He laughed with a shade of incredulity.
“We’re dull enough at close quarters—just a lot of rough working-men digging up God’s gold out of the land. I’d an idea you didn’t approve of us; thought we starved our dogs or something!” There came to him a recollection of the last meeting in the Lane. “You told me once you were home-sick for a collection of oddments of some sort—Tantalums, Thermos flasks and hair-curlers!”
It was she who laughed now, and so infectiously that Bluecaster, making for his carriage, stopped and asked to be introduced.
“I didn’t include him in my estimate,” Lanty added, when he had passed on, leaving a word for Hamer, and a message of sympathy for Helwise, struggling with a cold. “He’s different from the rest of us—you’d know it on the top of Skiddaw. He’s never done any digging, and I don’t want him to.”
“Digging might be good for him,” Dandy ventured, and was growled at for her pains.
“No, it wouldn’t! It might alter him, that’s all, but he’d lose all the other things. He’s the best chap in Britain! We’re here to do the digging for him, as we’ve always been. You don’t understand. They mean a lot to us—the little thoughtfulnesses and the bottles of cough-medicine and the words in season. If Bluecaster was digging, he’d be too busy to bother. That’s what he’s here for. But of course it can’t mean anything to you.”
“You’re rather rude, I think!” she replied gently, with a kind of humorous resignation at which he smiled in spite of himself. Up the street, on the green, a group of caravans was stationed, the lights of a merry-go-round filling the winter evening with colour. A rollicking tune came down to them, mixed with the shouts and laughter of the crowd.
“Come out and have a look!” he suggested, opening the door and offering a hand, and presently they were standing in the ring of light, caught in the deafening blare of the full orchestrion overhead. Some of the farmers had stayed for a final flourish to the day’s festivity. Denny was mounted on a tiger, with his brother’s little girl in front of him, and one of Braithwaite’s pleasing daughters behind. The big cattle-dealer was perched on an inadequate ostrich, with a scared wife clinging to the neck of a giraffe. The shy ploughman rode solemnly alone in the red-plush sumptuousness of a car. The blaze of brightness scooped out of the pressing dark gave the whole scene a curiously unreal effect, so that, watching the mechanical rise and fall of the flying circle, Lanty’s mind, reacting from the strain of the three days’ audit, grew gradually quiescent and dazed. Dandy spoke to him, but he did not hear her. Close at hand in the crowd, Brack had turned to face him, but he did not see him. The lights dimmed suddenly, became lanterns swinging and dipping in a night as dark as hell. The blare of the trumpets was the shattering roar of a big wind as it tore the air to tatters, and the wailing of the reeds grew into the shrieks of women and the thin crying of lambs. He was conscious of intense, paralysing fear, of a frantic necessity to shout, choked on his lips by the pressure of the gale. And through it all he felt that he was listening, straining his ears to madness against the tumult of an inferno let loose, just as, at Ninekyrkes, he had seen an old woman strain and reach through the tense stillness of coming thunder. The deadly helplessness of nightmare weighed him down as he writhed against the horror, certain that, if he could speak now, hear now, the unthinkable danger would pass. Through the torture a hand came up on to his, a hand that he had never touched before to recognise, but which held and drew him up and out of the abyss. He thought vaguely that it must be Hamer’s—the clasp had the same comfort—but when he had struggled blindly back to the present, he found it was not Hamer’s, but his daughter’s. He saw Brack, then, his eyes, as they rested on him, unnaturally brilliant, the pupils unnaturally large, before he dropped his still swaying gaze to Dandy’s face.
“What was it?” he asked. “I heard—water!” and as he said it he caught a little click in a man’s throat, as of satisfaction and justification, but when he looked again, Brack was gone. Dandy drew him out of the crowd.
“You looked as if you had gone blind!” she said. “I was frightened, and you trembled as if you were frightened, too. And you called first to your own father and then to mine, just as though you were drowning and wanted help. I expect you’re tired out, and ought to rest. Let me take you home in the car. You can send over for your horse to-morrow.”