Philippa suddenly lost her passivity, slipped like a snake from under his encircling arms, and rushed away among the trees. “I leave her to you!” she called back to them out of the darkness. “I leave her to you! You won’t endure her long.And what will Baptiste do, Adriano?”
This last word of hers calmed Sorio’s mood and threw him back upon his essential self. He sighed heavily.
“Well, Nance,” he said, “shall we go back? It’s no use waiting for her. She’ll find her way to Oakguard. She knows every inch of these woods.” He sighed again, as if bidding farewell, in one fate-burdened moment, both to the woods and the girl who knew them.
“Youcan go back if you like,” Nance answered curtly. “I’m going to speak to Brand”; and she told him in a brief sentence what she had learned from Linda.
Sorio seized her hand and clutched it savagely. “Yes, yes,” he cried, “yes, yes, let’s go together. He must be taught a lesson—this Brand! Come, let’s go together!”
They moved on rapidly and soon approached the end of the avenue and the entrance to the garden. As Sorio pushed open the iron gates, a sharp crack of thunder, followed by reverberating detonations, broke over their heads. The sudden flash that succeeded the sound brought into vivid relief the dark form of the house, while a long row of fading dahlias, drooping on their rain-soaked stems, stood forth in ghastly illumination.
Nance had time to catch on Adrian’s face a look that gave her a premonition of danger. Had she not herself been wrought-up to an unnatural pitch of excitement by her contest with Philippa, she would probably have been warned in time and have drawn back, postponing her interview with Brand till she could have seen him alone. As it was, she felt herself driven forward by a force she could not resist. “Now—very now,” she must face her sister’s seducer.
A light, burning behind heavy curtains, in one of the lower mullioned windows, enabled them to mount the steps. As she rang the bell, a second peal of thunder, but this time farther off, was followed by a vivid flash of lightning, throwing into relief the wide spaces of the park and the scattered groups of monumental oak trees. For some queer psychic reason, inexplicable to any material analysis, Nance at that moment saw clearly before her mind’s eye, a little church almanac, which Linda had pinned up above their dressing-table, and on this almanac she saw the date—the twenty-eighth of October—printed in Roman figures.
To the servant who opened the door Nance gave their names, and asked whether they could see Mr. Renshaw.“Mr.Renshaw,” she added emphatically, “and please tell him it’s an urgent and important matter.”
The man admitted them courteously and asked them to seat themselves in the entrance hall while he went to look for his master. He returned after a short time and ushered them into the library, where a moment later Brand joined them.
During their moment of waiting, both in the hall and in the room, Sorio had remained taciturn and inert, sunk in a fit of melancholy brooding, his chin propped on the handle of his stick. He had refused to allow the servant to take out of his hands either his stick or his hat, and he still held them both, doggedly and gloomily, as he sat by Nance’s side opposite the carved fireplace.
When Brand entered they both rose, but he motioned them to remain seated, and drawing up a chair for himself close by the side of the hearth, looked gravely and intently into their faces.
At that moment another rolling vibration of thunder reached them, but this time it seemed to come from very far away, perhaps from several miles out to sea.
Brand’s opening words were accompanied by a fierce lashing of rain against the window, and a spluttering, hissing noise, as several heavy drops fell through the old-fashioned chimney upon the burning logs.
“I think I can guess,” he said, “why you two have come to me. I am glad you have come, especially you, Miss Herrick, as it simplifies things a great deal. It has become necessary that you and I should have an explanation. I owe it to myself as well as to you. Bah! What nonsense I’m talking. It isn’t a case of ‘owing.’ It isn’t a case of ‘explaining.’ I can seethat clearly enough”—he laughed a genial boyish laugh—“in your two faces! It’s a case of our own deciding, with all the issues of the future clearly in mind, what will be really best for your sister’s happiness.”
“She has not sent—” began Nance hurriedly.
“What you’ve got to understand—you Renshaw—” muttered Adrian, in a strange hoarse voice, clenching and unclenching his fingers.
Brand interrupted them both. “Pardon me,” he cried, “you do not wish, I suppose, either of you, to cause any serious shock to my mother? It’s absurd of her, of course, and old-fashioned, and all that sort of thing; but it would actuallykillher—” he rose as he spoke and uttered the words clearly and firmly. “It would actuallykillher to get any hint of what we’re discussing now. So, if you’ve no objection, we’ll continue this discussion in the work-shop.” He moved towards the door.
Sorio followed him with a rapid stride. “You must understand, Renshaw—” he began.
“If it’ll hurt your mother so,” cried Nance hurriedly, “what must Linda be suffering? You didn’t think of this, Mr. Renshaw, when you—”
Brand swung round on his heel. “You shall say all this to me, all that you wish to say—everything, do you hear, everything! Only it must andshallbe where she cannot overhear us. Wait till we’re alone. We shall be alone in the work-shop.”
“If this ‘work-shop’ of yours,” muttered Sorio savagely, seizing him by the arm, “turns out to be one of your English tricks, you’d better—”
“Silence, you fool!” whispered the other. “Can’tyou stop him, Miss Herrick? It’ll be pure murder if my mother hears this!”
Nance came quickly between them. “Lead on, Mr. Renshaw,” she said. “We’ll follow you.”
He led them across the hall and down a long dimly lit passage. At the end of this there was a heavily panelled door. Brand took a key from his pocket and after some ineffectual attempts turned the lock and stood aside to let them enter. He closed the door behind them, leaving the key on the outside. The “work-shop” Brand had spoken of turned out to be nothing more or less than the old private chapel of Oakguard, disassociated, however, for centuries from any religious use.
Nance glanced up at the carved ceiling, supported on foliated corbels. The windows, high up from the ground, were filled with Gothic tracery, but in place of biblical scenes their diamonded panes showed the armorial insignia of generations of ancient Renshaws. There was a raised space at the east end, where, in former times, the altar stood, but now, in place of an altar, a carpenter’s table occupied the central position, covered with a litter of laths and wood-chippings. The middle portion of the chapel was bare and empty, but several low cane chairs stood round this space, like seats round a toy coliseum.
Brand indicated these chairs to his visitors, but neither Nance nor Sorio seemed inclined to avail themselves of the opportunity to rest. They all three, therefore, stood together, on the dark polished oak floor.
On first entering the chapel, Brand had lit one of a long row of tapers that stood in wooden candlesticksalong the edge of what resembled choir stalls. Now, leaving his companions, he proceeded very deliberately to set light to the whole line of these. The place thus illuminated had a look strangely weird and confused.
Certain broken flower-pots on the ground, and one or two rusty gardening implements, combined with the presence of the wicker-chairs to produce the impression of some sort of “Petit Trianon,” or manorial summer-house, into which all manner of nondescript rubbish had in process of long years come to drift.
The coats-of-arms in the windows above, as the tapers flung their light upon them, had an air almost “collegiate,” as if the chamber were some ancient dining-hall of a monastic order. The carpenter’s table upon the raised dais, with some dimly coloured Italianated picture behind it, inserted in the panelling, gave Nance a most odd sensation. Where had she seen an effect of that kind before? In a picture—or in reality?
But the girl had no heart to analyse her emotions. There was too much at stake. The rain, pattering heavily on the roof of the building, seemed to remind her of her task. She faced Brand resolutely as he strolled back towards them across the polished floor.
“Linda has told me everything,” she said. “She is going to have a child, and you, Mr. Renshaw, are the father of it.”
Sorio made an inarticulate exclamation and approached Brand threateningly. But the latter, disregarding him, continued to look Nance straight in the face.
“Miss Herrick,” he said quietly, “you are a sensible woman and not one, I think, liable to hysteric sentimentalism.I want to discuss this thing quite freely and openly with you, but I would greatly prefer it if your husband—I beg your pardon—if Mr. Sorio would let us talk without interrupting. I haven’t got unlimited time. My mother and sister will be both waiting dinner for me and sending people to find me, perhaps even coming themselves. So it’s obviously in the interests of all of us—particularly of Linda—that we should not waste time in any mock heroics.”
Nance turned quickly to her betrothed. “You’ll hear all we say, Adrian, but if it makes things easier, perhaps—”
Without a word, in mute obedience to her sad smile, Sorio left their side, and drawing back, seated himself in one of the wicker chairs, hugging his heavy stick between his knees.
The rain continued falling without intermission upon the leaden roof, and from a pipe above one of the windows they could hear a great jet of water splashing down outside the wall.
Brand spoke in a low hurried tone, without embarrassment and without any sort of shame. “Yes, Miss Herrick, what she says is quite true. But now come down to the facts, without any of this moral vituperation, which only clouds the issues. You have, no doubt, come here with the idea of asking me to marry Linda. No! Don’t interrupt me. Let me finish. But I want to ask you this—how do you know that if I marry Linda, she’ll bereallyany happier than she is to-day? Suppose I were to say to you that I would marry her—marry her to-morrow—wouldthat, when you come to think it over in cold blood, really make you happy in your mind about her future?
“Come, Miss Herrick! Put aside for a moment your natural anger against me. Grant what you please as to my being a dangerous character and a bad man, does that make me a suitable husband for your sister? Your instinct is a common instinct—the natural first instinct of any protector of an injured girl, but is it one that will stand the light of quiet and reasonable second thoughts?
“I am, let us say, a selfish and unscrupulous man who has seduced a young girl. Very well! You want to punish me for my ill-conduct, and how do you go about it? By giving up your sister into my hands! By giving up to me—a cruel and unscrupulous wretch, at your own showing—the one thing you love best in the world! Is that a punishment such as I deserve? In one moment you take away all my remorse, for no one remains remorsefulafterhe has been punished. And you give my victim up—bound hand and foot—into my hands.
“Linda may love me enough to be glad to marry me, quite apart from the question of her good fame. But will you, who probably know me better than Linda, feel happy at leaving her in my hands? Your idea may be that I should marry her and then let her go. But suppose I wouldn’t consent to let her go? And suppose she wouldn’t consent to leave me?
“There we are—tied together for life—and she as the weaker of the two the one to suffer for the ill-fated bargain!Thatwill not have been a punishment for me, Nance Herrick, nor will it have been a compensation for her. It will simply have worked out as a temporary boredom to one of us, and as miserable wretchedness to the other!
“Is that what you wish to bring about by this interference on her behalf? It’s absurd to pretend that you think of me as a mere hot-headed amorist, desperately in love with Linda, as she is with me, and that, by marrying us, you are smoothing out her path and settling her down happily for the rest of her life. You think of me as a cold-blooded selfish sensualist, and to punish me for being what I am, you propose to put Linda’s entire happiness absolutely in my hands!
“Of course, I speak to you like this knowing that, whatever your feelings are, you have the instincts of a lady. A different type of woman from yourself would consider merely the worldly aspect of the matter and the advantage to your sister of becoming mistress of Oakguard.That, I know, does not enter, for one moment, into your thoughts, any more than it enters into hers. I am not ironical in saying this. I am not insulting you. I am speaking simply the truth.
“Forgive me, Miss Herrick! Even to mention such a thing is unworthy of either of us. I am, as you quite justly realize—and probably more than you realize—what the world calls unscrupulous. But no one has ever accused me of truckling to public opinion or social position. I care nothing for those things, any more than you do or Linda does. As far as those things go I would marry her to-morrow. My mother, as you doubtless know, hopes that Ishallmarry her—wishes and prays for it. My mother has never given a thought, and never will give a thought, to the opinion of the world. It isn’t in her nature, as no doubt you quite realize. We Renshaws have always gone our own way, and done what we pleased. My father did—Philippa does; and I do.
“Come, Miss Herrick! Try for a moment to put your anger against me out of the question. Suppose you did induce me to marry Linda, and Linda to marry me, does that mean that you make me change my nature? We Renshaws never change andInever shall, you may be perfectly sure of that! Icouldn’teven if I wanted to. My blood, my race, my father’s instincts in me, go too deep. We’re an evil tribe, Nance Herrick, an evil tribe, and especially are we evil in our relations with women. Some families are like that, you know! It’s a sort of tradition with them. And it is so with us. It may be some dark old strain of Viking blood, the blood of the race that burnt the monasteries in the days of Æthelred the Unready! On the other hand it may be some unaccountable twist in our brains, due—as Fingal says—to—oh! to God knows what!
“Let it go! It doesn’t matter what it is; and I daresay you think me a grotesque hypocrite for bringing such a matter into it at all. Well! Let it go! There’s really no need to drag in Æthelred the Unready! What you and I have to do, Miss Herrick, is, seriously and quietly, without passion or violence, to discuss what’s best for your sister’s happiness. Put my punishment out of your mind for the present—that can come later. Your friend Mr. Sorio will be only too pleased to deal with that! The point forusto consider, for us who both love your sister, is, what will really be happiest for her in the long run—and I can assure you that no woman who ever lived could be happy long tied hand and foot to a Renshaw.
“Look at my mother! Does she suggest a person who has had a happy life? I tell you she would give all she has ever enjoyed here—every stick and stone of Oakguard—never to have set eyes on my father—never to have given birth to Philippa or to me! We Renshaws may have our good qualities—God knows what they are—but we may have them. But one thing is certain. We are worse than the very devil for any woman who tries to live with us! It’s in our blood, I tell you. We can’t help it. We’re made to drive women mad—to drive them into their graves!”
He stopped abruptly with a bitter and hopeless shrug of his shoulders. Nance had listened to him, all the way through his long speech, with concentrated and frowning attention. When he had finished she stood staring at him without a word, almost as if she wished him to continue; almost as if something about his personality fascinated her in spite of herself, and made her sympathetic.
But Sorio, who had been fidgetting with his heavy stick, rose now, slowly and deliberately, to his feet. Nance, looking at his face, saw upon it an expression which from long association she had come to regard with mingled tenderness and alarm. It was the look his features wore when on the point of rushing to the assistance of some wounded animal or ill-used child.
He uttered no word, but flinging Nance aside with his left hand, with the other he struck blindly with his stick, aiming a murderous blow straight at Brand’s face.
Brand had barely time to raise his hand. The blow fell upon his wrist, and his arm sank under it limp and paralysed.
Nance, with a loud cry for assistance, clung frantically to Sorio’s neck, trying to hold him back. But apparently beyond all consciousness now of what hewas doing, Sorio flung her roughly back and drove his enemy with savage repeated strokes into a corner of the room. It was not long before Brand’s other arm was rendered as useless as the first, and the blows falling now on his unprotected head, soon felled him to the ground.
Nance, who had flung open the door and uttered wild and panic-stricken cries for help, now rushed across the room and pinioned the exhausted flagellant in her strong young arms. Seeing his enemy motionless and helpless with a stream of blood trickling down his face, Adrian resigned himself passively to her controlling embrace.
They were found in this position by the two men-servants, who came rushing down the passage in answer to her screams. Mrs. Renshaw, dressing in her room on the opposite side of the house, heard nothing. The steady downpour of the rain dulled all other sounds. Philippa had not yet returned.
Under Nance’s directions, the two men carried their master out of the “work-shop,” while she herself continued to cling desperately to Sorio. There had been something hideous and awful to the girl’s imagination about the repeated “thud—thud—thud” of the blows delivered by her lover. This was especially so after the numbing of his bruised arms reduced Adrian’s victim to helplessness.
As she clung to him now she seemed to hear the sound of those blows—each one striking, as it seemed, something resistless and prostrate in her own being. And once more, with grotesque iteration, the figures upon Linda’s almanac ticked like a clock in answer to the echo of that sound. “October the twenty-eighth—Octoberthe twenty-eighth,” repeated the church-almanac, from its red-lettered frame.
The extraordinary thing was that as her mind began to function more naturally again, she became conscious that, all the while, during that appalling scene, even at the very moment when she was crying out for help, she had experienced a sort of wild exultation. She recalled that emotion quite clearly now with a sense of curious shame.
She was also aware that while glancing at Brand’s pallid and unconscious face as they carried him from the room, she had felt a sudden indescribable softening towards him and a feeling for him that she would hardly have dared to put into words. She found herself, even now, as she went over in her mind with lightning rapidity every one of the frightful moments she had just gone through, changing the final episode in her heart, to quite a different one; to one in which she herself knelt down by their enemy’s side, and wiped the blood from his forehead, and brought him back to consciousness.
Left alone with Sorio, Nance relaxed her grasp and laid her hands appealingly upon his shoulder. But it was into unseeing eyes that she looked, and into a face barely recognizable as that of her well-beloved. He began talking incoherently and yet with a kind of terrible deliberation and assurance.
“What’s that you say? Only the rain? They say it’s only the rain when they want to fool me and quiet me. But I know better! They can’t fool me like that. It’s blood, of course; it’s Nance’s blood.You, Nance? Oh, no, no, no! I’m not so easily fooled as that. Nance is at the bottom of that hole in the wood, where I struck her—one—two—three! It took three hits to do it—and she didn’t speak a word, not a word, nor utter one least little cry. It’s funny that I had to hit her three times! She is so soft, so soft and easy to hurt. No, no, no, no! I’m not to be fooled like that. My Nance had great laughing grey eyes. Yours are horrible, horrible. I see terror in them.Shewas afraid of nothing.”
His expression changed, and a wistful hunted look came into his face. The girl tried to pull him towards one of the chairs, but he resisted—clasping her hand appealingly.
“Tell me, Phil,” he whispered, in a low awe-struck voice, “tell me why you made me do it. Did you think it would be better, better for all of us, to have her lying there cold and still? No, no, no! You needn’t look at me with those dreadful eyes. Do you know, Phil, since you made me kill her I think your eyes have grown to look like hers, and your face, too—and all of you.”
Nance, as he spoke, cried out woefully and helplessly. “I am! I am! I am! Adrian—my own—my darling—don’t you know me? I am your Nance!”
He staggered slowly now to one of the chairs, moving each foot as he did so with horrible deliberation as if nothing he did could be done naturally any more, or without a conscious effort of will. Seating himself in the chair, he drew her down upon his knee and began passing his fingers backwards and forwards over her face.
“Why did you make me do it, Phil?” he moaned, rocking her to and fro as if she were a child. “Why did you make me do it? She would have given mesleep, if you’d only let her alone, cool, deep, delicious sleep! She would have smoothed away all my troubles. She would have destroyed the old Adrian and made a new one—a clear untroubled one, bathed in great floods of glorious white light!”
His voice sank to an awe-struck and troubled murmur. “Phil, my dear,” he whispered, “Phil, listen to me. There’s something I can’t remember! Something—O God! No! It’ssome one—some one most precious to me—and I’ve forgotten. Something’s happened to my brain, and I’ve forgotten. It was after I struck those blows, those blows that made her mouth look so twisted and funny—just like yours looks now, Phil! Why is it, do you think, that dead people have that look on their mouths? Phil, tell me; tell me what it is I’ve forgotten! Don’t be cruel now. I can’t stand it now. Imustremember. I always seem just on the point of remembering, and then something in my brain closes up, like an iron door. Oh, Phil—my love, my love, tell me what it is!”
As he spoke he clasped the girl convulsively, crushing her and hurting her by the strength of his arms. To hear him address her thus by the name of her rival was such misery to Nance that she was hardly conscious of the physical distress caused by his violence. It was still worse when, relaxing the force of his grasp, he began to fondle and caress her, stroking her face with his fingers and kissing her cheeks.
“Phil, my love, my darling!” he kept repeating, “please tell me—please, please tell me, what it is I’ve forgotten!”
Nance suffered at that moment the extreme limit of what she was capable of enduring. She dreaded everymoment that Philippa herself would come in. She dreaded the reappearance of the servants, perhaps with more assistance, ready to separate them and carry Adrian away from her. To feel his caresses and to know that in his wild thoughts they were not meant for her at all—that was more, surely more, than God could have intended her to suffer!
Suddenly she had an inspiration. “Is it Baptiste that you’ve forgotten?”
The word had an electrical effect upon him. He threw her off his lap and leapt to his feet.
“Yes,” he cried savagely and wildly, the train of his thoughts completely altered, “you’re all keeping him away from me! That’s what’s at the bottom of it! You’ve hidden Nance from me and given me this woman who looks like her but who can’t smile and laugh like my Nance, to deceive me and betray me! I know you—you staring, white-faced, frightened thing!Youdon’t deceive me!Youdon’t fool Adrian. I know you.Youare not my Nance.”
She had staggered away, a few paces from him, when he first threw her off, and now, with a heart-rending effort, she tried to smooth the misery out of her face and to smile at him in her normal, natural way. But the effort was a ghastly mockery. It was little wonder, seeing her there, so lamentably trying to smile into his eyes, that he cried out savagely: “That’s not my Nance’s smile. That’s the smile of a cunning mask! You’ve hidden her away from me. Curse you all—you’ve hidden her away from me—and Baptiste, too! Where is my Baptiste—you staring white thing? Where is my Baptiste, you woman with a twisted mouth?”
He rushed fiercely towards her and seized her by the throat. “Tell me what you’ve done with him,” he cried, shaking her to and fro, and tightening his grasp upon her neck. “Tell me, you devil! Tell me, or I’ll kill you.”
Nance’s brain clouded and darkened. Her senses grew confused and misty. “He’s going to strangle me,” she thought, “and I don’t care! This pain won’t last long, and it will be death fromhishand.”
All at once, however, in a sudden flash of blinding clearness, she realized what this moment meant. If she let him murder her, passively, unresistingly, what would become of him when she was dead? Simultaneously with this thought something seemed to rise up, strong and clear, from the depths of her being, something powerful and fearless, ready to wrestle with fate to the very end.
“He shan’t kill me!” she thought. “I’ll live to save us both.” Tearing frantically at his hands, she struggled backwards towards the open door, dragging him with her. In his mad blood-lust he was horribly, murderously strong; but this new life-impulse, springing from some supernatural level in the girl’s being, proved still stronger. With one tremendous wrench at his wrists she flung him from her; flung him away with such violence that he slipped and fell to the ground.
In a moment she had rushed through the doorway and closed and locked the heavy door behind her. Even at the very second she achieved this and staggered faint and weak against the wall, what seemed to her rapidly clouding senses a large concourse of noisy people carrying flickering lights, swept about her. As they came upon her she sank to the floor, her last impressionbeing that of the great dark eyes of Philippa Renshaw illuminated by an emotion which was beyond her power of deciphering, an emotion in which her mind lost itself, as she tried to understand it, in a deep impenetrable mist, that changed to absolute darkness as she fainted away.
The morning of the twenty-ninth of October crept slowly and greyly through the windows of the sisters’ room. Linda had done her best to forget her own trouble and to offer what she could of consolation and hope to Nance. It was nearly three o’clock before the unhappy girl found forgetfulness in sleep, and now with the first gleam of light she was awake again.
The worst she could have anticipated was what had happened. Adrian had been taken away—not recognizing any one—to that very Asylum at Mundham which they had glanced at together with such ominous forebodings. She herself—what else could she do?—had been forced to sign her name to the official document which, before midnight fell upon Oakguard, made legal his removal.
She had signed it—she shuddered now to think of her feelings at that moment—below the name of Brand, who as a magistrate was officially compelled to take the initiative in the repulsive business. Dr. Raughty and Mr. Traherne, who had both been summoned to the house, had signed that dreadful paper, too. Nance’s first impression on regaining consciousness was that of the Doctor’s form bending anxiously over her. She remembered how queer his face looked in the shadowy candle-light and how gently he had stroked the back ofher hand when she unclosed her eyes, and what relief his expression had shown when she whispered his name.
It was the Doctor who had driven her home at last, when the appalling business was over and the people had come, with a motor car from Mundham, and carried Adrian away. She had learnt from him that Brand’s injuries were in no way serious and were likely to leave no lasting hurt, beyond a deep scar on the forehead. His arms were bruised and injured, Fingal told her, but neither of them was actually broken.
Hamish Traherne had gone with the Mundham people to the Asylum and would spend the night there. He had promised Nance to come and see her before noon and tell her everything.
She gathered also from Fingal that Philippa, showing unusual promptitude and tact, had succeeded in keeping Mrs. Renshaw away, both from the closed door of the chapel and from the bedside of Brand, until the latter had recovered consciousness.
Nance, as her mind went over and over every detail of that hideous evening, could not help thanking God that Adrian had at least been spared the tragic burden of blood-guiltiness. As far as the law of the land was concerned, he had only to recover his sanity and regain his normal senses, to make his liberation easy and natural. There had been no suggestion in the paper she had signed—and she had been especially on the look-out for that—with regard tocriminallunacy.
She sat up in bed and looked at her sister. Linda was sleeping as peacefully as a child. The cold morning light gave her face a curious pallor. Her long brown lashes lay motionless upon her cheeks, and fromher gently parted lips her breath came evenly and calmly.
Nance recalled the strange interview she had had with Brand before Adrian flung himself between them. It was strange! Do what she could, she could not feel towards that man anything but a deep unspeakable pity. Had he magnetized her—her too—she wondered—with that mysterious force in him, that force at once terrible and tender, which so many women had found fatal? No—no! That, of course, was ridiculous. That was unthinkable. Her heart was Adrian’s and Adrian’s alone. But why, then, was it that she found herself not only pardoning him what he had done but actually—in some inexplicable way—condoning it and understanding it? Was she, too, losing her wits? Was she, too,—under the influence of this disastrous place—forfeiting all sense of moral proportion?
The man had seduced her sister, and had refused—thatremained quite clearly as the prevailing impression of that wild interview with him—definitely and obstinately to marry her, and yet, here was she, her sister’s only protector in the world, softening in her heart towards him and thinking of him with a sort of sentimental pity! Truly the minds of mortal men and women contained mysteries past finding out!
She lay back once more upon her pillows and let the hours of the morning flow over her head like softly murmuring waves. There is often, especially in a country town, something soothing and refreshing beyond words in the opening of an autumn day. In winter the light does not arrive till the stir and noise and traffic of the streets has already, so to speak, establisheditself. In summer the earlier hours are so long and bright, that by the time the first movements of humanity begin, the day has already been ravished of its pristine freshness and grown jaded and garish. Early mornings in spring have a magical and thrilling charm, but the very exuberance of joyous life then, the clamorous excitement of birds and animals, the feverish uneasiness and restlessness of human children, make it difficult to lie awake in perfect receptivity, drinking in every sound and letting oneself be rocked and lulled upon a languid tide of half-conscious dreaming.
Upon such a tide, however, Nance now lay, in spite of everything, and let the vague murmurs and the familiar sounds flow over her, in soft reiteration. That she should be able to lie like this, listening to the rattle of the milkman’s cans and the crying of the sea-gulls and the voices of newly-awakened bargemen higher up the river, and the lowing of cattle from the marshes and the chirping of sparrows on the roof, when all the while her lover was moaning, in horrible unconsciousness, within those unspeakable walls, was itself, as she contemplated it in cold blood, an atrocious trick of all-subverting Nature!
She looked at the misty sunlight, soft and mellow, which now began to invade the room, and she marvelled at herself in a sort of bewildered shame that she should not, at this crisis in her life,be able to feel more. Was it that her experiences of the day before had so harrowed her soul that she had no power of reaction left? Or was it—and upon this thought she tried to fix her mind as the true explanation—that the great underlying restorative forces were already dimly butpowerfully exerting themselves on behalf of Adrian, and on behalf of her sister and herself?
She articulated the words “restorative forces” in the depths of her mind, giving her thought this palpable definition; but as she did so she was only too conscious of the presence of a mocking spirit there, whose finger pointed derisively at the words as soon as she had imaged them. Restorative forces? Were there such things in the world at all? Was it not much more likely that what she felt at this moment was nothing more than that sort of desperate calm which comes, with a kind of numbing inertia, upon human beings, when they have been wrought upon to the limit of their endurance? Was it not indeed rather a sign of her helplessness, a sign that she had come now to the end of all her powers, and could do no more than just stretch out her arms upon the tide and lie back upon the dark waters, letting them bear her whither they pleased—was it not rather a token of this, than of any inkling of possible help at hand?
It was at that moment that amid the various sounds which reached her ear, there came the clear joyous whistling of some boy apprentice, occupied in removing the shutters from one of the shop-windows in the street. The boy was whistling, casually and clumsily enough, but still with a beautiful intonation, certain familiar strophes from the Marseillaise. The great revolutionary tune echoed clear and strong over the drowsy cobble-stones, between the narrow patient walls, and down away towards the quiet harbour.
It was incredible the effect which this simple accident had upon the mind of the girl. In one moment she had flung to the winds all thought of submission todestiny—all idea of “lying back” upon fate. No longer did she dream vaguely and helplessly of “restorative forces,” somewhere, somehow, remotely active in her favour. The old, brave, defiant, youthful spirit in her, the spirit of her father’s child, leapt up, strong and vigorous in her heart and brain. No—no! Never would she yield. Never would she submit. “Allons, enfants!” She would fight to the end.
And then, all in a moment, she remembered Baptiste. Of course! That was the thing to be done. Fool that she was not to have thought of it before! She must send a cabled message to Adrian’s son. It was towards Baptiste that his spirit was continually turning. It must be Baptiste who should restore him to health!
It was not much after six o’clock when that boy’s whistling reached her, but between then and the first moment of the opening of the post office, her mind was in a whirl of hopeful thoughts.
As she stood waiting at the little stuccoed entrance for the door to open, and watched with an almost humorous interest the nervous expectancy of the most drooping, pallid, unhealthy and unfortunately complexioned youth she had ever set eyes upon, she felt full of strength and courage. Adrian had been ill before and had recovered. He would recover now! She herself would bring him the news of Baptiste’s coming. The mere news of it would help him.
There was a little garden just visible through some iron railings by the side of the post office and above these railings and drooping towards them so that it almost rested upon their spikes, was a fading sunflower. The flower was so wilted and tattered that Nance had no scruple about stretching her hand towardsit and trying to pluck it from its stem. She did this half-mechanically, full of her new hope, as a child on its way to catch minnows in a freshly discovered brook might pluck a handful of clover.
The sickly-looking youth—Nance couldn’t help longing to cover his face with zinc-ointment; why did onealwaysmeet people with dreadful complexions in country post offices?—observing her efforts, extendedhishand also, and together they pulled at the radiant derelict, until they broke it off. When she held it in her hands, Nance felt a little ashamed and sorry, for the tall mutilated stem stood up so stark and raw with drops of white frothy sap oozing from it. She could not help remembering how it was one of Adrian’s innocent superstitions to be reluctant to pick flowers. However, it was done now. But what should she do with this great globular orb of brown seeds with the scanty yellow petals, like weary taper-flames, surrounding its circumference?
The lanky youth looked at her and smiled shyly. She met his eyes, and observing his embarrassment, obviously tinged with unconcealed admiration, she smiled back at him, a sweet friendly smile of humorous camaraderie.
Apparently this was the first time in his life that a really beautiful girl had ever smiled at him, for he blushed a deep purple-red all over his face.
“I think, ma’am,” he stammered nervously, “I know who you are. I’ve seen you with Mr. Stork.”
Nance’s face clouded. She regarded it as a bad omen to hear this name mentioned. Her old mysterious terror of her friend’s friend rose powerfully upon her. In some vague obscure way, she felt conscious of hisintimate association with all the forces in the world most inimical to her and to her future.
Observing her look and a little bewildered by it, the youth rambled helplessly on. “Mr. Stork has been a very good friend to me,” he murmured. “He got me my job at Mr. Walpole’s—Walpole the saddler, Miss. I should have had to have left mother if it hadn’t been for him.”
With a sudden impulse of girlish mischief, Nance placed in the boy’s hand the great faded flower she was holding. “Put it into your button-hole,” she said.
At that moment the door opened, and forgetting the boy, the sunflower, and the ambiguous Mr. Stork, she hurried into the building, full of her daring enterprise.
Her action seemed to remove from the youth’s thoughts whatever motive he may have had in waiting for the opening of the office. Perhaps this goddess-like apparition rendered commonplace and absurd some quaint pictorial communication, smudgy and blotched, which now remained unstamped in his coat-pocket. At any rate he slunk away, with long, furtive, slouching strides, carrying the flower she had given him as reverently as a religious-minded acolyte might carry a sacred vessel.
Meanwhile, Nance sent off her message, laying down on the counter her half-sovereign with a docility that thrilled the young woman who officiated there with awe and importance.
“Baptiste Sorio, fifteen West Eleventh Street, New York City,” the message ran, “come at once; your father in serious mental trouble”; and she signed it with her own name and address, and paid five shillings more to secure an immediate reply.
Then, leaving the post office, she returned slowly and thoughtfully to her lodging. The usual stir and movement of the beginning of the day’s work filled the little street when she approached her room. Nance could not help thinking how strange and curious it was that the stream of life should thus go rolling forward with its eternal repetition of little familiar usages, in spite of the desperation of this or the other cruel personal drama.
Adrian might be moaning for his son in that Mundham house. Linda might be fearing and dreading the results of her obsession. Philippa might be tossing forth her elfish laugh upon the wind among the oak-trees. She herself might be “lying back upon fate” or struggling to wrestle with fate. What mattered any of these things to the people who sold and bought and laughed and quarrelled and laboured and made love, as the powers set in motion a new day, and the brisk puppets of a human town began their diurnal dance?
It was not till late in the afternoon that Nance received an answer to her message. She was alone when she opened it, Linda having gone as usual, under her earnest persuasion, to practise in the church. The message was brief and satisfactory: “Sailing to-morrowAltruniaLiverpool six days boat Baptiste.”
So he would really be here—here in Rodmoor—in seven or eight days. This was news for Adrian, if he had the power left to understand anything! She folded the paper carefully and placed it in her purse.
Mr. Traherne had come to her about noon, bringing news that, on the whole, was entirely reassuring. It seemed that Sorio had done little else than sleep sincehis first entrance into the place; and both the doctors there regarded this as the best possible sign.
Hamish explained to her that there were three degrees of insanity—mania, melancholia, and dementia—and, from what he could learn from his conversations with the doctors, this heavy access of drowsiness ruled out of Adrian’s case the worst symptom of both these latter possibilities. What they called “mania,” he explained to her, was something quite curable and with nearly all the chances in favour of recovery. It was really—he told her he had gathered from them—“only a question of time.”
The priest had been careful to inquire as to the possibility of Nance being allowed to visit her betrothed; but neither of the doctors seemed to regard this, at any rate for the present, as at all desirable. He cordially congratulated her, however, on having sent for Sorio’s son. “Whatever happens,” he said, “it’s right and natural thatheshould be here with you.”
While Nance was thus engaged in “wrestling with fate,” a very different mental drama was being enacted behind the closed windows of Baltazar’s cottage.
Mr. Stork had not been permitted even to fall asleep before rumours reached him that some startling event had occurred at Oakguard. Long before midnight, by the simple method of dropping in at the bar of the Admiral’s Head, he had picked up sufficient information to make him decide against seeing any one that night. They had taken Sorio away, and Mr. Renshaw had escaped from a prolonged struggle with the demented man with the penalty of only a few bruises. Thus, with various imaginative interpolations which hediscounted as soon as he heard them, Baltazar got from the gossips of the tavern a fair account of what had occurred.
There was, indeed, so much excitement in Rodmoor over the event that, for the first time in the memory of the oldest inhabitants, the Admiral’s Head remained open two whole hours after legal closing time. This was in part explained by the fact that the two representatives of the law in the little town had been summoned to Oakguard to be ready for any emergency.
It was now about four o’clock in the afternoon. Baltazar had found himself with little appetite for either breakfast or lunch, and at this moment, as he sat staring at a fireplace full of nothing but burnt out ashes, his eyes had such dark lines below them that one might have assumed that sleep as well as food had lost its savour for him in the last twelve hours. By his side on a little table stood an untasted glass of brandy, and at his feet in the fender lay innumerable, but in many cases only half-smoked, cigarettes.
The impression which was now upon him was that of being one of two human creatures left alive, those two alone, after some world-destroying plague. He had the feeling that he had only to go out into the street to come upon endless dead bodies strewn about, in fantastic and horrible attitudes of death, and in various stages of dissolution. It was his Adriano who alone was left alive. But he had done something to him—so that he could only hear his voice without being able to reach him.
“I must end this,” he said aloud; and then again, as if addressing another person, “We must put an end to this, mustn’t we, Tassar?”
He rose to his feet and surveyed himself in one of his numerous beautifully framed mirrors. He passed his slender fingers through his fair curls and peered into his own eyes, opening the lids wide and wrinkling his forehead. He smiled at himself then—a long strange wanton smile—and turned away, shrugging his shoulders.
Then he moved straight up to the picture of the Venetian Secretary and snapped his fingers at it. “You wait, you smirking ‘imp of fame’; you wait a little! We’ll show you that you’re not so deep or so subtle after all. You wait, Flambard, my boy, you wait a while; and we’ll show you plots and counter-plots!”
Then without a word he went upstairs to his bathroom. “By Jove!” he muttered to himself, “I begin to think Fingal’s right. The only place in this Christian world where one can possess one’s soul in peace is a tiled bathroom—only the tiles must be perfectly white,” he added, after a pause.
He made an elaborate and careful toilet, brushing his hair with exhaustive assiduity, and perfuming his hands and face. He dressed himself in spotlessly clean linen and put on a suit that had never been worn before. Even the shoes which he chose were elegant and new. He took several minutes deciding what tie to wear and finally selected one of a pale mauve colour. Then, with one final long and wistful glance at himself, he kissed the tips of his fingers at his own image, and stepped lightly down the stairs.
He paused for a moment in the little hall-way to select a cane from the stick rack. He took an ebony oneat last, with an engraved silver knob bearing his own initials. There was something ghastly about the deliberation with which he did all this, but it was ghastliness wasted upon polished furniture and decrepit flies—unless every human house conceals invisible watchers. He hesitated a little between a Panama hat and one of some light-coloured cloth material, but finally selected the former, toying carefully with its flexible rim before placing it upon his head, and even when it was there giving it some final touches.
The absolute loneliness of the little house, broken only by an occasional voice from the tavern door, became, during his last moments there, a sort of passive accomplice to some nameless ritual. At length he opened the door and let himself out.
He walked deliberately and thoughtfully towards the park gates, and, passing in, made his way up the leaf-strewn avenue. Arrived at the house, he nodded in a friendly manner at the servant who opened the door, and asked to be taken to Mrs. Renshaw’s room. The man obeyed him respectfully, and went before him up the staircase and down the long echoing passage.
He found Mrs. Renshaw sewing at the half-open window. She put down her work when he entered and greeted him with one of thoseilluminedsmiles of hers, which Fingal Raughty was accustomed to say made him believe in the supernatural.
“Thank you for coming to see me,” she said, as he seated himself at her side, spreading around him an atmosphere of delicate odours. “Thank you, Baltazar, so much for coming.”
“Why do you always say that, Aunt Helen?” hemurmured, almost crossly. It was one of the little long-established conventions between them that he should address his father’s wife in this way.
There came once more that indescribable spiritual light into her faded eyes. “Well,” she said gaily, “isn’tit kind of a young man, who has so many interests, to give up his time to an old woman like me?”
“Nonsense, nonsense, Aunt Helen!” he cried, with a rich caressing intonation, laying one of his slender hands tenderly upon hers. “It makes me absolutely angry with you when you talk like that!”
“But isn’t it true, Tassar?” she answered. “Isn’t this world meant for the young and happy?”
“As if I cared what the world wasmeantfor!” he exclaimed. “It’s meant for nothing at all, I fancy. And the sooner it reaches what it was meant for and collapses altogether, the better for all of us!”
A look of distress that was painful to witness came into Mrs. Renshaw’s face. Her fingers tightened upon his hand and she leant forward towards him. “Tassar, Tassar, dear!” she said very gravely, “when you talk like that you make me feel as if I were absolutely alone in the world.”
“What do you mean, Aunt Helen?” murmured the young man in a low voice.
“You make me feel as if it were wrong of me to love you so much,” she went on, bending her head and looking down at his feet.
As he saw her now, with the fading afternoon light falling on her parted hair, still wavy and beautiful even in its grey shadows, and on her broad pale forehead, he realized once more what he alone perhaps, ofall who ever had known her realized, the unusual and almost terrifying power of her personality. She forced him to think of some of the profound portraits of the sixteenth century, revealing with an insight and a passion, long since lost to art, the tragic possibilities of human souls.
He laughed gently. “Dear, dear Aunt Helen!” he cried, “forget my foolishness. I was only jesting. I don’t give a fig for any of my opinions on these things. To the deuce with them all, dear! To free you from one single moment of annoyance, I’d believe every word in the Church Catechism from ‘What is your name?’ down to ‘without doubt are lost eternally’!”
She looked up at this, and made a most heart-breaking effort not to smile. Her abnormally sensitive mouth—the mouth, as Baltazar always maintained, of a great tragic actress—quivered at the corners.
“IfIhad taught you your catechism,” she said, “you would remember it better than that!”
Baltazar’s eyes softened as he watched her, and a strange look, full of a pity that was as impersonal as the sea itself, rose to their surface. He lifted her hand to his lips.
“Don’t do that! You mustn’t do that!” she murmured, and then with another flicker of a smile, “you must keep those pretty manners, Tassar, for all your admiring young women!”
“Confound my young women!” cried the young man. “You’re far more beautiful, Aunt Helen, than all of them put together!”
“You make me think of that passage in ‘Hamlet,’” she rejoined, leaning back in her chair and resumingher work. “How does it go? ‘Man delights me not nor woman either—though by your smiling you seem to say so!’”
“Aunt Helen!” he cried earnestly, “I have something important to say to you. I want you to understand this. It’s sweet of you not to speak of Adriano’s illness. Any one but you would have condoled with me most horribly already!”
She raised her eyes from her sewing. “We must pray for him,” she said. “I have been praying for him all day—and all last night, too,” she added with a faint smile. “I let Philippa think I didn’t know what had happened. But I knew.” She shuddered a little. “I knew. I heard him in the ‘work-shop.’”
“What I wanted to say, Aunt Helen,” he went on, “was this. I want you to remember—whatever happens to either of us—that I love you more than any one in the world. Yes—yes,” he continued, not allowing her to interrupt, “better even than Adriano!”
A look resembling the effect of some actual physical pain came into her face. “You mustn’t say that, my dear,” she murmured. “You must keep your love for your wife when you marry. I don’t like to hear you say things like that—to an old woman.” She hesitated a moment. “It sounds like flattery, Tassar,” she added.
“But it’s true, Aunt Helen!” he repeated with almost passionate emphasis. “You’re by far the most beautiful and by far the most interesting woman I’ve ever met.”
Mrs. Renshaw drew her hand across her face. Then she laughed gaily like a young girl. “What would Philippa say,” she said, “if she heard you say that?”
Baltazar’s face clouded. He looked at her long and closely.
“Philippa is interesting and deep,” he said with a grave emphasis, “but she doesn’t understand me.Youunderstand me, though you think it right to hide your knowledge even from yourself.”
Mrs. Renshaw’s face changed in a moment. It became haggard and obstinate. “We mustn’t talk any more about understanding and about love,” she said. “God’s will is that we should all of us only completely love and understand the person He leads us, in His wisdom, to marry.”
Baltazar burst into a fit of heathen laughter. “I thought you were going to end quite differently, Aunt Helen,” he said. “I thought the only person we were to love was going to be God. But it seems that it is man—or woman,” he added bitterly.
Mrs. Renshaw bent low over her work and the shadow grew still deeper upon her face. Seeing that he had really hurt her, Baltazar changed his tone.
“Dear Aunt Helen!” he whispered gently, “how many happy hours, how many, how many!—have we spent together reading in this room!”
She looked up quickly at this, with the old bright look. “Yes, it’s been a happy thing for me, Tassar, having you so near us. Do you remember how, last winter, we got through the whole of Sir Walter Scott? There’s no one nowadays likehim—is there? Though Philippa tells me that Mr. Hardy is a great writer.”
“Mr. Hardy!” exclaimed her interlocutor whimsically.“I believe youwouldhave come to him at last—perhaps youwill, dear, some day. Let’s hope so! But I’m afraid I shall not be here then.”
“Don’t talk like that, Tassar,” she said without looking up from her work. “It will not beyouwho will leaveme.”
There was a pause between them then, and Baltazar’s eyes wandered out into the hushed misty garden.
“Mr. Hardy does not believe in God,” he remarked.
“Tassar!” she cried reproachfully. “You know what you promised just now. You mustn’t tease me. No one deep down in his heart disbelieves in God. How can we? He makes His power felt among us every day.”
There was another long silence, broken only by the melancholy cawing of the rooks, beginning to gather in their autumnal roosting-places.
Presently Mrs. Renshaw looked up. “Do you remember,” she said very solemnly, “how you promised me one day never again to let Brand or Philippa speak disrespectfully of our English hymn-book? You said you thought the genius of some of our best-known poets was more expressed in their hymns than in their poetry. I have often thought of that.”
A very curious expression came into Baltazar’s face. He suddenly leaned forward. “Aunt Helen,” he said, “this illness of Adrian’s makes me feel, as you often say, how little security there is for any of our lives. I wish you’d say to me those peculiarly sad lines—you know the one I mean?—the one I used to make you smile over, when I was in a bad mood, by saying it always made me think of old women in a work-house! You know the one, don’t you?”
The whole complicated subtlety of Mrs. Renshaw’s character showed itself in her face now. She smiled almost playfully but at the same moment a supernaturallight came in her eyes. “I know,” she said, and without a moment’s hesitation or the least touch of embarrassment, she began to sing, in a low plaintive melodious voice, the following well-known stanza. As she sang she beat time with her hand; and there came over her hearer the obscure vision of some old, wild, primordial religion, as different from paganism as it was different from Christianity, of which his mysterious friend was the votary and priestess. The words drifted away through the open window into the mist and the falling leaves.