At that instant, loud and startling, close to the cairn sounded the blast of a horn, instantly responded to by the baying and yelping of dogs, by shouts, and screams, and cheers, and a tramp of rushing feet, and a crack of whips.
The suddenness of the uproar, its unexpectedness, its weirdness, coming on Charles’s overwrought nerves, at the same moment that he saw himself unwillingly involved in a robbery, completely overcame him; he uttered a cry of horror, sprang to his feet, upset the money box, and leaped out of the cutting, swinging the lantern, with his wide mantle flapping about him. His foot tripped and he fell; he picked himself up and bounded into the road against a horse with rider, who was in the act of blowing a horn.
Charles was too frightened and bewildered to remember anything about the hare hunt. He did not know where he was, what he was doing, against whom he had flung himself. The horse plunged, bounded aside, and cast his rider from his back. Charles stood with one hand to his head looking vacantly at the road and the prostrate figure in it. In another moment Mrs. Veale was at his elbow. ’What have you done?’ she gasped, ’You fool! what have you done?’
Charles had sufficiently recovered himself to understand what had taken place.
’It is the hare hunt,’ he said. ’Do you hear them? The dogs! This is—my God! it is Larry Nanspian. He is dead. I said I would break his neck, and I have done it. But I did not mean it. I did not intend to frighten the horse. I—I’—and he burst into tears.
’You are a fool,’ said Mrs. Veale angrily. ’What do you mean staying here?’ She took the horn from the prostrate Larry and blew it. ’Don’t let them turn and find you here by his dead body. If you will not go, I must, though I had no hand in killing him.’ She snatched the lantern from his hand and extinguished it. ’That ever I had to do with such an one as you! Be off, as you value your neck; do not stay. Be off! If you threatened Larry and have fulfilled your threat, who will believe that this was accident?’
Charles, who had been overcome by weakness for a moment, was nerved again by fear.
’Take his head,’ said Mrs. Veale, ’lay him on the turf, among the dark gorse, where he mayn’t be seen all at once, and that will give you more time to get off.’