Brack was thinking hard as he drove along the north marsh-road, his hat pulled low over his eyes against the evening sun. He was on his way to Ninekyrkes, to unearth a rumour and prove it true. Talk had it that one other on marsh-ground thought as he did of the Lugg, felt for it the same sinister distrust. The agent himself, at the late purgatorial meeting, had hinted that Whinnerah’s wife was far from sharing her husband’s attitude, and, since then, other tales had reached his ears. He was a constant visitor at Ladyford since his occupation of Thweng, and had gathered by degrees that there was something curiously wrong at the twin-farm. He meant to find out what it was. He had known Mrs. Whinnerah in his childhood, and even if she had been a stranger, Brack was not the man to be deterred by shyness. He remembered her as a delicate, highly-strung woman, with the fated look that many carry from cradle to grave without obvious fulfilment. She must be getting old now, and should therefore be easily handled. If she could be got to back his opinion, on whatever visionary or sentimental grounds, he might yet win his throw with the Lancasters. He had seen the young lord waver, and guessed that to his particular temperament a feeble woman’s mania would carry a strong appeal. Once arouse his pity, his fear of hurting something weaker than himself, and no amount of practical advice would keep him from trying to right however imaginary a grievance. Brack began to formulate a letter from Mrs. Whinnerah, to be dictated by himself. He was fond of framing letters. The biting word that goes home was to him much as a neat wrestling-chip to his boors of cousins at Pippin. He could see Bluecaster’s face grow troubled as he read, watch him pen his apologetic decision to that sneering image at Crabtree. (Brack had an imagination.) Once his lordship was started after his red herring of justice, the pride of the Lancasters would soon be kissing the earth! He bit at his cigarette so savagely that it broke in half and nearly choked him, which did not tend to soothe a jarred temper kept on edge by a fretted pride. He had had a bad time since the meeting, and though his cult of super-superiority had withheld him from the vulgarity of open retaliation, repression had increased a passing dislike to a single-eyed hate.
Born of good farm-stock, Brack had craved for so-called higher things—he had wished to be a gentleman; and the particular brand which had formed his ideal he now quite adequately represented. But the red-hot vanity that had brought him home prancing with effect had met a rude shock. The gray, old-world atmosphere had foiled his meretricious gentility as an ancient manor-wall a flaring poster. Its mellow feudalism, its pure instinct for “the real thing,” laughed at him and cast him out. The parent-stem mocked at the prize-shoot, and, deep down in him, something, hated and unacknowledged, recognised its justice. Certain colonies, indeed, in Witham and Cunswick, drawn chiefly from other and larger towns, hailed him with enthusiasm, but in this one instance he was true to the soil and would have none of them. Yet the soil would have none of him, and gave him no fellow—neither in Bluecaster, shabby and halting, but unmistakable, nor in Lancaster, at home in each man’s understanding, and certainly none in Uncle Willie Holliday, that rugged monument of fitness of place. That which was artist in Brack, the very thing that had betrayed him, now made hell for him where he had looked for a paradise of approval. The bitterness of it obscured the real motive of his late action, turning a passionate crusade into a petty wreaking of malice, clouding even the fear that waked him, shaking, in the night.
At Ladyford alone had he found balm. Michael Dockeray’s hospitality questioned the self-valuation of no guest under his roof. Francey was baffling but polite, and undoubtedly attractive, while the mistress, playing her own mother’s-game, laid no bar to his visits. He would call at Ladyford when he had finished at Ninekyrkes, and have supper with them. He lighted another cigarette, and felt vaguely comforted.
Ninekyrkes seemed like a house of the dead as he came to it in the early autumn evening. Wolf and Lup were at a shorthorn sale over at Cunswick—he happened to know that—so Mrs. Whinnerah would be alone. She came to the door when she saw the car, and received his self-introduction hospitably if without enthusiasm. She led the way into the unloved parlour, and Brack, breathing horsehair and mustiness, was inwardly flattered until assailed by a childish memory of the old Lord Bluecaster at Pippin, smoking on the settle with his feet on the hob. The old lord had d——d the parlour, and refused to bear company with the Family Bible. Brack had an uncomfortable feeling that the still woman opposite would have thought more of him if he had preferred the kitchen.
He talked Canada, farming, and life in general, with the peculiar ease that comes of having left home sans recommandation, to return in your own Studebaker-Flanders, and passed to the genial intimacy of interrogation which Northern folk tolerate only from their kind. Lancaster would have got his answers all right, but from Brack it smacked of the travelling bagman, and he discovered presently that he was getting nothing. He dropped it, then, and struck boldly for his point.
“I’ve come asking for sympathy!” he said, with a confidential smile. “You’ll have heard about the meeting, I guess, and how they think they’ve got the laugh on me over the Lugg, your Wolf and the rest. Well, they can go on laughing till the cows come home, but they’ll not make me take anything back. The Lugg’s got an eye-opener safe and handy for them, and when that comes along, I guess some of them will laugh on the wrong side of their mouths! But I’ve a notion—though I’m not saying why or how—that there’s somebody thinks as I do of the crawling old son of a gun, somebody that reckons with me that it should never have been built—and that’s you yourself right here, Mrs. Whinnerah! Tell me if I’m wrong. Don’t mind me!”
She didn’t mind him. He was certainly wrong, she told him, with her light, expressionless eyes fixed on his ingratiating countenance. Foiled again, he became less flippant.
“You’ll say it’s no affair of mine what you think, but when a man has a bang-up honest conviction, it’s up to him to get it proved if he can. I’m still smarting at the way they petered me out. I didn’t expect they’d catch on right away, but I did look for decent consideration. Oh, they’ll hold to it that I’ve had it—I’ve got that fixed! They’ll point to the meeting and say the matter was fairly discussed; but they know as well as I do that the whole arrangement was a barnstormer fake, stage-managed down to the smallest cue. The agent saw to that! It’s the old fairy-tale—Lancaster fiddled and the farmers danced, and the man shouting trouble was bucked out. I’m mighty sore about it, I say. I meant well, and I’m sore!”
He was in earnest, now. He drew his chair forward, laying his hand on the string-cover of the round table between them.
“I’ll just tell you what first set me hustling Bluecaster, and then perhaps you’ll chip in with your little lot. Over the pond I ran up against a queer sort of lie-slinger making a living out of telling folks’ futures when he wasn’t getting nabbed by the police. He was the real goods, too—I’d stake the whole Thweng outfit on it—though I’m not saying he didn’t feather-stitch the futures a trifle, just to make them look pretty! But that was when there were dollars on the game; he got none out of me. But he digged in my hotel when he had the cash, and the night before I sailed for England he fetched me up on the stairs. He said: ‘You’re clearing—pulling out for England, ain’t you?’ I told him he’d guessed it in once. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you just keep those eyes of yours skinned! There’s the gosh-dangdest trouble you ever struck coming for you out of the west. There’s some sort of mighty curiosity, wriggling like a snake, that’s getting ready to jump its contract; and water; and dead, wet, woolly things. I can’t see them—it’s so plum dark—only feel them when I reach out. There’s a crack like a gun over the sea, but you’ll not hear it when it comes, though you’ll get cold scares many a night, waiting for it! And where there was road there’ll be water, water big enough to drown a house, water and wet, woolly things——’ I told him to come off it when he started again on the wet woollies—he was giving me the jim-jams!—and I let him know pretty straight that I thought he was in for the blue devils, but he was too slick in earnest to take me up. He said he couldn’t fix it plainer, but I’d find it shine up brisk enough when the clock struck. ‘It’ll beat hell!’ he said. He told me I could see it for myself, if I’d practise a spell, that I’d the power as good as he had. I got him to show me how”—he laughed rather uncomfortably, looking away—“and I guess I know what the wet woollies are, anyway! He told me what farm I’d fixed on, after a deal of teeth-grinding and eye-rolling—it’s a bit of a twister for the psychic tongue, you’ll admit! and then he said: ‘There’s somebody else knows the last card in this deal—somebody in England.’ That’s what he told me, Mrs. Whinnerah, and I want to know! ‘There’s a woman over there powerful scared’”—he eyed her searchingly—“‘a woman scared clean out of creation——’”