striking his fist upon the table and glaring round the room with his sightless eyes; “you’ve all heard: three hours,—you, Mr. Medhurst, and you, Mr. Calthorpe, and you, Hambley, and you, Nan. Come here, Nan.”

Gregory’s wife went to him, like a dog to a cruel master; he had thrust his fingers through his black hair, and looked wild. He groped for her shoulder; clutched it firmly.

“Tell Gregory, Nan; tell him she had been dead three hours before I knew.”

Gregory’s wife made swift passes with her fingers to her husband, who read the signs and answered in the same language.

“He says you told him that when you first came in, Silas.” She had a clear and gentle voice.

“You hear that, Mr. Medhurst? you hear, Mr. Calthorpe? I told my brother that when I came in. I’m alone now; I had a son, but I don’t know where he is; I had a daughter too, but she went soon after her brother. I stand alone; I don’t count on nobody.”

“Come, Dene; I respect your sorrow, but I cannot hear you imply that your children deserted you: you were always, I am afraid, a harsh father.” Mr. Medhurst spoke in the reprimanding tone that he could assume at a moment’s notice; it was shaded with regret, as though he spoke thus not from a natural inclination to find fault, but from a pressure of duty.

“Why don’t you say that I was harsh to Hannah?” demanded Silas. Mr. Medhurst made a deprecatory movement with his hands; he would not willingly bring charges against a man already in trouble. “Why don’t you say so?” repeated the blind man, upon whom the movement was naturally lost.

“Since you insist,” said the clergyman, “I must say that the whole village knew you were not always very kind to your wife; in fact, I have spoken to you myself on the subject.”

“I knocked her about; I’d do the same to any woman, if I was fool and dupe enough to take up with another one,” Silas said.

His pronouncement left the room in silence; his blind glare checked the words on the lips of both the clergyman and the overseer; he still stood entrenched behind the table, his sinewy hand gripping Nan’s small shoulder, for she dared do nothing but remain motionless, neither cowering away nor moving closer to him, but keeping her eyes bent upon the floor. An oil-lamp swung from the ceiling above the table. Gregory watched them all in turn, from his chair beside the oven; he was really grinning now, and seemed more in the mood to defend his brother’s quarrels with his fist than to take any interest in the visible terror of his wife. Nor did she appear to expect championship from him. She had not thrown him so much as one appealing glance. Living between the two brothers, she might almost have forgotten which of the two was her husband and which her brother-in-law; in fact, it had been whispered in the village that the mode of life in the Denes’ cottage was such as to lead the woman into that kind of confusion,—but those who spoke so were the ignorant, who disregarded or else knew nothing of the pride and jealousy of the Denes.

“I didn’t knock her about so cruelly as the train,” said Silas, laughing wildly.

“O Lord!” Mr. Medhurst began, clasping his hands, “look with mercy upon this Thy servant, that in the hour of his trial....”

“Trial? what’s that?” cried Silas. “An inquest isn’t a trial, that I’m aware?”

“... that in the hour of his trial he may rise above the sorrows of the flesh to a more perfect understanding of Thy clemency....”

“It’s just babble,” said Silas, who was shaking now with rage from head to foot.

“Save him, O Lord, from the mortal sin of profanity; endow him with strength righteously to live, bringing him at the last out of the sea of peril into the calm waters of that perfect peace....”

“You so smooth and righteous, sir, I wonder it doesn’t shock you to see a woman battered in like Hannah’s battered now; yet you went and said your prayers over her; fairly gloated over her, perhaps?”

“Look, O Lord, with mercy upon this Thy poor distraught but faithful servant. Consider him with leniency; mercifully pardon....”

“Look here,” Silas cried, “the Lord’ll hear your prayers just as well if they’re put up from your parsonage. This is my cottage, and my affairs are my affairs; what I do, or what’s sent to me, and how I take it, is my affair. I’ve always held that a man was a thing by himself, specially when he’s in trouble; he isn’t forced to be the toy of sympathy, and of help he doesn’t want. Let me alone. I don’t want your prayers, Mr. Medhurst. I don’t want your holiday, Mr. Calthorpe. I’ll be at my work to-morrow morning same as I always am—same as I was to-day after my wife died, though, mark you, I didn’t know it. I don’t whine, so I don’t want you to do my whining for me. No. I never missed a day at my work yet, and though I’m blind I work to keep myself, and I’ll look after myself, and my rights, blind as I am,—I’ll not be deceived, not I. ‘Poor blind Silas.’ Don’t let me hear you say that. Perhaps I know more than you think, and guess the rest.” He went off into a string of mumblings, and a slight foam of saliva appeared at the corners of his mouth.

“It’s no good staying here, Mr. Medhurst,” said Calthorpe, trying to get the clergyman away.

“You speak to him, Calthorpe.”

“I’ll try.—Here, Silas, you don’t hate me?” said Calthorpe, going up to the blind man.

“No; you’re a well-meaning, ordinary sort of chap,” replied Silas.

“Yes, I don’t want to be anything else. Now see here, if you think work will keep your mind off things, you must come to work; but if you want to stop away, you can stop away for a week. Is that clear?”

“I’ll come to work. A man’s got a right to decide for himself, hasn’t he?”

“Of course he has; but don’t be too hard on yourself. Don’t get mulish. You don’t look right somehow. You’re all out of gear; small wonder just now, but you know as well as I do that you’re a bit ill-balanced at the best of times. Take it easy, Silas.”

“You mean well, I dare say.”

“Yes, I swear I do; don’t say it so grudgingly. See here: cling on to your political grievances, man; they’ll take your mind off your own troubles.”

“I know how to bear my own troubles.”

“I’m only giving you a hint; get angry over something. Go down and make one of your speeches to the debating society. I don’t share your views, and I disapprove of your methods, because they stir up trouble amongst the men, but I’d like to think that something was helping you.”

“Chatter!” said Silas suddenly.

“You’re too damned scornful,” said Calthorpe flushing. “All right then; fight it out with yourself. Snarl at your mates, and scare the women. Make yourself lonelier than you already are, you poor lonely devil.”

Silas laughed at that, and some of the hostility went out of his face.

“Thanks, Mr. Calthorpe. I’ll be at work to-morrow. Going now?”

“Mr. Medhurst and I are both going—unless you want us to stay?”

“No, I don’t want you to stay.”

“No ill-feeling, Silas?”

“None, if you mean because you mislaid a bit of your temper.”

III

Nan opened the door for Mr. Medhurst and Calthorpe, who passed out together and were immediately lost to sight in the fog. In the winter months, fog hung almost continuously over that low, fenny country; white fog; billowy, soaking mist. Little wraiths of it swirled into the kitchen as she opened the door, so she shut it again quickly,—she did everything quickly and neatly. For one moment of panic she wished she could have gone with Calthorpe, who was kindly, commonplace, and easy, instead of remaining alone with those two violent and difficult men, and the dead body of her sister-in-law upstairs. She was weary of the strain that never seemed to be relaxed in their cottage.

“Next time that canting parson comes here, I’ll lay hands upon him,” said Silas.

“Will I get supper now?” asked Nan, trying to distract him.

“What a packet of folk we had!” Silas broke out; “it was rat-tat at the door all the time, till the whole village had passed through, I should say.”

“Folks are kindly,” said Nan.

“Folks are curious,” barked Silas.

She sighed, but, knowing better than to remonstrate, resumed her question.

“Will you have supper now, Silas?” and she repeated the question on her fingers to Gregory. “We’ll eat with you, Silas, to-night. Gregory and I,—we’ll be there whenever you want us. I’ll do the house for you, and your cooking. We’ll all eat together, so long as you want us to.” She was gentle and bright.

“I don’t want your pity.”

She busied herself with getting the supper out of the oven, carrying the hot dishes carefully with a cloth. Gregory watched her, pivoting in his chair to follow her movements. Once he talked to her on his fingers: “Don’t you take no notice of Silas; he looks queer to-night,” and when she answered, “Small wonder,” a broad grin distorted his dark face. His bones and features, strongly carven, in conjunction with the muscularity of his body and the perpetual silence to which he was condemned, made him appear like a man cast in bronze. He was, moreover, singularly still; he would sit for hours without stirring, his arms folded across his chest; he never betrayed what he was thinking, but the others knew that it was always about machinery. Silas, on the other hand, was far more excitable; he was always occupied; his mind had many trains of thought which it pursued; Nan never knew which of the two brothers she found the more alarming, and life had become for her an uneasy effort to conciliate them both. She had hesitated before speaking of supper; meals seemed to accord badly with tragedy.

Silas talked unceasingly; he talked with his mouth full and many phrases were unintelligible. Now and then he mumbled, now and then raised his voice to a shout. He thundered assertions, and spat questions at Nan. Gregory sat crumbling bread and sneering at her distress. She was distressed because Silas was in one of his most uproarious moods, launching opinions on his diverse subjects, every one of which readily attained the proportions of an obsession in his mind; and she was distressed further because she had all the while the alienating sensation that her husband understood his brother better than she did, although he could hear no word. She sat between them, eating very little, while they ate voraciously. She was thinking of Hannah, who lay upstairs.

Once she asked a question. “Who’ll you get, Silas, to live with you now?”

“Linnet Morgan. He’s anxious to find handy lodgings.”

“Linnet Morgan. That’s the chap newly in charge of the scents? Would he live with just working-people like us?”

“What’s the difference?”

Nan could not define it. She had not intended a challenge, but Silas had a trick of treating everything as a challenge.

“He’s soft,” she said at last.

“He’ll learn not to be soft here.”

Towards the end of the supper, Silas fell into one of his silences that were little less alarming than his speech. He sat over the range, chewing his pipe. Nan, having cleared away the supper, made herself small with some sewing in a corner. Gregory, looming hugely about the low room, disposed his drawings on the table under the direct light of the hanging lamp. They were on oiled paper, pale blue, pale pink, and white; large sheets of exact drawings of exquisitely intricate machinery. He bent over them, handling pencils, rulers, small compasses, and other neat instruments of his craft with a certain and delicate touch. He had clamped the drawings to the table with drawing pins, holding down the curling corners, smoothing out the shine of the folds. He was lost at once in them, forgetting both his own observant mockery and the tragedy which had seized and shaken his relations in its rough grasp. He was lost in his silent world of smooth-sliding precision and perfection.

His drawing was his hobby, not his profession; he guarded it from the outside world as a secret, and in the factory perversely clung to the meanest and most strenuous physical labour. When his wife protested—with more politeness than indignation—his fingers ran in emphatic oaths. When his machines were ripe to be shown, he would lay them before the whole board of directors; yes, he would startle those gentlemen; but until then he would be a workman, wheeling the barrels of liquid soap to the vats, beating and stirring it in the vats when it needed cooling,—nothing more.

He worked under the light of the lamp, making here a dot of correction, there a measurement of infinitesimal exactitude. His great fingers touched as delicately as those of a painter of miniatures.

The kitchen clock ticked in the stillness.

IV

Nan rose presently, heaping her sewing into her large open basket. Her husband was still absorbed in his drawings, and Silas in his meditations, over which he muttered and scowled. He seemed to be conducting an argument with himself, for his lips moved, he nodded or shook his head, and tapped his fingers upon his knee. Nan hesitated before disturbing him. But she knew that she must warn him before she left the room, for he could communicate with Gregory only with difficulty. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“Eh? what’s that?” said Silas, starting; he had been very deeply lost in his thoughts.

“I’m going to our cottage for a bit, Silas, to put things straight there; I’ll be back presently.”

“Gregory’s here, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he’s got his drawings out on the table.”

Silas grunted, and Nan, after wrapping a muffler round her head and mouth, let herself out of the front door.

In her own kitchen, which was identical with Silas’s in the other half of the cottage, she stood breathing with a sense of relief. Ah! if she might remain there! But she might not; Silas, who fought all the time against her sympathy and her ministrations, Silas, in spite of that ungracious ferocity, was now dependent upon her and could not be forsaken. Responsibilities by a cruel irony thrust themselves upon her weakness. She, who had so much need of protection, must protect.

She must not idle here.

She began rapidly clearing away the disorder of the day, raking out the fire, and drawing the short curtains across the little windows. She took her husband’s boots into the scullery at the back of the kitchen, and set them ready to be cleaned the next morning. She went upstairs with a candle, turned down the bed, drew the curtains there too, and tidied the dressing-table. Through the partition in the next cottage was, she knew, a similar bedroom, and in that bedroom, where Silas and Hannah had slept every night for twenty-five years and where Hannah’s two children had been born, the remains of Hannah now lay, covered over with a sheet, and Hannah, brawny, loud-voiced, tyrannical towards her sister-in-law, bullied by Silas, at times sullen and at times nosily recalcitrant towards him, would no longer go about the house as a working-woman, her sleeves rolled up, an apron over her dress, clattering pails and mops, ordering stray children off her whitened doorstep. Nan had not loved Hannah, but she thought it horrible that Hannah should be lying through that thin partition, in the disfigurement of which the men had whispered.

She wished that she dared arrange to sleep in another room, but Gregory would be angry.

She finished her work as quickly as she could and returned to Silas’s cottage; only a couple of yards separated front-door from front-door, but, shivering, she pressed her muffler against her mouth to keep out the fog. The light and warmth were welcome again as she slipped into the kitchen.

Silas had not heard her. Gregory had his back to the door and did not see her. He was still bending over his drawings, all unaware that Silas stood near him, speaking, a wild and reckless look upon his face.

“You can’t hear me, Gregory, old man. Old brother Gregory, wrapped up in your drawings! How much do you know, hey? How much do you guess? I did it—you know that, hey? She laughed at me—with Donnithorne. She played the dirty on me—with Donnithorne. I hated her, but I’ve got my honour to look after. I shan’t tell anybody, only you, old man. Tell you I did it—hey? Don’t tell anybody, Gregory!”

III

I

Calthorpe and Mr. Medhurst had entered into a conspiracy to spare Silas from attending the inquest.

As they walked away from the Denes’ cottage together, in the fog, they did not speak for some time. They were turning the same thoughts over in their minds as they paced side by side down the village street, seeing the lights in the windows on either hand very dimly through the fog. The lantern which Calthorpe carried, swaying, lit up a pale milky circle but cast no forward ray. They were chilled; little drops of moisture gathered on the clergyman’s eyebrows and on Calthorpe’s brown beard; their very footfalls seemed to be muffled by the fog.

“It was warmer in Dene’s kitchen, Calthorpe!” said the clergyman at last, handling his chilblained fingers tenderly, and then beating his hands together in their thick woollen gloves.

“Yes, sir, but I’d sooner be out here than in that unhealthy sort of atmosphere,—like that poor little woman. I think, if you ask me, the fog was thicker in that room than it is out here. I scarcely liked to come away leaving her there. I never saw any one look more out of place. And so resigned, too; never a thought of revolt. But not glum, not pulling a long face; that’s what touched me.”

“No doubt she enjoys sufficient philosophy and religion to accept with a brave fortitude the lot she has herself chosen,” said Mr. Medhurst.

Calthorpe, who had been feeling slightly exalted and full of a chivalrous emotion, the novelty of which surprised him agreeably, thought that Mr. Medhurst laid hands of lead upon a butterfly.

“Well, I thought there was something lighter about her than that, somehow,” he said, struggling; but as the clergyman remained rigid, with a compassionate murmur of “Poor soul!” he turned to another subject. “Silas Dene seemed more excitable than usual, sir; they are strange fellows, those two, and you never know how they are going to take things. Silas’s readings work upon his mind; he’s full of queer theories. No doubt you’ve noticed, Mr. Medhurst. First he’s off on one hobby-horse, and then another. Politics, death, women, fate, science, even poetry—he’s got his views on them all; not lukewarm views, or ready to listen to argument, as you or I might be, but loud, aggressive views, and contradiction only makes him angry. He fairly bullies the village; I don’t know how he does it, but all the chaps are too much afraid of him to turn upon him.” Calthorpe came at last with a rush to the real point he had in sight, and said, “I thought his manner more than usually queer to-night; queerer, I mean, even than the circumstances warranted?”

“Yes; his irreverence—I might almost say his blasphemy—was very painful to hear; but we must remember, he is sorely tried.”

Calthorpe grunted.

“I wasn’t considering it, sir, only from the point of view of the church,” he suggested.

They had reached the little gate leading to the Rectory, and Mr. Medhurst stood with his hand on the latch. The breath of the two men eddied like smoke in the fog above the pallid light of Calthorpe’s lantern. Mr. Medhurst repressed his desire for the shelter of his own study, inhospitable as it was; so faint a stirring could scarcely be dignified by the name of desire, but such as it was he repressed it, recognising an enemy; personal inclinations were allowed no place in a life of monotonous mortification; his conscience ordered him to remain out in the raw evening until Calthorpe had finished saying whatever he might have to say, so he remained. Suavity, patience, tolerance, impartiality; above all, no self-indulgence.

“Yes, Calthorpe?” he prompted.

“That man’s not in a fit state to attend an inquest,” the overseer brought out.

“Ah. No, perhaps not,” said Mr. Medhurst, and then, startled, “You don’t mean....”

“Good gracious, sir, I don’t mean anything,—only to spare the man. It’s a clear enough case of accident,” muttered Calthorpe. “I’m only afraid he’ll lose his head if he’s brought to the inquest; begin to rant on all his pet topics, do himself harm very likely; be talked about; give a bad name to the factory; perhaps lose his job. The Board is very particular. And I can’t help having a liking for Silas Dene; he’s a sound worker, he’s full of pluck, he doesn’t drink as many men would under his circumstances. I can’t help having a respect for the man. He’s something out of the ordinary. Can’t we keep him away from the inquest, Mr. Medhurst?”

“Unfortunately, he was the last person to see his wife alive.”

“I think I can get round the coroner, sir, if you’ll back me up.” Calthorpe was quite eager.

“I will certainly lend you my support,” said the clergyman rather dubiously. “After all, it is a clear case of accident, as you say, and the inquest will only be a formal affair. I suppose it is really a clear case,” he added, “but his manner was very peculiar.”

“There now, sir,” said Calthorpe, pouncing on him, delighted to have proved his point, “you know Silas Dene as well as I do, and we both trust him, yet, having seen him in this state, you’re aware of the beginnings of doubt; what about the coroner, who comes out from Lincoln, and has never heard of Dene or his record before? I tell you, we must keep the man away. It’s only decent, only Christian. The man’s blind in more ways than one; we must see for him, and keep him from hitting his head against a wall.”

“No doubt you are right; I’ll help you. Send for me when you want me, Calthorpe; good-night.”

“Good-night, sir; thank you.”

Calthorpe hurried away with his lantern into the fog; Mr. Medhurst let himself in at his front door. He wondered whether he had been too hasty in leaving Calthorpe, whether he ought not to have inquired more thoroughly into the overseer’s exact meanings. Had his wish for creature comfort relaxed the vigilance he kept over his conscience? In any case, it was too late now for regrets. With a sigh he laid his coat, his clerical hat, his muffler and his gloves on the sideboard in his narrow hall, and, passing into his study, held a match to the gas-jet above his table. A small pop of explosion resulted in a thin blue flame. No fire burnt in the grate; Mr. Medhurst never permitted himself a fire until seven o’clock in the evening, and by the clock he saw that it was only half-past six. He blew upon his fingers, trying to warm them. For a few moments he knelt in prayer for guidance at his black horsehair sofa, then, rising, he drew his chair up to the writing-table and began to deal, methodically, with a pile of his papers. He had pigeon-holed Silas Dene already in the files of his mind.

II

Silas Dene came to the inquest in spite of Calthorpe’s intervention, Mr. Medhurst’s collaboration, and the coroner’s acquiescence.

He had agreed not to come; he had been surly and ungracious, but finally had given his consent and had even added a word of conventional gratitude. He had given a written affidavit, which was read at the inquest before his arrival. All evidence had been taken, that of Dene’s mates, of the driver of the truck-train,—the fog had been very thick at the level-crossing, and he couldn’t see five yards ahead of him,—that of the shunters who had found the body lying across the rails. All had gone smoothly in unbroken formality; the inquest was held in the village concert-room, with the body lying next door; Calthorpe was there, Mr. Medhurst, a representative of the board of directors, and many of the factoryhands who out of curiosity had interpolated themselves as possible witnesses; the proceedings were nearly over, and the verdict about to be pronounced, when after a fumbling at the door Silas Dene appeared suddenly in the room.

He was alone, and in the unfamiliar room he stood stock still, solitary, detached and startling; isolated as a man who has vast spaces around him, regardless of the cheap pitch-pine walls that actually confined him. He was bare-headed, in his working-clothes, as rugged as the bole of a storm-wrecked tree on the borders of a great plain. All gazed at him, and the coroner ceased speaking.

Silas broke the silence to say, in a restrained but threatening voice,—

“Is this the inquest?—I came here by myself,” he went on; “I was in the shops. I know Mr. Calthorpe persuaded me not to come. Then I changed my mind. I thought I’d like to hear for myself. Will some one take me to a place?”

They were amazed at his feat of travelling unescorted from the shops where he worked, to the heart of the village, and mysteriously this achievement increased their fear of him, enriching it with a bar of superstition. Calthorpe led him to a central chair, near the coroner, so that he stood in the middle of the room, with his hand on the back of the chair. He would not sit.

“This is very irregular,” said the coroner, “I know of no precedent for this, but of course there is no reason why Dene should not attend the rest of the inquest if he wishes. There will be no need for me to call him as a witness now; he attends as a spectator only. Dene, your affidavit was read earlier in the proceedings.”

“I want to speak,” said Silas.

“If there is anything you want to say, Dene....”

Silas stood erect at his full height, ignoring the chair to which he had been led; he had on his most truculent expression. Calthorpe was dismayed, but knew his own impotence. There was a natural force in Silas that was not to be thwarted. He made other men seem puny; only his brother Gregory matched him, and Gregory was not there.

“I’d like to hear the verdict returned first, if you’ve reached it,” said Silas.

The coroner shrugged his shoulders, annoyed and perplexed, then said,—

“Perhaps that would be as well. With the returning of the verdict the inquest is over, and anything you may like to say afterwards will be in the nature of a private address, not one held in a coroner’s court.”

He put the usual questions, and a verdict of “Death by Misadventure,” was returned, with a rider of sympathy to the widower “in the peculiarly sad circumstances of his bereavement.”

“Death by Misadventure,” Silas repeated slowly; everybody listened in greedy anticipation; the accident and the inquest both provided succulent material for the curiosity of the vulgar, and to batten upon the exposed passions of a fellow-being—and that fellow-being a Dene!—was an excitement, a treat, albeit an alarming treat, full of surprise and of that quality of danger never very far removed from all manifestations of the Denes. The audience bent forward, with a slight rasping of chair-legs on the wooden floor; they gazed at Silas as though he were an animal at bay, devouring him all the more shamelessly that they knew he could neither see them nor read the unthinking hunger on their faces. He was the centre of mystery and alarm in the village, emerging from his darkness and seclusion only to terrorise. Celebrated as an orator at the village debating society, the men never knew whether to regard him as a leader, an enemy, or an ally. But here his heart, and not his theories, was concerned!

His first words startled them beyond their hopes of gratification,—

“Are you so sure?” He had intoned, but now, seeking effect with the skill of a natural speaker, he dropped his voice a full octave as he swung out into the current of his theme, “It seems to me a paltry sort of thing, to die by misadventure. A paltry ending, to be taken away willy-nilly, like a brat from a party! Why, a man might be leaving many things incompleted, many things he had set his heart on doing before he died. Death by misadventure! I wouldn’t set much store by the man that couldn’t look after his own life better than that, owning himself the sport when he ought to be the master. It’s a shameful thing to be beaten. It’s a shameful thing to give up your right of choice. Death by misadventure! a blunder, a clumsy mismanagement, a failure to carry through to the end, that’s all.”

His audience was amazed at the scorn he contrived to infuse into what was, to them, nothing but a trumped-up thesis. They could not admit that this unexpected, unnecessary, far-fetched thesis could be anything other than trumped-up. Even Silas Dene, full of surprising opinions as he was, could not, with the longest plumb-line, have discovered such an opinion as this anchored in the wells of his heart. He must be joking at their expense—deluding himself, perhaps, in his effort to delude them. A practical joker, Silas; even, it would appear, over his wife’s body!

He had paused after his preamble, gathered all his thoughts up into his grip, and began to deal them out to his audience.

“Suicide, now—there’s nobility in that. That’s grand. That’s escape; true escape from a prison. The man who doesn’t care a damn for his own life is no prisoner. I call him the contemptuous man. He’s a conquerer; he’s free. How many of you have got that freedom? and how many have got snivelling, timorous little spirits that cling on to their miserable breath as a treasure? So long as you do that you’re bound slaves and prisoners. There’s no escape for you.

“You’re angry? I shouldn’t bait you and gibe at you? Every one of you is man enough to live up to my principles? Well, the floods are out; they’re handy; there’s nothing to prevent any one of you from proving his manhood and his independence. The floods over the fields, and there’s the Wash for anybody who’d like something a bit deeper.”

He launched this invitation at them with a trivial insolence. “He’s mad,” they said, and shrugged, crossing their arms in resignation, but they were troubled for all that; he was poking fun at them, a grim kind of fun, and their annoyance increased as they remembered his superiority over them: one couldn’t answer Silas Dene, he had read too many books, he returned fire with too many arguments and quotations. He stood there now, apparently ready to go on talking for ever, his only difficulty abiding in the variety of his topics, which to choose and which to discard. A little smile played across his lips as he paused, mentally turning over his wares, and surveying the audience which he could not see.

“That’s suicide. I see no reason why the man who, so to speak, has always got his finger on the trigger of his revolver and the muzzle of the revolver tapping between his teeth, should fear any pain or hazard. He has his way of escape always open. But there’s a braver man than that,” he said loudly, “the man who abstains from the death he doesn’t fear. Not from religion, not from thoughts of the hereafter; simply from contempt of the easy path. Too proud to avail himself of the remedy he has at hand. All of you who have troubles,” he said, pointing his finger at them and letting it range from side to side, sweeping across their rows as they sat, “wouldn’t you like to shake off those troubles by the easy way? never to suffer any more? to leave the responsibility to others?”

They could scarcely believe that a few minutes previously he had been inviting them to cast themselves into the floods.

“I should roar with derision at the man who killed himself to escape his pain,” he went on, as though possessed by a demon of mockery, a cold demon that enjoyed goading their bewilderment. Mr. Medhurst frankly thought him diabolic; Calthorpe wondered whether he was in his right mind. “I have the right to speak of it,” he exclaimed, suddenly angry; “I spend my life in darkness; let any one dare to say that I have got no right to speak of pain! I don’t complain or ask for pity; I don’t want pity, I’ll fight against pity so long as I have breath, your pity insults me. But I can speak, because I know death as well as any man who has once stood on the gallows with the rope round his neck and been reprieved at the last moment. I’ve leant across the border like one leans across a ditch, and touched fingers with death, and then drawn back my hand. You can’t say as much. But shall I tell you something?” he added sombrely. “I mistrust myself, whether I have that true freedom; am I truly the contemptuous man? I wonder! but I wonder without very much confidence.”

They were impressed, and as he ceased speaking they remained very still; the men thought “Poor devil!” and the women shivered. Calthorpe saw that Nan was straining forward in her place, her breath coming quickly, and her eyes full of tears. As she caught his glance she murmured, “Oh, can no one get him away?” but Calthorpe shook his head, for Silas had already begun to speak again.

III

“That’s for suicide, and that’s against suicide, and the more you think about it the more you’ll be obliged to think about it. Then there’s another thing to think about and talk about: murder.”

This time his audience was really startled; Nan gave a cry, and Calthorpe saw that she had grown pale, and that deep lines had appeared at either corner of her mouth. He made a movement to go and sit beside her, but at the same time Linnet Morgan shifted into a chair just behind her, and whispered to her over her shoulder, so Calthorpe remained where he was. Mr. Medhurst got up and pointedly left the building. The coroner coughed and said, “Really, Dene, you know....”

“I thought you told me, sir,” said Silas in his most insolent manner, “that this would cease to be a coroner’s court after the verdict had been returned?” The coroner made no answer to this, but began turning over his papers in order to conceal his annoyance, and after waiting a minute Silas continued, “Murder.... No one will deny that there’s as much courage in murder as in suicide. Oh, not in the actual fact, I grant—many of you would say there’s no courage, but only a sort of brutal cowardice, in murdering a man unawares, or worse still in murdering a woman,—no courage needed to push a woman under a train!—no, there’s no courage in the actual fact, but what about the forethought of it? the first idea, the scheming and the planning, the daily watching of the chosen victim, hey? you must come to a grand pitch of hatred before you can look at warm living limbs and think ‘I’ll turn you to the cold of death!’ Life’s great; I’ve a great respect for life. Life’s rich and warm and manifold, and lies outside the bestowal of man. That’s why I’ve so high a regard for life: there’s wealth in it, that we can’t bestow the same as we can take away. That’s why I say there’s courage in murder just as there is in suicide,—courage in assuming that liability.

“And consider the afterwards,—the courage in keeping silent afterwards. The man would be living with a secret that took him by the arm as he walked down the street, whispering in his ear, and that snatched bits off his fork at meal-time as he lifted the fork to his mouth,—a playful familiar secret. It’d jolt his elbow at the first sign of forgetfulness. It’d come out with him on Sundays, jaunty.... He’d know that by a word he could turn his invisible mate into a visible thing for every man to see. The deed wouldn’t be finished with the moment the deed was done. Oh no! Crime would be easy enough to the man who had no memory. But memory has long wiry fingers to prod us under the ribs....

“Soberly,” he continued changing his voice, “let us think: it would be simple for any one to murder my wife. They could do it in my presence; I’m blind; I should be none the wiser. Let us suppose that, after she left me at the shops that day, some one had seized on her and dragged her away towards the level crossing; she could have held out her arms towards me for rescue, but I should have known nothing—nothing! That’s all perfectly plausible. But who should have had a sufficient grudge against my wife? I’m going through the names....”

A real protest was about to be raised against this hideous entertainment, when a commotion arose:—Nan Dene had fainted.

IV

“Not surprising!” said the woman in commiseration, peering at her where she lay on the floor, “pore little soul!” “Better get her home,” said the men, and meanwhile the representative of the directors’ board took Silas firmly away from the hall. “Where’s Gregory?” asked some one; “At the factory,” some one else replied, and Calthorpe, pushing through the throng, said “Here, let me carry her.” “Mr. Morgan’s got her, sir,” said a voice, and Calthorpe saw Morgan rising from his knees with Nan drooping limply in his arms.

Great indignation was expressed against Silas as the factoryhands came in little groups out into the street. In the wan January sunlight Nan was already being hurried away in Morgan’s careful clasp towards her own cottage, followed by two women. Silas was on the opposite side of the street, his back against a house, in an attitude of defiance, talking to the director, who looked restrainedly indignant. Silas called out suddenly, pointing with his finger across the street, “Oh, I can hear you whispering! why not say it out loud: Silas Dene ought to be suppressed? but I’ve been a good friend to you in strikes and troubles, and it’s always been, ‘Get Silas Dene to speak for us.’...”

“Hush, hush, Dene!” said the director; “you’re not quite yourself; walk up and down with me for a little.” He took Silas by the arm and forced him to walk up and down, talking to him all the time in an earnest and persuasive undertone. The men and women lingered in their groups about the concert-room door, whispering together and watching Silas, but Calthorpe came amongst them and ordered them away. He was peremptory and irritable as they had rarely seen him.

IV

I

The fog persisted, turning the world to a strange and muffled place, and seeming by its secrecy to favour the evil deeds of men. Within its shroud a man bent on dark purposes might creep unobserved by his fellow-beings. It could be imagined to breed such purposes, as miasmic places breed fantastic lights and unwholesome growths. It was the more oppressive because it had no tangible weight; only the moral weight, and the obscuring of vision. It was a foul-playing foe, insidious and feline, not to be lifted by strength, or countered by resistance. It was stealthily horrible, as the destroyer of clarity, setting itself mutely but quite implacably against all bright and manifest things, against the proclamation of the sun and the sweet glory of the breeze. Like an influence that intentionally confuses clear thought and strong endeavour, discolouring all that is pure, fostering all that is obscure and fungoid, it made more difficult the road of the traveller, and, waiting ever outside the doors of houses, tried to slip in its unwholesome presence through any crack of door opened to admit it. It wreathed strangely around the corners of houses so entered. The inhabitants of Abbot’s Etchery spoke of it as a living thing. “He’s terrible thick to-day,” they said, or else, “He’s not thinking of going away from us as yet.”

II

On the higher ground beyond the marshes the air was clear from fog. Here were knolls surmounted by clumps of beech-wood, the ground beneath the trees rusty with last year’s leaves, and the trunks of the beeches themselves bare, lofty, and processional, their clubbed heads shaven against the winter sky. From these knolls one looked down over the brown mirror of the floods, that surrounded the block of the village with the factory and the ancient abbey, and that were crossed until the eye lost it in distance by the great dyke carrying the road and the perspective of stark telegraph poles. But this was only when the fog had lifted. When the fog lay heavy, one looked down upon a white plain of cloud, blackened by a great smear and a fading trail where the smoke of the factory-chimneys rose to mix with it (the chimneys whose summits sometimes reared themselves through the fog like three giant fingers), and concealing beneath it who could tell what stress and labour, what hope or suffering, what secrecy of purpose, what web of mingled and obscurely tending lives?

On the higher ground amongst the beeches stood the big Georgian house belonging to Malleson, a director of the factory and local squire of the district. It was built to turn its back upon the flooded region, and from the front windows and colonnaded façade the view stretched away over the gentle rise and fall of the midland country, the dun fields, clumps of bare trees, grey sky, and cawing rooks,—a landscape in dead and uneventful levels. Malleson was very well satisfied with it. His wife was not. Malleson found satisfaction in the dark tangle of the sleeping hedgerow and the dying brake, and was happy if with gun and spaniel he might wait at the top of a ride for the bolt of a rabbit, or might stand watching woodcutters at their cleavage, and, passing on, come upon a plough-team of his own horses straining across the shoulder of a hill under a wide heaven. He was content to lean over a gate looking across a bean-field, for so long a while that, like some animals, he took on the colour of his surroundings; a hare ran amongst the beans, sat listening upon its haunches, then ran again a little farther; a jay flashed blue between two clumps of hawthorn,—but Malleson, whose interest was professional, and who would never have owned to a more sentimental satisfaction, did not like jays in his woods any better than the presence of hares among his young beans.

Christine Malleson, his wife, hated the country, hated the Midlands, hated Malleson Place, Malleson’s spaniel, Malleson’s friends, Malleson’s relations, clothes, politics, point of view, position in the county, religion, appearance, conversation, and occupations. The only thing she liked about him was his money. In very early days, fifteen years ago, before she knew better, she had given him a son; but in the horror of that one experience,—which had, progressively, infringed upon her comfort, outraged her vanity, terrified her nearly out of her wits in one brief concentrated nightmare, and finally drawn down upon her the irony of Malleson’s joy, and of remarks designed to please her, smiling, congratulatory, immemorial, consecrated, fatuous,—all that had taught her never to allow the experiment to be repeated. The months that Malleson obliged her to spend in the country were one long sulky lassitude; she rarely set foot beyond the garden, and in cool weather spent her days in overheated rooms; discontented and fastidious, picking up a book, reading the beginning, and, if that interested her, turning to read the end, but always too languid to read the middle; sleeping on her sofa after luncheon, resting after tea, amusing herself by frequent change of clothes, sometimes staring out of the window while her be-ringed hand held back the muslin curtain, watching for the post that might cheer her by bringing some phrase of flattery or homage, after which event remained only the long empty hours before she found herself, arrived there by some monotonous law of routine, sitting at dinner opposite Malleson.

She never listened to what he said, and indeed when they were alone he spoke very little. She usually leaned her head upon her hand as though she were weary, a head of lovely shape, drooping gracefully; and picked at burnt almonds, or held a cigarette to her lips, for she had a habit that maddened Malleson, of smoking almost throughout a meal. It maddened him, yet he owned that his wife was a very graceful woman, sitting there languid, spoilt, indefinably but flowingly dressed, a woman unlike the wives of other country squires, and within his very scrupulous heart he contested that he preferred her thus, that a woman was designed as an ornament, not for the sturdier business of companionship. He knew that she despised him, and, humble, accepted her estimate, ranging himself low, not putting into the opposite balance the esteem in which men held him. Having long since ceased to think that his conversation might attract her attention, only his loyalty withheld him from admitting to himself that he looked forward to the relief of the moment when she would nod to him and trail out of the room, and he might throw his legs over the arm of his chair with a pipe and a book until he began to reflect it was time for him to go to bed.

III

She listened to him, however, while he told her about the inquest he had that day attended. She had volunteered an inquiry, and when he said in mild surprise, “My dear, it never occurred to me to mention it, because I know you don’t care much for the factory,” she replied, “You may as well tell me,” thinking how little discrimination he showed between the things that might interest her and those that could not possibly be expected to do so, “Emma said something about it while I was dressing.” “Gossip, of course,” he said, restrained but displeased, and she shrugged and murmured, “Prig....”

In the end he told her, though without enthusiasm; and the story stirred the rather stagnant pool of her curiosity. One or two of his phrases, pronounced meditatively, had put her on the scent of something unusual, something that might while away a portion of the dreary time, though calling for very little effort on her part,—she could not endure the idea of effort. “He speaks like an educated man,” her husband had said of the blind factory-hand, “or a great deal better than most educated men speak, and I believe he is entirely self-taught. It appears that he has a hunger for books.... And a born speaker, like some of those ranting parsons one hears sometimes talking to a crowd from a tub. All the makings of a demagogue. I should like to assist at one of his performances at the debating society; Calthorpe gives me to understand that they’re remarkable. He’s full of ideas—Utopian mostly—exposes them ably, works them out in both scope and detail, convinces his audience, or at any rate stirs them—and then demolishes the whole fabric—out of pure devilry. I wonder what the fellow’s mind is like inside? A black business, I should fancy!”

“I have heard of him before,” said Lady Malleson.

“I dare say he is merely a disgruntled Socialist,” said Malleson, who was already ashamed of having been led away into such speculative wordiness.

IV

In the waste of hours, after that, she found her thoughts revolving constantly around her preconception of Silas Dene. At first she smiled indulgently to herself when she encountered that unknown but quite definitely conceived figure, again erect and motionless in the foreground of her mental vision; then she grew resentful of the unknown man who so imposed himself upon her attention, like a grave and persistent apparition, bending upon her his unfaltering gaze. So long as he remained an evocation, she could toy with him; fit theories on to him, like an artist draping a lay figure. She diverted herself greatly by thinking him out at leisure, ordering and re-ordering the procession of her ideas; it was true that she had heard but little about him, yet her theories were clearly formulated: he must be a self-conscious man, humorously so perhaps, (she was not yet certain on the score of his humour, trying whether she liked him best with or without it), but in any case alarmingly so; but whether he had control over the trend of his life, as would seem to be indicated by his raising himself by his own effort above the intellectual level of his class, or the trend of his life over him, she was unable to decide. Was he that being for whom in her discontented, languid, tentative way she always sought,—for in her endlessly renewed hours of idleness she dallied, not unintelligently, with a little practical philosophy,—was he, might he be, that being who lived in perfect consciousness, viewing each incident of life in instant proportion, not condemned to wait for the slow drawing out of years into perspective, but calm, secluded, not so inhuman as to escape the passing ruffle of moods, nor so unreceptive as to escape the stimulus of new influences, but on the whole sternly planned, continuous, progressive, working towards a goal, not drifting towards some end unknown and concealed within the uncertainty of mists? This apprehension, this quality of being aware, was by Christine Malleson so greatly envied, because it was in herself so totally lacking. What did she upon earth? what track would she leave, did she hope to leave? she could not have replied. Would she find in a blind factory-hand that rarest illumination, flung like a straight ray along a dark road,—clearness and wholeness of vision? She knew without being told that he would prove a man of strong opinions; that much might be said of many men, but would he have taken the further step, and welded the scattered material into a system, that could be a weapon of defence or offence, a pix so ably constructed as to appraise the worth of coin both large and small? Was he of that calibre? She thought, potentially yes. She raised her cigarette to her lips, watching the slim blue trail of smoke that rose without wavering in the warm air of the draughtless room. Silas Dene, surely, smoked a pipe, of pungent black tobacco, and along with the specific picture of him ramming in the shreds, she played with the idea of herself as the wife or the mistress of such a man; he would be the experiment in a fine but natural metal, dross and dirt mingled with the gold of the nugget. She allowed herself to drift with the current of this amusement; she was alone, none could read her thoughts, a new luxury was precious to her appetite wearied by ennui, and she had the frankness of acknowledging to herself her craving for any new sensation. She smoked in long inhalations, more concerned with the thought of what she might do to Silas Dene than with the apprehension of what Silas Dene might do to her. She would like to bewilder that man. She would like to test his arrogance, break it if she could. She would like to prove to him that his control of life was based upon no true security. It could not be so based; no poor human could be truly immune. They might think themselves immune until the storm came along. Should she play this experiment, under the guise of Lady Bountiful, on Silas Dene? Should she indulge her curiosity at his expense? The first unseemliness of the idea passed away with surprising ease. He would help her to get through the weary country months. She had tried her hand at most things, this would be something new; something, therefore, amusing....

V

I

Calthorpe came often to see the Denes after the inquest; no one could have been kinder, more considerate, or more attentive than Calthorpe.

No doubt the Denes would have preferred to keep out Calthorpe, as they had kept out every one else, but he was the overseer, and they tolerated him.

He came on Saturday afternoons, on Sundays, and sometimes on ordinary week-days, during the evening.

He would spend a little time talking to Silas, and then he would knock at Nancy’s door and ask her for confidential information.

“Nobody can tell me so well how Silas is getting on as you can, Mrs. Dene,” he would say; “may I come in for a minute?” or else “would you stroll down the road?”

Nan never strolled down the road, but she always let him into her kitchen and gave him a chair beside the fire. Sometimes her husband was there, sometimes he was not, but in either case he could not affect the conversation. Nan told Calthorpe one day how it had taken her a little while to become accustomed to the disabilities of the brothers, and to remember that whereas Silas could hear and speak but could not see, Gregory could see but could neither hear nor speak.

“I used to stop and think; now of course I know without thinking. And really you wouldn’t believe how one can get on with Gregory: I talk to him with my fingers like I talk to you with my tongue, it’s no bother. He’s very quick, too, at understanding.”

Calthorpe had already noticed that she never lost an opportunity of praising her husband and advertising her own contentment. She was more reticent about her brother-in-law, and when once Calthorpe asked her why, she replied after a slight hesitation.

“Silas can speak for himself; he doesn’t need any one to speak for him.”

“He can certainly speak!” said Calthorpe. “Do you remember how he startled us all at the inquest? why, by the time he’d finished, half the folk were wondering whether they shouldn’t throw themselves into the floods, and the other half whether they shouldn’t go home and strangle their families!”

It was the first time he had directly mentioned the inquest to Nan, and he did so now in full recollection of the effect Silas’s speech had had upon her. He had hesitated long over the problem whether he should ever allude to it or no, but recognising the subject as the shadow always in the background of their talks, he had decided to attack it openly, his intent, as usual, kindly.

“It’s worried you a good deal, I know,” he added.

“Oh,” she began,—he knew that little “Oh,” by which she prefaced her remarks and which always betrayed her nervousness,—“Oh, I don’t think we ought to talk about it, do you?”

“You mean, you don’t want to talk about it?”

She got up in a restless way, and busied herself with a vase of wild flowers upon the dresser, turning herself so that her face was hidden from him.

“Mrs. Dene, you don’t want to talk about it?”

“Oh, don’t drive me, please,” she murmured, in a voice full of distress.

Calthorpe was very remorseful to feel that he had been the cause of this distress, and he came over to the dresser where she stood arranging the flowers.

“Very well; of course we will never speak of it again,” he said, trying to soothe her, but knowing that if his repentance took too affectionate a form she would immediately shy away from him. “What are you doing with those flowers? look, you have upset some of the water! here’s my handkerchief to mop it up with.”

As she took the handkerchief he saw that there were tears on her cheek, as clear as the drops of water she had spilt from the flowers; but with his large, rough tact he pretended not to notice.

“Where did you find so many flowers, this time of year? Primroses in February! Catkins, of course, and grasses, and a sprig of plum blossom....”

“And some wild violets,” she said, showing him. “Smell them, how sweet!”

“Well, I wish I had somebody like you to put flowers about my place,” he said in a rush of sentiment.

“Will you take these? Yes, please!” crushing them, all wet as they were, into his hands. “I got them in a copse over by Thorpe’s Howland last Sunday, I walked over there....”

“What, by yourself?”

“No, with Silas and Mr. Morgan; it was Gregory’s Sunday on at the factory. We started after dinner, Silas was in a good temper, and I was happy to get away from the floods for a bit. You know, there’s a belt of higher ground away there to the south, which never gets flooded. It was nice to see the green again, and to go through woods where the trees didn’t stand with their roots soaking and rotting in water. I hate the floods, they’re so cruel; cruel in a dull, flat sort of way.... Gregory likes them; they make him grin. Of course, Silas can’t see them, but if he could I’m certain he’d like them too; he’s always asking me to tell him just what they’re like. But that Sunday he’d forgotten about them. He was as cheerful as could be, repeating poetry all the time as we went along the lanes; he kept stopping and saying “Now listen to this!” and waving time with his stick as he recited, and Mr. Morgan kept capping what he said, and they laughed a lot, trying to outdo each other.” She smiled at the recollection, leaning with her back against the dresser; then Calthorpe saw the smile disappear from her lips as though at another darker remembrance, and the scared look came into her eyes.

“Well?” he prompted.

“Oh. Well, then we went on till we got to Thorpe’s Howland, and we made Silas sit under a beech-tree while we looked for primroses....”

“You and Linnet Morgan?”

“Yes, I and Mr. Morgan. Silas sat under the tree for a bit, pulling up the moss all round him; then he got up and leant against the tree-trunk, saying more poetry; Shakespeare, I think it was. Mr. Morgan beckoned to me to come and listen, so we crept up on tiptoe, and Silas went on like that for about half an hour; I don’t know how he manages to keep it all in his head. I don’t like it so much when he starts his poetry in the kitchen, but in the wood it seemed all right; it might have been part of the wood,” she said, lowering her voice and hanging her head with her pretty, sudden shyness, and scrutinising her finger nails.

“How do you mean: part of the wood?”

“Well,—there was a lot of patchy sunlight on the ground, coming through the trees, and the moss that Silas had torn up smelt bitter,—like earth,—and the primroses smelt soft and sweet. There was the sort of big sand-pit in the bank, where we had picked them. There were the trees, so gray and naked. There was Silas,—Mr. Morgan whispered to me that Silas looked like a tree himself, a tree that had been blasted by lightning, and when he said that, I saw he was right; even Silas’s arms, waving about, were like the branches.”

“Well, well!” said Calthorpe, scratching his chin.

“Mr. Morgan’s like a son to Silas already,” she went on; “he’s gay with him, and he’s as gentle as a woman. He’s never put out by Silas’s ways—never seems to notice them, in fact. And Silas likes him because he can talk to him by the hour about all the things he thinks about and reads about.”

“But Silas always talks to everybody.”

“Yes, he’s so greedy for an audience that he’ll put up with never getting a sensible answer, sooner than not talk at all. But Mr. Morgan’s got education; he’ll argue with Silas; he’s like a whetstone to a knife. He’ll get Silas into a proper excited rage, and then laugh, and Silas takes it in good part. It was a grand day when he came to live in the cottage.”

“Yes,—well, I must be going,” said Calthorpe, moving away, and he went after a rather sulky good-bye, very unlike his usual friendliness and promises to come again.

II

Nan stood still, with a finger to her lip, after he had gone, then she opened the door and ran quickly after him. He heard her steps, and her voice calling his name and, turning, he saw her, a bright flushed spot on each small cheek-bone, with strands of dark hair blowing across her face.

“Oh, Mr. Calthorpe, I haven’t offended you, have I?”

(“How tiny she is, and how concerned she looks!” he thought, and nearly laughed with tenderness.)

“Bless me, no, my dear!” he said, patting her arm as one might pat a child’s.

“I’m so glad; I was afraid ... you went away so suddenly.... You forgot the flowers; here, I’ve brought them.” She held them out, and continued to look anxiously up into his face. “Sure I didn’t say anything to offend you—sure?”

“Sure! you’re very sweet,” he said, taking the flowers.

“You’ve been so kind; I think you’re my best friend,” she said impulsively, and she put her hand on his cuff. “I must go back now—but you’re not cross, are you?”

“Not a bit; not in the very least.”

He walked away shaking his head rather ruefully.

“She won’t come for an ordinary stroll with me of an evening, yet she tears after me without a hat or a coat, all upset, for anybody to see! She’s got a good heart.... She’s never herself when those Denes are about. But when she’s herself she’s just as sweet as she can be. Poor little thing! Am I a fool to go there?” and thinking these thoughts he hurried on, carrying the flowers she had given him.

III

He continued, however, to go there, but he made his visits more rare, reflecting, with a shade of surprise at his own considerateness, that it would be doing her a bad turn to cause gossip in the village. He was, after all, the overseer, while she was only the wife of a factory-hand and a factory-hand herself, so that he could not visit the Denes as another man might, on a footing of equality. The death of Silas’s wife had given him an excuse at first for frequenting the double cottage, but that affair was now a month old, and was already beginning to be forgotten in the rude world of the factory-village, where accidents were more or less common. Silas himself never alluded to it. He seemed, as Nan had said, to live in comparative content with Linnet Morgan. Linnet Morgan was young, educated, and extremely clever; and so merry that Silas’s dark moods usually ended by being dispelled before his laughter. Linnet Morgan seemed, in fact, to have taken charge of Silas’s life.

So much, Calthorpe thought, for Linnet Morgan.

But Nan,—ah! Nan was winning and tantalising, demure sometimes and sometimes impetuous; Nan was shy but confiding; little and sweet and windblown; and Calthorpe tried to feel large and fatherly towards Nan. She evidently welcomed him, gave him his chair by the fire; then went about her occupations, stopping to chatter when she felt inclined, asking him his opinion with her pretty head held on one side and her hands on her hips, singing over her work,—adopting him very much, in fact, as an inmate of her household. This method might put him at his ease, but it also mortified him. She accepted his visits with a lack of self-consciousness, he sometimes thought, that would have been mortifying to any man. He supposed that Gregory was fond of her, but the difficulty of communicating with Gregory rendered too tedious the effort of discovering his thoughts. Calthorpe usually nodded pleasantly to Gregory, and left their acquaintance at that. He thought Gregory a sneering, sour kind of fellow, jealously wrapped up in his machinery; he would not let Calthorpe look at his designs, but covered them over with both hands outspread, when once the overseer bent with a friendly interest over his shoulder.

But Nan,—no, never had Calthorpe blundered across so delectable a being as Nan. He cursed himself for having hitherto overlooked the grace and delicacy which set her so apart from the other working women; he cursed himself anew each time he watched her as she hung muslin curtains across her windows, or arranged and re-arranged her wild flowers upon the dresser. He had to make his observations for himself, for she told him nothing; she did not tell him how she wilted daily as she passed through the factory on her way to her own work, which lay among the heaps of white powder and the myriads of little scent-bottles, and was congenial to her,—soft powder, coloured boxes, gilt labels, pretty cut-glass, and a constant rainbow of ribbons. She snipped them with her scissors, sitting on a high stool before the table, in company with rows of other girls, all in blue overalls; and the ends of ribbon fell in a scatter of confetti around her. She noticed everything that the other girls did not notice. They only lifted their heads to gape at the visitors who were being taken over the factory, but Nan, gentle, uncommenting, and inwardly blandished, dwelt with pleasure upon the bright lightness of the big room, upon the pale sunlight that fell on the bent heads of the girls,—some of them had fair, sleek hair that looked like spun silk in the sun,—upon the powdery cleanliness of the floor, and the scrubbed expanse of the tables between the armies of shining little bottles. She hated the rest of the factory, that smelt and smoked and clanked; but this one room approached her secret vision of diaphaneity and seemliness.

IV

For who amongst men and women lives without the secret vision of some spot, either known or merely conjectural, whether of red moors or sheltered meadows, mirrored coasts or battlemented mountains? Hers was a pitifully simple dream. Sun and water, and always light: light everywhere, streaming and pouring in, because light to her meant happiness. The house must be small, the rooms low; size alarmed her. She would be too timid to dwell beneath vaulted roofs. In her mind she knew its geography intimately, and the disposal of its garden; it stood in the heart of undulating cornlands, not very far from the sea. She had never seen it. And with whom she shared it she did not know. Certainly not with Gregory. Gregory’s exclusion was not deliberate; it was unthinking, and, had it been put to her in words, might have perplexed and dismayed her; nevertheless, it was a fact that Gregory’s step never sounded upon the tiles of her dream-passage, nor did his belongings lie in the litter of joint-proprietorship about the rooms.

V

Instead of this she was given flooded, low-lying country, a dark and ancient abbey, and the clanging factory served by fire and iron. She shuddered at the cranes which discharged the coal from the slow canal-barges of the factory’s private canal. She compared the barges to beetles, and the cranes that poised above them, to the pincer-armed antennæ of some gigantic spider, descending to devour. When they pivoted slowly with their dangling burdens, she shrank, thinking that the cable must break, either from accident or mischief, and drop the weight upon the men below. She thought the factory would relish that. She never went near the canal wharves or the railway line if she could possibly avoid it, but sometimes she had to take Silas to the “shops”—the packing sheds where he worked, and which were near the railway. He seemed often to ask her to take him there since Hannah had died, and on the way there he would talk about the accident. Nan was unable to answer. She led him conscientiously, holding her black shawl about her head with her free hand, and turning her profile away from him; but though she was careful of his steps she could never force an answer between her lips. No, not if she had known that he would guess his secret had been surprised; nothing could have loosened her response,—yet her terror of him was extreme. She had often to constrain herself from crying out. He walked boldly, really knowing the way without her guidance, and talking in a loud voice, swinging his arms, so that sometimes people stopped to stare at him. He rehearsed and repeated every detail of that day, making a grievance that he had not known of his wife’s death until three hours after its occurrence, and Nan shuddered, wondering how he could infuse so much vehemence into a lie. Had he perhaps persuaded himself of its truth? But she little knew the rotations moving in his brain, that dwelt upon the murder as a vindication of his own cunning and courage. That was a deed planned and executed by no bungler and no coward! He delighted fearfully in its elaboration. With every phrase he was risking a slip, as a man walking in a dangerous place risks his limbs with every step. True, he held Nan in contempt, but she did well enough for him to practice on; any suspicion that might raise its head in her mind could easily be laid again by his inventive brain. And after she had left him, he felt flattered and gratified by his own daring.

VI

A coward! was he a coward? Surely a blind man had very little choice; deeds of danger were debarred from him, but Silas dwelt amorously upon such deeds—courage pre-eminent amongst the high attributes that fascinated, baffled, and angered him.

By a twist of his brain, through his blindness, courage meant light. Courage shone. It allured him, so that he turned constantly round the image. There was nothing moral about this allurement, it was as pagan as any cult of beauty. Courage moreover—physical courage—carried with it the thought of death, which to his egoism was so supremely and morbidly entrancing. That he should cease to be?... he could never adopt this idea. He went up to it, and fingered it, but its clammy touch revolted him, and he violently rejected it always. But he returned to it again and again, working back his way in a roundabout fashion, disguising the phantom under a rich cloak of phrases.

VII

He was scarcely more wary in his dealings with Lady Malleson than with Nan, not that he underestimated her intelligence, but because she awoke all his boastfulness, pandered to it, stimulated him as nobody had in the whole of his highly experimental life. The comparative frequency of his interviews with her was kept strictly secret. It was now no longer Nan who led him to Malleson Place, as on the first occasion, but Hambley, whom Silas had terrorised into discretion. Nor did those meetings invariably take place in the house, but sometimes in a summer-house, away from the gossip of the servants, while Hambley was sent to skulk about the park, with orders not to return before an hour, or two hours; and even once, when Sir Robert was in London, Hambley was dismissed until midnight. He offered no objection; the employment was after his own heart, and Lady Malleson, unknown to Silas, made it well worth his while. He knew that he was safe enough over this. When the lady brought Silas to the garden gate, and gave him over to Hambley, Silas could not see what passed between her hand and Hambley’s. He could not see Hambley’s grin of thanks, or his lifted cap, or Lady Malleson’s nod of smiling complicity that enjoined silence. He could only stand by, waiting to be led away, during the little farce that was never neglected:

“Well, good-night, Dene; so glad you’re getting on well.”

“Good-night, my lady; thank you.”

“Good-night, Hambley. Take care of Dene going through the park.”

“Yes, my lady; good-night, my lady.”

Then they would turn and go, Hambley leading Silas with care, while Christine Malleson re-locked the garden gate and watched them, always reluctantly, out of sight.