Bosworth looked at her with listless eyes. She seemed far off from him, miles away. “Venny Brand?” he echoed.

  “You never liked her, Orrin.”

  “She’s a child. I never knew much about her.”

  “Well,” repeated his sister, with the guileless relish of the unimaginative for bad news, “I guess she’s dying.” After a pause she added: “It’ll kill Sylvester Brand, all alone up there.”

  Bosworth got up and said: “I’ve got to see to poulticing the gray’s fetlock.” He walked out into the steadily falling snow.

  Venny Brand was buried three days later. The Deacon read the service; Bosworth was one of the pall-bearers. The whole country-side turned out, for the snow had stopped falling, and at any season a funeral offered an opportunity for an outing that was not to be missed. Besides, Venny Brand was young and handsome—at least some people thought her handsome, though she was so swarthy—and her dying like that, so suddenly, had the fascination of tragedy.

  “They say her lungs filled right up . . . Seems she’d had bronchial troubles before . . . I always said both them girls was frail . . . Look at Ora, how she took and wasted away! And it’s colder’n all outdoors up there to Brand’s . . . Their mother, too, she pined away just the same. They don’t ever make old bones on the mother’s side of the family . . . There’s that young Bedlow over there; they say Venny was engaged to him . . . Oh, Mrs. Rutledge, excuse me . . . Step right into the pew; there’s a seat for you alongside of grandma . . .”

  Mrs. Rutledge was advancing with deliberate step down the narrow aisle of the bleak wooden church. She had on her best bonnet, a monumental structure which no one had seen out of her trunk since old Mrs. Silsee’s funeral, three years before. All the women remembered it. Under its perpendicular pile her narrow face, swaying on the long thin neck, seemed whiter than ever; but her air of fretfulness had been composed into a suitable expression of mournful immobility.

  “Looks as if the stone-mason had carved her to put atop of Venny’s grave,” Bosworth thought as she glided past him; and then shivered at his own sepulchral fancy. When she bent over her hymn book her lowered lids reminded him again of marble eye-balls; the bony hands clasping the book were bloodless. Bosworth had never seen such hands since he had seen old Aunt Cressidora Cheney strangle the canary-bird because it fluttered.

  The service was over, the coffin of Venny Brand had been lowered into her sister’s grave, and the neighbours were slowly dispersing. Bosworth, as pall-bearer, felt obliged to linger and say a word to the stricken father. He waited till Brand had turned from the grave with the Deacon at his side. The three men stood together for a moment; but not one of them spoke. Brand’s face was the closed door of a vault, barred with wrinkles like bands of iron.

  Finally the Deacon took his hand and said: “The Lord gave—”

  Brand nodded and turned away toward the shed where the horses were hitched. Bosworth followed him. “Let me drive along home with you,” he suggested.

  Brand did not so much as turn his head. “Home? What home?” he said; and the other fell back.

  Loretta Bosworth was talking with the other women while the men unblanketed their horses and backed the cutters out into the heavy snow. As Bosworth waited for her, a few feet off, he saw Mrs. Rutledge’s tall bonnet lording it above the group. Andy Pond, the Rutledge farm-hand, was backing out the sleigh.

  “Saul ain’t here today, Mrs. Rutledge, is he?” one of the village elders piped, turning a benevolent old tortoise-head about on a loose neck, and blinking up into Mrs. Rutledge’s marble face.

  Bosworth heard her measure out her answer in slow incisive words. “No. Mr. Rutledge he ain’t here. He would ‘a’ come for certain, but his aunt Minorca Cummins is being buried down to Stotesbury this very day and he had to go down there. Don’t it sometimes seem zif we was all walking right in the Shadow of Death?”

  As she walked toward the cutter, in which Andy Pond was already seated, the Deacon went up to her with visible hesitation. Involuntarily Bosworth also moved nearer. He heard the Deacon say: “I’m glad to hear that Saul is able to be up and around.”

  She turned her small head on her rigid neck, and lifted the lids of marble.

  “Yes, I guess he’ll sleep quieter now—And her too, maybe, now she don’t lay there alone any longer,” she added in a low voice, with a sudden twist of her chin toward the fresh black stain in the grave-yard snow. She got into the cutter, and said in a clear tone to Andy Pond: “ ’S long as we’re down here I don’t know but what I’ll just call round and get a box of soap at Hiram Pringle’s.”

  MR. JONES

  I

  Lady Jane Lynke was unlike other people: when she heard that she had inherited Bells, the beautiful old place which had belonged to the Lynkes of Thudeney for something like six hundred years, the fancy took her to go and see it unannounced. She was staying at a friend’s near by, in Kent, and the next morning she borrowed a motor and slipped away alone to Thudeney-Blazes, the adjacent village.

  It was a lustrous motionless day. Autumn bloom lay on the Sussex downs, on the heavy trees of the weald, on streams moving indolently, far off across the marshes. Farther still, Dungeness, a fitful streak, floated on an immaterial sea which was perhaps, after all, only sky.

  In the softness Thudeney-Blazes slept: a few aged houses bowed about a duck-pond, a silvery spire, orchards thick with dew. Did Thudeney-Blazes ever wake?

  Lady Jane left the motor to the care of the geese on a miniature common, pushed open a white gate into a field (the griffoned portals being padlocked), and struck across the park toward a group of carved chimney-stacks. No one seemed aware of her.

  In a dip of the land, the long low house, its ripe brick masonry overhanging a moat deeply sunk about its roots, resembled an aged cedar spreading immemorial red branches. Lady Jane held her breath and gazed.

  A silence distilled from years of solitude lay on lawns and gardens. No one had lived at Bells since the last Lord Thudeney, then a penniless younger son, had forsaken it sixty years before to seek his fortune in Canada. And before that, he and his widowed mother, distant poor relations, were housed in one of the lodges, and the great place, even in their day, had been as mute and solitary as the family vault.

  Lady Jane, daughter of another branch, to which an earldom and considerable possessions had accrued, had never seen Bells, hardly heard its name. A succession of deaths, and the whim of an old man she had never known, now made her heir to all this beauty; and as she stood and looked she was glad she had come to it from so far, from impressions so remote and different. “It would be dreadful to be used to it—to be thinking already about the state of the roof, or the cost of a heating system.”

  Till this her thirty-fifth year, Lady Jane had led an active, independent and decided life. One of several daughters, moderately but sufficiently provided for, she had gone early from home, lived in London lodgings, travelled in tropic lands, spent studious summers in Spain and Italy, and written two or three brisk business-like little books about cities usually dealt with sentimentally. And now, just back from a summer in the south of France, she stood ankle-deep in wet bracken, and gazed at Bells lying there under a September sun that looked like moonlight.

  “I shall never leave it!” she ejaculated, her heart swelling as if she had taken the vow to a lover.

  She ran down the last slope of the park and entered the faded formality of gardens with clipped yews as ornate as architecture, and holly hedges as solid as walls. Adjoining the house stood a low deep-buttressed chapel. Its door was ajar, and she thought this of good augury: her forebears were waiting for her. In the porch she remarked fly-blown notices of services, an umbrella stand, a dishevelled door-mat: no doubt the chapel served as the village church. The thought gave her a sense of warmth and neighbourliness. Across the damp flags of the chancel, monuments and brasses showed through a traceried screen. She examined them curiously. Some hailed her with vocal memories, others whispered out of the remote and the unknown: it was a shame to be so ill-acquainted with her own family. But neither Crofts nor Lynkes had ever greatly distinguished themselves; they had gathered substance simply by holding on to what they had, and slowly accumulating privileges and acres. “Mostly by clever marriages,” Lady Jane thought with a faint contempt.

  At that moment her eyes lit on one of the less ornate monuments: a plain sarcophagus of gray marble niched in the wall and surmounted by the bust of a young man with a fine arrogant head, a Byronic throat and tossed-back curls.

  “Peregrine Vincent Theobald Lynke, Baron Clouds, fifteenth Viscount Thudeney of Bells, Lord of the Manors of Thudeney, Thudeney-Blazes, Upper Lynke, Lynke-Linnet—” so it ran, with the usual tedious enumeration of honours, titles, court and county offices, ending with “Born on May 1st, 1790, perished of the plague at Aleppo in 1828.” And underneath, in small cramped characters, as if crowded as an afterthought into an insufficient space: “Also His Wife.”

  That was all. No name, dates, honours, epithets, for the Viscountess Thudeney. Did she, too, die of the plague at Aleppo? Or did the “also” imply her actual presence in the sarcophagus which her husband’s pride had no doubt prepared for his own last sleep, little guessing that some Syrian drain was to receive him? Lady Jane racked her memory in vain. All she knew was that the death without issue of this Lord Thudeney had caused the property to revert to the Croft-Lynkes, and so, in the end, brought her to the chancel step where, shyly, she knelt a moment, vowing to the dead to carry on their trust.

  She passed on to the entrance court, and stood at last at the door of her new home, a blunt tweed figure in heavy mud-stained shoes. She felt as intrusive as a tripper, and her hand hesitated on the door-bell. “I ought to have brought someone with me,” she thought; an odd admission on the part of a young woman who, when she was doing her books of travel, had prided herself on forcing single-handed the most closely guarded doors. But those other places, as she looked back, seemed easy and accessible compared to Bells.

  She rang, and a tinkle answered, carried on by a flurried echo which seemed to ask what in the world was happening. Lady Jane, through the nearest window, caught the spectral vista of a long room with shrouded furniture. She could not see its farther end, but she had the feeling that someone stationed there might very well be seeing her.

  “Just at first,” she thought, “I shall have to invite people here—to take the chill off.”

  She rang again, and the tinkle again prolonged itself; but no one came.

  At last she reflected that the care-takers probably lived at the back of the house, and pushing open a door in the court-yard wall she worked her way around to what seemed a stable-yard. Against the purple brick sprawled a neglected magnolia, bearing one late flower as big as a planet. Lady Jane rang at a door marked Service. This bell, though also languid, had a wakefuller sound, as if it were more used to being rung, and still knew what was likely to follow; and after a delay during which Lady Jane again had the sense of being peered at—from above, through a lowered blind—a bolt shot, and a woman looked out. She was youngish, unhealthy, respectable and frightened; and she blinked at Lady Jane like someone waking out of sleep.

  “Oh,” said Lady Jane—“do you think I might visit the house?”

  “The house?”

  “I’m staying near here—I’m interested in old houses. Mightn’t I take a look?”

  The young woman drew back. “The house isn’t shown.”

  “Oh, but not to—not to—” Jane weighed the case. “You see,” she explained, “I know some of the family: the Northumberland branch.”

  “You’re related, madam?”

  “Well—distantly, yes.” It was exactly what she had not meant to say; but there seemed no other way.

  The woman twisted her apron-strings in perplexity “Come, you know,” Lady Jane urged, producing half-a-crown. The woman turned pale.

  “I couldn’t, madam; not without asking.” It was clear that she was sorely tempted.

  “Well, ask, won’t you?” Lady Jane pressed the tip into a hesitating hand. The young woman shut the door and vanished. She was away so long that the visitor concluded her half-crown had been pocketed, and there was an end; and she began to be angry with herself, which was more often her habit than to be so with others.

  “Well, for a fool, Jane, you’re a complete one,” she grumbled.

  A returning footstep, listless, reluctant—the tread of one who was not going to let her in. It began to be rather comic.

  The door opened, and the young woman said in her dull sing-song: “Mr. Jones says that no one is allowed to visit the house.”

  She and Lady Jane looked at each other for a moment, and Lady Jane read the apprehension in the other’s eyes.

  “Mr. Jones? Oh?—Yes; of course, keep it . . .” She waved away the woman’s hand.

  “Thank you, madam.” The door closed again, and Lady Jane stood and gazed up at the inexorable face of her ancestral home.

  II

  “But you didn’t get in? You actually came back without so much as a peep?”

  Her story was received, that evening at dinner, with mingled mirth and incredulity.

  “But, my dear! You mean to say you asked to see the house, and they wouldn’t let you? Who wouldn’t?” Lady Jane’s hostess insisted.

  “Mr. Jones.”

  “Mr. Jones?”

  “He said no one was allowed to visit it.”

  “Who on earth is Mr. Jones?”

  “The care-taker, I suppose. I didn’t see him.”

  “Didn’t see him either? But I never heard such nonsense! Why in the world didn’t you insist?”

  “Yes; why didn’t you?” they all chorused; and she could only answer, a little lamely: “I think I was afraid.”

  “Afraid? You, darling?” There was fresh hilarity. “Of Mr. Jones?”

  “I suppose so.” She joined in the laugh, yet she knew it was true: she had been afraid.

  Edward Stramer, the novelist, an old friend of her family, had been listening with an air of abstraction, his eyes on his empty coffee-cup. Suddenly, as the mistress of the house pushed back her chair, he looked across the table at Lady Jane. “It’s odd: I’ve just remembered something. Once, when I was a youngster, I tried to see Bells: over thirty years ago it must have been.” He glanced at his host. “Your mother drove me over. And we were not let in.”

  There was a certain flatness in this conclusion, and someone remarked that Bells had always been known as harder to get into than any other house thereabouts.

  “Yes,” said Stramer; “but the point is that we were refused in exactly the same words. Mr. Jones said no one was allowed to visit the house.”

  “Ah—he was in possession already? Thirty years ago? Unsociable fellow, Jones. Well, Jane, you’ve got a good watch-dog.”

  They moved to the drawing-room, and the talk drifted to other topics. But Stramer came and sat down beside Lady Jane. “It is queer, though, that at such a distance of time we should have been given exactly the same answer.”

  She glanced up at him curiously. “Yes; and you didn’t try to force your way in either?”

  “Oh, no: it was not possible.”

  “So I felt,” she agreed.

  “Well, next week, my dear, I hope we shall see it all, in spite of Mr. Jones,” their hostess intervened, catching their last words as she moved toward the piano.

  “I wonder if we shall see Mr. Jones,” said Stramer.

  III

  Bells was not nearly as large as it looked; like many old houses it was very narrow, and but one storey high, with servants’ rooms in the low attics, and much space wasted in crooked passages and superfluous stairs. If she closed the great saloon, Jane thought, she might live there comfortably with the small staff which was the most she could afford. It was a relief to find the place less important than she had feared.

  For already, in that first hour of arrival, she had decided to give up everything else for Bells. Her previous plans and ambitions—except such as might fit in with living there—had fallen from her like a discarded garment, and things she had hardly thought about, or had shrugged away with the hasty subversiveness of youth, were already laying quiet hands on her; all the lives from which her life had issued, with what they bore of example or admonishment. The very shabbiness of the house moved her more than splendours, made it, after its long abandonment, seem full of the careless daily coming and going of people long dead, people to whom it had not been a museum, or a page of history, but a cradle, nursery, home, and sometimes, no doubt, a prison. If those marble lips in the chapel could speak! If she could hear some of their comments on the old house which had spread its silent shelter over their sins and sorrows, their follies and submissions! A long tale, to which she was about to add another chapter, subdued and humdrum beside some of those earlier annals, yet probably freer and more varied than the unchronicled lives of the great-aunts and great-grandmothers buried there so completely that they must hardly have known when they passed from their beds to their graves. “Piled up like dead leaves,” Jane thought, “layers and layers of them, to preserve something forever budding underneath.”

  Well, all these piled-up lives had at least preserved the old house in its integrity; and that was worth while. She was satisfied to carry on such a trust.

  She sat in the garden looking up at those rosy walls, iridescent with damp and age. She decided which windows should be hers, which rooms given to the friends from Kent who were motoring over, Stramer among them, for a modest house-warming; then she got up and went in.

  The hour had come for domestic questions; for she had arrived alone, unsupported even by the old family house-maid her mother had offered her. She preferred to start afresh, convinced that her small household could be staffed from the neighbourhood. Mrs. Clemm, the rosy-cheeked old person who had curtsied her across the threshold, would doubtless know.