Greene Ferne Farm Part 17

"Who is there that could take charge of the place?" asked Felix presently.

"Thur be the bailie."

"Go and bring him."

The shepherd went; and Felix, to pa.s.s the time, took a book from an old black chest of drawers, with bra.s.s rings and lions' heads for handles.

It was a small quarto, a.d. 1650, a kind of calendar of astrology, medicine, and agriculture, telling the farmer when the conjunction of the planets was favourable for purchasing stock or sowing seed. When, presently, the bailiff came--a respectable man enough for his station-- Felix, in his presence, locked the upper rooms and took the keys with him. Then, leaving the house in the bailiff's charge, he rode through the starlit night, by the lonely highway, homeward.

CHAPTER TEN.

A FRAY.

Puff-puff! puff-puff! hum-m-m! as the fly-wheel whizzed round with a sudden ease in working.

"I detest these ploughing engines," said Squire Thorpe, looking over the gate and leaning his arms on it, as country people always do.

"But if the tenants find deep ploughing and manuring better, I suppose that's the point," said Valentine.

"For the tenant, yes," said the Squire, as he shouldered his gun and turned away from the gate. "For _me_, it is another matter. It is a question with me if this deep ploughing will not exhaust the earth."

"But the artificial manure," said Valentine, who was inclined to argue with any one.

"Rubbish! Why, it's only used like dust--not an eighth of an inch thick; and they take all that out again quick enough. Then these deep drains; they carry away as much of the richness of the soil as water."

"You don't think much of unexhausted improvements," said Geoffrey.

"The greatest nonsense ever talked," said the Squire, working himself into a temper. "It's simply a device to suck every atom out of the soil, and leave me as dry as a dead hemlock. What profit do you suppose I get out of the land? I'm pestered to put up cattle-stalls and sheds, to sink wells and rebuild farmhouses, to put in drains--confound the drains! Then I must make reductions because the labourers want higher wages, and take off ten per cent, because the weather's been bad! As if the weather had not always been wrong these three hundred years! I'm perfectly sick of science and superphosphates, shorthorns, and steam tackle. Then they bring public opinion, forsooth, on me, and say I must disgorge! [Intense disgust.] Disgorge! Let them take the land, and welcome, and give me an equivalent in Consols, I should be twenty times better off. No; I'll be shot if they shall! [With energetic inconsistency.] I would sooner be flayed alive than part with a square inch! I love the land next to my mother! There! But I'll be let alone. I'll plant the whole place with oaks. My woods are the only things that pay me--except the rabbits, and that rascally Guss Ba.s.set poaches and nets them by the score. Look out!"

A covey of partridges rose, and Valentine, who was a little in advance, fired both barrels without effect.

"Mark!" said the Squire. "Gone to the turnips of course, the only place left for the poor things; this short stubble makes them as wild as hawks. Val, your nerves are shaky this afternoon, and, by Jove, that horse dying was enough!"

"My nerves are not at all shaken," said Valentine, as he reloaded.

He affected a stoical indifference, though really hit hard. His temper had been boiling like molten lead under the surface, and it wanted but little to make him explode. His losses and vexation, his jealousy of Geoffrey, the unfortunate suspicions that had been aroused in his mind about the night on the Downs--all had combined to irritate him to the last degree.

"Well, we've all lost money," said the Squire; "and what a terrible thing about poor old Fisher! May will stay at Greene Ferne, I suppose; she can never return alone to that gloomy house. Ah, that's more to my taste,"--pointing to a middle-aged labourer who was sowing corn broadcast. "Now watch his steps; regular as clockwork. See, his hand springs from his hip, and describes an exact segment of a circle--no, a parabola, I suppose--every time, so as to make the seed spread itself equally. That's higher than science--that's art, art handed down these thousand years."

A man now overtook them with a message from the house: the Squire was wanted about a summons.

"If you cross the turnips," he said, as he turned to leave them, "you may find the covey again; and then try the meadows at the edge of the wood; and if you see that rascally Ba.s.set at my rabbits, just--" he kicked a clod to pieces ill.u.s.tratively.

The Squire returned homewards; Geoffrey and Valentine entered the turnips, making for the narrow belt of meadow by the wood. It was not a regular shooting expedition: they had simply strolled out for an hour, and were not accompanied by a keeper. The moment the Squire left, the conversation dropped. Valentine was bitter against his old friend: Geoffrey had not forgotten the _contretemps_ at the nutting. It had been long before Margaret accepted his protestations of regret for his hasty words. Now no man, who is a man, likes the part of penitence. He considered that Valentine had forced him into that unpleasant position, and his wrath smouldered against him.

After the turnips, they got through a gap into the meadow land, which, being of poor quality, as is often the case near a wood, was dotted with dead thistles, rushes in the hollows, and bunches of tussocky gra.s.s.

Out from one of these sprang a hare, as nearly as possible midway between them. They both fired--so exactly simultaneously that it sounded as one report; and for the moment neither knew that the other had pulled the trigger. But when they saw what had happened, each turned away from the dead hare--neither would touch it. Each, bia.s.sed by previous irritation, accused the other in his mind of taking the shot from him. This little accident added to the sullen bitterness.

They now came to an immense double-mound hedge, into which the spaniels rushed. Valentine took the near side, Geoffrey the off, with the hedge between them. It was so thick neither could see the other; so trifling a circ.u.mstance tended to calm the annoyance--out of sight, out of mind.

As he followed the edge of the ditch, waiting now and then for the dogs to work the hedge thoroughly, Geoffrey became conscious of the beauty of the warm autumn day.

Puff-puff! puff-puff! hum-m-m! The sound of the distant ploughing engines came humming in the still air. He had noticed previously that his coat-sleeve was flecked with gossamer threads, and now saw that the bushes were white with them. Looking upwards, the atmosphere was full of glistening lines--like the most delicate silk--drooping downwards and shining in the sunlight. As far up as the eye could see, they came showering slowly, noiselessly, down. The surface of the gra.s.s was covered with these webs like a broad veil of fragile lace; and his feet, tearing a rent through it were whitened by the acc.u.mulated threads. The rooks rose from the oaks with a lazy cawing, loth to leave the ripening acorns, and settled again when he had pa.s.sed.

Hum-m-m! hum-m-m!

Underfoot a soft moss, luxuriating in the shade, almost took the place of gra.s.s. The hedge itself was like a wood, so wide and thick--full of ashpoles and hawthorn, crab-tree underwood, willow, elder, and blackthorn, and here and there spreading oak trees. It terminated at the wood; and as they approached it the dogs became more busy; for the rabbits were numerous, and the banks were bored with their holes.

Geoffrey kept his gun on the hollow of his left arm--ready for a rabbit--with the muzzle towards the hedge.

"Loo! Loo!" cried Valentine, urging the dogs.

Puff-puff! hum-m-m!

Geoffrey, looking intently at the mound, and expecting a rabbit to start every moment, did not notice that a mole had recently thrown up a heap of earth in his path. His foot striking against it caused him to stumble, and, to recover himself, he s.n.a.t.c.hed at a projecting branch of nut-wood. A twig, or perhaps his sleeve, touched the trigger of his gun--the muzzle still towards the hedge--and the sudden explosion that followed jerked the gun from his arm to the ground. Like a bullet the cartridge sang through between the ashpoles, and cut a small pendent bough of willow in twain, not two feet in front of Valentine's face.

"By Jove!" he shouted, "that was meant for me. There!"

Strung up to an unbearable tension by brooding over his losses and disappointment, jealous about Margaret, and now suddenly startled, Valentine lost all control of himself, and, swinging his gun round towards Geoffrey, without putting it to his shoulder, fired.

Geoffrey was in a stooping position, just lifting his gun from the ground, when the shot, fired low, came with a rattle among the crab-tree undergrowth. The tough fibres of the wood held and checked it, so that only a few pellets pa.s.sed by; but one or two of these, though their force was almost spent in penetrating the branches, struck him sharply by the knee with a sudden stinging pain.

"You shot at me!" shouted Geoffrey, now equally excited, and, hardly aware what he was doing, he sprang across the ditch and into the double mound, to get a clearer aim.

Valentine ran quickly down the meadow on his side; then, seeing no other cover, also leapt into the hedge, and they faced each other some thirty yards apart. As usual in double mounds, the growth of underwood was less dense in the middle, so that, though some distance apart, each was dimly visible through the branches. There came a loud report as they fired the remaining barrels almost simultaneously, and a crashing and cracking of splintered wood; but no harm yet, thanks to the crab and stubborn blackthorn. The sulphurous smoke, clinging to the close undergrowth and tall gra.s.ses, filled their nostrils with the scent and madness of battle. In his ordinary mood either of these two would have scouted the possibility of such a thing happening; but circ.u.mstances suddenly threw them as it were a thousand years back in civilisation on the original savage instincts of man. Had they carried even the muzzle loaders, which take time to ram the charge home, one or other might have paused. Better still if their arms had been the ancient matchlock, with the priming to look to and the match to blow. But these breechloaders, which send forth continuous flame, swift as the lightning, flash on flash, allow not a moment for thought. The "death and murder of a world," as Faust said, be on them.

As they jerked out the empty cartridge cases, and thrust in fresh charges, each instinctively moved to the best shelter he could see-- Valentine behind the gabions of a great gnarled ash-stole; Geoffrey to the cover of a crooked maple, whose leaves were turning yellow. Red tongues of fire darted forth, scorching the leaves and blackening the branches. Guided by sound and guess rather than sight, they fired vaguely into the thickets. From the oaks of great Thorpe Wood the rooks rose at the din, loudly cawing, high into the air; then in circling sweep they soared and wheeled, black and ominous, a dance of death in the azure beauty of the cloudless sky. The dogs yelped their very loudest, keeping at a distance from the hedgerow; they knew that something was wrong. Fast as the motions of the hand could answer to the eager hate in the heart, volley followed volley, till the heated metal of the barrels could scarcely be touched.

The dun smoke crept along the mound, and slipped with sudden draught into the rabbit-buries, and hung low over the ash-tops. With a hiss and roar and rattle the shot tore its way, biting hungrily at the branches as it pa.s.sed. The ash-boughs, tough and sinewy, though half-severed, hung together still; the willow split, and let the lead slip through its feeble wood; the hard crab-tree and blackthorn, with fibres torn and jagged, held and stopped it; the briar, with its circular pith, snapped and drooped. Through the broad burdock leaves and hollow hemlock stems and "gicks" the hasty pellets drilled round holes, or buried themselves in the bark of the larger tree-trunks, some glancing off at a sharp angle like Tyrrell's arrow. The maple, all scored and dotted, and partly stripped of leaves by the leaden shower, gave less cover than the ash-stole; and Geoffrey, with shot-holes in his hat, and the pellets hissing past his ears, yielded ground and retreated, firing as he went.

Valentine immediately advanced, and thus, like Indians in the backwoods, they glided from thicket to thicket, from tree to tree, stalking, but shooting wildly, baffled by the branches.

In a few minutes Geoffrey came to a great oak, rugged and moss-grown at the roots, which stood near the edge of the ditch that, at the end of the double mound, divided the hedge from the wood. Behind this he took his stand; and Valentine, advancing too rapidly, was stung by a pellet that glanced from a branch and struck his arm. He hastily rushed behind an ash-tree--it was not broad enough to shield him completely; but by its side grew a thicket of bramble and brake fern that helped to hide him from sight. He blazed rapidly at the edge of the oak; in return the shot came rushing through the fern, and scoring the bark of the ash.

Suddenly Geoffrey's fire ceased: the next moment Valentine guessed the truth--that his opponent's last cartridge was gone--and surely mad with rage stepped from his cover eager to seize the advantage. At the same moment Geoffrey, saying to himself that he would not die like a dog cowering behind a tree, walked out from the oak and faced his doom.

In that second--in the tenth of a second--he saw the sunbeams glance on the levelled barrel, and behind the twin circular orifices of the muzzle the smoke-blackened, frowning brow of the man who once had loved him.

"Fair play in the army!" shouted a hoa.r.s.e voice, and a long stick of briar suddenly projected from the fern at Valentine's side fell with a crash upon his barrel. The blow diverted the aim, but the charge exploded. Geoffrey uttered a sharp cry, turned round and put out his hand as if to lean against the oak, and then dropped.

"We used to have fair play in the army," said Augustus Ba.s.set, stepping up from the ditch out of the fern, with a briar in one hand, and a vicious ferret in the other--struggling hard, but dexterously grasped just behind the forelegs, the first finger in front of the legs, so that it could not bite. "You make a ring, look here!" in his incoherent way.

But Valentine, all aghast with sudden revulsion of feeling, had already rushed to his fallen friend and knelt beside him, feeling a pressure upon his heart and a dizziness of sight. For the blood of life was spouting from the right shoulder, and already the yellow fern and the grey gra.s.s were spotted and stained, and the lowly creeping ivy streaked with crimson.

"Speak, Geof, old fellow!" cried Valentine, becoming of a more deadly pallor than the wounded man.

"Plug the hole," said Augustus, who, though he had never seen service, like most old soldiers had some smattering of surgery. "You've lost your head. Here, let me. Hold pug;" and he pushed the ferret into Valentine's hands.

Pulling out his handkerchief, none of the cleanest, Augustus pressed it on the wound, and succeeded in reducing the flow of blood. Geoffrey moved, and Valentine, flinging the ferret aside, held him up.

"Speak to me!" he cried.

"Say not a word how it happened," Geoffrey replied, thinking of Margaret, and became unconscious again.