Ducdame Read Free

Lexie. But the other remained silent.
    “What do you do to all these women, Rook‚ to make them so fond of you? The thing’s getting ridiculous. There’s Cousin Ann—well! We all know what she and Mother are up to! And now it seems as if I’ve only to mention your name to Nell and she jumps out of her skin. Do you know what she said? She said you had a perfect right to live with Netta if you wanted to; and that it was outrageous of people to make such a fuss. She trembled all over like a bit of quaking grass when she talked about it.”
    Rook Ashover made no reply of any kind to this. His face grew hard. But Lexie rambled on without the least embarrassment .
    “It’s no use beating about the bush any more, Rook. You’ve got yourself into a pretty bloody predicament. No one can possibly tell what the upshot will be.”
    The elder man’s sullenness did melt at this.
    “The upshot will be that you and I will be the last of the Ashovers,” he remarked grimly.
    Lexie’s resemblance to the least heroic of the Cæsars became strikingly marked.
    “Mother hasn’t said anything more, has she?” he enquired anxiously. “God! It was awful when she actually talked of you and Netta before Ann. Rook, tell me. Would you send Netta away and marry Ann if I went over to the enemy? Or would you hold out even against me?”
    His brother seemed to regard this question as unworthy of any serious answer. He simply disregarded it.
    “You’re sure you do right in risking these walks, my dear?” He touched Lexie’s forehead as he spoke and ran his fingers through the young man’s thick hair as if he had been a woman.
    “I can’t help feeling,” he went on, “that you may, after all, be sacrificing everything by not doing what that doctor said. As long as we’re together you’ll always be tempted to go beyond your strength; and I’m the worst person in the world for the business of reminding you. I can’t realize things as I ought. I forget so.”
    Lexie had begun fumbling once more with one of the buttonholes of his brother’s overcoat; but he dropped his hand now.
    “I’m as fit as a badger in Field-Cover!” he cried. “It’s when you talk like that——”
    The malignant mechanism of chance stopped the words in his mouth.
    He swayed a little and bent his head, poking automaticallywith his stick at the mud under his feet which showed faint traces of frost marks.
    Rook clutched at his shoulder.
    “Lexie, don’t! Lexie, what is it? You’re not going to faint, are you?”
    But the young man had already gained his composure.
    “Let’s go into the churchyard‚” he said, taking his brother’s arm.
    They moved together through the gate and followed the path that led to the base of the tower.
    “Do sit down for a bit,” pleaded Rook. “It frightens me when you get like that.”
    “Here? Near the old man?” and Lexie made a scarcely perceptible grimace in the direction of their father’s grave.
    “Yes; here.”
    And they sat down side by side on a flat tombstone, the name and date of which had been obliterated by many Novembers.
    The rank autumnal grass in the uncut portion of the enclosure rose before them in the moonlight or lay in tangled swathes on the ground like the uncombed hair of a titanic skull.
    The bent stems and rain-battered leaves of the hedge parsley that grew where the graves ended resembled now an enchanted Lilliputian forest through which some fairy beasts had trampled, leaving it outraged and desolate.
    There was only one tree in that portion of the churchyard , a very old elm, lopped and beheaded and almost leafless, but with a trunk of such sturdy proportions and so deeply indented that it resembled the torso of a gigantic pillar, half buried in the earth but still bearing witness to its old obscure importance.
    The two men contemplated this colossal relic, their attention drawn to it by a low sound that suddenly emerged from its headless jagged top and died away.
    “Do you hear?”