V
They had their tea, Griselda with her boots off and her aching feet resting on a chair; and after she had lapped up two comfortable cups her irritation subsided and she was once again her pleasant and chattering little self. William, to give her a further rest, volunteered, though with some hesitation, to make the visit to the farm alone; in his mind, as in her own, Griselda was the French scholar of the pair, a reputation due to the fact that it was she to whom Madame Peys preferred, as a rule, to address her unintelligible remarks. Griselda knew what the offer cost him and generously declined to take advantage of it—stipulating only for a few minutes more repose before encasing her weary feet again in boots. The few minutes drew out into half-an-hour or more, and the shadows were lengthening in the valley when they started on their walk to the farm. They started arm-in-arm, the wife leaning on the husband; but when they came in sight of the house Griselda took her arm from William’s and they drew a little apart.
They need not have troubled to observe the minor proprieties; not a soul stirred, not a nose showed itself as they opened the little wooden gate of the garden and made for the open door. They were both of them unobservant of country sights and sounds, and it was not until they had knocked in vain on the open door and called in vain on the name of Madame Peys that they were struck by the absence of the usual noises of the farm. There was neither lowing of cows nor crowing and clucking of poultry; and the nondescript of a dog who usually heralded the approach of a visitor by strangling tugs at his chain and vociferous canine curses, for once had allowed their advent to pass unchallenged. They realized suddenly that there was a strange silence from the kennel and turned simultaneously to look at it.
“It’s odd,” said William. “I suppose they’ve all gone out, and taken the dog with them.”
“Where are the cocks and hens?” said Griselda suddenly. As if in answer to her query, a scraggy pullet at the awkward age appeared on the top of the farmyard gate, flapped groundwards and proceeded to investigate the neighbouring soil with a series of businesslike pecks. Their eyes turned towards the yard whence the pullet had emerged in search of her usual bevy of feathered companions; but the satisfied cluck of the bird as she sampled a seed remained unechoed and unanswered and brought no comrade to the spot. Obviously the family excursion was unlikely to be accompanied by a lengthy procession of poultry; and moved by a common impulse of wonder William and Griselda made for the gate and surveyed the farmyard beyond … The doors of byre and stable were standing wide, untenanted either by horse or by cow, and the two farm-carts had vanished. There was a small dark square in the corner of the yard marking the spot where yesterday an imprisoned mother had kept watch and ward over a baker’s dozen of attractive yellow downlings; now the dark square was the only trace of mother, chicks and cell.
“I wish,” said William, “that we could read what’s written on that paper. What can have happened to them all?”
“What’s happened to them is that they’ve gone,” Griselda returned with decision. “And gone for a good long time—people don’t take their cows and chickens and carthorses with them when they go for a weekend. I suppose they’re moving and taking another farm.”
“Ye‑es?” William agreed doubtfully. “But I shouldn’t have thought they’d have moved at such short notice—with all those animals. Of course, if they’re moving, they’ll come back for what they’ve left—those spades and the wheelbarrow and the furniture. There are a lot of things still in the kitchen … they may come to fetch them tonight.”
“They’re sure to,” his wife said hopefully. “Besides, Madame Peys would never leave us without milk or provisions for the morning—she’s much too considerate. I daresay the new farm isn’t far off, and she’ll either come herself or send Philippe. Then we must explain about the train tomorrow morning.”
William, still doubtful in spite of Griselda’s optimism, paused at the half-open door of the kitchen, pushed it more widely ajar and surveyed the interior in detail.
“They must have started in rather a hurry,” he commented.
The comment was justified by the disordered appearance of the room, suggesting a departure anything but leisurely and packing anything but methodical. There was an armchair upturned by the hearth where the ashes of the wood fire still glowed and reddened in places, but all the other chairs had vanished. The heavy table was still in the centre of the room, but a smaller one had gone, and several pans were missing from the row that shimmered on the wall opposite the fireplace. The canary’s cage and the clock on the mantelpiece had departed; and the china cupboard standing wide open was rifled of part of its contents—apparently a random selection. On the floor in one corner was a large chequered tablecloth knotted into a bundle and containing, judging by its bulges, a collection of domestic objects of every shape known to the housewife. It lay discarded at the foot of the stairs like a bursting and badly cooked pudding; its formidable size and unwieldy contour accounting in themselves for the household’s decision to abandon it … There was about the place—as in all dismantled or partially dismantled rooms—an indefinite suggestion of melancholy; William and Griselda were conscious of its influence as they stood in the centre of the kitchen which they had hitherto known only as a model of orderly arrangement.
“I wonder how long they will be,” Griselda said, as she and her husband came out into the dying sunlight. “It isn’t any good hanging about here; if nobody has turned up we can stroll down again after supper … I wonder if I could make an omelette—I’ve often watched her do it, and it doesn’t seem so very difficult. How lonely that chicken looks poking about by itself.”
Her eye followed the gawky pullet as it clucked and pecked in its loneliness about the vegetable garden—and suddenly her hand shot out and caught at her husband’s arm.
“William,” she said in a queer little whisper, “what’s that?”
“What?” William queried, half-startled by the clutch and the whisper.
“Don’t you see?—that heap … beyond the gooseberry bushes!”
He looked where she pointed, and she felt him thrill, as she herself had thrilled when her hand went out to his arm; neither spoke as they went towards the end of the garden, instinctively hushing their footsteps … The soft earth beyond the gooseberry bushes had been heaped into a long mound, and the solitary pullet was clucking and pecking at the side of a new-made grave.
They stood looking down at it in silence—dumb and uneasily fearful in the presence of a mystery beyond their powers of fathoming. The empty, untidy house behind them was suddenly a threat and a shadow; so was the loneliness and all-enclosing silence of the valley … The damp garden earth was still fresh and black from its turning; whoever lay under it could have lain but an hour or two; and, lest the unmistakable shape of the mound should fail to indicate what it covered, someone had laid on it a red spray torn from a rosebush and with a stick and a knot of string had fashioned a cross for the head. Two crossed hazel shoots and a handful of roses betokened that a spirit had returned to the God Who gave it.
As they stood at the graveside in the peace of the evening, the constant mutter of distant guns sent a low-spoken threat along the valley; but they were too much engrossed in their thoughts and surroundings to give it ear or heed, and it was the pullet who roused them from their stupor of dumb astonishment. Encouraged by their stillness, she drew near, surveyed the mound and with a flap of her clipped wings alighted under the cross. William instinctively bent forward to “shoo” her away, and as she fled protesting to a safer neighbourhood the husband and wife for the first time moved and spoke.
“What can have happened?” Griselda whispered. “Do you think—William, you don’t think there has been a murder?”
William shook his head, though not with excess of confidence. “There’s the cross,” he objected, “and the roses. A murderer would hardly put roses—”
“I don’t know,” Griselda whispered back. “You hear of criminals doing such strange things—and perhaps it was done hastily, in a quarrel, and the murderer repented at once. … For all we know that paper on our kitchen table may be a confession. … I wonder whose grave it is—if it’s one of the Peys. It’s so odd their all having gone—there must be something wrong. … You don’t suppose they’ve gone off to hide themselves?”
William reminded her of the absence of the farmyard stock—and she admitted that a family seeking to elude justice would hardly be so foolish as to attempt to conceal itself from the police in the company of seven cows, two carthorses and an entire colony of poultry. Nor, when untrodden woods lay around them, would they call attention to the crime by placing the grave of their victim in a prominent position in the garden; while it was difficult to think of the Peys family, as they had known them, as murderers and accomplices of murderers: the old lady so cheery and shrewd, her son and his wife so unintelligibly friendly, and Philippe so loutishly good-natured.
For a while a gruesome fascination held them to the side of the grave—and then Griselda quivered and said suddenly, “Let’s go home.” They walked away softly and closed the gate softly behind them; and, once they were well beyond it, instinctively quickened their footsteps. They walked arm-in-arm, speaking little, on their way back to the cottage, and it was not until they were almost on the threshold of their solitary homestead that it struck them that perhaps they would only be fulfilling their legal duty by informing the local authorities of the presence of the new-made grave. They discussed the idea, considered it, and after discussion rejected it: for one thing, there was the language difficulty, for another the natural shrinking of the foreigner from entangling himself in unknown processes of law—involving possible detention for the purpose of giving evidence. They decided that it would be better for the present to await events, and hope for the return of some member of the vanished family.
In after days, when after events had given him a clue, William framed his solution to the mystery of the grave and the empty farmhouse—a solution which perhaps was not correct as to detail but was certainly right in substance. Some fleeing Belgian, wounded to death, had found strength to outrun or outride the Uhlan, and seeking a refuge in the hidden valley had brought his news to the farmhouse, and died after giving it utterance. Those who heard it had buried him in haste, and straightway fled from the invader—fled clumsily, with horse and cart and cattle, leaving their scribbled, unreadable warning to the absent tenants of the cottage. Whether they fled far and successfully, or whether they were overtaken and in due course held fast behind the barrier of flesh and iron that shut off the German and his conquests from the rest of the civilized world—that William and Griselda never knew.
In the meantime, unfurnished with any clue, unknowing of the wild fury that in its scathing of the civilized world was shattering their most cherished illusions, they sought in vain for an explanation, and—without putting the fact into words—lit the lamp earlier than usual and took care to bolt the door. Usually it was fastened only on the latch, so that Madame could let herself in with the early morning; but tonight the darkness was unfriendly and the lonely valley held they knew not what of threatening.
Griselda, uneasily pondering on other matters, had no mind to give to the experiment of an omelette, and their supper was plain boiled eggs—boiled hard while she sat with wrinkled brow, unheeding of the flight of minutes. While they supped, their ears were always on the alert for a footstep or a hail from without; and perhaps for that reason they noticed as they had never noticed before the faint ghostly noises of the country—the night-calling bird and the shiver of leaves when the air stirred and sighed. They talked with effort and frequent pause, and with now and again a glance thrown sideways at the open window and the forest blackness behind it; there were no blinds to the windows, and but for the still, heavy heat they would have fastened the shutters and barred out the forest blackness. Perhaps they would have borne with the heat of a closed room had not both been ashamed to confess their fear of the window. In both their minds was the sense of being very far removed from humanity, the knowledge that between them and humanity was a lonely path and a house with its doors set open—a house deserted and half dismantled with a nameless grave before it. Unimaginative as they both were, they pictured the grave in the darkness with its roughly tied cross and its handful of wilting rosebuds.
They went upstairs earlier than usual, chiefly because they felt more comfortable when the windows below were fastened. William, coming last with the candle, took the added precaution of turning the key in the door at the foot of the stairs; and Griselda, though she made no remark, heard the click of the lock with a secret throb of relief. Upstairs they began by a little pretence of undressing—and then Griselda, with her hair down her back, sat close to William, with his coat off, and they held hands and talked in undertones in the intervals of listening for a footstep. The footstep never came; but it was not until close upon midnight that—knowing the early habits of the former tenants of the farm—they gave up all hope of hearing it and began to discuss their plans for the following day, on the presumption that they must leave the cottage and remove their luggage alone. Such unaided removal meant an earlier uprising than they had counted on—since if Madame did not prepare their breakfast they needs must prepare it themselves; and this misfortune realized, they decided to sit up no longer. They went to bed, but left the candle burning—as they said to each other, lest one of the Peys family should knock them up during the night. Neither slept much, partly from nervous uneasiness and partly from fear of oversleeping; but if they had guessed what a day would bring forth, neither would have slept at all.