There was an invitation, too, to live at the mansion, which Anthony did not accept. Twice a week he would visit the office and work there faithfully, but he could not bring himself to live in the house.
Apart from the manner in which the blow had been dealt him, he felt the loss of his employer most bitterly. He found the tragedy even more piteous than terrible. That so rude an axe should have been laid so untimely to the root of so glorious a tree filled him with sorrow. That the tree should have heard the step of the woodman on his way to the felling, haunted his memory.
So far, however, as Lyveden's health of mind was concerned, itself grievously inopportune, the catastrophe could not have happened at a more opportune moment. Trading upon the heels of his encounter with Valerie, it made a terrific counter-irritant to the violent inflammation which that meeting had set up. Yet if the back of the sickness was broken, disorder and corrective, alike so drastic, were bound seriously to lower the patient's tone. His splendid physical condition supported its brother Mind and saw him well of his faintness, but the two red days left their mark. Looking back upon them later, Anthony found them made of the stuff of which dreams are woven—bitter, monstrous dreams, wherein the impossible must be performed lest a worse thing befall and a malignant eye peers beneath stones which even Misery herself would leave unturned. How he had parted with Valerie he was uncertain. He could not remember her going. Of her coming he knew nothing at all. She had appeared and, he supposed, disappeared. Of Winchester's attack upon him, and the subsequent chase, his memory was clearer. How he had escaped, however, at the foot of the brier-clad slope, he could not conceive. He could have sworn that for the last thirty paces the man was not three feet behind….
He was thankful to get back to work, and plainly immensely relieved to find that, during his absence, the others had made such progress with the paling that the scene of his employer's seizure had been left well behind.
A week had elapsed since that cloud-burst, and, as before, Lyveden was finishing his lunch, when he noticed that Stokes, the second carpenter, had not returned. The fellow had gone to his quarters, to fetch some implement, nearly an hour before. When another half-hour had gone by, Anthony, in some impatience, dispatched Blake for the tool. Twenty minutes later the latter returned, chisel in hand, but with no news of his mate. When it was five o'clock and there was still no sign of Stokes, Anthony struck work and ordered an organized search. It seemed rather hopeless, but, on the whole, the best thing to do. The man was missing. If possible, more zealous than any, it was unthinkable that he was playing truant. He could not have been spirited away. Anthony supposed gloomily that he had met with a mishap. There was, indeed, no other solution.
It was getting quite dark when they found him down in a little dell upon a patch of greensward. Considering that he was a joiner, and not a sexton, he had made remarkable progress with a very creditable grave, which, he explained, was to receive the dead with which the woods were distributed. He added that it was a disgrace to leave so many corpses lying about, and pointed out that he had removed his boots for fear of treading upon them.
When they sought to humour him, he became suspicious and violent, and there was quite a struggle before he was overpowered.
CHAPTER VIII
THE POWER OF THE DOG
The accident was inevitable.