Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  * * * * *

  Gordon quickened his pace as he reached the basin of the valley under an apprehension lest he should find the farm people already risen. For, although it was still quite dark, there was all around him that universal movement, as if the earth itself were stirring from its sleep, which tells of an approaching dawn. The last two fields he covered at a run and regained the farm only to discover that his fears were groundless. The lamp in his parlour was still alight, but beginning to flicker for want of replenishing. Gordon cautiously opened the door at the foot of the staircase and listened. But he could hear nothing but his own breathing; evidently no one was moving as yet. He returned into the room to blow out the lamp, but was checked by the sight of his writing case on a cabinet against the wall. He went to it, drew out a packet of letters, and, pulling up a chair to the table, read, by the last spurts of the light, those which Kate had sent to him from Poonah. How blind he must have been, he thought. Why, effort was visible in every line of them, coldness seeking to screen itself beneath a wealth of phrases. He commenced to speculate curiously which portions were Hawke’s dictation and which her own work; otherwise the letters awakened no feeling in him. Phrases here and there fixed his attention. “You came into my life like a ray of sunlight into a musty room.” Yes! Hawke would have invented that, knowing how it would appeal to him. And, again, “I feel that I can rely on you whatever comes” — a postscript, scribbled hastily and smudged, evidently Kate’s own, and written covertly in Hawke’s presence. The extinction of the lamp put an end to this unprofitable investigation, and Gordon gathered the letters together, placed them in the grate, and set them ablaze. He waited until the last spark had died out and a heap of black flaky ashes was all that was left of the false tokens which he had treasured as sacred, and then crept cautiously up to his room. For some time he remained by his window, thinking. He noticed the angle in the barn-wall from which Hawke had darted out, and it seemed to him that the century might well have run to its end since then. His mind wandered to a side-issue, jumping at a stray suggestion that Time was held to mark age only because it represented the conventional progress of self-knowledge.

  But what if the knowledge of twenty years were crowded into one night? Gordon felt that that had been the case with him. He understood so much now; for instance, the fancy which had fleetingly occurred to him that they both had been brought into the isolation of that valley to work out a predestined purpose. He understood that purpose, could explain it, and would demonstrate his explanation to the other’s ignorance tomorrow. A gradual fading of colour from the sky made him correct himself. “To-day,” he murmured, with something of quiet exultation in his voice. Only he must spare Kate; no suspicion must be allowed to connect her with the solution of his problem. “I feel that I can rely on you whatever comes,” she had written. Well, he must prove to her that she was right — some way or another. The sound of movement in the interior of the house brought him back to the present and hinted the advantage of rest. So Gordon went to bed and slept dreamlessly until the sun stood high above the shoulder of Great End.

  CHAPTER VIII

  AS GORDON WAS breakfasting next morning, the door was thrown open and Hawke strolled in from the lane.

  “Well, have you got over your fatigue yet?” he asked, with a show of cordiality.

  “Quite, thanks!”

  Gordon let a moment or two slip before he found his tongue. For his new knowledge, acting vividly upon a somewhat morbid imagination, had not merely changed his conceptions of Hawke’s character, but, with them, also his very impressions of his appearance. He had been unconsciously developing the man’s features and body to express the qualities which he now attributed to him, moulding them, as it were, by the model of his own thoughts. So that, at the first, when Hawke stood before him in the flesh, clearly lit by the sunlight, which was pouring in through the open doorway, he hardly recognised his enemy. The very colloquialism of his speech seemed incongruous and out of place.

  “You slept soundly?” asked Hawke.

  There was a shade of anxiety in the question appreciable by his observer, and a faint symptom of a sneer about the lips when the answer was received.

  “Like a humming-top.”

  “You are going over to Eskdale, aren’t you?” Gordon resumed.

  “I shall if I have time.”

  “You have changed your plans?” The query was put with a sudden alacrity.

  “More or less. Lawson arrived at the Inn this morning from Drigg.”

  “Lawson?”

  “I don’t fancy you know him, but he was a friend of Arkwright’s.”

  “And is he going to stay here?” The anxiety was upon Gordon’s side now. Everything depended on the answer. For the presence of this interloper, even for a day, would render the accomplishment of his purpose impossible.

  “No! He is on his way to Buttermere. I am going with him part of the distance, and we mean to spend an hour or so on the Pillar Rock. If I have time I shall work round to Eskdale afterwards.”

  “It will mean a long day.”

  “Yes! But I have to leave for London to-morrow. And, by the way, that is what brought me up here. I shall be late back, I expect, and I want to borrow your lanthorn.”

  Hawke turned towards the nail on which he had seen it hanging the previous night. Gordon just managed to check an involuntary start from his chair when the other wheeled quickly round.

  “Why, it is gone!” he said suspiciously.

  “Haven’t they any at the Inn?”

  The counter-thrust was delivered with a perfect assumption of carelessness, and Hawke parried it clumsily.

  “Only one, and that’s broken. So I thought I would borrow yours.”

  “I should have been pleased to lend it you, but it belongs to the house. I suppose the farmer has taken it.”

  The indifference with which Gordon spoke disarmed Hawke, and the next moment a shadow darkening the doorway effectually prevented any further investigation as to the whereabouts of the missing article. The newcomer carried a lanthorn.

  “I hope you don’t mind me intruding,” he said. “It’s rather unceremonious, I know. But Hawke said he was going to borrow your lanthorn. Why, the landlady had two or three,” he went on, turning to Hawke. “She said she would have lent you one with pleasure. So I brought it for you.”

  “Thanks! Thanks!” Hawke interposed in confusion. “I must have misunderstood her. I never could unravel her dialect.” He abruptly introduced his friend to Gordon, and resumed: “I was just speaking of you. Gordon, you know, was with Arkwright when he died.”

  The conversation drifted into the desired channel, but too late to prevent Gordon realising that the request for a lanthorn had been the merest pretext to enable Hawke to assure himself that the night’s proceedings remained a secret. It was interrupted, however, by the servant, who bustled in with the tray to clear the table, and Gordon thought with a tremor: Suppose she had entered a minute earlier? Hawke would have been certain to question her, and to repeat his request; as it was, however, he was too anxious to cover his slip to risk broaching the subject again.

  “That is a good-looking girl,” said Lawson, when she had left the room.

  “Is she?” Gordon inquired. “I have not noticed her.”

  Lawson smothered an incredulous laugh, and Hawke broke in: “Oh, it’s true enough! Gordon never notices women’s looks. They are too sacred to him.”

  “And you nothing but their looks, I am told,” Lawson replied. “Well, I shall try to strike the golden mean.”

  “You will be making a mistake if you do,” Hawke answered.

  “Why?”

  “Because women are moods. Nothing more. They can cover the distance between Diana and Phryne at a jump. They are mere moods, and always to be construed in the present tense. You must take them as they are.”

  “You seem to have made a grammatical study of the subject,” Lawson laughed.

  “No! That is exactly what I h
ave not done. It is of no use. For, being moods, they are unintelligble, and the man who tries to solve them usually comes to grief. Besides, the effort is really unnecessary.”

  “You speak from experience?” Gordon asked quietly.

  “I don’t say that,” Hawke replied, and with a shade more of earnestness than the occasion seemed to demand. “No, I don’t say that. You may call it a theory of mine if you like. But I believe that it is true all the same. All that you want to know about a woman is the colour of her hair and eyes, whether she paints, how she is dressed, the texture of her gloves, and the size of her boots.”

  “I fancied a woman liked to be talked to about herself,” Lawson objected.

  “But those things constitute herself — at all events to most women,” he added, seeing that the other was about to interpose. “I admit there may be exceptions.”

  “But you have never met one.”

  Hawke shot a quick glance from beneath knitted brows at Gordon as the latter spoke; but the remark had fallen quite casually from his lips, and he appeared only bored by the discussion.

  “I don’t want to have my ideas attributed to personal causes. An anchorite may theorise,” Hawke replied.

  “Anchorite is good,” said Lawson.

  “Believe it or not, that is the right plan. A woman’s self is an awkward thing to tackle. It perplexes you if you begin to think about it, and the more you think, the more it perplexes you, and, consequently, the stronger the hold it seizes on you. And just because a woman’s bewildering, you run the risk of ending by respecting her — and that is fatal.”

  “Indeed! Why?”

  “Because the moment you begin to respect her, she begins to despise you.”

  Lawson burst out into a hearty laugh and said, “Come along, Hawke! That is enough lecture for to-day. You have made me laugh and bored Gordon to death.”

  “You epitomise the fate of unconventional truths,” Hawke answered, and then turned to Gordon.

  “What do you think of my theory? Does it bore you?”

  “I think,” Gordon replied, quietly, “that it is one of those theories which, to use your own words, sooner or later bring a man to grief.”

  “By Jove, yes! and irretrievably,” said Lawson. “So you had better take care, Master Hawke. I have often noticed that!” he continued musingly. “When a man comes to grief over facts, he can pull round if he has any luck. But when he comes a cropper over theories, there’s an end of him for good and all.”

  The chance remark made Gordon look towards the speaker with an active interest. Hawke’s lecture, as Lawson had said, merely bored him. The views it set forth were precisely those which he had attributed to the man, and he felt so certain of the accuracy of his opinion that the actual utterance of the views sounded to him little more than a repetition. His resolve, besides, to exact a full and speedy retribution from Hawke was mail of proof alike against the covert innuendo of the disquisition and the ironical malice which had prompted it. But these last words of Lawson seemed to him instinct with truth, and found a convincing commentary in his own experience.

  Lawson shook hands with Gordon and went out in the porch, with Hawke after him. The latter paused at the door to adjust the rucksack in which he carried their lunch on to his back, and shot a careless “I may see you again this evening” backwards over his shoulder, and they both passed the house and turned along the track to Black Sail.

  Gordon followed them into the open air. He crossed the field in front of the farm, and climbing on to the top of a huge moss-grown mound of stones which fills an angle in the boundary wall, lit his pipe and lay in the warm sunlight watching them. He could see them for some time toiling up the side of Kirkfell into Mosedale, and every now and then he caught a flash as the sun glittered on the steel head of an ice-axe. Mosedale forms, as it were, a recess in Wastdale, running back from the valley on the side opposite to Scafell, and the Pillar mountain makes the end wall of this recess. The Pillar Rock, however, to which Lawson and Hawke were directing their steps, projects from the further side of the mountain and lies in the northern valley of Ennerdale, and the distance between that spot and Wastdale cannot be traversed at the quickest in less than an hour.

  Gordon looked at his watch; it was a quarter to ten when they passed from his sight behind the shoulder of Kirkfell, and he began to calculate the time when he might hope to meet Hawke on Mickledoor Chasm. For that was the spot which he had chosen, its bleak solitude appealing to him with a sense of appropriateness. Hawke, he reflected, would have to cross Great Gable, and the Styhead, continue in the same direction southwards along Esk-Hause, the pass to Langdale, and then turn to the right into Eskdale, which is separated from the valley of Wastdale by the barrier of the Scafell chain. From there he would have to ascend the southern slope of the latter mountain, and Gordon reckoned that under no circumstances could he reach Mickledoor, the ridge between Scafell and Scafell Pikes, before half-past six.

  It would then be dark.

  That Hawke might change his plan and return home by the way he set out did not occur to him until hours after. For the half-formed idea that he was working under destiny had grown into a living conviction. He had come to look upon himself as the tool and agent in the completion of an ordained plan. So keen indeed had this feeling of personal irresponsibility become, that he gave no thoughts as to the details by which he was to carry out his purpose, confidently leaving occasion to direct the act. A line of Beatrice Cenci’s in Shelley’s play kept marching through his brain —

  “Thou wert a weapon in the hand of God

  To a just use.”

  In a word, he was looking across the interval of the next few hours, and dignifying as the judicial execution of a law what was in reality only the gratification of a savage lust for revenge; a distinction which he might have grasped from a certain luxurious feeling in the anticipation of it had he not abandoned his habit of self-analysis.

  The illusion was, moreover, very naturally strengthened by the fact that circumstances seemed strangely shaping themselves to fit in with his resolve. The very appearance of Lawson, which Gordon had considered at first an insuperable obstacle, now showed as an additional advantage. For the couple had ascended in full view towards the Pillar, in the reverse direction to Scafell, and consequently if Hawke’s body were found by the latter mountain, suspicion would be diverted from the idea of a premeditated attack. It would look as if Hawke had changed his route by chance, made the circuit of the valley, and then slipped on the cliffs at the opposite end. For Gordon reckoned that no one but Lawson and himself knew of Hawke’s projected expedition, and the former, being ignorant of the hostility between the two men, would have no reason to connect him with the accident. That Hawke had not mentioned his intentions to the Inn people seemed fairly evident from his lie about the lanthorn. Lawson, it is true, might have told them, for he borrowed it. Gordon determined to find that out. For at all costs suspicion must be diverted from himself for the sake of the girl waiting for his message fifteen miles away. He would go down to the Inn now; and besides, he recollected he had another mission to accomplish there.

  Gordon rose from his resting-place and had already proceeded some way in that direction when he suddenly stopped. After a moment’s thought he turned on his steps and went back to the farm. He shouted to his landlady to pack up his lunch in a parcel, and mounted to his room. The day before he had brought over such few articles as he required in a rucksack — the bag, half knapsack, half haversack, peculiar to mountaineers — and at the bottom of this lay, still folded up, an extra coat and pair of knee-breeches of the same cloth as those which he was wearing now. He emptied the bag of its other contents and descended with it to the parlour. The landlady presently brought in the packet which he had ordered, and he placed it with his flask inside the rucksack and fastened the strings.

  “Dinner at half-past seven,” he said. “I don’t expect to be in till then, I am going over to Rosthwaite to get some fresh nails hamme
red into my boots.”

  And he slung the rucksack on to his shoulders and went down to the Inn. He inquired what time they expected Mr. Hawke back. Mr. Hawke, they told him, had borrowed a lanthorn and set out for the Pillar, with a friend some time since. He knew that, but when did they expect him home? They were not quite sure, late they gathered, but Mr. Hawke had said nothing of the matter to them. In fact it was his friend who had borrowed the lanthorn. Could Mr. Gordon leave a note? Certainly! Would he write it in the coffee-room? Oh! He knew Mr. Hawke’s sitting-room then. No? The servant would show him to it if he preferred to write it there.

  Gordon was accordingly ushered up into the room where the first act of his tragical-comical history had been presented to his eyes the night before. He wasted no time over his recollections, however, but just cast one curious glance towards the outhouse on which he had hung, and proceeded to hunt for Kate’s missing shawl. The room was furnished upon strictly utilitarian principles, and seemed defiantly to challenge inspection by flaunting its incapacity for concealment. The search was consequently short. Gordon stopped before a cupboard in a recess by the side of the fireplace. There was another of a similar make in a corresponding position on the farther side, but that stood open, while this one was locked and the key removed. Gordon stooped to examine the lock; it belonged to that type which appears to have been invented in a genial spirit in order to excite curiosity and gratify it, and Gordon’s knife proved a quick skeleton-key. He found the shawl, as he had expected, carelessly tumbled on to the shelf, and he took it down and ran the white fleecy wool through his fingers with a queer sensation, as if he were handling something which he ought to recognise and yet could not. As a matter of fact, he knew the shawl quite well. He had bought it for Kate himself at Goring last September, when the evenings were growing chilly on the river. But he had rather fancied that the touch of it would somehow send a thrill through his deadened emotions, and the entire absence of any pulsation or throb made him hazily wonder for a moment whether this that he held was the real shawl of which he was in search.