It was clumsily done. He seemed to ignore Angela’s presence, and pointedly excluded her, with his eyes, from the invitation. It seemed evident that the man was determined on a tête-à-tête. Angela’s glance betrayed a surprise which she did not feel, and perhaps a pique which she did, but she rose to the occasion. “Do take him out, Mr. Brinkman. He’s getting dreadfully fat down here. Instead of taking exercise, he comes out and chats to me in public, more like a friend than a husband—and he’s making me drop my stitches.”
“Aren’t you coming?” asked Bredon, with a wholly unnecessary wink.
“Not if I know it. I’m not dressed for gorge inspecting. You may buy me a picture postcard of it, if you like, on the way back.”
The two strolled off up the valley. Bredon’s heart beat fast. It was evident that Brinkman was taking advantage of the overheard conversation, and was preparing to make some kind of disclosure. Was he at last on the track of the secret? Well, he must be careful not to betray himself by any leading questions. The post of the amiable incompetent, which he had already sustained with Brinkman, would do well enough.
“It’s a fine thing, the gorge,” said Brinkman. “It lies just below the Long Pool; but fortunately Pulteney isn’t fishing the Long Pool today, so we shan’t be shouted at and told to keep away from the bank. I really think, apart from the fishing, Chilthorpe is worth seeing, just for the gorge. Do you know anything about geology and such things?”
“You can search me. Beats me how they do it.”
“It beats me how the stream does it. Here’s a little trickle of water that can’t shift a pebble weighing half a pound. Give it a few thousand years, and it eats its way through the solid rock, and digs a course for itself a matter of fifteen or twenty feet deep. And all that process is a mere moment of time, compared with the millions of years that lie behind us. If you want to reckon the age of the earth’s crust, they say, you must do it in thousands of millions of years. Queer, isn’t it?”
“Damned rum.”
“You almost understate the position. Don’t you feel sometimes as if the whole of human life on this planet were a mere episode, and all our boasted human achievement were a speck on the ocean of infinity?”
“Sometimes. But one can always take a pill, can’t one?”
“Why, yes, if it comes to that. … An amusing creature, Pulteney.”
“Bit highbrow, isn’t he? He always makes me feel rather as if I were back at school again. My wife likes him, though.”
“He has the schoolmaster’s manner. It develops the conversational style, talking to a lot of people who have no chance of answering back. You get it with parsons too, sometimes. I really believe it would be almost a disappointment to him if he caught a fish, so fond is he of satirizing his own performance. … You haven’t been in these parts before, have you?”
“Never. It’s a pity, really, to make their acquaintance in such a tragic way. Gives you a kind of depressing feeling about a place when your first introduction to it is over a deathbed.”
“I am sure it must. … It’s a pity the country out toward Pullford has been so much spoilt by factories. It used to be some of the finest country in England. And there’s nothing like English country, is there? Have you travelled much, apart from the war, of course?”
“Now, what the devil does this man think he’s doing?” Bredon asked himself. Could it be that Brinkman, after making up his mind to unbosom himself, was feeling embarrassed about making a start, was taking refuge in every other conceivable topic so as to put off the dreaded moment of confession? That seemed the only possible construction to put on his conversational vagaries. But how to give him a lead? “Very little, as a matter of fact. I suppose you went about a good deal with Mottram? I should think a fellow as rich as he was gets a grand chance of seeing the world. Funny his wanting to spend his holiday in a poky little place like this.”
“Well, I suppose each of us has his favourite corner of earth. There, do you see how deep the river has cut its way into the rock?”
They had left the road by a footpath, which led down steeply through a wood of fir-trees and waist-deep bracken to the river bank. They were now looking up a deep gully, it almost seemed a funnel, of rock; both sides falling sheer from the tumbled boulders and fern-tufts of the hillside. Before them was a narrow path which had been worn or cut out of the rock-face, some five or six feet above the brawling stream, just clear of the foam that sprang from its sudden waterfalls. There was no habitation in view; the roaring of the water drowned the voice unless you shouted; the sun, so nearly at its zenith, could not reach the foot of the rocks, and the gorge itself looked gloomy and a little eerie from the contrast. “Let’s go along the path a bit,” said Brinkman; “one gets the effect of it better when one’s right in the middle of it. The path,” he explained, “goes all the way along, and it’s the regular way by which people go up when they mean to fish the Long Pool. I’ll go first, shall I?”
For a second Bredon hesitated. The man had so obviously been making conversation all the way, had so obviously been anxious to bring him to this particular spot, that he suddenly conceived the idea of hostile design. A slight push, disguised as an effort to steady
