He drove off, and the atmosphere felt lighter for the removal of his solid, overpowering presence. Jeannie, who had removed herself to the back premises at his approach, celebrated his departure by rushing out with a paroxysm of barking.
“That man always brings out the worst in me,” Hester observed. “He’s so worthy. I wish he would marry Louisa Gorman, though. She’s about the one woman I know who could keep him under. Goodbye, Ellie. Come again soon.”
Eleanor’s homeward route took her across Bolter’s Tussock. The westering sun was in her eyes as she came out on to the open moor at the top of the slope. Thus it was that only at the last moment did she put on her brakes in time to avoid a pale-faced mud-splashed man who tottered out into the road in front of her.
“Frank, darling!” she exclaimed. “What have you been up to now?”
CHAPTER IV. The Find
Pettigrew watched the car out of sight round a bend in the road, and then set himself to climb the short but steep slope in front of him. He was walking here on thin, wiry grass, made slippery by a month’s drought, and it was more of an effort than he had bargained for. He told himself very firmly that it was delightful to be walking again on Exmoor. He repeated it-rather defiantly-when one foot sank ankle deep in a boggy patch that mysteriously maintained itself on an otherwise arid hillside. After stopping to admire the view for the third time, he qualified it by the admission that for a man of his age Bolter’s Tussock was a good deal too far from the nearest road for comfort.
Then, as he gazed up towards the heathery plateau which seemed scarcely nearer than when he had started, something appeared momentarily on the skyline and was gone again with a gleam of sun on glass. It was so unexpected that it took him an appreciable time to recognize it. But there could be no doubt. It was a motor car, or rather the upper half of one, travelling on a road which must be lying just beyond the crest of the hill, a place where no road should have been-or at least where none had been when Pettigrew was last there. To prove that it was no optical illusion, two packed coaches followed in its wake a moment later.
His first reaction to the discovery that Bolter’s Tussock was in fact now about the most easily accessible spot on the moor was one of blind, irrational rage. A road! A highway across Bolter’s Tussock! The thing seemed a sheer indecency. Was nothing sacred nowadays? He stood there, fuming impotently, while several more vehicles crossed and recrossed the once hallowed spot, until the absurdity of the situation struck him, and he laughed aloud.
This was what happened, he told himself, when an elderly crock revisited the scenes of his childhood, and was naïve enough to think that he could revive, unchanged, the emotions that the child had experienced. First he discovered that his legs and lungs were barely equal to what had once been an easy walk; then that a very sensible piece of road engineering had made the walk unnecessary. He was a fool to have expected anything else, and a sentimentalist to regret it. All the same, if changes there had to be, he wished that they could have come anywhere else than to Bolter’s Tussock. As a boy, even before it had become associated with the first genuine fear that he had known, the place had had for him a quality of loneliness and mystery. He remembered how he had prided himself on the fact-real or fancied-that the name was a purely local usage and did not appear on the maps, so that only the truly initiate could even utter it. Now it was probably scheduled as a fare stage for buses. It was ridiculous to be upset by such a thing, but he felt upset, none the less. Rather melodramatically, he allowed himself the luxury of a deep sigh.
The sigh was echoed loudly from somewhere close at hand. He looked round in surprise but saw nothing to account for it. The noise was repeated, and followed this time by a throaty gurgle that, like so many things he had seen and heard that day, seemed to belong to the past. Then over the curve of the hillside above him appeared a face-an innocent, enquiring face, topped with a dark forelock that tumbled over a narrow forehead between two mild brown eyes-a long narrow face, terminating in the light-tan muzzle that is traditionally held to mark the Exmoor pony.
Pettigrew stared at the newcomer, who stared back at him, and then began haltingly to advance in his direction. At first glance it seemed remarkably like the pony whose odd characteristics he had been recalling shortly before, but he realized almost at once that it must be larger, several-what did they call them?-hands larger, in fact, unless he, Pettigrew, had mysteriously shrunk to the size of the small boy who had once ridden that pony. In other respects, the illusion was singularly complete. Like its predecessor, this was a half-bred Exmoor pony-always supposing that such a thing as a pure-bred Exmoor existed, as to which he seemed to recollect some controversy. This animal had thrown its rider, just as the other had been wont to do. It was stumbling because one fore leg was caught up in the trailing reins-a phenomenon which Pettigrew had had occasion to observe before. And as he had done more than once in those distant days, Pettigrew was now advancing upon it, uttering deprecating sounds.
The pony displayed no reluctance to be caught, thereby showing another marked distinction from the one that bulked so large in Pettigrew’s memory. Not only that, but it actually consented to stand stock still while he clumsily lifted one fore leg and released it from the reins. Either the breed had become noticeably milder with the years, he reflected, or this particular specimen must be too exhausted to resent handling. He slipped the reins over its head and examined his capture. To judge from its condition, it had been down in a bog recently, but it showed no signs of distress, although it was sweating freely. He patted its neck, and the beast responded by nearly knocking him over with a gesture of its head that was apparently intended to be friendly. He found an apple left over from lunch in his pocket, and their relations became positively affectionate.
“Well, Dobbin, and what do I do with you now?” Pettigrew asked.
The only reply that Dobbin could think of, apparently, was to thrust his nose in the direction of the now empty pocket and sneeze damply over Pettigrew’s coat. It was well-intentioned, but not particularly helpful.
He looked about him. The moor, which so recently had been alive with horsemen, horsewomen and not a few horsechildren, was now to all appearances deserted. There seemed little point now in going back to the road as he had intended. Even if after this delay he got there in time to cut off Eleanor, he could hardly abandon Dobbin to his fate. The better course, and the kinder one, seemed to be to press on up the hill in the hope of finding his late rider. Looking at the saddle and bridle and still judging this pony by the one that he remembered best, he came to the conclusion that they must have parted company fairly recently. Had it been otherwise, he reasoned, Dobbin would by now have shed a stirrup leather rolling in a bog-hole, if not burst his girth and got rid of the saddle altogether. At the very least, he would have trodden on the reins sufficiently hard and often to snap them. Yet the harness was in perfect order, though as worn and ancient as the equipment of hireling animals is apt to be. Warm with the conscious rectitude of a good Samaritan, Pettigrew took Dobbin by the bridle, turned him round and began to walk him back in the direction from which he had appeared.
The pony came willingly enough-from Pettigrew’s point of view a thought too willingly. It was the old difficulty of trying to accommodate the paces of two animals of very different natural gaits, and, willing as he might be, accommodation was not Dobbin’s strong point. He walked uphill about twice as fast as Pettigrew was prepared to go, and when checked threw his head about in a most uncomfortable and alarming fashion. Moreover, he had a disconcerting habit of monopolizing the only semblance of a track that there was and pushing his escort off it with a broad, hard and very smelly shoulder. The walk soon showed every sign of degenerating into a thoroughly undignified contest, in which Pettigrew got the worst of every round.