The Captives Part 83

She looked at him, asleep now in a corner of the carriage, his soft hat pulled down over his eyes, his head sunk, his hands heavy and idle on his lap. A fear caught at her heart as she watched him; he looked, indeed, terribly ill, exhausted with struggle, and now, with all the bitterness and despair drowned in sleep, very gentle and helpless. She bent over and folded the rug more closely round his knees. Had he woken then and seen her gaze! Her hand'' routed for an instant on his, then she withdrew back into her own corner.

That coming back into Glebeshire could not but be wonderful to her. She had been away for so long and it was her home.

The tranquillity and peace of the spring evening clothed her like a garment, the brown valleys, the soft green of the fields, the mild blue of the sky touched her until she could with difficulty keep back her tears.

"Oh, make it right!" she whispered; "make it right! Give him to me again--I do love him so!"

It was dusk when they arrived at Clinton St. Mary's.

The little station stood open to all the winds of heaven blowing in from the wide expanses of St. Mary's Moor. Maggie remembered, as though it were yesterday, her arrival at that station with Aunt Anne. Yes, she had grown since then.

A trap was waiting for them. Martin was still very silent, but he liked the air with the tang of the sea in it, and he asked sometimes about the names of places. As they drew nearer and nearer to all the old--remembered scenes, Maggie's heart beat faster and faster--this lane, that field, that cottage. And then, at last, there was the Vicarage perched on the top of the hill, with its chimneys like cats'

ears!

She thought of Uncle Mathew. The sight of the tranquil evening the happiness and comfort of the fields enabled her to think of him, for the first time, quietly. She could face deliberately his death. It was as though he had been waiting for her here and had come forward to rea.s.sure her.

They drove through the quiet little village, out on to the high road, then down a side lane, the hedges brushing against the sides of the jingle, then through the gates, into the yard, with Borhedden Farm, bright with its lighted windows, waiting for them.

Mrs. Bolitho was standing in the porch and greeted them warmly.

"You'll be just starved," she said. "It's wisht work driving in an open jingle all the way from Clinton. Supper's just about ready."

They were shown up to the big roomy bedroom, smelling of candles and clover and lavender. Martin stood there looking about, then--

"Oh, Martin, isn't it nice!" Maggie cried. "I do hope you'll be happy here!"

The emotion of returning home, of seeing the old places, sniffing the old scents, reviving the old memories was too much for her. She flung her arms round his neck and kissed him on the lips. For a moment, for a wonderful moment it seemed that he was going to respond. She felt him move towards her. His hands tightened about hers. Then, but very gently, he drew away from her and walked to the window.

CHAPTER III

THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE

Maggie, before she left London, had written both to Paul and Mr. Magnus giving them her new address. She had intended to see Magnus, but Martin's illness had absorbed her so deeply that she could not proceed outside it. She told him quite frankly that she was going down to Glebeshire with Martin and that she would remain with him there until he was well. She did not try to defend herself; she did not argue the case at all; she simply stated the facts.

Mr. Magnus wrote to her at once. He was deeply concerned, he did not chide her for what she had done, but he begged her to realise her position. She felt through every line of his letter that he disapproved of and distrusted Martin. His love for Maggie (and she felt that he had indeed love for her) made him look on Martin as the instigator in this affair. He saw Maggie, ignorant of the world, led away by a seducer from her married life, persuaded to embark upon what his own experience had taught him to be a dangerous, lonely, and often disastrous voyage.

He had never heard of any good of Martin; he had been always in his view, idle, dissolute, and selfish. What could he think but that Martin had, most wickedly, persuaded her to abandon her safety?

She answered his letter, telling him in the greatest detail the truth.

She told him that Martin had done all he could to refuse, that, had he not been so ill, he would have left her, that he had threatened her, again and again, with what he would do if she did not the him.

She showed him that it had been her own determination and absolute resolve that had created the situation--and she told him that she was happy for the first time in her life.

But his letter did force her to realise the difficulties of her position. In writing to Mrs. Bolitho she had spoken of herself as Martin's wife, and now when she was called "Mrs. Warlock" she tacitly accepted that, hating the deceit, but wishing for anything that might keep the situation tranquil and undisturbed. She asked Mrs. Bolitho to let her have a small room near the big one, telling her that Martin was so ill that he must be undisturbed at night. Then Mr. Magnus's letter arrived addressed to "Miss Cardinal," and she thought that Mrs. Bolitho looked at her oddly when she gave it to her. Martin's illness, too, seemed to disturb the household. He cried out in his dreams, his shouts waking the whole establishment. Bolitho, once, thinking that murder was being committed, went to his room, found him sitting up in bed, sweating with terror. He caught hold of Bolitho, flung his arms around him, would not let him go, urging him "not to help them, to protect him. They would catch him ... they would catch him. They would catch him."

The stout and phlegmatic farmer was himself frightened, sitting there on the bed, in his night-shirt, and "seeing ghosts" in the flickering light of the candle. Martin's conduct during the day was not rea.s.suring. He had lost all his ferocity and bitterness; he was very quiet, speaking to no one, lying on a sofa that over-looked the moor, watching.

Mrs. Bolitho's really soft heart was touched by his pallor and weakness, but she could not deny that there was something queer here.

Maggie almost wished that his old mood of truculence would return. She was terrified, too, of these night scenes, because they were so bad for his heart. The local doctor, a clever young fellow called Stephens, told her that he was recovering from the pneumonia, but that his heart was "d.i.c.key."

"Mustn't let anything excite him, Mrs. Warlock," he said.

There came then gradually over the old house and the village the belief that Martin was "fey." Mrs. Bolitho was in most ways a sensible, level-headed, practical woman, but like many of the inhabitants of Glebeshire, she was deeply superst.i.tious. It was not so very many years since old Jane Curtis had been ducked in the St. Dreot's pond for a witch, and even now, did a cow fall sick or the lambs die, the involuntary thought in the Glebeshire "pagan mind" was to look for the "evil eye." But Mrs. Bolitho herself had had a very recent example in her own family of "possession." There had been her old grandfather, living in the farm with them, as hale and hearty a human of sixty-five years as you'd be likely to find in a day's march through Glebeshire.

"He lost touch with them," as Mrs. Bolitho put it. In a night his colour failed him, his cheerful conversation left him, he could "do nought but sit and stare out o' window." A month later he died.

Martin had not been long at Borhedden before she came to her conclusions about him, told them to her James, and found that his slow but sure brains had come to the same decision. In the sense of the tragedy overhanging the poor young man she forgot to consider the possible impropriety of his relations with Maggie. He was removed at once from human laws and human judgment. He became "a creature of G.o.d"

and was surrounded with something of the care and reverence with which the princ.i.p.al "softie" in the village was regarded.

It was not that Martin's behaviour was in any way odd. After a few days in the utter peace and quiet of the moor and farm he screamed no more at night. He was gentle and polite to every one, ate his meals, took little walks out on to the moor and into the village, but liked best to sit in front of the parlour window and look out on to the heath and gra.s.s, watching the shadows and the sunlight and the driving sheets of rain.

Mrs. Bolitho had a tender heart and Maggie shared in her superst.i.tious pity. Looking back to her youth she had always thought Maggie a "wisht little thing." "Poor worm," what chance had she ever had with that great scandalous chap of a father? She saw her still in her shabby clothes trying to keep that dilapidated house together. No, what chance had she ever had? She was still a "wisht little thing."

Nor did it need very shrewd eyes to see how desperately devoted Maggie was to Martin. The sight of that touched the hearts of every human being in the farm. Not that Maggie was foolish; she did not hang about Martin all the time, she never, so far as Mrs. Bolitho could see, kissed him or fondled him, or was with him when he did not want her.

She was not sentimental to him, not sighing nor groaning, nor pestering him to answer romantic questions. On the contrary, she was always cheerful, practical, and full of common sense, although she was sometimes forgetful, and was not so neat and tidy as Mrs. Bolitho would have wished. She always spoke as though Martin's recovery were quite certain, and Dr. Stephens told Mrs. Bolitho that he did not dare to speak the truth to her. "The chances against his recovery," Stephens said, "are about one in a hundred. He's been racketing about too long.

Too much drink. But he's got something on his mind. That's really what's the matter with him."

Mrs. Bolitho was as naturally inquisitive as are most of her s.e.x, and this knowledge that Martin was a doomed creature with a guilty conscience vastly excited her curiosity. What had the man done? What had been his relations with Maggie? Above all, did he really care for Maggie, or no? That was finally the question that was most eagerly discussed in the depths of the Bolitho bedchamber. James Bolitho maintained that he didn't care "that" for her; you could see plain enough, he a.s.serted, when a man cared for a maid--there were signs, sure and certain, just as there were with cows and horses.

"You may know about cows and horses," said Mrs. Bolitho; "you're wrong about humans." The way that she put it was that Martin cared for Maggie but "couldn't get it out." "He doesn't want her to know it," she said.

"Why shouldn't he?" asked James.

"Now you're asking," said Mrs. Bolitho.

"Nice kind of courtin' that be," said James; "good thing you was a bit different, missus. Lovin' a la.s.s and not speaking--shouldn't like!"

Mrs. Bolitho's heart grew very tender towards Maggie. Married or not, the child was in a "fiery pa.s.sion of love." Nor was it a selfish pa.s.sion, neither--wanted very little for herself, but only for him to get well. There was true romance here. Maggie, however, gave away no secrets. She had many talks with Mr. Bolitho: about the village, about the new parson, about Mrs. Bolitho's son, Jacob, now in London engineering, and the apple of her eye,--about many things but never about herself, the past history nor her feeling for Martin.

The girl never "let on" that she was suffering, and yet "suffering she must be." You could see that she was just holding herself "tight" like a wire. The strange intensity of her determination was beautiful but also dangerous. "If anything was to happen--" said Mrs. Bolitho. She saw Martin, too, many times, looking at Maggie in the strangest way, as though he were travelling towards some decision. He certainly was a good young man in his behaviour, doing now exactly what he was told, never angry, never complaining, and that, Mrs. Bolitho thought, was strange, because you could see in his eye that he had a will and a temper of his own, did he like to exercise them. After all, he himself was the merest boy, scarcely older than Jacob. She could, herself, see that he must have been a fine enough lad when he had his health--the breadth of his shoulders, the thick st.u.r.diness of his shape, the strength of his thighs and arms. Her husband had seen the boy stripped, and had told her that he must have been a "lovely man." Drink and evil women--ay, they'd brought him down as they'd brought many another--and she thought of her Jacob in London with a catch at her heart. She stopped in her cooking and prayed there and then, upon her kitchen floor, that he might be kept safe from all harm.

Nearly every one in the village, of course, remembered Maggie, and they could not see that she was "any changed." "Cut 'er 'air short--London fashion" they supposed. They had liked her as a child and they liked her now. She was more cheerful and friendly, they thought, then she used to be.

Nevertheless all the village awaited, with deep interest, for what they felt would be a very moving climax. The young man was "fey." G.o.d had set His mark upon him, and nothing that any human being could do would save him. In old days they would have tried to come near him and touch him to s.n.a.t.c.h some virtue from the contact. They did not do that, but they felt when they had spoken to him that they had received some merit or advantage. The new parson came to call upon Martin and Maggie, but he got very little from his visit.

"Poor fellow," he said to his wife on his return. "His days are numbered, I fear."

To every one it was as though Martin and Maggie were enclosed in some world of their own. No one could come near them, no one could tell of what they were really thinking, of their hopes or fears, past or future.

"Only," as Mrs. Bolitho said to her husband, "one thing's certain, she do love 'im with all her heart and soul--poor lamb."

When Martin and Maggie had been at the farm about a fort-night, there came to St. Dreot's a travelling circus. This was a very small affair, but it came every year, and provided considerable excitement for the village population. There were also gipsies who came on the moor, and telling the fortunes of any who had a spare sixpence with which to cross their palms. The foreign and exotic colour that the circus and the gipsies brought into the village was exactly suited to the St.

Dreot blood. Many centuries ago strange galleys had forced their way into bays and creeks of the southern coast, and soon dark strangers had penetrated across the moors and fields and had mingled with the natives of the plain. Scarcely an inhabitant of St. Dreot but had some dark colour in his blood, a gift from those Phoenician adventurers; scarcely an inhabitant but was conscious from time to time of other strains, more tumultuous pa.s.sions, than the Saxon race could show.

This coming of the circus had in it, whether they knew it or no, something of the welcoming of their own people back to them again. They liked to see the elephant and the camel tread solemnly the uneven stones of the village street, they liked to hear the roar of the wild beasts at night when they were safe and warm in their own comfortable beds, they liked to have solemn consultations with the gipsy girls as to their mysterious destinies. The animals, indeed, were not many nor, poor things, were they, after many years' chains and discipline, very fierce--nevertheless they roared because they knew it was their duty so to do, and when the lion's turn came a notice was hung up outside his cage saying: "This is the Lion that last year, at Clinton, bit Miss Harper." There were also performing dogs, a bear, and two seals.