“We should have heard if she’d been seriously upset by going so far,” Nell was saying in reply to some remark of Netta.
The other shook her head. “I’m afraid a good many things could happen in Ashover House and we remain in the dark about them here. To tell you the truth, Nell, I feel as if anything might happen to any of us to-night!”
She moved her chair a little as she spoke, so as to get it away from the window, against which the rain had now begun to beat with extraordinary violence. Both the girls turned their heads toward the streaming pane; and there fell upon them that tremulous and not always unpleasant shudder such as children experience in large shadowy gardens when they play at hide-and-seek.
“If William isn’t better when he wakes up,” said Nell presently, “I shall ask Pod to stay the night. There’s no earthly reason why he shouldn’t do that. One of us can go round and tell his wife.”
Netta nodded. “I hope Lexie is safe home,” she said suddenly, turning quickly round with a new trouble in her eyes. “Pod says he left him in his cottage when he came here, too exhausted to walk any farther.”
Nell’s mouth opened pitifully and she clapped her hands together. “Oh, Netta,” she cried, “we forgot Lexie completely! How could we do that? Oh … oh … oh….” And she rose from her chair and looked helplessly at the flood of rain which made the window seem as if it were a porthole in a wave-deluged ship.
“There’s nothing we could have done, anyhow,” said Netta soothingly. “I don’t think Mrs. Pod would let him go unless he really felt better.”
Nell looked scrutinizingly at her, as a child looks at an older person, doubtful whether it is being honestly or treacherously comforted.
“I hope you are right,” she murmured, resuming her seat. “It would be horrible if anything happened to Lexie from our thoughtlessness. But I can’t believe it will! Oh, Netta, oughtn’t one of us to go to Ashover House and get William’s book? I don’t like to think of his waking up and wanting it and not finding it!” And once more she rose from her chair.
“Nell, sit down!”
The elder woman spoke with an authority far more weighty and unhesitating than would have been possible to the Netta of five months before. She had come to exercise, even in that short time, a sort of protective domination over the young girl.
“Don’t let’s work ourselves up into unnecessary agitation,” she said, smiling. “Not that I don’t feel just as you do,” she added a moment later. “It’s as if we two were locked up together in a fortress, isn’t it? With some great battle going on outside, in which all our people are engaged, on one side or the other!” She looked at her companion thoughtfully and sighed heavily. “My whole life has been a sort of waiting,” she murmured in a low voice. “But that’s at an end now.”
Nell hardly heard what she was saying. A nervous restlessness, beyond what she could quite account for, made her fidgety and preoccupied.
“I can just see Lexie describing his evening with Mrs. Pod, can’t you?” went on Netta. “Can’t you see him shutting first one eye and then the other in the way he does when he’s done something he’s pleased with? There’s nothing in the world delights him more than listening to the opinions of people like Mrs. Pod.”
“Why is it that I feel so funny and nervous, then?” demanded Nell. “I know it’s not about William. I can’t tell you just how I know; but I do know…. It’s about the others.” And she looked at her friend with an expression of puzzled exasperation, as if it were a sort of unkindness on Netta’s part not to relieve her anxiety.
“Hush! Didn’t you hear something?”
It was Netta who rose to her feet this time. She went to the door into the passage and opened it.
“I thought I heard the gate clicking,” she said.
Nell jumped up hastily and pushing past her ran upstairs.
A minute later Netta heard her voice calling her by name from the room above.
“Netta! Netta! Come here!”
It hardly surprised her when she did stand by her friend’s side in that littered room to see the figure of Mr. Pod lying fast asleep in the wicker chair, while the couch they had brought in for Hastings was untenanted and empty.
“He must have slipped out in his stockings!” whispered Nell. The girl was trembling from head to foot and her face was as white as the face of the marble clock on the mantelpiece which did nothing but point to half-past eleven with a malignant emphasis.
Netta bent over the sleeping man and shook him indignantly by the shoulder.
“Where be I? What be doing to I? Let a man bide where ’a be, can’t ’ee?”
“You’ve gone to sleep,” was the girl’s somewhat hopeless answer to these murmurings. “Mr. Hastings has got out of the house and we must go after him! Get your things on, Nell, quick as you can! There’s nothing else to do. We must all go and look for him. He’s probably gone to Ashover House with the idea of getting his book back!”
“Be parson rinned off, then?” muttered the bewildered sexton, rising with some embarrassment to his feet and staring feebly at the bookcase as if he suspected his prisoner to be ensconced behind it. “’A were there right enough, not two minutes agone! Do ’ee think ’a be hiding somewheres about, lady? ’A be a terrible crafty gentleman, when’s wits be working.’
“Nonsense, Mr. Pod,” said Netta severely, pulling on her hat and gloves and shoes, while Nell did the same in her bedroom. “Any one would think you’d been drinking. A reliable man you are, Mr. Pod; to go to sleep when we trusted you so implicitly! You don’t know what harm mayn’t come of this criminal neglect of yours!”
It is always a relief in any great human crisis to find a scapegoat; and the staring imbecility of the poor man at that moment certainly did lend itself to such treatment.
“Aren’t you ready yet, Nell?” the impatient girl cried, adjusting her cloak between the two open doors. “The rain has stopped now, so we needn’t bother what we put on! The great thing is to catch him before he gets to the bridge.”
Why she used the word “bridge” at that moment she herself could never have explained. “We’ve got to catch him before he gets to the bridge!” She remembered that phrase afterward with a certain superstitious shudder.
Mr. Pod, meanwhile, was defending himself volubly. “No need to be scolding of I, missy. I be ready to go along. ’Tis the other young leddy what’s keeping us. I’ve a-laid out too many precious corpses in me time not to be up and lively for anythink.”
Nell did appear now, at the head of the stairs, still very white and trembling. She seemed so helpless and so nervous that her agitation communicated itself to her friend.
“For God’s sake, let’s start.” The elder woman’s voice had caught the quiver of suspense with which the whole atmosphere of that house of open doors was now vibrating.
They all three descended the stairs together and passed out into the garden.
It had indeed been a chance for “a crafty gentleman” to exercise his wit, that stealthy escape of William Hastings! He had achieved it with the supernatural cunning of a madman, that cunning which seems to be instinctive and subhuman; as though, with the atrophy of his reason, a man’s mind were able to draw freely upon the magnetic duplicity of birds and fishes.
Passing the rain-drenched geranium bed, from which emanated an odour musky and sweet, as if from an enclosed conservatory, he picked up from the ground the great, heavy, iron-tipped garden rake which Pandie had dropped there early the same afternoon.
It was by reason of being burdened with this grotesque weapon that he allowed the gate to click as he went through, a sound that, in the silence of their suspense in the kitchen, had actually reached the ears of one of the girls.
The anger which the loss of his book had roused in him had now crystallized in his demented brain into a cold, murderous fury against the Squire of Ashover.
Hastings’s passion at that crisis was to his own mind a pure irrevocable physical necessity. It was neces
sary that he should find Rook Ashover—even if he had to break into his house—and it was necessary that he should kill him. Behind this necessity swirled and seethed and fermented all his suppressed jealousy, all his accumulated life hatred, all his desire to “crack Nature’s moulds” and bring back the original chaos!
Hurrying along the grass at the edge of the rain-soaked road without overcoat or shoes, the garden rake clutched tightly in his hand, he soon became aware that another figure, also bareheaded, was advancing toward him.
He was separated from this figure by scarcely more than the length of Foulden Bridge; but by the accident of his following the grass path rather than the open road he himself was a far less noticeable object to the other than the other was to him.
The coming together of these two figures, with the river and the white-railinged bridge between them, might easily have seemed like one single man encountering his own image, or even meeting a phantom of himself, as Goethe once did on an unfrequented road; but no such fancy as that crossed the mind of William Hastings. Whether in the whirl of his thoughts he paused to note the strangeness of this accident, that the man he was seeking was coming straight toward him, no one will ever know. Frozen stiff with excitement he savagely clutched his weapon in both hands and crouched down behind the woodwork of the bridge where it joined the road.
Rook came on with rapid strides to the centre of the bridge. What he saw was not the white railing at his side, or the swollen river beneath him, or the dim perspective of the road in front of him; least of all did he see that crouching figure.
He saw Lexie’s face at the open window. He saw that expressions of mock consternation which he knew so well. He heard his voice: “Is all well with the child? Is all well with Ann? What are you in such a ‘toss’ for, brother Rook?”
And then, before he had time to do more than make that spasmodic mental jerk with which the mind passes from one region of reality to another, Hastings was upon him. With a terrific swing of that fantastic weapon the priest struck him full on the side of the head; the arm which Rook instinctively raised to protect himself coming in contact with no more than the handle of the instrument.
Stunned and unconscious the wounded man fell heavily back against one of the two solitary railings which formed the double balustrade of the wooden bridge.
The impact of so massive and bony a frame was too much for that weather-weakened plank; and with a sinister crashing sound it broke and fell outward, precipitating the unconscious man into the stream below. Face downward in that swift-rushing current floated now, limp and unresisting, what was speedily no more than the shape, the form, the image of a homo sapiens. First to one side of the river it drifted; then to the other; the weeds brushing against its face, and the Frome water, embrowned by the rain, splashing and gurgling round its unheeding ears.
It was quite out of sight in the darkness—it would have been perhaps out of sight in full daylight—when William Hastings flung his weapon down and returned to consciousness from the petrified trance he had fallen into after striking his blow.
He occupied himself for a while, with an absorbed and vacant concentration, in the task of breaking off and throwing into the river bits of the broken rail that still hung loose and uneven over the water. Then wearily and slowly he turned back the way he had come.
Exhausted by the storm of passion in his brain and by the physical stress of what he had gone through that day he did not get very far. Long before he reached the gate of Toll-Pike Cottage he sank down by the wayside, a huddled, shivering, half-dazed creature, who was quickly passing from all conscious memory of his identity.
Here they found him after the lapse of barely an hour; and when they had carried him back into his room and had undressed him and got him into bed it was clear that his incoherent murmurings were something different from his former insanity.
Before morning he was in a raging fever; and the doctor when he finally appeared, between eleven and twelve of this first noonday of the month of October, was able to say no more than that nothing could be done for him beyond what Netta and Nell had already done.
He died at two o’clock in the afternoon of the following day, recognizing no one, aware of no human feeling, returning, as he had so often wished to return‚ to whatever “equilibrium,” it may be, beyond the difference between life and death, beyond the difference between space and time, smoothes away the outrage of consciousness and the “whips and scorns” of memory.
Some thirty-five years ago the wife of a classical-minded cobbler in east London had given birth to an unhealthily sensitive child; had nourished him with milk from breasts that were themselves ill-nourished; had lulled him to sleep with songs to which no feet had ever danced, with which no airs from green grass or from yellow sand had ever mingled; had washed him, clothed him, wondered at him, worshipped him…. Dead, stone-dead was that woman now; dead, and in a grave marked with no more than her name and the number of her few and evil years! She had died in absolute certainty that her son would be a famous thinker, known from the Hebrides to Land’s End. But she had not been able even to lift so much as a finger to help him when the work of his lifetime was being thrust into a bonfire of weeds! And where was she now, that mother, when to a rush of girlish tears that were more than half for another man, her worshipped son, a thick-set, heavy-jowled image of lamentable mortality, was lowered into the earth, with a Mr. Pod at his head and a Mr. Twiney at his feet?
Rook Ashover was buried a couple of days later than the man who brought to an end his Pyrrhonian scepticism with a garden rake.
That harmless horticultural tool was picked up on the first of October by none other than Binnory, whose instinct for disaster brought him to Foulden Bridge before the wings of rumour had scarcely begun to flutter.
It interested Binnory to decipher on its handle the name of an ironmonger in Bishop’s Forley. The name Was Lovejoy; and Binnory got pleasure from speaking of the rake as if it possessed itself that sonorous appellation. He ran off with it across the hill and hid it under an elder bush on the edge of Titty’s Ring. Here he would go, when the leaves began to fall, and rake them together with it; pretending that the elder bush was his house and that he was tidying up his drive “like Mr. Twiney at Ash’ver do”; and he would mutter his wildest fancies quite freely to this product of the Bishop’s Forley shop, going so far in his weak-headedness as to treat it as a kind of living fetish. Once he even carried his treasure trove several miles down the lane to display it with pride to the “half beasties,” whose caravan still remained in the neighbourhood.
Thus it happened that while the Squire of Ashover and the Priest of Ashover became less and less endowed with the illusion of personality, the rake “Lovejoy” gathered to itself more and more of this ambiguous value.
A hundred Octobers hence some pair of nameless lovers, seeking refuge from the inquisitive and the frivolous, may very likely stumble upon a rusty piece of iron and a worm-eaten staff, may very likely use them to clean the mud from their shoes, without the least notion of the part played by these objects in a long-forgotten Frome-side story.
No one knew what passed through Lady Ann’s mind as she lay pale and silent hour by long hour with her new-born child by her side; the child that was, after all, a son. Never had the proud girl kept her feelings more completely to herself. To whom, indeed, should she reveal them? Her father was dead. Her mother was dead. Mrs. Ashover’s grief at her son’s death was so mitigated by her sense of escape from a far greater disaster, the tragedy of the family’s extinction, that she could not have responded, even had Ann been entirely unreserved, to the girl’s craving for response. Lexie had always been critical and suspicious of her, his vanity piqued by her preference for his brother, his taste offended by her philistinism.
Missy Sparrow-Hawk was not made for submission to circumstance. She was made to control circumstance. But like many another shrewd diplomatist in this chaotic world she found herself baffled and beaten by that element of pure
chance which even a Poynings could not outwit.
She had calculated her moves with the most perfect nicety. She had counted on this. She had discounted that. What she had not foreseen was the intrusion upon the stage of events of the rake “Lovejoy.” She had felt so sure that in the end she would bring Rook round. Her child was her final master stroke. But no master stroke could bring the dead back to life.
Lady Ann was outwitted, outmanœuvred, beaten. As she lay in her bed listening to the wind in the autumn trees she looked steadily, unflinchingly, at the lonely years in front of her. She would live, of course. She would cherish Rook’s child. But whatever happened in the long future she would never again be the same Cousin Ann who had put on that crimson dressing gown in the gamekeeper’s cottage!
Well, there it was! She was twenty-six and she had her child. And yet in her unflinching realism she knew that she was beaten. The mouse-coloured dust in Ashover Church might exult in the continuance of its race. It had gained its end. It was victorious. But the human bridge by which that indestructible life urge had hurled itself into the future carried from henceforth a hurt, a scar, a mark, from which it would never quite recover!
Cousin Ann’s beautiful lips closed upon her secret. She would be a proud and competent mistress of a rejuvenated House. But as her heart hardened itself to envisage her defeat, she stared with her gray eyes into Something that at certain hours, when for instance the branches of the cedar creaked and the branches of the lime rustled, was not very far removed from what less stoical persons than Ann Wentworth Gore would have named despair.
At any rate, she did not protest, nor indeed did any other member of that household, when, by the reiterated importunity of the remorseless old dowager, the boy was christened John after his grandfather. Lexie in his heart was glad of his mother’s choice. Let the name of Rook disappear from the face of the earth! Let no other human being ever carry it, or be called to bed or board by its familiar sound!
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