Davy was bringing the cycle over the grass behind her. He did not want to be left behind.
“It’s no good, Davy,” she said. “I’m riding fast.”
She pushed the mare through the gap.
He saw them plunge into the bracken, and the oaks hid them.
Five minutes later Mary Wittels looked up at a woman who sat astride on a chestnut mare before her door and questioned her eagerly.
The woman had no hat. Her short, dark hair was in a tumbled disorder. There was a bruise on her forehead. She wore the dress of a housemaid, and a leather belt, with a long sheathed knife and a heavy pistol.
Mary’s shrewd old eyes surveyed her, and she answered respectfully. She had lived to see funny times. She did not know why she was dressed up like that. She might be playacting. But Mary knew a lady when she saw her. Knew her by her voice and words, and by her easy seat in the saddle.
“No, ma’am,” she said, “they seemed to go willin’. An’ then, when she was up it seemed as how he threw ’er rough-like over the ’orse....No, I’d never see’d them before....No, they didn’t go back under the trees. They rode straight for the ’all.”
Claire tried to learn what were the other exits from the park and what roads might be beyond them, but it was many years since Mary had been fifty yards from her own door. She explained that the Earl had objected to people crossing the park. The gate on the further side had, she believed, been blocked up years ago. There was nothing beyond but Bycroft Lane, and that led nowhere but to Farmer Richards’, as folk said wasn’t there now.
Claire thanked her hurriedly with an absurd pre-deluge feeling that she ought to give her a shilling, turned her horse, and rode rapidly up the drive.
She had no doubt that Helen had been abducted, either by force or fraud, by some members of Cooper’s gang. Only twenty minutes ago. The old woman had been exact on that point. She had noticed it by the aged timepiece which still ticked against the wall, as little altered as herself by the collapse of Europe.
Claire thought quickly. She had only a very vague idea of the geography of the surrounding district. But it was clear that when they crossed the park they must be riding away from the direction by which they came, and by which they must ultimately return. It seemed clear, also, that Tom would have time to cut off the retreat of the gang if they were still operating in this manner. So far good. (As to this, a careful calculation may leave us in some doubt. A good horse will cover much ground in an hour. Certainly, had they returned by the direct road they would not have kept Jerry waiting for the full half-hour he allowed them, and then he—but we anticipate.)
Claire supposed them to be better acquainted with the country than herself, but here she was excusably mistaken. They had relied on Rentoul for guidance, and Rentoul was dead. If we explore causes we shall find that it is the nameless firer of the shot that killed him who did more to bring these events to their destined end than all the anxious thought and subtle planning of Jerry Cooper or Joe, of Claire or Martin, of all, indeed, but Martha Barnes, who is in a class by herself.
Claire’s geography was vague, but she saw that they must come round to the right sooner or later to regain the highroad and to rejoin their companions. Could she cut them off if she should attempt the same direction at a sharper angle? It seemed the right thing to do, but she did not like to leave the drive on which she rode much faster than she could hope to do over the rough ground of the park, in which the rabbit burrows were a continued menace to her horse’s feet.
She passed the ruins of the hall on her left, a heap of ashes and blackened, fallen stonework, and then saw the weed-dimmed sign of a path on her other hand that crossed what had been a space of open lawn and struck into the woods beyond. Its track was plain, for the gravel weeds had grown less rankly than the grass on either hand. Claire turned her horse and rode rapidly, with a new hope in her heart. She saw that those she pursued might have taken the same way, in which case she could only hope that a greater speed would enable her to reach them before they could gain the protection of their companions; but they might have kept to the main path, which would give the better hope of an easy exit for their burdened horses, and if so, she might hope to have them.
Anyway she had a straight path and a good horse—how good she was only beginning to realise—and she must make the best speed she could.
So she came to the limit of the park and found that the last few yards sloped down to a high fence, over which a ladder of steps allowed pedestrian passage, but she saw no means by which her horse could cross it. She was about to make her way along the side of the fence, in hope of some more practicable exit, when she heard the sound of hooves, and voices in disputation.
On the further side of the fence there was a deep and narrow lane, obviously the Bycroft Lane of which the old woman had told her. Even on the higher ground of the park, which was level with the fence-top, it was too deep for her to see how great was the fall, but on the left hand the ground rose sharply on both sides of the fence, and in such a way that she could look up to the lane itself as it descended toward her.
It was a narrow, twisting lane, deep-rutted by the wheels of centuries, choked now with a five-foot growth of docks and nettles and a thousand hedge-weeds.
Claire looked up and saw two horsemen descending. The foremost was loaded with two children, one before and one behind. She saw his face, and recognised an earlier acquaintance with a start of natural astonishment. He saw her at the same moment, and the sight stopped in mid-sentence the raillery with which, for whatever purpose, he had been infuriating his companion’s temper.
“Devil take us both,” he ejaculated, “it’s the fighting bitch!” The expression may have been lacking in respectful courtesy, but was not without some justification. He felt a prudent satisfaction in the living shields that were before and behind him.
Now Claire, who, as we know, had a strong will and a resolute courage, had done what seemed to her to be the obvious and only thing when she had ridden to the rescue of Martin’s wife and children. But she had no natural gift for strategy. She had done what Martin would not have done in forcing an issue thus without any settled plan as to how she should act when the crisis came, and now that it had arrived she was in no mood to fear it.
Certainly she had no fear of Joe, on whom she looked with a contemptuous physical repulsion. She had always hated fat men!
The other man was less distinctly visible.
But it is fair to recognise that she would probably have acted in the same way had Jerry Cooper himself encountered her with such a booty. As to whether that should be accounted to her credit, two opinions are possible.
To her mind (which yet lacked any subtlety for its contrivance) it was clear that she must attempt a rescue.
Indignation and contempt gave her a moral ascendancy over her antagonists, and supplied the impulse of her first audacity.
Even while the exclamation of the ex-jockey left his mouth, his horse’s descent in the steep lane carried him out of Claire’s view. In another moment they would have ridden past beneath her.
She reined her horse back for a few yards and rode straight at the fence.
It was a reckless leap. Taken, it is true, at the level of the fence top, but from a distance of several yards, and into a depth which she could not see. Some credit is hers that she was not thrown clear of the saddle, but it is due to fortune only that the mare came down on four feet and uninjured.
She came down within a few yards of the advancing horsemen. The startled animals plunged and swerved. There was a second’s confusion, while Claire recovered her seat and control of her horse and Bryan found himself jostled into the hedge so that he kept his saddle with difficulty. As he reined his mount back into the middle of the narrow lane he found himself looking into Claire’s eyes at two yards’ distance. He had a short-barrelled carbine, loaded, in a holster at his right hand. He wrenched at it hastily. Claire saw the action, and her hand went to her pistol. The two weapon
s came up together, but the smaller, lighter pistol was an instant earlier. The one shot followed the other as quickly as a clock ticks, but the carbine was already falling from a broken arm.
Claire looked at the man that was disarmed before her. In his aspect, though she hardly knew that she had paused, lay the answer to the question, should she spare or kill? Had he been such as Rentoul I suppose that there would have been a different issue. But Claire had been taught already that the obtuse superstition of her earlier training that all human life is of an equal sanctity was no longer tenable.
She looked at the man, and at the woman who was carried so brutally at his saddlebow. She fired again, and again. The body rolled from the saddle.
But Joe, who had a better seat and a cooler head than the dead man or the living woman, was away already. He had pulled his horse straight and pushed past the chestnut’s tail even before she had recovered her feet from the leap or Claire had realised how she had landed. He was riding down the lane as fast as the rutted weed-choked surface and the burdens that he carried rendered possible, or at least prudent, for even in peril Joe was a cautious man.
The two women stood facing one another beside the waiting horses and the body of the dead man. It was not the meeting which Claire had purposed, but fate deals the cards, though there may be freedom to play them. Claire had noticed the handcuffed wrists as she had helped Helen from the horse. She had turned to the dying man, and found the key she sought in the first pocket she searched. Now their hands met as she released her—rival—her enemy. She looked at Helen with an interest which her protagonist could have no case for feeling. She was not of a jealous nature, but that meanest of human passions stirred in her heart as she did so.
We have seen too little of Helen. We may look, as Claire looked—it is but the hurried glance of a moment, for Joe is making off down the lane, with eyes on his horse’s steps, and ears alert for any following sound.
There was something more than personal in the contrast of these two women, whom a hundred chances had conspired to bring together so strangely.
Had they met four months ago, in the old ways, there would have been differences of character and outlook such as often make for friendship. But today those differences had widened to a point which would have seemed beyond thinking.
Helen knew of the changes which had come. She had been told. She had intelligence to realise what it must mean. In that first emergency, when she had fought for her children’s lives, she had shown that she was not without courage or resource, if the call were great enough to rouse her.
But since then her illness, and the isolation in which she had lived, had held her from any actual contact with the new conditions. And she had always been one to look at life, rather than to face the arena’s dust, or to seek its triumphs. Her life had been in her husband, and in her home, and in a lively interest in the events of the outer world.
Now she stood dizzily, and her hair—which she had never cut off after the last craze of the world which had ceased to be—was dishevelled.
But, apart from that, she showed no change from the conditions which were gone forever.
The hope—however faint—that Martin might return at any moment as the result of Tom’s promised search had caused her to dress with more than her usual care. It is idle to ask what she wore. The fashion of one year was the derision of the next. It is equally idle to ask how she contrived it. She had skill with hand and needle; and when had a woman failed at such devices, since the first monkey sat in some convenient tree-fork, and sewed the leaves that should make a mystery of her sex.
Claire looked, and knew. She was conscious of her own garments.
Claire saw a woman of her own height, who looked taller: of her own age, but who looked younger. She was in robust health, but, beside Claire, she looked fragile. She had a charm, a wild-rose beauty, with which Claire well knew that she could not compete.
Claire had little vanity. She did not doubt that her own judgement would be that of others. She might have a man’s friendship, but it was here that his eyes would turn with the desire which makes a woman’s heart beat quickly. And Claire was a woman. And when she thought of a man, she meant Martin.
All this was thought or seen as the handcuffs parted. Hands touched. Slim hands, fine and white, with rose-pink nails, were loosed by larger hands that were unclean, and scratched, and scarred, and hardened by many a rough task of recent days.
Claire would have been less than woman had she failed to observe the contrast, had she not wished that her own nails were unbroken.
All this took no time in the doing.
Helen looked at the bruised face, and uncouth dress of her abrupt deliverer, but she scarcely saw them. She may be excused some bewilderment, and her mind was on one thing only.
She said: “Can you save them?”
Claire said: “Can you ride?” She looked at the dead man’s horse.
Helen hesitated for a second. She could not ride, as she could not swim. Yet for her children’s safety there was nothing that she would not have ventured.
But the second’s hesitation was Claire’s answer. Besides, she thought (but without unkindness), she would be useless.
“You had better wait here,” she said. “My horse is faster.” Bryan’s was obviously not of the quality of the chestnut with which Rentoul’s scouting had been accomplished. “I will bring them to you.”
Her foot was in the stirrup as she spoke, and her leg went over the saddle.
She looked at Helen again. There was much that should be told before Martin met her. Things he would rely upon her to have told. And there was no time. But at least she could say something.
“I came to tell you that Martin is alive, and may be here before night. We have been good friends, Martin and I. More than friends. I ought to tell you that. I will bring you the children.”
It was more than she had clearly intended to say. She had meant to say simply that Martin was alive, and the rest had followed.
She saw joy leap into Helen’s eyes. She did not know whether Helen realised or regarded the meaning of the words that followed. She rode on down the lane.
Helen stood looking after her. Mechanically her hands went up in an endeavour to rearrange the mass of brown-gold hair, and desisted, having no means to fasten it.
Claire was right. She had hardly heard. There is nothing that conveys character, or gives warning or confidence, so surely as the human voice. Helen had heard a voice which had the largeness of Claire’s own nature. It had said: “Martin is alive—I will bring you the children.” What else could matter?
Helen laughed uncertainly. She said aloud: “She is like a Valkyrie.” She could have kissed her feet.
She went down the lane. She expected to meet her at any moment returning with the rescued children. She came to the highroad. She went on, and saw neither horse nor rider, but she saw something which quickened her pace along the smoothness of a tarred road, which was still clear of any growth, though few men trod it.
It was the peculiar devilishness of the civilisation which the seas had ended that it had dug death from the earth’s interior. The surface of the earth had been adapted by its Creator, through incalculable periods of preparation, for the support of sentient life, and with such life, on and above its surface, and for a few inches below it, it was crowded, life-in-life, small and large, to a miraculous minuteness, and with a bewildering complexity. It seemed the design of the Mind that formed it, that not an inch of this precious surface, redeemed for a brief while from the barren wastes of ether by gigantic operations continued through incalculable periods of time, should be destitute of the life for which it had been made ready. But this civilisation, sinning in this direction far beyond any which had preceded it, tore up the living surface of the earth, and smeared it with the dead matter below, from which life shrank back, baffled and terrified. They substituted the dead smoke for the living light, the dead steel for the living hand, the dead steam for the living h
orse, fatuously believing that they progressed toward some higher plane of being than that which their Master had provided for them.
They boasted that they had increased the possibility of human life on the earth’s surface, not having the wit to see that they had not increased its area of potential fertility by a single inch, nor found a method of cultivation more intensive than that of the spade in a man’s hand; and that, at the most, they could only claim that they had made it possible for large numbers of the race to crowd together at a distance from the food on which their lives depended.
They did not see that every yard of the earth’s surface which they deadened with coal or steel, with tar or petrol, every process which they carried out by the forces of dead matter rather than by the activities of living cells, definitely decreased the total of animate life, whether human or vegetable, which the earth could bear.
Three months had passed since the earth trembled, and its surface sank, but this stretch of highroad still ran, cursed and bare, between the wild-grown hedges. Running east and west, it had borne little of the wild rush to northward. A fallen elm lay across it. It bore the skeleton of a dead sheep that the dogs had eaten. Otherwise, for the most part, it was smooth and vacant.
But Helen did not regard these things. She scarcely saw them when, two hundred yards away, a child stood uncertainly, very bruised, and lost, and tearful.
For the next hour Helen remained seated on the fallen tree, holding a sleeping child in her arms, and watching an empty road. Then she rose doubtfully, and went homeward. She supposed it was there that Martin would seek her. There she might find news, or means of succour. She went back by the way she had come; hope, anxiety, and anticipation contending for supremacy in her heart.
Deluge: A Novel of Global Warming Page 30