Part 21

Isaac turned into his cottage for a moment to count out the eighty guineas he had promised Ursula and to lock the rest of the gold in his strong box at the bottom of the oak hutch. He did not doubt that the money would put the old lady in the best of tempers, and that he could safely confide in her concerning Bess. Isaac rejoined Dan in the garden, and they moved away towards Ursula’s cottage whose stone-wall and thatched roof showed amid the dark trunks and drooping branches of the pines. The old woman was in bed when Isaac knocked at the door. A lattice opened overhead, and a red beak and a pair of beady eyes under a pink night-cap appeared, with a few wisps of gray hair falling about a yellow and skinny neck. Isaac spoke a few words to her and jingled the money. The face popped in again and they heard Ursula hobbling down the stairs. She had tied on a red petticoat and thrown a black shawl over her shoulders. Isaac went into her when she had unbolted the door, leaving Dan leaning against the wall with his hands deep in his breeches-pockets.

Isaac remained with the old woman half an hour or more, the sound of their voices stealing out on the morning silence. He appeared in the best of tempers when he emerged from the cottage, slapped Dan on the shoulder, and limped away with him towards the hamlet, smiling to himself as though pleased with his own cleverness.

“The money’s tickled her into a good temper, lad,” he said. “I told her about the wench, and she took it very quiet.”

Dan cocked an eye shrewdly at his father.

“We waste a powerful lot of patience on the women,” he retorted.

Isaac wagged his head and looked particularly wise and saintly for the moment.

“I reckon we’d better shift the money,” he said.

As they rounded the corner of Ursula’s cow-house Isaac’s glance lighted on a man who was standing in the garden before his cottage. The fellow was busy throwing pebbles at the upper casements, imagining that the owner was still asleep within. As Dan and Isaac crossed the open stretch of grass-land that ran like a broad highway through the hamlet, the man standing in the garden caught sight of them as he turned to gather a fresh handful of pebbles from the path. He looked at them suspiciously for the moment, then waved his cap and came striding towards them over the grass. He was a rough, strongly built fellow, with the keen yet foxy air of a born poacher, his bushy brown beard and whiskers hiding fully half of his red and sun-tanned face.

“Hallo, Jim! What brings you this way, eh?”

The man grinned, and glanced first at Isaac and then at Dan.

“It be probable, Master Grimshaw, that we shall be running the ‘osses’ through to-morrow.”

“So—so!”

“Mus Garston be a-wanting to see ye both down at Thorney Chapel. There be a fat load comin’ through, and Mus Garston he’ll share like a gentleman.”

Isaac’s gray eyes gave that peculiar twinkle that told those who knew him that he was in the sweetest of tempers. He was never backward where money might be made, and he had no objection to cheating the Customs occasionally, provided that the adventure was worth the risk. Mus Garston was one of the finest land smugglers on the southern coast—a keen, black-eyed fellow, who loved the game better than he loved his soul. Bess, too, was safe, bound to the chair in Dan’s cottage. They could join Garston’s men and leave the girl to be dealt with at their leisure.

“We’ll come, Jim,” he said. “Come in and have a bite of food and a pull at the ale-pot.”

The poacher capped Isaac, for Grimshaw was a man of some circumstance among the night-moths of Pevensel. They went, the three of them, into Isaac’s cottage, and were soon gossiping over their bacon, brown bread, and ale. When they had ended the meal, Isaac whispered a few words into his son’s ear, and Dan, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, marched off to his cottage to look at Bess.

He found her much as they had left her, sitting stiffly in the chair, and gazing out of the window. Her face brightened a little when Dan entered, and she tried to smile at him as though for welcome. The man appeared in no mood to pity her. He felt the cords about her wrists and ankles, stared at her a moment in silence, stroking his beard with the palm of his hand.

“Dan,” she said, with a wistful drooping of the mouth.

Her husband’s dark eyes were hard and without light.

“What are you going to do with me?”

“Do with ye?”

“Yes.”

Dan frowned as he turned towards the door.

“Keep ye from playing more tricks,” he said. “You will bide there safe, I reckon, till we come back.”

Bess said never a word to him, but it was with a sinking heart that she heard Dan shut and lock the door. What would they do with her when they returned? Of a surety she had discovered some great secret that had lain hid in the deeps of Pevensel. What if her meddling should bring her to her death?

XXXVI

An hour passed, dragging its linked minutes like a snake crawling lazily in the long grass under the summer sun.

Bess, bound fast to the chair, sat like one weak after a long illness, the sunlight falling on the floor, to be reflected upon the brown beams of the old room. The girl’s face looked white and apathetic against the dark background of an old linen-press. Her eyes stared out steadily through the window at the green woods bathed in sunshine, and the white clouds sailing slowly north across the infinite azure of the June sky. The life fire had burned low in her since Dan had struck her down in the woods. The shock of the night had not yet lifted from her heart. Old Isaac’s pitiless gray eyes still haunted her, and she remembered the gleam of the barrel of the gun.

This same evening she was to have met Jeffray at Holy Cross, and the thought stirred the blood in her a little. She lay back in the chair, resting her head upon the rail, and taking her breath in deeply with slow, sighing inspirations. The memories of her last meeting with Jeffray began to work in her with quickening force. All the sweet complicity of the plot set the cords of her heart vibrating. If he but knew, if he had but guessed how Dan had treated her! If he were only wise as to her present peril!

With the increasing sense of her own powerlessness the spirit of revolt in her waxed but the more importunate. Why should she be made the creature of this man’s passions? She seemed to feel again the great fist, swinging with all the brutality of the man’s nature, and crashing into her face. All the ignominies of the past weeks rose up to taunt and madden her. All her hate and loathing waxed fiercer as she thought of her helpless yearning towards Jeffray. She began to struggle and twist in the chair, striving to get her teeth to the knots about her wrist. Dan had fastened them down to the front stretcher of the chair, and wrestle and strain as she would she could not reach them.

What could she do to free herself from the shame and the dread that encompassed her? Scream! Yes, but who would hear her, and who would help her if they heard? Ursula? Poor doddering Ursula! Doubtless she had been locked safely in her cottage, and Bess mistrusted the old woman’s courage when Isaac’s will had been declared law. Incensed the more by her own thoughts, she struggled again and again with the cords, twisting and straining till the oak chair rocked and creaked. The muscles stood out under the brown skin of her forearms. Her bruised lips began to bleed again as she held her breath, struggling and working her body from side to side.

Another hour passed. The bees droned on, the smell of the garden came in upon the breeze. Not a voice reached her from the hamlet. Silence prevailed save for the murmur of the insects, the vague rustling of the leaves, the steady, mocking tick of the old clock against the wall. The woods rolled up before her, their green splendor heightened by the blaze of the June sunlight. The very calm of the place seemed to intensify the passionate despair in her own heart.

Suddenly some new sound drifted to Bess’s ears. She twisted forward in the chair, straining at the cords. Some one was moving towards the cottage; Bess heard the rustle of feet in the long grass. Was it Dan returning, or old Isaac with those pistols in his belt? The footsteps stopped at the garden-gate. Bess could see neither the gate nor the path from where she sat. The latch lifted; some one was coming up the brick-paved path. She heard the sound of breathing, the sound of a hand trying the locked door. For a moment silence held. Then with the rustling of clothes against the wall of the cottage a round-backed figure showed blurred by the sunlight at the window, a hook-nosed face looked in at Bess through the open lattice.

It was Ursula.

Bess, leaning forward in the chair, stared at the old woman with a swift flooding of blood into her face.

“Is that you, mother?”

Instinctively she had chosen the word that she had used to Ursula when she was a child. There was a husky and vibrating wistfulness in the voice that seemed to carry strange and simple pathos.

Ursula was standing at the window, wringing her hands together. For two hours past she had been the creature of indecision, halting between fear of Isaac and great dread of the hints that the old man had cast into her ears.

“Mother!”

Ursula began to whimper as she looked in at the girl, the impotence of her dotage showing in her face.

“What!—they have bound ye to the chair?”

“I can’t stir, mother.”

“Oh, dear Lord! what shall I do?”

“Are we alone?”

“They be all away save Solomon,” she answered.

Bess’s face strained painfully towards the window.

“Where is Solomon?” she asked.

Ursula still twisted her hands together and peered round her suspiciously.

“Chopping firewood in his shed. I slipped round through the trees. Lord o’ mercy, what’s to be done—what’s to be done!”

Bess’s strength of purpose increased with Ursula’s indecision.

“Mother,” she said, in a whisper.

“Ay, child.”

“Ye’ve always been kind to me. Will ye let them bury me in the forest with a bullet in my heart?”

Ursula began to sway to and fro, pressing her hands to her bosom, whimpering and muttering like one demented.

“Why did ye meddle, Bess—why did ye meddle?”

“Isaac wanted to shoot me by the Monk’s Grave.”

“He be a fierce man, be Isaac.”

“Dan stood for me then; he’ll not stand for me again. Isaac will shoot me; I’ve seen death in his eyes.”

Ursula stretched herself across the window-sill with her head between her hands. Her distress was pitiable in its impotence. Bess watched her, realizing that her one hope rested on the feeble and faltering courage of this crooked and half-witless creature.

“Mother,” she said, hoarsely.

Ursula darted up her head and looked at Bess.

“Climb in through the window.”

“Lord have mercy on me, how can a poor old cripple climb in to ye?”

“Mother, you must.”

“I can’t, I can’t, wench; how can I?”

“Try, now try for Bess’s sake. My blood will be upon you if Isaac has his way.”

The words seemed to strike Ursula full in the face. She stood shaking, blinking her eyes, and working her loose, inturned lips together. Then she thrust her arms over the sill, gripped the wooden ledge within, and tried to drag herself to the level of the window. Bess watched the wrinkled and trembling head straining forward upon its yellow neck. The sinews stood out in the sticks of forearms, the feet scraped and worked against the wall. Slowly Ursula dragged herself up and through so that she could get one knee upon the ledge. She lay there panting a moment, looking at Bess.

“Quick, mother, quick!”

Ursula drew her left knee up on to the window-ledge, knelt, and, getting on her feet, crouched half within the opening of the lattice. There was a wooden stool under the window. Ursula caught one foot in her petticoat in the descent, lurched forward, and came tumbling on the floor. Her forehead struck the brick-work heavily. For a moment she lay groaning and twitching, Bess gazing at her in an agony of helpless dread.

Ursula was shaken but not stunned. She struggled up on her hands and knees, looking round her with a vacant pathos that might have appeared ludicrous at any other time. Bess was bending forward in the chair.

“Quick, mother, a knife!”

Ursula picked herself up, and went tottering round the room, holding her head between her hands. She moved to the dresser, dragged out one drawer after another, and came back at last with a horn-handled knife in her hand. Bess never shifted her eyes from the old woman’s face.

“My wrist, here, the cord—cut it.”

Ursula tumbled on her knees, sawed at the rope shakily, and stabbed Bess’s wrist in her clumsy fright. The sight of blood startled her. She dropped the knife, and sat on her heels, gaping at Bess.

“Cut the rope, mother; ye haven’t hurt me.”

Ursula picked up the knife and sawed at the cord again, Bess straining at it to keep it taut. Blood was trickling slowly down her fingers; that was nothing. Strand by strand the thin rope gave under the edge of the knife. A last twist of the girl’s strong arm and her hand was free.

She took the knife from Ursula instantly, cut the cords about her other wrist and ankles, careless of how she hurt herself in her haste. A stifled cry came from Ursula as Bess rose free of the oak chair. The old woman had tottered forward and fallen in a faint upon the floor.

Bess stood staring at her in mute vexation, then went on her knees beside her, turning Ursula upon her back, and chafing her hands. The old woman gave no single sign of consciousness, but lay there with her mouth open and her eyes shut, the pallor of her face contrasting with the red bricks in the floor. Bess gazed at her, hesitating. What should she do? Leave Ursula to Isaac’s anger, and take time and its precious fortune to herself? Solomon Grimshaw might be hanging about the cottage; every moment Bess thought to see a face looking at her through the open lattice.

Desperate, she ran to the window and looked out. The garden seemed asleep in the sunshine; no one was to be seen. In the distance she fancied she could catch the sharp play of Solomon’s bill as he split the pine-boughs in his woodshed. With necessity for her inspiration, she turned back to Ursula, lifted her easily in her strong arms, carried her to the window, and lowered her unceremoniously by her skirts into the garden. Then she climbed out after her, picked Ursula up again, for she was nothing but a sack of skin and bone, and, passing round to the back of the garden, broke away into the woods that rose close about the cottage. Casting a half circle through the trees, breathing hard through her set teeth, and stopping often to listen, she drew towards Ursula’s cottage with the woman still unconscious in her arms. Interminable minutes seemed to pass before she came through the pine-thickets to the cottage, raised the latch of the door, and carried Ursula within.

Bess laid her down on the settle before the fire, and, kneeling, saw that Ursula showed signs of a return to consciousness. The eyes opened, the hands groped out towards the girl’s face. Bess bent and kissed the old woman upon the mouth.

“Mother, mother—”

Ursula stared at her vacantly as though trying to remember what had happened. Bess gave her no moment to delay. She was fearful, and grew more fearful each instant of Dan’s return.

“See, I have brought you back to your own cottage,” she said; “now—I must go. Remember, when Isaac comes back—you know nothing, you have not been near Dan’s house. They may think I broke free by myself.”

Ursula nodded, sighed, and put her hands to her head.

“I’ve saved ye, child,” she said.

“God bless you for it, mother! I must go.”

Bess kissed Ursula again, smoothed her gray hair for her, and, starting up, turned towards the door. She closed it softly after her, and, looking round warily, darted across the open stretch of grass-land for the farther woods. She would take the path for the Beacon Rock, strike across the heath, and reach the road for Rodenham. Her one hope of safety was with Jeffray. He would defend her against Isaac and against Dan.

Bess had barely reached the trees when Solomon Grimshaw sauntered out from the woodshed, wiping his forehead with his bare forearm. He caught sight of Bess as she slipped into the woods, gave a shout, and started after her. Bess heard the shout, stopped, and glanced back over her shoulder. She saw Solomon running towards her, shaking his fist. One look was sufficient. Bess gathered up her skirts and ran, her gray cloak melting away amid the trees, her ankles in their red stockings flashing under her green petticoat. Solomon was but a lame old horse; she could out-distance him easily in the woods.

XXXVII

That same evening while Bess sat bound in Dan’s cottage in the deeps of Pevensel, there was much weighing of words in the dining-room at Hardacre.

Dr. Jessel, rector and chaplain, sat at the polished table, with paper, ink, and pouncet-box before him, and a much-nibbled quill in his fist. For years he had acted as the confidential scribe and scholarly supervisor of letters to the household of Hardacre, and he had been called in that morning to prepare a certain epistle, guided by the baronet’s personal discretion. Sir Peter faced the parson across the table, and advised him magisterially as to the contents of the letter.

Mr. Lancelot was pacing the room behind his father’s chair, cocking his sword under his coat-tails, expanding his chest and swinging his shoulders with an air of exuberant self-satisfaction. He appeared to feel no little contempt for Parson Jessel and the baronet as they squabbled and argued over the phrasing of this momentous letter. The parson’s classic and elegant style was not flexible and fierce enough to adapt itself to Sir Peter’s temper. The chaplain was a diplomat and a literary sycophant by nature. His Ciceronian taste revolted from Sir Peter’s blunt and brutal methods of expression.

The baronet leaned back at last with his thumbs in his waistcoat-pockets, hiccoughed, and regarded Jessel with evident irritation.

“Put it down, Jessel,” he said; “put it down—I say. I ain’t going to draw my ale mild for fear of scalding the young scoundrel’s stomach. Call a blackguard a blackguard, sir, when he deserves it. You’re too damned polite, Jessel. Give it him hot on the last page. I’m right there, ain’t I, Lot?”

Mr. Lancelot came to a halt behind his father’s chair, fixed his eyes on the parson’s face, and upheld Sir Peter.

“Put in plenty of brimstone, Jessel,” he said. “Rub it in, man—rub it in.”

“That’s the tune, Lot,” said the baronet, warmly. “I’m dry to the lungs with haggling with ye. Confound this scholarly niceness, I say! Call a cur a cur, sir, and have done with it.”

The chaplain screwed up his mouth with a whimsical expression of resignation, shook his wig, and put pen to paper. He scratched away for a minute or so to the baronet’s dictation, finished with a flourish, shook the pouncet-box over the page, and leaned back in his chair with the letter in his hand.

“Shall I read the epistle to you, gentlemen?” he asked, clearing his throat.

“Ay, fire away,” quoth Sir Peter; “it ought to be as good as swearing at the young devil in person.”

Dr. Jessel proceeded to the reading of the letter with full nasal unction, striving to crush its literary crudities beneath an episcopalic diction. Sir Peter twinkled and beamed, gurgling and patting his stomach suggestively when some very palatable sentence tickled his native sense of humor. Mr. Lot leaned his elbows on the back of his father’s chair, and joined heartily in the old gentleman’s enjoyment of the word-feast. At the conclusion of Dr. Jessel’s essay in declamation the baronet exploded with characteristic gusto.

“Deuce take it, sir, that ought to make the young devil shake in his shoes. He’ll feel a bit liverish after our brimstone, Jessel, eh? Seal it up, man. And may a good lifter on the rump go with it.”

The chaplain sealed up the letter gracefully, and delivered it with a bow to Mr. Lot.

“May you shine, sir,” he said, “as the noble Achilles shone before Troy.”

Mr. Lot swaggered to the sideboard, poured himself out a glass of wine, and tossed it down with an emphatic tilt of the elbow.

“You’ll do, Lot—you’ll do,” said the baronet.

Mr. Hardacre appeared troubled by no doubts as to the triumph of his cause.

“The lad will just crawl, sir,” he said; “he ain’t fit for anything but scribbling verses.”

Love and hate being thus romantically mingled, Bess’s woodland tenderness and Jilian’s sickly spite, Providence, that cup-bearer to kings and peasants, prepared to deliver the goblet into Jeffray’s hands. Nor was there a league between the two influences as they approached the man that day; Bess skipping brown-footed over the heather, the Hardacre coach rolling with its heroic burden over the rough and dusty road.

Richard Jeffray, abandoning Wilson to Butler’s “Hudibras” and a pipe of Virginia in the library, had turned out to wander in the park. He was to meet Bess at Holy Cross that evening, and the vexed riddle with him was the riddle of the future. The thunder-cloud that he knew must be gathering at Hardacre loomed to his imagination across the northern sky. He would see the lightnings of the Sussex Zeus flashing vengeance out of the heavens. Lot Hardacre was not the demigod to remain idle for lack of bluster. He would descend upon Rodenham, strut and swagger, ruffle it like any scoundrel modelled upon the manhood of old White Friars.

The Hardacre problem was plain enough to him; its solution rested on a frank flouting of Mr. Lancelot’s tyranny. With Bess, however, Jeffray’s thoughts found themselves groping through twilight towards a distant dawn. The play had opened with all the fair inevitableness that makes for tragedy. How was it to be developed? Above all, how was it to end? Three alternatives met Jeffray at the moment. Renunciation, mere intrigue, and a grand defying of the gods.

Turning back at last towards the house, whose tall chimney-stacks and gables glimmered between the chestnuts and the cedars of the park, Jeffray followed a path that led by a rough bridge over a brook into a short stretch of woodland on the side of the hill. It appeared to be a fragment of the old forest of the weald that had escaped through the centuries from the iron-founder’s furnaces. The oaks stood at a noble distance from one another, the short and mighty boles breaking into the giant grandeur of their knotted limbs. The sweeping canopies of foliage rolled and met from tree to tree. Beneath them bracken grew. Beyond, panels of blue sky and silvery landscape closed in this sylvan temple of old Time.

As Jeffray idled through the wood he heard a voice calling him suddenly by name. The cry startled him as though it had echoed the voices of his inmost thoughts. He started back, looked, and saw a woman’s figure moving towards him under the trees. She came on swiftly, a kind of tired endurance on her face, her eyes turned steadily towards him, like the eyes of one straining towards sanctuary. It was Bess.

Jeffray felt the hot blood streaming to his face. He went forward to meet her, the green-wood filling for him with a double mystery. Bess held out a hand towards him. He saw that she looked white and tired, her eyes shining in her pale face with the fever of some strong emotion. He marked her bruised lips, the strip of blood-stained linen round her wrist. The girl’s face told him that something grim had happened.

She came straight to him with no hesitating look, came to him as though he were the one man on earth whom she could trust. Her strength seemed to fail her when she was within reach of Jeffray’s hands. She tottered and caught her breath. In a moment the man’s arms were holding her. The impulse justified him, as did the tired head that drooped towards his shoulder.

“What has happened, Bess? Tell me everything.”