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Morris came up with an eager respectfulness at Chris's sign, keeping a yard or two away lest the swinging luggage on his own horse should discompose the master, and answered a formal question or two about the roads and the bags, which Chris put to him as a gambit of conversation.
Now and then something moved with a small rustling. It might have been a lizard, a crab, or even a bat. But Chris thought of snakes and stiffened to rigidity, scarcely daring to breathe. The roar of the sea sounded remote and far, yet insistent also as though it held a threat. And, above all, thick and hard and agitatingly distinct, arose the throbbing of her frightened heart.
For the first time in several days a certain moodiness which had affected Otis Pilkington left him, and he dreamed happy daydreams. The gaiety of Otis was not, however, entirely or even primarily due to the improvement in the weather. It had its source in a conversation which had taken place between himself and Jill's Uncle Chris on the previous night.
Chris still believed they were on a track, but the heavy rains of the week before had sent the water rushing down it in a torrent, which would have destroyed any marks there might have been. When they could see the opening to the river in front of them they climbed the side of the donga. All seemed quiet, and stopping and taking advantage of the bushes, they crept forward to the edge of the water.
He was hardly out of the house before Ruth Gates arrived. She looked a little distressed; she would not stay for a moment, she declared. Her machine was outside, and she was riding over to Longdean without delay. A note had just been sent to her from Chris. "My uncle is in Paris," she said. "So I am going over to Longdean for a few days. Lord Littimer is there, and Frank also.
Nothing must delay the harvesting and transporting of the wheat. The women folk arranged for the burial of old Chris Dorn. Kurt sat and moved about in a gloomy kind of trance for a day and a half, until his father was laid to rest beside his mother, in the little graveyard on the windy hill. After that his mind slowly cleared.
But when the bargain was concluded he lingered and added shamefacedly: "Won't you please let that red-and-black rooster live as long as you can? I raised it." "Why, bless my heart!" exclaimed Miss Chris, "I believe the child is fond of the chicken." Eugenia, who was hovering by, burst into tears and declared that the rooster should not die. "Twenty cents is s-o ch-ea-p for a li-fe," she sobbed.
Accordingly in the schoolroom our hero passed as Burton and on the ball-field as Chris, and since his existence alternated 'twixt these two worlds, he was Christopher Mark Antony Burton only at breakfast and at bed-time intervals so brief that they were endured with cheerfulness and complacency.
"And you have been sitting up with me ever since?" "It was only three hours," he said. He gave her Max's draught with the words, as if to check all comment on his action, and Chris submissively said no more. But she held his hand very tightly as they went out together. The dawn was just spreading golden over the sea when they entered the room where Bertrand lay asleep.
Ralph, that dignified man of affairs, suddenly stepped into her mind as a formidable enemy of God and man; Chris appeared as a spiritual power, and the quiet Margaret as the very centre of the sudden storm. She sat here now by the fire, shading her face with her hand and watching that familiar face set in hard and undreamed lines of passion and resolution and expectancy.
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