Part 202

They had reached the lane leading to their farm. Its depth held them closer than the twilight held. The trees guarded them. Every green branch roofed a hollow deep with haze.

"If you were a cold woman I could understand it."

"I couldn't. It's because I was anything but cold."

"I know. You were afraid then."

"Yes. I was mortally afraid."

Above the lane, on the slope of the foot hills, they could see their farm, a dim grey roof in a ring of ash-trees. A dim green field opened out below it, fan-wise with a wild edge that touched the moor. It seemed to her with her altered memory that it was home they were drawing near.

"George," she said, "you know women as God knows them; why didn't you know me? Can't you see what I was afraid of? What we're all afraid of? What we're eternally trying to escape from? The thing that hunts us down, that turns again and rends us."

"You thought you saw that in me?"

"I don't see it now."

"Not now," he whispered.

They had come to the porch of the farmhouse. The door stood open. The lamp-light drew them in. He closed the door behind them. She stood facing him as one who waits.

"Not now," he said aloud.

He glanced round. The house and all about it was still.

"If we could always be here, Jinny----"

She turned from him, afraid.

"Why not?" he said, and followed her and took her in his arms.

He pressed back her head with one hand. His face sought hers, the face she knew, with its look of impetuous flight, of curves blown back, the face that seemed to lean forward, breasting the wind of its own speed. It leaned now, swift to its desire. It covered her face. Its lips were pressed to her lips, lips that drank her breath, that were fierce in their drinking, after their long thirst. She pushed it from her with her two hands and cried out, "Rose, little Rose!"

She struggled from his arms and ran from him, stumbling up the steep stairs. A door opened and shut. He heard her feet go slowly on the floor of her room above him. They reached the bed. She seemed to sink there.

LXIII

That night she knew that she must leave Dartmoor, and go somewhere where George Tanqueray could not follow her and find her. She was mortally afraid of him. He had tracked and hunted her down swiftly and more inevitably than any destroyer or pursuer.

In spite of him, indeed because of him, her passion for this solitude of the moors was strong upon her, and she planned to move on the next day into Somerset, to a place on Exmoor that she knew. She would leave very early in the morning before Tanqueray could come to her.

She lay all night staring with hot eyes at the white walls that held her. At daylight she dropped asleep and slept on into the morning. When she woke she faced her purpose wide-eyed and unflinching. Her fear was there also and she faced it.

She was down too late for any train that could take her away before noon, and Tanqueray might come now at any time.

She was so late that the day's letters waited for her on the window-sill. In her agitation she nearly missed seeing them. One was from Gertrude, fulfilling punctually her pledge, assuring her as usual that all was well. The other was from her brother-in-law, Henry. It was very brief. Henry, after expressing the hope that she continued to benefit by the air of Dartmoor, supposed that she would have heard that Hugh was suffering from a chill he had caught by motoring without an overcoat.

She had not heard it. She read Gertrude's letter again to make sure. Among all the things, the absolutely unnecessary things, that Gertrude had mentioned, she had not mentioned that. She had broken her pledge.

They kept things from her, then. Heaven only knew what they had kept.

She read Henry's letter again. There were no details, but her mind supplied them as it grasped the sense of what he had written. There rose before her instantly a vision of Hugh lying in his bed ill. He had a racing pulse, a flaming temperature. He was in for gastritis, at the least, if it was not pneumonia. She saw with intolerable vividness a long procession of terrors and disasters, from their cause, the chill, down to their remotest consequences. Her imagination never missed one.

And instantly there went from her the passion of her solitude, and the splendour of the moors perished around her like an imperfect dream, and her genius that had driven her there and held her let go its hold. It was as if it owned that it was beaten. She had no more fear of it. And she had no more fear of George Tanqueray.