Ducdame (3 page)

There, at any rate, they all lay, the Ashovers of Ashover! Their two descendants, the fair one and the dark one, pressed their foreheads very close to the window and
surveyed
the well-known marble images and the brass
inscriptions
on the stone floor.

The most imposing effigy of them all was that of Benjamin Ashover, the 18th-century Deist, the friend of Voltaire.

The mortuary grandeur of this sturdy infidel threw all the rest into the shade. Clumsy classical cupids, with less resemblance to cherubs than to wine bottles, supported the plump pillow on which rested the well-shaped, supercilious head; nor could anything exceed the patronizing complacency with which this bewigged unbeliever contemplated his present surroundings!

Very different was the expression of Sir Robert Ashover, the cavalier victim of Oliver Cromwell.

Wistful and indignant, in lace collar and embroidered coat, this defender of old illusions stared out of his marble frame with an expression of melancholy surprise at the lack of gentlemanliness, or even of common decency, in “the ways of God to Man.”

More different still from the philosopher’s smirk was the impenetrable aloofness, stern and forbidding, of Lord Roger of Ashover, the Crusader.

With his mailed hands crossed, with his hound at his feet, with his unsheathed sword at his side, Lord Roger looked like a man-at-arms of Eternity, deep asleep, while the armies of Time trampled past him.

“
E
la
sua
volontate
è
nostra
pace,”
his lips seemed to say under his pointed beard!

Rook and Lexie drew back together from the window and returned in silence to the gravel path that led to the gate.

Once outside in the road they both became conscious that the luminous mystery above them had worked some kind of sorcery upon their nerves, had vampirized in some perceptible way their life energy.

Every grass blade, every tree trunk, every gatepost, was still floating in a lovely transparent liquid trance.

But when the two men had parted from each other, and Rook, pausing on the bridge to listen to his brother’s dragging footsteps and tapping stick, had become suddenly conscious that there was an alteration in the feel of the air, the echo of Lexie’s final words returned to him.

“She has never been really friendly to the human race. Never really friendly! It’s a shame we can’t wait here together, brother Rook, until we can smell the dawn!”

T
HE rain lashed against the window panes of the dining room of Ashover House. Netta Page sat facing the window in a tall straight-backed chair.

She had finished her breakfast. She sat with her chin on her hands‚ her elbows on the table‚ her eyes staring in front of her.

There were no other people in the room. Rook and Lady Ann had breakfasted together earlier. Mrs. Ashover never appeared till midday. The same situation had repeated itself many times already; and these lonely morning meals were by no means distasteful to Netta.

As she sat now in that straight-backed chair her eyes were fixed steadily on the rain; but her thoughts were focussed on the figure of a little old lady in a black satin dress who had just passed her on the staircase.

It was not a nice experience to be looked through as if you were transparent and as if the balustrade on the other side of your body were requiring a new coat of paint; but it was a still more unpleasant sensation to be given a glance that resembled a sharp stinging smack on the cheek; and Netta, in recalling these incidents‚ was conscious that her
resentment
at them was something new; was something different from the weary habitual patience into which the buffets of life had beaten her.

But this sort of thing had been going on for a year; and she still could be quite happy at certain moments.

Not one single time, since Rook had brought her to the house, had Mrs. Ashover spoken to her, or smiled at her, or eaten at the same table with her.

The servants‚ too, old-fashioned and eccentric, had taken their cue from the old lady and had missed no opportunity of making the intruder feel her position.

Well!
that
, at any rate, was quite different now. The appearance of Cousin Ann upon the scene had changed all that. Netta did not quite understand Cousin Ann’s
kindness
. But, on the other hand, she did not suspect it of any hidden treachery. She just accepted it as she had accepted so much else. And it certainly had made the whole
difference
as far as the servants were concerned. Lady Ann could not apparently coax Mrs. Ashover into a different mood; but she had forced her to retreat from position after position of overt contempt, and she had cast such a spell over the rest of the household that the girl no longer went to and fro among them like a convicted criminal.

Everybody in the place had felt the new influence. The worst of the village gossips, when they saw the daughter of Lord Poynings grow friendlier and friendlier with “the kept woman,” had begun to wonder if it wouldn’t after all result in Master Rook’s marrying “the poor harmless body.”

Even that formidable entity “the neighbourhood” showed signs of a certain restlessness under its own verdict. It was one thing to punish the impoverished Ashovers. It was another thing to be denied the pleasure of meeting Ann Wentworth Gore.

A tentative gesture, however, which was made from a certain quarter to propitiate Lady Ann without relaxing the proprieties, met with such an annihilating rebuff that it would have needed a bolder person than any who lived just then on the banks of the Frome to repeat that offence. The Ashover family was therefore left in peace to work out its own destiny.

Many other images besides those of the ungracious old lady and the friendly young one rose between Netta and the streaming window panes that November morning.

Rain more than anything else in the world carries the mind back to early associations, and Netta saw herself as a little girl in a starched pinafore watching it beat on the roof of the Black Dog at Portsmouth.

She saw herself as an overworked barmaid at the King George in Southampton, watching it turn the little stone gutter into a turbid flood.

She saw herself as the ambiguously protected “niece” of Major-General Sir James Carton watching it drip‚ drip, drip from a Hammersmith waterspout upon a
galvanized-iron
roof.

She saw herself as a second-rate actress in a second-rate stock company watching it from the common dressing room as it changed the colour from yellow ochre to rusty brown of a Bristol alley wall.

She saw herself in a boat at Abingdon, watching it leap up in a million tiny water tongues from the surface of the great smooth river, the day when a Guy’s Hospital student took her to Pangbourne. She could feel at that very moment the touch of his young feverish hand upon her body. She could hear the harsh-throated sedge warblers chattering in the reeds.

Netta loved these solitary interludes in the Ashover dining room.

She could dream things there and tell herself stories there, untroubled by any agitation. She could even think without hopeless regret of that rash proceeding that had for ever ruined her chance of having a child. She could even try to imagine what sort of child Rook and she would have had if things had been different!

So far off and so soothingly vague were Netta’s thoughts that morning that she scarcely turned in her chair when Pandie, the red-haired housemaid, came in to set light to the fire.

“No, you’ll never see no rain like our rain, miss, in all the
countries you do travel through! ’Tain’t in nature that water should fall from dry clouds same as from wet clouds, and there aren’t no clouds this side of Salisbury Plain so wet as ours!”

Thanks to Cousin Ann, Pandie was always affable now; and the sound of her voice and the look of her sturdy broad back bent over the coals filled Netta with a delicious feeling of security.

Oh, how often in former times she had longed to be at once thoroughly idle and thoroughly respectable!

It was her craving for this particular combination that had betrayed her into the Major-General episode, the single one of all her experiences that she would have liked blotted completely out of her memory.

“I like your rain very much,” she said softly. “Were you born in Ashover, Pandie?”

“Me, miss? Me, mum? The Lord love us! No, mum. I were born down Somerset-way atween Tarnton and
Durston
. ‘Twas fresh water, too, where Father lived. But ’tweren’t Frome-water. ’Twas Parret-water; and there were big willow trees over’n and terrible black mud under’n. Corpses themselves would turn to water where I was born‚ miss; but that’s not saying anything against these parts.”

When Pandie was gone the crackling of the newly lit sticks increased Netta’s content.

The effect of rain-lashed windows was to give to the light that filled the room a curious atmospheric quality; a quality that roused in the woman who sat there an indefinable
feeling
connected with a mysterious dream she had sometimes, the exact outlines of which, though repeated again and again‚ she invariably lost.

What the rain really did was to throw a greenish-gray shadow into the room, a shadow that was broken at this
moment
by spurts and splashes of redness coming from the grate.

She drank her remaining cup of tea in quick little sips, holding up the cup with a certain nonchalant air as she had seen Cousin Ann do, the little finger stiffly extended, the elbow resting on the table.

Over the fireplace was a portrait of Sir Robert Ashover, the unfortunate Cavalier; and the sad eyes and melancholy
forehead
of this picture met her gaze with penetrating
sympathy
.

From the very first she had taken a fancy to Sir Robert. She loved his carefully combed curls and his dreamy sensuous lips. She looked at him now with renewed reassurance. He was certainly the last person in the world to will any harm to a poor girl.

She found herself on the point of wishing that Rook was more like Sir Robert and less like his mother.

But Rook had something in him that separated him from all of them; from her most of all.

Oh, dear! She hurriedly jerked up her consciousness, like an entangled fishing line, out of
that
trouble; and threw it again, with a clear fresh swing, into less weedy waters.

How wonderful it was to be free from worry.

She had worried a great deal when she first came to this place. She wondered what her Bristol friends, Madge and Minnie, would feel if they were in her shoes.

She smiled to herself as she thought of such a possibility. They would be miserable. They would be pining for shops and picture houses and “boys.” Why was it she didn’t crave for any of these things? Minnie and Madge had always said she was a “funny one‚” and she supposed they were right. She remembered how even Rook had expressed surprise that she could go on like this, month after month, doing nothing at all and wanting nothing at all.

Cousin Ann was the only person who never seemed to get annoyed with her. It did not appear to aggravate Cousin Ann when she wanted to read stories in her bedroom instead
of walking through the mud and rain. The young lady even chose books for her, just the ones she liked best, out of the jumble of volumes that filled the house.

Thinking of Cousin Ann she rose from her chair and went out into the hall.

Here she stood for a moment, very still and quiet,
listening
to the wind and to the voice of Pandie talking in the kitchen.

Then she gave a little jerk to one of her sleeves, glanced at her feet to see that her stockings were unruffled, and opening the door with rather a deprecatory softness, went into the drawing room.

Lady Ann was standing at a large rosewood table which she had covered with newspapers. On the table was a great rain-drenched heap of chrysanthemums, laurustinus, and a few marigolds, together with the wet leaves of certain other plants. Lady Ann was engaged in shaking the water out of these flowers and in arranging them in a row of tall vases.

She welcomed Netta with affectionate gravity, as one priestess might welcome another when engaged in something which implied an hieratic freemasonry.

Nor was their background at that moment unworthy of them. The chairs and sofas of the chilly room wore a kind of grand ghostliness in their chintz covers. They seemed to survey these two warm-blooded persons like so many wistful defunct nuns. The stately ornaments on the
chimney-piece
were all white and gilt; the landscapes on the walls were all in pale water colour or pastel. The whole room had the look of something that accepted Time and Change and Death as its lords and masters and yet refused to yield one inch of its own dignity and ceremoniousness.

Neither Lady Ann nor Netta spoke much as they went on with their work but they were both obviously very happy in what they were doing. Indeed, as they laughed and spread
out fresh paper on the table and poured water from one vase to another one and arranged the cut stalks and the pungent-smelling leaves, it was as if all individual difference between them dropped away; while two depersonalized figures, as in some old faded print entitled “Women
Arranging
Flowers‚” substituted themselves for the real Ann Gore and the real Netta Page.

“Rook says that Lexie isn’t so well.”

These words, as soon as Netta had uttered them, sounded to her ears as if she had heard them long before, spoken by someone else.

Cousin Ann stared at her in obvious surprise.

“He didn’t tell me that this morning,” she said. “But of course he may have been too worried to talk about it.”

She was silent for a moment, her large gray eyes staring in front of her, her full lips parted, her rounded chin raised.

Then with a sudden almost childish gesture of excitement: “Listen, Netta, I’ve got an idea. Let’s go round there now, this very moment. Let’s take him some of these flowers.”

The blank look with which the older woman received this suggestion and her glance at the windows increased Cousin Ann’s excitement.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she cried. “That’s what we’ll do! We’ll surprise him. There’s heaps of time. I’ll lend you my mackintosh and take my plaid cloak. Oh, you dear, how funny and frightened you look, Come on. I’ll get Pandie to clear these things away. No, no. Of course I can’t go alone. Oh, you dear thing. I do adore you when you look so scared.”

In her impetuosity the young girl seized Netta’s head between her hands and kissed her on the forehead. Then she dragged her out of the room and up the historic staircase.

The road between Ashover Church and Ashover village lay east and west. Between it and the water meadows there was nothing but a stretch of low white railings.
Halfway 
to the village the road crossed a narrow wooden bridge where the river turned sharply to the south.

It was a road that had a distinct character of its own and no reforming county council had yet dared to meddle with that character.

The flooded ruts into which the two women kept stumbling might have been indented by the wagon wheels of Cromwell; and the rough ditch-side grass, now beaten flat by the weather, might have fed the flocks of Wolsey.

Cousin Ann’s excitement seemed rather to increase than to diminish. Her thick boots and stockings kept her feet dry; while the water streaming down her cheeks heightened her eager colour.

Netta, on the contrary, was conscious that her feet were miserably wet, that the draggled ends of her hair were hanging loose, and that the rain was finding its way down her very neck behind the collar of her mackintosh.

Dead yellow leaves whirled past them as they struggled on. The willows bowed down toward the alders. The alders bent desolately toward the reeds. The reeds crouched and shuddered until they touched the surface of the swollen ditches. Tossed wildly on the rain came flocks of starlings, their awkward bodies carried up and down by the wind, their wings beating aimlessly.

The women arrived at last at the cottage of the Vicar of Ashover, a little whitewashed two-story building close to the road, where in former times had stood the turnpike toll-gate.

Lady Ann hesitated here a moment, pulling her cloak closer round herself and adjusting the mackintosh of her companion. She had made Netta wear a cloth cap of Rook’s and the miserable patience of the rain-drenched face beneath it struck her now with a little twinge of remorse.