"Wild Duck!" chanted Stuart with monotonous reiteration.
The sun had long since been blotted greyly from the west. Pennons of ragged mist fluttered wraithlike about the fading banks; waved and drifted and dissolved in streamers over the colourless tracts of water. The blasphemous mumblings of an ancient and invisible fisherman rose and fell in cadences upon the uncanny silence. An hour before, and the reeds had still been tipped with the sun's gold. An hour later, and blackness would be warm and velvety, interrupted by chirps and rustlings, stir among the rushes, and the brush of unseen wings. But at this between-hour, phantoms were abroad; and melancholy stole over the souls of Peter and Oliver; melancholy deepened by Stuart's strange repetition of 'Wild Duck! Wild Duck!' term which now held a gloom and menace it had altogether lacked at lunch that afternoon.
"Perhaps you'll explain your reference, Stuart?"
"Ibsen--and the Doll's House--when Nora went out to find her soul. You refused to swear at her this afternoon, and I thought something bad would come of it. And then the wild duck put it into her head to take your pistols and go to sacrifice something ... with vine-leaves in her hair.--No, that's Hedda Gabler! Oh, well, there's an impossible husband in that, too!"
'Pistols' were even more sinister than wild ducks. Oliver said, "You imply that my wife has committed suicide?"
They could not clearly see his face in the half-light. Stuart leapt in with a hasty and matter-of-fact "Of course not. Don't be absurd. She thinks you need--oh, startling into a keener realization of her personality, and this is her way of doing it."
"But you said she hadn't merely gone for a walk?"
"No--yes----" exasperated. "Can't you get something between a mere walk and never-again?"
Oliver couldn't. The weight of his opinion had crashed heavily from one extreme to the other; as Stuart had remarked, he was at all times difficult to move, either forwards or backwards.
"If she's not coming back," argued Oliver, "she must have left me for good. And if she has firearms with her, then I'd better follow. It all looks to me very silly." And with a commendable absence of flurry, his broad back loomed up the garden, and disappeared into the bungalow.