Oh! if she had but known Mary Deane, if she could but have come to her, and put her arms round her and told her that d.i.c.k had not been as heartless as she thought, that he had remembered her at the last, and as far as he could had made a late amends for all the evil he had done her.

But the child was dead, and Mary Deane herself was gone. Gone whither?

She had flung away in anger and despair, as she, Annette, had once flung away. Perhaps there had been no Mrs. Stoddart to care for Mary in her hour of need.

Annette's heart sank as if a cold hand had been laid upon it.

The peaceful, radiant faith and joy of a few hours ago--where were they now? In their place, into this close, desolate room with the dead bird on the sill, came an overwhelming fear.

Men were cruel, ruthless creatures, who did dreadful things to women under the name of love.

As at a great distance, far far away in the depths of childhood, she heard her mother sobbing in the dark. Almost her only recollection of her mother was being waked in the night by that pa.s.sionate sobbing. The remembrance of her father came next, sordid, good-humoured, mercenary, and she shuddered. No wonder her mother had cried so bitterly! Close behind it followed the sensitive, sensual face of the musician who had offered to train her. And then, sudden and overwhelming, blotting out everything else, came the beautiful young lover whom she had cast forth from her heart with pa.s.sion a year ago. All the agony and despair which she had undergone then surged back upon her, seemed to rush past her to join forces with the cold desolation lingering in the empty room.

Annette hid her face in her hands. She had put it all behind her. She had outlived it. But the sudden remembrance of it shook her like a leaf.

In that grim procession d.i.c.k came last--poor, poor d.i.c.k! He had not been wicked, but he had done wicked things. He had betrayed and broken faith.

He had made as much desolation and anguish as if he had been hard-hearted. Oh! why did women love men? Why did they trust them?

Annette stood a long time with her face in her hands. Then she went out and closed the door behind her. The sun was shining bravely, and she longed to get out of this death-shadowed house into the warm, living sunshine. She went back to the drawing-room, her quiet step echoing loudly down the pa.s.sage, and looked out of the long window. But the outlook was not calculated to lessen her oppression.

Close at hand, as she knew, were gracious expanses of sea and sky and gleaming river. But a stone wall surrounded the house, and on the top of it a tall wooden fence had been erected, so high that from the ground floor you could not look over it. This wooden fence came up close to the house on every side, so close that there was only just room for the thin firs and a walnut tree to grow within the narrow enclosure, their branches touching the windows.

Annette did not know that the wall and the fence and the trees were there to protect the house from the east wind, which in winter swept with arctic ferocity from the sea.

In the narrow strip between the fenced wall and the house Mary Deane had tried to make a little garden. Vain effort! The walnut tree and the firs took all sun from the strip of flower-bed against the wall of the house, where a few Michaelmas daisies and snap-dragons hung their heads. She had trained a rose against the wall, but it clung more dead than alive, its weak shoots slipping down from its careful supports. She had made a gravel path beside it, and had paced up and down it. How worn and sunk that path was! There was not room for two to go abreast in it. One footfall had worn that narrow groove, narrow almost as a sheep track in the marsh. And now the path was barely visible for the dead leaves of the walnut, falling untimely, which had drifted across it, and had made an eddy over the solitary clump of yellow snap-dragon.

Annette drew back the bolt of the window, and stepped out. The air, chill with the mist which had silvered everything, was warm compared to the atmosphere of the house.

She drew a long breath, and her mind, never accustomed to dwell long upon herself, was instantly absorbed in freeing the snap-dragon from the dead leaves which had invaded it. Two birds were bathing themselves sedulously in the only sunny corner at the end of the garden. Annette saw that their bath also was choked with leaves, and when she had released the snap-dragon, she applied her energies to the birds' bath.

But she had hardly removed a few leaves from it when she stopped short.

It was a day of revelations. The birds' bath was really a lake: a miniature lake with rocks in it, and three tin fishes, rather too large it must be owned to be quite probable, and a tin frog spread out in a swimming att.i.tude, and four ducks all jostling each other on its small expanse. It was a well-stocked lake. Tears rose in Annette's eyes as she explored still farther, lifting the drifted leaves gently one by one.

They covered a doll's garden about a yard square. Some one, not a child, had loved that garden, and had made it for a beloved child. The enclosure with its two-inch fence had no gra.s.s in it, but it had winding walks, marked with sand and tiny white stones. And it had a little avenue of French lavender which was actually growing, and which led to the stone steps on the top of which the house stood, flanked by sh.e.l.ls.

It was a wooden house, perhaps originally a box; of rather debased architecture, it must be conceded. But it had windows and a green door painted on it, and a chimney. On the terrace were two garden-seats, evidently made out of match-boxes; and outside the fence was a realistic pigsty with two china pigs in it, and a water-b.u.t.t, and a real hay-stack. Close at hand lay a speckled china cow, and near it were two seated crinkly white lambs.

Annette kneeling by the lake, crying silently, was so absorbed in tenderly clearing the dead leaves from the work of art, and in setting the cow on its legs again, that she did not hear a step on the path behind her. Roger had come back and was watching her.

When she discovered the two lambs sitting facing each other, she seized them up, and kissed them, sobbing violently.

Something in Annette's action vaguely repelled him as he watched her. It was what he would have defined as "French." And though he had swallowed down the French father, he hated all symptoms of him in Annette. It was alien to him to kiss little china lambs. Janey would never have done that. And Janey was the test, the touchstone of all that was becoming in woman.

And then all in a moment the tiny wave of repulsion was submerged in the strong current of his whole being towards her. It was as if some dormant generous emotion had been roused and angered by his petty pin-p.r.i.c.k opposition to put out its whole strength and brush it away.

"Don't cry," said Roger gruffly. But there were tears in his small round eyes as well as in hers.

"Oh, Roger," said Annette, speaking to him for the first time by his Christian name, "have you seen it, the fishes and the ducks, and the pigsty, and the little lambs and everything?"

Roger nodded. He had watched that property in course of construction. He might have added that he had provided most of the animals for it. But if he had added that, he would not have been Roger.

"And she's burnt everything in the nursery," continued Annette, rising and going to him, the tears running down her face. "The toys and everything. And she's torn down the little pictures from the wall and broken them and thrown them on the fire. And I think she only left the garden because--poor thing--because she forgot it."

Roger did not answer. He took her in his arms, and said with gruff tenderness, as if to a child, "Don't cry."

She leaned against him, and let his arms fold her to him. And as they stood together in silence their hearts went out to each other, and awe fell upon them. All about them seemed to shake, the silvered firs, the pale sunshine, the melancholy house, the solid earth beneath their feet.

"You will marry me, won't you, Annette?" he said hoa.r.s.ely.

Remembrance rushed back upon her. She drew away from him, and looked earnestly at him with tear-dimmed, wistful eyes.

The poor woman who had lived here, who had worn the little path on which they were standing, had loved d.i.c.k, but he had not married her. She herself, for one brief hour, had loved some one, but he had had no thought of marrying her. Was Roger, after all, like other men? Would he also cast her aside when he knew all, weigh her in the balance, and find her not good enough to be his wife?

There was a loud knocking at the door, and the bell pealed. It echoed through the empty house.

Roger started violently. Annette did not move. So absorbed was she that she heard nothing, and continued gazing at him with unfathomable eyes.

After one bewildered glance at her, he hurried into the house, and she followed him half dazed.

In the hall she found him reading a telegram while a dismounted groom held a smoking horse at the door. At the gate the dogcart was waiting, tied to the gate-post.

Roger crushed the telegram in his hand, and stared out of the window for a long moment. Then he said to Annette--

"Janey has sent me on this telegram to say her brother d.i.c.k is dead. It has been following me about for hours. I must go at once."

He turned to the groom. "I will take your horse. And you will drive Miss Georges back to Noyes in the dogcart."

The man held the stirrup, and Roger mounted, raised his cap gravely to Annette, turned his horse carefully in the narrow path, and was gone.

CHAPTER x.x.x

"Even the longest lane has a turning, though the path trodden by some people is so long and so straight that it seems less like a lane than 'a permanent way.'"--ELLEN THORNEYCROFT FOWLER.

Time moves imperceptibly at Riff, as imperceptibly as the Rieben among its reeds.

To Janey it seemed as if life stood stock-still. Nevertheless, the slow wheel of the year was turning. The hay was long since in, standing in high ricks in the farmyards, or built up into stacks in lonely fields with a hurdle round them to keep off the cattle. The wheat and the clover had been reaped and carried. The fields were bare, waiting for the plough. It was the time of the Harvest Thanksgiving.

Janey had been at work ever since breakfast helping to decorate the church, together with Harry and Miss Black, and her deaf friend Miss Conder, the secretary of the Plain Needlework Guild. Miss Conder's secretarial duties apparently left her wide margins of leisure which were always at the disposal of Miss Black.

Except for the somewhat uninspiring presence of Miss Black and Miss Conder and her ear trumpet, it had all been exactly as it had been ever since Janey could remember.

As she stood by the Ringers' Arch it seemed to her as if she had seen it all a hundred times before: the children coming crowding round her, flaxen and ruddy, with their hot little posies tied with gra.s.s,--the boys made as pretty posies as the girls,--and Hesketh, "crome from the cradle," limping up the aisle with his little thatched stack under his arm; and Sayler with his loaf; and the farmers' wives bringing in their heavy baskets of apples and vegetables.

Sometimes there is great joy in coming home after long absence and finding all exactly as we left it and as we have pictured it in memory.

We resent the displacement of a chair, or the lopping of one of the cedar's boughs, and we note the new tool-shed with an alien eye.

But it is not always joyful, nay, it can have an element of despair in it, to stay at home, and never go away, and see the wheel of life slowly turn and turn, and re-turn, and yet again re-turn, always the same, yet taking every year part of our youth from us. The years must come which will strip from us what we have. Yes, we know that. But life should surely give us something first, before it begins to take away.