1
THAT night was one of the cold and starry nights which sometimes fall on the downs in the middle of summer. As they began to climb up the slope, the earth seemed to be returning in warm, almost tangible waves, the heat it had received during the day from the sun. But when they got clear of the gloomy beech groves on the lower slopes, when the uneven track had failed them and left them in the middle of a great sweep of open grass, this ceased, and the air grew gradually cooler. Presently the wind, which had fallen at dusk, rose again, coming from another direction, faint but chilly. The motion of the air could hardly be felt, yet it had in it some quality which touched and stayed the blood and enervated the spirit. These hours of darkness promised, before they were done, to reduce the fugitives to a lower state of wretchedness than they yet had suffered.
When they had stumbled for some time up the steeply rising hill-side which bore only small and scattered patches of gorse and juniper, Jeremy realized that they were now as far from the road as they needed to be, and that it would be impossible for them to walk on much longer. He looked about him for some shelter in which they might pass the night and not be immediately obvious to any searcher when day broke. But he could see none; and he began to be troubled in his mind, for he dared not halt lest exhaustion should pin them in the open where they stood. He scanned eagerly every patch of bush that they passed; but all were too thin and too much exposed. At last on his left he thought he saw a line dark against the dark sky, which might perhaps be a wood. He pulled gently at the old man’s arm and directed their steps towards it. When they came close it proved to be a thick grove of bushes and low thorn trees, running on either hand out of the narrow limits of their sight.
“This will do well enough,” he said in the murmured voice of pre-occupation; and Eva assented with a single word.
They pushed their way through the close growth, and came suddenly on a steep bank three or four yards from the edge of the thicket.
“This will do!” Jeremy cried in a heartier tone; and he explained that he wished to be well hidden by bushes, but not so much shut in that in the morning they could not get a clear view of the country around them. But, while he was explaining all this, Eva was gently laying down the Speaker, so that his head rested against the bank, and making for his head a pillow out of her cloak. Jeremy silently gave her his own cloak, with which she covered the sleeping or comatose old man. When she had finished she stood up, shivered slightly, and folded her arms as if to retain the last vanishing sparks of warmth in her body. Jeremy, standing also, quiet and somber, felt a wave of inexpressible emotion rise in his heart at the sight of her slender and shadowy figure.
“Eva ... Eva ...” he murmured, and she came into his arms as though that had been the homing-cry. They had no words to use with one another. They kissed once, and then stood locked in his embrace, Eva’s face pressed into his shoulder, one of his broad hands on her hair, the other at her waist. After a little while he pressed her head gently backwards, bent the supple waist and lowered her on to the ground as tenderly as she had lowered her father. She suffered what he did without speaking or resisting, and allowed him to move her head so that it rested on a thick tuft of grass, and to wrap her riding skirt tightly about her ankles. For a moment after he had done the silence endured, and Jeremy thought that, even thus, after the fatigues of the day, she would not find it hard to sleep. But when she saw him standing, square, black and aloof, between her and the stars, she called out to him softly,
“Jeremy! Jeremy! come down to me!” He knelt by her side, and laid one hand on her arm, conscious, as he made it, of the clumsiness and inexpressiveness of the gesture. “Lie down by me,” she went on. “The night will be cold, and we shall keep one another warm.”
After the first exquisite exhilaration of finding himself at her side, limb to limb, cheek to cheek, clasped in her arms as she in his, the faculty of reckoning minutes and hours vanished from his mind. This seemed to him an image of the eternal night which descends on all. He had a vision of a shrouded figure pacing an endless corridor and pausing for the length of a human life between one step and the next. Only the slow, unintermittent rhythm of the girl’s breathing suggested to him that time passed. He stirred slightly in her arms: he wished to look up at the sky.
At their heads stood a low hawthorn, beaten, stunted, and misshapen by many fierce winds, which threw out its sprawling branches over them; and close to their side was a thick overhanging clump of gorse. Between the two swam vaguely the North Star; and his eyes strayed from this to the Great Bear, whence he found or guessed the other constellations, riding the night sky, remote, brilliant and serene. It seemed to him that what spirit he had left ceased to be human and was sucked up into the fellowship of those bright indifferent lights, and the vast spaces which separated them. He began to amuse himself by calling back to mind as much as he could remember of that ancient and ridiculous science, astronomy. Odd facts floated into his thoughts concerning the weight of the stars, the speed of a ray of light, the nature of gravitation. He recalled epoch-making and cataclysmic discoveries, all records of which were now very likely erased from the annals of mankind. He wondered idly what had become of So-and-so who had been forever busy with the perihelion of Mercury, and of Such-and-such who had exhibited strange frenzies when you mentioned to him the name of a noted Continental astronomer. He recollected queer empty wrangles about the relation between the universe we can see or conceive, and the infinite, inconceivable universe, of the existence of which our minds mysteriously inform us. He was fascinated by the recurrence in his thoughts of a theory that our system, and all the stars we can see, are but one minute and negligible organism, moving regularly through space.... He was trying to form some image of what this must mean, when he felt himself recalled, as though to another life, by a voice that was infinitely distant, infinitely faint, and which had once held an infinite significance for him. It was a struggle to come back to this forgotten point in time and space: he struggled....
The girl was speaking. “Jeremy,” she repeated, louder, “I am not asleep.”
He came back, awoke into the real world with a shock like that of a diver coming out of the sea, and found that still the same night was in progress, that nothing around him had changed, and that he was very cold. They had both of them given up their cloaks to the old man and had nothing to cover them. The wind, so faint and tenuous that it was impossible to tell whence it came, crept insidiously through or over everything that might have served them for a shelter. The thin air surrounded and drenched them with its enervating chill, taking away from them almost even the strength for speech. But Jeremy answered,
“Nor am I, dearest. I was thinking.”
They lay silent for some time. Then Eva began again, “Do you know where we are?”
“I don’t at all. I didn’t think to ask the name of the village. We must be somewhere on the downs between Bury and Duncton, but I couldn’t see whereabouts in the darkness. Anyway, in the morning we must make towards the west.”
Silence again.
But the effort of recalling these facts had drawn Jeremy back to human life; and presently he said with simplicity, “I love you ... I love you....” She answered him, and they talked, telling one another of their feelings, exploring strange paths, making strange discoveries, each taking turns to draw the other aside, like two children together in a wood, one of whom points out the flowers, while the other, finger on lip, calls for silence to listen to the birds. As they talked in soft murmurs they forgot the cold and the passage of time: it was the longest converse they had ever held in intimacy. Thus it was not the gray light of morning stealing over the hill-side but the Speaker, who suddenly began to be restless and to cough and moan in his sleep, that first drew their attention from themselves.
Eva started hurriedly out of Jeremy’s embrace and went to the old man. He was in the grip of another attack; and his contorted face showed that he was suffering deeply. Jeremy followed her, and stood helplessly by while she arranged more comfortably the folded cloak under his head and drew over his body the wrappings which, as constantly, with aimless violent movements of his arms he threw off again. Then, as suddenly as the attack had begun, it seemed to pass. The old man grew calm and allowed himself to be covered. He settled on his back, folded his arms across his breast and threw back his head; and his breathing became more gentle. Jeremy discovered with a shock that the sunken and brilliant eyes were open and were intensely fixed on his. He opened his mouth to say he knew not what, but the Speaker had begun in a faint but distinct whisper.
“Jeremy, we were beaten——”
It was as though he had returned to the last moment of the battle, as though the three days of his aberration had not been, and he was saying now what he might have said then. But to Jeremy there was nothing but injustice in this long-suspended comment. He forgot where they were and what was their condition; and words of hot anger rose in his mouth. He was deceived for a moment by the serenity and calmness of the Speaker’s voice into thinking that this was indeed the man who had tyrannically driven them all into disaster by his ungovernable will.
“You——” shaped itself on his lips, never spoken; for the girl plucked in terror at his arm and at the same moment he stopped, jaw dropping, eyes starting and hands hanging as though the tendons of the wrists had been cut. For the old man was dead.
Eva threw herself down beside the body and pressed her lips on her father’s cold forehead. Then realizing that what she had dreaded was true, that the final event had taken place, she slipped helpless to one side, sobbing violently with dry eyes and convulsed mouth. Jeremy looked from the dead man to the grief-racked girl, impotent and abased. This was the end of the old man’s schemes and efforts, his life-long devotion, his last sufferings—this cold and miserable death, in the beginning of the morning, on a bare hill in the country that was no longer his own to scheme for. In the contemplation of the body Jeremy felt for a moment relieved of human desires, contemptuous of what demanded so much pains for so small a reward.
But while he stood thus he realized for the first time how light it had grown. All the down was dimly revealed, the sun was on the point of rising, and faint mists, curling off the fields, obscured the distances. But close at hand the grove in which they had hidden, and the bank against which they had rested, were plainly shown. Again a sense of staggering recognition invaded Jeremy’s brain, and he did not know in what world or what time he was living. Then in a flash he was enlightened.
“The Roman road!” he exclaimed, forgetting the dead and living companions who lay at his feet. For the long bank, overgrown and almost hidden, extending into the mist on either side, was the Stane Street, running over the downs like an arrow to Bignor Hill. A pure wonder overcame Jeremy, and he went nearer to the road, touched the high unmistakable stony mound and followed its trace with his eyes. He remembered it, having tracked it without any difficulty from near Halnaker Hill through the Nore Wood, past Gumber Farm and past this very place, no longer ago than—no longer ago than the year 1913. The month had been September, and blackberries had been very thick in the hedges. He was bewildered and the waking earth turned dizzily round him, while the tragedy in which he had just taken a part and which was perhaps to continue, sank into the category of small and negligible things. It seemed to take its place with the road and everything else in a fantasy of idle invention.
He recovered himself when Eva touched him lightly on the arm. She was self-possessed again, save that she was trembling violently and that her beautiful face was drawn and pale. He wished to explain to her what had thus struck him dumb, but she whispered,
“Look! Look down there!”
The sun was now just up, the mists were fast clearing, and the open spaces and long shadows of the hill-side and the plain were very distinct. As he followed her pointing finger, he saw a line of little figures, a mile away, spread out as though they were beating the ground, advancing slowly up the hill.
“The Welsh!” he uttered, somberly and without agitation. This was what he had known and expected, and his heart did not beat a fraction the faster for it. When he looked at Eva, she too was calm, almost rigid, waiting for his next word.
“We must creep up through the bushes,” he whispered, as though the enemy had been already within earshot. “Perhaps we can get away from them in the woods up there.” She nodded, and while he unstrapped his pistols and saw that they were loaded, she bent over her father, disposed his limbs and covered his face with her cloak. Then she put her hand in Jeremy’s, saying only,
“We must leave him. We could do nothing for him.”
Without another glance at the dead man, they began to hurry, bending almost double, beside the bank of the road, stumbling over roots and avoiding the swinging bushes as best they could. Once or twice they had to dash across open spaces where the ancient road had disappeared, gaps kept clear by old cart-tracks or a shepherd’s path; and once, where the bushes clustered too thickly, they had to leave shelter and run for a hundred yards in the bare field.