On they went, sparks flying from the flints as the shoes smote hard upon them. The air grew more chilly as they got higher up and the road more slippery; Rhys leaned forward, encouraging the mare as she laboured valiantly up the heart-breaking slope. The banks flew by, gates, stiles; soon they were passing the ruined cottage that stood not a hundred yards from the egress to the mountain; he could see the bare boughs of the apple-trees that tapped against the battered window-panes.
Suddenly the mare lurched, scraping the earth with her feet, and the moon seemed to sway in the sky and to be coming down to meet the hedge. A crash, and she was lying on her off side with Rhys’ leg pinned underneath her. A mark like a slide on the blue, shining ground showed how the frost was taking firm grip of the world.
She struggled up again before he had time to find out whether he was hurt or not, and stood over him, shivering with fright. Fortunately she had hardly touched him in her efforts to rise, as his foot had come out of the stirrup, and he was able to pick himself up in a few seconds with a strong feeling of dizziness and an aching pain in his shoulder. His first idea was to remount as quickly as possible, but, when he put his foot in the iron, he almost fell back again on the road. Something hot was running down his face, first in slow drops, then faster; he could not raise his right shoulder at all, and his arm felt weary and numb. A gust of wind brought the sound of Harry’s galloping fitfully up the lane, making the mare turn half round to listen, her nostrils dilated; she seemed quite uninjured. Rhys seized the stick he had dropped as they fell, and, with it in his available hand, struck her two violent blows on her quarter. She plunged forward like a mad creature, and set forth for her stable at Great Masterhouse.
As she disappeared he dragged himself with great difficulty through the hedge on his right. Before him the fields fell away perpendicularly to the valley, and the moon was white on the grass that lay like a frosty, vapoury sheet round him. He saw a deep ditch running downward with the land, and had just sense and strength enough left to stagger towards it, a black, positive silhouette on the moon-struck unreality of the surrounding world.
As he rolled into it he lost consciousness, and so did not hear Harry Fenton a minute later as he tore past.
[CHAPTER VIII
MASTER AND MAN]
A MAN was sitting on the low wall which enclosed the spectre of a garden trimming a ragged ash-plant into the plain dimensions of a walking-stick. He worked with the neatness displayed by many heavy-handed persons whose squarely-tipped fingers never hint at the dexterity dormant in them.
It was easily seen that, in order to assign him a place in the social scale, one would have to go a good way down it; nevertheless, he reflected the facial type of his time as faithfully as any young blood enveloped in the latest whimsies of fashionable convention, though, naturally, in a less degree. The man of to-day who looks at a collection of drawings made in the early nineteenth century can find the face, with various modifications, everywhere; under the chimney-pot hat which (to his eye) sits so oddly on the cricketer, beneath the peaked cap of the mail-coach guard, above the shirt-sleeves of the artisan with his basket of tools on his back. As we examine the portraits of a by-gone master, Sir Peter Lely, Joshua Reynolds—whom you will—we are apt to ask ourselves whether the painter’s hand has not conveyed too much of his own mind to the canvas, making all sitters so conform to it as to reproduce some mental trait of his own, like children of one father reproducing a physical one. Those who find this may forget that there is an expression proper to each period, and that it runs through the gamut of society, from the court beauty to the kitchen wench, from the minister of State to the rat-catcher who keeps the great man’s property purged of such vermin. The comprehensive glance of the man on the wall as compared with the immobility of his mouth, the wide face set in flat whiskers which stopped short in a line with the lobe of his ear, dated him as completely as if he had been a waxwork effigy set up in a museum with “Early Victorian Period” printed on a placard at his feet. His name was George Williams, and, in the eye of the law, he was a hedger and ditcher by occupation; on its blind side, he was something else as well.
The garden, which formed a background to the stick-maker, was indeed a sorry place, forming, with the tumble-down cottage it surrounded, a sort of island in the barren hillside. A shallow stream on its way to the valley ran by so near the wall, that there was only room for a few clumps of thistle between it and the water. When the dweller in the cottage wished to reach civilization, he had to cross a plank to a disused cart-track making from the uplands down to the village. Hardly any one but the tenant of this unprofitable estate ever troubled the ancient way with his presence, but, in spite of this, Williams looked up expectantly now and then to where it cut the skyline a furlong or so mountainwards. Behind him the tall weeds which were choking the potato patch and the gooseberry bushes straggled in the grey forenoon light, and the hoar-frost clung to a few briars that stretched lean arms over the bed of the stream.