236 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



bowelled ? It is all shadowy within, behind the windows, 

 like the eyes of a corpse, and without sound, or form, or 

 light, and it is for no one that the creeper magnificently 

 arrays itself in bediamonded crimson and gold that throbs 

 and wavers in the downpour. The martins are still there, 

 and their play up and down before the twenty windows 

 is a senseless thing, like the play of children outside a 

 chamber of agony or grief. They seem to be machines 

 going on and on when their master and purpose are dead. 

 But then, too, there is gradually a consolation, a restful- 

 ness, a deceit, a forgetting, in the continuity of their 

 movement and their unchanged voices. The two hundred 

 autumns perpetuated in the tones of the bricks are in vain. 

 Strangers will come, no doubt I hope they will not 

 and be pleased, actually proud, at this mellowness, which 

 ought to have died with the last of the family that built 

 the house. 



The tall horse-chestnuts throw down their fruit out of 

 the crisp, rusty foliage and it rolls darkly burnished out 

 of the pods white as mushrooms in the rain, and where it 

 falls it lies, and no child gathers it, and the harvest 

 waggons have crushed a thousand under their wheels. 

 The moss is beginning to encrust the gravel for the soft 

 feet of the ghosts, of the old men and the mothers and 

 the maids and the school-boys and tottering babes that 

 have trodden it once. Now that they are all gone, every 

 one, they seem always to have been ghosts, with loud, 

 happy voices and wails of sorrow, with smiles, dark looks, 

 passionate splendours, bright hair, the bright brown hair 

 as of red deer in the men, the long, heavy coils of living 

 odorous gold in the women, but flitting to and fro, foot- 

 less, unconfined, like the swallows, returning and wander- 



