The Love-Story of Aliette Brunton
his brow damp with sweat under the cap-peak. Restlessly he resumed his
tramp; restlessly the dog followed him; round the house and round
again--till at last, to Ponto's delight, his master made his way out of
the gardens, through the stables, to the gate of the paddock.
3
The paddock, a square two-acre of trampled grasses fenced with the high
white of blossoming hawthorn, shimmered in the afternoon sunshine; and
at far end of it, as he opened the gate, Ronnie saw Miracle. At the
click of the gate-latch, the big thoroughbred, golden as a guinea to the
rich light, lifted his head from the fragrant pasture; scrutinized his
visitors; and with a whinny of delight came cantering toward them. Ten
yards away, he stopped--his neck arched, his eyes wide in speculation.
Then, pace by balancing pace, muzzle outstretched, he came on; snuffled
down at the dog; snuffled up at the man.
Tactfully as Aliette's self Ronnie gentled the horse, caressing the
smooth muzzle, the sleek skin under the branches of the jaws. Somehow,
it seemed as though Miracle were aware of the fret in him, of the fret
in Ponto; as though Miracle, following the pair of them up and down the
paddock, were trying to say: "It's all right. It's quite all right."
And Ronnie thought, looking at Miracle's great shoulders, at the slope
of his pasterns and the sinuous strength of his hocks: "You carried her
over Parson's Brook, old boy. You'll carry her again, next winter, as
you carried me this, across a stiller country than Mid-Oxfordshire,
across the ridge-and-furrow and the cut-and-laids and the timber of the
shires."
Miracle followed the pair of them back to the gate, and stood looking
over it while they made their way to the stables. The big blue clock
under the old-fashioned hunting wind-vane (a metal man on a metal horse
capping on a metal hound) showed ten minutes to four. In the center of
the deserted courtyard--ominous--stood Hartley's car. Toward it, through
the archway, came the doctor himself.
Ronnie's heart sank at sight of the man. "Anything gone wrong?" he asked
curtly.
"On the contrary." Hartley, a big-shouldered fellow who rode like a
thruster and looked more like a vet. than a county practitioner, laughed
under his large mustache. "On the contrary. Everything's going
splendidly. If only we could get you husbands out of the way at these
times----"
"How much longer?" interrupted Ronnie.
"Two hours at the least." The doctor abstracted a small package from the
dickey of his car. "We can't rush our fences at this game, you know."
"Is my wife in pain?"
"Of course she's in pain."
"Bad pain?"
"Good Lord, no. Nothing out of the ordinary. She's a Trojan, is your
missus, Cavendish." And Hartley, stuffing the package into a capacious
pocket, added. "As a matter of fact, it seems to me that you're looking
a jolly sight worse than she is. Why don't you take my advice, and get
on a gee-gee for an hour or so? _We_ don't want you kicking about the
house, I can tell you."
The doctor hurried off through the archway toward the house, leaving
Ronnie a little ashamed of himself. Hartley, for all his coarseness,
knew his job. He began to wonder whether it wouldn't be a sound scheme
to follow Hartley's advice, and go out for a ride. Driver, the groom,
had asked for the Saturday afternoon off; but he could easily saddle up
one of the hacks in the loose-boxes, either the old brown mare, Daisy,
or the little bay horse which he had bought--a week since--as a surprise
for Aliette on her convalescence.
Ronnie, Ponto still at his heels, made his way into the unlocked
harness-room; picked a saddle from its rack, a snaffle bridle from its
peg; and emerged again into the courtyard.
"Which shall it be?" he thought, "Daisy or the bay?" And hesitating in
his choice, it came to him, quite suddenly, that if he really _were_
going to ride--if, despite the apprehensions which had once more started
nagging at his mind, he really meant to disregard the pull of that
invisible halter which bound him to the house where Aliette lay in
pain--then the only horse possible for him to ride was Miracle.
Why not? The thoroughbred had only been "lying out" a week. An hour's
exercise wouldn't do him any harm. He'd enjoy, perhaps, a little canter
across the grass to Spaxton's Covert.
Wonderingly, Ponto followed his master back to the paddock. Miracle
still had his head across the gate; nor, when he saw the saddle over
Ronnie's right arm, the bridle in his left hand, did he sulk away. The
big golden-gleaming horse seemed rather pleased than sulky to feel the
brow-band slipped up his forehead, the snaffle-bar slipped into his
mouth, the throat-lash of the bridle buckled loose, and the
saddle-girths gripping him. He tossed at his bit and hogged his back in
the old playful way as Ronnie--the ashplant in his left hand--put an
unhorsemanly-shod foot into the iron and swung an unhorsemanly-trousered
leg over the cantle.
As the three of them, horse and dog and man, set off across the paddock,
Ronnie knew the impulse to turn back, to off-saddle. It seemed heartless
that he should ride out across green fields while Alie--had not Hartley
himself admitted?--was in pain. But half-way across the two-acre the
impulse weakened; and by the time they made the far gate it had
altogether died away.
He unlatched the gate with his ashplant, and Miracle nipped through.
Before them, up-and-down emerald between rolling grasses, lay the
bridle-path to Spaxton's Covert. The horse, at a touch of the rein,
broke from walk to trot, from trot to a springy canter that traversed
the ridge-and-furrow without an effort. Southerly breezes blew across
the sixty-acre pasture. Two hares, mating, scurried from their approach.
The great horned beasts, white-faced Herefords and black Welsh steers,
watched them incuriously till--catching sight of Ponto--they, too, moved
lumbering away.
At the crest, Ronnie drew rein. Here, they were on the very spine of the
county. Looking back, he could still see the high chimney-stacks and the
stable-clock of Windmill House: but already Little Overdine had tucked
itself away into a cup of the vale; so that only its church-tower and
the motionless sails of the windmill betrayed it from the humpy fields
through which Little Overdine Brook serpentined like a gigantic green
caterpillar.
Mapwise, from that high eminence, the shires outspread their panorama,
pasture on rolling pasture, with here a bright square of young green
cornland, here a dark blob of covert, here a blue hill and there a vale,
here a great house nestling among trees, there a red farm, there a
church, and there a white railway-gate, but scarce a factory chimney
from horizon to horizon.
Not for nothing do men hark back to the place of their father's birth!
To Ronnie, ever since he had first set eyes on this panorama, it had
been home. Already he knew its every landmark; already it had power over
him, power to soothe, power to set him a-dream.
And to-day, more than ever before, the shires set their spell upon him,
so that he imagined--sitting there motionless on the motionless horse--a
son soon to be born, a son who would esteem the Tudor house on the brow
of Little Overdine Hill, and all this wide champaign, these counties
which were neither pretty-pretty as the garden South, nor rocked and
sea-girt as the West, nor grandly cragged and forested as the North, but
just--so Ronnie put it to himself that afternoon--just England, the old
England of bold horses and bold hounds and bolder men.
4
The three, horse and dog and man, set off again. Down from the crest
they came at a canter, through fields ridged yellow with buttercups,
where the young lambs frisked bleating from their path, by blazing
hawthorn-hedges a-chatter with startled finches, through the
pasture-gates, to the little wooden bridge over the Brook. Now, on a
slope above them, they saw the bright new green of Spaxton's Covert;
five acres of blessed woodland whither, on some dark November afternoon,
a dog-fox hard-pressed from Lomondham Ruffs or Highborough Gorse might,
if only scent failed, perchance make safety from the beaten pack.
But to-day the dog-fox feared neither pack nor horseman. They saw him, a
red shape at covert's edge; saw him grin at them from fifty yards'
range, and lope disdainfully back through the wooden palings to his
mate!
Ronnie, laughing at the incident, halted Miracle, dismounted, and called
the rabbit-eager Ponto to heel. The half-hour or so of open air had
steadied his nerves. Lighting a cigarette, looking at his watch, he saw
that his hands no longer trembled. "Alie's all right," he said to
himself. "Everything's all right."
He mounted again, and headed away from the covert toward Lomondham. From
Lomondham to Little Overdine by the highroad is four good miles.
"That'll get me home comfortably by five," thought Ronnie. But just
before he made the Lomondham road, fear gripped him again. Suddenly some
instinct, an instinct so strong that he dared not even fight against it,
warned him that Alie was in danger.
And with fear came self-reproach. He had been away a whole hour, a whole
hour of life or death for the woman he loved. He had been enjoying
himself, _enjoying_ himself, dreaming of a son when perhaps--perhaps----
Miracle, trotting at ease, felt himself abruptly gathered together, felt
the ring of the snaffle hard against his off cheek, felt the grass at
roadside under his hoofs, broke to a canter and from a canter to a
gallop. Ponto, caught unawares fifty yards in rear, heard man and horse
disappear round a bend in the hawthorn hedges; Ponto, quickening his
lollop round the bend, saw the pair streak hell-for-leather up the hill;
Ponto, laboring desperately not to be left behind, saw them halt for a
moment at the gate of Lomondham Lane and knew that his master had taken
the short cut home. "He can't have forgotten _me_," thought Ponto
angrily.
But Ronnie, in that moment of fear, had forgotten everything except
Aliette. The lane saved a mile and a half, and the lane was all soft
turf--good going--the first five furlongs of it straight as a
race-course.
Down those first five furlongs Miracle went like a steed possessed. The
turf thudded under his hoofs. The hawthorn-hedges streaked past him like
snowbanks alongside a train. "Hope to God we don't meet any one at the
bend," thought Ronnie, his silk-socked ankles thrust home in the irons,
his trousered knees gripping the saddle-flaps, his hands low and his
body a little forward.
For now there was no controlling Miracle. The fear of the thoroughbred
man on his back had communicated itself in some mysterious way to the
thoroughbred horse. He, too, wanted to get home. Grandly he swept the
ground from under him. Scarcely, with voice and rein, Ronnie succeeded
in checking speed as they tore madly round the bend; scarcely, leaning
hard over, he succeeded in keeping his seat.
And then, abruptly, he remembered the tree!
The tree, a great elm, overturned by the gale, was a bare four hundred
yards on, just around the next bend, beyond the bridge that arched up
like the back of a big red hog from the green of the lane.
"Steady, Miracle," called Ronnie, "steady, you old fool. This isn't the
National." He was still terribly frightened about Alie; but for himself
he had no fear. Even when his horse, head down, neck-muscles arched
against the reins, took the red bridge as though it had been a
water-jump, it never struck Ronnie that he wouldn't be able to stop him.
Two hundred yards from the tree, he still intended to pull up. Miracle,
with no corn in him, couldn't hold that pace another furlong. Miracle,