He moved forward quickly and pushed open the door. The room itself was
lightened by the gleam from the passage and also by the moonlight that
came dimly through the window. The shadow of some great tree was flung
upon the floor. He saw, at once, that the room was changed. The
rocking-horse that had been yesterday against the wall had now been
dragged far across the floor. The white front of the dolls'-house had
swung open and the furniture was disturbed as though some child had been
interrupted in his play. Four large dolls sat solemnly round a dolls'
tea-table, and a dolls' tea service was arranged in front of them. In
the very centre of the room a fine castle of bricks had been rising, a
perfect Tower of Babel in its frustrated ambition.
The shadow of the great tree shook and quivered above these things.
Seymour saw Mrs. Trenchard's face, he heard her whisper:
"Who is it? What is it?"
Then she fell upon her knees near the tower of bricks. She gazed at
them, stared round the rest of the room, then looked up at him, saying
very quietly:
"I knew that they would come back one day. I always waited. It must have
been they. Only Francis ever built the bricks like that, with the red
ones in the middle. He always said they _must_ be...."
She broke off and then, with her hands pressed to her face, cried, so
softly and so gently that she made scarcely any sound.
Seymour left her.
V
He passed through the house without any one seeing him, crossed the
common, and went up to his bedroom at the inn. He sat down before his
window with his back to the room. He flung the rattling panes wide.
The room looked out across on to the moor, and he could see, in the
moonlight, the faint thread of the beginning of the Borhaze Road. To
the left of this there was some sharp point of light, some cottage
perhaps. It flashed at him as though it were trying to attract his
attention. The night was so magical, the world so wonderful, so without
bound or limit, that he was prepared now to wait, passively, for his
experience. That point of light was where the Scarecrow used to be, just
where the brown fields rise up against the horizon. In all his walks
to-day he had deliberately avoided that direction. The Scarecrow would
not be there now; he had always in his heart fancied it there, and he
would not change that picture that he had of it. But now the light
flashed at him. As he stared at it he knew that to-day he had completed
that adventure that had begun for him many years ago, on that Christmas
Eve when he had met Mr. Pidgen.
They were whispering in his ear, "We've had a lovely day. It was the
most beautiful nursery.... Two other children came too. They wore
_their_ things...."
"What, after all," said his Friend's voice, "does it mean but that if
you love enough we are with you everywhere--for ever?"
And then the children's voices again:
"She thought they'd come back, but they'd never gone away--really, you
know."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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