Prisoners of Silence

Chapter I

It had been a dull, damp October day. The hours had worn one into another heavily and drearily ; weighted, as it were, with the moisture, intangible but all pervading which seemed to shut out alike healthy air, invigorating light, and that elasticity which these bring to the spirit of mankind. The day was dying now, though it was only four o'clock in the afternoon ; and as the light waned, fading as something incongruous and incom patible with the raw, sad atmosphere, along the little river which ran through the small cathedral town up from the flat, grey-looking country, crept a cold white mist. The river ran through the poorest part of the town, and the mist crawled first through slums, passing in at open doors and broken windows, casting a deadly damp where was already the deadly chill of poverty, killing struggling little fires, searching through and through scanty garments to shivering frames.

Up from the slums it passed, spreading and growing steadily and imperceptibly, into the busy thoroughfares, chilling the hope and the vigour out of the workers, hushing and blighting as it moved. On through the town to where the shops gave place to houses ; little villa residences, through the thin walls and ill-fitting doors and windows B of which it penetrated, insidious and all pervading. Out here, where there was little human warmth and little light to temper it, it gathered force and volume, as though the genius of the long brooding day had taken form at last and risen in resistless power. On up the hill it swept, shrouding and blotting out the better houses it encountered, until it reached the summit. On the brow of the hill, just where the road turned, a green palisade ran along by the pavement enclosing a garden, and some two or three hundred yards further on, a house, which loomed out in the dusk, square and white.

Noiselessly and imperceptibly the palisade was blotted out. Up the garden the mist stole, slowly, very slowly, rolling itself out now like some impalpable winding-sheet ; creeping on and on until the square white house rose up grey and gloomy from its very midst. Here on the top of the hill the impulse which had rolled it up from the river ceased. It spread no further, except as it grew thinner in the distance and dispersed. It seemed to stop at the white house, round which it hung heavy and clinging. There was the slightest possible stir in the air up here — all insufficient to be called a breeze, all insufficient to break up the mist. But it was enough to stir it slightly, to produce a hardly perceptible fluctuation in its density, to give it a strange effect of stealthy, creeping movement.

Round and round the house it seemed to steal, to and fro ; pressing itself against the walls ; crawling up and along windows and doors ; with a haunting suggestion in its shadowy restlessness as of some weird, half palpable presence that sought an entrance. A few bricks, a pane or so of glass. On the other side of this slight barrier was a picture of placid, commonplace comfort ; which, in the very sharpness of the contrast it presented, emphasized into that grotesqueness which is never without a touch of the terrible, the grim suggestion shut out by warm curtains and bright lights. It was a square room, fairly large. It was furnished as a drawing room ; not as the idea obtains in fashionable London, but according to the canons of country town taste and conscience. The bulk of the furniture was such as might have been bought about thirty years earlier — a large oval rosewood table, heavy upholstered sofa and chairs, a large pier-glass.

Super imposed on this foundation was a miscellaneous selection of objects evidently of more recent introduction, and products of that artistic development on which the latter end of the nineteenth century particularly prides itself ; there were sundry bamboo-chairs, a little oak table, a " Liberty " silk fire-screen, and so forth. And these articles were disposed about the room with an absolute absence of taste, which proclaimed that they had been selected on some other principle than that of artistic merit, and that the artistic faculty in their arranger was probably non-existent. The wall-paper was of the much gilded floral order ; the pictures were water-colours, which startled alternately by their unprecedented feeble ness and their unnecessary violence. The cottage piano more nearly resembled a nick-nack table than a musical instrument ; apparently its presence required justifica tion.

But the incongruous ugliness of the room was not its most salient feature. It was dominated and thrown into abeyance by a certain air of solid comfort which pervaded it ; an air which obviously owed its origin — and suggested the fact with unmistakeable distinctness — to well-directed housewifely care and common sense. The comfort in question was that commonplace animal comfort which is entirely independent of beauty or refinement, needing only substantial ministration to that B physical warmth and ease which constitute it. And it spoke as eloquently in every fold of the ugly red velvet curtains, in every yard of thick, Avell-swept, barbaric carpet : above all, in every matter-of-fact detail in the arrangement of the Avhole ; as in the strong illumination given by the large lamp and the bright fire on the spotless hearth.

But the point of the background — as of all arrange ments of inanimate things — lay in the humanity for which it formed a setting, and which gave the final touch of life and reality to all its suggestions. The room had only one occupant — a Avoman. She was sitting at some distance from the fire near the table, and Avell Avithin the circle of lamplight, with some grey knitting in her hands ; and every line of her figure, at once composed and energetic, every decisive movement of her hands, or of her head, as she turned it now and again to look at the clock, proclaimed, beyond all possibility of doubt, that here Avas not only the mistress, but the mind to which the room owed its character ; the personality in AA'hich all that it shadoAved forth touched the supreme expression. She was a tall, rather large-boned Avoman, presumably some fifty years old, well developed and matronly-looking.

She wore a brown dress, rather plainly cut after that translation of the fashion of two years back Avhich would be likely to commend itself to a country tOAvn dressmaker, and made of a stuff Avhich had evidently been selected with the same keen common sense as to durability, and the same absence of taste, as that evinced in the room in which she sat. It was quite umvorn, and conveyed an impression of solid value and suitability ; the former characteristic being further borne out by the handsome gold brooch which fastened her collar and the Avatch-chain visible in the front of her dress. She wore no cap. Her rather coarse black hair was brushed back from her forehead and arranged in a series of neat and compact plaits at the back ; and, except at the temples, where it was considerably worn away, it was very plentiful.

Her face— and when once that was noticed, the hard deftness of her hands also — very subtly reduced the impression of comfort conveyed by her surroundings to an affair of line and rule, the outcome of a vigorous and rigorous sense of fitness, and a determination that things and people alike should be kept up to the mark. It had probably been conspicuously good-looking in its girlish days in a bold, highly-coloured style. The strongly-marked features and the large black eyes were still there ; but under the hardening hand of time, all that had rendered them attractive had disappeared. There were few wrinkles ; but two deep, perpendicular lines in the forehead and the vigorous set of the rather thin lips gave the whole face a somewhat sharp determination. The eyes, also, were keen and hard, with no beauty, either of depth or sympathy.

A lack of sympathy, in fact, a something which, without being coarse in its outward expression, suggested a certain coarseness or bluntness within, was one of the most marked characteristics of the face. She sat there, never slackening the mechanical energy of her fingers even when she glanced round, as has been said, at the clock. Even this slight manifestation of restlessness or expectancy seemed a little out of keeping with her personality. By-and-by she rose and poked the fire ; strictly for its good and not at all as a satisfaction to herself. She was returning to her seat with a brisk and rather heavy step when the door opened. " Tea, my dear ? It is almost — indeed, I may say it is past five o'clock, is it not ? " The new-comer who spoke these words was a man. He was an elderly man ; his hair, indeed, was nearly white ; he was short in stature and spare in figure ; and the most remarkable point about him at the moment was the contrast between his general bearing and expression and the tone in which he spoke.

His small proportions were drawn up, evidently habitually, to their fullest ex tent ; and there was that in the slight inflation of his chest, in the pose of his head, and in his step as he walked across the room, which revealed the fact that here was a man who was accustomed to regard himself, and, indeed, to be regarded, as a person of the utmost importance. The lines about the rather wavering pale brown eyes, innumerable fine wrinkles, spoke of perfect self-complacency. The somewhat loose lips, distinctly uncertain in expression for the moment, alone seemed to harmonize with the manner of his speech ; the shape of the chin, which might possibly have borne out the im pression conveyed by the mouth, being hidden by a small white beard. His tone presented the singular combination of pomposity, peevishness, and tentativeness, the first-named qualities being conspicuously in the minority.

His small and elderly tenor voice seemed to become weaker as he spoke and as he drew nearer to the fire. He held an open letter in his hand, and as he finished speaking, he returned it to its envelope. It was addressed to " Dr. Vallotson, The Chestnuts." "Are you thinking of waiting?" he added, sub missively. His wife glanced from the tea equipage in the corner, wanting only the tea-pot for perfect completeness, to the clock. " She ought to be here by this time," she said. " Yes we will wait for her." Her voice bore out the suggestion of her face. It was hard and decisive. And Dr. Vallotson subsided into a luxurious easy chair, in which he established himself with peculiar care for his personal ease, before he spoke again. When he finally broke the silence, he appeared to be un consciously indemnifying himself for his enforced patience by the contemplation of himself in a more dignified position.

" It has been a very expensive business," he said, fixing his eyes on the fire, and letting his finger-tips rest lightly together as he solemnly pursed up his mouth. " Very expensive, this Girton affair ; and as to this foreign travelling — well, I hope Constance knows what a for tunate girl she is." Mrs. Vallotson glanced at him for a moment with a certain half-contemptuous curve about her lips as of a listener who knows considerably more both of his expenses and his income than does the speaker himself. Then she said composedly, — " It is a good thing for a girl to travel ; and I don't suppose Girton did her any harm, either ! " There was a moment's silence, and then Dr. Vallotson fidgeted irritably. The desire for his tea was evidently growing upon him, and peremptorily demanded some kind of outlet.

Being as peremptorily forbidden direct expression, it obviously sought relief through some other channel ; and in a few minutes he began to speak with almost undisguised peevishness. " I really cannot see, Adelaide," he said, " what neces sity there was for sending North to meet Constance. I feel sure she could have come with perfect safety alone, or a suitable escort could have been fonnd for her by her friends. And I have been exceedingly inconvenienced by his absence." A moment's silence followed this expression of Dr. Vallotson's opinion. His wife had met his little furtive movements of impatience with absolute calm. The tones of his irritable voice as he began his last speech had left her absolutely unmoved ; but during the course of that same speech her face had changed suddenly. For an instant, and only for an instant, everything about it that was hard and unwomanly was intensified until it was almost repellent.

Then the tension of the muscles which must have produced this strange effect seemed to relax, leaving her face rather set. " I do not approve of young girls travelling alone. I do not choose my daughter to do it ! " she said drily and mechanically. " But you do not seem to consider — " Dr. Vallotson was interrupted. A very neat servant had come noiselessly into the room, and was now stand ing by his chair. " If you please, sir," she said, " there's a message from the Dean's to ask when Dr. Branston will be back." " From the Dean's ! " repeated Dr. Vallotson fussily, lifting himself at the same time with evident reluctance from his easy-chair. " Say I will come down to the Deanery at once, Sarah. Dear ! dear ! " In the final ejaculations were blent the accents of considerable self importance and elation, and the regret of a naturally lazy man for ease which must be abandoned.

But as he prepared to rise the servant spoke again. "They don't want any one at once, sir," she said. " The message is only to say will Dr. Branston step down as soon as convenient after he gets back, and to ask when — " Quite suddenly, and almost as though the reiterated question were more than she could bear, Mrs. Vallotson interposed harshly. " You have been told once to-day, Sarah," she said, " Dr. Branston is expected home every moment, as you must know perfectly well ! Say that he will call at the Deanery this evening ! " There was a ring in her mistress's voice, and a flash in her mistress's eyes, before which Sarah departed pre cipitately. And Dr. Vallotson, apparently vaguely con scious of something in his wife's tone which seemed to him in harmony with his own feelings, turned to her with a movement full of vindictive annoyance.

" This is the kind of thing that has been going on all day," he said petulantly. " If I have been asked once in the course of this day when North will be back, I have been asked fifty times. It is exceedingly annoying." He paused, but Mrs. Vallotson made no comment. She was knitting rapidly, with her attention apparently concentrated on her work, and her face singularly forbidding. Receiving no verbal sympathy, but not apparently feeling himself checked, Dr. Vallotson pro ceeded to elaborate his expression of irritation. " That I should be anxious for his return," he said, " is natural enough. I am really beginning to feel the strain of the heavy work, which this holiday of his has thrown upon me, very severely. But it is a matter that cannot possibly affect any one else. I shall make a point of speaking to North on the subject to-morrow."

The somewhat peculiar chain of reasoning which ex pressed itself in the last words, spoken with much pom pous irascibility, passed as unnoticed by Mrs. Vallotson as had the denunciatory tone of her husband's previous observations. As though she, in her turn, were seeking some outlet for a feeling not to be directly expressed, she lifted her eyes suddenly to the clock, and said harshly, — " It is getting very late ! I hope North has made no mistakes about the trains." Dr. Vallotson gave a lordly but rather unheeding wave of his hand, as though to intimate that there was every possibility that such was the case. He pursued his own train of thought without a break. " He has been exceedingly remiss, too, with his correspondence during his absence," he said angrily. " Exceedingly remiss ! To my additional inconvenience !

You remember, Adelaide, my mentioning the new Cottage Hospital at Hatherleigh to you ? They are anxious for some reason or another that North should be at its head." "Hasn't he answered ?" said Mrs. Vallotson, looking up sharply. " Not a word ! " returned her husband. " I forwarded the letter of the committee a week ago — directly after he started, you know — and he has made them no reply. I have been perfectly pestered for the last two days with inquiries as to whether I think he will undertake it. Here is a note which has just come from Archdeacon French, most anxious about it." Mrs. Vallotson's lips took their most determined line. " Of course he will undertake it ! " she said shortly. " There's no question about it. But it is extremely wrong of him — " She stopped short. The front-door bell was pealing through the house, and as she heard it Mrs. Vallotson rose, not hurriedly but instantly, and laid down her work.

The darkness passed from her face as though the feeling that brought it there were suddenly and absolutely dis placed ; and she went out of the room with quick, firm steps. Dr. Vallotson looked after her and settled himself com fortably in his chair. " Dear child," he murmured pompously. " Dear little Constance ! I wonder whether she has grown ? " A moment or two later voices and footsteps made themselves audible in the passage outside, and he turned towards the door as it was pushed open by Mrs. Vallot son, who was saying, evidently as a conclusion to a speech unheard, — " And you must be hungry, too, I'm sure, child ! Come and have some tea directly." Nothing, evidently, could make Mrs. Vallotson's voice soft, or her face tender ; but there was something about her alert decision as she re-entered the room — a satisfaction, a kind of pleased excitement — which changed her very strangely.

She did not touch the girl who was following her, nor did she glance round at her as she hastened across the room to the tea-table. But in every line of her face, in every tone of her voice, as she issued quick, terse orders to the servant who was bringing in the tea-pot, there was an intense consciousness of her presence. The new arrival was a small, thin girl with Mrs. Vallotson's large black eyes ; a smooth forehead sur mounted, under her travelling hat, by soft, fluffy brown hair ; a little nose rather inclined to turn up at the ip ; and a brown complexion. She would have been a very pretty girl but for the excessive prominence of a chin that seemed too large for her face. She was a little pale now, as though with fatigue ; but her expression and bearing were singularly composed, and singularly self-assured.

She received the embrace with which Dr. Vallotson greeted her with great calmness, kissing him lightly on the cheek in return. " Thanks, yes, a very good journey on the whole!" she said, in answer to his inquiry. " Oh, no, I'm not tired, thank you, father. The distance from Paris is nothing, you know." The high-pitched girlish voice was a little self-satisfied, and more than a little supercilious. It harmonized unmis takably with the curve, evidently habitual, of the rather pretty lips, and with the glance of the eyes. But the expression and the manner alike modified — with curious unconsciousness of the fact on the part of their owner — as Mrs. Vallotson spoke from the other side of the room, and the girl turned towards her. "Here's your tea, Connie," said Mrs. Vallotson. " Take it and sit down there by the fire.

That's right ! Are you cold ? How is it you're so late ? " " What time did you leave London ? " added Dr. Vallotson, condescendingly. " The train was late, mother," returned the girl, with much less self-assertion in her voice — though here again the modification was evidently quite unconscious. " Nearly half an hour late. Dear me, it is nice to be at home again ! " She was looking at her mother, as she spoke, with a little smile in her eyes which made her face far prettier than did their ordinary critical expression. But Mrs. Vallotson only replied by a brief nod of approbation, though the lines about her mouth were wonderfully relaxed as she turned her attention to the condition of the tea-pot. It was Dr. Vallotson who said, — " Of course ! of course ! Quite right, my dear, quite right !

Let me see, now ; how long is it since you were at home? Six months ? " " Ten months," said his wife decisively. " Connie didn't leave Cambridge at Easter, and she went abroad directly the summer holidays began. I think you've grown, Connie." Connie drew herself up with some dignity. "I don't think so, mother!" she said rather quickly. " One doesn't generally grow at my age, does one ? North said—" Mrs. Vallotson turned towards her abruptly, a quick contraction as of sudden recollection making the lines in her forehead show deep and clear cut. But the verbal interruption came from her husband. " North ! " he said testily. " Yes, by-the-bye, of course ! Where is North ? " " He has come, I suppose ? " said Mrs. Vallotson. Her voice rang in harsh contrast with the tone of her last observation, and Constance answered her mother.

" Oh, yes," she said indifferently, " of course. A man met him at the station — one of the men out of Garrett's stores, I think he said — and asked him to go and see his son as soon as he could ; and North went with him at once. He asked me to say that he should not be long." Mrs. Vallotson made no comment. She poured out a second cup of tea for her husband, with no softening of the contraction of her brows. But Dr. Vallotson amply compensated Connie for her silence. " A most preposterous thing to do ! " he declared. " Most preposterous ! and really almost insulting in North, as though the practice needed his services so urgently that he could not even go through the town without finding work ! The practice has done very well without him, as I can assure him, though I have been worked to death !

He should most certainly have come home first, and received his instructions from me A man from Garrett's stores, did you say?" Dr. Vallot son's cheeks flushed a faint, angry pink as he spoke. " Why, that must be the person who sent for me late last night — all down to Hobart's Court — and evidently a slight case ! Of course, I did not think of going. I sent the man on to Smith. If North had had the common courtesy to consult me on the subject, I could have told him so 1 " Mrs. Vallotson's eyes were turned upon her husband as he spoke, and their gaze seemed somewhat to discom pose him, though she did not speak. He was beating his foot upon the carpet with an uneasy assertion of righteously offended dignity, when Constance, who had been contemplating him with some disapprobation in her eyes, turned her head suddenly.

" Wasn't that the front door?" she said. "I expect that is North." With a movement that was very sudden and almost violent, Mrs. Vallotson rose, and turned away to place her knitting in a basket on a side-table. As will some times happen in moments of even trivial expectancy, no one spoke. Dr. Vallotson continued to beat his foot upon the carpet with a pronounced accentuation of his air of lofty indignation. Constance drank her tea in composed indifference. And it was in the midst of the same silence that Mrs. Vallotson, with her lips so tightly set as to be even slightly paled, came back into the lamp light as the door opened, and a tall, dark young man came into the room. He paused for an instant on the threshold as he became aware of the family group await ing him, and a constraint which might have been a faint reflection of the rigidity in the dark woman's face turned towards him, seemed to strengthen about him.

Then he crossed the room to Mrs. Vallotson. " How are you, Adelaide ? " he said, in a strong and full, but rather formal, tone. " I am sorry to have been delayed." And then, as she mechanically lifted her cheek to him, he stooped and just touched it with his lips.

Chapter II

The little cathedral city of Alnchester, lying snugly en sconced beneath its long range of sheltering, if insignifi cant hills, seemed to have missed, in spite of its antiquity, that vaguely attractive quality called venerable ness. The few old houses left had little character of their own, and no beauty. Even the cathedral was an uninteresting grey pile. The market-place and all the older part of the town lay directly at the bottom of the hills and near the river. The newer parts had grown up on the other side of the market-place, and had spread up a steep rise in the ground ; and it was from these newer parts that the town derived such negative colour as it possessed. To the commonplace was wedded an air of unimpeachable respectability ; neat, well kept, monotonous. Whether the character of their city influenced the tone of the inhabitants, or whether the tone of the in habitants was responsible for the character of the city, it is not possible to say.

The fact remains that the people of Alnchester were in perfect harmony with their surroundings. The ideas of Alnchester were bounded by Alnchester thought. Messages from the world beyond, in the shape of books or newspapers, were received on approval, so to speak ; but unless the matter they contained was sus ceptible of transmutation by the Alnchester mind into something that the Alnchester public could understand and accept, they were loftily ignored, or still more loftily condemned. The wheels of daily life ran in grooves which time had modified, inevitably, to some extent, but which had been modified as inevitably to the Alnchester pattern. Innovations of all kinds were regarded with a disapproving superiority, which only melted into approval and admiration when the progress of time and the touch of necessity had made them apparently indi genous to Alnchester soil.

The society of Alnchester was divided sharply into two divisions : the cathedral people and the townspeople. The two parties never mixed— the thing would have seemed to them inconceivable — but they existed side by side in perfect amity. The cathedral people, the aristocrats of Alnchester, looked down with serene tolerance upon their inferiors. The townspeople were not without a certain pride in the precincts, and were never weary of striving for the impossible — a footing in the " cathedral set." Each sphere had its own interests com plete within itself ; its own topics of gossip. But either sphere being somewhat limited as a field for human energies, and Alnchester affairs being of course better worth attention than any other, it did happen now and again that a conspicuous event in one sphere would attract the notice of the other, and serve as food for discussion in both.

Such an event had taken place, towards the end of the 'sixties, in the establishment in Alnchester of a new doctor. The circumstance had not at first sight seemed one likely to focus the attention of town and precincts for any length of time. The practice which death had rendered vacant was not an important one. But the transitory interest which was all that his fellow-townsmen had been prepared to bestow upon the new-comer had found itself, almost without consciousness, certainly without volition, on their part, arrested and held. The new doctor turned out to be a newly-married man. Before very long it began to be whispered about that young Mrs. Vallotson was " rather an acquisition ; so capable, and so sensible." And at the same time Dr. Vallotson, who was understood to be ten years her senior, and who was referred to at first in somewhat non-committal terms as " a nice, quiet little man," was discovered to be " very clever in his profession."

The practice began to grow. There was a certain feature about the Vallotson household which afforded unlimited material for discussion in Alnchester ; and thus helped, other circumstances being so favourable, to keep it before the public eye. And this was the presence therein of a dark, taciturn little boy of four years old. He was introduced to Alnchester as Mrs. Vallotson's half-brother, by name North Branston. So great a disparity of age between a half-brother and sister, argued a family history of some interest ; it also suggested the pleasing probability of exceedingly charming relations of a semi-maternal character between the said brother and sister. As to the first of these two points, Alnchester was enlightened on its introduction to the boy in a few matter-of-fact sentences, which accounted for his existence in the simplest fashion, and deprived it of any possible halo of romance.