The next few days were to Nigel like a piece of steep hill to a cart-horse. There was only one comfort—he felt no temptation to seek oblivion again as he had sought it at the Bells. He turned surlily from the men he had looked to for alleviation—he knew they could not give it. All they could do was to cover his wounds with septic rags—they had no oil and wine for him.
So he put down his head, seeing nothing but the little patch of ground over which he moved, planted his feet firmly, and pulled from the shoulder. Perhaps it was because he saw such a little of his way that he did not notice Janey was doing pretty much the same thing—with the difference that she fretted more, like a horse with a bearing-rein, which cannot pull from the collar. Side by side they were plunging up the hill of difficulty—and yet neither saw how the other strained.
Len vaguely realised that something was wrong with Janet, but he put it down to her anxiety about Nigel. An atmosphere of reticence and misunderstanding had settled on Sparrow Hall, frankness had gone and effects were put down to the wrong causes. Len tried to help Janey by helping Nigel. It struck him that his brother would be happier if he had less pottering work to do. So he took upon himself all the monotonous details of the yard, and asked Nigel to see to the larger[Pg 87] matters, which involved much tramping in the country round.
One day towards the end of October, Len asked him to attend an auction at Forest Row. He went by train, but as the auction ended rather earlier than he expected, he decided to walk home.
It was a pale afternoon, smelling of rain. The sky was covered with soft mackerel clouds, dappled with light, and the distances were mysterious and tender. Nigel had a special love for distances—for three years he had not been able to look further than a wall some thirty yards off, except when he lifted his eyes to that one far view prison could not rob him of, the sky. Now the stretch of distant fields, the blur of distant woods, the gleam of distant windows in distant farms, even the distant gape of Oxted chalk-pit among the Surrey hills, filled him with an ineffable sense of quiet and liberty.
For this reason he walked home along the high road, ignoring the dusty cars—so that he might look on either side of him into distances, the shaded sleep of meadows in the east, the pine-bound brows of the Forest in the west.
He did not feel that resentment at Nature\'s indifference to human moods, which is a man\'s right and a token of his lordship. On the contrary, the beauty and happiness of the background to his travail gave him a vague sense of ultimate justice. The peace of the country against the restless misery of human life reminded him of those early Italian pictures of the Crucifixion—in which, behind all the hideous medi?val realism of the[Pg 88] subject, lies a tranquil background of vineyard and cypress, lazily shining waters, dream cities on the hills. That was Life—a crucifixion against a background of green fields.
He was roused from his meditations by being nearly knocked down by a big car. He sprang into the hedge, and cursed with his mouth full of dust. The dust drifted, and he saw some one else crouching in the hedge not a hundred feet away. It was a girl with her bicycle—somehow he felt no surprise when he saw that it was Tony Strife, the "girl-kid," again.
She was obviously in difficulties. One of her tyres was off, and her repairing outfit lay scattered by the roadside. She did not see him, but stooped over her work with a hot face. Nigel did not think of greeting her—though their last encounter had impressed him far more than the first; she had even come once or twice into his dreams, standing with little Ivy among fields of daisies, in that golden radiance which shines only in sleep.
He was passing, when suddenly she lifted her head, and recognition at once filled her eyes—
"Oh, Mr. Smith!..."
Her voice had in it both relief and entreaty. He stopped at once.
"What\'s happened?"
"I\'ve punctured my tyre—and I can\'t mend it."
He knelt down beside her, and searched among the litter on the road.
"Why, you haven\'t got any rubber!"
"That\'s just it. I haven\'t used my bicycle for[Pg 89] so long that I never thought of looking to see if everything was there. What shall I do?"
"Let me wheel it for you to a shop."
"There\'s nowhere nearer than Forest Row, and that\'s three miles away."
"Are you in a great hurry?"
"Yes—terrible. The others have gone up to Fairwarp in the car for a picnic. There wasn\'t enough room for us all, so Awdrey and I were to bicycle; then she said her skirt was too tight, so they squeezed her in, and I bicycled alone. It\'s quite close really, but I had this puncture, and they all passed me in the car, and never saw me, they were going so fast. I don\'t know how I can possibly be at Fairwarp in time."
"No—nor do I. We can\'t mend your tyre without the stuff, and the nearest shop is two miles from here."
"I\'ll have to go home, that\'s all. They\'ll be awfully sick about it—for I\'ve got the nicest cakes on my carrier."
Nigel laughed.
"Then perhaps you have the advantage, after all. Just think—you can eat them all yourself!"
"They\'re too many for one person. I say, won\'t you have some?"
"That would be a shame."
"Oh no—do have some. I hate eating alone—and I\'m awfully hungry."
She began to unstrap the parcel from her carrier.
"This is a dusty place for a picnic," said Nigel, "let\'s go down the lane to Brambletye, and eat them there."
[Pg 90]
The idea and the words came almost together. He did not pause to think how funny it was that he should suddenly want to go for a picnic with a school-girl of sixteen. It seemed quite natural, somehow. However, he could not help being a little dismayed at his own boldness. This girl would freeze up at once if by any chance he betrayed who he really was. As for her people—but the thought of their scandalised faces was an incitement rather than otherwise.
"Where\'s Brambletye?" asked Tony.
"Don\'t you know it?—it\'s the ruin at the bottom of that lane. You must have passed it often."
"I\'ve never been down the lane—only along the road in the car."
"And you live so near! Why, I\'ve often been to Brambletye, and I live much further away than you."
"Where do you live?"
This was a settler, to which Nigel had laid himself open by his enthusiasm. He decided to face the situation boldly.
"I live over in Surrey—at a place called Fan\'s Court."
"Fan\'s Court," she repeated vaguely. "I don\'t think I\'ve heard of it."
"Oh, it\'s a long way from you—beyond Blindly Heath—and only a little place. I\'m not very well off, you know."
She glanced at his shabby clothes, and felt embarrassed, for she saw that he had noticed the glance.
He picked up the litter from the roadside, and began to wheel her bicycle down the hill.
[Pg 91]
"I say," she breathed softly, "this is an adventure."
So it was—for both, in very different ways. For her it was an incursion into lawlessness. Her father was tremendously particular, even her girl friends had to pass the censor before intimacy was allowed, and as for men—why, she had never really known a man in her life, and here she was, picnicing with one her parents had never seen! Nigel was in exactly the opposite position—he was adventuring into law and respectability. He was with a girl, a school-girl, of the upper middle classes, to whom he was simply a rather poverty-stricken country gentleman—to whom his disgrace was unknown, who admitted him to her society on equal terms, ignorant of............