BORLASE IS ABSENT-MINDED
Borlase began by being angry and riding hard. He was certain Mrs.
Severn's interruption had been deliberate. It was not probable she would
be friendly to any one who wished to rob Old Lafer of Anna, who was oil
to the domestic machinery. But he thought he should quickly outwit her
unless she developed an ability for taking trouble.
Gradually his pace slackened. The remembrance of the sudden shyness in
Anna's manner consoled him. He was sure she had understood all at last.
This fired hope and coloured her non-appearance with an encouraging
construction; she could not have come back, for to do so would be
courting his intention. The more he pondered the more convinced he was
that he had banished the old Anna who went and came without a thought
of self. As such she had been delightful but his pulses beat to think
how much more delightful she would be now. Let him only have her to
himself again and no mortal power should balk him of his opportunity.
Her image seemed to move before him all the way home. The tones of her
voice, her little tricks of speech and gesture were photographed on his
mind. She had worn a bunch of sweet peas at her throat, how sweet they
were! He went over all the alternations of her mood that evening, and
as he remembered how her friendliness had at last merged into shyness,
his heart leapt. He would speak to her soon, and in one short year they
would be married.
Thus his ride ended slowly with drooping rein, and he was only roused
by the Minster clock striking eleven as he entered Wonston.
He ought to have called at a cottage in East Lafer, and he did not know
that he had passed through the village--yes, he had though; his horse
had shied at the geese asleep on the green and he remembered having
turned to catch the last glimpse of the lights twinkling at Old Lafer.
Why the deuce had he forgotten the poor fellow in pain who was expecting
him? As for the lanes with grassy margins where he generally took a
gallop, the plantations suggesting pheasant-shooting, the oncoming
turnips where partridges would find covert, he had seen none of them.
The charm of the blurred landscape, the freshness of the night air, with
its whiffs of sweetness from the honeysuckle thrown here and there in
foamy sheets over the maple and holly of the hedges, had for once been
unnoticed.
He had indeed forgotten everything in thinking of Anna, as he realised
when he got into his own house. A sleepy maid met him in the hall with
the announcement that a boy from the Mires had been waiting an hour
for medicine. He found him in the surgery, sitting on a chair behind
the door with his legs dangling, and his cap held between his knees.
He had forgotten all about old Hartas Kendrew's needs, and that he had
ordered a messenger to come, so could not excuse himself by having
overlooked the knack these dalesboys had of covering three or four miles
in a whipstitch. He whistled softly as he sought out the necessary
drugs and compounded them in a mortar. It was certain a doctor had no
business to be in love. He did not care much for old Kendrew, but had
it not been ten to one that the man at East Lafer would be asleep, he
would have galloped back to see him. Old Kendrew was a miserable sinner
whose death certificate it would give him pleasure to sign any day. He
was not only a drunken scoundrel and cherished a blackguardly hatred
of straight dealing but knew one or two discreditable facts connected
with the family whom for Anna Hugo's sake Borlase wished to hold in
special honour. Borlase knew well that there were elements of disastrous
wrong-doing in Mrs. Severn's character and suspected that Kendrew knew
this too. She had at various times left Old Lafer for some weeks and
stayed at Kendrew's pit cottage at the Mires. There she had degraded
herself by intemperance. This rendered it all but an impossibility that
Kendrew should not have the knowledge and power to spread a scandal
whenever he chose. Knowing the man as he did, it was inexplicable that
he had not already done so. Some time had passed since her last visit
to the Mires; and Borlase knew that at present she was little talked
about except with admiration of her appearance and musical gifts.
Her old freaks, if hinted at, were considered amusing, as one of the
irresponsibilities of genius. The sin involved was, he was convinced,
unsuspected where it was not, as in his case, definitely known. Dinah
Constantine had told him. It had, joined to his professional knowledge
of her physique and character, interested him psychologically.
'And how was Hartas when you came away, Jimmy?' he asked as he folded up
the bottle.
'Lord, sir, I came off just after you'd gone yourself, so he couldna
either hev worsened or bettered, but I ken he wer swearing awful. I
heard him the whiles Scilla wer talking to me about t' physic--swearing
awful, he wer!'
Borlase laughed.
'Swearing, was he?' he said. 'That's his chief complaint, Jimmy, to tell
you the truth. It comes of _not_ telling the truth. A man fouls his
throat with lies and oaths to back them up until a moral disease seizes
it, and he can't speak anything else, and when he drinks and gets D.T.
too, the moral and physical diseases act upon each other until he's a
mass of corruption, soul and body. Take care you never swear and lie and
poach grouse and fire at keepers as Hartas and his lad did. Kit's in
gaol, you know, having a spell at the Mill, and Hartas is still worse
off, as he lies now in a strait-jacket. Mind you're always honest to the
powers that be, and touch your cap to the Admiral and Miss Marlowe.'
Jimmy's eyes gleamed with awe. What he did not understand in this speech
was even more impressive than what he did. 'Hartas says he'll be even
with the Admiral for sending Kit to t' Mill, he says he will one of
these days, sir. It's that he raves on at, and he calls Miss Cynthia
too, and Lias Constantine for----'
'I daresay. For telling the truth?' said Borlase, nodding.
'Well, he witnessed he both saw them kill t' birds and lay fresh
snares. Then he jumbles in Mrs. Severn and----'
'Yes, yes,' said Borlase hastily, 'he's a cantankerous old gaffer who's
possessed by a thirst for vengeance against the law and those who uphold
it. We all hate being found out in a sin more than the sin itself, I
fear. Now get off home, and tell Scilla to keep up her heart, he'll pull
through.'
'She'd a deal liefer he wouldn't,' said Jimmy, opening his jacket and
buttoning up the bottle of medicine in his breast pocket. He adjusted
his cap with various shovings to and fro on his shock of red hair and
clutched a heavy stick that had been propped in the corner.
'Hartas's talk made me feel that queer in my inside, sir,' he said with
a shrewd, half-humorous glance at him, 'that I wer fair certain there'd
be a skirling o' bogies on the moor and I just brought this along to
thwack t' air with.'
Borlase would have smiled had not Jimmy kept his eye on him with a
boldness born of the suspicion that he might. And after all what was
there to smile at? Jimmy Chapman was a fine little lad, and it was
his realisation of the powers of darkness in the person of a drunkard
and blasphemer that peopled the moor for him with the supernatural.
When Hartas Kendrew was down in delirium tremens as the result of a
drinking bout, his invoking the devil and his agencies was so real an
element in the life of the pitmen at the Mires that his ravings must
generate belief--however reluctant--in the probability of fiends and
bogies responding. Had the Mires been a respectable hamlet and its
pit population one of healthy morals and God-fearing principles, the
midnight moor would have had no terrors, for good would have had the
predominance over evil.
The mould which makes us is circumstance. Borlase knew it had made Kit
Kendrew a poacher when his wife fell ill of fever. To the epigram that
'nothing is certain but the unforeseen' he thought there might be added
'or more powerful.' It had been so in Kit's case. Up to the time of his
marriage he had been a wild lad, suspected of more and graver trespasses
than were traced home to him, but also open-handed and kind-hearted.
Those who abhorred Hartas as evil to the core and unredeemable, cast
many a kind thought on Kit; he would get into trouble if only from his
daring spirit, and it would be a thousand pities. When he married, many
prophesied that it would be the saving of him. Priscilla was nurse-maid
at Old Lafer and a good steady girl. But she lost her baby and fell
ill when a hard winter was at its hardest. There was no coal-mining to
be done, for the moors were snow-bound. Kit loved her passionately and
nursed her devotedly. He was aghast to find that tea and porridge would
not bring her round to health. Delicacies were ordered, she must have
strengthening diet. Every circumstance was just at that time against
honesty.
Borlase, looking round and noting with appreciation the exceptional
cleanliness and tidiness of the cottage, never dreamt that extreme
poverty lurked here. He had still to learn that they are often the
poorest who make the greatest efforts to appear least so, and that there
are women who manage a clean collar round their throats when they have
not a loaf of bread in the cupboard. The Marlowes were away, and there
was no soup-kitchen at the Hall that winter for those labourers on the
estate who cared to take advantage of it and no Miss Cynthia to inquire
after wife, husband, or children, and make notes of necessities in a
little morocco-leather note-book, which many knew well and had cause
to bless. Anna Hugo was also away on one of her visits to Rocozanne.
There was no one to befriend them. It was useless to go to Mrs. Severn;
and his heart was sore at the remembrance of various rebuffs in his
courtship which he had had from Dinah Constantine. Dinah had thought
Priscilla was throwing herself away; she knew her value and begrudged
losing her services. The more desperate he became, the more he shrank
from asking help.
One day, as he trudged back from Wonston with medicine, his dog caught
a hare in a hedge. He pocketed it and made Scilla some soup. This was
before the days of the Ground Game Acts, when it was a penalty to
touch a rabbit whose burrow was on the land a man rented. Kit snared
a few rabbits first. Almost every man at the Mires did the same and
the Admiral knew it. But they did it in a clumsy fashion that raised
no fears of more ambitious depredations. Kit, however, soon found
that there was an art in the practice and a blood-warming risk in its
pursuit. The grouse season was just out for that winter, but there were
other birds whose close time was not so strictly preserved. By the time
Priscilla was strong again he had acquired a skill that absorbed him and
had bent every resource of his mind to its success as a trade. She knew
nothing, but Hartas knew all. They stored their spoil in a dub in the
ling near the coal-pit, and the following winter this spoil was grouse.
Then came suspicion and watchfulness on the part of the keepers,
combined one night with a nasty fray in which guns were used and a
man was killed. The offenders got off, however, and could not be
sworn to. Kit knew the police were on the alert, and would not allow
his father to run risks. They both kept quiet for a while, and Kit,
without the excitement that mastered him, was a miserable man. Hartas
had the itching palm but Kit the young blood. Do and dare he must. And
he did, once too often. He succeeded in eluding the keepers and not
a soul at the Mires would have betrayed him; but Elias Constantine,
shepherding on a sheep-gait which Mr. Severn had taken over unknown
to him, happened to look over a wall as he was in the act of taking a
moor-bird out of the snare. To Elias, whose respect for the law and all
time-worn institutions was inbred and unbounded, it seemed that he was
an instrument in the hands of Providence for bringing the offender to
justice. Here were grouse, and the Admiral's grouse, going by dozens
into a poacher's sack! Here also, in all probability, was the man who
had fired the shot that killed the under-keeper. If that had not been
murder, it was manslaughter. He watched the scientific process for some
time, the disentangling of the birds' legs from the cunning wire-loop,
the flutters of the exhausted victims, the final twist of the necks, the
re-setting of the snares.
Then he gave a sign to his collie. A bound over the wall, a rush through
the ling and the dog was at the man's throat and bearing him to the
ground!
All was over with Kit and he knew it. He would make a clean breast of
it, too, over that gun-shot, be the consequence what it might. But
he managed to save his father, who was busy at the dub, by a warning
whistle. The dim morning light covered Hartas's escape. But Kit was
given up to the wrath of a scandalised bench of game-preserving
magistrates and thence to trial by judge and jury. They inflicted upon
him the full penalty of the law, on a conviction for manslaughter.