In a sense, indeed, it was a death-cry that she heard. For Gordon, as
he watched her ride away, and listened to the lanthorn clanking
against the saddle, knew that his real self went with her.
The extended sympathy for his fellows which he had fostered during
these last two years, his interest in their comings and goings, his
ambitions and his assiduous patience in straining after their
attainment--in fact, the finer qualities of his nature seemed not
merely to have been awakened by his one great passion, but to have
gained their being from it and to be dependent upon it for their life.
They were, if one may use the phrase, the reflex of his imaginative
belief in the worth of his mistress--a belief founded purely upon
sentiment and sustained by misconceptions of different points in her
bearing, such as a certain air of disdain she habitually wore, which
was in itself only the result of a fastidious intuition in matters of
taste and the like, and which Gordon mistook for the visible sign of
an innate superiority.
And so this mute farewell meant something more to him than even the
final parting from the woman he loved; it was also a parting from his
gentler nature. All that there was of goodness and truth in him had
come into his life through Kate Nugent, and now that she took her gift
back with her as she went, she left him stripped almost of his
humanity, bare and scarred as the rugged crags surrounding him. So
intense and poignant grew the feeling of his loss, that he came to
fancy, with the imagery peculiar to his bent, that his very soul was
the flame of the candle in the lanthorn, which he saw, like a red
star, moving farther and farther into the distance.
He made one last spasmodic effort, like a dying man clutching at his
life. He ran forward in a mad revolt, and the well-loved name sprang
to his lips. "Kitty!" he shouted, his whole being in the cry. But no
answer came back to him; he heard the lanthorn still faintly clanking
against the saddle, and the mountains drearily mocking him with their
melancholy repetition of his word, while the light went steadily
dwindling down the Pass--a pin's head of fire.
For a moment he waited stone-still, staring after it, and then flung
himself face-downwards in the bracken, tearing the roots convulsively
with his fingers. A savage fury seized him and ran through his veins
like a flame, demanding action and retaliation. Any passive return to
the old trough of his cynicism was barred by a clear consciousness of
what might have been had Kate but matched his truth to her with a like
truth to him, and by an exaggerated self-reproach which led him still
to fix the chief blame for her treachery upon his own failure to
understand her. But there was another man to share his blame. The
thought swept down upon him--a black whirlwind blotting out even the
image of Kate. If he had erred himself, it was through excess of
chivalry; he could, at all events, plead that. But Hawke! Gordon was
unable to think of him; he only saw him a sinister picture of malice
and craft, and as he looked he became filled with a venom of hate.
Hawke's face rose before his mind, every feature magnified and stamped
with the brand of his character, and remained fixed in full view
leering at him. Gordon's loathing grew until he felt sick with the
strength of it. He sprang hastily to his feet. The night was very
clear, and low down to the ground a spark was just visible in the far
distance. But he did not look that way; he turned his back towards
Keswick and blindly, with stumbling steps, descended into Wastdale
towards his enemy. And all the length of that path Hawke's face bore
him company.
* * * * *
It was close upon four when Kate started off upon her long ride, and,
with the knowledge that she had no time to spare, she urged her horse
on at a greater speed than the roughness of the Pass made prudent.
Once, indeed, at the far end, when the track takes a sudden turn at
right angles to its previous course, and begins to wind down into
Borrowdale, she barely escaped a heavy fall, and was only saved by the
quick recovery of the beast she rode. At the bottom of the decline,
however, after crossing Stockley Bridge, the path widens out on to
more level ground. But it runs through pastures, and Kate's progress
was impeded by a succession of gates which, since she carried no crop,
compelled her to dismount to open them. But by the time she had
reached Sea Toller--the long white house, lying two miles from the
base of Styhead--the difficulties of her journey were ended. A firm,
broad road led straight from that point over the nine miles which
separated Kate from Keswick, and she roused her horse to a gallop. The
animal stretched itself out in a full stride as if it realised the
need for haste, making the night air ring with the clatter of its
hoofs, and it seemed to Kate that barely a minute could have passed
before she burst through the little village of Rosthwaite.
This quick approach to home, however, plunged a new fear into her
breast.
What if her family had discovered her absence?
The question was a fever to her blood. At the time she had set off
from Keswick the chance of that discovery had appeared to her the
least of the dangers that she ran, so completely had she been
engrossed by the necessity of regaining her letters; and, besides, she
had laid her plans carefully, with perfect confidence in the fidelity
of the groom. Afterwards, at Wastdale, the hurry of events had
obscured her to all speculation on the matter, compelling a
concentration of her faculties upon immediate issues. Now, however,
she began to see a hundred threatening possibilities.
She had pleaded a headache. What more likely than that her father or
her aunt should have come to her room to inquire after her before they
went to bed? Her father?--she dismissed him with a moment's
reflection. The good man took life and his daughter's ailments easily.
But her aunt! Kate remembered with a shiver that she was a
homoeopathist. She was bound to have inquired. She could not enter the
room, it is true, for Kate had locked the door and held the key safe
in her pocket.
She felt in her dress suddenly, half-expecting to find that she had
dropped it. It was safe, however, and she experienced a relief; but
the relief was only momentary.
For the window of her bedroom opened level on to the garden. A lucky
advantage, she had considered it before, as affording an easy egress
and return. Now it seemed to her the most vulnerable point in her
plan. For if her aunt made inquiries at the door, and received no
answer, she had but to step into the garden to solve her perplexities.
A passing vision of an old lady in bedroom slippers padding over the
grass with a box of pills failed to distract her. Kate sent her wits
abroad on the wings of fear in search of excuses, but they returned to
her empty-handed. Her dread was, moreover, accentuated by a retrospect
upon the other dangers of that night. Her successful evasion of them
only made this last risk loom the larger.
The nearer she drew towards home, the more it overshadowed her. When
she crossed the marsh land at the end of the Lake, discovery had
already become the probability; by the time she passed Lodore, a
certainty, and when she topped Castle Hill, just above Keswick town,
she strained her eyes towards the water's edge, fully expecting to see
every window of their house ablaze with light.
All was in darkness, however, except for one faint glimmer, which Kate
guessed came from the stables. The revulsion of feeling which she
underwent acted on her like a shock, and she reined up her horse
and clung to the saddle, dizzy. In the hollow a clock chimed the
half-hour, lifting a silvery encouragement, and she moved on again
slowly down the hill. Some twenty yards from the front of the house
she dismounted, led the horse into a lane which gave on to the road,
crossed a paddock at the back of the garden, and reached the stables,
which stood apart from the main building. The light which she had
noticed came from the harness-room; she tapped softly on the
window-pane and was answered by a low growl, followed by a sharp
"Quiet!"
Immediately afterwards the door was opened cautiously, and the groom
Martin appeared and led the horse in quietly. Kate followed him and
closed the door.
"What time is it?" she asked, in a whisper.
"Just gone half-past five, Miss."
"Has any one--I mean, no one has noticed my absence?"
Martin reassured her, with a touch of patronage in his tone, which a
cockney deficiency of aspirates made singularly unpalatable. She
turned to the collie; he had followed Martin from the harness-room and
was wisely superintending the proceedings with his ear cocked and his
head on one side.
"You brought Charlie in."
"Yes, Miss! I dursn't leave him in the yard. He mightn't have known
your footsteps at once."
"That was thoughtful of you." The dog took the compliment to itself
after the fashion of its kind, and showed his appreciation by planting
his forepaws as high up on her as he could, and stretching itself
lazily.
"Thank you very much," said Kate. "Good night!" and she hurried across
the yard, pursued by a whispered--
"You 're very welcome, Miss, I'm sure."
A wicket-gate gave her entrance into the garden, and she crept softly
to the window of her bedroom, and opened it with a palpitating heart.
Nothing, however, had been disarranged, the room was as she had left
it. She did not dare to risk a light, but flung off her clothes
quickly in the dark, unlocked the door, and tumbled into bed. For a
long time sleep would not come to her in spite of her fatigue. She
heard the clock strike six, and then half-past. For now that she
herself was safe, her thoughts unconsciously reverted to Gordon. She
saw his face again framed in the darkness, as the light fell on it
from her lanthorn, and wondered whether he was still on the bridge,
looking eastwards down the Pass. That last cry of his recurred to her.
"Kitty!" The name rang in her ears, stretched out into a threnody. She
tried to flee from it, and it pursued her, now swelling into the deep
peal of an organ-note, now sinking into a pitiful wail. And it was not
merely the cry she heard, but Gordon's voice in it, vibrating with its
hopeless misery. For a time it accused her sharply, but with continual
repetition began to lose its meaning. The girl started to murmur the
word to herself mechanically, in an undertone of accompaniment.
Finally it became a lullabye, and so hymned her to sleep.
"Kitty!"
Was she destined to hear it all her life, Kate questioned on the
borderland of sleep.
"Kitty!"
A hand was laid on her shoulder and she woke with a start. A
girl-cousin, one of the intending bridesmaids, was standing by her
bedside.
"How startled you look!"
"I thought you were----" Kate checked herself in confusion, and a peal
of laughter rippled through the room. It warned her of the part she
had to play.
"What time is it?" she asked hastily.
"Ten o'clock! Your aunt would not have you called before. How is your
head?"
Kate asserted complete recovery and proceeded to dress, though with a
languid dilatoriness which belied her statement. The house was nearly
full of her women-folk relations, and she dreaded to face them. She
looked at herself in the mirror and fancied every one would read her
night's ride in her jaded pallor and the shadows about her eyes. Even
her father noticed them when she entered the breakfast-room, with a
"You don't look over bright, Kitty!" The company was assembled in full
force about the table, and she had to run the gauntlet of their
smirking condolements. "Never mind. I will put you right. It's bile."
Homoeopathy smiled comfortably from behind the tea-urn, and Kate for
the first time thanked Providence for the birth of Dr. Hahnemann. She
noticed with relief that the meal was nearly over, but gained no
respite thereby. For, after breakfast, there were new presents to be
inspected and acclaimed--noticeably one from Poonah, a jade idol of
most admired ugliness. Kate explained her shiver of repulsion by the
carven malice of its features. Then followed consultations upon
frocks, interspersed with eulogies of David and predictions of the
happiness in store for well-assorted couples, plainly calling for
enthusiastic answers nicely tempered by a diffident modesty. At times,
indeed, the task almost exceeded her powers of endurance, and she felt
madly spurred to hurl the truth like a bombshell into the midst of the
flummery. She restrained herself, however, drawing a faint solace of
amusement from a mental picture of the resultant chaos, and somehow or
another the day wore on to its close. "They will know in the morning,"
she reflected. But she was mistaken. It was not until the third day
that the news of the liberation came.
* * * * *
Gordon quickened his pace as he reached the basin of the valley under
an apprehension lest he should find the farm people already risen.
For, although it was still quite dark, there was all around him that
universal movement, as if the earth itself were stirring from its
sleep, which tells of an approaching dawn. The last two fields he
covered at a run and regained the farm only to discover that his fears
were groundless. The lamp in his parlour was still alight, but
beginning to flicker for want of replenishing. Gordon cautiously
opened the door at the foot of the staircase and listened. But he
could hear nothing but his own breathing; evidently no one was moving
as yet. He returned into the room to blow out the lamp, but was
checked by the sight of his writing case on a cabinet against the
wall. He went to it, drew out a packet of letters, and, pulling up a
chair to the table, read, by the last spurts of the light, those which
Kate had sent to him from Poonah. How blind he must have been, he
thought. Why, effort was visible in every line of them, coldness
seeking to screen itself beneath a wealth of phrases. He commenced to
speculate curiously which portions were Hawke's dictation and which
her own work; otherwise the letters awakened no feeling in him.
Phrases here and there fixed his attention. "You came into my life
like a ray of sunlight into a musty room." Yes! Hawke would have
invented that, knowing how it would appeal to him. And, again, "I feel
that I can rely on you whatever comes"--a postscript, scribbled
hastily and smudged, evidently Kate's own, and written covertly in
Hawke's presence. The extinction of the lamp put an end to this
unprofitable investigation, and Gordon gathered the letters together,
placed them in the grate, and set them ablaze. He waited until the
last spark had died out and a heap of black flaky ashes was all that
was left of the false tokens which he had treasured as sacred, and
then crept cautiously up to his room. For some time he remained by his
window, thinking. He noticed the angle in the barn-wall from which
Hawke had darted out, and it seemed to him that the century might well
have run to its end since then. His mind wandered to a side-issue,
jumping at a stray suggestion that Time was held to mark age only
because it represented the conventional progress of self-knowledge.
But what if the knowledge of twenty years were crowded into one night?
Gordon felt that that had been the case with him. He understood so
much now; for instance, the fancy which had fleetingly occurred to him
that they both had been brought into the isolation of that valley to
work out a predestined purpose. He understood that purpose, could
explain it, and would demonstrate his explanation to the other's
ignorance tomorrow. A gradual fading of colour from the sky made him
correct himself. "To-day," he murmured, with something of quiet
exultation in his voice. Only he must spare Kate; no suspicion must be
allowed to connect her with the solution of his problem. "I feel that
I can rely on you whatever comes," she had written. Well, he must
prove to her that she was right--some way or another. The sound of
movement in the interior of the house brought him back to the present
and hinted the advantage of rest. So Gordon went to bed and slept
dreamlessly until the sun stood high above the shoulder of Great End.