Puff-puff! puff-puff! hum-m-m! as the fly-wheel whizzed round with a
sudden ease in working.
"I detest these ploughing engines," said Squire Thorpe, looking over the
gate and leaning his arms on it, as country people always do.
"But if the tenants find deep ploughing and manuring better, I suppose
that's the point," said Valentine.
"For the tenant, yes," said the Squire, as he shouldered his gun and
turned away from the gate. "For _me_, it is another matter. It is a
question with me if this deep ploughing will not exhaust the earth."
"But the artificial manure," said Valentine, who was inclined to argue
with any one.
"Rubbish! Why, it's only used like dust--not an eighth of an inch
thick; and they take all that out again quick enough. Then these deep
drains; they carry away as much of the richness of the soil as water."
"You don't think much of unexhausted improvements," said Geoffrey.
"The greatest nonsense ever talked," said the Squire, working himself
into a temper. "It's simply a device to suck every atom out of the
soil, and leave me as dry as a dead hemlock. What profit do you suppose
I get out of the land? I'm pestered to put up cattle-stalls and sheds,
to sink wells and rebuild farmhouses, to put in drains--confound the
drains! Then I must make reductions because the labourers want higher
wages, and take off ten per cent, because the weather's been bad! As if
the weather had not always been wrong these three hundred years! I'm
perfectly sick of science and superphosphates, shorthorns, and steam
tackle. Then they bring public opinion, forsooth, on me, and say I must
disgorge! [Intense disgust.] Disgorge! Let them take the land, and
welcome, and give me an equivalent in Consols, I should be twenty times
better off. No; I'll be shot if they shall! [With energetic
inconsistency.] I would sooner be flayed alive than part with a square
inch! I love the land next to my mother! There! But I'll be let
alone. I'll plant the whole place with oaks. My woods are the only
things that pay me--except the rabbits, and that rascally Guss Basset
poaches and nets them by the score. Look out!"
A covey of partridges rose, and Valentine, who was a little in advance,
fired both barrels without effect.
"Mark!" said the Squire. "Gone to the turnips of course, the only place
left for the poor things; this short stubble makes them as wild as
hawks. Val, your nerves are shaky this afternoon, and, by Jove, that
horse dying was enough!"
"My nerves are not at all shaken," said Valentine, as he reloaded.
He affected a stoical indifference, though really hit hard. His temper
had been boiling like molten lead under the surface, and it wanted but
little to make him explode. His losses and vexation, his jealousy of
Geoffrey, the unfortunate suspicions that had been aroused in his mind
about the night on the Downs--all had combined to irritate him to the
last degree.
"Well, we've all lost money," said the Squire; "and what a terrible
thing about poor old Fisher! May will stay at Greene Ferne, I suppose;
she can never return alone to that gloomy house. Ah, that's more to my
taste,"--pointing to a middle-aged labourer who was sowing corn
broadcast. "Now watch his steps; regular as clockwork. See, his hand
springs from his hip, and describes an exact segment of a circle--no, a
parabola, I suppose--every time, so as to make the seed spread itself
equally. That's higher than science--that's art, art handed down these
thousand years."
A man now overtook them with a message from the house: the Squire was
wanted about a summons.
"If you cross the turnips," he said, as he turned to leave them, "you
may find the covey again; and then try the meadows at the edge of the
wood; and if you see that rascally Basset at my rabbits, just--" he
kicked a clod to pieces illustratively.
The Squire returned homewards; Geoffrey and Valentine entered the
turnips, making for the narrow belt of meadow by the wood. It was not a
regular shooting expedition: they had simply strolled out for an hour,
and were not accompanied by a keeper. The moment the Squire left, the
conversation dropped. Valentine was bitter against his old friend:
Geoffrey had not forgotten the _contretemps_ at the nutting. It had
been long before Margaret accepted his protestations of regret for his
hasty words. Now no man, who is a man, likes the part of penitence. He
considered that Valentine had forced him into that unpleasant position,
and his wrath smouldered against him.
After the turnips, they got through a gap into the meadow land, which,
being of poor quality, as is often the case near a wood, was dotted with
dead thistles, rushes in the hollows, and bunches of tussocky grass.
Out from one of these sprang a hare, as nearly as possible midway
between them. They both fired--so exactly simultaneously that it
sounded as one report; and for the moment neither knew that the other
had pulled the trigger. But when they saw what had happened, each
turned away from the dead hare--neither would touch it. Each, biassed
by previous irritation, accused the other in his mind of taking the shot
from him. This little accident added to the sullen bitterness.
They now came to an immense double-mound hedge, into which the spaniels
rushed. Valentine took the near side, Geoffrey the off, with the hedge
between them. It was so thick neither could see the other; so trifling
a circumstance tended to calm the annoyance--out of sight, out of mind.
As he followed the edge of the ditch, waiting now and then for the dogs
to work the hedge thoroughly, Geoffrey became conscious of the beauty of
the warm autumn day.
Puff-puff! puff-puff! hum-m-m! The sound of the distant ploughing
engines came humming in the still air. He had noticed previously that
his coat-sleeve was flecked with gossamer threads, and now saw that the
bushes were white with them. Looking upwards, the atmosphere was full
of glistening lines--like the most delicate silk--drooping downwards and
shining in the sunlight. As far up as the eye could see, they came
showering slowly, noiselessly, down. The surface of the grass was
covered with these webs like a broad veil of fragile lace; and his feet,
tearing a rent through it were whitened by the accumulated threads. The
rooks rose from the oaks with a lazy cawing, loth to leave the ripening
acorns, and settled again when he had passed.
Hum-m-m! hum-m-m!
Underfoot a soft moss, luxuriating in the shade, almost took the place
of grass. The hedge itself was like a wood, so wide and thick--full of
ashpoles and hawthorn, crab-tree underwood, willow, elder, and
blackthorn, and here and there spreading oak trees. It terminated at
the wood; and as they approached it the dogs became more busy; for the
rabbits were numerous, and the banks were bored with their holes.
Geoffrey kept his gun on the hollow of his left arm--ready for a
rabbit--with the muzzle towards the hedge.
"Loo! Loo!" cried Valentine, urging the dogs.
Puff-puff! hum-m-m!
Geoffrey, looking intently at the mound, and expecting a rabbit to start
every moment, did not notice that a mole had recently thrown up a heap
of earth in his path. His foot striking against it caused him to
stumble, and, to recover himself, he snatched at a projecting branch of
nut-wood. A twig, or perhaps his sleeve, touched the trigger of his
gun--the muzzle still towards the hedge--and the sudden explosion that
followed jerked the gun from his arm to the ground. Like a bullet the
cartridge sang through between the ashpoles, and cut a small pendent
bough of willow in twain, not two feet in front of Valentine's face.
"By Jove!" he shouted, "that was meant for me. There!"
Strung up to an unbearable tension by brooding over his losses and
disappointment, jealous about Margaret, and now suddenly startled,
Valentine lost all control of himself, and, swinging his gun round
towards Geoffrey, without putting it to his shoulder, fired.
Geoffrey was in a stooping position, just lifting his gun from the
ground, when the shot, fired low, came with a rattle among the crab-tree
undergrowth. The tough fibres of the wood held and checked it, so that
only a few pellets passed by; but one or two of these, though their
force was almost spent in penetrating the branches, struck him sharply
by the knee with a sudden stinging pain.
"You shot at me!" shouted Geoffrey, now equally excited, and, hardly
aware what he was doing, he sprang across the ditch and into the double
mound, to get a clearer aim.
Valentine ran quickly down the meadow on his side; then, seeing no other
cover, also leapt into the hedge, and they faced each other some thirty
yards apart. As usual in double mounds, the growth of underwood was
less dense in the middle, so that, though some distance apart, each was
dimly visible through the branches. There came a loud report as they
fired the remaining barrels almost simultaneously, and a crashing and
cracking of splintered wood; but no harm yet, thanks to the crab and
stubborn blackthorn. The sulphurous smoke, clinging to the close
undergrowth and tall grasses, filled their nostrils with the scent and
madness of battle. In his ordinary mood either of these two would have
scouted the possibility of such a thing happening; but circumstances
suddenly threw them as it were a thousand years back in civilisation on
the original savage instincts of man. Had they carried even the muzzle
loaders, which take time to ram the charge home, one or other might have
paused. Better still if their arms had been the ancient matchlock, with
the priming to look to and the match to blow. But these breechloaders,
which send forth continuous flame, swift as the lightning, flash on
flash, allow not a moment for thought. The "death and murder of a
world," as Faust said, be on them.
As they jerked out the empty cartridge cases, and thrust in fresh
charges, each instinctively moved to the best shelter he could see--
Valentine behind the gabions of a great gnarled ash-stole; Geoffrey to
the cover of a crooked maple, whose leaves were turning yellow. Red
tongues of fire darted forth, scorching the leaves and blackening the
branches. Guided by sound and guess rather than sight, they fired
vaguely into the thickets. From the oaks of great Thorpe Wood the rooks
rose at the din, loudly cawing, high into the air; then in circling
sweep they soared and wheeled, black and ominous, a dance of death in
the azure beauty of the cloudless sky. The dogs yelped their very
loudest, keeping at a distance from the hedgerow; they knew that
something was wrong. Fast as the motions of the hand could answer to
the eager hate in the heart, volley followed volley, till the heated
metal of the barrels could scarcely be touched.
The dun smoke crept along the mound, and slipped with sudden draught
into the rabbit-buries, and hung low over the ash-tops. With a hiss and
roar and rattle the shot tore its way, biting hungrily at the branches
as it passed. The ash-boughs, tough and sinewy, though half-severed,
hung together still; the willow split, and let the lead slip through its
feeble wood; the hard crab-tree and blackthorn, with fibres torn and
jagged, held and stopped it; the briar, with its circular pith, snapped
and drooped. Through the broad burdock leaves and hollow hemlock stems
and "gicks" the hasty pellets drilled round holes, or buried themselves
in the bark of the larger tree-trunks, some glancing off at a sharp
angle like Tyrrell's arrow. The maple, all scored and dotted, and
partly stripped of leaves by the leaden shower, gave less cover than the
ash-stole; and Geoffrey, with shot-holes in his hat, and the pellets
hissing past his ears, yielded ground and retreated, firing as he went.
Valentine immediately advanced, and thus, like Indians in the backwoods,
they glided from thicket to thicket, from tree to tree, stalking, but
shooting wildly, baffled by the branches.
In a few minutes Geoffrey came to a great oak, rugged and moss-grown at
the roots, which stood near the edge of the ditch that, at the end of
the double mound, divided the hedge from the wood. Behind this he took
his stand; and Valentine, advancing too rapidly, was stung by a pellet
that glanced from a branch and struck his arm. He hastily rushed behind
an ash-tree--it was not broad enough to shield him completely; but by
its side grew a thicket of bramble and brake fern that helped to hide
him from sight. He blazed rapidly at the edge of the oak; in return the
shot came rushing through the fern, and scoring the bark of the ash.
Suddenly Geoffrey's fire ceased: the next moment Valentine guessed the
truth--that his opponent's last cartridge was gone--and surely mad with
rage stepped from his cover eager to seize the advantage. At the same
moment Geoffrey, saying to himself that he would not die like a dog
cowering behind a tree, walked out from the oak and faced his doom.
In that second--in the tenth of a second--he saw the sunbeams glance on
the levelled barrel, and behind the twin circular orifices of the muzzle
the smoke-blackened, frowning brow of the man who once had loved him.
"Fair play in the army!" shouted a hoarse voice, and a long stick of
briar suddenly projected from the fern at Valentine's side fell with a
crash upon his barrel. The blow diverted the aim, but the charge
exploded. Geoffrey uttered a sharp cry, turned round and put out his
hand as if to lean against the oak, and then dropped.
"We used to have fair play in the army," said Augustus Basset, stepping
up from the ditch out of the fern, with a briar in one hand, and a
vicious ferret in the other--struggling hard, but dexterously grasped
just behind the forelegs, the first finger in front of the legs, so that
it could not bite. "You make a ring, look here!" in his incoherent way.
But Valentine, all aghast with sudden revulsion of feeling, had already
rushed to his fallen friend and knelt beside him, feeling a pressure
upon his heart and a dizziness of sight. For the blood of life was
spouting from the right shoulder, and already the yellow fern and the
grey grass were spotted and stained, and the lowly creeping ivy streaked
with crimson.
"Speak, Geof, old fellow!" cried Valentine, becoming of a more deadly
pallor than the wounded man.
"Plug the hole," said Augustus, who, though he had never seen service,
like most old soldiers had some smattering of surgery. "You've lost
your head. Here, let me. Hold pug;" and he pushed the ferret into
Valentine's hands.
Pulling out his handkerchief, none of the cleanest, Augustus pressed it
on the wound, and succeeded in reducing the flow of blood. Geoffrey
moved, and Valentine, flinging the ferret aside, held him up.
"Speak to me!" he cried.
"Say not a word how it happened," Geoffrey replied, thinking of
Margaret, and became unconscious again.
There was a rustling of branches and a cracking of dead sticks
underfoot, and two men in their shirt-sleeves rushed out from the wood.
"By Gaarge, you, Measter Newton, be shot!"
"He won't die," said Augustus, looking up, and apparently quite
unconcerned. "I put my finger in--it hasn't touched the artery; look!"
He held out his hands, which were soaking red.
The two strong men turned white with a sudden sickness.
"We thought us hearn a scrame," one said.
"Make a litter," said Augustus. "There, you great odd-me-dods
[scarecrows], you don't know what it is! A hand-barrow, then, you
gawnies! What are you staring there for? Go and get your hurdles!"
"Zo us wull; come on, Bill!" and away they ran.
"A man's made just like a pig inside," said Augustus to Valentine, and
he proceeded to compare the anatomy to heedless ears. Quite sobered by
the shock, Basset was of more use than any of them. Long hardened, and
indifferent to all but the immediate gratification of his senses with
smoke and beer, Augustus had lost all the finer perceptions, and had
become not exactly callous, but unimpressionable. That very condition
rendered his aid valuable at such a time. Even now, under the crust of
stolidity, there were not wanting some better feelings in this wreck of
an educated man. He was faithful to the hand that fed him, i.e. to the
Greene Ferne people; Geoffrey had frequently given him tobacco and such
trifles, and now he was really anxious to do his best. As it was, he
had probably saved Geoffrey's life; for when the last shot was fired,
they were so near that the cartridge had only just begun to scatter; had
it struck the head or chest with the shot altogether, like a bullet,
instant death must have followed. But the blow on the barrel with the
stick so far diverted the swift aim of the practised sportsman, that
only a part of the charge took effect in the shoulder.
The two men ran as fast as they might across a corner of the wood,
crashing through the hazel, and stumbling in their haste as the woodbine
caught their heavy shoes. They made straight for a spot about a hundred
and fifty yards distant, where on the edge of the meadow land stood a
rude shed, framed of logs and slabs, thatched with flags from the brook,
and walled on three sides with hurdles interwoven with straw. By the
hut was a pile of ashpoles, dry and hard, cut a winter since in the
depths of Thorpe Wood, and drawn out there for better convenience.
These men had been at work for some months splitting the poles, shaving
and preparing them to be used as wooden hoops for barrels. Geoffrey, on
his way from Squire Thorpe's down to Greene Ferne, had frequently passed
the hut, and, interested in their work, formed a slight acquaintance
with the men. They told him that these ashen hoops, cut from English
woods, went in shiploads to Jamaica and other sugar lands, returning
round the sugar casks. He in turn had given them cigars, or a couple of
rabbits that he had shot; and watching the dexterous way they used their
tools, and how cheerfully they worked through rain and shine and
thunderstorm, grew to almost envy their content. They had heard the
firing as they worked by the hut, and stayed to listen to it. When it
suddenly ceased, simultaneously with a sharp cry as of pain, they
guessed there had been an accident. Now these rough sons of toil,
mindful of his little kindnesses, staying not a moment to inquire how
the catastrophe occurred, ran with all their might, tore down the
thatched hurdles which formed their walls, and with these, a couple of
poles, and their jackets snatched up in a hurry, hastened back to the
scene.
On this improvised litter Geoffrey, still insensible, was placed, his
head propped up somewhat with their jackets; and then, as they lifted
him, the question arose, where should they take him. As he was the
Squire's visitor, it seemed proper to carry him there; but Augustus, who
had his own private reasons for desiring to avoid the Squire, vehemently
insisted that it was all up-hill and through the wood, and much farther
than Greene Ferne. Valentine, anxious to get somewhere, and quite
beside himself with impatience, begged them to start; so the bearers set
out across the corner of the wood for the farm. Basset walked in front,
opening a road through the bushes; but the tall dead thistles, swinging
back as they hurriedly pushed along, pricked the pale cheek and listless
hands of their burden. They emerged from the wood shortly, and crossed
the meadow towards the ploughed field.
Augustus, with his hand now on Valentine's shoulder, babbled in his ear,
and showed him the briar-stick.
"I was poking a rabbit-bury," said he, "when you came along shooting.
There ain't no call to say anything to the Squire. See, here's bunnie's
fur!" He pointed to the end of the stick, where the sharp curved
prickles were left on, having been cut from the other end for ease of
handling. To these prickles a little soft fur adhered, together with
particles of sand. "I found him--he's got his head in the bottom of the
hole and can't move, and my other pug is at him. He's young, and wants
lining. When you came along I got down in the ditch under the fern.
But, I say, fair play in the army! If this had been a ground-ash
stick,"--swishing the briar, which bent easily--"I should have knocked
the gun out of your hands; but this briar plied, don't you see? I must
go back for the other ferret presently."
He ran forward to open the gate of the ploughed field for the bearers,
who were now a little way in front.
Puff-puff! puff-puff! hum-m-m! The fly-wheel whirled about, beating the
air to musical resonance; the steel sinew of Behemoth stretched across
the stubble, dragging the shares remorselessly through tender roots of
pimpernel and creeping convolvulus. Hum-m-m!
It was rough travelling over the deep fresh-turned furrows, that exhaled
a scent of earth, and their burden was somewhat jolted.
"Hulloa, you! What's up? I say there--you!"
The men with the ploughing engines had espied the litter, and,
abandoning operations, came running across the field. Thus, surrounded
by an excited group, the wounded man was borne over the lawn at Greene
Ferne.