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Updated: May 4, 2025
But in the drawing-room he stood aghast, glancing round in the firelit dusk to ascertain that he had not mistaken the number, for though the maid at the door had a well-known face, and though tables, chairs, and pictures were familiar, the two occupants of the room were utter strangers, and at least as much startled as himself.
Yet again there are other moments, when sights and sounds have an overpowering and awful significance; when the gleams of some tremendous secret seemed flashed upon my mind, at the sight of the mist-hung valley with its leafless woods and level water-meadows; the flaring pomp of sunset hung low in the west over the bare ploughland or the wide-watered plain; the wailing of the wind round the firelit house; the faint twitter of awakening birds in the ivy; the voice and smile of my children; the music breaking the silence of the house at evening.
Soon the great valley lay below us, running out in a golden haze to the far blue mountains. "Ah!" she sighed, like one who comes from a winter night into a firelit room. She was silent, while her eyes drank in its spacious comfort. "That is your heritage, Elspeth. That is the birthday gift to which old Studd's powder-flask is the key." "Nay, yours," she said, "for you won it."
The shadows and the generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent wars, go by into ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all this, a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and peaceful landscape; many firelit parlours; good people laughing, drinking, and making love as they did before the Flood or the French Revolution; and the old shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn.
The death, so long ago, of that young love seemed more with her than her husband's death, which took on the visionary, picture aspect of any tragedy seen from a distance, not lived through. But now, in this long, firelit leisure, that was the final summing of it all. She was grave, she was sad; but she could feel no severity for herself, and, long ago, she had ceased to feel any for poor Everard.
Sometimes in certain modes, they could be sad, but it was the sadness of lonely homeless things, old dreaming spirits of wind and wave, not the sadness of such things as had known love and lost what they had loved, but the melancholy of such forlorn beings as by their nature were shut out from the love that dwells about the firelit hearth and the old roofs of homesteads.
A sudden radiance broke upon her face, a sudden shadow fell on the firelit floor, and there was entering at the doorway a tall, lithe young mountaineer, whose first glance, animated with a responsive brightness, was for the girl, but whose punctilious greeting was addressed to the old woman. "Howdy, Mis' Roxby howdy?
The road, the wide terrace beyond, the seats, the eternal sea beyond that, the lighted lamps now flaring in the October night-wind, with the few dispersed people abroad at the tea-hour; these things, meeting and melting into the firelit hospitality at his elbow or was it that portentous amenity that melted into them? seemed to form round him and to put before him, all together, the strangest of circles and the newest of experiences, in which the unforgettable and the unimaginable were confoundingly mixed.
Weldon sat slightly apart, watching the firelit group before him, while his mind trailed lazily to and fro, from home, with its holly wreaths in the windows, to Cape Town where the flower-boxes edging a wide veranda would be a mass of geranium blossoms now, and where, in the shady western end, would sit a tall girl with hair the color of the yellow flame.
Lancaster back to her room and administer to her what remained in the tiny gold flask. "Curse that green stuff!" said Bullard under his breath. "I'd sooner handle a bunch of live wires." He was standing in front of the clock, in the glow of an overhanging lamp, the only one he had switched on on entering the firelit room. The pendulum in its callous swing fairly blazed.
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