“I think I miss London Bridge Road a little, and—Kensington Park. Don’t you, too, Adrian?”
“Yes, there’s a house behind them,” Sorio repeated, disregarding her last words and staring fixedly at the oak trees. “There’s a house behind them.”
His manner was so queer that the girl looked at him with serious alarm.
“What’s the matter with you, Adrian?” she said.“I’ve never known you like this—”
“It’s where the Renshaws live,” her lover continued. “They have a kind of park. Its wall runs close to the village. Some of the trees are very old. I walked there this morning before breakfast. Baltazar advised me to.”
Nance looked at him still more nervously. Then she gave a little forced laugh. “That is why you were so late in coming to see me, I suppose! Well, you say the Renshaws live there. May one ask who the Renshaws are?”
He took the girl’s arm in his own and dragged her forward at a rapid pace. She remarked that it was not until some wide-spreading willows on the further side of the river concealed the clump of oaks that he replied to her question.
“Baltazar told me everything about them. He ought to know, for he’s one of them himself. Yes, he’s one of them. He’s the son of old Herman, Brand’s father; not legitimate, of course, and Brand isn’t always kind to him. But he’s one of them.”
He stopped abruptly on this last word and Nance caught him throwing a furtive glance across the stream.
“Who are they, Adrian? Who are they?” repeated the girl.
“I’ll tell you,” he cried, with strange irritation. “I’ll tell you everything! Whenhaven’tI told you everything? They are brewers. That isn’t very romantic, is it? And I suppose you might call them landowners, too. They’ve lived here forever, it seems, and in the same house.”
He burst into an uneasy laugh.
“In the same house for centuries and centuries! The churchyard is full of them. It’s only lately they’ve taken to be brewers—I suppose the land don’t pay for their vices.”
And again he laughed in the same jarring and ungenial way.
“Brand employs Baltazar—just as if he wasn’t his brother at all—in the office at Mundham. You remember Mundham? We came through it in the train. It’s over there,” he waved his hand in front of him, “about seven miles off. It’s a horrid place—all slums and canals. That’s where they make their beer. Their beer!” He laughed again.
“You haven’t yet told me who they are—I mean who else there is,” observed Nance while, for some reason or other, her heart began to beat tumultuously.
“Haven’t I said I’d tell you everything?” Sorio flung out. “I’ll tell you more than you bargain for, if you tease me. Oh, confound it! There’s Rachel and Linda! Look now, do they appear as if they were happy?”
Favoured by the wind which blew sea-wards, the lovers had been permitted to approach quite close to their friends without any betrayal of their presence.
Linda was seated on the river bank, her head in her hands, while Miss Doorm, like a black-robed priestess of some ancient ritual, leant against the trunk of a leafless pollard.
“They were perfectly happy when I left them,” whispered Nance, but she was conscious as she spoke of a cold, miserable misgiving in her inmost spirit. Like a flash her mind reverted to the lilac bushes of the London garden, and a sick loneliness seized her.
“Linda!” she cried, with a quiver of remorse in her voice. The young girl leapt hurriedly to her feet, andMiss Doorm removed her hand from the tree. A quick look passed between the sisters, but Nance understood nothing of what Linda’s expression conveyed. They moved on together, Adrian with Linda and Nance with Rachel.
“What do they call this river?” Nance enquired of her companion, as soon as she felt reassured by the sound of the girl’s laugh.
“The Loon, my dear,” replied Miss Doorm. “They call it the Loon. It runs through Mundham and then through the fens. It forms the harbour at Rodmoor.”
Nance sat silent. In the depths of her heart she made a resolution. She would find some work to do here in Rodmoor. It was intolerable to be dependent on any one. Yes, she would find work, and, if need be, take Linda to live with her.
She felt now, though she would have found it hard to explain the obscure reason for it, more reluctant than ever to return to London. Every pulse of her body vibrated with a strange excitement. A reckless fighting spirit surged up within her. Not easily, not quickly, should her hold on the man she loved be loosed! But she felt danger on the horizon—nearer than the horizon. She felt it in her bones.
They had now reached the foot of Rachel’s garden and there was a general pause in order that Adrian might do justice to the heavy architecture of Dyke House, as it was called—that house which the Badger—to follow Doctor Raughty’s tale—had taken into his “noble” but “malformed” head to leave to his solitary descendant.
As they passed in one by one through the little dilapidatedgate, Nance had a sudden inspiration. She seized her lover by the wrist. “Adrian,” she whispered, “has there been anything—any one—to remind you—of what—you saw—that morning?”
She could not but believe that he had heard her and caught her meaning, yet it was hard to assume it, for his tone was calm and natural as he answered her, apparently quite misunderstanding her words:
“The sea, you mean? Yes, I’ve heard it all night and all day. We’ll go down there this afternoon, and Linda with us.” He raised his voice. “You’ll come to the sea, Linda; eh, child? To the Rodmoor sea?”
The words died away over the river and across the fens. The others had already entered the house, but a laughing white face at one of the windows and the tapping of girlish hands on the closed pane seemed to indicate acquiescence in what he suggested.
The wind had dropped but no gleam of sunshine interrupted the monotonous stretch of grey sky, grey dunes and grey sea, as the sisters with their two companions strolled slowly in the late afternoon along the Rodmoor sands.
Linda was a little pale and silent, and Nance fancied she discerned now and again, in the glances Miss Doorm threw upon her, a certain sinister exultation, but she was prevented from watching either of them very closely by reason of the extraordinary excitement which the occasion seemed to arouse in Sorio. He kept shouting bits of poetry, some of which Nance caught the drift of, while others—they might have been Latin or Greek, for all she knew—conveyed nothing to her but a vague feeling of insecurity. He was like an excited magician uttering incantations and invoking strange gods.
The sea was neither rough nor calm. Wisps of tossed-up foam appeared and disappeared at far distant points in its vast expanse, and every now and then the sombre horizon was broken in its level line by the emergence of a wave larger and darker than the rest.
Flocks of gulls disturbed by their approach rose, wheeling and screaming, from their feeding-grounds on the stranded seaweed and flapped away over the water.
The four friends advanced along the hard sand, close to the changing line of the tide’s retreat, and from theblackened windrow there, of broken shells and anonymous sea refuse they stopped, each one of them, at different moments, to pick up some particular object which attracted or surprised them. It was Nance who was the first to become aware that they were not the only frequenters of that solitude. She called Adrian’s attention to two figures moving along the edge of the sand-dunes and apparently, from the speed with which they advanced, anxious to reach a protruding headland and disappear from observation.
Adrian stopped and surveyed the figures long and intently. Then to her immense surprise, and it must be confessed a little to her consternation, he started off at a run in pursuit of them. His long, lean, hatless figure assumed so emphatic and strange an appearance as he crossed the intervening sands that Linda burst into peals of laughter.
“I wish they’d run away from him,” she cried. “We should see a race! Who are they? Does he know them?”
Nance made no reply, but Miss Doorm, who had been watching the incident with sardonic interest, muttered under her breath, “It’s begun, has it? Soon enough, in all conscience!”
Nance turned sharply upon her. “What do you mean, Rachel? Does Adrian know them? Doyouknow who they are?”
No answer was vouchsafed to this, nor indeed was one necessary, for the mystery, whatever it was, was on the point of resolving itself. Adrian had overtaken the objects of his pursuit and was bringing them back with him, one on either hand. Nance was not long in making out the general characteristics of the strangers.They were both women, one elderly, the other quite young, and from what she could see of their appearance and dress, they were clearly ladies. It was not, however, till they came within speaking distance that the girl’s heart began to beat an unmistakable danger-signal. This happened directly she obtained a definite view of the younger of Adrian’s companions. Before any greeting could be given Rachel had whispered abruptly into her ear, “They’re the Renshaws—I haven’t seen them since Philippa was a child, but they’re the Renshaws. He must have met them this morning. Look out for yourself, dearie.”
Nance only vaguely heard her. Every fibre of attention in her body and soul was fixed upon that slender equivocal figure by Adrian’s side.
The introduction which followed was of a sufficiently curious character. Between Nance and the young woman designated by Rachel as Philippa there was an exchange of glances when their fingers touched like the crossing of two naked blades. Mrs. Renshaw retained Linda’s hand in her own longer than convention required, and Linda herself seemed to cling to the brown-eyed, grey-haired lady with a movement of childish confidence. Nance was calm enough, for all the beating of her heart, to remark as an interesting fact that her rival’s mother, though oppressively timid and retiring in her manner towards them all, seemed to exercise a quelling and restraining influence upon Rachel Doorm, who began at once speaking to her with unusual deference and respect. The whole party, after some desultory conversation, began to drift away from the sea towards the town and Nance found herself in spite of some furtive efforts to the contrary, wedged closely inbetween Mrs. Renshaw and Rachel—with Linda walking in front of them—as they followed the narrow uneven path between the sand-dunes and the heavy sand of the upper shore.
Every now and then Mrs. Renshaw would bend down and call their attention to some little sea plant, telling them its name in slow sweet tones, as if repeating some liturgical formula, and indicating into what precise colour its pale glaucous buds would unsheathe as the weather grew warm.
On these occasions Nance quickly turned her head; but do what she could, she could only grow helplessly conscious that Adrian and his companion were slipping further and further behind.
Once, as the tender-voiced lady touched lightly, with the tips of her ungloved fingers, a cluster of insignificant leaves and asked Nance if she knew the lesser rock-rose the agitated girl found herself on the point of uttering a strangely irrelevant cry.
“Rose au regard saphique,” her confused heart murmured, “plus pâle que les lys, rose au regard saphique, offre-nous le parfum de ton illusoire virginité, fleur hypocrite, fleur de silence.”
They approached at last the entrance of the little harbour, and to Nance’s ineffable relief Mrs. Renshaw paused and made them sit down on a fish-smelling bench, among coils of rope, and wait the appearance of the missing ones.
The tide was low and between great banks of mud the water rushed sea-ward in a narrow, swirling current. A heavy fishing smack with high tarred sides and red, unfurled sails, was being steered down this channel by two men armed with enormous poles. Through themasts of several other boats, moored to iron rings in the wooden wharf, and between the slate roofs of some ramshackle houses on the other side, they got a glimpse, looking westward across the fens, of a low, rusty-red streak of sombrely illuminated sky. This apparently was all the sunset Rodmoor was destined to know that evening and Nance, as she listened vaguely to Mrs. Renshaw’s gentle voice describing to Linda the various “queer characters” among the harbour people, had a strange, bewildered sense of being carried far and far and far down a remorseless tide, with a heavy sky above her and interminable grey sands around her, and all the while something withheld, withdrawn, inexplicable in the power that bore her forward.
They came at last—Adrian and Philippa Renshaw, and Nance had, in one heart-rending moment, the pitiless suspicion that the battle was lost already and that this fragile thing with the great ambiguous eyes and the reserved manner, this thing whose slender form and tight-braided, dusky hair might have belonged to a masquerading boy, had snatched from her already what could never for all the years of her life be won again!
As they left the harbour and entered the main village street, Adrian made one or two deliberate efforts to detach Nance from the rest. He pointed out little things to her in the homely shop-windows and seemed surprised and disappointed when she made no response to his overtures. Shecouldnot make any response. She could not bring herself so much as to look into his face. It was not from any capricious pride or mere feminine pique that she thus turned away but from a profound and lamentable numbness of every emotion. The wound seemed to have gone further even than she herself hadknown. Her heart felt like a dead cold weight—like a murdered, unborn child—beneath her breast, and out of her lethargy and inertness, as in certain tragic dreams, she could not move. Her limbs seemed formed of lead, and her lips—at least as far as he was concerned—became those of a dumb animal.
A man, viewing the situation from outside, the slightness and apparent triviality of the incident, would have been astounded at the effect upon her of so insubstantial a blow, but women move in a different world, a world where the drifting of the tiniest straw is indicative of crushing catastrophes, and to the instinct of the least sensitive among women Nance’s premonitions would have been quite explicable.
It was at that moment that it was sharply borne in upon her how slight her actual knowledge of her lover was. Her absorption in him was devoted and complete but in regard to the intricacies and complications of his character she was as much in the dark to-day as when they first met in London Bridge Road.
Strangely enough, in the paralysis of her feelings, Nance was unconscious of any definite antagonism to the cause of her distress. She found she could talk quite naturally and spontaneously to Miss Renshaw when chance threw them together as they emerged upon the village green.
“Oh, I like those trees!” she cried, as the row of ancient sycamores which gave the forlorn little square its chief appeal first struck her attention.
The cottage of Baltazar Stork, it turned out, was just behind these sycamores and next door to the building which, with its immense and faded sign-board, offered the natives of Rodmoor their unique dissipation.“The Admiral’s Head!” Nance repeated, surveying the sign and thinking to herself that it must have been under that somewhat sordid roof that Miss Doorm’s parent had drunk himself to death.
“Don’t look at it,” she heard Mrs. Renshaw say. “I feel ashamed every time I pass it.”
Philippa gave Nance a quick and rather bitter smile.
“Mother is telling them that it is our beer which they sell there. You know we are brewers, don’t you? Mother thinks it her duty to remind every one of that fact. She gets a curious pleasure out of talking about it. It’s her morbid conscience. You’ll find we’re all rather morbid here,” she added, looking searchingly into Nance’s face.
“It’s the sea. Our sea is not the same as other seas. It eats into us.”
“Why do you say just that—and in that tone—to me?” Nance gravely enquired, answering the other’s gaze. “My father was a sailor. I love the salt-water.”
Philippa Renshaw shrugged her shoulders. “You may love beingonit. That’s a different thing. It remains to be seen how you like beingnearit.”
“I like it always, everywhere,” repeated Nance obstinately, “and I’m afraid of nothing it can do to me!”
They overtook the others at this point and Mrs. Renshaw turned rather querulously to her daughter.
“Don’t talk to her about the sea, Philippa—I know that’s what you’re doing.”
The girl with the figure of a boy let her eyes meet Adrian’s and Nance felt the dead weight in her heart grow more ice-cold than before, as she watched the effect of that look upon her lover.
It was Rachel who broke the tension. “It wasn’t so very long ago,” she said, “that Rodmoor was quite an inland place. There are houses now, they say, and churches under the water. And it swallows up the land all the time, inch by inch. The sand-dunes are much nearer the town, I am sure of that, and the mouth of the river, too, than when I lived here in old days.”
Mrs. Renshaw looked by no means pleased at this speech.
“Well,” she said, “we must be getting home for dinner. Shall we walk through the park, Philippa? It’s the nicest way—if the grass isn’t too wet.”
In the general chorus of adieus that followed, Nance was not surprised when Sorio bade good-night to her as well as to the others. He professed to be going to the station to meet the Mundham train.
“Baltazar will have a lot of things to carry,” he said, “and I must be at hand to help.”
Mrs. Renshaw pressed Linda’s hand very tenderly as they parted and a cynical observer might have been pardoned for suspecting that under the suppressed sigh with which she took Philippa’s arm there lurked a wish that it had been the more docile and less difficult child that fate had given her for a daughter.
Linda, at any rate, proved to be full of enthusiastic and excited praise for the sad-voiced lady, as the sisters went off with Rachel. She chattered, indeed, so incessantly about her that Nance, whose nerves were in no tolerant state, broke out at last into a quite savage protest.
“She’s the sort of person,” she threw in, “who’s always sentimental about young girls. Wait till you findher with some one younger than you are, and you’ll soon see! Am I not right, Rachel?”
“She’s not right at all, is she?” interposed the other. Miss Doorm looked at them gravely.
“I don’t think either of you understand Mrs. Renshaw. Indeed there aren’t many who do. She’s had troubles such as you may both pray to God you’ll never know. That wisp of a girl will be the cause of others before long.”
She glanced at Nance significantly.
“Hold tight to your Adrian, my love. Hold tight to him, my dearie!”
Thus, as they emerged upon the tow path spoke Rachel Doorm.
Meanwhile, from his watch above the Inn, the nameless Admiral saw the shadows of night settle down upon his sycamores. His faded countenance, with its defiant bravado, stared insolently at what he could catch between trees and houses, of the darkening harbour and if Rodmoor had been a ship instead of a village, and he a figurehead instead of a sign-board, he could not have confronted the unknown and all that the unknown might bring more indifferently, more casually, more contemptuously.
The night of her first meeting with Adrian Sorio, found the daughter of the house of Renshaw restless and wakeful. She listened to the hall clock striking the hour of twelve with an intentness that would have suggested to any one observing her that she had only been waiting for that precise moment to plunge into some nocturnal enterprise fraught with both sweetness and peril.
The night was chilly, the sky starless and overcast. The heavy curtains were drawn but the window, wide-open behind them, let in a breath of rain-scented air which stirred the flames of the two silver candles on the dressing table and fluttered the thin skirt of the girl’s night-dress as she sat, tense and expectant, over the red coals of a dying fire.
A tall gilt-framed mirror of antique design stood on the left of the fireplace.
As the last stroke of midnight sounded, the girl leapt to her feet and swiftly divesting herself of her only garment, stood straight and erect, her hands clasped behind her head, before this mirror. The firelight cast a red glow over her long bare limbs and the flickering candle flames threw wavering shadows across her lifted arms and slender neck. Her hair remained tightly braided round her head and this, added to the boyish outlines of her body, gave her the appearance of one of those androgynous forms of later Greek art whose ambiguousloveliness wins us still, even in the cold marble, with so touching an appeal. Her smooth forehead and small delicately moulded face showed phantom-like in the mirror. Her scarlet lips quivered as she gazed at herself, quivered into that enigmatic smile challenging and inscrutable which seems, more than any other human expression, to have haunted the imagination of certain great artists of the past.
Permitted for a brief moment to catch a glimpse of that white figure, an intruder, if possessed of the smallest degree of poetic fancy, would have been tempted to dream that the dust of the centuries had indeed been quickened and some delicate evocation of perverse pagan desire restored to breath and consciousness.
Such a dream would not, perhaps, have survived a glance at the girl’s face. With distended pupils and irises so large that they might have been under the influence of some exciting drug, her eyes had that particular look, sorrowful and heavy with mystery, which one feelscould not have been in the worldbefore the death of Christ.
With her epicene figure, she resembled some girl-priestess of Artemis invoking a mocking image of her own defiant sexlessness. With her sorrowful inhuman eyes she suggested some strange elf-creature, born of mediæval magic.
Turning away from the mirror, Philippa Renshaw blew out the candles and flung open the curtains. Standing thus for a moment in the presence of the vague starless night full of chilly earth odours, she drew several long deep breaths and seemed to inhale the very essence of the darkness as if it had been the kiss of some elemental lover. Then she shivered a little, closedthe window and began hurriedly to dress herself by the firelight. Bare-headed, but with a dark cloak reaching to her feet, she softly left her room and crept silently down the staircase. One by one she drew the heavy bolts of the hall door and turned the ponderous key.
Letting herself out into the night air with the movements of one not unaccustomed to such escapades, she hurried down the stone pathway, passed through the iron entrance gates, and emerged into the park. Catching up the skirt of her cloak, and drawing it tightly round her so that it should not impede her steps, she plunged into the wet grass and directed her course towards the thickest group of oak trees. Between the immense trunks and mossy roots of these sea-deformed and wind-stunted children of the centuries she groped her way, her feet stumbling over fallen branches and her face whipped by the young wet leaves.
A mad desire seemed to possess her, to throw off every vestige and token of her human imprisonment and to pass forth free and unfettered into the embrace of the primeval powers. One would have thought, to have watched her as she flung herself, at last, on her face under one of the oldest of the trees and liberating her arms from her cloak, stretched them round its trunk, that she was some worshipper of a banished divinity invoking her god while her persecutors slept, and passionately calling upon him to return to his forsaken shrine. Releasing her fierce clasp upon the rough bark of the tree, not however before it had bruised her flesh, the girl dug her nails into the soft damp leaf-mould and rubbed her forehead against the wet moss. She shuddered as she lay like this, and as she shuddered sheclutched yet more tightly, as if in a kind of ecstasy, the roots of grass and the rubble of earth into which her fingers dug.
Meanwhile, within the house, another little drama unrolled itself. In the old-fashioned library collected by many generations of Renshaws, where the noble Rabelaisian taste of the eighteenth century jostled unceremoniously with the attenuated banalities of a later epoch, there sat, at the very moment when the girl descended the stairs, a tall powerfully built man in evening dress.
Brand Renshaw was a figure of striking and formidable appearance. Immensely muscular and very tall, he carried upon his massive shoulders a head of so strange a shape that had he been a mediæval chieftain he would doubtless have gone down to posterity as Brand Hatchet-pate, or Brand Hammer-skull. His head receded from a forehead narrow and high, and rose at the back into a dome-like protrusion which, in spite of the closely-clipt, reddish hair that covered it, suggested, in a manner that was almost sinister, the actual bony substructure of the cranium beneath.
The fire was out. The candles on the table were guttering and flickering with little spitting noises as their wicks sank and the cold hearth in front of him was littered with the ashes of innumerable cigarettes. He was neither reading nor smoking them. He sat with his hands on the arms of his chair, staring into vacancy.
Brand Renshaw’s eyes were like the eyes of a morose animal, an animal endowed perhaps with intellectual powers denied to the human race, but still an animal, and when he fixed his gaze in his concentrated mannerupon the unknown objects of his thought there was a weight of heavily focussed intensity in his stare that was unpleasantly threatening.
He was staring in this way at the empty grate when, in the dead silence of the house, he caught the sound of a furtive step in the hall without, and immediately afterwards the slight rasping noise of bolts carefully shot back.
In a flash he leapt to his feet and extinguished the guttering candles. Quietly and on tip-toe he moved to the door and soundlessly turning the handle peered into the hall. He was just in time to see the heavy front door closed. Without the least token of haste or surprise he slipped on an overcoat, took his hat and stick and went forth in pursuit of the escaped one.
At first he saw only the darkness and heard no sound but the angry flutterings of some bird in the high trees, and—a long way off, perhaps even beyond the park—the frightened squeal of a hunted rabbit. But by the time he got to the gate, taking care to walk on the flower-beds rather than on the stone pathway, he could make out the figure of the girl no great way in front of him. She ran on, so straight and so blindly, towards the oak trees that he was able without difficulty to follow her even though, every now and then, her retreating figure was absorbed and swallowed up by the darkness.
When at last he came up to her side as she lay stretched out at the foot of the tree, he made no immediate attempt to betray his presence. With his arms folded he stood regarding her, a figure as silent and inhuman as herself, and over them both the vague immensitiesand shadowy obscurities of the huge earth-scented night hung lowering and tremendous, like powers that held their breath, waiting, watching.
At intervals an attenuated gust of wind, coming from far away across the marshes, moved the dead leaves upon the ground and made them dance a little death dance. This it did without even stirring the young living shoots on the boughs above them.
The darkness seemed to rise and fall about the two figures, to advance, to recede, to dilate, to diminish, in waves of alternate opacity and tenuity. In its indrawings and outbreathings, in the ebb and flow of its fluctuating presence, it seemed to beat—at least that is how Brand Renshaw felt it—like the pulse of an immense heart charged with unutterable mysteries.
This illusion, if it were an illusion, may have been due to nothing more recondite than the fact that, in the silence of the heavy night, the sound of the tide on the Rodmoor sands was the background of everything.
It was not till the girl rose from the ground that she saw him standing there, a shadow among the shadows. She uttered a low cry and made a movement as if to rush away, but he stepped quickly forward and caught her in his arms. Tightly and almost savagely he held her, pressing her lithe body against his own and caressing it with little, deep-voiced mutterings as if he were soothing a desperate child. She submitted passively to his endearments and then, with a sound that was something between a moan and a laugh, she whispered brokenly into his ear, “Let me go, Brand, I was silly to come out. I couldn’t help it. I won’t do it again. I won’t, I swear.”
“No, I think you won’t!” the man muttered, keepinghis arm securely round her waist and striding swiftly towards the house. “No, I think you won’t!”
He paused when they reached the entrance into the garden and, taking her by the wrists, pressed her fiercely against one of the stone pillars upon which the gate hung.
“I know what it is,” he whispered. “You can’t deceive me. You’ve been with those people from London. You’ve been with that friend of Baltazar’s. That’s the cause of all this, isn’t it? You’ve been with that damned fool—that idiotic, good-for-nothing down at the village. Haven’t you been with him? Haven’t you?”
The arms with which he pressed her hands against her breast trembled with anger as he said these words.
“Baltazar told me,” he went on, “only this morning—down at Mundham—everything about these people. They’re of no interest, none, not the least. They’re just like every one else. That fellow’s half-foreign, that’s all. An American half-breed, of some mongrel sort or other, that’s all there is to be said of him! So if you’ve been letting any mad fancies get into your head about Mr. Sorio, the sooner you get rid of them the better. He’s not for you. Do you hear? He’s—not—for—you!” These last words were accompanied by so savage a tightening of the hands that held her that the girl was compelled to bite her lip to stop herself from crying.
“You hurt me,” she said calmly. “Let me go, Brand.” The self-contained tone of her voice seemed to quiet him and he released her. She raised one of her wrists to her mouth and softly caressed it with her lips.
“You’ll be interested, yourself, in these people before very long,” she murmured, flashing a mocking lookat him over her bare arm. “The second girl is very young and very pretty. She confided in me that she was extremely afraid of the sea. She appealed to mother’s protective instincts at once. I’ve no doubt she’ll appeal to your—protective instincts! So don’t be too quick in your condemnation.”
“Damn you!” muttered her brother, pushing the gate open. “Come! Get in with you! You talk to me as if I were a professional rake. I take no interest—not the slightest—in your young innocents with their engaging terrors. To bed! To bed! To bed!”
He pushed her before him along the path, but Philippa knew well that the hand on her shoulder was lighter and less angry than the one that had held her a moment ago, and as she ascended the steps of Oakguard—the name borne by the Renshaw house since the days of the Conqueror—there flickered over her shadowy face the same equivocal smile of dubious meaning that had looked out at its owner, not so long since, from the mirror in her room.
When the dawn finally crept up, pallid and cold out of the North Sea and lifted, with a sort of mechanical weariness, the weight of the shadows, it was neither Brand nor Philippa who was awake.
Roused, as always, by the slightest approach of an unusual sound, the mother of that strange pair had lain in her bed listening ever since her daughter’s first emerging from the house.
Once she had risen, and had stood for a moment at the window, her loose grey hair mixed with the folds of an old, faded, dusky-coloured shawl. That, however, was when both of her children were away in the middle of the park and absolute silence prevailed. With thissingle exception she had remained listening, always silently listening, lying on her back and with an expression of tragic and harassed expectation in her great, hollow, brown eyes. She might have been taken, lying there alone in the big four-posted bed, surrounded by an immense litter of stored-up curios and mementoes, for a symbolic image of all that is condemned, as this mortal world goes round, to watch and wait and invoke the gods and cling fast to such pathetic relics and memorials as time consents to leave of the days that it has annihilated.
Slowly the dawn came up upon the trees and roofs of Oakguard. With a wan grey light it filled the pallid squares of the windows. With a livid grey light it made definite and ghastly every hollow and every wrinkle in that patient watcher’s face.
Travelling far up in the sky, a long line of marsh-fowl with outstretched necks sought the remoter solitudes of the fens. In the river marshes the sedge-birds uttered their harsh twitterings while, gathered in flocks above the sand-dunes, the sea-gulls screamed to the inflowing tide their hunger for its drifted refuse.
Wearily, at last, Helen Renshaw closed her eyes and it was the first streak of sunshine that Rodmoor had known for many days which, several hours later, kissed her white forehead—and the grey hairs that lay disordered across it—softly, gently, tenderly, as it might have kissed the forehead of the dead.
Adrian Sorio sat opposite his friend over a warm brightly burning fire.
Baltazar Stork was a slight frail man of so delicate and dainty an appearance that many people were betrayed into behaving towards him as gently and considerately as if he had been a girl. This, though a compliment to his fragility, was bad policy in those who practised it, for Baltazar was an egoist of inflexible temper and under his velvet glove carried a hand of steel.
The room in which the two friends conversed was furnished in exquisite and characteristic taste. Old prints, few in number and rare in quality, adorned its walls. Precious pieces of china, invaluable statuettes in pottery and metal, stood charmingly arranged, with due space round each, in every corner. On either side of the mantelpiece was a Meissen-ware figure of engaging aspect and Watteau-like design, while in the centre, in the place where a clock is usually to be found, was a piece of statuary of ravishing delicacy and grace representing the escape of Syrinx from the hands of Pan.
The most remarkable picture in the room, attracting the attention at once of all who entered, was a dark, richly coloured, oval-shaped portrait—a portrait of a young man in a Venetian cloak, with a broad, smooth forehead, heavy-lidded penetrating eyes, and poutingdisdainful mouth. This picture, said to have been painted under the influence of Giorgione by that incomparable artist’s best loved friend, passed for a portrait of Eugenio Flambard, the favourite secretary of the Republic’s most famous ambassador during his residence at the Papal Court.
The majority of these treasures had been picked up by Baltazar during certain prolonged holidays in various parts of the Continent. This, however, was several years ago before the collapse of the investment, or whatever it was, which he inherited from Herman Renshaw.
Since that time he had been more or less dependent upon Brand, a dependence which nothing but his happy relations with Brand’s mother and sister and his unfailing urbanity could have made tolerable.
“Adrian, you old villain, why didn’t you tell me you’d seen Philippa. Brand informed me yesterday that you’ve seen her twice. This isn’t the kind of thing that pleases me at all. I don’t approve of these clandestine meetings. Do you hear me, you old reprobate? You don’t think it’s very nice, do you, for me to learn by accident—by a sort of wretched accident—of an event like this? If youmustbe at these little games you might at least be open about them. Besides, I have a brotherly interest in Philippa. I don’t want to have her innocence corrupted by an old satyr like you.”
Sorio contented himself by murmuring the word “Rats.”
“It’s all very well for you to cry ‘Rats!’ in that tone,” went on the other. “The truth is, this affair is going to become serious. You don’t suppose for a moment, do you, that your Nance is going to lie down, asthey say, and let my extraordinary sister walk over her?”
Adrian got up from his seat and began pacing up and down the little room.
“It’s absurd,” he muttered, “it’s all absurd. I feel as if the whole thing were a kind of devilish dream. Yes, the whole thing! It’s all because I’ve got nothing to do but walk up and down these damned sands!”
Baltazar watched him with a serene smile, his soft chin supported by his feminine fingers and his fair, curly head tilted a little on one side.
“But you know, mon enfant,” he threw in with a teasing caress in his voice, “you know very well you’re the last person to talk of work. It was work that did for you in America. You don’t want to startthatover again, do you?”
Adrian stood still and glared at him.
“Do you think I’m going to letthat—as you call it—finish me forever? My life’s only begun. In London it was different. By God! I wish I’d stayed in London! Nance feels just the same. I know she does. She’ll have to get something, too, or we shall both go mad. It’s this cursed sea of yours! I’ve a good mind to marry her, out of hand, and clear off. We’d find something—somewhere—anywhere—to keep body and soul together.”
“Why did you come to us at all, my dear, if you find us so dreadful?” laughed Baltazar, bending down to tie his shoe-string and pull up more tightly one of his silk socks.
Adrian made no answer but continued his ferocious pacing of the room.
“You’ll knock something over if you’re not careful,” protested his friend, shrugging his shoulders. “You’re the most troublesome fellow. You accept a person’s offer and make no end of a fuss over it, and then a couple of weeks later you roar like a bull and send us all to the devil. What’s the matter with us? What’s the matter with the place? Why can’t you and your precious Nance behave like ordinary people and make love to one another and be happy? She’s got all her time to herself and you’ve got all your time to yourself. Why can’t you enjoy yourselves and collect seaweed or starfish or something?”
Adrian paused in his savage prowl for the second time.
“It’s your confounded sea that’s at the bottom of it,” he shouted. “It gets on her nerves and it gets on mine. Little Linda was perfectly right to be scared of it.”
“I fancied,” drawled the other, selecting a cigarette from an enamelled box and turning up the lamp, “you found little Linda’s fears rather engaging than otherwise.”
“It works upon us,” Sorio went on, heedless of the interruption, “it works upon us in some damnable kind of way! Nance says she hears it in her sleep. I’m sureIdo. I hear it without a moment’s cessation. Listen to the thing now—shish, shish, shish, shish!Why can’t it make some other noise? Why can’t it stop altogether? It makes me long for the whole damned farce to end. It annoys me, Tassar, it annoys me!”
“Sorry you find the elements so trying, Adriano,” replied the other languidly, “but I really don’t know what I can do to help you—I can only advise you tokeep out of Philippa’s way. She’s an element more troublesome than any of them.”
“Tassar!” shouted the enraged man in a burst of fury, “if you don’t stop dragging Philippa in, I’ll murder you! What’s Philippa to me? Ihateher—do you hear? I hate the very sound of her name!”
“Her name?” murmured Stork, meditatively, “her name? Oh, I think you’re quite wrong to hate that. Her name suggests all sorts of interesting things. Her name has quite a historic sound. It’s mediæval in colour and Greek in form. It makes me think of Euripides.”
“This whole damned Rodmoor of yours,” moaned Adrian, “gets too much for me. Where on earth else, could a man find it so hard to collect his thoughts and look at things as they are? There’s something here which works upon the mind, Tassar, something which works upon the mind.”
“What’s working onyourmind, my friend,” laughed Baltazar Stork, “is not anything so vague as dreams or anything so simple as the sea. It’s just the quite definite but somewhat complicated business of managing two love affairs at the same time! I’m sorry for you, little Adrian, I’m extremely sorry for you. It’s a situation not unknown in the history of the world, in fact, it might be called quite common. But I’m afraid that doesn’t make it any pleasanter for you. However, it can be dealt with, with a little skill, Adrian, with just a little skill!”
The man accused in this teasing manner turned furiously round, an angry outburst of blind protest trembling on his tongue. At that moment there was a low knock at the outer door. Baltazar jumped to his feet.“That must be Raughty,” he cried. “I begged him to come round to-night. I so longed for you to meet him.” He hastened out and admitted the visitor with a cordial welcome. After a momentary pause and a good deal of shuffling—for Dr. Raughty was careful to wear not only an overcoat but also goloshes and even gaiters when the weather was inclement—the two men entered the room and Stork began an elaborate introduction.
“Dr. Fingal Raughty,” he said, “Mr. Adrian—” but to his astonishment Sorio intervened, “The Doctor and I have already become quite well acquainted,” he remarked, shaking the visitor vigorously by the hand. “I’m afraid I wasn’t as polite as I ought to have been on that occasion,” he went on, speaking in an unnaturally loud voice and with a forced laugh, “but the Doctor will forgive me. The Doctor I’m sure will make allowances.”
Dr. Raughty gave him a quick glance, at once friendly and ironical, and then he turned to Stork. “Mother Lorman’s dead,” he remarked with a little sigh, “dead at last. She was ninety-seven and had thirty grandchildren. She gurgled in her throat at the last with a noise like a nightingale when its voice breaks in June. I prefer deaths of this kind to any other, but they’re all pitiful.”
“Nance tells me you were present at old Doorm’s death, Doctor,” said Adrian while their host moved off to the kitchen to secure glasses and refreshment.
The Doctor nodded. “I measured that fellow’s skull,” he remarked gravely. “It was asymmetrical and very curiously so. The interesting thing is that there exists in this part of the coast a definite traditionof malformed skulls. They recur in nearly all the old families. Brand Renshaw is a splendid example.Hisskull ought to be given to a museum. It is beautiful, quite beautiful, in the anterior lobes.”
Baltazar returned carrying a tray. The eyes of Dr. Raughty gleamed with a mellow warmth. “Nutmeg,” he remarked, approaching the tray and touching every object upon it lightly and reverently. “Nutmeg, lemon, hot water, gin—andbrandy! It’s an admirable choice and profoundly adapted to the occasion. May I put the hot water on the hob until we’re ready for it?”
While Baltazar once more withdrew from the scene, Dr. Raughty remarked, gravely and irritably, to Sorio that it was a mistake to substitute brandy for rum. “He does it because he can’t get the best rum, but it’s a ridiculous thing to do.Anyrum is better than no rum when it’s a question of punch-making. Are you with me in this, Mr. Sorio?”
Adrian expressed such complete and emphatic agreement that for the moment the Doctor seemed almost embarrassed.
On Baltazar’s return to the room, however, he hazarded another suggestion. “What about having the kettle itself brought in here?”
Stork looked at him without speaking and placed on the table a small plate of macaroons. The Doctor glanced whimsically at Sorio and, helping himself from the little plate, muttered in a low voice after he had nibbled the edge of a biscuit, “Yes, these seem perfectly up to par to-day.”
The three men had scarcely settled themselves downin their respective chairs around the fire than Adrian began speaking hurriedly and nervously.
“I have an extraordinary feeling,” he said, “that this evening is full of fatal significance. I suppose it’s nothing to either of you, but it seems to me as though this damnedshish, shish, shish, shishof the sea were nearer and louder than usual. Doctor, you don’t mind my talking freely to you? I like you, though I was rude to you the other day—but that’s nothing—” he waved his hand, “that’s what any fool might fall into who didn’t know you. I feel I know you now. That word about the rum—forgive me, Tassar!—and the kettle—yes, particularly about the kettle—hit me to the heart. I love you, Doctor Raughty. I announce to you that my feeling at this moment amounts to love—yes, actually to love!
“But that’s not what I wanted to say.” He thrust his hands deep into his pockets, stretched his legs straight out, let his chin sink upon his chest and glared at them with sombre excitement. “I feel to-night,” he went on, “as though some great event were portending. No, no! What am I saying? Not an event. Event isn’t the word. Event’s a silly expression, isn’t it, Doctor,—isn’t it—dear, noble-looking man? For you do look noble, you know, Doctor, as you drink that punch—though to say the truth your nose isn’t quite straight as I see it from here, and there are funny blotches on your face. No, not there.There!Don’t you see them, Tassar? Blotches—curious purply blotches.”
While this outburst proceeded Mr. Stork fidgeted uneasily in his chair. Though sufficiently accustomed toSorio’s eccentricities and well aware of his medical friend’s profound pathological interest in all rare types, there was something so outrageous about this particular tirade that it offended what was a very dominant instinct in him, his sense, namely, of social decency and good breeding. Possibly in a measure because of the “bar sinister” over his own origin, but much more because of the nicety of his æsthetic taste, anything approaching a social fiasco orfaux pasalways annoyed him excessively. Fortunately, however, on this occasion nothing could have surpassed the sweetness with which Adrian’s wild phrases were received by the person addressed.
“One would think you’d drunk half the punch already, Sorio,” Baltazar murmured at last. “What’s come over you to-night? I don’t think I’ve ever known you quite like this.”
“Remind me to tell you something, Mr. Sorio, when you’ve finished what you have to say,” remarked Dr. Raughty.
“Listen, you two!” Adrian began again, sitting erect, his hands on the arms of his chair. “There’s a reason for this feeling of mine that there’s something fatal on the wind to-night. There’s a reason for it.”
“Tell us as near as you can,” said Dr. Raughty, “what exactly it is that you’re talking about.”
Adrian fixed upon him a gloomy, puzzled frown.
“Do you suppose,” he said slowly, “that it’s for nothing that we three are together here in hearing of that—”
Baltazar interrupted him. “Don’t say ‘shish, shish, shish’ again, my dear. Your particular way of imitating the Great Deep gives me no pleasure.”
“What I meant was,” Sorio raised his voice, “it’s a strange thing that we three should be sitting together now like this when two months ago I was in prison in New York.”
Baltazar made a little deprecatory gesture, while the Doctor leaned forward with grave interest.
“But that’s nothing,” Sorio went on, “that’s a trifle. Baltazar knows all about that. The thing I want you two to recognise is that something’s on the wind,—that something’s on the point of happening. Do you feel like that—or don’t you?”
There was a long and rather oppressive silence, broken only by the continuous murmur which in every house in Rodmoor was the background of all conversation.
“What I was going to say a moment ago,” remarked the Doctor at last, “was that in this place it’s necessary to protect oneself fromthat.” He jerked his thumb towards the window. “Our friend Tassar does it by the help of Flambard over there.” He indicated the Venetian. “I do it by the help of my medicine-chest. Hamish Traherne does it by saying his prayers. What I should like to know is howyou,” he stretched a warning finger in the direction of Sorio, “propose to do it.”
Baltazar at this point jumped up from his seat.
“Oh, shut up, Fingal,” he cried peevishly. “You’ll make Adrian unendurable. I’m perfectly sick of hearing references to this absurd salt-water. Other people have to live in coast towns besides ourselves. Why can’t you let the thing take its proper position? Why can’t you take it for granted? The whole subject gets on my nerves. It bores me, I tell you, it bores me to tears.For Heaven’s sake, let’s talk of something else—of any damned thing. You both make me thoroughly wretched with your sea whispers. It’s as bad as having to spend an evening at Oakguard alone with Aunt Helen and Philippa.”
His peevishness had an instantaneous effect upon Sorio who pushed him affectionately back into his chair and handed him his glass. “So sorry, Tassar,” he said. “I won’t do it again. Iwasbeginning to feel a little odd to-night. One can’t go through the experience of cerebral dementia—doesn’t that sound right, Doctor?—without some little trifling after-effects. Come, let’s be sensible and talk of things that are really important. It’s not an occasion to be missed, is it, Tassar, having the Doctor here and punch made with brandy instead of rum, on the table? What interests me so much just now,” he placed himself in front of the fireplace and sighed heavily, “is what a person’s to do who hasn’t got a penny and is unfit for every sort of occupation. What do you advise, Doctor? And by the way, why have you eaten up all the macaroons while I was talking?”
This remark really did seem a little to embarrass the person indicated, but Sorio continued without waiting for a reply.
“Yes, I suppose you’re right, Tassar. It’s a mistake to be sensitive to the attraction of young girls. But it’s difficult—isn’t it, Doctor?—not to be. They’re so maddeningly delicious, aren’t they, when you come to think of it? It’s something about the way their heads turn—the line from the throat, you know—and about the way they speak—something pathetic, something—what shall I call it?—helpless. It quite disarms a person. It’s more than pathetic, it’s tragic.”
The Doctor looked at him meditatively. “I think there’s a poem of Goethe’s which would bear that out,” he remarked, “if I’m not mistaken it was written after he visited Sicily—yes, after that storm at sea, you remember, when the story of Christ’s walking on the waves came into his mind.”
Sorio wrinkled up his eyes and peered at the speaker with a sort of humorous malignity.
“Doctor,” he said, “pardon my telling you, but you’ve still got some crumbs on your moustache.”
“The one word,” put in their host, while Dr. Raughty moved very hastily away from the table and surveyed himself with a whimsical puckering of all the lines in his face, at one of Stork’s numerous mirrors, “the one word that I shall henceforth refuse to have pronounced in my house is the word ‘sea.’ I’m surprised to hear that Goethe—a man of classical taste—ever refers to such Gothic abominations.”
“Ah!” cried Sorio, “the great Goethe! The sly old curmudgeon Goethe! He knew how to deal with these little velvet paws!”
Dr. Raughty, reseating himself, drummed absent-mindedly with his fingers upon the empty macaroon plate. Then with a soft and pensive sigh he produced his tobacco pouch, and filling his pipe, struck a match.
“Doctor,” murmured Sorio, his rebellious lips curved into a sardonic smile and his eyes screwed up till they looked as sinister as those of his namesake, Hadrian, “why do you move your head backwards and forwards like that, when you light your pipe?”
“Don’t answer him, Fingal,” expostulated Baltazar,“he’s behaving badly now. He’s ‘showing off’ as they say of children.”
“I’m not showing off,” cried Sorio loudly, “I’m asking the Doctor a perfectly polite question. It’s very interesting the way he lights his pipe. There’s more in it than appears. There’s a great deal in it. It’s a secret of the Doctor’s; probably a pantheistic one.”
“What on earth do you mean by a ‘pantheistic’ one? How, under Heaven, can the way Fingal holds a match be termed ‘pantheistic’?” protested Stork irritably. “You’re really going a little too far, Adriano mio.”
“Not at all, not at all,” argued Sorio, stretching out his long, lean arms and grasping the back of a chair. “The Doctor can deny it or not, as he pleases, but what I say is perfectly true. He gets a cosmic ecstasy from moving his head up and down like that. He feels as if he were the centre of the universe when he does it.”
The Doctor looked sideways and then upon the ground. Sorio’s rudeness evidently disconcerted him.
“I think,” he said, rising from his chair and putting down his glass, “I must be going now. I’ve an early call to make to-morrow morning.”
Baltazar cast a reproachful look at Adrian and rose too. They went into the hall together and the same shufflings and heavy breathings came to the ears of the listener as on Raughty’s arrival. The Doctor was putting on his goloshes and gaiters.
Adrian went out to see him off and, as if to make up for his bad behaviour, walked with him across the green, to his house in the main street. They parted at last,the best of good friends, but Sorio found Baltazar seriously provoked when he returned.
“Why did you treat him like that?” the latter persisted. “You’ve got no grudge against him, have you? It was just your silly fashion of getting even with things in general, eh? Your nice little habit of venting your bad temper on the most harmless person within reach?”
Sorio stared blankly at his friend. It was unusual for Mr. Stork to express himself so strongly.
“I’m sorry, my dear, very sorry,” muttered the accused man, looking remorsefully at the Doctor’s empty glass and plate.
“You may well be,” rejoined the other. “The one thing I can’t stand is this sort of social lapse. It’s unpardonable—unpardonable! Besides, it’s childish. Hit out by all means when there’s reason for it or you’re dealing with some scurvy dog who needs suppressing but to make a sensitive person like Fingal uncomfortable, out of a pure spirit of bullying—it’s damnable!”
“I’m sorry, Tassar,” repeated the other meekly. “I can’t think why I did it. He’s certainly a charming person. I’ll make up to him, my dear. I’ll be gentle as a lamb when I see him next.”
Baltazar smiled and made a humorous and hopeless gesture with his hands. “We shall see,” he said, “we shall see.”
He locked the door and lit a couple of candles with ritualistic deliberation. “Turn out the lamp, amico mio, and let us sleep on all this. The best way of choosing between two loves is to say one’s prayers and go to bed. These things decide themselves in dreams.”
“In dreams,” repeated the other, submissively following him upstairs, “in dreams. But I wish I knew why the Doctor’s ankles look so thick when he sits down. He must wear extraordinary under-clothes.”
Philippa Renshaw’s light-spoken words about Linda recurred more than once to the mind of the master of Oakguard as April gave place to May and May itself began to slip by. The wet fields and stunted woods of Rodmoor seemed at that time to be making a conscious and almost human effort to throw off the repressive influence of the sea and to respond to the kindlier weather. The grasses began to grow high and feathery by the road-side, and in the water-meadows, buttercups superseded marigolds.
As he went to and fro between his house and his office in Mundham, Brand—though he made as yet no attempt to see her—became more and more preoccupied with theideaof the young girl. That terror of the sea in the little unknown touched, as his sister well knew it would, something strangely deep-rooted in his nature. His ancestors had lived so long in this place that there had come to exist between the man’s inmost being and the voracious tides which year by year devoured the land he owned, an obstinate reciprocity of mood and feeling. That a young and fragile intruder should have this morbid fear of the very element which half-consciously he assimilated to himself, gave him a subtle and sullen exultation. The thing promised to become a sort of perverted link between them, andhe pleased himself by fancying, even while, in fear of disillusionment, he kept putting off their encounter, that the girl herself could not be quite free of some sort of premonition of what awaited her.
Thus it happened that Philippa Renshaw’s stroke in her own defence worked precisely as she had anticipated. Brooding, in his slow tenacious way, as the weeks went by, upon this singular projection of his imagination, he let his sister do what she chose, feeling assured that in her pride of race, she would not seriously commit herself with a nameless foreigner, and promising himself to end the business with a drastic hand as soon as it suited him to do so.
It was about the middle of May when an event took place which gave the affair a decisive and fatal impulse. This was a chance encounter, upon the bridge crossing the Loon, between Brand and Rachel Doorm. He would have passed her even then without recognition, but she stopped him and held out her hand.
“Don’t you remember me, Mr. Renshaw?” she said.
He removed his hat, displaying his closely cropped reddish head with its abnormal upward slope, and regarded her smilingly.
“You’ve changed, Miss Rachel,” he remarked, “but your voice is the same. They told me you were here. I knew we should meet sooner or later.”
“Put on your hat, Mr. Renshaw,” she said, seating herself on a little stone bench below the parapet and making room for him at her side. “I knew, too, that we should meet. It’s a long time from those days—isn’t it?—a long time, and a dark one for some of us. Do you remember when you were a child, how you asked me once why they called this place the NewBridge, when it’s obviously so very old? Do you remember that, Mr. Renshaw?”
He looked at her curiously, screwing up his eyes and wrinkling his forehead. “My mother told me you’d come back,” he muttered. “She was always fond of you. She used to hope—well, you know what I mean.”
“That I’d marry Captain Herrick?” Miss Doorm threw in. “Don’t be afraid to say it. The dead can’t hear us and except the dead, there’s none who cares. Yes, she hoped that, and schemed for it, too, dear soul. But it was not to be, Mr. Renshaw. Ellie Story was prettier. Ellie Story was cleverer. And so it happened. The bitter thing was that he swore an oath to Mary before she died, swore it on the head of my darling Nance, that if he did ever marry again, I should be the one. Mary died thinking that certain. Anything else would have hurt her to the heart. I know that well enough; for she and I, Mr. Renshaw, as your mother could tell you, were more than sisters.”
“I thought you and Linda’s mother were friends, too,” observed Brand, looking with a certain dreamy absorption up the straight white road that led to the Doorm house. The mental fantasies the man had woven round the name he now uttered for the first time in his life had so vivid a meaning for him that he let pass unnoticed the spasm of vindictiveness that convulsed his companion’s face.
Rachel Doorm folded her arms across her lean bosom and flung back her head.
“Ellie wasafraidof me, Mr. Renshaw,” she pronounced huskily, and then, looking at him sharply: “Yes,” she said, “Mrs. Herrick and I were excellent friends, and so are Linda and I. She’s a soft, nervous,impressionable little thing—our dear Linda—and very pretty, too, in her own way—don’t you think so, Mr. Renshaw?”
It was the man’s turn now to suffer a change of countenance. “Pretty?” he laughed. “I’m sure I don’t know. I’ve never seen her!”
Rachel clasped her hands tightly on the lap of her black dress and fixed her eyes upon him. “You’d like to see her, wouldn’t you?” she murmured eagerly. He answered her look, and a long, indescribable passage of unspoken thoughts flickered, wavered and took shape between them.
“I’ve seen Nance—in the distance—with my mother,” he remarked, letting his glance wander to the opposite parapet and away beyond it where the swallows were skimming, “but I’ve never yet spoken to either of the girls. I keep to myself a good deal, as every one about here knows, Miss Rachel.”
Rachel Doorm rose abruptly to her feet with such unexpected suddenness that the man started as if from a blow.
“Your sister,” she jerked out with concentrated vehemence, “is doing my Nance a deadly injury. She’s given her heart—sweet darling—absolutely and without stint to that foreigner down there.” She waved her hand towards the village. “And if Miss Renshaw doesn’t let him go, there’ll be a tragedy.”
Brand looked at her searchingly, his lips trembling with a smile of complicated significance.
“Do make her let him go!” the woman repeated, advancing as if she were ready to clasp his hand; “you can if you like. You always could. If she takes him away, my darling’s heart will be broken. Mr.Renshaw—please—for the sake of old days, for the sake of old friends, do this for me, and make her give him up!”
He drew back a little, the same subtle and ambiguous smile on his lips. “No promises, Miss Rachel,” he said, “no promises! I never promise any one anything. But we shall see; we shall see. There’s plenty of time. I’m keeping my eye on Philippa; you may be sure of that.”
He held out his hand as he spoke to the agitated woman. She took it in both of her own and quick as a flash raised it to her lips.
“I knew I should meet you, Mr. Renshaw,” she said, turning away from him, “and you see it has happened! I won’t ask why you didn’t come to me before. I haven’t askedthatyet—have I?—and I won’t ever ask it. We’ve met at last; that’s the great thing. That’s the only thing. Now we’ll see what’ll come of it all.”
They separated, and Brand proceeded to cross the Bridge. He had hardly done so when he heard her voice calling upon him to stop. He turned impatiently.
“When you were a little boy, Mr. Renshaw,”—her words came in panting gasps—“you said once, down by the sea, that Rachel was the only person in the world who really loved you. Your mother heard you say it and looked—you know how she looks! You used always to call me ‘Cousin’ then. Far back, they say, the Renshaws and the Doormswerecousins. But you didn’t know that. It was just your childish fancy. ‘Cousin Rachel,’ you said once—just like that—‘come and take me away from them.’”
Brand acquiesced in all this with an air of strained politeness. But his face changed when he heard herfinal words. “Listen,” she said, “I’ve talked to Linda about you. She’s got the idea of you in her mind.”
At the very moment when this encounter at the New Bridge ended—which was about six in the afternoon—Nance Herrick was walking with a beating heart to a promised assignation with Sorio. This was to take place at the southern corner of a little withy-bed situated about half a mile from Dyke House in the direction of Mundham. It was Nance’s own wish that her lover—if he could still be called so—should meet her here rather than in the house. She had discovered the spot herself and had grown fond of it. Sheltered from the wind by the clump of low-growing willows, and cut off by the line of the banked-up tow-path from the melancholy horizon of fens, the girl had got into the habit of taking refuge here as if from the pursuit of vague inimical presences. In the immediate neighbourhood of the withy-bed were several corn fields, the beginning of a long strip of arable land which divided the river from the marshes as far as Mundham.
The particular spot where she hoped to find Sorio awaiting her was a low grassy bank overshadowed by alders as well as willows, and bordered by a field of well-grown barley, a field which, though still green, showed already to an experienced eye the kind of grain which a month or so of not too malicious weather would ripen and turn to gold. Already amid the blades of the young corn could be seen the stalks and leaves of newly grown poppies, and mingled with these, also at their early stage of growth, small, indistinguishable plants that would later show themselves as corn-flowers and succory.