‘There was a scream,’ she insisted. ‘A real scream. Did you hear it?’
‘An owl, I expect. Plenty about.’
‘No, not an owl,’ she said. ‘More like something caught. It was horrible.’
‘I won’t have steel gins on my land,’ said Matthew. ‘You know that. Not since Father died.’
‘Matthew, what’s the matter? You sound … different.’ He heard her strike a match, saw her hold its flame to the wick of her candle. The room became full of crawling shadows.
‘Why! You’re not undressed!’
‘I’m all right, Ann. For God’s sake leave me alone.’
The flame of the candle sank low, almost to extinction, then reaching the wax it sprang into life again and lit his haggard face.
He got off his bed. ‘See here, Ann. I’ve got to go out again. Did you take your tablets?’
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t want to sleep. I was thinking.’
‘But you said you’d had a dream.’ His voice was edged with suspicion. What did she know?
‘Yes. I did drop off for a minute. And then I heard that scream.’
He winced. To hell with the scream. What’s a dead rat matter?
‘Well, take one now. Take two, to make sure.’ He unscrewed the cap of the small bottle containing Ann’s tablets. ‘Here you are.’ She took them from his hand. ‘And here’s water,’ he said, lifting a tumbler from her bedside table.
She held tumbler in one hand and tablets in the other. ‘What are you going out for? Why can’t you come to bed?’
‘I’ve forgotten something. Never mind.’ His voice rose. ‘I’ve forgotten my gun, if you must know.’
‘Your gun?’
Foreseeing an endless catechism he said quickly: ‘Yes, my gun, Ann. That’s what I said. Can’t leave it out there all night. It’ll get wet. You take your stuff and go to sleep.’
Before she could answer he was out of the room, going downstairs, leaving the house, drawn as by a magnet to what he wished never to see again but had to see, must see. The gun must be retrieved: that was obvious. But in some secret part of him he was almost glad of having forgotten the gun, because it excused the gross folly of his going back, to seek and to find, to stare and to wonder. To make sure the thing was real and not a nightmare. To make sure it was still there. To fight against its power over him, and perhaps—he toyed with a new temptation—perhaps to put it for ever out of sight.
With some such half-thought he had paused on his way through the house to put on a mackintosh before coming out this second time.
The body had not moved, but it had changed, and not for the better. The mansign of the face, blood-painted, was past recognition; the flesh a greyish putty-colour; the features sagging. In place of the fixed scream was now a specious, leering peace. You’re no beauty, said Matthew, but you can’t scare me. He saw there was still malice in this wide-eyed corpse. It mocked and derided him. It dangled a noose before his eyes. I must keep calm, he said. I mustn’t let go of myself. When he tried to lift it the stiffened limbs seemed to resist him, and the head horribly dangled.
‘Come along, Mr Caidster,’ he said. ‘Easy does it, boy. We’re going a little walk together, you and I.’
§ 13
HE got back to the house some two hours later. Ann was still awake. That he knew, the moment he entered the room, although she did not at first speak. He began taking off his clothes. His work was done. He could do no more. Body and brain were both exhausted. He was emptied of fear and of thought. He had taken his fill of horror, and in this moment he felt that nothing again could make his pulse hurry or wring a pang from his heart. He knew by the sound of her sighing breath and restless movements that she was awake and watchful, but could spare no thought for the oddness of her not speaking to him. He forgot it at once, and forgot her, and forgot everything, except the wish to be in bed.
‘What’s the time, Matthew?’
Pulled back from the verge of sleep, he said: ‘About midnight, I suppose.’ He knew it was later.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked him.
He did not answer.
Because she must not be told, because he refused to recall what he had dropped out of mind, and because he was tired and could not cope with the question, he did not answer her. Lugging out of his breeches, he left them in a heap on the floor and got into bed still wearing his shirt. The sheets were cold, but his blood warmed them, and he drifted away almost at once.
‘Matthew!’
God! What is it now?
‘Matthew, I’m sorry, but I must ask you something. I’ve tried not to, but I must.’
‘What is it?’ His voice was drunk with sleepiness.
‘Have you been with Hilda?’
‘Have I been—what?’ Her words made no sense to him.
‘Tonight. Since you left me. Have you been with Hilda?’
He got her meaning now, or some of it. ‘Hilda? No.’ He could not conceive why she asked him the question, was too tired to unravel its implications.
The very indifference of the denial carried instant conviction. After a limp silence she said brokenly: ‘Thank God. I couldn’t have borne it…. Not tonight I couldn’t.’
‘Couldn’t have borne what?’ he said, having gone and come back again even while she was speaking. ‘Ann, I’m tired.’
‘Yes, I know. Good night, Matt.’
He was asleep. And when presently he woke again, summoned back into consciousness by a loud thought, Ann herself was asleep. He spoke to her and she did not answer. Her breathing was quiet and serene, like a young child’s. Had she answered he would perhaps have poured out the whole intolerable truth upon her, rather than live with it another moment alone. But to wake her demanded a decision of which he was incapable. And now he was glad of her inaccessibility, and he hugged to himself more tightly than ever the secret that was eating away his heart. Recalling what had wakened him he fumbled for matches, lit a candle (uncareful of Ann) and groped among his tumbled clothes till he found his watch. It said ten past three, but when he held it to his ear he found it was not going.
The anaesthesia of weariness had passed off. That brief hazardous sleep had restored him to anxiety. It was imperative that he should know what time it was. He went to the window, and lifted the curtain, and looked out. Less by the look of the grey unlighted morning than by a more general and subtle sense, he judged that an hour must have passed since his watch stopped. Perhaps more than an hour. He stood at the window for what seemed a long while. The air from outside was very cold. His feet were stones. The breath of his nostrils rose up before him like smoke: in two pulsing streams it came forth and went up and was gone. The road he looked on was empty and quiet, and darker than when, long hours earlier, a man with a gun had gone down it, keeping carefully to the grass verge. The silence sang in his ears with a new, unravelled meaning. Suddenly, near at hand, came a cockcrow. It startled him by its suddenness. He scanned the horizon fearfully. But morning was not yet at hand, and the cry, coming out of a dream, was not repeated. The anxious wives folded their feathers again: their lord slumbered. Presently another sound reached Matthew’s ears; clear and comforting, a familiar music heard every morning, when the wind was right, half an hour before getting-up time; the sound of a distant train speeding to the north. He knew now that it must be nearly five o’clock, and with a sigh he let fall the curtain and went back to bed.
But he could not sleep again. After an eternity of tossing and turning he remembered something else he had strangely forgotten. He remembered the existence of Hilda, who had lain haunted, the night through, haunted and trembling for him, for herself, for her mistress. In the first blind terror of what she had seen from her window she wanted to run away, but the insoluble question where on earth she should run gave panic time to subside. She began thinking, and thinking ahead. Unknowingly she took up the task of thinking at the point where Matthew, having done his best and his worst, had dropped it. The precise course of eve
nts was still a dark mystery to her. Having once looked out, she had drawn her curtain across the broken window and flung herself into the warm bed, burrowing deep under the bedclothes, not daring to look out again. Yet with the first light of morning she did look again, to see, not what she expected, but, clearly defined, the place where it had sprawled. Leading from that eloquent impression was a narrow trail of disturbance going towards the orchard. Whether it could mean to other eyes what it meant to hers she hardly stopped to ask herself. She saw it all, painfully distinct. She saw the trampled ground. She saw blood on the grass. And not liking what she saw she dressed herself hurriedly and crept downstairs.
She was down early indeed, but not much before her wonted time. She had a fixed routine of duties, but this morning she chose to depart from it in one particular. Before anything else was done the pigs must be fed. Carrying a bucket of swill she made her way to the sty where Susie, the great sow, took her ease; gave her one sight and sniff of her breakfast, then turned away and down the narrow cobbled path that led to the desecrated ground. A snorting, grunting, voracious commotion came after her.
‘Get away, do!’ said Hilda. ‘You’ll have me over, you old silly!’
At judicious intervals she spilled some of the treasure on the grass, to Susie’s brief gratification. And at last, throwing up her hands as if disclaiming all further responsibility, she surrendered the bucket itself to the jubilant snout, and went back indoors, opening the door of the second sty on the way. The burden of her thoughts was lightened. Her step had a new vigour. There’s nothing that pigs won’t eat, she reflected comfortably. Maybe that’s why they’re called pigs.
§ 14
THERE were several things Matthew had forgotten or not thought of. There were several things he did not know. But he did know and he did remember that the death by violence of even the most valueless human being is not a matter of indifference to the law. Every time he woke, from what was a fevered dream rather than sleep, that knowledge woke with him. It woke with him, got up with him, watched him dress, stood at his elbow as that other fear had done, and went with him in all his ways. A little before midday it came to him in the uniform of a policeman.
‘They told me I’d find you out here, Mr Elderbrook.’
‘Did they? Who?’ said Matthew.
‘Her up at the house, sir. Hilda, don’t they call her?’
‘She——’
Matthew began speaking, but checked himself. He had been on the point of saying that Hilda knew nothing about the affair. But it now occurred to him, as a diverting idea, that there was no point in making things too easy for this young fellow. Matthew was in a curiously divided state. He was almost two persons. Half of him was deeply conscious of the farm, the fields, the very ground he stood on: the other half knew that nothing could ever be the same again. Being here, in the place that belonged to him, and to which by a commerce more intimate than marriage he himself belonged, he felt tranquil and secure. Part of him could savour that tranquillity as never before. He was spending the morning in the field called Fanny Severals. Hedgebill in one hand and a short hooked stick in the other he had worked his way along the short west side of the Severals, trimming and turning, lopping and lacing, as Joe had taught him best part of thirty years ago. In daylight, with hand and brain subdued to an accustomed task, the events of last night seemed remote and improbable; only fear could sharpen again the blurred outlines and varnish with reality the nightmare shapes; and when he lifted up his eyes to the hills of the far horizon he seemed to read there, in the familiar undulating line called Horse’s Nape, his reassurance. Yet side by side with this illogical sense of peace, this surrender of the mind to an old habit, lived the clear knowledge that by his act he had put himself in mortal danger. Impossible though it seemed that anything could happen to divorce him from these fields, this bending sky, that curved horizon, which were woven into the very texture of his being, it was almost equally impossible, if one stopped to think of it, that a deed so rash, so hastily done, so little meditated, should go undetected. And, by that token, here was a policeman, a smart, youngish, sergeant of police. His arrival was no shock to Matthew and did not discompose him, though it could have (he thought) only one meaning.
‘Have I seen you before?’ Matthew asked easily.
‘I reckon so,’ said the policeman with a smile. ‘I Ve seen you, sir, a time or two, anyhow.’
‘Have you then?’ said Matthew. He spoke in a tone of mild wonder. That division in his mind kept him still and calm.
‘Everyone knows Mr Elderbrook,’ said his visitor. ‘I’m from Midlingford,’ he explained.
His voice and his stressing of the name’s last syllable proclaimed him a true countryman and a man of Mershire. It was only strangers who impiously contracted Midling-ford to Midlingf’d. Pleasant sort of fellow but he’s taking his time, thought Matthew. Why doesn’t he bring out the handcuffs and be done with it?
‘Well, sergeant, what is it this time? Foot and mouth again?’
He smiled at the sergeant with a conscious but gentle irony. No quarrel with him. Let’s take things easy.
‘You’ve a man here name of Caidster, haven’t you, Mr Elderbrook?’
‘We had,’ said Matthew.
He looked blandly at his questioner, feeling a little lightheaded.
‘You had?’ said the policeman curiously.
The man’s evident surprise shook Matthew out of his dream. He saw that he had stupidly assumed too much, that the doom he had already accepted was not yet upon him; and with the discovery his heart seemed to stand still. Despair, a moment before, had frozen him calm. This new hope made him tremble. He was suddenly afraid, of the future and of himself. He was afraid of the burden he must carry and afraid lest he should incontinently cast it off. Almost more than anything in the world he wanted to take this good fellow into his confidence and tell him everything. But he was not a free man: there was Ann to consider.
‘That’s right,’ said Matthew. ‘He hasn’t turned up this morning.’
‘I see. Do you know anything about him?’
‘Not a thing,’ said Matthew. ‘He’s only been with us a matter of weeks.’
‘When did you see him last, Mr Elderbrook?’
‘Oh, he was about the place yesterday. I didn’t notice particularly.’ Matthew faced his man with an air of candid interest. ‘Do you want the fellow? What’s he been up to?’
‘Well, not exactly. The fact is, sir, we’ve got him. He’s dead.’
Matthew’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Dead?’
He felt shame at having to deceive this friendly-spoken police officer, though nothing but satisfaction in his news. So it was true then: he was dead. What else of last night was true?
‘He was found on the line this morning. Nasty mess.’
‘The line?’ said Matthew. ‘Do you mean——’
‘The railway line tother side of the Hitcham road from your own land, Mr Elderbrook. Willie Probert identified the body and told us deceased worked for you. On and off, he said. Funny little business. Money in the pockets and everything.’
‘Well now,’ said Matthew, ‘that’s a thing that hasn’t happened all my life. No, not in living memory it hasn’t. It’s a steep cutting, is that one. I’ve known it from a child. Why should anyone go down there?’
The policeman shrugged his shoulders. ‘Can’t say, I’m sure. I was wondering if you could throw some light on it.’
‘Me? How should I?’ Matthew’s voice was sharper than he intended.
‘It runs only just inside the Midlingford boundary, that railway line,’ said the policeman, going off at a tangent. ‘A few yards east and the Keyborough folk could have had him. And welcome, too. Head as good as off, you might say. What was on his mind, I wonder.’
Matthew said harshly: ‘I wasn’t in the gentleman’s confidence.’
‘Quite so, Mr Elderbrook. Seems to have been rather a lone wolf, by all accounts.’
‘I take it then,’
said Matthew, ‘you think he did it deliberately?’
‘That’s for the Coroner to say, sir. Still, between you and me …’ He nodded sagaciously. ‘In the absence of evidence as to state of mind and so on, they’ll have to bring it in accidental. Can’t help themselves. But … well——’
‘Would you like to talk to the men?’ Matthew suggested.
‘I’ve done that, sir.’ Oh you have, have you, Matthew thought grimly. ‘We shan’t need them again, Mr Elderbrook, but we’d like a word or two from you, sir, if you don’t mind. Inquest’s tomorrow. Ten o’clock sharp at the Town Hall’
So that was it. A trap. Get him there and tie him into knots and make him say too much.
‘Ah,’ said Matthew. He spoke slowly, with a painful smile. ‘So you want me to waste my morning at Midlingford, do you, in that draughty Town Hall of yours? And what’s the good of it? I’ve told you all I know, and that’s nothing at all. He wasn’t much more than a tramp, when all’s said. Here today and gone tomorrow. Nobody knew anything about him, and he wasn’t,’ said Matthew, suddenly relishing his own candour, ‘he wasn’t what I’d call a likable chap either.’
It was a comfort to be speaking even that much truth.
§ 15
THE day of the inquest dawned cold and clear. A white frost lay on field and road, and dusted the smooth contours of Horse’s Nape in the distance. By nine o’clock the day was bright with winter sunshine, and Matthew decided to ride to Midlingford on his seldom-used bicycle. At the bottom of his mind was the unstated thought that if the inquest should culminate in his own arrest the bicycle would be an encumbrance more easily and less conspicuously disposed of than pony and trap. He wished, too, to circumvent Ann’s just perceptible intention of going with him to Midlingford if she were given a chance. He could not conceive why she should want to attend an inquest, unless it were with a vague hope of protecting him from dangers dimly surmised. He was confident that she could know nothing of that night’s doings, though he found it matter for disquiet that she had let the subject drop, saying nothing about it next morning. Nor had she made any further reference to Hilda. Because of his intolerable tiredness that question had made small mark in him, and he could no longer persuade himself that she had really asked it, that it was not a mere fragment of dream. He was right in thinking that his acute consciousness of the coming inquest was not entirely hidden from Ann. What he could not know was that there was something she wanted urgently to say to him, something she preferred to say in the open, away from the house; that she felt forlorn, resolved, courageous, torn between pride and love; that she could not bear to watch this widening distance between him and herself. He was unaware of any such distance: it was in her mind only. In his mind was the tension of a resolve not to be tricked or frightened into saying too much. All he had to do was to forget that he knew anything more of the affair than other people, and to give evidence accordingly. That should not be difficult to remember. Nor should the truth, being so fantastic, be difficult to ignore or to suppress. So, on the surface of his mind, he argued, turning a deaf ear to the voice within that was for ever trying to persuade him to blurt it all out.
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