The Squire was late.
A hundred years ago night fell more seriously. It closed in on a
countryside less peopled, on houses and hamlets more distant, and
divided by greater risks of flood and field. The dark hours were longer
and haunted by graver apprehensions. Every journey had to be made on
horses or behind them, roads were rough and miry, fords were plenty,
bridges scarce. Sturdy rogues abounded, and to double every peril it
was still the habit of most men to drink deep. Few returned sober from
market, fewer from fair or merry-making.
For many, therefore, the coming of night meant the coming of fear.
Children, watching the great moths fluttering against the low ceiling,
or round the rush-light that cast such gloomy shadows, thought that
their elders would never come upstairs to bed. Lone women, quaking in
remote dwellings, remembered the gibbet where the treacherous
inn-keeper still moulded, and fancied every creak the coming of a man
in a crape mask. Thousands suffered nightly because the goodman
lingered abroad, or the son was absent, and in many a window the light
was set at dusk to guide the master by the pool. On market evenings
women stole trembling down the lane that the sound of wheels might the
sooner dispel their fears.
At Garth it was youth not age that first caught the alarm. For Josina’s
conscience troubled her, and before even Miss Peacock, most fidgety of
old maids, had seen cause to fear, the girl was standing in the
darkness before the door, listening and uneasy. The Squire was seldom
late; it could not be that Clement had met him and there had been a—but
no, Clement was not the man to raise his hand against his elder—the
thought was dismissed as soon as formed. Yet why did not the Squire
come? Lights began to shine through the casements, she saw the candles
brought into the dining-room, the darkness thickened about her, only
the trunks of the nearer beeches gave back a gleam. And she felt that
if anything had happened to him she could never forgive herself.
Shivering, less with cold than with apprehension, she peered down the
drive. He had been later than this before, but then her conscience had
been quiet, she had not deceived him, she had had nothing with which to
reproach herself on his account.
Presently, “Josina, what are you doing there?” Miss Peacock cried. She
had come to the open door and discovered the girl. She began to scold.
“Come in this minute, child! What are you starving the house for,
standing there?”
But Josina did not budge. “He is very late,” she said.
“Late? What nonsense! And what if he is late? What good can you do,
standing out there? I declare one might suppose your father was one of
those skimble-skambles that can’t pass a tavern door, to hear you talk!
And Thomas with him! Come in at once when I tell you! As if I should
not be the first to cry out if anything were wrong. Late indeed—why,
goodness gracious, I declare it’s nearly eight. What can have become of
him, child? And Calamy and those good-for-nothing girls warming their
knees at the fire, and no more caring if their master is in the river
than—Josina, do you hear? Do you know that your father is still out?
Calamy!” ringing a hand-bell that stood on the table in the hall,
“Calamy! Are you all asleep? Don’t you know that your master is not in,
and it is nearly eight?”
Calamy was the butler. A tall, lanthorn-jawed man, he would have looked
lugubrious in the King’s scarlet which he had once worn; in his
professional black, or in his shirt sleeves, cleaning plate, he was
melancholy itself. And his modes and manners were at least as mournful
as his aspect—no man so sure as “Old Calamity” to see the dark side of
things or to put it before others. It was whispered that he had been a
Dissenter, and why the Squire, who hated a ranter as he hated the
devil, had ever engaged him, much less kept him, was a puzzle to
Garthmyle. That he had been his son’s servant and had been with the boy
when he died, might have seemed a sufficient reason, had the Squire
been other than he was. But no one supposed that such a thing weighed
with the old man—he was of too hard a grain. Yet at Garth, Calamy had
lived for a score of years, and been suffered with a patience which
might have stood to the credit of more reasonable men.
“Nearly eight!” Miss Peacock flung at him, and repeated her statement.
“We’ve put the dinner back, ma’am.”
“Put the dinner back! And that’s all you think of, when at any minute
your master—oh, dear, dear, what can have happened to him?”
“Well, it’s a dark night, ma’am, to be sure.”
“Gracious goodness, can’t I see that? If Thomas weren’t with him——”
The butler shook his head. “Under notice, ma’am,” he said. “I think the
worst of Thomas. On a dark night, with Thomas——”
Miss Peacock gasped.
“I should say my prayers, ma’am,” the butler murmured softly.
Miss Peacock stared, aghast. “Under notice?” she cried. “Well, of all
the—’deed, and I wish you were all under notice, if that is the best
you’ve got to say.”
“Hadn’t you better,” said Josina from the darkness outside, “send
Fewtrell to meet him with a lanthorn?”
“And get my nose bitten off when your father comes home! La, bless me,
I don’t know what to do! And no one else to do a thing!”
“Send him, Calamy,” said Josina.
Calamy retired. Miss Peacock looked out, a shawl about her head. “Jos!
Where are you?” she cried. “Come in at once, girl. Do you think I am
going to be left alone, and the door open? Jos! Jos!”
But Josina was gone, groping her way down the drive. When Fewtrell
followed with his lanthorn he came on her sitting on the bridge, and he
got a rare start, thinking it was a ghost. “Lord A’mighty!” he cried as
the light fell on her pale face. “Aren’t you afraid to sit there by
yourself, miss?”
But Josina was not afraid, and after a word or two he shambled away,
the lanthorn swinging in his hand. The girl watched the light go
bobbing along as far the highway fifty yards on, saw it travel to the
left along the road, lost it for some moments, then marked it again, a
faint blur of light, moving towards the village.
Presently it vanished and she was left alone with her fears. She
strained her ears to catch the first sound of wheels. The stream
murmured beneath her, a sick sheep coughed, the breeze whispered in the
hedges, the cry of an owl, thrice repeated, sank into silence. But that
was all, and in the presence of the silent world about her, of the
all-enveloping night, of the solemn stars shining as they had shone
from eternity, the girl knew herself infinitely helpless, without
remedy against the stroke of impending fate. She recognized that
lighted rooms and glowing fires and the indoor life did but deceive;
that they did but blind the mind to the immensity of things, to the
real issues, to life and death and eternity. Anguished, she owned that
a good conscience was the only refuge, and that she had it not. She had
deceived her father, and it would be her fate to endure a lasting
remorse. At last, her eyes opened, she fancied that she detected behind
the mask a father’s face. But too late, for the bridge which he had
crossed innumerable times, the drive, rough and rutted, yet the
harbinger of home, which he had climbed from boyhood to age, the
threshold which he had trodden so often as master—they would know him
no more! At the thought she broke down and wept, feeling all its
poignancy, all its pitifulness, and finding for the moment no support
in Clement, no recompense in a love which deceit and secrecy had
tainted.
Doubtless she would not have taken things so hardly had she not been
overwrought; and, as it was, the first sound that reached her from the
Garthmyle road brought her to her feet. A light showed, moving from
that direction, travelling slowly through the darkness. It vanished,
and she held her breath. It came into view again, and she groped her
way forward until she stood in the road. The light was close at hand
now, though viewed from the front it moved so little that her worst
forebodings were confirmed. But now, now that she saw her fears
justified, the woman’s fortitude, that in enduring is so much greater
than man’s, came to her aid, and it was with a calmness that surprised
herself that she awaited the slow procession, discerned by the
lanthorn-light her father’s huddled form, and in a trembling voice
asked if he still lived.
“Yes, yes!” Arthur cried, and hastened to reassure her. “He will do
yet, but he is hurt. Go back, Jos, and get his bed ready, and hot
water, and some linen. The doctor will be here in a minute.”
His voice, firm and collected, struck the right note, and the girl
answered to it bravely. She made no lamentation, shed no tears—there
would be time for tears later—but gathering up her skirts she sped up
the drive, and before the carriage had passed the bridge she had given
the alarm in the house. There, in a moment, all was confusion. Miss
Peacock, whatever fears she had expressed, was ill prepared for the
fact, and it was Josina, who, steadied by that half-hour of
self-examination, stilled the outcry of the maids, gave the needful
orders, and seconded Calamy in carrying them out, had candles placed on
the stairs, and with her own hand brought out a stout chair. When the
carriage, the lanthorn gleaming sombrely on the shining trunks, drew
slowly out of the darkness, she was there with lights and brandy. For
her the worst was over. The scared faces of the women, their stifled
cries and confused hovering, were but a background to her steady
courage.
Still, even she yielded the first place to Arthur. Whatever pity or
horror he had felt, he had had time to overcome, and to think both of
the present and the future. And he rose to the occasion. He directed,
arranged, and was himself the foremost worker. By the time Mr. Farmer,
the village doctor, arrived, he had done much which had to be done. The
Squire had been carried upstairs, and lay, breathing stertorously, on
his great four-post bed with the dingy drab curtains and the two
watch-pockets at the head; and everything which could be of use had
been brought to hand.
The doctor shut out the frightened maids and shut out Miss Peacock. But
Arthur was only at the beginning of his resources. His nerve was good
and he aided Farmer in his examination, while Jos, standing out of
sight behind the curtain, calm but quivering in every nerve, handed to
him or to Calamy what they needed. Even then, however, and while he was
thus employed, Arthur found occasion to whisper a cheering word to the
girl, to reassure her and give her hope. He forced her to take a glass
of wine, and when Calamy, shaking his head, muttered that he had known
a man to recover who had been worse hurt—but he was a strong young
fellow—he damned the butler for an old fool, regardless of the fact
that coming from Calamy this was a cheerful prognostic.
Presently he made her go downstairs. “Nothing more can be done now,”
said he. “The doctor thinks well of him so far. He and I will stay with
him to-night. You must save yourself, Jos. You will be needed
to-morrow.”
He left the room with her, and as she would not go to bed he made her
lie down on a couch, and covered her with a cloak. He had dropped the
tone of patronage, almost of persiflage, which he had used to her of
late, and he was kindness itself, behaving to her as a brother; so that
she did not know how to be thankful enough for his presence, or for the
relief from responsibility which it afforded. Afterwards, looking back
on that long, strange night, during which lights burned in the rooms
till dawn, and odd meals were served at odd times, and stealthy feet
trod the stairs, and scared faces peeped in only to be
withdrawn—looking back on that strange night, and its happenings, it
seemed to her that without him she could not have lived through the
hours.
In truth there was not much sleep for anyone. The village doctor, who
lived in top-boots, and went his rounds on horse-back, and by
old-fashioned people was called the apothecary, could say nothing for
certain; in the morning he might be able to do so. But in the
morning—well, perhaps by night, when the patient came to himself, he
might be able to form an opinion. To Arthur he was more candid. The eye
was beyond hope—it could not be saved, and he feared that the other eye
was injured; and there was serious concussion. He played with his fob
seals and looked sagely over his gold-rimmed spectacles as he mouthed
his phrases. Whether there was a fracture he could not say at present.
He had seen in a long life and a country practice many such cases, and
was skilful in treating them. But—no active measures. “Dr. Quiet,” he
said, “Dr. Quiet, the best of the faculty, my dear. If he does not
always effect a cure, he makes no mistakes. We must leave it to him.”
So morning came, and passed, and noon; and still nothing more could be
done. With the afternoon reaction set in; the house resigned itself to
rest. Two or three stole away to sleep. Arthur dozed in an arm-chair.
The clock struck with abnormal clearness, the cluck of a hen in the
yard was heard in the attics. So the hours passed until sunset
surprised a yawning house, and in the parlor they pressed one another
to eat, and in the kitchen unusual luxuries were consumed with a
ghoulish enjoyment, and no fear of the housekeeper. And still Farmer
could add nothing. They must wait and hope. Dr. Quiet! He praised him
afresh in the same words.
Some hours earlier, and before Josina, after much scolding by Miss
Peacock, had retired to her room to lie down, Arthur had told his
story.
He did not go into details. “It would only shock you, Jos,” he said.
“It was Thomas, of course, and I hope to heaven he’ll swing for it. I
suppose he knew that your father was carrying a large sum, and he must
have struck him, possibly as he turned to say something, and then
thrown him out. We must set the hue and cry after him, but Clement will
see to that. It was lucky that he turned up when he did.”
She drew a sharp breath; this was the first she had heard of Clement.
And in her surprise “Clement?” she exclaimed. Then, covering her
confusion as well as she could, “Mr. Ovington? Do you mean—he was
there, Arthur?”
“By good luck he was, just when he was wanted. Poor chap. I can tell
you it knocked him fairly down. All the same, I don’t know what might
not have happened if he had not come up. I sent him for Farmer, and it
saved time.”
“I did not know that he had been there,” she murmured, too
self-conscious to ask further questions.
“Well, you wouldn’t, of course. He’d been fishing, I fancy, and came
along just when it made all the difference. I don’t know what I should
have done without him.”
“And Thomas? You are sure that it was Thomas? What became of him?”
“He made off across the fields. It was dark and useless to follow
him—we had other things to think of, as you may imagine. Ten to one he
has made for Manchester, but Clement will see to that. Oh, we’ll have
him! But there, I’ll not tell you any more, Jos. You look ill as it is,
and it will only spoil your sleep. Do you go upstairs and lie down, or
you will never be able to go on.” And, Miss Peacock fussily seconding
his advice, Jos consented and went.
Arthur’s manner had been kind, and Jos thought him kind. A brother
could not have been more anxious to spare her unpleasant details. But,
told as he had told it, the story left her under the impression that
Clement’s part had been secondary only, and slight, and that if there
were a person to whom she owed the preservation of her father’s life,
it was Arthur, and Arthur only. Which she was the more ready to
believe, in view of the masterly way in which he had managed all at the
house, had taken the upper hand in all, and saved her, and spared her.
Yet Arthur had been careful to state no facts which could be
contradicted by evidence, should the whole come out—at an inquest, for
instance. He had foreseen the possibility of that, and had been
careful. Indeed, it was with that in his mind that he had—well, that he
had not gone into details.