XXVIII

The yellow moon rising above the hill cast long shadows of the chestnut-trees, and illuminated a section of the barn through the space where the great doors had been. The haze of August seemed to have lingered in the atmosphere after the sun had set, and streaming through it the disk of the moon took a yellowish tint. Thus the harvest colour stayed on into the night; burnt by the sun’s heat into the wheat and stubble, as hues are burnt in by the potter’s furnace, this hazy yellow remained. There was a faint yellow in the stubble under the moonlight; the dried grass retained a faint hint of it; the broad roof of the barn was yellowish-red.

Over the fields all things appeared dim and indistinct; the haze of day had settled down into the night. At hand the increasing brilliance of the moon⁠—nearly full⁠—lit up each leaf of the chestnut-trees. A star by the zenith, and one or two low down in the south, shone with the peculiar light of summer⁠—they flickered slowly, and at each scintillation seemed nearly gone; their light was not equal to their size, and there were wide plains of the sky without a visible star.

The owl had gone past, and the bats had exhausted the excitement which seizes them at dusk. There was no sound of any living thing; the wind had fallen, and the low murmur of the brook among its green flags did not reach so far. Under the hill the copse was touched with moonlight down the slope of the treetops; their recesses were in the deepest shadow. For while the beams of the moon illumine the side towards it⁠—that which immediately receives its rays⁠—they are accompanied with little diffused light, and away from the actual impact of the rays there is always a darkness. Each leaf of the chestnut-trees on the side towards the east was brightly lighted, but behind each leaf there was shadow. By day the sunbeams would have gone, as it were, round and under the leaf, and there would have been light everywhere; by night there was a lit-up surface in front, and darkness behind.

Ruy lay as he had fallen, and was stiffening in the moonbeams before the chestnut-tree. Two night-crows were busy upon him; his eyes were already gone.

The crows moved uneasily at the sound of footsteps in the narrow lane, but did not rise till a man emerged from the shadow and came towards the tree. Silently the crows flew away into the dark by the copse; there were dots of white, too, now moving among the thistles by the verge of the wood⁠—these were the white tails of rabbits rushing away to their burrows.

Robert Godwin walked straight to the chestnut-tree, and, pausing on the spot where he had thrown Felise, drew from his pocket one of the old flintlock pistols he had so carefully cleaned. Without a moment’s delay, and in the most matter-of-fact manner, he placed the muzzle of the pistol against his breast and touched the trigger. There was a flash as the powder ignited in the pan, but the charge did not explode. At the flash a bird fluttered out from the tree into the night.

Godwin did not hesitate in his fatal purpose because of this accidental reprieve from his own violence. He opened the pan and poured fresh gunpowder into it from some which he carried in a screw of newspaper in his waistcoat-pocket. With a pin he cleaned the touch-hole, and then patiently thrust the grains of powder as well as he could into the aperture, in order that the flame might next time communicate with the charge.

Some time since he had purchased two ounces of loose gunpowder at an ironmonger’s in Maasbury⁠—cheap powder, such as is sold for birdkeepers’ guns; he would not go to the expense of Curtis and Harvey’s diamond-grain. He did not quite know when he bought it whether it was to be used against himself or Martial, or against both.

When he thought he had primed the pistol he closed the pan, again put the muzzle to his breast, and pulled the trigger. The bullet entered his heart and he fell dead; his face struck a bunch of yellow fungi growing in the grass, and lay still there.