“Oo’d ha’ thought he’d ha been so old,” said the neighbours, watching him totter back from the village well, with his two pails of water hanging on hooks from a bar of wood across his shoulders. “’E seemed a likely man too, when ’e married the girl, but folk didn’t ought to wed where there’s such a breach in years.”
“Ah, ’e feels that now,” said an old man wisely. “And yet it seems a pity ’e couldn’t ha’ kep’ the comfort o’ the little ’un. It wern’t _’er_ fault no ways, and it do seem rough on a child too.”
Was that what he was beginning to think himself also?
When their backs were all turned, and they had gone back to their work or their pleasure, to friends or to home; when the door was safely shut behind him and he was alone once more with the lonely, silent plain—the distant, murmuring sea—his face let go of that cruel hold on secrecy, he dared to think of his pain—to tell it—to himself and to the land that was his most familiar friend.
For his pain was there, it never left him. Only from having been a furious beast, flying at his throat, it had become merely a constant and wearisome companion, who would leave him no peace even in his loneliness—a persistent aching—a weary, weary longing.
Yes, that was it: a weary, weary longing—a longing for the little duties that used to need fitting in to his rougher man’s work, the care of a tender little body, the care of a sunny little soul, the daily anxieties and the hourly joys, the rare punishments, the frequent rewards, the mischief, and the noise and the laughter—the endless vitality of the day and the deep and tender rest of even.
To use her own little phrase—the phrase that came back to him at every turn—“all gone—all gone!”
The words echoed through his brain most days, but, when the bells of which the parish was so proud pealed on Sundays, and he closed his door and sat by his lonely hearth, instead of leading her forth to church in her best as he had been wont to do—then they fairly maddened him.
For the first chime of seven bells would seem to ring out other words that were almost as often in his mind; those last appealing words of his poor erring wife, that he so little understood at the time: “It ain’t ’er fault no ways, Tom!” and then the last short bell would say over and over again: “All gone, all gone!” until he could have sworn at it to bid it stop.