WALTER PENTON found himself facing the penetrating wind of the December morning which was in its stillness and blackness the dead of night, before he had fully realized what was happening. A number of keen perceptions indeed had flashed across his mind, yet it felt like nothing so much as the continuation of a dream when, enveloped in an atmosphere of sound, the horse’s hoofs clanging upon the frosty road, the wheels grinding, the harness jingling, all doubled in clamor by the surrounding stillness, he was carried along between black, half-visible hedge-rows, under dark bare trees, swaying in the wind, through shut-up silent villages, and the death-like slumber of the wide country, bound hard in frost and sleep. A groom less awake than himself, shivering and excited, but speechless, and affording him no sense of human companionship, was by his side, driving mechanically, but at the highest speed, along a road which to unaccustomed eyes was invisible. The scene was a very strange one after the intoxicating dream of the evening, with all its phantasmagoria of light and praise, and confused delight and pride. The blackness before him was as heavy as the preliminary vision had been dazzling; the air blew keen, cutting the very breath which rose in white wreaths like smoke from his lips. Where was he rushing? carried along by a movement which was not his own, an unwilling agent, acting in spite of himself. Sir Walter’s old head, crowned with white locks, looking upon him with so much genial approbation, Mrs. Russell Penton’s drawn and rigid countenance, the disturbed face of her husband, the plump simplicity of little Mab, a sort of floating rosy cherub among all these older countenances, seemed to flit before him in the mists; the music echoed, the lights glowed; and then came the darkness, the ring of the hoofs and wheels, the stinging freshness of the cold air, and all dark, motionless, silent around. He was in a vision still. The German poem in which the lady is carried off behind the black horseman, tramp, tramp across the land, splash, splash across the sea, seemed to ring in his ears through his dream. He was preternaturally awake and aware of everything, yet his eyes were in a mist of semi-consciousness, and all the half-visible veiled sights about him seemed like the vague and flying landscape of uneasy fever-journeys. The cold, which half stupefied him, by some strange process only intensified these sensations; his companion and he never exchanged a word. He was not acquainted even with the lie of the roads, the ascents and descents, or of what houses those were which looked through the darkness from time to time surrounded by spectral trees. After awhile an overwhelming desire for sleep seized him. He had visions of the bed, all white and in order, which he had left behind; of the chair by the fire which he had been roused out of; of his own room at home, all silent, cold, waiting for him. If only he could make a spring out of this moving, jingling thing, out of the stinging of the air, and get into the quiet and warmth and sleep!
When the groom spoke Walter woke up again, broad awake from what must have been a doze. “Shall we go to the Hook or to Mr. Rochford’s first, sir?” the man asked. Walter started bolt upright, and came to himself. They were clashing through his own village, and a moment later he would have passed without seeing the white blinds at the windows of Crockford’s cottage which shone through the gloom. He waved his hand in the direction of his home, thinking that to give his father the benefit of a warning was worth the trouble before he went on. He took the reins into his own hands, knowing the steep descent toward the house, which was ticklish even in daylight, and this touch of practical necessity brought him to his full senses, and for the first time dispersed the mists. He perceived now fully what he was doing. As the horse’s steps sunk half stumbling down the invisible abyss of the way, Walter felt, with a tingling of his ears and a sinking of his heart, that he also was dropping from the brilliant mount of possibility which he had been ascending with delighted feet. It had seemed as if all the decisions of fate might be reversed, as if he were to be the arbiter of his own fortune, as if—And now it was his hand that was to seal his own fate. Such thoughts and questionings, such rebellions against a duty which is not to be escaped, may go on while one is executing that very duty without any practical effect. Walter pushed on all the time as well as the difficulties of the path would allow. He dashed into the little domain at the Hook with an energy that made the still air tingle, feeling as if he were himself inside, and starting to the shock of the sudden awakening in the midst of the darkness. The groom, who had opened the gate, ran on and gave peal after peal to the bell, and presently the house, which had stood so dead and dark in the midst of the spectral trees, awoke with a start. One or two windows were opened simultaneously. “Who is there?” cried Mr. Penton, in a bass tone, while a sudden wavering treble with terror in it shrieked out, “Oh, it’s Wat, it’s Wat!” and “Something has happened to Ally!” with a cry that penetrated the night.
“Father,” said Wat, “nothing is the matter with either of us. Sir Walter’s very ill. I’m going to fetch Rochford and the papers. You have to come too, to sign. Be ready when I come back.”
“Rochford and the papers! To sign! What do you mean: In the middle of the night!”
And here there came a white figure to the window, crying “Ally—are you sure, are you sure, Wat, all’s right with Ally?” through the midst of the question and reply.
“I tell you, father, Sir Walter’s dying. Be ready, be at the cross-roads if you can in half an hour. It’s three miles further, but this horse goes like the wind. Don’t stop for anything. In half an hour. It’s true; it’s not a dream,” he shouted, turning round to go away.
“Wat! dying, did you say? And a ball in the house! Wat! had they got the doctor? what was it? Wat!”
“I can’t stay. He may be dead before we get there. In half an hour at the cross-roads,” cried the youth, turning the horse with dangerous abruptness: and in a minute or two all was still again. The darkness and silence closed round, and the astonished family, terrified, startled out of the profound quiet of their repose, blinked, dazzled at the newly lit candles, and said to each other wildly, “Dying! perhaps before they can get there. But Ally—Ally and Wat are all right, thank God!” And soon there was a twinkle of lights from window to window. The servants got up last, being less easily awakened; but Mrs. Penton had already some tea ready for her husband, and Anne, in a little dressing-gown, was collecting the warmest coats and wrappers which the family possessed, before Mr. Penton himself, very grave, almost tremulous, in the sudden emergency, could get ready. His fingers trembled over his buttons. Sir Walter, whom he had not seen for years; the old man who had been as one who would never die; the kind uncle of old; the causeless antagonist of later years. It was strange beyond measure to Edward Penton to be thus sent for with such startling and tragic suddenness in the middle of the night. “What shall I do?” he said, wringing his hands, “if he should die before—” “Oh, Edward, make haste; lose no time; a minute may do it,” cried his wife in her anxiety. They almost pushed him out, Anne running before to see that the gate was open, with a lantern to show him the way. There was no one else to carry the lantern, and she went with him up the steep ascent with the flicker of the light flaring unsteadily about the dark road. She was very thinly clad, with an ulster over her dressing-gown, and her poor little feet thrust into her boots, and shivered as she ran, and stumbled with the lantern, which was too big for her, her father being too much absorbed in his thoughts to perceive what a burden it was. Anne shivered, but not altogether from cold. Her heart was beating high, the quick pulsations vibrating to her lively brain, and alarm, awe, the indefinite melancholy and horror of death mingling with that keen exhilaration of quickened living which any tremendous event brings with it to the young. It was a wonderful thing to be happening, to be mixed up in, to realize so much more vividly than even her father did. Her very lantern and course along this steep and dark road in the middle of the night gave a thrilling consciousness to Anne of having a great deal to do with it, of being really an actor in the drama. She would not leave him till the lights of the dog-cart showed far off, coming on swiftly, silently, through the dark, before any sound could be heard. It was all wonderful; the portentous darkness, without a star; the cold, the silence, the consciousness of what was going on; the sense, which took her breath away, that perhaps after all the lawyer, with his papers, and her father, who had to sign them, might be too late; that even now, when she turned to make her way, trembling a little with cold and fright and nervous excitement, Sir Walter might be dead, and Penton be “ours!” Mother would be my lady in any case; the servants would have to be taught to call her so. And all this might be determined in an hour or two, perhaps before daylight! Anne shivered more and more, and was afraid of the darkness under the hedge-rows as she went home alone with the heavy lantern. She had a great mind to leave it under the hedge and run all the way home, without minding the dark; but such darkness as that was not a thing which a girl could make up her resolution not to mind.
Walter had gone on from the Hook with this issue plainer and plainer in his mind—if he but delayed a little, did not press the horse, took it more easily, he might, without reproach, without harm, be late, and so after all preserve his birthright. He said to himself that if the papers were but there Mrs. Russell Penton would have them signed whatever might happen, if her father was in the act of dying she would have them signed. There was nothing she would not do to secure her end. Had she not secured himself, even himself, who was so much against her, whose life was more in question than any one’s, to do her will and serve her purpose? And when he could not resist her who could? She would get her way. She would make the old man’s melting, his sudden partiality, come to nothing; and again Walter, whose head had been turned a little, who had begun to feel more than ever what it would be to be the heir of Penton, would be replaced in the original obscurity of his poor relationship. And all this might be changed if he but delayed a little, went softly, spared the horse! All the time, while these thoughts were going through his mind, he was pressing on with vehemence, making the animal fly through the darkness. He did not hesitate a moment practically, though he said all this to himself. What he did and what he thought seemed to run on in two parallel lines without deflection, without any effect upon each other. It was all in his hands to do as he pleased: no one could blame him or say anything to him if he ceased to press on, if he let the reins drop loosely. But it never occurred to him to do so. Then there was the possibility that Rochford might not be ready at once, that he might not be able to find the papers over which he had so dawdled, that he might not be ready to jump up as Walter had done. What need was there to press him, to make the same startling summons at his door that had been made at the Hook, to insist on an answer? There seemed no need to take any active steps in order to upset the family arrangement, to turn everything the other way. All that it was necessary to do was only to let the reins fall on the horse’s neck, to urge him forward no more.
They arrived thus flying at the gates of the Rochfords’ house, a big red-brick mansion just outside the town. There was a light in the coachman’s cottage which answered the purpose of a lodge, and the coachman himself came out, half scared, half awake, to open to the pair of lamps that gleamed through the darkness, and the fiery horse from whose nostrils went up what seemed puffs of smoke into the frosty air. “At ’ome? He’ve just got home, and scarce a-bed yet,” said the man. “Whatever can you want of master so early in the morning?” Walter had considered it to be night up to this moment; he recognized it as morning with a sigh of excitement. “Mr. Rochford must be called immediately,” he said, his thoughts tugging at him all the time, saying, Why? Why can’t you let him alone? Is it your business to force him to get up, to produce his papers, to drive half a dozen miles in the chill of the morning? But Walter, though he heard all this, took no notice. “Let him know that I am waiting. Sir Walter Penton is very ill. He must come at once,” he said. He jumped down from the cart, and began to pace rapidly up and down to restore the circulation to his half-frozen limbs, while the groom covered the horse with a cloth and eased the harness. There was no time to put the animal up, to go in-doors and wait. As Walter took his sharp walk up and down, the opposing force in his mind had a time to itself of inaction and silence, and heaped argument upon argument before him. What! hurry like this, drag every one that was wanted from their rest, disturb the whole sleeping world with the clamor of his appeal in order to undo himself! Was this his duty, anyhow that it could be considered? Was it his duty to undo himself? More than ever, now he had seen it, Penton had become the hope of his life, the object of all his wishes; and was it in order to divest himself of the last possibility of being heir of Penton, though this was what Sir Walter had called him, that he was here?
The chill became keener than ever; a sharp air, blighting everything it touched, blew in his face and chilled him to the bone. It was the first breath of the dreary dawning, the dismal rising of a dull day. A faint stir became perceptible in the house, very faint, a light flashed at a window, there was a far-off sound of a voice, the movement of some one coming down-stairs. Then a voice called out, “What is it, Penton? Is it possible I’m wanted? I can’t believe the man. What do you want with me?” And Rochford, shivering, half dressed, with a candle in his hand, appeared at a side door, close to which Walter was performing his march. “You can’t have come all this way for nothing,” he cried, “but it’s not an hour since I came home. It doesn’t seem possible. Am I wanted certainly?”
Now was the time. The reasonings within tore Walter as if they had got hold of his heart-strings. Why should he be so obstinate, forcing on what would be his own ruin? It would be all his doing, the hurry-scurry through the night, the insistance, calling up this man, who yawned and gazed at him with a speechless entreaty to be let off, and his father, who probably now was waiting for him by the cross-roads in the dark, chilled too to the heart. It would be all his own officiousness, offering himself to go, forcing the others. These harpies were tearing at him all the time he was saying aloud, his own voice sounding strange and far off in his ears, “Sir Walter has been taken very ill; he wants you at once. Mrs. Russell Penton sent me. You are to bring all the papers, and we are to pick up my father on the way.” He said all this as steadily as if there was not another sentiment in his mind. “What,” said Rochford, “the papers, and your father! Come in, at least; it will take me some time to find them. Come in, though I fear there’s no fire anywhere.”
“I want no fire, only make haste,” said Walter, “we may be too late.” Too late! yes, it was possible even now to be too late, but no longer likely. Now be still, oh, reasoning soul, keep silence, for there is no remedy—the thing is done, and yet it was still possible that it might not be done in time.
Rochford was a long time getting himself and his papers together; so long that the blackness became faintly gray, and objects grew slowly visible, rising noiselessly out of the night. The young man went up and down, up and down mechanically. He had jumped down to recover himself of the numbness of his long drive, but numbness seemed to have taken possession of him body and soul. His mind had fallen into a sort of sullen calm. He asked himself whether he should take the trouble to accompany them back at all. Rochford and his father were all that were necessary. He was not wanted. He thought he would walk home, getting a little warmth into him, following the clamor of the cart, but so far behind that all the echoes would die out, and leave him in the silence, making his way home. Not to Penton, where for a moment he had dreamed a glorious dream, and heard himself called old Sir Walter’s heir, but home to the Hook, where he had been born, where to all appearance he would die, where he could steal to his own bed in the morning gray, and sleep and sleep, and forget it all. But now again another revolution took place in him; he no longer wanted to sleep, all his faculties were wide awake, and life ablaze in him as if he never could sleep again. When Rochford at last came out with his bag, Walter acted as if there had never been a question in his mind, as he had acted all along; he sprung up to his place without a word, gathered the reins out of the groom’s hand, and took the road again, reckless, at the hottest pace. The horse was still fresh, rested yet fretted by the delay, and easily urged to speed. Walter did not know how to drive, he had no experience of anything more spirited than the pony-of-all-work at home, and it was solely by the light of nature, and a determination to get forward, that he was guided. The groom had not ventured to say anything, but Rochford was afraid, and remonstrated seriously. “You can’t go downhill at this pace, you will bring the horse down, or perhaps break our necks,” he said. “I’ll not be too late,” said Walter, “that is the only thing; we must be there in time.” At the cross-roads Mr. Penton, shivering, was pulled up on the cart almost without stopping, and they dashed on once more. The landscape revealed itself little by little, rising on all sides in gray mist, in vague ghostly clearness—the skeleton trees, the solid mass of the houses, the long clear ribbon of the river lighting the plain. And then Penton—Penton rising dark and square with its irregular outline against the clouds. There were lights in many of the windows, though every moment the light grew clearer. Dawn had come, the darkness was fleeing away; had life gone with it? as it is said happens so often. Walter, dashing in at the open gates, urging the horse up the avenue, did not ask himself this question. He felt a conviction, which was bitter at his heart, that he had completed his mission successfully, and that they had come in time.