She could scarcely take in the news that her
aunt was a hopeless maniac, for Mrs. Nixon, having been extremely stupid
all her days, had naturally succeeded in passing with her relations as
typically sensible. With the Reynolds family, as with the great majority
of us, want of imagination is always equated with sanity, and though
many of us have never heard of Lombroso we are his ready-made converts. We have always believed that poets are mad, and if statistics
unfortunately show that few poets have really been inhabitants of
lunatic asylums, it is soothing to learn that nearly all poets have had
whooping-cough, which is doubtless, like intoxication, a minor madness. 'But is it really true?' she asked at length. 'Are you certain uncle is
not deceiving you? Aunt seemed so sensible always.' She was helped at last by recollecting that Aunt Marian used to get up
very early of mornings, and then they went into the drawing-room and
talked to the old man. His evident kindliness and honesty grew upon
Mary, in spite of a lingering belief in her aunt's fables, and when he
left, it was with a promise to come to see them again. Mrs. Darnell said she felt tired, and went to bed; and Darnell returned
to the garden and began to pace to and fro, collecting his thoughts. His
immeasurable relief at the intelligence that, after all, Mrs. Nixon was
not coming to live with them taught him that, despite his submission,
his dread of the event had been very great. The weight was removed, and
now he was free to consider his life without reference to the grotesque
intrusion that he had feared. He sighed for joy, and as he paced to and
fro he savoured the scent of the night, which, though it came faintly
to him in that brick-bound suburb, summoned to his mind across many
years the odour of the world at night as he had known it in that short
sojourn of his boyhood; the odour that rose from the earth when the
flame of the sun had gone down beyond the mountain, and the afterglow
had paled in the sky and on the fields. And as he recovered as best he
could these lost dreams of an enchanted land, there came to him other
images of his childhood, forgotten and yet not forgotten, dwelling
unheeded in dark places of the memory, but ready to be summoned forth. He remembered one fantasy that had long haunted him. As he lay half
asleep in the forest on one hot afternoon of that memorable visit to the
country, he had 'made believe' that a little companion had come to him
out of the blue mists and the green light beneath the leaves--a white
girl with long black hair, who had played with him and whispered her
secrets in his ear, as his father lay sleeping under a tree; and from
that summer afternoon, day by day, she had been beside him; she had
visited him in the wilderness of London, and even in recent years there
had come to him now and again the sense of her presence, in the midst of
the heat and turmoil of the City. The last visit he remembered well; it
was a few weeks before he married, and from the depths of some futile
task he had looked up with puzzled eyes, wondering why the close air
suddenly grew scented with green leaves, why the murmur of the trees and
the wash of the river on the reeds came to his ears; and then that
sudden rapture to which he had given a name and an individuality
possessed him utterly. He knew then how the dull flesh of man can be
like fire; and now, looking back from a new standpoint on this and
other experiences, he realized how all that was real in his life had
been unwelcomed, uncherished by him, had come to him, perhaps, in virtue
of merely negative qualities on his part. And yet, as he reflected, he
saw that there had been a chain of witnesses all through his life: again
and again voices had whispered in his ear words in a strange language
that he now recognized as his native tongue; the common street had not
been lacking in visions of the true land of his birth; and in all the
passing and repassing of the world he saw that there had been emissaries
ready to guide his feet on the way of the great journey. A week or two after the visit of Mr. Nixon, Darnell took his annual
holiday. There was no question of Walton-on-the-Naze, or of anything of the kind,
as he quite agreed with his wife's longing for some substantial sum put
by against the evil day. But the weather was still fine, and he lounged
away the time in his garden beneath the tree, or he sauntered out on
long aimless walks in the western purlieus of London, not unvisited by
that old sense of some great ineffable beauty, concealed by the dim and
dingy veils of grey interminable streets. Once, on a day of heavy rain
he went to the 'box-room,' and began to turn over the papers in the old
hair trunk--scraps and odds and ends of family history, some of them in
his father's handwriting, others in faded ink, and there were a few
ancient pocket-books, filled with manuscript of a still earlier time,
and in these the ink was glossier and blacker than any writing fluids
supplied by stationers of later days. Darnell had hung up the portrait
of the ancestor in this room, and had bought a solid kitchen table and
a chair; so that Mrs. Darnell, seeing him looking over his old
documents, half thought of naming the room 'Mr. Darnell's study.' He had
not glanced at these relics of his family for many years, but from the
hour when the rainy morning sent him to them, he remained constant to
research till the end of the holidays. It was a new interest, and he
began to fashion in his mind a faint picture of his forefathers, and of
their life in that grey old house in the river valley, in the western
land of wells and streams and dark and ancient woods. And there were
stranger things than mere notes on family history amongst that odd
litter of old disregarded papers, and when he went back to his work in
the City some of the men fancied that he was in some vague manner
changed in appearance; but he only laughed when they asked him where he
had been and what he had been doing with himself. But Mary noticed that
every evening he spent at least an hour in the box-room; she was rather
sorry at the waste of time involved in reading old papers about dead
people. And one afternoon, as they were out together on a somewhat
dreary walk towards Acton, Darnell stopped at a hopeless second-hand
bookshop, and after scanning the rows of shabby books in the window,
went in and purchased two volumes. They proved to be a Latin dictionary
and grammar, and she was surprised to hear her husband declare his
intention of acquiring the Latin language. But, indeed, all his conduct impressed her as indefinably altered; and
she began to be a little alarmed, though she could scarcely have formed
her fears in words. But she knew that in some way that was all
indefined and beyond the grasp of her thought their lives had altered
since the summer, and no single thing wore quite the same aspect as
before.