He came close and stood looking meditatively down at the dead race-horse—recognised its long, white-reach face, the colour and make of it, while his loose lips worked with a contemptuous yet pitying smile.
"So that's the way my lady's taken it, has she?" he said presently. "On the whole I don't know that I'm sorry. In some cases much benefit unquestionably is derivable from letting blood. This shows she doesn't mean to go under if I know her; and that's a mercy, for that poor little beggar, the baby's sake."
He turned and contemplated the stately facade of the house. The ranges of windows, blind with closed shutters and drawn curtains, in the early sunshine gave off their many panes a broad dazzle of white light.
"Poor little beggar," he repeated, "with his forty thousand a year and all the rest of it. Such a race to run and yet so badly handicapped!"
He stooped down, examined the horse, found the mark of the bullet.
"Contradictory beings, though, these dear women," he went on. "So fanciful and delicate, so sensitive you're afraid to lay a finger on them. So unselfish, too, some of them, they seem too good for this old rough and tumble of a world. And yet touch 'em home, and they'll show an unscrupulous savagery of which we coarse brutes of men should be more than half ashamed. God Almighty made a little more than He bargained for when He made woman. She must have surprised Him pretty shrewdly, one would think, now and then since the days of the apple and the snake."
He moved away up the carriage drive, following Timothy, the sweating, straining mare, and swinging gig. The carrion crow flapped back, with a croak, and dropped on the horse's skull again. Hearing that bodeful sound the doctor paused a moment, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, and looking round at the bird at its ugly work, set as foreground to that pure glory of the sunrise, and the vast noble landscape, misty valley, dewy grassland, far ranging hillside crowned with wood.
"The old story," he muttered, "always repeating itself. And it strikes one as rather a wasteful, clumsy contrivance, at times. Life forever feeding on death—death forever breeding life."
Thus ended the Clown, own brother to Touchstone, of merry name and mournful memory, paying the penalty of wholly involuntary transgressions. From which ending another era dated at Brockhurst, the most notable events of which it is the purpose of the ensuing pages duly to set forth.