Puff‑puff! puff‑puff! hum‑m‑m! The sound of the distant ploughing engines came humming in the still air. He had noticed previously that his coat-sleeve was flecked with gossamer threads, and now saw that the bushes were white with them. Looking upwards, the atmosphere was full of glistening lines—like the most delicate silk—drooping downwards and shining in the sunlight. As far up as the eye could see, they came showering slowly, noiselessly, down. The surface of the grass was covered with these webs like a broad veil of fragile lace; and his feet, tearing a rent through it were whitened by the accumulated threads. The rooks rose from the oaks with a lazy cawing, loth to leave the ripening acorns, and settled again when he had passed.
Hum‑m‑m! hum‑m‑m!
Underfoot a soft moss, luxuriating in the shade, almost took the place of grass. The hedge itself was like a wood, so wide and thick—full of ashpoles and hawthorn, crab-tree underwood, willow, elder, and blackthorn, and here and there spreading oak trees. It terminated at the wood; and as they approached it the dogs became more busy; for the rabbits were numerous, and the banks were bored with their holes. Geoffrey kept his gun on the hollow of his left arm—ready for a rabbit—with the muzzle towards the hedge.
“Loo! Loo!” cried Valentine, urging the dogs.
Puff‑puff! hum‑m‑m!
Geoffrey, looking intently at the mound, and expecting a rabbit to start every moment, did not notice that a mole had recently thrown up a heap of earth in his path. His foot striking against it caused him to stumble, and, to recover himself, he snatched at a projecting branch of nut-wood. A twig, or perhaps his sleeve, touched the trigger of his gun—the muzzle still towards the hedge—and the sudden explosion that followed jerked the gun from his arm to the ground. Like a bullet the cartridge sang through between the ashpoles, and cut a small pendent bough of willow in twain, not two feet in front of Valentine’s face.
“By Jove!” he shouted, “that was meant for me. There!”
Strung up to an unbearable tension by brooding over his losses and disappointment, jealous about Margaret, and now suddenly startled, Valentine lost all control of himself, and, swinging his gun round towards Geoffrey, without putting it to his shoulder, fired.
Geoffrey was in a stooping position, just lifting his gun from the ground, when the shot, fired low, came with a rattle among the crab-tree undergrowth. The tough fibres of the wood held and checked it, so that only a few pellets passed by; but one or two of these, though their force was almost spent in penetrating the branches, struck him sharply by the knee with a sudden stinging pain.
“You shot at me!” shouted Geoffrey, now equally excited, and, hardly aware what he was doing, he sprang across the ditch and into the double mound, to get a clearer aim.
Valentine ran quickly down the meadow on his side; then, seeing no other cover, also leapt into the hedge, and they faced each other some thirty yards apart. As usual in double mounds, the growth of underwood was less dense in the middle, so that, though some distance apart, each was dimly visible through the branches. There came a loud report as they fired the remaining barrels almost simultaneously, and a crashing and cracking of splintered wood; but no harm yet, thanks to the crab and stubborn blackthorn. The sulphurous smoke, clinging to the close undergrowth and tall grasses, filled their nostrils with the scent and madness of battle. In his ordinary mood either of these two would have scouted the possibility of such a thing happening; but circumstances suddenly threw them as it were a thousand years back in civilisation on the original savage instincts of man. Had they carried even the muzzle loaders, which take time to ram the charge home, one or other might have paused. Better still if their arms had been the ancient matchlock, with the priming to look to and the match to blow. But these breechloaders, which send forth continuous flame, swift as the lightning, flash on flash, allow not a moment for thought. The “death and murder of a world,” as Faust said, be on them.
As they jerked out the empty cartridge cases, and thrust in fresh charges, each instinctively moved to the best shelter he could see—Valentine behind the gabions of a great gnarled ash-stole; Geoffrey to the cover of a crooked maple, whose leaves were turning yellow. Red tongues of fire darted forth, scorching the leaves and blackening the branches. Guided by sound and guess rather than sight, they fired vaguely into the thickets. From the oaks of great Thorpe Wood the rooks rose at the din, loudly cawing, high into the air; then in circling sweep they soared and wheeled, black and ominous, a dance of death in the azure beauty of the cloudless sky. The dogs yelped their very loudest, keeping at a distance from the hedgerow; they knew that something was wrong. Fast as the motions of the hand could answer to the eager hate in the heart, volley followed volley, till the heated metal of the barrels could scarcely be touched.
The dun smoke crept along the mound, and slipped with sudden draught into the rabbit-buries, and hung low over the ash-tops. With a hiss and roar and rattle the shot tore its way, biting hungrily at the branches as it passed. The ash-boughs, tough and sinewy, though half-severed, hung together still; the willow split, and let the lead slip through its feeble wood; the hard crab-tree and blackthorn, with fibres torn and jagged, held and stopped it; the briar, with its circular pith, snapped and drooped. Through the
