Ducdame (11 page)

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.

R
OOK’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 proved 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!

It was not an easy matter, struggling up that hill through the soft unfrozen snow, between rabbit holes and molehills, between furze bushes and hornbeam stumps; and when at last they reached the top and found themselves among the great dark trunks of the Scotch firs, it was natural enough that they should lean against each other for a moment’s breathing time before commencing the descent.

The touch of his cousin’s cold cheek, the familiar
associations
aroused in him by the smell of the Irish-tweed jacket she wore, as they leant together against one of those rough tree trunks, plunged him into the irresponsible security of remembered things.

Between the enormous sky spaces above the trees, void of star or planet, and the heavy snow masses that had descended out of their gulfs, there must have been proceeding, all that
evening, some magnetic affinity that in the end would result in still further visitations from those airy heights.

Some of these magnetic currents from the elements above the firmament must have passed through these two human bodies on their mysterious journey; for when after a while they began going down the hill on the Dorsal side, Rook became conscious that his former familiarities with his cousin had not blunted the edge of their attraction for each other.

As they descended into the valley hand in hand, there was that in the tones of both their voices that suggested the atmosphere of a reckless, unholy prank.

When they arrived at Mr. Drool’s house they found that Corporal Dick was lying comfortably in his own bed, that the doctor had departed, and that Mrs. Drool had turned Binnory out of his especial room and had made the place presentable for Cousin Ann’s reception.

The idiot boy was in a high state of excitement over all these developments. He watched his mother making up a cot for him by the kitchen fire with unbounded satisfaction, but he kept returning to the Corporal’s room to tell the lady “who be going to sleep wi’ I” what sounds and sights of the encompassing night were to be expected by his visitor.

The Corporal’s room and Binnory’s room were isolated from the rest of the house, so that Cousin Ann had no need to fear any difficulty or interruption in the performance of her nursing duties.

Uncle Dick was very quiet now, but Mrs. Drool told Rook that they had had considerable difficulty in keeping him in bed when they first got him undressed.

“Doctor told Drool,” she said, “that we was to watch out for new sympterums in his sad state. He said Drool had to sit up wi’ ’ee for fear ’ee’d do summat to hurt ’isself with his crazy old notions. What did he do up at house, Master Rook? There be a couple down this morning from Ash’ver
Old Pyke who do tell how Martha Vabbin wrastled wi’ ’ee all night long, in backyard! They do say how he did shoot at she with’s rabbit gun and how she did beat on’s head to quiet ’un with a girt iron shovel!”

“Don’t you worry, Mrs. Drool,” the Squire of Ashover found himself saying in answer to this new version of recent events; and as he spoke he hesitated for a moment with that queer tightening of the nerves about the heart which indicates the forming of a subconscious resolution, of which the rational mind is only half aware. “Netta will understand,” he said to himself. “She will know I have stayed up with the old man. I
could
send Drool over to tell them, but it’s not a nice night for such a thing.”

“Don’t you worry, Mrs. Drool,” he repeated. “I’ll sit up with Mr. Richard myself. You and your husband can go to bed, just as usual. There
is
one thing, though, you might do for Lady Ann and me. You might send us up some sort of light supper—anything you have in the house—just on a tray, you know—let your son bring it up to us. We could have it in Mr. Richard’s room if it isn’t too much trouble.”

The result of this suggestion was that a couple of hours later Rook and Ann sat down to a substantial meal of cold pheasant, home-made bread and Dorchester pale ale, while their low-voiced conversation attuned itself to the peaceful breathings of the invalid. They had scarcely begun their repast when Ann became conscious that the idiot was making some curious vocal attempts, in her room opposite, to imitate the voices of some carol singers or “waits” who had visited the gamekeeper’s house earlier in the day. Binnory was practising a grotesque version of his own of the familiar ditty—“God rest you merry, gentlemen”; a version that seemed, as it reached her ears, to be mingled with a more questionable tavern catch, picked up from some less pious quarter.

Disturbed by this incongruous serenade, which the
excitement 
of her nerves rendered the more noticeable, Cousin Ann got up, opened the door, and crossed the passage.

She found the idiot sitting on her bed while one of the pillows, decorated with her hat and cloak, was propped up horizontally against the wall beside him. “She be
you,
lady,” said the boy with a certain obstinate sulkiness in his voice, “and I be Squire. Us be singing ‘Born is the king’ to them ghosties what do bide out there.”

Lady Ann looked at the lad with a mixture of confusion and irritation. Then catching sight of her leather bag, open on a chair, with her heavy crimson dressing gown in it, she suddenly seemed to grow oblivious of the boy’s presence and, as if she were quite alone, threw off her tweed jacket, slipped out of her tweed skirt, and hurriedly put her dressing gown on.

“You be different from
she
now,” muttered Binnory, indicating the pillow with a jerk of his thumb.

Cousin Ann smiled at him as she had not often smiled at any one. The feeling of the soft garment against her limbs, in place of the other, made her suddenly vividly aware of that classic perfection of her form which had struck Netta so. The natural tingling of her relaxed muscles after their struggle through the snow increased this consciousness.

“Come in and have some supper with Mr. Ashover and me,” she said to the idiot gently. “And since I’m quite different now, we can put
her
back to bed, can’t we?”

She removed the cloak and hat from the pillow and
replaced
it at the head of the bed, patting it smooth with her hand. Then she led the boy across the passage and into the Corporal’s room where Rook had already disposed of half the great jug of Dorchester ale. Her thoughts, as she placed the boy between them and met Rook’s clouded gaze of appreciation, were fatal and masterful in their recognition of her chance-given opportunity.

She had at first that sickening sense of inability to eat a mouthful which used to come over her at hunt breakfasts in her father’s house before a great meet of Blackmore hounds; but it did not take more than a few sips of Mrs. Drool’s jug to remove that inhibition, and very soon she found herself enjoying the meal with full youthful zest.

“And do you remember the night Aunt Edith found us in the hayloft?” Rook said suddenly, his heart warmed by the soft look in the girl’s eyes. “How on earth did she get up the ladder, Coz? Or didn’t she get up the ladder? And that evening you nearly fell through the ice on Abbotsbury Pond?
That
was a mad Christmas, eh? The time your father had to go to Paris, and you and I had the whole place to
ourselves
?”

“That’ll larn ’ee to play the bitch in gentlemen’s houses—that’ll larn ’ee, ye sly baggage!”

The interruption came from the bed, but the old man turned over to the wall and once more his breathing was quiet and undisturbed.

“It’s not only thik old owl-devil wot I do hear o’ nights,” threw in Binnory. “There be hosts and hosts o’ them others, wot nobody but me take notice of.”

“What others do you mean, Binnory?” enquired Cousin Ann, her face radiant with a heathen happiness that quite ensorcerized the lad, as if it had been the rich honey drink of Valhalla.

“I mean them hosts of girt gray boggles that go flapping over Dorsal, lady; same as can’t bear to bide where Mister Pod do put ’em when they be deaded and shrouded.”

“Goodness, Rook! Who puts these ideas in this child’s head?” murmured Cousin Ann.

“Him as is over there, lady,” replied Binnory, answering for himself. “Granfer Dick do tell I of everythink. ’A do tell of how babies be born wot bain’t prayed over afore they be born, but be just dropped, like lambs at lambing-time.
’A do tell of babies that do cry like corncrakes after we, when us be up field-way or down river-way, till us dursn’t bide in them places after dark be come. ’A do tell of how slimmity puss-cats, in shape of wimmings from Lunnon, do catch great folks round them’s necks, and scrabbit them till they ain’t no blood left in ’em!”

“Blood!” the voice came suddenly and startlingly from the bed. “I’ve ’a seen that bloody bitch quelled and quieted. I’ve ’a put the Lord’s own lead in her.”

Cousin Ann rose to her feet, but the old man with a
commanding
sweep of his hand waved her off. He raised himself up in bed and stared wildly at them, searching for words.

Binnory, too frightened to move or breathe, gazed at him with mouth and eyes open. Granfer Dick had always been more than human to the lad, and this burst of excitement in him was as though the eternal hills had begun to cry out.

Anxious not to increase the old man’s excitement by
unnecessary
opposition, and not quite free from the fumes of the Dorchester ale, Rook remained passive in his seat, while his cousin leaned against the edge of his chair ready to spring over to the bed the moment the need arose.

It was at her that the Corporal now pointed his long gaunt arm, the white nightshirt clinging tight round the bony wrist, the forefinger outstretched.

“Where be the spirit of your people, Ann Poynings? Where be your love and your maiden beauty this bitter day? Have you no thought to put a hand out and stop this ruin of hopes and expectations; this crumbling down of what took a thousand years to build? What be your girl-pride and your lady-pride; your maidenhead-fears and your virgin-fears, compared with Ashover going down into a rumour of dust and dirt? Ay! Ay! Your cheeks are rosy-bright and your eyes shining. You do know what an old man would say but must forbear to say. You do know well enough! Ay! If ye be as comely in shift and smock as ye be in
cramosin, he that be now sitting aside of ’ee would be a gowk and a gammon to let the ice freeze on the cold sheets!”

His arm sank down on the bed and his head fell back on the pillow.

Lady Ann went quickly over to him and pulled the
bedclothes
up under his chin. He met her gaze with a look of beseeching intensity, the wild glare dying out from his face like the reflection of a blown-out torch from a murky pool.

Then to the girl’s amazement one of his wrinkled eyelids closed in a fantastic goblinish wink and he heaved over against the wall and remained dead-still.

She stood by his side for a second or two, contemplating his giant frame under the chequered coverlet. The thoughts that passed at that moment through the head of Missy Sparrow-hawk would have been difficult to put into
intelligible
words.

She protracted her pose at the bedside longer than was necessary. When she did turn away from her now peacefully breathing patient, it was not at Rook she looked but at the boy.

“Better run down now, Binnory, and get into bed! Do you want the lady to come down and tuck you up? Very well, then! Be a good boy and undress yourself quietly and I’ll come down and say good-night to you in five, six, seven,
ten
minutes.”