He laughed at his master mirthlessly.
"I say my horse bolted," said the man who once had a silver-studded bridle.
"Cowards both," said the little man.
The other gnawed his knuckle through some meditative moments, with his eye on his inferior.
"Don"t call me a coward," he said at length.
"You are a coward like myself."
"A coward possibly. There is a limit beyond which every man must fear.
That I have learnt at last. But not like yourself. That is where the difference comes in."
"I never could have dreamt you would have left him. He saved your life two minutes before.... Why are you our lord?"
The master gnawed his knuckles again, and his countenance was dark.
"No man calls me a coward," he said. "No. A broken sword is better than none.... One spavined white horse cannot be expected to carry two men a four days" journey. I hate white horses, but this time it cannot be helped. You begin to understand me?... I perceive that you are minded, on the strength of what you have seen and fancy, to taint my reputation.
It is men of your sort who unmake kings. Besides which--I never liked you."
"My lord!" said the little man.
"No," said the master. "NO!"
He stood up sharply as the little man moved. For a minute perhaps they faced one another. Overhead the spiders" b.a.l.l.s went driving. There was a quick movement among the pebbles; a running of feet, a cry of despair, a gasp and a blow....
Towards nightfall the wind fell. The sun set in a calm serenity, and the man who had once possessed the silver bridle came at last very cautiously and by an easy slope out of the ravine again; but now he led the white horse that once belonged to the little man. He would have gone back to his horse to get his silver-mounted bridle again, but he feared night and a quickening breeze might still find him in the valley, and besides he disliked greatly to think he might discover his horse all swathed in cobwebs and perhaps unpleasantly eaten.
And as he thought of those cobwebs and of all the dangers he had been through, and the manner in which he had been preserved that day, his hand sought a little reliquary that hung about his neck, and he clasped it for a moment with heartfelt grat.i.tude. As he did so his eyes went across the valley.
"I was hot with pa.s.sion," he said, "and now she has met her reward. They also, no doubt--"
And behold! Far away out of the wooded slopes across the valley, but in the clearness of the sunset distinct and unmistakable, he saw a little spire of smoke.
At that his expression of serene resignation changed to an amazed anger.
Smoke? He turned the head of the white horse about, and hesitated. And as he did so a little rustle of air went through the gra.s.s about him.
Far away upon some reeds swayed a tattered sheet of grey. He looked at the cobwebs; he looked at the smoke.
"Perhaps, after all, it is not them," he said at last.
But he knew better.
After he had stared at the smoke for some time, he mounted the white horse.
As he rode, he picked his way amidst stranded ma.s.ses of web. For some reason there were many dead spiders on the ground, and those that lived feasted guiltily on their fellows. At the sound of his horse"s hoofs they fled.
Their time had pa.s.sed. From the ground without either a wind to carry them or a winding sheet ready, these things, for all their poison, could do him little evil. He flicked with his belt at those he fancied came too near. Once, where a number ran together over a bare place, he was minded to dismount and trample them with his boots, but this impulse he overcame. Ever and again he turned in his saddle, and looked back at the smoke.
"Spiders," he muttered over and over again. "Spiders! Well, well.... The next time I must spin a web."
4. THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT
He sits not a dozen yards away. If I glance over my shoulder I can see him. And if I catch his eye--and usually I catch his eye--it meets me with an expression.
It is mainly an imploring look--and yet with suspicion in it.
Confound his suspicion! If I wanted to tell on him I should have told long ago. I don"t tell and I don"t tell, and he ought to feel at his ease. As if anything so gross and fat as he could feel at ease! Who would believe me if I did tell?
Poor old Pyecraft! Great, uneasy jelly of substance! The fattest clubman in London.
He sits at one of the little club tables in the huge bay by the fire, stuffing. What is he stuffing? I glance judiciously and catch him biting at a round of hot b.u.t.tered tea-cake, with his eyes on me. Confound him!--with his eyes on me!
That settles it, Pyecraft! Since you WILL be abject, since you WILL behave as though I was not a man of honour, here, right under your embedded eyes, I write the thing down--the plain truth about Pyecraft.
The man I helped, the man I shielded, and who has requited me by making my club unendurable, absolutely unendurable, with his liquid appeal, with the perpetual "don"t tell" of his looks.
And, besides, why does he keep on eternally eating?
Well, here goes for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!
Pyecraft--. I made the acquaintance of Pyecraft in this very smoking-room. I was a young, nervous new member, and he saw it. I was sitting all alone, wishing I knew more of the members, and suddenly he came, a great rolling front of chins and abdomina, towards me, and grunted and sat down in a chair close by me and wheezed for a s.p.a.ce, and sc.r.a.ped for a s.p.a.ce with a match and lit a cigar, and then addressed me. I forget what he said--something about the matches not lighting properly, and afterwards as he talked he kept stopping the waiters one by one as they went by, and telling them about the matches in that thin, fluty voice he has. But, anyhow, it was in some such way we began our talking.
He talked about various things and came round to games. And thence to my figure and complexion. "YOU ought to be a good cricketer," he said. I suppose I am slender, slender to what some people would call lean, and I suppose I am rather dark, still--I am not ashamed of having a Hindu great-grandmother, but, for all that, I don"t want casual strangers to see through me at a glance to HER. So that I was set against Pyecraft from the beginning.
But he only talked about me in order to get to himself.
"I expect," he said, "you take no more exercise than I do, and probably you eat no less." (Like all excessively obese people he fancied he ate nothing.) "Yet,"--and he smiled an oblique smile--"we differ."
And then he began to talk about his fatness and his fatness; all he did for his fatness and all he was going to do for his fatness; what people had advised him to do for his fatness and what he had heard of people doing for fatness similar to his. "A priori," he said, "one would think a question of nutrition could be answered by dietary and a question of a.s.similation by drugs." It was stifling. It was dumpling talk. It made me feel swelled to hear him.
One stands that sort of thing once in a way at a club, but a time came when I fancied I was standing too much. He took to me altogether too conspicuously. I could never go into the smoking-room but he would come wallowing towards me, and sometimes he came and gormandised round and about me while I had my lunch. He seemed at times almost to be clinging to me. He was a bore, but not so fearful a bore as to be limited to me; and from the first there was something in his manner--almost as though he knew, almost as though he penetrated to the fact that I MIGHT--that there was a remote, exceptional chance in me that no one else presented.
"I"d give anything to get it down," he would say--"anything," and peer at me over his vast cheeks and pant.
Poor old Pyecraft! He has just gonged, no doubt to order another b.u.t.tered tea-cake!
He came to the actual thing one day. "Our Pharmacopoeia," he said, "our Western Pharmacopoeia, is anything but the last word of medical science.
In the East, I"ve been told--"
He stopped and stared at me. It was like being at an aquarium.
I was quite suddenly angry with him. "Look here," I said, "who told you about my great-grandmother"s recipes?"
"Well," he fenced.
"Every time we"ve met for a week," I said, "and we"ve met pretty often--you"ve given me a broad hint or so about that little secret of mine."