1 Windmill House, a modest broad-eaved, slant-gabled Tudor building, stone below, brick and black oak above, the whole roofed with Colleyweston slate-slabs which time had lichened to dark-green velvet, surveys the Rutland hamlet of Little Overdine from the brow of Little Overdine Hill. Beyond its walled gates the white road switches down between two files of red cottages, past the Norman tower of Little Overdine Church, toward Screever Castle and the distant Screever Vale. Behind it and about it the shires sweep sheer fields of ridge-and-furrow to the far and the clear horizons whither--all winter--high-mettled riders and high-mettled horses pour at a gallop after the pouring hounds.
But now, all about Windmill House, the ridge-and-furrows stood knee-deep in hay; and hounds pattered mute at early morning exercise along the white road; and the high-mettled horses grazed leisurely in the shade of the hawthorn hedges; and, in every covert from Lomondham Ruffs to Highborough Gorse the red vixens suckled unmolested. For now, it was spring in Rutland--spring in the little county of the big-bosoming pastures and the big-bosomed women--spring, too, in the heart of Ronald Cavendish!
Yet, for him, spring held its fear. "Your wife will be all right," Dr. Hartley had assured. "Everything's going splendidly. Some time this evening, I expect. About six o'clock if we're lucky. Why don't you go out for a ride?"
And Aliette, smiling up at him through the increasing pangs, had said almost the same thing: "Go away, man. Please go away."
As he went from her, out of the high cretonne-bright room down the blue-carpeted stairs into a hall fragrant with white lilac, apprehension tightened its grip on Ronnie. Suppose Hartley had lied to him--suppose Hartley had made a mistake--suppose Aliette, his Aliette, were--were not to "get over things"?
"But that's ridiculous," he said to himself, "quite ridiculous. Alie's so strong. And besides, after all we've been through together, that just couldn't happen."
He wandered into the low-ceiled library, picked a book at random, and sat down to read. But the words of the book conveyed no meaning to his brain. His brain was upstairs--with Alie. Kate came in to remind him of lunch. He said to her, speaking softly as though he were in a sick-room: "Oh, bring me something in here, will you?"
Kate brought some sandwiches, and a whisky-decanter. He ate a sandwich, and drank a stiff peg. Then he crept quietly up the wide staircase and listened outside Alie's door. But the closed mahogany let through no sound; and after a little while he tiptoed downstairs again.
"If only," he thought, "it were all over. Safely over!" His heart ached for the woman he loved, for the pangs which she must bear alone. Almost, he hated the unborn cause of her sufferings. What need had he and Alie of children? Was not their love for one another all-sufficing? Had they not won enough from life already? Why tempt Providence with yet another hazard?
Suppose--suppose Alie were to die?
Fretfully Ronnie wandered back to the library; fretfully he flung his long length into a big saddle-bag chair. But he could not rest in the chair. The Wixton imagination tore and tore at his brain. Windmill House, last of Julia Cavendish's Little Overdine properties; Windmill House, where his mother had honeymooned with his father; Windmill House, whither he had brought Aliette for sanctuary while the law was separating her from Hector--seemed sanctuary no longer. Death and life hovered about the place, each contentious for mastery.
He looked at the Chippendale clock on the dark oak mantelpiece. The clock-hands pointed two. "Another four hours," he thought. "Another four eternities!"
How the minutes dragged as one watched them! How cruel, how desperately cruel was time!
He looked out of the window, through the shining lattices to a shining garden. Yesterday's gale no longer blew. It had pelted all morning; and the tennis-lawn still glinted with raindrops. Thrushes hopped on it, and blackbirds. Through the open pane in the lattices, from under the eaves of the house, came faint eager twitterings. Out of doors, perhaps, one would feel more hopeful, less--less infernally jumpy.
Ronnie, closing the library door behind him, stole quietly across the square hall, and picked an old tweed cap from its peg in the cloakroom, an ashplant from its corner in the porch. The front door of Windmill House stood open. Through it he could see the flagstone path, bright either side with vari-colored primulas; and at the end of the flags, high-hung between brown stone walls, the wrought-iron gates that gave on to the highroad.
For a long time, hands in his pockets, the ashplant dangling by its crook from his forearm, Aliette Cavendish's husband stood ruminant under the sloped porch. For a long time his memory, apprehension-prompted, conjured up the past months.
He recollected how, by the sheerest luck, Windmill House had fallen tenantless just when they most needed a refuge from London; how, at first sight of the place, Alie, a white-cheeked pathetic Alie, nerve-wracked and listless, had brightened to interest; and how, as autumn deepened to winter, she had made the Tudor house a veritable home. He recollected himself, Friday after Friday, driving his new car down from London; finding her, week after week, braver, healthier, better and better equipped for the ordeal to be faced. He recollected their joyous Christmas together--and the black days which had followed Christmas--the days when "the case" loomed near and nearer, frightening her anew with the dread of "those awful newspapers."
Luckily, he had been able to keep most of "those awful newspapers" from her; so that she had seen only three reports of "The Hanging Prosecutor's Divorce-Suit."
Ronnie remembered, standing there motionless in the gabled doorway, how--each helping each through the difficult days--they had made light of that trouble, telling one another that it was "like having a tooth out; soon over!" Nevertheless, the memory still ached at times--as a broken bone aches to the cold long after the cure of the actual fracture.
And, "I wonder," thought Ronald Cavendish, lover, "whether the people who make their livings by it, the writing-folk, know how much the written word can hurt? I wonder if Julia knew, when she wrote 'Man's Law.'"
He began to think of Julia, tenderly, as the imaginative think of the dead. Julia would be glad to know that the purpose of her book had been accomplished before its publication; that, published, it would contain no hurt. Julia, chivalrous, would not wish to injure a man who--at the pinch of things--had behaved chivalrously.
For that in the end Hector Brunton had behaved well, even his enemy admitted. Had it not been for Brunton, Brunton with his tremendous influence, the six months between the granting of the divorce-decree and the making of that decree absolute would never have been shortened to three. Had it not been for Brunton, not even Sir Peter Wilberforce could have succeeded in setting Aliette free to marry her lover before her lover's child was born to her.
And on that, vividly, Ronnie's memory conjured up the scene of three days ago: he and she, Roberts the chauffeur for witness, being legally married in the dingy registrar's office of the near-by townlet. Driving back to Windmill House, they had laughed together--a little cynically--at the formality. Yet underneath their laughter had been tears, tears of gratitude to the kindly Fates.
"Man," Aliette had smiled, "it feels so--so funny not to be an outcast any more."
2
Ponto's sleek head nuzzling his knees disturbed Ronnie's musing. He took his hands out of his pockets and began fondling the dog's ears. But Ponto wanted his mistress; restlessly he tried to push his way into the house. His slitty eyes were a dumb miserable question; his great stern stood out, rigid as a pointer's, from his huge body.
"Down, will you?" whispered Ronnie. "Down--you panicky old devil."
The black-and-white hound, still protesting, squatted on his haunches; rose up again; and began to pad restlessly up and down the flagstones. Every now and then he came sniffing toward the porch.
"She's all right, Ponto," Ronnie kept on saying. "She's quite all right, old man." And somehow, soothing the animal, he succeeded in soothing himself. What a fool he was to worry! Children were born every day, every hour, every minute. And Alie was so strong. Besides, Alie wanted a child; she wanted a child more than anything else in the world.
After a while Ponto ceased his padding, and subsided--still dubious--at his master's feet. After a while Ronnie, consulting his watch, saw that it was nearly three o'clock.
"Three more hours," he thought; "three more hours of suspense." He wanted to go back into the house, to wait outside Alie's door. But instinct, and her last words, restrained him. One could do no good by one's presence; one could only hinder, flurry the nurse and the doctor at their work.
Slowly, the great dog at his heels, Ronnie wandered down the flagstones to the gate. Looking back, the house showed restful, a home of safety under blue spring skies. The laburnums made curtains of yellow for its latticed windows; the lilacs were cones of white and mauve to its sloping eaves. Surely not death but life hovered over that lichened roof, over those high stone chimney-stacks!
And life was good--good. Life had given to him, Ronald Cavendish, every fine thing of a man's wishing; love, victory over his one-time enemy, money, success in his profession. For him, life had been like some old story-book; a story-book that ended happily.
But with that thought apprehension gripped him again. Life, perhaps, had given him too much. Fate, perhaps--even now--meant to snatch the cup of happiness from his lips.
He looked up at Aliette's window. The silk curtains were drawn; and imagination shuddered at the task of visioning her behind them. She was in pain, his Aliette, the one being in the world who made life glorious to him. She was in pain. In danger. And he, her husband, could not help.
Slowly, unable longer to bear the sight of those drawn curtains, Ronnie--the unhappy dog in his wake--turned away; slowly, the pair began to wander about the gardens, round the house and round again, through the shrubberies, past the garage and the stables, across the tennis-lawn, up and down the rose-pergola. And, "I can't stand this," thought Ronald Cavendish; "I can't stand this another minute."
It seemed to him, in his agony, as though life must be planning revenge on him; as though the ultimate penalty were now to be exacted. Alie would die in child-birth; and all they had won together be lost eternally.
Vainly, he strove to curb his imagination. Vainly he said to himself: "It can't happen. It simply can't happen." Vainly he wished that Alie had accepted her mother's offer to join them for their wedding-day. One was so lonely, so infernally lonely. If only Mollie and James hadn't been on their honeymoon! If only Julia were alive! But Julia was dead, and James--selfish beast!--enjoying himself, and Aliette's parents waiting for a telegram.
He looked at his watch again. Barely half-past three yet! And Hartley had said, "Six o'clock." His hand, as he put the watch back in his pocket, shook like an apple-tree-spur in a spring gale. He could feel his brow damp with sweat under the cap-peak. Restlessly he resumed his tramp; restlessly the dog followed him; round the house and round again--till at last, to Ponto's delight, his master made his way out of the gardens, through the stables, to the gate of the paddock.
3
The paddock, a square two-acre of trampled grasses fenced with the high white of blossoming hawthorn, shimmered in the afternoon sunshine; and at far end of it, as he opened the gate, Ronnie saw Miracle. At the click of the gate-latch, the big thoroughbred, golden as a guinea to the rich light, lifted his head from the fragrant pasture; scrutinized his visitors; and with a whinny of delight came cantering toward them. Ten yards away, he stopped--his neck arched, his eyes wide in speculation. Then, pace by balancing pace, muzzle outstretched, he came on; snuffled down at the dog; snuffled up at the man.
Tactfully as Aliette's self Ronnie gentled the horse, caressing the smooth muzzle, the sleek skin under the branches of the jaws. Somehow, it seemed as though Miracle were aware of the fret in him, of the fret in Ponto; as though Miracle, following the pair of them up and down the paddock, were trying to say: "It's all right. It's quite all right."
And Ronnie thought, looking at Miracle's great shoulders, at the slope of his pasterns and the sinuous strength of his hocks: "You carried her over Parson's Brook, old boy. You'll carry her again, next winter, as you carried me this, across a stiller country than Mid-Oxfordshire, across the ridge-and-furrow and the cut-and-laids and the timber of the shires."
Miracle followed the pair of them back to the gate, and stood looking over it while they made their way to the stables. The big blue clock under the old-fashioned hunting wind-vane (a metal man on a metal horse capping on a metal hound) sh............