ONE COMES OVER THE RIDGE
I
"Mine will come out right." But Percival's twenty-first birthday, that
was to have seen the consummation of Aunt Maggie's plan, came--and Aunt
Maggie held her hand and let it go.
A double reason commanded her. Percival's coming of age arrived with
the Old Manor closed and Rollo and his mother far afield on that two
years' travel which Lady Burdon had long before projected for her son
to introduce his "settling-down." It were an empty revenge, Aunt
Maggie thought, that could be taken in such case; robbed of its sting,
sapped of all its meaning, unless it were delivered to Lady Burdon face
to face, as face to face with Audrey she had struck Audrey down.
That was one reason that found Percival's twenty-first birthday gone,
and still the blow not struck. The other was in tribute to the fate
that had carried forward Aunt Maggie's plan through many hilly places
and that, fatalistic, she dared not hasten when the promised land drew
into sight. When she heard during the three months of Percival's
zestful life on the little horse farm leading to his birthday that
Rollo, before that birthday dawned, would be shipped and away on his
leisurely journey round the world, she was at first strongly tempted to
make end of her long waiting; at last to Audrey's murderer send
Audrey's son. Her superstitious reliance on fate prevented her. With
fate she had worked hand in hand through these long years. Vengeance
had been nothing had she taken it at the outset when Audrey lay cold
and still in the room in the Holloway Road. Under fate's guidance it
was become a vengeance now indeed--Lady Burdon twenty years secured in
her comfortable possessions; her husband by fate removed, and the blow
to be struck through her cherished son; a friendship by fate designed
suddenly to turn against her and drive her forth as she had driven
Audrey. Fate in it all, in each moment and each measure of it, and
Aunt Maggie had the fear that now to dismiss fate and anticipate the
hour that she and fate had chosen would be to risk by fate's aid being
dismissed.
Fate gave her hint of it--gave her warning. She was in one moment
being told by Percival of Rollo's intended departure and long absence;
and seeing herself robbed, her plan for his twenty-first birthday
defeated, was urging herself with "Now--now. No need to wait
longer--now;" she was in the next hearing Percival's desolation at the
thought of losing "old Rollo" for so long--of their plans for closest
companionship during the few weeks that remained to them; and hearing
it, was warned by the same question she once before had asked herself
and dared not finish, much less answer then, and dared not finish now:
"What, when I tell him, if--"
Fate in it. Fate warning her, Aunt Maggie thought. Fate threatening
her. Fate had been so real, so living a thing to her, its hand so
plain a hundred times, that she had come to envisage it as a
personality, an actuality--a grim and stern and all-powerful companion
who companioned her on her way and who now stooped to her ear and told
her: "Go your own way--if you dare. Seek to take your revenge now
without my aid and short of the time that you and I have planned--if
you dare. Abandon me and tell him now." Then the threat: "What, when
you tell him, if--"
"Strange-like"? "Touched-like"? Thus, at least, she held her hand,
paying tribute to fate; thus when the birthday came, and Rollo and Lady
Burdon across the sea, and empty her vengeance made to seem if she then
took it, she turned to fate and asked of fate "What now?"
"Strange-like"? "Touched-like"? Again to her ear that strong
companion stooped--not threatening now; encouraging, supporting....
"Why, Aunt Maggie," Percival cried, "you do look well--fit, this
morning. Fifty times as bright as you've been looking these past days.
Younger, I swear!"
"Well, it is your birthday, dearest," she told him.
"All very well! But every time we've mentioned my birthday, my
twenty-first--even last night--you've been--I've thought it has made
you sad, as if you didn't want me to have it!--growing too old, or
something!"
For answer she only shook her head and smiled at him. But her reason
for the stronger air he noticed in her, for her rescue from her
depression of the days that led to his birthday, was that to her
question of "What now?" she was somehow assured that she had but to
wait, but to have a little more patience, and her opportunity would
come. Fate was shaping it for her; fate in due time would present
it....
II
Percival for his own part was also in some dealing with fate in these
days. As one that is forever feasting his eyes on a prized and newly
won possession, the more fully to realise it and enjoy it, so
frequently in these days he was telling himself "I'm the happiest and
luckiest beggar in the world!" and was marvelling at the train of
tricks and chances by which fate--luck as he called it--had brought him
to this happy, lucky period.
Every human life falls into periods reckoned and divided not by years
but by events. Sometimes these events are recognised as milestones
immediately they fall; a death, a birth, a marriage, a new employment,
a journey, a sickness--we know at once that a new phase is begun, we
take a new lease of interest in life; not necessarily a better or a
brighter lease, a worse, maybe--but new and recognised as different.
More frequently the milestone is not perceived as such until we look
back along the road, see the event clearly upstanding and realise that
we were one man as we approached it and have become another since we
left it behind; again not necessarily a better or a happier man--a
worse, maybe; and maybe one that often cries with outstretched arms to
resume again that former figure. It cannot be. Life goes forward, and
we, once started, like draughtsmen on a board, may not move back.
Beside each event that marks a milestone we leave a self as the serpent
sheds a skin--all dead; some better dead; some we would give all, all
to bring again to life. It may not be.
Percival in these happy, happy months as right-hand man to the Rough
'Uns on the famously prospering little horse farm often told himself
that his life had been--as he expressed it--in three absolutely
different periods. He found a wonderful pleasure in dividing them off
and reviewing them. Daily, and often more than once in a day, when he
had a pony out at exercise, he would pull up on the summit of rising
ground and release his thoughts to wander over those periods as his
eyes reviewed from point to point the landscape stretched beneath him;
his mind aglow with what it tasted just as his body glowed from his
exercise of schooling the pony in the saddle. Three periods, as he
would tell himself. The first had ended with that night when he came
to Dora in the drive. Everything was different after that. Then all
his life with Japhra and with Ima in the van--the tough, hard, good
life that ended with the fight. The third--he now was in the third!
Two had been lived and left, and in review had for their chief burthen
the picture of how, as he had said during his convalescence, every one
had been so jolly, jolly good to him. Two had been lived and had
shaped him--"a sort of _thing_ for other people's plans"; and what kind
plans! and what dear planners! and he, of their fondness, how happy a
thing!--to this third period that sung to him in every hour and that
went mistily into the future whose mists were rosy, rosy, rose-red and
snow-white, Snow-White-and-Rose-Red....
III
In the first few months, before Rollo and Lady Burdon took their
departure for the two years' travel, he was daily, in the intervals
from his work, with "old Rollo"; Dora often with them. Nothing would
satisfy Rollo for the few weeks that lay between Percival's beginning
of his duties with the Hannafords and his own start for the foreign
tour but that they must be spent at Burdon Old Manor, nothing would
please him to fill in those days but to pass them in Percival's
company. He made no concealment of his affection for his friend. Men
not commonly declare to one another the liking or the deeper feeling
they may mutually entertain. The habit belongs to women, and that it
was indulged by Rollo was mark in him of the woman element that is to
be observed in some men. It is altogether a different quality from
effeminacy, this woman element. Sex is a chemical compound, as one
might say, and often are to be met men on the one hand and women on the
other in whom one might believe the male or female form that has
precipitated came very nearly on the opposite side of the
division--women who are attracted by women and to whom women are
attracted; and men, manly enough but curiously unmannish, who are
noticeably sensible to strongly male qualities and who arouse something
of a brotherly affection in men in whom the male attributes ring sharp
and clear as a touch on true bell.
There were thrown together in Rollo and Percival very notable examples
of these hazards in nature's crucibles. The complete and most
successful male was precipitated in him of whom Japhra had said long
days before: "I know the fighting type. Mark me when the years come.
A fighter thou." Qualities of woman were alloyed in him who once had
cried: "Men don't talk about these things, Percival, so I've never told
you all you are to me--but it's a fact that I'm never really happy
except when I'm with you." Strongly their natures therefore cleaved,
devotedly and with a clinging fondness on the weaker part; on the
bolder, protectively and with the tenderness that comes responsive from
knowledge of the other's dependence.
"Men don't talk about these things--but I'm never really happy except
when I'm with you." That diffidence at sentiment and that
self-exposure despite it, made when Percival, off to join Japhra,
seemed to be passing out of his life, were repeated fondly and many
times by Rollo now that Percival looked to be back in his life again.
"Hearing me talk like this," he told Percival, "it makes you rather
squirm, I expect--the sort of chap you are. But I can't help it and I
don't care," and he laughed--"the sort of chap I am. You don't
know--you can't come near guessing, old man, what it means to me to
think you've chucked all that mad gipsy life of yours that might have
ended in anything, the rummy thing it was, and that kept you utterly
away from me; to think you've chucked all that and are settled down in
a business that really is a good thing, every one says it is, and any
one can see it. It means to me--well, I can't tell you what, you'd
only laugh. But I can tell you this much, that I do nothing but think,
and all the time I'm away shall be thinking, of how we'll both be down
here always now when I get back, and of all the things we'll do
together."
They were riding as he spoke, their horses at a walk up the steady
climb of the down to Plowman's Ridge from Market Roding. His voice on
his last sentence had taken an eager, impulsive note, and as though he
had a sudden suspicion that it was betraying an undue degree of
sentiment he stopped abruptly, his face a trifle red. It was his
confusion, not any excess of sentiment, that Percival--quick as of old
in sympathy with another's feelings--noticed. He edged his horse
nearer Rollo's and touched Rollo with his whip. "Yes, we're going to
have a great, great time, aren't we?" he said. "I'm only just
beginning to realise it--great, Rollo!"
The affectionate touch and the responsive words caused Rollo to turn to
him as abruptly as he had broken off. "I've planned it," Rollo said.
"I'm forever planning it. When I get back--fit--I'm going to settle
down here for good. I loathe all that, you know," and he jerked his
head vaguely to where "all that" might lie, and said, "London and that
kind of thing. I'm going to take up things here. I've never had any
interests so far. My rotten health, partly, and partly not getting on
with people, and I've let everything drift along and let mother make
all the programmes. That's how it's been ever since you went off. Now
you're back again and I'm keen as anything. I'm going to work up all
this property, going to get to know all the people intimately and help
them with all sorts of schemes. Going to run my own show--you know
what I mean, no agent or any one between me and the tenants and the
land. And you're going to help me--that's the germ of it and the
secret of it and the beginning and the end of it."
Percival laughed and said: "Help you! You won't want any help from me.
I can see myself touching-my-hat-to-the-squire sort of thing as you go
hustling about the country-side."
But Rollo was too serious for banter. "You know what I mean," he said.
"And you--you're going to be a big man in these parts, as they say, the
way you're going, before very long."
They had gained the Ridge and by common consent of their horses were
halted on the summit. Rollo turned in his saddle and pointed below
them. "Percival, that's what I mean," he said, and carried his whip
from end to end along the Burdon hamlets. "That's what I think of.
Look how peaceful and remote it all looks, shut away from everything by
the Ridge. We two together down there, planning and doing and living--"
Percival's gaze had travelled on from Burdon Old Manor where the whip
had taken it and over the Ridge into the eastward vale. He turned
again to Rollo, recalled by the stopping of his voice; and Rollo saw
his strong face bright and said: "You'll think me a frightful ass,
you'll think me a girl, but you know I get quite 'tingly' when I
anticipate it all. And not want your help!--Why, only look at that for
instance," and he laughed and put his hand against Percival's where it
lay before his saddle. The delicate white, the veins showing, against
the strong brown fist was illustration enough of his meaning. "And
you're not long out of an illness that would have outed me in two
days," he said.
He saw the bright look he had observed shade, as it were, to one very
earnest. The symbol of their two hands so strongly different quickened
in Percival the appeal that he always felt in Rollo's company, that
went back to the early years of their play together, that was vital
part of this happy, lucky period, and that was warmed again in the
thoughts that came to him as he had looked over the eastward valley.
"Why, Rollo," he said earnestly, "it is good to think of. It is going
to be good. We two down there. It's wonderful to me how it's all come
out. It makes me 'tingly,' too, when I think of it--and of what it's
going to be. Help you--why, we two--" He pressed the brown fist about
the delicate hand. "There!--just like this good old Plowman's Ridge
that shuts us off from everybody! Nothing comes past that to interfere
with us."
They were a moment silent, each in his different way occupied by this
close exchange of their friendship; and Rollo's way made him almost at
once put his horse about, concerned lest his face should betray his
feelings, and made him say with an attempt at lightness: "No, nothing,
with the good old Ridge to shut us off," and then, "Is that some one
riding up from Upabbot?"
The direction was that where Percival's gaze had been. "Yes, it is,"
Percival said. "I thought so. She's coming up. It's Dora."