Once in the lane it occurred to her that the most sensible way home would be round by the barley fields; for Heron’s Ridge was much less of an eminence there, and she could stroll back at leisure by the village road and the two bridges.
She turned to the right accordingly at this point, and soon found herself opposite the gate into the wood where she had first revealed to Rook that she was with child. An unpleasantly familiar voice came suddenly to her ears from the other side of this gate. She moved a step toward it; and there, under the brushwood, she saw Binnory.
Nor was the idiot alone. Occupied, beneath his fascinated scrutiny, in collecting some especial herbalist’s plant—which may even have been, for all Ann knew about such things, the famous classical hellebore—the old trot, Betsy Cooper herself, turned toward her the sort of menacing scrutiny that a sinister sorceress of ancient times might have turned toward some Eurynome or Dione, big with the child of an Olympian.
“Save us and help us if it ain’t her ladyship’s own self!” cried the crone, rising from her knees and coming forward.
“’Tis my pretty leddy! ’Tis my pretty leddy!” ejaculated the idiot, approaching the gate with still more alacrity. “Have ’ee been to Lunnon to find Squire Ash’ver, what rumpled thee fine feathers for ’ee unbeknownst to any but poor Binnory?”
Lady Ann instinctively drew away from these two discomfortable figures, retreating, as she pulled her cloak around her, toward the middle of the lane. Here she stopped and faced them; but neither the old woman nor the boy made any attempt to come farther than the gate.
“Thee best get up along over Hern’s Top as quickly as thee may,” said Betsy Cooper. “’Twere only last night when I be cleaning me horse-cart, out where us do bide now, and me partners were quiet-like and ’twere all still as churchyard stones, that a voice inside me belly said to I, ‘Look i’ thik wold crystal, Betsy lass; look i’ thik wold crystal!’ And no sooner did I do what ’un did say than, Lord bless us and keep us! There was that black parson of yours a-murderin’ of poor dear Squire!”
She stopped to take breath and Lady Ann moved as if to go on down the lane.
“It’s true as God’s dear blood, your ladyship!” screamed the old woman, making a feeble attempt to open the gate. “Get home with you, you owdacious turleypin!” This was addressed to Binnory, who was staring at the girl in the road as if he meditated a wild rush toward her.
“I can’t listen to you now,” said Lady Ann calmly. “But if you’d like to come up to the house later I’m sure you’ll be made welcome.”
She spoke in the tone she habitually used to poor people, the tone that was at once easy and distant. What it implied was: “I have no time now to chatter with picturesque vagabonds; but my servants will be charmed to give you tea in the kitchen!”
Betsy Cooper by no means missed the quality of this rebuff; but she was too excited to enter into personal adjustments just then; besides, beyond all her eccentricity, she was saturated with a feudal respect for the house of Ashover.
“Don’t ’ee take on, your ladyship,” she pleaded. “Don’t ’ee take on! ’Twere after I’d a-seen that murderin’ parson in Cimmery stone that I heard a voice out of one of me partner’s mouths. They innocents do talk if it be talking, your ladyship; and it’s what me partner said that do most bide in me mind. ’A said a terrible queer word, Lady Ash’ver; and it’s as true as God’s dear blood what I be telling thee.”
The idiot, who had now climbed to the top of the gate and was balancing himself there like a demonic gargoyle, burst in with an exultant cry at this point.
“I do know what the half beastie did say, pretty leddy! Binnory do know what the half beastie did say to Granny Cooper!”
“I can’t listen to you now,” repeated Lady Ann sternly. “Come up to the house later; and you, too, Binnory, if you like. Good-afternoon to you both!” And she swept off down the lane with all a grand lady’s indifference as to whether the populace commented on her condition or held their peace.
She did not put her hands to her ears, however, as many prospective mothers of heroes and demigods have been driven ere now to do; and for that reason it was impossible not to hear what the old woman shouted after her.
“Till book be burned no child’ll be borned!”
The idiot, who had now scrambled over the gate, ran after her down the lane. “Till book be burned no child’ll be borned!” he screamed in his shrill voice; and it was only after Lady Ann had turned twice round, threatening him with her parasol, that he desisted and drifted back to his companion.
Even when she was out of all sight and hearing of these two troublesome beings and had rounded the corner at the point opposite Titty’s Ring she still seemed to hear that ominous and fantastic oracle. The magpies chattered it; the green finches chittered it; the very rooks themselves, who now began to gather in larger numbers, seemed echoing it with their rueful cawings. The whole incident was peculiarly distasteful to the girl’s mind; but the first effect it had upon her was doubtless an excellent one. It roused to full flood her gallant fighting spirit. What impertinence! What intolerable impertinence! And then her invincible youthfulness came to her aid. There was something that tickled her realistic sense of humour about the whole thing. “It’s just a trick to get money out of us,” she thought. “That fool Hastings has probably been telling everybody what he told me on New Year’s night, about his abominable theories. No doubt when he spent that day in the caravan with Netta Page the old woman listened to his mad talk. The dwarfs probably heard him, too! In fact, the chances are that our absurd clergyman and his insane fancies are the common gossip of the whole neighbourhood.”
Had Lady Ann been a more neurotic or a weaker person this agitating encounter would have been actually dangerous to her. As it was, so robust was her constitution and so defiant her temper, it seemed rather to hearten her and steady her than to do her any harm.
It did cross her mind as she left the lane and made her way through the stubble fields toward the village that she was at that crisis in her life singularly alone. Her own parents were dead. Mrs. Ashover was her nearest relative; and the girl was far too sagacious not to know that it was in the rôle of a mother of future Ashovers rather than in the rôle of a daughter to herself that the old tribal fanatic cherished her.
Alone. Well? What of that? Many a Norse ancestor of hers had been alone ere now, both on land and sea, and that fact had not weakened the strength of his arm or blurred his clear, unclouded glance into the shifty eyes of Fate!
Besides, she was not alone! Rook might have a cold and fickle heart. His mother might be obsessed by the family. Very well! Let them go. She carried her champion, her supporter, her ally, here in her own vitals!
She was at the top of the ridge now and beginning to feel exhausted. That young Viking in her belly was displaying his strength—and his sex, too—how sure she was of that!—by certain familiar thumpings and stirrings.
It must be getting on toward tea-time. The autumn sun already rested, red and glowing, like a vast eye-socket veiled in titanic sorrow, on the treetops behind the Drools’ cottage.
The church and churchyard down there in the valley were gathered now in thick woolly mists, and as she looked at them she remembered the peculiar psychic support which more than once those dead people there had seemed capable of giving her.
Well! Weary though she was, she was so mysteriously self-subsistent at that moment that she felt strong enough to steer her vessel onward without assistance, or even sympathy, from any quarter.
As she came slowly down the stubble field with its faint strawy smell and its little tufts of fumitory and small wild yellow pansies she had a strange fierce longing for the unknown travail that was to come upon her. She felt associated so closely with her child in this struggle that it was almost as if two lovers, of proud Spartan breed, were preparing for an engagement with a barbarous enemy!
Never for one second did she contemplate the possibility of her death. The
life force in her seemed so inexhaustible, so potent, that it tossed such thoughts aside, as a racehorse might toss the foam from his mouth and nostrils.
She soon reached the hawthorn hedge where she had met Rook on the occasion of her visit to Toll-Pike. She smiled faintly as she thought of that unenjoyed lunch! And she said to herself with stark sincerity, “How can Rook and Lexie find anything to attract them in that sentimental, funny-looking little thing?”
She sat down to rest on the identical spot where she had rested before. The hedge protected her from the rising mists, and the ground was still warm except where the longer grass had caught the dew. With her cloak wrapped round her she sank luxuriously back against the furrow of sweet-smelling earth mould. The largeness of that autumn day, its indrawn breath, its immense passivity, lulled her into a delicious relaxation.
She lay there for nearly an hour, living intensely and absorbingly in the great parturient process that was going on within her. Then, at last, feeling the approach of the evening chill, she rose to her feet, and, rested and comforted in mind and body, pushed open the ancient ramshackle gate into the remembered barley field.
It was then that quite suddenly, and, as it were, quite naturally, that tiresome, ungrammatical refrain, “Till book be burned no child’ll be borned,” repeated itself in her ears as if someone at her very side had whispered it.
Lady Ann became grave and stood motionless, like a beautiful animal scenting some species of ambiguous danger. “What’s up with me?” she thought to herself. “Is this nerves? Or am I growing superstitious?”
And then without reasoning about it at all she suddenly felt an irresistible instinct driving her to go straight down to Toll-Pike Cottage and face this life-hating conjurer whose sorcery was so inimical to herself and her child.
She tried to find, for her own justification, some quite reasonable motive for stopping at Toll-Pike Cottage just then; nor was such a motive very difficult to find. She felt not the slightest embarrassment at being seen either by Nell or Hastings in her present condition. As for Netta’s presence there, she did not permit it to affect her one way or the other. Her attitude to both these rivals of hers was that of an indifferent conqueror of superior race, whose caprices may be indulged to the furthest limit in sublime contempt for any reaction, favourable or unfavourable, that they might produce on the vanquished.
It did not take her long to reach the cottage. This time there was no Marquis of Carabas lying on the back porch. But Lady Ann did not intend to enter in that unconventional manner this time. She walked round to the front door and rang the bell. To her surprise she heard excited and agitated voices in the room above.
She waited. No one seemed to have noticed her ring. There was evidently something serious going on upstairs.
Was this crazy priest quarrelling with these two women? Was he ill-using them, perhaps? All her social instincts as a member of the English ruling class rose up in indignation. It was no more to her then that Rook had taken his pleasure with these girls than if they had been daughters of Twiney or of Pod! What was unpardonable was that in the village of Ashover, within a mile of Ashover House, an English clergyman should be behaving like a drunken blacksmith. For it was that. She was not country-born for nothing. She had heard so often that particular mingling of female clamour with masculine threats from under the eaves of thatched cottages, as she rode home, dreamy and content, through Sturminster, through Shaftesbury, through Stalbridge, from a successful hunt with the Blackmore pack!
With her practical and realistic mind she came to the prompt conclusion that in “his weakness and his melancholy” this hedge priest of theirs had taken to drink. Accustomed from her earliest childhood to high-handed interference, and entirely free from any physical apprehensions on her own behalf, the intrepid girl boldly turned the handle of the door, entered the little hallway, and walked resolutely and unflinchingly up the narrow staircase.
Her steps on the stairs were no more audible to the persons in that room than had been the sound of her ring. She heard scuffling and struggling in there as well as this turmoil of voices.
With a quick movement of her strong young wrist she turned the handle of the door and swung it wide open. The sight that met her eyes was disturbing enough; though it was not quite on a par with the violent ruffianism she had been imagining. Like all people of her kind she lumped the middle classes and the proletariat together, and took for granted that any of them might at any moment break all laws of decency and self-respect.
She was not surprised, therefore, to see William Hastings with a white distorted countenance struggling to release himself from the arms of Mr. Pod, who, very red in the face and obviously much embarrassed at being found in such a situation, was holding the priest down on a sofa-bed.
This article of furniture must have been recently dragged in from the room opposite, for it was placed awkwardly and grotesquely between the philosopher’s desk and the round table in the centre of the chamber.
On one side of this makeshift bed stood Netta, evidently doing her best to soothe the afflicted man; while at its foot, leaning across it so as to touch her husband’s hands with her own, was the slender form of Nell, from whose eyes the tears were streaming and whose whole body was trembling with agitation and concern.
“Lordy! Your Ladyship did give I a start!” cried the breathless sexton, relaxing his hold upon the man on the bed. “Us all thought as you was drownded in sheep wash or summat!”
“Thank God, you’re all right, Lady Ann,” said Netta gravely, glancing anxiously down at the man beneath her to see that he did not take advantage of this new apparition to make a fresh struggle to escape.
But Hastings was staring at Ann with wild intensity, every line in his face expressive of the passing of one complicated emotion after another across the clouded mirror of his mind. He had worked at the completion of his book so passionately that now it was finished the actual volume itself, its leather binding, its ink-stained pages, had become to his unsettled brain a magical engine of destruction, a nihilistic catapult as it were, that it now behoved him to hurl at the citadels of life!
Two of these life ramparts had got themselves lodged in his mind as especially challenging to his campaign—those Ashover tombs in the church chancel, and the living body of Lady Ann Ashover! From those tombs, Hastings had come to be obstinately convinced, emanated the very essence of this unscrupulous life force, which in its relentless strivings disturbed the placid pools of non-existence. And here was Lady Ann herself, now standing before him, the incarnation of the remorseless urge! With the extravagant fanaticism of a mad logician, Hastings formulated, even as he looked at the woman, a monstrous and diabolic project. He would make her herself hug to her heart his “Book of Annihilation,” and carry it to the place of those living dead.
To his distorted vision this hurling of his book among his enemies presented itself as the supreme stroke in an abysmal spiritual warfare whereof he was the protagonist and this woman, big with child, the antagonist.
The man’s intellectual magnetism was so great that as he sat up there in bed with the veins in his forehead distended and his face quivering with conflicting emotion the four persons in that room remained awed and silent. When he did speak it was with a mingling of insane cunning and disordered impetuousness.
“They won’t let me take it and hide it!” he cried. “I want to hide it under those chancel slabs … I could easily get up those stones and put it there; but they won’t let me! And now you’ve come and you’ll join with them. If you hadn’t come I’d have done it. Wouldn’t I have done it, fellow?” And he turned his distracted glance upon the embarrassed Mr. Pod, who stood watching him with one of his great fists ostentatiously clenched, as if Hastings were a troublesome bullock at Tollminster Fair.
“’Tis true enough, your ladyship, what Parson do say,” acquiesced the sexton. “’A would have rinned all the way to church and have scrabbled with’s own hands at they paving stones! ’A would h
ave done that; and maybe heaved up some of they ancient Squires what do bide under them moniments! ’Tis God’s truth what ’a do say, your ladyship. ’A be a terrible strong man, and there be none to hold ’un but only I and these two young leddies!”
Lady Ann became suddenly aware of the actual presence of Hastings’s book. The manuscript occupied a large leather-bound volume as big as a business ledger, and it lay on the priest’s desk just above his bed. She knew the look of the book, as she had seen it in his hands before; and she surveyed it now with a peculiar and unusual interest.
Nell, who was standing at the foot of the bed, caught the direction of the visitor’s glance.
“My husband had just finished his last chapter, Lady Ann, when this idea of hiding it in the church came into his head. You feel better now, William, don’t you? You won’t frighten us again, will you, William?”
The man rose a little higher on the bed, straightening his legs and propping himself up on his two hands. He stared at Nell’s face with that pathetic and puzzled frown with which people whose mental processes have grown jangled become for a moment aware of something wrong and unusual.
It was as if he were peering helplessly at the young girl through the entangled boughs of his own obscuring delusion. Fancying that he did hear her and understand her Nell flung herself down on her knees at his side and began chafing one of his hands.
Lady Ann exchanged glances with Netta; but neither of them, nor indeed Mr. Pod himself, who looked as if he would be thankful if the floor sank beneath him, seemed anxious to intervene between these two.
Lady Ann’s thoughts wandered off to all that buried dust under the church pavement which seemed to be so persistent an influence in the movement of events in this place. She recalled the man’s wild discourse to her on New Year’s Eve, at the end of Marsh Alley, and how he had associated, even then, the negations of his ferocious logic with the extinction of the House of Ashover. He was disarmed and innocuous enough now; but she, in her sanity, began just then, as she saw the book lying there within her reach, to be betrayed into the same illusion as the one which this madman held, namely, that this mysterious destructive force had actually passed from the living man’s intellect into the inanimate potency of the work he had just completed.
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