Short Fiction by Arthur Machen (ebook reader .txt) 📕

His voice broke a little, and he wiped his eyes hastily, for though stout and successful he was not unfeeling, and he was fond of his wife. He had spoken quickly, and had gone lightly over many details which might have interested specialists in certain kinds of mania, and Darnell was sorry for his evident distress.

“I came here,” he went on after a brief pause, “because I found out she had been to see you last Sunday, and I knew the sort of story she must have told.”

Darnell showed him the prophetic leaflet which Mrs. Nixon had dropped in the garden. “Did you know about this?” he said.

“Oh, him,” said the old man, with some approach to cheerfulness; “oh yes, I thrashed him black and blue the day before yesterday.”

“Isn’t he mad? Who is the man?”

“He’s not mad, he’s bad. He’s a little Welsh skunk named Richards. He’s been running some sort of chapel over at New Barnet for the last few years, and my poor wife⁠—she never could find the parish church good enough for her⁠—had been going to his damned schism shop for the last twelvemonth. It was all that finished her off. Yes; I thrashed him the day before yesterday, and I’m not afraid of a summons either. I know him, and he knows I know him.”

Old Nixon whispered something in Darnell’s ear, and chuckled faintly as he repeated for the third time his formula⁠—

“I thrashed him black and blue the day before yesterday.”

Darnell could only murmur condolences and express his hope that Mrs. Nixon might recover.

The old man shook his head.

“I’m afraid there’s no hope of that,” he said. “I’ve had the best advice, but they couldn’t do anything, and told me so.”

Presently he asked to see his niece, and Darnell went out and prepared Mary as well as he could. She could scarcely take in the news that her aunt was a hopeless maniac, for Mrs. Nixon, having been extremely stupid all her days, had naturally succeeded in passing with her relations as typically sensible. With the Reynolds family, as with the great majority of us, want of imagination is always equated with sanity, and though many of us have never heard of Lombroso we are his ready-made converts. We have always believed that poets are mad, and if statistics unfortunately show that few poets have really been inhabitants of lunatic asylums, it is soothing to learn that nearly all poets have had whooping-cough, which is doubtless, like intoxication, a minor madness.

“But is it really true?” she asked at length. “Are you certain uncle is not deceiving you? Aunt seemed so sensible always.”

She was helped at last by recollecting that Aunt Marian used to get up very early of mornings, and then they went into the drawing-room and talked to the old man. His evident kindliness and honesty grew upon Mary, in spite of a lingering belief in her aunt’s fables, and when he left, it was with a promise to come to see them again.

Mrs. Darnell said she felt tired, and went to bed; and Darnell returned to the garden and began to pace to and fro, collecting his thoughts. His immeasurable relief at the intelligence that, after all, Mrs. Nixon was not coming to live with them taught him that, despite his submission, his dread of the event had been very great. The weight was removed, and now he was free to consider his life without reference to the grotesque intrusion that he had feared. He sighed for joy, and as he paced to and fro he savoured the scent of the night, which, though it came faintly to him in that brick-bound suburb, summoned to his mind across many years the odour of the world at night as he had known it in that short sojourn of his boyhood; the odour that rose from the earth when the flame of the sun had gone down beyond the mountain, and the afterglow had paled in the sky and on the fields. And as he recovered as best he could these lost dreams of an enchanted land, there came to him other images of his childhood, forgotten and yet not forgotten, dwelling unheeded in dark places of the memory, but ready to be summoned forth. He remembered one fantasy that had long haunted him. As he lay half asleep in the forest on one hot afternoon of that memorable visit to the country, he had “made believe” that a little companion had come to him out of the blue mists and the green light beneath the leaves⁠—a white girl with long black hair, who had played with him and whispered her secrets in his ear, as his father lay sleeping under a tree; and from that summer afternoon, day by day, she had been beside him; she had visited him in the wilderness of London, and even in recent years there had come to him now and again the sense of her presence, in the midst of the heat and turmoil of the City. The last visit he remembered well; it was a few weeks before he married, and from the depths of some futile task he had looked up with puzzled eyes, wondering why the close air suddenly grew scented with green leaves, why the murmur of the trees and the wash of the river on the reeds came to his ears; and then that sudden rapture to which he had given a name and an individuality possessed him utterly. He knew then how the dull flesh of man can be like fire; and now, looking back from a new standpoint on this and other experiences, he realized how all that was real in his life had been unwelcomed, uncherished by him, had come to him, perhaps, in virtue of merely negative qualities on his part. And yet, as he reflected, he saw that there had been a chain of witnesses all through his life: again and again