She spoke with a pa.s.sion that nothing had justified, and I faced her bewilderedly as she rose. The children had gathered themselves in a roundel behind a bramble bush. One sleek head bent over something smaller, and the set of the little shoulders told me that fingers were on lips.
They, too, had some child"s tremendous secret. I alone was hopelessly astray there in the broad sunlight.
"No," I said, and shook my head as though the dead eyes could note.
"Whatever it is, I don"t understand yet. Perhaps I shall later--if you"ll let me come again."
"You will come again," she answered. "You will surely come again and walk in the wood."
"Perhaps the children will know me well enough by that time to let me play with them--as a favour. You know what children are like."
"It isn"t a matter of favour but of right," she replied, and while I wondered what she meant, a dishevelled woman plunged round the bend of the road, loose-haired, purple, almost lowing with agony as she ran. It was my rude, fat friend of the sweetmeat shop. The blind woman heard and stepped forward. "What is it, Mrs. Madehurst?" she asked.
The woman flung her ap.r.o.n over her head and literally grovelled in the dust, crying that her grandchild was sick to death, that the local doctor was away fishing, that Jenny the mother was at her wits end, and so forth, with repet.i.tions and bellowings.
"Where"s the next nearest doctor?" I asked between paroxysms.
"Madden will tell you. Go round to the house and take him with you. I"ll attend to this. Be quick!" She half-supported the fat woman into the shade. In two minutes I was blowing all the horns of Jericho under the front of the House Beautiful, and Madden, in the pantry, rose to the crisis like a butler and a man.
A quarter of an hour at illegal speeds caught us a doctor five miles away.
Within the half-hour we had decanted him, much interested in motors, at the door of the sweetmeat shop, and drew up the road to await the verdict.
"Useful things cars," said Madden, all man and no butler. "If I"d had one when mine took sick she wouldn"t have died."
"How was it?" I asked.
"Croup. Mrs. Madden was away. No one knew what to do. I drove eight miles in a tax cart for the doctor. She was choked when we came back. This car "d ha" saved her. She"d have been close on ten now."
"I"m sorry," I said. "I thought you were rather fond of children from what you told me going to the cross-roads the other day."
"Have you seen "em again, Sir--this mornin"?"
"Yes, but they"re well broke to cars. I couldn"t get any of them within twenty yards of it."
He looked at me carefully as a scout considers a stranger--not as a menial should lift his eyes to his divinely appointed superior.
"I wonder why," he said just above the breath that he drew.
We waited on. A light wind from the sea wandered up and down the long lines of the woods, and the wayside gra.s.ses, whitened already with summer dust, rose and bowed in sallow waves.
A woman, wiping the suds off her arms, came out of the cottage next the sweetmeat shop.
"I"ve be"n listenin" in de back-yard," she said cheerily. "He says Arthur"s unaccountable bad. Did ye hear him shruck just now? Unaccountable bad. I reckon t"will come Jenny"s turn to walk in de wood nex" week along, Mr. Madden."
"Excuse me, Sir, but your lap-robe is slipping," said Madden deferentially. The woman started, dropped a curtsey, and hurried away.
"What does she mean by "walking in the wood"?" I asked.
"It must be some saying they use hereabouts. I"m from Norfolk myself,"
said Madden. "They"re an independent lot in this county. She took you for a chauffeur, Sir."
I saw the Doctor come out of the cottage followed by a draggle-tailed wench who clung to his arm as though he could make treaty for her with Death. "Dat sort," she wailed--"dey"re just as much to us dat has "em as if dey was lawful born. Just as much--just as much! An" G.o.d he"d be just as pleased if you saved "un, Doctor. Don"t take it from me. Miss Florence will tell ye de very same. Don"t leave "im, Doctor!"
"I know. I know," said the man, "but he"ll be quiet for a while now.
We"ll get the nurse and the medicine as fast as we can." He signalled me to come forward with the car, and I strove not to be privy to what followed; but I saw the girl"s face, blotched and frozen with grief, and I felt the hand without a ring clutching at my knees when we moved away.
The Doctor was a man of some humour, for I remember he claimed my car under the Oath of aesculapius, and used it and me without mercy. First we convoyed Mrs. Madehurst and the blind woman to wait by the sick bed till the nurse should come. Next we invaded a neat county town for prescriptions (the Doctor said the trouble was cerebro-spinal meningitis), and when the County Inst.i.tute, banked and flanked with scared market cattle, reported itself out of nurses for the moment we literally flung ourselves loose upon the county. We conferred with the owners of great houses--magnates at the ends of overarching avenues whose big-boned womenfolk strode away from their tea-tables to listen to the imperious Doctor. At last a white-haired lady sitting under a cedar of Lebanon and surrounded by a court of magnificent Borzois--all hostile to motors--gave the Doctor, who received them as from a princess, written orders which we bore many miles at top speed, through a park, to a French nunnery, where we took over in exchange a pallid-faced and trembling Sister. She knelt at the bottom of the tonneau telling her beads without pause till, by short cuts of the Doctor"s invention, we had her to the sweetmeat shop once more. It was a long afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and dissolved like the dust of our wheels; cross-sections of remote and incomprehensible lives through which we raced at right angles; and I went home in the dusk, wearied out, to dream of the clashing horns of cattle; round-eyed nuns walking in a garden of graves; pleasant tea-parties beneath shaded trees; the carbolic-scented, grey-painted corridors of the County Inst.i.tute; the steps of shy children in the wood, and the hands that clung to my knees as the motor began to move.
I had intended to return in a day or two, but it pleased Fate to hold me from that side of the county, on many pretexts, till the elder and the wild rose had fruited. There came at last a brilliant day, swept clear from the south-west, that brought the hills within hand"s reach--a day of unstable airs and high filmy clouds. Through no merit of my own I was free, and set the car for the third time on that known road. As I reached the crest of the Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under the sun; and, looking down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the Channel turn through polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter. A laden collier hugging the coast steered outward for deeper water and, across copper-coloured haze, I saw sails rise one by one on the anch.o.r.ed fishing-fleet. In a deep dene behind me an eddy of sudden wind drummed through sheltered oaks, and spun aloft the first day sample of autumn leaves. When I reached the beach road the sea-fog fumed over the brickfields, and the tide was telling all the groins of the gale beyond Ushant. In less than an hour summer England vanished in chill grey. We were again the shut island of the North, all the ships of the world bellowing at our perilous gates; and between their outcries ran the piping of bewildered gulls. My cap dripped moisture, the folds of the rug held it in pools or sluiced it away in runnels, and the salt-rime stuck to my lips.
Inland the smell of autumn loaded the thickened fog among the trees, and the drip became a continuous shower. Yet the late flowers--mallow of the wayside, scabious of the field, and dahlia of the garden--showed gay in the mist, and beyond the sea"s breath there was little sign of decay in the leaf. Yet in the villages the house doors were all open, and bare- legged, bare-headed children sat at ease on the damp doorsteps to shout "pip-pip" at the stranger.
I made bold to call at the sweetmeat shop, where Mrs. Madehurst met me with a fat woman"s hospitable tears. Jenny"s child, she said, had died two days after the nun had come. It was, she felt, best out of the way, even though insurance offices, for reasons which she did not pretend to follow, would not willingly insure such stray lives. "Not but what Jenny didn"t tend to Arthur as though he"d come all proper at de end of de first year-- like Jenny herself." Thanks to Miss Florence, the child had been buried with a pomp which, in Mrs. Madehurst"s opinion, more than covered the small irregularity of its birth. She described the coffin, within and without, the gla.s.s hea.r.s.e, and the evergreen lining of the grave.
"But how"s the mother?" I asked.
"Jenny? Oh, she"ll get over it. I"ve felt dat way with one or two o" my own. She"ll get over. She"s walkin" in de wood now."
"In this weather?"
Mrs. Madehurst looked at me with narrowed eyes across the counter.
"I dunno but it opens de "eart like. Yes, it opens de "eart. Dat"s where losin" and bearin" comes so alike in de long run, we do say."
Now the wisdom of the old wives is greater than that of all the Fathers, and this last oracle sent me thinking so extendedly as I went up the road, that I nearly ran over a woman and a child at the wooded corner by the lodge gates of the House Beautiful.
"Awful weather!" I cried, as I slowed dead for the turn.
"Not so bad," she answered placidly out of the fog. "Mine"s used to "un.
You"ll find yours indoors, I reckon."
Indoors, Madden received me with professional courtesy, and kind inquiries for the health of the motor, which he would put under cover.
I waited in a still, nut-brown hall, pleasant with late flowers and warmed with a delicious wood fire--a place of good influence and great peace.
(Men and women may sometimes, after great effort, achieve a creditable lie; but the house, which is their temple, cannot say anything save the truth of those who have lived in it.) A child"s cart and a doll lay on the black-and-white floor, where a rug had been kicked back. I felt that the children had only just hurried away--to hide themselves, most like--in the many turns of the great adzed staircase that climbed statelily out of the hall, or to crouch at gaze behind the lions and roses of the carven gallery above. Then I heard her voice above me, singing as the blind sing --from the soul:--
In the pleasant orchard-closes.
And all my early summer came back at the call.
In the pleasant orchard-closes, G.o.d bless all our gains say we-- But may G.o.d bless all our losses, Better suits with our degree,
She dropped the marring fifth line, and repeated--
Better suits with our degree!
I saw her lean over the gallery, her linked hands white as pearl against the oak.