Here they found him after the lapse of barely an hour; and when they had carried him back into his room and had undressed him and got him into bed it was clear that his incoherent murmurings were something different from his former insanity.
Before morning he was in a raging fever; and the doctor when he finally appeared, between eleven and twelve of this first noonday of the month of October, was able to say no more than that nothing could be done for him beyond what Netta and Nell had already done.
He died at two o’clock in the afternoon of the following day, recognizing no one, aware of no human feeling, returning, as he had so often wished to return‚ to whatever “equilibrium,” it may be, beyond the difference between life and death, beyond the difference between space and time, smoothes away the outrage of consciousness and the “whips and scorns” of memory.
Some thirty-five years ago the wife of a classical-minded cobbler in east London had given birth to an unhealthily sensitive child; had nourished him with milk from breasts that were themselves ill-nourished; had lulled him to sleep with songs to which no feet had ever danced, with which no airs from green grass or from yellow sand had ever mingled; had washed him, clothed him, wondered at him, worshipped him…. Dead, stone-dead was that woman now; dead, and in a grave marked with no more than her name and the number of her few and evil years! She had died in absolute certainty that her son would be a famous thinker, known from the Hebrides to Land’s End. But she had not been able even to lift so much as a finger to help him when the work of his lifetime was being thrust into a bonfire of weeds! And where was she now, that mother, when to a rush of girlish tears that were more than half for another man, her worshipped son, a thick-set, heavy-jowled image of lamentable mortality, was lowered into the earth, with a Mr. Pod at his head and a Mr. Twiney at his feet?
Rook Ashover was buried a couple of days later than the man who brought to an end his Pyrrhonian scepticism with a garden rake.
That harmless horticultural tool was picked up on the first of October by none other than Binnory, whose instinct for disaster brought him to Foulden Bridge before the wings of rumour had scarcely begun to flutter.
It interested Binnory to decipher on its handle the name of an ironmonger in Bishop’s Forley. The name Was Lovejoy; and Binnory got pleasure from speaking of the rake as if it possessed itself that sonorous appellation. He ran off with it across the hill and hid it under an elder bush on the edge of Titty’s Ring. Here he would go, when the leaves began to fall, and rake them together with it; pretending that the elder bush was his house and that he was tidying up his drive “like Mr. Twiney at Ash’ver do”; and he would mutter his wildest fancies quite freely to this product of the Bishop’s Forley shop, going so far in his weak-headedness as to treat it as a kind of living fetish. Once he even carried his treasure trove several miles down the lane to display it with pride to the “half beasties,” whose caravan still remained in the neighbourhood.
Thus it happened that while the Squire of Ashover and the Priest of Ashover became less and less endowed with the illusion of personality, the rake “Lovejoy” gathered to itself more and more of this ambiguous value.
A hundred Octobers hence some pair of nameless lovers, seeking refuge from the inquisitive and the frivolous, may very likely stumble upon a rusty piece of iron and a worm-eaten staff, may very likely use them to clean the mud from their shoes, without the least notion of the part played by these objects in a long-forgotten Frome-side story.
No one knew what passed through Lady Ann’s mind as she lay pale and silent hour by long hour with her new-born child by her side; the child that was, after all, a son. Never had the proud girl kept her feelings more completely to herself. To whom, indeed, should she reveal them? Her father was dead. Her mother was dead. Mrs. Ashover’s grief at her son’s death was so mitigated by her sense of escape from a far greater disaster, the tragedy of the family’s extinction, that she could not have responded, even had Ann been entirely unreserved, to the girl’s craving for response. Lexie had always been critical and suspicious of her, his vanity piqued by her preference for his brother, his taste offended by her philistinism.
Missy Sparrow-Hawk was not made for submission to circumstance. She was made to control circumstance. But like many another shrewd diplomatist in this chaotic world she found herself baffled and beaten by that element of pure chance which even a Poynings could not outwit.
She had calculated her moves with the most perfect nicety. She had counted on this. She had discounted that. What she had not foreseen was the intrusion upon the stage of events of the rake “Lovejoy.” She had felt so sure that in the end she would bring Rook round. Her child was her final master stroke. But no master stroke could bring the dead back to life.
Lady Ann was outwitted, outmanœuvred, beaten. As she lay in her bed listening to the wind in the autumn trees she looked steadily, unflinchingly, at the lonely years in front of her. She would live, of course. She would cherish Rook’s child. But whatever happened in the long future she would never again be the same Cousin Ann who had put on that crimson dressing gown in the gamekeeper’s cottage!
Well, there it was! She was twenty-six and she had her child. And yet in her unflinching realism she knew that she was beaten. The mouse-coloured dust in Ashover Church might exult in the continuance of its race. It had gained its end. It was victorious. But the human bridge by which that indestructible life urge had hurled itself into the future carried from henceforth a hurt, a scar, a mark, from which it would never quite recover!
Cousin Ann’s beautiful lips closed upon her secret. She would be a proud and competent mistress of a rejuvenated House. But as her heart hardened itself to envisage her defeat, she stared with her gray eyes into Something that at certain hours, when for instance the branches of the cedar creaked and the branches of the lime rustled, was not very far removed from what less stoical persons than Ann Wentworth Gore would have named despair.
At any rate, she did not protest, nor indeed did any other member of that household, when, by the reiterated importunity of the remorseless old dowager, the boy was christened John after his grandfather. Lexie in his heart was glad of his mother’s choice. Let the name of Rook disappear from the face of the earth! Let no other human being ever carry it, or be called to bed or board by its familiar sound!
But it was a blubbered and ravaged countenance, emptied of all zest for life, robbed of its most characteristic folds and ceases, haggard and woebegone, like the knight-at-arms in “La Belle Dame,” that the younger brother — who would, except for this infant, have been the new Squire of Ashover— turned toward the dishes prepared for him by Mrs. Bellamy and toward the books and trees and flower beds and sunrises and sunsets of his accustomed life. He saw, not felt, how beautiful those halcyon days of October were. He went to and fro in a blank and hollow trance, a trance scooped out and scraped dry of all rich and joyous aplomb, of all pleasant chat, of all mellow and wanton sallies.
When November came and Lady Ann’s child was more than a month old Lexie began slowly to regain something of his old humour. The curious thing about it was that his health, instead of suffering any collapse by Rook’s death, took a decided turn for the better. It was as if, by passing so suddenly into the dim underworld, the elder Ashover had transferred some actual psychic magnetism into the nerves of his companion. Their life together had been so intimate and so involved that it is easy to imagine the existence of a sort of common cistern of energy flowing between them; drawn upon by both of them; and deriving its source from the indestructible vitality of their ancestors! Such a reservoir would naturally flow with its own independent pulse; and the fact that there was only one of them left to draw upon it would double the influx of its power as soon as the first shock of separation had lost its violence.