Chapter X

She was so braw a lady,--not only in the physical meaning of splendid height and just bodily proportion; noble outlines and sweet, healthful hues; hair as richly black-brown as the bracken of her wintry braes, and eyes as tawny-golden as the crystals of her Scottish mountains,--that the heart of the man who loved and had lost her, seemed to shrivel and blister in his bosom, as though some fierce corrosive acid had been poured upon the throbbing flesh....

Again and again he said what he was coming to say, as the willing mare, urged by no sparing hand, made good her journey towards Kerr's Arbour. Straining up steep bare brae-roads; picking her way down slippery descents; plashing through muddy bottoms walled with high cliff-banks clad with funereal firs and shadowy larches, revealed by passing gleams from the dog-cart's lamps. As the high-road changed to a hilly private road bordered by a plantation of conifers backed by a wire park-fence, the beast, which had given signs of distress unheeded by the man--checked at the steep with almost a woman's sob....

Something in the sound wakened a dull pity in Edward Yaill. He got down, and walked beside Brownie, as she slipped and stumbled on stones washed loose by the rain-scour; and as a soldier will, he cursed the badness of the road. It was in a rotten state, compared to what it had been before the War came to take its super-toll of human energy. Sweeping into its huge and bloody maw gentle and simple, noble and infamous, ignorant and learned, penniless and rich. Nothing was the same. Nothing would, could, ever be the same again. Life had been transmuted, not into gold--but from honest silver into a strange, new ugly metal--in this vast, comprehensive crucible of War....

Most hopelessly, irremediably changed of all human beings was Edward Yaill. Once a man meant by his Maker to inhabit an earthly Paradise, by the warm, fragrant side of the tenderest of mates. To that sick-hearted wretch, dogged by a pitiless Fate: outcast, or it seemed so to him--from decent Society: traitor to the woman unswervingly worshipped through the long years of a drawn-out engagement, it was meagrest comfort to know himself blamelessly loyal. Even as a Saint who in the delirium of fever has heard his own crazed voice blaspheming God....

In the horrible wreck and wastage of Yaill's plans, one thought was clear. He must get to Katharine first, and tell her himself before others carried the tale. He looked up at the thin, pale face of the new moon coldly staring down at him between overshadowing branches, and thought it judged and condemned and repulsed him; like the face of the woman in the train. The woman knew Katharine Forbis--might even have written to her. He might find Kerr's Arbour mined, when he got there. A hundred things might have happened to ruin his chances.... What chances he meant he did not clearly know.

Sometimes his mood was cold as he tramped by Brownie, and sometimes hot,--but always he tramped in Hell. He was going--going unless another had been before him, to break the heart of the dearest of living women with five words of his mouth.

"Listen! I have married another!" Afterwards adding: "Even with my soul and body worshipping none but you!" Then--would she die with her great wide eyes reproaching him? Or would she drive him from her with words of scorn? Scornful words would be unlike Katharine Forbis--Katharine who rarely judged and seldom blamed. But the silence in which she would hear him out to an ending, would be infinitely more tragic, unspeakably more terrible than wrath....

Insensibly beneath his feet the steepness levelled. Another mile and Kerr's Arbour would be in sight. But Yaill walked on, now obsessed and held by visions. In mental flashes Katharine came and went.

A hundred times they had climbed this hill together. He felt as though she moved beside him now. He could see the sleet-drops glistening on her smooth cheek, whipped to a sweet carnation by the chilly wind. The scent of camphor from her furs came back to him, with the light pressure of her gloved hand upon his arm. In his ears were the tones of her nice voice,--the frank glance of her fair eyes seemed to meet his, for him were her gay words and her tender ones--like the sweet smile upon her rather large mouth. A smile that expressed its owner's innate conviction--shared by the majority of her acquaintances--that never under any imaginable circumstances could Miss Forbis be unwelcome or undesirable in the estimation of any being she chose to bless. No wonder her wretched Edward was wrung and tortured. In vision after vision she came and vanished, as he tramped beside the now exhausted Brownie under the thin new February moon.

The iron-hard ringing ground, slippery with cat-ice; whitened with powdery hoar-frost; flowed on unheeded under the footfalls of brute and human, who marched together to a worsting Fate. All Nature seemed to reproduce Yaill's mood--the desolate, wintry hills, the eerie scream of the whaups--frozen out of their feeding-grounds in marsh and bogland,--the wailing cry of the hunting-owls, were in tune with him. The skirl of the north-east wind, honed to a razor-edge on the Jutland coast--tanged with the freezing salt of the wild North Sea; mined, patrolled, netted, guarded,--watched from bleak shore to shore, and from the oozy depths, and from the immeasurable heights of Air, by friends and foes, indomitable in hatred,--echoed through the chambers of his desolate heart....

In the Spring of 1910 they had become engaged, and were to have been married in the Winter of that year,--but her mother had died--and Katharine had been unwilling to leave her father, and there had been delays and delays.... And then the wedding had been arranged to take place in the Autumn of 1914, and the War had prevented it--the damnable War!

He ground his teeth, thinking of what the War had done for him and for many another man as wretched--and the distant hooting of the owls, freezing as they hunted freezing rick-mice--and the shriek of the north-east wind--sounded like Irish Banshees wailing the coming death of beautiful love....

For Katharine's love had always been perfectly beautiful. She had been the ideal mate--the sweetheart who never palls. She had fed her lover's heart with the wholesome bread of tenderness, and never let his soul lack nourishment. She had met him full at every turn and exigency of Life--even as they had moved to meet it side by side. In the purest, most spiritual sense these betrothed lovers were wedded--though their ancient Church had not yet made them one.

And now he was hastening to meet her and pull down his tower of love about his ears. Why hurry? whooped the owls and skirled the curlew. If you are going to tell her as you purpose, will you not reach Kerr's Arbour far too soon? But if you have the wisdom that men boast of--take what Life yet may give ere you lose all....

He topped the crest of the final steep, and halted to let his dumb companion breathe awhile.... Now the sharp tuff-tuff of a motor-cycle came out of the distance behind him, and he wondered who was having so cold a ride upon that road to-night. Even from this point he looked on his journey's ending, with the sensation that a man may have in meeting with a dying friend....

Nothing of beauty characterised Kerr's Arbour, an irregular mass of masonry rising from a walled garden-courtyard shut in by high yew-hedges: a stone wall and a _porte-cochère_ of ancient wrought-iron, beyond a bridged dry moat at the bottom of the private road. It showed as a rambling house of Early Jacobean architecture tacked on to the peel-tower reared by Sir Hew Forbis the Crusader, somewhere about 1147. The ancient battlemented tower was squat and clumsy, the rooms with rare exceptions were low-pitched, the ancient casements small, the stairways narrow, and the stone-flagged passages anything but level to the tread. But set in a fold of the snow-tipped hills and shielded on North and East with plantations of oak and evergreen, with the snow-veiled mirror of a little lake, burn-fed, trouty, haunted with heron and other waterfowl,--lying beyond the wintry gardens to the southward; with chilly moonlight on its frosty battlements and lying in pools upon its stone-flagged terrace; and smoke curling from its clustered chimneys; with mingled firelight and lamplight winking from well known windows--it caught at the wanderer's heart as a vision of Home.

He looked up at the black-white sky, and it seemed to his misery, that beyond that inky wrack and livid cumulus--hurrying south like a curse rushing to fulfil itself--dwelt One who in His high austere remoteness looked coldly on the pigmy woes of men. To Whom his pangs were the struggle of the fly in the milk-jug,--the writhings of the worm severed by the gardener's mattock,--the pain of the snail being beaten by the thrush on the stone....

What, O what was it to Him that Katharine's love had always been perfectly beautiful! And that to live beggared of all that wealth of sweetness--perhaps through all the years of life to follow--would be sheer Hell to her lover, Edward Yaill.

Yaill shrieked at the thought, as a man at the stab of the bayonet--and the sweat broke out upon him, despite the cold. His hand went out and gripped the shaft of the dog-cart, so fiercely that the dogskin glove split.... Baulked passion, thwarted desire rent and tore him. Oh, what were Honour and Truth but pithless meanings! He would go down to Kerr's Arbour where she waited, and love and be loved before the ending came. He would drink one draught of the wine his soul and body craved for--before Fate dashed the cup out of his hands.

So said, so it should be done. He took the reins from the hame-spike, and the flare of the wind-blown candle-lamp showed his smile. He sprang to his seat and snatched the whip from the socket, and lashed the mare--who broke into a furious gallop--the cart swinging and lurching perilously behind her as she pounded madly down the steep descent. At the bottom lay the curve of the dry moat, crossed by what had been a wooden drawbridge, converted in the reign of the last Stuart monarch, into an arch of rough-cut granite blocks. Beyond the bridge and a short avenue of beeches rose the rust-red iron gates of Kerr's Arbour, with the arms of the house wrought into their ancient tracery: a wolf's head crest with the motto "FORBYS FOES FA" above a shield with the plain device of three escallops _argent_ on a _fesse_ between two chevrons _sable_ and _gules_.

The gates stood open for the guest of honour. On their cracked stone pillars, topped with grotesque lead effigies of wolves, each supporting the sword of a Crusader, oil lanterns burned, dangling by chains from iron cressets (meant to hold flares of greased or tarry tow). A dog barked within, and the cracked familiar voice of Whishaw, the butler, snapped out angrily:

"Down, Dawtie! Quiet, bitch! Gin ye dinna ken the Colonel, ye daumned eediot, canna ye haud yer tongue like Laddie an' Bran?"

The dog-cart's worn tyres shirred on the gravel of the courtyard. Yaill leaped down. The heavy nailed hall-door stood wide open. Warmth and light rushed together on the exile, and the scent of flowers, the pretty smells of burning peat and apple-wood, lavender, camphor and sandal from the great Japan cabinets ranged in the hall, came to him in a satisfyingly, fragrant whiff. This was home.... Katharine's home.... And Katharine.... He trembled and a mist blurred his vision--and then his sick heart leaped--because she came.