John Powys: Ducdame

Netta bent over the sleeping man and shook him indignantly by the shoulder.

“Where be I? What be doing to I? Let a man bide where ’a be, can’t ’ee?”

“You’ve gone to sleep,” was the girl’s somewhat hopeless answer to these murmurings. “Mr. Hastings has got out of the house and we must go after him! Get your things on, Nell, quick as you can! There’s nothing else to do. We must all go and look for him. He’s probably gone to Ashover House with the idea of getting his book back!”

“Be parson rinned off, then?” muttered the bewildered sexton, rising with some embarrassment to his feet and staring feebly at the bookcase as if he suspected his prisoner to be ensconced behind it. “’A were there right enough, not two minutes agone! Do ’ee think ’a be hiding somewheres about, lady? ’A be a terrible crafty gentleman, when’s wits be working.’

“Nonsense, Mr. Pod,” said Netta severely, pulling on her hat and gloves and shoes, while Nell did the same in her bedroom. “Any one would think you’d been drinking. A reliable man you are, Mr. Pod; to go to sleep when we trusted you so implicitly! You don’t know what harm mayn’t come of this criminal neglect of yours!”

It is always a relief in any great human crisis to find a scapegoat; and the staring imbecility of the poor man at that moment certainly did lend itself to such treatment.

“Aren’t you ready yet, Nell?” the impatient girl cried, adjusting her cloak between the two open doors. “The rain has stopped now, so we needn’t bother what we put on! The great thing is to catch him before he gets to the bridge.”

Why she used the word “bridge” at that moment she herself could never have explained. “We’ve got to catch him before he gets to the bridge!” She remembered that phrase afterward with a certain superstitious shudder.

Mr. Pod, meanwhile, was defending himself volubly. “No need to be scolding of I, missy. I be ready to go along. ’Tis the other young leddy what’s keeping us. I’ve a-laid out too many precious corpses in me time not to be up and lively for anythink.”

Nell did appear now, at the head of the stairs, still very white and trembling. She seemed so helpless and so nervous that her agitation communicated itself to her friend.

“For God’s sake, let’s start.” The elder woman’s voice had caught the quiver of suspense with which the whole atmosphere of that house of open doors was now vibrating.

They all three descended the stairs together and passed out into the garden.

It had indeed been a chance for “a crafty gentleman” to exercise his wit, that stealthy escape of William Hastings! He had achieved it with the supernatural cunning of a madman, that cunning which seems to be instinctive and subhuman; as though, with the atrophy of his reason, a man’s mind were able to draw freely upon the magnetic duplicity of birds and fishes.

Passing the rain-drenched geranium bed, from which emanated an odour musky and sweet, as if from an enclosed conservatory, he picked up from the ground the great, heavy, iron-tipped garden rake which Pandie had dropped there early the same afternoon.

It was by reason of being burdened with this grotesque weapon that he allowed the gate to click as he went through, a sound that, in the silence of their suspense in the kitchen, had actually reached the ears of one of the girls.

The anger which the loss of his book had roused in him had now crystallized in his demented brain into a cold, murderous fury against the Squire of Ashover.

Hastings’s passion at that crisis was to his own mind a pure irrevocable physical necessity. It was necessary that he should find Rook Ashover — even if he had to break into his house — and it was necessary that he should kill him. Behind this necessity swirled and seethed and fermented all his suppressed jealousy, all his accumulated life hatred, all his desire to “crack Nature’s moulds” and bring back the original chaos!

Hurrying along the grass at the edge of the rain-soaked road without overcoat or shoes, the garden rake clutched tightly in his hand, he soon became aware that another figure, also bareheaded, was advancing toward him.

He was separated from this figure by scarcely more than the length of Foulden Bridge; but by the accident of his following the grass path rather than the open road he himself was a far less noticeable object to the other than the other was to him.

The coming together of these two figures, with the river and the white-railinged bridge between them, might easily have seemed like one single man encountering his own image, or even meeting a phantom of himself, as Goethe once did on an unfrequented road; but no such fancy as that crossed the mind of William Hastings. Whether in the whirl of his thoughts he paused to note the strangeness of this accident, that the man he was seeking was coming straight toward him, no one will ever know. Frozen stiff with excitement he savagely clutched his weapon in both hands and crouched down behind the woodwork of the bridge where it joined the road.

Rook came on with rapid strides to the centre of the bridge. What he saw was not the white railing at his side, or the swollen river beneath him, or the dim perspective of the road in front of him; least of all did he see that crouching figure.

He saw Lexie’s face at the open window. He saw that expressions of mock consternation which he knew so well. He heard his voice: “Is all well with the child? Is all well with Ann? What are you in such a ‘toss’ for, brother Rook?”

And then, before he had time to do more than make that spasmodic mental jerk with which the mind passes from one region of reality to another, Hastings was upon him. With a terrific swing of that fantastic weapon the priest struck him full on the side of the head; the arm which Rook instinctively raised to protect himself coming in contact with no more than the handle of the instrument.

Stunned and unconscious the wounded man fell heavily back against one of the two solitary railings which formed the double balustrade of the wooden bridge.

The impact of so massive and bony a frame was too much for that weather-weakened plank; and with a sinister crashing sound it broke and fell outward, precipitating the unconscious man into the stream below. Face downward in that swift-rushing current floated now, limp and unresisting, what was speedily no more than the shape, the form, the image of a homo sapiens. First to one side of the river it drifted; then to the other; the weeds brushing against its face, and the Frome water, embrowned by the rain, splashing and gurgling round its unheeding ears.

It was quite out of sight in the darkness — it would have been perhaps out of sight in full daylight — when William Hastings flung his weapon down and returned to consciousness from the petrified trance he had fallen into after striking his blow.

He occupied himself for a while, with an absorbed and vacant concentration, in the task of breaking off and throwing into the river bits of the broken rail that still hung loose and uneven over the water. Then wearily and slowly he turned back the way he had come.

Exhausted by the storm of passion in his brain and by the physical stress of what he had gone through that day he did not get very far. Long before he reached the gate of Toll-Pike Cottage he sank down by the wayside, a huddled, shivering, half-dazed creature, who was quickly passing from all conscious memory of his identity.

Here they found him after the lapse of barely an hour; and when they had carried him back into his room and had undressed him and got him into bed it was clear that his incoherent murmurings were something different from his former insanity.