The White Peacock (19 page)

Over the hill, the big flushed face of the moon poised just above the
treetops, very majestic, and far off—yet imminent. I turned with swift
sudden friendliness to the net of elm–boughs spread over my head, dotted
with soft clusters winsomely. I jumped up and pulled the cool soft tufts
against my face for company; and as I passed, still I reached upward for
the touch of this budded gentleness of the trees. The wood breathed
fragrantly, with a subtle sympathy. The firs softened their touch to me,
and the larches woke from the barren winter–sleep, and put out velvet
fingers to caress me as I passed. Only the clean, bare branches of the
ash stood emblem of the discipline of life. I looked down on the
blackness where trees filled the quarry and the valley bottoms, and it
seemed that the world, my own home–world, was strange again.

Some four or five days after Annable had talked to me in the churchyard,
I went out to find him again. It was Sunday morning. The larch–wood was
afloat with clear, lyric green, and some primroses scattered whitely on
the edge under the fringing boughs. It was a clear morning, as when the
latent life of the world begins to vibrate afresh in the air. The smoke
from the cottage rose blue against the trees, and thick yellow against
the sky. The fire, it seemed, was only just lighted, and the wood–smoke
poured out.

Sam appeared outside the house, and looked round. Then he climbed the
water–trough for a better survey. Evidently unsatisfied, paying slight
attention to me, he jumped down and went running across the hillside to
the wood. "He is going for his father," I said to myself, and I left the
path to follow him down hill across the waste meadow, crackling the
blanched stems of last year's thistles as I went, and stumbling in
rabbit holes. He reached the wall that ran along the quarry's edge, and
was over it in a twinkling.

When I came to the place, I was somewhat nonplussed, for sheer from the
stone fence, the quarry–side dropped for some twenty or thirty feet,
piled up with unmortared stones. I looked round—there was a plain dark
thread down the hillside, which marked a path to this spot, and the wall
was scored with the marks of heavy boots. Then I looked again down the
quarry–side, and I saw—how could I have failed to see?—stones
projecting to make an uneven staircase, such as is often seen in the
Derbyshire fences. I saw this ladder was well used, so I trusted myself
to it, and scrambled down, clinging to the face of the quarry wall. Once
down, I felt pleased with myself for having discovered and used the
unknown access, and I admired the care and ingenuity of the keeper, who
had fitted and wedged the long stones into the uncertain pile.

It was warm in the quarry: there the sunshine seemed to thicken and
sweeten; there the little mounds of overgrown waste were aglow with very
early dog–violets; there the sparks were coming out on the bits of
gorse, and among the stones the colt–foot plumes were already silvery.
Here was spring sitting just awake, unloosening her glittering hair, and
opening her purple eyes.

I went across the quarry, down to where the brook ran murmuring a tale
to the primroses and the budding trees. I was startled from my wandering
among the fresh things by a faint clatter of stones.

"What's that young rascal doing?" I said to myself, setting forth to
see. I came towards the other side of the quarry: on this, the moister
side, the bushes grew up against the wall, which was higher than on the
other side, though piled the same with old dry stones. As I drew near I
could hear the scrape and rattle of stones, and the vigorous grunting of
Sam as he laboured among them. He was hidden by a great bush of sallow
catkins, all yellow, and murmuring with bees, warm with spice. When he
came in view I laughed to see him lugging and grunting among the great
pile of stones that had fallen in a mass from the quarry–side; a pile of
stones and earth and crushed vegetation. There was a great bare gap in
the quarry wall. Somehow, the lad's labouring earnestness made me
anxious, and I hurried up.

He heard me, and glancing round, his face red with exertion, eyes big
with terror, he called, commanding me:

"Pull 'em off 'im—pull 'em off!" Suddenly my heart beating in my throat
nearly suffocated me. I saw the hand of the keeper lying among the
stones. I set to tearing away the stones, and we worked for some time
without a word. Then I seized the arm of the keeper and tried to drag
him out. But I could not.

"Pull it off 'im!" whined the lad, working in a frenzy.

When we got him out I saw at once he was dead, and I sat down trembling
with exertion. There was a great smashed wound on the side of the head.
Sam put his face against his father's and snuffed round him like a dog,
to feel the life in him. The child looked at me:

"He won't get up," he said, and his little voice was hoarse with fear
and anxiety.

I shook my head. Then the boy began to whimper. He tried to close the
lips which were drawn with pain and death, leaving the teeth bare; then
his fingers hovered round the eyes, which were wide open, glazed, and I
could see he was trembling to touch them into life.

"He's not asleep," he said, "because his eyes is open—look!"

I could not bear the child's questioning terror. I took him up to carry
him away, but he struggled and fought to be free.

"Ma'e 'im get up—ma'e 'im get up," he cried in a frenzy, and I had to
let the boy go.

He ran to the dead man, calling "Feyther! Feyther!" and pulling his
shoulder; then he sat down, fascinated by the sight of the wound; he put
out his finger to touch it, and shivered.

"Come away," said I.

"Is it that?" he asked, pointing to the wound. I covered the face with a
big silk handkerchief.

"Now," said I, "he'll go to sleep if you don't touch him—so sit still
while I go and fetch somebody. Will
you
run to the Hall?"

He shook his head. I knew he would not. So I told him again not to touch
his father, but to let him lie still till I came back. He watched me go,
but did not move from his seat on the stones beside the dead man, though
I know he was full of terror at being left alone.

I ran to the Hall—I dared not go to the Kennels. In a short time I was
back with the squire and three men. As I led the way, I saw the child
lifting a corner of the handkerchief to peep and see if the eyes were
closed in sleep. Then he heard us, and started violently. When we
removed the covering, and he saw the face unchanged in its horror, he
looked at me with a look I have never forgotten.

"A bad business—an awful business!" repeated the squire. "A bad
business. I said to him from the first that the stones might come down
when he was going up, and he said he had taken care to fix them. But you
can't be sure, you can't be certain. And he'd be about half way
up—ay—and the whole wall would come down on him. An awful business, it
is really; a terrible piece of work!"

They decided at the inquest that the death came by misadventure. But
there were vague rumours in the village that this was revenge which had
overtaken the keeper.

They decided to bury him in our churchyard at Greymede under the
beeches; the widow would have it so, and nothing might be denied her in
her state.

It was a magnificent morning in early spring when I watched among the
trees to see the procession come down the hillside. The upper air was
woven with the music of the larks, and my whole world thrilled with the
conception of summer. The young pale wind–flowers had arisen by the
wood–gale, and under the hazels, when perchance the hot sun pushed his
way, new little suns dawned, and blazed with real light. There was a
certain thrill and quickening everywhere, as a woman must feel when she
has conceived. A sallow tree in a favoured spot looked like a pale gold
cloud of summer dawn; nearer it had poised a golden, fairy busby on
every twig, and was voiced with a hum of bees, like any sacred golden
bush, uttering its gladness in the thrilling murmur of bees, and in warm
scent. Birds called and flashed on every hand; they made off exultant
with streaming strands of grass, or wisps of fleece, plunging into the
dark spaces of the wood, and out again into the blue.

A lad moved across the field from the farm below with a dog trotting
behind him,—a dog, no, a fussy, black–legged lamb trotting along on its
toes, with its tail swinging behind. They were going to the mothers on
the common, who moved like little grey clouds among the dark grose.

I cannot help forgetting, and sharing the spink's triumph, when he
flashes past with a fleece from a bramble bush. It will cover the bedded
moss, it will weave among the soft red cow–hair beautifully. It is a
prize, it is an ecstasy to have captured it at the right moment, and the
nest is nearly ready.

Ah, but the thrush is scornful, ringing out his voice from the hedge! He
sets his breast against the mud, and models it warm for the turquoise
eggs—blue, blue, bluest of eggs, which cluster so close and round
against the breast, which round up beneath the breast, nestling content.
You should see the bright ecstasy in the eyes of a nesting thrush,
because of the rounded caress of the eggs against her breast!

What a hurry the jenny wren makes—hoping I shall not see her dart into
the low bush. I have a delight in watching them against their shy little
wills. But they have all risen with a rush of wings, and are gone, the
birds. The air is brushed with agitation. There is no lark in the sky,
not one; the heaven is clear of wings or twinkling dot——.

Till the heralds come—till the heralds wave like shadows in the bright
air, crying, lamenting, fretting forever. Rising and falling and
circling round and round, the slow–waving peewits cry and complain, and
lift their broad wings in sorrow. They stoop suddenly to the ground, the
lapwings, then in another throb of anguish and protest, they swing up
again, offering a glistening white breast to the sunlight, to deny it in
black shadow, then a glisten of green, and all the time crying and
crying in despair.

The pheasants are frightened into cover, they run and dart through the
hedge. The cold cock must fly in his haste, spread himself on his
streaming plumes, and sail into the wood's security.

There is a cry in answer to the peewits, echoing louder and stronger the
lamentation of the lapwings, a wail which hushes the birds. The men come
over the brow of the hill, slowly, with the old squire walking tall and
straight in front; six bowed men bearing the coffin on their shoulders,
treading heavily and cautiously, under the great weight of the
glistening white coffin; six men following behind, ill at ease, waiting
their turn for the burden. You can see the red handkerchiefs knotted
round their throats, and their shirt–fronts blue and white between the
open waistcoats. The coffin is of new unpolished wood, gleaming and
glistening in the sunlight; the men who carry it remember all their
lives after the smell of new, warm elm–wood.

Again a loud cry from the hill–top. The woman has followed thus far, the
big, shapeless woman, and she cries with loud cries after the white
coffin as it descends the hill, and the children that cling to her
skirts weep aloud, and are not to be hushed by the other woman, who
bends over them, but does not form one of the group. How the crying
frightens the birds, and the rabbits; and the lambs away there run to
their mothers. But the peewits are not frightened, they add their notes
to the sorrow; they circle after the white, retreating coffin, they
circle round the woman; it is they who forever "keen" the sorrows of
this world. They are like priests in their robes, more black than white,
more grief than hope, driving endlessly round and round, turning,
lifting, falling and crying always in mournful desolation, repeating
their last syllables like the broken accents of despair.

The bearers have at last sunk between the high banks, and turned out of
sight. The big woman cannot see them, and yet she stands to look. She
must go home, there is nothing left.

They have rested the coffin on the gate posts, and the bearers are
wiping the sweat from their faces. They put their hands to their
shoulders on the place where the weight has pressed.

The other six are placing the pads on their shoulders, when a girl comes
up with a jug and a blue pot. The squire drinks first, and fills for the
rest. Meanwhile the girl stands back under the hedge, away from the
coffin which smells of new elm–wood. In imagination she pictures the man
shut up there in close darkness, while the sunlight flows all outside,
and she catches her breast with terror. She must turn and rustle among
the leaves of the violets for the flowers she does not see. Then,
trembling, she comes to herself, and plucks a few flowers and breathes
them hungrily into her soul, for comfort. The men put down the pots
beside her, with thanks, and the squire gives the word. The bearers lift
up the burden again, and the elm–boughs rattle along the hollow white
wood, and the pitiful red clusters of elm–flowers sweep along it as if
they whispered in sympathy—"We are so sorry, so sorry——"; always the
compassionate buds in their fulness of life bend down to comfort the
dark man shut up there. "Perhaps," the girl thinks, "he hears them, and
goes softly to sleep." She shakes the tears out of her eyes on to the
ground, and, taking up her pots, goes slowly down, over the brooks.

In a while, I too got up and went down to the mill, which lay red and
peaceful, with the blue smoke rising as winsomely and carelessly as
ever. On the other side of the valley I could see a pair of horses nod
slowly across the fallow. A man's voice called to them now and again
with a resonance that filled me with longing to follow my horses over
the fallow, in the still, lonely valley, full of sunshine and eternal
forgetfulness. The day had already forgotten. The water was blue and
white and dark–burnished with shadows; two swans sailed across the
reflected trees with perfect blithe grace. The gloom that had passed
across was gone. I watched the swan with his ruffled wings swell
onwards; I watched his slim consort go peeping into corners and under
bushes; I saw him steer clear of the bushes, to keep full in view,
turning his head to me imperiously, till I longed to pelt him with the
empty husks of last year's flowers, knap–weed and scabius. I was too
indolent, and I turned instead to the orchard.