Chapter 24

Peter, finding the farmer and his wife at breakfast, told them he was leaving, and asked that his luggage should be taken to the station. The station was two miles from the house, and Peter started to walk. He had turned into the drive, and was passing the last of the farm buildings, when he ran upon two figures vehemently talking. Their voices troubled his miserable brooding; but he was hardly yet aware of their presence before his way was barred. He looked up from the ground and was confronted with a man visibly blazing with anger.

He looked aside for an explanation, and saw that the man had been talking with the farmer's granddaughter. She was watching them with expressionless eyes, but with a cold satisfaction hiding in the line of her mouth.

"What does this mean?" said Peter, making an attempt to pass.

He looked swiftly from one to the other, recognising his opponent as the man he had seen talking from his horse in the yard yesterday.

The man struck at Peter with his whip.

Peter caught the blow on his arm, and flung out his fists.

"What's your quarrel with me?" asked Peter.

"Well you know it," said the man.

[Pg 172]

Peter turned to the farmer's granddaughter. She smiled at him, and he understood. He was filled with a desolating sense of the futility of resisting the event.

"I've no quarrel with you," he drearily protested to the man, "why do you force it?"

"It's late to talk of forcing."

"Forcing? I don't understand."

Again Peter turned to the woman. Her metallic outfacing of his question flashed the truth at him.

"He knows that you have insulted me."

The words came from her on a low malicious note.

"Are you going to fight?" the man blazed at him, flinging his weapon to the ground. "Or are you going to take that?" He pointed to the whip lying between them.

Peter flung off his coat. Standing in the sun, he felt weak and vague. He swayed a little. He felt he must get away from the intolerable heat. He looked into the shed beside them, and the man nodded.

They went in and faced each other upon a dusty floor of uneven stone. The girl sat on Peter's coat, indecently fascinated. The man looked grimly at Peter's strong arms and professional attitude. But Peter was faint and sick. He saw his fists before him as though they belonged to another—white and blurred. Dreamily he realised that a blow had started upon him out of the[Pg 173] grey air. He met it with an instinctive guard; but he weakly smiled to feel something heavy and strong break through his arm like paper. Then everything was blotted out.

In a moment the man was kneeling beside him, astonished at the strange collapse of his opponent. Peter had gone down like a sack, striking his head on the stone floor. The man had hardly touched him. Indeed, he had himself nearly fallen with the impetus of a blow which had fallen upon the air.

He felt Peter's pulse and forehead, awed by his stillness and the stare of his eyes. The girl was now beside him.

"Quick," she said. "Run to the house. We must get him to bed."

The man looked at her, hard and stern.

"You're a bit too anxious," he said.

"Can't you see? The boy's dying."

He looked implacably into her eyes.

"Let the blackguard lie."

"Fool!"

She almost spat at him, with a gesture of impatient agony for Peter on the floor.

"You've been lying to me," suddenly said the man.

She did not answer, but he persisted:

"You told me——"

"He did not."

He lifted his hand to strike her. She did not flinch, but said quietly:

[Pg 174]

"Who's the blackguard now?"

He turned and walked swiftly from the shed. She heard him running to the house, and took Peter's head on her lap. His lips were moving. Compassion stirred in her—a sensual compassion, feeding upon her complete possession of Peter, helplessly at her pleasure.

The man returned with the farmer's cart, and Peter was taken to the house. A telegram was sent to Hamingburgh, and the local doctor was called. He said that Peter had had a stroke of the sun. He was in a raging fever. The farmer's granddaughter was occasionally left with him.

She sat for several hours beside the bed watching Peter's restless and feeble movements. Sometimes she heard him talking vaguely and softly, but for long she could catch no syllable of what he said. Again she was stirred with delicious pity. She put her hands upon his cheeks, and leaned over his stirring lips for a long hour. Then suddenly she began to hear what he was saying, piecing his broken words.

He was walking alone in a dark house. It was very dark and quite still except for the dripping of water into a cistern. Peter always returned to this dripping water. He was looking for someone, and he stood where she used to sleep. At last a strange name came to his tongue—endlessly repeated.

The listening girl drew away from him. She[Pg 175] went to the window to get beyond range of his voice. She was empty and thwarted. The name pursued her and she turned back to the bed. Maddened by his repeated murmur, she felt as if she were fighting for a place in his mind. She put her hand upon his mouth, trying to still the name upon his lips. But she felt them moving under the touch of her fingers, with the syllables that shut her out.

She dropped on her knees beside him, becoming a part of his madness.

"Here is the woman you want," she sang to him. Tears of vexation and jealousy—quick as a child's—started down her face.

"Peter, boy, don't you remember? You came to me, and dropped in the hay. I sang to you in the dark, and you came."

But Peter stood in a dark house, muttering a name she had never heard. Now he was striking matches one after another, peering into the empty corners of a deserted room. Then he spoke of an attic with rafters, and again of the dripping water.

The girl looked into his vacant eyes.

"Can't you see me, Peter?"

It was someone else he saw: he talked now of her dusty frock and of a garden where he sat and waited.

The woman by the bed could not come between him and this lovely ghost. She strained Peter towards her, and put her face to his cheek.

[Pg 176]

"No, Peter; it's me that is here. Can't you feel that I am holding you?"

Her pressure started in him another disordered memory. He struggled against her, and raised himself upon an elbow. His eyes looked quite through her. He saw her in his brain, but he did not see her in the room before him. The girl shuddered to hear him struggling with a mirage of herself. He was back in the loft. At first she thought it was the sight of her visibly before him in the room that caused him to speak of her. She drew back, and with a shudder saw he was talking to the air.

"You are not Miranda," he said, accusing the shape of his brain. "She smiled, but she did not smile like that."

The girl could no longer endure it. She went from the room, and, till Mrs. Paragon came, the farmer's wife sat beside him.