him down, and for a moment vision and hearing deserted him, and nothing was left but the agonised sensitivity of his finger-tips, flayed and quivering from the very touch of the withered grass.
So he never saw Annet draw the muzzle of the gun to her breast and settle it, smiling – though the darkness would have hidden the lovely and terrible quality of the smile – against her heart.
Hearing came back to him with a crash, swollen sounds battering his flinching ears like bomb-bursts. Then as suddenly they dwindled and separated, congealing into recognisable order, though for some seconds they made no sense, because he had no strength to turn his head. He thought there was a voice urging something, and that must have been Annet, and another voice that recoiled and refused, in helpless horror, and yet with so little strength or conviction that it was plain it could not long go on refusing. And then a clipped impact, a sharp, faint cry, and something falling.
Two things falling. One of them flew and rolled, ricocheting from the rocks, and at the end of its course along the grass stung his outstretched hand. He closed his fingers on it, and it was hard and heavy, and fitted snugly into his palm. A flung stone. Not just any stone, he knew it by its weight and texture. One of Jane’s specimens of galena. One of the boys must have had it in his pocket. It didn’t belong on top here, it came from below, by the old lead workings.
One of the boys! That shook him into full consciousness again, and drove him to his knees, heavy head thrust erect by main force, clouded eyes straining. The mated shadows under the Altar had been torn apart, something small and metallic had whined against stone in falling. The gun, struck clean out of Blacklock’s hand, lay three yards away in the grass, a pencil-beam of light from his little torch searched for it frantically and found it. On either side shadows came running, a ring of footsteps circled him like a chain, as he flung himself after the gun and snatched it from the ground.
He was straightening up with it in his hand when another light found him, pinned him, held him transfixed and dazzled. Someone had come scrambling round the slabs of the Altar, running with the rest, and there halted suddenly to launch and steady the beam of a strong torch upon him. For a long moment he crouched blinded in the glare, his head thrown back, his eyes dilated and blank as glass in a contorted face of desperation and anguish, quite motionless.
He could have fired into the light, he could have taken one at least of these encroaching shadows with him out of the world, but he did not. They were all round him, they knew him, there was no escape. He knew it was all over. It stared plain in the tragic mask of his face that he knew, and had accepted his end. He looked full into the light, and suddenly lifted the gun to his own temple and squeezed the trigger.
The shot and Annet’s brief, heart-rending shriek of grief and loss exclaimed and recoiled together from rock to rock, eddying away into infinite distance. The beam of light quivered in a shaking hand, and dropped after the collapsing body into the grass.
When George Felse reached the spot half a minute later, with Lockyer hard on his heels, when Jane Darrill came forward on unsteady legs, the torch dangling in her hand and the two boys silent and shaken beside her, Dominic still clutching a fragment of barytes in his hand, Annet was couched in the trampled grass with her lover’s body cradled in her arms, her cheek pressed against his head, the small, powder-rimmed hole in his temple hidden by the fall of her black hair. Body, arms, head, she was folded about him with all her force, as though she would never again unclasp and separate herself from him. She did not move when they came to her, or speak, or show in any way that she was aware of them.
Faintness like a smothering velvet curtain swung between Tom’s eyes and the figures that closed in from either side. Snatches of voices reached him. He heard George telling somebody to ‘see what you can do for Tom,’ and then there were hands carefully taking hold of him, turning him on his back, detaching his rigid fingers from the tuft of long grass by which he had been trying to drag himself along. Someone raised him a little against a knee. Through his own personal darkness he was spasmodically aware of light turned upon him. The hands that were busy at his blood-soaked shoulder were a man’s, but the light touch that supported his head was surely a woman’s. He opened his eyes and looked up into Jane’s face, softly lit from below, drawn, subdued, great-eyed with shock.
The pendulum of consciousness reached its steadiest, and the light its brightest. He lifted his head with an effort, craning round Jane’s supporting arm. Someone stood between him and Annet, a young, tall silhouette, frozen still for awe of death.
‘Dom, go down and ’phone from the box,’ said George’s voice. ‘Call the station and tell them it’s an ambulance job, urgent. Then call Superintendent Duckett, and tell him what’s happened. And then go home. You hear?’
Low-voiced, Dominic said: ‘Yes,’ and offered no argument. He uncrooked his aching finger from about the piece of bartytes he wouldn’t, after all, have to throw, and let it fall dully into the ground; then, remembering that Jane had wanted it, groped for it again and returned it to his pocket. He felt beneath the dangling plummet of specimens for coppers, and his hand, numbed from long tension, fumbled clumsily with pennies it could not feel except as coldness. He dragged his gaze from Annet and went as he was bidden, walking to the edge of the westward slope with the abnormal firmness and matter-of-factness of one still in shock; but once over the edge he came to himself, and set off running and leaping down the traverse of grass like a hare.
His going uncovered the two figures clasped indissolubly together in the grass. Annet had not moved. Withdrawn into herself in the sealed silence of bereavement, she crouched in the classic shape of mourning. Tom strained to keep his eyes upon her, and his own pain was only an irritation that fretted at his bitter concentration without bringing him ease, a threat that filmed his vision over with faintness when most he desired to continue seeing. He moaned when they eased the coat away from his wound, but he shook the encroaching dark from him, and fastened on Annet still like a famishing man.
George had dropped to his knees beside those motionless, fused lovers, and was putting back gently the curtain of black hair that shrouded their faces, to look closely at the wound that had brought them down together. But even when he had satisfied himself, what was there he could have to say to Annet? She knew Peter Blacklock was dead; there was no need for anyone to break that news to her. There was no need for words at all; there was no aspect of this death and this survival she had not already understood. And George had nothing to say. But without fuss, as one doing what was there to be done, he took her chin in his hand and lifted her head erect, gently loosened her fingers from their rigid clasp, and unwound her arms from about her dead. He lifted the limp body out of her embrace and laid it down in the grass, and taking Annet by the hands, drew her to her feet.
And she turned to him, not away from him! She turned to him voluntarily, leaning forward into his shoulder with a broken sigh. He held her for a while, gently and impersonally; and when she raised her head and stood back from him he took away his arms gently and gradually and let her stand alone.
‘Miles!’
He had not said one word or made one movement until then, only stood motionless and apart in the darkness by the rocks, biding his time. Tom had forgotten him until he heard the measured and muted voice say: ‘I’m here.’
‘Take Annet down to my car, and drive her home. She’ll go with you now.’
