She left the heap of burning weeds and moved slowly, very slowly, toward the house. She began to be aware that the exhaustion, which made her body feel like something that was made of pulseless wool but at the same time was as heavy as sods of turf, was now accompanied by other, more disturbing symptoms.
Lady Ann bit her lip and stood for a moment quite still. Then, moving on steadily and quietly across the lawn, she mounted the familiar steps of the entrance to the house and opened the door into the hall.
Here she swayed and staggered; and finally fell half-fainting into one of the great mahogany hall chairs inscribed with the armorial bearings of the House of Ashover!
CHAPTER XXV
BY GOOD fortune Mr. Twiney and his gig were both in the Ashover stable, when on Lady Ann’s recovery from her collapse it became plain that her confinement was at hand. The man was despatched at once to fetch Doctor Twickenham, whose house was some three miles away, on the Tollminster Road.
It was Mrs. Ashover herself who discovered the girl, white and foredone, on that hard mahogany chair in the panelled hall. The old lady displayed as much energy in this crisis as she had done on previous agitating occasions; and it was not long before, with Rook’s help, she had got the girl safely undressed and in bed, in the pleasant room she had used since her arrival on the scene more than a year ago.
Left alone at last with his wife, whose sufferings were at present very intermittent, Rook found himself quite differently affected and much more affected than he had anticipated. He was a man to whom the immediate presence of physical distress was more impressive than any mental or emotional appeal. Something peculiarly responsive and sensitive in him was stirred and troubled as he watched those quick spasms crossing the girl’s flushed face.
“Ann,” he muttered as he bent down over her. “Ann, my sweet Ann!”
She smiled at him stoically, but he could not help noticing that there was a remoteness and detachment at the back of her eyes, as if she were a duellist with drawn rapier saluting her opponent while she spoke lightly and casually to the friend at her side.
“You will get through it all right, Ann? You feel you’ll be all right?”
It seemed natural enough to her that she should be the one to supply comfort at that moment rather than to receive it.
“Of course I’ll get through it, Rook,” she said. “Don’t you fret yourself about me. Go for a walk and keep safe away till it’s all over. And don’t let your mother or any one else worry you about me. I shall be all right.”
She clenched her fingers tightly as a recurrent spasm overtook her; but as soon as it passed she smiled at him again.
“He’ll be born on the first of October,” she said confidently.
There was a moment’s silence between them while he wondered whether it would annoy her, or whether she would think it an unreal and sentimental thing to do, if he took hold of one of her hands.
To his utter astonishment she suddenly plucked both her arms out from beneath the sheet and flung them round his neck.
“Kiss me, Rook,” she sobbed. “I love you! I do love you so much!”
He bent down; and for the first time in the lives of these two proud creatures there were salt tears mingled with the embrace they exchanged.
A hurried knock at the door made the man rise up erect and composed.
“Open it, dear,” she gasped; and with a smile more obviously strained than any she had yet given him, “and go for a good long walk — but not too long!”
He opened the door and there stood his mother. The little lady had the demeanour of some military conqueror in an old print who stands amid dying men and horses with the complacency of a successful horticulturist.
“We mustn’t exhaust her by talking,” she said; and Rook felt inclined to take the triumphant old woman by the shoulders and shake her violently, while he bawled in her ears: “It’s wicked! It’s wicked! It’s wrong! It’s wrong! It’s wrong!” What he did say was: “I’m going out for a while, Mother. Twickenham will be here in a moment.”
“But — Rook”—and Mrs. Ashover showed signs of puzzled irritation—“she may ask for you presently. She may want you. They often feel like that!”
He pushed past her without replying and ran downstairs.
His overcoat lay on the hall table and he pulled it on, shivering. For some reason he felt at that moment deadly cold. As he did this Pandie came running out of the kitchen.
“Master Rook! How be my Lady? Be it really begun, then? ’Tis best for all when’t do come quick and fast. Missus said I were to bide in kitchen and not come nigh to she; but ’tis terrible hard to stand afore thik old sink and act natural-like when my Lady be brought to bed. Martha, she do say ’tis the Lord wi’ healing in His wings what us best to pray to; but I says, and they was my very words, Master Rook, I says, I’ll just run out and ask Squire hisself. Maybe he’ll say ’tis tempting of Providence for I to bide in kitchen! Maybe he’ll say ’twere best for she and best for the blessed babe that I bide upstairs near thik door so’s to be ready and waiting. Martha can open for doctor. She be one who can act natural when all be topsy-turvied! But I weren’t born holy and hushed. I were born trembly and human-hearted. So don’t ’ee tell I to bide in kitchen, Master Rook, when my Lady be brought to bed. ’Tisn’t in nature that I should do the like o’ that, whatever Missus do say!”
Rook hardly caught the drift of this torrent of speech, but a sickening pity came over him for that lonely figure in the room upstairs; and at the same time the feeling deepened upon him that he must get away — away — away.
He moved to the door; but the red-haired servant in her excitement clung to his coat sleeve.
“Thee aren’t going out, Master, be ’ee? Oh, don’t ’ee go out, Master, don’t ’ee go out! I’ve a-heard four girt thunderclaps already as I were trying to scrape thik old silver coffee-pot what thee mother must have clean though sky do fall! Don’t ’ee go out, Squire Ash’ver, don’t ’ee go out, Master Rook! Doctor’ll be here present; and ’tisn’t in nature for ’ee to go!”
He flung her off and rushed bareheaded into the garden, slamming the great Georgian door behind him. It was with an indescribable feeling of relief, when he found himself outside the drive gate and in the road, that he felt heavy splashes of rain upon his face.
There was no sound of thunder; and indeed it may well have been that those four thunderclaps had no existence except in Pandie’s head, but before he had gone many steps a torrential volume of rain descended upon him.
It was like the breaking of some vast taut hawser by which the very planetary ship itself was roped to its cosmic dock; so that the earth vessel now, free of all restraint, unpiloted, masterless, lampless, drifted, with all its dark, wet, silent decks and rigging, into a chaos of water, wherein the waters “that are above the firmament” mingled with the waters “that are beneath the firmament!”
When Rook reached the middle of the stone bridge he turned round, hearing the sound of wheels. Very faintly, like two watery marsh fires, phosphorescent and fitful, he could see the lights of Twiney’s cart as it stopped at the drive gate. So the mare had been persuaded, somehow, in spite of this waterspout of rain, to pass the “Gorm” signpost; and the doctor had come to Ashover House, for the first time, for this purpose, since he came to assist at the birth of Lexie!
Rook leaned upon the cold parapet of the bridge from the surface of which the rain splashed into the darkness. As he stared down into the murmuring obscurity beneath him he remembered how the river had looked on that moonlit night when Lexie came over from Marsh Alley to meet him in the churchyard. That was the first time his brother had told him about his desire to be buried underneath the elm.