I  
Nan returned frequently along the road on the top of the dyke, on the red and gray February evenings, when the stillness was absolute; on either side of the dyke the floods lay, placid and flat as mirrors, over broad miles of country, reflecting the crimson sun up a path of roughened and reddened splendour. The water-filled ruts along the road glowed with the same light; long narrow lines of fire. How dismal that flooded land would have been without that light; gray, only gray, without the red! All the most dismal elements were present: a few isolated and half-submerged trees stuck up here and there out of the water, and at intervals the upper half of a gate and gate-posts protruded, the entrance to some now invisible field; useless, ridiculous, and woebegone. But that red light, cold and fiery, scored its bar of blood across the gray lagoons.
90The village lay in front of her, at the end of the road, and behind the village rose the three high chimneys of the factory, black amongst the gray waters, the gray sky, threatening and desolate in the midst of desolation. The three black plumes of smoke drifted upwards, converged into a large leisurely volume, and dispersed; already in the dusk the red glow at their base was becoming visible, and a single star appeared high above them, as though a spark that had floated out from the heart of the factory now hung suspended in supercilious vigil. The abbey on the farther side lay heaped in a mass as dark as the mass of the factory. Nan would shift to the other hand the basket she was carrying home from the market-town of Spalding; walking along the elevation of the dyke, she made a tiny, upright figure in the great circle of the flat country, for here the disc of the horizon was as apparent as it is at sea. The group of village, factory, and church, emerged like an island loaded with strange and sombre piles of architecture, adrift from all other encampments of men. Abbot’s Etchery lay before her, against that formidable foundry of the heavens, that swarthy splendour of smoke and sunset, and as she continued to advance she thought 91that she re-entered an angry prison, too barbarous, too inimical, for her to dwell beneath it, and live.
II
 
The calm, cold weather broke late in February; a gale swept for two nights and a day across the country, beating up the waters into little jostling peaks and breaking from the forlorn trees branches that were jerked hither and thither upon the waves, now coming to rest upon a tussock of higher ground, now taken again by the shallow storm of the floods, or tossed to lie against the bulwark of the dykes. The smoke from the factory chimneys was snatched by the wind, and swirled wildly away in coils and streamers, black smoke mingled with the dark masses of cloud that drove across the disordered sky. Gulls from the Wash flew inland,—the gulls, that more than any other bird attune themselves to the season, in summer gleaming white, lovely and marbled, on the wing, but in times of tempest matching the clouds, iron-gray, the most desolate of birds.
It became unsafe for carts to travel along the road on the top of the dyke, since one farm-cart, swaying already under an excessive load of fodder, 92was caught by a gust of wind and overturned. After one moment of perilous balance, it crashed down the embankment, dragging after it the two frenzied horses, falling in a welter of broken limbs, tangled harness, and splintered woodwork, while the trusses of hay broke from their lashings and scattered into the borders of the flood.
The storm of wind and water raged round this disaster, and folk from the village collected on the top of the dyke to gape down at the carter busy amongst the wreckage, and surreptitiously at Malleson, the owner, who stood alone, more in sorrow for his valiant horses than in regret over his material loss. There was no hope of saving the horses,—they were shire horses, stately and monumental,—by the time the crowd had assembled their tragic struggle had already ceased. The carter was sullenly bending down, unbuckling the harness; he would speak to no one. On the top of the dyke the gale buffeted the little crowd, so that the men (their hands buried in their pockets, their overcoats blown against their legs as they stood with their backs to the winds, and their mufflers streaming) stamped their feet to keep themselves warm, and the women with pinched faces drew their black shawls more 93closely round their heads and whispered dolefully together.
III
 
The accident greatly excited Silas Dene; it occurred on a Saturday afternoon, and Nan, who was sewing in her own kitchen, heard upon the wall the three thumps that were Silas’s usual summons. She found him with Linnet Morgan, Hambley, and Donnithorne, one of his mates, who had stopped on his way down the street to bring the news.
Silas wanted Nan to go to the scene of the accident and to bring him back a first-hand report. She cried out in dismay, appealing with her eyes to both Morgan and Donnithorne. Hambley she ignored; his very presence made her shudder, and she knew he would side with Silas.
“But, Silas, I wouldn’t for the world! Those poor horses—what are you asking me to do? to go and gloat over them?”
“Sentiment!” said Silas, who was angry. “Linnet says the same. God, if I had eyes to use.... There’s violence and destruction half a mile down the road, and you won’t go to see it. It maddens me, the way you folk neglect the gifts and the opportunities 94God offers you. Sentimentalists! A fine rough smash-up ... the wind’s a poet. A poet, I say, wasting food and life for the mischief of it. The food of beasts, and the life of beasts; wasted! There’s twenty trusses of hay in the floods, so Donnithorne here tells me,—twenty trusses spoilt for dainty-feeding cows,—and two fine horses smashed, and a big wagon. They’re lying heaped at the bottom of the dyke. There’s blood spilt, as red as the heat of the sun. No man would dare to bring all that about for the sake of the mischief; but the wind’s a poet, I say—I like the wind—he tears up in a minute trees that have persevered inch by inch for a thousand years, and sends to the bottom ships full of a merchant’s careful cargo. Well, you won’t go down the road and tell a blind man about the smash?”
“Guts spilt, Mrs. Dene!” said Hambley, rubbing his hands together and provoking her. She turned away from him with repulsion.
“Ye’re morbid, Silas,” said Donnithorne in disgust, his hand on the latch. He was a red-headed, red-bearded man, with pale but lascivious blue eyes that once had leered at Hannah, Silas’s wife.
“Morbid, am I? no, it’s you squeamish ones that 95are morbid, and I that have the stout fancy. If Heaven had given me eyes! I wouldn’t be such a one as you. I’d sooner be a fool playing with a bit of string, and crooning mumble-jumble, or taking off my hat to a scarecrow in the dusk.”
With that he bundled them all out, and slammed the door.
IV
 
Linnet Morgan followed Nan back into her own kitchen.
“Oh, Mr. Morgan, is Silas mad?” she said, turning to him at once.
“I sometimes don’t know what to make of him.”
“Would he go to look at the accident, do you think, if he could see?”
“Not he!” said Morgan, “not he! But he’s safe to say so. He turned pale when Donnithorne told him about it, but next minute he was pretending to be all eager, like you heard him.”
They remained standing, occupied with their own thoughts. Gregory glanced up from his drawings as they came in, but otherwise took no notice of them. Morgan sat down before the range, and began prodding a piece of firewood between the small open bars.
96“I lose my bearings, living with Silas,” he said presently; “amongst all his manias, he’s got this mania for destruction. Perhaps the long and short of it is, that he likes talking loud about big noisy things, when he’s certain they won’t come near him to hurt him. Being blind keeps him safe.... Mrs. Dene, come for a turn with me. You look right white and scared. Come out, and let the wind blow away bad thoughts?”
“I’ll ask Gregory to come with us.” She went over to her husband, touched him on the arm to attract his attention, and spoke to him on her fingers. “He says he’s busy with his drawings, but will we go without him.”
V
 
They took the road that led in the opposite direction from the accident, and uncharitable eyes watched them go past the windows of the houses in the village. But they walked all unconscious, feeling relieved and with a gay sense of holiday, almost a sense of truancy; and when the wind caught them as they left the shelter of the village, and forced them to a breathless standstill, they laughed, and struggled on again, exhilarated by their fight against so clean and natural a foe. They were soon in the 97open country, having left the village behind; they breasted the wind, and breathed it deeply, tasting, or fancying that they tasted, upon their lips the salt of the flying spray. The road which they followed lost the monotony of its straightness when they conquered it yard by yard, and remembered that, did they but follow it far enough, it would lead them eventually to the sea.
There was indeed a regal splendour about the day, about the embattled sky and driven clouds. The northern forces had been recklessly unleashed. The sea would be beaten into a tumult full of angry majesty. How wild a day, how arrogant a storm!
VI
 
Coming back, the wind almost forced them into a run, and they yielded, racing along the road, impelled as by a strong hand. They could not speak to one another in the midst of the turmoil, but they smiled from time to time in happy understanding. As they neared the village Nan checked herself, and, leaning breathless against one of the telegraph-posts that bordered the road, tried to re-order her hair, but the wind took her shawl and blew it streaming from her hand, also the strands of her hair in little 98wild fluttering pennons. Nevertheless, she was in such high good humour that she only laughed at what might have been an annoyance, turning herself this way and that to gain the best advantage over the wind. Morgan stood by, laughing himself, and watching her. She wore a dark red shirt, and the wind had blown two patches on to her cheeks, which were usually so pale they looked fragile and transparent. They continued more soberly towards the village, still without speaking, even when they reached the shelter of the street, because it seemed unnecessary.
They saw Silas standing on his own doorstep, hatless, in a strange attitude, holding his hands stretched out before him, the fingers wide apart. Nan ran up and caught one of his hands; Morgan was surprised, for she never treated Silas with levity. She seemed to have shaken off the years of repression, to have forgotten totally the conscientious lesson.
“What are you doing standing there, Silas?” She was very gay.
“Letting the wind whistle in my fingers. Hark! Bend down your head.”
“I can’t hear it, Silas.”
99“No, you’ve coarse ears; eyes! eyes! yes! but coarse ears. Where have you been?”
“Along the dyke....”
“Seen the accident?”
“Hush, Silas; you shan’t dwell on that.” Morgan had never seen her so brave, so radiant, with the blind man. She took his arm now, leading him back into his cottage. “Sit down by the fire, Silas; it’s warm and sheltered in here. The kettle’s singing.”
“I’d sooner stay in the wind,” he said, striving against the light pressure of her hands on his shoulders as she held him down.
“The wind’s too rough; I’ve had enough of it.”
“Then let me stay on the doorstep alone. You stop in the shelter with Linnet.”
“No, Silas, we’ll all three stop in here together. I’ll sing to you a bit, shall I?” Morgan observed her firmness with a surprised admiration.
She got her zither from the cupboard where she kept it, laid it on the table, and tried the chords with a little tortoiseshell clip that she slipped over her thumb. The thin notes quivered through the bluster of the wind and the harshness of Silas’s voice. She bent intently over her tuning, trying the 100notes with her voice, adjusting the wires with the key she held between her fingers.
“Now!” she said, looking up and smiling.
She sang her little sentimental songs, “Annie Laurie,” and “My boy Jo,” her voice as clear and natural as the accompaniment was painstaking. She struck the wires bravely with her tortoiseshell clip. Morgan applauded.
“It’s grand, Mrs. Dene.”
“Why do you choose to-day for your zither?” Silas asked in his most rasping tone.
“It’s Sunday, Silas,—a home day.”
“But you’re not home; you’re in my cottage; your home is with Gregory, next door. You’re here with me and Linnet.”
“Gregory can’t hear me sing,” she said pitifully.
“Then why don’t you dance? he could see you dance.”
“I asked him to come for a walk,” she said, her brightness dimmed by tears.
“And he wouldn’t go? with you and Linnet?”
“No, he was drawing.”
“Ah?” said Silas. “But Linnet went with you? Linnet wasn’t busy?”
“What’ll I sing that pleases you?” she said, 101maintaining her endeavour; “‘Loch Lomond?’ You used to like ‘Loch Lomond.’”
“Ask Linnet; he’s Scotch; no doubt that’s what put a Scotch song into your mind.”
“Silas!” she said in despair, dropping her hands on to her zither, which gave forth a jangle of sounds.
“If you want home, as you say, stop here with Linnet; I’ll lend you my cottage,” said Silas, rising and groping for his cap. “Play at home for a bit. Draw the curtains, light the lamp, make tea for yourselves, put the kettle back to sing on the hob, and you, Nan, sing to your zither to your heart’s content. It’s a pleasant, warm room, for pleasant, warm people. Home of a Sunday, with the wind shut out! Oh yes, I’ll lend you my cottage. Gregory’s lost in his drawings till supper-time. Stay here and talk and smoke and sing, while the room grows warmer, and you forget the wind and the two dead horses and spoilt fodder lying down the road. Spend your evenings in forgetfulness. Ask no questions of sorrow. Kill darkness with your little candle of content.”
“You’re crazy; where are you going?” cried Morgan.
102“Only to the Abbey,—not into the floods,” Silas replied with a laugh.
“To the Abbey? alone?”
“One of my haunts, you know.”
VII
 
Silas found his way along the village street by following the outer edge of the pavement with his stick; as he went he snorted and muttered. “I’ll have nothing to do with Nan’s kindness,” he said to himself several times. “She’s easily satisfied; she’s comfortable; she’s grateful. She shuts the eyes that she might see with.” This thought made him very angry, and he strode recklessly along, knocking against the few folk that were abroad on that inclement evening. One or two of them stopped him with a “Why, Dene! give you a hand on your way anywhere?” but he rejected them, as he was determined to reject all comfort and patience that Nan might offer him. He liked the wind, that opposed him and made his progress difficult; he struck out against it, the struggle deluding him into a reassuring illusion of his own courage. He welcomed the wind for the sake of that tortuous flattery....
103He would have made his way to Lady Malleson, but he was afraid to venture under the trees in the park, where a bough might be blown down upon him.
VIII
 
At the end of a side-street the Norman abbey rose, black and humped and semi-ruined, the huge dark clouds of the evening sky sailing swiftly past the ogive of its broken arches. The village had retreated from the abbey, because the abbey’s furthermost walls were lapped by the floods, so that it remained, the outer bulwark of man’s encampment upon the inviolate mound in the midst of the inundations; it remained like some great dark derelict vessel, half beached upon dry land, half straining still towards the waters. The street which led to it was a survival of the ancient town, gabled and narrow, with cobbled ground; Silas tapped his way over the cobbles. He could not see the enormous mass of tower and buttress and great doorway, that blocked the end of the street before him, but he heard the scattered peal of bells, and the deep gloom of the abbey lost nothing in passing through the enchantment of his blind fancy. He entered, and 104was swallowed up in shadows. The roof was lost in a sombre and indistinguishable vault. The aisles became dim colonnades, stretching away into uncertain distance. The pillars with their bulk and gravity of naked stone dwarfed the worshippers that rustled around their base. The organ rumbled in the transept. Silas moved among the aisles, handing himself on from pillar to pillar; he imagined that he moved in a forest, touching his way from tree-trunk to tree-trunk; he conceived the abbey as illimitable, and relished it the more because ruin had impaired the intention of the architecture.
The organ from its rumbling broke out into its full volume, a giant treading in wrath through the forest, a storm rolling among the echoes of the hills. Night came, and the clouds moved invisibly past overhead, over the abbey and the floods. Nothing but the dark flats of water lay between the abbey and the sea; its bells gave their music to the wind, and the great voice of its organ was more than a man-made thing. The black shape of the abbey on the edge of the desolate floods bulked like a natural growth rooted in old centuries, harmonious and consonant with nature. To the vision of Silas Dene, on which no human limitations were imposed, and 105whose mind was fed on sound and thought alone, the abbey was not less vast than night itself, only a night within the night, an abode of ordered sound within the gale of sound. In his fancy he was not clear as to whether it were roofed over, or lay open to the sky; he could vary his decision according to the vagary of the moment, alternately picturing the rafters high above his head, or the scudding moonlit heavens of ragged black and silver. He put his hands upon the pillars with no thought of man’s construction; they seemed monolithic. He caressed them, moving between them, leaning against them, and listening to the organ. He was in a large, dim, mysterious place, that had a kindred with the floods and with the storm. He knew that all around him were shadows which, while making no difference to the perpetual shadow he himself lived in, obscured and hampered the free coming and going of other men. Darkness was to him a confederate and an affinity; he would smile when people spoke of nightfall or of an impenetrable fog. He searched now with his hand until it touched the shoulder of a kneeling woman.
“Are there any lights in the church?” he whispered.
106“Why, surely!” she said, startled, “candles upon the altar.”
He was displeased; he moved behind a column where he knew the shadows would be deeper. The organ had ceased, and he heard prayers. He shook with inward mockery, confident that the abbey, which he had endowed with a personality and had adopted into his own alliance, would reject the prayers as contemptuously as he himself rejected them. It would await the renewed majesty of the organ.... To Silas the organ represented no hymn of praise; it represented only the accompaniment of storm; he was not even troubled, because he did not notice them, by the infantile words which the congregation fitted to its chords. It had never occurred to him to think of the abbey as a holy temple until he came by chance upon a thing to which his imagination made a kindled and ravenous response.
For once he had not made for himself the discovery of this new theme in the course of his reading. He owed it, a resented debt, to the conversation of his mates in the shops. Silas, listening, had felt his ever-ready contempt surging within him; it angered him to learn from illiterate men of a subject that he alone amongst them was fitted to understand. 107They skirted round it; but he grasped it avidly, adopting it, as though a niche in his mind had been always waiting for it. He took it with him to the abbey, like a man carrying something secret and deadly under his cloak. Black Mass....
He scarcely knew what it meant. He took it principally as a symbol of distortion and mockery. It seemed to be one of the phrases and summings up he had always been searching for, he who liked to condense a large vague district of imaginings into a final phrase.
When he remembered Black Mass in the ordinary way, he smiled in satisfaction, and stowed it away as a secret; but when he thought of it in the abbey he hunched himself as though he were in the throes of some physical pleasure. In bringing that thought with him into the abbey he was taunting a tremendous God, a revengeful God; and he exalted fearfully in the latent implication of his own daring. Surely courage could go no further than the defiance of God! His ready ecstasy swept him away. The world he lived in was a reversed world, where darkness held the place of light; in the world of his soul a similar order should prevail. Taut-strung, he cast around for some piece of blasphemy, some monstrous 108thing that he could do,—he did not know what. He only knew that now he was brave, though it might be with the courage of hysteria; presently he would be again afraid. He dreaded the return of his cowardice. He had not been a coward the day he had killed Hannah; only afterwards; he must not dwell upon the afterwards.
He had no weapon with him in the church except his voice, and a penknife in his pocket.
He must achieve something; something! anything!
In the midst of his excitement he took it into his head that a piece of the ruined masonry, detached by the wind, might fall in upon him and crush him. Still chattering under his breath to himself, his hands nervously working, he moved closer to the shelter of the pillar. Here he felt more secure, but still the gusts of storm sent waves of physical anxiety through him. He was torn between that small anxiety and the illimitable defiance.
The organ swelled out again, lifting him upon its great rhythm as a wave lifts a swimmer.