“Mrs. Bellamy has gone to bed long ago,” said Lexie. “Do you mind running down and seeing who it is, Rook?”
“I’ll go,” cried William Hastings who happened to be nearest the door.
As he went down there was an intense moment of expectancy. Even Netta, who had been waked from sleep, realized that there was something serious in the air.
Nell was visibly trembling. “I feel,” she whispered to Rook, “as if a goose were walking over my grave.”
They could all hear the door opened and shut, the sound being followed by the tones of a man’s voice talking in a low, hurried murmur. Then there was the creaking of a hall chair as Hastings made the messenger sit down, and almost immediately the clergyman reappeared.
“It’s Drool, from Antiger Lane,” he said gravely. “Mr. Richard Ashover died two hours ago.”
CHAPTER XII
MORE than three months had passed over the precincts of Ashover, and before this space of time had elapsed the greatest transfiguration possible to the life of the earth was already growing visible and audible. The passing of autumn into winter, for all its stark relief of bare branches and frozen hills, has nothing comparable to this miraculous reversion, taking place in the heart of the vegetable world, heralded from the yellow bills of blackbirds and from the throats of wind-tossed missel thrushes mating in the high trees.
The poignance of the change has slid into the very word we use to mark and note it, a word that seems to be itself the essence of this jargoning from brown and yellow beaks, this rising of bubbling freshets between green banks, this mounting of sticky sap in cool-growing stalks!
For there is something in our northern syllable “spring” which suggests, not only the vernal fragilities themselves, but all that damp, chilly, earthy, moss-scented world out of which these little emerald-coloured blades and sheaths and filmy spears pierce their path into the air.
Latinized words, like the word “primavera,” have their own sophisticated allurement; but the word “spring,” full as it is of the very greenness of hyacinth stalks, the very blueness of hedge-sparrows’ eggs, the very glint of celandine petals, has a sadder, more human significance; has something that carries the mind back, beyond the suppliance of any particular spring sound or spring sight, into the dark rain-soaked background which gave all these things birth; into cold wet places where stinging hazel twigs switch the skin, where the ground is treacherous with hidden swamps, where young birds and young rabbits are devoured by hawks, where the winds bring a perilous relaxation and heart-hurting memories, where the beech drippings are black and poisonous, where the blackthorn buds are ominous with fate and sorrow and sudden death.
It was by a gate in Antiger Lane, as they were on their way, at the end of a long, rambling walk, to make some final arrangements as to Uncle Dick’s scanty belongings, that Lady Ann revealed to Rook that she was destined to have a child.
The girl never forgot the tiniest aspect of the scene they looked at at that moment. Her condition seemed to have softened something in her; seemed to have made her sensitive, in a way she had never been sensitive before, to the little things of nature and life.
As they leaned now side by side upon this gate the faint, almost sickly smell of primroses stole over her senses and made it harder than ever to break the silence. She had a little bunch of them in her dress, loose pink-tinged stalks and diaphanous blooms mingled with large vegetable-like leaves.
She could see the crimson buds of a large pink campion hanging loosely down against a mass of dog mercury; and not far from it, at the edge of a fallen trunk spotted with fungi, she could make out what she imagined to be the fragile greenish-yellow petals of the little plant called moschatel.
The deeper interstices of the wood as she let her gaze wander into them were not of one uniform green. It was as if there were in Nature some living spirit of growth and life that trembled and wavered into one nuance of colour after another, from faint coral to elusive purple, according to the manner in which the filmy sheaths and coverings of the buds and the sap-filled tenuous twigs took the character of their particular tree. Something in the inmost nature of the young sycamores, for example, gave to their large, clumsy, sticky embryo leaves an embronzed glossiness that was as different from the diaphanous green of the beech buds flecked with translucent threads of moth-soft whiteness as was the delicate freshness of the larches, as if an emerald-coloured waterfall had splashed down upon them, from the sturdy outgrowths of the dogwood.
“I ought to tell you, Rook, that it is certain now. It’s no good not telling you, is it?”
Some obstinate maliciousness in him made him refuse to let her off with this.
“What’s certain now? What are you talking about?”
She knew that he knew perfectly well, but she was too much softened by the season and by her mood to answer his obstinacy in like coin. “I am talking about the fact that unless anything goes wrong I am to have a child, Rook.”
As she spoke she looked straight into his face. Her gray eyes, a little distended, were solemn and almost infantile in their appeal.
“You’re not angry, Rook, are you? You’re pleased, Rook, aren’t you?”
His obstinacy did melt at this and he kissed and embraced her in all tenderness.
“Yes — I suppose I am,” he murmured, as he released her. “More than I like to admit to myself, I expect! But what the devil are we going to do now, my sweet Coz?”
“Do, Rook?”
The reproachfulness in her tone was obliterated for him by the droop in the corners of her mouth which had the look of a child who, whatever happens, must be brave and not weep, though it has “full cause for weeping.”
He made the great decision quickly now. Probably he had really, in his unconscious nature, been gradually making it all through that warm, relaxed, balmy-breathed spring.
“We must be married at once, of course; without a moment’s delay. I don’t want to make use of Hastings. In fact, he’s been so odd lately in his manner to me that he might easily refuse to have anything to do with us, and that would be the kind of thing we want to avoid just now. No! I’ll run over to Tollminster, get a special license, and see my little friend Tishmarsh. He’d marry us like a shot and nothing said! There’d be no difficulty if we did it like that. You’ve not been married before and I’ve not been married before.” He paused, and after a second found himself drawing a deep breath: “Heigh-ho!”
The sigh of the Master of Ashover floated away into the Antiger Woods and lost itself amid the chatterings of hedge sparrows and chittering of wrens. Cousin Ann bit her lip and repressed an instinctive rush of Poynings pride that might have altered the whole course of subsequent events if she had given way to it.
All she said was: “I shall put myself in your hands, Rook. You must do with me as you think best for us both.”
He drew her arm within his own and they walked on silently together toward the gamekeeper’s cottage.
Had any stranger approached them, as they loitered thoughtfully side by side, his first thought would have been: “What a splendid typical pair of English lovers!” His second thought, on catching sight of their faces, would have been: “Those people have quarrelled and neither of them is of the stuff to forgive!”
When they reached Mr. Drool’s cottage Rook looked at his watch.
“I think,” he said, “I’d better go straight back to the house, get the necessary funds, and make Twiney drive me over there before dark. It’s four o’clock now and I should catch young Tishmarsh at his tea. Twiney’s mare could easily run me over in half an hour.”