Doll craned over the gunwale, his arms in the water. There was a swirl, a momentary glimpse of a stolid fish, face and heavy shoulders, and the boat righted itself.
"Missed him, as I live!" gasped Doll. "Bring him in again."
Hugh let out the slippery line, and drew it in again slowly, hand over hand. Doll's round head was over the side, his long legs spread adhesively in the bottom of the boat. Crack, beyond himself with excitement, got on the seat and barked without ceasing.
"He's coming up again," said Doll, gutturally, sliding forward his left hand. "I must get him by the eyes, and then I doubt if I can lift him. He's a big brute. He's dragging the whole boat and everything. He's about done now. Steady! Now!"
The great side of the pike lay heaving on the surface for a second, and Doll's left forefinger and thumb were groping for its eyes. But the agonized pike made a last effort. Doll had him with his left hand, but could not raise him. "Pull him in now for all you're worth," he roared to Hugh, as he made a grab with his right hand. His legs began to lose their grip under the violent contortions of the pike. The boat tilted madly. Hugh reached forward to help him. There was a frantic effort, and it capsized.
"Bad luck," said Doll, coming up spluttering, shaking his head like a spaniel. "But we shall get him yet. He's bleeding like a pig. He'll come up directly. Good Lord! the water's like ice. We must be over one of the springs. I suppose you are all right, Scarlett."
Hugh had come up, but in very different fashion.
"Yes," he said, faintly, clutching the upturned boat.
"I'm not sure," said Doll, keeping going with one hand, "that we had not better get ashore and fetch the other boat. The water's enough to freeze one."
"I can't swim," said Hugh, his teeth chattering.
He was a delicate man at the best of times, and the cold was laying hold of him.
Doll looked at his blue lips and shaking hands, and his face became grave. He measured the distance to the shore with his eye. It had receded in a treacherous manner.
"I'm not much of a performer myself," he said, "since I broke my arm last winter, but I can get to the shore. The question is, can you hold on while I go back and bring the other boat, or shall we have a try at getting back together?"
"I can hold on all right," said Hugh, instantly aware that Doll did not think he could tow him to land, but was politely ready to risk his existence in the attempt.
"Back directly," said Doll, and without a second's delay he was gone. Hugh put out his whole strength in the endeavor to raise himself somewhat out of the ice-cold water. But the upturned boat sidled away from him like a skittish horse, and after grappling with it he only slipped back again exhausted, and had to clutch it as best he could.
As he clung to the gunwale he heard a faint coughing and gasping close to his ear. Some one was drowning. Hugh realized that it must be Crack, under the boat. He called to him; he chirruped, as if all were well. He stretched one hand as far as he could under the boat feeling for him. But he could not reach him. Presently the faint, difficult sound ceased, began again, stopped, and was heard no more.
A great silence seemed to rush in on the extinction of that small sound. It stooped down and enveloped Hugh in it. Everything was very calm, very still. The boat kept turning slowly round and round, the only thing that moved. The sunlight quivered on the wet, upturned keel. Already it was drying in patches. Hugh watched it. The cold was sapping his powers as if he were bleeding.
"I could have built a boat in the time Loftus takes to fetch one," he said to himself, and he looked round him. No sign of Doll. He was alone in the world. The cold was gaining on him slowly, surely. Why had he on such heavy gloves, which made him fumble so clumsily. He looked at his bare cut hands, and realized that their grip was leaving them. He felt that he was in measurable distance of losing his hold.
Suddenly a remembrance flashed across him of the sinister face of the water as it had first looked up at him through the trees. Now he understood. This was the appointed place for him to die. Hugh tightened his hold with his right hand, for his left was paralyzed.
"I will not," he said. "Nothing shall induce me. I will live and marry Rachel."
The cold advanced suddenly on him, as at the point of the bayonet.
"Why not die?" said another voice. "Will it be easier in three months' time than it is now? Will it ever be so easy again? See how near death is to life, a wheel within a wheel, two rings linked together. A touch, and you pass from one to the other."
Hugh looked wildly round him. The sun lay warm upon the tree-tops. It could not be that he was going to die here and now; here in the living sunshine, with the quiet, friendly faces of the hills all around him.
He strengthened his numb hold fiercely, all but lost it, regained it. Cramp, long held at bay, overcame him.
And the boat kept turning in the twilight. He reached the end of his strength, and held on beyond it. He heard some one near at hand suffocating in long-drawn gasps. Not Crack this time, but himself.
The boat was always turning in the darkness.
The struggle was over. "It is better so," said the other voice, through the roaring of a cataract near at hand. "Your mother will bear it better so. And all the long difficulties are over, and pain is past, and life is past, and sleep is best."
"But Rachel?"
She was here in the warm, swaying darkness. She was with him. She was Death. Death was only her arms round him in a great peace. Death was better than life. He let go the silly boat that kept him from her and turned wholly to her, his closed eyes against her breast.
Chapter XXVII
*
The main difference between people seems to be that one man can come under obligations on which you can rely—is obligable—and another is not. As he has not a law within him, there's nothing to tie him to.—EMERSON.
"Father," said Teddy to Lord Newhaven, "do—do be a horse, and I will ride you in the water."
"Me, too," said Pauly.
"I am not anxious to be a horse, Teddy. I'm quite content as I am."
Lord Newhaven was stretched in an easy but undefensive attitude on the heathery bank, with his hands behind his head. His two sons rushed simultaneously at him and knelt on his chest.
"Promise!" they cried, punching him. "Two turns each." There was a free fight, and Lord Newhaven promised.
"Honor bright! Two turns each, and really deep!"
"Honor bright," said Lord Newhaven.
His two sons got off his chest, and Teddy climbed on his back in readiness, as his father sat up and began to unlace his boots.
"Higher!" said Teddy, over his shoulder, his arms tightly clasped round his father's neck, as Lord Newhaven rolled up his trousers.
"You young slave-driver, they won't go up any higher."
"You said 'honor bright.'"
"Well, Shylock, I am 'honor bright.'"
"You had them over your knees last time."
"I had knickerbockers on, then."
"Won't these do the same?"
"They won't come up another inch."
"Then one, two, three—off!" shrieked Teddy, digging his heels into the parental back.
The horse displayed surprising agility. It curveted, it kicked, it jumped a little drain, it careered into the water, making a tremendous splashing.
The two boys screamed with delight.
But at last the horse sat down on the bank gasping, wiped its forehead, and, in spite of frenzied entreaties, proceeded to put on its socks and boots.
Lord Newhaven was not to be moved a second time. He lit a cigarette and observed that the moment for sailing boats had arrived.
The boats were accordingly sailed. Lord Newhaven tilted his hat over his eyes and acted as umpire.
"It is not usual to sail boats upsidedown," he said, seeing Teddy deliberately upset his.
"They are doing it out there," said Teddy, who had a reason for most things. And he continued to sail his boat upsidedown.
&nbs
p; Lord Newhaven got up, and swept the water with his eye. His face became keen. Then his glance fell anxiously on the children.
"Teddy and Pauly," he said, "promise me that you will both play on this one bit of sand, and not go in the water till I come back."
They promised, staring bewildered at their father.
In another moment Lord Newhaven was tearing through the brushwood that fringed the water's edge.
As he neared the boat-house he saw another figure trying to shove out the remaining boat.
It was Doll. Lord Newhaven pushed her off and jumped in.
Doll was almost speechless. His breath came in long gasps. The sweat hung on his forehead. He pointed to the black, upturned boat.
"This one leaks," said Lord Newhaven, sharply.
"It's got to go all the same, and sharp," said Doll, hoarsely.
Lord Newhaven seized up a fishing-tin and thrust it into Doll's hands.
"You bale while I row," he said, and he rowed as he had never rowed before.
"Who is it?" he said, as the boat shot out into the open.
Doll was baling like a madman.
"Scarlett," he said. "And he's over one of the springs. He'll get cramp."
Lord Newhaven strained at the oars.
*
Consciousness was coming back, was slowly climbing upwards, upwards through immense intervals of time and space, to where at last, with a wrench, pain met it half-way. Hugh stirred feebly in the dark of a great forlornness and loneliness.
"Rachel," he said—"Rachel."
His head was gently raised, and a cup pressed to his lips. He swallowed something.
He groped in the darkness for a window, and then opened his eyes. Lord Newhaven withdrew a pace or two, and stood looking at him.
Their eyes met.
Neither spoke; but Hugh's eyes, dark with the shadow of death, said plainly, "Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?"
Then he turned them slowly, as an infant turns them to the sky, the climbing woods, leaning over each other's shoulders to look at him, to the warm earth on which he lay. At a little distance was stretched a small rough-haired form. Hugh's eyes fixed on it. It lay very still.
"Crack," he said, suddenly, raising himself on his elbow.
There was neither speech nor language. Crack's tail, that courteous member, made no sign.
"He was under the boat," said Lord Newhaven, looking narrowly at the exhausted face of the man he had saved, and unable for the life of him to help a momentary fellow-feeling about the little dog.
Hugh remembered. It all came back, the boat, Crack's dying gasps, the agonized struggle, the strait gate of death, the difficult passage through it, the calm beyond. He had almost got through, and had been dragged back.
"Why did you interfere?" he said, in sudden passion, his eyes flaming in his white face.
A dull color rose to Lord Newhaven's cheek.
"I thought it was an accident," he said. "If it was not, I beg your pardon."
There was a moment's silence.
"It was an accident," said Hugh, hoarsely, and he turned on his elbow and looked fixedly at the water, so that his companion might not see the working of his face.
Lord Newhaven walked slowly away in the direction of Doll, whose distant figure, followed by another, was hurrying towards them.
"And so there is a Rachel as well, is there?" he said to himself, vainly trying to steel himself against his adversary.
"How is he now?" said Doll, coming within ear-shot.
"He's all right; but you'd better get him into dry clothes, and yourself, too."
"Change on the bank," said Doll, seizing a bundle from the keeper. "It's as hot as an oven in the sun. Why, Scarlett's sitting up! I thought when we laid into him on the bank that he was too far gone, didn't you? I suppose"—hesitating—"Crack?"
Lord Newhaven shook his head.
"I must go back to my boys now," he said, "or they will be getting into mischief."
Doll nodded. He and Lord Newhaven had had a hard fight to get the leaking boat to land with Hugh at the bottom of it. It had filled ominously when Doll ceased baling to help to drag in the heavy, unconscious body.
There had been a moment when, inapprehensive as he was, Doll had remembered, with a qualm, that Lord Newhaven could not swim.
"Every fellow ought to swim," was the moral he drew from the incident and repeated to his wife, who, struck by the soundness of the remark, repeated it to the Gresleys.
Lord Newhaven retraced his steps slowly along the bank in his water-logged boots. He was tired, and he did not hurry, for he could see in the distance two small figures sitting faithfully on a log where he had left them.
"Good little chaps," he said, half aloud.
In spite of himself his thoughts went back to Hugh. His feelings towards him had not changed, but they had been forced during the last half-hour out of their original intrenchments into the open, and were liable to attack from new directions.
It was not that he had virtually saved Hugh's life, for Doll would never have got him into the leaking boat and kept it afloat single-handed. That first moment of enthusiasm, when he had rubbed the senseless limbs and breathed into the cold lips, and had felt his heart leap when life came halting back into them, that moment had passed and left him cold.
But Hugh's melancholy eyes, as they opened once more on this world and met his unflinchingly, haunted him, and the sudden anger at his interference. It was the intrenchment of his contempt that Lord Newhaven missed.
A meaner nature would not have let him off so easily as Hugh had done.
"It was an accident," he said to himself, unwillingly. "He need not have admitted that, but I should have been on a gridiron if he had not. In different circumstances that man and I might have been friends. And if he had got into a scrape of this kind a little further afield I might have helped to get him out of it. He feels it. He has aged during the last two months. But as it is—Upon my word, if he were a boy I should have had to let him off. It would have been too bloodthirsty. But he is seven-and-twenty. He is old enough to know better. She made a fool of him, of course. She made a greater one of me once, for I—married her."
Lord Newhaven reviewed with a dispassionate eye his courtship and marriage.
"A wood anemone," he said to himself; "I likened her to a wood anemone. Good Lord! And I was thirty years of age, while this poor devil is twenty-seven."
Lord Newhaven stopped short with fixed eyes.
"I believe I should have to let him off," he said, half-aloud. "I believe I would let him off if I was not as certain as I stand here that he will never do it."
Chapter XXVIII
*
"The less wit a man has, the less he knows that he wants it."
Hester always took charge of the three elder children and Fräulein of the baby during the six-o'clock service, so that the nurse might go to church. On this particular Sunday afternoon Hester and the children were waiting in the little hall till the bell stopped, before which moment they were forbidden to leave the house. Mr. and Mrs. Gresley had just started for the church, Mr. Gresley looking worn and harassed, for since luncheon he had received what he called "a perfectly unaccountable letter" from one of his principal parishioners, a Dissenter, who had been present at the morning service, and who Mr. Gresley had confidently hoped might have been struck by the sermon. This hope had been justified, but not in the manner Mr. Gresley had expected. Mr. Walsh opined, in a large round hand, that as worms (twice under-dashed) did not usually pay voluntary church and school rates he no longer felt himself under an obligation to do so, etc. The letter was a great, an unexpected blow. Who could have foreseen such a result of the morning's eloquence.
"The truth is," said Mr. Gresley, tremulously, "that they can't and won't hear reason. They can't controvert what I say, so they take refuge in petty spite like this. I must own I am disappointed in Walsh. He is a man of some education, and liberal as regards money. I had thought he was better than
most of them, and now he turns on me like this."
"It's a way worms have," said Hester.
"Oh, don't run a simile to death, Hester," said Mr. Gresley, impatiently. "If you had listened to what I tried to say this morning you would have seen I only used the word worm figuratively. I never meant it literally, as any one could see who was not determined to misunderstand me. Worms pay school-rates! Such folly is positively sickening, if it were not malicious."
Hester had remained silent. She had been deeply vexed for her brother at the incident.
As the church-bell stopped the swing-door opened, and Boulou hurried in, like a great personage, conscious that others have waited, and bearing with him an aroma of Irish stew and onions, which showed that he had been exchanging affabilities with the cook. For the truth must be owned. No spinster over forty could look unmoved on Boulou. Alas! for the Vicarage cook, who "had kept herself to herself" for nearly fifty years, only to fall the victim of a "grande passion" for Boulou.
The little Lovelace bounded in, and the expedition started. It was Regie's turn to choose where they should go, and he decided on the "shrubbery," a little wood through which ran the private path to Wilderleigh. Doll Loftus had given the Gresleys leave to take the children there.
Red Pottage Page 18