Ducdame (22 page)

What
was
that?

She paused, listening, one hand pressed against the lintel of the door; the other stroking the Marquis with her parasol, as he rubbed his back against her ankles.

From within the little front dining room came the sound of the arranging of knives and forks, of plates and glasses; a sound which conveyed instantaneously to Cousin Ann’s mind the fact that whoever they might be who were to partake of that meal, the meal itself was not ready.

And then, all suddenly, she heard Nell begin to sing as she put the finishing touches to her luncheon table. She sang the famous song of the exiled courtier in “As You Like It”:

The girl had no power of voice and no very good ear. She sang in a careless and irresponsible way, but the jealous heart of the listener did not fail to catch the strain of thrilling feminine happiness that underlay the notes of the old song.

“She is alone and she is expecting Rook,” thought Lady Ann; and a sudden spasm of fierce anger took possession of her; an anger that caused the red parasol to tremble in her clutch as if it had been a deadly weapon.

Then in a flash it came over her what to do. In a far better trained and far richer voice than Nell’s she burst out into the melancholy Jaques’s bitter antiphony:

She did not get any further; for Nell, who had stood for a minute with a plate of almonds and raisins in her hand, frozen helpless with panic, now came hurrying down the passage, her cheeks white, her mouth grotesquely open.

“Lady Ann! How you did startle me! Is anything the matter?”

Cousin Ann made no movement to meet her, no movement to cross tibe threshold. She waited till the girl came quite close.

In one second Cousin Ann became as calm and collected as if the two of them were casually meeting at a garden party at Antiger House.

“I’d no idea you had a voice, Nell,” she said. “We must have you bring your songs up to the house one of these nights.”

Nell bit her lip. The tone of that “we must have you”
was like the tone Lady Ann would have used to some pretty little girl in the village; to some child of Martin Pod or Mr. Twiney.

“Won’t you come in?” The words were uttered
mechanically
. She had meant to say something altogether different.

“Oh, no, no! On no account!” Cousin Ann responded. “I’m lunching at home. It was so nice of you to ask Rook to join you and your husband. By the way, could I see Mr. Hastings? I’ve got a message for him from my aunt.”

Nell’s mouth opened and shut and her eyes looked as frightened as a hedge sparrow’s when it hears the hunting call of the shrike.

“William isn’t here,” she murmured faintly. “He was suddenly called away and I thought—I thought it would be silly not to enjoy the pleasure of such an important guest. If I had had any one to send, I would have begged you to come, too; but I expect even then it would have been too hurried a notice. But now you
are
here, I do hope you will stay? And let me have the pleasure of getting a meal for you both?”

“My husband has not come yet, then?” enquired Lady Ann. Nell shook her head. “Well. Perhaps I will rest a little then, if I may?” And taking the other’s consent for granted, and carrying it off with so natural an air that it was impossible for Nell to resist her, she moved hurriedly down the passage and went straight into the dining room.

There lay, betrayed and revealed to those jealous eyes, a pathetic little love feast prepared by the young girl for the man she idealized.

The two places had been laid opposite each other in the curve of the bow window. A great bowl of blue violas, light and delicate as butterflies’ wings, more like wild flowers than garden flowers, stood in the middle of the table. At the side of one of the plates, evidently the one to be used by
Rook, lay three pansies, a purple one, a yellow one, and a black one.

Lady Ann surveyed this spectacle with a sudden indrawing of her breath. So this was the way the sad, remorseful, preoccupied Rook was taking his diversion. And he had lied to her, with the worst kind of lie, the treacherous half-lie of a coward. He had duped her, under the guise of
conscience-stricken
remorse. What hypocrisy, what calculated
cold-blooded
hypocrisy. And she, too, in the state in which she was.

Her indignation blotted Nell completely out of the picture. Her one desire now was to meet Rook face to face.

“How prettily you have set the table,” she said with a smile. “I’m sure Mr. Ashover will be delighted when he sees what a charming welcome is awaiting him. Well, I must be off.”

She moved back to the kitchen door, quite oblivious now of her pretended need of resting.

Nell was too miserable and bewildered to say one word in answer to this. All she could do was just to follow her visitor meekly down the passage.

“What a lovely cat,” Cousin Ann now murmured, stooping down to stroke the Marquis of Carabas. “Oh, by the way, Nell, my aunt expects you to her picnic this
afternoon
. Will your husband’s engagement prevent his being there, too? What shall I say to Mrs. Ashover?”

“It’s very kind of you, Lady Ann, I’m sure. But William can’t possibly come, I’m afraid.”

“Well. Come yourself, anyway,” cried Cousin Ann, picking up her parasol and passing out. “You don’t happen to know from what direction Rook will descend upon you?” she added gaily as Nell waited in the doorway.

The girl shook her head.

“Because I’d like to ask him whether
he
intends to come to his mother’s little party. But never mind
.
My aunt and
I will survive it, I daresay, even if we are the only people there. Good-bye.” And without waiting to see the closing of the door—the door that was no longer to be left open for intruders—she retraced her steps by the same path she had followed to reach the house.

She knew that Rook’s business that morning had taken him to the other side of Heron’s Ridge, and her only impulse now was to walk quickly enough so as to intercept him while he was still out of sight of the cottage.

She was conscious of feeling a little tired and faint as she ascended the hill; but her anger, which now settled into a calm, cold fury, was strong enough to support and sustain her; and it was not long before she reached the stile into the second barley field, breathing heavily as she went.

Here again she came to a tall hawthorn hedge voluptuously scented with the richly perishing May blossoms. She forced her way through a half-open gate which must have remained exactly in the same position since the early spring, for the feathery grasses grew high and tall around it and several wisps of bindweed had encircled its lowest bar.

She had calculated her movements to a nicety. There, approaching her with swinging careless steps, down the rough slope of a gorse-grown incline, was the figure of her husband. He saw her in a moment; stood for a second as if confused at her appearance; and then came on resolutely to where she awaited him, her free hand pressed tightly against her waist, her face white and drawn.

“Ann! What are you doing here?”

She made a little gesture that kept him at a distance while she recovered her breath.

“I—thought—I—would like—a little stroll—but it—it has been rather too much for me.”

She spoke in gasps, but she smiled quite naturally into his face and her tone was calm.

“You’d better come into Nell’s with me,” he said. “You
can’t walk back in that state. She’ll be able to look after you.”

“I think—if you don’t mind, Rook—I’d prefer to rest a little where I am.”

As she spoke she sank down, easily and spontaneously, among the grasses of the hedge. Her movement disturbed several white butterflies which fluttered away along the edge of the field, while a scarlet-and-black cinnabar moth flew heavily from a tuft of clover to a patch of hedge parsley; where it paused, as if to regard the tulips in her hat, its wings drawn close against its body.

Rook knelt down anxiously by her side, his face sad and puzzled; his heart infinitely weary of the whole business of living. Above them, lost in the cerulean blue, not one lark, or two or three or four, but it might well have been a whole classic chorus of larks kept up that arrogant, brazen,
importunate
monotone of ecstasy, such as no instrument of string or pipe, no voice of man or woman, could lift from the earth; the very voice, so it might well seem, of the
griefless
, merciless, exultant sky, whose colour mocks all human passion by the impact of its appalling simplicity.

I
T DID not need a long interlude under that June hedge to bring the colour back to Lady Ann’s cheeks and a more even beat to her indignant heart.

The savage and primitive portion of her nature was soothed and satisfied by the fact that she was keeping Rook away from Nell; and something more subtle within her was quick enough to divine that Rook’s attitude under this turn of events was not at all the attitude of a baffled and
disappointed
amorist.

He seemed just simply concerned and agitated at her own state and apparently took it for granted, without any other thought, that he would now have to support her back to Ashover.

He took her back there, indeed, leaning on his arm, by the very same path she herself had followed an hour ago; and his tenderness and solicitude were so obviously genuine that, though her anger against him still smouldered on in the depths, she
confined its expression to nothing more serious than a few bitter sarcasms. It still remained possible that “everything,” including that carefully prepared table, was on Nell’s side; possible, after all, that Rook had not wilfully deceived her, that he had not, in fact, himself been aware of the convenient absence of Mr. Hastings.

Though she was feminine enough to derive a wicked
satisfaction
in the thought of that table left there without a guest; those yellow, purple, and black pansies lying unseen by any eye except her own, she was practical enough to insist on
Mr. Twiney’s being sent back at once to the village with orders to call in at Toll-Pike Cottage on his way to his own house. “And put the back seat in, Twiney, please,” she said, as they encountered the gardener on their return. “And don’t forget to call for Mrs. Hastings as well as Mr. Lexie!  I shall drive; so there will be just four people. Mr. Ashover will walk.”

Perhaps even the outraged feelings of Lady Ann would have been subdued into pity if she could have seen the forlorn figure in Toll-Pike Cottage removing one by one the plates from the dining room and the dishes from the kitchen stove. Nell had seen from her bedroom, to which she had fled to escape the mocking sight of her preparations, the husband and wife making their way back across the fields; and the sight had filled her with a cold, miserable hopelessness and a bitter shame.

Lady Ann’s intrusion had been particularly cruel because there had been a pitiable struggle in her own conscience over the whole affair. She had seen very little of Rook since the fatal day of Netta’s flight. He had given her very few chances to see him. And though she had struggled heroically to keep up the level of her emotion to what she had felt when they met in that drawing room, there were occasions when, as in the case of this unfortunate lunch, her longing to be with him, to have him to herself alone, overpowered her
conscientiou
s scruples.

The fact that she had steadily struggled to efface every instinct of possessiveness from her feelings so as to be of genuine use to him as a friend made it all the bitterer and more shameful to be thus exposed in her lapse from her
self-imposed
standard by Lady Ann’s appearance.

Nothing is harder to bear than a fall from one’s own ideal when it is grossly interpreted. A portion of oneself ranges itself then on the side of the accuser and the rest of one’s being writhes helplessly under a double shame.

By degrees she managed to calm herself enough so as to restore her house to its normal appearance. She hadn’t the heart to taste any of the things she had prepared.
Standing
by the cleared and empty table she nibbled a few biscuits and drank a glass of milk. Of those three pansies, she slipped one without a smile into a little apple-green volume of Shelley and squeezed the other two into a vase of wild flowers.

She had just done this when she saw Mr. Twiney at the gate. She went out to meet him. He announced in a
circuitous
rigmarole that he had been ordered to call for her with his gig.

“’Tisn’t as if me cart were a gentleman’s cart; but the lady up there,” and he jerked his thumb toward Ashover House, “be going to drive me mare, and she expects ’ee to sit on thik back-seat ’long wi’ Mr. Lexie.”

Nell was on the point of explaining to the man that she had not the least intention of coming to Antiger High Mead; but she suddenly changed her mind.

“I am going up to see Mr. Lexie in a minute or two,” she said, “and I’ll tell him to expect you.”

She let Mr. Twiney depart then; and running back into the house and up into her room began to put on her walking shoes and her newest hat.

Half an hour later she was sitting in Lexie’s little garden at the rear of his cottage; confessing everything that had occurred. The enclosure was a small one, defended on two sides by rough gray walls and divided from a small orchard at the back by a briar-rose hedge.

The girl sat opposite Lexie in a low deck chair; and as she talked to him from beneath the shady brim of her hat she kept pulling at the green blades and brittle daisy-stalks of the grass patch beneath them.

From one of the apple trees in the orchard came the sweet reiterated quinquapartite moan of a wood pigeon; and
Lexie, as he listened to what his guest was saying, found
himself
repeating the measured Shakespearean quatrain that he loved so well:

“And so she came right into my room and saw how I was expecting your brother—saw everything. And I could tell just how it struck her, just what she thought.” Nell sighed miserably and threw away a little handful of squeezed-up daisy-stalks which fell across the burnished golden face of a dandelion.

“She thought what was the truth,” said Lexie, the leathery folds and humorous wrinkles about his eyes deepening into a hundred crevices and furrows as ruggedly emphatic as those on the bark of his favourite elm tree.

The girl lifted her chin and leaned forward. “You know it wasn’t like that,” she said. “You know I hadn’t the least wish to make her feel badly. It just happened that William was out for the day and I thought it would be nice to cook a meal for him—for Rook, I mean. I hadn’t talked quietly and properly to him for weeks and weeks.”

Lexie did his best not to smile as if he were speaking to an irrational child. He was conscious of a certain irritation against his brother. How badly things were arranged in this world. Why couldn’t all this romantic “havering” be concentrated on someone more fitted to appreciate it than this master of manias and inhibitions!

“And now I’ve really hurt her,” Nell went on. “She’ll think that there’s something serious between Rook and me and be up in arms whenever we meet. I’ve made things worse for Rook, made them much worse; and there’s actually
nothing between us except what you know perfectly
well—just
what I happen to feel myself—which doesn’t matter to Rook at all or to any one else!”

Lexie’s half-conscious irritation against his brother
betrayed
itself now in spite of his humorous lightness of tone. “Tell me, Nell,” he said, “are you in love with Rook?”

The outrageous directness of this question did not seem to annoy the young girl. For some curious reason those plain significant words gave her a kind of relief. She liked the way Lexie uttered them. She liked to hear them being uttered.

“In—love—with—Rook?” she repeated very slowly. “I wonder if it
is
as thrilling as that. I certainly have never been in love with my husband if ‘in love’ means the sort of feeling I have for your brother. And yet William has been much nicer to me lately. He’s been steadily nicer and nicer since he stopped writing his book.”

“Has he let it go altogether?” asked Lexie.

She shook her head doubtfully. “I wouldn’t like to say that and I think it would be unlucky to say it. It might start him off at it to-morrow. But he certainly has not written a line—I know that for a fact—since the end of April. He wrote a little after Netta went away; and then he stopped. Why do you suppose he stopped?”

Lexie replied to this only by one of his characteristic grimaces.

“Don’t you worry about Ann, my sweet Nell,” he said. “She’ll be just the same to you. And when she’s talked to Rook about your lunch, and beaten him up a bit, she’ll be the same to him, too! These things are not really so terrible as people think they are. There’s a deal of
conventional
bluff in it.”

“Women think a lot about things like that,” murmured the girl feebly.

Lexie sawed the air with his hand; a trick of his when he
got excited. The gesture was peculiar to him and its nature resembled the movement a person might make when
obstructed
by tall reeds in a thick swamp.

“They don’t really!” he cried with more emphasis than Nell had ever heard him use about anything. “It’s all put into their heads by what they read and by what they hear and by what they think that other people think. Left to themselves women would take these things very easily and very naturally.”

As he paused to take breath, for he had worked himself into a sincere agitation now and his gray eyes had become quite large and brilliant, the girl opposite him suddenly burst into a peal of unexpected laughter.

He looked at her with injured gravity, the naïveté of which made it harder for her to recover herself. His self-respect was genuinely outraged; but the graver and more
discomposed
he looked, the more difficult did she find it to stop laughing. It was as if Lexie had become a church, a funeral, a parliamentary debate, a meeting of scientists. She began to have what children call “a regular laughing fit.” She put her hands to her face, and tears of merriment ran down her cheeks.

“What the devil’s the matter with you?” he demanded, rising from his chair and approaching hers. His face wavered between sympathy for what might have been hysterical agitation and annoyance at what might have been childish rudeness.

His tone quieted her and she took her fingers from her face and searched about for her handkerchief.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, “I’m so very sorry. It’s silly of me—— You’re a dear, Lexie—I love you very much.” And she held out her hand to him.

He took it and refused to let it go.

“What was it that set you off just then?” he asked gravely. “Did I say anything especially ridiculous? Did I give
myself 
away in some unpardonable fashion? Did what I said seem obvious and banal beyond words?”

“Dear Lexie!” murmured the girl, trying in vain to get her fingers out of the invalid’s clutch in such a manner as might seem natural and unconscious. “Dear Lexie! Of course you didn’t do anything of the kind! What you said was very sensible; and I daresay quite true. It was
because
it was so sensible that I laughed. I don’t think sensible things, or even true things, are ever the right explanations when it comes to women!”

Lexie’s countenance at that moment would have made an engaging study for some master painter; for some
portraitist
possessed of the psychological impressionism of Spain combined with the grandiose vitality of Venice. The little wrinkles in the skin of his cheeks indicated that his humour was tickled. An unusually concentrated frown in his heavy forehead suggested that his wits were piqued. While the way his drooping half-closed eyelids reduced his eyes—lately so wide open—to nothing but little narrow slits of
amorousness
denoted that the accidental imprisonment of a hand that desired to escape had already aroused the satyr in his blood.

“You steered me off just now,” he said, pressing the hand he held against the girl’s slender neck, “when I asked you a definite question. I don’t believe you’re half as much of an idealist as you think you are, you sweet Nell. Why do you keep that hat on? You’re not afraid of sunstroke, are you?”

As he spoke he used his free hand to pull out the one
hatpin
that the girl wore; and in a moment her head was bare. He stooped over her as if to follow up his advantage.

Nell’s own sensations at the moment were terribly
complicated
. His warm knuckles pressed against her neck sent a faint luxurious relaxation through every nerve of her body. She was so full of shame at her recent lapse from her own
ideal that a great weariness possessed her heart, a weariness that could easily have found a numbing relief in letting him do what he liked.

But simultaneously with these emotions there suddenly rose up within her, to her own surprise, a surging wave of anger against him. What right had he to behave in this way? What right had he to assume that she would let him make love to her? She freed her hand with a jerk and pushed him back so violently and unexpectedly that he staggered.

“What are you doing, Lexie?” she cried indignantly. “I’ve told you before I don’t like this sort of thing!”

She didn’t catch the expression upon his face at this rebuff. She only heard him mutter something under his breath as he moved off; and then she saw him go hurriedly to the flower bed under the wall and stoop down. He seemed to be looking for something among the green shoots of the unbudded delphiniums, something that required much fumbling and searching for, if it were to be-found at all.

His body looked so thin and fragile as he stooped over the bed and his head so heavy, that a twinge of commiseration passed through her.

“What silly punctilious creatures girls are!” she thought to herself. “Why shouldn’t I have let him kiss me if he wanted to? He’s a much finer, a much more interesting human being than I am; and he’s ill, too! What a brute one is with one’s wretched pride and egotism!”

Lexie had found what he wanted now and came back smiling, his head held high, his hand extended. It was a single lavender-coloured, double French primrose, enfolded in its own large crumpled leaf.

“It’s the last left,” he said, handing it to her. “
Fast-fading
primroses covered up in leaves,” he added, purposely misquoting; “only this isn’t a real primrose. I never have been able to make out what mysterious old associations
I have with this flower. It always gives me a peculiar
sensation
unlike anything else. Don’t you think, my sweet Nell, that there are certain memories in us that come straight down to us from our parents and through them from
their
parents? If it isn’t like that, what is it? Memories of our childhood before we were conscious?”