Leonard dozed a little, but he did not sleep. A leaden weariness was in his limbs, but his heart and brain were horribly active, forbidding rest. His heart was full of rage, and his brain was full of images—he could doze only till these last crystallised in dreams, when their vividness woke him up at once. He woke each time with a start and a vague feeling of uneasiness and alarm. He feared he was going to be ill—just when Janey needed him so badly. He must bear up till to-morrow; by then she would be better, to-night she was helpless without him. He looked at the cramped figure on the bed, and his throat tightened with sorrow, shame and rage.
She should be avenged—he swore it. Lowe should be made to realise that it was not with impunity that one dragged women like Janey into the mud and then climbed out over their shoulders. He should be made to grovel to her and implore her forgiveness. Len had not quite settled his course of action, but he had fixed the results. Lowe was a worm, a miserable, loathly, little, wriggling worm, and he had slimed a lily—he should squirm under a decent man\'s boot....
The room darkened. The curtains, fluttering in the dusk-wind, were like ghosts. The line of woods on the horizon became dim, and an owl[Pg 238] called from them suddenly. Then a procession of clouds began to flit solemnly across the window—driven from the south-west. They were brown against the bottomless grey, and there was a kind of majestic rhythm in their march before the wind.
Len rose with a shudder—somehow he could not sit still. He went to the window and looked out. Then he remembered that he had not shut in the fowls for the night or stalled the cows. He would have to leave Janey for a little and attend to the farm. He stepped back and looked at her. Her bed was in darkness, and all he could see was a long, black mass on the paleness of the bed-clothes. She was sleeping heavily, with quick, stertorous breathing, and it was not likely that she would wake for some time—he had certainly better go now, while she slept so well.
He crept quietly from the room and down the dark stairs. Outside the breeze puffed healingly upon him, cooling him with a sweet dampness as he climbed into the stream-field where the cows were pastured. The mists were too high and clammy for them to be left out at night, and the man had gone home after milking them. He called to them softly, and great shadows began to move out of the fogs towards him. The peace of the twilight and of his work with the calm, milk-smelling beasts, was so great that, in spite of rage and suffering, a kind of dreamy comfort came to Len—a quiet he felt only in the fields. He began to whistle as he drove the cows home before him. Then suddenly the whistling made him remember Nigel\'s concert.
[Pg 239]
He had meant to send off a second telegram, which Nigel would receive just before he went on the platform at the Bechstein. The last shattering hour had made him forget his plan, and he realised that if his brother was to have his message of good-cheer it must be sent at once. But how? There was still time, but he could not leave the house, even on such an errand—and yet his brother must be "bucked up" at all costs. To-morrow he would send another wire, asking him to come down for the week-end, but he thought it as well not to risk alarming him to-night. Len pondered a minute, then suddenly it occurred to him that he could give his telegram to the postman, who was due to pass Sparrow Hall on his way back from his round. By a lucky chance there was a telegraph-form in the house; Len filled it in, and then ran out with it to the lane.
He looked up at Janey\'s window—all was quiet, only the white curtains fluttered out on the wind; anyhow he would hear if she woke and called him. The lane was very dark—the sky was still faintly light above it, but night had fallen between the hedges. He heard footsteps, and saw a figure coming down Wilderwick hill.
"Hullo, Winkworth!" he cried, "I want you to do something for me."
He stepped out into the middle of the lane, and at the same time the figure began to climb the stile into Wilderwick meadows.
"Hi!" shouted Len—he suddenly realised that on fine dry nights the postman would take the field-path to Dormans.
[Pg 240]
"Hi!" he shouted, running after him. "Winkworth!—I\'ve a——".
The words died on his tongue. He had reached the stile, and saw standing on the further side of it, on the high ground which the darkness had not reached—with the last of the western light upon his face—Quentin Lowe.
For a moment both men stared at each other, then Lowe moved away. Len stood stock still, a queer grimace on his features.
"Were you calling me, sir?"
A voice behind him made him start. The postman had come out of the darkness and stood at his elbow.
"I thought I heard you shout \'Winkworth\' when I was far up the hill. Anything you want, Mus\' Furlonger?"
"Yes—yes—would you take this telegram to Dormans, and see it sent off? Here\'s a bob...."
His voice sounded vague, somehow, as if it were a mechanical process unconnected with his real self. He stood watching the old postman as he climbed the stile and took the turning for Dormans, where the track divided. A minute later a figure became silhouetted against the sky on his right; the path to Cowden and the valley farms dipped abruptly a few yards beyond the stile, then climbed to the high grounds near Goatsluck Wood. Quentin Lowe was clearly visible as he hurried away towards Kent—almost as if he feared pursuit.
Leonard stared after him, his eyes bright with hate and fever. A kind of delirium was in his[Pg 241] brain as he watched that thick-set, slouching figure, caricatured into a dwarf by his fury and the cheverel light. Then suddenly he bounded forward.
He forgot all about the illness that was creeping over him, and Janey alone in the dark house. Or rather, he told himself that he would be up with Quentin in a minute, and would have settled him in a couple more. He would drag him back to Sparrow Hall by the scruff of the neck, and Janey, poor, outraged Janey, should be his judge, and taste triumph even in her despair.
He climbed the stile and ran up the path, plunging recklessly through the tall, ghostly buttercups, glowing faintly in the twilight. He had soon lost the path, a mere borstall, and was trampling the hay-grass, but he did not slack.
Quentin had for the moment disappeared. The trees of Goatsluck Wood waved against the sky: Len was conscious of a kind of illusion as he approached them—it seemed as if they were very far away, then suddenly he found himself on the tangled rim of the wood, the boughs shuddering and rustling over him, as he groped his way into the darkness.
He had to run along the hedge till he found the stile, and he realised that Lowe now had a good start. But he would not stop, nor defer his vengeance to another, more auspicious, day. Janey would probably not wake till the next morning—and meantime his blood was up. He was not quite sure what he should do to Quentin when he overtook him—he was not worth killing, that would[Pg 242] only mean more sorrow for Janey, but he had ideas of pounding him more or less to a jelly and then dragging him back to Sparrow Hall and making him kiss the ground at Janey\'s feet, and grovel and slobber for her forgiveness, with other humiliations which he did not think for a minute his sister would not enjoy.
Meantime he floundered stupidly among the trees. The path was not often used, and the undergrowth had become tangled across it—branches of ash and hazel whipped his cheeks, and brambles caught his feet and sent him stumbling. Once he fell full length, with the soft suck of mud under his body, and once he had to stop and fight for his breath which had been knocked out of him by the low bough of an oak. It was very dark in Goatsluck Wood—like a dark dream. He looked up and saw shuddering patches of sky, and they intensified the strange dream spell, for he seemed to be moving through them, tossed by the wind and scorched by whirling stars.
Then suddenly a meadow swam towards him—another meadow full of buttercups, all gleaming faintly in the marriage of twilight and moonlight that revelled over the fields. A soft wind baffed him, and cooled his lips with little drops of rain. He pounded on through the buttercups, thought and self-consciousness both almost swallowed up in the abnormal consciousness of environment that accompanies certain states of fever. He saw the moon hanging low and yellow in the east, he saw long, tangled hedges, and tufts of wood—and all round him, in meadow after meadow, that ceaseless[Pg 243] shimmer of buttercups, as the wind puffed through them and bowed them to the moon.
Then suddenly he saw Quentin Lowe. His pace had slackened, for he had not seen Furlonger for some minutes, but the next moment he looked over his shoulder and hurried on again.
"Stop!" cried Leonard.
The figure hunched itself against the wind and plunged on.
"Stop!" gasped Len, and calling up all his strength broke into a run.
Quentin looked back, and saw that he was running. He himself was too proud to run, but he doubled against the hedge, and changing his direction, walked towards Langerish, so that Len nearly overran him.
But just in time he saw the short, heavy figure groping along the rim of the buttercups, and the chase took a southward direction.
Len had not the breath to run far—he wondered vaguely what had winded him. He came panting after Quentin, always the same distance behind; he no longer cried "Stop!"—just padded gasping after him.
They skirted the meadow known as Watch Oak, then followed the grass lane to Golden Pot and the outhouses of Anstiel. Quentin was trying to work his way back towards Kent and the valley of the hammer ponds, but Leonard drove him obstinately southwards. He was beginning to gain on him a little. Quentin could hear his footsteps, and he knew why he was following him.
[Pg 244]
A sick dread was creeping up Lowe\'s back—he looked round at the shuddering woods and that strange sky of storm and stars, and he trembled with the presentiment that he saw them all for the last time. Furlonger was a great, big, burly brute—and Furlonger would kill him. Perhaps, after all, he deserved to d............