Around us in the short straw and dust stalked the farmer’s fowls, cackling, with red-eyed glances askew at our intrusion. Ducks were quacking. Doves flew in with whir of wing. I thought I should boil over with delight. And presently a sheepdog, ears down and tail between its legs, slid round the beam of the barn door. Half in, half out, it stood bristling, eyes fixed, head thrust out. My companion drew himself up and with a large stone in his hand, edged, stooping and stealthily—and very much, I must confess, like the picture of a Fuegian I have seen in a book—between the gaudy wheels of the wagon, and faced the low-growling beast. I watched him, enthralled. For a moment or two he and the sheepdog confronted each other without stirring. Then with one sharp bark, the animal flung back its head, and with whitened eye, turned and disappeared.
“Oh, bravissimo!” said I, mocking up at Mr. Anon from under my hood. “He was cowed, poor thing. I would have made friends with him.”
We sat on in the sweet, dusty scent of the stormy air. The hail turned to rain. The wind rose higher. I began to be uneasy. So heavily streamed the water out of the clouds that walking back by the way we had come would be utterly impossible for me. What’s to be done now?—I thought to myself. Yet the liquid song of the rain, the gurgling sighs and trumpetings of the wind entranced me; and I turned softly to glance at my stranger. He sat, chin on large-boned hands, his lank hair plastered on his hollow temples by the rain, his eyes glassy in profile.
“I am glad of this,” he muttered dreamily, as if in response to my scrutiny. “We are here.”
A scatter of green leaf-sheaths from a hawthorn over against the barn was borne in by the wind.
“I am glad too,” I answered, “because when you are at peace, so I can be; for that marvellous land you tell me of is very far away. Why, who—?” But he broke in so earnestly that I was compelled to listen, confiding in me some queer wisdom he had dug up out of his books—of how I might approach nearer and nearer to the brink between life and reality, and see all things as they are, in truth, in their very selves. All things visible are only a veil, he said. A veil that withdraws itself when the mind is empty of all thoughts and desires, and the heart at one with itself. That is divine happiness, he said. And he told me, too, out of his farfetched learning, a secret about myself.
It was cold in the barn now. The fowls huddled close. Rain and wind ever and again drowned the low, alluring, faraway voice wandering on as if out of a trance. Dreams, maybe; yet I have learned since that one half of his tale is true; that at need even an afflicted spirit, winged for an instant with serenity, may leave the body and, perhaps, if lost in the enchantments beyond, never turn back. But I swore to keep his words secret between us. I had no will to say otherwise, and assured him of my trust in him.
“My very dear,” he said, softly touching my hand, but I could make no answer.
He scrambled to his feet and peered down on me. “It is not my peace. All the days you are away. …” He gulped forlornly and turned away his head. “But that is what I mean. Just nothing, all this”—he made a gesture with his hands as if giving himself up a captive to authority—“nothing but a sop to a dog.”
Then stooping, he drew my cape around me, banked the loose hay at my feet and shoulders, smiled into my face, and bidding me wait in patience a while, but not sleep, was gone.
The warmth and odour stole over my senses. I was neither hungry nor thirsty, but drugged with fatigue. With a fixed smile on my face (a smile betokening, as I believe now, little but feminine vanity and satisfaction after feeding on that strange heart), my thoughts went wandering. The sounds of skies and earth drowsed my senses, and I nodded off into a nap. The grinding of wheels awoke me. From a welter of dreams I gazed out through the opening of the barn at a little battered cart and a shaggy pony. And behold, on the chopped straw and hay beside me, lay stretched out, nose on paw, our enemy, the sheepdog. He thumped a friendly tail at me, while he growled at my deliverer.
Thoughtful Mr. Anon. He had not only fetched the pony-cart, but had brought me a bottle of hot milk and a few raisins. They warmed and revived me. A little light-witted after my sleep in the hay, I clambered up with his help into the cart and tucked myself in as snugly as I could with my draggled petticoats and muddy shoes. So with myself screened well out of sight of prying eyes, we drove off.
All this long while I had not given a thought to Mrs. Bowater. We stood before her at last in her oilcloth passage, like Adam and Eve in the Garden. Her oldest bonnet on her head, she was just about to set off to the police station. And instead of showing her gratitude that her anxieties on my account were over, Mrs. Bowater cast us the blackest of looks. Leaving Mr. Anon to make our peace with her, I ran off to change my clothes. As I emerged from my bedroom, he entered at the door, in an old trailing pilot coat many sizes too large for him, and I found to my astonishment that he and my landlady
