Chapter XXII

On the afternoon of the last day of October Rusk was strolling along the river bank by himself. He had left Denis fishing in a stream hard by, where he had once caught a small trout, and which he had haunted assiduously ever since. He had left him with the intention of returning later on, but at the present moment he had forgotten all about him, and was completely absorbed in his own thoughts. The path he followed was heavy, and covered with a clinging brown mud. The ground sloped up upon either side from the dark river, down whose black surface a few brown and scattered leaves drifted slowly. Rusk came to a pause and leaned against a broken stile. On the opposite bank the curve upward was broad and low and sweeping--a smooth meadow of a yellow-green hue, washed across with waves of darker green, and crowned, toward the top of the incline, by trees of every shade of brown and red and gold and green. In the mildness of the season, though the ground was drifted over by a powder of dead leaves, most of the trees were still well covered, the blacker, stouter limbs alone being visible through the thinning foliage. Two horses moved slowly over the grass, nibbling lazily. Grey clouds blew overhead. The reflections of tall grasses and reeds, of hawthorn bushes and stooping trees, of tangled shrubs and naked prostrate logs, were motionless in the still water; all the colour of the upper world was mirrored there, hardly dimmed, in this deep dark mirror, as in a dream. The lower clouds in the west were tinged with gold and washed through with a faint cold sunlight, looking almost silvery behind the deeper red-bronze of the trees, while in the east a heavier cloud-bank was black and threatening, approaching slowly, though hardly seeming to move.

A barge came drifting along, pulled by a white horse with mud-splashed legs. It passed so smoothly, low in the dark, oily water, that it seemed the sleepiest thing in the world. When it was gone, the silence closed in once more, broken now only by the chirping of one or two birds, and the distant sound of the weir. And the quiet of the passing afternoon had a melancholy that brought with it a curious consolation. Rusk acquiesced in its sleepy stillness; his mood became sympathetic with it, and with the somewhat austere beauty of his surroundings; but he was thinking of things that might have seemed far enough removed from the scene about him, things that were altogether practical....

After a while he clambered over the broken, rickety stile, and ascended the incline, till he reached a road leading in a homeward direction. He had been walking for some time, still lost in thought, when he saw someone coming towards him whom he took to be Miss Anna Birch. It was indeed Miss Anna--Miss Anna, who had been paying a visit at one of the cottages in the village, where there was a child lying sick of some childish ailment, and who was now returning home. She carried a basket in her hand, and she had recognized Rusk almost at the same moment as he had recognized her. He quickened his pace, and when they met he turned back with her, and both entered a long, narrow lane, grass-grown and high-banked, a short-cut to the Birches’ house.

The country everywhere was still clothed in a brown and yellow autumnal tint, with richer notes of gold and crimson. The yellow leaves had fallen from the chestnut-trees, and were drifting over the ground; the beeches were a deep red-brown; the willows still a delicate silver-grey; but the last lingering traces of summer were gone, and there was rustle of dead leaves in the wind.

It was a country of mingled wood and pasture-land, stretching between the river and the hills, and lying now under a white, drifting light of mid-afternoon. The sunless landscape had a melancholy and somewhat wintry charm; the cold wan light was slowly fading, and the wind seemed full of whispering voices--the thin, low, trembling notes of withered grasses, the fuller, sweeping murmur of the trees.

They followed the garden wall, built of crumbling red brick, stained with patches of rich dark green moss, and with tufts of wall-flower shivering high up in the wind, till they reached a small green wooden gate, where they came to a pause. Here Rusk was about to take leave of his companion, but Miss Anna still detained him.

“Now you have come so far you must come in and have tea,” she declared; and the young man yielded without much persuasion.

He had a weakness for drinking tea with the Miss Birches. It was the most innocent of dissipations, and the society of these ladies he always found to have a certain sweetness and fragrance that was most agreeable to him. Miss Anna, perhaps, was not perceptibly old-fashioned. She liked to talk about Wagner’s music, for instance, a good deal of which she had listened to abroad, and Rusk had once discovered her reading a novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio. This work, it is true, she subsequently confessed to having taken up more for the sake of her Italian than for any great pleasure it afforded her; she preferred things like the delightful “Chèvre d’Or” of Paul Arène, a book she had lent Rusk a week or two ago, and which he told her now he had enjoyed immensely.

They had tea indoors--the garden days had been over for some time--and the young Englishman, looking out at the sober flower-beds, the faded, leaf-strewn grass, had a curious sense of regret. He found an indescribable melancholy, delicate and half-fanciful, in the passing of summer; and never before had he been so conscious of its personal significance, its suggestion of the passing of other things one cared for, hours, some of them, one would gladly enough recall. His sentimental reveries were prosaically interrupted by Miss Birch discovering that he had a slight cold. She insisted on preparing some special kind of tea for him, in which tea itself appeared to be the least important ingredient; and Rusk allowed himself to be doctored and made much of, with a half-amused sense of drifting back into a not tremendously remote boyhood. Miss Anna found that he was becoming far too serious. She declared that when she had met him he had frowned at her as if he carried a thousand cares on his shoulders.

“They must have been worldly cares,” said Rusk smiling. “I was wondering what I should do when I leave here--leave the Bracknels, that is. I had intended to go in for teaching, you know, but I have decided not to. I don’t think I should like it--I mean, in a school; and of course one can’t go on being a tutor all one’s life; once is enough for me at all events. I think I shall try to get some sort of inspectorship--something of that kind at any rate (there are such things, you know)! I must begin to make inquiries.”

“But you are getting on all right with the Bracknels, aren’t you?” Miss Birch ventured. “You are not thinking of leaving just yet?”

Rusk laughed. “Oh, no. It’s not so immediate as all that. I shall stay with them as long as they want me to--for another year or two, that is. But then will come the difficulty. I don’t somehow see myself taking a second pupil.”

“Did you ever suggest that you and Denis should go abroad for a few months?” Miss Anna asked him. “It would do him a world of good, and it would be rather nice for both of you.”

“It would indeed,” said Rusk regretfully. “The only thing is that it might be considered _too_ nice. Mr. Bracknel would call it an unnecessary expense, and he doesn’t like unnecessary expenses.”

“Don’t you think that he would in this case--if you put it to him very artfully--put it to him as being ever so much to Denis’s advantage and all that?”

“But he has his own ideas as to what is to Denis’s advantage,” said Rusk dubiously. “And then--well, he’s not exactly the kind of man you can suggest such things to. You never know whether he’ll insult you or not. He’s got an awfully peculiar mind, you know. He might think I only wanted to travel for nothing; and if he did he’d probably say so, and--oh, well, it would be very unpleasant all round.”

“But still----”

“It _has_ been confoundedly unpleasant, I may tell you, more than once, even as it is. All this fuss about Alfred, too, seems to have made him worse than ever. He’s so beastly suspicious--seems to think that everybody is trying to ‘do’ him in some way or other.”

“He’ll get over the Alfred affair now Alfred is settled in a house of his own.”

Rusk was not convinced, but he did not argue the point further, and presently he rose to go. As he walked back he turned Miss Anna’s suggestion over in his mind. It had a peculiar brilliance and fascination, but unfortunately all the turning over, all the brilliancy and fascination in the world, couldn’t make it appear very practicable. He was so far from seeing it in this light that he did not even think it would be worth his while to go through the highly distasteful task of approaching Mr. Bracknel on the subject. The less he had to approach Mr. Bracknel on any subject whatever the better, he thought. Such undertakings seldom met with success. Mr. Bracknel had his own ways of regarding things, and he had an obstinacy that could move mountains.

Rusk did not take a direct route back to the house, but wandered on down a series of lanes and field-paths, feeling rather in the mood for a lonely ramble. Presently he perceived a solitary figure coming towards him through the twilight. The figure as it drew closer proved to be that of Denis, and he was carrying a fishing-rod over his shoulder, though apparently this was the only trophy he was bringing back with him from his afternoon’s sport. His lack of success, however, did not seem to have put him out of humour. He was whistling as he came. “Where are _you_ off to?” he called out gaily, as soon as he caught sight of Rusk. Then, coming up with him, he passed his arm beneath his tutor’s and they walked on in this fashion together.

“I’m just taking a stroll,” Rusk had replied. “I’ve been over at the Miss Birches’.”

“I wondered why you had deserted me. Do you know that this is the last day of October--Hallow Eve--and that you certainly shouldn’t be out alone after dark ‘on this night of all nights of the year?’”

“I don’t suppose the risk is very serious,” said Rusk absently.

“Don’t be too sure. On just this one night the dead can leave their graves and dance in the moonlight on the grass--do you imagine they’re going to miss it for you?”

Rusk glanced round into the damp foggy evening. “There isn’t very much moonlight at present, is there?” he said. “I think we are fairly safe.” He was thoughtful, but Denis prattled on, undiscouraged.

“There is all there’s going to be. It is a new moon. You’re brave because you don’t realize your danger.” He spoke in a gay, happy tone, and his fresh young voice had, as always, a curious charm, though, having begun to break, it was subject to sudden and surprising alterations of pitch. Rusk turned to where he pointed, and saw in the western sky a faint, almost imperceptible, crescent.

“The old Irish feast to the moon was held on this night,” the boy said. “Amy and May will be trying all kinds of things after dinner--at least they used to other years--to find out who they are going to marry, and all that.”

“Well, you and I aren’t in a hurry to know,” Rusk supposed. “Are we?”

“_Aren’t_ we, you mean. There’s nothing we want to know more.” He was silent a moment. “I saw Alfred yesterday. Mamma went to visit Mrs. Alfred; in the deadest of secrecy; you mustn’t breathe a word about it; and I went with her though I didn’t go in. I waited outside to bring mamma home again, and I saw Alfred in the distance. It’s rather stupid, isn’t it--I mean, all the fuss that has been made. To listen to papa you would think we mixed exclusively with the aristocracy. It’s a little quaint, you know. Papa always was rather quaint, don’t you think? She must hate us like poison, and that’s about the only effect it can have. Personally, I have a theory that she’s rather nice.”

“I daresay it’s as good as any of the others,” said Rusk a little wearily.

“Are you bored?” asked Denis, smiling at him, and leaning a little on his arm.

“Bored! What with?”

“With the family.”

“Are _you_ the family, then?”

“With me, if you like?... I’m awfully frightened of boring you,” he laughed. “After all, I know nothing; I’ve seen nothing; I’ve done nothing. Naturally I can’t have very much to talk about. Do you mind?”

“You’re a wonderful humbug,” said Rusk. “How do you expect me to say it if I do?”

“Oh, easily enough.”

“Are you fishing for a compliment?”

“I don’t know. Won’t you pay me one if I am? Or are you frightened of making me conceited? I think you might risk it.”

“Ah, well, I won’t.”

“No: you’re not bored.... What were the Miss Birches saying?”

“They were talking about you.”

“Were they? I hope they said something nice--or do you think that sentimental?”

“I’ll perhaps tell you later on what they said--if anything comes of it, which is highly improbable. I’ve an idea it is something you’ll like.”

“You _are_ mysterious! I want to know what it is at once.”

“Ah well, you won’t know. You must learn to control your curiosity.”

“But why did you excite it? I will go and see for myself if you don’t tell me.”

“Come along,” said Rusk. “It is getting late.”

They quickened their pace. It was very dark. Now and then they stumbled over some unevenness in their path, and occasionally they had to scramble across a ditch or over a stile, for they still kept to the fields.

“If we had gone by the river it would have been easier,” said Denis.

“But this is a short cut; and it’s going to rain.”

“Is it? I like the river better. I’m very fond of the river. There is something strange about it at night, too!... You’re not superstitious, Mr. Rusk, are you?”

“I don’t think so. Not that I know of at any rate.”

“Not even a little bit?”

“Oh, I won’t say that!”

“You’re never afraid of something you don’t understand?”

“Something that may be going to happen?”

“No, not exactly that.... It doesn’t get as far as that. It’s just a kind of feeling.”

“About what?”

“That you’re not altogether alone--when you ought to be alone--when you seem to be alone, I mean.... If you’re walking across the lawn to the house, do you never feel as if there was something at a window high up, hiding behind the blind, and watching you?”

“Oh, you’re too full of fancies for me!” growled Rusk good humouredly. He laid a firm, friendly hand on his shoulder. “I never saw such a little chap! What I’m afraid of at present is that we’re going to get wet through.”