“I think, sir,” he said in a pinched voice, “I ought to go straight home now. If you don’t awfully mind.”
“Go home? After coming all up here for a special purpose, go home with nothing done? Nonsense, child! There’s no hurry, you’ll be home just as quickly in the car.” And the big body, powerful and silent, leaned nearer, seemed to Dominic’s fascinated eyes simply to be nearer, without a sound or a movement. He backed away by inches, trying to keep the distance between them intact. The hands of the bushes, sudden and frightening, clawed at his back; he did not know quite how he had been deflected into them, but they were there, nudging him. He felt sick, but he was used to that, it happened in every crisis, and he was growing out of it gradually and learning to control it.
“Yes, sir, but— It’s very good of you, but I ought to go straight back to my father. I ought not to wait. And there isn’t any need for me to bother you now, I’ve just found what we needed. It’s quite all right now, thank you. So if you really don’t mind—”
The darkness round his little glowworm of light confused him. He was trying to stay steadily between Blunden and the gate, now perhaps a hundred yards behind them; but somehow in his anxiety to keep his face to the old man he had allowed himself to be edged round into the rim of the drive, into the undergrowth; and now he had no sense of direction at all, he was just marooned on a floating island of inadequate light in a sea of dark. He knew he would see better if he switched the torch off, but he knew he must not do it. Other people, mere whispers in the bushes—and how if they were only owls and badgers, after all?—they had to see, too; they had to see everything.
“And what,” said the old man softly, “what have you found? What is this magic word that settles everything? Show me!” And the ambling, massy darkness of him below the shoulders shifted suddenly, and he was nearer, was within touch. Something else moved, too, from left hand to right; the walking-stick on which he had leaned so heavily, so ageingly, since Charles was killed. He was not leaning on it now, his back was not sagging, the stoop of his head was a panther’s stoop from muscular, resilient shoulders. Dominic felt behind him, and was lacerated with holly spines.
“It’s his name,” he said in a little, quaking voice which longed rather to shriek for George than to pursue this any farther. “I tried and tried, and couldn’t read it before, but it is his name, Helmut Schauffler— So it’s all right, isn’t it? I must go quickly, and give it to my father. It was very kind of you to help me, but I’ve got to go and find him at once—”
“Pretty superhuman of you,” said the old man’s voice heartily, “not to have shown it to someone long before this. Didn’t you? Not even to some of the other boys?”
“No, honestly I didn’t.”
“Not to anyone at all?” The hand that held the stick tightened its fingers; he saw the long line of descending darkness in the darkness lift and quiver, and that was all the warning he had.
“No, nobody but you!”
Then he gathered himself, as if the words had been the release of a spring, and leaped a yard to his right, stooping his head low, the light of the torch plunging madly as he jumped. He saw only a confusion of looming, heavy face, immense bristling moustache, exaggerated cheeks, set teeth and braced muscles steadying the blow, and two bright, firm, matter-of-fact blue eyes that terrified him more than all the rest, because they were not angry, but only practically intent on seeing him efficiently silenced. He saw a dark, hissing flash which must have been the stick descending, and felt it fall heavily but harmlessly on his left arm below the shoulder, at an angle which slid it down his sleeve almost unchecked, to crash through the holly-branches and thud into the ground. Then his nerve gave way, and he clawed his way round into the line of the drive, and ran, and ran, dangling his numbed left arm, with the heavy feet pounding fast behind him. He threw the little book away, and the torch after it, and plunging aside into the bushes, tore a way through them into somebody’s arms.
He didn’t know what was happening, and was too stunned to attempt to follow the sounds he heard, though he knew that someone had screamed, and was dimly and rather pleasurably aware that it had not been with his voice. Confused impressions of a great many people erupting darkly from both sides of the drive cleared slowly into a sharper awareness. Voices regained their individuality. Pussy had screamed, and he thought he had heard his father’s tones in a sudden sharp shout, and then after the crashing of branches and thudding of feet and gasping and grunting of struggle, a heavy fall. He didn’t care much. He was satisfied to be alive, and held with a sort of relentless gentleness hard against a big, hard body, into whose shoulder he ground his face, sobbing dryly, and past caring who heard him.
“All right, all right, son!” Jim Tugg was saying in his ear. “We was by you all the time. If you’d held still I had me hands on you, all ready to lug you backwards out of harm’s way. Never mind, fine you did it your own way. All over now bar the shouting!”
There wasn’t much shouting. It had gone very quiet. Dominic drew calming breaths that seemed to be dragged right down to his toes. “Did they get him? Is it all right?” he managed between gulps.
“We’ve got him all right. Don’t you worry!”
So presently he took his face out of Jim’s shoulder, and looked. Several torches had appeared in a random ring of light about the torn holly-bushes and the scuffled patch of gravel in the drive. Chad Wedderburn and Constable Weaver were holding Selwyn Blunden by the arms, but though all his muscles heaved a little in bewilderment against the restraint, he was not struggling. His big head had settled like a sleeping owl’s, deep into the hunched shoulders, and his face had sagged into a dead, doughy stillness; but the blue, icy eyes which stared hard at Dominic out of this flabby mask were very much alive. They had not hated him before, because he had been only a slight bump in the roadway, but they hated him now because he was the barrier into which a whole life had crashed and shattered. He stared back, and suddenly, though he couldn’t be ashamed, he couldn’t be proud, either. He blinked at the rest of them, at Io just starting toward him a step or two in impulsive tenderness, with Pussy in her arm; at his father just picking up the fallen walking-stick in his handkerchief, hurriedly and without due reverence because his mind was on something else, and thrusting that, too, into Io’s hands. It wasn’t all over bar the shouting, at all; it had only just begun, and it was he who had begun it. He’d had to, hadn’t he? There wasn’t anything else to be done. But he turned his face into Jim Tugg’s patient sleeve, and said:
“I want my father! I want to go home!”
George was by him already, lifting him out of Jim’s arms as by right, hugging him, feeling him all over for breaks and bruises, and finding nothing gravely wrong. George was an inspired comforter. Jim Tugg heard him, and grinned. Dominic heard him, and came to earth with a fine corrective bump that braced his nerves and stiffened his pride indignantly, and did him more good just then than all the sympathy in the world. Having satisfied himself that his son was not a whit the worse, and still holding him tightly:
“You bat-brained little hellion!” said George feelingly. “Just wait till I get you home!”
