CHAPTER XXV. THE BEGINNING OF THE RIFT.
It was three of the morning when Griff got back to Gorsthwaite. Kate heard him push the key into the lock and was down in a moment.
"Griff, where have you been?"
"What! not asleep, wifey? It is against orders for you to be up at this time of night."
He reached out his arms for her into the dark, and found her, and stroked her tumbled hair, mutely thanking God that he had time to collect himself before she could see his face.
"I couldn't sleep, dear. I have been so nervous about everything of late, and I feared—I don't know what."
She cried a little then, for her nerves were highly strung nowadays, and the relief from a molehill of dread was commensurate with a mountainous terror.
"I know, Kate, I know. I will not take such long walks till you are well and strong again, and able to come with me."
"Why are we stopping out here? You are wet through. I built up a big fire in the parlour not long ago, thinking you would be cold and wet when you reached home."
His grasp tightened on her almost harshly.
"Do you mean that you came downstairs from your bed to look after my comfort?" he demanded. "Kate, you make me ashamed of myself."
"But I wasn't asleep, dear, and this dressing-gown is as warm as warm. Come and see what a beautiful blaze there is; I put on a heap of logs, as well as peat."
A ruddy glow welcomed them as they went in, and lit up every wrinkle and furrow that the past night had brought into Griff's face—lit up, too, the clotted patch of hair around the place where Mother Strangeways had struck him with the bottle. Kate, seeing this, gave a little cry.
"Where have you been?" she repeated. "Griff, you haven't been out with the poachers again? You promised so faithfully."
"No, wife," he laughed, uneasily, "I have not been poaching. Don't worry about it; it is only just a bruise."
But Kate had made up her mind not to be put off.
"You shall tell me. Do you think I'm a baby, Griff, that I must needs have everything unpleasant kept from me?"
"You know where old Mother Strangeways' cottage is? I passed it on my way back to-night, and heard cries from within. I went in and found her dying. That is why I was so late in getting home. I had to slip across to Marshcotes for the doctor before coming on here."
"Yes, but the cut on your head?" persisted Kate.
"She hated me for some reason or other, and threw a bottle at me. That is all. Tut, child, the woman is dead; it is too late to tremble for what she might have done. Now, off you run to bed, while I go and change these wet things. I won't waste your fine blaze, Katey, but I'll read for an hour or so and have a whisky hot."
"Can't I stay with you, dear? I don't want to sleep a bit, and——"
"No, you can't! Off with you; I'm too tired to carry you upstairs by main force."
She kissed him good night. Just as she was going Griff called her back.
"Don't say anything about this to the mother, will you? It would only bother her."
"No, not a word, if you had rather I didn't.—Mother is not well, Griff; I wish she would have the doctor."
"She will have the doctor, Kate, when she is too weak to forbid him to cross the threshold," laughed Griff. "Nothing serious, is it?"
"I don't think so. Only, she seemed rather feverish to-night when she went to bed. I made her drink some black-currant tea."
"Poor old lady! She'll be well by morning, never fear, lest you should give her another dose."
But the old lady was far from well on the morrow, and Griff began to grow anxious. At the end of the day he would hear of no refusal, but set off on Lassie to fetch the doctor from Marshcotes. The doctor pronounced it a case of pleurisy, and anticipated no great danger so far as the patient's present condition went.
"She will get wet through, that mother of yours, and go about afterwards without changing. You're an obstinate lot, you Lomaxes, and why you haven't died out long ago as a race, passes my wits."
The old doctor had known Griff's father, and he exercised his privilege as a friend of the family to grumble on the slightest pretext.
"Carelessness toughens people, if they begin early enough. It is coddling that sends up the death-rate," laughed Griff.
"Nonsense! There's a mean in all things. Only the other day I called to see a patient down in the village, and there was your mother, reading away by the fire as if her clothes were not filling the room with steam. She had been out for a walk in the rain, she told me, and hadn't had time to change. Well, now she has time to be ill. I wish you good day, young man. You're an obstinate lot."
Mrs. Lomax weathered her illness so easily that she thought lightly of it, and fumed at the ridiculous fuss they were making about her convalescence. One morning she announced her intention of going out; the October sun shone temptingly over the heather, and there was a fresh breeze blowing.
"Not for another week, mother," pleaded Griff, "you know what the doctor said."
"Fiddlesticks, Griff! Because he's an old woman himself, he likes to think I am one, too. But I'm not. Out I go this morning, to get the cobwebs blown away."
Griff argued, entreated, and finally went out to the farm-buildings in the rear, thinking that his mother had given up the idea. Whereupon Mrs. Lomax, smiling like a truant child, crept upstairs, past the room where Kate was reading away the two hours' rest enjoined on her each morning, put on her bonnet and cloak, and stepped out into the moor with a rather feeble imitation of her old swinging gait. She returned at the end of an hour, feeling more tired than she would admit, and she laughed at Griff's face of concern when she confessed to her escapade.
That night she was worse, and by the morning all the old symptoms had set in with renewed vigour. But she was persistent in her assertion that going out had nothing whatever to do with the relapse; she even went so far as to hint that her yesterday's walk in the fresh air had given her a better chance to grapple with the enemy.
A couple of days later Griff rode to Saxilton for one or two sick-room necessaries which could not be got in Marshcotes. When he returned Kate met him in the hall. Her eyes were red, and her voice uncertain.
"Mother has been asking for you ever since the doctor left. Will you go up at once?"
"Is she worse?" asked Griff, a sudden fear seizing him.
For answer she burst into tears, and Griff went sadly up the stairs. The old lady stretched out her hand to him eagerly. He sat down on the edge of the bed and took both hands in his; he was shocked to notice the rapid change for the worse in her since he left.
"I have wanted you, Griff. They told me you had gone to Saxilton to buy me some things. You always have taken a great deal of trouble on my account. But I wish you hadn't gone to Saxilton. I shall not need what you brought."
"It was no trouble, dear. Why do you—mother, why do you speak in that tone about—not needing——?"
"Because I am going to die," said the old lady, quietly.
"Mother, mother, not that!"
"Yes, Griff. The doctor did not say it in so many words, but my eyes are sharp. I never did pay much attention to people's words—especially a doctor's. But I watched his face when he thought I was not looking, and it said, as plain as could be, 'You will die.' So there's an end of it, Griff."
"What do we care about his opinion? Tell yourself you will live, little mother; there's fight in you yet."
"Very little, now. I have done; the doctor only clinched what I felt in myself—otherwise, of course, I should not have believed him."
"Mother, you won't die!" cried Griff, at a loss to meet this quiet acceptance of the inevitable. It seemed so foreign to all the sick woman's characteristics.
She looked at him with a whimsical, half-pathetic smile. "Don't try to fool me, Griff; you should know how I hate it. Do you think I am afraid?"
He made no answer, only pressed her hands a little closer in his own. After a long silence she spoke again, in a soft, measured voice.
"I think people make far too much of dying, and the dread of facing the Unknown. I am sorry to leave you, and I would stay if any effort could keep me here; but I fear nothing. Perhaps I hope more than my life has given me any right to do. I never understood religion, Griff, and I went my own way through everything, and I believe I have been a very selfish, bad old woman."
"Mother——"
"Boy, I never would have you flatter me, and I don't mean to now. How did you find Kate?"
"Well enough—quite well, dear. Don't worry about her."
"She will fret about me a good deal. Be very careful of her, Griff; there are not many women in the world I should admit to be worthy of you. You see what a foolish mother I am."
Griff did not understand how it came about, but his tears were pouring fast on to the thin old hands. The mother ruffled away the hair from his forehead, and comforted him with a hundred soothing gestures, laid aside long ago with the end of his childhood. The dying strove to calm the living.
"Come, dear, come. I am an old woman, and I had to go some time. Don't fret so about it. I have had a good life, and you have been a good son to me, Griff. We might almost have been lovers, you and I, from the way we behaved at times."
She fell into a reverie, a little smile flitting now and then across her lips as she recalled this or that pleasant memory. And Griff went softly from the bedside; he could not bear up against the pathos of it all. But she heard his footfall, faint as it was, and called him back.
"Only a word, dear, and then you can leave me to sleep. The end won't be just yet, I think; you can come back for the good-bye. It is about the child. Don't be too fearful about it; don't hedge it round with carefulness, and shut out the fresh air from it. Kate will know what I mean when it comes. A baby, Griff—one's own baby—seems so wonderful, and frail, and precious, till one gets used to it. You must fight that down, and try to believe it will grow without being shut up in a glass case." She laughed, and her sharp old eyes fastened themselves on Griff with a touch of roguishness in them. "If any one asks how I died, boy, tell them that I died as I lived—trying to teach you good common sense. And—yes, tell them this, too—I died glad of my life, and proud of the grand old stock. You have the Lomax pride in you, marrow-deep: cling to it, Griff, and pass it on to your children."
A week later Griff stood in the wind-swept graveyard at Marshcotes. A bitter, roving gale chased the fallen leaves in and out among the tombstones. The parson droned his "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," but the sexton's scattered handful of earth was forestalled by the rattle of hail upon the coffin-lid. The moor would have none of man's tawdry symbols; it loved the dead too well.
And Griff took heart from the blustering weather. As of old, the heath was one with him in sympathy, and mourned, in its own wild way, for the fearless woman who was gone.
The old doctor passed an arm through his as he turned towards Gorsthwaite.
"I will go with you, Griff, if you'll let me. I have not seen your wife to-day."
Neither spoke till they were well out on the moor. Griff, striving hard to look ahead, not backward, began to talk of Kate.
"She is not strong, doctor, and this has been a sad blow to her. What are her chances?"
The doctor glanced at him nervously, and fumbled with the buttons of his great-coat.
"Oh, good enough, good enough! She'll pull through all right. It's not for a good while yet, you know, and there is time to get over all this before then."
"You sound shifty," said Lomax, curtly; "do you mean there is danger?"
"Well—we shall all of us have to be careful. She is not strong—never has been since the first year of her marriage. I have attended her off and on since she was a child. The healthiest woman I ever saw till she married. Her weakness is all owing to that brute Strangeways; he led her a dog's life for years."
They went on for another half-mile, till the doctor, anxious to turn his companion's attention from his troubles, struck off into another topic.
"By the way, talking of Strangeways, do you remember the night, not long ago, when you knocked me up to go to Sorrowstones Spring? Phew, it was a night, too! I blessed you pretty heartily on the way. The old hag was dead as a door-nail, and she might have waited for me till the morning without a touch of impatience. Joe, I fancy, is of the same breed; he has taken up his quarters in the maternal cottage."
"What is he doing?" asked Griff, more from a feeling that he had to say something than from any interest in the answer.
"What has he been doing for years past? Drink, drink, only more now than of old. He has failed in his quarry business, and they say he hasn't a penny in the world. Well, well, let him pass; he's a fine object-lesson for those who believe in the inherent worth of the animal man. Cross between a gentleman-rake and a woman of the soil—a bad cross always—children inherit worst of both sides. Heigho! Here we are at Gorsthwaite. Now, mind that you pull yourself well together, Griff. Your wife wants no molygrubs from you, let me tell you; she will manufacture enough and to spare for herself. Oh, and another thing. I don't know whether you think of moving into the Manor soon. You had better not, till your wife is strong again. The moving would only worry her."
But old Jose Binns, milking his cows in the mistal that same evening, nodded his head sagely, and a dour look was on his face.
"I said 'at there'd no gooid come on it, an' there's war i' th' making. No gooid could ha' come on it, choose how a mon looks at it."