The carrier found assistance sooner than he had expected. Leaning against the inner side of the gate, with her back to him, was a tall girl. She was bending over a fiddle, drawing from it wailing sounds that went well with the waste behind her and the fading light. Her head swayed in time, her elbow moved slowly. She did not hear the wheels, and he had to call, "Whisht! Miss Pleasance, whisht!" before she heard and turned.
He could see little of her face, for in the hollow the light was almost gone, but her voice as she cried, "Is that you, Nickson? Have you something for us?" rang out so cheerily that it strung his nerves anew.
"Yes, miss," he answered. "But it is your father I want. I have got a man here who has been hurt----"
"What? In the cart?" she cried. She stepped forward and would have looked in. But he was before her.
"No, miss, you fetch your father!" he said sharply. "It is just a matter of minutes, maybe. You fetch him here, please."
She understood now, and turned and sped through the shrubbery, and across the little rivulet and the lawn. In five minutes the grey house, which had stood gaunt and lifeless in the glooming, was aroused. Lights flitted from window to window, and servants called to one another. The surgeon, a tall, florid, elderly man, with drooping white moustaches, came out, after snatching up one or two necessary things. The groom hastened behind him with a candle. Only Pleasance, the messenger of ill, whom her father had bidden stay in the house, had nothing to do in the confusion. She laid down her violin and bow, and stood in the darkness of the outer room--it was half hall, half parlour--listening and wondering.
The sound of heavy footsteps crunching the gravel presently warned her that the man was to be brought into the house. She heard her father direct the other bearers to make for his room, which was on the left of the hall, and her face grew a shade paler as the men stumbled with their burden through the doorway. There is something monstrous to the unaccustomed in limbs which fall lifeless, or stick out stiff and stark in ghastly prominence. She averted her face as the group passed her, and yet managed to touch the groom's sleeve. "What is it, Daniel?" she whispered.
"He has been shot, miss," the servant answered. He was enjoying himself hugely, if the truth be told.
She had no time to ask more. The door was shut upon her, and she was left alone with her curiosity. She wondered how it had happened, for this was not the shooting season, and Nickson had spoken of the man as a stranger. She pondered over the problem until the maids, who were too much upset to stay in their own quarters, came into the room with lights. Then she stepped outside, and stood on the gravel listening to the murmur of the brook, and looking at the old sundial which gleamed white on the lawn.
She had been there no more than a minute when the doctor--as every one in those parts called him--came out with Nickson. Carefully closing the door behind him--an extraordinary precaution with one who was usually the most easy-going of men--he laid his hand on his companion's shoulder. "Why did he do it, Nickson?" he asked in a low voice, which was not free from tremor. "Can you tell me? Have you any idea? He is dressed as a gentleman, and he has a gold watch and money in his pockets."
Their eyes were new to the darkness, and they did not see her, though she was within earshot, and was listening with growing comprehension. "It beats me to say, sir," was Nickson's answer--"that it does. If you will believe me, sir, he was talking to me, just before he did it, as reasonably as ever man in my life."
"Then what the devil was it?"
"That is what I think, sir," the carrier answered, nodding.
"What?"
"It was just the devil, sir."
"Pshaw!" the doctor returned pettishly. "You are sure that he did it himself?"
"As sure as I can be of anything!" the carrier answered. "There was not a human creature barring myself within half a mile of him when the pistol went off--no, nor could have been."
"Well," the doctor said, after a pause, and in a tone of vexation, "it is no good bringing in the police unless he dies, and I don't think he will. He has had a wonderful escape. I suppose you will not go blabbing it about, Nickson?"
"Heaven forbid!" the carrier replied. And after a few more words took his leave.
They went without discovering the listener, and she slipped into the lighted hall and stood there shivering. The darkness outside frightened her. It seemed to hold some secret of despair. Even in the familiar room, in which every faded rug and dusty folio and framed sampler had its word of everyday life for her, she looked fearfully at the closed door which led to her father's room. She shrank from turning her back upon it. She kept glancing askance at it. When her father came to supper, she could not meet his eye; and he must have noticed her strangeness had he not been absorbed in the riddle presented to him, in thoughts of his patient's case, and perhaps in some painful train of meditation induced by it. Such questions as his daughter put he answered absently, and he ate in the same manner, breaking off once to visit his charge. It was only when the preparations for the night were complete, when the maids had retired, and Pleasance was waiting, candlestick in hand, to say good night, that he spoke out.
"When is Woolley coming back?" he asked with a sigh.
"The twenty-eighth, father," she answered. She betrayed no surprise at the question, though it was one he could have answered for himself. Woolley was his assistant, and was absent on a holiday tour.
He was silent a moment. His tone was querulous, his eye wandered when he spoke next. "I thought--I did think that we should have this little bit to ourselves, Pleasance," he complained. And he seemed shrunken. His fierce moustaches and his florid colour no longer hid his weakness of moral fibre. He looked years older than when he had bent with professional alertness over his patient. Something in that patient's strange case had come home to him and unmanned him. "This little bit," he continued, looking at her wistfully, "though it be the last, girl."
"It will not be the last, father," she answered, meeting his look without flinching. "We shall stay together whatever happens."
"Ay, but where, child?" he cried with passion, throwing out his hands as though he appealed to the dumb things around him--"where? Do you think to transplant me? I am too old. I have lived here too long--I and my fathers before me for six generations, though I am but a broken country apothecary--for me to take root elsewhere! Why, girl"--his voice rose higher--"there is not a stone of this old place, not a tree, that I do not know, that I do not love, that I would not rather own than a mile of streets!"
To her surprise he broke down and turned away to hide the tears in his eyes--tears which it pained her deeply to see. She knew how weak he was, and what cause she had to blame him in this matter. But his tears disarmed her, and she laid her hand on his and stroked it tenderly. "How much do you owe Mr. Woolley, father?" she asked, when he had recovered himself.
"Three thousand pounds," he answered, almost sullenly.
He had never told her before, and she was appalled. "It is a large sum," she said, looking at the faded cushions on the window-seats, the fly-blown prints, the well-worn furniture, which made the room picturesque indeed, but shabby. "What can have become of it?"
He made a reckless movement with his hand--he still had his back towards her--as though he flung something from him.
She sighed. She had not intended to reproach him, for economy was not one of her own strong points; and she remembered bills owing as well as bills paid, and many a good intention falsified. No, she could not reproach him; and she chose to look at the matter from another side. "It is a great deal of money," she repeated. "Would he really let all that go if--just to marry me?"
"To be sure!" her father said briskly. "That is," he continued, his conscience pricking him, "it would be the same thing then. The place would come to him anyway."
"I see," she answered dryly. She was always pale--though hers was a warm paleness--but now there were dark shadows under her eyes. They were grey eyes, frank and resolute, now sad and scornful