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Cleeve Court
by
“Well, Charles Hannaford, you don’t look overjoyed to see me home again!”
The poacher grinned awkwardly. He was caught, for certain: nevertheless, his wariness did not desert him.
“You took me rather sudden, Mister Walter.”
“That’s fairly evident. Maize, eh?” He scooped a few grains into his palm and sniffed at them. “Better maize than my father’s, no doubt. Where’s Macklin?”
“Somewhere’s about. I say, Mister Walter–“
“And Jim Burdon?”
“Near abouts, too. Be you goin’ to tell on me?”
“Why on earth shouldn’t I? It’s robbery, you know, and I don’t care any more than my father does for being robbed.”
“That was a nasty tumble of yours, sir.”
“Yes, I suppose it was something of a spill. But I’m not hurt, thank you.”
“It might ha’ been a sight worse,” said Charley Hannaford reflectively. “A foot or two more, now–and the rock, if I remember, sloping outwards just here below.” He leaned his head sideways and seemed to drop a casual glance over the ledge.
Walter knew that the drop just there was a very nasty one indeed. “Oh, but yon’s where I came over–I couldn’t have fallen quite so wide–” he began to explain, and checked himself, reading the queer strained smile on Hannaford’s face.
“I–I reckon we’ll call it Providence, all the same,” said the poacher.
Then Walter understood. The man was desperate, and he–he, Walter a Cleeve, was a coward.
Had he known it, across the gully a pair of eyes were watching. He had help within call. Jim Burdon had come to the upper end of the plantation a few seconds too late to witness the accident. By the time he reached the hedge there and peered over, Walter had disappeared; and Jim– considerably puzzled, half inclined to believe that the stranger had walked over the edge of the White Rock and broken his neck–worked his way down the lateral fence beside the gully, to be brought up standing by the sight of the man he sought, safe and sound, and apparently engaged in friendly chat with Charley Hannaford.
But Walter a Cleeve’s back was turned towards the fence, and again Jim failed to recognise him. And Jim peered over the fence through a gorse-whin, undetected even by the poacher’s clever eyes.
“It’s queer, too,” went on Charley Hannaford slowly, as if chewing each word. “I hadn’t even heard tell they was expectin’ you, down at the Court.”
“They are not,” Walter answered. He scarcely thought of the words, which indeed seemed to him to be spoken by somebody else. He was even astonished at the firmness of their sound; but he knew that his face was white, and all the while he was measuring Hannaford’s lithe figure, and calculating rapidly. Just here he stood at a disadvantage: a sidelong spring might save him: it would take but a second. On the other hand, if during that second or less . . . His eyes were averted from the verge, and yet he saw it, and his senses apprised every foot of the long fall beyond. While he thought it out, keeping tension on himself to meet Charley Hannaford’s gaze with a deceptive indifference, his heart swelled at the humiliation of it all. He had escaped from a two years’ captivity–and, Heavens! how he had suffered over there, in France! He had run risks: his adventures–bating one unhappy blot upon them, which surely did not infect the whole–might almost be called heroic. And here he was, within a few hundred yards of home, ignominiously trapped. The worst of it was that death refused to present itself to him as possible. He knew that he could save himself by a word: he foresaw quite clearly that he was going to utter it. What enraged him was the equal certainty that a courageous man–one with the tradition he ought to have inherited–would behave quite differently. It was not death, but his own shameful cowardice, that he looked in the face during those moments.