When he awoke he knew at once that he was not alone in the little forgotten house. A tramp perhaps, a trespasser almost certainly. He had not had time to move under this thought before the other overpowered it. It was he who was the tramp, the trespasser. The other might be the local police. Have you ever tried to explain anything to the police in a rural district? It would be better to lie quietly, holding one’s breath, and so, perhaps, escape an interview that could not be to his advantage, and might, in view of the end he pursued, be absolutely the deuce-and-all.
So he lay quietly, listening. To almost nothing. The other person, whoever it was, moved hardly at all; or perhaps the movements were drowned in the mutter of the thunder and the lashing of the rain, for Sellinge had not slept out the storm. But its violence had lessened while he slept, and presently the great thunders died away in slow sulky mutterings, and the fierce rain settled to a steady patter on the thatch and a slow drip, drip from the holes in the roof to the rotting boards below. And the dusk was falling; shadows were setting up their tents in the corners of the stairs and of the attic whose floor was on a level with his eyes. And below, through the patter of the rain, he could hear soft movements. How soft, his strained ears hardly knew till the abrupt contrast of a step on the earth without reminded him of the values of the ordinary noises that human beings make when they move.
The step on the hearth outside was heavy and plashy in the wet mould; the touch on the broken door was harsh, and harshly the creaking one hinge responded. The footsteps on the boarded floor of the lower room were loud and echoing. Those other sounds had been as the half-heard murmur of summer woods in the ears of one half asleep. This was definite, undeniable as the sound of London traffic.
Suddenly all sounds ceased for a moment, and in that moment Sellinge found time to wish that he had never found this shelter. The wildest, wettest, stormiest weather out under the sky seemed better than this little darkening house which he shared with these two others. For there were two. He knew it even before the man began to speak. But he had not known till then that the other, the softly moving first-comer, was a woman, and when he knew it, he felt, in a thrill of impotent resentment, the shame of his situation and the impossibility of escaping from it. He was an eaves-dropper. He had not, somehow, thought of eavesdropping as incidental to the detective career. And there was nothing he could do to make things better which would not, inevitably, make them worse. To declare himself now would be to multiply a thousandfold everything which he desired to minimise. Because the first words that came to him from the two below were love-words, low, passionate, and tender, in the voice of a man. He could not hear the answer of the woman, but there are ways of answering which cannot be overheard.
‘Stay just as you are,’ he heard the man’s voice again, ‘and let me stay here at your feet and worship you.’
And again: ‘Oh, my love, my love, even to see you like this! It’s all so different from what we used to think it would be; but it’s heaven compared with everything else in the world.’
Sellinge supposed that the woman answered, though he caught no words, for the man went on:
‘Yes, I know it’s hard for you to come, and you come so seldom. And even when you’re not here, I know you understand. But life’s very long and cold, dear. They talk about death being cold. It’s life that’s the cold thing, Anna.’
Then the voice sank to a murmur, cherishing, caressing, hardly articulate, and the shadows deepened, deepened inside the house. But outside it grew lighter because the moon had risen and the clouds and the rain had swept away, and sunset and moonrise were mingling in the clear sky.
‘Not yet; you will not send me away yet?’ he heard. ‘Oh, my love, such a little time, and all the rest of life without you! Ah! let me stay beside you a little while!’
The passion and the longing of the voice thrilled the listener to an answering passion of pity. He himself had read of love, thought of it, dreamed of it; but he had never heard it speak; he had not known that its voice could be like this.
A faint whispering sound came to him; the woman’s answer, he thought, but so low was it that it was lost even as it reached him in the whisper of a wet ivy-branch at the window. He raised himself gently and crept on hands and knees to the window of the upper room. His movements made no sound that could have been heard below. He felt happier there, looking out on the clear, cold, wedded lights, and also he was as far as he could be, in the limits of that house, from those two poor lovers.
Yet still he heard the last words of the man, vibrant with the agony of a death-parting.
‘Yes, yes, I will go.’ Then, ‘Oh, my dear, dear love; good-bye, good-bye!’
The sound of footsteps on the floor below, the broken hinged door was opened and closed again from without; he heard its iron latch click into place. He looked from the window. The last indiscretion of sight was nothing to the indiscretions of hearing that had gone before, and he wanted to see this man to whom all his soul had gone out in sympathy and pity. He had not supposed that he could ever be so sorry for anyone.
He looked to see a young man bowed under a weight of sorrow, and he saw an old man bowed with the weight of years. Silver-white was the hair in the moonlight, thin and stooping the shoulders, feeble the footsteps, and tremulous the hand that closed the gate of the little enclosure that had been a garden. The figure of a sad old man went away alone through the shadows of the pine-trees.
And it was the figure of the old man who had driven by the Five Bells in the old-fashioned carriage, the figure of the man he had come down to watch, to spy upon. Well, he had spied, and he had found out – what?
He did not wait for anyone else to unlatch that closed door and come out into the moonlight below the window. He thinks now that he knew even then that no-one else would come out. He went down the stairs in the darkness, careless of the sound of his feet on the creaking boards. He lighted a match and held it up and looked round the little bare room with its one shuttered window and its one door, close latched. And there was no-one there, no-one at all. The room was as empty and cold as any last year’s nest.
He got out very quickly and got away, not stopping to shut door or gate nor to pick up the colour-box and canvas from the foot of the stairs where he had left them. He went very quickly back to the Five Bells, and he was very glad of the lights and the talk and the smell and sight and sound of living men and women.
It was next day that he asked his questions; this time of the round-faced daughter of the house.
‘No,’ she told him, ‘Squire wasn’t married,’ and ‘Yes, there was a sort of story.’
He pressed for the story, and presently got it.
‘It ain’t nothing much. Only they say when Squire was a young man there was some carryings on with the gamekeeper’s daughter up at the lodge. Happen you noticed it, sir, an old tumble-down place in the pine woods.’
Yes, he had happened to notice it.
‘Nobody knows the rights of it now,’ the girl told him; ‘all them as was in it’s under the daisies this long time, except Squire. But he went away and there was some mishap; he got thrown from his horse and didn’t come home when expected, and the girl she was found drownded in the pond nigh where she used to live. And Squire he waren’t never the same man. They say he hangs about round the old lodge to this day when it’s full moon. And they do say … But there, I dunno, it’s all silly talk, and I hope you won’t take no notice of anything I’ve said. One gets talking.’
Caution, late born, was now strong in her, and he could not get any more.
‘Do you remember the girl’s name?’ he asked at last, finding all assaults vain against the young woman’s caution.
‘Why, I wasn’t born nor yet thought of,’ she told him, and laughed and called along the fresh sanded passage: ‘Mother, what was that girl’s name, you know, the one up at the lodge that …’
‘Ssh!’ came back the mother’s voice; ‘you keep a still tongue, Lily; it’s all silly talk.’
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‘All right, mother, but what was her name?’
‘Anna,’ came the voice along the fresh sanded passage.
‘Dear sir,’ ran Sellinge’s report, written the next day, ‘I have made enquiries and find no ground for supposing the gentleman in question to be otherwise than of sound mind. He is much respected in the village and very kind to the poor. I remain here awaiting your instructions.’
While he remained there awaiting the instructions he explored the neighbourhood, but he found nothing of much interest except the grave on the north side of the churchyard, a grave marked by no stone, but covered anew every day with fresh flowers. It had been so covered every day, the sexton told him, for fifty years.
‘A long time, fifty years,’ said the man, ‘a long time, sir. A lawyer in London, he pays for the flowers, but they do say …’
‘Yes,’ said Sellinge quickly, ‘but then people say all sorts of things, don’t they?’
‘Some on ’em’s true though,’ said the sexton.
THE BEGINNING
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This collection published with a new introduction by Penguin Books 2016
Introduction copyright © Naomi Alderman, 2016
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ISBN: 978-0-241-97723-1
E. Nesbit, Horror Stories
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