At once she was surrounded by women, one of whom must have been her sister. Presently she was carried away.
From all sides came sympathetic murmurs concerning the heat.
To my sorrow, Mrs King did not return to enjoy the over-bountiful tea. My aunt made enquiries of her sister, who said that Daffodil was been obliged to be sent home in the pony cart. ‘It is a great nuisance, as she intended returning to St Leonards tomorrow, and now she won’t be well enough.’
‘Is her indisposition more serious than we had hoped?’ asked my aunt.
‘Oh,’ said the sister, blinking at me with eyes not half so fine as her sibling’s, ‘she makes a fuss about it. She has these delicate ways from her younger years. I may say, she’d never have dared go on so then. They would have dismissed her.’
‘I thought,’ said I sternly, ‘that she seemed most unwell.’
‘No, it isn’t that she’s ill,’ declared the vulgar sister, whose hat might have been a lesson to us all in the virtues of regret. ‘She says it’s something that she saw in Austria, once.’ My aunt and I evidenced incomprehension. The sister said, ‘I can say nothing of it. She refuses to explain. She says it’s too dreadful, and it’s taken her these six years to put it from her, and now she’s been reminded and will need to stay in bed, with me expected to be flapping round her all day long, and neglecting my duties and Pa.’
We extricated ourselves from the uninspiring Miss Sempson and soon after left the tea party. As we were going out I remember that Aunt Alice said to me, ‘There is disappointing Mr Polleto. I understand he contributed generously to the bell fund, which I find curious, since he’s far from affluent, and never attends the church. Nor is he sociable. Did you happen to notice him this afternoon?’
I said that he might easily go unnoticed, but that I had not, I thought, seen him. Nor had I.
The day before my departure from Steepleford, I had planned a walk through the woods. Whether or not I would approach the stretch of the Lane that ran by Josebaar Hawkins’s house I was myself unsure. In any event, a sudden thunderstorm erupted. Its violence and tenacity were such that I gave over any idea of walking, and spent all that last day with my aunt. The following morning we parted most affectionately, and I returned to London. A month later I went abroad and spent the rest of the year in Rome, in which ancient, imperial and legend-haunted city it may be supposed Steepleford and all its tales sank in my memory to a depth of fathoms.
Just after the New Year, I spent a day or so again at Steepleford. This time, there was snow down, but a flawless snow, thick and solid to tread upon, the weather chill and fine. Had I truly forgotten the house in Salter’s Lane? I think that I had in everything but my heart. I took my way across the white fields, admiring the shapes of everything, each changed by its cover of pale fleece, then strayed off into the ancient woods, which were like a cathedral of purest ice.
And then somehow, in the way these things turn out, I took at random another of the silent avenues, and found myself ten minutes later at one of the several openings into the Lane. I had been walking by then for more than two hours, and it seemed foolish not to follow this path back to the town.
Soon I reckoned I had been wise to do so. The low afternoon sun was clouding over and a mauve cast hid the sky. So I strode briskly, thinking of a warm fire ahead and other cheer, and came level with the high wall of Josebaar Hawkins’s ill-starred house.
At first I think I did not recognize it, for like everything else it was plastered with white. But then I got a great shock, and stopped dead in my tracks.
‘What has happened here?’ I asked, perhaps aloud. Until that time, the trees of the old estate had made a second wall behind the first, and the pile of the building had been visible only in portions, as I have previously described. Now, looking beyond one huge holly tree, I gained abruptly a view of the entire upper front aspect — all of it, its timber, stone and brickwork, the roof and chimneys, and every cold window, glaring as if it were eye to eye with me, like some person who has suddenly whipped from their face a mask.
Astonished, I attempted to reason how this should be. It was not that the trees were bare. No, it was that every tree, saving the holly, which in any case stood this side of the wall, had been brought down.
I confess that meeting the house like this, head-on, unnerved me. I made no secret of that to myself. But in a moment or so, I had a rational thought. Some vandals had been at work in the ‘grounds’. They had chopped down the trees and carted them away, no doubt to provide firewood for needy winter hearths.
On the strength of this rationale, an unusual, perhaps a boy’s desire took me, having seen so much, to scale the wall and peer over into the precincts of the house, now open to be studied. I have to say too that my peculiar eagerness to do this was prompted, I now think, more by an aversion to doing it, rather than a longing after secrets. It was like a dare one must not evade, for fear of being thought — worst of all by oneself — a coward.
I am quite strong and fit. The wall had inconsistencies and irregular stones in plenty. Despite the snow, I got up it in less than three minutes, and, perched there on the top, stared down into the gardens.
They were the most desolate sight. Patches of snow lay all about, but the ground had turned dark, and in places black, the snowfall having partly melted away as it already had on some of the higher trees in the woods. There was a good reason for this. Any sun that fell here must fall directly over everything since nothing now stood between it and the ground, only the house. Every tree and shrub that had grown, rampantly and untended, within the walls had been felled and, presumably, taken away. And I wondered who could have made so bold after all these hundred and more years.
Then something else caught my eye. There was, toward the side of the house, a sort of ornamental little building, perhaps a folly. It was ruinous and falling down, and its demise seemed to have been hastened by a young oak tree, which had toppled aslant upon its roof, and leaned there yet.
So why then, I wondered, had the wood-stealing vandals not carted off also this ready-felled tree? There it lay, as useful as any other timber, bare and exposed, its dislocated branches creaking in some unfelt wind, clear as complaining voices in the stillness.
There were no birds, of course. There was, as before, no sound — beyond, this time, the creaking of the fallen tree’s branches. But this effect had been common through much of the woods, as the day advanced and the winter sun prepared to leave the earth. Until this point I had not noted it particularly.
Now I did. For here the absence of all sound, save that sinister creaking whine of broken branches, seemed heavy with presage. The air smelled sour, and faintly dirty, like one might expect in the centre of an industrial town, where smoke and cinders fall and make each breath lifeless, and potent with disease.
And then, even as I sat there gazing at it, the unlikeliest thing occurred. The leaning dead oak tree swayed, and out of it there burst a shower of dry pieces, splinters of wood ejected, and then one whole limb snapped off and dropped, disintegrating even as it went, so that by the instant it touched the ground, there was no more left of it than dust. What had caused such a thing? The action of some animal? No animal was in the vicinity, so much was plain. The simple process of a slow decay, then, electing to finish its work coincidentally with my scrutiny? I had the strangest notion that, simply by staring at the tree, I had hastened the branch’s breaking off and dissolution.