Ducdame (38 page)

Sitting in Mr. Pod’s little kitchen through which not a breath of air passed, either by door or window, he could not help recalling his brother’s words about these days when the wind was dead in Ashover.

“I don’t like it,” he said to himself. “I don’t like it! Things are beginning to get out of control; and I can’t tell what the upshot will be.”

T
HE inviolable stillness of that last day of September prevented Lady Ann from enjoying her usual rest in the afternoon. An unaccountable malaise came upon her, a sense of suffocation, of being shut in, imprisoned, sepulchred, buried alive. She had suffered from the same species of nervousness once or twice before, but never so badly as now.

She went to the window of her room and looked out.

Everything was hushed and death-still in the somnolent garden. The branches of the great cedar swam motionless upon the air and seemed borne up by vibrant aërial waves of soft blue mist.

“I’ll go for a walk,” she said to herself. “I’ll take Lion.”

She put on her prettiest summer hat, threw a thin loose dust-coloured cloak round her shoulders and slipped quietly down the stairs. Very cautiously, so as not to arouse any one’s attention, she let herself out of the front door and walked round to the rear of the house.

She knew that Rook was out with Lexie somewhere and she knew that Mrs. Ashover was resting in her big upstairs room. As she came past the kitchen door she was met by that peculiar complicated odour which in English houses of the Ashover sort seems synonymous with two o’clock in the afternoon, might indeed be the very smell of the
gamboge-coloured
hide of two o’clock, that enemy of romance and all delicate joy! It was an odour in which the “washing-up” beginning in the scullery mingled with the servants’ dinner ending in the kitchen and both of these with the
indescribable
sense of the crowding together of the various house pets, canine and feline, who had “followed the dishes out.”

Lady Ann had not been able to eat much lunch and this two-o’clock smell made her feel for a moment a little dizzy and sick. But the great point was that nobody about the place saw her as she hurried past. Lion was neither at the kitchen door nor in his kennel by the stable. “Oh, I forgot!” she said to herself. “I told them to take him down to Drool’s.” She had vexed herself lately about the dog; feeling that, now her own walks were curtailed, it didn’t get enough exercise, Rook being teased rather than entertained by the animal’s company.

Her momentary malaise passed off after she had crossed the orchard and got clear away on the slope of Battlefield, and when she reached the top of Heron’s Ridge she felt better than she had felt for several weeks.

She felt happier, too. That rich, indolent, windless autumn day was profoundly adapted to her mood. The sense of the apples and pears growing riper and mellower every day among those lichen-covered branches, of the hazelnuts growing browner and plumper among their crumpled leaves, of the mushrooms in the lush grass meadows appearing so suddenly and so quickly, that even those who knew their privileged haunts would wonder at their coming; the sense of all these things around and about her seemed to soothe her mind and liberate her spirit, as if the immense fecundity of Nature were something she could draw upon to enlarge and replenish her own vitality.

She had not been as far as Drool’s cottage for several weeks; but to-day it seemed to her that it would be very nice to pay a visit to the place. She felt a queer emotional craving to stand once more, whatever might be the result of what she had soon to go through, in that little room of Binnory’s. And besides, she would greatly love to catch a final glimpse of the dog, her one completely faithful and loyal supporter, before she entered upon this life-and-death struggle.

There were many feelings in her proud young heart that she had always found it easier to confide to horses and dogs than to her own species; and with Lion especially she had come to find a satisfying sense of dropping her reserve and giving way to this or that primitive and even savage emotion such as her stoical training had taught her to suppress in the presence of her own race.

She came down the Dorsal side of the hill with a gayer and more light-hearted tread than she had used for many a long day in her diurnal strolls. She watched the rabbits with the eye of a sportsman, at once sympathetic and predatory. She snuffed the air, at one big clump of bracken, catching the familiar taint of a fox in that misty windless atmosphere; and she stopped more than once to place her foot on the loose up-flung trail of earth mould which marked the movement of a burrowing mole. A few of her husband’s black namesake birds kept up a perpetual clamour above the high tops of the trees as if to make sure that no invading jay or magpie should interfere with the return of their tribe when later in the afternoon they “made wing to the rooky wood,” while the whirring headlong flight of more than one family of partridges made her forget her obligation to her own
offspring
!

It was only when she was quite close to the cottage at the foot of the hill that her mood veered. It was as if the master of the vessel of her mind had suddenly come on deck and given orders to swing sheer round, from larboard to
starboard
. It was a quick instinctive rush of anger against Rook that decided her.

“I’ll turn round and go straight back,” she thought. “That room is nothing to me now; and Lion will only want to go home with me if he sees me.”

She was so close to the gap in the hedge, however, by which the lane was reached, a little to the right of the cottage, that she was led on, by that curious and childish instinct
which demands that the most drifting of human walks should have some sort of goal, to struggle cautiously down the bank to the familiar road.

Once in the lane it occurred to her that the most sensible way home would be round by the barley fields; for Heron’s Ridge was much less of an eminence there, and she could stroll back at leisure by the village road and the two bridges.

She turned to the right accordingly at this point, and soon found herself opposite the gate into the wood where she had first revealed to Rook that she was with child. An
unpleasantly
familiar voice came suddenly to her ears from the other side of this gate. She moved a step toward it; and there, under the brushwood, she saw Binnory.

Nor was the idiot alone. Occupied, beneath his fascinated scrutiny, in collecting some especial herbalist’s plant—which may even have been, for all Ann knew about such things, the famous classical hellebore—the old trot, Betsy Cooper herself, turned toward her the sort of menacing scrutiny that a sinister sorceress of ancient times might have turned toward some Eurynome or Dione, big with the child of an Olympian.

“Save us and help us if it ain’t her ladyship’s own self!” cried the crone, rising from her knees and coming forward.

“’Tis my pretty leddy! ’Tis
my
pretty leddy!” ejaculated the idiot, approaching the gate with still more alacrity. “Have ’ee been to Lunnon to find Squire Ash’ver, what rumpled thee fine feathers for ’ee unbeknownst to any but poor Binnory?”

Lady Ann instinctively drew away from these two
discomfortable
figures, retreating, as she pulled her cloak around her, toward the middle of the lane. Here she stopped and faced them; but neither the old woman nor the boy made any attempt to come farther than the gate.

“Thee best get up along over Hern’s Top as quickly as thee may,” said Betsy Cooper. “’Twere only last night
when I be cleaning me horse-cart, out where us do bide now, and me partners were quiet-like and ’twere all still as churchyard stones, that a voice inside me belly said to I, ‘Look i’ thik wold crystal, Betsy lass; look i’ thik wold crystal!’ And no sooner did I do what ’un did say than, Lord bless us and keep us! There was that black parson of yours a-murderin’ of poor dear Squire!”

She stopped to take breath and Lady Ann moved as if to go on down the lane.

“It’s true as God’s dear blood, your ladyship!” screamed the old woman, making a feeble attempt to open the gate. “Get home with you, you owdacious turleypin!” This was addressed to Binnory, who was staring at the girl in the road as if he meditated a wild rush toward her.

“I can’t listen to you now,” said Lady Ann calmly. “But if you’d like to come up to the house later I’m sure you’ll be made welcome.”

She spoke in the tone she habitually used to poor people, the tone that was at once easy and distant. What it implied was: “I have no time now to chatter with picturesque
vagabonds
; but my servants will be charmed to give you tea in the kitchen!”

Betsy Cooper by no means missed the quality of this rebuff; but she was too excited to enter into personal
adjustments
just then; besides, beyond all her eccentricity, she was saturated with a feudal respect for the house of Ashover.

“Don’t ’ee take on, your ladyship,” she pleaded. “Don’t ’ee take on! ’Twere after I’d a-seen that murderin’ parson in Cimmery stone that I heard a voice out of one of me partner’s mouths. They innocents
do
talk if it
be
talking, your ladyship; and it’s what me partner said that do most bide in me mind. ’A said a terrible queer word, Lady Ash’ver; and it’s as true as God’s dear blood what I be telling thee.”

The idiot, who had now climbed to the top of the gate and
was balancing himself there like a demonic gargoyle, burst in with an exultant cry at this point.

“I do know what the half beastie did say, pretty leddy! Binnory do know what the half beastie did say to Granny Cooper!”

“I can’t listen to you now,” repeated Lady Ann sternly. “Come up to the house later; and you, too, Binnory, if you like. Good-afternoon to you both!” And she swept off down the lane with all a grand lady’s indifference as to whether the populace commented on her condition or held their peace.

She did not put her hands to her ears, however, as many prospective mothers of heroes and demigods have been driven ere now to do; and for that reason it was impossible not to hear what the old woman shouted after her.

“Till book be burned no child’ll be borned!”

The idiot, who had now scrambled over the gate, ran after her down the lane. “Till book be burned no child’ll be borned!” he screamed in his shrill voice; and it was only after Lady Ann had turned twice round, threatening him with her parasol, that he desisted and drifted back to his companion.

Even when she was out of all sight and hearing of these two troublesome beings and had rounded the corner at the point opposite Titty’s Ring she still seemed to hear that ominous and fantastic oracle. The magpies chattered it; the green finches chittered it; the very rooks themselves, who now
began
to gather in larger numbers, seemed echoing it with their rueful cawings. The whole incident was peculiarly distasteful to the girl’s mind; but the first effect it had upon her was doubtless an excellent one. It roused to full flood her gallant fighting spirit. What impertinence! What intolerable impertinence! And then her invincible
youthfulness
came to her aid. There was something that tickled her realistic sense of humour about the whole thing. “It’s
just a trick to get money out of us,” she thought. “That fool Hastings has probably been telling everybody what he told me on New Year’s night, about his abominable theories. No doubt when he spent that day in the caravan with Netta Page the old woman listened to his mad talk. The dwarfs probably heard him, too! In fact, the chances are that our absurd clergyman and his insane fancies are the common gossip of the whole neighbourhood.”

Had Lady Ann been a more neurotic or a weaker person this agitating encounter would have been actually dangerous to her. As it was, so robust was her constitution and so defiant her temper, it seemed rather to hearten her and steady her than to do her any harm.

It did cross her mind as she left the lane and made her way through the stubble fields toward the village that she was at that crisis in her life singularly alone. Her own parents were dead. Mrs. Ashover was her nearest relative; and the girl was far too sagacious not to know that it was in the rôle of a mother of future Ashovers rather than in the rôle of a daughter to herself that the old tribal fanatic cherished her.

Alone.
Well? What of that? Many a Norse ancestor of hers had been alone ere now, both on land and sea, and
that
fact had not weakened the strength of his arm or blurred his clear, unclouded glance into the shifty eyes of Fate!

Besides, she was not alone! Rook might have a cold and fickle heart. His mother might be obsessed by the family. Very well! Let them go. She carried
her
champion,
her
supporter,
her
ally, here in her own vitals!

She was at the top of the ridge now and beginning to feel exhausted. That young Viking in her belly was displaying his strength—and his sex, too—how sure she was of
that!
—by certain familiar thumpings and stirrings.

It must be getting on toward tea-time. The autumn sun already rested, red and glowing, like a vast eye-socket veiled in titanic sorrow, on the treetops behind the Drools’ cottage.

The church and churchyard down there in the valley were gathered now in thick woolly mists, and as she looked at them she remembered the peculiar psychic support which more than once those dead people there had seemed capable of giving her.

Well! Weary though she was, she was so mysteriously self-subsistent at that moment that she felt strong enough to steer her vessel onward without assistance, or even
sympathy
, from any quarter.

As she came slowly down the stubble field with its faint strawy smell and its little tufts of fumitory and small wild yellow pansies she had a strange fierce longing for the
unknown
travail that was to come upon her. She felt
associated
so closely with her child in this struggle that it was almost as if two lovers, of proud Spartan breed, were
preparing
for an engagement with a barbarous enemy!

Never for one second did she contemplate the possibility of her death. The life force in her seemed so inexhaustible, so potent, that it tossed such thoughts aside, as a racehorse might toss the foam from his mouth and nostrils.

She soon reached the hawthorn hedge where she had met Rook on the occasion of her visit to Toll-Pike. She smiled faintly as she thought of that unenjoyed lunch! And she said to herself with stark sincerity, “How
can
Rook and Lexie find anything to attract them in that sentimental, funny-looking little thing?”