At their approach a white, smooth-haired dog of dubious ancestry burst from regions behind the toll, and with the indecent instinct of low breeding for the disastrous and unusual, set about its aggravation by a storm of high-pitched barks. Catherine almost fell as Mrs. Cockshow ducked down without warning, and, snatching up a stone from the road, sent it thundering against the dog’s ribs.
“That’ll ’elp ye ’ome!” said she, as the animal dived with a yell under the lowest bar of the gate.
There was a shed behind the house, with a considerable patch of garden; and the honest smell of the manure-heap proclaimed the neighbourhood of live stock to instructed noses. The dog was waiting for the two women at the door with his tail tucked in. His senseless face and the horrid length of leg that raised his body high above the ground did not suggest youth, and reminded the observer less of a puppy than of a foolish person on stilts. He followed, unabashed, but without raising his tail, as Catherine and Mrs. Cockshow entered. A person skilful to notice could have gained some clue to the toll-woman’s character from his demeanour; for even this vulgar creature might be supposed to know his world.
[CHAPTER V
PENCOED]
AS Heber’s appearance at her door in search of Catherine convinced Susannah that the girl had fled alone, she longed to rush after his rival and tell him of her discovery. She had not doubted that Catherine was with the shepherd. The moment she realised that there was still a chance of bringing Saunders and the truant together, her spirits, which had been dashed to the earth on finding the bird flown, rose again, and she cast about for some means of communicating with Charles. Her only anxiety was lest the two men should meet in the town and the shepherd learn how she had deceived him. She could but trust to chance to prevent that; and, had she known it, chance had proved kind, for Charles went straight to the Hand of Friendship, and, mounting his horse without a word to anybody, set his angry face homewards. In the course of the harassed evening which followed, Susannah made up her mind to write to him.
Most people thought it a curious thing that Susannah’s destiny seemed to have nothing better in store than attendance upon a half-crippled old man. But most people scarcely realise as a truth that, to the accomplishment of any end, no matter how obvious or how commonplace, there is required a procession of acquiescent circumstances which would make the observer giddy, could he see it. Any human being who meets a stranger in the road has only to think of the chain of chances—each of which has fulfilled itself—to be forged before that meeting can be brought about, and of the one link whose lack would be the undoing of the whole. We speak of ‘the hour and the man’ as though they were the only ingredients of fate, and as if their simultaneous appearance were all that was needed. But the hour may come and the man with it, and some untoward arrangement of detail may triumph over both.
Everything had gone smoothly with Susannah but the one detail of her own temperament. She had grasped life with both hands, caring no whit how much good others got out of it and thinking only of the passing day. She could not remember the time when masculine eyes had not followed her, and now, though her sun had passed its zenith, they followed her still. It was nearly three years since she had arrived to keep house for her uncle and so been thrown against her cousin Heber. Though few men had come to close quarters with her disturbing personality without feeling its influence, the shepherd, unlike others in this as in most of his ways, had treated her with the plain friendliness he might have shown to a man. Perhaps it was this that made Susannah feel for him what she had never felt for the many who had courted her and whom she had looked upon as mere pleasant accessories of life.