The Bird of Time has but a little way

To flutter — and the Bird is on the wing.

— OMAR KHAYYáM.

IT was the third week of November. Winter, the destroyer, was late, but he had come at last. There was death in the air. A whisper of death stole across the empty fields and bare hill-side. The birds heard it and were silent. The November wind was hurrying round Westhope Abbey, shaking its bare trees.

Lord Newhaven stood looking fixedly out eastward across the level land to the low hills beyond. He stood so long that the day died, and twilight began to rub out first the hills and then the long white lines of flooded meadow and blurred pollard willows. Presently the river mist rose up to meet the coming darkness. In the east, low and lurid, a tawny moon crept up the livid sky. She made no moonlight on the grey earth.

Lord Newhaven moved away from the window, where he had become a shadow among the shadows, and sat down in the dark at his writing-table.

Presently he turned on the electric lamp at his elbow and took a letter out of his pocket. The circle of shaded light fell on his face as he read — the thin grave face, with the steady, inscrutable eyes.

He read the letter slowly, evidently not for the first time.

“If I had not been taken by surprise at the moment I should not have consented to the manner in which our differences were settled. Personally, I consider the old arrangement to which you regretfully alluded at the time”—(“pistols for two and coffee for four,” I remember perfectly)—“as preferable, and as you appeared to think so yourself, would it not be advisable to resort to it? Believing that the old arrangement will meet your wishes as fully as it does mine, I trust that you will entertain this suggestion, and that you will agree to a meeting with your own choice of weapons on any pretext you may choose to name within the next week.”

The letter ended there. It was unsigned.

“The time is certainly becoming short,” said Lord Newhaven. “He is right in saying there is only a week left. If it were not for the scandal for the boys, and if I thought he would really hold to the compact, I would meet him, but he won’t. He flinched when be drew lots. He won’t. He has courage enough to stand up in front of me for two minutes, and take his chance, but not to blow his own brains out. No. And if he knew what is in store for him if he does not, he would not have courage to face that either. Nor should I, if I were in his shoes, poor devil. The first six foot of earth would be good enough for me.”

He threw the letter with its envelope into the fire and watched it burn.

Then he took up the gold pen which his wife had given him, examined the nib, dipped it very slowly in the ink, and wrote with sudden swiftness.

“Allow me to remind you that you made no objection at the time to the manner of our encounter and my choice of weapons, by means of which publicity was avoided. The risk was equal. You now, at the last moment, propose that I should run it a second time, and in a manner to cause instant scandal. I must decline to do so, or to reopen the subject, which had received my careful consideration before I decided upon it. I have burnt your letter, and desire you will burn mine.”

“Poor devil!” said Lord Newhaven, putting the letter, not in the post-box at his elbow, but in his pocket. “Loftus and I did him an ill turn when we pulled him out of the water.”

The letter took its own time, for it had to avoid possible pitfalls. It shunned the company of the other Westhope letters, it avoided the village post-office, but after a day’s delay it was launched, and lay among a hundred others in a station pillar-box. And then it hurried, hurried, as fast as express train could take it, till it reached its London address, and, went softly upstairs, and laid itself with a few others on Hugh’s breakfast table.

For many weeks since his visit at Wilderleigh, Hugh had been like a man in a boat without oars, drifting slowly, imperceptibly on the placid current of a mighty river, who far away hears the fall of Niagara droning like a bumble bee in a lily cup.

Long ago, in the summer, he had recognised the sound, had realised the steep agony towards which the current was bearing him, and had struggled horribly, impotently, against the inevitable. But of late, though the sound was ever in his ears, welling up out of the blue distance, he had given up the useless struggle, and lay still in the sunshine watching the summer woods slide past, and the clouds sail away, always away and away, to the birthplace of the river, to that little fluttering pulse in the heart of the hills which a woman’s hand might cover, the infant pulse of the great river to be.

Hugh’s thoughts went back like the clouds towards that tiny spring of passion in his own life. He felt that he could have forgiven it — and himself — if he had been swept into the vortex of a headlong mountain torrent leaping down its own wild water-way, carrying all before it. Other men he had seen who had been wrested off their feet, swept out of their own keeping by such a torrent on the steep hillside of their youth. But it had not been so with him. He had walked more cautiously than they. As he walked he had stopped to look at the little thread of water which came bubbling up out of its white pebbles. It was so pretty, it was so feeble, it was so clear. Involuntarily he followed it, watched it grow, amused himself half contemptuously with it, helped its course by turning obstacles from its path. It never rushed. It never leaped. It was a toy. The day came when it spread itself safe and shallow on level land and he embarked upon it. But he was quickly tired of............