Slowly, unable longer to bear the sight of those drawn curtains, Ronnie--the unhappy dog in his wake--turned away; slowly, the pair began to wander about the gardens, round the house and round again, through the shrubberies, past the garage and the stables, across the tennis-lawn, up and down the rose-pergola. And, "I can't stand this," thought Ronald Cavendish; "I can't stand this another minute."
It seemed to him, in his agony, as though life must be planning revenge on him; as though the ultimate penalty were now to be exacted. Alie would die in child-birth; and all they had won together be lost eternally.
Vainly, he strove to curb his imagination. Vainly he said to himself: "It can't happen. It simply can't happen." Vainly he wished that Alie had accepted her mother's offer to join them for their wedding-day. One was so lonely, so infernally lonely. If only Mollie and James hadn't been on their honeymoon! If only Julia were alive! But Julia was dead, and James--selfish beast!--enjoying himself, and Aliette's parents waiting for a telegram.
He looked at his watch again. Barely half-past three yet! And Hartley had said, "Six o'clock." His hand, as he put the watch back in his pocket, shook like an apple-tree-spur in a spring gale. He could feel his brow damp with sweat under the cap-peak. Restlessly he resumed his tramp; restlessly the dog followed him; round the house and round again--till at last, to Ponto's delight, his master made his way out of the gardens, through the stables, to the gate of the paddock.
3
The paddock, a square two-acre of trampled grasses fenced with the high white of blossoming hawthorn, shimmered in the afternoon sunshine; and at far end of it, as he opened the gate, Ronnie saw Miracle. At the click of the gate-latch, the big thoroughbred, golden as a guinea to the rich light, lifted his head from the fragrant pasture; scrutinized his visitors; and with a whinny of delight came cantering toward them. Ten yards away, he stopped--his neck arched, his eyes wide in speculation. Then, pace by balancing pace, muzzle outstretched, he came on; snuffled down at the dog; snuffled up at the man.
Tactfully as Aliette's self Ronnie gentled the horse, caressing the smooth muzzle, the sleek skin under the branches of the jaws. Somehow, it seemed as though Miracle were aware of the fret in him, of the fret in Ponto; as though Miracle, following the pair of them up and down the paddock, were trying to say: "It's all right. It's quite all right."
And Ronnie thought, looking at Miracle's great shoulders, at the slope of his pasterns and the sinuous strength of his hocks: "You carried her over Parson's Brook, old boy. You'll carry her again, next winter, as you carried me this, across a stiller country than Mid-Oxfordshire, across the ridge-and-furrow and the cut-and-laids and the timber of the shires."
Miracle followed the pair of them back to the gate, and stood looking over it while they made their way to the stables. The big blue clock under the old-fashioned hunting wind-vane (a metal man on a metal horse capping on a metal hound) showed ten minutes to four. In the center of the deserted courtyard--ominous--stood Hartley's car. Toward it, through the archway, came the doctor himself.
Ronnie's heart sank at sight of the man. "Anything gone wrong?" he asked curtly.