After her talk with Mr. Traherne, Nance went straight to the village and visited the available lodging. She found the place quite reasonably adapted to her wishes and met with a genial, though a somewhat surprised reception from the woman of the house. It was arranged that the sisters should come to her that very evening, their more bulky possessions—and these were not, after all, very extensive—to follow them on the ensuing day, as suited the convenience of the local carrier. It remained for her to secure her sister’s agreement to this sudden change and to announce their departure to Rachel Doorm. The first of these undertakings proved easier than Nance had dared to hope.
During these morning hours Miss Doorm gave Linda hardly a moment of peace. She persecuted her with questions about the events of the preceding day and betrayed such malignant curiosity as to the progress of the love affair with Brand that she reduced the child to a condition bordering upon hysterical prostration. Linda finally took refuge in her own room under the excuse of changing her dress but even here she was not left alone. Lying on her bed, with loosened hair and wide-open, troubled eyes fixed upon the ceiling, she heard Rachel moving uneasily from room to room below like a revengeful ghost disappointed of its prey.The young girl put her fingers in her ears to keep this sound away. As she did so, her glance wandered to the window through which she could discern heavy dark clouds racing across the sky, pursued by a pitiless wind. She watched these clouds from where she lay and her agitated mind increased the strangeness of their ominous storm-blown shapes. Unable at last to endure the sight of them any longer she leapt to her feet and, with her long bare arms, pulled down the blind. To any one seeing her from outside as she did this she must have appeared like a hunted creature trying to shut out the world. Flinging herself upon her bed again she pressed her fingers once more into her ears. In crossing the room she had heard the heavy steps of her enemy ascending the staircase. Conscious of the vibration of these steps, even while she obliterated the sound they made, the young girl sat up and stared at the door. She could see it shake as the woman, trying the handle, found it locked against her.
Nothing is harder than to keep human ears closed by force when the faculty of human attention is strained to the uttermost. It was not long before she dropped her hands and then in a moment her whole soul concentrated itself upon listening. She heard Miss Doorm move away and walk heavily to the end of the passage. Then there was a long pause of deadly silence and then, tramp—tramp—tramp, she was back again.
“I won’t unlock the door! I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!” muttered the girl, and as if to make certain that her body obeyed her will she stretched herself out stiffly and clutched the iron bars above her head. She lay like this for some minutes, her lips parted, her eyeswildly alert and her breast rising and falling under her bodice.
Once more the door shook and she heard her name pronounced in a low clear-toned voice.
“Linda! Linda!” the voice repeated. “Linda! I must talk to you!”
Unable to endure the tension any longer and finding the dimness of the room more trying than the view of the sky, the girl ran to the window and pulled up the blind as hastily as she had pulled it down. She gazed out, pressing her face against the pane. The clouds, darker and more threatening than ever, followed one another across the heavens like a huge herd of monstrous beasts driven by invisible herdsmen. The Loon swirled and eddied between its banks, its waters a pale brownish colour and here and there, floating on its surface, pieces of seaweed drifted. The vast horizon of fens, stretching away towards Mundham, looked almost black under the sky and the tall pines of Oakguard seemed to bow their heads as if at the approach of some unknown menace.
The door continued to be shaken and the voice of Rachel Doorm never ceased its appeal. Linda went back to her bed and sat down upon it, propping her chin on her hands. There is something about the darkening of a house by day, under the weight of a threatened storm, that has more of what is ominous and evil in it than anything that can occur at night. The “demon that walketh by noonday” draws close to us at these times.
“Linda! Linda! Let me in! I want to speak to you,” pleaded the woman. The girl rose to her feet and, rushing to the door, unlocked it quickly. Returningto her bed she threw herself down on her face and remained motionless. Rachel Doorm entered and, seating herself close to Linda’s side, laid her hand upon the girl’s shoulder.
“Why haven’t you got on your frock?” she murmured. “Your arms must be cold as ice. Yes, so they are! Let me help you to dress as I used to in the old days.”
Linda drew herself away from her touch and with a convulsive jerk of her body turned over towards the wall.
“It’s a pity you didn’t think over everything,” Miss Doorm went on, “before you began this game with Mr. Renshaw. It’s begun to hurt you now, hasn’t it? Then why don’t you stop? Tell me that, Linda Herrick. Why don’t you stop and refuse to see him any more? What? You won’t answer me? I’ll answer for you then. You don’t stop now, you don’t draw back now, because you can’t! He’s got hold of you. You feel him even now—don’t you—tugging at your heart? Yes, you’re caught, my pretty bird, you’re caught. No more tossing up of your little chin and throwing back your head! No more teasing this one and that with your dainty ways—while you whistle them all down the wind. It’s you—you—that has to come now when some one else calls, and come quickly, too, wherever you may have run! How do you know he doesn’t want you now? How do you know he’s not waiting for you now over there by the pines? Take care, my girl! Mr. Renshaw isn’t a man you can play with, as you played with those boys in London. It’ll be you who’ll do the whining and crying this time. The day’s near when you’ll be on your knees to him beggingand begging for what you’ll never get! Did you think that a chit of a child like you, just because you’ve got soft hair and white skin, could keep and hold a man like that?
“Don’t say afterwards that Rachel Doorm hadn’t warned you. I say to you now, give him up, let him go, hide yourself away from him! I say that—but I know very well you won’t do what I say. And you won’t do it because you can’t do it, because he’s got your little heart and your little body and your little soul in the palm of his hand! I can tell you what that means. I know why you press your hands against your breast and turn to the wall. I’ve done that in my time and turned and tossed, long nights, and got no comfort. And you’ll turn and toss, too, and call and call to the darkness and get no answer—just as I got none. Why don’t you leave him now, Linda, before it’s too late? Shall I tell you why you don’t? Because it’s too late already! Because he’s got you for good and all—got you forever and a day—just as some one, no matter who, got Rachel once upon a time!”
Her voice was interrupted by a sudden splashing of rain against the window and the loud moaning gust of a tremendous wind making all the casements of the house rattle.
“Where’s Nance?” cried the young girl, starting up and leaping from the bed. “I want Nance! I want to tell her something!”
At that moment there were voices below and the sound of a vehicle driven to the rear of the house. Miss Doorm left the room and ran down the stairs. Linda flung on the first dress that offered itself and going to the mirror began hastily tying up her hair. She hadhardly finished when her sister entered. Nance stood on the threshold for a moment hesitating, and looking anxiously at the other. It was Linda who made the first movement.
“Take me away from here,” she gasped, flinging herself into her sister’s arms and embracing her passionately, “take me away from here!”
Nance returned the embrace with ardour but her thoughts whirled a mad dance through her brain. She had a momentary temptation to reveal at once her new plan and let her sister’s cry have no other answer. But her nobler instinct conquered.
“At once, at once! My darling,” she murmured. “Yes, oh, yes, let’s go at once! I’ve got some money and Mr. Traherne will send me some more. We’ll take the three o’clock train and be safe back in London before night. Oh, my darling, my darling! I’m so glad! We’ll begin a new life together—a new life.”
At the mention of the word “London” Linda’s arms relaxed their hold and her whole body stiffened.
“No,” she gasped, pushing her sister away and pressing her hand to her side, “no, Nance dear, I can’t do it. It would kill me. I should run away from you and come back here if I had to walk the whole way. I won’t see him. I won’t! I won’t! I won’t talk to him—I won’t let him love me—but I can’t go away from here. I can’t go back to London. I should get ill and die. I should want him so much that I should die. No, no, Nance darling, if you dragged me by force to London I should come back the next day somehow or another. I know I should—I feel ithere—as she said.”
She kept her hand still pressed against her side andgazed into Nance’s face with a look of helpless pleading.
“We can find somewhere to live, you and I, without going far away, somewhere where we shan’t seeherany more—can’t we, Nance?”
It was then, and with a clear conscience now, that the elder girl, speaking hurriedly and softly, communicated the preparations she had made and the fact that they were free to leave Dyke House at any moment they chose.
“I’ve asked the man to put up the horse here for the afternoon,” she said, “so that we shall have time to collect the things we want. They’ll send for our trunks to-morrow.”
Linda’s relief at hearing this news was pathetic to see.
“Oh, you darling—you darling!” she cried, “I might have known you’d save me. I might have known it! Oh, Nance dear, it was horrid of me to say those things to you yesterday. I’ll be good now and do whatever you tell me. As long as I’m not far away fromhim—not too far—I won’t see him, or speak to him, or write to him! How sweet of Mr. Traherne to let me play the organ! And he’ll pay me, too, you say? So that I shall be helping you and not only be a burden? Oh, my dear, what happiness, what happiness!”
Nance left her and descended to the kitchen to help Miss Doorm prepare their midday meal. The two women, as they busied themselves at their task, avoided any reference to the issue between them, and Nance wondered if the man from the Admiral’s Head, who now sat watching their preparations and speculating whether they intended to give him beer as well as meat,had intimated to Rachel the object of his delayed departure. When the meal was ready, Linda was summoned to share it and the thirsty ostler, sipping lemonade with a wry countenance, at a side table, was given the privilege of hearing how three feminine persons, their heads full of agitation and antipathy, could talk and laugh and eat as if everything in the wide world was smooth, safe, harmless and uninteresting.
When the meal was over Nance and Linda once more retired to their room and busied themselves with selecting from their modest possessions such articles as they considered it advisable to take with them. The rest they carefully packed away in their two leather trunks—trunks which bore the initials “N. H.” and “L. H.” and still had glued to their sides railway labels with the word “Swanage” upon them, reminiscent of their last seaside excursion with their father.
The afternoon slipped rapidly away and still the threatened storm hung suspended, the rain coming and going in fitful gusts of wind and the clouds racing along the sky. By six o’clock it became so dark that Nance was compelled to light candles. Their packing had been interrupted by eager low-voiced consultation as to how they would arrange their days when these were, for the first time in their lives, completely at their own disposal. No further reference had been made between them, either to Adrian or to Mr. Renshaw. The candles, flickering in the gusty wind, threw intermittent spots of light upon the girls’ figures as they stooped over their work or bent forward, on their knees, whispering and laughing. Not since either of them had arrived in Rodmoor had they been quite so happy. The relief at escaping from Dyke House lifted the atmosphereabout them so materially that while they spoke of their lodging in the High Street and of the virtues of Mrs. Raps, Nance began to feel that Adrian would, after all, soon grow weary of Philippa and Linda began to dream that, in spite of all appearances, Brand’s attitude towards her was worthy of a man of honour.
At six o’clock they were ready and Nance went down to announce their departure to Rachel Doorm. She found their driver asleep by the kitchen fire and, having roused him and told him to put his horse into the trap, she went out to look for her mother’s friend.
She found Rachel standing on the tow path gazing gloomily at the river. She was bareheaded and the wind, wailing round her, fluttered a wisp of her grey hair against her forehead. Beneath this her sunken eyes seemed devoid of all light. She turned when she heard Nance’s step, her heavy skirt flapping in the wind as she did so, like a funereal flag.
“I see,” she said, pointing at the light in the sisters’ room where the figure of Linda could be observed passing and repassing, “I see you’re taking her away. I suppose it’s because of Mr. Renshaw. May I ask—if it’s of any interest to you that I should care at all—what you’re going to do with her? She’s been—she and her mother—the curse ofmylife, and I fancy she’s now going to be the curse of yours.”
Nance wrapped herself more tightly in a cloak she had picked up as she came out and looked unflinchingly into the woman’s haggard face.
“Yes, we’re going away—both of us,” she said. “We’re going to the village.”
“To live on air and sea-water?” inquired the other bitterly.
“No,” rejoined Nance gently, “to live in lodgings and to work for our living. I’ve got a place already at the Pontifex shop and Mr. Traherne’s going to pay Linda for playing the organ. It’ll be better like that. I couldn’t let her go on here after what happened yesterday.”
Her voice trembled but she continued to look Miss Doorm straight in the face.
“You were away on purpose yesterday, Rachel,” she said gravely, “so that those two might be together. It was only some scruple, or fear, on Mr. Renshaw’s part that stopped him meeting her in the house. How often this has happened before—his seeing her like this—I don’t know, and I don’t want to know—I only pray to God that no harm’s been done. If ithasbeen done, the child’s ruin’s onourhead. I cannot understand you, Rachel, I cannot understand you.”
Miss Doorm’s haggard mouth opened as if to utter a cry but she breathed deeply and restrained it. Her gaunt fingers twined and untwined themselves and the wind, blowing at her skirt, displayed the tops of her old-fashioned boots with their worn, elastic sides.
“So she’s separated us, has she?” she hissed. “I thought she would. She was born for that. And it’s nothing to you that I’ve nursed you and cared for you and planned for you since you were a baby? Nothing! Nothing at all! She comes between us now as her mother came before. I knew it would happen so! I knew it would! She’s just like her mother—soft and clinging—soft and white—and this is the end of it.”
Her voice changed to a low, almost frightened tone.
“Do you realize that her mother comes to me every night and sits looking at me with her great eyes just as she used to do when Linda had been rude to me in the old days? Do you realize that she walks backwards and forwards outside my door when I’ve driven her away? Do you realize that when I go to bed I find her there, waiting for me, white and soft and clinging?”
Her voice rose to a kind of moan and the wind carried it across the empty road and tossed it over the fields.
“And she speaks, too, Nance. She says things to me, soft, clinging, crying things that drive me distracted. One day, she told methatonly last night, one day she’s going to kiss me and never let me go—going to kiss me with soft, pleading, terrified lips through all eternity, kiss me just as she did once when Linda lost my beads. You remember my beads, Nance? Real jade, they were, with funny red streaks. I often see them round her neck. They’ll be round her neck when she kisses me, jade, you know, my dear, with red streaks. I shall see nothing else then, nothing else while we lie buried together!”
She lowered her voice to a whisper.
“It was the Captain who brought them. He brought them over far seas. He brought them for me, do you hear—for me! But they’re always round her neck now, after that day.”
Nance listened to this wild outburst with a set stern face. She had always suspected that there was something desperate and morbid about Rachel’s attachment to her father but never, until this moment, had she dreamed how far the thing went. She looked at the woman’s face now and sighed and with that sigh she flung to the blowing wind the covenant between herselfand her own mother. All the girl’s natural sanity and sense of proportion were awake now and she stiffened her nerves and hardened her heart for what she had to do.
“Between a vow to the dead,” she thought, “and the safety of the living, there can be only one choice for me.”
“So you’re going away,” began Miss Doorm again. “Well, go, my dear, go and leave me! I shan’t trouble the earth much longer after you’re gone.”
She turned her face to the river and remained motionless, watching the flowing water. The heavy weight of the threatening storm, the storm that seemed as though some powerful earth-god, with uplifted hand, were holding back its descent, had destroyed all natural and normal daylight without actually plunging the world into darkness. A strange greenish-coloured shadow, like the shadow of water seen through water, hung over the trees of the park and the opposite bank of the river. The same greenish shadow, only touched there with something darker and more mysterious, brooded over the far fens out of which, in the remote distance, a sort of reddish exhalation indicated the locality of the Mundham factories. The waters of the Loon—as Rachel and Nance looked at them now—had a dull whitish gleam, like the gleam of a dead fish’s eye. The sense of thunder in the air, though no sound of it had yet been heard, seemed to evoke a kind of frightened expectancy. The smaller birds had been reduced to absolute stillness, their twitterings hushed as if under the weight of a pall. Only a solitary plover’s scream, at rare intervals, went whirling by on the wind.
“Come back, come in, will you?” said Nance at last, “and say good-bye to us, Rachel. I shall come and see you, of course. We shall not be far away.”
She stretched out her hand to help her down the slope of the embankment. Rachel made no response to this overture but followed her in silence. No sooner, however, had they entered the garden and closed the little gate behind them, than the woman fell on her knees on the ground and caught the girl round the waist.
“Nance, my treasure!” she cried pitifully, “Nance, my heart’s baby! Nance, oh, Nance, you won’t leave me like this after all these years? No, I won’t let you go! Nance, you can’t mean it? You can’t really mean it?”
The wind, blowing in gusts about them, made the gate behind them swing open on its hinges. Rachel’s dishevelled tress of grey hair flapped like a tattered piece of rag against the girl’s side.
“Look,” the woman wailed, “I pray you on my knees not to desert me! You don’t know what you’re doing to me. You don’t, Nance, you don’t! It’s all my life you’re taking. Oh, my darling, won’t you have pity? You’re the only thing I’ve got—the only thing I love. Nance, Nance, have pity on me!”
Nance, with tears in her eyes but her face still firm and hard-set, tried to free herself from the hands that held her. She tried gently and tenderly at first but Rachel’s despair made the attempt difficult. Then she realized that this appalling tension must be brought at all costs to an end. With a sudden, relentless jerk, she tore herself away and rushed towards the house. Rachel fell forward on her face, her hands clutchingthe damp mould. Then she staggered up and raised her hand towards the lighted window above at which Linda’s figure was clearly visible.
“It’s you—it’s you,” she called aloud, “it’s you who’ve done this—who’ve turned my heart’s darling against me, and may you be cursed for it! May your love turn to poison and eat your white flesh! May your soul pray and pray for comfort and find none! Never—never—never—find any! Oh, you may well hide yourself! Buthewill find you. Brand will find you and make you pay for this! Brand and the sea will find you. Listen! Do you hear me? Listen! It’s crying out for you now!”
Whether it was the sudden cessation of her voice, intensifying the stillness, or a slight veering of the wind to the eastward, it is certain that at that moment, above the noise of the creaking gate and the rustling bushes, came the sound which, of all others, seemed the expression of Rodmoor’s troubled soul. Linda herself may not have heard it for at that moment she was feverishly helping Nance to pile up their belongings in the cart. But the driver of their vehicle heard it.
“The wind’s changing,” he remarked. “Can you hear that? That’s the darned sea!”
The trap carrying the two sisters was already some distance along the road when Nance turned her head and looked back. They had blown out their candles before leaving and the kitchen fire had died down so that there was no reason to be surprised that no light shone from any of the windows. Yet it was with a cold sinking of the heart that the girl leaned forward once more by the driver’s side. She could not helpseeing in imagination a broken figure stumbling round the walls of that dark house, or perhaps even now standing in their dismantled room alone amid emptiness and silence, alone amid the ghosts of the past.
While the sisters were taking possession of their new abode and trying to eat—though neither had much appetite—the supper provided for them by Mrs. Raps, Hamish Traherne, his cassock protected from the threatening storm by a heavy ulster, was making his promised effort to “talk” with the master of Oakguard. Impelled by an instinct he could not resist, perhaps with a vague notion that the creature’s presence would sustain his courage, he carried, curled up in an inside pocket of his cloak, his darling Ricoletto. The rat’s appetite had been unusually good that evening and it now slept peacefully in its warm nest, oblivious of the beating heart of its master. Carrying his familiar oak stick in his hand and looking to all appearance quite as formidable as any highwayman the priest made his way through the sombre avenue of gnarled and weather-beaten trees that led to the Renshaw mansion. He rang the bell with an impetuous violence, the violence of a visitor whose internal trepidation mocks his exterior resolution. To his annoyance and surprise he learnt that Mr. Renshaw was spending the evening with Mr. Stork down in the village. He asked to be allowed to see Mrs. Renshaw, feeling in some obscure way suspicious of the servant’s statement and unwilling to give up his enterprise at the first rebuff. The lady came out at once into the hall.
“Come in, come in, Mr. Traherne,” she said, quite eagerly. “I suppose you’ve already dined but you can have dessert with us. Philippa always sits long over dessert. She likes eating fruit better than anything else. She’s eating gooseberries to-night.”
Mrs. Renshaw always had a way of detaching herself from her daughter and speaking of her as if she were a strange and somewhat menacing animal with whom destiny had compelled her to live. But the priest refused to remove his ulster. The interest of seeing Philippa eat gooseberries was not strong enough to interrupt his purpose.
“Your son won’t be home till late, I’m afraid?” he said. “I particularly—yes, particularly—wanted to see him to-night. I understand he’s at the cottage.”
“Wait a minute,” cried the lady in her hurried, low-voiced tone. “Sit down here, won’t you? I’ll just—I’ll just see Philippa.”
She returned to the dining-room and the priest sat down and waited. Presently she came hurrying back carrying in her hands a plate upon which was a bunch of grapes.
“These are for you,” she said. “Philippa won’t touch them. There! Let me choose you out some nice ones.”
The servant had followed her and now stood like a pompous and embarrassed policeman uncertain of his duty. It seemed to give Mrs. Renshaw some kind of inscrutable satisfaction to cause this embarrassment. She sat down beside the priest and handed him the grapes, one by one, as if he were a child.
“Brand orders these from London,” she remarked,“that’s why we get them now. I call it extravagance, but hewilldo it.” She sighed heavily. “Philippa,” she repeated, “prefers garden fruit so you mustn’t mind eating them. They’ll get bad if they’re not eaten.”
The servant hastened on tip-toe to the dining-room door, peered in, and returned to his post. He looked for all the world, thought Mr. Traherne, like a ruffled and disconsolate heron. “He’ll stand on one leg soon,” he said to himself.
“When do you expect your son home?” he enquired again. “Perhaps I might call at the cottage and walk back with him.”
“Yes, do!” Mrs. Renshaw cried with unexpected eagerness. “Do call at the cottage. It’ll be nice for you to join them. They’ll all be there—Mr. Sorio and the Doctor and Brand. Yes, do go in! It’ll be a relief to me to think of you with them. I’m sometimes afraid that cousin Tassar encourages dear Brand to drink too much of that stuff he likes to make. They will put spirits into it. I’m always telling them that lime juice would be just as nice. Yes, do go, Mr. Traherne, and insist on having lime juice!”
The priest looked at the lady, looked at the servant and looked at the hall door. He felt a faint scratching going on inside his cloak. Ricoletto was beginning to wake up.
“Well, I’ll go!” he exclaimed, rising to his feet.
At that moment the figure of Philippa, exquisitely dressed in a dark crimson gown, emerged from the dining-room. She advanced slowly towards them with more than her usual air of dramatic reserve. Mr. Traherne noticed that her lips were even redder than herdress. Her eyes looked dark and tired but they shone with a mischievous menace. She held out her hand sedately and as he took it, fumbling with his ulster, “I hope you enjoyed your grapes,” she said.
“You ought to apologize to Mr. Traherne for appearing before him at all in that wild costume,” remarked Mrs. Renshaw. “You wouldn’t think she’d been at the dentist’s all day, would you? She looks as if she were in a grand London house, doesn’t she, just waiting to go to a ball?”
“Yes, at the dentist’s,” Mrs. Renshaw went on, speaking quite loudly, “at the dentist’s in Mundham. She’s got an abscess under one of her teeth. It kept her awake in the night. I think your face is still a little swollen, dear, isn’t it? She oughtn’t to stand in this cold hall, ought she, Mr. Traherne? And with so much of her neck exposed. It was quite a large abscess. Let me look, dear.” She moved towards her daughter, who drew hastily back.
“She won’t let me look at it,” she added plaintively. “She never would, not even when she was a child.”
Hamish, fumbling with his fingers inside his ulster, made a grotesque grimace of sympathy and once more intimated his desire to say good-night. He discerned in the look the girl had now fixed upon her mother an expression which indicated how little sympathy there was between them. It was nearly half past nine when he reached Rodmoor and knocked at Baltazar’s door. There was some sort of village revel going on inside the tavern and the sound of this blended, in intermittent bursts of uproar, with the voices from Stork’s little sitting-room. Both wind and rain had subsidedand the thunder-feeling in the air had grown less oppressive.
Traherne found himself, as he had been warned, in the presence of Raughty, Sorio and Brand. Ushered in by the urbane Baltazar he greeted them all with a humorous and benignant smile and took, willingly enough, a cup of the admirable wine which they were drinking. They all seemed, except their host himself, a little excited by what they had imbibed and the priest observed that several other bottles waited the moment of uncorking. Dr. Raughty alone appeared seriously troubled at the new-comer’s entrance. He coughed several times, as was his habit when disconcerted, and glanced anxiously at the others.
Sorio, it seemed, was in the midst of some sort of diatribe, and as soon as they had resumed their seats he made no scruple about continuing it.
“It’s all an illusion,” he exclaimed, looking at Mr. Traherne as if he defied him to contradict his words, “it’s all an absolute illusion that women are more subtle than men. The idea of their being so is simply due to the fact that they act on impulse instead of by reason. Any one who acts on impulse appears subtle if his impulses vary sufficiently! Women are extraordinarily simple. What gives them the appearance of subtlety is that they never know what particular impulse they’re going to have next. So they just lie back on themselves and wait till it comes. They’re eminentlyphysiological, too, in their reactions. Am I not right there, Doctor? They’re more entirely material than we are,” he went on, draining his glass with a vicious gulp, “they’re simply soaked and drenched inmatter. They’re not really completely or humanlyconscious. Matter still holds them, still clings to them, still drowns them. That is why the poets represent Nature as a woman. The sentimental writers always speak of women as so responsive, so porous, to the power of Nature. They put it down to their superior sensitiveness. It isn’t their sensitiveness at all! It’s their element. Of course they’re porous to it. They’re part of it! They’ve never emerged from it. It flows round them like waves round seaweed. Take this question of drink—of this delicious wine we’re drinking! No woman who ever lived could understand the pleasure we’re enjoying now—a pleasure almost purely intellectual. They think, in their absurd little heads, that all we get out of it is the mere sensation of putting hot stuff or sweet stuff or intoxicating stuff into our mouths. They haven’t the remotest idea that, as we sit in this way together, we enter the company of all great and noble souls, philosophizing upon the nature of the gods and sharing their quintessential happiness! They think we’re simply sensual beasts—as they are themselves, the greedy little devils!—when they eat pastry and suck sugar-candy at the confectioner’s. No woman yet understood, or ever will, the sublime detachment from life, the victory over life, which an honest company of sensible and self-respecting friends enjoy when they drink, serenely and quietly, a wine as rare, as well chosen, as harmless as this! Women hate to think of the happiness we’re enjoying now. I know perfectly well that every one of the women who are connected with us at this moment—and that only applies,” he added with a smile, “to Mr. Renshaw and myself—would suffer real misery to see us at this moment.It’s an instinct and fromtheirpoint of view they’re justified fully enough.
“Wine separates us from Nature. It frees us from sex. It sets us among the gods. It destroys—yes!—that’s what it does, it destroys our physiological fatality. With wine like this,” he raised his glass above his head, “we are no longer the slaves of our senses and consequently the slaves of matter. We have freed ourselves from matter. We havedestroyedmatter!”
“I’m not quite sure,” said Doctor Raughty, going carefully to the fireplace where, on the fender, he had deposited for later consumption, a saucer of brandied cherries, “I am not sure whether you’re right about wine obliterating sex. I’ve seen quite plain females, in my time, appear like so many Ninons and Thaises when one’s a bit shaky. Of course I know they may appear so,” he went on patiently and assiduously letting every drop of juice evaporate from the skin of the cherry he held between his fingers before placing it in his mouth, “appear desirable wenches, I mean, without our having any inclination to meddle with them but the impulse is the same. At least,” he added modestly, “their being there does not detract from the pleasure.”
He paused and, with his head bent down over his cherries, became absolutely oblivious to everything else in the world. What he was trying now was the delicate experiment of dipping the fruit, dried by being waved to and fro in the air, in the wine-glass at his side. As he achieved this end, his cheeks flushed and nervous spasmodic quiverings twitched his expressive nostrils.
“I am inclined to agree with the Doctor,” said Brand Renshaw. “It seems mere monkish nonsense to me toseparate things that were so obviously meant to go together. I like drinking while girls dance for me. I like them to dance on and on, and on and on till they’re tired out and then—” He was interrupted by a sudden crash which made all the glasses ring and ting. Mr. Traherne had brought down his fist heavily upon the rosewood table.
“What you people are forgetting,” shouted the priest, “is that God is not dead. No! He’s not dead, even in Rodmoor. Nature, girls, wine, rats,—are all shadows in flickering water. Only one thing’s eternal and that is a pure and loving heart!”
There was a general and embarrassed hush after this and the priest looked round at the four men with a sort of wistful bewilderment. Then an expression of indescribable sweetness came into his face.
“Forgive me, children,” he muttered, pressing his hand to his forehead. “I didn’t mean to be violent. Baltazar, you must have filled my glass too quickly. No, no! I mustn’t touch a drop more.”
Stork leaned forward towards him.
“We understand,” he said. “We understand perfectly. You felt we were going a little too far. And so we were! These discourses about the mystery of wine and the secret of women always betray one into absurdity. Adrian ought to have known better than to begin such a thing.”
“It was my fault,” repeated Mr. Traherne humbly. “If you’ll excuse me I’ll get something out of my pocket.”
He rose and went into the passage. Brand Renshaw shrugged his shoulders and lifted his glass to his lips.
“I believe it’s his rat,” whispered Dr. Raughty softly. “He lives too much alone.”
The priest returned with Ricoletto in his hand and resuming his seat stroked the animal dreamily. Baltazar looked from one to another of his guests and his delicate features assumed a curious expression, an expression as though he isolated himself from them all and washed his hands of them all.
“Traherne refers to God,” he began in a flutelike tone, “and it’s no more than what he has a right to do. But I should be in a sorry position myself if my only escape from the nuisance of women was to drag in Eternity. Our dear Adrian, whose head is always full of some girl or another, fancies he can get out of it by drink. Brand here doesn’t want to get out of it. He wants to play the Sultan. Raughty—we know what an amorous fellowyouare, Doctor!—has his own fantastic way of drifting in and out of the dangerous waters. I alone, of all of you, have the true key to escape. For, between ourselves, my dears, we know well enough that God and Eternity are just Hamish’s innocent illusion.”
The priest seemed quite deaf to this last remark but Brand turned his hatchet-shaped head towards the speaker.
“Shut up, Tassar,” he muttered harshly, “you’ll start him again.”
“What do you mean?” cried Sorio. “Go on! Go on and tell us what you mean.”
“Wait one moment,” intervened Dr. Raughty, “talk of something else for one moment. I must cool my head.”
He put down his pipe by the side of his saucer ofcherries, arranging it with exquisite care so that its stem was higher than its bowl. Lifting his chair, he placed it at a precise angle to the table, returning twice to add further little touches to it before he was half-way to the door. Finally, laying down his tobacco pouch, lightly as a feather upon the seat of the chair, he rushed out of the room and up the stairs.
“When the Doctor gets into the bathroom,” remarked Brand, “we may as well put him out of our minds. The last time he dined with me at Oakguard he nearly flooded the house.”
Mr. Traherne pressed his rat to his cheek and grinned like a satyr.
“None of you people understand Fingal,” he burst out, “it’s his way of praying. Yes, I mean it! It’s his way of saying his prayers. He does it just as Ricoletto does. It’s ritual with him. I understand it perfectly.”
The conversation at this point seemed to have a peculiarly irritating effect upon Sorio. He fidgeted and looked about him uneasily. Presently he made an extraordinary gesture with one of his hands, opening it, extending the fingers stiffly back and then closing it again. Baltazar, watching him closely, remarked at last, “What’s on your mind now, Adriano? Any new obsession?”
They all looked at the Italian. His heavy “Roman-Emperor” face quivered through all its muscles.
“It’s not ritual,” he muttered gloomily, “you’d better not ask me what it is, for Iknow!”
Brand Renshaw smiled a cruel smile.
“He means that it’smadness,” he remarked carelessly, “and I dare say he’s quite right.”
“Fingal Raughty’s not mad,” protested Mr. Traherne, “I tell you he bathes himself just as my rat does—to praise God and purge his sins!”
“I wasn’t thinking about the Doctor,” said Brand quietly, the same cruel gleam in his eyes. “Mr. Sorio knows what I meant.”
The Italian made a movement as if he were about to leap upon him and strike him, but the reappearance of Fingal, his cheeks shining and his face softly irradiated, distracted the general attention.
“You’d begun to tell us, Stork,” said the Doctor, “whatyourescape is from the sting of sensuality. You wipe out, altogether, you say, God and Eternity?”
Baltazar’s feminine features hardened as if under a thin mask of enamel. Brand shot a malignant glance at him.
“I can answer that,” he said, with venomous bitterness. “Tassar thinks himself an artist, you know. He despises the whole lot of us as numbskulls and Philistines. He’ll tell you that art’s the great thing and that critics of art know much more about it than the damned fools who do it, all there is to be known, in fact.”
Baltazar’s expression as he listened to his half-brother’s speech was a palimpsest of conflicting emotions. The look that predominated, however, was the look of a woman under the lash, waiting her hour. He smiled lightly enough and gesticulated with his delicate hand.
“We all have our secret,” he declared gaily. “Brand thinks he knows mine but he’s as far from knowing it as that new moon over there is from knowing the secret of the tide.”
His words caused them to glance at the window. The clouds had vanished and the thin ghostly crescent peered at them from between the curtains.
“The tide obeys it,” he added significantly, “but it keeps its own counsel.”
“And it has,” put in Sorio fiercely, “depths below depths which it were better for no corpse-world to interfere with!”
Dr. Raughty, who had cleared his throat uneasily several times during the last few moments, now called the attention of the company to a scorched moth which, hurt by one of the candles, lay shuddering upon the edge of the table.
“Hasn’t it exquisite markings?” he said, touching the creature with the tip of his forefinger, and bending forward over it like a lover. “It’s a puss-moth! I wish I had my killing-bottle here. I’d keep it for Horace Pod.”
Sorio suddenly leapt from his seat and made a snatch at the moth.
“Shame!” he cried, addressing indiscriminately the Doctor, Horace Pod and the universe. “Poor little thing!” he added, seizing it in his fist and carrying it to the window. When, with some difficulty and many muttered imprecations he had flung it out, “it tickled me,” he remarked gravely. “Moths flutter so in your hand.”
“Most things flutter,” remarked Brand, “when you try to get rid of them. Some of them,” he added in asignificant tone, “don’t confine themselves to fluttering.”
The incident of the moth seemed to break up, more than any of the preceding interruptions, the harmony of the evening. Dr. Raughty, looking nervously at Sorio and replacing his pipe in his pocket, announced that he intended to depart. Brand Renshaw rose too and with him, Mr. Traherne.
“May I walk with you a little way?” said the priest.
The master of Oakguard stared at him blankly.
“Of course, of course,” he replied, “but I’m afraid it’ll take you out of your road.”
It was some time before they got clear of the house as Baltazar with a thousand delicate attentions to each of them and all manner of lively speeches, did his best, in the stir of their separation, to smooth over and obliterate from their minds the various little shocks that had ruffled his entertainment. They got away, however, at last and Brand and the priest, bidding the rest good night, took the road to the park. The sky as they entered the park gates was clear and starry and the dark trees of the avenue up which they walked, rose beside them in immovable stillness.
Mr. Traherne, putting his hand into the pocket of his ulster to derive courage from contact with his pet, plunged without preamble into the heart of the perilous subject.
“You may not know, Renshaw,” he said, “that Miss Herrick and her sister are leaving Dyke House and are going to live in the village. Nance has got work at Miss Pontifex’ and Linda is going to play the organ regularly for me. I believe there’s beensomething—lately”—he hesitated and his voice shook a little but, recovering himself with a tremendous effort, “something,” he went on, “between Linda and yourself. Now, of course, in any other case I should be very reluctant to say anything. Interference in these things is usually both impertinent and useless. But this case is quite different. The girl is a young girl. She has no parents. Her sister is herself quite young and they are both, in a sense, dependent on me as the priest of this place for all the protection I can give. I feel responsible for these girls, Renshaw, responsible for them, and no feelings of a personal kind with regard to any one,” here he squeezed Ricoletto so tightly that the rat emitted a frightened little squeal, “shall interfere with what I feel is my duty. No, hear me out, hear me out, Renshaw!” he continued hurriedly, as his companion began to speak. “The matter is one about which we need not mind being quite open. I want you, in fact, to promise me—to promise me on your word of honour—that you’ll leave this child alone. I don’t know how far things have gone between you. I can’t imagine, it would be shameful to imagine, that it has gone beyond a flirtation. But whatever it has been, it must stop now. It’s only your word of honour I want, nothing but your word of honour, and I can’t believe you’ll hesitate, as a gentleman, to give me that. You’ll give me that, won’t you, Renshaw? Just say yes and the matter’s closed.”
He removed his hand from his pocket and laid it on his companion’s wrist. Brand was sufficiently cool at that moment to remark as an interesting fact that the priest was trembling. Not only was he trembling but as he removed his hat to give further solemnity to hisappeal, large drops of perspiration, known only to himself, for darkness dimmed his face, trickled down into his eyes. Brand quietly freed himself and moved back a step.
“I’m not in the least surprised,” he said, “at your speaking to me like this, and strange as it may seem it does not annoy me. In fact it pleases me. I like it. It raises the value of the girl—of Linda, I mean—and it makes me respect you. But if you imagine, my good Mr. Traherne, that I’m going to make any such promise as you describe, you can have no more notion of what I’m like than you have of what Linda’s like. Talk toher, Hamish Traherne, talk to her, and see what she says!”
The priest clenched his fingers round the handle of his oak stick. He felt rising in him a tide of natural human anger. Mentally he prayed to his God that he might retain his self-control and not make matters worse by violence.
“If it interests you to know,” Brand continued, “I may tell you that it’s quite possible I shall marry Linda. She attracts me, I confess it freely, more than I could possibly explain to you or to any one. I presume you wouldn’t carry your responsibility so far as to make trouble about my marrying her, eh? But that’s nothing. That’s neither here nor there. Married or unmarried, I do what I please. Do I convey my meaning sufficiently clearly? I—do—what—I—please. Let that be your clue henceforth, Mr. Hamish Traherne, and the clue of everybody else in Rodmoor, in dealing with me. Listen to me, sir. I do you the honour of talking more openly to you to-night than I’m ever likely to talk again. Perhaps you have the ideathat I’m a mere commonplace sensualist, snatching at every animal pleasure that comes my way? Perhaps you fancy I’ve a vicious—what do you call it?—‘penchant’—for the seduction of young girls? Let me tell you this, Mr. Hamish, a thing that may somewhat surprise you. I’ve walked these woods till I know every scent in them by night and day—do you catch that fungus-smell now? That’s one of the smells I love best of all!—and in these walks, absolutely alone,—I love being alone!—I’ve faced possibilities of evil—faced them and resisted them, mind you!—compared with which these mere normal sexual lapses we’re talking about are silly child’s play! Linda does me good. Do you hear? She does me good. She saves me from things that never in your wildest dreams you’d suppose any one capable of. Oh, you priests! You priests! You shut yourselves up among your crucifixes and your little books, and meanwhile—beyond your furthest imagination—the great tides of evil sweep backwards and forwards! Listen! I needn’t tell you what that sound is? Yes—you can hear it. In every part of this place you can hear it! I was born to that tune, Traherne, and I shall die to that tune. It’s better than rustling leaves, isn’t it? It’s deeper. It’s the kind of music a man might have in his head when doing something compared with which such little sins as you’re blaming me for are virtues! Did you see that bat? I’ve watched them under these trees from midnight to morning. A bat in the light of dawn is a curious thing to see. Do you like bats, Mr. Traherne, or do you confine yourself to rats?
“Bah! I’m talking like an idiot. But what I want you to understand is this. When you’re dealing withme, you are dealing with some one who’s lost the power of being frightened by words, some one who’s broken the world’s crust and peeped behind it, some one who’s seen the black pools—did you guess there were black pools in this world?—and has seen the red stains in them and who knows what caused those stains! Damn it all—Hamish Traherne—what did you take me for when you talked to me like that? A common, sensual pig? A vulgar seducer of children? A fellow to be frightened back into the fold by talk of honour and the manners of gentlemen? I tell youI’ve seen bats in the dawn—and seen them too, with images in my memory that onlythat sound—do you hear it still?—could equal for horror.
“It’s because Linda knows the horror of the sea that I love her. I love to lead her to it, to feel her draw back and not to let her draw back! And she loves mefor the same reason! That’s a fact, Mr. Hamish, that may be hard for you to realize. Linda and I understand each other. Do you hear that, you lover of rats? We understand each other. She does me good. She distracts me. She keeps those black pools out of my mind. She keeps Philippa’s eyes from following me about. She takes the taste of funguses out of my mouth. She suits me, I tell you! She’s what I need. She’s what I need and must have!
“Bah! I’m chattering like an idiot. I must be drunk. Iamdrunk. But that’s nothing. That’s one of the vices that aremyvirtues. I’ll tell you another thing, while I’m about it, Hamish Traherne. You’ve wondered sometimes, I expect, why I’m so good to Baltazar. Quite Christian of me, you’ve thought it, eh? Quite noble and Christian—considering what heis and what I am? That just shows how little you know us, how little you know either of us! Tassar can no more get away from me than I can get away from him. We’re bound together for life, my boy, bound together by what those black pools mean and whatthat sound—you wouldn’t think you could hear it here, would you?—never stops meaning.
“Bah! I’m drunk as a pig to-night! I’ve not talked like this to any one, not for years. Listen, Traherne! You have an ugly face but you’re not a fool. Wasn’t it Saint Augustine who said once that evil was a mere rent in the cloak of goodness? The simple innocent! I tell you, evil goes down to the bottom of life and out beyond! I know that, for I’ve gone with it.I’ve seen the bats in the dawn.
“Yes, Tassar’s gone far, Hamish Traherne, farther than you guess. Sometimes I think he’s gone farther thanIguess.Henever talks, you know. You’ll never catchhimdrunk. Tassar could look the devil in the face, and worse, and keep his pretty head cool!—Oh, damn it all, Traherne, it’s not easy for a person never to open his mouth! But Tassar’s got the secret of that. He must get it from my father. There was a man for you! You wouldn’t have dared to talk to him like this.”
Several times during this long outburst, Mr. Traherne’s fingers had caused pain to Ricoletto. But now he flung out his long arms and clutched Brand fiercely by the shoulders.
“Pray—you poor lost soul,” he shouted, “pray the great God above us to have mercy upon you and have mercy upon us all!”
His arms trembled as he uttered these words and,hardly conscious of what he was doing, he shook the heavy frame of the man before him backwards and forwards as if he had been a child in his hands. There was dead silence for several seconds and, unheeded by either of them, a weasel ran furtively across the path and disappeared among the trees. The damp odours of moss and leaf-mould rose up around them and, between the motionless branches above, the stars shone like pin-pricks through black parchment. Suddenly Brand broke away with a harsh laugh.
“Enough of this!” he cried. “We’ve had enough melodramatic nonsense for one night. You’d better go back to bed, Traherne, or you’ll be oversleeping yourself to-morrow and my mother will miss her matins.”
He held out his hand.
“Good night!—and sleep soundly!” he added, in his accustomed dull, sarcastic tone.
The priest sighed heavily and groped about on the ground for the hat he had dropped. Just as he had secured it and was moving off, Brand called out to him laughingly,
“Don’t you believe a word of what I said just now. I’m not drunk at all. I was only fooling. I’m just a common ruffian who knows a pretty face when he sees it. Talk to Linda about me and see what she says!” He strode off up the avenue and the priest turned heavily on his heel.
Nance and Linda were not long in growing accustomed to their new mode of life. Nance, after her London experiences, found Miss Pontifex’ little work-room, looking out on a pleasant garden, a place of refuge rather than of irksome labour. The young girls under her charge were good-tempered and docile; and Miss Pontifex herself—an excitable little woman with extravagantly genteel manners, and a large Wedgewood brooch under her chin—seemed to think that the girl’s presence in the establishment would redound immensely to its reputation and distinction.
“I’m a conservative born and bred,” she remarked to Nance, “and I can tell a lady out of a thousand. I won’t say what I might say about the people here. But we know—we know what we think.”
Nance’s intimate knowledge of the more recondite aspects of the trade took an immense load off the little dressmaker’s mind. She had more time to devote to her garden, which was her deepest passion, and it filled her with pride to be able to say to her friends, “Miss Herrick from Dyke House works with me now. Her father was a Captain in the Royal Navy.”
The month of July went by without any further agitating incidents. As far as Nance knew, Brand left Linda in peace, and the young girl, though lookingweary and spiritless, seemed to be reconciling herself fairly well to the loss of him and to be deriving definite distraction and satisfaction from her progress in organ-playing. Day by day in the early afternoon, she would cross the bridge, under all changes of the weather, and make her way to the church. Her mornings were spent in household duties, so that her sister might be free to give her whole time to the work in the shop, and in the evenings, when it was pleasant to be out of doors, they both helped Miss Pontifex watering her phloxes and delphiniums.
Nance herself—as July drew to its close and the wheat fields turned yellow—was at once happier and less happy in her relations with Sorio. Her happiness came from the fact that he treated her now more gently and considerately than he had ever done before; her unhappiness from the fact that he had grown more reserved and a queer sort of nervous depression seemed hanging over him. She knew he still saw Philippa, but what the relations between the two were, or how far any lasting friendship had arisen between them, it was impossible to discover. They certainly never met now, under conditions open to the intrusion of Rodmoor scandal.
Nance went more than once, before July was over, to see Rachel Doorm, and the days when these visits occurred were the darkest and saddest of all she passed through during that time. The mistress of Dyke House seemed to be rapidly degenerating. Nance was horrified to find how inert and indifferent to everything she had come to be. The interior of the house was now as dusty and untidy as the garden was desolate, and judging from her manner on the last visit she paid, thegirl began to fear she had found the same solace in her loneliness as that which consoled her father.
Nance made one desperate attempt to improve matters. Without saying anything to Miss Doorm, she carried with her to the house one of Mrs. Raps’ own buxom daughters, who was quite prepared, for an infinitesimal compensation, to go every day to help her. But this arrangement collapsed hopelessly. On the third day after her first appearance, the young woman returned to her home, and with indignant tears declared she had been “thrown out of the nasty place.”
One evening at the end of the month, just as the sisters were preparing to go out for a stroll together, their landlady, with much effusion and agitation, ushered in Mrs. Renshaw. Tired with walking, and looking thinner and whiter than usual, she seemed extremely glad to sit down on their little sofa and sip the raspberry vinegar which Nance hastened to prepare. She ate some biscuits, too, as if she were faint for want of food, but all the time she ate there was in her air an apologetic, deprecatory manner, as though eating had been a gross vice or as though never in her life before had she eaten in public. She kept imploring Nance to share the refreshment, and it was not until the girl made at least a pretence of doing so that she seemed to recover her peace of mind.
Her great, hollow, brown eyes kept surveying the little apartment with nervous admiration. “I like it here,” she remarked at last. “I like little rooms much better than large ones.” She picked up from the table a well-worn copy of Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury” and Nance had never seen her face light up so suddenly as when, turning the pages at random, she chanced uponKeats’ “Ode to Autumn.” “I know that by heart,” she said, “every word of it. I used to teach it to Philippa. You’ve no idea how nicely she used to say it. But she doesn’t care for poetry any more. She reads more learned books, more clever books now. She’s got beyond me. Both my children have got beyond me.” She sighed heavily and Nance, with a sense of horrible pity, seemed to visualize her—happy in little rooms and with little anthologies of old-world verse—condemned to the devastating isolation of Oakguard.
“I see you’ve got ‘The Bride of Lammermoor’ up there,” she remarked presently, and rising impetuously from her seat on the sofa, she took the book in her hands. Nance never forgot the way she touched it, or the infinite softness that came into her eyes as she murmured, “Poor Lucy! Poor Lucy!” and began turning the pages.
Suddenly another book caught her attention and she took down “Humphrey Clinker” from the shelf. “Oh!” she cried, a faint flush coming into her sunken cheeks, “I haven’t seen that book for years and years. I used to read it before I was married. I think Smollett was a very great writer, don’t you? But I suppose young people nowadays find him too simple for their taste. That poor dear Mr. Bramble! And all that part about Tabitha, too! I seem to remember it all. I believe Dickens used to like Smollett. At least, I think I read somewhere that he did. I expect he liked that wonderful mixture of humour and pathos, though of course, when it comes to that, I suppose none of them can equal Dickens himself.”
As Mrs. Renshaw uttered these words and caressed the tattered volume she held as if it had been made ofpure gold, her face became irradiated with a look of such innocent and guileless spirituality, that Nance, in a hurried act of mental contrition, wiped out of her memory every moment when she had not loved her. “What she must suffer!” the girl said to herself as she watched her. “What she musthavesuffered—with those people in that great house.”
Mrs. Renshaw sighed as she replaced the book in the shelf. “Writers seem to have got so clever in these last years,” she said plaintively. “They use so many long words. I wonder where they get them from—out of dictionaries, do you think?—and they hurt me, they hurt me, by the way they speak of our beloved religion. They can’tallof them be great philosophers like Spinoza and Schopenhauer, can they? They can’t all of them be going to give the world new and comforting thoughts? I don’t like their sharp, snappy, sarcastic tone. And oh, Nance dear!”—she returned to her seat on the sofa—“I can’t bear their slang! Why is it that they feel they must use so much slang, do you think? I suppose they want to make their books seem real, butIdon’t hear real people talking like that. But perhaps it comes from America. American writers seem extraordinarily clever, and American dictionaries—for Dr. Raughty showed me one—seem much bigger than ours.”
She was silent for a while and then, looking gently at Linda, “I think it’s wonderful, dear, how well you play now. I thought last Sunday evening you played the hymns better than I’ve ever heard them! But they were beautiful hymns, weren’t they? That last one was my favourite of all.”
Once more she was silent, and Nance seemed to catchher lips moving, as she fixed her great sorrowful eyes upon the book-shelf, and began slowly pulling on her gloves.
“I must be going now,” she said, with a little sigh. “I thank you for the raspberry vinegar and the biscuits. I think I was tired. I didn’t sleep very well last night. Good-bye, dears. No, don’t, please, come down. I can let myself out. It’s a lovely evening, isn’t it, and the poppies in the cornfields are quite red now. I can see a big patch of them from our terrace, just across the river. Poppies always make me think of the days when I was a young girl. We used to think a lot of them then. We used to make fairies out of them.”
Nance insisted on seeing her into the street. When she entered the room again, she was not altogether surprised to find Linda convulsed with sobs. “I can’t—I can’t help it,” gasped the young girl. “She’s too pitiful. She’s too sad. You feel you want to hug her and hug her, but you’re afraid even to touch her hand!” She made an effort to recover herself, and then, with the tears still on her cheeks, “Nance dear,” she said solemnly, “I don’t believe she’ll live to the end of this year. I believe, one of these days, when the Autumn comes, we shall hear she’s been found dead in her bed. Nance, listen!”—and the young girl’s voice became awe-struck and very solemn—“won’t it be dreadful forthose two, over there, when they find her like that, and feel how little they’ve done to make her happy? Can’t you imagine it, Nance? The wind wailing and wailing round that house, and she lying there all white and dreadful—and Philippa with a candle standing over her—”
“Why do you say ‘with a candle’?” said Nance brusquely. “You’re talking wildly and exaggerating everything. If they found her in the morning, like that, Philippa wouldn’t come with a candle.”
Linda stared dreamily out of the window. “No, I suppose not,” she said, “and yet I can’t see it without Philippa holding a candle. And there’s something else I see, too,” she added in a lower voice.
“I don’t want—” Nance began and then, more gently, “Whatelse, you silly child?”
“Philippa’s red lips,” she murmured softly, “red as if she’d put rouge on them. Do you think she ever does put rouge on them? That’s, I suppose, what made me think of the candle. I seemed to see it flickering against her mouth. Oh, I’m silly—I’m silly, I know, but I couldn’t help seeing it like that—her lips, I mean.”
“You’re morbid to-day, Linda,” said Nance abruptly. “Well? Shall we go to the garden? I feel as though carrying watering-pots and doing weeding will be good for both of us.”
While this conversation was going on between the sisters in their High Street lodging, Sorio and Baltazar were seated together on a bench by the harbour’s side. The tide was flowing in and cool sea-breaths, mixed with the odour of tar and paint and fisherman’s tobacco, floated in upon them as they talked.
“It’s absurd to have any secrets between you and me,” Sorio was saying, his face reflecting the light of the sunset as it poured down the river’s surface to where they sat. “When I become quite impossible to you as a companion, I suppose you’ll tell me so andturn me out. But until then I’m going to assume that I interest you and don’t bore you.”
“It isn’t a question of boring any one,” replied the other. “You annoyed me just now because I thought you were making no effort to control yourself. You seemed trying to rake up every repulsive sensation you’ve ever had and thrust it down my throat. Bored? Certainly I wasn’t bored! On the contrary, I was much more what you might callbitten. You go so far, my dear, you go so far!”
“I don’t call that going far at all,” said Sorio sulkily. “What’s the use of living together if we can’t talk of everything? Besides, you didn’t let me finish. What I wanted to say was that for some reason or other, I’ve lately got to a point when every one I meet—every mortal person, and especially every stranger—strikes me as odious and disgusting. I’ve had the feeling before but never quite like this. It’s not a pleasant feeling, my dear, I can assure you of that!”
“But what do you mean—what do you mean by odious and disgusting?” threw in the other. “I suppose they’re made in the same way we are. Flesh and blood is flesh and blood, after all.”
As Baltazar said this, what he thought in his mind was much as follows: “Adriano is evidently going mad again. This kind of thing is one of the symptoms. I like having him here with me. I like looking at his face when he’s excited. He has a beautiful face—it’s more purely antique in its moulding than half the ancient cameos. I especially like looking at him when he’s harassed and outraged. He has a dilapidated wistfulness at those times which exactly suits my taste.I should miss Adriano frightfully if he went away. No one I’ve ever lived with suits me better. I can annoy him when I like and I can appease him when I like. He fills me with a delicious sense of power. If only Philippa would leave him alone, and that Herrick girl would stop persecuting him, he’d suit me perfectly. I like him when his nerves are quivering and twitching. I like the ‘wounded-animal look’ he has then. But it’s these accursed girls who spoil it all. Of course it’s their work, this new mania. They carry everything so far! I like him to get wild and desperate but I don’t want him mad. These girls stick at nothing. They’d drive him into an asylum if they could, poor helpless devil!”
While these thoughts slid gently through Stork’s head, his friend was already answering his question about “flesh and blood.” “It’s just that which gets on my nerves,” he said. “I can stand it when I’m talking to you because I forget everything except your mind, and I can stand it when I’m making love to a girl, because I forget everything but—”
“Don’t say her body!” threw in Baltazar.
“I wasn’t going to,” snarled the other. “I know it isn’t their bodies one thinks of. It’s—it’s—what the devil is it? It’s something much deeper than that. Well, never mind! What I want to say is this. With you and Raughty, and a few others who really interest me, I forget the whole thing.Youare individuals to me. I’m interested in you, and I forget what you’re like, or that you have flesh at all.
“It’s when I come upon people I’m neither in love with nor interested in, that I have this sensation, and of course,” and he surveyed a group of women who atthat moment were raising angry voices from an archway on the further side of the harbour, “and of course I have it every day.”
Stork looked at him with absorbed attention, holding between his fingers an unlit cigarette. “What exactlyisthe feeling you have?” he enquired gently.