With hesitation, and another writhe to get away—“N—no.”
“Then, all that story you told of the deception practised upon you was a lie?”
“Not a lie—it was a joke. James was not such a fool as you, he took it as such. But you—”
Then Stephen Saltren drew his wife to her feet, and strode to the door, dragging her with him. She screamed. She supposed he was about to kill her; but he turned, and said gloomily, “I will not hurt you, I want to show you what you have done—with your joke.”
He forced open the door, and drew her through the garden, out at the wicket gate, along the path up the coombe. There were two ways thence to Orleigh Park, one down the coombe to the main valley and high-road, and round a shoulder of hill; the other way by a steep climb up a zig-zag path in the side of the hill to the top of the crag, thence over a stretch of some thirty acres of furzy down into the plantations and so into the park through them. The tortuous ascent began at the cottage, Chillacot, but Saltren drew his wife past the point whence it rose to where the evening sun cast the black shadow of the crag or “cleave” across the glen, and there—lying on broken, fallen stones, with his hands outstretched, his face to the clear sky, lay Lord Lamerton, dead.
Marianne Saltren cowered back, she was too frightened by what she saw to care to approach; but her husband’s vice-like grasp did not relax for all her weeping and entreaties. He compelled her to come close to the fallen man.
His finger ends buried themselves in her wrists, and checked her pulse, that her hands became numb, and tingled.
He remained silent, for long, looking at the dead man, his own face scarcely less white, his muscles hardly less rigid, his features as set, and more drawn. There was no sunlight in the narrow valley where they stood under the great slate cleave, but above at the edge of the opposite hill were gorse bushes so covered with golden bloom that they seemed to be but one yellow flower, and on them the evening sun rested lovingly. Above, ghost-like in the blue sky, was a filmy disc—the moon, only perceivable from the deep valley, unseen by those who stood in the sunlight. The rooks were congregating in the wood at the bottom of the valley. That wood was a favourite resort to which the birds from several rookeries came every evening before set of sun, and chattered incessantly, and made as much noise as if they were members of the House of Commons discussing Irish matters. The sound issuing from that wood was strident like the rattle of a lawn-mower.
A blue-bottle fly was buzzing round the dead man. Saltren saw it, it made him uneasy; he let go one of his wife’s hands and with his disengaged hand drew his kerchief from his throat, a black silk one, and whisked it to and fro, to drive away the insect. “I cannot tell,” he said, “heaven knows. If it had not been for what you said, for your amusing joke, he might now be living. I cannot tell. The ways of Providence are dark. We are but instruments used, and not knowing for what purpose used. I cannot tell.”
He put the kerchief to his face and wiped it.