The Shuttle Part 82

"Than scruple--than power--even than a man's determination and decent pride."

"Are you proud?" she half whispered quite brokenly. "I am not--since I waited for the ringing of the church bell--since I heard it toll. After that the world was empty--and it was as empty of decent pride as of everything else. There was nothing left. I was the humblest broken thing on earth."

"You!" he gasped. "Do you know I think I shall go mad directly perhaps it is happening now. YOU were humble and broken--your world was empty!

Because----?"

"Look at me, Lord Mount Dunstan," and the sweetest voice in the world was a tender, wild little cry to him. "Oh LOOK at me!"

He caught her out-thrown hands and looked down into the beautiful pa.s.sionate soul of her. The moment had come, and the tidal wave rising to its height swept all the common earth away when, with a savage sob, he caught and held her close and hard against that which thudded racing in his breast.

And they stood and swayed together, folded in each other's arms, while the wind from the marshes lifted its voice like an exulting human thing as it swept about them.

CHAPTER XLIX

AT STORNHAM AND AT BROADMORLANDS

The exulting wind had swept the clouds away, and the moon rode in a dark blue sea of sky, making the night light purely clear, when they drew a little apart, that they might better see the wonderfulness in each other's faces. It was so mysteriously great a thing that they felt near to awe.

"I fought too long. I wore out my body's endurance, and now I am quaking like a boy. Red G.o.dwyn did not begin his wooing like this. Forgive me,"

Mount Dunstan said at last.

"Do you know," with lovely trembling lips and voice, "that for long--long--you have been unkind to me?"

It was merely human that he should swiftly enfold her again, and answer with his lips against her cheek.

"Unkind! Unkind! Oh, the heavenly woman's sweetness of your telling me so--the heavenly sweetness of it!" he exclaimed pa.s.sionately and low. "And I was one of those who are 'by the roadside everywhere,' an unkempt, raging beggar, who might not decently ask you for a crust."

"It was all wrong--wrong!" she whispered back to him, and he poured forth the tenderest, fierce words of confession and prayer, and she listened, drinking them in, with now and then a soft sob pressed against the roughness of the enrapturing tweed. For a s.p.a.ce they had both forgotten her hurt, because there are other things than terror which hypnotise pain. Mount Dunstan was to be praised for remembering it first. He must take her back to Stornham and her sister without further delay.

"I will put your saddle on Anstruthers' horse, or mine, and lift you to your seat. There is a farmhouse about two miles away, where I will take you first for food and warmth. Perhaps it would be well for you to stay there to rest for an hour or so, and I will send a message to Lady Anstruthers."

"I will go to the place, and eat and drink what you advise," she answered. "But I beg you to take me back to Rosalie without delay. I feel that I must see her."

"I feel that I must see her, too," he said. "But for her--G.o.d bless her!" he added, after his sudden pause.

Betty knew that the exclamation meant strong feeling, and that somehow in the past hours Rosalie had awakened it. But it was only when, after their refreshment at the farm, they had taken horse again and were riding homeward together, that she heard from him what had pa.s.sed between them.

"All that has led to this may seem the merest chance," he said. "But surely a strange thing has come about. I know that without understanding it." He leaned over and touched her hand. "You, who are Life--without understanding I ride here beside you, believing that you brought me back."

"I tried--I tried! With all my strength, I tried."

"After I had seen your sister to-day, I guessed--I knew. But not at first. I was not ill of the fever, as excited rumour had it; but I was ill, and the doctors and the vicar were alarmed. I had fought too long, and I was giving up, as I have seen the poor fellows in the ballroom give up. If they were not dragged back they slipped out of one's hands.

If the fever had developed, all would have been over quickly. I knew the doctors feared that, and I am ashamed to say I was glad of it. But, yesterday, in the morning, when I was letting myself go with a morbid pleasure in the luxurious relief of it--something reached me--some slow rising call to effort and life."

She turned towards him in her saddle, listening, her lips parted.

"I did not even ask myself what was happening, but I began to be conscious of being drawn back, and to long intensely to see you again. I was gradually filled with a restless feeling that you were near me, and that, though I could not physically hear your voice, you were surely CALLING to me. It was the thing which could not be--but it was--and because of it I could not let myself drift."

"I did call you! I was on my knees in the church asking to be forgiven if I prayed mad prayers--but praying the same thing over and over. The villagers were kneeling there, too. They crowded in, leaving everything else. You are their hero, and they were in deep earnest."

His look was gravely pondering. His life had not made a mystic of him--it was Penzance who was the mystic--but he felt himself perplexed by mysteriously suggestive thought.

"I was brought back--I was brought back," he said. "In the afternoon I fell asleep and slept profoundly until the morning. When I awoke, I realised that I was a remade man. The doctors were almost awed when I first spoke to them. Old Dr. Fenwick died later, and, after I had heard about it, the church bell was tolled. It was heard at Weaver's farmhouse, and, as everybody had been excitedly waiting for the sound, it conveyed but one idea to them--and the boy was sent racing across the fields to Stornham village. Dearest! Dearest!" he exclaimed.

She had bowed her head and burst into pa.s.sionate sobbing. Because she was not of the women who wept, her moment's pa.s.sion was strong and bitter.

"It need not have been!" she shuddered. "One cannot bear it--because it need not have been!"

"Stop your horse a moment," he said, reining in his own, while, with burning eyes and swelling throat, he held and steadied her. But he did not know that neither her sister nor her father had ever seen her in such mood, and that she had never so seen herself.

"You shall not remember it," he said to her.

"I will not," she answered, recovering herself. "But for one moment all the awful hours rushed back. Tell me the rest."

"We did not know that the blunder had been made until a messenger from Dole rode over to inquire and bring messages of condolence. Then we understood what had occurred and I own a sort of frenzy seized me. I knew I must see you, and, though the doctors were horribly nervous, they dare not hold me back. The day before it would not have been believed that I could leave my room. You were crying out to me, and though I did not know, I was answering, body and soul. Penzance knew I must have my way when I spoke to him--mad as it seemed. When I rode through Stornham village, more than one woman screamed at sight of me. I shall not be able to blot out of my mind your sister's face. She will tell you what we said to each other. I rode away from the Court quite half mad----"

his voice became very gentle, "because of something she had told me in the first wild moments."

Lady Anstruthers had spent the night moving restlessly from one room to another, and had not been to bed when they rode side by side up the avenue in the early morning sunlight. An under keeper, crossing the park a few hundred yards above them, after one glance, dashed across the sward to the courtyard and the servants' hall. The news flashed electrically through the house, and Rosalie, like a small ghost, came out upon the steps as they reined in. Though her lips moved, she could not speak aloud, as she watched Mount Dunstan lift her sister from her horse.

"Childe Harold stumbled and I hurt my foot," said Betty, trying to be calm.

"I knew he would find you!" Rosalie answered quite faintly. "I knew you would!" turning to Mount Dunstan, adoring him with all the meaning of her small paled face.

She would have been afraid of her memory of what she had said in the strange scene which had taken place before them a few hours ago, but almost before either of the two spoke she knew that a great gulf had been crossed in some one inevitable, though unforeseen, leap. How it had been taken, when or where, did not in the least matter, when she clung to Betty and Betty clung to her.

After a few moments of moved and reverent waiting, the admirable Jennings stepped forward and addressed her in lowered voice.

"There's been little sleep in the village this night, my lady," he murmured earnestly. "I promised they should have a sign, with your permission. If the flag was run up--they're all looking out, and they'd know."

"Run it up, Jennings," Lady Anstruthers answered, "at once."

When it ran up the staff on the tower and fluttered out in gay answering to the morning breeze, children in the village began to run about shouting, men and women appeared at cottage doors, and more than one cap was thrown up in the air. But old Doby and Mrs. Welden, who had been waiting for hours, standing by Mrs. Welden's gate, caught each other's dry, trembling old hands and began to cry.

The Broadmorlands divorce scandal, having made conversation during a season quite forty years before Miss Vanderpoel appeared at Stornham Court, had been laid upon a lower shelf and buried beneath other stories long enough to be forgotten. Only one individual had not forgotten it, and he was the Duke of Broadmorlands himself, in whose mind it remained hideously clear. He had been a young man, honestly and much in love when it first revealed itself to him, and for a few months he had even thought it might end by being his death, notwithstanding that he was strong and in first-rate physical condition. He had been a fine, hearty young man of clean and rather dignified life, though he was not understood to be brilliant of mind. Privately he had ideals connected with his rank and name which he was not fluent enough clearly to express. After he had realised that he should not die of the public humiliation and disgrace, which seemed to point him out as having been the kind of gullible fool it is scarcely possible to avoid laughing at--or, so it seemed to him in his heart-seared frenzy--he thought it not improbable that he should go mad. He was harried so by memories of lovely little soft ways of Edith's (his wife's name was Edith), of the pretty sound of her laugh, and of her innocent, girlish habit of kneeling down by her bedside every night and morning to say her prayers.

This had so touched him that he had sometimes knelt down to say his, too, saying to her, with slight awkward boyishness, that a fellow who had a sort of angel for his wife ought to do his best to believe in the things she believed in.

"And all the time----!" a devil who laughed used to sn.i.g.g.e.r in his ear over and over again, until it was almost like the ticking of a clock during the worst months, when it did not seem probable that a man could feel his brain whirling like a Catherine wheel night and day, and still manage to hold on and not reach the point of howling and shrieking and dashing his skull against wails and furniture.

But that pa.s.sed in time, and he told himself that he pa.s.sed with it.

Since then he had lived chiefly at Broadmorlands Castle, and was spoken of as a man who had become religious, which was not true, but, having reached the decision that religion was good for most people, he paid a good deal of attention to his church and schools, and was rigorous in the matter of curates.

He had pa.s.sed seventy now, and was somewhat despotic and haughty, because a man who is a Duke and does not go out into the world to rub against men of his own cla.s.s and others, but lives altogether on a great and splendid estate, saluted by every creature he meets, and universally obeyed and counted before all else, is not unlikely to forget that he is a quite ordinary human being, and not a sort of monarch.

He had done his best to forget Edith, who had soon died of being a shady curate's wife in Australia, but he had not been able to encompa.s.s it. He used, occasionally, to dream she was kneeling by the bed in her childish nightgown saying her prayers aloud, and would waken crying--as he had cried in those awful young days. Against social immorality or village light-mindedness he was relentlessly savage. He allowed for no palliating or exonerating facts. He began to see red when he heard of or saw lightness in a married woman, and the outside world frequently said that this characteristic bordered on monomania.

Nigel Anstruthers, having met him once or twice, had at first been much amused by him, and had even, by giving him an adroitly careful lead, managed to guide him into an expression of opinion. The Duke, who had heard men of his cla.s.s discussed, did not in the least like him, notwithstanding his sympathetic suavity of manner and his air of being intelligently impressed by what he heard. Not long afterwards, however, it transpired that the aged rector of Broadmorlands having died, the living had been given to Ffolliott, and, hearing it, Sir Nigel was not slow to conjecture that quite decently utilisable tools would lie ready to his hand if circ.u.mstances pressed; this point of view, it will be seen, being not illogical. A man who had not been a sort of hermit would have heard enough of him to be put on his guard, and one who was a man of the world, looking normally on existence, would have reasoned coolly, and declined to concern himself about what was not his affair. But a parallel might be drawn between Broadmorlands and some old lion wounded sorely in his youth and left to drag his unhealed torment through the years of age. On one subject he had no point of view but his own, and could be roused to fury almost senseless by wholly inadequately supported facts. He presented exactly the material required--and that in ma.s.s.