of their misdoings. The commonest sin was wenching, then sharp dealing, then drunkenness.
Amos had prudently brought a stool which he placed
near the door of the barn, so that as Damask sat there
the scent of cut hay, of honeysuckle and wild roses drifted
in and touched her before it became sullied by the odour
of human breath, human sweat and the ale-reek which
hung about some of the unregenerate. She was still sulky,
and until John Whitwell climbed up into the improvised
pulpit and began to talk she would rather have been at
home, making gooseberry jam, with a cup of tea to look
forward to.
Whitwell spoke very simply and said nothing that was new to such a regular chapel-goer as Damask; what was new was his burning belief and his power to convey it. He believed in God who loved the world and offered even to the worst of men a chance to repent and enjoy eternal life in Heaven; he believed that the Devil tempted men to sin, to resist God, and waited gloatingly for the chance to torture them in Hell throughout all eternity.
He was fluent and passionately sincere, and he possessed good looks above the average and some rudimentary hypnotic power. When at the end of his discourse he threw his arms wide and, with the last level rays of sunshine falling on his smooth yellow hair, earnest face and beautiful eyes, cried, ‘My brothers, my sisters, make the choice tonight, for tonight your soul might be required of you. Eternal joy or eternal pain—that is the choice. And here is Jesus, opening His crucified arms to you, calling you to come and cast yourselves upon His infinite mercy. Come, while there is time,’ fifty-five people moved forward, and quite a few of them were those who had come to see the fun.
Damask went too, of course. She was fourteen, and it was June and she was under a spell. So confused that to the end of her days Jesus of Nazareth would wear John Whitwell’s face, speak with his voice. Dust moved in the barn as the penitents shuffled forward, and the sun shimmered in the dust and there was a halo about that yellow head. She went forward and offered her heart, to Amos’s
supreme joy.
The next four years, save for an occasional lapse into sin and a consequent troubling of conscience, were happy ones. Her heart was in safe keeping. She was happier than Juliet, who at the same age gave her heart to Romeo; happier than Sally Ashpole, who at the same age gave what she thought was her heart and what was certainly her virginity to one of Widow Hayward’s soldier sons; happier than all the uncounted girls who at the same age gave their hearts to governesses and fellow schoolgirls and other fallible human creatures. Jesus never repudiated her love, never exploited it, never changed. He was always there, always loving, even when, or perhaps especially when, she hurt Him by sinning. And she had no doubt, on this evening, as she stepped out into the windy dark, that He would be with her on the Lower Road.
She cherished a half-hope that at the Lodge Jarvey would open the gate for her and say that he had an errand up to the house and would carry the boots with him. Or would that be cheating? Now and then it was difficult to decide whether a chance accident was a sign of God’s favour or a particularly cunning wile of the Devil. Tonight no such decision was called for; the eldest of the Jarvey boys admitted her and scuttled back into shelter like a rabbit. The wind was full in her face as she trudged up the avenue, and by the time she reached the back door of the Manor she was completely out of breath. The yard between the house and the stables lay deserted, unusually quiet, and it was a long time before anyone answered the door to her. She was obliged to ring the bell three times; and when someone came it was not one of the maids, it was the stout, regal housekeeper, Mrs Hart, who did not ordinarily answer doors. She looked as though she had been crying and just stood there without speaking.
‘Good evening,’ Damask said. ‘I’ve brought the boots. I promised Sir Charles this afternoon…’
To her astonishment Mrs Hart made no move to take the parcel; she lifted her black silk apron and held it to her face, beginning to cry again, wildly.
‘His boots!’ she sobbed. ‘He’ll not need them. Poor dear man, he’ll never wear boots again!’
‘Why… is he ill ?’ Damask faltered.
‘He’s dead I Brought home not ten minutes since, on a gate, his neck broke.’
And who then would pay for the boots? All that leather of the best quality, all those hours of Amos’s labour. Oh what a pity that they hadn’t been finished earlier, finished and paid for! That was her first thought and she was immediately ashamed of it. ‘Oh dear,‘she said.‘What happened?’ Like most mourners, Mrs Hart, though she would have been impervious to comfort, found the invitation to tell a dramatic tale a palliative to her grief.
‘What happened? Ah, that nobody can say.’ She lowered her apron. ‘His horse came back, about six o’clock, all in a muck sweat and the saddle empty. So then Sir Edward he rid the highway with a coupla men and Parson took Bobby, just as he was, all of a tremble, and went with a couple more along Lower Road, and Mr Hatton went off to Berry Lane—you never saw such a to-do. And then, like I told you, they found him, poor dear, dead, with his neck broke, and brought him home on a gate. The best master that ever breathed, he was, for all he was so particular.’
‘Where did they find him?’ ‘In the Lower Road, just by the Lady’s Ride.’ Genuinely grief-stricken as she was, something professional, automatic still functioned perfectly in the housekeeper’s mind. All girls were stupid, it took five minutes and at least one repetition to get the simplest thing into their minds. She always acted on that assumption, and now, in one more instance, she realised how right she was. Damask Greenway hadn’t so much as blinked at the first telling of the broken neck, the sudden tragic death— but now, just five minutes later, she went all pale and gave a great gasp.
‘Come to think of it,’ said Mrs Hart, ‘you’d be one of the last people to see him alive, wouldn’t you? That’ll be something to remember.’ She mopped her face again. ‘Did you notice aught… anything to show why he should have a dizzy spell and fall off his horse?’
‘No … no. He seemed … quite ordinary.’ (And I told him a lie!)
‘Ah, so I said.’ Mrs Hart sounded immensely satisfied. ‘There’s more in this than meets the eye. It’d take something more than a falling branch to make old Bobby rear and shy. And the state he was in! I allust did say that I wouldn’t venture along that road after dark—no, not for a thousand …’
‘Mrs Hart, what shall I do with the boots?’
How rude, to interrupt like that I
‘Not for a thousand pounds,’ said Mrs Hart firmly. ‘The boots? I’m sure I don’t know.”
‘Shall I leave them?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Hart said coldly. ‘And this is no tune to be bothering with such things.’
Boots … boots! Fancy interrupting her just as she was telling how she had always felt about that dreadful road! Damask Greenway needed to be put in her place; Mrs Hart did it, closing the door firmly.
It was not the first time—it was far from the first time —that Damask had suspected that there was something queer, something quite out of the ordinary about her mind. Most people had minds which dealt with one thought, and then another, one at a time. Hers very often dealt with two, even three, all at the same time. She was thinking now, as the door shut in her face, that it was lucky that Mrs Hart hadn’t taken the boots. Father could perhaps sell them as they were, or alter them to fit somebody else, or, if the worst came to the worst, use the leather again. They wouldn’t be the dead loss that they might have been had Mrs Hart taken them and put them down somewhere to be forgotten. And at the same time another part of her mind was thinking about the Lower
Road … thinking such terrible, terrifying thoughts that no other mind could have held them and any other thought at the same time; thinking that God really did intend to punish her for that lie, to test her faith to the uttermost. And at the same time yet a third part of her mind was capable of standing back and observing what a very strange mind Damask Greenway had, to be able to think all these things together. The whirl of so much thinking made her dizzy. There was the familiar moment of blackness during which all the thoughts came together. Then everything cleared and one thought had come uppermost—the thought of the Lower Road.