Rachel had come to the open window, and she uttered a frightened cry at sight of him perched high in the tree.

"Oh, dads, do take care!"

Next moment her mother came to the window; and they stood side by side, each with a hand to her eyes, watching him in the same att.i.tude of anxiety.

"Don't speak to him," whispered Mavis; and Dale heard the whisper as clearly as if it had been close against his ear.

He could not do it before them. He had been too slow about it; he could not darken their lives with the visible horror of it. And it seemed to him that he had not sufficiently thought of its effect upon them. The whole thing had been clumsily planned. Just at first, when he was found hanging dead with the saw dangling from his neck, it might have been believed that he had slipped and fallen, and hanged himself by accident; but afterward all would have known that it was suicide. The truth would have been betrayed by the running noose, by recollections of Mr. Bates, and by everybody's knowledge of an ancient local custom.

"All right," he said. "Don't alarm yourselves, my dears. I must give this job up, Mavis. I can't quite reach where I wanted to."

"Mind how you come down," said Mavis. "Do come down carefully."

"Yes, dads," said Rachel, "do _please_ come down carefully."

He climbed down slowly, feeling no joy in his respite, saying to himself: "I must think of some other way. I must finish with the hay-making, get the rick complete, and clear up everything in the office--so's at least poor Mav'll find things all ship-shape when she has to take over and manage without me. My hurry to get it through was selfishness; for, after all, I've best part of three weeks to do it in. The on'y real necessity is to have it done before Norah comes home."

And again he thought of the finger of G.o.d. This clumsy hurried execution had been refused by G.o.d. He was being pushed away, so that the last glimpse of his eyes should not see the pleasant picture of home.

He must do it privately, secretly, in a lonely spot; and he must spare no pains, must plot and scheme till he contrived all the convincing details of a likely accident. That was how he had killed Everard Barradine; and he must arrange matters similarly for himself.

x.x.xIV

Two or three days pa.s.sed. The busy yet peaceful life of home and fields was going on; the hay had been carried; the rick was made, and the rick-sheet covered a handsome pile.

Dale worked hard, quite in his old untiring way, and seemed just his natural self; but truly he was mentally detached from the surrounding scene. For the second time in his life, and to a greater extent than the first time, he was subjugated and controlled by one dominant idea.

Throughout each day all things around him were dreamlike and unsubstantial, and he performed many actions as automatically as if he had been a somnambulist. He walked and talked or rode on the shaft of a wagon without in the least troubling to think what he was doing, and every time his thought became active it seemed to spring into vigor again merely to obey the prompting of the inner voice that now governed him.

Thus while sitting on the wagon shaft he thought: "If I pitched myself off and let the wheels go over me, that would be _likely_, just the accident that fools are always making, but it wouldn't fulfil the other conditions that have been laid on me. Also it might fail. I might only mess myself up, and not quite kill myself."

Half an hour afterward, as he walked beside the empty wagon back to his hay fields, he was still hammering away at the dominant idea.

A gun and a hedge--no accident can be more common than that. Say you want to shoot some rats that have been showing their ugly whiskers in the field ditches; take your gun, well charged, and blow your brains out among the brambles of an untrimmed hedge.

Or these motor-cars! He thought of the way they came racing down the highroad from Old Manninglea. How would it be to wait for one of these buzzing, crashing, stinking road monsters over there on the edge of the heath, and jump out just in front of it? If one stooped down and took the full shock on one's forehead, it would mean a mess that there would be no patching together again. But one could not attempt that in daylight, because the driver would jam the breaks on, swerve round one, do anything desperate rather than run into one. And if he could not avoid one, he would tell everybody at the inquest that it was a plain suicide and nothing else. There would be pa.s.sengers in the car too, who would also swear to its being a suicide. And at night these traveling cars have such powerful head-lamps that the roadway is lighted up for a hundred yards in front of them. Even at night, they would recognize it as suicide.

Toward dusk every evening external things became more real, and his hold on life tightening, he suffered more acutely in each hour that pa.s.sed. Night after night he went back to Hadleigh Wood. It was the wood of despair, the focal point of all his pain, and he was drawn to it irresistibly through the gathering darkness.

On the second evening he found it difficult to get away. Mavis stopped him, asked him some domestic question, and then began to talk about a new suit of clothes for their boy. He was alive again now, emerged from his somnambulistic state, and he gave full attention to this matter of Billy's new serge suit; nevertheless, all at once she apologized for troubling him, and inquired if he had anything on his mind.

"No, Mav, of course not."

"Are you sure, Will? Do tell me if you've something worrying you."

"What should I have to worry me?" and he put his arm round her ample waist, and gave her an affectionate squeeze.

"The hay's all right, isn't it?"

"Yes, everything is all right.... You can't do better than you've suggested about Billy. Take him with you to Manninglea--and, look here, if Mr. Jones can't fit him properly out of stock, let him make the suit to measure. Don't consider the extra expense. We can afford it."

"Thank you, Will." Mavis was delighted. "You've told me to do the very thing I wanted to do; but of course I'd never have done it without your authority. I've been longing to see the little chap in clothes regularly cut out and finished for him, and n.o.body else."

Going through the yard Dale was stopped by his men. The foreman wanted directions for to-morrow's work; the carter asked for three new tires; the stableman regretted to be compelled to report that one of the horses had broken his manger rack.

As he finally came out on the road, Dale was thinking, "Soon now I shall be gone, but everything here will be just the same. They will all of them find that they can do very well without me: the men, the children, Mavis--yes, even Norah. Mavis will be the one who will grieve for me. Norah will suffer most, but it will be only for a little while. She'll take another sweetheart--a real sweetheart this time, and she'll marry, and give birth to babies; and it will be to her as if I had died a hundred years ago, as if I had never lived at all, as if I'd been somebody she'd read of in a story-book, or somebody she'd dreamed about in one of those silly nasty sort of dreams which young girls can't help having, but are ashamed to remember and always try to forget."

Mavis, however, would wish to remember him, and be sorry when she found his image fading. She would struggle to keep it bright and fresh. She would grieve long and sincerely--and then she would be quite happy. She wouldn't marry again; she wouldn't do anything foolish. "No," he thought, "she'll just devote herself to the bairns, working for them late and early, and managing the business as well as I have managed it myself. She'll be cheated a bit here and there, as a woman always is--but, all said and done, she'll do very well without me. Customers will support her--the word will go round. 'Don't let's turn our backs on the widow of that poor fellow Dale.'"

And he thought, with a bitterness of heart that almost made him sick, that perhaps after his death many people might speak well of him; that certainly in the little world of Vine-Pits Farm and the Cross Road cottages there would be a natural inclination to exaggerate his few good qualities and be gentle to his innumerable faults; so that a sort of legend of virtue would weave itself about his memory, making him a humble, insignificant, but local saint--to be placed at a respectful distance and yet not too far from the shrine of that great and ill.u.s.trious saint the late Mr. Barradine. "Of course," people might say, "one was a grand gentleman, and the other only a common fellow who had raised himself a bit by hard work; but both of 'em were good kind men, and both no doubt have met with the reward of their goodness up there in Heaven."

As soon as he got into the wood he hurried as rapidly as he could toward Kibworth Rocks; and then when he got near them he walked slowly up and down the ride, with his head bowed and his hands clasped behind his back. And each evening the same thing happened. Visions of Norah a.s.sailed him; he pa.s.sed again through the tortures of yearning desire that he had felt when he first read her letter; and he said to himself, "If proof was wanted, here's the proof. This would show me, if I didn't know already, that I must do it."

In imagination he saw her sitting alone on a balk of timber by the sea. Her hands lay loose in her lap; her neck was bent; her whole att.i.tude indicated dejection, loneliness, sadness. She was thinking about him. She was thinking, "How cruel of him not to answer my sad little letter. He can't be so busy but what he could have found time to send me a few lines with his own hand. Just half a sheet of paper would have been enough--with one or two ink crosses at the end, to show me he prized the kisses that I put in my letter to him. It was brutal, yes, and cowardly, to make Mrs. Dale write instead. If Mrs.

Dale hadn't written telling me he'd received my letter, I couldn't have found it in my heart to believe that he'd treat me so abominably cruel."

And, groaning, he spoke to this mental picture that he had evoked for his renewed torment. "Norah, my sweet one, I can't help myself.

Commands have been laid upon me. I'm no longer free to do what I please. Norah, don't look away from me. Turn to your boy--let him see your dear eyes, though the sight of them makes him bleed." And the thought-picture obeyed him. He saw the entrancing oval of the face instead of its delicate profile, looked into the profound beauty of her eyes, felt that her warm red lips were close in front of him, and that he would go raving mad if they did not come closer still and let him kiss them.

After such spasms of burning pain he was temporarily exhausted; he felt completely emptied of emotional power, as if his nerves had delivered so fierce a discharge that they must cease from working until time and repose had allowed them to replenish themselves. Then, so long as this state lasted, his love for the girl was deprived of all material for pa.s.sion; it was as though the highest thinking part of him had been cut off from the sensational ma.s.s, and only the top of his head served to keep alive his memory of the girl.

Then he thought of her with a fantastic longing that seemed to him beautiful, immaterial, and innocent. He said to himself, "I don't shirk my punishment. I'm going to take it. But fair's fair--There's no occasion to make myself out worse than I really am. Norah has taken hold of me a great deal more by my int'lect than by the low animal kind of feelings that are the mark of the abject sinner. I can't live without her; but if I might live with her, I feel I could be content to let it all remain quite innocent between us. Yes, I feel I could be happy with her just as a companion, provided she and I were alone together, far away from everybody else--yes, I'd take my happiness on those terms, that she was never to be anything else to me but just that."

But soon those treacherous nerves restored themselves, the upper and lower parts of him were all one again, and the diffuse yet darting pain returned. Anger came too. It seemed that the dead man mocked him, went on softly laughing at him.

"What a humbug you are"--he gave the dead man words--"what a colossal humbug. You and your nice Sunday go-to-meeting thoughts. It's so easy, isn't it? to dress up one's rottenness in pretty sentimental twaddle.

But you don't deceive anybody. You don't even deceive yourself, not for three minutes at a stretch. You know that underneath all your humbugging pretenses the black sin is unchanged. You are no better and no worse than I was. You are exactly the same as me."

And Dale, breaking his own rule, or forgetting in his anger that he had refused to discuss things with this imaginary voice, answered wrathfully.

"This girl cares for me--that's the difference between us. She offers me love. And that's something you never had."

"How do you know?" said the dead man. "Your Mavis was one of many.

And, besides, don't be so sure that Mavis wasn't fond of me. She never ran away from me. She came when I whistled for her."

Dale brandished his arms wildly, turned round, and stared at the pine-trees and the bracken. It seemed to him that some imperishable essence of the man was really here, mingling with the shadows, floating in the dusky air; and that possibly over there among the rocks, if one went to look for it, one might see a simulacrum of the man's bodily shape--perhaps only a gray shadowy outlined form, the odious stranger of dreams, but more vague than in the dreams, stretched on his back, holding up his blood-stained boots, and grinning all over his battered face.

"Yes, perhaps so," said the voice. "But I notice that you don't come in to look for me. You keep to the ride still. Now you've got so very close to me, why do you turn shy of the last little bit? Is it that you wish me to save you trouble by showing myself?"

And Dale made gestures of semi-insane fury, and spoke in a loud, hoa.r.s.e voice.

"Yes, show yourself if you want to. You 'aarve my leave. Come out an'

stan' here before me. I'm not afraid of you--now or hereafter."

"Hereafter--hereafter--hereafter." As Dale moved away slowly, the dead man seemed to mock him, to laugh at him derisively. "Hereafter--yes, that's a big word. Yes, go and talk that out with G.o.d."