ONE MORE HOLIDAY.
The inevitable morning came, but the letter did not.
Harding was first incredulous, then when a light flashed upon him, he
was at once amused and indignant.
"So! I kept you waiting till the latest day, and you are returning the
compliment. I am given to understand that you can take your time as well
as I? That's fair enough, no doubt, only it seems rather a small sort of
revenge, and, as things have turned out, it's a nuisance. What is to be
done now? Shall I wait another day for my instructions, or shall I go
up to town at once? I told him to write here, but, after all, what is
there to say, except, 'Be at the office on such a day?' Shall I go, or
stay?"
He tossed up, not ill-pleased to decide his uncle's affairs so airily.
The coin decreed that he should stay.
"It's just as well," he said to himself. "I don't want to seem impatient
if he isn't."
But the additional day of idleness proved very burdensome. He fancied
that the Mitchelhurst gossips watched his every movement; he felt
himself in a false position; he shut himself up in his little
sitting-room and asked for books. Mrs. Simmonds brought him all she had,
but she looked upon reading as a penitential occupation for Sundays, and
periods of affliction, and the volumes were well suited for the purpose.
Harding thrust them aside. The local paper was nearly a week old, but
he read every word of it.
"There'll be a new one to-morrow, sir," said his landlady, delighted to
see that he enjoyed it so much.
"Thank you, Mrs. Simmonds, but I shall be far enough away by this time
to-morrow," the young man replied.
He spent a considerable part of the afternoon lying on the horse-hair
couch, and staring at the ceiling. A ceiling is not, as a rule, very
interesting to study, and the only thing that could be said for this one
was that it was conveniently near. Reynold could examine every
smoke-stain at his ease, and every fly that chanced to stroll across his
range of vision. The first he noticed made him think of Barbara and
Joppa, but the later comers were simply wearisome. There is a
distressing want of individuality about flies. Even when one buzzed
about his head, with a fixed determination to wander awhile upon his
forehead, he had not an idea which fly it was. It seemed to him, as he
lay there, with his arm thrown up for a pillow, that flies in general
were just one instrument of torture of, say, a billion-fly power. The
afternoon sunshine and the smouldering fire had wakened more than he
could reckon in the little parlour.
He would not have cared to confess how much he was troubled by his
uncle's silence. He had expected to be met rather more than half-way,
instead of which it seemed that he was to be taught to know his place.
The idea was intolerable, and it haunted him.
When Mrs. Simmonds came in with a tray (the surveyor always took his tea
between five and six), she made a remark or two about things in
general, which Reynold, turning his lustreless eyes upon her,
endeavoured to receive with a decent show of interest. When she brought
the tea-pot, she told him that Mr. Hayes had sent to the Rothwell Arms
for a carriage early that afternoon. "Indeed!" said Reynold, this time
endeavouring to conceal the interest he felt.
"What were they going to do?" he wondered, as he propped his head on his
hand and sipped his tea. Was the old man taking Barbara away? What did
it mean?
It meant simply that Mr. Hayes had wearied of his self-imposed
seclusion, and had announced to his niece that he should drive over to
Littlemere and see Masters. He added that he might not return to dinner,
and that she was not to wait for him. While Reynold lay on the sofa the
carriage had gone by, with the little man sitting in it, his head rather
more bowed than usual, planning how he would explain the quarrel to his
friend. "Masters will understand--he knows how the fellow behaved the
night before," said Mr. Hayes to himself a score of times. But every
time he said it he felt a little less certain that Masters would
understand exactly as he wished.
Mrs. Simmonds, returning after a considerable interval, told her lodger
that the wind was getting up, and she thought there was going to be a
change in the weather. She mostly knew, as she informed him, on account
of her rheumatism. Reynold opened the door for her and her tray, and
then went to the window.
The moon had risen, the low roofs and gaunt poplars of Mitchelhurst were
black in its light, and wild wreaths of cloud were tossed across the
sky. It was a sky that seemed to mean something, to have a mood and
expression of its own. Reynold watched it for a few minutes, till its
vastness made the little box of a room, where even the flies had fallen
asleep again, insupportably small. He took his hat and went out.
He did not care which way he went, if only it were not in the direction
of the Place. Mr. Hayes, when he charged Barbara not to go near the
gate, had a sort of fancy that the young fellow might walk defiantly on
the very edge of the forbidden ground, and peer through the bars with a
white, spiteful face. The girl acquiesced indifferently. She might not
altogether understand Reynold Harding, but she knew most certainly that
he would never approach them.
It chanced that evening that he took a narrow lane which led out of the
Littlemere road. It proved to be a rugged but very gradual ascent.
Presently it led him through a gate, and, still gently rising, became a
mere cart track across open fields, where the wind came in sudden,
hurrying gusts over the grey slopes, and brought undefinable suggestions
of hopelessness and solitude. Reaching the highest point the wayfarer
passed through another gate, and pursued a level road, bordered by
spaces of unenclosed grass, sometimes widening almost to a common,
sometimes shrinking to a mere strip between the white way and the low
hedgerows. Reynold pushed forward, gazing at the sky. The clouds, torn
and driven by the wind, fled wildly overhead, like shattered squadrons,
and yet rolled up in new unconquered masses, as if from a gloomy host
encamped on the horizon. The moon, slowly climbing the heavens, fought
her way as a swimmer fights the waves. Now she would show a pale face
through the blanched ripples of a misty sea, then would be over-powered
by a black deluge of cloud, which darkened earth and sky, and swept over
her sunken and scarcely suspected presence. And then suddenly she would
emerge, pearl-white and pure, from the midst of the fierce confusion,
rising unopposed over a gulf of shadowy blue. Or yet again she would
glance mockingly from behind a rent veil of gossamer at the lonely
little traveller who toiled so far below, under the vast arch of the
heavens, and who raised his pre-occupied eyes to her, from the world of
dream and mystery which he carried with him under the little arch of his
skull. To Harding just then that inner world seemed more real,
stranger, and less trodden, than did the world without. The billows of
cloud, vast and formless and dark, rolling on high, were no more than
symbols of the undefined forebodings which gathered blackly in his soul
and changed with every thought. The wild and restless melancholy of the
evening harmonised so marvellously with his temper, that he could almost
have forgotten its outward reality, had it not been for the wind which
blew freshly in his face. It did not seem possible that, when hereafter
he came back to Mitchelhurst, he could walk this way whenever he
pleased.
Yet he noted landmarks now and then. Here was a thin row of firs, slim
and black, then a bare stretch of road where he stepped quickly, his
shadow at his side for company, and then a sturdy oak, with all its
brown leaves astir in a gust, which whispered hurriedly as he went by.
Somewhat further yet the way grew narrow, dipping down into a little
hollow, where a runnel of clear water crossed it, glancing over the
pebbly earth. There was a plank at one side, and Reynold, stepping on
it, smelt the water-mint which clustered at its edge. It seemed,
somehow, as if the night, which uttered his desolate thoughts in the
wind and the flying clouds, breathed them in that perfume.
Reynold was one of those who take little interest, even as children, in
stories of goblins and witches, yet who sympathise with the mood which
gave such legends birth, something which in its unshapen darkness and
mystery is more impressive than the strangest vision. Why this
inexplicable mood, with its world-wide suggestiveness, should have come
upon him that evening, transforming the bit of upland country through
which he walked to a grey and ghostly region, he could not tell. He
tried to reason with his shadowy presentiments. He was going to his work
the next day; that very evening he was going back to the little parlour
over the shop; Mrs. Simmonds would have his supper ready, old Simmonds
would be smoking bad tobacco in the back room; his walk would lead to
nothing else. Yet he could not convince himself. He could call up his
uncle and Mrs. Simmonds before his eyes, but they were grotesque
apparitions in his cloudland. What was it that he was awaiting? Why did
he feel as if the crisis of his fate were come, as if it would be upon
him before the night were over? "Are we to see it out together?" he
said, looking up at the moon.
He hardly knew whether he had uttered the question aloud or not, and he
stopped short. There was a pool close by, roughly fenced from the road,
and fringed with ragged bushes on the further side. He sat down on the
rail. "To-morrow," he said to himself, "nothing can happen before
to-morrow." He took old Mr. Harding's letter from his pocket, and tried
to read it in the moonlight, but a sudden gust caught it, and almost
tore it out of his hand. He crushed the flapping paper together, put it
back, and sat gazing at the black pool at his side, idly wondering
whether it were deep enough to drown a man. It looked deep, he
thought--as deep as the heavens, and a troubled gleam of moonlight
rested on it every now and then. Harding knew well that he should never
touch his life, yet he played that night with the fancy that in one of
the darkened moments when the moon was hidden, it would not be difficult
to drop below that shadowy surface, and effectually end the business, so
that when the bright glance rested there again it should read nothing.
He fancied the moon-beams travelling swiftly along the road, and not
finding him, while he lay hidden under the water, with a clump of osiers
bending and quivering above him in the windy night. "Why couldn't I do
it?" he asked himself. "Why do I go on to meet my ill-luck? It is
coming, I know, to play me some devil's trick--I feel it in the air,
just as Mrs. Simmonds feels a change of the weather in her poor bones."
So, idly jesting, he stooped and tossed a pebble into the brimming
blackness, and as he did so he pictured to himself the groping hands,
and the ugly strangling fight with death which the moon might chance to
see, if it tore its veil aside too quickly. And, besides, there was the
grim uncertainty of it. _What_ was under that dusky surface? "That's as
you please to put it, I suppose," said Reynold, getting to his feet.
"Eternity, or just a little black mud. And, by Jove, that railing's
rather shaky!" He turned his face towards Mitchelhurst, laughing at his
own folly. "Well, I'll take to-morrow and its chance of
fortune--presentiments and all?"
The wind, which had fought against him as he came, seemed now so
impatient to get him safely back to Mrs. Simmonds, that it fairly took
him by the shoulders and hurried him along, as if it knew that it was
between nine and ten, and that the good lady was addicted to early
hours. And perhaps Reynold himself was slightly ashamed of his moonlit
vagary, and not altogether unwilling to seek the shelter of that little
roof. He ran and walked down the field path, and saw the glimmering
lights of the village below, small sparks of friendly welcome in the
great night. When, finally, he turned into the Littlemere road, and was
somewhat sheltered from the wind, he met a couple of youths, fresh from
the "Rothwell Arms," harmonious in their desire to sing together, but
not in the result of their efforts. About a hundred yards further he
encountered the Mitchelhurst policeman. The road was quite populous and
homely.
He had outstripped his forebodings in his hurried race, and the question
whether his landlady would think that he was very late for supper was
uppermost in his mind. He opened the door, which was never fastened till
Simmonds bolted it at night, and drew a breath which gave him a
comprehensive idea of the variety of goods they kept in stock. With the
chilly sweetness of the night air still upon him, the young man strode
into his room, and confronted Barbara Strange, who rose from the sofa to
meet him.
All his misgivings overtook him in a moment.