An End and a Beginning (34 page)

Quietly she rose from the bed, threw on a dressing-gown and crossed to the window. She drew back a curtain, went behind it, lost herself in its folds, and looked out and saw the first signs of the coming light, and the distant hills buried in their own silence.

10

“There was no light. There were no sounds. No wind. And there were no trees. There was nothing at all save the grass, and I've seen it greener than that in my day. There wasn't even a bush, just railings. A mysterious place, like a great park, and not a soul about. No one, and not even a bird. And nothing moved. Nothing. There
was
nothing. A queer dream I had indeed.”

Miss Fetch's head nodded from time to time. She fought against sleep, and against the drawing-down heat of the fire. She shook herself upright and looked at the clock again. How long would she wait? How long would they be? “The doves are fast asleep,” she thought, and she smiled into the fire. “A very odd dream indeed.”

And an odd morning. Miss Fetch had knocked, had called, first the name of the woman, and then the man. Later, she had struck the gong. Perhaps that would wake them up. She had passed their room, had paused to listen, but there was not a sound. “And still are,” she told herself, as she watched the clock's hand move. “No matter, I'll sit here and wait.”

She had laid the table for breakfast, she had brought in the tray, and she had carried it back to the kitchen. She was glad to sit, glad to rest her bones. “Lord! How they ache this morning. I couldn't even stretch in my bed last night. Maybe their bones are aching too.”

She sat there with folded hands, and she thought about yesterday. “There's something a little unreal about the whole lot of it,” she thought. “All this running about, all this excitement, and the way the pair of them cling together, the way they cling. If only they knew how silly they looked, a pair of middle-aged people thinking they're children in the wood for the first time, and the world full of bells and Christmas cards. So silly. But I'm sorry for the man, so lost-looking. H'm! He thinks I know nothing about him. If only he knew. And she's a case. She looks as unhappy as him, a terribly disappointed woman. Thinking of her husband, no doubt at all. She must have run away. I wonder what'll come of it? How extraordinary, here I am sitting by this fire, with my notice to get out, to go home to my sister, out of her mouth and into my hand as casually as though it were an order from the grocer. No, there's something odd about her.”

Miss Fetch remembered yesterday. “God save us, but I thought she'd never stop, never get tired, and the way the questions was being flung at me, tossing over her head as she tripped about from room to room, and me trailing behind her and wondering when it was going to come to an end. The things she shifted, and the things she smashed. The things she liked and the things she hated; the things that had to go
there
, and not here, and time after time she was calling out to that man to come and help with this, that, and the other. Such liveliness, such excitement. But the questions, the questions. Why everybody who ever worked in this house was out on parade.

“‘And what about Miss Clancy?' says she, and I says, ‘Well, she's away out of here just after your mother died, and happy and married in New York, with a family of her own.' And ‘Morelly?' says she. ‘What about Morelly?' And I told her about him, and how he'd got himself a nice place now down Baldoyle way, and one after another she was naming them, and such a warmth in her voice there was, like she'd never forgotten them, and they were so real to me then. Why, I could see them coming up from the cellars and down from the attics. And Devone? says she, and Larkin and Farrell, and Scully, and Twomey. And I could see old Morelly and the boy hurrying across from the stables. Well indeed, it gave me a queer turn hearing the names again, and it was like yesterday, and the day before that, and I was young myself, and pure white in an apron stiff and cold out of the very room I was in a few hours ago. And then away off she went to the room she was born in, and stood there so silent, so still, and staring round and round till her eye lights on a little horse standing on a table in the window, and she rushes to it and picks it up, and holds it so tightly in her hand, and looked at it for a long time, and not a sound from her, and I'd a feeling she had hold of a happy day.

“Poor woman, I thought, perhaps she was the silly girl to run off like that to unknown places, and even though her father never gave a damn for anybody but himself, 'twas her mother that always loved her, and cried often she did over the letters she had from her daughter in Gelton. Ah, why I was moved by the way she held that little horse in her hands, and I stole away out of the room, and went and stood at the end of the passage, waiting to be called by her, which I was very soon after. She fairly ran into another room, and the first thing she does is to pick up that lovely old vase that always her mother filled with fresh flowers from the garden, and shouts out that she always hated the thing, that it was ugly, that she'd never liked it
there
, and the crash when she flung it out of the window, and it broke to pieces in the drive. Why I'm sure you could have heard it over half the county. And I said to her, ‘Why, ma'm, that's the lovely old vase your mother always used for the flowers in her room,' but she never answered me, no, indeed, so I said nothing more about that. And into another room she rushed and over to that piano, and had the lid up and the dust of years in the air, whilst she sat down and twiddled with a tune out of it that was always her favourite as a child, and crying out of her that it was badly out of tune, and didn't Mr. O'Rourke come any more to tune it, and I said no, and she got up and banged down the lid like one possessed, and rushed to the door and called Mr. Fury, who came and shifted it to another part of the room, and the noise, and the dust. But I thought I'd never stop answering her questions and I thought I'd never stop walking about that whole day, and it was the saddest thing I ever saw the way she hung on to a tiny stone horse that was a fine model of the first creature that spun them the gold dust.” Fresh to Miss Fetch's mind came the names of the green places where it had galloped home.

“And I was in a room that was her mother's last, and holding a fine bit of velvet that draped her invalid chair, and far away I was, standing at the very edge of that afternoon when she fell off the horse, and suddenly Mrs. Fury was right behind me, so quiet she came up, and I jumped when she spoke to me, and hardly the sort of words I expected out of her mouth. Surprised I was, and let fall the velvet that she picked up promptly enough, and draped the chair again, and looks at me out of big eyes, and says how lonely I must have felt all these years. Why a lump came into my throat then, for I've been a lifetime in this house, and 'twas the very first time I'd been asked what I felt about anything.”

Her head nodded, and her head came up. The clock's hand touched the hour. “I'd have liked very much to have slept round the clock myself.

“How did I spend my days? says she, and so I told her a day in my life, and how I was used to getting up at six o'clock in the morning from the day I was born, and how I made myself some coffee, and then went off on the rounds of this echoing house, and back again, and everywhere I let in the air that had to come, if I didn't want the place to fall down and the things to rot. And after that I had my breakfast with a clear mind, and the freshness of the day blowing in where it had to, and after that I went off to the village to do my bit of shopping. And there I laughed with the villagers about the Downeys, and I defended them also. There was always something to be doing in and out of the old church, and always something to be thought about that kept my mind busy and my fingers nimble, for I always liked to be working on the rock of faith. After my lunch, says I, I went away to my room, and always I was glad to be in it, for it's a fine thing to have a room of your own. 'Twas the close of a day I liked best of all, says I, for no matter what the weather, I enjoyed walking about the land here in the cool of an evening, and many's the time it seemed strange to me to be looking up into those great dark windows that was once so bright with the lights, and the silence was sad often enough.

“And I used to stand in under a window, and think of the shouting and laughing days, and the goings on, and the great comings and goings there was, and sometimes I'd even hear the cries of old Hennessey out in the stables there, and the high whistling of the boy Dolan that mastered anything on four legs by a touch of his wonderful hands. And the neighing of the horses was in my ears also, and the singing from the very top of the coach house where Dolan lay and hardly cared for sleep at all, so full of his days, so happy them times. Always I carried them things back into the house, and then set off again to close all the windows, and shut the big doors, and lock them, and turn the day into another night by the candle lighted in my hand, and always I took my supper away to my own room, for I never liked being alone too long in that barracks of a kitchen. Sometimes I would do me a bit of sewing, and lying in my good bed I'd do a bit of reading also. I never felt lonely, and I never felt lost with the company of saints around me, and after that my prayers that are changeless to me, and I tell my beads like the talk of friends. Lying comfortable there I was, night on night, and thinking of the day ending that was only like yesterday, and knowing how to-morrow would be the same colour to my eyes, that each morning I opened by the grace of God, and the people that was close to my life was farther and farther away from me, and no longer to be reached now, and no longer understood, and often I thought of the young girl that was you, ma'm, gone off like a piece of lightning that saddened your mother to her days' end.

“How very still she stood then, and the tip of the velvet clutched fast in her hand, and looking down at it, and looking at me, and saying with her voice that was always soft, ‘How good you've been, Winifred, how good you've been,' and it went to my heart, and it blinded me, seeing her there like that, and she walked slowly away and stood at the window, and I went after he and took her hand. For I could see something broken and a bit fallen about her, and I felt like I used to do when I saw them trees falling one after another in the depths of winter, that groaned no less than men, and I would think of the shame and the waste of it all. I couldn't help telling her about those lovely trees, and she said nothing, and was so still, and I felt I must go away to my own kitchen and sit down. And I wondered how one half of a nature could cast me out, and another half leap to what she'll call a kindness in me, which it isn't really, but only the sensible lived-to rule in the round of my common life. I was all for getting up then, and rushing back to her, and holding her like I used to do when she was a young girl, and holding her tight and letting her feelings topple, and letting her cry some strange misery out of her. And letting her talk also, and letting her walk so slowly back over the road she travelled with such tight-shut eyes, and letting her think about the husband she'd left behind her, and look to the man she's now sleeping with, and letting her decide once and for all by which she'll be nailed to the ground. God! I know. I've seen my tiger leap in a man's room, and I was all blindness and fire, and my common sense tossed into the very air about me. Poor Miss Downey.”

The head rose, and the head fell, and the heat of the fire stretched out like arms.

“Well indeed! I think I'd rather be off to the nuns in some old home, with my bit of cleaning and my bit of scrubbing, and in the evenings I'd be sewing there, and staring away at the cowled creatures that walked into and out of the world in the same moment. And I'd rather do that than go away to sit in a stone cottage, and stare my sister out. She's not waiting for me, and never was waiting for anybody in her known days, and never wanted anyone at all, so independent she was. Why I can remember my father once saying how always her nature would lie low to the ground, and it does to-day, and the cow that calves and the pig that farrows means more to her than any soul that ever stood up beside her. The hand of the man on her shoulder was only my father's hand. The roads of our life are given and not chosen, and the window in that old place will always be too small for me, and the stone too cold.”

Miss Fetch sat up with a jerk; she thought she had heard the sound of a foot on the stairs, the creak of a door, and she forced herself from the chair, and went out and looked about her. The silence is where it always lay, and the stairs reach to the same height, and nobody goes up, and nobody comes down. She stood at the foot and she called loudly that breakfast was waiting, and listened, and waited a moment, and then went back to her kitchen to stand by the waiting tray, and to look dejectedly at the stove and the breakfast that was fast spoiling. The clock showed five minutes past eleven o'clock, and now she thought they would never come down, and saw them in her mind's eye, locked and fast and drowned in each other's arms, and buried and warm under blankets, and the world and the day shut out. It was as she was stood there watching a kettle boil, that she heard the feet on the stairs, and across the hall, and the closing of a door. “They've come,” she thought, “somebody's come, and not before time, with half the day over.” She picked up the tray and went into the breakfast room. She saw only the man stood at the mantelpiece and holding his hands to the fire.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning,” Peter said, and swung round and stood there as she laid the table.

“Is Mrs. Fury coming down soon?” she asked.

“I think so,” Peter said, “I think so.”

“I should sit in at once if I were you,” Miss Fetch said, “this breakfast is almost ruined. And I knocked three times.”

Peter sat down.

“It's very late,” Miss Fetch said.