But this first mood of his did not last long. His wife’s fragile loveliness haunted him and the memory of how she had yielded to his kisses remained as a thing that troubled his blood. The image of her standing in that doorway, the familiar outlines of her figure changed by the presence of their child, came between him now and every curve and contour of the chalk hills around him.
As he grew weary with walking in that relaxing heat, his pride ebbed completely away. He had cursed her once; but he never cursed her after that. ‘Nelly, my love, my darling, my true love!’ he cried aloud.
More and more exhausted did he grow; there came a real humming and hammering in his brain and a sickening sense of dizziness. He had been too excited to do more than swallow a cup of tea that morning and he had eaten nothing. It was now well on in the afternoon.
By the time he reached the point where the open Downs lost themselves in the alluvial plain at their foot, he was so faint that it was with a deliberate and conscious effort that he took each individual step.
At length he stood still and looked hopelessly round. ‘I can’t do it,’ he muttered. ‘I can’t do it.’
He sank down on the ground and rested for a few minutes. Then he got up again and tried once more; but the brief rest seemed to have made his legs weaker than ever and his head dizzier. ‘Damn!’ he muttered in a fit of childish irritation and tears of sheer physical exhaustion came into his eyes.
He looked back along the path by which he had come and forward towards the valley, hoping that some kind of cart or wagon might be in sight, which would help him to reach a farmhouse or a village.
The long white perspective of the empty chalk track offered no trace of any living or moving object.
He left the path then, and staggered across a ploughed field to where a high hedge of hawthorn and holly completely blocked his eastern view.
Reaching this hedge he sank down on the bank beneath it and gave himself up to a comatose acquiescence in whatever might befall.
Several hours passed over his head and the sun sank below a mass of clouds. It began to grow cold and damp; the inherent chilliness of the rain-soaked February earth making itself felt as soon as the heat of the sun was withdrawn.
Feeling very cold at last, for he had no overcoat, Richard managed to crawl through a hole in the thickset hedge into the field beyond.
The moment he tottered to his feet on the further side he knew where he was; the knowledge came to him with a sharp and bitter stab.
He was looking down into Nelly’s Happy Valley, the very place where he had first made love to her!
He sat down again and with his arms round his knees gazed dreamily at the gorse bushes and the last year’s bracken.
Another hour passed away while he sat there; staring patiently down upon the scene of that lovemaking of nearly a year ago.
Suddenly he saw a figure coming along the bottom of the valley, carrying some object in his hand.
Richard was roused at once to something like a flicker of hope. Well did he know that figure and what he carried! It was Robert Canyot with his easel frame and paint box returning after a day on the Downs. With a warm breath of reviving hope the thought crossed his mind — Canyot will explain to her. She will listen to him. It never occurred to his dizzy and exhausted brain that there was anything fantastic in thus begging his rival to act as his intermediary with his wife. There was something about Canyot that inspired this insane sort of confidence and Richard had always been careless and childish, if not blunt and insensitive, in matters of this kind.
He struggled to his feet and shouted wildly, waving his arms.
The young man’s astonishment at the sound of his voice was obvious even at that distance but he saw him carefully put down the things he carried under a gorse bush and come striding up the hill towards him.
‘How damnably faint I feel!’ Richard said to himself. ‘I pray I shan’t collapse before I’ve sent him off to her!’
He sat down again to await the painter’s arrival, drawing each breath with conscious deliberation, lest the dizziness which hovered over him should intervene before he made his appeal.
He remained seated when at last Canyot stood over him leaning on his stick.
‘So you’ve come,’ was the young man’s laconic remark.
‘Yes, I’ve come,’ responded Richard. ‘But I’m feeling damned ill at this moment. You haven’t got any brandy on you, have you?’
Canyot shook his head.
‘You look rather queer,’ he muttered. ‘You’d better come and stay the night with me. Do you think you can walk? You look awfully shaky.’
‘Never mind how I look,’ said Richard hurriedly. ‘It’s only want of food. I’ve been up there, Canyot. I’ve been up there and I’ve seen her. But I told her everything, you know, and she got very angry and sent me off. She sent me off, Robert, after I’d sworn that I wouldn’t speak to Elise again.’
‘What do you want me to do?’ said Canyot suddenly.
Richard looked confused and miserable. A sort of hangdog expression of dilapidated helplessness came into his face.
‘How did you know I wanted you to do anything?’ he said with the ghost of a smile.
Canyot chuckled grimly. ‘Pretty obvious!’ he remarked. ‘You don’t shout to a fellow like that just for fun.’
‘Yes, Robert,’ Richard pleaded, fixing his eyes desperately upon him. ‘I do want you to do something. I want you to go straight to Nelly — now, at once — and make her understand that I will be faithful to her, after this, for the rest of my life.’
‘How can she trust you?’ retorted the young man.
‘I love no one else,’ said Richard in a low voice.
Robert Canyot looked at him closely. ‘It is an agreement between us?’ he said. ‘Between you and me?’
Richard nodded and held out his hand.
‘Very well,’ muttered the other after their hands had met. ‘I’ll go. I tried to get her to divorce you, but she wouldn’t. She loves you, I suppose, God help her!’ He gave a harsh little laugh. ‘I’ll go,’ he added, ‘but for heaven’s sake, stay exactly where you are, so that I know where to find you! I’ll be back in a couple of hours anyway. And look here, eat some of this.’ Fumbling in his pocket he handed Richard a piece of cheese wrapped up in tissue paper. ‘You look most confoundedly ill,’ he said suddenly, as he prepared to force his way through the hedge; ‘I hope you’re not going to kick the bucket or anything, while I’m gone? Maybe after all I’d better get a cart for you from Littlegate before anything else. ‘Richard’s look of blank despair at this suggestion decided him, however, to do what he had promised.’ After all,’ he called back to him, as he forced a path through the hedge, ‘West Horthing is as near as Littlegate and I can get a trap or something for you there! But you shall sleep with me tonight, whatever happens, and we’ll have a talk. Don’t move from where you are!’
Left to himself again Richard tried his best to eat the piece of cheese. The taste of it nauseated him. ‘Oh, for just one drink of water,’ he moaned aloud. As if in mocking answer to his prayer, the heavy clouds which had been working up with the growing darkness from where the sun had sunk, now burst over his head in torrents of rain.
He crept closer to the hedge for shelter; but the rain fell in such heavy floods that the hedge itself was soon penetrated through and through, and the continuous dripping from it became almost worse than facing the storm in the open. The man remained crouching there, his head whirling with strange wild thoughts, alternately full of hope and hopelessness.