He bowed his head still lower over the parapet, deriving a fierce pleasure from thus yielding himself up to the mysterious caprice of the blind, soulless, formless element which knew no difference between a living human skeleton and the inanimate blocks of smooth quarried stone. His mind, always abnormally sensitive to physical sensations, began to detach itself from any definite train of thought; began to disembody itself and unsheathe itself, until it seemed to arrive at a naked airy freedom which enabled it to mingle with the dark flow of that invisible gurgling water and with the seething downpour of that inundating deluge.
Drowning! That was the ultimate sensation he craved; drowning in these vast inhuman elements that obeyed no master and had no purpose or object or obligation; but only drifted and drifted, on and on, up and down, as the unknown reservoirs of subhuman force sucked them in.
Oh, with what happiness he could imagine himself floating—dead—dead—dead—down that current of dark swollen water! No more responsibilities, no more decisions, no more miserable remorse!
That mysterious country of the underworld of which the Greek wanderer had his vision, coming to it at last through those Cimmerian mists, may after all have held a shadowy correspondence with something that really did exist!
If so, it was surely there, surely under those gray willows and among those tall grasses, that the land of untroubled twilight awaited him, whose margins he had so often approached, caught in quick strange glimpses, along the Frome-side roads and the green Frome-side lanes!
He stood erect and looked about him. The rain began rapidly to diminish now, moving away over the valley toward the east with the same capricious suddenness as that with which it had first arrived.
He crossed the bridge and walked on to the entrance into the churchyard.
He hesitated here for a while, his mind returning to his wife and to that devastating sense of a woman’s absolute loneliness at these hours which had driven him forth by a kind of shame. How wicked it was, how dark, how heathen, that mock sympathy which his mother and Pandie had displayed! How horrible this deep, blind, pitiless understanding that women had of one another at such moments—an understanding that was not tenderness or pity but something else; something that came to the surface at these times from the subterranean abysses of nature.
“Ann—my dear sweet Ann—bear it a little longer, just a very little longer, and you’ll be happier than you ever dreamed was possible!”
So he said in his heart, making of his craving to relieve her in her travail a sort of desperate conscious prayer, directed to no deity and to no demon, but to the vast night itself, oldest of all divinities, accomplice alike of the birth of grass blades in the wet dew of Titty’s Ring and of the birth of planets in the cold emptiness of space.
Then it occurred to him that he would like, on this night of the birth of his first-born, to go for a moment to where his father—“the old man” with whom he had had a lifelong feud—lay stretched out under his six feet of clay.
This irrational yielding to the very tradition against which he had struggled so long came upon him without warning; came upon him as if in reply to an actual summons. He hesitated for a moment longer, shaking his head from side to side and pulling his drenched overcoat tightly round him, while with a grim, rather ghastly smile he stared at the dark roof in front of him, from which the water was now audibly dripping.
He became suddenly conscious, as never before, of the appalling finality of human decisions, even in the least important matter. The water dripped, dripped, dripped, from that sloping roof, upon the enmossed slabs of some enclosed tombstone; and it seemed to him as if it dripped from the eternal wound in the heart of the universe, the wound that nothing could staunch or heal, the original blunder of the gods, the free will of life to will against life.
Shivering now a little, though the rain had quite ceased, and lifting his feet very heavily and with difficulty, as if they were subjected in some special way just then to the law of gravitation, Rook moved up the gravel path and rounded the corner of the building.
There before him, visible in spite of the darkness, was the familiar white headstone; there, too, the well-known trunk of Lexie’s elm. But what struck his mind with a shock of abrupt amazement, struck it with the sort of chill that comes over us when something occurs which resembles the intrusion of the abnormal or supernatural, was the emerging from the church porch of a human figure. He moved forward boldly, however, in pursuit of this figure which proceeded to cross the churchyard to its remote end under the broken wall. There, as he approached it, it assumed the appearance of a woman, a woman who took up a spade which she had left on the ground and began to dig with animal-like rapidity and concentration, throwing the loose earth upon a growing heap at her side.
It was clear she must have been at her task for some while before the rain interrupted her; for the heap of earth at the edge of the hole she was digging showed large and unmistakable in the darkness.
He recognized her now. She was Betsy Cooper. And well enough did he apprehend what she was at; for it had been one of the scandals of the village in his boyhood that Nancy Cooper, his father’s favourite, had been buried somewhere in that quarter without a tombstone; and that even the mound that indicated the place had been flattened out in some orderly but impious tidying up of that particular spot.
He walked straight across to where the old woman was digging. She did not hear him approach and he came close up to her before he spoke.
“Betsy!”
She leaped up at the sound, and drew away trembling, dropping her spade into the hole. When she saw who it was her face became transfigured with wild concern.
“Get ’ee back into house, Squire Ash’ver! Get ’ee back into house while there be time! What be ’ee doing traipsin’ in churchyard when thee’s wife be brought to bed? Get ’ee back, Squire Rook, lest some girt blow fall on ’ee! Hist—hist—dear Squire alive! There be terrible mischief abroad this blessed night for thee and thine. I do know it and I’ve a-told them maidies in kitchen what I do know! Dursn’t one of all thy folk up and tell ’ee what I did say to they afore this same sundown? I’d a-told it to thee wold mother but naught of it and naught of poor Betsy would she bide. Wahay! Wahoh! And that none should heed! Wahoh! And that thee own self should be traipsin’ here, none withholding! Get thee back to house, for the sake of thy own flesh and blood, Squire Ash’ver! Get thee back for Christes’ sake afore ’tis too late!”
The old woman’s agitation was so extreme that she actually waved both her thin arms in the air, while her face assumed the look of some inspired prophetess.
Rook looked at her with grave attention. But, as in the case of a greater than he, there were powers and influences abroad that rendered him obstinately obdurate to her clamour.
“So you’re trying to find Nancy?” he said sternly and quietly, looking down into the hole she had digged.
And as he looked, a sharp spasm came over him and a strange emotion gripped his vitals. In one single flash he got a vision of the whole tragic pity of the human race—these mothers, these children! He saw his own delicately nurtured Ann alone in that bed. He saw this old woman wrestling with the very earth, if so be that she might touch the bones of her child dead twenty, thirty years ago.
“Let my Nancy bide where she be!” cried the hag in desperation. “Look to thee own self, Squire Ash’ver! Look to thee own self and get back to house!”
He turned away, unwilling to drive the woman to further extremes of supplication; but as he left her there he said compassionately and gently, but with a certain sternness: “If you do find your girl to-night, Betsy, or on any other night, I will see to it that she has a proper tombstone.”
He passed his father’s grave this time with a shrug of his shoulders. Was the late Squire himself responsible for the abominable neglect that was the cause of Betsy’s nocturnal piety? Were those “half beasties,” as Binnory called them, his own half brothers?
He walked rapidly o
ut of the churchyard into the road.
Once more that leaden feeling in his legs, as if the law of gravitation had suddenly doubled its centripetal pull!
Once more that accursed sense of enormous importance in the making of trivial, unessential decisions!
“Ann didn’t need me there,” he thought, “till it’s all over. It’s the least I can do for her to obey her literally. She doesn’t want any more of these mock-sympathetic watchers!” And he visualized with such appalling distinctness the red-haired Pandie, obsessed with gloating sentiment, clinging to the banisters or listening at the door, that he plucked at his heavy feet as if they had been two obdurate roots, and strode resolutely off toward Foulden Bridge.
It was then, out there between the river bank and the open meadows, that the quality of the sky above his head began to change. The waning moon was still below the horizon; but a gentle wind had risen from the west and had swept the clouds before it, so that Rook was able to discern at least one or two of the constellations with which he was familiar.
He could see the great outstretched wings of Cygnus, like the wings of some vast emissary of fate despatched by one demiurge to another, flying across the fields of space.
He could see a star that he fancied must be Aldebaran; and another that he noted to himself, with that pathetic satisfaction with which creatures of a day find respite from their nothingness in the mere naming of the immortals, as a luminary that might be, only his memory always failed him, that favourite sky mark of his brother Lexie, Vega in Lyra.
Lit by the stars as if by far-off candle flames the wide water meadows stretched away to his left; and beyond the river and beyond the barley fields rose dark and blurred, like a great bastion of some invisible fortress, the vague outline of Heron’s Ridge.
Certain stars, watery and faint, as if they had been the drowned but not quite extinguished bodies of glowworms, lay silent and deep-buried in the muddy water of a ditch at the roadside. Bits of broken reed stalk and wind-blown twigs from willow trees and alders floated between the images of these fallen stars, as if they floated above a crevice in the terrestrial orb itself which sank down into antipodal gulfs.
Calmed and soothed by the largeness of the night about him the Squire of Ashover began to recover the equipoise of his perturbed spirit.
Ashover? Ashover? What was Ashover between the hovering wings of Cygnus and the stretching out of the chords of Lyra?
He suddenly began to feel strangely, exultantly happy; happier than he had been for more than twelve months; happier than he had been since those irresponsible days just after his father’s death.
Every person he thought of at that moment intensified rather than diminished his happiness. Round all the people of his life there seemed to float a sort of ideal luminosity, enhancing their dignity, their beauty, their originality, their human worth.
He felt a sense of inexpressible gratitude to the gods that he had ever known these people of his life, his brother, his mother, his wife, Netta, and Nell. Some actual chemical fluid, wonderful, magical, as if those high stars had been melted in some enchanted forest pool to which he had pressed his lips, seemed to flow round the figures of these people as they gathered there in his mind, and to harmonize for ever his relations with them.
Under the healing flow of this magical fluid, which seemed actually at that moment flooding every cell of his brain, the knots of the nerves that were jangled there unloosed themselves and expanded freely; expanded like the floating tendrils of dry seaweed when the twilight tide covers it, after a hot day!
In the ecstasy of what he felt just then it seemed to him that he could live happily by Ann’s side for the rest of his life. It seemed to him that even if her love were far more predatory and possessive than it ever had been he still could live with her, live with her and her child, without any of that abominable illusion of being suffocated, divided, impinged upon, from which he had suffered so horribly in times past.
And the same thing applied to all the other people of his life. Something had happened to those knotted nerves in his soul that had untied them completely, that had spread them out beautifully and freely like crumpled mosses that have been washed by rain and can now hold the sun in their leafy cups without withering.
As he came near to Foulden Bridge his happiness grew to such a pitch that he actually skipped a step or two with those feet of his that just now were so leaden and heavy.
The alders by the sheep wash, if they possessed any conscious interest in the human figures of their environment, must have been struck by the sight of a bony, hatless, middle-aged man, skipping with his feet as if they were the hooves of an escaped goat!
All at once Rook became aware—without warning, without premonition-—of that same young rider upon the gray horse moving silently along by his side.
Instinctively, as before, he clutched at the youth’s saddle; and as before, the boy laid his warm youthful fingers caressingly upon his hand.
“I told her I’d have a tombstone put up as soon as she found her,” he discovered himself saying, as if in answer to some reproach which the boy had made. “And I’ve obeyed Ann to-night quite literally. She told me to walk to Foulden Bridge.”
Why he said just this, when Ann had never once mentioned the word “Foulden,” is one of those queer incidents in a man’s life destined to remain to the end of time hidden away unsolved in the limbo of the irrelevant.
But what troubled Rook then was that the youth did not respond to his self-justifying speeches. All he did was to press the hand upon his saddle with still more tender solicitude. Rook wanted him to speak. His longing that he should speak was the first interruption he had suffered to that strange happiness which still hung about him.
But the boy rode slowly on and remained silent. Suddenly Rook felt those fingers grow cold. And it was not only that they grew cold. They seemed to melt away; they seemed to become lighter and more insubstantial than mist!
He looked up. Ah! that figure was receding, horse and rider together, receding and receding; growing dim and faint, dimmer and fainter, until there was no more left of them than a troubled shadow, limned as it were in a great withdrawing wave, rolling back down a shelving beach.
And as they vanished from the man’s sight there came to his ears what seemed like a lamentable sigh:
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”
And though with his reason he knew it was only the rising of the wind and its tremulous passage across the shaken reeds, to his heart it seemed an appeal and a warning and a farewell; but what was most strange of all to him just then was the fact that simultaneously with the sinking away of that forlorn sigh across the wet fields, he became absolutely certain, beyond doubt or dispute, that in her bed in Ashover House his wife had been delivered of a son.
So certain was he of this that a rush of quick irrepressible tears came to the back of his eye sockets, and though not a tear actually fell he was conscious enough that he, too, Rook of Ashover, was experiencing now, for all his sceptical disillusionment, the most primitive emotion of the human race: that immemorial exultation, older than the tents of Abraham, older than the tents of Achilles, the joy that a man child is born into the world!
For the third time that night he stood hesitating. He would have liked to go straight home, run at top speed home, leap up the staircase, push Pandie and his mother aside, and embrace his wife and the new-born.
But at that moment another instinct in him contended with the desire to retrace his steps; namely, the instinct just to rush over to Marsh Alley and be the first to bring the news of his son’s birth to Lexie.
Oh, he must do that. Lexie had been associated with every crisis in his life; and now—in the medley of events that had occurred since he left him at Toll-Pike—he had made no sign. To let this night of all nights pass by without seeing Lexie, would it not be something that he would regret to the end of his days? Lexie would laugh at him—he could see at this moment the face he would make—but he would be t
ouched and pleased, all the same, at this disordered midnight visit. He could hear his voice rallying him: “So brother Rook is all ‘alive-oh’ at last!” That was the way he would fool him; that was the way he would send him back post-haste; utterly refusing, no doubt, to believe that the child was yet born; scolding him even for being so superstitious!
It was characteristic of Rook Ashover that at this particular moment of his life he should be hesitating between these two quite irrational appeals: the tug at his heart that pulled him toward a brother who would only tease him when he appeared, and the tug at his heart that pulled him toward a child whose very existence was entirely problematical!
For the third time he brought his hesitation to an end. For the third time he plucked at those earthbound feet of his and strode forward.
“I’ll throw stones at his window,” he thought, “if he’s gone to bed.” And he walked rapidly on to the centre of Foulden Bridge.
While these events were proceeding in the lives of the Squire and Lady Ann, matters were not much more quiescent or peaceful within the narrow walls of Toll-Pike Cottage.
With the help of the muscular arms of Mr. Pod the two girls had succeeded in restraining the violent excitement of the unfortunate philosopher. His thoughts still full of his book, his mind full of wild fancies, the fixed idea had taken possession of him that it was to deliver his precious work into the hands of his enemy, Rook, that Lady Ann had stolen it.
Helpless under the sturdy guardianship of his sexton gaoler the poor wretch had relapsed into that sort of petrified passivity into which rabbits and hares are wont to sink when some immense danger menaces their life.
The girls, who kept opening the door to see how he was, became more and more reassured as night drew on, believing—because it was just that they especially wanted to believe—that he had fallen into a calm, refreshing sleep, from which he would finally awake, cured of his temporary dementia.
So reassured did they become that they even prepared for themselves a little supper in Nell’s kitchen and sat talking together there in low voices, while every now and then Netta would replenish a plate on the floor from which the Marquis of Carabas licked up the morsels his fastidious heart loved.
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