John Powys: Ducdame

He turned away, unwilling to drive the woman to further extremes of supplication; but as he left her there he said compassionately and gently, but with a certain sternness: “If you do find your girl to-night, Betsy, or on any other night, I will see to it that she has a proper tombstone.”

He passed his father’s grave this time with a shrug of his shoulders. Was the late Squire himself responsible for the abominable neglect that was the cause of Betsy’s nocturnal piety? Were those “half beasties,” as Binnory called them, his own half brothers?

He walked rapidly out of the churchyard into the road.

Once more that leaden feeling in his legs, as if the law of gravitation had suddenly doubled its centripetal pull!

Once more that accursed sense of enormous importance in the making of trivial, unessential decisions!

“Ann didn’t need me there,” he thought, “till it’s all over. It’s the least I can do for her to obey her literally. She doesn’t want any more of these mock-sympathetic watchers!” And he visualized with such appalling distinctness the red-haired Pandie, obsessed with gloating sentiment, clinging to the banisters or listening at the door, that he plucked at his heavy feet as if they had been two obdurate roots, and strode resolutely off toward Foulden Bridge.

It was then, out there between the river bank and the open meadows, that the quality of the sky above his head began to change. The waning moon was still below the horizon; but a gentle wind had risen from the west and had swept the clouds before it, so that Rook was able to discern at least one or two of the constellations with which he was familiar.

He could see the great outstretched wings of Cygnus, like the wings of some vast emissary of fate despatched by one demiurge to another, flying across the fields of space.

He could see a star that he fancied must be Aldebaran; and another that he noted to himself, with that pathetic satisfaction with which creatures of a day find respite from their nothingness in the mere naming of the immortals, as a luminary that might be, only his memory always failed him, that favourite sky mark of his brother Lexie, Vega in Lyra.

Lit by the stars as if by far-off candle flames the wide water meadows stretched away to his left; and beyond the river and beyond the barley fields rose dark and blurred, like a great bastion of some invisible fortress, the vague outline of Heron’s Ridge.

Certain stars, watery and faint, as if they had been the drowned but not quite extinguished bodies of glowworms, lay silent and deep-buried in the muddy water of a ditch at the roadside. Bits of broken reed stalk and wind-blown twigs from willow trees and alders floated between the images of these fallen stars, as if they floated above a crevice in the terrestrial orb itself which sank down into antipodal gulfs.

Calmed and soothed by the largeness of the night about him the Squire of Ashover began to recover the equipoise of his perturbed spirit.

Ashover? Ashover? What was Ashover between the hovering wings of Cygnus and the stretching out of the chords of Lyra?

He suddenly began to feel strangely, exultantly happy; happier than he had been for more than twelve months; happier than he had been since those irresponsible days just after his father’s death.

Every person he thought of at that moment intensified rather than diminished his happiness. Round all the people of his life there seemed to float a sort of ideal luminosity, enhancing their dignity, their beauty, their originality, their human worth.

He felt a sense of inexpressible gratitude to the gods that he had ever known these people of his life, his brother, his mother, his wife, Netta, and Nell. Some actual chemical fluid, wonderful, magical, as if those high stars had been melted in some enchanted forest pool to which he had pressed his lips, seemed to flow round the figures of these people as they gathered there in his mind, and to harmonize for ever his relations with them.

Under the healing flow of this magical fluid, which seemed actually at that moment flooding every cell of his brain, the knots of the nerves that were jangled there unloosed themselves and expanded freely; expanded like the floating tendrils of dry seaweed when the twilight tide covers it, after a hot day!

In the ecstasy of what he felt just then it seemed to him that he could live happily by Ann’s side for the rest of his life. It seemed to him that even if her love were far more predatory and possessive than it ever had been he still could live with her, live with her and her child, without any of that abominable illusion of being suffocated, divided, impinged upon, from which he had suffered so horribly in times past.

And the same thing applied to all the other people of his life. Something had happened to those knotted nerves in his soul that had untied them completely, that had spread them out beautifully and freely like crumpled mosses that have been washed by rain and can now hold the sun in their leafy cups without withering.

As he came near to Foulden Bridge his happiness grew to such a pitch that he actually skipped a step or two with those feet of his that just now were so leaden and heavy.

The alders by the sheep wash, if they possessed any conscious interest in the human figures of their environment, must have been struck by the sight of a bony, hatless, middle-aged man, skipping with his feet as if they were the hooves of an escaped goat!

All at once Rook became aware — without warning, without premonition-of that same young rider upon the gray horse moving silently along by his side.

Instinctively, as before, he clutched at the youth’s saddle; and as before, the boy laid his warm youthful fingers caressingly upon his hand.

“I told her I’d have a tombstone put up as soon as she found her,” he discovered himself saying, as if in answer to some reproach which the boy had made. “And I’ve obeyed Ann to-night quite literally. She told me to walk to Foulden Bridge.”

Why he said just this, when Ann had never once mentioned the word “Foulden,” is one of those queer incidents in a man’s life destined to remain to the end of time hidden away unsolved in the limbo of the irrelevant.

But what troubled Rook then was that the youth did not respond to his self-justifying speeches. All he did was to press the hand upon his saddle with still more tender solicitude. Rook wanted him to speak. His longing that he should speak was the first interruption he had suffered to that strange happiness which still hung about him.

But the boy rode slowly on and remained silent. Suddenly Rook felt those fingers grow cold. And it was not only that they grew cold. They seemed to melt away; they seemed to become lighter and more insubstantial than mist!

He looked up. Ah! that figure was receding, horse and rider together, receding and receding; growing dim and faint, dimmer and fainter, until there was no more left of them than a troubled shadow, limned as it were in a great withdrawing wave, rolling back down a shelving beach.

And as they vanished from the man’s sight there came to his ears what seemed like a lamentable sigh:

“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”

And though with his reason he knew it was only the rising of the wind and its tremulous passage across the shaken reeds, to his heart it seemed an appeal and a warning and a farewell; but what was most strange of all to him just then was the fact that simultaneously with the sinking away of that forlorn sigh across the wet fields, he became absolutely certain, beyond doubt or dispute, that in her bed in Ashover House his wife had been delivered of a son.

So certain was he of this that a rush of quick irrepressible tears came to the back of his eye sockets, and though not a tear actually fell he was conscious enough that he, too, Rook of Ashover, was experiencing now, for all his sceptical disillusionment, the most primitive emotion of the human race: that immemorial exultation, older than the tents of Abraham, older than the tents of Achilles, the joy that a man child is born into the world!