Part 17

"I know; and lucky for her. But remember she can't change any more than you can. The only difference is that she doesn't try to, and you do. All this brooding and morbidness and chewing over her light words is not worthy of a man. Be satisfied. You'll wear--you can take that to your comfort. You'll wear all through, and the pattern of you is like to be brighter in her eyes ten years hence than now. No call to go in such a fog of your own breeding. Wood and iron are different enough in their fashion as any two creatures in the world; but that doesn't prevent 'em from cleaving exceeding tight together. She knows all this well enough; she's a woman with rather more sense of justice than is common to them; and your future's sure, if you'll only be patient and content; for she loves you better far than she's ever told you, or is ever likely to."

*CHAPTER V.*

*IN SPRING MOONLIGHT*

Another springtime gladdened the heart of man and set the sap of trees, the blood of beasts, the ichor of the wild wood gods a-flowing. A green veil spread again, a harmony of new-born music, colour, scent, all won of sunshine, rose from feathered throats, from primroses, from censers of the fragrant furze; and there was whisper of vernal rains, ceaseless hurtle of wings, and murmur of bees; while upon new harps of golden green, soft west winds sang to the blue-eyed, busy young Earth-Mother, their immemorial song.

Honor Endicott moved amid the translucent verdure; and her eyes shadowed mystery, and her heart longed for her baby's coming, as a sick man longs for light of day. She found an awakening interest in her own sex--a thing strange to her, for few women had ever peeped within the portals of her life; but now she talked much with Mrs. Loveys and the matrons of Little Silver. She listened to their lore and observed how, when a woman's eyes do dwell upon her child, there comes a look into them that shall never be seen at any other time. She noticed the little children, and discovered with some surprise how many small, bright lives even one hamlet held. Black and brown-eyed, blue-eyed and grey; with white skins and red; with soft voices and shrill; rough and gentle; brave and fearful--she watched them all, and thought she loved them all, for the sake of one precious baby that would come with the first June roses. The little life quickened to the love-songs of the thrushes; it answered the throbbing music of river and wood; its sudden messages filled her eyes with tears; her heart with ineffable, solemn thrills of mother-joy. Great calm had spread its wings about Honor. She approached her ordeal in a high spirit, as of old-time mothers of heroes. She abstracted herself from all daily routine, but walked abroad with her husband in the long green twilights, or sat beside Mark Endicott and watched his wooden needles tapping as he talked. A recent pettiness of whim and fancy had almost vanished, though now and again she did express a desire and rested not until the fulfilment. Fear she had none, for the season of fear was passed, if it had ever clouded her thoughts. To Myles her attitude insensibly grew softer, and she found his wealth of affection not unpleasant as her time approached. She accepted his worship, received his gifts, even pretended to occasional fancies that he might have the pleasure of gratifying them.

There came an evening of most lustrous beauty. Mild rain had fallen during the day, but the sky cleared at nightfall, when the clouds gleamed and parted in flakes of pearl for the pageant of a full May moon. Silently she swam out from the rack of the rain; spread light into the heart of the spring leaves; woke light along the glimmering grass blades; meshed and sprinkled and kissed with light each raindrop of them all, until the whole soaking world was bediamonded and robed in silver-grey.

Honor turned from beholding her dim grass lands, the time then being nine.

"I must go out," she said. "The night is alive and beckoning with its lovely fingers. The peace of it! Think of this night in the woods! I must go out, and you must take me, Myles."

"Not now, dearest one. It is much too late, and everything soaking wet after the rain."

"I can wrap up. I feel something that tells me this is the very last time I shall go out till--afterwards. Just an hour--a little hour; and you can drive me. I've got to go whether you will or not."

"Let us wait for the sun to-morrow."

"No, no--to-night. I want to go and feel the peace of the valley. I want to hear the Teign sisters kissing and cuddling each other under the moon. I'll put on those tremendous furs you got me at Christmas, and do anything you like if you'll only take me."

"Doctor Mathers would be extremely angry!" murmured her husband.

"He need know nothing about it. Don't frown. Please, please! It would hearten me and cheer me; and I promise to drink a full dose of the red wine when I come in. You shall pour it out. There--who could do more?"

She was gone to make ready before he answered, and Mark spoke.

"She cannot take hurt in this weather if she's wrapped up in the furs. The air feels like milk after the rain."

Stapledon therefore made no ado about it, but marched meekly forth, and himself harnessed a pony to the little low carriage purchased specially for his wife's pleasure.

Soon they set off through the new-born and moon-lit green, under shadows that lacked that opacity proper to high summer, under trees which still showed their frameworks through the foliage. Inflorescence of great oaks hung in tassels of chastened gold, and a million translucent leaves diffused rather than shut off the ambient light. Unutterable peace marked their progress; no shard-borne things made organ music; no night-bird cried; only the rivers called under the moon, the mist wound upon the water-meadows, and the silver of remote streamlets twinkled here and there from the hazes of the low-lying grass land or the shadows of the woods--twinkled and vanished, twinkled and vanished again beyond the confines of the night-hidden valley.

"A fairy hour," said Honor; "and all things awake and alive with a strange, strange moon-life that they hide by day."

"The rabbits are awake at any rate. Too many for my peace of mind if this was my land."

"Don't call them rabbits. I'm pretending that their little white scuts are the pixy people. And there's Godleigh under the fir trees--peeping out with huge yellow eyes--like the dragon of an old legend."

"Yes, that's Godleigh."

"Drive me now to Lee Bridge. It was very good of you to come. I appreciate your love and self-denial so much--so much more than I can find words to tell you, Myles."

"God be good to you, my heart! I wish I deserved half your love. You make me young again to hear you speak so kindly--young and happy too--happy as I can be until afterwards."

"It won't be many more weeks. The days that seemed so long in winter time are quite short now, though it is May. That is how a woman's heart defies the seasons and reverses the order of Nature on no greater pretext than a paltry personal one."

"Not paltry!"

"Why, everything that's personal is paltry, I suppose, even to the bearing of your first baby."

"I should be sorry if you thought so, Honor."

"Of course, I don't really. Hush now; let me watch all these dear, soft, moony things and be happy, and suffer them to work their will on my mind. I'm very near my reformation, remember. I'm going to be so different afterwards. Just a staid, self-possessed, sensible matron--and as conservative as a cow. Won't there be a peace about the home?"

"Honor!"

"Honour bright. Look at Forde's new thatch! I hate new thatch under the sun, but in the moonlight it is different. His cot looks like some golden-haired, goblin thing that's seen a ghost. How pale the whitewash glares; and the windows throw up the whites of their eyes!"

"Don't talk so much. I'm sure you'll catch cold or something. Now we're going down to valley-level. Lean against me--that's it. This hill grows steeper every time I drive down it, I think."

They crossed Chagford Bridge, where a giant ash fretted the moonlight with tardy foliage still unexpanded; then Myles drove beyond a ruined wool factory, turned to the right, passed Holy Street and the cross in the wall, and finally reached the neighbourhood of Lee Bridge. Here the air above them was dark with many trees and the silence broken by fitful patter of raindrops still falling from young foliage. The green dingles and open spaces glittered with moisture, where the light fell and wove upon them a fabric of frosted radiance touched with jewels, to the crest of the uncurling fern-fronds, and the wide shimmer of the bluebell folk--moon-kissed, as Endymion of old. Pale and wan their purple stretched and floated away and faded dimly, rippling into the darkness; but their scent hung upon the air, like the very breath of sleeping spring.

"Stop here, my love," said Honor. "What a bed for the great light to lie upon! What a silence for the tiny patter of the raindrops to make music in! And thoughts that hide by day--sad-eyed thoughts--peep out now upon all this perfection--hurry from their hiding-places in one's heart and look through one's eyes into these aisles of silver and ebony; and so go back again a little comforted. The glory of it! And if you gaze and listen closer, surely you will see Diana's own white self stealing over the mist of the bluebells, and hear perhaps her unearthly music. Nay, I must talk, Myles, or I shall cry."

"I'm only thinking of all this ice-cold damp dropping upon you out of the trees," he said.

They proceeded, then stopped once again at Honor's urgent desire. The great beech of the proposal stood before her, and she remembered the resting-place between its roots, the words carved upon its trunk. Its arms were fledged with trembling and shining foliage; its upper peaks and crown were full of diaphanous light; its huge bole gleamed like a silver pillar; and spread under the sweep of the lower branches there glimmered a pale sheen of amber where myriads of little leaf-sheafs had fallen and covered the earth as with spun silk.

Great longing to be for one moment alone with the old tree seized upon Honor. Suddenly she yearned to gaze at the throne of her promise to Christopher, to see again those letters his hand had graven upon the bark above. The desire descended in a storm upon her, and shook her so strongly that her voice came, tremulously as bells upon a wind, to utter the quick plan of her imagination.

"I wish you'd go to the bridge yonder and get me some water to drink. Your tobacco pouch will do if you rinse it well, as you often have upon the Moor. I'm frantically thirsty."

"My dear child--wait until we get home. Then you've promised me to drink some wine."

"No, I can't wait; I'm parched and I want the river water. To please me, Myles. It won't take you a moment--straight between the trees there, to that old bridge of ash poles. That's the nearest way. I must drink--really I must. It's unkind to refuse."

He grumbled a little and declared what with the dropping trees, she might have enough water; but then he saw her face in the moonlight, and she kissed him, and he departed to do her bidding.

The rustic bridge, crossed by Honor at the outset of this record, was a structure but seldom used save by gamekeepers. It spanned Teign some seventy yards away from the great tree; but Myles, who did not know the spot well, found that he must now cross a tangled underwood to reach the river. The place was difficult by night, and he proceeded with caution, emptying the tobacco out of his pouch into his pocket as he did so. One fall, got from a treacherous briar, he had; then he arrived beside the bridge and noted where faint indication of a woodland path led from it. By following this his return journey promised to be the easier. Myles knelt and scrambled to the brink, sweetened the rubber pouch and filled it as well as he could with water. He had, however, scarcely regained his feet when a shrill scream of fear twice repeated frightened the dreaming forests from their sleep, rang and reverberated to the depths of the woods, and revealed a sudden echo close at hand that threw back upon its starting-point the deep horror of the cry. For a second Stapledon made no movement, then he charged into the woods and tore his way back to the road. There he arrived a minute later, torn and bleeding. The pony stood unmoved, but Honor had disappeared. As Myles looked wildly about him, it seemed that in her fearful expression of sudden terror his wife had vanished away. Then, amid the dark spaces of shadow and the silver interspaces of light he found her, lying with the moon upon her white face and one small hand still clutching a few bluebells. She had fallen midway between the carriage and the great beech; she had been stricken senseless by some physical catastrophe or mental shock.

The man groaned aloud before what he saw, dropped down on his knees beside her, gathered her up gently, and uttered a thousand endearing words; but her head fell forward without life towards him, and setting her down, he gathered the wet, shining moss and pressed it about her forehead and neck and unfastened the buttons at her throat. Great terror came upon him as she still remained unconscious, and he picked her up to carry her back to the carriage. Then she moved and opened her eyes and stretched her hands to him; whereupon, in his turn, he cried aloud and thanked God.

As she began to apprehend, to order the broken tangles of thought and take up again the threads so suddenly let fall, he feared that she would faint once more, for with return of memory there came a great wave of terror over her eyes; but she only clung to him and breathed with long, deep gasps of fear, yet said no word. Then it seemed that a physical pang distracted her mind from the immediate past; a strange, bewildered look crossed her upturned face, and she bowed herself and pressed her hand into her side and moaned.

"Oh, I was a mad fool to do this!" he cried. "I am to blame for it all. Let me drive--back through Godleigh. That's nearest. We've the right, though we never use it. Say you're better now."

But she could not answer yet, and he made the pony gallop forward until it crossed the bridge over Teign, then turned into the private park-lands beyond.

Presently Honor spoke.

"I'm so sorry I screamed out. I frightened you and made you hurry from the river and tear your face. It's bleeding very badly still. Take my handkerchief--poor Myles!"

"What happened? What were you doing?"

"I had a sudden longing to gather some of the bluebells with the moonlight and dew on them. Nothing happened--at least----"

"Something must have nearly frightened you to death from your terrible shriek."

"I don't know. I can't remember. A tree moved, I think--moved and seemed alive--it was some dream or trick of the light."

"All my fault. Why am I thus weak with you?"

"Oh, it was so grey, Myles. You saw nothing?"

"Nothing but you. I had eyes for nothing else."

She shivered and nestled close to him.

"But I'm so sorry I cried out like that."

"Don't think more about it. Half the terror was in your mind, and half in the pranks of the moonlight among the trees. They look enough like ghosts. I only hope to heaven no harm will come of this. The fall has not hurt you, has it?"

"No, no, no; I shall be all right. I was only----"

Then suffering overtook her again, and she shrank into herself and said no more. But as they left the gates of Godleigh and prepared to mount the hill homewards, Honor spoke in a small, faint voice.

"While we are here in Little Silver, dearest, perhaps--Doctor Mathers--I don't know whether it's anything, but I'm not very well, dear Myles. I'm--indeed I think baby's going to be born to-night. Perhaps we had better call and tell him before going home."

Her husband was overcome with concern. He ran to the physician's little dwelling, distant two hundred yards off in the village, delivered his message, and then, returning, put the astounded pony at the hill in a manner that caused it to snort viciously and utter a sort of surprised vocal remonstrance almost human. The sound made Honor laugh even at her present crisis; but the laugh proved short, and in three minutes Myles was carrying her to her room and bawling loudly for women.

Soon the household knew what had happened; Doctor Mathers arrived; and Tommy Bates, hurled out of sleep, was despatched at high pressure for Mrs. Brimblecombe, the sexton's wife--a woman of significance at such times.

Very faintly through the silence a noise of voices came to the ear of Collins where he slept in a spacious attic chamber with Churdles Ash. Thereupon Henry left his bed and wakened the elder man.

"Theer's the douce of a upstore down house 'bout somethin'. Please God we ban't afire!"

Mr. Ash grunted, but the last word reached his understanding; so he awoke, and bid the other see what was amiss. Collins thereupon tumbled into his trousers and proceeded to make inquiries. In three minutes he returned.

"'Tis missus took bad," he said. "A proper tantara, I can tell 'e, an' doctor in the house tu. Ought us to rise up? Might be more respectful in such a rare event."

"Rise up be damned!" said Mr. Ash bluntly. "Not that I wouldn't rise up to the moon if I could take the leastest twinge off of her; but 'tis woman's work to-night. The sacred dooty of child-bearin' be now gwaine on, an' at such times even the faither hisself awnly looks a fule. Go to sleep."

"The dear lady be afore her date seemin'ly," remarked Collins, returning to his bed.

"'Tis allus so wi' the fustborn. The twoads be mostly tu forrard or tu back'ard. An' they do say as them born late be late ever after, an' do take a humble back plaace all theer days; while them born airly gets ahead of or'nary folks, an' may even graw up to be gert men. I've seed the thing fall out so for that matter."

"An' how might it have been wi' you, I wonder, if theer's no offence? How was you with regards to the reckoning?"

"'Tis a gude bit back-along when I was rather a small bwoy," answered Churdles, laughing sleepily at his own humour; "but, so far as I knaw, I comed 'pon the appointed day to a hour."

"Just what us might have counted upon in such a orderly man as you," mused Collins.

"'Tis my boast, if I've got wan, that I never made my faither swear, nor my mother shed a tear, from the day that I was tucked-up.[#] No fegs! Never. Now you best go to sleep, or you might hear what would hurt your tender 'eart."

[#] Short-coated.

*CHAPTER VI.*

*SORROW'S FACE*

Throughout that short summer night the young successor of Doctor Courteney Clack was torn in two between a birth-bed and a death-bed. For the old mother of Gregory Libby was now to depart, and it chanced that the hour of her final journey fell upon a moment of great peace before the dawn. Then, when she had passed, while her son yet stared in fear from the foot of the bed, Doctor Mathers dragged his weary limbs up the hill again to Bear Down. Now he rendered the household happy by his announcement that he had come to stop until all was concluded.

He sat and smoked cigarettes and soothed Myles, who tramped the parlour like a caged animal. He spoke cheerily, noted the other's mangled face, and congratulated him upon a narrow escape, for his left cheek was torn by a briar to the lid of the eye. Presently he yawned behind his hand, gladly partook of a cup of tea, and prayed that the expected summons from the dame above might not be long delayed. And when the sun was flaming over the hills and the air one chant of birds, there came a woman with a kind face, full of history, and spoke to Doctor Mathers.

"Now, sir, us would like to see you."

Myles turned at the voice, but his companion was already gone. Then the terrific significance of these next few moments surged into the husband's mind, and he asked himself where he should go, what he should do. To go anywhere or do anything was impossible; so he hardened his heart and tramped the carpet steadily. There was a vague joy in him that his child should be born at the dawn hour.

A moment later Mark Endicott entered. He, too, had not slept but he had spent the night in his own chamber and none knew of his vigil. Now he came forward and put out his hand.

"Be of good heart, lad! She's going on very well with great store of strength and spirit, Mrs. Loveys tells me."

"If I could only--"

"Yes, every man talks that nonsense. You can't; so just walk out upon the hill along with me an' look at the first sun ever your child's eyes will blink at. A fitting time for his advent. A son of the morning you are; and so will he or she be."

"Last night it is that makes me so fearful for Honor."

"A shock--but time enough to fret if there's any harm done. Wait for the news quiet and sensible."

They walked a little way from the house, Myles scarcely daring to look upward towards a window where the cherry-blossom reigned again; but when they stood two hundred yards distant, a cry reached them and Tommy Bates approached hurriedly.

"Maister! Maister Stapledon, sir! You'm wanted to wance!"

"Go!" said Mark, "and tell Tom to come and lead me back."

So, for the second time in twenty-four hours, Myles Stapledon ran with heavy and laborious stride. In a few moments he reached the house, and finding nobody visible, entered the kitchen and made the china ring again with his loud summons. Then Mrs. Loveys entered, and her apron was held up to her eyes. Behind her moved Cramphorn and his daughter Margery, with faces of deep-set gloom.

"What's this? In God's name speak, somebody. Why are you crying, woman?"

"She's doin' cleverly--missis. Be easy, sir. No call to fret for her. All went butivul---but--but--the dear li'l tiny bwoy--he'm dead--born dead--axin' pardon for such black news."

"Honor knows?"

"Ess--'pears she knawed it 'fore us did. The dark whisper o' God--as broke it to her in a way no human could. 'Twas last night's fright an' fall as killed un, doctor reckons."

The man stared, and sorrow set his face in a semblance more than common stonelike.

"Bear up, dear sir," ventured Jonah. "She'm doin' braave herself, an' that's more'n a barrel-load o' baabies to 'e, if you think of it aright. An' gude comes out o' evil even in such a case sometimes, for he might have been born a poor moonstruck gaby, as would have been a knife in his mother's heart for all time."

But Stapledon did not answer. He walked past them, returned to the parlour and resumed his slow tramp up and down. What of the great event waited for, hoped for, dreamed about through near nine months--each a century long? He felt that all the past was true, but this last half-hour a dream. He saw the chair that Doctor Mathers had occupied, observed his empty cup, his litter of cigarette-ends about the hearth. It seemed hard to believe that the climax was come and passed; and for one brief and bitter moment the man's own suffering dominated his heart. But then he swept all personal tribulation out of mind, and went upon his knees and thanked the Unknown for His blessings, in that it had pleased Him to bring Honor safely through her ordeal. He prayed for her sorrow to be softened, her pain forgotten, and that her husband might be inspired in this trial to lighten his wife's supreme grief. He begged also for wisdom and understanding to support her and lift her burden and bear it himself as far as that was possible.