So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled
round, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in,
brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or
drawing-room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped,
wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already
furred, tarnished, cracked. What people had shed and left—a pair of
shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes—those
alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once
they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks
and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a
world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door
opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again.
Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its
sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing
in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment
darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a
soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.
So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of
loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted; solitary like a pool at
evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that
the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though
once seen. Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and
among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the
wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating,
and reiterating their questions—"Will you fade? Will you perish?"—
scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity,
as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer:
we remain.
Nothing it seemed could break that image, corrupt that innocence, or
disturb the swaying mantle of silence which, week after week, in the
empty room, wove into itself the falling cries of birds, ships hooting, the
drone and hum of the fields, a dog's bark, a man's shout, and folded
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them round the house in silence. Once only a board sprang on the landing;
once in the middle of the night with a roar, with a rupture, as after
centuries of quiescence, a rock rends itself from the mountain and
hurtles crashing into the valley, one fold of the shawl loosened and
swung to and fro. Then again peace descended; and the shadow
wavered; light bent to its own image in adoration on the bedroom wall;
and Mrs McNab, tearing the veil of silence with hands that had stood in
the wash-tub, grinding it with boots that had crunched the shingle, came
as directed to open all windows, and dust the bedrooms.
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