Part 48 (1/2)
Nor did Hilda. The movement braced and intoxicated her, and rendered thought impossible. She brimmed with emotion, like a vase with some liquid una.n.a.lysable and perilous. She was not happy, she was not unhappy; the sensation of her vitality and of the kindred vitality of the earth and the air was overwhelming. She would have prolonged the journey indefinitely, and yet she intensely desired the goal, whatever terrors it might hold for her. At intervals she pulled up the embroidered and monogrammed ap.r.o.n that slipped slowly down over her skirt and over Harry's tennis-flannels, disclosing two rackets in a press that lay between them. Perhaps Harry was thinking of certain strokes at tennis.
”Longford!” e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Harry, turning his head slightly towards the body of the vehicle, as they rattled by a hamlet.
Soon afterwards the road mounted steeply,--five hundred feet in little more than a mile, and the horses walked, but they walked in haste, fiercely, clawing at the road with their forefeet and thrusting it behind them. And some of the large tors emerged clearly into view--c.o.x Tor, the Staple Tors, and Great Mis lifting its granite above them and beyond.
They were now in the midst of the moor, trotting fast again. Behind and before them, and on either side, there was nothing but moor and sky.
The sky, a vast hemisphere of cloud and blue and suns.h.i.+ne, with a complex and ever elusive geography of its own, discovered all the tints of heath and granite. It was one of those days when every tint was divided into ten thousand shades, and each is richer and more softly beautiful than the others. On the shoulder of Great Mis rain fell, while little Vixen Tor glittered with mica points in the sun. Nothing could be seen over the whole moor save here and there a long-tailed pony, or a tiny cottage set apart in solitude. And the yellowish road stretched forward, wavily, narrowing, disappeared for a s.p.a.ce, reappeared still narrower, disappeared once more, reappeared like a thin meandering line, and was lost on the final verge. It was an endless road. Impossible that the perseverance of horses should cover it yard by yard! But the horses strained onward, seeing naught but the macadam under their noses. Harry checked them at a descent.
”Walkham River!” he announced.
They crossed a pebbly stream by a granite bridge.
”Hut-circles!” said Harry laconically.
They were climbing again.
Edwin, in the body of the wagonette with Janet and Alicia, looked for hut-circles and saw none; but he did not care. He was content with the knowledge that prehistoric hut-circles were somewhere there. He had never seen wild England before, and its primeval sanity awoke in him the primeval man. The healthiness and simplicity and grandiose beauty of it created the sublime illusion that civilisation was worthy to be abandoned. The Five Towns seemed intolerable by their dirt and ugliness, and by the tedious intricacy of their existence.
Lithography,--you had but to think of the word to perceive the paltriness of the thing! Riches, properties, proprieties, all the safeties,--futile! He could have lived alone with Hilda on the moor, begetting children by her, watching with satisfaction the growing curves of her fecundity--his work, and seeing her with her brood, all their faces beaten by wind and rain and browned with sun. He had a tremendous, a painful longing for such a life. His imagination played round the idea of it with voluptuous and pure pleasure, and he wondered that he had never thought of it before. He felt that he had never before peered into the depths of existence. And though he knew that the dream of such an arcadian career was absurd, yet he seemed to guess that beneath the tiresome surfaces of life in the Five Towns the essence of it might be mystically lived. And he thought that Hilda would be capable of sharing it with him,--nay, he knew she would!
His mood became gravely elated, even optimistic. He saw that he had worried himself about nothing. If she wanted to visit the prison, let her visit it! Why not? At any rate he should not visit it. He had an aversion for morbidity almost as strong as his aversion for sentimentality. But her morbidity could do no harm. She could not possibly meet George Cannon. The chances were utterly against such an encounter. Her morbidity would cure itself. He pitied her, cherished her, and in thought enveloped her fondly with his sympathetic and protective wisdom.
”North Hessary,” said Harry, pointing with his whip to a jutting tor on the right hand. ”We go round by the foot of it. There in a jiff!”
Soon afterwards they swerved away from the main road, obeying a signpost marked ”Princetown.”
”Glorious, isn't it?” murmured Janet, after a long silence which had succeeded the light chatter of herself and Alicia about children, servants, tennis, laundries.
He nodded, with a lively responsive smile, and glanced at Hilda's mysterious back. Only once during the journey had she looked round.
Alicia with her coa.r.s.e kind voice and laugh began to rally him, saying he had dozed.
A town, more granite than the moor itself, gradually revealed its roofs in the heart of the moor. The horses, indefatigable, quickened their speed. Villas, a school, a chapel, a heavy church-tower followed in succession; there were pavements; a brake full of excursionists had halted in front of a hotel; holiday-makers--simple folk who disliked to live in flocks--wandered in ecstatic idleness. Concealed within the warmth of the mountain air, there p.r.i.c.ked a certain sharpness. All about, beyond the little town, the tors raised their s.h.a.ggy flanks surmounted by colossal ma.s.ses of stone that recalled the youth of the planet. The feel of the world was stimulating like a tremendous tonic.
Then the wagonette pa.s.sed a thick grove of trees, hiding a house, and in a moment, like magic, appeared a huge gated archway of brick and stone, and over it the incised words:
PARCERE SUBJECTIS
”Stop! Stop! Harry,” cried Alicia shrilly. ”What are you doing?
You'll have to go to the house first.”
”Shall I?” said Harry. ”All right. Two thirty-five, be it noted.”
The vehicle came to a standstill, and instantly clouds of vapour rose from the horses.
”Virgil!” thought Edwin, gazing at the archway, which filled him with sudden horror, like an obscenity misplaced.
II
Less than ten minutes later, he and Hilda and Alicia, together with three strange men, stood under the archway. Events had followed one another quickly, to Edwin's undoing. When the wagonette drew up in the grounds of the Governor's house, Harry Hesketh had politely indicated that for his horses he preferred the stables of a certain inn down the road to any stables that hospitality might offer; and he had driven off, Mrs. Rotherwas urging him to return without any delay so that tennis might begin. The Governor had been called from home, and in his absence a high official of the prison was deputed to show the visitors through the establishment. This official was the first of the three strange men; the other two were visitors. Janet had said that she would not go over the prison, because she meant to play tennis and wished not to tire herself. Alicia said kindly that she at any rate would go with Hilda,--though she had seen it all before, it was interesting enough to see again.