Turning to his right, away from the river, he could make Out with hardly less difficulty the shadowy masonry of the house he had just left, standing in the midst of its ghostly lawn, between the branches of its two great trees.
Those trees looked more monumental than the house itself as he surveyed them now — especially the cedar. That was the tree he had had such trouble climbing as a young boy. He remembered how his grandfather — the one whose bones must still be intact, the bones of a life-weary octogenarian amid that mouse-coloured dust — had been forced to put a ladder to its trunk to bring him down.
The other tree was a lime, half of whose leaves had already drifted across the road into the ditch behind the milestone. But that tree Rook associated with later happenings, and all hurriedly, for he was loth to change his mood, he surveyed the house; the house of which he was himself the twenty-first possessor, as the guide books proudly put it, in the direct male line.
Ashover House had been a small house in the 13th Century. In the 17th it had been a spacious one. Now in the 20th Century it was a small house again; the mediæval buttresses, the Tudor staircase, the Jacobean doorway, the Inigo Jones ceiling being the only portions of it that witnessed to its former dignity. For the rest it was a little, old-fashioned, lichen-covered building, dominated by two gigantic trees.
But small as it was, it had its own mysterious pathos to Rook as he watched it, so hushed and motionless there. Beyond the house his eyes followed the familiar kitchen garden with its high brick walls and well-kept out-houses. And beyond that, too, he looked; to where the trunks of the old apple trees weaving their twisted shadows on the long grass led to the thorn hedge where the yellow-hammers always nested; led beyond that to the rough sloping pasture, thick with mysterious knolls and hollows, which they called Battlefield; led, finally, to the high sentinel row of gaunt Scotch firs that guarded the top of Heron’s Ridge.
Ragged, yet monumental, desperate in their abandoned gestures, yet sternly taciturn in their rooted immobility, these pine trees had been the background of his imagination as long as he could remember.
He turned away from them now with a sigh of unconscious distress, and, swinging clear round, gave himself up to the opposite quarter of that transfigured landscape.
Here he followed the road as it left the church gate and stretched away over the fields and ditches. There was a mile of it before one came to the hamlet, a mile of mud and reeds and floods and marsh fowl, out of the midst of which rose a second bridge across the river, a wooden one with white railings.
It was the forlornness of this unusual approach as much as the sturdy compactness of the place itself that made whatever view one got of Ashover village a thing extremely sensitive to atmospheric conditions, responsive to every varying shift of wind and weather.
At this particular hour its little mass of roofs and walls presented the appearance of a miniature city in some old steel engraving. Rook stared at it in half-ashamed sadness. How little he really knew, he to whom the place had given its name, of the actual thoughts, of the actual dramas, that went on under those projecting eaves and contorted chimneys!
Splash! An enormous water rat dived down from the bank into Saunders’ Hole and proceeded to swim across the river.
Rook watched its course with curious interest, noting its sublime imperviousness to everything in the world except its immediate purpose.
There was something about the illuminated ripples that extended behind it, as it swam, that seemed in some way symbolical of all planetary movement. Vivid as quicksilver those ripples flashed, until the shadow of the bridge blotted them out!
No sooner had the rat reached its goal and vanished in the reeds than the great perch splashed out once more into the moonlight and sank, leaving a new circle of silver ripples, to live for a transitory moment.
Tired of seeing nothing but these reflected evidences of her power, Ashover leaned back against the stone coping of the bridge and stared up at the great luminary herself. Those queer hieroglyphs written across her face seemed as if they were on the point of revealing, to him alone of all the tribes of men, some incredible world secret. The immense silver disc grew nearer and larger and brighter as he gazed at it. It ceased to be a mere satellite of the earth, a mere mirror of an invisible sun. It became a round illuminated lake that drew him toward it, that drew him into it. The blue-black sky around it became a sloping, slippery shore, that held no ledge, no crevice, to which he could cling; nothing to break the swift, fatal, final slide into that magnetic gulf!
His neck grew stiff from the way in which he had twisted himself backward. But his fingers did not relax their hold on the stone coping. If some nocturnal bird had been circling above him the creature might easily have mistaken his face for dome inanimate piece of whiteness, set up there as a mark in the night.
Still he remained motionless, spellbound, ensorcerized; and between the white face looking downward and the white face looking upward a strange correspondency established itself.
The spell was broken for him at last by the sound of feet upon the road. The footsteps were distant, but the silence of the hour caused them to be to him as though they were a few paces off. Rook crossed the bridge to the farther side and scrutinized the road that led to the village.
He had not long to wait. Emerging from the shadow of the clump of alders that hid the weir dam‚ where the sheep-washing pool was, came the figure of a man. The figure advanced in a way peculiar to itself. It advanced with difficulty, with a laboured, shuffling, dragging movement, and yet it advanced hurriedly and with a fixed intent. Rook remembered the unswerving preoccupation of the swimming rat.
The concentrated shuffle of his brother’s feet, the monotonous tap of his brother’s stick, had something about them that was primitive, subhuman, animal. They suggested the presence of an inbitten bodily hurt, the overcoming of which had become automatic, but could never become easy.
With rapid strides the elder brother hurried to meet the younger. They met at the church gate.
What Lexie Ashover saw was a tall, dark, massive-featured personage, bony rather than thin, clumsy rather than powerful, whose predominant facial expression was a sort of sullen, puzzled abstraction.
What Rook saw was an emaciated figure whose large fair head, covered with thick curly hair and out of all proportion to the leanness of his person, had been moulded, in some fit of divine whimsicality, into a startling resemblance to the well-known portrait bust of the Emperor Claudius.
Both brothers were bareheaded. Both were lifted at that moment above their ordinary level of feeling. But the excitement that was agitating them took in Rook the form of morose abruptness; in Lexie the form of nervous volubility.
It was a peculiarity of these two to display their affection for each other with a shameless freedom. They kissed each other now in the middle of the moonlit road as if they had been agitated conspirators‚ sealing some covenant of fatal complicity.
With his fingers twitching nervously at his brother’s overcoat‚ Lexie began talking in a hurried eager voice‚ as if someone or something at any moment might interrupt him.
“I saw Nell last night; here at this very spot. Our priestly friend had stayed inside the church for some reason; and she had wandered out and was waiting for him just here. Rook‚ I know I’m right in what I told you about her. She’s unhappy. She’s very unhappy.”
The elder Ashover’s gaze transferred itself from his brother’s face to the wall of the churchyard. “Unhappy‚” he repeated after a pause‚ and the word sounded like the splash of a stone that someone had thrown into a deep well.