Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (393 page)

“No, but don’t you see?” Mrs. Egerton said. “That’s why I should like you to keep the cross, if only for a little time. Since it was in the hands of that slave it hasn’t been out of the hands of an Egerton until now. But my son is the last of the family, and you’ve saved him from a dishonour worse than death quite as certainly as it is said that slave many times saved his master.”

“I guess,” Mr. Sorrell said, “that chap must have been a handy sort of fellow to have about one. You don’t get them like that now for thirty shillings a week. I’d just like to see one of my clerks walking from London to Brighton in his nightshirt carrying my gold stylo!”

“They say,” Mrs. Egerton went on, “he lived for some time at Tamworth and then he died. He’s said to have had weird gifts of prophecy and things. He prophesied steam-engines and people being able to speak to each other hundred of miles apart and their flying about in the air like birds. That’s recorded in the chronicle.”

“You don’t say!” Mr. Sorrell said. And he took the cross out of the case by the heavy gold ring at its top. “I should think he must have scared them some. I rather like those faithful characters of the Dark Ages. They didn’t produce much else that was worth speaking of, but they did invent the trusty servant. Did you ever see the picture at Winchester? It was called the trusty servant, and it had a head like a deer and half a dozen other assorted kind of limbs. I’ve forgotten about it now.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Mrs. Egerton said. “I don’t think people have very much changed even nowadays.” And leaning forward she spoke with a deep and rather sonorous earnestness. “They say that in all the ages the blessing of a mother upon the preserver of her child—”

“Oh come!” Mr. Sorrell said. And he felt himself grow pink even down into his socks.

“No it hasn’t,” Mrs. Egerton continued. “It hasn’t ever lost its power to console the unhappy. So that if ever you find yourself in a tight place—”

“Oh well, that’s never likely to happen,’’ Mr. Sorrell said. “You’d have to bring down the country before you could bring our house down. Why, we’re—”

Mrs. Egerton suddenly clutched at her heart. Her eyes became filled with an agony of panic, her mouth opened to scream. The smooth running of the train had changed into a fantastic hard jabbing. The glass of the inner windows cracked with a sound like a shriek and fell splintering over her knees. There was a rattle like the volley of machine-guns. He was thrown forward on to Mrs. Egerton and she thrown back upon him. Then with a frightful jerk all motion ceased. Mr. Sorrell perceived that the glazed photographs of beauty spots served by that line, together with all the wall of the carriage, were descending upon his upturned forehead. The two opposite seats of the carriage were crushed one in upon the other so that he screamed with the pain it caused his legs. The carriage turned right over; he was hanging head downwards in a rush of steam. For a moment he was conscious of a great pain in his temples.

CHAPTER III.

MR. SORRELL felt that his blistered feet pained him very much. His legs ached from long walking: his head was dizzy with the heat of the sun, and he hated the voices of the larks that, with a monotonous and penetrating sound, drilled down all over the immense landscape. He walked on, on, and on. He seemed to have been walking on and on for ages. He had no idea why he was where he was, but it seemed to him perfectly natural that he should be there. And beside him there paced a large white mule, with little silver bells on the tips of its ear-caps. In the hot sunshine the mule nodded its head, and closed its eyes.

He plodded on in this way, mechanically and without will. There was a buzzing in his ears, and his eyes felt intolerably heavy. Suddenly he stumbled over a stone, and a voice behind him said, “Gare!” Behind him, sitting sideways upon the mule, was a nun with a white head-dress. She had red cheeks, large teeth, and a kindly smile. The mule was wandering slowly upon its way without any guidance from her. Slung around her were packages of coarse linen cloth tied with leather thongs, and upon her arm was a large wickerwork basket filled with eggs. She said something to Mr. Sorrell and he felt himself muttering to himself, “Some Southern French dialect.” And suddenly too, without knowing exactly why, he heard himself utter the words, “Egerton” and “Tamworth.” The nun smiled energetically and said, “Yea, yea, yea!” She lifted her black draped arm towards the horizon of the ascending down. She said, “Là haut et puis descendre!”

Mr. Sorrell found himself shaking his head in a muzzy fashion, and he uttered the words, “Serai-je en France?”

The nun shook her head. “Non, non,” she answered. “Cestung paid bin Wiltshire, tousprès Sarum.”

Mr. Sorrell exclaimed,” Esperanto, by Jove!” And the nun exclaimed energetically, “Oi, oi, oi! Bonne esperantz, fidesle serviteur!”

Mr. Sorrell’s legs carried him perpetually and mechanically forward. “When I wake up,” he said to himself, “I wonder if I shall remember all this. It’s the flying dream, of course, and I’m short of clothing as usual, but I wish I could do the gliding step. We don’t get along fast at this rate.” And mechanically he attempted to pull what he considered to be his nightshirt further down over his shins. Then he perceived that he carried in his right hand a package swathed apparently in palm leaves. “That’ll be the old cross,” he said to himself. And still pacing onward he began to undo the stiff and cracked covering. The nun’s eyes were large and eager. The thin golden object came out from amongst its brittle swathings.

“O bel! O gai!” the nun exclaimed. And suddenly she was down from her mule. She fell upon her knees close to his feet, and with avid fingers clutched the relic and pressed it to her lips, her eyes streaming with tears.

“I can’t let it go out of my hands, you know,” Mr. Sorrell said. “It’s only pawned to me, though I haven’t got a pawnbroker’s licence. And if I let go of it heaven only knows where it will vanish to! You never can tell in dreams.”

The nun had burst into a great number of prayers in what Mr. Sorrell recognised was Latin pronounced, he should say, in a Portuguese manner. And out of politeness Mr. Sorrell remained still dangling the cross before the eyes of the religious, so that he felt as if he were holding out a watch to a little child who had asked the time in the streets. The beautiful mule had wandered to a little distance and was cropping the grass. From time to time it shook its head and the little bells jingled.

“By Jove!” Mr. Sorrell said. “If anybody kodaked us now!” For there the three of them were in exceedingly bright weather — in weather so bright that all the little shadows were blue and sparkling — in an immense fold of the downs like a bowl with the blue arch of the sky inverted over them like another bowl, he himself in a single long white garment, the nun in a multiplicity of folds of coarse black, in a white head-dress spreading out on each side like a swan’s wings, kneeling upon the soft turf, her hands upraised, her lips moving....

“We should come out very well,” Mr. Sorrell said, “if the chap could get in the donkey and basket of eggs.” His head paining him a little less, he lifted his eyes and took a glance across the valley. On the brow of the hill before him were a great number of sheep, all lying down in the noontide heat, and high against the skyline, very small, and draped in a cloak so that he resembled figures that Mr. Sorrell had seen when surveying mines in Spain, a shepherd leant motionless upon the shaft of a great crook.

“Well now, these are the good old times!” Mr. Sorrell said. “What set me dreaming of them? It’s better than being chased by alligators when you can’t run away. It’s more tranquil, but it’s queer all the same. I wish the ants wouldn’t run over my feet.” And with the sole of his left leg Mr. Sorrell gently rubbed the instep of his other foot. The nun rose slowly to her feet. She pointed to the cross in his hand. “Vint de la Tierre Trèssaincte? Messire de Egerton a Tamville?”

“Why, certainly,” Mr. Sorrell said. “It was brought from the Holy Land by Sir Stanley Egerton of Tamworth. Mrs. Lee-Egerton was telling me so only just—” Mr. Sorrell stopped and started violently.

“Merciful God! What’s that?” he said. His eyes had wandered farther round the skyline, and where their road mounted he perceived a solitary, broad-spreading oak tree. From its great branches there descended three ropes, and at the ends of them, their feet pointing straight to the earth, their hands apparently clasped behind their backs, were the bodies of three men, their heads cocked at one side with a sort of jaunty defiance, whilst upon the crown of the highest sat a large raven. The nun looked at them with a friendly and cheerful smile. “Trèsmeschiants gents, voleurs attrapés par le très noble Sire de Coucy avant son depart.”

“So Mr. Coucy left them when he went away?” Mr. Sorrell asked. “Sort of a visiting-card, I suppose? But how you can look at them like that so calmly just after you’ve been saying those pretty prayers, I can’t think. I don’t say the law should not take its course, but it ought to be done out of the way, calmly and prettily. It’s not the sort of thing a lady ought to have to take the risk of looking at.”

The nun shook her head to show that she did not understand, and then she walked up to the mule and clambered slowly into the saddle. Having settled herself down comfortably, she made signs that Mr. Sorrell should lift her basket of eggs, and with slow footsteps they resumed their way, Mr. Sorrell carrying the cross by its large ring which he fitted on to his little finger. But they had hardly been gone ten yards before the nun gave a little scream.

“Well, I thought you wouldn’t get much nearer to those corpses and still keep a brave face on it,” Mr. Sorrell said.

The nun once more got down from the mule, and having set the basket of eggs on the ground she ran swiftly with awkward movements back along the track they had taken, and Mr. Sorrell perceived that she was bending down to pick up something, with her voluminous clothes disposed all round her.

“I’m hanged if she isn’t picking up those palm leaves!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed. And when she returned to him with her hand stretched out holding with great care the thin, crackling objects he exclaimed, “Why, you can get half a dozen of them for a penny — fans, you know — almost anywhere. No, I don’t want them,” he continued. “I’ll get a piece of brown paper and wrap the thing up the first place we come to.”

And interpreting from his manner that he disdained these precious objects, which had formerly enveloped the sacred emblem, the nun drew from her breast a little leather wallet closed by a leather thong into which, very carefully, she introduced the dried-up fragments. There sat upon her face an expression of supreme, of beatific contentment. A sinister, earthy odour swept slowly down upon them from the large oak tree. The raven flapped slowly and heavily into the blue air.

“Oh, hang it!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed. “You aren’t going any closer? I say, it’s horrible and it’s infectious too. You don’t know what you won’t catch.”

The nun was looking at him with a patient want of comprehension, and Mr. Sorrell had the conviction that she did not smell anything at all.

“Il m’est impossible de la supporter!” he exclaimed. And closing his nostrils tightly with his fingers he ran up the hill at right angles to the course they had been pursuing.

And suddenly fear seized him. “Hang it all!” he exclaimed. “This isn’t a dream. This can’t be a dream. It’s all too clear. What the devil does it mean? Where am I? What country is this?” He looked down the hill. The white mule and the nun with her many packages were continuing their course, which led them almost immediately beneath the tree with its sinister decorations. The corpse which the raven had abandoned was veering slowly round and round. The others remained quite motionless.

“It must have been that thing that happened to the train!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed. “I’m delirious. I’m mad. I must have escaped from a lunatic asylum. That’s how I come to be here. That must be a sick-nurse — that’s why she doesn’t mind the sight of dead bodies. But hang it all, they don’t hang people from trees nowadays! And three chaps can’t have gone and committed suicide at once!”

He gripped his head with both his hands, the golden cross tapping upon his cheek, but his hands came away again in sudden astonishment. His whole head was enveloped in linen cloth. “That must have been the accident,” he said. “My head is bandaged up. But how could they have been so careless as to let me escape if I
was
in an asylum!”

The sun, great and glowing, was descending in the heavens, and the greatness of the heat being past, the sheep on the other hillsides were getting up to feed once more. The tinkle of their innumerable little bells swept down to his ears and mingled with the song of the larks. A couple of peewits rose from the hillside round the sky, uttering their cries that are like the last wails of despair. And with motionless wings an enormous bird sailed slowly over the lip of the down, and, great, brown, and moving very slowly, it drifted down the valley. The shepherd on the other hill suddenly burst into loud cries and violently agitated his cloak. But with absolute indifference the great bird drifted on.

“An eagle!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed. “Good God! That must have been an eagle! But there aren’t any golden eagles any more except in Spain. I must be in Spain. My God! I must get to the bottom of this!” And suddenly bursting into a run he went across the hillside in pursuit of the nun, who had very nearly reached the rim of the valley.