"I shall have to hurry to catch that tobacconist," the girl declared, instantly. Her small voice was raised, insistent to be heard. "Good Lord! it's past six o'clock! — But then he always reserves a box of my special brand, every day, and if I'm not there… I say! Hullo, Martin!"
She stepped out into the road, motioning Rampole to follow. The murmur of voices had frozen. Standing in the middle of the road, still with his hand half lifted, a slightly built young man had twisted round to face her. He had the spoiled, self-conscious face of one who generally gets his way with women, with dark hair and a contemptuous mouth; and he was a little drunk. He swayed a little now. Behind him Rampole could see a crooked track in the white dust to show his progress.
"Hello, Dot!" he said, abruptly. "You can certainly sneak up on a fellow. What's the idea?"
He spoke with a strong attempt at an American accent. Laying a hand on the arm of the person with him, he assumed dignity. This latter was obviously a relation; his features were blunt where the other's were delicate, his clothes rode high on him, and his hat did not have the same careless curve as Martin Starberth's, but there was an undeniable resemblance. He looked embarrassed, and his hands seemed too big.
"Been — been in to tea, Dorothy?" he asked, fumbling. "Sorry we're late. We — we were detained."
"Of course," the girl said, impassively. "May I present: Mr. Rampole, Mr. Martin Starberth, Mr. Herbert Starberth. Mr. Rampole's a countryman of yours, Martin."
"You an American?" demanded Martin, in a brisk manner. "That's good. Whereya from? New York? That's good. I just left there. I'm in the publishing business. Whereya staying? — Fell's? That old codger. Look here, come on up to the house and I'll give you a little drink."
"We're going to tea, Martin," Herbert said, with a sort of stolid patience.
"Ah, yell with that tea stuff. Listen, you come up to the house―"
"You'd best not go to tea, Martin," said his sister; "and, please, no more to drink. I wouldn't care, but you know why."
Martin looked at her. "I'm going to tea," he said, sticking out his neck, "and, what's more, I'm going_ to have another little drink. Come on, Bert."
He had forgotten Rampole, for which the American was grateful. He adjusted his hat. He brushed his arms and shoulders, though there was no dust on him, and straightened up, clearing his throat. As the stolid Herbert guided him on, Dorothy whispered: "Don't let him go there, and see that he's all right by dinner-time. Do you hear?"
Martin heard it, too. He turned, put his head on one side; and folded his arms.
"You think I'm drunk, don't you?" he demanded, studying her.
"Please, Martin!"
"Well, I'll show you whether I'm drunk or not! Come on, Bert."
Rampole quickened his step beside the girl as they moved off the other way. As they turned a bend in the road he could hear the cousins arguing, Herbert in a low voice, and Martin vociferously, his hat pulled down on his eyebrows.
For a time they walked in silence. That momentary encounter had jarred against the fragrance of the hedgerows, but it was swept away by the wind over the grass in the meadows that surrounded them. The sky was watery yellow, luminous as glass, along the west; firs stood up black against it, and even the low bog water had lights of gold.
Here were the lowlands, sloping up into wolds; and from a distance the flocks of white-faced sheep looked like toys out of a child's Noah's ark.
"You mustn't think," the girl-said, looking straight ahead of her and speaking very low — "you mustn't think he's always like that. He isn't. But just now there's so much on his mind, and he tries to conceal it by drinking, and it comes out in bravado."
"I knew there was a lot on his mind. You can't blame him." '
"Dr. Fell told you?"
"A little. He said it was no secret."
She clenched her hands. "Oh no. That's the worst of it. It's no secret. Everybody knows, and they all turn their heads away. You're alone with it, do you see? They can't talk about it in public; it isn't done. They can't talk about it to me. And I can't mention it either… "
A pause. Then she turned to him almost fiercely.
"You say you understand, and it's nice of you; but you don't! Growing up with the thing… I remember, when Martin and I were tiny children, mother holding us each up to the window so that we could see the prison. She's dead now, you know. And father."
He said, gently, "Don't you think you're making too much of a legend?"
"I told you — you wouldn't understand."
Her voice was dry and monotonous, and he felt a stab. He was conscious of searching desperately for words, feeling his inadequacy every time he found one; yet groping after a common point with her, as he might have groped after a lamp in a haunted room.
"I'm not intelligent about practical things," he said, blankly. "When I get away from books or football, and up against the world, I'm just mixed up. But I think that, whatever you told me, I would understand it, provided it concerned you."
Across the lowlands drifted a clangor of bells. A slow, sad, ancient clangor, which-swung in the air and was a part of it. Far ahead, the church-spire among the oaks caught the last light. Birds twittered into flight from its belfry as the bell notes clashed with iron weariness, and a rook was cawing. They had stopped by a stone bridge over a broad stream. Dorothy Starberth turned and looked at him.
"If you can say that," she said, "it's all I could ask."
Her lips moved slowly, with a faint smile, and the breeze was smoothing her dark hair.
"I hate practicality," she went on, with sudden vehemence. "I've had to be practical ever since father died.
Herbert's a good old dependable horse, with about as much imagination as that hayrick over there. And there's Mrs. Colonel Granby, and Leutitia Markley, and Mrs. Payne who uses the ouija board, and Miss Porterson who almost gets round to reading the new books. There's Wilfrid Denim, who comes to pay me attentions every Thursday night at nine P.M. precisely, runs out of new conversational matter at nine five, and continues to talk about a play he saw in London three years ago, or else illustrates tennis strokes till you think he's jolly well got St. Vitus' dance. Oh yes — and Mr. Saunders. St. George for Merrie England, and if Harrow beats Eton this year the country's in the hands of the Socialists. Woof!"
She wound up breathlessly, again shaking her head with vehemence until she had to smooth back the cloudy hair. Then she smiled, rather shame-facedly. "I don't know what you'll think of me for talking like this―"
"I think you're absolutely right!" Rampole returned, enthusiastically. He had particularly relished that crack about Mr. Saunders. "Down with ouija boards. A bas le tennis. I hope Harrow knocks Eton for a row of brick-ahem! What I mean to say is, you're absolutely right and long live Socialism."
"I didn't say anything about Socialism."
"Well, say something about it, then," he offered, magnanimously. "Go on, say something about it. Hurrah for Norman Thomas! God bless―"
"But why, silly? Why?"
"Because Mr. Saunders wouldn't like it," explained Rampole. The thesis seemed to him a good one, if vague. But another idea struck him, and he inquired, suspiciously: "Who is this Wilfrid person who comes round to see you every Thursday night? 'Wilfrid' is a lousy name, anyway. It sounds like somebody with marcelled hair."
She slid off the coping of the bridge, and she seemed somehow set free in the strength of her small body laughter-real and swashbuckling, as he had heard it the night before-had got out of its prison, too.
"I say! We'll never get those cigarettes if we don't hurry… I feel the way you talk. D'you want to run for it? But take it easy; it's a quarter of a mile."
Rampole said, "What ho!" and they clipped out past the hayricks with the wind in their faces, and Dorothy Starberth was still laughing.
"I hope I meet Mrs. Colonel Granby," she said, breathlessy. She seemed to think this a wicked idea, and turned a flushed face over her shoulder, eyes dancing. "It's nice, it's nice.- Ugh! I'm glad I have on low-heeled shoes."
"Want to speed it up?"
"Beast! I'm warm already. I say, are you a track man?" "Hmf. A little."
A little. Through his brain ran white letters on black boards, in a dusky room off the campus, where there were silver cups in glass cases and embalmed footballs with dates painted on them. Then, with the road flying past, he remembered another scene of just such an exhilaration as he felt now. November, with a surf of sound beating, the rasp of breathing, and the quarterback declaiming signals like a ham actor. Thick headache. Little wires in his legs drawn tight, and cold fingers without feeling in them. Then the wheeze and buckle of the line, and thuds. Suddenly the cold air streaming in his face, a sensation of flying over white lines on legs wired like a puppet's, and a muddy object he plucked out of the air just under the goal-posts… He heard again that stupefying roar, and felt his stomach opening and shutting as the roar lifted the dusky air like a lid off a kettle. That had been only last autumn, and it seemed a thousand years ago. Here he was on a weirder adventure in the twilight, with a girl whose very presence was like the tingle of those lost, roaring thousand years.
"A little," he repeated, suddenly, drawing a deep breath.
They were into the outskirts of the village, where thick waisted trees shaded white shop-fronts, and the bricks of the sidewalks ran in crooked patterns like a child's writing exercise. A woman stopped to look at them. A man on a bicycle goggled so much that he ran into the ditch and swore.
Leaning up against a tree, flushed and panting, Dorothy laughed.
"I've had enough of your silly game," she said, her eyes very bright. "But, O Lord! I feel better!"
From the furious excitement which had possessed them, neither knowing why, they passed to deep contentment and became carefully decorous. They got the cigarettes, the tobacconist explaining as 'ow he had stopped there after hours, and Rampole gratified a long-cherished wish to buy a church-warden pipe. He was intrigued by the chemist's shop; with its large glass vats of red and green and its impressive array of drugs, it was like something out of a mediaeval tale. There was an inn, called The Friar Tuck, and a public-house called The Goat and Bunch of Grapes. Rampole was steered away from the latter only by the girl's (to him) inexplicable refusal to accompany him into the bar. All.in all, he was much impressed.
"You can get a shave and a hair-cut in the cigar store," he continued to muse. "It isn't so different from America, after all."
He felt so fine that even the trials were nothing. They ran into Mrs. Theodosia Payne, the lawyer's wife, who was stalking grimly along the High Street with her ouija board under her arm. Mrs. Payne had a formidable hat. She moved her jaws like a ventriloquist's dummy, but spoke like a sergeant-major. Nevertheless, Rampole listened with Chesterfieldian politeness while she explained the vagaries of Lucius, her "control" — apparently an erratic and dissipated member of the spirit world, who skidded all over the board and spelled with a strong cockney accent. Dorothy saw her companion's face looking dangerously apoplectic, and got him away from Mrs. Payne before they both exploded into mirth.
It was nearly eight o'clock before they started back. Everything pleased these two, from the street lamps (which resembled glass coffins, and burnt a very consumptive sort of gas) to a tiny shop with a bell over the door, where you could get gilt-covered gingerbread animals and sheets of long-forgotten comic-songs. Rampole had always had a passion for buying useless junk, on the two sound principles that he didn't need it and that he had money to spend; so, finding a kindred spirit who didn't think it was childish, he indulged. They went back through a luminous dusk, the song-sheets held between them like a hymnal, earnestly singing a lament called, "Where Was You, ‘Arry, on the Last Bank 'Oliday?" — and Dorothy was sternly ordered to repress her hilarity in the pathetic parts.
"It's been glorious," the girl said when they had almost reached the lane leading to Dr. Fell's. "It never occurred to me that there was anything interesting in Chatterham. I'm sorry to go home."
"It never occurred to me, either," he said, blankly. "It just seemed that way this afternoon."
They meditated this a moment, looking at each other.
"We've got time for one more," he suggested, as though that were the most important thing in the world. "Do you want to try `The Rose of Bloomsbury Square'?"
"Oh no! Dr. Fell's an old dear, but I've got to preserve some dignity. I saw Mrs. Colonel Granby peeping through the curtains all the time we were in the village. Besides, it's' getting late…."
"Well―"
"And so―"
They both hesitated. Rampole felt a little unreal, and his heart was pounding with enormous rhythm. All about them the yellow sky had changed to a darkling light edged with purple. The fragrance of the hedgerows had become almost overpowering. Her eyes were very strong, very living, and yet veiled as though with pain; they went over his face with desperate seeking. Though he was looking only there, he somehow felt that her hands were extending….
He caught her hands. "Let me walk home with you," he said, heavily; "let me―"
"Ahoy there!" boomed a voice from up the lane. "Hold on! Wait a minute."
Rampole felt something at his heart that was like a physical jerk. He was trembling, and he felt through her warm hands that she was trembling, too. The voice broke such an emotional tensity that they both felt bewildered; and then the girl began to laugh.
Dr. Fell loomed up, puffing, out of the lane. Behind him Rampole saw a figure that looked familiar; yes, it was Payne, with the curved pipe in his mouth. He seemed to be chewing it.
Dread, coming back again after a few brief hours….
The doctor looked very grave. He stopped to get his breath, leaning one cane up against his leg.
"I don't want to alarm you, Dorothy," he began, "and I know the subject is taboo; all the same, this is a time for speaking straight out―"
"Er!" said Payne, warningly, making a rasp in his throat. "The--er-guest?"
"He knows all about it. Now, girl, it's none of my business, I know―"
"Please tell me!" She clenched her hands.
"Your brother was here. We were a bit worried about the state he's in. I don't mean the drinking. That'll pass off; anyway, he was sick, and he was almost cold sober when he left. But it's the fright he's in; you could see it in the wild and defiant way he acted. We don't want him to get wrought up and do himself an injury over this silly business. Do you see?"
"Well? Go on!"
"The rector and your cousin took him home. Saunders is very much upset about this thing. Look here, I'll be absolutely frank. You know, of course, that before your father died he told Saunders something under a sort of seal of confession; and Saunders just thought he was out of his head at the time? But he's beginning to wonder. Now there may not be anything in this, but — just in case — we're going to keep guard. The window of the Governor's Room is plainly visible from here, and this house isn't much over three hundred yards from the prison itself. Do you see?"
"Yes!";
"Saunders and I, and Mr. Rampole, if he will, are going to be on the watch all the time. There'll be a moon, We can see Martin when he goes in. All you have to do is walk to the front of the lawn, and you have a good view of the front gates. Any noise, any disturbance, anything at all suspicious — Saunders and the young un here will be across that meadow before a ghost could vanish." He smiled, putting his hand on her shoulder. "This is all moonshine, I know, and I'm just a crazy old man. But I've known your people a long time — you see? Now, then, what time does the vigil commence?"
"At eleven o'clock."
"Ah, I thought so. Now, then, just after he's left the Hall, telephone us. We'll be watching. Naturally, you're not to mention this to him; it isn't supposed to be done, and if he knew it he might be in just such a state of nervous bravado to go the other way and block our plans. But you might suggest to him that he sit somewhere near the window with his light."
Dorothy drew a deep breath. "I knew there was something in it," she said, dully. "I knew you were all keeping something from me… O my God! why does he have to go, anyway? Why can't we break a silly custom, and―"
"Not unless you want to lose the estate," Payne said, gruffly. "Sorry. But that's the way it's arranged. And I have to administer it. I have to deliver several keys — there's more than one door to be got through — to the heir. When he returns them to me, he must show me a certain thing from inside that vault, never mind what, to show me he's really opened it.
Again the lawyer's teeth gripped his pipe hard. The whites of his eyes looked luminous in the dusk.
"Miss Starberth knew all that, gentlemen, whether the rest of you did or not," he snapped. "We grow frank. Very well. Permit me to shout my affairs from the church spire. My father held this trust from the Starberths before me. So did my grandfather, and his grandfather. I state these details, gentlemen, so as not to seem a fool for technicalities. Even if 1 wanted to break the law, I tell you frankly I wouldn't break the trust."
"Well, let him forfeit the estate, then! Do you think any of us would care a snap of our fingers―"
Payne cut her short, testily: "Well, he isn't such a fool, however you and Bert feel about it. Good Lord! girl, do you want to be a pauper as well as a laughingstock? This procedure may be foolish. Very well. But it's the law and it's a trust." He brought the palms of his hands together with a sort of hollow thock. "I'll tell you what is more foolish. Your fears. No Starberth has suffered harm like that since 1837. Just because your father happened to be near the Hag's Nook when his horse threw him―"
"Don't!" the girl said, wretchedly.
Her hand quivered, and Rampole took a step forward. He did not speak; his throat felt hot and sanded with fury. But he thought, If I hear that man's voice a minute longer, by God! I'll break his jaw.
"You've said enough, Payne, don't you think?" grunted Dr. Fell.
"Ah," said Payne. "Just so."
Anger was in the air. They heard a small noise of Payne sucking his leathery jaws in against his teeth. He repeated, "Just so!" in his low, dry voice, but you knew that he felt the licking flames.
"If you will excuse me, gentlemen," he continued, very impassive, "I shall accompany Miss Starberth… No, sir," as Rampole made a movement, "on this occasion, no. There are confidential matters I must express. Without interference, I hope. I have already discharged a part of my duty in handing over the keys to Mr. Martin Starberth. The rest remains. As — ah — possibly an older friend than the rest of you," his thin voice went high and rasping, and he almost snarled, "I may possibly be permitted to keep some matters confidential."
Rampole was so mad that he came close to an absurd gulp. "Did you say `manners'?" he asked.
"Steady," said Dr. Fell.
"Come along, Miss Starberth," said the lawyer.
They saw him shoot in his cuffs and hobble forward, and the white flash of his eyes as he glanced
his shoulder. Rampole pressed the girl's hand; then both of them were gone…
"Tut, tut!" complained the doctor, after a pause. "Don't swear. He's only jealous of his position as family adviser. I'm much too worried to swear. I had a theory, but… I don't know. It's going all wrong. All wrong… Come along to dinner."
Mumbling to himself, he led the way up the lane. Something cried aloud in Rampole's heart, and the dusk was full of phantoms. For a moment the released, laughing creature with the wind in her hair as she raced; the wistfulness of the square sombre face, wry-smiling on a bridge; the practicality, the mockery, the little Puckish humours; then suddenly the pallor by the hedge, and the small gasp when these terrors crept back. Don't let anything happen to her. Keep good watch, that no harm may touch her. Keep good watch, for this is her brother….
Their footfalls rustled in the grass, and the insect-hum pulsed in shrill droning. Distantly, in the thick air to the west, there was a mutter of thunder.