Ducdame (32 page)

“I’m sure my brother meant no harm. And I’m sure Mrs. Hastings didn’t mean to laugh in your face, Twiney. I can’t imagine either of them doing such a thing. Well! Good-day to you! If I happen to meet them I’ll tell them that you’re still waiting.”

He began to move off, but Mr. Twiney’s indignation was not yet appeased.

“I think you ought to know it, Squire, though I’m not the one to tell you. But they do say down village that Mr. Lexie and Missy Hastings be up to no good in these goings on. I’ve a-driven them two into every lane and every cattle
drive round these parts. I think it’s only due to ’ee, Mr. Ash’ver, seeing as you’re Squire and such-like, to let ’ee know how the wind be blowing!”

“All right, Twiney; I’m much obliged to you, Twiney; but you mustn’t listen to the village gossip, you know. Good-day to you!” And with unctuous discretion on his tongue but black anger in his heart he strode down the lane.

So this was why he had been seeing so little of Lexie during the last fortnight! The rogue had stolen a march on him and had been up to serious mischief with that romantic little idiot! He found it impossible to see the thing in a
reasonable
or magnanimous light. A few weeks ago he would have shrugged his shoulders and washed his hands of the matter. Nell belonged to Hastings; not to him. She had never really belonged to him! Why was it, then, that he felt so maliciously angry with both her and his brother? He refused to attempt to analyze what he felt. He just gave himself up to a blind irrational grievance; to a sense of having been betrayed by his brother and fooled by the girl.

Every complicated and suppressed irritation he had ever harboured against Lexie rose to the surface. He felt as if he had wilfully allowed his remorse about Netta to tie his hands in a struggle with his brother which had been secretly going on for many months; a struggle as to whether he with his translunar lust, or Lexie, with his humorous satyrishness, should carry off this sensitive little being of the twisted mouth and the slender pliable limbs!

No sooner was he round the first corner and out of sight of Mr. Twiney than he stood stock still, staring at the woods in front of him. He knew well where Titty’s Ring was. It was a clearing in the centre of the wood where the ground
became
level for a short distance and where in former times there had been a spring. Lexie had had from childhood a curious predilection for this particular spot; for the
lusciousness
of the long damp grass that grew there, for its complete
isolation in the centre of so much undergrowth, for its
cuckoo-flowers
that were larger and of a deeper lilac there than down in the valley, while all the years he had known it there had been two grass snakes in that place, which every spring cast their spotted skins; of which skins he had collected quite a number, mysterious and unique objects, different in the
feeling
of their scaly texture from anything else in the whole world!

It was, in fact, as Rook well knew, a symbolic and
significant
fact that his brother had taken Nell to this favourite spot of his, and had taken her there, too, on an afternoon that seemed, as Lexie himself would have put it, “dedicated” to such a felicitous proceeding.

He approached the fence that separated him from the wood and began staring savagely into its umbrageous recesses. The wood itself became, as he gazed into its leafy shadows, an utterly different thing from what it had been before. It became a classic and Arcadian refuge, “dear to Pan and the Nymphs,” in whose embowered hiding-places all the
responsibilities
of the world fell away and vanished.

Rook began to visualize the scene in Titty’s Ring with an intensity that caused him a sick sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. He made a faint troubled effort to remember the menace that overhung his brother’s life; but even as he did this he found his own fingers fumbling at the little box containing those morphia tablets, the loss of which, when he returned the other one, Lexie had never discovered. No! He himself, as his mind became more and more morbid, might be driven to die, too. And that being so, the difference between their two fates was not so tremendous as to give him a cruel and outrageous advantage.

And after all, at the bottom of things, when it became a matter of two males fighting for a female, these questions of honour and justice and fairness and even decency, didn’t they always go to the wall? Lexie had flung them over.
There had been a sort of tacit understanding between them about Nell; and though he had certainly allowed Lexie to think that he had withdrawn from the field, it was taking his
withdrawal
a little too literally, to act as if Nell were entirely fancy-free.

Rook’s thoughts, as the August sun beat upon his head, growing even hotter as it sank a little from the zenith, were so wild and unbalanced as to resemble the thoughts of a
person
in a fever. The shock of what he had just heard and the vivid material images his mind kept conjuring up of what was going on at Titty’s Ring stirred up a certain black mud of human maliciousness which lay dormant in one deep recess of his nature.

The most fantastic ideas entered his mind; the idea, for example, that he was the victim of a conspiracy of
persecution
, or at least of manipulation, in which everyone in his circle played a definite part, propitiating and managing him to ends that were theirs and not his.

He began to envisage Netta’s disappearance as part of this conspiracy and it presented itself to him that his wife had probably encouraged Lexie in this more serious pursuit of Nell. And his mother, too! He recalled now how often in the last few weeks the old lady had held him at her side, no doubt to keep him away from Toll-Pike Cottage. He felt an angry sensation of being waylaid and humoured and manœuvred at every turn, of being surrounded by the pressure of soft, firm, strong hands that were regulating his life contrary to his deepest life illusion!

Once more he began to feel that in opposition to the free play of his identity all these terrible forces of tribal continuity and tribal self-assertion were using him for purposes utterly foreign to his own personal vision of existence. They
intended
that the family should have an inheritor; and in order that this should come to pass they were prepared to turn him, Rook Ashover, into a mere passive link in a chain that
stretched back to the 13th Century and forward God knows how far!

The old blind vicious feeling came over him that he, a lonely, solitary, hunted figure, was engaged in a life-
and-death
struggle with “Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, and Powers,” all conspiring to reduce his independent life to a meaningless cipher!

Well! He would fight them all; and if Lexie—the only human soul in the world that he really loved—went over to their side, he would fight him, too, whether he were a dying man or not! All the time that these extravagant thoughts whirled through his brain he held his cloth cap in his hand; and the early afternoon sun, full of the iron virulence which it possesses at that hour, intensified the fever that raged within him.

All at once, driven by a sudden irresistible impulse, he forced his way through the fence and plunged into the wood. Like Lexie he knew every stick and stone of that countryside; and it was not long before he hit upon one of the little mossy paths, formerly game drives but invaded now by every sort of vegetation, which intersected the thick
undergrowth
.

He followed this path with a stride that grew more and more rapid as he advanced; for he knew by the look of certain outstanding trees that he was not far from the piece of level ground where Titty’s Ring and other smaller nameless
expanses
of open grass broke the leafy monotony.

Arrived at the first of these woodland greenswards he paused for a minute to take breath. Steady, unflickering shadows, dark as the hollow places in some immense
sorrowful
upturned face, lay in great silent pools on the deep-rooted grass. Faint vibrations of the air that could hardly be called winds lifted the feathery seed tops of hawkweed and dandelion; while out of the silence all around him came
indescribable
sighings and rustlings, as if an invisible
population 
of elemental beings, lighter than air itself, were
awakening
from their noon siesta.

Wiping the sweat from his forehead with the cap he was still clutching in his fingers, he shook his head solemnly and gravely from side to side as if replying to some formidable argument of an unseen antagonist. He then moved away from this first clearing and took a path opposite to the path by which he had come.

A second greensward was followed by yet another, each one more magical in its shadowy seclusion; and Rook felt as if he were passing through a series of sacred groves, the leafy purlieus and outermost “lady-chapels,” it might be, of some thrice-holy place, as yet unvisited by any human votary!

Hush! He was certain that he had heard voices….

He stopped dead still, listening intently, cursing the loud chatter of a jay that broke the surrounding stillness.

It was those two! He knew their tones. He knew the amorousness in his brother’s low chuckling laugh; he knew the faint broken protest—who would not know
that
if not he?—of Nell’s timid and enchanting reluctance.

The path in which he waited now was narrowed and almost closed by several horn-beam bushes; and to the end of his life he remembered the look of those thick leaves, so olive-green on one side and so ivory-white on the other! One of these bushes had extended clear across the path; and unwilling to force his way noisily through its thick growth he sank down upon hands and knees and crept under it, still holding his cloth cap in one hand and his stick in the other.

A sour-sweet smell rose from the earth as his knuckles pressed against it, that peculiar smell which belongs to dry wood mould that has been so fed by fallen leaves and by the rubble of dead twigs as to become something far more organic than the soil of any ploughed-up open field.

In the midst of the blind turmoil of his blood his senses seemed preternaturally acute and alert. He saw the tiny
gray cups of a little patch of moss, each cup decorated outside by infinitesimal scales and bosses, as if from the fingers of some fairy Hephæstus, and shining inside as though inlaid with opalescent enamel.

It was extraordinary how clear his mind was as he crept forward, the lower branches of the hornbeam switching the back of his head. He even stopped, for the flicker of a second, to lift up the bent stalk of a minute saxifrage which his hand, as if it had been the paw of an animal, had brushed heavily aside. As far as the sensations of that little cluster of pale green petals were concerned he might have been a
love-crazed
dinosaur, advancing to interrupt the pleasures of a brother dinosaur. A blind weight, a crushing bruise, and then a great mysterious uplifting! That was all that the saxifrage felt. How could it know that this miraculous
uplifting
was the result, achieved at a moment when the rest of the man was demented, of the existence of a pitifulness in
human
nature that was older than its earliest appearance in Antiger Great Wood?

There was a single moment, just before he saw them there in that sunlit glade, when a half-forgotten memory of some childish game with his brother in that very place became a living portion of the olive-green screen before him, a living film of affection, which had to be torn apart by a conscious movement of his will before he leapt out upon them.

But he lifted his head now, very gently, rising up on his knees; and what he saw, as he rose, seemed by its own power, independently of his will, to break that filmy screen of ancient association. Standing locked together in one another’s arms, in the very centre of Titty’s Ring, the long grass in the
sunlight
showing green as seaweed about their feet, Nell barely touching the ground upon which Lexie’s heels were so
masterfully
planted, the two figures were swaying to and fro in an ecstasy of amorous enchantment. He rose upright, flung
aside the last intervening branch of the hornbeam, and rushed out upon them.

His first impulse was to strike them both down. The accumulated irritations of many months would have been behind that blow; and behind it, too, would have been a deep, subterranean, occult jealousy of Lexie; not merely the
immediate
jealousy over Nell but a much more subtle thing: a jealousy of Lexie’s sagacity and—who knows?—even of the mysterious advantage in these things that his very illness gave him! And mentally speaking, the blow
was
given. Rook had the feeling of giving it. He had the relief, the exhaustion, the relaxation of having given it. And yet in the course of his rush toward them, and of his approach till he’ stopped in front of them, he never so much as raised his hand.

Lexie was the one whose head was turned toward him and he at once loosened his hold upon the girl, who sank down upon the grass. Whiter than any human being had ever seen it was the younger Ashover’s Claudian countenance as he moved forward a step or two, putting himself between his brother and the girl upon the ground. As for Nell, she gave one startled cry, stared at the intruder as if he had been a complete stranger, and then covered her face with her two hands.

“So this is it, is it?” said Rook hoarsely, confronting them with a look so menacing that Lexie made a little nervous deprecatory movement.

“Rook—I’m ashamed of you—to follow us like this—to frighten Nell like this—— What’s up now? What’s the matter with you? Nell and I have a perfect right to come out together if we want to on a fine August afternoon!”

His voice took on the old familiar tone of semi-badinage as he said this, and the colour began to come back to his face.

“So this is it!” repeated Rook, staring wildly at Nell who had now removed her hands from her face and was answering
his look with a steady scrutinizing gaze that became more and more full of complicated significance.