Radowitz assented.
“You will find a keeper there. Send him with three or four men.”
“Yes—at once. Shall I take a message to the house?”
Radowitz spoke very gently. The red-gold of his hair, and his blue eyes, were all shining in the strange light. But he was again as pale as Falloden himself. Douglas drew out a pencil, and a letter from his pocket. He wrote some words on the envelope, and handed it to Radowitz.
“That’s for my mother’s maid. She will know what to do. She is an old servant. I must stay here.”
Radowitz rushed away, leaping and running down the steep side of the hill, his white shirt, crossed by the black sling, conspicuous all the way, till he was at last lost to sight in the wood leading to the keeper’s cottage.
Falloden went back to the dead man. He straightened his father’s limbs and closed his eyes. Then he lay down beside him, throwing his arm tenderly across the body. And the recollection came back to him of that hunting accident years ago—the weight of his father on his shoulders—the bitter cold—the tears which not all his boyish scorn of tears could stop.
His poor mother! She must see Radowitz, for Radowitz alone could tell the story of that last half hour. He must give evidence, too, at the inquest.
Radowitz! Thoughts, ironic and perverse, ran swarming through Falloden’s brain, as though driven through it from outside. What a nursery tale!—how simple!—how crude! Could not the gods have devised a subtler retribution?
Then these thoughts vanished again, like a cloud of gnats. The touch of his father’s still warm body brought him back to the plain, tragic fact. He raised himself on his elbow to look again at the dead face.