He hesitated a moment and she turned on him fiercely. “Won’t you do even a small thing for me?” she cried and pushed at him with her hands. Dumb, caught up by her command, he made a blind motion towards her, which she repelled. “A farewell for two minutes’ absence?” she mocked. “I’ll kiss you when you return soon.”
Pail in hand he walked down the path, but a soft, somehow imploring, echo of that “soon” brushed him on the cheek and made him turn. A white flower upon a slender stem which trembled in the dusk was what he seemed to see. Indeed the image was not fancy only, for one hand extended itself across the dark to find support against the door. It was too dark to see her face, but in her eyes he could imagine the smile well-known to him, because he could not see the fear.
XI
His body a little bent by the weight of water in the pail, Andrews turned to make his way back to the cottage. A sky curdled with dark, heavy clouds had forced the pace of night. In a crack above his head a single star shone fitfully with a pale radiance between the scurry of cloud. Quenched and returning with an almost even rhythm the glow was like the revolving lantern of a lighthouse and when unseen might have been shining on another tract of land in a different quarter of the earth. In the western sky a yellow glow rapidly fading illumined the lower edge of an aerial bank of grey, soiled snow. To the southwest shadow had now completely enveloped the down and extinguished in darkness the contempt of its heaving shoulder. A frosty bite in the air mingled with physical dread to drive Andrews into a long discomforted shudder.
The path to the well was some fifty yards in length and a bend hid the cottage from view. Still staggering uncertainly from his load Andrews turned the corner. “Unwise,” he thought, seeing the door of the cottage standing open, and was amazed still further at the imprudence of a candle. From within it displayed the defenceless door by its golden glow that washed outwards and lipped along the path.
Andrews put down his pail and stepped backwards, with mouth dry and lungs that seemed barren of air. Into the diminishing radiance of the candle a large man had stepped with a blundering caution which told his name to Andrews very familiar with Joe’s incongruous bulk. “O God,” he prayed, “help me. He’ll find I’m not there and follow.” Without waiting to see Joe enter the cottage Andrews ran. Only when he reached the well did the prick of conscience bring him to a halt. Elizabeth was alone in the cottage. “But she has the gun,” he told himself and awaited for long seconds a shot which did not come. “Go back, go back, go back,” heart told the flinching flesh, but that single reiterated message was ineffective beside the host of reasons that the fearing body had at its call. “They are looking for me, they will not hurt her,” he told himself, and again, “Carlyon must be there. He’ll see that she’s safe,” and last of all a feeling of irritation against the responsibility forced on him. “It’s her fault,” he told himself. “Why did she send me for water? Why did she leave the door open? She was asking for trouble. If she’d any thought for my safety, she’d have been more careful.” After all if he ran back now what could he do? He was unarmed.
And yet he must do something, even the grudging flesh admitted that. The wisest course for both of them without a doubt was to go for help. She had said that there was a neighbour only a mile away. Cautiously he struck sideways from the wall towards the road, eyes growing tired with a meticulous, terrified watch, ears listening for the slightest sound from the cottage behind. It remained wrapped in a complete, puzzling and disturbing silence. “She has not even called out to me” he thought and was illogically hurt even in his fear.
The flickering wings of a bat dived at him and he put up fingers, tingling and jumping with nerves, to guard his face. The wind blew past his ears and seemed to him the passage of time rushing by him. Minutes which had crawled flew. Seconds flew so swiftly that they could not be discerned but melted into one whirling belt of time driven by an engine whose beats were the beats of his own heart and the multitudinous noises of his brain. He dared not run, for to run was to abandon caution. Andrews caught a vision of himself, a small black figure lifting slow feet with the sluggish movements of a man trapped in a shallow bog, while seconds, minutes, surely hours, roared by with an accelerating speed. Once he was brought altogether to a standstill by the sight as it seemed to him of a figure which stood beneath a tree silently regarding him. With heart beating in panic brought to a climax Andrews stared back, afraid to move lest the figure had not yet observed him, trying through the darkness to fit familiar lineaments to the invisible face. Then the clouds parted for a moment to allow the passage of a proud orange moon and before they closed again the watching figure was shown to be no more than a strip of ivy hanging from a tree.
At last the road appeared, a faintly gleaming viscous track across the matt surface of the dark. Rutted and broken as it was, to Andrews’s feet it seemed hard, smooth and safe compared with the path they had left. He
