The engine emitted a portentious puff of smoke, and the train began to move. Luke walked by the side of his friend’s window, his hand on the sash.
“You think it is inadvisable to thwart my brother, then,” he said, “in any way at all. You think I must humour him. You are afraid if I don’t—” His walk was of necessity quickened into a run.
“It’s a long story, dearie, a long story. But I had the privilege under God Almighty of knowing your blessed mother when she was called, and I tell you it makes my heart ache to see James going along the same road as—”
Her voice was extinguished by the noise of wheels and steam. Luke, exhausted, was compelled to relax his hold. The rest of the carriages passed him with accumulated speed and he watched the train disappear. In his excitement he had advanced far beyond the limits of the platform. He found himself standing in a clump of yellow rag-wort, just behind his own stone-cutter’s shed.
He gazed up the track, along which the tantalizing lady had been so inexorably snatched away. The rails had a dull whitish glitter but their look was bleak and grim. They suggested, in their narrow merciless perspective, cutting the pastures in twain, the presence of some remorseless mechanical Will carving its purpose, blindly and pitilessly, out of the innocent waywardness of thoughtless living things.
An immense and indefinable foreboding passed, like the insertion of a cold, dead finger, through the heart of the young man. Fantastic and terrible images pursued one another through his agitated brain. He saw his brother lying submerged in Hullaway Pond, while a group of frightened children stood, in white pinafores, stared at him with gaping mouths. He saw himself arriving upon this scene. He even went so far as to repeat to himself the sort of cry that such a sight might naturally draw from his lips, his insatiable dramatic sense making use, in this way, of his very panic, to project its irrepressible puppet-show. His brother’s words, “Young man, I will never forgive you for this,” rose luridly before him. He saw them written along the edge of a certain dark cloud which hung threateningly over the Hullaway horizon. He felt precisely what he would feel when he saw them — luminously phosphorescent — in the indescribable mud and greenish weeds that surrounded his brother’s dead face. A sickening sense of loss and emptiness went shivering through him. He felt as though nothing in the world was of the least importance except the life of James Andersen.
With hurried steps he re-crossed the line, re-passed the turn-stile, and began following the direction taken by his brother just two hours before. Never had the road to Hullaway seemed so long!
Half-way there, where the road took a devious turn, he left it, and entering the fields again, followed a vaguely outlined foot-path. This also betraying him, or seeming to betray him, by its departure from the straight route, he began crossing the meadows with feverish directness, climbing over hedges and ditches with the desperate pre-occupation of one pursued by invisible pursuers. The expression upon his face, as he hurried forward in this manner, was the expression of a man who has everything he values at stake. A casual acquaintance would never have supposed that the equable countenance of Luke Andersen had the power to look so haggard, so drawn, so troubled. He struck the road again less than half a mile from his destination. Why he was so certain that Hullaway was the spot he sought, he could hardly have explained. It was, however, one of his own favourite walks on rainless evenings and Sunday afternoons, and quite recently he had several times persuaded his brother to accompany him. He himself was wont to haunt the place and its surroundings, because of the fact that, about a mile to the west of it, there stood an isolated glove-factory to which certain of the Nevilton girls were accustomed to make their way across the field-paths.
Hullaway village was a very small place, considerably more remote from the world than Nevilton, and attainable only by narrow lanes. The centre of it was the great muddy stagnant pond which now so dominated Luke’s alarmed imagination. Near the pond was a group of elms, of immense antiquity, — many of them mere stumps of trees, — but all of them possessed of wide-spreading prominent roots, and deeply indented hollow trunks worn as smooth as ancient household furniture, by the constant fumbling and scrambling of generations of Hullaway children.
The only other objects of interest in the place, were a small, unobtrusive church, built, like everything else in the neighborhood, of Leonian stone, and an ancient farm-house surrounded by a high manorial wall. Beneath one of the Hullaway Elms stood an interesting relic of a ruder age, in the shape of some well-worn stocks, now as pleasant a seat for rural gossips as they were formerly an unpleasant pillory for rural malefactors.
As Luke Andersen approached this familiar spot he observed with a certain vague irritation the well-known figure of one of his most recent Nevilton enchantresses. The girl was no other, in fact, than that shy companion of Annie Bristow who had been amusing herself with them in the Fountain Square on the occasion of Mr. Clavering’s ill-timed intervention. At this moment she was sauntering negligently along, on a high-raised path of narrow paved flag-stones, such paths being a peculiarity of Hullaway, due to the prevalence of heavy autumn floods.
The girl was evidently bound for the glove-factory, for she swung a large bundle as she walked, resting it idly every now and then, on any available wall or rail or close-cut hedge, along which she passed. She was an attractive figure, tall, willowy, and lithe, and she walked in that lingering, swaying voluptuous manner which gives to the movements of maidens of her type a sort of provocative challenge. Luke, advancing along the road behind her, caught himself admiring, in spite of his intense preoccupation, the alluring swing of her walk and the captivating lines of her graceful person.
The moment was approaching that he had so fantastically dreaded, the moment of his first glance at Hullaway Great Pond. He was already relieved to see no signs of anything unusual in the air of the place, — but the imaged vision of his brother’s drowned body still hovered before him, and that fatal “I’ll never forgive you for this!” still rang in his ears.
His mind all this while was working with extraordinary rapidity and he was fully conscious of the grotesque irrelevance of this lapse into the ingrained habit of wanton admiration. Quickly, in a flash of lightning, he reviewed all his amorous adventures and his frivolous philanderings. How empty, how bleak, how impossible, all such pleasures seemed, without the dark stooping figure of this companion of his soul as their taciturn background! He looked at Phyllis Santon with a sudden savage resolution, and made a quaint sort of vow in the depths of his heart.
“I’ll never speak to the wench again or look at her again,” he said to himself, “if I find Daddy Jim safe and sound, and if he forgives me!”
He hurried past her, almost at a run, and arrived at the centre of Hullaway. There was the Great Pond, with its low white-washed stone parapet. There were the ancient elm-trees and the stocks. There also were the white-pinafored infants playing in the hollow aperture of the oldest among the trees. But the slimy surface of the water was utterly undisturbed save by two or three assiduous ducks who at intervals plunged beneath it.
He drew an immense sigh of relief and glanced casually round. Phyllis had not failed to perceive him. With a shy little friendly smile she advanced towards him. His vow was already in some danger. He waved her a hasty greeting but did not take her hand.
“You’d better put yourself into the stocks,” he said, covering with a smile the brutality of his neglect, “until I come back! I have to find James.”
Leaving her standing in mute consternation, he rushed off to the churchyard on the further side of the little common. There was a certain spot here, under the shelter of the Manor wall, where Luke and his brother had spent several delicious afternoons, moralizing upon the quaint epitaphs around them, and smoking cigarettes. Luke felt as if he were almost sure to find James stretched out at length before a certain old tombstone whose queer appeal to the casual intruder had always especially attracted him. Both brothers had a philosophical mania for these sepulchral places, and the Hullaway graveyard was even more congenial to their spirit than the Nevilton one, perhaps because this latter was so dominatingly possessed by their own dead.