Ducdame (43 page)

No one knew what passed through Lady Ann’s mind as she
lay pale and silent hour by long hour with her new-born child by her side; the child that
was
,
after all, a son. Never had the proud girl kept her feelings more completely to herself. To whom, indeed, should she reveal them? Her father was dead. Her mother was dead. Mrs. Ashover’s grief at her son’s death was so mitigated by her sense of escape from a far greater disaster, the tragedy of the family’s extinction, that she could not have responded, even had Ann been
entirely
unreserved, to the girl’s craving for response. Lexie had always been critical and suspicious of her, his vanity piqued by her preference for his brother, his taste offended by her philistinism.

Missy Sparrow-Hawk was not made for submission to circumstance. She was made to control circumstance. But like many another shrewd diplomatist in this chaotic world she found herself baffled and beaten by that element of pure chance which even a Poynings could not outwit.

She had calculated her moves with the most perfect nicety. She had counted on this. She had discounted that. What she had not foreseen was the intrusion upon the stage of events of the rake “Lovejoy.” She had felt so sure that in the end she would bring Rook round. Her child was her final master stroke. But no master stroke could bring the dead back to life.

Lady Ann was outwitted, outmanœuvred, beaten. As she lay in her bed listening to the wind in the autumn trees she looked steadily, unflinchingly, at the lonely years in front of her. She would live, of course. She would cherish Rook’s child. But whatever happened in the long future she would never again be the same Cousin Ann who had put on that crimson dressing gown in the gamekeeper’s cottage!

Well, there it was! She was twenty-six and she had her child. And yet in her unflinching realism she knew that she was beaten. The mouse-coloured dust in Ashover Church might exult in the continuance of its race.
It
had gained its
end.
It
was victorious. But the human bridge by which that indestructible life urge had hurled itself into the future carried from henceforth a hurt, a scar, a mark, from which it would never quite recover!

Cousin Ann’s beautiful lips closed upon her secret. She would be a proud and competent mistress of a rejuvenated House. But as her heart hardened itself to envisage her defeat, she stared with her gray eyes into Something that at certain hours, when for instance the branches of the cedar creaked and the branches of the lime rustled, was not very far removed from what less stoical persons than Ann
Wentworth
Gore would have named despair.

At any rate, she did not protest, nor indeed did any other member of that household, when, by the reiterated
importunity
of the remorseless old dowager, the boy was christened John after his grandfather. Lexie in his heart was glad of his mother’s choice. Let the name of Rook disappear from the face of the earth! Let no other human being ever carry it, or be called to bed or board by its familiar sound!

But it was a blubbered and ravaged countenance, emptied of all zest for life, robbed of its most characteristic folds and ceases, haggard and woebegone, like the knight-at-arms in “La Belle Dame,” that the younger brother—who would, except for this infant, have been the new Squire of Ashover– turned toward the dishes prepared for him by Mrs. Bellamy and toward the books and trees and flower beds and sunrises and sunsets of his accustomed life. He saw, not felt, how beautiful those halcyon days of October were. He went to and fro in a blank and hollow trance, a trance scooped out and scraped dry of all rich and joyous aplomb, of all pleasant chat, of all mellow and wanton sallies.

When November came and Lady Ann’s child was more than a month old Lexie began slowly to regain something of his old humour. The curious thing about it was that his health, instead of suffering any collapse by Rook’s death, took
a decided turn for the better. It was as if, by passing so suddenly into the dim underworld, the elder Ashover had transferred some actual psychic magnetism into the nerves of his companion. Their life together had been so intimate and so involved that it is easy to imagine the existence of a sort of common cistern of energy flowing between them; drawn upon by both of them; and deriving its source from the indestructible vitality of their ancestors! Such a reservoir would naturally flow with its own independent pulse; and the fact that there was only one of them left to draw upon it would double the influx of its power as soon as the first shock of separation had lost its violence.

The first outward indication of this
vita
nuova
in the sick man was the frequency of his visits to Toll-Pike Cottage where Netta was still staying on as Nell’s guest. More than once Nell came alone to share some meal with him in his own house; and by the time the first two weeks of November were over, there had been some very uncomfortable scenes with Mrs. Bellamy, who passionately resented these
unconventional
entertainments.

In the middle of November there happened to fall upon Frome-side a long unaccountable spell of gusty westerly wind. It was a peculiar wind that thus came to that Dorset valley over the orchards and moors of Somersetshire. It was an intermittent wind, with wild spurts of incredibly thin rain, rain so fine and vapoury that it soaked to the core
whatever
it approached and made man and beast, and even the trees of the field, bend and bow and sway and crouch, when its chilly gusts swept over them and enveloped them.

It was at the close of one of the worst of these persecuted days that Netta Page came to bid farewell to her buried friend.

The rain had ceased with the fall of twilight, but not one flower upon the grave she came to greet had that persistent wind left intact. What disfigured wreaths did remain on the
mound of disturbed loam were reduced to shapeless tangles of string and stalks.

The wind kept blowing her hair loose from under her hat. It swept her cloak against her figure. It whirled round her in eddies and spirals. It blew leaves and twigs against her face and made it difficult for her to breathe as it beat furiously against her mouth and nostrils. She kept forming words in her throat; and it was to herself as if she uttered them. But whether any real sound would have come forth from her lips, even if this tempest had ceased, is more than doubtful.

But she was talking to the shrouded form beneath her; and, coherent or incoherent, her words had their relief for her own soul….

“You needn’t fret any more about him or her or me or any one! It’s all right, Rook dear. Everything is all right.”

The force of the wind made her lift both hands to her
rain-drenched
hat; but even that movement did not prevent two long wisps of hair from detaching themselves from the rest and blowing like tattered streamers behind her. Hurriedly she sank down on her knees and pressed her face against the soaked clay.

The descending darkness swept over her and covered her, separating her from the rest of the world.

Over Antiger Woods, over Dorsal, over Battlefield, like some enormous arrow-stricken dying bird, that darkness came upon her; and though her mind was too absorbed in her grief to be conscious of anything external it is likely enough that the swallowing up of all shapes and contours and colours in the one great wave of blackness made it easier for her to feel that she and what lay down there beneath her were for that moment undivided.

So dependent are the minds of human beings upon these outward tokens, so pitiably do they cling to the least vestige of any “real presence” of what they have loved, that the worst pang of loss that Netta was ever destined to know came
when at last, stiff and shivering, she moved away from that spot.

It is significant that these holes dug in churchyard clay are not refilled and covered up, so as to be left just level with the surrounding sod! For it is these tragic hillocks, themselves so nearly resembling enshrouded human shapes, that give us the last illusion of our sorrow, the idea that they actually wrap up and enfold that form which in reality lies so far below!

Netta stumbled several times in the darkness over other graves, graves that were no more to; her mind than so many ridges of obstructing turf clods; but she reached the road at last; and when she did reach it and began to make her way with heavy dragging steps back to the cottage, though the storm of her grief had exhausted itself, what took its place was a cold, dull, inert recognition of that unbridgeable gulf between the living and the dead which the assuaging ritual of all the centuries leaves still exposed—yawning; gaping, uncrossed.

She found the door of the cottage left open to admit her; but the fire was almost out in the little parlour and the house was empty.

As
she went to and fro among the deserted rooms, making weary and half-mechanical preparations for her own and her companion’s evening meal, she fancied she heard the sound of loud harsh music coming from the direction of the village. She opened the kitchen door and listened. Certainly there
was
something going on. Oh! This was the worst of it; that a human soul is not even allowed to live in quiet with its own loss. Life must be rushing, jerking, trailing, dancing,
howling
forward, just the same; and for ever deriding the least
attempt
to hold it back, to strike it into silence!

“It sounds like a whirligig,” she thought as she closed the door. “I didn’t know they had whirligigs in the country.” When the meal was prepared and all was ready for Nell’s return she sat down listlessly on a chair in the kitchen,
listening to that harsh music in the distance, to the purring of the Marquis of Carabas, to the ticking of the clock. Once she started, fancying she heard a sound on the floor above. She thought how queer it was that rooms where people had died should be endowed with more life than other rooms; and that the very boards should creak and the very soot fall dawn the chimney with a sort of intense and solemn
self-consciousness
!

She wanted to concentrate her mind an a hundred little incidents of her life with Rook; but instead of being able to do this she was compelled, as if by an inner command, to listen intently to hear whether another board would creak up there in Hastings’s room….

Netta was not the only one who had heard the strains of music that November evening. A couple of hours before, just after she had taken her hat and cloak and gone out into the twilight, the unexpected sound had reached the ears of her two friends as they sat together in the very place where she was sitting now.

“Listen!” cried Lexie eagerly, leaping to his feet and running out into the back garden. The girl followed and he turned to her with an expression of childish delight. “It’s a roundabout!” he chuckled. “Who would have thought it possible as late in the year as this and on a night like this? I’ve known them to come in October on their way to London; but never in November!”

He looked round him. It was nearly dark now; and, although the rain had stopped, the wind was moaning
disconsolately
in the trees above the wall and was tossing the bare stalks of the raspberry canes against the posts of the empty clothes line.

It was one of those evenings in which foot travellers on country roads lean for a while over some wet stile or gate and survey the faint whitish glimmer in the sad west, and listen to the splash of raindrops from some tall elm above their
heads as a disturbed starling or pigeon tumbles out of

“When was the last merry-go-round
you
saw, Nell?” he asked. And there was a tone in his voice as if he were
deliberately
defying the forlornness of earth and air and sky.

“I’ve never seen one in Ashover, Lexie,” she answered.

“Well, you
shall
see one!” he cried. “For I’ll show you one. I can take a girl to a circus of a cold November night as well as another!”

“But, Lexie——” she began.

He swept aside her objections. “Come!” he cried. “Get your things on! It’ll do us good to have a bit of sport.”

He hurried her back into the house and made her put on her cape and hat, both of them composed of new mourning black, bought at a shop in Tollminster.

As he held her cloak for her, she was struck by the manner in which the faded tweed suit he wore had grown by daily use to become a kind of animal’s skin. No human being’s clothes, seen without the wearer, could be more characteristic, more living, than Lexie Ashover’s! The effect was enhanced by the perpetual presence of some dead hedge weed or another left in his buttonhole as it might have been left on the shaft of a cart or at the bottom of a wicker basket.

He put on a heavy muffler and overcoat and took his stick in his hand. This stick, a round-handled ash stick, was worn as smooth and glossy by long use as the carved pew of a monk or a hermit’s spade.

Once out in the road they were aware that this stormy night had its own peculiar spirit, a spirit that had something reckless and magnetic in it, disturbing to
human nerves. Neither the man nor the girl glanced back toward the white railings of Foulden Bridge, railings which had not yet been mended. Lexie kept talking and gesticulating; pointing with his hand in the direction from which the sound seemed to proceed; and laughing in his deep, chuckling, almost
leonine manner over the strange fantasy of this belated showman in coming to such a place in the month of
November
.

He led his companion at a quick pace, past the house of Mr. Pod, past the entrance to Marsh Alley, until he brought her to a small enclosed field on the north of the village where such entertainers were wont to encamp when they visited that district.

The sound of the music increased in volume as they approached and was combined with spasmodic shrieks from the primitive engine that worked the roundabout, with the noisy shouts of young men, the laughter and giggling of girls, and the cries of children.

The wind was still blowing so violently that the rough naphtha-lighted tent, in the midst of which the wooden horses gyrated, shook and shivered and tugged at its supports to such an alarming degree that the older villagers hesitated to enter for fear of having the whole thing come down about their ears.