“Whoever it was he’s disappeared now,” he said, coming back to the middle of the room and hesitating there with a puzzled frown, his hand on the chair where he had laid his clothes.
“I wonder if I ought to dress and go out and see—I don’t want to make a fuss—but if it is Uncle Dick—— What did Pandie say about him?”
“She said he’d been behaving queerly all day; hanging about the garden with a gun and. asking her questions.”
Rook gave a perceptible start. “What?” he cried out. Then in a calmer voice: “I don’t see anything very mad in that, Netta! Pandie’s always getting the jumps about something or other. Uncle Dick was no doubt wanting me to go shooting with him. Good Lord! I can’t see the old man wandering round here with a lantern in the middle of the night.”
Netta shook her head. “But you said you saw someone. Did the man you see have a gun, Rook?”
He did not answer, but began pacing up and down the room, cursing under his breath: “The Corporal! Damn the Corporal!”
Each time he came to the chair where his clothes had been thrown, he stopped and picked up his shirt or his vest. Then he would throw the thing down and start walking and muttering again.
Nothing could have been more disagreeable to him than the idea of playing hide-and-seek at that confounded hour with a problematical Uncle Dick.
The unpleasant notion that if it was his uncle he might have to lock him up for the night, or even escort him back home over Battlefield and Dorsal, made him extremely unwilling to begin the business of dressing. And yet something ought to be done!
But perhaps it wasn’t Uncle Dick at all—just some predatory night wanderer from the village on the way to his rabbit snares. A nocturnal chase after a poor devil of that kind would be worse than the other possibility.
Rook decided to let the matter rest. He became conscious of a superimposing weight in the atmosphere that made nothing seem more desirable than to take Netta in his arms and fall fast asleep.
He flung a shovelful of coal on the fire to keep it alive till morning, and throwing the window wide open to the now absolutely untroubled night, got straight into bed.
It was Netta and not he who stayed a wake long enough to count the strokes, when the solemn Queen Anne timepiece in the hall downstairs, an object brought into the family by one of the sagacious marriages of great-grandfather Benjamin, struck twelve of the clock.
Rook was still fast asleep, as fast asleep as if he had spent the night drinking wine with Monsieur Voltaire, when Netta awoke to her first white Christmas at Ashover.
An extraordinary sensation, that sudden consciousness of the fact that the window ledges were thick with a soft feathery muffling substance, and the dark woodwork of the window a mere frame to the falling, falling, falling of heavy silent flakes!
A miraculous intrusion, this mysterious whiteness, so different from all terrestrial or solar elements; as if some vast meteoric moon, virginal and immaculate, had actually collided, in its mystic orbit, with our motley guilt-stained earth!
Netta glanced at the fire. It was still warm and glowing, while a light that seemed to proceed rather from the snow itself than from any remoter luminary filled the room with a faint bluish mist.
Very noiselessly she slipped out of bed and began hurriedly putting on her clothes. It was a little after seven and she knew that there was a service at eight in Ashover Church.
She had secretly resolved the night before that she would go to this service. Mrs. Ashover always went to the more popular one at eleven o’clock; but Netta had helped Nell Hastings to set up a little straw-thatched manger, overarched with holly, in that famous chancel, and she was filled with an eager desire to see how it looked with the lighting of the candles Cousin Ann, she felt sure, would go rushing through the snow with Lion if she went out at all. In fact, the chances were that there would be no human being at this queer ceremony except the disastrous Mr. Hastings and his equivocal wife.
She took her heavy cloak and muffler, drew a pair of goloshes over her thickest boots, pulled low down over her head a young girl’s tam-o’-shanter that had accompanied her through all her vicissitudes, kissed her hand at the figure in the bed, and let herself out.
She left the house by the kitchen door, greeting Pandie and the cook, who were enjoying a cup of early tea over the stove, in so happy a voice that when she had gone Pandie remarked to the other: “These here actressy gels do love a bit of white Christmas, same as decent-living folks, then; seems so! Her be gone to hear Parson Hastings say his ‘shed-for-you’ by snow-shine I reckon! Will the poor deceived man give the like o’ she the sacriments, do ’ee suppose?”
Martha Vabbin opened the top of the stove with an iron hook and shifted the kettle.
“Maybe he will and maybe he won’t,” she replied. “But I heard tell that when Corporal Dick askit for a sup o’ them things in bygone days the Reverend that then was talked terrible straight to the poor hedge-dropped lad.”
Netta’s experience of snow in the real country was so slight that she felt an extraordinary sensation of awe as her steps broke the feathery whiteness that covered everything. A cart of some kind had entered the drive gate since the snow-storm began; but apart from this, everything was virginal and unstained.
The purity of the new-fallen snow made all the various little objects that displayed themselves in their shameless browns or yellows look more than just dirty; look in some queer way degraded, as if Nature had tossed them out in a fit of disgust. Every single twig or gatepost or tree root which did dare to assert its identity, bore upon its face the look of being subjected to a kind of penitential exposure, as if the self-respecting reticence with which it had concealed all the little birthmarks, deformities, and discolorations upon its poor skin were being held up to scorn.
Netta had passed round the corner of the house and was making her way through the little shrubbery path bordered by laurels and laurustinus, when she became aware of a sudden rustling and stumbling in the bushes behind her. She stopped and turned round. Could it be that Rook had found she was gone and had followed her? The moment she stopped and remained motionless, the person or animal behind her did the same thing; and so instantaneous was the sequence of silence upon sound that it was almost as if the steps of this mysterious pursuer were only an echo of her own.
Something kept her from retracing her way; perhaps a vague fear that it might be Cousin Ann; but each time she advanced and stopped again, the same phenomenon repeated itself. In the end she began to run, stumbling over the hidden roots and shaking the snow down from the smooth leaves of the laurels.
Just at the moment she emerged from the shrubbery near the drive gate and caught sight of the lighted windows of the church on the other side of the river, she tripped up over a dead branch and fell headlong to the ground.
Simultaneously with her fall two sharp reports rang out behind her and two volleys of leaden gunshot rattled against the gate.
She scrambled up on her knees, her face in the direction from which the shots had come. With a rapid movement of thought she wondered if she had been hit; and as she wondered, she was distinctly conscious of a delicious wave of relaxation and relief.
Her brain had never been clearer, her thoughts never more clairvoyant.
If only she had been hit, how lovely to die just here; especially if Rook came to find her when she was dead! It was with a queer detached observation, almost as if she had been an irresponsible onlooker instead of a muffled-up white-faced woman kneeling in the snow, that she watched the tall form of Corporal Dick emerge from the bushes.
Seeing her kneeling like this and gazing at him with great staring eyes, it must have crossed the crazed wits of the Ashover bastard that the contents of both his barrels had lodged in her body.
With a gasping cry he flung his gun away and stood panting, like an animal that has killed its quarry but has burst its own heart in the exhausting pursuit.
For the space of three or four seconds the w
oman’s eyes and the man’s eyes remained spellbound, entoiled in that peculiar and unique complicity—unlike anything else in the world—that unites a hunter and his victim.
Then in one swooning moment the effect of his twelve-hour vigil in the falling snow darkened the old man’s senses. He reeled like a tree that has been cut with an axe, threw up his arms, and fell heavily on his face.
His fall and the sight of his outstretched figure lying before her broke the spell of Netta’s paralyzed nerves. She staggered to her feet and moving toward him knelt down by his side. At first she thought he was dead; but as she turned his gaunt frame over, she felt his heart beating under his snow-dampened clothes.
With some effort, for Corporal Dick’s tall figure was massive-boned though skeleton-lean, she dragged him along the snow to the nearest tree and there propped up his head on her muffler and tam-o’-shanter. Then she took off her cloak and spread it over him; and after standing for a second to see whether the tree trunk kept the snow from falling on his face, she started back at a run toward the house; crossing the lawn between the lime tree and the cedar.
As she ran she heard the church bell begin to ring. It rang unevenly, and she surmised that either Nell herself was ringing it or that Mr. Hastings had got some village boy to help him.
By good luck Rook had heard the report of the gun and was already half-dressed when she reached their room.
“Shot at you?” he kept repeating; and he hugged her with more warmth than Netta had experienced for many a long month. “Shot at you? Corporal Dick shot at you? Ay! What a race we are!”
He seemed to Netta to be actually exhilarated by the event. She heard him humming “Good King Wenceslaus” as he pulled on his boots. This was a tendency she was never quite able to fathom in him, this tendency to detach himself from things that happened and to enjoy them in a sort of inhuman trance, as if they were insubstantial dream pictures!
Netta felt obscurely piqued by his mood, in spite of the warm hug he had given her. It seemed odd that he should hum “King Wenceslaus” like that, when she had just been shot at as if she had been a pheasant or a rabbit!
She could not help the tears coming into her eyes as she thought how easily she might have been lying now just where the Corporal was lying.
It was through a vague self-pitying humour, not devoid, however, of a certain sweetness, that the domestic agitations that followed reached her mind as if through a mist made of fine-drifted snow.
It all seemed to mingle with the snow, this whispered, murmured agitation; Pandie’s voice offering wild conjectures; Mrs. Ashover’s voice issuing contradictory commands.
It mingled with the snow; it mingled with that sudden glance she had had of the lighted windows across the river; it mingled with the tune of “King Wenceslaus”; it mingled with a few floating fragmentary words from that old ditty, about “bringing meat” and “bringing wine!”
She was herself so far removed from the domestic furore that rose and fell round the recovering consciousness of Corporal Dick that she hardly commented on the fact that Rook said no word about her version of the episode in the garden. Rook was not the only perosn who heard the shots; nor was Rook the only person who knew of the Corporal’s excited state of mind. Netta was once more, however, to become aware of how embattled a front the House of Ashover could turn to all outside interference.
Even when the gun itself was found, half-buried in the snow, it did not seem to occur to any one that the affair was a matter for official examination. The old feudal spirit, according to which in former days the Lords of Frome-side would have power of life and death over those within their gates, seemed to hover over every aspect of this unlucky incident.
But it was not only the alarums and excursions of domestic agitation that reached Netta, during the subsequent hours of that singular Christmas Day, through a dream-like mist. The attitude of each one of the family, their personal characteristic reactions, affected her with the same muffled remoteness.
It seemed to her half-unreal when she learnt that Corporal Dick was suffering from brain fever; still more unreal when she heard his voice, apparently perfectly sane and intelligible, demanding that he should be taken home; most of all unreal when it was decided that he should be taken—in Doctor Twickenham’s closed carriage—to the gamekeeper’s house.
It seemed to her exactly like an event in a dream when, after some talk with the doctor about a trained nurse, Lady Ann volunteered to sleep at the gamekeeper’s and act that very part!
It was only when the church bells were ringing for the three o’clock afternoon service that this vaporous condition of Netta’s mind was dissipated with an unpleasant and shocking suddenness.
The doctor had already carried off his patient, avoiding the snowdrifts in the narrower lanes, when it emerged as a settled arrangement that Rook was to escort Lady Ann across Battlefield and Dorsal to the house of Mr. Drool.
It was curious how bitterly Netta received this information as it was revealed to her during a rather strained and silent Christmas repast. On innumerable other occasions she had seen the cousins go off together without a qualm. But to-day, after her conversation with Lady Ann, she felt a sickening distaste at the thought of their association.
She was the one who had been shot at. She was the one who for Rook’s sake had kept the thing a secret. It seemed an unnecessary stroke of irony that she should be just calmly set aside, and that all the drama of the event should centre in Cousin Ann’s acting the heaven-sent trained nurse!
To Netta’s simple mind an attempted murder was an attempted murder, a thing of bloody violence and notoriety, implying policemen and judges and law courts. There was something weird to her in the way Rook and Lady Ann could enjoy Mrs. Vabbin’s mulled claret and mince pies and Pandie’s chatter about the Corporal’s craziness when, but for a stumble over a log, there would have been a dead body lying in the house—a body that would have been Netta herself!
How could Rook go off in such high spirits with Lady Ann at his side and Lion scattering the snow with flying leaps, when there was nothing for herself to do but put on her cloak and tam-o’-shanter again and set out to church—unless she wished to sit alone in her bedroom thinking of Mrs. Ashover sitting alone in her bedroom?
What her nature really craved at that moment was someone like Minnie or Florrie to whom she could tell the whole story; tell how she felt when she was running; tell how she felt when she saw the lighted windows; tell how she felt when she heard the shots; tell everything and have a good satisfying cry about everything—but instead of that, there were Pandie and Martha whispering over a belated meal in the kitchen and there was Mrs. Ashover upstairs with the Prayer Book on her lap—Netta could just see her!—reading about shepherds and Stars in the East and wishing that Corporal Dick had shot a little straighter while he was about it!
In the end she did slip out and hurry off to that afternoon service. She had never, since she was a child, missed altogether the Christmas Offices, and as she listened to Hastings’s monotonous intonation mumbling over one of them now, like a great belated wasp in a forgotten apple loft, her indignant pity began to melt away.
It was no high supernatural consolation that came to her there. It was simply as if she herself, Netta Page, moving in the wake of those unrealizable turbaned shepherds, with the sound of a gunshot in her ears and a pitiful purpose hugged to her heart, had stumbled upon the presence of an event, which—whether fabulous or not—had covered the sorry footprints of humanity as the snow covered the fields, with a mysterious inviolable beauty.
CHAPTER IX
ROOK’S high spirits did not diminish as, with Lion in front of him and Cousin Ann at his side, he struggled through the snow up the slope of Battlefield.
What Netta had interpreted as but another, darker example of that vein of inhuman detachment in him by which she had been so often hurt was in reality a feeling of immense relief that the Corporal had struck his threatened blow and that the blow had prov
ed harmless. He had not breathed a hint to the girl of Uncle Dick’s threats, but the thing had been a growing weight on his mind, the heavier because of its vagueness; and now that it was all over—for his instinct told him that the old man was henceforth hors de combat—his present sense of escape was proportionate to his former fears.
The darkness that came slowly upon them, as step by labouring step they struggled up the hill, was mingled for Rook with a warm, exhilarating consciousness of his cousin’s proximity. The association of Netta’s figure with complicated agitations threw him back with a peculiar relief, now Netta was safe and sound, to his old careless easy pleasure in Lady Ann’s company.
He had always enjoyed being out in the fields with this warm-blooded creature of his own race, and to-night something in the character of the evening itself intensified that enjoyment.
It seemed to have a special quality of its own, the darkness that was falling about them now and isolating their two figures from the rest of the universe. It had a quality that was almost man-made, so burdened was it with ancient human consciousness of the ways of life upon the earth.
It seemed to carry with it an accumulated sense of the ending of days, of long, fate-charged days, that somehow or another had ended at last.
It was like a vast epitome of the various finalities, upshots, results, conclusions, that had descended, for better or for worse, upon all the eyelids that had ever closed, by sleep or by death, along that countryside!
Not a labourer, not a carter, not a shepherd, that had ever shuffled homeward after his day’s work, but had left some residue of his patience and his resignation upon the burden of that darkness.
And it was a peculiarly English darkness. It was a darkness with an island roughness in it, where a faint tang of seashore fog blended with the breath of hidden moss and heavy mud and with the chill of the snow.
And withal it was saturated with history. Just such a twilight as this must have settled upon Pevensey or Sedgemoor after some great historic battle, when the alarums and excursions had died down!
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