Setting her face with renewed determination and clutching her stick tightly the old lady made her way down the hill to the back door of the house in the lane.
The gamekeeper and his wife were engaged in feeding the fowls, assisted by their idiot son. This child, whose half-articulate utterances and facial distortions would have been horrible in a city, fell naturally into his place among wilting hemlocks and lightning-struck trees and birds eaten by hawks and rabbits eaten by weasels.
Mr. and Mrs. Drool were thrifty, decent people who were able to increase their income very considerably by this fowl run of theirs; especially since Lord Antiger’s agent had ceased to invite any one to shoot in those particular preserves and had gone to live himself in Bishop’s Forley, five miles away.
“Mrs. Ashover! Well, I never!”
“The missus her own self! Well, I’ll be jiggered!”
“Blub … blub … blub! Binnory good boy! Give Binnory summat.”
“Don’t drag at the missus, Binnory!”
“Don’t ’ee mind him, Mrs. Ashover! Don’t ’ee mind him! He do know who you be as well as he knows who we be! ’Tis a windle-wandle innocent; but you should hear’n holler to the hoot owls when sun be down. And he do know the gentry when he sees ’un as well as any God-fearing man.”
Mrs. Ashover responded to these various voices with unruffled equanimity. She patted Binnory on the head and told him never to kill slowworms. She steered the conversation to Mr. Drool’s pheasants and to Mrs. Drool’s Wyandottes. She answered their questions about Rook and Lexie with becoming vagueness.
At the first pause in the conversation, however, she moved straight to her purpose.
“I want to see Mr. Richard,” she said. “Is he in the house?”
“She wants to see Corporal Dick,” repeated the woman, glancing with a certain obvious embarrassment at her husband.
“He be weed-burning in garden, mum,” she went on. “It be a job he have always a mind for. He do like the smell o’t and the flare o’t. Joe and me have always marked it in him. He do look as eager for bonfire-time as ’twere for the King’s birthday.”
“May I go round and speak to him, Polly?”
“Certainly you may, ’m; mayn’t she, Joe? Certainly she may speak to Granfer Dick. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t speak to the Corporal, is there, Joe?”
Mrs. Drool looked extremely uncomfortable as she uttered these words; and the gamekeeper’s uneasiness was so great that without knowing what he did he picked up his corduroy coat from the clothes line and shook it in the air.
“Binnory’ll take you to see Granfer Dick burnin’ things. Binnory’ll take you”; and the idiot tugged at Mrs. Ashover’s skirt, uttering while he did so the peculiar inhuman sound represented by the syllables, “blub-a-blub … blub-a-blub.”
Mrs. Ashover did not hesitate. Taking the boy by the hand she walked rapidly round the house, leaving the gamekeeper and his wife staring blankly at each other.
The reason of their embarrassment became quite plain when the strangely assorted pair reached the place. Granfer Dick, for some reason of his own, had stripped himself not only of his coat and waistcoat but of his shirt, too; and, armed with a pitchfork, was throwing weeds on the fire in nothing but a pair of old military trousers.
The Corporal was a man of gigantic size; and the sight of such an extremely old man in such scanty clothing surrounded by smoke and flame was certainly a thing calculated to disturb a stranger.
Mrs. Ashover was no stranger, however; nor did her appearance cause the least discomfort to the octogenarian. He leaned on his pitchfork and with a wave of his hand sent Binnory away.
“Well, sister Joan, what mischief brings you here this day of all days? You’ve only been three times to see me since John died and now you come on the very day he died.”
The resolute little woman did not wince or draw back. She brushed a flying spark from her dress and pointed at the Corporal with her stick.
Between the fading November sunset and the clouds of blue smoke she looked like an aristocratic sorceress summoning up some great fire spirit. She was in one of her most reckless moods; but it was with a quiet affectionate gesture that she beckoned the old man to move nearer to her out of the smoke. Ever since her husband had first introduced her to this bastard brother of his she had felt friendly to him and free of her usual prejudices. She called him “Corporal” though now; and, as they fell to exchanging confidences, he did not repeat the “sister Joan,” but addressed her without any appellation at all.
“I’ve no one to go to! I’ve no one to go to,” Mrs. Ashover found herself saying. “Doctor Twickenham is a fool. William Hastings is mad; and Lexie is worse than mad where Rook is concerned. I told you a year ago, Richard”—“She drops the Corporal when she wants help,” thought the old man—“where it seemed to me Ann Gore might come in. Well! I’ve had her with me for several months, and what’s the result? I am besieged in my own house. That woman is everywhere. I meet her on the staircase. I meet her in the garden. I only don’t meet her in the dining room and the drawing room because I stay in my own bedroom! I tell you the place doesn’t belong to me any more. I am just an uncomfortable visitor, staying with my son and his mistress. That’s how it must appear to all our neighbours; and that’s how it is.”
The Corporal threw his pitchfork away and led his agitated visitor back to the house. Opening the front door he took her straight into his own little room where there was a big wood fire. He placed her in a dilapidated armchair with the utmost courtesy and then began muttering and groaning while he fumbled for his best clothes in the chest of drawers.
“So Ann has gone over to the harlot? Ay, John. Ay, John. Ay, John. That I should have lived to see this.”
“I’ve no one to go to,” repeated Mrs. Ashover. “That’s why I came to you. John always used to come to you. I can hear him saying it now—‘I’ll just run across and talk to Richard’—so, my friend,” and she smiled almost wistfully at the wrinkled contorted features appearing under the upheld coat, “you must help us at this pinch or see us go right down to the bottom.”
Granfer Dick pulled a chair to the opposite side of the fire, took his seat deliberately, and stared with concentrated intensity at his kinswoman.
“Smoke if you want to, Corporal,” said the old lady. He shook his head and continued to survey her with frowning forehead and screwed-up eyes, thinking many things.
“It’s funny…. It’s as funny as a bad dream,” murmured the old woman. “But if something isn’t done soon nothing will change it. Rook will get older and older till he dies childless; and the family will die out with him.”
A fierce light came into the Corporal’s pale eyes and the skin of his closely shaven face tightened itself over its bony framework like parchment that is pulled taut.
“What’s that?” he cried. “Die out? The Ashovers ‘die out’?”
“Certainly they will, if you can’t think of how to help me. When once I’m buried and out of the way, things will go on exactly as they are now, till Lexie is dead and Rook is dead. That woman is certain to outlive them both; and then … Well! that’ll be the end. There’ll be nobody else.”
The two old people looked each other full in the eyes and all manner of wild fantastic thoughts passed between them. They were like a pair of aged priests, servants for innumerable years at a venerable altar, who suddenly awake to the fact that the great god of their idolatry is stricken with a mortal disease.
Terrible with a kind of mad panic such priests might become. They might slaughter holocausts of sheep and oxen. They might steal the flocks from the shepherd and the swine from the swineherd. Nothing might be safe from their sacrificial depredations unless their god himself intervened.