Ducdame (18 page)

No sooner were they out of the consecrated enclosure, however, and on the sunlit road than the whole mental
atmosphere
about them changed.

“May I come with you as far as the bridle path?” said Nell. “I made up my mind this morning that I would go to Antiger Woods to look for primroses, and I think I shall still do that—unless,” she added with a gentle glance at Cousin Ann, “I can be of any help to any one?”

Rook’s wife and Rook’s mother exchanged a quick
significant
look.

“I think, my dear,” said the latter with a sudden sharp eagerness, “you may be of immense use to us a little later. If my son, for instance, succeeds in finding Miss Page, and brings her back here, as I’m afraid he’s only too likely to do, it would be a blessed relief to all of us if you could—perhaps—for just a few days—till other arrangements were made—take her in at the cottage?”

Nell was unable to prevent the blood rushing to her cheeks. Had this aunt-mother and this niece-daughter, with their merciless aristocratic gray eyes, sounded her heart’s secret to its uttermost depths? Were they bent upon punishing her for her temerity? Was this extraordinary suggestion their premeditated revenge?

“I am sure William and I will do everything we can to help you, Mrs. Ashover,” the girl answered gravely. “I only trust no harm has come to Netta. I can’t believe that she went to any of those dreadful places. I expect she just took the night train to Bristol. I know she’s got people she knows there. Or she may have gone to London.”

Mrs. Ashover had ceased to listen. A new thought had come into her mind.

“Will you walk back with us to the house, Nelly? There is something I’d be most grateful to you if you’d do for me. Something I want to send to Lexie.”

The girl permitted herself to be led prisoner by these two dominant spirits and they all three crossed the bridge.

A few minutes later Nell found herself waiting alone in the great chilly unused drawing room whose spacious
ceremoniousness
seemed to embrace and envelop her as if she were just one more primrose or crocus or snowdrop to be “arranged” in a slender glass vase.

Never did the room look more stately, in its gilt and its whiteness, in its water colours and French prints; but the
young visitor felt an intense and increasing hostility to the whole atmosphere there, as if the great room were
consciously
emphasizing a sort of victory over her and over all the wayward romance she represented.

She moved to the mantelpiece and stood silently
regarding
a little gold-framed miniature of Rook’s father when a young child. The picture fascinated her by its resemblance to Rook, and a wave of overpowering pity for what she knew well enough he was going through during these agitated hours swept over her like a shivering ague fit.

The odd thing was, and she wondered at it herself, that she felt no anger, no bitterness against him. She longed to rise up against them all and do something—she knew not what—to clear his path for him; to make, as the Bible says, “his way smooth.” She felt glad that she was to be sent on a message to Lexie. She wondered how much Lexie had been told of all that was happening. Had Lady Ann found time to send him news of her marriage, news of Netta’s
disappearance
? What an irony if this “something” that she was to take to him were nothing less than this double-edged piece of overpowering intelligence!

She looked at the marble and gilt clock. It was already nearly one. Would she be forced to stay and eat lunch with this mother and this daughter?

The idea of such a thing was utterly repulsive to her. It would have been like eating with two judges while the executioner was at work upon the condemned!

A sudden sound of the opening and shutting of doors in the rear of the house made her stand transfixed on the faded hearthrug, her eyes hypnotized by its convoluted pattern, her ears listening, listening—— In a moment she lifted her head and made one irrepressible movement toward the door. She had heard a familiar voice outside, engaged in a hurried low-toned dialogue with Pandie. Then there came his step in the passage and the door of the drawing room was flung open.

Nell stared at him for a moment in speechless dismay. He might have served, save for his English clothes, for a picture of Hamlet rushing in upon Ophelia. His clothes were muddy and untidy, his boots unpolished, his chin
unshaven
, his eyes bloodshot and sunk deep in their sockets as if after many nights of sleeplessness.

He shut the door with studied precaution and fixed a long nervous look upon the girl as if expecting some angry
outburst
from her. Then, advancing a step or two, he threw down his hat and stick upon the rosewood table and looked wildly round him like a hunted criminal seeking sanctuary.

Nell’s paralyzed dismay melted into infinite tenderness when she saw how broken he was. She went straight up to him and threw her arms round his neck.

His face felt cold and clammy to her kiss, as if it had been something carved out of the pith of elder-wood, and the
unshaven
hairs upon his chin pricked her cheek.

“Hush,” he whispered nervously. “Hush, for God’s sake! They haven’t any idea that I’m here. They’re upstairs. Pandie told me you were alone. I’ve come back for money and my shaving things. Twiney’s waiting for me in the road. I wouldn’t let him drive up. Pandie’s gone to my room to get everything. She won’t breathe a word. So
you
mustn’t either, my sweet Nell! Oh! I shall find her; I shall find her; or never come back here again!”

The young girl released his neck but clung still to his shoulders, gazing up into his face.

“You will find her, Rook dear. I know you’ll find her! I never believed it for a moment when they said she’d gone to that dreadful place.”

He took her hands gently from his shoulders and held her at arm’s length away from him. In his excitement the grip of his fingers was so powerful that he bruised her flesh.

“You don’t know what it is to feel as I feel, Nell,” he
muttered
huskily. “It’s like being a murderer.”

“It was not your fault, Rook darling,” she whispered. “It was not your fault. I know all about it. I saw it all happening; but what could I do? Oh, Rook, my dear, dear love, what could I do?”

“It’s like being a murderer, Nell,” he repeated, gripping her thin arms so tightly that she could not refrain from a little smothered cry. “It’s just as if I had deliberately killed her! And she was so good! Oh! Nell, I was all she had. And she was so dear and good!”

He loosed her arms and uttered a sigh that shook his bony frame to its centre.

“You will find her, Rook dear! You will find her!” the girl kept repeating; and then, feeling suddenly faint with the tension of this encounter, she sank down on one of the tall, embroidered, Louis Quatorze chairs, heart-shaped and gilded.

He fell on his knees at her side and taking her face in his hands kissed her pitifully and blindly. Under his kisses her colour came back and she leaned forward, her hands
clasping
his head.

“Rook, dear, dear Rook, you’ll find her!” she chanted, in a kind of crooning monotone, swaying a little as if
rocking
an infant. “You’ll find her, Rook. Have no fear! Something tells me that you and she will meet again.”

He rose to his feet and glanced nervously at the door.

“If I do, Nell,” he whispered, “you’ll be my friend, won’t you, and help me through with all this?”

She never knew what he really meant by this last appeal, for with a quick tap at the door Pandie put her head into the room and beckoned to him.

“I’m with you, Pandie,” he cried. “Good-bye, Nell!”

And before she had found the strength to get up from the rose-embroidered chair with the stiff gilded arms, he had got out of the room and the door was shut.

Once upon her feet she felt her normal strength coming back; and with that strength she felt a certain strange deep
happiness stirring in her heart, a happiness that was
different
from the happiness she had experienced earlier that morning, and yet was not, it may be, altogether remote from that! She bent down over a great shallow vase of
primroses
that stood in the middle of the table where Rook had thrown his hat and stick, and she buried her face in those pale virginal blooms.

She approached the verge, as she inhaled that penetrating sweetness, of nothing less than the open secret which “many prophets and kings” have died without knowing, namely, that when love passes a certain subjective barrier and flows outward over the life of the person loved, it liberates itself for that moment at least from the sting that is “cruel as the grave.”

She was still smelling these flowers when Mrs. Ashover came in; carrying in her hand a folded note.

“Will you take this to Lexie for me, my dear?” she said. “I would have loved to keep you to lunch with us, but as you can see, everything is at sixes and sevens!”

For no reason at all except from an inherent and invincible capriciousness in the very texture of all terrestrial
happenings
, it was this silly phrase “sixes and sevens” rather than anything that any other human being had said to her that day that kept teasingly and mechanically forming itself upon her lips as she recrossed the two bridges over the river, on her way to be the first messenger to inform Lexie Ashover that his historic name was in less danger than it had been, two days ago, of disappearing altogether from the face of the earth!

E
MERGING from the ex-priest’s house at Bishop’s Forley, the Reverend William Hastings, his head
throbbing
from the excitement of his metaphysical arguments with the German visitor, found himself walking, about six o’clock in the evening, through a street completely unknown to him in the poorer district of the rambling overcrowded town.

He had walked all the ten miles to the place that morning and when he left his confrères he announced his intention of walking all the way home; but the agitation of the
arguments
they had had in this singular meeting had left him so exhausted that he began to think he would give up all thought of getting back that night.

This point being settled he felt half inclined to return to his heretical colleague and ask for hospitality; but the
memory
of the wretchedly meagre quarters the man lived in, combined with a vision of the abnormal physical size of the foreign guest, made him shrink from such a step. He
decided
to dispatch a telegram to his wife and find a room in some lodging house or inn.

The hum and stir in his brain, reverberating and
richocheting
with dark and disturbing oracles, had driven him blindly on so far from the centre of the town that now, when he came to his senses and looked round for any sign of what he wanted, he found himself as much lost and confused as if he were in a completely strange country.

The sun had disappeared behind a bank of clouds, the edges of which wore that peculiar crimson zig-zag, so
portentous 
and menacing, such as long ago the hawk-like eyes of Dante must have lit upon, as appropriate to the dusky walls of Dis!

This jagged torch flare in the west gave a yet more
threatening
and lurid aspect to the narrow poverty-stricken streets, abutting upon blackened sheds and upon desolate open spaces. There were shallow pools of rain water in some of these open spaces, pools whose metallic surface, livid and motionless, reflected this sunset glow.

Across the path of the sunset rose up certain dilapidated groups of melancholy and lamentable dwellings, from which a tall broken chimney here and a projected roof-corner there isolated themselves from their surroundings and stood out, black and ominous, against what looked like a vast bleeding wound in the ribs of the world.

Vaguely moving in the direction of the sunset, and falling back, as he went, so deeply into his wild cosmic speculations that he became oblivious of everything around him, it was not until he was right under the wall of a hideously
recognizable
building that he grew conscious once again of his human identity.

It was the Bishop’s Forley Workhouse which he now was skirting, feeling obscurely aggrieved, even as a philosopher, at the rubbish heaps and smouldering rubble mounds that made of this place a sort of Golgotha. One particular spot struck with a vibration of horror the tough nerves of this lover of Nothingness.

It was a sort of local potter’s field or pauper
burying-ground
, and it was entirely surrounded by iron railings some ten feet high. A fresh instalment of young nettles had come back with the coming of spring, but the old ones were there, too, interspersed with anonymous oblong mounds and with rusty tins and rain-drenched newspapers.

The look of the nettles between those tall iron railings presented itself to the mind of William Hastings in a sudden
bleak objective light that was unusual with him. He stood still and stared in front of him.

On one side of the enclosure rose the blank wall of the Workhouse. There was only one iron-barred window in that forlorn expanse, and this window had caught from the
afterglow
in the western sky a certain greenish phosphorescent tint such as may be observed on the flesh of corpses.

On the other side of the enclosure were the roofless walls of a ruined factory: walls from which emanated that peculiar ghastliness of futility which only the work of men’s hands, when it has fallen into desuetude, is able to evoke.

What came over the mind of the heretic priest at that moment was a certain day, years and years ago, when, in the wretched playground of a second-rate preparatory school, he had watched a couple of his companions throwing handfuls of cinders taken from a galvanized iron ash bin at the body of a dead rat. He had been the laughing stock of the school even before that day for his inability to conform to their standards, but after that day his loathing for every aspect of youthful high spirits hardened into a misanthropic mania.

His mind recalled the loveliness of the country through which he had passed on his way to this town. It recalled the elaborate patient defence of a certain “hope against hope” advocated by the man from Germany. And there arose in him a ferocious wish that he could take this abomination of desolation, standing here so real and tangible in the twilight, and plant it down among the gracious meadows and the plausible arguments, so that none should escape its terrible significance.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of
approaching
footsteps and he turned his back to the iron railings and waited, listening.

The steps came drifting along slowly, uneven spasmodic, shuffling, and stumbling. When they came round the corner
by the ruined factory he saw that the figure bearing down upon him was that of a woman. She came up to him,
muttering
as she came, one hand dragging after her a torn umbrella and one clinging tenaciously to a black bag that swung
half-open
against her side.

When she reached him she stopped short and looked him straight in the face with a long, puzzled, half-understanding stare. Hastings knew her at once. His own mind was so wrought upon by what he had been feeling that it was with something less than a startled shock and yet something more than a casual comprehension that he recognized her and realized what her state implied.

“I’ve left that place—I’m never going back,” she said hurriedly; and then with a pitiable and almost infantile intonation: “You won’t tell them, will you? You won’t tell any one, will you?”

He sighed and made an awkward gesture as if shrugging his shoulders. The sight of her standing there with that wretched open bag and that trailing umbrella was something he had to deal with, to get into focus, to be drastic and practical about.

Like a slowly retreating wave, leaving only wisps of scattered spindrift behind it, to be blown at random hither and thither, his metaphysical thoughts fell back, fell away, displaying him, as the outside world generally found him, a quiet, self-controlled country priest.

What was this woman doing in the slums of Bishop’s Forley? And since he had encountered her there what did it behove
him
to do? For the flicker of a second his instinct was just to bolt, just to leave her as she was; but a kind of aloof, weary pity, mixed with the mechanical habit of his trade, kept him from such an extreme of callousness.

“I can’t take her
back to Ashover to-night,” he thought. “I suppose I must take her to some lodging house.” He stood looking at her, as she let her vacant stare wander
away from his face and drift along the wall of the Workhouse and over the Paupers’ Cemetery.

“Will she come with me?” he wondered, “and if she does, will she behave properly and stay in the room I find for her? She looks as if she might refuse to remain in any one place to-night.” And the man began to recall the various hopeless experiences he had had with women in this state.

While he hesitated and wondered what to do, Netta turned away from him and began to shuffle off down the road. This decided him. He stepped quickly after her and offered her his arm. She leaned upon it at once with a hopeless docility like that of some dazed and bewildered animal that has lost all power of individual decision. She even permitted him to take from her the black bag, which he at once proceeded to shut, and then to retain in the same hand with which he held his stick.

He did not dare reverse the direction she was following, knowing by experience that such interference with a person’s obscure desires is apt to cause any sort of outbreak or
collapse
. As a philosopher he let the whole thing take what course it would. As a clergyman he automatically assumed a kind of professional responsibility that remained on the alert for each new crisis as it might happen to arise.

They were soon outside the limits of the town. The deepening of the twilight about the solitary roadway,
bordered
by forlorn allotment patches and broken wooden palings, seemed rather to intensify than to diminish the dilemma of the exploited misanthrope.

It was Netta herself, as it happened, who was the first to bring them back to practical urgencies. The effect of
whatever
it was that she had been drinking began to wear off in the effort of physical movement and in the impact of the chilliness of approaching night.

“Where are we going?” she said suddenly, bringing him to a pause by a field gate through which they could see the dim
shapes of a hurdled flock and catch the smell of turnips and damp straw and sheep’s excrement.

“Do ’ee ask the dear gentleman where he be taking of ’ee?” came a startling voice out of the hedge.

Netta pressed instinctively closer to the clergyman’s side; for the figure that followed the voice, from what seemed the very depths of a watery ditch, was strange enough to scare the most preoccupied mind.

It was that of a woman so old as to be almost beyond human recognition. Her face was not so much the colour of ashes as the colour of the inside of a white eggshell that has been exposed on the top of a rubbish heap for many weeks. Out of this face looked forth a pair of ghastly sunken eyes, colourless now in the darkness, but possessed of some kind of demonic vitality that made both Hastings and Netta shrink and draw back, as if from the presence of something
malignant
and dangerous.

“Betsy must have known ’ee was coming, dearie! What else was I nursing my old bones for on way home from town? ’Twas so when the gentleman from London brought his sweetheart this way fifteen years agone. These things be writ in the stars, sweet lady; they be writ in the stars. What else was it that made old Betsy bide in ditch for best of an hour, and her with her partners waiting for she at home? Well! Well! Ye’ve a-come, ye’ve a-come; and since this be so and partners be waiting, I reckon Betsy’ll be getting
home-along
before ’tis dark.”

She pulled out of the ditch as she spoke a heavy pedlar’s basket upon which apparently she had been sitting. Netta still clung with obvious dismay to Hastings’s arm and this seemed to arrest the crone’s attention. Her sunken eyes, like those of a hundred-year-old weasel, examined every detail in the appearance of the two intruders. There was nothing in any casual inspection of William Hastings to suggest his profession. He was wearing a dark overcoat and a black
cloth cap drawn low over his forehead. He might have been a land agent or a doctor or a well-to-do commercial traveller.

“Be the gentleman nice to ’ee, dearie?” said the woman, moving a little nearer.

Conscious of Netta’s discomposure Hastings waved her off.

“Where do you live, granny?” he asked.

The question evidently put a new idea into the old trot’s head.

“Me partners be waiting for I,” she murmured; and then in a shrill eager voice, “But you mid come and see where old Betsy do bide. You mid come and see! Betsy’ll tell the sweet lady’s fortune and bring down wagonloads o’ luck on both your pretty heads. So come along wi’ I, young folk; and me and my partners will show you Cimmery Land in the girt wold crystal stone!”

Hastings and Netta looked at each other in the darkness. He could see she was expecting him to make a curt refusal to this apparition’s suggestion. It was on his lips to do so and lead her away, but then he imaged to himself the long dreary road they had followed, the hopelessness of hunting for shelter in a district of the town completely unknown to him, and the possibility that even if he did find a lodging of some sort Netta would not settle down in it. The old woman’s words suggested that the escape from their present uncertainty which she offered was not far to seek.

He cast his eyes round them. All was silent. All was obscure and dark. His philosophy was authentic enough to make it easy for him to be led, at a moment like this, by any chance-blown straw. It did not really matter! He was tired and hungry. His companion was near the end of her tether. Why not just resign themselves and see what happened?

He looked at Netta with a little shrug of his shoulders. She, too, was beginning to feel her powers of volition ebbing and sinking.

“Very well, Mother,” he said to the old woman. “Let’s see where you live.”

The issue was more propitious than he could have hoped. Their guide led them forward not more than a few hundred paces, and while they were still, both of them, in a sort of exhausted daze, they found themselves clambering up the steps of a stationary caravan; and in an incredibly short while after that it seemed almost a natural thing in their
bewilderment
that they should be drinking better tea out of better cups and saucers than any that Hastings, at any rate, was accustomed to enjoy under his Nell’s housekeeping!

The interior of the caravan was spotlessly clean and the old woman herself under the yellow lamplight presented a much less sinister appearance than when she had first materialized, like an evil spirit, at the gate by the sheepfold.

There was one moment when Netta began nervously
looking
round, as she stirred her tea, as if desirous of something else, that might have had an unfortunate issue; for Hastings, catching the look, enquired of their entertainer if she could give the girl a taste of brandy.

“Not if she askit me till Judgment Day!” cried the woman. “I bain’t a soft-heart and I bain’t one for blunt knives or silver bullets, but I be afeard of liquor as if it were a burning lake of adder’s gall.”