The Pursuit Part 3

About fifty yards separated Aylmer from the boar. The child was a full furlong distant. A sudden chill pulsed into, and gripped, the man's heart as he realized the situation.

Again the woman called aloud and smote her horse furiously across the withers as she strove to urge it on. Taken by surprise the gray changed step, stumbled, and nearly came down. With lowered spear Aylmer shot ahead.

The horse responded n.o.bly to the need. The interval decreased. The boar was thirty yards ahead--twenty--now no more than ten. The wicked little eyes flung glances sideways; the bristling withers showed that almost imperceptible rippling motion which presages a "jink."

Aylmer leaned down across his saddle, holding out the spear before him almost by the b.u.t.t. He was yet too far to get in a thrust. He could only hope to divert the brute's attention by a short, p.r.i.c.king stab. For the child, now running with short, terrified strides, was immediately in front of the gleaming tusks.

Aylmer lunged out.

The point reached and entered the boar's flank. It squealed savagely, turned, blundered, and fell beneath the horse's hoofs. Aylmer felt the shock, the agonizing effort at recovery, the final thud of the fall. The horse tripped and rolled over; the spear was torn from the rider's grip.

Aylmer ploughed a groove in the sand which landed him far out beyond the huddle of flying limbs in which the white tusks were already working viciously.

He scrambled first to his knees and then to his feet. He looked around.

The child was close to him, running now towards him. His hands were outstretched; he gave little panting cries.

And then Aylmer experienced that curious cold sense of relaxation which comes to some men when the situation calls for instant effort. He saw the child; he saw also the boar, slas.h.i.+ng relentlessly a way out from the tangle of his horse's legs; he saw the horsewoman whose reins were tightening not twenty yards away. But here was no cause for hesitation or bewilderment. His mind, to himself, worked with a certain sense of leisure. He stooped, caught up the child, placed him in the woman's arms, and gave her horse a thrust of dismissal with his fist. As the flying hoofs scattered the sand upon his tunic, he turned to confront his own plight without fear, with, indeed, nothing less than relief. The absorbing objective of the last two minutes being achieved, his mind had not had time to review and interpret his own danger.

The boar shook itself free of entanglement, snapped around at the wound in its flank, swayed a little and suddenly, malignantly, focussed its gaze upon Aylmer. It gave a grunt of satisfaction, as it seemed. As if the tension of a hidden spring was released, it bounded forward.

Aylmer looked at it as one looks at, and appraises, a picture. The sense of his own peril was in his mind, but latently. He understood the consequences if the boar reached him, but, owing to some perverse enravelment of the brain, details absorbed him to the veiling of all else. He noted with what excellent effect the crimson smear upon the dark flank shone out against the dull background of the sand. He recognized the abnormal curl of the tusks, and debated to what angle the jaw must be slanted to deliver the ripping undercut which experience told him he would receive within a couple of seconds. He saw with a pang of regret that the shaft of his spear was broken; the splintered end protruded from below the withers of the still struggling horse. Thus the picture--which engrossed him.

And then it was gone, blotted out. The thunder of hoofs, a rising cloud of sand, a dark, struggling ma.s.s, which was the boar upon its back. The rider whom he had distanced had pa.s.sed and the spear had got home. Red was the central spot of this picture, also, but no longer on the dark flank. It welled from the dying animal's chest in torrents.

As he watched its struggles, the sense of hazard escaped came home to him. Fear found room in his brain. He ran towards the broken spear, grasped it, turned to confront a peril which no longer menaced.

A shudder shook the swaying body, the great thews relaxed. The boar panted violently--once--twice. Then with a single sigh, very gently, very languidly, it sank upon the earth. And so lay still.

As he stood staring down at it, a reaction against his tinge of panic moved Aylmer to laughter. He began to giggle in little bubbling gasps of mirth which were near relations of hysteria. Matters had gone so quickly that his sense of proportion had been displaced. First perfect equanimity, then sudden and unfounded apprehension, now recoil. One short minute had made ample room for all these among his emotions. He found laughter the only balm to his self-respect, for he was s.h.i.+vering with a Briton's uneasy sense of having been guilty of melodrama.

His introspection was so intent that he failed to observe the return of the lady in white till her horse spurned the sand upon his riding boots.

Then he wheeled alertly and looked up in her face. Her veil had dropped.

She was clasping the child to her with the hand in which she gripped the reins. The other she held out to him.

"You saved the boy!" she said, in a quick, panting whisper. "You saved him!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: _"You saved the boy!" she said, in a quick, panting whisper_]

Aylmer took the proffered hand, lifted his hat, smiled, and recognized the lady of the pier.

He hesitated a moment. He shrugged his shoulders.

"No," he deprecated, and pointed to the other spear-man who was already wheeling to inspect his trophy. "Your thanks are due to our friend Despard, if anywhere."

"No!" she contradicted vehemently. "Did I not see it? You were sacrificing yourself, doing it deliberately. And I shall never forget it--never!"

He smiled again. He looked at the child who sat silent on the saddle-bow, staring down at him.

"Still running away?" queried Aylmer, pleasantly. "Whither, this time?

And what was the terrible hurry?"

A guilty grin puckered the little man's lips.

"I thought I knowed you; you're the man of--of yesterday," he shrilled.

"I was running from Selim. He wanted me to take siesta, but I did wish to be in the hunt."

Aylmer nodded.

"The usual trouble," he said. "We all want to be in--or, at any rate, to see--the hunt. And we never pay any attention to Selims, worse luck.

You'll learn more by experience, sonny."

The child made a little gesture of protest.

"That's not my name," he answered solemnly. "Mother calls me Jackanapes, or Jack. But I'm John, really, just John."

"Just John," a.s.sented Aylmer. "Just John what?"

"John Aylmer," said the boy and stared in surprise at his new friend's startled visage. But the other John Aylmer was not looking at his namesake. He was looking at the girl who held him.

Her eyes answered the glance gravely, sternly, even defiantly, and in silence.

"You?" cried Aylmer. "You are--?"

She hesitated.

"John's nurse," she said, looking him steadily in the face.

CHAPTER III

THE SHADOW OF A NAME

For a moment there was silence between the two. Aylmer's fingers unconsciously wound and unwound a tiny lock of hair in the horse's mane.

His eyes travelled over the woman's face and figure appraisingly; his brows contracted into a frown of puzzlement.

He had seen little John Aylmer's mother once before, at her wedding nine years previously. She had been a girl, then, almost a child, and young for her age, which was barely eighteen. Her beauty had been the fresh, innocent _beaute du diable_. She was fair, blue-eyed, with a tendency to fragility. And if report told the truth, her beauty had wasted and her fragility increased through the cruel years of her husband's domination.

A bare six months ago she had been freed. Her father's millions had helped her to a separation which English Courts had made a legal one.

They had also given her the custody of her one child, the heir to the Aylmer name and the Landon t.i.tle.

This girl was fair, indeed; her eyes like the sea, her color fresh, her forehead bland and unwrinkled. But she was not the woman whose woes had made copy for a thousand newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, whose sufferings had roused the storm of execration which had made the honest name of Aylmer a byword of dishonor and reproach. No, this was not his cousin Landon's wife.

And yet?

Feature for feature, line for line, she reminded him of the woman whose daintiness he remembered among the ma.s.sed decorations of that New York cathedral those years ago.

He sought bluntly for an explanation.