He stopped dead still, listening intently, cursing the loud chatter of a jay that broke the surrounding stillness.
It was those two! He knew their tones. He knew the amorousness in his brother’s low chuckling laugh; he knew the faint broken protest — who would not know that if not he? — of Nell’s timid and enchanting reluctance.
The path in which he waited now was narrowed and almost closed by several horn-beam bushes; and to the end of his life he remembered the look of those thick leaves, so olive-green on one side and so ivory-white on the other! One of these bushes had extended clear across the path; and unwilling to force his way noisily through its thick growth he sank down upon hands and knees and crept under it, still holding his cloth cap in one hand and his stick in the other.
A sour-sweet smell rose from the earth as his knuckles pressed against it, that peculiar smell which belongs to dry wood mould that has been so fed by fallen leaves and by the rubble of dead twigs as to become something far more organic than the soil of any ploughed-up open field.
In the midst of the blind turmoil of his blood his senses seemed preternaturally acute and alert. He saw the tiny gray cups of a little patch of moss, each cup decorated outside by infinitesimal scales and bosses, as if from the fingers of some fairy Hephæstus, and shining inside as though inlaid with opalescent enamel.
It was extraordinary how clear his mind was as he crept forward, the lower branches of the hornbeam switching the back of his head. He even stopped, for the flicker of a second, to lift up the bent stalk of a minute saxifrage which his hand, as if it had been the paw of an animal, had brushed heavily aside. As far as the sensations of that little cluster of pale green petals were concerned he might have been a love-crazed dinosaur, advancing to interrupt the pleasures of a brother dinosaur. A blind weight, a crushing bruise, and then a great mysterious uplifting! That was all that the saxifrage felt. How could it know that this miraculous uplifting was the result, achieved at a moment when the rest of the man was demented, of the existence of a pitifulness in human nature that was older than its earliest appearance in Antiger Great Wood?
There was a single moment, just before he saw them there in that sunlit glade, when a half-forgotten memory of some childish game with his brother in that very place became a living portion of the olive-green screen before him, a living film of affection, which had to be torn apart by a conscious movement of his will before he leapt out upon them.
But he lifted his head now, very gently, rising up on his knees; and what he saw, as he rose, seemed by its own power, independently of his will, to break that filmy screen of ancient association. Standing locked together in one another’s arms, in the very centre of Titty’s Ring, the long grass in the sunlight showing green as seaweed about their feet, Nell barely touching the ground upon which Lexie’s heels were so masterfully planted, the two figures were swaying to and fro in an ecstasy of amorous enchantment. He rose upright, flung aside the last intervening branch of the hornbeam, and rushed out upon them.
His first impulse was to strike them both down. The accumulated irritations of many months would have been behind that blow; and behind it, too, would have been a deep, subterranean, occult jealousy of Lexie; not merely the immediate jealousy over Nell but a much more subtle thing: a jealousy of Lexie’s sagacity and — who knows? — even of the mysterious advantage in these things that his very illness gave him! And mentally speaking, the blow was given. Rook had the feeling of giving it. He had the relief, the exhaustion, the relaxation of having given it. And yet in the course of his rush toward them, and of his approach till he’ stopped in front of them, he never so much as raised his hand.
Lexie was the one whose head was turned toward him and he at once loosened his hold upon the girl, who sank down upon the grass. Whiter than any human being had ever seen it was the younger Ashover’s Claudian countenance as he moved forward a step or two, putting himself between his brother and the girl upon the ground. As for Nell, she gave one startled cry, stared at the intruder as if he had been a complete stranger, and then covered her face with her two hands.
“So this is it, is it?” said Rook hoarsely, confronting them with a look so menacing that Lexie made a little nervous deprecatory movement.
“Rook — I’m ashamed of you — to follow us like this — to frighten Nell like this— What’s up now? What’s the matter with you? Nell and I have a perfect right to come out together if we want to on a fine August afternoon!”
His voice took on the old familiar tone of semi-badinage as he said this, and the colour began to come back to his face.
“So this is it!” repeated Rook, staring wildly at Nell who had now removed her hands from her face and was answering his look with a steady scrutinizing gaze that became more and more full of complicated significance.
“So this is how you have decided to treat me,” he went on, throwing down both stick and cap upon the grass and rubbing his forehead as if to obliterate some evil dream. “It’s the sort of thing one expects from Lexie,” he continued bitterly; “but I’d fooled myself into thinking that you were different from the rest of them, Nell.”
The younger Ashover began at this moment to display unmistakable signs of his malady. A quick spasm crossed his features; his mouth quivered; a convulsive tremor ran through him. “Sit down!” said Rook in a commanding tone. “No, you’re perfectly right. I ought not to have come. But you needn’t be afraid, you two; I won’t interrupt your excursions a second time. Sit down, Lexie, can’t you?”
His brother obeyed him and sinking on the ground by Nell’s side hugged his knees with his arms.
“I thought you meant fisticuffs just now, Rook,” he said, smiling. “What would you have done”—and he turned his head toward the young girl—“if Rook and I had started butting at each other like two roaring bulls? God! I’m glad you didn’t go for me with that oak stick of yours, Rook. It looks like the very father of cudgels! Sit down yourself, for the Lord’s sake; and don’t stand on one leg any more.”
But Rook did not change from his dazed, fixed stare at Nell. It was as if he had been some infuriated but puzzled savage, whose spirit was slowly being sapped by the power of a civilized eye.
“I’m sorry, Nell,” he blurted out at last. “I’m very sorry I followed you.”
But the girl rose quietly to her feet. “I think I’ll walk home by myself,” she said. “I’ve had enough of the Ashover family for one afternoon!”
Her tenuous sarcasm, obvious and simple though it was, carried a weight out of all proportion to its justification, by reason of its incongruity upon the lips that uttered it. Lexie made a grimace; and searching about in his pocket for what he wanted lit a cigarette with shaky fingers.
But Rook’s face darkened into an angry frown. “You won’t leave this spot, Nell,” he said fiercely, “till you and I have come to an understanding!”
She made no answer to this challenge; but tossing her head and giving him one quick reproachful look she walked off toward the hornbeam path.
Both the brothers saw her forcing her way through the branch-covered aperture with swift impatient movements of her thin bare arms.
When she was out of sight Rook made a hesitating movement to follow her.
“Stop, you fool, stop!”
The affectionate roughness in Lexie’s tone did more than all his whimsicalities to soothe away the elder brother’s dangerous mood. Curiously enough, too, the mere fact that he had seen the worst, or what he convinced himself was the worst, of that amorous encounter, drew out the sharpest sting of his jealousy. And the girl had gone. Lexie and she were no longer together. And in her going she had reserved her indignation, her hurt pride, her revolt, her sense of shame, entirely for him; her mute reproaches entirely for him; her revenge entirely for him. That “I’ve had enough of you Ashovers” was a barbed dart that she must have known he would be the one to smart under! Lexie would not care. Lexie enjoyed a certain humorous gregariousness in his amours. “Enough of the Ashovers” was a hit at the elder of the Ashovers; and in these cases the one whom the woman wants to hurt the most is the one she loves the best!