No hand hath trained the ivy, The walls are gray and bare; The boats upon the sea sail by, Nor ever tarry there; No beast of the field comes nigh, Nor any bird of the air."

MARY COLERIDGE.

It was black dark inside the house, instead of the white darkness outside.

Knocking Annette carefully against pieces of furniture, Roger guided her down a narrow pa.s.sage into what felt like a room. Near the ceiling were two bars of white where the fog looked in over the tops of the shutters.

He struck another match, and a little chamber revealed itself, with faded carpet and a long mirror. But no sooner was it seen than it was gone.

"Did you see that chair near you?" said Roger. "I haven't many matches left."

"There is a candle on the mantelpiece," she said.

Roger was amazed at Annette's cleverness. He had not seen it himself, but she had. He exulted in the thought.

He lit it, and the poor little tall drawing-room came reluctantly into view, with its tarnished mirror from which the quicksilver had ebbed, and its flowered wall-paper over which the damp had scrawled its own irregular patterns. The furniture was of the kind that expresses only one idea and that a bad one. The foolish sofa, with a walnut backbone showing through a slit in its chintz cover, had a humped excrescence at one end like an uneasy chair, and the other four chairs had servilely imitated this hump, and sunk their individuality, if they ever had any, to be "a walnut suite." A gla.s.s-fronted chiffonier had done its horrid best to "be in keeping" with the suite. On the walls were a few prints of race-horses stretched out towards a winning-post; and steel engravings of the Emperor of the French in an order and the Empress Eugenie all smiles and ringlets served as pendants to two engravings of stags by Landseer.

Annette took off Roger's coat and laid it on a chair.

"Some one has been very unhappy here," she said, below her breath.

Roger did not hear her. He was drawing together the litter of waste-paper in the grate. And then--careful man!--having ascertained with the poker that the register was open, he set a light to it.

The dancing, garish firelight made the sense of desolation acute.

"Who lived here?" said Annette.

Roger hesitated a moment, and then said--

"A Mrs. Deane."

"Was she very old?"

"Not very--not more than twenty-seven."

"And is she dead?"

Roger put some more paper on the fire, and held it down with the poker.

"No. She has left. Her child died here a month ago."

"Poor soul! Her only child?"

"Yes."

"And her husband? Is he dead too?"

Roger thought a moment, and then said slowly, "As good as dead."

He looked round the room and added, "d.i.c.k Manvers lent her the house. It used to be the agent's, but no one has lived in it since I can remember.

It has always been to let furnished, but no one ever took it. People seem to think it is rather out of the way."

The rollicking, busy flame died down and left them in the candle-light once more. But after a few moments the ghostly pallor above the shutters deepened. Roger went to them and opened them. They fell back creaking, revealing a tall French window. The fog was eddying past, showing the tops of the clump of firs, and then hiding them anew. He gazed intently at the drifting waves of mist.

"The wind is shifting," he said. "It will blow from the land directly, and then the roke will go. I shall run down to the farm and bring the dogcart up here."

After all, he should have to propose in the dogcart. Men must have proposed and have been accepted in dogcarts before now. Anyhow, he could not say anything in this house when he remembered who had lived here, and the recent tragedy that had been enacted within its walls.

"You must put on your coat again," she said, bringing it to him. "And mayn't I come with you? Wouldn't that be better than bringing the cart up here?"

"Oh, Merrylegs can see anywhere. Besides, there's the ford: I doubt you could get over it dry-shod, and I shall have to go a couple of miles round. And you've had walking enough. I shan't be gone more than half an hour. I dare say by then the sun will be full out."

"I would rather come with you."

"You're not afraid to stay here, are you? There is nothing to hurt you, and that candle will last an hour. I don't believe there's even a live mouse in the place."

"I am sure there isn't. Everything here is dead and broken-hearted. I would rather go with you."

Roger's face became the face of a husband, obstinacy personified. She did not realize that they had been in danger, that he had felt anxiety for her, and that he had no intention of being so acutely uncomfortable again if he could help it.

"You will stay quietly here," he said doggedly. "This is the most comfortable chair."

She sat down meekly in it at once, and smiled at him--not displeased at being dragooned.

He smiled back, and was gone. She heard him go cautiously along the pa.s.sage, and open and shut the front door.

The light was increasing steadily, and a few minutes after he had left the house the sun came pallidly out, and a faint breeze stirred the tops of the fir trees. Perhaps this was the land breeze of which he had spoken. A sense of irksomeness and restlessness laid hold on her. She turned from the window, and wandered into the little entrance hall, and unbarred a shutter to see if Roger were coming back. But no one was in sight on the long, straight, moss-rutted road that led to the house. She peered into the empty kitchen, and then, seeing a band of sunlight on the staircase, went up it. Perhaps she should see Roger from one of the upper windows. There were no shutters on them. She glanced into one after another of the little cl.u.s.ter of dishevelled bedrooms, with crumpled newspapers left over from a hurried packing still strewing the floors. The furniture was ma.s.sive, early Victorian, not uncomfortable, but direfully ugly.

There was one fair-sized south bedroom, and on the window-sill was a young starling with outspread, grimy wings. Annette ran to open the window, but as she did so she saw it was dead, had died beating against the gla.s.s trying to get out into the sunshine, after making black smirches on the walls and ceiling.

Everything in this one room was gay and pretty. The curtains and bed-hangings were of rosebud chintz. Perhaps the same hand that had made them had collected from the other rooms the old swinging mirror with bra.s.s rosettes, and the chest of drawers with drop handles, and the quaint painted chairs. Annette saw the crib in the corner. This room had been the nursery. It was here, no doubt, that Mrs. Deane had watched her child die. Some of the anguish of the mother seemed to linger in the sunny room with its rose-coloured curtains, and something, alas! more terrible than grief had left its traces there.

A devastating hand, a fierce destructive anger had been at work. Little pictures had evidently been torn down from the wall and flung into the fire. The fireplace was choked high with half-burned debris--small shoes, pinafores, and toys. A bit of a child's linen picture-book had declined to burn, and hung forlornly through the bars, showing a comic picture of Mrs. Pig driving home from market. A green wheel had become unfastened, and had rolled into the middle of the room when the wooden horse and cart were thrust into the fire.

"She must have cried all the time," said Annette to herself, and she shivered. She remembered her own mad impulse of destruction.

"It's no use being angry," she whispered to the empty walls. "No use. No use."

The photograph frames had evidently been swept into the fire too, all but one, for there was broken gla.s.s in the fender and on the floor. But one framed photograph stood on the mantelpiece, the man in it, smiling and debonair, looking gaily out at Annette and the world in general.

Under it was written in a large clear hand, "Daddy."

It was d.i.c.k Le Geyt, but younger and handsomer than Annette had ever known him. She looked long at it, slowly realizing that this, then, had been the home of d.i.c.k's mistress, the Mary of whom he had spoken and her child, to whom he had done a tardy justice in his will, the will she had helped him to make. The child, d.i.c.k's child, was dead. Its empty crib was in the corner. Its memorials had perished with it.

All that was left now of that little home was d.i.c.k's faded photograph smiling in its frame, purposely, vindictively left when all the others had been destroyed. Mary Deane had not cared to take it with her when she cut herself adrift from her past. She had not had the clemency to destroy it with the rest. She had left it to smile mockingly across the ruins of the deserted nursery. While Annette stood motionless the fierce despair of the mother became almost visible to her: the last wild look round the room and at the empty crib, the eyes averted from the smiling face on the mantelpiece, and then--the closed door and the lagging, hurrying footfall on the stairs.

"It's no use being angry," she whispered again. "Even d.i.c.k knew that. No use. No use."

And with pitying hands she took d.i.c.k's photograph out of the frame and tore it up small, and thrust the pieces among the charred remains of his child's toys. It was all she could do for him.