While I was crouching in the dark I called to you--who died to-day--to stand between us!"The man absolutely shuddered from head to foot.
"I was alive, and you see I heard you and came," he answered hoarsely.
He lifted her in his arms and carried her into the cottage.
Her cheek felt the enrapturing roughness of his tweed shoulder as he did it.He laid her down on the couch of hay and turned away.
"Don't move," he said."I will come back.You are safe."If there had been more light she would have seen that his jaw was set like a bulldog's, and there was a red spark in his eyes--a fearsome one.But though she did not clearly see, she KNEW, and the nearness of the last hours swept away all relenting.
Nigel Anstruthers having discreetly waited until the two had passed into the house, and feeling that a man would be an idiot who did not remove himself from an atmosphere so highly charged, was making his way toward the lane and was, indeed, halfway through the gate when heavy feet were behind him and a grip of ugly strength wrenched him backward.
"Your horse is cropping the grass where you left him, but you are not going to him," said a singularly meaning voice.
"You are coming with me."
Anstruthers endeavoured to convince himself that he did not at that moment turn deadly sick and that the brute would not make an ass of himself.
"Don't be a bally fool!" he cried out, trying to tear himself free.
The muscular hand on his shoulder being reinforced by another, which clutched his collar, dragged him back, stumbling ignominiously through the gooseberry bushes towards the cart-shed.Betty lying upon her bed of hay heard the scuffling, mingled with raging and gasping curses.Childe Harold, lifting his head from his cropping of the grass, looked after the violently jerking figures and snorted slightly, snuffing with dilated red nostrils.As a war horse scenting blood and battle, he was excited.
When Mount Dunstan got his captive into the shed the blood which had surged in Red Godwyn's veins was up and leaping.
Anstruthers, his collar held by a hand with fingers of iron, writhed about and turned a livid, ghastly face upon his captor.
"You have twice my strength and half my age, you beast and devil!" he foamed in a half shriek, and poured forth frightful blasphemies.
"That counts between man and man, but not between vermin and executioner," gave back Mount Dunstan.
The heavy whip, flung upward, whistled down through the air, cutting through cloth and linen as though it would cut through flesh to bone.
"By God!" shrieked the writhing thing he held, leaping like a man who has been shot."Don't do that again! DAMNyou!" as the unswerving lash cut down again--again.
What followed would not be good to describe.Betty through the open door heard wild and awful things--and more than once a sound as if a dog were howling.
When the thing was over, one of the two--his clothes cut to ribbons, his torn white linen exposed, lay, a writhing, huddled worm, hiccoughing frenzied sobs upon the earth in a corner of the cart-shed.The other man stood over him, breathless and white, but singularly exalted.