If there had been more light she would have seen that his jaw was set like a bulldog’s, and there was a red spark in his eyes—a fearsome one. But though she did not clearly see, she KNEW, and the nearness of the last hours swept away all relenting.
Nigel Anstruthers having discreetly waited until the two had passed into the house, and feeling that a man would be an idiot who did not remove himself from an atmosphere so highly charged, was making his way toward the lane and was, indeed, halfway through the gate when heavy feet were behind him and a grip of ugly strength wrenched him backward.
“Your horse is cropping the grass where you left him, but you are not going to him,” said a singularly meaning voice. “You are coming with me.”
Anstruthers endeavoured to convince himself that he did not at that moment turn deadly sick and that the brute would not make an ass of himself.
“Don’t be a bally fool!” he cried out, trying to tear himself free.
The muscular hand on his shoulder being reinforced by another, which clutched his collar, dragged him back, stumbling ignominiously through the gooseberry bushes towards the cart-shed. Betty lying upon her bed of hay heard the scuffling, mingled with raging and gasping curses. Childe Harold, lifting his head from his cropping of the grass, looked after the violently jerking figures and snorted slightly, snuffing with dilated red nostrils. As a war horse scenting blood and battle, he was excited.
When Mount Dunstan got his captive into the shed the blood which had surged in Red Godwyn’s veins was up and leaping. Anstruthers, his collar held by a hand with fingers of iron, writhed about and turned a livid, ghastly face upon his captor.
“You have twice my strength and half my age, you beast and devil!” he foamed in a half shriek, and poured forth frightful blasphemies.
“That counts between man and man, but not between vermin and executioner,” gave back Mount Dunstan.
The heavy whip, flung upward, whistled down through the air, cutting through cloth and linen as though it would cut through flesh to bone.
“By God!” shrieked the writhing thing he held, leaping like a man who has been shot. “Don’t do that again! DAMN you!” as the unswerving lash cut down again—again.
What followed would not be good to describe. Betty through the open door heard wild and awful things—and more than once a sound as if a dog were howling.
When the thing was over, one of the two—his clothes cut to ribbons, his torn white linen exposed, lay, a writhing, huddled worm, hiccoughing frenzied sobs upon the earth in a corner of the cart-shed. The other man stood over him, breathless and white, but singularly exalted.
“You won’t want your horse to-night, because you can’t use him,” he said. “I shall put Miss Vanderpoel’s saddle upon him and ride with her back to Stornham. You think you are cut to pieces, but you are not, and you’ll get over it. I’ll ask you to mark, however, that if you open your foul mouth to insinuate lies concerning either Lady Anstruthers or her sister I will do this thing again in public some day—on the steps of your club—and do it more thoroughly.”
He walked into the cottage soon afterwards looking, to Betty Vanderpoel’s eyes, pale and exceptionally big, and also more a man than it is often given even to the most virile male creature to look—and he walked to the side of her resting place and stood there looking down.
“I thought I heard a dog howl,” she said.
“You did hear a dog howl,” he answered. He said no other word, and she asked no further question. She knew what he had done, and he was well aware that she knew it.
There was a long, strangely tense silence. The light of the moon was growing. She made at first no effort to rise, but lay still and looked up at him from under splendid lifted lashes, while his own gaze fell into the depth of hers like a plummet into a deep pool. This continued for almost a full minute, when he turned quickly away and walked to the hearth, indrawing a heavy breath.
He could not endure that which beset him; it was unbearable, because her eyes had maddeningly seemed to ask him some wistful question. Why did she let her loveliness so call to him. She was not a trifler who could play with meanings. Perhaps she did not know what her power was. Sometimes he could believe that beautiful women did not.
In a few moments, almost before he could reach her, she was rising, and when she got up she supported herself against the open door, standing in the moonlight. If he was pale, she was pale also, and her large eyes would not move from his face, so drawing him that he could not keep away from her.
“Listen,” he broke out suddenly. “Penzance told me— warned me—that some time a moment would come which would be stronger than all else in a man—than all else in the world. It has come now. Let me take you home.”
“Than what else?” she said slowly, and became even paler than before.
He strove to release himself from the possession of the moment, and in his struggle answered with a sort of savagery.
“Than scruple—than power—even than a man’s determination and decent pride.”
“Are you proud?” she half whispered quite brokenly. “I am not—since I waited for the ringing of the church bell— since I heard it toll. After that the world was empty—and it was as empty of decent pride as of everything else. There was nothing left. I was the humblest broken thing on earth.”
“You!” he gasped. “Do you know I think I shall go mad directly perhaps it is happening now. YOU were humble and broken—your world was empty! Because–-?”
“Look at me, Lord Mount Dunstan,” and the sweetest voice in the world was a tender, wild little cry to him. “Oh LOOK at me!”
He caught her out-thrown hands and looked down into the beautiful passionate soul of her. The moment had come, and the tidal wave rising to its height swept all the common earth away when, with a savage sob, he caught and held her close and hard against that which thudded racing in his breast.
