John Powys - Ducdame

Binnory, too frightened to move or breathe, gazed at him with mouth and eyes open. Granfer Dick had always been more than human to the lad, and this burst of excitement in him was as though the eternal hills had begun to cry out.

Anxious not to increase the old man’s excitement by unnecessary opposition, and not quite free from the fumes of the Dorchester ale, Rook remained passive in his seat, while his cousin leaned against the edge of his chair ready to spring over to the bed the moment the need arose.

It was at her that the Corporal now pointed his long gaunt arm, the white nightshirt clinging tight round the bony wrist, the forefinger outstretched.

“Where be the spirit of your people, Ann Poynings? Where be your love and your maiden beauty this bitter day? Have you no thought to put a hand out and stop this ruin of hopes and expectations; this crumbling down of what took a thousand years to build? What be your girl-pride and your lady-pride; your maidenhead-fears and your virgin-fears, compared with Ashover going down into a rumour of dust and dirt? Ay! Ay! Your cheeks are rosy-bright and your eyes shining. You do know what an old man would say but must forbear to say. You do know well enough! Ay! If ye be as comely in shift and smock as ye be in cramosin, he that be now sitting aside of ’ee would be a gowk and a gammon to let the ice freeze on the cold sheets!”

His arm sank down on the bed and his head fell back on the pillow.

Lady Ann went quickly over to him and pulled the bedclothes up under his chin. He met her gaze with a look of beseeching intensity, the wild glare dying out from his face like the reflection of a blown-out torch from a murky pool.

Then to the girl’s amazement one of his wrinkled eyelids closed in a fantastic goblinish wink and he heaved over against the wall and remained dead-still.

She stood by his side for a second or two, contemplating his giant frame under the chequered coverlet. The thoughts that passed at that moment through the head of Missy Sparrow-hawk would have been difficult to put into intelligible words.

She protracted her pose at the bedside longer than was necessary. When she did turn away from her now peacefully breathing patient, it was not at Rook she looked but at the boy.

“Better run down now, Binnory, and get into bed! Do you want the lady to come down and tuck you up? Very well, then! Be a good boy and undress yourself quietly and I’ll come down and say good-night to you in five, six, seven, ten minutes.”

The lad obeyed her without demur. He glanced reverently at the sleeping form, touched his forehead mechanically, as he had been taught to do when addressing the gentry, and slipped quietly down the stairs.

The cousins were left alone with the sleeping man. Rook got up and walked over to the window.

“Shall I open it a little?” he asked. The soi-disant trained nurse nodded.

He pulled the sash down.

The night outside was windless and hushed as a vast mausoleum, but before he pulled up the window again they both heard in the stillness the soft shuffling muted thud — snow upon snow — where some bowed-down branch was eased of its clinging load.

“It’ll begin again before morning,” said Rook, turning toward the girl. “Perhaps we shall be completely snowed up here! I hope the Drools have plenty more of that ale in the house.”

He spoke casually and lightly to conceal his growing agitation. Vaguely in his mind he associated the great darkened mass of frozen cloud-stuff that covered the earth with the inevitableness of the fate that was gathering about him.

“I’ll just run down to see that the boy’s all right,” said Cousin Ann, yielding to a little nervous shiver, “and then I’ll go straight to bed. Good-night, Cousin.” She made a slight movement toward him, and then, drawing herself up, lifted her half-extended hand to her own hair and adjusted its braids.

“Good-night, my dear,” murmured Rook brusquely, emptying the last drop of ale into his glass and swallowing it at a gulp.

She closed the door. He heard her go downstairs and enter the front kitchen. He waited, listening intently, his knuckles pressed upon the table. Why should the ticking of the clock be echoed so ridiculously by the irrepressible beating of his heart?

He heard the shutting of the kitchen door and her quick rush up the stairs. Then her own door was shut; and the house was as silent as Antiger Great Knoll.

An overpowering restlessness came upon him. He glanced round the Corporal’s room, at the gilded clock on the mantelpiece, at the lithograph of the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, at the old man’s Sunday clothes hanging on wooden pegs, at the mother-of-pearl shells on the little mahogany table, at the shiny horsehair armchair, at the spotted china dogs that glowered at each other from red-tasselled brackets. Finally he could stand it no more. “I’ll have a breath of air,” he said to himself. “A breath of air, Uncle Dick,” he repeated aloud, apostrophizing the form on the bed.

“I hope she won’t think I’m running away,” he thought as he descended the creaking stairs. “But, no! She’s a sensible girl and a man ought to cool his head after all that ale!”

The gamekeeper’s backyard was no longer isolated from the surrounding planetary spaces. No mere fragmentary instalment of the inter-stellar darkness had lodged itself there. The whole weight of the great Opposite of Light, the whole volume of light’s negation and antithesis, bore down upon him out of aërial infinitude. The superincumbent ocean of blackness, swallowing up all form, all colour, all past, all future, was indeed enough to drown fathom-deep every scruple left in his human brain.

He found himself recalling, as he stood there in the trodden snow, a particularly outrageous oracle of his brother Lexie, most mischievously germane to the matter in hand. He was on the point of turning to go in when a faint night wind, touching his face as it journeyed from nowhere to nowhere, seduced him into making a few further steps over the vegetable stumps and clumps of Mr. Drool’s garden.

Peering through that blind opacity he could just make out the vague line of the garden hedge. The Antiger Woods were entirely invisible. The elm trees by the side of the lane showed themselves as vague pillars of darkness within the dome of darkness. It struck his mind as a strange thing, that, though all distinctions were blotted out, he still was conscious of the snow at his feet as being something white, rather than black or gray. Did human beings inherit some queer colour sense, quite apart from the vision of the eye; a tactile sense, perhaps; derived from some remote animal or even vegetable atavism?

Ah! Ah! what was that? …

A most uncanny sound, blood-curdling and shocking, came suddenly to his ears from the invisible heart of the snow-bound hills. He smiled to himself when it was repeated, for he was sceptical enough not to be startled a second time by any nocturnal terror.

He stood still, listening. The second time, however, proved to be the last time. Only once again until the hour of his death did Rook Ashover hear that sound; nor did he ever come to any rational conclusion as to that sound’s origin.

Often and often after that night it was his destiny to wonder what that thing was. It was louder and more appalling than the cry of any wild creature. When Rook tried to describe it to Lexie he emphasized the fact that it seemed to come to him through some heavy, remote intervening substance. The nearest description he seemed able to give of it was that it suggested the united exultation of a host of people buried underground.

The occurrence might have altered the course of events that night — for all his inhuman callousness — if it had not been that his wanderings through Mr. Drool’s garden had brought him to that side of the house from which he could see his cousin’s window.