AFTER an excellent tea William and Melia went up the road to Dibley. It was two miles on and they took a path of classic beauty, fringed by a grove of elms in which the rooks were cawing, along a carpet of green bracken through which the lovely river wound. Dibley stood high, at the crest of a great clump of woodland, with the Sharrow silver-breasted below surging through a glorious valley.

It was getting on for twenty years since Bill had last handed Melia over the stile at the top of the glade, famous in song and story, and they had debouched arm in arm past the vicarage, along the bridle path, and had threaded their way through a nest of thatched cottages to the village green. The sun had now waned a little and the air had cooled on these shaded heights, the tea had been refreshing, and, for a few golden moments, inexpressibly sweet yet tragically fleeting, the courage of youth came back to them. Just beyond the parson’s gate the Corporal stopped suddenly, took Melia in his arms and kissed her.

It was a sloppy thing to do, unworthy of old married people, but the guilt of the act was upon them, though neither knew exactly why it should have come about. They crossed the paddock and went on through the romantic village, so sweetly familiar in its changelessness. It seemed but yesterday since they walked through it last.

“I’ve wondered sometimes,” whispered the Corporal at the edge of the green, “what made you marry me?”

“I believed in you, Bill; I always believed in you.” It was a great answer, yet somehow it was unexpected. In his heart he knew he was not worthy of it and that seemed to make it greater still.

Facing the duck pond, at the far end of the green, was the white cottage in which Torrington the artist had lived and died. It had changed a bit since his time. Things had been added by his more opulent successor. There were an iron gate, a considerable garden and a tall tower with a glass roof which nobly commanded the steep wooded slopes of the valley of the Sharrow.

With the new eyes a great painter had given him Bill saw at once that this was a rare pitch for an artist. It was one of the most beautiful spots in the land. The immense city of Blackhampton with its thousands of chimneys and its roaring factories might have been a hundred miles off instead of a bare four miles down the valley. There was not a glimpse or a sound of it here in this peace-haunted woodland, in this enchantment of stream and hill, bathed in a pomp of golden cloud and magic beauty.

The simple cottage had been modernized and amplified, but with rare tact and cunning, so that it was still “all of a piece,” much as Torrington had left. But the house itself was empty, with green shutters across the windows. On the gate was a padlock, the reason for which was given in a printed bill stuck on a board that had been raised beside it.

A list followed of the furniture and effects, but across the face of the bill was pasted a diagonal red-lettered slip,

The Corporal tried to open the gate but found the padlock unyielding, and then he gazed at the notice wistfully.

“Wonder who’s bought it,” he said.

Melia wondered too.

“Hope it’s an artist,” said the Corporal.

“So do I. But I expect it isn’t. Artists is scarce.”

“You’re right, there.” The Corporal sighed heavily. “Artists is scarce.” There was a strange look in his eyes and he turned them suddenly upon the duck pond so that Melia shouldn’t notice it.

Across the road, beside the duck pond, was a wooden bench, sacred to the village elders, none of whom, however, was in occupation at this moment. The Corporal pointed to it. “Let’s go an’ set there a minute,” he said in a husky voice. As if she had been a child he took her by the hand and led her to it.

They sat down and in a moment or two it was as if the spirit of the place had descended upon them. The magic hush of evening crept into their blood like a subtle wine. A strange soft rapture seemed to pervade the air. The Unseen spoke to them as never before.

The Corporal took off his hat and wiped the dew from his forehead. And then with a queer tightening of the throat and breast he scanned earth and sky. They seemed marvelous indeed. He felt them speak to him, to the infinite, submerged senses whose presence he had hardly suspected. Never had he experienced such awe as now in the presence of this peace that passed all understanding.

In a little while the silence of the Corporal began to trouble Melia. A cold hand crept into his. “What is it, love?” she said softly.

Not daring to look at her, he kept his eyes fixed on the sky.

“What is it, love—tell me?” He hardly knew the voice for hers; not until that moment had he heard her use it; but it had the power to ease just a little the intolerable pressure of his thoughts.

“I was wondering,” he said slowly, at last, “whether it would not have been better never to have been born.”

She shivered, not at his words, but at the gray look on his face.

“Stanning said the night before he went he thought that taking it altogether it would have been better if there had never been a human race at all. I’ll never forget that last talk with him, not if I live to be a hundred—which I shall not.” The Corporal had begun to think his thoughts aloud. “You see, he knew then that his number was up. I can see him settin’ there, Mother, just as you are now, lookin’ at that old sunset, his back to that old canal—the Yser, I think they call it—an’ stinkin’ it was, fair cruel. ‘Auntie,’ he said suddenlike, ‘tell me what brought you into this?’ I said, ‘No, boy’—just like a child he was as he set there—‘it’s for me to ask you that question. You’re a big gun, you know, a shining light; I’m a never-was-er.’ That seemed to make him laugh; he was one that could always raise a laugh, even when he felt most solemn. ‘I come of a long stock of high-nosed old Methodists,’ he said. ‘Always made a thing they call Conscience their watchword and fetish. There was a Stanning went to the stake for it in the time of Bloody Mary; there was another helped Oliver Cromwell to cut the head off King Charles. A poisonous, uncomfortable crowd, and all my life they’ve seemed to come back and worry me just at the times I should have been most pleased to do without them. People talk about free will—but there isn’t such a thing, my dear.’

“I allowed that there wasn’t in my case. Then I told him about Troop Sergeant Major Hollis, who fought at Waterloo. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yours is an old name in the city, older than mine, I dare say.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘according to Bazeley’s Annals there was a William Hollis who was mayor of the borough in the year of the Spanish Armada.’ ‘Good for you, Auntie,’ he said, chaffing-like; he was a rare one for chaff. ‘One up to you. Then,’ he said, ‘there was William Hollis who was “some” poet in the eighteenth century, who wrote the famous romantic poem, “The Love Lorn Lady of Corfield.” Still,’ he said, ‘these things don’t explain you dragging your old bones to rot out here.’ ‘They do in a way, though,’ I said. ‘When we come up against a big thing it isn’t us that really matters, it’s what’s at the back of us. I used to set in my old garden on The Rise,’ I said, ‘in those early days when those dirty dogs opposite was just beginning to wipe their feet on Europe. And I said to myself, Bill Hollis, how would you like it if they broke through the fence into your garden, trampling your young seeds and goose-stepping all over your roses and your tulips. And I tell you, Jim—we got to be very familiar those last few weeks—it used to make me fair mad to read in the Tribune what they’d done ... Louvain one time ... Termondy another ... et cetera.... And I kept on settin’ there day after day, in my old garden on the top o’ The Rise, saying to myself, Hollis, it’s no use, me lad, you’re going into this. You’ve failed in every bloody thing so far, and if you take on this you’ll not be man enough to stick it out. War isn’t thinking, it’s doing, and you’ve never been a doer, you’ve not. Then I read in the Tribune one morning that they’d got Antwerp and I said to myself, I can’t stand this no more. And I went right away to the Duke of Wellington and had a liquor up—but only a mild one, you know—and then round the corner to the Recruiting Office and gave my age as thirty-six and here I am admiring this bleeding sunset with the eye of an artist.’

“That made him laugh some more. ‘Well, Auntie,’ he said, ‘I’m very proud to have known you and I hope you’ll do me the honor of accepting this as a keepsake.’ He unbuttoned his greatcoat and took this old watch out of his tunic.”

The Corporal paused an instant in his story to follow the example of his friend. He produced an old-fashioned gold hunting watch, with J. T. in monogram at the back, and handed it to Melia.

“It’s a rare good one, Mother,” the Corporal’s voice was very low, “solid gold.” He opened the lid and showed her the inscription:

“Stanning said, ‘I had the luck to buy that in a pawnshop in Blackhampton long after he was dead, and if I had had a boy of my own I should like him to have kept it as an heirloom, but as I have not I want you to take it, Auntie, because I know you’ll appreciate it.’ Somehow, I could tell from the way he spoke that he was done. I hadn’t the heart to refuse it, although I hadn’t a boy or a girl of my own neither.” A huskiness in the Corporal’s throat made it hard to go on for a moment. “‘I’m only thirty-nine,’ he said, ‘and all the best is in me. I don’t fancy having my light put out like this in a wet bog, but it’s got to come, my dear. I hate to think that sometime to-morrow I shall be as if I had never been.’ ‘Not you,’ I said. ‘You’re sickening for the fever.‘ But I couldn’t move him. He’d got the hoo-doo. ‘No use talking about it,’ he said, ‘but you and I’ll never have that day’s fishing in Corfield Weir. I should like you to have seen my cottage up at Dibley. It’s got the ghost of that old boy.’ He put his hand on the watch, Mother, just like this. ‘If there is a heaven for dead painters, and I doubt it, I’d like to sit in John Torrington’s corner on his right hand. You see, I’ve learned all sorts of things, living in his house. I was getting to know the lights on the Sharrow and the feel of the clouds—in all the great Torringtons the clouds feel like velvet—and he was going to show me the way to handle sunlight—I’ve already been twice across to New York to see “An Afternoon in July in the Valley of the Sharrow,” the most wonderful thing of its kind in existence. You get the view from my cottage—his cottage—at Dibley. I should like you to have seen it, Auntie. And then I should like to have taken you across to New York to show you what old John made of it. Fancy having to go all the way to New York to look at it. So like us to be caught on the hop, in the things that really matter.’ I give you my word, Mother, he raised a laugh even then, but of a sudden his voice went all queer-like. ‘However,’ he said, ‘there’s a Mind in this that knows more than we do.’ Then the lad began to shiver just as if he had the ague. And the next day, about the same time, or mayhap the perishin’ old sun had gone a bit more west, I had to go out across No Man’s Land to bring him in ... what there was left of him.”

The Corporal ended his strange story as if after all it didn’t much matter. He was quite impersonal, but Melia sat beside him shivering at the look in his eyes. Never before had the veil been torn aside in this way. She was a dull soul, fettered heavily by her limitations, but sitting there in the growing dusk it came on her almost with horror that in all those long years it was the first peep she had had behind the scenes of his mind. She hadn’t realized the kind of man he was. More than once she had cast it in his face that he was an idle shack-about. Somehow, there had been nothing to give her the key to him; and now, miraculously as it seemed, it had come to her, it was too late.

She had the key to him now. But the sands were running out in fate’s hour glass. She couldn’t bear to look at his thin gray face as the light fell on it, nor at his strange eyes fixed on the padlocked gate of the cottage opposite. Of a sudden the watch slipped from her shaking hands, and fell lightly in a little brake of thistles by the end of the bench on which they sat.

Cautiously and carefully he picked it out. “Take care on it, Mother,” he said softly as he put it again in her hands. “I wish we’d a little boy as could have had it. However, we’ve not. There was once a George Hollis who was an artist; I showed you that picture of his, “The Glade above Corfield,” the other day; Jim said it was a good one. John Torrington one time was his pupil. Don’t suppose he was any relation but it’s the same name.”

Melia put the watch in the pretty leather bag he had insisted on buying for her. And then she said with a horrible clutch in her throat: “Bill, promise! You’ll come back ... won’t you?”

His eyes didn’t move.

“I’ll be that lonely.”

He sighed softly like a child who is very tired. “I’ll do what I can, Mother.” The voice was gentleness itself. “I can’t do more.”

She didn’t know ... she didn’t realize ... what ... she ... was....

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