Ducdame (41 page)

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 out 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 touched 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.

“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.