Antony Gray,-Gardener

Excerpt

PROLOGUE

March had come in like a lion, raging, turbulent. Throughout the day the wind had torn spitefully at the yet bare branches of the great elms in the park; it had rushed in insensate fury round the walls of the big grey house; it had driven the rain lashing against the windows. It had sent the few remaining leaves of the old year scudding up the drive; it had littered the lawns with fragments of broken twigs; it had beaten yellow and purple crocuses prostrate to the brown earth.

Against the distant rocky coast the sea had boomed like the muffled thunder of guns; it had flung itself upon the beach, dragging the stones back with it in each receding wave, their grinding adding to the crash of the waters. Nature had been in her wildest mood, a thing of mad fury.

With sundown a calm had fallen. The wind, tired of its onslaught, had sunk suddenly to rest. Only the sea beat and moaned sullenly against the cliffs, as if unwilling to subdue its anger. Yet, for all that, a note of fatigue had entered its voice.

An old man was sitting in the library of the big grey house. A shaded reading lamp stood on a small table near his elbow. The light was thrown upon an open book lying near it, and on the carved arms of the oak chair in which the man was sitting. It shone clearly on his bloodless old hands, on his parchment-like face, and white hair. A log fire was burning in a great open hearth on his right. For the rest, the room was a place of shadows, deepening to gloom in the distant corners, a gloom emphasized by the one small circle of brilliant light, and the red glow of the fire. Book-cases reached from floor to ceiling the whole length of two walls, and between the three thickly curtained windows of the third. In the fourth wall were the fireplace and the door.

There was no sound to break the silence. The figure in the oak chair sat motionless. He might have been carved out of stone, for any sign of life he gave. He looked like stone,—white and black marble very finely sculptured,—white marble in head and hands, black marble in the piercing eyes, the long satin dressing-gown, the oak of the big chair. Even his eyes seemed stone-like, motionless, and fixed thoughtfully on space.

To those perceptive of “atmosphere” there is a subtle difference in silence. There is the silence of woods, the silence of plains, the silence of death, the silence of sleep, and the silence of wakefulness. This silence was the last named. It was a silence alert, alive, yet very still.

A slight movement in the room, so slight as to be almost imperceptible, roused him to the present. Life sprang to his eyes, puzzled, questioning; his body motionless, they turned towards the middle window of the three, from whence the movement appeared to have come. It was not repeated. The old utter silence lay upon the place; yet Nicholas Danver kept his eyes upon the curtain.

The minutes passed. Then once more came that almost imperceptible movement.

Nicholas Danver’s well-bred old voice broke the silence....