Chapter Thirteen

Alec Osborn rode a good deal in these days.  He also walked a good deal, sometimes with a gun over his shoulder and followed by a keeper, sometimes alone.  There was scarcely a square yard of the Palstrey Manor lands he had not tramped over.  He had learned the whole estate by heart, its woods, its farms, its moorlands.  A morbid secret interest in its beauties and resources possessed him.  He could not resist the temptation to ask apparently casual questions of keepers and farmers when he found himself with them.  He managed to give his inquiries as much the air of accident as possible, but he himself knew that they were made as a result of a certain fevered curiosity.  He found that he had fallen into the habit of continually making plans connected with the place.  He said to himself, “If it were mine I would do this, or that.  If I owned it, I would make this change or that one.  I would discharge this keeper or put another man on such a farm.”  He tramped among the heather thinking these things over, and realising to the full what the pleasure of such powers would mean to a man such as himself, a man whose vanity had never been fed, who had a desire to control and a longing for active out-of-door life.

“If it were mine, if it were mine!” he would say to himself.  “Oh! damn it all, if it were only mine!”

And there were other places as fine, and finer places he had never seen,—­Oswyth, Hurst, and Towers,—­all Walderhurst’s all belonging to this one respectable, elderly muff.  Thus he summed up the character of his relative.  As for himself he was young, strong, and with veins swelling with the insistent longing for joyful, exultant life.  The sweating, panting drudgery of existence in India was a thought of hell to him.  But there it was, looming up nearer and nearer with every heavenly English day that passed.  There was nothing for it but to go back—­go back, thrust one’s neck into the collar again, and sweat and be galled to the end.  He had no ambitions connected with his profession.  He realised loathingly in these days that he had always been waiting, waiting.

The big, bright-faced woman who was always hanging about Hester, doing her favours, he actually began to watch feverishly.  She was such a fool; she always looked so healthy, and she was specially such a fool over Walderhurst.  When she had news of him, it was to be seen shining in her face.

She had a sentimental school-girl fancy that during his absence she would apply herself to the task of learning to ride.  She had been intending to do so before he went away; they had indeed spoken of it together, and Walderhurst had given her a handsome, gentle young mare.  The creature was as kind as she was beautiful.  Osborn, who was celebrated for his horsemanship, had promised to undertake to give the lessons.

A few days after her return from London with her purchases, she asked the husband and wife to lunch with her at Palstrey, and during the meal broached the subject.