And yet as they went about together there was growing in Betty Vanderpoel’s mind a certain realisation. It grew in spite of the recognition of the change in him—the new thing lighted in his eyes. Whatsoever he felt—if he felt anything— he would never allow himself speech. How could he? In his place she could not speak herself. Because he was the strong thing which drew her thoughts, he would not come to any woman only to cast at her feet a burden which, in the nature of things, she must take up. And suddenly she comprehended that the mere obstinate Briton in him—even apart from greater things—had an immense attraction for her. As she liked now the red-brown colour of his eyes and saw beauty in his rugged features, so she liked his British stubbornness and the pride which would not be beaten.
“It is the unconquerable thing, which leads them in their battles and makes them bear any horror rather than give in. They have taken half the world with it; they are like bulldogs and lions,” she thought. “And—and I am glorying in it.”
“Do you know,” said Mount Dunstan, “that sometimes you suddenly fling out the most magnificent flag of colour—as if some splendid flame of thought had sent up a blaze?”
“I hope it is not a habit,” she answered. “When one has a splendid flare of thought one should be modest about it.”
What was there worth recording in the whole hour they spent together? Outwardly there had only been a chance meeting and a mere passing by. But each left something with the other and each learned something; and the record made was deep.
At last she was on her horse again, on the road outside the white gate.
“This morning has been so much to the good,” he said. “I had thought that perhaps we might scarcely meet again this year. I shall become absorbed in hops and you will no doubt go away. You will make visits or go to the Riviera—or to New York for the winter?”
“I do not know yet. But at least I shall stay to watch the thorn trees load themselves with coral.” To herself she was saying: “He means to keep away. I shall not see him.”
As she rode off Mount Dunstan stood for a few moments, not moving from his place. At a short distance from the farmhouse gate a side lane opened upon the highway, and as she cantered in its direction a horseman turned in from it— a man who was young and well dressed and who sat well a spirited animal. He came out upon the road almost face to face with Miss Vanderpoel, and from where he stood Mount Dunstan could see his delighted smile as he lifted his hat in salute. It was Lord Westholt, and what more natural than that after an exchange of greetings the two should ride together on their way! For nearly three miles their homeward road would be the same.
But in a breath’s space Mount Dunstan realised a certain truth—a simple, elemental thing. All the exaltation of the morning swooped and fell as a bird seems to swoop and fall through space. It was all over and done with, and he understood it. His normal awakening in the morning, the physical and mental elation of the first clear hours, the spring of his foot as he had trod the road, had all had but one meaning. In some occult way the hypnotic talk of the night before had formed itself into a reality, fantastic and unreasoning as it had been. Some insistent inner consciousness had seized upon and believed it in spite of him and had set all his waking being in tune to it. That was the explanation of his undue spirits and hope. If Penzance had spoken a truth he would have had a natural, sane right to feel all this and more. But the truth was that he, in his guise—was one of those who are “on the roadside everywhere—all over the world.” Poetically figurative as the thing sounded, it was prosaic fact.
So, still hearing the distant sounds of the hoofs beating in cheerful diminuendo on the roadway, he turned about and went back to talk to Bolter.
CHAPTER XXXVII
CLOSED CORRIDORS
To spend one’s days perforce in an enormous house alone is a thing likely to play unholy tricks with a man’s mind and lead it to gloomy workings. To know the existence of a hundred or so of closed doors shut on the darkness of unoccupied rooms; to be conscious of flights of unmounted stairs, of stretches of untrodden corridors, of unending walls, from which the pictured eyes of long dead men and women stare, as if seeing things which human eyes behold not—is an eerie and unwholesome thing. Mount Dunstan slept in a large four-post bed in a chamber in which he might have died or been murdered a score of times without being able to communicate with the remote servants’ quarters below stairs, where lay the one man and one woman who attended him. When he came late to his room and prepared for sleep by the light of two flickering candles the silence of the dead in tombs was about him; but it was only a more profound and insistent thing than the silence of the day, because it was the silence of the night, which is a presence. He used to tell himself with secret smiles at the fact that at certain times the fantasy was half believable—that there were things which walked about softly at night—things which did not want to be dead. He himself had picked them out from among the pictures in the gallery—pretty, light, petulant women; adventurous-eyed, full-blooded, eager men. His theory was that they hated their stone coffins, and fought their way back through the grey mists to try to talk and make love and to be seen of warm things which were alive. But it was not to be done, because they had no bodies and no voices, and when they beat upon closed doors they would not open. Still they came back—came back. And sometimes there was a rustle and a sweep through the air in a passage, or a creak, or a sense of waiting which was almost a sound.
“Perhaps some of them have gone when they have been as I am,” he had said one black night, when he had sat in his room staring at the floor. “If a man was dragged out when he had not LIVED a day, he would come back I should come back if—God! A man COULD not be dragged away—like THIS!”
And to sit alone and think of it was an awful and a lonely thing—a lonely thing.
But loneliness was nothing new, only that in these months his had strangely intensified itself. This, though he was not aware of it, was because the soul and body which were the completing parts of him were within reach—and without it. When he went down to breakfast he sat singly at his table, round which twenty people might have laughed and talked. Between the dining-room and the library he spent his days when he was not out of doors. Since he could not afford servants, the many other rooms must be kept closed. It was a ghastly and melancholy thing to make, as he must sometimes, a sort of precautionary visit to the state apartments. He was the last Mount Dunstan, and he would never see them opened again for use, but so long as he lived under the roof he might by prevision check, in a measure, the too rapid encroachments of decay. To have a leak stopped here, a nail driven or a support put there, seemed decent things to do.
“Whom am I doing it for?” he said to Mr. Penzance. “I am doing it for myself—because I cannot help it. The place seems to me like some gorgeous old warrior come to the end of his days It has stood the war of things for century after century—the war of things. It is going now I am all that is left to it. It is all I have. So I patch it up when I can afford it, with a crutch or a splint and a bandage.”
Late in the afternoon of the day on which Miss Vanderpoel rode away from West Ways with Lord Westholt, a stealthy and darkly purple cloud rose, lifting its ominous bulk against a chrysoprase and pink horizon. It was the kind of cloud which speaks of but one thing to those who watch clouds, or even casually consider them. So Lady Anstruthers felt some surprise when she saw Sir Nigel mount his horse before the stone steps and ride away, as it were, into the very heart of the coming storm.