Part 39 (1/2)
The next morning, Juliet, walking listlessly up and down the garden, turned the corner of a yew hedge, and came suddenly upon a figure that might well have appeared one of the kobolds of German legend. He was digging slowly but steadily, crooning a strange song--so low that, until she saw him she did not hear him.
She started back in dismay. The kobold neither raised his head nor showed other sign than the ceasing of his song that he was aware of her presence. Slowly and steadily he went on with his work. He was trenching the ground deep, still throwing the earth from the bottom to the top.
Juliet, concluding he was deaf, and the ceasing of his song accidental, turned softly, and would have retreated. But Polwarth, so far from being deaf, heard better than most people. His senses, indeed, had been sharpened by his infirmities--all but those of taste and smell, which were fitful, now dull and now exquisitely keen. At the first movement breaking the stillness into which consternation had cast her, he spoke.
”Can you guess what I am doing, Mrs. Faber?” he said, throwing up a spadeful and a glance together, like a man who could spare no time from his work.
Juliet's heart got in the way, and she could not answer him. She felt much as a ghost, wandering through a house, might feel, if suddenly addressed by the name she had borne in the old days, while yet she was clothed in the garments of the flesh. Could it be that this man led such a retired life that, although living so near Glaston, and seeing so many at his gate, he had yet never heard that she had pa.s.sed from the ken of the living? Or could it be that Dorothy had betrayed her? She stood quaking. The situation was strange. Before her was a man who did not seem to know that what he knew concerning her was a secret from all the world besides! And with that she had a sudden insight into the consequence of the fact of her existence coming to her husband's knowledge: would it not add to his contempt and scorn to know that she was not even dead? Would he not at once conclude that she had been contriving to work on his feelings, that she had been speculating on his repentance, counting upon and awaiting such a return of his old fondness, as would make him forget all her faults, and prepare him to receive her again with delight?--But she must answer the creature! Ill could she afford to offend him! But what was she to say? She had utterly forgotten what he had said to her. She stood staring at him, unable to speak. It was but for a few moments, but they were long as minutes. And as she gazed, it seemed as if the strange being in the trench had dug his way up from the lower parts of the earth, bringing her secret with him, and come to ask her questions. What an earthy yet unearthly look he had! Almost for the moment she believed the ancient rumors of other races than those of mankind, that shared the earth with them, but led such differently conditioned lives, that, in the course of ages, only a scanty few of the unblending natures crossed each other's path, to stand astare in mutual astonishment.
Polwarth went on digging, nor once looked up. After a little while he resumed, in the most natural way, speaking as if he had known her well:
”Mr. Drake and I were talking, some weeks ago, about a certain curious little old-fas.h.i.+oned flower in my garden at the back of the lodge. He asked me if I could spare him a root of it. I told him I could spare him any thing he would like to have, but that I would gladly give him every flower in my garden, roots and all, if he would but let me dig three yards square in his garden at the Old House, and have all that came up of itself for a year.”
He paused again. Juliet neither spoke nor moved. He dug rather feebly for a gnome, with panting, asthmatic breath.
”Perhaps you are not aware, ma'am,” he began again, and ceasing his labor stood up leaning on the spade, which was nearly as high as himself, ”that many of the seeds which fall upon the ground do not grow, yet, strange to tell, retain the power of growth. I suspect myself, but have not had opportunity of testing the conjecture, that such fall in their pods, or sh.e.l.ls, and that before these are sufficiently decayed to allow the sun and moisture and air to reach them, they have got covered up in the soil too deep for those same influences. They say fishes a long time bedded in ice will come to life again: I can not tell about that, but it is well enough known that if you dig deep in any old garden, such as this, ancient, perhaps forgotten flowers, will appear.
The fas.h.i.+on has changed, they have been neglected or uprooted, but all the time their life is hid below. And the older they are, the nearer perhaps to their primary idea!”
By this time she was far more composed, though not yet had she made up her mind what to say, or how to treat the dilemma in which she found herself.
After a brief pause therefore, he resumed again:
”I don't fancy,” he said, with a low, asthmatic laugh, ”that we shall have many forgotten weeds come up. They all, I suspect, keep pretty well in the sun. But just think how the fierce digging of the crisis to which the great Husbandman every now and then leads a nation, brings back to the surface its old forgotten flowers. What virtues, for instance, the Revolution brought to light as even yet in the nature of the corrupted n.o.bility of France!”
”What a peculiar goblin it is!” thought Juliet, beginning to forget herself a little in watching and listening to the strange creature. She had often seen him before, but had always turned from him with a kind of sympathetic shame: of course the poor creature could not bear to be looked at; he must know himself improper!
”I have sometimes wondered,” Polwarth yet again resumed, ”whether the troubles without end that some people seem born to--I do not mean those they bring upon themselves--may not be as subsoil plows, tearing deep into the family mold, that the seeds of the lost virtues of their race may in them be once more brought within reach of sun and air and dew. It would be a pleasant, hopeful thought if one might hold it. Would it not, ma'am?”
”It would indeed,” answered Juliet with a sigh, which rose from an undefined feeling that if some hidden virtue would come up in her, it would be welcome. How many people would like to be good, if only they might be good without taking trouble about it! They do not like goodness well enough to hunger and thirst after it, or to sell all that they have that they may buy it; they will not batter at the gate of the kingdom of Heaven; but they look with pleasure on this or that aerial castle of righteousness, and think it would be rather nice to live in it! They do not know that it is goodness all the time their very being is pining after, and that they are starving their nature of its necessary food.
Then Polwarth's idea turned itself round in Juliet's mind, and grew clearer, but a.s.sumed reference to weeds only, and not flowers. She thought how that fault of hers had, like the seed of a poison-plant, been buried for years, unknown to one alive, and forgotten almost by herself--so diligently forgotten indeed, that it seemed to have gradually slipped away over the horizon of her existence; and now here it was at the surface again in all its horror and old reality! nor that merely, for already it had blossomed and borne its rightful fruit of dismay--an evil pod, filled with a sickening juice, and swarming with gray flies.--But she must speak, and, if possible, prevent the odd creature from going and publis.h.i.+ng in Glaston that he had seen Mrs.
Faber, and she was at the Old House.
”How did you know I was here?” she asked abruptly.
”How do you know that I knew, ma'am?” returned Polwarth, in a tone which took from the words all appearance of rudeness.
”You were not in the least surprised to see me,” she answered.
”A man,” returned the dwarf, ”who keeps his eyes open may almost cease to be surprised at any thing. In my time I have seen so much that is wonderful--in fact every thing seems to me so wonderful that I hardly expect to be surprised any more.”
He said this, desiring to provoke conversation. But Juliet took the answer for an evasive one, and it strengthened her suspicion of Dorothy.
She was getting tired of her! Then there was only one thing left!--The minor prophet had betaken himself again to his work, delving deeper, and throwing slow spadeful after spadeful to the surface.
”Miss Drake told you I was here!” said Juliet.
”No, indeed, Mrs. Faber. No one told me,” answered Polwarth. ”I learned it for myself. I could hardly help finding it out.”
”Then--then--does every body know it?” she faltered, her heart sinking within her at the thought.