Chapter Thirty-Nine
Although the shortening of the summer days cast the shadow of autumn over those who were sufficiently sensitive to perceive it, the weather continued fine and very warm, with the occasional heavy storms which had been frequent during this first island summer.
On the day following Muriel’s visit to Helen Webster there was little activity in a camp from which the more virile members had departed, most of its remaining population finding sufficient occupation in the routines of their daily life, which were already establishing the obligations and interdependencies without which men cannot easily congregate, however primitive may be the form of life which contents them.
And the condition of these people was not one of a primitive simplicity. It was complicated by tradition, habits, and some continuing practices of the highly organized civilization from which they came; while at the same time they had fallen, from ignorance and lack of any common directing purpose, to disorders and degradations which would have astonished the most primitive savages of any established tradition.
They ate, borrowed, quarrelled, cleaned, gossiped, and gamed, as the morning passed, or occupied themselves in sorting or exchanging the miscellaneous uselessness of their accumulations, or in some fresh salvage or constructive work.
In the later morning, some of them were mildly curious when a sound of rifle-shots was heard from the direction of Larkshill or Cowley Thorn, but this feeling was excited rather by a wonder as to the firearms that could be in use than by any fear of hostile attack.
Shots might be fired at any time at bird or rabbit, or to pick off the finest of a litter of running pigs, but it was doubtful now whether there were half a dozen effective firearms of any kind left in the district, and fewer that were in the hands of any who were likely to use them.
Curiosity quickened when the sound came more loudly—a dozen shots or more that followed one another in an irregular volley, and that were nearer than before. But these were succeeded by a long silence, giving time to discuss the nature of the noise they had heard, and the possibility of it having a quite different origin from that of their first presumption.
Only Steve Fortune, with an uneasy doubt of whether he might not have made a mistake in thinking that he would be safer here than with the militant body that he had declined to join, made his way over the canal bridge, and looked across the desolation that surrounded the derelict ironworks, to see the solitary figure of Will Carless approaching without any sign of panic, but at something more than an ordinary rate of progression.
Steve decided that he had news that it would be worth while to hear, and sat down on a heap of bricks that marked the path of the fallen stack, to await his coming.
Will paused as he came up to him, and spoke with some evident excitement:
“Cooper’s in Larkshill!”
Steve did not look perturbed, and his apparent coolness had its effect on the younger man. Steve did not consider the news to be very serious. It was imagination, not facts, that overcame him. And the rivalry of the two men had its effect on both in such a contact.
“Was it him shooting?” said Steve. “I shouldn’t ’a’ thought there’s one left in Larkshill now that ’ud fight a sparrow, unless it’s Pellow or Harris.”
“They’re not fighting,” said Will. “They were all firing at Davy Barnes. He’s got off on Todd’s bike down Sowter’s Lane, to fetch the boys back if he can. They say he got through safe, but I don’t think anyone really knows. They say Cooper’s lot rode off Cowley way. Anyway, they hadn’t come through Larkshill beyond Bycroft Lane.”
“Rode?” asked Steve.
“Yes, so they say. They say he had about sixty men, all on horseback, and armed with rifles. Martha Barnes gave the alarm, and they were bolting for cover before he got to Larkshill. We’d better see the women do the same here.”
“Where?” drawled Steve, and Will Carless looked blank.
He hated the way that Steve always made him feel young, especially when Doll was about. But the question was not easily answered. There was plenty of cover beyond Larkshill, and about Cowley Thorn there were thick copses and shattered woods, where those who would might lie more closely, and be more hardly followed, than would have been the case before they had felt the force of the tempest. But what cover was there in the cindered flats that lay on both sides of the empty ditch of the canal, and the bare, grazed fields between the line and the sea?
“Well, they’d better know,” said Steve, as Will made no answer; and the two men went back together.
It was fortunate for the inhabitants of the camp that Cooper did not appear with sixty men or with six, for there would have been no practical difference. Having nowhere to hide, its inhabitants made no attempt to do so. No one can blame them for that.
They swarmed together as the news spread, and made their way to the canal bridge, where they could see as far as the farther side of the Larkshill Road—which was on a slightly higher level—and would have warning of any hostile approach, though it is not clear that they would have found any advantage from that circumstance. There was some show of weapons among the men, and some show of courage in the presence of the women that they should protect, but the best, both of men and weapons, were away somewhere in the south, and any force of armed and mounted men that had been halted by sight of the front of resistance that they were likely to offer would have shown its ignorance of those with whom it dealt.
The only word of useful counsel came from Muriel Temple, who proposed that they should go forward to the Larkshill Road, and follow it to Bycroft Lane, and so, turning off there, might gain the shelter of the high bracken in the park, where a hundred might lie close and take some finding.
It was an audacious proposal to advance more than half-way along the road which those from whom they fled would take, but it had the logical strength of being the sole hope, however slender it might seem. But the timid crowd stood listening and hesitating, when every moment must augment their danger. They heard a distant shot, and then another still fainter. They decided that Cooper’s objective was his old locality, and with the opportunity to gain their security the inclination died. It is no defence to recognize that they were right in fact, for the reasons were beyond their knowing.
They stood there for an hour of waiting silence, and then began to scatter, one by one, to their previous occupations. But Steve still stood among those who watched and listened. At last there came the sound of two shots, almost as one, and then of others in quick succession. They were nearer than the earlier ones had been, and more to the right.
“Bycroft Lane, or thereabouts, I reckon,” said a man at Steve’s elbow.
“Someone ought to see what’s happening,” he answered, in his soft drawl. “I think I’ll go and find out.” He felt that he could endure the suspense no longer.
The group of those that remained watched him cross the barren land, and disappear to the right along the Larkshill Road. He was a hero once again in the open mouths of many women, and the thoughts of men. But he knew that he had gone only because he was in too great a fear of the danger that he could not see.
Chapter Forty
Steve Fortune made his way as far as the turning of Bycroft Lane without meeting anything larger or more formidable than a rabbit, though he saw a woman, whom he failed to recognize, with a child in her arms, farther along the Larkshill Road as he turned up the lane.
He went on up the narrow, weed-grown hollow, and he came on a brown horse, saddled but riderless, which lifted a startled head and moved off as he approached.
Steve was both alarmed and puzzled. It confirmed the rumour which Will had brought that Cooper had come with a mounted force. Steve remembered the great elm which lay across the Larkshill Road, and wondered how a troop of horse-men would surmount the obstacle, or by what other way they might have come. He supposed the horse to be a sign of the nearness of human enemies, and he looked round carefully. For some minutes he stood and listened in silence, w
hile the horse resumed its grazing.
He remembered the gaudy scarf he wore, and, with a new instinct of caution, he pulled it off, and pushed it into a pocket as he stood.
He heard nothing, and began to look at the horse with a new idea. Here was something to be acquired: something on which he might possibly escape the surrounding dangers.
His father had been a horse-coper. He had ridden bare-backed as a boy, though seldom since.
The animal was well equipped, though the saddle and bridle were evidently adapted from different sets of harness. A good horse enough, though he had seen better.
He moved slowly toward the horse, but it was shy and suspicious, and turned away up the lane as he advanced.
Then it stopped, as though there were something which it feared to pass. It moved nervously from side to side of the road, and then turned back, and made a rush past him, and down the lane.
Steve made no useless effort to follow. He went on more slowly and cautiously than before. He came upon the body of a dead man. The man was Bryan, who had been expelled from the camp after Cooper left. He had been shot more than once through the body, and in the arm.
This explained the shots they had heard, but who could have fired them?
There was a carbine lying near the dead man’s hand. Steve picked it up, and saw that it had been recently discharged from one barrel. The other was still loaded. But the man had not shot himself, and whoever had done so had left his horse and his weapon.
Steve took the carbine. He took some cartridges from the dead man also.
He went on with no less caution, but with some added confidence, and in more bewilderment than before.
He came to the spot where the stile at the bank-top gave access to the park. That was the way he had meant to go, and he saw no reason to change his purpose. Horsemen could not go that way. Bracken can give excellent cover. If he went on up the lane he would be unlikely to find anything but the sheer cliff-fall to the sea, which now broke it off. Every reason led him to choose the park.
He went straight on, not seeking the paths or the open spaces. The rabbits scattered before him. There was no other sign of life. He lay down in a deeply sheltered spot, feeling a pleasant security. It was warm, and he was glad to rest. He puzzled over what he had seen, and could find no solution. It was not his nature to be content under such circumstances. He must seek, and know. He got up again, and went on through the park.
He kept on through oak and bracken, well south of the drive, but seeing the ruins of the Hall in the distance. He approached the lodge, keeping well under cover. He had not been here before, but he knew that it must be here that Tom Aldworth kept the woman and her children.
He considered that he could gain nothing by approaching it more nearly. If the woman were lying close, she would know little or nothing. If she had been taken, his approach would be equally futile, and a useless risk. He did not want to risk anything. He had no purpose of interposition, whatever might be happening. He had no instinct of communal responsibility. But he wanted to know. Till he knew he would have no rest from the fears that vexed him.
He followed the park-palings—high, close, wooden palings, not over-easy to scale, nor wise to attempt without knowing what might be on the other side. He came to a place where a rotten cross-piece had failed and several of the uprights had been forced aside. He stepped through into a grassy ditch that ran along the side of the road. The weeds were scanty here, and there was a narrow path across the ditch, as though there had been a passage-way through the fence for some time, though he thought that the forcing of the boards was recent. The ground in the ditch was still soft from the storm of yesterday. It showed hoof-marks. Steve looked at them with attention. Two horses—if not three. And all entering. He could not see that any had left. And there was the fresh mark of a bike-tyre. He supposed that that must mean that Davy was back. But what was he doing here? If Davy were back, perhaps Tom had returned also? He went slowly down the road toward Larkshill, with an eye on the cover that grew abundantly on the high bank at the farther side, ready to retreat to its shelter at the first sign of life upon the road before him.
But it was not life to which he came. It was death again. Rentoul lay on the road, shot through the back—Rentoul who had ridden away with those first six horses that Cooper had got together. But there was no horse here, and still no sign of any human life.
The silence and mystery, to which some men would have been insensitive—might, indeed, have seen little of mystery that any of a dozen explanations would fail to satisfy—terrified Steve Fortune.
There was something to him inexplicable in these dead men of Cooper’s gang that he stumbled over on the lonely roads He had feared that Cooper would have made a fierce and fatal attack upon a population unorganized and almost unarmed for resistance. He would not have been so surprised—indeed, scarcely so terrified—had he come upon the dead bodies of men shot down in defence of their wives and homes. But this was something beyond explanation, and he could not rest nor return till he had resolved its mystery.
Yet he hesitated, as such men will, to take the bolder course of returning through Larkshill, where there must surely be evidence enough, probably voices enough, to tell him what had occurred.
He resolved to make inquiry at the silent lodge….
He went back through the fence, and made his way through the bracken the more cautiously that he thought he heard the sound of horses’ hoofs approaching up the road he had left. But though he went cautiously, and on foot, he took the shortest way, keeping the high palings within his view, and knowing that he must come upon the lodge by that direction.
It followed that he was already ambushed in the thick ivy that overgrew the bank-top above the lodge when the horses which he had heard came out from a wider circuit through the bracken, and the sound of their approach caused him to lie close, just as he had decided that he could descend in safety.
He saw two horses, one of which was ridden by a woman, and the other riderless at her side. There was nothing in such a sight to alarm a man who lay in the ivy above her, with a double-barrelled carbine against his hand.
Yet Steve lay very still, for the mystery deepened. The woman was a stranger whom he had never seen before, and she carried a child before her. He had never forgotten a face, even in the old days, and now he could have sworn to every woman that he had seen through the summer months. But that was not all. It was not men only that he remembered well. He did not forget horses either. The led horse he had not seen before, but the chestnut mare on which she rode was one of the six with which Cooper had departed from Cowley Thorn. It was the one that Rentoul had ridden, and Rentoul lay dead on the road.
The woman rode astride, and with the easy carriage of one who was well used to the saddle. She wore a belt with a heavy pistol at one side, and a long sheath-knife at the other.
He thought for a moment that she had killed Rentoul and taken his horse. But that did not follow—was indeed, unlikely, if, as he supposed she should be one of Cooper’s gang. She might have come up after he had been killed by others, caught his horse, and changed from her own, which was certainly the inferior animal, if it were the one which was now beside her.
His guesses were partly right, but, as is usual with such constructions, when he guessed correctly he misled himself further in consequence.
Of one thing he was sure. This was not the woman that Tom had kept at the lodge. He had never seen her, but he had heard her described. Besides, this one was not of a kind that would have remained so long in solitude.
Whoever she was, she reined up at the door as at an expected termination, and Steve heard it opened, as she slipped from the saddle, he could not see by whom, but he saw the rider’s face, as she turned after setting the child to the ground, more clearly than he had done before. It was the face of a woman dark of brow and of heavy, shortened hair, young, comely, and resolute. He took little account of her dress. It was little indication in these days (as, inde
ed, it had been little for many earlier ones, though from different causes), but he heard her voice, the surest means of classifying women either then or now:
“I must find them if they’re not back, but I think they’ll be quite safe. Here’s one of them, anyway.”
He heard the voice that answered, which he knew must be that of the old lodge-keeper, though he could not catch her words. He saw the rider tie the led horse to a tree at the side of the drive, and leave the other loose beside it, with a word of praise and petting.
He observed that she moved without any indication of nervous haste, but with a purposeful energy.
She went off at a brisk pace across the park, taking the way that led past the Hall, and onward to Bycroft Lane, walking as one who took a familiar way, and hitching her belt round, so that the pistol came easily to her hand.
Steve was sure that this was not a woman who could have lived among them either unknown or inactive. Yet she appeared to be known where Tom was keeping his invalid and her children, and to be occupied in their interests.
He did not feel the mystery to be less, but he felt that its solution would be here if he waited.
He had not lain for half an hour longer when he heard the feet of another horse approaching up the road. It stopped outside the gates, and a man, who was also a stranger to Steve, dismounted quickly. The horse had a second rider, in whom Steve had a fresh surprise when he recognized Davy Barnes.
He heard the man’s voice, not unkindly, but with a commanding curtness. “You can go now, Davy.” Steve knew the voice for that of one who was used to the direction of others, and who gave such an order without diverting his mind from more important considerations.
Davy walked off down the road.
The man pulled out some keys, and unlocked the gates, though not as one who was accustomed to do so. He led his horse through, and fastened it beside the brown gelding already tethered. He stood for a moment, as though irresolute, before a door that remained closed and silent. Steve, always sensitive to the moods of others, thought that he was divided between hope and fear as he did so. But he was not of a kind to hesitate in facing the event that met him. After that moment’s pause, he stepped resolutely to the door, and knocked upon it.
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