The lilac had fallen and the roses were in bloom when Jeffray took a
stately and affectionate leave of the Lady Letitia, and journeyed back
to Rodenham with Peter Gladden in his coach and four. The dowager had
appeared sincerely sorry at Richard’s departure. He had refused to
permit her to repay him the two hundred guineas that she had borrowed at
Rodenham; moreover, he had made the old lady several handsome presents,
lace and jewelry being still acceptable to the belle of seventy. Day by
day the Lady Letitia diligently applauded Jeffray’s strengthening spirit
of revolt, trumpeting in his ears the preposterous insolence of Mr.
Lancelot’s contempt, and bidding him work out his own salvation. Her
only regret appeared to have been that Richard had refused her the joy
of choosing him a wife.
Dick Wilson remarked the change in Jeffray when they walked in the
garden on the evening of his return. The man’s face and figure appeared
to have gained alertness and decision. There was a new suppleness and
grace about his carriage that contrasted with the half-slouching and
dreamy melancholy that had burdened him before. His eyes were keen and
alive to the things about him. He carried his head high, and spoke with
more decision than of old.
“I must confess, sir,” said the painter, frankly, “that the air of
Tunbridge seems to have suited you.”
Jeffray smiled as they paced the terrace side by side.
“I have been taking fencing lessons, Dick,” he said.
“Fencing lessons, sir?”
“From D’Aiglan, the Frenchman. He has done me a great deal of good. I am
ready for any emergency.”
Wilson elevated his eyebrows expressively, and looked at Jeffray with
curious intentness.
“I always thought that you were a man of peace, sir,” he said.
Jeffray laughed rather grimly, and, drawing Wilson away into the yew
walk, told him briefly the whole tenor of his love affair with Miss
Hardacre. He was beginning to learn that truth and the sword are much
akin, and that brave candor is often more magical than sentimental
secretiveness. Wilson, much astonished, plodded to and fro at Jeffray’s
side, fingering his chin and emitting an expressive interjection from
time to time. He was a broad-minded student of the world’s whims and
weaknesses, and his sympathies were wholly with Jeffray in the matter.
“What are you going to do, sir?” he asked at last.
“Tell the truth as kindly as I can, Dick, and defy this fire-eating
cousin of mine. I have no intention of financing the family by marrying
the daughter.”
“You have made up your mind, eh?”
“I am tired, Dick, of contemplating a life-long hypocrisy.”
Wilson brushed the tobacco ash and snuff from his waistcoat, whistled a
few lines of a favorite ditty, and then laid his hand on Jeffray’s
shoulder.
“I think you are right, sir,” he said.
“Thanks, Dick, thanks.”
“There is too much damned trafficking in matrimony in this world. I
shall never forget old Hogarth’s preaching. Unless God and the heart are
in the thing, the bond is but a pledge to the devil.”
Jeffray looked Wilson straight in the eyes.
“I am glad to hear you speak like this, Dick,” he said; “it strengthens
me.”
“And I am glad, sir,” quoth the painter, “that you are one of the few
people who can tell the truth.”
Meanwhile Bess had been watching and waiting in Pevensel for Jeffray’s
return, eager to show him the brooch that Dan had given her—a cross
within a circle of gold studded with emeralds. The brooch had proved to
her that her memories of the past were not mere dreams begotten out of
restless fancy of childhood. Perhaps old Ursula was not her aunt, and
perhaps Dan and the forest-folk had no blood communion with her, as she
had been taught to believe. Once she showed the brooch to Ursula,
watching the old woman’s wrinkled face keenly the while. The crone had
peered at it with some uneasiness, working her toothless mouth and
fidgeting at her apron-strings with her fingers. She had asked Bess how
she had come by the bauble, and, being told that it was Dan’s present,
she had held up her hands, turned her back on the girl, and refused to
utter another word on the matter. Ursula’s attitude puzzled Bess. She
went solemn-eyed through the early days of June, thinking of Jeffray and
the past, and wondering what would happen in the future.
Twice she had quarrelled fiercely with Dan since he had given her the
brooch, and it was only by grappling her passions down that she could
keep her hands from shedding blood. Silence and an attitude of meek
submission went sorely against the temper of her soul. It was only the
dire necessity for dissimulation that held her quiet under her husband’s
bullyings. For bully her he did after the fashion of a great, clumsy
savage, proud of his own huge strength and the prerogatives thereof. It
pleased the oaf to fancy that he was taming Bess as he would have tamed
a bad-tempered filly; that he was breaking her spirit, and fastening his
bondage upon her with the masterful complacency of a lord and a
possessor. Like a great ape he would grin and mock her, tweak her hair,
pinch her arms, twit her with his triumph, and gloat over the passivity
that seemed to flatter his strength. Now and again Bess’s anger would
blaze up in hot revolt, a passion-play that lent a charm to the brute
pride of conquest. He believed that he had tamed and subdued the girl,
not suspecting that he was only stacking the pent-up fire within her
heart.
It was not till Jeffray had ridden on three successive evenings to the
yew valley that Bess was able to slip away from the hamlet to meet him.
It was a still evening in June, the grass knee-deep in the golden
meadows, the scent of the white may heavy on the air. The voices of the
birds alone broke the deep silence of the summer woods. The black spires
of the yews and their massive limbs were streaked and eyeleted with the
flooding gold of the western sky.
Jeffray came first to the trysting-place, feeling like a man who has
drunk a bumper of sparkling wine. He tethered his horse deep in one of
the thickets, and went and stood in the entry of the Hermit’s Cave, a
rough chamber cut in the rock, with a low doorway and a mere slit of a
window. The air was damp, pungent, and refreshing. Below lay the pool
covered with white water-weed, where the old recluse of yore had drawn
his water and kept his fish. There was still the outline of a cross cut
in the wall of the chamber, and a broken bench of stone jutted out
beneath the window.
Richard straightened suddenly as he leaned against the rough jamb of the
doorway, and stood listening with a smile hovering about his mouth. Some
one was singing in the yew wood—an old country song, simple and full of
pathos. The mellow and half-husky voice rose and fell amid the shadows
of the trees.
Soon he saw her coming down the path, the gnarled and rugged trunks and
spreading boughs building a sun-splashed colonnade towards the pool.
Jeffray went down through the tall grass and met the girl at the edge of
the wood.
They did not touch each other’s hands, but stood quite close together,
smiling shyly like a pair of children. Neither seemed to have a single
word to say for the moment. It was all silent intuition with them, a
glance, a sense of nearness, a rush of blood to the face. They turned
and walked towards the great stone by the pool. Bess sat down there.
Richard found himself beside her, a foot of the bare rock between them.
The girl’s eyes were searching his face.
“You look quite brown and strong,” she said.
“Yes, I am strong again,” he answered her.
“Have you ridden here—before?”
“The two past evenings. I had a feeling that I should find you
to-night.”
“Dan went out into the woods, and so—I came.”
They sat in silence a moment, looking at each other, and hearing no
sound save the occasional plash of a fish leaping in the pool. Bess’s
fingers were feeling for the brooch at her bosom. She unpinned it, and,
holding it in her palm, held it out to Jeffray with a smile.
“Dan has given me this,” she said.
Their fingers touched and lingered an instant in the contact.
“It is the brooch I remember—”
“Yes—”
“At the tall lady’s throat who was near me when I was a little child.”
Jeffray, who was staring at the thing, glanced up suddenly into Bess’s
face. A look of mute inquiry, of significant sympathy, flashed between
them.
“How did the brooch come to Dan?” asked the man.
“I do not know.”
“Strange. Perhaps—”
“Dan went out one night, and gave me this in the morning. Where it came
from I cannot tell, unless Isaac, his father, gave it him.”
Jeffray sat in thought, balancing the brooch in his palm, and gazing out
over the still waters of the pool. Bess watched him, her hands resting
on the stone, her brown forearms bare to the elbow.
“Bess,” he said to her at last.
She swayed slightly towards him, her eyes on his.
“Can you discover how Dan came by the brooch?”
She frowned, and her mouth hardened; it was not in her heart to seek
anything from Dan.
“I will not ask anything from him,” she said.
“Why not, Bess?”
“Because I hate him, hate him night and day.”
Richard looked at her almost wistfully.
“Yet you may learn something of your past from him,” he said.
“Yes—”
“You may be no Grimshaw, Bess; you look to have finer blood in you than
theirs.”
Bess lifted her head as though some ennoblement would be very sweet to
one who felt the shame of her present lot. Any such discovery would lift
her nearer to Jeffray and lessen that gulf between them that was ever
stretched before her pride.
“I will try,” she said at last—“try what I can learn from Dan. He is a
great fool, though he is so strong.”
“And you do not love him any better?”
“Love Dan?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, is there any heart in me that I should love the brute! I have felt
near killing him before now.”
Scarcely had this burst of passion spent itself in words when Bess’s
face grew bleak and set. She held up a hand and sat listening, rigid yet
alert. Jeffray could hear nothing, for his ears were less quick to the
sounds of the forest than the girl’s. Only by the look of strained
intentness on her face could he tell that she caught sounds that did not
reach his hearing.
“What is it?” he asked her, in a whisper.
“I hear a dog panting in the wood.”
“Ah!”
“Where is your horse?”
“Well out of sight of the path.”
“Good. Listen to that!”
The rapid sound of some brute beast’s breathing drew near out of the
silence of the wood. Even Jeffray could hear it as he sat with his eyes
fixed on Bess’s face. Then a whistle shrilled out from the darkness of
the trees, seeming to make the still air quiver. It was Dan’s whistle,
and the panting was the panting of his dog.
Quick as thought Bess started up, beckoned to Jeffray, and ran through
the grass towards the hermitage. The man followed her, glancing back
over his shoulder at the impenetrable shadows of the yews. Bess sprang
in up the low steps of the doorway, seized Richard’s wrist as he entered
after her, and, with her face close to his, spoke in a whisper.
“It is Dan, curse him!”
“He may not see us.”
“The devil must have put it into the fool’s head to come this way.”
“Shall I slip out and leave you?”
Bess understood the spirit that prompted him, and that it was not
cowardice that inspired the question. They were still very close to each
other, Bess’s stray side curls brushing Jeffray’s cheek.
“Stay with me,” she said.
“Bess!”
“Stay.”
“I will.”
She flashed a wonderful look at him of a sudden and tightened her
fingers for one moment about his wrist. Jeffray colored as he drew his
sword and watched Bess move towards the window. Stepping back to where
the inner wall of the room lay in deep shadow, he heard the panting of
the dog and the rasp of Dan’s gruff voice as he called the brute to
heel.
Bess drew back from the window and came gliding along the wall towards
Jeffray. He understood that she had caught a glimpse of Dan or of the
dog, and that their one hope was that the man might pass by and keep the
spaniel at his heel. Bess drew close to Jeffray and leaned back against
the wall where the darkness lay. Their hands touched and held each
other. A strong thrill passed up Jeffray’s arm. He could feel the warmth
of Bess’s body as she half leaned against him. She was holding her
breath and watching the stretch of sward that showed through the
doorway.
Again they heard Dan calling to the dog. He was passing by the pool, and
they could catch his heavy foot-falls on the grass. The footsteps ceased
of a sudden, and they could hear the panting of the dog quite near.
Jeffray felt the pressure of Bess’s fingers. They looked into each
other’s eyes—one long look that seemed to challenge fate.
Dan’s harsh hail rang out again.
“Heel, Doll, heel—you bitch!”
The spaniel whimpered wistfully. They heard her move through the long
grass, splash through the shallows of the pool, the sound of her
breathing growing less and less. They saw Dan go striding past the
doorway, his gun over his shoulder, a hare dangling by the legs from his
left hand. In a flash he was gone, the black spaniel padding at his
heels and looking back restlessly from time to time.
Bess gave a great sigh and leaned heavily against Jeffray. Somehow the
man’s arm had crept round her, and he felt the full ebb and flow of her
breath. The warmth of her body seemed to steal into him with a sense of
nearness and of contact. Her head was half resting on his shoulder, her
hair brushing his cheek.
“Bess.”
She turned her head and looked up at him, half wearily, yet with a tired
tenderness. Her eyes seemed doubly bright in the cool darkness of the
place.
“He has gone.”
“Thank God.”