The road ran through a cutting, sunless, cooled by many small springs of
water trickling down the rock-face, green with draperies of the
hart's-tongue and common polypody ferns; and emerged again into warmth
upon a curve of the hillside facing southward down the coombe, and almost
close under the second span of the viaduct, where the tall trestles
plunged down among the tree-tops like gigantic stilts, and the railway
left earth and spun itself across the chasm like a line of gossamer, its
criss-crossed timbers so delicately pencilled against the blue that the
whole structure seemed to swing there in the morning breeze. Above it, in
heights yet more giddy, the larks were chiming; and Mr. Molesworth's heart
went up to those clear heights with a sudden lift.
In all the many times he had crossed the viaduct he had never once
guessed--he could not have imagined--how beautiful it looked from below.
He stood and gazed, and drew a long breath. Was it the escape from
dreadful peril, with its blessed revulsion of feeling, that so quickened
all his senses dulled by years of habit? He could not tell. He gave
himself up to the strange and innocent excitement.
Why had he never till now--and now only by accident--obeyed the impulse to
descend this road and explore? He was rich: he had not even the excuse of
children to be provided for: the Bank might surely have waited for one
day. He did not want much money. His tastes were simple--Was not the
happiness at this moment thrilling him a proof that his tastes were simple
as a child's? Lo, too, his eyes were looking on the world as freshly as a
child's! Why had he so long denied them a holiday? Why do men chain
themselves in prisons of their own making?
What had the station-master said? It might be an hour--certainly not less
than forty minutes--before the train could be restarted. Mr. Molesworth
looked at his watch. Forty minutes to explore the road: forty minutes'
holiday! He laughed, pocketed the watch again, and took the road briskly,
humming a song.
Suppose he missed his train? Why, then, the Bank must do without him
to-day, as it would have to do without him, one of these days, when he was
dead. He thought of his fellow-directors' faces, and laughed again.
He felt morally certain of missing that train. What kind of world would
it be if money grew in birds' nests, or if leaves were currency and
withered in autumn? Would it include truant-schools for bankers? . . .
"He that is down needs fear no fall,
He that is low, no pride;
He that is humble ever shall
Have God to be his guide."
"Fulness to such a burden is
That go on pilgrimage--"
Mr. Molesworth did not actually sing these words. The tune he hummed was
a wordless one, and, for that matter, not even much of a tune. But he
afterwards declared very positively that he sang the sense of them,
being challenged by the birds calling in contention louder and louder as
the road dipped towards the stream, and by the music of lapsing water
which now began to possess his ear. For some five or six furlongs the
road descended under beech-boughs, between slopes carpeted with last
year's leaves: but by and by the beeches gave place to an oak coppice with
a matted undergrowth of the whortleberry; and where these in turn broke
off, and a plantation of green young larches climbed the hill, the wild
hyacinths ran down to the stream in sheet upon sheet of blue.
Mr. Molesworth rested his creel on the low hedge above one of these sheets
of blue, and with the music of the stream in his ears began to unpack Sir
Warwick Moyle's fishing-rod. For a moment he paused, bethinking himself,
with another short laugh, that, without flies, neither rod nor line would
catch him a fish. But decidedly fortune was kind to him to-day: for,
opening the creel, he found Sir Warwick's fly-book within it, bulging with
hooks and flies by the score--nay, by the hundred. He unbuckled the strap
and was turning the leaves to make his choice, when his ear caught the
sound of footsteps, and he lifted his eyes to see Sir John Crang coming
down the road.
"Hullo!" hailed Sir John. "I saw you slip out of the station and took a
fancy that I'd follow. Pretty little out-of-the-way spot, this. Eh?
Why, where on earth did you pick up those angling traps?"
"I stole them," answered Mr. Molesworth deliberately, choosing a fly.
He did not in the least desire Sir John's company, but somehow found
himself too full of good-nature to resent it actively.
"Stole 'em?"
"Well, as a matter of fact, they belong to a friend of mine. They were
lying ready to hand in the station, and I borrowed them without leave.
He won't mind."
"You're a cool one, I must say." It may be that the recent agitation of
his feelings had shaken Sir John's native vulgarity to the surface.
Certainly he spoke now with a commonness of idiom and accent he was
usually at pains to conceal. "You must have a fair nerve altogether,
for all you're such a quiet-looking chap. Hadn't even the curiosity--had
you?--to find out what had gone wrong; but just picked up a handy
fishing-rod and strolled off to fill up the time till damages were
repaired. Look here. Do you know, or don't you, that 'twasn't by more
than a hair's-breadth we missed going over that viaduct?"
"I knew we must have had a narrow escape."
"And you can be tying the fly there on to that gut as steady as a doctor
picking up an artery! Well, I envy you. Look at _that!_" Sir John held
out a brown, hairy, shaking hand. "And I don't reckon myself a coward,
either."
Mr. Molesworth knew that the man's record had established at any rate his
reputation for courage. He had, in fact, been a famous hunter-out of
Dacoity.
"I didn't know you went in for that sort of thing," pursued Sir John,
watching Mr. Molesworth, who, with a penknife, was trimming the ends of
gut. "Don't mind my watching your first cast or two, I hope? I won't
talk. Anglers don't like being interrupted, I know."
"I shall be glad of your company: and please talk as much as you choose.
To tell the truth, I haven't handled a rod for years, and I'm making this
little experiment to see if I've quite lost the knack, rather than with
any hope of catching fish."
It appeared, however, that he had not lost the knack, and after the first
cast or two, in the pleasure of recovered skill, his senses abandoned
themselves entirely to the sport. Sir John had lit a cigar and seated
himself amid the bracken a short distance back from the brink, to watch:
but whether he conversed or not Mr. Molesworth could not tell.
He remembered afterwards that at the end of twenty minutes or so--probably
when his cigar was finished--Sir John rose and announced his intention of
strolling some way farther down the valley--"to soothe his nerves a bit,"
as he said, adding, "So long! I see you're going to miss that train, to a
certainty."
Yes, it was certain enough that Mr. Molesworth would miss his train.
He fished down the stream slowly, the song and dazzle of the water filling
his ears, his vision; his whole being soothed and lulled less by the
actual scene than by a hundred memories it awakened or set stirring.
He was young again--a youth of twenty with romance in his heart.
The plants and grasses he trod were the asphodels, sundew, water-mint his
feet had crushed--crushed into fragrance--five-and-twenty years ago. . . .
So deeply preoccupied was he that, coming to a bend where the coombe
suddenly widened, and the stream without warning cast its green fringe of
alders like a slough and slipped down a beach of flat pebbles to the head
waters of a tidal creek, Mr. Molesworth rubbed his eyes with a start.
Had the stream been a Naiad she could not have given him the go-by more
coquettishly.
He rubbed his eyes, and then with a short gasp of wonder--almost of
terror--involuntarily looked around for Sir John. Here before him was a
shore, with a church beside it, and at the far end a whitewashed cottage--
surely the very shore, church, cottage, of Sir John's dream! Yes, there
was the stone cross before the porch; and here the grid-fashioned church
stile; and yonder under the string-course the scaffold-hole with the grass
growing out of it!
If Mr. Molesworth's hands had been steady when he tied on his May-fly,
they trembled enough now as he hurriedly put up his tackle and disjointed
his rod: and still, and again while he hastened across to the cottage
above the rocky spit--the cottage with the larch plantation above and in
the garden a laburnum aslant and in bloom--his eyes sought the beach for
Sir John.
The cottage was a large one, as Sir John had described. It was, in fact,
a waterside inn, with its name, The Saracen's Head, painted in black
letters along its whitewashed front and under a swinging signboard.
Looking up at the board Mr. Molesworth discerned, beneath its dark
varnish, the shoulders, scimitar, and grinning face of a turbaned Saracen,
and laughed aloud between incredulity and a sense of terror absurdly
relieved. This, then, was Sir John's black man!
But almost at the same moment another face looked over the low hedge--the
face of a young girl in a blue sun-bonnet: and Mr. Molesworth put out a
hand to the gate to steady himself.
The girl--she had heard his laugh, perhaps--gazed down at him with a frank
curiosity. Her eyes were honest, clear, untroubled: they were also
extremely beautiful eyes: and they were more. As Mr. Molesworth to his
last day was prepared to take oath, here were the very eyes, as here was
the very face and here the very form, of the Margaret whom he had suffered
for, and suffered to be lost to him, twenty-five years ago. It was
Margaret, and she had not aged one day.
In Margaret's voice, too, seeing that he made no motion to enter, she
spoke down to him across the hedge.
"Are you a friend, sir, of the gentleman that was here just now?"
"Sir John Crang?" Mr. Molesworth just managed to command his voice.
"I don't know his name, sir. But he left his cigar-case behind. I found
it on the settle five minutes after he had gone, and ran out to search for
him. . . ."
Mr. Molesworth opened the gate and held out a hand for the case. Yes: he
recognised it. It bore Sir John's monogram in silver.
"I will give it to him," he said. Without exactly knowing why, he
followed her into the inn-kitchen. Yes, he would take a pint of her ale.
"The home-brewed?" Yes, certainly, the home-brewed.
She brought it in a pewter tankard, exquisitely polished. The polish of
it caught and cast back the sunlight in prismatic circles on the scoured
deal table. The girl--Margaret--stood for a moment in the fuller sunlight
by the window, lingering there to pick a dead leaf from a geranium on the
ledge.
"Which way did Sir John go?"
"I _thought_ he took the turning along the shore; but I didn't notice
particularly which way he went. He said he had come down the valley, and
I took it for granted he would be going on."
Mr. Molesworth drank his beer and stood up. "There are only two ways,
then, out of this valley?"
"Thank you, sir--" As he paid her she dropped a small curtsey--"Yes, only
two ways--up the valley or along the shore. The road up the valley leads
to the railway station."
"By the way, there was an accident at the station this morning?"
"Indeed, sir?" Her beautiful eyes grew round. "Nothing serious, I hope?"
"It might have been a very nasty one indeed," said Mr. Molesworth, and
paused. "I think I'll take a look along the shore before returning.
I don't want to miss my friend, if I can help it."
"You can see right along it from the rock beyond the garden," said the
girl, and Mr. Molesworth went out.
As he reached the spit of rock, the sunlight playing down the waters of
the creek dazzled him for a moment. Rubbing his eyes, he saw, about two
hundred yards along the foreshore, a boat grounded, and two figures beside
it on the beach: and either his sight was playing him a trick or these two
were struggling together.
He ran towards them. Almost as he started, in one of the figures he
recognised Sir John. The other had him by the shoulders, and seemed to be
dragging him by main force towards the boat. Mr. Molesworth shouted as he
rushed up to the fray. The assailant turned--turned with a loud hissing
sound--and, releasing Sir John, swung up a hand with something in it that
flashed in the sun as he struck at the newcomer: and as Mr. Molesworth
fell, he saw a fierce brown face and a cage of white, gleaming teeth bared
in a savage grin. . . .
He picked himself up, the blood running warm over his eyes, and, as he
stood erect for a moment, down over his white waistcoat. But the dusky
face of his antagonist had vanished, and, with it, the whole scene.
In place of the foreshore with its flat grey stones, his eye travelled
down a steep green slope. The hissing sound continued in his ears, louder
than ever, but it came with violent jets of steam from a locomotive,
grotesquely overturned some twenty yards below him. Fainting, he saw and
sank across the body of Sir John Crang, which lay with face upturned among
the June grasses, staring at the sky.