"Mine!"
The word was breathed rather than uttered, and its intonation conveyed a
sense of the most perfect, even ecstatic, contentment. The vivid green
of early summer woods piled as it were in great cloud masses to the
clear, unbroken blue, rolling up from the sheen and glory of golden seas
of buttercups which flooded every rich meadow surface. Hawthorn hedges
distilled their sweetness from snowy clusters crowding each other in
their profusion, a busy working ground for myriad bees whose murmur made
music in low waves of tone upon the sweet evening glow. And yonder,
behind him who is contemplating all this, the slant of the westering sun
touches the tall chimney stalks of the old house, just visible among
masses of feathery elms loud with cawing clamour from black armies of
homing rooks. Again the glance swept round upon this wealth of English
summer loveliness and again the uttered thought, with all its original
exaltation, escaped the lips.
"Mine!"
Wagram Gerard Wagram strolled leisurely on, drinking in the golden glory
of the surroundings as though suffering it to saturate his whole being.
As for the second time he half-unconsciously enunciated that single
possessive it was with almost a misgiving, an uncomfortable stirring as
of unreality. Would he awaken directly, as he had more than once
awakened before, to find this vision of Paradise, as it were, dispelled
in the cold and sunless grey of a mere existence, blank alike of aim or
prospect--illusions dead, life all behind, in front--nothing?
With these conditions he was well acquainted--only too well. The seamy
side of life had indeed been his--failure, straitened means,
disappointment in every form, and worse. Years of bitter and
heart-wearing experiences had planted the iron in his soul--but this was
all over now, never to return. To him, suddenly, startling in its
unexpectedness, had come the change, and with it, peace.
A perfect chorus of bird harmony filled the air. Thrushes innumerable
poured forth their song, whose sweet and liquid notes gurgled upon the
ear as though through organ pipes. Robins, too, and blackbirds were not
slow to join in, and then the soft amorous coo of wood-pigeons, and
through all--thrown as it were from copse to copse--the blithe and
gladsome shout of answering cuckoos.
Wagram opened a gate noiselessly, and with equally noiseless tread moved
along one of the "rides" of a wood. On his shoulder was a rabbit
rifle--one of some power and driving capacity--with which he was wont to
practise long shots at outlying but uncommonly suspicious and wideawake
Bunny. Things rustled in the undergrowth and brambles on either side,
as though stealthily creeping away. A slight stirring of the grass
caught his eye, and, as he bent over it, an adder contracted itself into
a letter S, with its heart-shaped head somewhat lifted, alert,
defensive. He raised the rifle so as to bring down the butt upon the
snake--then seemed to think better of it.
"Poor little brute. The chances are ten thousand to one against it ever
damaging anybody in a place like this, and those chances it can have the
benefit of."
He touched it with the muzzle of the gun, amused by the impotent wrath
wherewith the small reptile struck at the cold iron. Then he went on
his way.
He reached a gate and peered over. Two or three rabbits were out
feeding, but they darted like lightning into cover before he had time so
much as to raise the piece. Passing out of the gate he crossed the open
meadow.
In front a gleam of water, and beyond it the skipping forms of young
lambs, whose shrill bleat harmonised with the multitudinous bird voices,
and the green loveliness of the picture. Leaning lazily on the parapet
of an old stone bridge which spanned the river, Wagram watched the
ripple here and there of a rising trout, or the perky flirtings of a
pair of water-ouzels, whose nest clung, excrescence-like, against one of
the stone piers. Away down stream the roof of a picturesque old mill,
its wheel for the nonce still and silent, and beyond, pointing above
more woods, the spire of a distant church.
Again that well-nigh ecstatic sense of possession--of ownership--came
over him, and now, giving himself up to it, he fairly revelled in it.
The utter solitude of the spot constituted, in his eyes, one of its
greatest charms. He could wander at will without meeting a human being,
and though here the bridge carried on a public thoroughfare it was a
lonely road at any time. But one side of such solitude was that
thoughts of the past would arise, would obtrude, and such he steadily
put from him. For he hated the past. Not one day of it would he
willingly live over again--to no single incident of it would he
willingly let his mind revert. It was a very nightmare.
Leaving the bridge he strolled up the tree-shaded road intending to
return home. But no chances did he get of practising marksmanship, for
the rabbits seemed unaccountably shy. Ah--at last. There was one.
Nearly a hundred yards' range, too. Yes, it would do.
But before he could draw trigger he lowered the piece and threw up his
head listening. A sound--a strange sound--had caught his ear. Yet it
was not so much the nature of the sound, as the quarter from which it
came that had startled him. No further thought of the rabbit now, as he
listened for its repetition.
It came--louder, nearer, this time--a strange, harsh, raucous bellow.
Again and again he heard it, each time nearer still. And with it now
blended another sound--a loud shrill scream for help.
Wagram's blood thrilled as already he foresaw a tragedy. It happened
that a portion of the park was set apart for several varieties of the
larger African antelopes, which they were trying to acclimatise, and one
of these must, by some means or other, have escaped from its paddock.
It is a fact that the shyest and wariest of wild creatures in their
natural state, when captured and placed in confinement, as they become
accustomed to the sight of the human form divine, soon develop an
aggressive ferocity in exactly opposite proportion to their former
shyness. No better instance is furnished of familiarity thus breeding
contempt than in the case of the male ostrich. In his wild state the
sky-line is hardly a sufficiently respectable distance for him to keep
between you and him--incidentally he never does hide his head in the
sand, a ridiculous fable probably originating with the old Portuguese
explorers, in whom the waggishly disposed natives would find fair game.
"Camped off" or enclosed, there is no limit to his absolutely fearless
truculence. Even the graceful little springbok, half tamed, and shut up
alone in a paddock, we have known to give a full-grown man all the rough
and tumble he wants before getting out of that paddock unscathed. And
these, we repeat, were of the largest variety of antelope, and now here
was one of them at large and pursuing somebody--from the scream,
evidently a woman.
Even while thinking, Wagram was at the same time acting, for he had
rushed forward and literally torn himself through a high thick hedge
which interposed between himself and what was transpiring. And this is
what he saw.
A girl on a bicycle was skimming the broad white road which banded the
level sward. Close in pursuit coursed a strange looking beast, utterly
out of keeping with the peaceful and conventional beauty of an English
park--a slate-coloured beast, with the head of an exaggerated he-goat,
and bearded withal; the horns of a miniature buffalo, the mane of a
horse and almost the tail of one. It was in fact a fair specimen of the
brindled gnu, commonly known as the blue wildebeeste.
Fortunately the creature did not seem able to make up its mind to
charge; for now it would range up alongside of the bicycle and its
rider, prancing and whisking around, and uttering its raucous bellow,
then it would drop back, and rush forward again with horns lowered, to
pull up and proceed to play the fool as before. All this Wagram took
in, as he hurried up, and, taking it in, knew the peril to be great and
dual. If the beast were to charge home, why then--those meat-hook like
horns would do their deadly work in a moment. If the rider kept up, or
increased her pace any further to speak of, why then this road ended in
a gate giving admission to the high road, and this gate was shut. There
was only one thing to be done, and he did it.
He rushed towards this strange chase, shouting furiously, even
grotesquely, anything to draw the attention of the dangerous brute. But
at that moment, whether the girl had lost her head, or was as startled
at this new diversion as her pursuer ought to have been, the bicycle
wheel managed to get into a dry rut, skidded, and shot the rider clean
off on to the turf. A half-strangled scream went up, and she lay still.
It is possible that the accident saved the situation so far as she was
concerned, for the gnu held straight on and, lowering his head, with a
savage drive sent his horns clean through the fabric of the machine
lying in the road, then throwing up his head flung the shattered
fragments of metal whirling about in every direction, but the remainder,
entangled in the horns, still hung about his forehead and eyes.
Wagram summed up the peril in a flash. There lay the girl, helpless if
not unconscious, the gate a quarter of a mile away--even the hedge he
had come through considerably over a hundred yards. Not so much as a
tree was there to dodge behind, and there was the infuriated beast
shaking its head and bellowing savagely in frantic attempts to disengage
itself of the clinging remains of the bicycle. The rifle, he decided,
was of no use; the bullet, too diminutive to kill or disable, would only
avail to madden the animal still more. And even then it succeeded in
flinging the last remnant of the shattered machine from its horns. It
stood for a second, staring, snorting, stamping its hoofs, then charged.
Wagram levelled the piece and pressed the trigger. The hammer fell with
a mere click, and as he remembered how he had fired in the air while
rushing to the rescue, in the hope that the report might scare the
beast, the shock of the onrush sent him to earth, knocking the weapon
from his grasp.
For a second he lay, half stunned. Fortunately, he had managed to dodge
partially aside so as to escape the full shock, and the impetus had
carried his assailant on a little way. Would the brute leave them, he
wondered, if they both lay still. But no. It faced round, stamped,
shook its head, bellowed, then came on again--this time straight for the
prostrate girl.
Wagram rose to his feet with a shout--a loud, pealing, quavering shout.
He had no clear idea as to what he was going to do, but the first thing
was to get between the maddened beast and its intended victim.
Even at that moment, so strange are the workings of the human mind,
there flashed across Wagram's brain the irony of it all. The ecstasy of
possession had culminated thus: that a sudden and violent death should
overtake him in the midst of his possessions, and through the agency of
one of them. The gnu, diverted from its original purpose, or preferring
an erect enemy to a recumbent one, once more charged him. Then he
literally "took the bull by the horns" and gripped them as in a vice.
Throwing up its head the struggling, pushing beast strove to tear itself
free, but those sinewy hands held on. Then it reared on its hind legs,
and tall man as he was, Wagram felt himself pulled off the ground.
Though considerably past his first youth, he was wiry and hard of
condition, and still he held on, but it could not continue. He must
relax his grip, then he would be gored, trampled, mangled out of all
recognition. Already one of the pointed hoofs, pawing wildly downward,
had ripped his waistcoat open, gashing the skin, when--he was
somersaulting through the air, to fall heavily half-a-dozen yards away,
at the same time that the sharp crack of firearms almost at his very ear
seemed to point to a miracle in his swiftly revolving brain.
He raised his head. His late enemy was lying on the turf, a faint
quiver shuddering through its frame, and, standing contemplating it,
erect, unhurt, the form of her he had nearly lost his life to rescue,
and in her hand, the smoke still curling from the muzzle, a rifle--his
rifle.