Miracles are flowering every
moment now in the country, while the only miracle in London is the
mud. What sunshine, what air! Drink them in, for they are the one
divine medicine. One wants that medicine sometimes, for there are sad
things and terrible things all round us, pain and anguish, and decay. Yet I suppose that even those call out the splendour of fortitude
or endurance. Even when one looks on a struggle which one knows is
hopeless, it warms the heart to see it.”

The gleam that shone from her paled, her arms dropped, and she moved
on. Then, soft of voice and soft of eye, she spoke again. “Such a sad thing happened here two days ago,” she said. “A small
girl--now what was her name? Yes--Ellen Davenport--brought a note from
the village up to the house. I was out, so she left it, and started, it
is supposed, to go back home. She has not been seen since. Descriptions
of her were circulated in all the villages for miles round; but, as
you heard at lunch, there has been no news of her, and the copses and
coverts in the park have been searched, but with no result. And yet out
of that comes splendour. I went to see her mother yesterday, bowed down
with grief, but she won’t give up hope. ‘If it is God’s will,’ she said
to me, ‘we shall find my Ellen alive; and if we find her dead, it will
be God’s will, too.’”

She paused. “But I didn’t ask you down here to moan over tragedies,” she said. “I wanted you after all your weeks in town to come and have a
spring-cleaning. Doesn’t the wind take the dust out of you, like one of
those sucking-machines which you put on to carpets? And the sun! Make a
sponge of yourself and soak it up till you’re dripping with it.”

For a couple of miles, at the least, we kept along this high ridge of
down, and the larks were springing from the grass, vocal with song
uncongealed, as they aspired and sank again, dropping at last dumb
and spent with rapture. Then we descended steeply, through the woods
and glades of the park, past thickets of catkinned sallows, and of
willows with soft moleskin buttons, and in the hollows the daffodils
were dancing, and the herbs of the springtime were pushing up through
the brittle withered stuff of the winter. Then, passing along the one
street of the red-tiled village, in which my companion pointed me out
the house where the poor vanished girl had lived, we turned homewards
across the grass and joined the road again at the bottom of the great
lake that lies below the terraced gardens of the house. This lake was artificial, made a hundred years ago by the erection of a
huge dam across the dip of the valley, so that the stream which flowed
down it was thereby confined and must needs form this sheet of water
before it found outlet again through the sluices. At the centre the dam
is some twenty-five feet in height, and by the side of the road which
crosses it clumps of rhododendrons lean out over the deep water. The
margin on the side towards the lake is reinforced with concrete, now
mossy and overgrown with herbage, and the face of it, burrows down
to the level of the bottom of the dam through four fathoms of dusky
water. The lake was high and the overflow poured sonorously through the
sluices, and the sun in the west made broken rainbows in the foam of
its outpouring. As we paused there a moment, my companion seemed the incarnation of the
sights and sounds that went to the spell of the spring; singing larks
and dancing daffodils, west wind and rain-bowed foam and, no less, the
dark, deep water, were all distilled into her radiant vitality. “And now for the house again,” she said, going briskly up the steep
slope. “Is it inhospitable of me to wish that no one was coming except,
of course, our delightful Archie? A houseful brings London into the
country, and we shall talk scandal and stir up mud instead of watching
miracles.”

Another faint memory of her lingered somewhere in the dusk, and I
groped for it, as one gropes in slime for the roots of a water-plant,
and pulled it out. A notorious murderer had been guillotined that
morning in France, and in some Sunday paper next day there was a
brutal, brilliant, inexcusable little sketch of his being led out
between guards for the final scene at dawn outside the prison at
Versailles. And, as I wrote my name in Lady Rorke’s visitors’ book
on Monday morning, I spilt a blot of ink on the page and hastily
had recourse to the blotting-pad on her writing-table in order to
minimize the disfigurement. Inside it was this unpardonable picture,
cut out and put away, and I thought of the thrush and the dentist’s
waiting-room----

A month afterwards her husband died, after three weeks of intolerable
torment. The doctor insisted on his having two trained nurses, but
Lady Rorke never left him. She was present at the painful dressings
of the wound from the operation that only prolonged the misery of his
existence, and even slept on the sofa of the room where he lay. *       *       *       *       *

Archie Rorke arrived that evening. He let me know at once that he had
seen the announcement of Lady Rorke’s death, and said no more about
it till later, when he and I were left alone over the fire in the
smoking-room. He looked round to see that the door was shut behind the
last bedgoer of my little party, and then turned to me. “I’ve got to tell you something,” he said. “It’ll take half an hour, so
to-morrow will do if you want to be off.”

“But I don’t,” said I. He pulled himself together from his sprawling sunkenness in his chair. “Very well,” he said. “What I want to tell you is the story of the
breaking-off of my engagement with Sybil. I have often wanted to do so
before, but while she was alive, as you will presently see, I could
tell nobody. I shall ask you, when you know everything, whether you
think I could have done otherwise. And please do not interrupt me till
I have finished, unless there is something you don’t understand, for it
won’t be very easy to get through with it. But I think I can make it
intelligible.”

He was silent a moment, and I saw his face working and twitching. “I must tell somebody,” he said, “and I choose you, unless you mind it
awfully. But I simply can’t bear it alone any more.”

“Go on, then, old boy,” I said. “I’m glad you chose me, do you know. And I won’t interrupt.”

Archie spoke. “A week or two only before our marriage was to have taken place,” he
said, “I went down to Lincote for a couple of days. I had had the house
done up and re-decorated, and now the work was finished and I wanted to
see that all was in order. Nothing could be worthy of Sybil, but--well,
you can guess, more or less, what my feelings were. “For a week before there had been very heavy rains, and the lake--you
know it--below the garden was very high, higher than I had ever seen
it: the water poured over the road across the dam which leads to the
village.