“I’m afraid I can’t say what he looked like,” he said lamely.
“But you saw him?”
“Oh yes. I saw him all right.”
“Ah.” Tom said nothing more for an appreciable time. “A funny old place, the Tussock,” he remarked at last. “There’s no knowing what you mightn’t see up here. Night times, especially. Of course, there is those as can see by day.”
“Do you mean the place is-haunted?”
Tom shrugged his shoulders.
“I’m not saying it is,” he said. “But there’s them as do.”
“But that’s ridiculous,” Pettigrew protested. But even as he spoke, doubts assailed him. After all, the Tussock was haunted for him, and in a very particular way. The conditions for a hallucination were ideal. He had been all day obsessed with the recollections of the past, of which this one, because so long suppressed, had become by far the most powerful. Given the coincidence of the pony’s sudden swerve at precisely the right time and place to fit in with his thoughts, was it not possible that an optical illusion might follow? And people who were prone to optical illusions of this nature might be called, as Percy put it, “not quite…”
He felt strongly the necessity of impressing upon someone his sanity and respectability, if only to convince himself that he was, in spite of everything, sane and respectable. “I’m afraid I may have done your pony some damage,” he went on quickly. “If you think you ought to call in a vet, you must do it at my expense. There’ll be the shoeing to pay for anyway, and I dare say you feel I ought to give you something for my ride.”
Tom looked at, him seriously and not unkindly. “That’s a fair offer, sir,” he said. “I tell you what- you’ve not got a bad seat on a horse-better than Mr. Percy’s, if you want to know. What do you say if I was to find you something a bit quieter, more suitable to a man of your age, like? I’d forget about the other matter then. What do you say?” Pettigrew shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Thank you for the compliment but quite definitely No.”
Tom shrugged his shoulders and looked round to where the other two men were now approaching. Then he gave a whistle, and his horse trotted obediently up to where he stood. He climbed easily into the saddle. “Shall I let you know about the pony, then?” he asked. “Do, please. My name is Pettigrew and I am staying at Sallowcombe.”
“Oh.” The friendliness in the man’s face faded as the colour in a Japanese lantern fades when the candle inside is blown out. He turned his horse’s head away. “Well, Mr. Olding,” he called out, “we’d best be getting along home.”
Pettigrew stared after the three men as they rode away across the moor in a mood of gloomy resignation. He was too tired even to feel resentment at the brutally sudden change of front. It seemed, in any case, all of a piece with the illogical sequence of disasters that had marked the afternoon. No doubt there was an explanation, but it was not worth while looking for one. Just now he was concerned only with how he, Pettigrew, was to get along home from where he was.
The sound of motor traffic close at hand reminded him that Bolter’s Tussock was no longer the remote spot that it once had been. He moved wearily but thankfully towards the road.
The first vehicle that approached him pulled up at his frantic signals. With an extraordinary sense of returning to reality from a world of dreams, he opened the door and climbed in beside his wife.
“Frank, darling!” she exclaimed. “What have you been up to now? ”
But Frank was already fast asleep.
CHAPTER VII. Lying Up
I think,” said Eleanor, “that it might be a good plan if you were to go to bed.”
Her husband murmured faintly that perhaps it would. He was far too grateful to her for the superb tact with which she had refrained from asking any questions about his afternoon’s adventures to oppose any suggestion that she might care to make. But in any case he knew that the sooner he was in bed the better. It was not merely that he was extremely tired; he felt, if not ill, at least decidedly out of sorts. The appetite which he had brought home from his expedition had dwindled to nothing at the sight of food, and from certain uneasy qualms he was fairly sure that he was running a temperature. This latter fact, however, he hoped would escape Eleanor’s notice.
Vain hope! No sooner was he in bed than a thermometer was thrust into his mouth. Following the maddening custom of nurses all the world over, Eleanor did not reveal the verdict, but he was not interested in the precise reading. He knew without being told that he was officially an invalid. He knew, further, that he had brought it on himself, and that it served him right. He swallowed meekly the concoction that Eleanor handed him and sank gratefully back on his pillow.
His sleep was restless and disturbed by ugly dreams. Waking in the small hours, he was shocked to realize that they were in all essentials the same grisly nightmares that had troubled him as a schoolboy, with perhaps an added element of horror. If he had not realized it before, he knew now that the sentimental backward journey in time on which he had been engaged had its dangers as well as its attractions. I must be my age in future, he told himself, and on that resolution fell asleep once more.
Whether because his resolution took effect or for some other cause, his sleep this time was peaceful enough. He woke late, his fever gone, but with a body aching as though it had been scientifically belaboured by experts. He accepted without protest the decision that he should spend the day in bed. An immense lassitude of mind possessed him. He was vaguely conscious of there being something that should be done, a decision that ought to be taken, but he drowsily postponed the effort of even seeking to remember what it was.
It was Sunday morning. Eleanor had announced her intention of going to church for morning service. Sunday newspapers came late to this remote spot, but he had brought plenty of books with him, and presently he roused himself sufficiently to glance at them. He picked up successively a historical work which he was very anxious to read, a neglected classic which he had always intended to read and a cheap thriller which he had brought along because Eleanor liked that sort of stuff.
One hour, eight chapters and one hundred and twenty pages later, he was contemplating the predicament of a heroine who owed her perilous state entirely to her pigheaded refusal to inform the proper authorities that in Chapter I she had found a dead body in her dustbin. Pettigrew felt that this was trying his credibility a little too high. At the same time, the young woman’s dilemma seemed in some way faintly familiar… His tired brain shied away from the problem that lay just below the level of consciousness, and by the time that Eleanor returned from church he was slumbering once more.
He made only a pretence of eating lunch, and the tray was hardly out of the room before he was again asleep. Some time later he was jerked wide awake by the ringing of a bell. It took him an appreciable time to realize that it was a telephone, and that the thudding sounds that made his bed shake were the footsteps of Mrs. Gorman scurrying to answer it. It still seemed to him vaguely inappropriate that Sallowcombe should have this, or any other, attribute of modernity. Evidently, the line was not particularly good, for Mrs. Gorman’s part in the conversation was loud enough to penetrate all over the house. Pettigrew could not but hear, though at first he paid little attention to what was being said. He caught the name of “Gilbert” repeated once or twice, and then, “When did it happen?” He was left in no doubt as to what had happened to Gilbert, for Mrs. Gorman’s next words were: “Well, it’s a merciful release, I reckon, after all these years.” The phrase struck Pettigrew as being neither original nor provocative, but it was plainly not to the taste of the other party to the conversation, for Mrs. Gorman’s succeeding observation, spoken very loudly and with an unexpected rasp in her voice, was: “I’ll thank you not to talk to me like that, Louisa. You can keep that sort of language for Jack. If you dare to use it, that is.”