None the less green Widderstone kept calling him, much as a bell in the imagination tolls on and on, the echo of reality. If the worst should come to the worst, why—there is pasture in the solitary byways for the beast that strays. He quickened his pace along lonelier streets, and soon strode freely through the little flagged and cobbled village of shops, past the same small jutting window whose clock had told him the hour on that first dark hurried night. All was pale and faint with dying colours now; and decay was in the leaf, and the last swallows filled the gold air with their clashing stillness. No one heeded him here. He looked from side to side, exulting in the strangeness. Shops were left behind, the last milestone passed, and in a little while he was descending the hill beneath the elm boughs, which he remembered had stood like a turreted wall against the sunset when first he had wandered down into the churchyard.
At the foot of the hill he passed by the green and white Rectory, and there was the parson, a short fat, pursy man with wrists protruding from his jacket sleeves as he stood on tiptoe tying up a rambling rose-shoot on his trim cedared lawn. The next house barely showed its old red chimney-tops, above its bowers; the next was empty, with windows vacantly gazing, its paths peopled with great bearded weeds that stood mutely watching and guarding the seldom-opened gate. Then came more lofty grandmotherly elms, a dense hedge of every leaf that pricks, and then Lawford found himself standing at the small canopied gate of the queer old wooden house that the stranger of his talk had in part described.
It stood square and high and dark in a small amphitheatre of verdure. Roses here and there sprang from the grass, and a narrow box-edged path led to a small door in a low green-mantled wing, with its one square window above the porch. And while, with vacant mind, Lawford stood waiting, as one stands forebodingly upon the eve of a new experience, he heard as if at a distance the sound of falling water. He still paused on the country roadside, scrutinising this strange, still, wooden presence; but at last with an effort he pushed open the gate, followed the winding path, and pulled the old iron hanging bell. There came presently a quiet tread, and Herbert himself opened the door which led into a little square wood-panelled hall, hung with queer old prints and obscure portraits in dark frames.
“Ah, yes, come in, Mr. Lawford,” he drawled; “I was beginning to be afraid you were not coming.”
Lawford laid hat and walking-stick on an oak bench, and followed his churchyard companion up a slightly inclined corridor and a staircase into a high room, covered far up the yellowish walls with old books on shelves and in cases, between which hung in little black frames, mezzo tints, etchings, and antiquated maps. A large table stood a few paces from the deep alcove of the window, which was surrounded by a low, faded, green seat, and was screened from the sunshine by wooden shutters. And here the tranquil surge of falling water shook incessantly on the air, for the three lower casements stood open to the fading sunset. On a smaller table were spread cups, old earthenware dishes of fruit, and a big bowl of damask roses.
“Please sit down; I shan’t be a moment; I am not sure that my sister is in; but if so, I will tell her we are ready for tea.” Left to himself in this quiet, strange old room, Lawford forgot for a while everything else, he was for the moment so taken up with his surroundings.
What seized on his fancy and strangely affected his mind was this incessant changing roar of falling water. It must be the Widder, he said to himself, flowing close to the walls. But not until he had had the boldness to lean head and shoulders out of the nearest window did he fully realize how close indeed the Widder was. It came sweeping dark and deep and begreened and full with the early autumnal rains, actually against the lower walls of the house itself, and in the middle suddenly swerved in a black, smooth arch, and tumbled headlong into a great pool, nodding with tall slender water-weeds, and charged in its bubbled blackness here and there with the last crimson of the setting sun. To the left of the house, where the waters floated free again, stood vast, still trees above the clustering rushes; and in glimpses between their spreading boughs lay the far-stretching countryside, now dimmed with the first mists of approaching evening. So absorbed he became as he stood leaning over the wooden sill above the falling water, that eye and ear became enslaved by the roar and stillness. And in the faint atmosphere of age that seemed like a veil to hang about the odd old house and these prodigious branches, he fell into a kind of waking dream.
When at last he did draw back into the room it was perceptibly darker, and a
