The Man Within (25 page)

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.

HIS BODY A
little bent by the weight of the 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 south-west 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’ feet it seemed hard, smooth and safe compared with the path they had left. He broke into a run. To run was comforting. He felt that at last he was really doing something to save Elizabeth. The physical exertion of trying to force more speed out of unwilling feet gave no room for any whinings of the conscience. He felt that he was back on the heels of time.

After about ten minutes a building raised itself on his left out of the dark. Low and squat it exuded on the laurel scented evening a smell of cattle and manure. As Andrews opened the gate and began to walk up the path towards a heavy nailed door, a dog, somewhere round the corner of the house, rattled its chain and broke the quiet with a hoarse sound, more bellow than bark. Before Andrews had time to knock, a window was flung up a few feet above his head and a sluggish voice asked him who the hell he was. Andrews thought that he recognized one of the voices which had paid the last respects to Mr Jennings a few days previously.

His voice breaking a little through lack of breath, he called, ‘I want help. Up at Jennings’. Smugglers. They are attacking the girl.’

Andrews felt that seconds passed between the moment
when
the words left the farmer’s mouth and the moment when they reached his ears. When they came they were not worth the time they took.

‘That’s a likely tale.’

Andrews’ breath had returned. He grew vehement. ‘It’s true. You must help. You’ve got men here. Horses.’

‘You said smugglers, didn’t you?’ the man said. ‘We don’t meddle with smugglers.’ Andrews remembered then that Elizabeth had warned him against expecting any help from her neighbours.

‘A woman,’ he begged desperately.

‘Nought but a bloody hoor,’ the farmer returned with crushing simplicity.

Andrews unwisely lost his temper. ‘You damned liar,’ he cried.

The man above stirred with a sleepy emotion. ‘Look here,’ he cried, ‘clear off. Spoilin’ a man’s supper. Why don’t you ’elp ’er yourself?’

The question struck straight at Andrews’ uneasy conscience. Why indeed? it echoed with a despairing grief. She believed in me, he thought, and then remembering her as he had last seen her, when she had hurried him off down the path to the well, he wondered. He heard again that faintly echoed ‘soon’, imploring, yes, but unbelieving. She was in a damned hurry to get me away, he thought. Until this moment fear had allowed him no opportunity for thought. He had been annoyed at the imprudence of the candle and the open door. Now for the first time he questioned the imprudence. Struck by fear as to the conclusion to which his thoughts were leading him he interrupted them. ‘If you won’t help yourself,’ he begged, ‘at least lend me a horse. I’ll ride into town and fetch the officers.’

‘Now ain’t that likely?’ the sluggish voice mocked him. ‘When’d I see that horse again, eh? Why don’t you help ’er yourself?’

‘I’m only one man unarmed.’

‘Well, why should I be shot for the bloody hoor?’ the man rejoined in a tone of aggrievement. ‘Leave ’er alone. They won’t ’urt ’er. Amiable lot – the Gentlemen.’

Leave her alone. Why, that, naturally, was the logical conclusion; it was only this blind, restless dissatisfied love which urged him to a bolder course. Leave her alone – and in a flash of revelation he knew that that was what she had consciously given him the chance to do. She had seen Joe coming and she had sent him away. That was the reason for her impatience and the disbelief in her whispered ‘soon’. He remembered how she had said to him, ‘I had no right to make you risk yourself.’ Cutting him across the face like the thong of a whip struck the thought, she put her trust in my cowardice. And she was right, right, right. Her sacrifice had been safe with him. And yet remembering that ‘soon’ he knew that she had hoped, however faintly, for his return, but a return of his own will, as her lover, accepting danger voluntarily. Clenching his hands he said to the man above, his body shrinking still in panic at his own words, ‘I’m going back now.’

He heard a movement as though the farmer were about to shut the window and played his last card. ‘There’s a reward out for these men,’ he said and added quickly, ‘They are on the run. They’ve lost their ship.’

The voice, less sluggish now, said, ‘Money’s not worth a skin.’

‘You needn’t risk that,’ Andrews said. ‘Send a man in on a horse to Shoreham to the officers.’

‘You’ll be askin’ fifty-fifty?’ the man asked reluctantly.

‘No,’ said Andrews, ‘only the loan of a horse back to the cottage.’ At his own words his heart became a battleground between exaltation and fear.

‘Stay there,’ the man said, ‘and I’ll come down to you.’

He was winning, winning after all, he felt, in this race to catch up time. ‘Oh God, God, God,’ he prayed, ‘give me courage to go through with this.’ The knife, Lewes, his return,
and
the fourth time, which was, Elizabeth said, to bring him the peace he craved. But it is not peace I want now, he thought, only her, O God, guard her till I come.

He allowed himself to be inspected closely in the light of a lamp. Even to the suspicious farmer his desperate impatience proved a passport of honesty. ‘I’ll ride to Shoreham myself,’ the man said. ‘D’you know the amount of the reward?’ He was opening the stable door as he spoke and grunted with approval at the prompt lie ‘Fifty pounds a head.’ Even now, however, the faint lurkings of suspicion induced him to choose the sorriest nag in the stable for Andrews to ride. But to Andrews it was a winged Pegasus compared with his weary feet.

The night for one instant, as he left the dim fluttering lights of the farm, was a pair of dark doors which opened only to enclose him. Then he was driving his horse, urging it forward with stick and passionately whispered words to knock its head against the black wall which receded always out of reach. Still in his heart was that strange mingling of exaltation, because he was doing at last what was right and dangerous, and fear. The two emotions left no room for planning. His only object was to reach the cottage as soon as might be and fling himself upon any whom he might find there. They would kill him probably and then they would go because their object was achieved. ‘You trusted in my cowardice to keep me safe,’ he cried through the dark. ‘You were wrong, wrong, wrong,’ but his heart felt sick at the thought of how nearly she had been right. ‘Go faster, you devil,’ he called to the horse, beating it unmercifully upon the flank, till the wretched animal which was old and uncertain in eyesight stumbled in its efforts to obey. With an eye rolled backwards nervously to watch the upraised stick it put back its ears and whinnied not so much a protest against cruel treatment as a pathetic excuse for being unable to obey.

A cry came from the bushes at the edge of the road a
little
in front. A figure shot into his path and held out both arms to stop the horse and rider. The horse shied to one side and halted. The figure approached and put one hand upon the rein. ‘Where are you going?’ a voice asked and Andrews recognized Tims.

He put his hand down to the wrist which held the rein and gave it a sudden twist. ‘Who’s at the cottage?’ he asked.

The boy, whimpering with pain, replied, ‘Joe and Carlyon.’

‘And what are you doing here?’

‘They told me to keep a look-out.’ He suddenly creased his face up in a puzzled frown. ‘It wasn’t true, Andrews, was it? You didn’t put me in that box?’

‘Why are they at the cottage?’ Andrews asked.

‘They said they’d meet you there. They want to talk to you.’

‘Let go of my rein.’

‘But Andrews, you haven’t told me. It’s not true, is it?’

Andrews struck his horse and forced it forward.

Persistently the boy clung to the rein and stumbled with it.

‘Let go,’ Andrews cried again.

‘But, Andrews …’ Andrews drew back his arm and struck the boy across the face with his stick. The mouth creased with a cry of pain, the hand loosed the rein, and for a brief instant before the darkness separated them, Andrews saw a dog’s eyes raised to him in pain and puzzlement. With an instinctive gesture of self-disgust Andrews flung the stick towards an invisible hedge and leaning forward over the horse’s head began to implore it, ‘Faster, old boy, faster, faster.’

Carlyon’s there, he told himself, all must be well. Enmity was forgotten in the relief of that knowledge. He was riding, riding to a friend and he urged his horse the faster the sooner to see his friend. She would be safe with Carlyon.
What
did Carlyon’s anger against him matter? He was Elizabeth’s guardian now, to keep her safe from the Joes and Hakes of an embittered world. The rattle of the hoofs upon the road sang themselves rhythmically into his brain until they became a poem which he whispered aloud to the night which was fleeing past him into banishment. Carlyon reading, Carlyon speaking slowly with rapt face stunned with the shock of beauty. Carlyon, my friend Carlyon. A face in a sunset on a hill speaking unimagined things. A God-like and heroic ape. ‘You can have anything you want, all except the ship.’ The voice falling on the last word as though it spoke of something holy and unsullied. The
Good Chance
.