This feeling was not diminished when her rival gave her what seemed to resemble the melancholy shadow of an ironic curtsey. It remained when, with a movement that could not have been more dignified if it had been the exit of the betrayed crown prince, the friend of Florrie and Minnie bowed herself out into the empty hall.
CHAPTER VIII
NETTA never forgot the final hour of that Christmas Eve as she watched from their bed the figure of Rook standing in his dressing gown by the window. He was as one who reports to his companion from some solitary Childe Roland Tower the signs and portents of a world dark with mysterious travail throes.
So as not to chill her with the night air as she sat up erect in the bed, her brown hair hanging loose over each shoulder and her eyes big with her hidden purpose, he did not open the window, though he longed to do so; but since their only light was the last flicker of their fire, the great hollow spaces of the hushed midnight gave up their secret to him.
“There’s a thaw beginning,” he said, half turning toward the bed.
“Does that mean that it’ll rain to-morrow?” she asked in a low voice as if she were afraid of disturbing something, afraid of interrupting some deep dark purpose of nature, as sacred and hidden as her own.
“It means a white Christmas — that’s what it means,” replied the Squire of Ashover. “I can’t see one single star. Wait a moment! Cover yourself up, will you? And I’ll open the window.”
Netta obediently sank down on the pillow and pulled the bedclothes close under her chin. Lying warm and quiet there she closed her eyes. In spite of everything she felt strangely happy.
Rook opened the upper window sash and leaned out, inhaling great breaths of dark damp air.
“There are clouds over everything,’ he reported. “And they’re not rain clouds, Netta. I can smell the snow coming.”
“Can you really smell the snow?” whispered the woman; and as the night air swept in about her she, too, was conscious of an indescribable presence there in the great brooding spaces, a presence like that of some enormous, formless, feathery body, the approach of which did actually send out some vague impalpable essence, recognizable by human senses — the smell of the snow!
Netta lay for several minutes in silence, giving herself up to this mysterious elemental process that was going on out there in the vast night.
Then suddenly she was conscious of a vague uneasiness. Why did not Rook close the window and come back into the room?
She raised her head. He was still leaning out, staring into the darkness, motionless as a sentinel, and she became conscious from the very pose of his head that he was absorbed in watching something or listening to something. Was he listening to the relaxing of the crust of the earth as it yielded to the thaw?
All at once he closed the window and turned round.
“Did you see anything?” she asked.
He looked at her in surprise. “How did you know?” he returned. And she saw by his face that he had received some kind of shock.
He came and sat down on the bed, taking the hand which she thrust out toward him.
“What was it, Rook?” she whispered.
He fixed her with his eyes, seeing her and yet not seeing her, like a man who is recreating in his mental vision some disturbing image.
“Rook!” she repeated, this time with real concern in her voice; “Rook! What did you see out there?”
His natural and somewhat morose humour came back into his eyes.
“There’s no point in making a secret of it,” he said. “There’s someone out there with a lantern, standing by the shrubbery, behind the trees. He moved off when I opened the window and slunk into the bushes. My dear, I don’t like it! It’s nearly midnight. Who the devil would be in our garden in the middle of the night?”
Netta drew away her hand and sat up very straight, staring at him with wide-open eyes.
“I believe I know who it is, Rook!” she cried excitedly. “It’s Corporal Dick! Pandie was rambling on just now about him. Oh, Rook, do you think he’s gone mad?”
Rook leapt to his feet and strode to the window.
“Whoever it was he’s disappeared now,” he said, coming back to the middle of the room and hesitating there with a puzzled frown, his hand on the chair where he had laid his clothes.
“I wonder if I ought to dress and go out and see — I don’t want to make a fuss — but if it is Uncle Dick— What did Pandie say about him?”
“She said he’d been behaving queerly all day; hanging about the garden with a gun and. asking her questions.”
Rook gave a perceptible start. “What?” he cried out. Then in a calmer voice: “I don’t see anything very mad in that, Netta! Pandie’s always getting the jumps about something or other. Uncle Dick was no doubt wanting me to go shooting with him. Good Lord! I can’t see the old man wandering round here with a lantern in the middle of the night.”
Netta shook her head. “But you said you saw someone. Did the man you see have a gun, Rook?”
He did not answer, but began pacing up and down the room, cursing under his breath: “The Corporal! Damn the Corporal!”
Each time he came to the chair where his clothes had been thrown, he stopped and picked up his shirt or his vest. Then he would throw the thing down and start walking and muttering again.
Nothing could have been more disagreeable to him than the idea of playing hide-and-seek at that confounded hour with a problematical Uncle Dick.
The unpleasant notion that if it was his uncle he might have to lock him up for the night, or even escort him back home over Battlefield and Dorsal, made him extremely unwilling to begin the business of dressing. And yet something ought to be done!
But perhaps it wasn’t Uncle Dick at all — just some predatory night wanderer from the village on the way to his rabbit snares. A nocturnal chase after a poor devil of that kind would be worse than the other possibility.
Rook decided to let the matter rest. He became conscious of a superimposing weight in the atmosphere that made nothing seem more desirable than to take Netta in his arms and fall fast asleep.
He flung a shovelful of coal on the fire to keep it alive till morning, and throwing the window wide open to the now absolutely untroubled night, got straight into bed.
It was Netta and not he who stayed a wake long enough to count the strokes, when the solemn Queen Anne timepiece in the hall downstairs, an object brought into the family by one of the sagacious marriages of great-grandfather Benjamin, struck twelve of the clock.
Rook was still fast asleep, as fast asleep as if he had spent the night drinking wine with Monsieur Voltaire, when Netta awoke to her first white Christmas at Ashover.
An extraordinary sensation, that sudden consciousness of the fact that the window ledges were thick with a soft feathery muffling substance, and the dark woodwork of the window a mere frame to the falling, falling, falling of heavy silent flakes!
A miraculous intrusion, this mysterious whiteness, so different from all terrestrial or solar elements; as if some vast meteoric moon, virginal and immaculate, had actually collided, in its mystic orbit, with our motley guilt-stained earth!
Netta glanced at the fire. It was still warm and glowing, while a light that seemed to proceed rather from the snow itself than from any remoter luminary filled the room with a faint bluish mist.
Very noiselessly she slipped out of bed and began hurriedly putting on her clothes. It was a little after seven and she knew that there was a service at eight in Ashover Church.
She had secretly resolved the night before that she would go to this service. Mrs. Ashover always went to the more popular one at eleven o’clock; but Netta had helped Nell Hastings to set up a little straw-thatched manger, overarched with holly, in that famous chancel, and she was filled with an eager desire to see how it looked with the lighting of the candles Cousin Ann, she felt sure, would go rushing through the snow with Lion if she went out at all. In fact, the chances were that there would be no human being at this queer ceremony except the disastrous Mr. Hastings and his equivocal wife.