Ishmael mounted the long slope and stood looking down upon Cloom, and it seemed to him the fabric of a dream. So strong upon him was the sense of loss of the time-sense that the place-sense also reeled and slipped to a different angle in his mind. He saw how in a far-off field at the crest of the further slope serried rows of washing were laid out, looking so oddly like gravestones that the surface of his mind took it for a cemetery until, pricked to a more normal consciousness, he realised that there could be no such thing there, but only a field belonging to a farm of his own. Even then it seemed to him that he was wandering in an unfamiliar country, with a something unreal about it that gave it a dreamlike quality. The sky was by now a deep slate colour; below it the yellow of the road and the green of the fields showed a bleached pallor, and on the telegraph poles that rose and dipped to the crest the china insulators looked like motionless white birds against the darkness. He went on and down to his house; but all the while he knew that this was not his real habitation, that the house Boase was building daily, stone by stone, was for him too the ultimate bourne, that house which, in some other dimension, only glimpsed here to the dazzling of the mind, is straightened by neither time nor place as we understand them. He knew it, but not yet for him did the knowledge hold any peace—rather it sent a chill of helplessness to his heart. He still wanted something in this world, and not in the next, to make the inner joy by which he lived.
With autumn Boase died. Like his life, his death seemed so natural, so without any sense of strain or outrage, that it was robbed, even for the man who had loved him, of all bitterness beyond that of personal loss. He had not gone uncriticised more than can anyone; there were not a few of the country people too coarse of grain to understand a man's life could really be as his appeared, and a certain capriciousness in his own likes and dislikes, which was one of his greatest weaknesses, had made for him intolerant critics among his own class. Yet, all in all, he was as near perfection, not only in character, but in understanding, as anyone Ishmael had ever heard of—far more so than anyone he had ever met. And of later years the Parson had grown in tolerance, which always to him had been a Christian duty—though it was far from being a weak or maudlin tolerance; and he had also lost much of that individualism which had been the only thing to cloud his judgment. More than most old men he had been free from glorification of the past, though not as free as he himself imagined. Something of Ishmael had gone with Killigrew's going, but that something had hardly included much of his heart; now there was buried with the Parson, or, more truly, strove to follow him whither he had gone, a love which was as single-natured a thing as can be felt. The return of Nicky was the only thing which at all filled the emptiness in Ishmael's days.
Nicky had altered, and for the better, if, thought Ishmael, it was not the mere selfishness of the old generation which had ever made him feel Nicky needed improvement. This deepening, this added manliness, would after all have been superhuman in the boy who had gone away. Nicky had lived roughly among rough men, and he had stood the test well. He still had the delightful affectations of youth, but wore them with a better grace. He came back not only the heir and future master of Cloom, but a man who could have won his way in the world without so many acres behind him. He was full of new ideas for farming, which he had imbibed in Saskatchewan, and Ishmael, with a smile of dry amusement against himself, found he was as suspicious of them as ever John-James had been of his iron ploughs and Jersey cows. Farming being "the thing" in Canada, Nicky, who had gone away rather despising it, came back eager to try his hand.
When Ishmael had first started machinery at Cloom, beginning with a binder and going on to a steam thresher that he hired out for the harvest all around the district, the hedges had been black with folk crowding to see the wonders, just as they had when the first traction engine made its appearance in West Penwith. Yet Cornishmen, who are conservative creatures, still cling to their straight-handled scythes, although they are less convenient than those with curved handles in use up-country. Nicky had small use for customs such as this, and he poured forth ideas that would have turned John-James pale, if anything could have affected his seamed and weather-beaten countenance.
John-James was an old man now—he had aged quickly with his outdoor life; but always he refused to let Ishmael pension him off, and though as overseer he had a wage passing any paid in the county, and though he lived comfortably enough in his little cottage chosen by himself, with a tidy body who came in from the village every day to attend to his wants, he still showed all the premature ageing of the countryman. He had never married, and with age had taken many queer ways, one of them being a rooted dislike to having any woman except his sister Vassie in his house. Georgie was never allowed to cross its threshold, and he always called her "Mrs. Ruan." The two little girls he adored, and they knew he was their uncle, though with the unquestioning faith of childhood they accepted that he lived alone in a little cottage like a working man because he was eccentric and mustn't be worried to live as father did. Ishmael was very fond of this brother—as fond as John-James' rigid taciturnity would let him be. John-James' chief peculiarity was displayed always during the week's holiday he took every year; on each day of this week he would make a pilgrimage to some cemetery. A new graveyard was an unfailing magnet for him; he would spend hours there and return next year to note what new headstones had taken root. "Why on earth do you want to go and spend all your holiday in cemeteries, John-James?" Georgie had once asked him; "you'll have to be there for ever and ever some day; why do you want to go before you have to?" John-James, attired in his best broadcloth, with a bowler hat firmly fixed above his weather-beaten face, stared at her stonily "I go to the graveyards," he said at length, "because them be the only places where folks mind their own business…."
Tom had quite dropped out of the family circle made by Ishmael, Vassie, and John-James. He found the annoyance of not being received in the same circles as Ishmael and Vassie too irksome to him—who, he not unfairly considered, had done so much the best and with the greatest handicaps. The day when he came over to Cloom and found Lord Luxullyan and John-James having tea together was too much for his grasp of social values, and he straightway bought a practice in Plymouth, where he did very well and rose to be an alderman, though the gleaming eminence of mayor never was to be for him. He married the daughter of a rich draper—in "the wholesale"—and as soon as he could afford it he dropped all doubtful practices and became strictly honest in his profession.
Of all the family, Vassie, who had started out with a more defined character than the others, was the least changed. She was eminently successful—had been ever since she met Flynn and determined to marry him. She had made him a good wife, for he was one of those men who need feminine encouragement, and with all his brilliance would never have got so far without her to encourage him. He was not to be one of the great men of his day, but he had done well, having attained an Under-Secretaryship under Gladstone's last Administration, which he continued under Lord Rosebery. With the advent of the Conservative party in '95 he retired, though still only sixty, and busied himself with a small estate he had bought in Ireland, where he intended to work out his schemes for model Utopian tenancies. Vassie was irked by the change. She had carried into middle life her superabundant energy—her love of being in the eye of the world. She had no children to occupy her—her only real quarrel with life—and it did not suit her to sit in Ireland while her once flaming Dan played with model villages and made notes for his reminiscences. He had, as flaming dreamers often do, fallen onto the dreams without the fire, and, having attained a certain amount of his ideals, was better pleased to sit and look backwards over those which had not materialised than to face a losing struggle in their cause.
Vassie tried all her wiles to induce him to come to London after the first year in retirement, and at last she was able to assure him that she was not feeling well. The symptoms were but slight to begin with—a tinge of rheumatism in one leg, which annoyed without incapacitating her. The rheumatism became so fierce that the local doctor at last decided it must be neuritis, and when the pain became increasingly acute and frequent he grew alarmed and insisted on a London opinion. Vassie herself felt a pang of fear, and it was a genuine terror she carried to the grim house in Harley Street a few days later. The next week she was at Cloom.
Ishmael was shocked at the change in her. Her hair, that had still shown its old brassy hue when last he had seen her at the time of the fall of the Government, was now a faded grey—that harsh green-grey that fair hair nearly always turns to on its way to white. There were hollows under her eyes, and her full mouth looked drawn. She smiled at his shocked exclamation that he could not suppress.
"Don't look like that!" she told him. "The doctor says it's not hopeless, or wouldn't be if I'd let them operate."
"It? What is it?" asked Ishmael.
"Tuberculosis in the knee. They want me to have my leg off, and I won't. You don't want me to, do you, Ishmael? I'd rather die whole if I've got to."
He had felt all his blood rush to his head with the horror of it; his heart pounded sickeningly, a darkness swirled before his eyes. Vassie linked her arm in his and walked him up and down the lawn in front of the house; from within they could hear the steady rumble of Dan's voice as he talked to Georgie. Ishmael could not trust himself to speak. Vassie was very dear to him, though there had been few caresses between them during their lives. She stood for something to him no one else ever had, even as she did for John-James. She had never been popular with women—Phoebe had feared her, Georgie called her hard and coarse; but to men, though with all her beauty she had been very unattractive to them as far as her sex went, she meant a good deal as a friend. Judith and she were the only two of the old set who had ever been really intimate, and that was more a curious kinship between them, a mutual respect born out of the strength each recognised in the other's very different character, than anything warmer. But to Ishmael and John-James she still held the glow that for them had enwrapped her even in early days when her destiny was only clear cut in her own mind, and when her hardness, commented on by others, was to them an unknown quantity. When she turned it towards them it became strength, and it did not need caresses to tell Ishmael that what of tenderness she possessed was more for him than for anyone else in the world. She felt more his equal than she did with Dan, whom she alternately despised, with the kindly despite of a wife, and respected for qualities of brain that were beyond her practical reach. She always had to explain to Dan, to Ishmael never. She slipped her arm through his now and gave it a little hug.
"Don't worry! After all something must come to all of us," she said.
The phrase knocked at Ishmael's heart. "Something must come to all of us…." Everyone had to die of something, from some outrage on nature. There had to be some convulsion out of the ordinary course to bring it about; cases where the human machine simply ran down, as with the Parson, were rare. This horror was lying in wait for all—the manner of their leaving. It was astonishing, looked at in cold blood, that people lived and were gay and happy with this hanging over them from their birth onwards. He realised that it was this fact—that only by some disruption of the ordinary course could death come—which had always made death seem so unnatural to him. He had for a flash the feeling that every woman, however maternal, has when she knows she is to have a baby—a feeling of being caught in something that will not let one go. "Something must come to all of us…."
Her "something" had come to Vassie. She had to submit to the operation, but, though she rallied from it, no real good could be done, and the end became merely a question of time. She did not kick against the pricks, as Ishmael had done all his life; she accepted it all with a certain stoicism that was not without its grandeur, and, though she became very irritable, she had moments of greater softening than ever before. She was dying when the clouds of the coming war with the South African Republics first began to lower over the country. The Flynns were in London, for Vassie was now too ill ever to think of crossing over to Ireland again, but she suddenly took it into her head to wish to be taken down to Cloom. This was when she heard the news that Nicky, who had been a volunteer for some time, had enlisted in the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. She had always been very attached to him, spending upon him what of thwarted motherhood she alone knew, and he for his part had responded to her rather more than he did to most people. Ishmael was wired to, and in November of '99, a month after the declaration of war, Dan brought her down with a couple of hospital nurses and she was installed in the biggest and sunniest room at Cloom.
With Nicky's absorption into the Army and Vassie's incursion hard upon the edge of her final parting Ishmael was more strangely affected than by anything that had happened merely to himself in his whole life. The approach of death for Vassie, the perpetual chance of it for Nicky, gave him the fulness of life, in so far as life means the power to feel. He had thought the loss of power to feel for himself an inevitable part of age, as it had been of the thickening and greater materialism of middle life; but now he knew that never had he been ravaged as now, because never before had he encountered fear for someone he loved.
Bitter loss, the loss of disappointment which at the time the soul tells one is worse than loss by death, he had known over Blanche; pain, anger, hardness, with his family he could not have missed; horror and remorse had both assailed him over Phoebe; natural sorrow that held no sense of outrage he had felt for the loss of Killigrew and Boase. But this was something different—this aching sense of helplessness, of a passion of protectiveness that could avail neither Vassie under his roof nor Nicky on the far veldt. He had not been of those who are insensitive to the pain of the world—rather had it held too much of his sympathies; but now, in the sublime selfishness of great personal grief, he felt he would give everything—the war, the whole rest of the world—to have Nicky back in safety. That was only at first, or when the fear was strongest; at other times his sense of proportion and knowledge of how Nicky himself would feel towards such a sentiment, brought him to a truer poise.
The war dragged on. The nation began to see that it was not to be the "walk-over" so confidently expected; disasters occurred, long sieges wore the folk at home even as those in the beleaguered towns, growls against the Government were raised, people talked of "muddling through," and every barrel-organ in the land ground out "Soldiers of the Queen" and "The Absent-minded Beggar." Then the world went mad and mafficked, felt a little ashamed of itself, and became, for the first time for years, rather usefully introspective and self-critical. And "Nicky … Nicky … Nicky …" beat out every swing of the pendulum of Time at Cloom.
Between the beats of intensest feeling Ishmael would fall into the arid spaces which all deep emotion holds as a strongly-running sea holds hollows—spaces where it did not seem to matter so much after all, when in a dry far-off way he could tell himself that nothing really made any difference in life. From these hollows he came up again as a man comes floating into consciousness after chloroform—recalled by a sense of pain. He had one of these spaces just after Vassie had been buried, and all the time he was consoling Dan's frantic and noisy sorrow he was feeling a hypocrite, because, so he told himself, he really did not care. He did care, and deeply, but he was making the mistake of thinking that any grief can go the whole way, that all else in life can possibly be blotted out. True instinct told him it could not, that all of life could never fall in ashes round the head even when it was bowed in irrevocable loss; but a remnant of the conventional made him feel as though it ought to, and this made him distrust what grief he felt. His thought for Nicky, even when he was in his dry spaces, he always knew was eating at him. When, with peace, came the expectation of Nicky's return in safety, it seemed to Ishmael that never before had he known all that fatherhood meant. Cloom, the future, all that he had worked for all his life, would surely come back with Nicky.
"When Nicky comes home" grew to be the watchword in the household at Cloom. The two girls, clever Lissa and thoughtful Ruth, were now grown up, and far from the childish griefs of postponed drives; they had built up a very pretty legend round the figure of Nicky these three years of the war. Ruth had copied out his letters from South Africa and made a manuscript book of them, that Lissa, who was "going in" for craftsmanship, bound in khaki with the badge of the D.C.L.I. on the cover, and they gave it to their father with great pomp. All of life centred round "when Nicky comes home." He had done very well, having gained a commission and won a D.S.O., and there was talk of a public reception in Penzance for him and the rest of the local heroes.
One day Nicky came home, but with a wife, and the homecoming was consequently quite unlike everything that had been planned. The girls declared loudly that he had spoilt everything and that they had wanted him to themselves, though privately Ruth thought Marjorie very fascinating.
Marjorie was a Colonial by birth—a good-looking, vigorous modern young woman, with a rather twangy voice. She admired Cloom so much as an antique that her enthusiasm seemed somehow to belittle it. Yet there was something splendid about her—in her confidence and poise, her candour, her superb health, and the simplicity of her thoughts. Ishmael could not but think her the perfect wife for Cloom and the future of Cloom. She would bring fresh, clear blood to the old stock, which showed signs of falling on unhealth. For the first time in his thirty-odd years Nicky was in contact with someone he admired more than himself, and the result was excellent. His early discontent had settled into ambition—the limited honest ambition of the country gentleman such as Ishmael would most have wished to see in him. Canada and the war between them had carried him far from the politics of his father—as far as Ishmael had found himself from Boase long ago; and when a bye-election occurred in the division he stood for it in the Unionist interests, and won, his honours still thick upon him, even in that Radical locality. He was now growing more and more to be master of Cloom, taking an interest in it even during his inevitable absences in town, Ishmael falling into the background; for his sixty years, though vigorous within him if he took care of himself, made him suffer for any violent exertion.
He had slipped into the background—to all but Georgie. She kept pace with him, although so much younger, because in him she saw her own youth. Her children had grown up and away from her as children must, and she clung to her husband as she had not been wont to do when the practical affairs of a family had absorbed more of her attention.
Ishmael endeavoured to live up to the Parson's advice and keep fluid, and his naturally mobile nature helped him in this. Where and when he did fall short, as the inevitable prejudices of age in favour of the ways it knows arose in him, he at least could see it and smile at himself. But, following on the intense period of personal feeling he had lived through while Nicky was at the war, had come the inevitable reaction, and from that reaction, as far as the capacity for any outstanding emotion went, he was too old to recover.
He had learned the lesson of life too well, saw the whole pattern with too great clarity. This alone would have relegated him to the background, for it is the frame of mind which, when it is temperamental from the outset, makes the looker-on at life; while when it is attained it creates the person to whom other people come for sympathy and help in matters that seem to them enormously important, even while they appeal to the wider view for better proportion.
He was in the background; but he was not yet content to be there. He was content to be thought a person who could have feelings that started and ended in others—even as a young man he had worked for that; but he had not filled in his background with anything that satisfied the portion of himself, which, even if a man live for others ever so completely, still clamours for satisfaction. Every part of him that was in relation to others had adjusted, but that one spot which always answers to the self alone was merely going on from day to day as best it could. He was content to have no burning emotions, no strong longings, to be considered less important than themselves by all the younger people amongst whom he lived, but within him the voice that says "I am I … I still want something for myself alone, some solution of the riddle, something to make up for loss of youth and beauty and strength," still stirred and muttered. Not prosperity, not children, not a wife who took step by step with him, could give this, or even help him to find out what it was. Not his memory of what the Parson had lived and died by could fill him wholly; he had not yet come to that perfect satisfaction, life was too insistent in him. Not in the next world, or in any personal contact, however intimate, in this, could the stuff of life be found. He had imagined while Nicky was away that after all he too had attained the personal fusion that most people seemed to cling to as the chief support in life, but now he knew that that way was not for him any more than for any other at the loneliest pass.
A few days after Nicky's triumphant election, when thought was once more possible at Cloom, Ishmael felt more depressed than he had for long; he had been living not so much in the valleys as upon the straight plains of late. To-day his eyes were hurting him and he could not read; there was no work crying to be done, and the heavy warm air was misted with damp that seemed to melt into the bones. He went out, shaking off Georgie's protests, and struck up the valley leading from the sea. The old mood was on him that had recurred again and again through life—the mood when nothing would satisfy but to go out alone and walk and walk and breathe in peace from earth and air. He went on, not walking fast, for the depression that was on him was not like a definite grief that urges the body to fierce exertion, and as he went it was as though he had neglected the charm too long and it was going to fail him. A blight seemed to hang upon everything, and a dread that had no form but that pressed on him grew as he went.
He came at last to the marshy bottom of the valley, where the wet and tussocky grass was set in a tangle of blackberry bushes and bracken higher than a man. A few forlorn tufts of cotton-grass still blew out in the languid breeze and the yellow stars of the cinquefoil shone from the moss, but disfigured by the dozens of evil-looking black slugs, three or four inches long, that lay motionless all over the marsh. A faint, subtle smell hung on the air, the fragrance of the dodder, that covered the gorse bushes with a fine vermilion net, studded with pale pink flowers like fat flesh-coloured flies caught in a vast red spider's web. The whole place seemed redolent of evil—the motionless glossy slugs, the deadly parasite with its curiously obscene flowers, the littered undergrowth rotting in the water, all these filled Ishmael with a suffocating sense of doom. He stayed at gaze, yet longing to get away from this steamy place, where the gorse had gone grey beneath the false embraces of the dodder.
At last he turned and climbed slowly up the valley side; when he reached the top he had to pause and lean upon a gate to get his breath. His heart was pounding in his ears. He did not look up; for a few minutes the world was dark and filled with a great roaring. Then he felt his breath coming more easily and the giddiness passed; he opened his eyes and straightened himself.
He opened them on to the wide stretch of sky that arched over the sea, and there he saw, stretched from headland to headland, one gleaming foot springing from an irradiated field, the other dying into a swirl of misty foam, a perfect arch of rainbow. It was so triumphant, so brilliant, so unexpected, that at first he stood staring, his mouth open, his whistling breath coming unheeded.
A rainbow alone in Nature always looks an alien thing—it is never part of a landscape, but the added touch which means wonder. Like snow, it is always a phenomenon. It has never lost the quality of miracle.
Far below the glowing span lay Cloom, wet grey roofs gleaming, and a dazzle of sun upon its whitewash; around the fields lay like a jewelled canopy, lighter than the sky, which still wore a deep purple-grey, against which the arch burned like fire.
As Ishmael looked the tears swam in his eyes, making the whole radiant vision reel and run together in a blaze of passionate light and colour.
As he stood there, feeling a keener joy than he could ever remember the personal having given him, all his philosophy, all his changing beliefs in what was most worth while, resolved themselves into the passionate cry: "Let beauty not die for me…. May dawn and sunset, twilight and storm, hold their thrill to the last; may the young moon still cradle magic and the old moon image peace; may the wind never fail to blow freedom into my nostrils, and the sunlight strike to my heart till I die. And if colour, light, shadow, and sound of birds' calling all fall away from my failing senses, at least let the touch of earth be sweet to my fingers and the air to my eyelids."
A little boy was riding into Cloom farmyard astride a big carthorse, whistling and beating time with a toy switch upon its irresponsive flanks. He was so small that his bare brown legs stuck straight out on either side of him, but he sat upright and clutched the dark tangled mane firmly. The horse planted his big gleaming hoofs with care, his broad haunches heaved slightly as he went, and the child swayed securely to the action. Beside the horse's arched neck walked an old man, less sure of step than the animal; the child drummed with his sandalled feet against the round sides of his steed and managed to kick the old man as he did so.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Granpa!" he said in a clear treble, laughing a little, not because he thought it was funny to have hit his grandfather, but because it was such a fine day and it was so jolly on the big horse, and he knew his grandfather would understand that he could not help laughing at everything. The old man put up his hand and laid it gently on the slim brown leg, keeping it there till the horse stopped in the middle of the yard, when he held up both his arms and the boy slipped down into them.
"Jim!" called at woman's voice from the house. "Jim! Hurry up; it's past lesson-time."
"Bother!" said Jim regretfully; "it's always lesson-time just as I'm really occupied. I wish I was a grown-up and could do what I liked."
The old man did not contradict him with a well-worn platitude, because he knew that in the way the child meant grown-ups did have a great deal of freedom.
"You wouldn't like to be as old as I am, would you, Jim?" he asked. Jim regarded him thoughtfully; evidently this was the first time he had even imagined such a thing ever being possible. He cast about in his mind to think of some answer that would not hurt his grandfather's feelings.
"Well, perhaps not quite as old as you, Granpa!" he said; "as old asDaddy; not with white hair like you—just a grown-up man."
"Jim …!" came the voice again more insistently, and his mother appeared at the back door and stood framed in its arch of carved granite. Marjorie Ruan was still a fine young woman; her thirty-odd years sat lightly upon her. Her tanned skin and the full column of her long, bare throat gave her a look of exuberant health. She was dressed in a smart suit of white linen and her brown head was bare.
"Have you been having a ride?" she asked. "But you mustn't stop when I call you, you know! You shouldn't keep him when he ought to come, Granpa!" The grandfather remained unperturbed. He liked and admired Marjorie, but there were times when he considered her manners left something to be desired. Jim ran into the house, and Marjorie, shepherding him in with a sweeping motion of her strong, big arm, disappeared also, curved a little over him. Ishmael was left alone in the yard, stroking the velvet-soft muzzle of the waiting horse.
Ishmael made a fine figure as he stood there, a little stooped, but handsome in his thin old way, with his strongly-modelled nose and his dark hazel eyes deep-set beneath the shaggy white brows. He was clean-shaven, and the fine curve of his jaw, always rather pointed than heavy, gave a touch of the priestly which looked oddly alien with his loose Norfolk jacket and corduroy breeches and the brown leather gaiters that protected his thin old legs. His close-cropped grey head was uncovered, and he still carried it well; he looked his years, but bore them bravely, nevertheless.
"You are going to finish sowing the four-acre to-day?" he asked the man who came out from a shed leading another horse. "I shall come along myself later on. Mind you regulate the feed of the drill carefully; it's not been working quite well lately." He stood watching a moment while the man harnessed the horses to the big drill, which, standing quiescent now, was soon to rattle and clank over the ploughed and harrowed earth of the four-acre field. Then he turned, and, going through the house, went out on to the lawn, where on a long chair in the sun, carefully swathed in shawls, an old lady was lying.
"Have you everything you want, Judy?" he asked, sitting slowly down on the garden-chair beside her. She looked up at him through the large round spectacles, that gave her an air as of a fairy godmother in a play, and nodded. "Everything, thanks! Marjorie has been very good. My knitting—which I always take about with me, because I think it's only decent for an old lady to knit, not because I can do it well, for I can't; to-day'sWestern Morning Newsand yesterday'sTimes; and my writing-pad, if I should take it into my head to write letters, which I shan't, because, as you know, I think letters are thoroughly vicious. One of the few signs of grace about the present generation is the so-called decay of the art of letter-writing."
"Jim would agree with you. He has just had to go in to his lessons; and he thinks that letters are a lot of rot, anyway!"
"What are you doing to-day, Ishmael?"
"I am thinking of helping with the four-acre. Nicky will soon be down for the Easter recess, and then I shall be so carefully looked after I shall not get the chance to overtire myself."
"Nicky has turned out a dear boy, and good son," said Judy kindly.
"Nicky always was a dear boy—even at his most elusive. Jim is more human than Nicky was at his age, but he hasn't Nicky's charm, that something of a piskie's changeling that made Nicky so attractive. Yes, he's a 'good son,' to use your horrible expression, Judy. And Marjorie is a very good wife for him, though I must say I enjoy it when I can have the two boys, the big and the little one, to myself."
"I sometimes wonder how much you ever really liked women," said Judy.
"I have always liked them, as you call it, very much indeed. But I don't think I've ever thought of them as women first and foremost, but as human beings more or less like unto myself."
"That's where you've made your mistake. Not because they aren't—for they are—but because that destroys the mystery, and no one is keener on keeping up the idea that women are mysterious creatures, unlike men, than women themselves."
"I daresay you're right. But to look at, merely externally, I've always been able to get the mystery. They can look so that a man is afraid to touch such exquisite, ethereal creatures, all the time that they're wanting to be touched most. Georgie always used to say I never understood women."
"When she meant that you showed your understanding too clearly. DearGeorgie!"
"Yes, dear Georgie! It does seem rough luck that she should have gone the first when she was so much younger than I, doesn't it?"
"Rough luck on you, or on her, are you meaning at the moment?"
"At the moment I was meaning on her. She was so in love with life. But I suppose really on me. I might, humanly speaking, have been fairly sure that I should have had her as a companion all the last years."
"Do you find it very lonely since Ruth married her tame clergyman andLissa went away to become a full-blown painter?"
"Doesn't it always have to be lonely? Isn't it always really? The only thing is that when we are young we have distractions which prevent us seeing it. We can cheat ourselves with physical contact that makes us think it possible to fuse with any one other human being. But it isn't. When we are our age—well, we know it's always isolated, but that it doesn't matter."
"What does matter? Those to come?"
"Yes, those to come—always them first; yet not that alone, or there would be no more value in them than in ourselves if it were always to be a vicious circle like that. Each individual soul is equally important, the old as much as the young, in the eternal scheme. It is only in the economy of this world that youth is more important than age."
"I think I can fairly lay claim to being a broadminded ''vert'" said Judith, "but of course, you know, I can't help feeling I've got something in the way of what makes things worth while that you haven't?"
"Yes, I know you do. I see you're bound to have. But of course, owing to what the Parson inculcated into me, I think I've got it too, but I quite see I can't expect you to think so."
"It's seeing the light that matters most, I think," said Judy. "We believe the same though IknowI've got it, and you onlythinkyou have! But it's the thinking that is all important. The mystery to me is how anyone can be satisfied with the phenomena of this world alone as an answer to the riddle."
"It's not so much of a mystery to me. The world is so very beautiful that it can stand instead of human love, so why not, to some people, instead of Divine love also? The beauty of it is what I have chiefly lived by. It could for very long thrill me to the exclusion of everything else."
"And now?" asked Judith.
"Now? Now I am old that has been young, and still I cannot answer you that. I believe these airmen tell you of air pockets they come to, holes in the atmosphere, where their machines drop, drop…. I think I am in an air pocket, a hole between the guiding winds of the spirit … one is too occupied in not dropping when in those holes to think of anything else. Action is the best thing, which is why I am now going to leave you to sow the four-acre."
He got up, slowly and painfully, though he stood as erect as ever once he was upon his feet. He stood a moment looking at Judith.
"Judy, d'you ever have those times when you feel something is going to happen?" he asked, "when you expect something to come round the corner, so to speak, at every moment. One so often had it in one's youth—one woke with it every morning: I don't mean that, but the expectation of some one thing that is in the air so near one that any moment it may break into actuality?"
"I never have it now, my dear, but I know what you mean. Why? Have you got it?"
"Yes."
"Is it about anything particular you are feeling it?"
"No, no; my uncanny vision doesn't go as far as that, I'm afraid."
"Dare I murmur indigestion?" she asked, with a gentle chuckle, hunching herself into her shawls.
"You may murmur, but I scorn you as a materialist and one who isn't even genuine. I go to my sowing, but you'll see if this old man is not justified of his dreams." He left her, and she watched him across the lawn with the detached affection of the old in her eyes; then she took up, not her knitting or her writing-pad, but the little book of devotions that lay in a fold of her shawl, and started to read, her lips moving slightly but soundlessly.
In the four-acre field there was a strong wind blowing that for days had been drying the turned earth to powder. The soil, so rich of hue when freshly turned, now showed a pale drab, dry and crumbling beneath the feet, while every step stirred up the fine particles and made them blow about like smoke.
Ishmael superintended the pouring of a sack of dredge-corn into the gaping maw of the drill, and the man took the rope reins, and, throwing over the lever, set the horses off, following as faithfully as might be the curve of the hedge. The sun gleamed on the glossy haunches of the horses, on the upper curve of the spidery wheels, whose faded vermilion seemed to revolve under a quivering splash of living gold that magically stayed poised, as it were, to let the wheels slip perpetually from under. The wind blew the horses' forelocks away between their ears; while about their plumy fetlocks, wreathing around the wheels and the sharp nozzles of the drill and from the heavy feet of the man who followed, rose the blown clouds of powdery soil, as though the earth were smoking at some vast sacrifice.
All the way up and down the field, back and forth, with a clanking as the lever was thrown in and out of gear for the turn at either end, this cloud went with them, blowing fine and free, encompassing them high as the horses' bellies. Ishmael watched, checked the man at the turn, and finding the corn was flowing too freely, altered the indicator, and then himself took the reins and in his turn went up and down the lines of smoking earth. And gradually, as he went, his sense of sight, and through it his brain, became gently mesmerised as the shallow furrows made by the nozzles of the drill drew themselves perpetually just before him. He could see the bright seeds dribbling into the top of the serpentine tubes, but no eye could catch their swift transit into the earth, which closed and tossed over itself in the wake of the nozzles as foam turns and throws itself about in the wake of a screw. Ishmael, his eyes on that living earth that surged so rhythmically yet with such freedom of pattern that no clod fell like another, while the dust blew back from it like spray, was soothed in exactly the same way that a man is soothed when he watches the weaving of the foam-patterns as they slip perpetually from beneath a ship.
Every year upon his farm there now came something of the joy of the gambler to Ishmael, who never sowed without feeling that it might be for the last time. Curiously enough, it never occurred to him as possible that he could die before what he had sown was grown and reaped. Every threshing over, he wondered if he should live to see another; every sowing he told himself it might be the last time he saw the earth closing over the trail of the seeds, that before another spring came round the earth might be closed over him instead, and this gave an extra keenness of appreciation to all he did and watched. Now, as he sowed, peace seemed to come to him as well as pleasure, a feeling that though sowing was always for a blind future, yet that future was as securely in the womb of the thought of God as the seeds in the womb of the earth. He walked on, up and down, till the last furrow had been sown and the seeds lay all hidden and the ruffled earth only awaited the quieting of the roller. Then he leant upon the drill and stared out over the acres that were to him as the flesh of his flesh; he bent down and crumpled a clod between his fingers for sheer joy of the feel of it.
When he straightened himself it was to see the figure of an old man he did not know coming through the gate that led from the lane into the farmyard. There was only one field intervening, and Ishmael's eyes were still very good at a distance; he could see the old man was no one from those parts. There was something outlandish, too, about the soft slouch hat and the cut of the clothes, of a slaty grey that showed up clearly amidst the earthy and green colours all around. The old man stood fumbling with the gate in his hand, then, when it swung back, he stayed staring round him as though he were looking for something he did not find. He made two or three little steps forward, then paused. Ishmael, having bidden the man see to the horses, went into the next field that gave into the yard.
The stranger looked round, saw him, hesitated again, then went forward, more surely this time, as though he had either remembered something or suddenly made up his mind. He passed through the archway into the court. Ishmael stood, his hand on the gate, staring after him, his heart thumping painfully, why, he could not or would not admit to himself. Then he, too, went on and into the court. He crossed it, went through the passage door that stood open, and on into the kitchen which lay on the left. There was no one there. He passed into the sitting-room on the right of the passage, and there he saw the old man standing by the fireplace and looking round him with an odd, bewildered air. He looked up as Ishmael came in, and their eyes met. Afterwards Ishmael realised that he had always known it was Archelaus from the moment he had seen him stand and look round him at the gate.
Archelaus looked a very old man. He was old even in actual years, and almost ageless if some indefinable look on his seamed face registered more truly the period sustained by the ravaged spirit. He stood staring at Ishmael, then spoke in a husky, uncertain voice that went suddenly from gruffness to a high querulousness.
"Who be you?" he asked. "I be Archelaus Beggoe, and I'm come home to where I was born and reared…. I'm come home, I tell 'ee."
The two old men stood looking at each other.
"Don't you remember me?" asked Ishmael gently. "I'm Ishmael, your brother; you know…." He went forward and took the other's unresisting hand. "Welcome home, Archelaus!"
The elder brother said nothing, but slowly a look of comprehension began to dawn in his bleared old eyes, a look that was inexpressibly sly and yet harmless, so infantine was his whole aspect of helplessness. He shook Ishmael's hand very slowly, then dropped it.
"I'm come home," he repeated obstinately.
The next day it became plain to Ishmael that Archelaus spoke the truth when he announced that he had come home. His legs were old and stiff, but after pottering all the morning after his brother, who suddenly felt years younger through sheer force of contrast, he followed him obstinately out to the four-acre field, where Ishmael had hoped to get away from him. And Ishmael watched the rolling, as he had only the day before watched the sowing, but with a sinking of the heart instead of the lightening that had been his only twenty-four hours earlier. The mere presence of Archelaus, though they were now both old men, past rivalry, held for him an antagonism he could hide but could not keep himself from feeling.
As the ridgy clods flattened out to a level of purplish fawn beneath the one passing of the cumbrous roller, that yet looked so small behind the huge mare, Ishmael felt his spirits being as flattened as the four-acre itself. Yet even as yesterday the two horses had done, so to-day the mare spread her powerful haunches and raised clouds of earth with each firm impact of her gleaming hoofs; but the joy was gone from the sight. Even Hester, the farm-dog, lineal descendant of poor Wanda, seemed to feel the inaction in the air, and, leaving off her slavish following of the roller, flung herself down on a stretch of field where it had already passed, legs outspread, looking so flattened as she lay there, a mere pattern of black and white, that the roller might have passed over her also. Archelaus stood leaning upon a favourite stick of Nicky's that he had taken from the hall, and commented shrewdly enough upon the affairs of the farm. He seemed suddenly to be showing a great interest in them, and during the days that followed this did not diminish. For all his years his wits seemed bright; only whenever the suggestion arose that he might be happier if he took up his quarters elsewhere his eyes seemed actually to film over like a bird's with the blankness that descended on them. Indeed, there seemed no real reason for getting rid of him. He was old and strange, but he behaved himself and played with the children, both Ruth's couple and little Jim; he was a huge success. He ousted the grandfather—so much more vivid were his tales, so much more amusing the things he could do with a penknife and a bit of wood. Whistles, whips, boats, all seemed to grow under his gnarled old hands, with their discoloured and broken nails, as though without effort. And watching his success, knowing by some instinct he would not have told for fear of misconstruction to any but Judy, who always understood, that some malign wish to hurt lay at the springs of his brother's complaisance towards the children, Ishmael felt a stirring of the old unease that he admitted to himself was not without a leaven of jealousy.
For the Easter recess Nicky came down, and no lover ever waited for his mistress with a more high-beating heart than Ishmael did for his son. And at the back of his mind was the haunting fear of Archelaus as affecting his relations with Nicky, a fear such as he might have had had Nicky been a woman and he and Archelaus young men.
Nicky came, charming as ever. He was so full of life that his forty-odd years seemed nothing to him. He had that immense vitality, sparkling but full of reserved strength, that brings with it a sense of completeness apart from youth or age. Ishmael felt the old pang of disappointment that Nicky gave so little, repented of directly some little thing showed how Nicky was thinking of and for him. Nicky drew his brows together when he heard of his uncle's advent. He was a great stickler for the conventions, and did not like this appearance in the flesh of old family scandals that might again become a topic for busy tongues.
Archelaus was out when Nicky arrived, but when the family party was assembled on the lawn for tea he made his appearance. Everyone was there. Ruth had driven over from her Vicarage with her two little girls, with whom Jim was playing and occasionally quarrelling; Marjorie sat by Nicky and waited on him with an indulgence she generally showed him on the first day together after they had been separated for a few weeks; and even the volatile Lissa was there, in a sense, as Ruth had had a long letter from her that morning which she had brought over to read to her father. Ruth's husband, a gentle, kindly, abstracted creature, was there too, pulling his long fingers through his beard and saying very little. Ishmael liked him, but preferred him to come to the Manor rather than himself going to the Vicarage. He had never got over the idea bred in him by association with the Parson that a priest should not be married.
Archelaus wandered on to the lawn looking his most spruce; he had evidently tried to tidy himself, having shaved and put on a clean collar of extraordinarily antiquated make. His clothes might have had "American ready-made" written upon them. He advanced towards them slowly, leaning heavily on his stick.
"Nicky," said Ishmael, "this is your Uncle Archelaus…. This is my boy."
Nicky got to his feet and said rather coldly that he hoped his uncle was well, but it was the old man whose eagerness in holding out his hand made Nicky's advance seem laggard. Nicky had taken a dislike to his uncle; he could not tell why. He flattered himself he was not a snob, but he thought this old Rip Van Winkle a terrible thing to drop into any family out of the blue. Archelaus lowered himself into a chair beside his nephew and began to try and make conversation. There was something pathetic about his evident efforts and Nicky's hidden distaste that was all there was to meet it, masked by courtesy. Ishmael suddenly felt his heart soften towards his brother; he told himself almost with a pang that he need not have been afraid that this old prodigal would have beguiled Nicky as he did the children; his simple wiles were not for grown men busy with affairs. Yet he still watched anxiously, though now the faint feeling of anxiety had rather transferred itself from Nicky to Archelaus.
As the days went on his heart grew no lighter, though in the society of Nicky, busy as he was with showing him all the latest improvements, he had not much time to think of anything else. Archelaus was too old and enfeebled to go all over the estate as Ishmael was still able to do, and gloried in the doing now he saw that there were others less able to than he. Yet, had he had more leisure to observe, his anxiety would have grown, not lessened, for a cloud began to gather upon Archelaus that was like the old brooding of his youth, though less articulate, but perhaps none the less dangerous for that. There had been a softening about him those first days of Nicky's return, as there was still when he played with Jimmy; but now the look that had held a timid eagerness when it was turned on Jimmy's father glowed with something else less good, a something that deepened when it was turned on Ishmael.
About this time Judith brought her visit to a close, and Ishmael was chiefly occupied with getting her off in safety and with as little fatigue as might be. Each year now their parting held something of the quality possessed by his yearly gamble with his crops, only in the former case the chances against them were doubled, for it might be Judy who failed to come again on the long journey from town.
She had a companion, a devoted creature but colourless, whom she could be said rather to suffer gladly than enjoy, and her interests, were divided between the little slum church she lived near in London, her friends at Cloom, and the rare visits of Lissa, of whom she was very fond, and who sometimes went and poured out to her enthusiasms about Futurist paintings, which Judy, who had remained true to the early Impressionist school, could only consider a perverse return to cave art.
"Shall I give your love to Lissa?" asked Judith as Ishmael tucked her into the cosiest seat of Nicky's car, which was to take her to Penzance. "No, I won't," she went on. "I shall tell her she's to come and give it for herself. She is coming, I know, now she's got her International picture off her mind. She's a very gifted woman, but I sometimes think it's a pity for her to fill her life with nothing but paint and canvases. I'm old-fashioned, I suppose!"
"Lissa and I understand each other," said Ishmael. "She is the only other human being beside myself I've ever met who finds the deepest joy in things and places instead of people."
"Do you still? Not you; they've failed you for a long time now, I know, and they'll fail Lissa. I wish I hadn't given her the advice I did when she came to town."
"What was that?" asked Ishmael, stepping back as Nicky climbed into the driver's seat.
"Never to trust a man or offend a woman. She's stuck to it too well. I've got to the age when I think it's better to have trusted too much than too little. Good-bye, my dear! Take care of yourself. I shan't come again."
"What …" began Ishmael; but at a sign from Judith Nicky had put in the clutch and the car was sliding off down the drive. Ishmael turned and went thoughtfully into the house. He wondered whether Judy too had suffered from that same sense of a shattered atmosphere that he had since the return of Archelaus.
It seemed absurd that he should, he told himself. He was seventy, Archelaus older; it was surely time they found it possible to live together in harmony…. And yet it was not that there was any definite bad feeling between them, that he could find any holes in the scheme of his brother's behaviour. It was only that Archelaus, old as he was, still retained the quality of a satyr, of something oddly malevolent, that boded ill. Ishmael tried to break himself of the feeling, life-old with him, though for so many years forgotten, but he found that, though he could force himself not to dwell on it, beyond that he was powerless. There was no actual harm Archelaus could do him, and he told himself repeatedly that there must be something rather hateful in himself that he could still feel this profound troubling of aversion.
He called for Jim to go over the farm with him; but the little boy was not to be found, and one of the maids told him she had seen him go off with his new uncle. Ishmael paused to put on a big coat, for the wind was fresh although it was late in May, and then he too went out.
In the four-acre the young corn he had sown on that day of Archelaus's return showed some four or five inches of green blades. Lest it should grow too fast and rank, the roller had been busy over it the day before, and, though the elastic tissue of its frail-looking growth was already springing erect again, the field still showed alternate stripes of light and dark, marking this way and that of the roller's passing, as though some giant finger had brushed the nap of this fine velvety tissue the wrong way.
Ishmael leant upon the gate and looked at the corn, mechanically noting its good condition, but feeling no pleasure at the sight. It was for him as though a blight had come over the Cloom of his idolatry, and he told himself it could never again be the same for him. He felt very old and tired, though it was still early in the day. His brain was working slowly; it took him a long time to register upon it his thoughts about anything at which he was looking, and the knowledge of this distressed him.
Judy had gone and was not coming back—she had said so. That aroused no acute sensation in him, but rather a dreary feeling of being sorry. Judy was old in spite of her vigour and her ever-quick tongue, which age had quickened. She had always been articulate, he always the reverse, and on this morning he felt a dumb impotency even towards himself. He stared out over the acres filmed with that thin, fine green, and past it to the wine-coloured ploughed lands and the pastures, and, turning a little against the gate, he saw the house, a pale pearl-grey on this clear day. He turned to his left and saw cultivated land far as the cliffs where once waste had been; and here and there on the rolling slopes of the moor beyond he saw a little grey farmstead that was his too, whose tenants owed their prosperity to him. And for the first time in his life the sight gave him no joy. Archelaus had drawn a blight over it all. He might tell himself with the resentful anger of old age that the thing was all wrong, absurd even; but that availed nothing. Years had not softened the fact that the presence of Archelaus had power to spoil things for him, now as when he had been a child. Archelaus was somewhere now with little Jimmy, telling him tales of the far places of the earth, which he, Ishmael, had never seen, never would see. Jim was listening entranced, his bright brown eyes shining as Nicky's did when he was moved, as Phoebe's had been wont to do.
A bright whistling sounded from the direction of the house, and Nicky came to the gate leading from the farmyard and stood looking across it. He saw Ishmael, and, waving his hat, began to come over the field towards him. And quite suddenly a certain balm slipped into Ishmael's grieved heart. At least he had Nicky … and that, after all, was what Cloom meant. Cloom might in all these years have failed him as far as she herself was concerned, leaving him feeling bereft and lost, but it was not in her power or in that of Archelaus to spoil whatever since Nicky's birth had been his chief reason for loving Cloom. This was not a blind love as the mere instinct for acres had been—this was the motive power of love itself. He waited in sudden gladness by the gate.
The day sharpened as it went on, cold rain blew up, and the inmates of the Manor began to be anxious that Archelaus had not yet come in with little Jim. No one seemed to know where he had gone or taken the child. As the day wore on Marjorie, usually a very placid, strong-minded mother, began to grow frantic. She declared that never since he came to the place had she considered Archelaus quite sane or responsible, and that Ishmael ought to have known better to keep such a queer old man on in the same house as a child. Nicky tried to comfort her before he went out for the third time on his horse to try and find some trace of the two missing members of the family. Ishmael could do nothing but wander from room to room, oppressed by a sense of fear such as he had not suffered from since Nicky had gone to South Africa. Once he shook his fist in the air as he waited by himself in the dining-room, whence he could watch the drive, and the facile, burning tears of age ran down his face as he spoke aloud of Archelaus in a cracked old voice he hardly recognised for his own. If Archelaus had let the boy come to any harm, if he had done him any hurt…. Back on his mind came flooding old memories of Archelaus—the night in the wood, for instance…. He had done wrong to believe that even at eighty years old that deep malevolence had faded. His instinct had been the thing all his life long which had made genius for him, and he had been wrong not to trust it now he was old. It was probably the only thing about him which had not aged, and he should have let himself go with it….
Late that night, through wind and sharp rain-shower, Nicky came back, with Jim, sleepy but unhurt and full of his adventure, before him on the horse. Archelaus and the child had been found wandering on the moor by Botallack mine, now long disused; Jim was crying with hunger and alarm and the old man babbling of the days when he had worked there. He was trying to find one particular shaft to show the child, he said. As it was ruined, with an unguarded lip and a sheer drop in the darkness of some five hundred feet, it was as well that the search for it had failed. Archelaus was following with the doctor in his trap, said Nicky briefly. He had seemed as though suddenly broken down, the doctor thought, and would probably never recover. And, indeed, when Archelaus was half-carried, half-helped, into the hall, he looked, save for the two spots of colour on his high cheek-bones, like some huge old corpse galvanised into a shocking semblance of life.
He was taken up to his room, the one with the four-poster bed in which the old Squire had died, with the wide view of the rolling fields. And there, it was soon plain, Archelaus would remain for what was left to him of his earthly course.
A week later there was no doubt that Archelaus was dying. He had passed the week only half-conscious—some spring both in the machinery of his splendid old body and his brain seemed as though they had given way together. He lay dying, and Ishmael, standing day by day beside the bed, looking down on the seamed, battered, gnarled thing that lay there so helplessly, felt a stirring of something new towards Archelaus. It was not any touch of that irrational affection that very easily affected people experience for those they have never really liked and yet towards whom they feel a warm outflow merely because of the approach of death; neither was it any regret that he had not loved Archelaus in life. That would have been absurd; there had been nothing to make him like his brother and everything to make him do the reverse, and he was not of those whose values are upset by approaching death. But his antipathy for Archelaus had all his life been so deep, if not so very violent a thing, that it had hitherto prevented him feeling towards him even as amicably as one human being naturally feels towards another. This was the change that took place now—he was not enabled to yearn over a brother, but he was, for the first time, able to look with the detached impersonal sympathy and kindliness of one man towards another whom he has no particular reason to dislike. A profound pity wrung his heart as he looked—the pity he would have felt from the beginning if Archelaus had ever let him, the pity which had prompted his forbearance at the time of the bush-beating in the wood.
This broken old man had wandered all his days; he had lived all over the earth and called no place his, even as he had possessed many women and yet called none his own. That such had been his nature and would have been even under other circumstances did not at this pass make the wanderings less pitiful. For the whole time that sense of wrong had kept telling him that he ought to have one special place for his own, and that one the place where he was born, which his father had held before him. Looking down on him, Ishmael wondered what it was that had driven him back to it at the latter end, whether it were blind instinct or some more reasoned prompting. He was soon to know, for on the day a week after Archelaus had been brought home he seemed to become himself again in mind and demanded to see his brother alone.
Ishmael went upstairs and into the bedroom.
Archelaus lay in the big bed, looking smaller than seemed possible; his face, deep in the pillows, jutted sharply between the mounds of whiteness with an effect as of some gaunt old bird of prey. His hands and long corded wrists looked discoloured against the sheet. Ishmael went across to the bed and sat down beside it. Archelaus was very still; only his eyes glittered as they stared up at Ishmael from between his thickly veined lids.
"You wanted to see me," said Ishmael. His voice was expressionless, but not from any hard feeling on his part. It seemed to him as he sat there that nothing as vigorous as animosity could be left alive between them—both old, both frail, both drawing near to sleep. And yet, as their eyes stared into each other's, some tremor of the old distaste still seemed to communicate itself….
Archelaus began to speak, very slowly, very low, so that Ishmael had to stoop forward to hear, but each word was distinct, and evidently with that extraordinary clarity that comes sometimes to the dying, even to those whose brains have been troubled, the old man knew what he was saying.
"I want to tell 'ee," said Archelaus. Ishmael stayed bent forward, attentive.
"What do 'ee suppose I came back for?" asked Archelaus—and this time there was definite malice in voice and look; "because I loved 'ee so?"
"No, I never thought that. I wondered rather … and I thought it was just that—" he broke off. Archelaus finished the sentence for him.
"That I was old and wandering in my wits, and came home as a dog does? No; it wasn't that. I came home to tell 'ee something—something I've hid in my heart for years past, something that'll make I laugh if I find myself in hell!"
Ishmael waited in silence. When he again began to speak it was as thoughArchelaus were wandering away from the point which he had in mind.
"You've set a deal of store by Cloom, haven't you, Ishmael?" he asked.
Ishmael nodded. Archelaus went on:
"Not just for Cloom, is it? To hand it on better'n you got it—to have your own flesh and blood to give it to? To a man as is a man it wouldn't be so much after all wi'out that?"
Again Ishmael assented. Again Archelaus went on without any fumbling after words, as though all his life he had known what he was going to say at this moment. He lifted his hand and began fumbling at the neck of his nightshirt. Ishmael guessed what he was wanting, for when he had been undressed they had found a little flat oilskin bag slung around his neck which they had left there. Now he bent forward, and, loosening the shirt, lifted out the bag. In obedience to a nod from Archelaus, he took out his knife and, cutting the dark, greasy string that looked as though it had rested there for years, slipped the bag from off it. Then, still in obedience to Archelaus, he slit the oil-silk and a few discoloured letters fell out. He gathered them up from off the coverlet and waited.
"Read," said Archelaus. Ishmael dived into a pocket for his spectacles, found them, adjusted them, and began to turn over the letters. Archelaus pointed to one with his trembling old finger. "That first," he whispered; "take that one first." Then, as Ishmael settled himself to read, he added with a low chuckle: "Knaw the writen', do 'ee?"
It had seemed vaguely familiar to Ishmael, but no more, and not even now could he say whose it was. It was very old-fashioned writing and very characterless, the hand which had in his youth been called "Italian," and it seemed to him to have nothing distinctive about it. "Never mind," said Archelaus as he shook his head; "you'll knaw fast enough. Read."
This is what Ishmael read by the evening light that flooded the room:
"Dear Archelaus," ran the letter, "I don't know whatever I shall do. I wish I was dead. Why did you come back and trouble me? There were plenty of women where you came from. You have told me about them often enough. I never wanted you to make love to me. I never liked it, only I couldn't help it. And now there's a baby coming and he hasn't been near me for over two months. He seems as though he didn't want me any more, and I don't know what to do, because now he'll have to know…."
Ishmael read so far, and though he did not understand what he read, and it sent no rush of knowledge over his soul, yet a deadly sense of fear, of yet he knew not what, sent his heart pounding through his frame. The letter fell to his knee and Archelaus, watching, said:
"I told her to speak 'ee soft and let her lil' body lie against 'ee…."
Ishmael picked up the letter again, looked from the date—the month of January, in 1868—to the signature, "Phoebe Ruan," before he let the letter drop again. Still he said nothing, and after a minute Archelaus went on.
"Read the next," he said.
The next was but a further plaint, signed with Phoebe's name, in a rather more uneven hand. Ishmael found himself remembering, as his eye met them again, her little tricks with the pen—the wandering tails to her words, the elaborate capitals which gave a touch of individuality to the regular slanting lines. He picked up the last letter.
"Dear Archelaus," it began—Phoebe would never have suffered sufficiently from a sense of fitness to alter the conventional beginning, whatever the stress under which she wrote—"I have done it, and now he need never know unless you tell him, and you won't ever, will you, dear, dear Archelaus? Please promise me."
"Did you promise?" was all Ishmael's voice asked.
Archelaus stirred a little in the bed.
"I promised never to hurt her by tellen' 'ee," he said. There was a moment of silence, and then he broke into vehement speech. Even his voice had gathered strength; it was as though in the full flood of what was sweeping out of him, after being dammed for so many years, all physical disabilities were washed away.
"Aw, what do 'ee think I ded it for?" he asked; "for love of Phoebe? Her!… I could have got as good at any brothel to Penzance…. It wasn't for love I ded it; it was for hate. Hate of 'ee, Ishmael! To get my revenge, and for you not to knaw till it was too late, much too late, to cast her off or the child. I wanted to wait till the boy should be the warld to 'ee … till he had grown as your own soul, and you saw his son ready to come after him and thought it was your own flesh and blood you was leaving behind you, and you too old to leave any other…. Cloom's been yours all your life, but when you and I are both on us dead and rotting, it'll be I and not you who's living on at Cloom. So 'tes mine, after all, not yours…."
A moment later and the triumphant voice went on again.
"There's another letter," it said, "from your old Parson. I wrote to he after I'd met Nicky—my son—casual-like once in Canada. That's what he answered."
Again Ishmael picked up the letter, almost mechanically, and read:
"I have received your letter dated July, 1891. I cannot find words to write to you as I would wish. If what you tell me is true—and I do not think you could have invented the letters of which you send me copies—it would matter very little if I found the pen of men and of angels to tell you what I thought. I can only tell you that even if the wish is wicked I hope with all my heart, and pray it too, that you may never be allowed to come home to tell your brother what it is in your heart to tell him. That the boy may never in his turn have a son to gratify you with the sight of your grandchild at Cloom. That this weapon you have forged against your brother may be under Providence to your own undoing. And since the ways of God are mysterious—though I am tempted to say not as past finding out as the ways of man—even if you carry out your threat it may be that Ishmael will be given strength to withstand the horror of what you tell him, and that the Lord has a comfort for him in ways you could not understand, so that you will be robbed of all but an empty victory…."
As Ishmael slowly and with meticulous care put the letters safely on to the bed a step was heard coming along the passage, the step of Nicky, the only step in that house which was both that of a man and vigorous. Archelaus turned his head a little on the pillow, and Ishmael, for the first time showing any emotion, leant towards him. "If you say a word to him—" he began. The steps paused at the door and then went on again. Ishmael stayed bent forward, eyes sidelong. Archelaus began to speak, as though his mind had drifted backwards from the acuteness of the present.
"All these years …" he muttered, "all these years … wandering auver the earth, I've thought on it…. Phoebe, she was a light woman and many was the time I'd held her lil' body to mine, but she was soft as a lil' lamb fresh from its mother, so she was…. The likes of you wants too much from a woman; I was never one of they chaps. If a woman was lil' and soft, said I—"
"Archelaus," said Ishmael, speaking very distinctly and bending over the old man to try and attract his wandering attention, "when you came back from California, had you it in your mind to do this thing?"
He had to repeat the question, and at last Archelaus showed a gleam of knowledge. "When I came back from Californy …" he murmured, "I came back, so I ded…. No, I'd forgot all about her then, sure enough; she was but a soft lil' thing. But he'd got her, him as had taken all of mine, got the wench as had been mine, that I might ha' wanted again, and I was mad as fire. And then I was glad of it, for I saw my way, if so be as I could only get a cheild by her…." He turned a little on his pillows towards Ishmael and became confidential. "That was my fear," he went on, "that I'd go wi' her again and no cheild 'ud come any more than it had afore. But there's often a change in women after a few years, and besides … I'd not wanted to get 'en afore. I knew I'd get 'en that time, and I ded. She was some whisht, she was, weth you and your fine gentleman ways of not sleeping along o' she, when she found the way she was in…." He laughed, a tiny, little old thread-like laugh, as out of the trough of the years there floated up to him Phoebe's predicament and his advice as to how to meet it—a thin little thread of laughter that spanned the years and connected that time of which he spoke with this present moment by the bed of death. The laugh died away and fell again into the abysses from which it had been evoked, and there only hung a silence in the room, but it was a silence thin, brittle as glass.