第4章

Then suddenly as the house had filled so suddenly it emptied.Maggie found that she was desperately tired.She went to bed and slept instantly.On waking next morning she was aware that it was a most beautiful winter's day and that there was something strange in the air.There came to her then very slowly a sense of her father.She saw him on the one side, persistently as she had found him in his room, strange, shapeless, with a crumpled face and a dirty beard that seemed to be more dead than the rest of him.On the other side she saw him as she had found him in the first days of her consciousness of the world.

He must have been "jolly" then, large and strong, laughing often, tossing her, she remembered, to the ceiling, his beard jet-black and his eyebrows bushy and overhanging.Once that vigour, afterwards this horror.She shook away from her last vision of him but it returned again and again, hanging about her over her shoulder like an ill-omened messenger.And all the life between seemed to be suddenly wiped away as a sponge wipes figures off a slate.After the death of her mother she had made the best of her circumstances.

There had been many days when life had been unpleasant, and in the last year, as his miserliness had grown upon him, his ill-temper at any fancied extravagance had been almost that of an insane man, but Maggie knew very little of the affairs of other men and it seemed to her that every one had some disadvantage with which to grapple.She did not pretend to care for her father, she was very lonely because the villagers hated him, but she had always made the best of everything because she had never had an intimate friend to tell her that that was a foolish thing to do.

It was indeed marvellous how isolated her life had been; she knew simply nothing about the world at all.

She could not pretend that she was sorry that her father had died;and yet she missed him because she knew very well that she was now no one's business, that she was utterly and absolutely alone in the universe.It might be said that she could not be utterly alone when she had her Uncle Mathew, but, although she was ignorant of life, she knew her Uncle Mathew...Nevertheless, he did something to remove the sharp alarm of her sudden isolation.Upon the day after her father's death he was at his very best, his kindest, and most gentle.He was rather pathetic, having drunk nothing out of respect to the occasion; he felt, somewhere deep down in him, a persistent exaltation that his brother Charles was dead, but he knew that it was not decent to allow this feeling to conquer him and he was truly anxious to protect and comfort his niece so well as he was able.

Early in the afternoon he suggested that they should go for a walk.

Everything necessary had been done.An answer to their telegram had been received from his sister Anne that she could not leave London until that night but would arrive at Clinton St.Mary station at half-past nine to-morrow morning.That would be in good time for the funeral, a ceremony that was to be conducted by the Rev.Tom Trefusis, the sporting vicar of Cator Hill, the neighbouring parish.

The house now was empty and silent.They must escape from that figure, now decent, clean, and solemn, lying upon the bed upstairs.

Mathew took his niece by the hand and said:

"My dear, a little fresh air is the thing for both of us.It will cheer you up."So they went out for a walk together.Maggie knew, with a deep and intimate experience, every lane and road within twenty miles' radius of St.Dreot's, There was the high-road that went through Gator Hill to Clinton and then to Polwint; here were the paths across the fields to Lucent, the lanes that led to the valley of the Lisp, all the paths like spiders' webs through Rothin Wood, from whose curve you could see Polchester, grey and white, with its red-brown roofs and the spires of the Cathedral thrusting like pointing fingers into the heaven.It was the Polchester View that she chose to-day, but as they started through the deep lanes down the St.Dreot's hill she was startled and disturbed by the strange aspect which everything wore to her.She had not as yet realised the great shock her father's death had been; she was exhausted, spiritually and physically, in spite of the deep sleep of the night before.The form and shape of the world was a little strained and fantastic, the colours uncertain, now vivid, now vanishing, the familiar trees, hedges, clouds, screens, as it were, concealing some scene that was being played behind them.But beyond and above all other sensations she was conscious of her liberty.She struggled against this; she should be conscious, before everything, of her father's loss.But she was not.It meant to her at present not so much the loss of a familiar figure as the sudden juggling, by an outside future, of all the regular incidents and scenes of her daily life, as at a pantomime one sees by a transformation of the scenery, the tables, the chairs, and pictures the walls dance to an unexpected jig.She was free, free, free--alone but free.What form her life would take she did not know, what troubles and sorrows in the future there might be she did not care--to-morrow her life would begin.

Although unsentimental she was tender-hearted and affectionate, but now, for many years, her life with her father had been a daily battle of ever-increasing anger and bitterness.It may be that once he had loved her; that had been in those days when she was not old enough to love him...since she had known him he had loved only money.She would have loved him had he allowed her, and because he did not she bore him no grudge.She had always regarded her life, sterile and unprofitable as it was, with humour until now when, like a discarded dress, it had slipped behind her.She did not see it, even now, with bitterness; there was no bitterness for anything in her character.

As they walked Uncle Mathew was considering her for the first time.