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  She laughed until the tears ran down between her fingers; but even then, deep down underneath her collapse, she was conscious that a set of fantastic possibilities, like blocks of erratic tesseræ, were forming themselves into a kind of pattern. It was all so mad and strange. But who could tell? She knew there were powers and forces in the world that would sometimes carry to a conclusion what was imagined when they refused to yield an inch to what was willed.

  She was suddenly aware of a crazy desire to bring the Corporal upon the scene. It could do no harm for him to see Rook; it could do no harm for him to see Cousin Ann. It would gratify a perverse longing in her for him to see the intruding woman herself. Let the bastard deal with the mistress. There would be an ironic justice in that. She thought deeply for a minute, biting her lip and tapping the ground with her stick.

  It couldn’t do any harm; that was certain. Rook had always treated the old man well and Lexie, before he got ill, had been in the habit of spending hours with him.

  She glanced at the clock on Granfer Dick’s mantelpiece. How the days were closing in! It was only a quarter to five now. If they started together at once they might find the whole party still sitting over tea; and what was more natural than that she should have asked the Corporal to escort her home? Then he would see the woman. John was dead but John’s brother would see the enemy in the house.

  She felt like some beleaguered chatelaine who could bring up at need a trusty freelance ready for anything. The adventure appealed to the old woman’s youthful spirit. It appealed to a vein of superstition in her, too. The Corporal was a queer character. Perhaps he had the evil eye! Perhaps he would strike God’s own terror into the heart of the creature. Her mind ran off down a long avenue of wild conjectures. Perhaps John’s brother would whisper such murderous threats into the wretch’s ear that one of these fine days she would pack her things without a word and be off into the void!

  The hands of the clock in that little empty room were still short of the hour of five when the mistress of Ashover, leaning on the Corporal’s arm, was struggling up the slope that led to the Scotch firs.

  “Tu-whit—tu-who! Tu-whit—tu-who!” came the voice of Binnory, and they fancied they could hear a long-drawn answering wail from the depths of the Antiger Woods.

  It was getting very dark before they were halfway up the hill. The November night, rolling like a great brown-coloured wave across the earth, gathered up their human excitement into its own dark heart and diffused it over the misty woods and leaf-strewn lanes. The fatality of old age mingled with the fatality of vast dim vegetable forces moving to obscure dissolution.

  Caw! Caw! Caw! came the cry of solitary belated birds, following their companions from the ploughed fields of the valley to the trees on Antiger Great Knoll; and the voice of the rooks became the voice of the night itself, that great primordial winged thing, woeful and yet undespairing, lamentable and yet consolatory; full of whispers and murmurs, of premonitions and memories, wherein the beginning of things reaches forward to the end of things and the end of things reaches backward to the beginning.

  Mrs. Ashover’s arm trembled as it rested on the Corporal’s; and the old man himself had frequently to delay their ascent in order to take breath.

  And yet something that was stronger than their decrepitude seemed to draw them both on. Was it that the actual flame of life in this man and this woman was leaping high and fierce just then because of some occult emotional understanding that was older and deeper than this present business? Had Joan Ashover from the very first felt more tenderly for this brother of her “John” than she herself had realized?

  Perhaps some of these shadowy clumps of furze bush, dripping with wet white mist and smelling of dead wood and fungous growths, by the side of which they rested, were old enough to recall other encounters between these two, wherein the wild vagaries of the human heart had been fecund of astounding self-deceptions!

  They were standing now beneath the great trunks of Heron’s Ridge and both the old people drew into their lungs the chill, muddy, pungent breath of the distant water meadows as it came up to them across the flooded river.

  Very old they both felt as they breathed that chilly breath! The little lady’s outburst of adventurousness flagged, wilted, sank. The first coming on of the night, with its unsealings and releases, was a very different thing from the established nocturnal power that now sank its foundations into one abyss and lifted its ramparts into another!

  She drew her arm stiffly out of the Corporal’s and turned her face round to him. They could see little of each other’s expression but John’s brother was not surprised when she said in a faint querulous voice: “It’s too late to-night. They will all have separated. I couldn’t bring them together. That woman will have gone to her room, to my son’s room. You’d better leave me here, Corporal. No! No! I couldn’t think of taking you farther. You are older than I am, my friend. Good-night, Corporal!”

  A few minutes later a slim figure with bowed head and weary limbs was descending the hill to the south through the rabbit burrows of Battlefield, while a gaunt figure with bowed head and weary limbs was descending the hill to the north through the rabbit burrows of Dorsal.

  An electric current sent in a bee line through the clay heart of Heron’s Ridge would have connected those two figures; but not for long.

  Tu-whit—tu-who! Tu-whit—tu-who! wailed the owls of Antiger Great Knoll; but no one listened to them except the idiot; and he was too occupied with stamping out the ashes of Granfer Dick’s bonfire to give them back their cry.

  CHAPTER IV

  WILLIAM HASTINGS sat writing at the window in the upper back room of Toll-Pike Cottage.

  Pale watery sunlight, faint as though it had passed through fathoms of attenuating mist, spread itself out over his minute meticulous manuscript, over the bare floor, over the shabby bookcase, over the gaunt discoloured volumes of Philo, Iamblicus, Plotinus, Paracelsus, which stood like dehumanized, featureless ghosts between the melancholy milestones of his Latin and Greek theology.

  The Napoleonic stomach of the man was pressed forward against the edge of the wretched little table which served him for a desk, while his white, plump ecclesiastical fingers held the pen with a suave ferocity.

  It was not permitted just then to any living person to catch the expression on William Hastings’s face as with calm, monotonous scrupulosity he formed word after word and punctuated them and dotted them and preserved their measured margins.

  There happened to be two little crumpled-up dead flies upon the window sill before him, and it seemed as if some power inimical to life itself emanated from the movements of that white, plump hand. Was it an accident, a coincidence, that on the grass below the theologian’s window a forlorn heap of frost-bitten feathers was all that was left of a seven-month-old sparrow?

  Is there, perhaps, a power of destruction in human thought capable of projecting its magnetism beyond its own realm of immaterial ideas? Nothing moved in that shabby room except the hand that was writing, and yet there undoubtedly did mingle with the pale, watery light that filtered in something that seemed to make the more friendly of the volumes upon the shelves draw closer together, to make the print of Saint Jerome with his lion and his skull look unnaturally ghastly, and to make the black marble clock upon the mantelpiece tick like the heart of a condemned man.

  But if the furniture in Mr. Hastings’s room caught in such a troubled manner the vibration of his “not very cheerful book,” there was someone in the house who received these mysterious emanations much more woefully.

  The young woman down below kept wandering uneasily from parlour to kitchen and from kitchen to parlour. She presented the appearance of someone who struggled with an overpowering impulse to run out of the house, to run down the road, to run for miles and miles and miles.

  At one point as the hours went on she did actually steal up to her bedroom and snatch her hat and cloak from the shaky cupboard; but she flung them aside when she came dow
n and returned to her stove in the kitchen.

  She was boiling something in an iron pot, and as she stood stirring this, she kept looking furtively round, holding herself very still to listen, her hand on the spoon and her head turned sideways.

  Once she opened the back door a little and let the misty yellow light lie cold and comfortless on the gray flagstones and the smell of leaf mould mingle with the steam of her cauldron.

  It was one of those days when the stillness is so absolute that it seems as if all the winds of the world had actually dropped out of the air, like great birds shot through the heart, and were now lying stone dead in remote lakes and ponds and backwaters out of all reach of recovery.

  There was a small poplar tree behind Toll-Pike Cottage, and just because there were so few leaves left each one of them seemed to float in its own particular atmospheric circle; and as it floated, to be consciously holding its breath.

  The very prevalence of pale yellow over every other colour gave to the fragment of space framed by the open door a look as of royal obsequies, as if all the land were covered, like a naked archaic corpse, with flakes upon flakes of chilly gold.

  It sometimes happens, in an out-of-the-way country spot like this one, that even the most harmless and commonplace noises cease altogether, leaving behind them a silence so profound that it becomes ominous.

  Such a silence, saturated like a great wet sponge with a watery yellowness that might have been washed from the golden body of some drowned idol, gathered closer and closer round the agitated girl.

  She put her hands to her ears at last. She was afraid of hearing the scratching of a pen up there; but this gesture only had the effect of making her abominably conscious of the beating of her own heart.

  Suddenly she decided to endure the thing no longer; and very silently, moving on tiptoe, she crept upstairs.

  Pausing at her husband’s door she found herself without the courage to open it and without the courage to descend. She just stood outside on the landing listening.

  Ah! she was sure she could hear his pen now; and it seemed to her as if it were the beak of some obscene bird pecking at the throat of life. This monstrous thinking-machine was the only thing that was alive in that windless morning. By the chilly mortuary light of the same sun whose pallid gold made the leaves so yellow and the air so misty this infernal cerebral gimlet was boring its way into some undefended crevice in the foundations of human sanity.

  She would have found it hard to say by what gradual means she had become so certain as to the nature of her husband’s thought. But certain she was now; and if she had dared she would have rushed into the room like a madwoman and torn the abominable thing into a thousand fragments.

  Why didn’t she dare? What was there about this man that always paralyzed her? She leaned against the closed door and bowed her head upon her elbow. She seemed beyond the relief of tears, beyond the power of any decision.

  It had all been so wonderful to her at first. To be loved by a recluse, by a thinker, by a person so different from the rest. And Aunt Martha had been so pleased about it before she died; so pleased that her nervous, troublesome niece had someone to look after her.

  To look after her! What would the old lady have said could she have known? She recalled her feelings when she first fully realized that her ideal image of the man had been broken to pieces. But she mustn’t think of that. Nothing that could ever happen would be quite as bad as what she went through then. Who was it who had told her once that cut flowers before they actually die suffer a spasmodic crisis and stretch themselves out with a palpable jerk, stark and rigid? That was just the way her romantic feeling for William had ended—given a horrible spasmodic jump, like a broken spring, and fallen in a dead heap!

  And it was not only that the mainspring of her love was broken. There had taken its place another feeling about him, a feeling very difficult to define, a vague, mysterious terror of something within him that baffled and perplexed her, something that roused an agitation in her such as people feel in the presence of the supernatural.

  It is true that this particular sensation came and went. It was at its worst at moments like this when something in the day itself played into its hands. But there were other days, when, in the ordinary exchange of little diurnal domestic interests, the thing subsided and died down. During these calmer interludes, though the romance of her love was dead beyond recall, she was not devoid of a certain quiet affection for him, strong enough to respond to his own attenuated, eccentric, spasmodic fits of tenderness.

  But to-day that almost supernatural terror seemed at its very worst. Oh, she was at the end of her tether to-day and something would have to be done. She could bear the strain of it no longer. She began listening again with increased intensity….

  Ah, he had pushed his chair back in there and put down the pen. She could see him as clearly as if the wood against which she leaned had been glass. She saw how his white hands clasped themselves upon his stomach, just where the little gold cross hung down. Oh, loathing! Loathing! Loathing! What was this? She was downstairs now, pulling on her cloak. Bang! The door had shut behind her and she was in the garden. Click! The gate had swung behind her and she was in the road.

  Where was she going?

  It was not till she had walked some hundreds of yards down the road that she knew she was going to Lexie Ashover’s. That was the last resort, then! That was what her feet would do with her when her mind ceased to act!

  All the rest of the way she remained drugged and numb; and even at Lexie’s door she was still too dazed to catch the look of disapproval with which Mrs. Bellamy regarded her, or to realize until she had removed her cloak in Lexie’s room that she had forgotten to take off her apron.

  Lexie had been more submissive to his doctor during the last week, and the girl was touched to see how this relapse into an invalid state had affected his spirits. He seemed to have lost something of his accustomed vein of humorous malice.

  He removed a pile of books from the lap of a leather armchair and made her sit opposite him, scanning her face with a certain whimsical intensity as children in fairy books scan the faces of human-speaking animals.

  The pallor of the day increased the natural pallor of her skin. Her oval forehead with the silky hair falling on each side of it seemed to carry more human sadness under its tender curves than any mere personal trouble could account for. Lexie’s flickering fire threw softening lights upon this sorrow, without touching its lodged hurt.

  His own cue, it seemed, was a low confidential tone of intimate gravity. “You know what happened after we talked in the churchyard that night? They came to see me … in the morning … just as you have come now … and Ann was more Ann than I’ve ever seen her. I couldn’t stand it. It was too much. But whether Netta heard what I said, or understood what I meant, the Lord alone knows! They were both dripping wet and I packed them off. But I’m sure Ann understands. You know what I’m like when I get rattled, Nell. I don’t beat about the bush.”

  A faint little smile crossed the visitor’s face.

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I said she’d come to ‘square’ me.”

  “Lexie! Did you say that?”

  “Why not? I believe in bringing everything right out into the air. I like to see the little horns protruding and the furry ears pricked up. I like to see the sharp claws under the velvet pads.”

  “But, Lexie, did Netta hear what you said? Oh, Lexie! How awful!”

  “I tell you they were both so dripping wet that it was all very confused. It was like quarrelling in a laundry. You could smell their drenched clothes. You could smell their wet skins. Poor Netta stood on one leg like a rain-soaked heron, and Ann looked as if she didn’t know her head from her tail. It was an entertaining scene, only I was too rattled to enjoy it.”

  “But do you really mean that Ann is trying to come between Netta and Rook?”

  “Nell, I’m ashamed of you! Don’t you know that women like th
at never come between people in that way?”

  “In what kind of way do they do it, then?”

  Lexie made a face at her as if he were playing at bears with a young child.

  “They don’t do anything,” he said. “They just look on till it happens.”

  Nell raised herself very straight in her chair and met Lexie’s grimace eye to eye.

  “If she entangles Rook and makes Netta unhappy it’ll be a cruel, scandalous, wicked shame!”

  Her violent words had their effect. Lexie got up, shuffled to the mantelpiece, and leaning his elbow against the corner of it looked down with concern into her face.

  “I suppose,” he said solemnly, “it has never occurred to you that Rook may be thoroughly tired of both of them.”

  She frowned and tilted back her head to get the full significance of this, and the young man was aware of something more vibrant and tense in her manner than he had realized at first.

  He began to wonder about the apron, too, which she had now untied from her waist and was mechanically folding upon her lap.

  “Tired of both of them,” she repeated; and then, avoiding his eyes and dropping her head—“He used to be very fond of Ann before he met Netta, didn’t he?”

  Lexie seemed to derive a mischievous satisfaction from delaying his answer to this question. He took his elbow from the chimneypiece and placed his hand upon the back of her chair.

  She kept her head bent, but the next thing he did was done in so casual and natural a way that it was very difficult for her to take offence at it. He lifted up her chin with two fingers and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

  “Did you say ‘fond of Ann’?” he cried. “He used to make love to her for whole summers. They used to stay out all night. My mother never knew half that went on. They were a fair pair; and I daresay Ann fell in love with him for ever and ever. She’s certainly had endless chances of being married since, though she’s only twenty-five—did you realize that, Nell?—only twenty-five now.”