In his abstracted fashion he sent his soul wandering over the wide expanse of water meadows, intersected by reedy ditches, which lay beyond the low wall of the churchyard.
He could actually feel the chill of those cold fields, of those flooded ditches, as if his mind had the power of carrying his senses with it on such a voyage. He seemed to himself to become a moving nebulous shadow, acting as sentinel to the very floor of silence upon which the world is built.
What he felt most conscious of at that moment was not the menace of mortality by which his brother was threatened, but the indrawn breath of multitudes upon multitudes of grass blades, full of the pallid greenish sap of that late season‚ that seemed answering the attraction of the moon with a conscious answer; just as the vast swaying sea growths are said to do under their fathoms of salt water.
“Why do you keep harping upon death?” he said at last. “Lots of people with your particular trouble live for years and years. You’ll probably see me buried by the side of the old man long before they disturb the roots of your elm for you.”
Lexie looked at him with the peculiar look that death-threatened people have in the presence of the ultimate treachery. The luminousness that surrounded them made it impossible that Rook could miss that look — a look that begged and pleaded, a look that howled, like a dog driven to its kennel.
“This is my last November,” the look said, “and I love every moment of every hour of life!”
“Can’t you see that I am sinking into absolute loneliness?” the look said. “Hold me! Clutch me! Save me!”
Rook glanced at his brother; saw the look; but still continued to allow his soul to wander over the fields. He wanted his brother to die least of all things in the world. He could not imagine life without him. And yet in some mysterious way, just because of the ghastly threat to the bond between them, he experienced an actual enhancing of the beauty of that night.
Something in the depths of his nature gathered itself together under his brother’s words, focussed itself, roused itself to a strange pitch of exaltation. The white tombstones, the headless tree, the motionless shadow of the tower, the spellbound meadows, became so beautiful to him that death itself seemed hardly less beautiful.
Those pastures seemed to stretch away and away, until they crossed the borderline between death and life. They seemed to reach out to something dim and vague and wonderful; to some unearthly ghost garden‚ far from all human troubling, where nothing but solemn milk-white cattle moved up and down through a pearl-gray mist, licking every now and then with great languid tongues the drooping rims of huge moon mushrooms.
There must have been a long silence between the two brothers just then; for when Rook returned to himself it seemed that it was across an immeasurable gulf that his own last words returned to him.
By one of the quick simultaneous movements of thought that often occurred between them when they were alone together they both fixed their eyes upon their father’s grave.
It was Lexie who finally put into words the thing that was in their minds.
“The old man won’t like it if we’re the last of his race. But I suppose that’s nothing to you, Rook.”
The face of the elder Ashover certainly did not at that moment suggest the passion of piety. Never had it worn more obstinately its characteristic look of truculent abstraction.
But Lexie was undeterred.
“Are you absolutely certain,” he said, “that Netta can’t have a child?”
Rook nodded.
“You’d marry her, of course, if she did?”
“I suppose so.”
“And nothing any of us can do or say will ever make you get rid of her?”
Rook shook his head.
“Well, for God’s sake, let’s tell the old gentlemen inside that the family’s done for, and see what they say!”
Lexie rose to his feet as he spoke and, hobbling between the graves, passed into the shadow of the tower.
Rook came slowly after him. There was an illusory chilliness within the shadow that gave to both men the sensation of crossing the mouth of a sepulchre. And in very definite sense this building was the sepulchre of their people.
They moved round to the south side of the church and followed the wall till they reached the east end. Then stepping close up to an unstained widow they peered straight into the chancel.
The moonlight streaming in behind them threw its ghostly light on everything there. The little church looked as if it had been illuminated for some nocturnal office.
The Norman arch, the carved mediæval niches, the brass lectern, the tall Puritan pulpit, seemed all of them emphatically conscious of some invisible ceremony. Was it an unending platonic dialogue they listened to, between nothingness and the dust of the generations? or did the living souls of all the animate creatures that were asleep just then — men and women under their blankets, cattle under their hurdles, wild fowl under their marsh reeds — gather together “on such a night as this,” a queer, twittering, bleating, weeping, bodiless crowd, animulœ, vagulœ, blandulœ, and hold a secular consistory above those cold slabs?
There, at any rate, they all lay, the Ashovers of Ashover! Their two descendants, the fair one and the dark one, pressed their foreheads very close to the window and surveyed the well-known marble images and the brass inscriptions on the stone floor.
The most imposing effigy of them all was that of Benjamin Ashover, the 18th-century Deist, the friend of Voltaire.
The mortuary grandeur of this sturdy infidel threw all the rest into the shade. Clumsy classical cupids, with less resemblance to cherubs than to wine bottles, supported the plump pillow on which rested the well-shaped, supercilious head; nor could anything exceed the patronizing complacency with which this bewigged unbeliever contemplated his present surroundings!
Very different was the expression of Sir Robert Ashover, the cavalier victim of Oliver Cromwell.
Wistful and indignant, in lace collar and embroidered coat, this defender of old illusions stared out of his marble frame with an expression of melancholy surprise at the lack of gentlemanliness, or even of common decency, in “the ways of God to Man.”
More different still from the philosopher’s smirk was the impenetrable aloofness, stern and forbidding, of Lord Roger of Ashover, the Crusader.
With his mailed hands crossed, with his hound at his feet, with his unsheathed sword at his side, Lord Roger looked like a man-at-arms of Eternity, deep asleep, while the armies of Time trampled past him.
“E la sua volontate è nostra pace,” his lips seemed to say under his pointed beard!
Rook and Lexie drew back together from the window and returned in silence to the gravel path that led to the gate.
Once outside in the road they both became conscious that the luminous mystery above them had worked some kind of sorcery upon their nerves, had vampirized in some perceptible way their life energy.
Every grass blade, every tree trunk, every gatepost, was still floating in a lovely transparent liquid trance.
But when the two men had parted from each other, and Rook, pausing on the bridge to listen to his brother’s dragging footsteps and tapping stick, had become suddenly conscious that there was an alteration in the feel of the air, the echo of Lexie’s final words returned to him.
“She has never been really friendly to the human race. Never really friendly! It’s a shame we can’t wait here together, brother Rook, until we can smell the dawn!”
CHAPTER II
THE rain lashed against the window panes of the dining room of Ashover House. Netta Page sat facing the window in a tall straight-backed chair.