The Arrival at Marsh End

Source written for Revision Library in a classic literary style (original, copyright-free).

The carriage had been climbing since noon, and still the moor rolled away on every side, vast and colourless beneath a sky the hue of pewter. Eleanor Marsh pressed her gloved hand to the window and watched the last farmhouse recede into that grey immensity, until nothing remained to mark the road save the wheel-ruts filling slowly with rain. She had been travelling since dawn, and weariness had long since given way to a quieter apprehension: the sense, not easily reasoned away, that she was passing out of one life and into another from which there could be no easy return.

It was nearly five o'clock, and the light failing fast, when the carriage turned at last between two crumbling stone pillars and entered an avenue of limes so ancient and so densely grown that their branches met overhead in a dripping vault. Eleanor caught her first sight of the house through this tunnel of wet leaves: a long, low frontage of grey stone, its windows dark and numerous as the cells of a hive, its roofline broken by a solitary weathervane that turned, with a mournful creak, first one way and then another, as though undecided which quarter of the wind to trust. She had been told the house was called Marsh End, and she thought, as the carriage drew up before its door, that no name could have suited it better; for it seemed indeed to stand at the very end of things, forbidding further passage, admitting nothing beyond itself but the moor and the failing light.

The door was opened before she had properly descended by a woman of perhaps fifty years, spare and upright, in a gown of such severe black that Eleanor took her, for one uncertain moment, to be in mourning. This was Mrs Kelsall, the housekeeper, whose greeting, though civil enough in its words, was delivered with a reticence that Eleanor would come to know well in the weeks that followed: a manner of speaking that gave away no more than duty strictly required, and left the rest, always, to be guessed at. "You will be tired from the journey, Miss Marsh," said she, taking up one of the smaller boxes herself. "The master is from home until Thursday. You will meet your pupil directly."

Eleanor followed her across a vestibule floored in black and white stone, and into a hall so vast and so ill-lit that the portraits ranged along its walls seemed less to hang there than to lurk, their painted eyes following her progress with an attention she found it difficult entirely to dismiss as fancy. No sound reached her but the ticking of a great clock upon the stair, and, once, from some upper region of the house, what she took at first for the wind in a chimney, and then, listening again, was no longer sure that it had been the wind at all.

It was in this hall that Mrs Kelsall paused, and turned, and for the first time looked at Eleanor directly. "Master Julian is a delicate child," she said, choosing her words, it seemed to Eleanor, with unusual care, "and much altered since his poor mother died. You will find him quiet. I would not have you expect otherwise, nor" - here she hesitated, and the pause lengthened until Eleanor thought she did not mean to finish the sentence at all - "nor be surprised by anything he may tell you. Children imagine a great deal, in a house like this one, with no one but servants for company." She said no more, but led the way up the staircase with the air of one who had already said too much.

Eleanor's room, when she reached it, proved small but not uncomfortable, with a narrow bed, a washstand, and a single window that looked out, not upon the avenue by which she had come, but upon the marsh itself, stretching away grey and featureless to a horizon she could no longer distinguish from the sky. She stood at this window some minutes after Mrs Kelsall had gone, watching the last light drain out of the day, and turning over in her mind all that had been said, and, more particularly, all that had been left unsaid. She was one and twenty, and had faced, she told herself, worse trials than an old house and a taciturn housekeeper. And yet, as the dark came down at last over the marsh, and a single light appeared, briefly, in a window she could not account for, she found her resolve required rather more effort to maintain than she had expected it would.