Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/33

 The door closed. Very slowly he raised himself, but moving was torture; he put on his night-shirt and then quickly caught back a scream as it touched his back. He moved to the window and closed it, then he climbed very slowly on to his bed, and the tears that he had held back came, slowly at first, and then more rapidly, at last in torrents. It was not the pain, although that was bad, but it was the misery and the desolation and the great heaviness of a world that held out no hope, no comfort, but only a great cloud of unrelieved unhappiness.

At last, sick with crying, he fell asleep.

The first shadow of light was stealing across the white undulating common and creeping through the bare trees of the desolate garden when four dark figures, one tall, two fat, and one small, stole softly up the garden path. They halted beneath the windows of the house; the snow had ceased falling, and their breath rose in clouds above their heads. They danced a little in the snow and drove their hands together, and then the tall figure said:

“Now, Tom Prother, out with thy musick.” One of the fat figures felt in his coat and produced four papers, and these we^e handed round.

“Bill, my son, it's for thee to lead off at thy brightest, mind ye. Let 'em have it praper.”

The small figure came forward and began; at first his voice was thin and quavering, but in the second line it gathered courage and rang out full and bold:


 * As oi sat under a sicymore tree
 * A sicymore tree, a sicymore tree,
 * Oi looked me out upon the sea
 * On Christ's Sunday at morn.

“Well for thee, lad,” said the tall figure approvingly, “but the cold is creepin' from the tips o' my fingers till my singin' voice is most frozen. Now. altogether.”

And the birds in the silent garden woke amongst the ivy on the distant wall and listened: