Age by age,
The clay wars with His fingers and pleads hard
For its old, heavy, dull, and shapeless ease.
--W. B. YEATS.
Wentworth never knew how he spent the night, if indeed that interminable
tract in which time stopped could have been one night. It was longer
than all the rest of his life put together. In later years, in peaceful
later years, confused memories came to him of things that he must have
seen then, but of which he took no heed at the time; of seeing the
breath of animals like steam close to the ground; of stumbling suddenly
under a hedgerow on a huddled, sleeping figure with a white face, which
struggled up unclean in the clean moonlight, and menaced him in a foul
atmosphere of rags.
And once, many years later, when he was taking an unfamiliar short cut
across the downs, he came upon a little pool in an old chalk pit, and
recognised it. He had never seen it by day, but he knew it. He had
wandered to it on a night of moon and mist, and had seen a fox bring
down her cubs to drink just where that twisted alder branch made an arch
over the water.
Wentworth sat by that chalk pit on the down utterly spent in body and
mind hour after hour, till the moon, which had been tangled in the alder
stooped to the violet west with one great star to bear her company. Who
shall say through what interminable labyrinths, through what sloughs,
across what deserts, his tortured mind had dragged itself all night? The
sun had gone down upon his wrath. The moon had gone down upon his wrath.
The land was grey. The spectral horses moving slowly in the misty fields
were grey. A streak of palest saffron light showed where the dim earth
and dim sky met.
A remembrance came to him of a summer dawn such as this, years and years
ago, when Michael had been dangerously ill, and how his whole soul had
spent itself in one passionate supplication that he might not be taken
from him.
* * * * *
A tender green transparent as the light seen through a leaf in May was
welling up the sky. Two tiny clouds floated in it like rafts of rose
colour upon a sea of glass.
* * * * *
A deep and bitter sense of injustice was growing within him with the
growing light.
A hundred times during the night he had recalled in cold anger every
word of that final scene in the library, his own speech, his own
actions, his great wrongs, his unendurable pain.
And yet again it returned upon him, always with Fay's convulsed face,
and clinging hands, always with the Bishop's scathing words of
dismissal. Their horrible injustice rankled in his mind, their
abominable cruelty to himself revolted him. Hideous crimes had been
committed against him, but _he_ had done no evil, unless to love and to
trust were evil. Why then was he to be thus thrust into the wrong, thus
condemned unheard, cast forth with scorn because he had not obediently
fallen in with the Bishop's preposterous demand on him to condone
everything? _It was not to be expected of him._
Suddenly the faces of the others watching him after Fay's confession
rose before him, the Bishop's, Magdalen's, Michael's. He saw that they
had not expected it of him either--not even Michael. Only in Fay's
up-raised eyes as she held him by the knees had there been one instant's
anguished hope. Only in hers. And that had been quickly extinguished.
_He had extinguished it himself._
* * * * *
The little clouds turned to trembling flame. The whole sky flushed and
then paled. A thread of fire showed upon the horizon. It widened. It
drew into an arch. The sun rose swiftly, a sudden ball of living fire;
and in a moment the smallest shrub upon the down, the grazing horses,
the huddled sheep, were casting gigantic shadows across the whole world.
A faint sound of wheels was growing clearer and nearer.
Wentworth saw a dog-cart coming towards him along the great white road.
As he looked it pulled up and then stopped. A man got out and came
towards him. The raw sunlight caught only his face and shoulders. He
seemed to wade towards him waist deep through a grey sea.
Lord Lossiemouth again!
Lord Lossiemouth's heavy tired face showed sharp and white in the garish
light.
"I have been looking everywhere for you," he said, not ungently. "I
waited half the night at Barford, and then went on to Saundersfoot
station, and then to Wrigley. Your servants thought you might possibly
have gone there. But you had not been seen there. Magdalen sent me to
tell you you must go back to the Palace. Your brother is very ill. He
had an attack of haemorrhage apparently just after you and he parted in
the hall. I promised her not to go back without you. Shall we drive
on?"