Chapter 22

"Why not? You said I might tell my secrets. I wasn't afraid. I thought 'Oh, aren't I glad I done what Mrs. Dale told me not to--and come into my wondersome, wondersome wood, and drawn _you_ after me!'"

"Norah, stop."

"Why? You're glad too, aren't you? I _know_ you are. I knew it when you came walking so tall and so quiet; an' I thought 'This is it--what I always hoped for--wonders to happen to me in Hadleigh Wood.' But I was afraid of the wood once--more afraid than Granny knew. I wouldn't tell her."

"What d'you mean? What wouldn't you tell her?"

"What I'd seen here."

"What had you seen?"

"I kep' it as my great secret--but I'll tell you, because you've found out all my secrets, now, haven't you?"

"Well, let's hear it."

"I saw a man hiding, crawling, ready to spring out on me."

"Oh. When was that?"

"Ages and ages ago, when I was almost a baby."

"Heft yourself, Norah. I want to get up, an' stretch ma legs."

The gentle soothing fire had faded--an invincible coldness crept on slow-moving blood from his heart to his brain. The girl was safe now. He would not injure her to-night. He got up, and stood looking down at her.

"Well," he said quietly, "let's hear some more. What sort of a man was it?"

"A wild man--with water dripping off him. He had crept out of the river."

"Do you mean--a sort of ghost or demon?"

"I didn't know."

"Not like an ordinary man--not like any other man you've ever seen?"

"Oh, no. All wild--fierce and dreadful. Not standing upright--more like an animal in the shape of a man."

"But surely you told your Granny, or somebody?"

"No. I've never told a soul except you."

"An' you say you were scared, though?"

"Oh, I was, rarely scared."

"Then you must have told your Granny, or one of 'em. You've forgotten, but I expect you told people at the time."

"I didn't. I didn't dare to at first. I thought he'd come after me, if I did. I was afraid."

Dale grunted again. "An' d'you mean to say you'd the grit in you to come back here all the same, after that?"

"Not for a little while. Then I did. I was all a twitter, so frightened still, but I was fascinated for to do it too--just to see."

"But you never saw him again."

"No, and then I began to think it was all a fancy. D'you think it was a fancy, and not real?"

"My dear girl, no;" and Dale shrugged his shoulders. "You prob'ly saw some poor devil of a tramp who had slept here, and was getting on the move after his night's rest." Then he took a step away from the tree, and spoke curtly. "Come. We must go home."

Norah sprang off the tree, hurried to his side, and, with her hands linked about his arm, looked up at him anxiously.

"Yes, but it's all right, isn't it? You're not angry with me--not turning against me?"

"No, it's all right."

"Then, don't let's go. Let's stay here a little longer"

"No, we must go--or Mrs. Dale will be coming to fetch us;" and he began to walk briskly. "And look here, Norah. I shall inform her I found you here by yourself, and I have lectured you at full length, and you've said you'll be good for the future. So don't answer back if she speaks sharp."

"Oh, I don't mind what she says now;" and Norah laughed happily as she trotted after him through the trees.

That evening he sat outside on the bench long after the supper table had been taken away and the kitchen door closed. Quite late, when Mavis spoke to him from an upper window, he said he must have one more pipe before he turned in.

Norah had been singing in the kitchen while she washed the plates; then he had heard her humming softly in the sitting-room; now she had gone up-stairs and was silent. The thoughts and sensations that had been suddenly and strangely inhibited a few hours ago came into play again, warmed his blood once more, repossessed his brain. Soon he was impotent to struggle against them. As he sat huddled and motionless, he revived each memory and wilfully renewed its delight. The brick walls, the timber beams, the flooring boards, and plastered partitions could not divide her from him; though hidden at a distance, she shed emanations, fiery atoms, darting sparks, that infallibly reached him: when he closed his eyes in order not to see the empty space before him, she herself was here. He could feel again the light weight of her body upon his knees, her hair brushed against his chin, her face gave itself to his lips.

Then more remote memories came to join the recent memories, deepening the spell that subjugated him. He thought of her crying when he teased her about love and marriage, and when her poor little innocent heart was bursting because of his pretense of not understanding that she craved for no love but his. And he thought of how she had looked in the middle of the night when he covered her with his jacket, and she stood before him trembling and blushing, with her hair all tumbling loose. That had been one of the mental pictures which he could not even make dim, much less obliterate.

He groaned, got up from the bench, and walked very slowly round the kitchen and behind the house. The first breath of air that he had noticed for days was stirring the leaves, and he saw the new moon like a golden sickle poised above the broken summit of a hayrick. It was a serenely beautiful nights with an atmosphere undoubtedly cooler than any they had had of late; he looked at the peaceful fields, and the fruit trees and the barn roof, all so gently, imperceptibly touched by the young and tender moonbeams; and he thought that the thin yellow crescent was being watched by thousands and thousands of eyes, that men were turning their money, and wishing for luck, for fame, or for satisfied love. But he only of all men might not wish for the desire of his heart, and to him only the moon could bring nothing but pain.

He went through the kitchen garden, and stood under an apple tree staring back at the window of her room. And still older memories sprang up and grew strong, so that they might attack and overcome and utterly undo him. The wild bad fancies of his adolescence came thronging upon him. Imagination and fact entangled themselves; the past and the present fused, and became one vast throbbing distress. He thought if he crept beneath the window and called to her, she would answer his call. If he told her to do so, she would come out in her night-dress--she would walk bare-footed through the fields, and plunge with him into the wonderful wood. If he told her to do it, she would go into the stream, and dance and splash--realizing that old dream--the white-bodied nymph of the wood for him to leap at and carry off into the gloom. He wrenched himself round, and made his way rapidly from the garden to the meadow. He could not support his thoughts. The proximity of the girl was driving him mad.

All through the little meadow and again in the wider fields the air had a soft fragrance; the sky was high and quite clear, with a few stars; the whole earth, for as much as he could see of it, seemed to be sleeping in a deep delightful peace. Beyond his fences there were the neighbors' farms, and then there were the heath, the hills; and beyond these, other counties, other countries, the rest of the turning globe, the universe it turned in--and once again he had that feeling of infinite smallness, the insect unfairly matched against a solar system, the speck of dust whirled as the biggest stars are whirled, inexorably.

At the confines of his land he leaned upon a gate, groaning and praying.

"O Christ Jesus, Redeemer of mankind, why hast Thou deserted me? O God the Father, Lord and Judge, why dost Thou torment me so?"

XXIX

Very early in the morning he told Mavis that he felt sure they ought to send Norah away on a holiday for the good of her health.

"This hot weather has been a severe test for all of us," he said; "and of course what I should consider equally advisable would be to send you and the children along with her, but I suppose--"

"What, me go away just when you're going to cut the grass!"

"Very well," he said, "I won't urge it. But as to Norah, that's a decision I've come to; so please don't question it. She's been working too hard--"

"Did she complain to you yesterday, when you lectured her?"

"No. Not a word. An' she'll prob'ly resist the idea. But she must be overruled, because my mind is made up. So now the only question that remains is--where are you to send her? What about that place for servants resting--at Bournemouth, the place Mrs. Norton collects subscriptions for?"

"Yes, I might ask Mrs. Norton if she could spare us a ticket."

"No, send the girl as a paying guest. I don't grudge any reasonable expense. Or again there's Mrs. Creech's daughter-in-law, over at S'thaampton Water."

"Oh, there's half a dozen people I could think of--"

"All right," he said; "but I want it done now, straight away. And look here, Mav. Take this thing off my shoulders, and don't let me be bothered. I shouldn't have decided it, if I didn't know it was right. I've a long and difficult day before me. You just hop into the gig, and Tom'll drive you round--to see Mrs. Norton or anybody else. Only let me hear by dinner-time that the arrangement is made."

"You shall," said Mavis cheerfully.

"Thank you, Mav. You're always a trump. You never fail one."

What had seemed an insuperable difficulty was thus in a moment accomplished. His quietly authoritative tone had made Mavis accept the thing not only easily but without a doubt or question, and he thought remorsefully that, except for his sneaking, cowardly delay, all this might have occurred a month ago. He felt a distinct lightening of the trouble as he went back into his own room, and then the weight of it fell upon him again. He had succeeded so far as Mavis was concerned; but how about Norah?

He stood meditating in front of the looking-glass before he began to shave. When he picked up the shaving-brush, he noticed that his hand was trembling--not much, yet quite visibly. It never used to do that, and he looked at it with disgust. It seemed to him like an old man's hand.

Then he began to study his face in the glass. No one would have guessed that this was a man who had been praying all night. The whole face showed those signs of fatigue that come after base pleasures, after riotous waste of energy, after long hours of debauch. It seemed to him that his gray hair was finer of texture than it ought to be, hanging straight and thin, with no strength in it; that his eyes were too dim, that the flesh underneath them had puffed out loosely, and that his lower lip was drooping slackly--and he shuddered in disgust. It seemed to him that his face changed and grew uglier as he looked at it. It was becoming like an old man's face he had seen years ago.

In spite of the slight shakiness of his hand he managed to shave himself without a cut, and he was just about to wash the soap away when he heard a sound of lamentation on the lower floor. It was Norah loudly bewailing herself. Mavis had gone down-stairs and published his sentence of banishment.

Suppose that the girl betrayed their secret. Suppose that she was even now telling his wife what had happened in the wood. Well, he must go down to them and flatly deny whatever Norah said. But he tingled and grew hot with a most miserable shame; his heart quailed at the mere notion of the sickening, disgraceful character of such a scene--he, the highly respected Mr. Dale, the good upright religious man, being accused by a little servant girl and having to rebut her accusations in the presence of his wife.

He dipped his head in the basin, and even when under the cold water the tips of his ears seemed as if they were on fire. He must go down-stairs the moment he had cooled his face; but he would go as some wretched schoolboy goes to the headmaster's room when he guesses that his unforgivable beastliness has been discovered, and that first a thrashing and then expulsion are awaiting him.

Some of the lying words that he must utter suggested themselves. "Oh, Norah, this is a poor return you are making for all my kindness. Aren't you ashamed to stand there and tell such ungrateful false-hoods. Ma lass, your cheek surprises me. I wonder you can look me in the face."

But it would be Mavis, and not Norah, who would look him in the face--and she would read the truth there. She would see it staring at her in his shifting eyes, his slack lip, and his weak frown. Her first glance at him would be loyal and frank, just an eager flash of love and confidence, seeming to say, "Be quick, Will, and put your foot on this viper that we've both of us warmed, and that is trying to bite me;" then she would turn pale, avert her head, and drop upon a chair. And for why? Because she had seen the nauseating truth, and her heart was almost broken.

Then he suddenly understood that there was no real danger of all this. It was only his own sense of guilt that unnerved him. Nothing had happened in the wood. If he behaved quietly and sensibly, he would be altogether safe, and Mavis would never guess. Truly all that he had to conceal was that he had been stopped on the very brink of his sin, that but for a startling interference, an almost miraculous interference, the wicked thoughts would infallibly have found their outlet in wicked deeds.

If Norah said he took her on his knees and kissed her, Mavis would think nothing of it--would not even think it undignified; would merely take as one more evidence of his kindly nature the fact that, instead of upbraiding the silly child, he had embraced her. If the girl howled and said she did not want to go because she was fond of him, Mavis would think nothing of that either. Mavis knew it already, and had never thought anything of it.

Therefore if he did not betray himself, the girl could not betray him. All that was required of him was just to maintain an ordinary air of ingenuousness. He had done enough acting in his life to be at home when dissimulating. He must do a little more successful acting now.

After a minute or so he went down-stairs, and was outwardly staid and calm, looking as he had looked on hundreds of mornings: the good kind father of a household, whose only care is the happiness and welfare of those who are dependent on him.

Directly he entered the breakfast-room Norah ran sobbing to him and clung to his hand.

"She is sending me away. Oh, don't let her do it. You promised you wouldn't. Oh, why do you let her do it?"

"This is _my_ plan, Norah," he said gently; "not Mrs. Dale's. I wish it--and I ask you not to make a fuss."

"I've told her," said Mavis, "that it's only for her own good; and that she'll be back here in a fortnight or three weeks. But she seems to think we want to be rid of her forever."

"No, no," said Dale. "Nothing of the sort. It's merely for the good of your health--and not in any way as a punishment for your having been rather disobedient."

"Why, I'm sure," said Mavis cheerfully, "most girls would jump for joy at the chance. You'll enjoy yourself, and have all a happy time."

"No, I shan't," Norah cried. "I shall be miserable;" and she looked up at Dale despairingly. "Do you promise I'm really and truly to come back?"

"Of course I do. And it's all on the cards that Mrs. Dale and Rachel and Bill may follow you before your holiday is over."

"Oh, I doubt that," said Mavis.

"No," cried Norah, "when I'm gone you'll turn against me, and forget me. I shall never see you again, and I shall die. I can't bear it." And she began to sob wildly.

Then Dale, standing big and firm, although each sob tore at his entrails, pacified and reassured the girl. He said that she must not be "fullish," she must be "good and sensible," she must fall in with the views of those "older and wiser" than herself; finally, after his arguments and admonitions, he laid his hand on her bowed head as if silently giving a patriarchal blessing; and Mavis watched and admired, and loved him for his noble generosity in taking so much trouble about the poor little waif that had no real claim on him.

"There," she said, "dry your eyes, Norah. Mr. Dale has told you he wishes it, and that ought to be enough for you."

And then Norah said she would do what Mr. Dale wished, even if she died in doing it.

"Oh, stuff, stuff," said Mavis, laughing cheerily. "I never heard such talk. Now come along with me, and get the breakfast things;" and she took Norah down the steps into the kitchen.

Norah came back to lay the cloth presently, and would have rushed into Dale's arms, if he had not motioned to her to keep away, and laid a finger on his lips warningly. But he could not prevent her from whispering to him across the table.

"Will you come and see me, wherever it is?"

"Perhaps."

"Come and see me without _her_. Come all for me, by yourself."

Dale did more work in that one morning than he had done for months. The wet season had naturally postponed the hay-making, but negligence was postponing it still further; now at last he gave all necessary orders. But it was only his own grass that he had to deal with. Letting everything drift, he had not made any of the usual arrangements with his neighbors; this year he would not have to ride grandly round and watch dozens of men and women laboring for him; and there would be no farmers' banquet or speeches or cigar-smoking.

When he came in to dinner he found Mavis all hot and red, but pleased with herself after her bustling activities. The whole business was settled. Norah was to go as a paying guest to that place at Bournemouth, and Mavis would drive her over to Rodchurch Road and put her into the four-fifteen train. At the station they would meet a girl called Nellie Evans, whom by a happy chance Mrs. Norton was despatching to-day; and so the two girls could travel together, and prevent each other from being a fool when they changed trains at the junction; and altogether nothing could have turned out better or nicer.

Mavis, babbling contentedly all through dinner, harped on the niceness both of people and things. Mrs. Norton, and indeed everybody else, had been so nice about it. All Rodchurch had seemed anxious to assist Mr. and Mrs. Dale in contriving their little maid's holiday. "And it is nice," said Mavis simply, "to be treated like that." Mrs. Norton had taken her all round the vicarage garden, and she had never seen it looking nicer. "Although the flowers aren't anything to boast of, any more than ours are."

"And what _do_ you think? Here's a bit of news you'll be sorry to hear, though it mayn't surprise you." Then Mavis related how it had been necessary to procure some sort of trunk to hold Norah's things, because there wasn't a single presentable bit of luggage in the house, and she had discovered exactly what she wanted--something that was not immoderate, appearing solid, yet not heavy--at the new shop that had recently been opened at the bottom of the village near the Gauntlet Inn. First, however, she had gone to their old friend the saddler's, wanting to see if she could buy the box there. But Mr. Allen's shop was empty, woe-begone, dirty with cobwebs, dead flies, and mud on the window; and Mr. Allen himself was ill in bed, being nursed hand and foot, and fed like a baby, by poor Mrs. Allen. He had been stricken down by some dreadful form of rheumatism, and three doctors had said the same thing--that he had brought this calamity upon himself by his ridiculous, ceaseless tramping after the hounds.

Dale nodded and smiled, or made his face appropriately grave, while Mavis prattled to him; but truly his mind was occupied only by Norah. She came in and out of the room, looking pale and limp and resigned; she knew all about the trunk, and that it was up-stairs and that already the mistress and Ethel had begun to pack it; she was submitting to destiny, but out of her soft blue eyes there shot a glance now and then that made him quiver with pain.

He went out of the house the moment dinner was finished, and kept moving about, now in the office, now in the yard, never still. Then, when he was pottering round and round the office for the fiftieth time in two hours, he heard a footstep, and Norah came--to whisper and cling to him, to make him kiss her again; to penetrate him with her ineffable sweetness; to plant the seeds of inextinguishable desire in the last few cells and fibers of his brain that as yet she had not reached.

"I don't ast you to stand in th' road when we drive away. I'd rather not. Say good-by to me now, when there's nobody watchin'."

Then he had to take her in his arms once more; and they stood close to the door, far from the window, pressed heart to heart, mute, throbbing.

"I'm kissing you," she whispered presently, "but you're not kissing me. Kiss me."

And he obeyed her.

"No," she whispered. "Different from that. Kiss me like you did yesterday."

"Very well," he said hoarsely. "This is the good-by kiss. This is good-by." And once again he felt the swift lambent ecstasy of a love that he had never till now guessed at; a joy beyond words, beyond dreams, beyond belief. "Now, you must go;" and he slowly released himself, and held her at arm's length. "That was our good-by. Good-by, my Norah--my darling--good-by." Then he went to the table in front of the window, and sat down.

She came a little way from the door, and spoke to him before going out and along the passage.

"I shan't mind now--however miserable I am--because I know it's all right. An' I promise to be good, an' do all I'm told, an' always be your own Norah."

Then she left him--the gray-haired respected Mr. Dale of Vine-Pits Farm, sitting in his office window for all the world to see; looking livid, shaky, old; and feeling like a Christian missionary in some far-off heathen land, who, having preached to the gang of pirates into whose hands he had fallen, lies now at the roadside with all his inside torn away, and waits for birds with beaks or beasts with claws to come and finish him.

Before the horse was put into the wagonette and the trunk brought down-stairs, Dale had left the house and gone some distance along the road in the direction of the Barradine Arms. Even if Norah had not said that he need not be there at the moment of departure, he would have been unable to remain. He could not stand by and see her piteous face, her slender figure, her forlorn gestures, while they carried her off--the poor little weak thing sent away from hearth and home, cast out among strangers because any spot on the earth, however bare or hard, had become a better shelter for her than the place that should have been sacredly secure.

He walked heavily, with a leaden heart and leaden feet; his eyes downcast, not glancing at the dark trees on one side or the bright fields on, the other. But after passing the first of the woodland paths and before coming to the second, he looked up. He had heard the sound of many footsteps and the murmur of many voices. All those blue-cloaked orphans, two and two, an endless procession, were advancing toward him.

Never had the sight and the sound of them been so horribly distasteful to him. They were still a long way off, and he thought he could dodge them, at any rate avoid meeting them face to face, if he hurried on to the second footpath and dived into the wood there. But then it seemed as if he had stupidly miscalculated the distance, or that his legs were failing him, or that the girls came sweeping down the road at an impossibly rapid pace; so that they were right upon him just as he reached the stile. He drew aside, and, feeling that it was too late now to turn his back, watched them as they passed.