He was interrupted at that moment by a roar of laughter from the group beside them and Baltazar rose and pulled him away. “Upon my soul, Adrian,” he whispered, as he led him back across the green, “you must behave better! You’ve given those honest fellows something to gossip about for a week. They’ll think you really are up to something, you can’t shout like that without being listened to and you can’t quarrel with the whole of humanity.”
Adrian turned fiercely round on him. “Can’t I?” he exclaimed. “Can’t I quarrel with humanity? You wait, my friend, till I’ve got my book published. Then you’ll see! I tell you I’ll strike this cursed human race of yours such a blow that they’ll wish they’d treated a poor wanderer on the face of the earth a little better and spared him something of their prying and peering!”
“Your book!” laughed Baltazar. “A lot they’ll care for your book! That’s always the way with you touchy philosophers. You stir up the devil of a row with your bad temper and make the most harmless people into enemies and then you think you can settle it all and prove yourselves right and everybody else wrong by writing a book. Upon my soul, Adrian, if I didn’tlove you very much indeed I’d be inclined to let you loose on life just to see whether you or it could strike the hardest blows!”
Sorio looked at him with a curiously bewildered look. He seemed puzzled. His swarthy Roman face wore a clouded, weary, crushed expression. His brow contracted into an anxious frown and his mouth quivered. His air at that moment was the air of a very young child that suddenly finds the world much harder to deal with than it expected.
Baltazar watched him with secret pleasure. These were the occasions when he always felt strangely drawn towards him. That look of irresolute and bewildered weakness upon a countenance so powerfully moulded filled him with a most delicate sense of protective pity. He could have embraced the man as he watched him, blinking there in the afternoon sunshine, and fumbling with the handle of his stick.
But at that moment Nance appeared, walking rapidly with bent head, up the narrow street. Baltazar looked at her with a gleam of hatred in his sea-coloured eyes. She came to rob him of one of the most exquisite pleasures of his life, the pleasure of reducing this strong creature to humiliated submissiveness and then petting and cajoling him back into self-respect. The knowledge that he left Sorio in her hands in this particular mood of deprecatory helplessness, remorseful and gentle and like a wild beast beaten into docility, caused him the most acute pain. With poisonous antagonism under his urbane greeting he watched furtively the quick glance she threw at Adrian and the way her eyes lingered upon his, feeling her way into his mood. He cast about for some element of discordthat he could evoke and leave behind with them to spoil the girl’s triumph for he knew well that Adrian was now, after what had just occurred, in the frame of mind most adapted of all to the influence of feminine sympathy. Nance, however, did not give him an opportunity for this.
“Come on,” she said, “we’ve only just time to catch the three o’clock train. Come on! Good-bye for a while, Mr. Stork. I’ll bring him back safe to you, sooner or later. Come on, Adrian, we really must be quick!”
They went off together and Baltazar wandered slowly back across the green. He felt for the moment so lonely that even his hatred drifted away and sank to nothingness under the inflowing wave of bitter universal isolation. As he approached his cottage he stopped stone-still with his eyes on the ground and his hands behind his back. Elegantly dressed in pleasant summer clothes, his slight graceful figure, easy bearing, and delicate features, gave without doubt to the casual bystanders who observed him, an impression of unmitigated well-being. As a matter of fact, had that discerning historic personage who is reported to have exclaimed after an interview with Jonathan Swift, “there goes the unhappiest man who ever lived,” exercised his insight now, he might have modified his conclusion in favour of Baltazar Stork.
It would certainly have required more than ordinary discernment to touch the tip of the iron wedge that was being driven just then into this graceful person’s brain. Looking casually into the man’s face one would have seen nothing perhaps but a dreamy, pensive smile—a smile a little bitter maybe, and self-mocking but withno particularly sinister import. A deeper glance, however, would have disclosed a curious compression of the lines about the mouth and a sort of indrawing of the lips as if Mr. Stork were about to emit the sound of whistling. Below the smiling surface of the eyes, too, there might have been seen a sort of under-flicker of shuddering pain as if, without any kind of anæsthetic, Mr. Stork were undergoing some serious operation. The colour had deserted his cheeks as if whatever it was he was enduring the endurance of it had already exhausted his physical energies. Passing him by, as we have remarked, casually and hastily, one might have said to oneself—“Ah! a handsome fellow chuckling there over some pleasant matter!” but coming close up to him one would have instinctively stretched out a hand, so definitely would it then have appeared that, whatever his expression meant, he was on the point of fainting. It was perhaps a fortunate accident that, at this particular moment as he stood motionless, a small boy of his acquaintance, the son of one of the Rodmoor fishermen, came up to him and asked whether he had heard of the great catch there had been that day.
“There’s a sight o’ fish still there, Mister,” the boy remarked, “some of them monstrous great flounders and a heap of Satans such as squirts ink out of their bellies!”
Baltazar’s twisted lips gave a genuine smile now. A look of extraordinary tenderness came into his face.
“Ah, Tony, my boy,” he said, “so there are fish down there, are there? Well, let’s go and see! You take me, will you? And I’ll make those fellows give you some for supper.”
They walked together across the green and down the street. Baltazar’s hand remained upon the child’s shoulder and he listened as he walked, to his chatter; but all the while his mind visualized an immense, empty plain—a plain of steely-blue ice under a grey sky—and in the center of this plain a bottomless crevasse, also of steely-blue ice, and on the edge of this crevasse, gradually relinquishing their hold from exhaustion, two human hands. This image kept blending itself as they walked with all the little things which his eyes fell upon. It blent with the cakes in the confectioner’s window. It blent with the satiny blouses, far too expensive for any local purchaser, in Miss Pontifex’s shop. It blent with the criss-cross lines of the brick-work varied with flint of the house where Dr. Raughty lived. It blent with their first glimpse of the waters of the harbour, seen between two ramshackle houses with gable roofs. Nor when they finally found themselves standing with a little crowd of men and boys round a circle of fish-baskets upon the shore did it fail to associate itself both with the blue expanse of waveless sea stretched before them and with the tangled mass of sea shells, seaweed and sea creatures which lay exposed to the sunlight, many-coloured and glistening as the deeper folds of the nets which had drawn them from the deep were explored and dragged forward.
Meanwhile Adrian and Nance, having safely caught their train, were being carried with the leisurely steadiness of a local line, from Rodmoor to Mundham. Jammed tightly into a crowded compartment full of Saturday marketers, they had little opportunity during the short journey to do more than look helplessly across their perspiring neighbours at the rising andfalling of the telegraph wires against a background of blue sky. The peculiar manner in which, as a train carries one forward, these wires sink slowly downwards as if they were going to touch the earth and then leap up with an unexpected jerk as the next pole comes by, was a phenomenon that always had a singular fascination for Sorio. He associated it with his most childish recollections of railway travelling. Would the wires ever succeed in sinking out of sight before the next pole jerked them high up across the window again? That was the speculation that fascinated him even at this moment as he watched them across the brim of his companion’s brightly trimmed hat. There was something human in the attempts the things made to sink down, down, down and escape their allotted burden and there was certainly something very like the ways of Providence in the manner in which they were pulled up with a remorseless jolt to perform their duties once more.
Emerging with their fellow-passengers upon the Mundham platform both Sorio and Nance experienced a sense of happiness and relief. They had both been so long confined to the immediate surroundings of Rodmoor that this little excursion to the larger town assumed the proportions of a release from imprisonment. It is true that it was a release that Adrian might easily have procured for himself on any day; but more and more recently, in the abnormal tension of his nerves, he had lost initiative in these things. They wandered leisurely together into the town and Sorio amused himself by watching the demure and practical way in which his companion managed her various economic transactions in the shops which she entered. He could nothelp feeling a sense of envy as he observed the manner in which, without effort or strain, she achieved the precise objects she had in mind and arranged for the transportation of her purchases by the carrier’s cart that same evening.
He wondered vaguely whether all women were like this and whether, with their dearest and best-loved dead at home, or their own peace of mind permanently shattered by some passage of fatal emotion only some few hours before, they could always throw everything aside and bargain so keenly and shrewdly with the alert tradesmen. He supposed it was the working of some blind atavistic power in them, the mechanical result of ages of mental concentration. He was amused, too, to observe how, when in a time incredibly short she had done all she wanted, instead of rushing off blindly for the walk they had promised themselves past the old Abbey church and along the river’s bank, she shrewdly interpreted their physical necessities and carried him off to a little dairy shop to have tea and half-penny buns. Hadhebeen the cicerone of their day’s outing he would have plunged off straight for the Abbey church and the river fields, leaving their shopping to the end and dooming them to bad temper and irritable nerves from sheer bodily exhaustion. Never had Nance looked more desirable or attractive as, with heightened colour and little girlish jests, she poured out his tea for him in the small shop-parlour and swallowed half-penny buns with the avidity of a child.
Baltazar Stork was not wrong in his conjecture. Not since their early encounters in the streets and parks of South London had Sorio been in a gentler mood or one more amenable to the girl’s charm. Ashe looked at her now and listened to her happy laughter, he felt that he had been a fool as well as a scoundrel in his treatment of her. Why hadn’t he cut loose long since from his philandering with Philippa which led nowhere andcouldlead nowhere? Why hadn’t he cast about for some definite employment and risked, without further delay, persuading her to marry him? With her to look after him and smooth his path for him, he might have been quite free from this throbbing pain behind his eyeballs and this nervous tension of his brain. He hurriedly made up his mind that hewouldask her to marry him—not to-day, perhaps, or to-morrow—for it would be absurd to commit himself till he could support her, but very soon, as soon as he had found any mortal kind of an occupation! What that occupation would be he did not know. It was difficult to think of such things all in a moment. It required time. Besides, whatever it was it must be something that left him free scope for his book. After all, his book came first—his book and Baptiste. What would Baptiste think if he were to marry again? Would he be indignant and hurt? No! No! It was inconceivable that Baptiste should be hurt. Besides, he would love Nance when he knew her! Of that he was quite sure. Yes, Baptiste and Nance were made to understand one another. It would be different were it Philippa he was thinking of marrying. Somehow it distressed and troubled him to imagine Baptiste and Philippa together. That, at all costs, must never come about. His boy must never meet Philippa. All of this whirled at immense speed through Sorio’s head as he smiled back at Nance across the little marble table and stared at the large blue-china cow which, withudders coloured a yet deeper ultramarine than its striped back, placidly, like an animal sacred to Jupiter, contemplated the universe. There must have been a wave of telepathic sympathy between them at that moment, for Nance suddenly swallowing the last of her bun, hazarded a question she had never dared to ask before.
“Adrian, dear, tell me this. Why did you leave your boy behind you in America when you came to England?”
Sorio was himself surprised at the unruffled manner in which he received this question. At any other moment it would have fatally disturbed him. He smiled back at her, quite easily and naturally.
“How could I bring him?” he said. “He’s got a good place in New York and I have nothing. Ihadto get away, somewhere. In fact, they sent me away, ‘deported’ me, as they call it. But I couldn’t drag the boy with me. How could I? Though he was ready enough to come. Oh, no! It’s much better as it is—much, much better!”
He became grave and silent and began fumbling in one of his inner pockets. Nance watched him breathlessly. Was he really softening towards her? Was Philippa losing her hold on him? He suddenly produced a letter—a letter written on thin paper and bearing an American stamp—and taking it with careful hands from its envelope, stretched it across the table towards her. The action was suggestive of such intimacy, suggestive of such a new and happy change in their relations, that the girl looked at the thing with moist and dazed eyes. She obtained a general sense of the firm clear handwriting. She caught the openingsentence, written in caressing Italian and, for some reason or other, the address—perhaps because of its strangeness to a European eye—fifteen West Eleventh Street—remained engraved in her memory. More than this she was unable to take in for the moment out of the sheer rush of bewildering happiness which swept over her and made her long to cry.
A moment later two other Rodmoor people, known to them both by sight, entered the shop, and Sorio hurriedly took the letter back and replaced it in his pocket. He paid their bill, which came to exactly a shilling, and together they walked out from the dairy. The ultramarine cow contemplated the universe as the newcomers took their vacated table with precisely the same placidity. Its own end—some fifty years after, amid the debris of a local fire, with the consequent departure of its shattered pieces to the Mundham dumping ground—did not enter into its contemplation. Many lovers, happier and less happy than Sorio and Nance, would sit at that marble table during that epoch and the blue cow would listen in silence. Perhaps in its ultimate resting-place its scorched fragments would become more voluble as the rains dripped upon the tins and shards around them or perhaps, even in ruins—like an animal sacred to Jupiter—it would hold its peace and let the rains fall.
The two friends, still in a mood of delicate and delicious harmony, threaded the quieter streets of the town and emerged into the dreamy cathedral-like square, spacious with lawns and trees, that surrounded the abbey-church. A broad gravel-path, overtopped by wide-spreading lime trees, separated the grey south wall of the ancient edifice from the most secluded ofthese lawns. The grass was divided from the path by a low hanging chain-rail of that easy and friendly kind that seems to call upon the casual loiterer to step over its unreluctant barrier and take his pleasure under the welcoming trees. They sat down on an empty bench and looked up at the flying buttresses and weather-stained gargoyles and richly traceried windows. The sun fell in long mellow streams across the gravel beside them, broken into cool deep patches of velvet shadow where the branches of the lime trees intercepted it. From somewhere behind them came the sound of murmuring pigeons and from further off still, from one of the high-walled, old-fashioned gardens of the houses on the remote side of the square, came the voices of children playing. Sorio sat with one arm stretched out along the top of the bench behind Nance’s head and with the other resting upon the handle of his stick. His face had a look of deep, withdrawn contentment—a contentment so absolute that it merged into a sort of animal apathy. Any one familiar with the expression so often seen upon the faces both of street-beggars and prince-cardinals in the city on the Tiber, would have recognized something indigenous and racial in the lethargy which then possessed him. Nance, on the other hand, gave herself up to a sweet and passionate happiness such as she had not known since they left London. While they waited thus together, reluctant by even a word to break the spell of that favoured hour, there came from within the church the sound of an organ. Nance got up at once.
“Let’s go in for just a minute, Adrian! Do you mind—only just a minute?”
The slightest flicker of a frown crossed Sorio’s facebut it vanished before she could repeat her request.
“Of course,” he said, rising in his turn, “of course! Let’s go round and find the door.”
They had no difficulty in doing this. The west entrance of the church was wide open and they entered and sat down at the back of the nave. Above them the spacious vaulted roof, rich with elaborate fan-tracery, seemed to spread abroad and deepen the echoes of the music as if it were an immense inverted chalice spilling the odour of immortal wine. The coolness and dim shadowiness of the place fell gently upon them both and the mysterious rising and sinking of the music, with no sight of any human presence as its cause, thrilled Nance from head to foot as she had never been thrilled in her life. Oh, it was worth it—this moment—all she had suffered before—all she could possibly suffer! If only it might never stop, that heavenly sound, but go on and on and on until all the world came to know what the power of love was! She felt at that moment as if she were on the verge of attaining some clue, some signal, some sign, which should make all things clear to her—clear and ineffably sweet!
The deep crimsons and purples in the coloured windows, the damp chilly smell of the centuries-old masonry, the large dark recesses of the shadowy transepts, all blended together to transport her out of herself into a world kindlier, calmer, quieter, than the world she knew.
“And—he—shall—feed—” rang out, as they listened, the clear flutelike voice of some boy-singer, practising for the morrow’s services, “shall—feed—his—flock.”
The words of the famous antiphony, “staled and rung upon” as they might be, by the pathetic stammerings of so old a human repetition, were, coming just at this particular moment, more than Nance could bear. She flung herself on her knees and, pressing her hands to her face, burst into convulsive sobs. Sorio stood up and laid his hand on her shoulder. With the other hand—mindful of early associations—he crossed himself two or three times and then remained motionless. Slowly, by the action of that law which is perhaps the deepest in the universe, the law ofebb and flow, there began in him a reaction. Had the words the unseen boy singer was uttering been in Latin, had they possessed that reserve, that passionate aloofness in emotion, which the instinct of worship in the southern races protects from sentiment, such a reaction might have been spared him; but the thing was too facile, too easy. It might have been the climax of a common melodrama. It fell too pat upon the occasion. And it was insidiously, treacherously, horribly human. It was too human. It lacked the ring of style, the reserve of the grand manner. It wailed and sobbed. It whimpered upon the Almighty’s shoulder. It wanted the tragic abandonment of the “Dies Irae,” as it missed the calmer dignity of the “Tantum ergo.” It appealed to what was below the level of the highest in religious pathos. It humiliated while it comforted. The boy’s voice died away and the organ stopped. There was a sound of shuffling in the choir and the mutter of voices and even a suppressed laugh.
Sorio removed his hand from Nance’s shoulder and stooping down picked up his hat and stick. He looked round him. A fashionably dressed lady, carrying abunch of carnations, moved past them up the aisle and presently two younger women followed. Then a neatly attired dapper young clergyman strolled in, adjusting his eye-glasses. It was evidently approaching the hour of the afternoon service. The spell was broken.
But the kneeling girl knew nothing, felt nothing, of all this. She, at all events, was in the church of her fathers—the church that her most childish memories rendered sacred. Had she been able to understand Sorio’s feeling, she would have swept it aside. The music was beautiful, she would have said, and the words were true. From the heart of the universe they came straight to her heart. Were they rendered unbeautiful and untrue because so many simple souls had found comfort in them?
“Ah! Adrian,” she would have said had she argued it out with him. “Ah, Adrian, itiscommon. It is the common cry of humanity, set to the music of the common heart of the world, and is not that more essential than ‘Latin,’ more important than ‘style’?”
As a matter of fact, the only controversy that arose between them when they left the building was brief and final.
“I fancy,” remarked Sorio, “from what you tell me of her, that that’s the sort of thing that would please Mrs. Renshaw—I mean the music we heard just now!”
Nance flushed as she answered him. “Yes, it would! It would! And it pleasesmetoo. It makes me more certain than ever that Jesus Christ was really God.” Sorio bowed his head at this and held his peace and together they made their way to the bank of the Loon.
What they were particularly anxious to see was an old house by the river-side about a mile east of thetown which had been, some hundred years before, the abode of one of the famous East Anglian painters of the celebrated Norwich school—a painter whose humorous aplomb and rich earth-steeped colouring rivalled some of the most notable of the artists of Amsterdam and The Hague.
Their train back to Rodmoor did not leave till half-past seven and as it was now hardly five they had ample time to make this little pilgrimage as deliberately as they pleased. They had no difficulty in reaching the river, and once at its edge, it was only a question of following its windings till they arrived at Ravelston Grange. Their way was somewhat impeded at first by a line of warehouses, between which and a long row of barges fastened to a series of littered dusty wharves, lay all manner of bales and casks and bundles of hay and vegetable. There were coal-yards there too, and timber-yards, and in other places great piles of beer-barrels, all bearing the name “Keith Radipole” which had been for half a century the business title of Brand Renshaw’s brewery. These obstacles surmounted, there were no further interruptions to their advance along the river path.
The aspect of the day, however, had grown less promising. A somewhat threatening bank of clouds with dark jagged edges, which the efforts of the sun to scatter only rendered more lurid, had appeared in the west and when, for a moment, they turned to look back at the town, they saw its chimneys and houses massed gloomily together against a huge sombre bastion whose topmost fringe was illuminated by fiery indentations. Nance expressed some hesitation as to the wisdom of going further with this phalanx of storm threatenings followingthem from behind, but Sorio laughed at her fears and assured her that in a very short time they would arrive at the great painter’s house.
It appeared, however, that the “mile” referred to in the little local history in which they had read about this place did not begin till the limits of Mundham were reached and Mundham seemed to extend itself interminably. They were passing through peculiarly dreary outskirts now. Little half-finished rows of wretchedly built houses trailed disconsolately towards the river’s edge and mingled with small deserted factories whose walls, blackened with smoke, were now slowly crumbling to pieces. Desolate patches of half-cultivated ground where the stalks of potatoes, yellowing with damp, alternated with thickly growing weeds, gave the place that peculiar expression of sordid melancholy which seems the especial prerogative of such fringes of human habitation. Old decaying barges, some of them half-drowned in water and others with gaunt, protruding ribs and rotting planks, lay staring at the sky while the river, swirling past them, gurgled and muttered round their submerged keels. It was impossible for the two friends to retain long, under these depressing surroundings, their former mood of magical harmony. Little shreds and fragments of their happiness seemed to fall from them at every step and remain, bleakly flapping among the mouldering walls and weedy river-piles, like the bits of old paper and torn rag which fluttered feebly or fell into immobility as the wind rose or sank. The bank of clouds behind them had now completely obscured every vestige of the sun and a sort of premature twilight lay upon the surface of the river and on the fields on its further side.
“What’s that?” asked Nance suddenly, putting her hand on his arm and pointing to a large square building which suddenly appeared on their left. They had been vaguely aware of this building for some while but one little thing or another in their more immediate neighbourhood had confined it to the remoter verge of their consciousness. As soon as she had asked the question Nance felt an unaccountable unwillingness to carry the investigation further. Sorio, too, seemed ready enough to let her enquiry remain unanswered. He shrugged his shoulders as much as to say “how can I tell?” and suggested that they should rest for a moment on a littered pile of wood which lay close to the water’s edge.
They stepped down the bank where they were, out of sight of the building above, and seated themselves. With their arms around their knees they contemplated the flowing tide and the dull-coloured mud of the opposite bank. A coil of decaying rope, tossed aside from some passing barge, lay at Sorio’s feet and, as he sat in gloomy silence, he thought how like the thing was to something he had once seen at an inquest in a house in New York. As for Nance, she found it difficult to remove her eyes from a shapeless bundle of sacking which the tide was carrying. Sometimes it would get completely submerged and then again it would reappear.
“Why is it,” she thought, “that there is always something horrible about tidal rivers? Is it because of the way they have of carrying things backward and forward, backward and forward, without ever allowing them either to get far inland or clear out to sea? Is a tidal river,” she said to herself, “the one thing in allthe world in which nothing can be lost or hidden or forgotten?”
It was curious how difficult they both felt it just then either to move from where they were or to address a single word to one another. They seemed hypnotized by something—hypnotized by some thought which remained unspoken at the back of their minds. They felt an extreme reluctance to envisage again that large square building surrounded by weather-stained wall, a wall from which the ivy had been carefully scraped.
Slowly, little by little, the bank of clouds mounted up to the meridian, casting over everything as it did so a more and more ominous twilight. The silence between them became after a while, a thing with a palpable presence. It seemed to float upon the water to their feet and, rising about them like a wraith, like a mist, like the ghost of a dead child, it fumbled with clammy fingers upon their hearts.
“I’m sure,” Sorio cried at last, with an obvious struggle to break the mysterious sorcery which weighed on them, “I’m perfectly sure that Ravelston Grange must be round that second bend of the river—do you see?—where those trees are! I’m sure it must! At any rate wemustcome to it at last if we only go on.”
He looked at his watch.
“Heavens! We’ve taken an hour already getting here! It’s nearly six. How on earth have we been so long?”
“Do you know, Adrian,” Nance remarked—and she couldn’t help noticing as she did so that though he spoke so resolutely of going forward he made not the least movement to leave his seat—“do you know I feel as if we were in a dream. I have the oddest feelingthat any moment we might wake up and find ourselves back in Rodmoor. Adrian, dear, let’s go back! Let’s go back to the town. There’s something that depresses me beyond words about all this.”
“Nonsense!” cried Sorio in a loud and angry voice, leaping to his feet and snatching up his stick. “Come on, my girl, come, child! We’ll see that Ravelston place before the rain gets to us!”
They clambered up the bank and walked swiftly forward. Nance noticed that Sorio looked steadily at the river, looked at the river without intermission and with hardly a word, till they were well beyond the very last houses of Mundham. It was an unspeakable relief to her when, at last, crossing a little footbridge over a weir, they found themselves surrounded by the open fens.
“Behind those trees, Nance,” Sorio kept repeating, “behind those trees! I’m absolutely sure I’m right and that Ravelston Grange is there. By the way, girl, which of your poets wrote the verses—
‘She makes her immemorial moan,She keeps her shadowy kine,O, Keith of Ravelston,The sorrows of thy line!’
‘She makes her immemorial moan,She keeps her shadowy kine,O, Keith of Ravelston,The sorrows of thy line!’
‘She makes her immemorial moan,
She keeps her shadowy kine,
O, Keith of Ravelston,
The sorrows of thy line!’
They’ve been running in my head all the afternoon ever since I saw ‘Keith Radipole,’ on those beer-barrels.”
Nance, however, was too eager to reach the real Ravelston to pay much heed to his poetic allusion.
“Oh, it sounds like—oh, I don’t know—Tennyson, perhaps!” and she pulled him forward towards the trees.
These proved to be a group of tall French poplars which, just then, were muttering volubly in the rain-smelling wind. They hurried past them and paused before a gate in a very high wall.
“What’s this?” exclaimed Sorio. “Thiscan’t be Ravelston. It looks more like a prison.”
For a moment his eyes encountered Nance’s and the girl glanced quickly away from what she read in his face. She called out to an old man who was hoeing potatoes behind some iron railings where the wall ended.
“Could you tell me where Ravelston Grange is?” she enquired.
The old man removed his hat and regarded her with a whimsical smile.
“’Tis across the river, lady, and there isn’t no bridge for some many miles. Maybe with any luck ye may meet a cattle-boat to take ye over but there’s little surety about them things.”
“What’s this place, then?” asked Sorio abruptly, approaching the iron railings.
“This, mister? Why this be the doctor’s house of the County Asylum. This be where they keep the superior cases, as you might say, them what pays summat, ye understand, and be only what you might call half daft. You must a’ seed the County Asylum as you came along. ’Tis a wonderful large place, one of the grandest, so they say, on this side of the kingdom.”
“Thank you,” said Sorio curtly. “That’s just what we wanted to know. Yes, we saw the house you speak of. It certainly looks big enough. Have there been many new cases lately? Is this what you might call a good year for mental collapses?”
As he spoke he peered curiously between the iron bars as if anxious to get some sight of the “half daft,” who could afford to pay for their keep.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘a good year,’ mister,” answered the man, watching him with little twinkling eyes, “but I reckon folk have been as liable to go shaky this year as most other years. ’Tisn’t in the season, I take it, ’tis in the man or for the matter of that,” and he cast an apologetic leer in Nance’s direction, “in the woman.”
“Come on, Adrian,” interposed his companion, “you see that guide-book told us all wrong. We’d better get back to the station.”
But Sorio held tightly to the railings with both his hands.
“Don’t tease me, Nance,” he said irritably. “I want to talk to this excellent man.”
“You’d better do what your missus says, mister,” observed the gardener, returning to his work. “The authorities don’t like no loitering in these places.”
But Sorio disregarded the hint.
“I should think,” he remarked, “it wouldn’t be so very difficult to escape out of here.” He received no reply to this and Nance pulled him by the sleeve.
“Please, Adrian, please come away,” she pleaded, with tears in her voice. The old man lifted up his head.
“You go back where you be come from,” he observed,“and thank the good Lord you’ve got such a pretty lady to look after you. There be many what envies you and many what ’ud like to stand in your shoes, and that’s God’s truth.”
Sorio sighed heavily, and letting go his hold upon the railings, turned to his companion.
“Let’s find another way to the town,” he said. “There must be some road over there, or at worst, we can walk along the line.”
They moved off hastily in the direction opposite from the river and the old man, after making an enigmatic gesture behind their backs, spat upon his hands and returned to his work. The sky was now entirely overclouded but still no rain fell.
With the coming of September there was a noticeable change in the weather. The air got perceptibly colder, the sea rougher and there were dark days when the sun was hardly seen at all. Sometimes the prevailing west wind brought showers, but so far, in spite of the cooler atmosphere, there was little heavy rain. The rain seemed to be gathering and massing on every horizon, but though its presence was felt, its actual coming was delayed and the fields and gardens remained scorched and dry. The ditches in the fens were low that season—lower than they had been for many years. Some of them were actually empty and in others there was so little water that the children could catch eels and minnows with their naked hands. In many portions of the salt marshes it was possible to walk dry-shod where, in the early Spring, one would have sunk up to the waist, or even up to the neck.
Driven by the hot weather from their usual feeding-grounds several rare and curious birds visited the fens that year. The immediate environs of Rodmoor were especially safe for these, as few among the fishermen carried guns and none of the wealthier inhabitants cared greatly for shooting. Brand Renshaw, for instance, like his father before him, refused to preserve any sort of game and indeed it was one of the chief causes of hisunpopularity with the neighbouring gentry that he was so little of a sportsman.
One species of visitor brought by that unusually hot August was less fortunate than the birds. This was a swallow-tail butterfly, one of the rarer of the two kinds known to collectors in that part of the country. Dr. Raughty was like a man out of his senses with delight when he perceived this beautiful wanderer. He bribed a small boy who was with him at the moment to follow it wherever it flew while he hurried back to his rooms for his net. Unluckily for the swift-flying nomad, instead of making for the open fens it persisted in hovering about the sand-dunes where grew a certain little glaucous plant and it was upon the sand dunes, finally, that the Doctor secured it, after a breathless and exhausting chase.
It seemed to cause Fingal Raughty real distress when he found that neither Nance nor Linda was pleased at what he had done. He met, indeed, with scanty congratulations from any of his friends. With Sorio he almost quarreled over the incident, so vituperative did the Italian become when reference was made to it in his presence. Mrs. Renshaw was gently sympathetic, evidently regarding it as one of the privileges of masculine vigour to catch and kill whatever was beautiful and endowed with wings, but even she spoilt the savour of her congratulations with a faint tinge of irony.
Two weeks of September had already passed when Sorio, in obedience to a little pencilled note he had received the night before, set off in the early afternoon to meet Philippa at one of their more recently discovered haunts. In spite of his resolution in the little dairy shop in Mundham he had made no drastic changein his life, either in the direction of finding work to do or of breaking off his relations with the girl from Oakguard. That excursion with Nance in which they tried so ineffectively to find the great painter’s house left, in its final impression, a certain cruel embarrassment between them. It became difficult for him not to feel that she was watching him apprehensively now and with a ghastly anxiety at the back of her mind and this consciousness poisoned his ease and freedom with her. He felt that her tenderness was no longer a natural, unqualified affection but a sort of terrified pity, and this impression set his nerves all the more on edge when they were together.
With Philippa, on the other hand, he felt absolutely free. The girl lived herself so abnormal and isolated a life, for Mrs. Renshaw disliked visitors and Brand discouraged any association with their neighbours, that she displayed nothing of that practical and human sense of proportion which was the basis of Nance’s character. For the very reason, perhaps, that she cared less what happened to him, she was able to humour him more completely. She piqued and stimulated his intelligence too, in a way Nance never did. She had flashes of diabolical insight which could always rouse and astonish him. Something radically cold and aloof in her made it possible for her to risk alienating him by savage and malicious blows at his pride. But the more poisonous her taunts became, the more closely he clung to her, deriving, it might almost seem, an actual pleasure from what he suffered at her hands. Anxious for both their sakes to avoid as much as possible the gossip of the village, he had continued his habit of meeting her in all manner of out-of-the-wayplaces, and the spot she had designated as their rendezvous for this particular afternoon was one of the remotest and least accessible of all these sanctuaries of refuge. It was, in fact, an old disused windmill, standing by itself in the fens about two miles north of that willow copse where he had on one fatal occasion caused Nance Herrick such distress.
Philippa was an abnormally good walker. From a child she had been accustomed to roam long distances by herself, so that it did not strike him as anything unusual that she should have chosen a place so far off from Oakguard as the scene of their encounter. One of her most marked peculiarities was a certain imaginative fastidiousness in regard to themilieuof her interviews with him. That was, indeed, one of the ways by which she held him. It amounted to a genius for the elimination of the commonplace or the “familiar” in the relations between them. She kept a clear space, as it were, around her personality, only approaching him when the dramatic accessories were harmonious, and vanishing again before he had time to sound the bottom of her evasive mood.
On this occasion Sorio walked with a firm and even gay bearing towards their rendezvous. He followed at first the same path as that taken by Nance and her sister on the eve of their eventful bank-holiday but when he reached Nance’s withy-bed he debouched to his left and plunged straight across the fens. The track he now followed was one used rarely, even by the owners of cattle upon the marshes and in front of him, as far as his eye could reach, nothing except isolated poplars and a few solitary gates, marking the bridges across the dykes, broke the grey expanse of the horizon. Thedeserted windmill towards which he made his way was larger than any of the others but while, in the gently-blowing wind the sails of the rest kept their slow and rhythmic revolution, this particular one stretched out its enormous arms in motionless repose as if issuing some solemn command to the elements or, like the biblical leader, threatening the overthrow of a hostile army.
As he walked, Sorio noticed that at last the Michaelmas daisies were really in bloom, their grey leaves and sad autumnal flowers blending congruously enough with the dark water and blackened reed-stems of the stagnant ditches. The sky above him was covered with a thin veil of leaden-coloured clouds, against which, flying so high as to make it difficult to distinguish their identity, an attenuated line of large birds—Sorio wondered if they were wild swans—moved swiftly towards the west. He arrived at last at the windmill and entered its cavernous interior. She rose to meet him, shaking the dust from her clothes. In the semi-darkness of the place, her eyes gleamed with a dangerous lustre like the eyes of an animal.
“Do you want to stay where we are?” he said when he had relinquished the hand she gave him, after lifting it in an exaggerated foreign manner, to his lips. She laughed a low mocking laugh.
“What’s the alternative, Adriano mio? EvenIcan’t walk indefinitely and it isn’t nice sitting over a half-empty dyke.”
“Well,” he remarked, “let’s stay here then! Where were you sitting before I came?”
She pointed to a heap of straw in the furthest corner of the place beneath the shadow of the half-ruinedflight of steps leading to the floor above. Adrian surveyed this spot without animation.
“It would be much more interesting,” he said, “if we could get up that ladder. I believe we could. I tried it clumsily the other day when I broke that step.”
“But how do we know the floor above will bear us if we do get up there?”
“Oh, it’ll bear us all right. Look! You can see. The middle boards aren’t rotted at all and that hole there is a rat-hole. There aren’t any dangerous cracks.”
“It would be so horrid to tumble through, Adrian.”
“Oh, we shan’t tumble through. I swear to you it’s all right, Phil. We’re not going to dance up there, are we?”
The girl put her hand on the dilapidated balustrade and shook it. The whole ladder trembled from top to bottom and a cloud of ancient flour-dust, grey and mouldy, descended on their heads.
“You see, Adrian?” she remarked. “It really isn’t safe!”
“I don’t care,” he said stubbornly. “What’s it matter? It’s dull and stuffy down here. I’m going to try anyway.”
He began cautiously ascending what remained intact of the forlorn ladder. The thing creaked ominously under his weight. He managed, however, to get sufficiently high to secure a hold upon the threshold-beam of the floor above when, with the aid of a projecting plank from the side-wall of the building, he managed to retain his position and after a brief struggle, disappeared from his companion’s view.
His voice came down to her from above, muffled a little by the intervening wood-work.
“It’s lovely up here, Phil! There are two little windows and you can see all over the fens. Wait a minute, we’ll soon have you up.”
There was a pause and she heard him moving about over her head.
“You’d much better come down,” she shouted. “I’m not going up there. There’s no possible way.”
He made no answer to this and there was dead silence for several minutes. She went to the entrance and emerged into the open air. The wide horizon around her seemed void and empty. Upon the surface of the immense plain only a few visible objects broke the brooding monotony. To the south and east she could discern just one or two familiar landmarks but to the west there was nothing—nothing but an eternal level of desolation losing itself in the sky. She gave an involuntary shudder and moved away from the windmill to the edge of a reed-bordered ditch. There was a pool of gloomy water in the middle of the reeds and across this pool and round and round it whirled, at an incredible speed, a score or so of tiny water-beetles, never leaving the surface and never pausing for a moment in their mad dance. A wretched little moth, its wings rendered useless by contact with the water, struggled feebly in the centre of this pool, but the shiny-coated beetles whirled on round it in their dizzy circles as if it had no more significance than the shadow of a leaf. Philippa smiled and walked back to the building.
“Adrian,” she called out, entering its dusty gloomand looking up at the square hole in the ceiling, from which still hung a remnant of broken wood-work.
“Well? What is it?” her friend’s voice answered. “It’s all right; we’ll soon have you up here!”
“I don’t want to go up there,” she shouted back. “I want you to come down. Please come down, Adrian! You’re spoiling all our afternoon.”
Once more there was dead silence. Then she called out again.
“Adrian,” she said, “there’s a moth being drowned in the ditch out here.”
“What? Where? What do you say?” came the man’s reply, accompanied by several violent movements. Presently a rope descended from the hole and swung suspended in the air.
“Look out, my dear,” Sorio’s voice ejaculated and a moment later he came swinging down, hand over hand, and landed at her side. “What’s that?” he gasped breathlessly, “what did you say? A moth in the water? Show me, show me!”
“Oh, it’s nothing, Adrian,” she answered petulantly. “I only wanted you to come down.”
But he had rushed out of the door and down to the stream’s edge.
“I see it! I see it!” he called back at her. “Here, give me my stick!” He came rushing back, pushed roughly past her, seized his stick from the ground and returned to the ditch. It was easy enough to effect the moth’s rescue. The same fluffy stickiness in the thing’s wet wings that made it helpless in the water, made it adhere to the stick’s point. He wiped it off upon the grass and pulled Philippa back into the building.
“I’m glad I came down,” he remarked. “I know it’ll hold now. You won’t mind my tying it round you, will you? I’ll have both the ends down here presently. It’s round a strong hook. It’s all right. And then I’ll pull you up.”
Philippa looked at him with angry dismay. All this agitating fuss over so childish an adventure irritated her beyond endurance. His proposal had, as a matter of fact, a most subtle and curious effect upon her. It changed the relations between them. It reduced her to the position of a girl playing with an elder brother. It outraged, with an element of the comic, her sense of dramatic fastidiousness. It humiliated her pride and broke the twisted threads of all kinds of delicate spiritual nets she had in her mind to cast over him. It placed her by his side as a weak and timid woman by the side of a willful and strong-limbed man. Her ascendency over him, as she well knew, depended upon the retaining, on her part, of a certain psychic evasiveness—a certain mysterious and tantalizing reserve. It depended—at any rate that is what she imagined—upon the inscrutable look she could throw into her eyes and upon the tragic glamour of her ambiguous red lips and white cheeks. How could she possibly retain all these characteristics when swinging to and fro at the end of a rope?
Sorio’s suggestion outraged something in her that went down to the very root of her personality. Walking with him, swimming with him, rowing in a boat with him—all those things were harmonious to her mind and congruous with her personal charm. None of these things interfered with the play of her intelligence, with the poise, the reserve, the aloofness of herspiritual challenge. She was exceptionally devoid of fear in these boyish sports and could feel herself when she engaged in them with him, free of the limitations of her sex. She could retain completely, as she indulged herself in them, all the equilibrium of her being—the rhythm of her identity. But this proposal of Sorio’s not only introduced a discordant element that had a shrewd vein of the ludicrous in it, it threw her into a physical panic. It pulled and tugged at the inmost fibres of her self-restraint. It made her long to sit down on the ground and cry like a child. She wondered vaguely whether it was that Adrian was revenging himself upon her at that moment for some accumulated series of half-physical outrages that he had himself in his neurotic state been subjected to lately. As to his actual sanity, it never occurred to her to questionthat. She herself was too wayward and whimsical in the reactions of her nerves and the processes of her mind to find anything startling, inthatsense, in what he was now suggesting. It was simply that it changed their relations—it destroyed her ascendency, it brought things down to brute force, it turned her into a woman.
Her mind, as she stood hesitating, reviewed the moth incident. That sort of situation—Adrian’s fantastic mania for rescuing things—had just the opposite effect on her. He might poke his stick into half the ditches of Rodmoor and save innumerable drowning moths; the only effectthathad on her was to make her feel superior to him, better adapted than he to face the essential facts of life, its inherent and integral cruelty for instance. But now—to see that horrible rope-end dangling from that gaping hole and to see the eager, violent, masculine look in her friend’s eyes—it was unendurable;it drove her, so to speak, against the jagged edge of the world’s brute wall.