John Powys - Ducdame

She left the house by the kitchen door, greeting Pandie and the cook, who were enjoying a cup of early tea over the stove, in so happy a voice that when she had gone Pandie remarked to the other: “These here actressy gels do love a bit of white Christmas, same as decent-living folks, then; seems so! Her be gone to hear Parson Hastings say his ‘shed-for-you’ by snow-shine I reckon! Will the poor deceived man give the like o’ she the sacriments, do ’ee suppose?”

Martha Vabbin opened the top of the stove with an iron hook and shifted the kettle.

“Maybe he will and maybe he won’t,” she replied. “But I heard tell that when Corporal Dick askit for a sup o’ them things in bygone days the Reverend that then was talked terrible straight to the poor hedge-dropped lad.”

Netta’s experience of snow in the real country was so slight that she felt an extraordinary sensation of awe as her steps broke the feathery whiteness that covered everything. A cart of some kind had entered the drive gate since the snow-storm began; but apart from this, everything was virginal and unstained.

The purity of the new-fallen snow made all the various little objects that displayed themselves in their shameless browns or yellows look more than just dirty; look in some queer way degraded, as if Nature had tossed them out in a fit of disgust. Every single twig or gatepost or tree root which did dare to assert its identity, bore upon its face the look of being subjected to a kind of penitential exposure, as if the self-respecting reticence with which it had concealed all the little birthmarks, deformities, and discolorations upon its poor skin were being held up to scorn.

Netta had passed round the corner of the house and was making her way through the little shrubbery path bordered by laurels and laurustinus, when she became aware of a sudden rustling and stumbling in the bushes behind her. She stopped and turned round. Could it be that Rook had found she was gone and had followed her? The moment she stopped and remained motionless, the person or animal behind her did the same thing; and so instantaneous was the sequence of silence upon sound that it was almost as if the steps of this mysterious pursuer were only an echo of her own.

Something kept her from retracing her way; perhaps a vague fear that it might be Cousin Ann; but each time she advanced and stopped again, the same phenomenon repeated itself. In the end she began to run, stumbling over the hidden roots and shaking the snow down from the smooth leaves of the laurels.

Just at the moment she emerged from the shrubbery near the drive gate and caught sight of the lighted windows of the church on the other side of the river, she tripped up over a dead branch and fell headlong to the ground.

Simultaneously with her fall two sharp reports rang out behind her and two volleys of leaden gunshot rattled against the gate.

She scrambled up on her knees, her face in the direction from which the shots had come. With a rapid movement of thought she wondered if she had been hit; and as she wondered, she was distinctly conscious of a delicious wave of relaxation and relief.

Her brain had never been clearer, her thoughts never more clairvoyant.

If only she had been hit, how lovely to die just here; especially if Rook came to find her when she was dead! It was with a queer detached observation, almost as if she had been an irresponsible onlooker instead of a muffled-up white-faced woman kneeling in the snow, that she watched the tall form of Corporal Dick emerge from the bushes.

Seeing her kneeling like this and gazing at him with great staring eyes, it must have crossed the crazed wits of the Ashover bastard that the contents of both his barrels had lodged in her body.

With a gasping cry he flung his gun away and stood panting, like an animal that has killed its quarry but has burst its own heart in the exhausting pursuit.

For the space of three or four seconds the woman’s eyes and the man’s eyes remained spellbound, entoiled in that peculiar and unique complicity — unlike anything else in the world — that unites a hunter and his victim.

Then in one swooning moment the effect of his twelve-hour vigil in the falling snow darkened the old man’s senses. He reeled like a tree that has been cut with an axe, threw up his arms, and fell heavily on his face.

His fall and the sight of his outstretched figure lying before her broke the spell of Netta’s paralyzed nerves. She staggered to her feet and moving toward him knelt down by his side. At first she thought he was dead; but as she turned his gaunt frame over, she felt his heart beating under his snow-dampened clothes.

With some effort, for Corporal Dick’s tall figure was massive-boned though skeleton-lean, she dragged him along the snow to the nearest tree and there propped up his head on her muffler and tam-o’-shanter. Then she took off her cloak and spread it over him; and after standing for a second to see whether the tree trunk kept the snow from falling on his face, she started back at a run toward the house; crossing the lawn between the lime tree and the cedar.

As she ran she heard the church bell begin to ring. It rang unevenly, and she surmised that either Nell herself was ringing it or that Mr. Hastings had got some village boy to help him.

By good luck Rook had heard the report of the gun and was already half-dressed when she reached their room.

“Shot at you?” he kept repeating; and he hugged her with more warmth than Netta had experienced for many a long month. “Shot at you? Corporal Dick shot at you? Ay! What a race we are!”

He seemed to Netta to be actually exhilarated by the event. She heard him humming “Good King Wenceslaus” as he pulled on his boots. This was a tendency she was never quite able to fathom in him, this tendency to detach himself from things that happened and to enjoy them in a sort of inhuman trance, as if they were insubstantial dream pictures!

Netta felt obscurely piqued by his mood, in spite of the warm hug he had given her. It seemed odd that he should hum “King Wenceslaus” like that, when she had just been shot at as if she had been a pheasant or a rabbit!

She could not help the tears coming into her eyes as she thought how easily she might have been lying now just where the Corporal was lying.

It was through a vague self-pitying humour, not devoid, however, of a certain sweetness, that the domestic agitations that followed reached her mind as if through a mist made of fine-drifted snow.

It all seemed to mingle with the snow, this whispered, murmured agitation; Pandie’s voice offering wild conjectures; Mrs. Ashover’s voice issuing contradictory commands.

It mingled with the snow; it mingled with that sudden glance she had had of the lighted windows across the river; it mingled with the tune of “King Wenceslaus”; it mingled with a few floating fragmentary words from that old ditty, about “bringing meat” and “bringing wine!”

She was herself so far removed from the domestic furore that rose and fell round the recovering consciousness of Corporal Dick that she hardly commented on the fact that Rook said no word about her version of the episode in the garden. Rook was not the only perosn who heard the shots; nor was Rook the only person who knew of the Corporal’s excited state of mind. Netta was once more, however, to become aware of how embattled a front the House of Ashover could turn to all outside interference.

Even when the gun itself was found, half-buried in the snow, it did not seem to occur to any one that the affair was a matter for official examination. The old feudal spirit, according to which in former days the Lords of Frome-side would have power of life and death over those within their gates, seemed to hover over every aspect of this unlucky incident.