But Mrs. Edward had sunk info the chair, and buried her face in her black-gloved hands.
CHAPTER V
Christian began his walk with swift, energetic steps, and a guiding eye fixed resolutely on a distinguishing mark in the distant line of tree-tops beyond, as if both speed and directness of course were of utmost urgency to his purpose. While his body moved forward thus automatically, however, his mind remained engrossed with what had been said and done in the room he was leaving behind.
His brain reproduced over and over again the appearance of the two young brothers, their glances at each other, their sneering scowls at him. The picture of Augustine whispering in Edward’s ear, and of Edward shaking his sulky head, stuck in his memory as a living thing. He had continued to see it after he had turned his back on them and gone to the window. The infamous words which had been spoken about his father were a part of this picture, and their inflection still rang in his ears just as the young men still stood before his eyes, compact of hostility to him and his blood.
The noise of guns in the wood he approached was for a time subordinated in his mind to those bitter echoes of Edward’s speech. When at last these reports of firing attracted his attention, he had passed out of sight of Caermere, and found himself on a vaguely defined path at the end of a broad heath, much overgrown with heather and broom and low, straggling, inhospitable-looking shrubs novel to his eye. Curious movements among this shaggy verdure caught his wandering notice, and he stopped to observe them more closely. A great many rabbits—or would they be hares?—were making their frightened escape from the wood in front of him, and darting about for cover in this undergrowth. He became conscious now of an extraordinary tumult in the wood itself—a confused roar of men’s voices raised in apparently meaningless cries, accompanied by an unintelligible pounding of sticks on timber and crackling brush. This racket almost drowned the noise of the remote firing; its effect of consternation upon the small inhabitants of the thicket was only less than the bewilderment that it caused in Christian’s mind. Forgetting altogether his own concerns, he pushed cautiously forward to spy out the cause of the commotion.
Somewhat later, he emerged from the wood again, having obtained a tolerable notion of what was going on. He had caught a view of one line of beaters making their way through a copse, diagonally away from him—rough men clad for the most part in white jackets, who shouted and thrashed about them with staves as they went—and it was easy enough to connect their work, and the consequent rise and whirring rush of birds before it, with the excited fusillade of guns farther on. Christian did not get a sight of the sportsmen themselves. Albeit with some doubts as to the dignity of the proceeding, he made a detour of the piece of woodland, with the idea of coming out upon the shooting party, but when he arrived at the barrier it was to find on the spot only a couple of men in greenish corduroys, whom he took to be underkeepers. They were at work before a large heap of pheasants, tying the birds in pairs by the necks, and hanging them over a long stick, stretched between two trees, which already bent under its burden. They glanced up from their employment at Christian, and when he stooped to pick up one of the cartridge cases with which the ground at his feet was strewn, they exchanged some muttered comment at which both laughed aloud. He instinctively threw the little tube down, and looked away from the men. The thought occurred to him that if they only knew who he was their confusion would be pathetic, but as it was, they had the monopoly of self-possession, and it was he who shyly withdrew.
The whole diversion, however, had cleared and sweetened his mood. He retraced his steps through the wood and then struck off in a new direction across the heath, at a more leisurely pace than he had come, his mind dwelling pleasurably upon the various picturesque phases of what he had witnessed. The stray glimpses of la chasse which had been afforded him in the South had had nothing in common with this. The unkempt freedom of the growths about him appealed to his senses as cultivated parks and ordered forests had never done. It was all so strong and simple and natural—and the memory of the beaters smashing along in the thicket, bawling and laying about them with their clubs, gave it a primitive note which greatly pleased his fancy.
The heath was even finer, in his eyes, than the wood. The air stirring across it, for one thing, had a quality which he seemed never to have known before—and the wild, almost savage, aspect of its squat gray and russet herbage, the sense of a splendidly unashamed idleness and unproductiveness suggested by its stretches of waste land, charmed his imagination. He said to himself, as he sauntered here, that he would gallop every day across this wonderful plain, with a company of big dogs at his horse’s heels. The thought of the motion in the saddle inspired him to walk faster. He straightened himself, put his hands to his coat at the breast as he had seen young Englishmen do on their pedestrian tours, and strode briskly forward, humming to himself as he moved. The hateful episode of the morning had not so much faded from his thoughts, as shaken itself into a new kaleidoscopic formation. Contact with these noble realities out of doors had had the effect, as it were, of immeasurably increasing his stature. When he thought of those paltry cousins of his, it was as if he looked down upon their insignificance from a height.