Ducdame Read Free Page B

of the moon with a conscious answer; just as the vast swaying sea growths are said to do under their fathoms of salt water.
    “Why do you keep harping upon death?” he said at last. “Lots of people with your particular trouble live for years and years. You’ll probably see me buried by the side of the old man long before they disturb the roots of your elm for you.”
    Lexie looked at him with the peculiar look that death-threatened people have in the presence of the ultimate treachery. The luminousness that surrounded them made it impossible that Rook could miss that look—a look that begged and pleaded, a look that howled, like a dog driven to its kennel.
    “This is my last November,” the look said, “and I love every moment of every hour of life!”
    “Can’t you see that I am sinking into absolute loneliness?” the look said. “Hold me! Clutch me! Save me!”
    Rook glanced at his brother; saw the look; but still continued to allow his soul to wander over the fields. He wanted his brother to die least of all things in the world. He could not imagine life without him. And yet in some mysterious way, just because of the ghastly threat to the bond between them, he experienced an actual enhancing of the beauty of that night.
    Something in the depths of his nature gathered itself together under his brother’s words, focussed itself, roused itself to a strange pitch of exaltation. The white tombstones, the headless tree, the motionless shadow of the tower, the spellbound meadows, became so beautiful to him that death itself seemed hardly less beautiful.
    Those pastures seemed to stretch away and away, until they crossed the borderline between death and life. Theyseemed to reach out to something dim and vague and wonderful ; to some unearthly ghost garden‚ far from all human troubling, where nothing but solemn milk-white cattle moved up and down through a pearl-gray mist, licking every now and then with great languid tongues the drooping rims of huge moon mushrooms.
    There must have been a long silence between the two brothers just then; for when Rook returned to himself it seemed that it was across an immeasurable gulf that his own last words returned to him.
    By one of the quick simultaneous movements of thought that often occurred between them when they were alone together they both fixed their eyes upon their father’s grave.
    It was Lexie who finally put into words the thing that was in their minds.
    “The old man won’t like it if we’re the last of his race. But I suppose that’s nothing to you, Rook.”
    The face of the elder Ashover certainly did not at that moment suggest the passion of piety. Never had it worn more obstinately its characteristic look of truculent abstraction .
    But Lexie was undeterred.
    “Are you absolutely certain,” he said, “that Netta can’t have a child?”
    Rook nodded.
    “You’d marry her, of course, if she did?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “And nothing any of us can do or say will ever make you get rid of her?”
    Rook shook his head.
    “Well, for God’s sake, let’s tell the old gentlemen inside that the family’s done for, and see what they say!”
    Lexie rose to his feet as he spoke and, hobbling between the graves, passed into the shadow of the tower.
    Rook came slowly after him. There was an illusory chilliness  within the shadow that gave to both men the sensation of crossing the mouth of a sepulchre. And in very definite sense this building was the sepulchre of their people.
    They moved round to the south side of the church and followed the wall till they reached the east end. Then stepping close up to an unstained widow they peered straight into the chancel.
    The moonlight streaming in behind them threw its ghostly light on everything there. The little church looked as if it had been illuminated for some nocturnal office.
    The Norman arch, the carved mediæval niches, the brass lectern, the tall Puritan pulpit, seemed all of them emphatically conscious of