As Lady Susan scrambled down the other side of the bank she said
mechanically to herself that Hugh must have taken another turn before
they crossed the railway, only for that she would have seen him when she
looked back before she rode at her last jump. How extraordinarily well
he had been going--how long ago it seemed, and yet it could only have
been about ten minutes. Below her stretched the long fields up which
Solomon had carried her; the mist swept thick and cold across them,
shutting out the rest of the world, and making their loneliness more
complete. A grey horse was moving up the field towards her; she walked
uneasily towards it, crippled by her safety habit, stiff in every limb.
She could at first only make out that it was lame, she neared and saw a
saddle and dangling reins. The stillness of the hillside seemed to tell
her the rest. She came up to the grey horse and took him by the head; he
was dead lame and trembling all over, there was mud on his jaw, on his
shoulder, on the saddle. She had seen before what horses looked like
after a bad fall. She led him down the field in the direction from which
he had come, and saw, away by the fence, a motionless spot of scarlet
and white.
In a few moments she was on her knees beside her husband. His face was
buried in a heather tussock, his hands were clinched in the black and
boggy soil; as she tried to turn him over the blood trickled heavily
from the corner of his mouth. A little gurgling sound in his throat told
her that he was alive, but he was far away in that trance of physical
defeat in which soul and body seem alike absorbed.
She was wholly unversed in illness, un-acquainted with death, but in
the novels she had read episodes of fainting had been freely scattered,
and they had left a general idea in her mind. With shaking fingers,
shaking from her recent struggle and the impact of this latest shock,
she unfastened Hugh’s hunting-tie and the neck of his shirt, while her
sinking heart told her of her own ignorance and loneliness, and the
white face remained unmoved. It seemed to have become smaller, and the
temples hollow and blue. She took off the glove from the heavy, listless
hand, and tried with her unskilled fingers to feel the pulse. It was
just perceptible, and at the contact with that thread of life shut up
inside the intolerable mystery of unconsciousness, the fear, the
paralyzing helplessness began to give way. Something like the clinking
of a tin can came to her ear, and she started up. Two little girls, with
red petticoats over their heads, were crossing the field, and Lady Susan
ran towards them, calling with what voice she could muster. At sight of
the dishevelled vision in top-boots and a man’s hat emerging from the
mist, the children seemed disposed to fly, but finally came to her. Her
heart sank as she saw their hesitating, timorous faces. Could she make
them understand? To every request they returned the same whispered “We
will, miss,” with their lovely eyes cast down in shyness, but
half-a-crown and a glimpse of the figure lying by the fence quickened
their sense of the seriousness of the matter. They were taking their
father’s dinner to where he was working on the line, they would run on
to Letter Kyle with a note to the doctor, they would send people to
help. Their nimble red feet seemed to promise speed; Lady Susan snatched
out her pencil-case, but on what was the note to be written? It came to
her like a flash that she had seen Hugh put a letter into his
breast-pocket before he started; the inside of the envelope would do.
She went back to him, and with a shrinking hand moved the inert form and
found the letter. As she took it out of the envelope she saw her own
name and that of Glasgow; and in one blinding moment read the sentence
that connected them. There was a pause. She looked up and saw the
innocent and awe-struck eyes of the children fixed on her as they stood,
too frightened to come near the prostrate figure in the red coat. She
put the letter into her own pocket, and opening out the envelope wrote
on it her demand for help, for a doctor, for a carriage from French’s
Court. The final “We will, miss,” was murmured, the red legs carried the
children down the hill at full speed, till the rhythmic clanking of the
milk-can died away.
Let her not be blamed if her first thought was for herself and her
position. Her seven-and-twenty years, her careless and daring
flirtations, and her marriage, had not taught her what it was to be in
love. She knew that Hugh was in love with her; it was a comfortable
knowledge, pleasant and commonplace as sunshine, and she had no more
real comprehension of what he might suffer on her behalf than she had of
the flames of hell. She thought first of herself, accused in public,
accused in private; she put her hands over her face and said she would
go away and never come back to French’s Court, where the people spent
their time in spying and telling these foul, infernal lies. Hughie would
believe her anyhow. She would tell him all about it. It wasn’t so very
much, after all, and he wasn’t a bit strait-laced. She took her hands
from her face and saw the motionless body flung in the heathery grass,
the vacant brow, the strangeness, the terrific pallor. She stood as
people stand when the sudden inrush of an idea overwhelms the physical
part of them; it had come to her that it might be too late to tell
Hughie about it. It sank into her soul, carrying with it the remembrance
of her husband standing by the hall door with the letter in his hand. He
had read it before he started; he had only spoken to her once
afterwards, something about the balance-strap of her saddle, but he had
not seemed different. She had noticed that he looked ill, and had
presently forgotten all about it. The past flowed in on her; his
kindliness, his simpleness, his straightness, most of all, that belief
in her that was bound up in the deepest heart of an unjealous nature.
The face that lay sideways in the heather began to torture her with its
mute reproach; she knelt down beside him, tearless and tense, enduring
strong feeling as the undemonstrative must endure it. She bent over him
at length, and, as if half afraid, stooped her head and kissed the pale
cheek, knowing for the first time the dreadful kiss that is so much to
one, so much less than nothing to the other.