Ducdame (37 page)

It seemed to him as if what she had done was something worse than ingratitude. She had taken their love, which was the expression of all that had been best and tenderest and most delicate in him, and had treated it as something evil and sinful. He had given her a pity, an understanding, a recognition, that went beyond anything those priests could give her; and now she was capable of this enthusiastic cry: “I owe them everything!”

The window of the room was wide open to the garden and there floated in upon them the distant murmur of Lexie’s and Nell’s voices and the musky scent of geraniums.

Rook found that he had counted much more upon Netta’s attitude to him than he had until that moment realized. It was not that he had anything to offer her; any reasonable alternative to this new life she had found for herself. If there had been anything definite in his mind he could have dealt with this blow more effectively, have found an antidote for its smart. He was standing before her there, pleading angrily and helplessly for something that had no shape, no substance, no form. He was pleading with her to have pity upon his life illusion, pity upon his soul’s inmost self, pity upon that ultimate reflection of himself before himself which lay in the abysmal mirror of his self-deception as the sky lies in a mirage of water above arid sands! He was pleading with her to save from destruction something that was so tenuous that he himself could hardly define it. Like a thin film of autumn mist his self-love wavered and undulated between them in that geranium-scented air. It became a drooping filament of unreal vapour. It faded; it hovered; it sank. A sense of intolerable emptiness came over him. Netta’s Fathers had saved
her
soul; but they had stricken his.
But how could
she
know that? How could she know that his feeling for her was the one affair of his life that exactly lent itself to that morbid peculiarity in the depths of his being, his desire to love a person who in some way was
dependent
upon him, helpless before him, different from what he was by some impassable gulf?

Along with the emptiness that filled his soul there came the sting of a peculiarly masculine resentment; the resentment which arises when a woman with whom one has dropped one’s mask and put aside one’s reserve suddenly reassumes
her
mask and
her
reserve at the very moment when one is most unarmed and at her mercy!

“And so your Fathers have taught you to look back upon our life together as
sin?
” His tone was strained and harsh; and the girl saw clearly that he was on the verge of breaking out into a torrent of indignant words, bitter, corrosive, capable of leaving behind them scars that would never be effaced.

She must stop him. She must explain to him. She must make him realize what she had been feeling when she
deliberately
began drinking in order to degrade herself in his eyes. It was intolerable to her that he should take her present mood, her new life, and make of it something that diminished the value of all that had been between them. What she wanted to make him understand was that never from her—never, never from her!—could come any
diminishing
, any undervaluing of their love or of all that that love had meant. And if she could not make him see this without saying what was too hard to say, well, she must say it!

Woman-like, what hurt her most was that she should have blurred the image of herself that their love had created in his mind, nay, spoilt his response to that image by giving him the idea that it was possible for her to have changed so much as to be ready to betray their past together, to blaspheme against what they had shared.

She looked at him with that expressive look with which one human being beats at the closed shutters of another’s
conciousness
, like a starving traveller whose language is so remote, so foreign, that it might be mistaken for the wind in the trees, for the rain on the porch! What she wanted to lay before him was nothing less than the full measure of her love. That he should accuse her of not recognizing the worth of their days together or the value of the sympathy he had given her—it was blind, unfair, distorted, mad!

That was what men were always doing in this world; they were laying stress on external, outward, logical aspects of relations between people and missing the one thing needful! They were always working themselves up into rational indignation about aspects of love that were accidental,
occasional
, relative; whereas, all the while, Love Himself,
absolute
and immeasurable, remained dumb and inarticulate on the threshold!

As she looked at him now with this mystery lying unspoken, unspeakable, at the heart of her existence, and that turmoil of wild accusation trembling upon his tongue, it came over her what a tragic chasm it was that separated the love of a woman from the love of a man.

“It is thus. It is so. There are these evidences. There is this proof,” cries the exacting reason of the one. “I love you! Can’t you see that I love you?” answers the blind instinct of the other. Netta began to feel heart-sick and dizzy as she watched him, standing there like a judge;
waiting
, waiting, till some self-betraying murmur on her part brought down on her head the already formulated sentence. She seemed to herself to be beating back with her hands a clamour of discordant voices, of confused inexplicable sounds. Why did those steps keep marching up and down, up and down, in the room above? Or were they, too, only the beating of her heart? Surely that must be Lexie and Nell just
outside
the door! But their murmurings reached her as if they
were not human at all; as if Rook’s pulses full of unjust anger had acquired some horrid goblin speech and were rushing upon her like an infuriated mob—

And then, without any reason for it, she saw with
incredible
clearness a little thin gold ring that the “Father” had worn on his finger when she was first pouring out to him the misery of her shame, of her loneliness; and as that vision disappeared, mingling strangely with a fierce red spot on Rook’s lowering forehead, she found herself experiencing that lightning-rapid panorama of her whole previous existence, such as, people had told her, persons underwent when, in drowning, they sank for the third time.

She certainly had begun to feel actually faint. What was Rook doing standing there, so funnily stern, in front of her? What was it she had to make him understand? Something that a person could do when he loved another person very much—but something that it was impossible to speak of!

“Rook!” she brought out with a kind of gasp.

At that moment the door flew open and Lexie and Nell precipitated themselves into the room. They both showed signs of extreme agitation and they both began speaking at once.

“Pandie is out there——”

“Pandie has come to say that——”

Rook turned pale. Had the moment arrived? Was he even now the father of an heir to Ashover?

Netta rose to her feet, also very white and trembling.

“Is it Lady Ann?” she asked.

Lexie was the one to explain; for Nell’s attention was
distracted
at that moment by the sound of her husband’s steps moving backward and forward in his room above.

“Pandie is at the gate,” said Lexie hurriedly. “She says your wife can’t be found.”

The first feeling that Rook had under the shock of this
unexpected
news was—strangely enough—a queer spasm of
relief
!
For some profound subconscious reason anything seemed more tolerable to him just then than to hear that his child had come into the world.

“Can’t be found?” he repeated. And then, taking
advantage
of the strangeness of the communication to give vent to his unnatural emotion in the form of blind anger against the messenger: “What does the little fool come
running
here for?” he cried sternly. “Why doesn’t she look about in the garden, in the kitchen garden, in the orchard, up Battlefield, even? Ann has been walking quite far some of these days. She’s taken into her head to go a farther stroll than usual, that’s all! What’s the use of coming here to tell us a thing like that? Let me see her.” And he made a step toward the open door, where Nell was still standing, nervously preoccupied by the sounds overhead. “Let me see her! Let me talk to her!”

But Lexie intervened and stopped him. “It’s more serious than you think, Rook,” he said gravely. “For God’s sake keep your wits about you! They’ve searched the garden
and
the orchard already. Pandie says they’ve been everywhere. Mother has been herself to the top of Heron’s Ridge looking for her. God knows what may not have happened! Women are apt to go crazy at these times and do the maddest things. Pandie says old Betsy Cooper has turned up, dragging the idiot Binnory after her, with some wild story about having seen her in Antiger Lane near Drool’s cottage. Martha Vabbin has gone to get Drool himself; and to see if by some lucky chance she just went in there to rest. But from what Betsy and the idiot say she didn’t go into the cottage at all——” He broke off suddenly,
disturbed
by the sight of Nell rushing wildly up the stairs.

“There’s something wrong up there, too,” he added, with a shrug of his shoulders.

Rook without a word hurried into the garden. He found Pandie standing on the gravel path like a comic image of
desperation, her head bare and her hand clutching an
enormous
garden rake.

“Oh, Master Rook, Master Rook! What have come upon our heads to-day?” cried the distracted servant. “Missus says I was to fetch ’ee to come home at once; and Mr. Lexie, too, if he were well enough to walk on his feet. And she says you was to fetch Mr. Twiney and Mr. Pod up along! And she says you was to summon the police; and I reckon myself ’twould be only right, considering how them gippoos be abroad, to send to Forley Barracks for the Military. Lord alive! Lord alive! That I should be the woman to tell the Squire of Ashover that his lady be gone to find a hole in the river deep enough to commit ’fanticide in!”

Rook was too bewildered by this time even to smile at these aberrations of the native of Somersetshire.

“What have you got that rake for, Pandie?” he asked.

“For to drag the ponds and ditches with, Master Rook! They say that when a body’s expecting, like as your lady be, there ain’t no pond water near or far that Providence don’t tempt ’un with. ’Tis a pity her legs bain’t swelled up! When their legs be swelled up they can’t go suiciding and such-like. ’Tis a dispensation of Nature!”

Rook turned away from her.

“Lexie! Nell! Netta!” he called out. “I’m off to the house!”

He strode to the gate. “You go on to the village, Pandie,” he cried, “and get Twiney and Pod and bring them back with you in Twiney’s cart and don’t go shouting all this nonsense to everyone you meet. I expect I shall find Lady Ann safe at home when I get back!”

He was already in the road when he heard his brother’s voice calling him by name. He turned and met Lexie at the gate.

“Nell has just come down from talking to that beggar upstairs,” said the younger man, “and she says she’s had the greatest difficulty in quieting him. I couldn’t get the
drift of what the trouble was; but he’s got his confounded book mixed up with your child. The chap seems to have gone all to pieces. I’m glad Netta
is
with them. Nell oughtn’t to be left alone with him.” He laid his hand on his brother’s arm. “You’re not letting this fuss about Ann upset you, Rook, are you? This day seems dedicated to one agitation after another! But don’t you worry, dear Rook. Ann’s probably turned up by now.”

Rook suddenly bent forward, took his brother’s grave and anxious countenance between his hands and kissed him rapidly. “I shall look in at the church,” he said. “That’s just the place none of them would think of! But, as you say, she’s probably safe back in her room by now. There’s something about this day that seems to make everyone nervous. I’ve noticed it before. Whenever the wind drops dead in Ashover and the air is absolutely still, something’s sure to happen with us. We’re a funny family. The gods must be perfectly sick of us. Well, I’m off! Don’t leave Nell alone with Hastings, I beg you, Lexie!”

He strode off down the road.

Lexie saw Pandie staring up at Hastings’s window as if she had been mesmerized. With one hand on her rake she was mechanically moving it about among the geraniums. Whether in that waking dream she imagined she was dredging a pond to find Ann’s body or whether she was reverting to some childish memory of helping her father amid the rich loam of Sedgemoor, no one will ever know. There are instinctive actions and gestures of human beings, especially at some great crisis of drastic events such as was then gathering about these people, which will always retain an element of the grotesque and the inexplicable.

“I’ll come with you to the village, Pandie,” said the young man, breaking in upon her trance. “Here! For God’s sake drop that rake of yours and pull yourself together! What’s the matter with you, woman?”

The red-haired servant turned toward him a face that was distorted with emotion.

“She told I we be all flummoxed by thik parson up there.”

“
Who
told you?” cried Lexie impatiently; and then, catching sight of Netta at the door, “Don’t you leave Nell alone with that chap, will you? Pandie and I are going to the village.”

Netta made a sign that she understood him and returned into the house. Lexie took the rake from Pandie’s
unconscious
hands and led her into the road.

“Who told you?” he repeated as they moved off together.

“That gippoo bitch, Bet Cooper, ’twere what warned I of ’ee. ’Twas for that she be come, so ’a did say. She’d a-seen thik parson murdering our Squire, or summat o’ that, in a girt wold crystal-stone, what she have stoled from some foreign scollard! I did tell thee mother what she did say; but not a thought would she give to it. Your mother’s not one to attend to God his wone self when she be put about.”

Lexie found his strength barely sufficient to reach the first house in the village, which by good luck happened to be that of Mr. Pod, the Sexton. Here he decided to rest, sending Pandie on to find Mr. Twiney.