Rowcliffe pointed to the little phial of chlorodyne lying in the straw. "If I were you," he said, "I shouldn't leave that lying about."
Through his long last night in the gray house haunted by the moon, John Greatorex lay alone, screwed down under a coffin lid, and his son, Jim, wrapped in a horse-blanket and with his head on a hay sack, lay in the straw of the stable, beside Daisy his mare. From time to time, as his mood took him, he turned and laid his hand on her in a poignant caress. As if she had been his first-born, or his bride, he spoke to her in the thick, soft voice of passion, with pitiful, broken words and mutterings.
"What is it, Daasy——what is it? There, did they, then, did they? My beauty—my lil laass. I—I wuss a domned brute to forget tha, a domned brute."
All that night and the next night he lay beside her. The funeral passed like a fantastic interlude between the long acts of his passion. His great sorrow made him humble to Mrs. Gale so that he allowed her to sustain him with food and drink. And on the third day it was known throughout Garthdale that young Greatorex, who had lost his father, had saved his mare.
Only Steven Rowcliffe knew that the mare had saved young Greatorex.
* * * * *
And the little phial of chlorodyne was put back among the cobwebs and forgotten.
XIV
Down at the Vicarage the Vicar was wrangling with his youngest daughter. For the third time Alice declared that she was not well and that she didn't want her milk.
"Whether you want it or not you've got to drink it," said the Vicar.