She got up and ran as fast as she could away across the field.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Down the road the car came to a standstill with a grinding of brakes. One of the men got out and ran back. There was a difference of opinion between him and the driver as to what had happened. The fog had made it impossible to see. The wheels had bumped over something. With any luck Miss Hilary Carew was a corpse.

He reached the spot. There was no corpse on the road. There was a good deal of smashed bicycle, scattered, fragmentary, and excessively dangerous. He trod on the rim of a wheel, and half a dozen broken spokes came flicking up at him, tearing his trouser leg and stabbing into the palm which he thrust out to fend them off. He swore, shouted, barked his shin on a pedal, and getting clear, ran back to the car.

All this took a minute or two. By the time explanations and recriminations had been bandied, and an electric lamp extracted from a crowded cubby-hole, Hilary had blundered into a second hedge. If she had not been so giddy she would have run straight down the deep field, and she would probably have been overtaken there, for the men soon found the place where she had forced her way through the first hedge. With the fog to help her she might have escaped, but there were two of them, able-bodied and active, and they had a torch. They had also a great deal at stake. But then so had she, and if she was weak and shaken, her very weakness helped her and she had run anything but straight. Her head was swimming, and without knowing it she bore hard to the right. This took her across a corner of the field and brought her up short against a hedge which ran in from the road. She scrambled through it, being lucky enough to strike a gap, and then, finding her feet on a downhill slope, she followed them. They took her into a deep hollow place set about with bushes. When she got there she stopped, crouched down and trembling all over. The bushes closed her in and hid her, and the fog hid the bushes. Here, in this dreadful dark lonely place, like a hunted wild thing she had a sanctuary. The earth supported her shaking limbs. The darkness was a shelter. The stripped wintry bushes stood sentinel. If a foot moved against her, or a hand stretched out to do her harm, there would be an alarum of snapping twig and creaking branch.

Gradually she relaxed. Her heart quieted. Her head cleared. She listened, and could hear no sound of pursuit.

After what seemed like a very long time a faint sound came to her, a sound of voices. Just that – just voices, just an indistinguishable murmur of sound a longway off. She strained in an agony, waiting for it to come nearer, to break upon her. Instead there was silence. Then, suddenly sharp and clear, the slam of a door, and upon that again an engine throbbing.

Hilary’s hands came together and held one another tight. They had got into the car, banged the door, and started the engine. They had given up looking for her, and they were going away. Oh, joyful, joyful, joyful, joyful, joyful!

A cold drop trickled suddenly between her shoulder-blades. Suppose it was a trick. Suppose they were only pretending to go away. Suppose she climbed back into the road and found them waiting for her there. A hand at her throat – suddenly – in the dark. A voice behind the curtain of fog, whispering under its breath, ‘Quick, and we’ll make a job of it!’ They wouldn’t miss her a second time. The car would smash her as it had smashed the bicycle. She wouldn’t ever see Henry any more. That hurt so sharply that it did her good. She felt a fierce determination to see Henry again. She was going to. She didn’t care what they did, she was going to.

She became suddenly quiet and balanced. She was conscious of a new courage. It was not the young courage which says with a light heart, ‘Dreadful things happen – in the newspapers – to other people – but of course they couldn’t happen to me or to the people I love.’ They had happened to her, they had happened to Marion, they had happened to Geoffrey Grey. If she found courage now, it was the older, colder courage which says, “This thing has got to be faced, and it’s up to me to face it.’

She sat up, pushed back her hair from her face, winced as she touched a long deep scratch, and heard the car go down the road and away. It was heading for Ledlington. The sound of it faded out upon the foggy air. It didn’t stop suddenly, as it would have done if they had run on for a bit and then pulled up. It lessened gradually and died away in the distance.

And yet it might be a trick. There had been two men. One of them might have stayed behind to catch her when she came out upon the road again. They would surely count on her having to find her way back to the road. She thought of a still black figure, a featureless wickedness, standing there under the hedgerow, waiting. Her thought was quite steady and calm. It wouldn’t do to go out on the road. Neither could she risk trying to stop a passing car. It would probably be impossible in a fog like this anyhow.

She began to try and think what she had better do.

Fields belong to somebody. There might be a path somewhere near, or a cottage -some place which she could reach without going out upon the road again. She tried to remember the way she had come, and to make out where she was now. She thought about half way to Ledlington, but she couldn’t remember any place like this hollow among the bushes, and she didn’t know how far off the road she was. Not far by the noise of the car, which had sounded startlingly close.

She was, had she only known it, at the bottom of the pond which had been offered to her as a landmark by the shock-headed boy when he was telling her how to find Humpy Dick’s cottage. He had omitted to tell her that it had gone dry in the drought, and she had omitted to notice it as she rode past. A glint of water was what she had been looking for, and, missing that, she missed the footpath, too.

She found it now. Climbing up out of the bottom and pushing through the bushes, she came upon it almost at once, a rutted path deeply scored by the passing of laden carts. Carts meant people, and people meant a house. She began to follow the ruts away from the road.

It wasn’t easy. Without that deep scoring of the ground she would have been lost, but the furrows kept her to the path. If she ceased to stumble and turn her ankles, she knew at once that she was bearing away from the track, and so felt her way back to it and stumbled on again. It was very weary work. Suppose there wasn’t any house. Suppose this wasn’t a real place at all. Suppose she had got into a nightmare where an endless path went on, and on, and on through an everlasting fog. That was a very stupid thought. If you had one single grain of sense you didn’t let yourself think that sort of thought when you were trying to find your way in a fog. Here Hilary’s imp cocked a snook at her and said rudely: If you had a grain of sense you wouldn’t have come.’ He made a sort of jingle of it, and it went echoing round and round inside her head:

‘You’d have stayed at home, you wouldn’t have come.

You wouldn’t have come, you’d have stayed at home.’

She went on feeling for the ruts with her feet, walking with one hand stretched out in front of her in case of a wall or another hedge.

It was a gate she touched. Her hand went over it, and it brought her up short with a bar at her waist and another across her knees. She felt for the latch, lifted it, and walked through. It wasn’t big enough to be a field gate, and there were no ruts inside it, just a hard path which might at some time have been laid down in gravel. It was quite hard to walk on – hard, and narrow. She bore too far to the right, and went in up to her ankle in the soft earth of a garden bed. And then, before she came to it, she was aware of the house. It was much too dark to see anything, and her outstretched hand touched only the empty air, yet some sense told her that the house was near. Two more cautious steps, and there it was -a wall covered with creepers – the wood of a window frame, cold glass. She was off the path and must get back to it again. Groping, she came to a step, and a wooden door with a heavy metal knocker. The enchanting vision of a lighted room – a fire, hot tea – rose gloriously upon the fog. Open, Sesame! She had only to knock on the door and someone would open, and the enchantment would come true. She had the knocker in her hand, and nothing so easy as to let it fall – nothing so easy, and nothing so hard.