Ducdame (7 page)

At the first relaxing of his embrace she drew herself gently away, and all her endeavour was to retain the sweetness of his tenderness, without spoiling it by any blunder, without spilling a drop of its delicious security.

She pulled him down on the bed beside her, close to the pillows still marked by the imprint of Ann’s head, and
remained 
quite silent for a moment, holding tight to one of his hands and lifting it once—twice—three times—to her lips.

“Little Netta!” he kept repeating. “Little Netta!”

At last feeling his arm round her waist, feeling herself drawn close against him, she gathered up courage to speak again.

“I oughtn’t to have acted like that, Rook. I know I oughtn’t. I can’t think why I did! You’re not angry with me any more, are you?”

“Angry?” he repeated. “Angry? Good God! It’s you who ought to be angry! Netta darling, listen—listen to me.” His voice grew very quiet and resolute, the voice which she had come to associate with her happiest moments; the voice he had used when he first made her come with him to
Ashover
.

“Cousin Ann and I are very old friends. You do
understand
that, don’t you? And when I say ‘old friends’ you do know what I mean? There’s no danger to you, none at all, from what Cousin Ann and I are to each other
now
,
you understand. It would be different altogether if we were meeting here for the first time.
Then
you might have had a right to be worried. But when people have known each other all their lives, there’s a certain—oh, I don’t know—a certain familiarity which to a person like me destroys all the thrill of—well! of love-making, to be quite frank.—Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Netta darling?”

The sweetness to her wounded feelings of the tenderness in his voice was all that concerned the woman at that moment. As to what he actually
said
,
it just excited a vague wonder and amusement in her that her mysterious Rook could be so stupid, so blind. She felt he had not the remotest desire to deceive her, to pull wool over her eyes. But, mercy! what things men
could
think, what things men
could
say! An overwhelming wave of pitiful gentleness toward him, just because he was so funny, swept over her heart. She lifted
up her chin and gave him a quick, sudden, passionate

“Oh, I know I was mad,” she repeated. “I know I was mad.”

His arm tightened round her in a reassuring hug. Then with a bound he was off the bed and hanging over the dead ashes in the grate.

“Why haven’t they cleared this up?” he grumbled. “Why didn’t Pandie light your fire?”

Wow
ho
!
Wow
ho
!
Wow
ho!
moaned the wind in the chimney above his head.

He moved to the side of the mantelpiece and rang the bell.

“Tell her to take the ashes away and bring some sticks,” he said. “I’ve got to go round now and meet Uncle Dick. The old man’s been hanging about all morning, they tell me. What he wants I can’t think! You’ve seen him, haven’t you, Netta? I told you about him. My grandfather was a rake in his time. I daresay I’ve got plenty of other relations hidden away somewhere if the truth were known.”

Netta heard him as if his voice came to her through a dense volume of green, humming water. The wind began rattling the window again, as though its invisible fingers itched to get her by the throat.

“Uncle Dick?” she repeated vaguely. “Oh, yes, Corporal Dick! I know. Cousin Ann introduced me to him. He lives over there—beyond Battlefield. Yes, of course you must go if he wants to see you.”

She got up and stood there, passive and hesitating. She would have given anything to be really loved just then—not petted and pitied but loved, so as to drown all her thoughts. But he moved straight to the door.

“Make Pandie light you one of her best fires,” he said.

Rook Ashover found his poor relation waiting for him in the little nondescript place they had acquired the habit of calling “the Master’s Study” since the time of Uncle Dick’s
progenitor. Perhaps that was the reason the Corporal always insisted upon being shown in there in preference to any more formal reception.

The old man was sitting on a high-backed chair, his long bony fingers crossed over one of his knees. His hat and stick and muffler lay on the table.

“Well, Uncle Dick, how goes it?” said the nephew, shaking his visitor cordially by the hand. “Sit down, sit down.” And he drew up another high-backed chair and smilingly placed himself opposite him, with the look of one who
deprecates
an expected reproof.

“Wind rather strong to-day, eh?” went on the younger man. “Found it rough, I expect, coming across the hill? How are they all over there?”

The Corporal regarded the Squire of Ashover with an austere, quizzical eye.

“It’s not about them, Nephew, that I’ve come so far to see ’ee.”

“What is it for, Uncle, then? Just for old companion’s sake and to tell me I’ve been neglecting you lately?”

“They tell me, down Dorsal, that Lexie be no better and that Doctor says there’s no hope for ’n to see another year round.”

Rook’s smile died upon his face. “That’s so, Uncle. I’m afraid that’s so.”

“Well, then, if that’s so,” returned the old man, uncrossing his knees and leaning forward, “how is it that you have the face, Nephew—you that be Squire and all that—to go and fix yourself up with a young woman that may be a decent body and such-like and I’m not saving she isn’t, but one that makes your blessed mother feel lonesome and confounded in her own house, as if the whole world were turned
higgledy-piggledy
? ’Tisn’t that I’ve anything against Miss Page here. She be a good-hearted young woman by all accounts. But, good or bad, we know that she isn’t your lawful wife;
and we know that she be standing in the place of your lawful wife; and the long and short of
that
is—with Lexie being as he be—that when he’s gone and when in due time you are gone, too, there’ll be no more Ashovers on Frome-side. Young, old, rich, poor, that’ll finish ’em! That’ll be the end.”

Having thus finished the longest consecutive utterance he had ever made in his life the Corporal crossed his legs, straightened himself out in his chair, and solemnly and gravely winked at his obstinate nephew.

Rook had shuffled uneasily more than once during this discourse, but by the time it was over he had taken his cue.

“Uncle Richard,” he began, “I am very grateful to you for speaking your mind so frankly. Of course, I
do
see how unpleasant all this is for my mother. And I see exactly how you yourself must feel about it. Unfortunately there are certain questions in life that one cannot decide in
consideration
for other people’s feelings; or even perhaps for one’s own feelings. I don’t think you’d wish me to behave badly, Uncle Richard. I brought Miss Page here to the house with my eyes fully open. She herself, I daresay, would have
preferred
to remain in seclusion. If I had known, of course, how my mother would take it, shutting herself up in her room and so on, I admit I might have acted differently. I fancied that time and habit would bring her round. They don’t seem to have done so. And there it is! You must see for yourself that I cannot send Miss Page away
now.
It would be a dishonourable thing, a brutal thing, an impossible thing. No! No! Uncle; there are situations in life when a man must shift for himself. I fully understand your motives in coming to me like this. But it’s no use. My mother is my mother and I am myself. As to the future, We shall see! Not even
you
can read the future, Uncle!”

The old man heard him to the end. Then with a stiff mechanical jerk he got up, straightened his shoulders to
their full height, took his stick and hat and muffler from the table, and strode resolutely to the door.

“This is all I’m to get from you, then?” said he in a husky voice. “I’m an old man and a poor man; but this house and this family are more precious to me than my own life. You think I’m an old fool. Don’t ’ee be too sure, Nephew; don’t ’ee be too sure! There be some as can endure to see their hopes frustrated; and there be some as can’t and won’t. When a man’s my age and has nothing to live for and nothing to fear,
he’s
dangerous
—that’s what he is; he’s
dangerous!
He’s like a fox that’s been half-skinned in a trap. He goes slow and he goes round; but he gets his goose in the end!”

Rook had risen to his feet and was standing with his body bent forward and his fingertips resting on the table. He might have been a bewildered parliamentarian watching the intrusion of some reckless bomb-thrower. He wished he had taken a different line with the old fanatic; been conciliatory, prevaricating, indefinite. Nothing more annoying than this could possibly have occurred—annoying and sinister. The old man’s vague and obscure menaces were just the kind most of all calculated to worry a man’s mind. The wildest, queerest thoughts whirled through Rook’s brain as he watched his uncle turn round upon him once more, his hand on the door handle.

“You think because you were born legitimate-like and be Squire of Ashover and stand where your father stood and where my father stood, that you can do as you please. Do you know this place as I know it? Do you hear the voices of dead folks calling to you out of their graves? Do you see things in the woods, in the lanes, in the bartons, as I do? Things that do walk and wail o’ nights, ’cause the Lord won’t let un lie still? Hark to the wind now, young man, hark to the wind now! It’s contrary to nature for the wind to talk to a man, but ’a do talk; I’ve a-heard un; day in, day out; and ’a do say such things as would turn a man’s wits if he
didn’t know north from south in every copse and spinny o’ Frome-side. But go your ways, Rook Ashover, go your ways! Drive our dead folks back where they belong! Be the black plague to your sacred mother! I’ve a-said my say and I be going. But I’ve not finished with this little job yet!”

To Rook’s final astonishment before he disappeared into the hallway the extraordinary old man gave him a second portentous wink, the effect of which upon the aged face that made it was bizarre in the extreme. It was as if a judge, wearing the black cap, had suddenly put out his tongue at the condemned.

The agitated silence which followed the departure of Uncle Dick was interrupted by the familiar sound of Pandie ringing the hall bell as a signal for lunch. The noise made Rook think of the days when he and Lexie used to bolt up to their bedroom at the end of the passage to wash themselves clean of fish scales and river slime.

Oh, Lexie, Lexie … Ay! He would be content to go over the whole wretched business of his life again if only he could give his brother ten good years more of the existence he loved so well!

D
ECEMBER had come; and with the coming of
December
there fell upon that country of pastures and orchards a warm trance-like stillness.

The earth seemed to lie back upon itself, relaxed and lethargic. The days slid by imperceptibly, each one
resembling
the one before it, in a heavy, damp, windless atmosphere, steamy and misty, with large sun-warmed, earth-brown noons followed by amber-coloured twilights.

On one of these rich mellow placid days, imperturbable and languid as a woman in bed with her first-born, Mrs. Ashover and Lady Ann sat in the former’s luxurious room, enjoying afternoon tea.

Any one who could have peered into this privileged
chamber
would have displayed little surprise at learning that its occupant preferred to have all her meals brought up to her there.

The place was really an almost flawless work of art. It had the qualities of a drawing room and yet it was more
delicate
, more dainty, more personal, than any drawing room Lady Ann had ever seen.

Mrs. Ashover had a fire in the grate, but it was so warm that she had opened one of the windows, and the rich
earth-heavy
smell of ploughed furrows and mud-muffled lanes came floating in and hovered over the delicate bric-à-brac and over the Queen Anne chairs and tables.

It was perhaps because of the millions and millions of dead leaves that were dissolving back into the flesh of their great drowsy mother that, with this air from the woods and
meadows, there came a perceptible savour, acrid and
penetrating
, of the very sweat of death itself.

It was the sort of day that has an especial appeal to the nerves of women, perhaps because the passivity, the
inertness
, the lethargy of the earth at these times, its preparturient
fallowness
,
moribund and yet magnetic, self-absorbed and yet germinative, has something in it that answers to one of their own most profound and secret moods.

The land, thus lying fallow and immobile, might be said to have sunk down, to have sunk back, into some interior level or stratum of being, where it was unapproachable to the sun’s generative warmth, and yet had a mysterious life of its own.

Hardly conscious of the systole and diastole of its faint breath, of the subterranean beating of its muffled pulses, the vast rain-soaked countryside seemed, during this placid winter solstice, to be in some mysterious way enjoying the ecstasy of its own virginal languor, of its own deep peace, as a “still unravished bride of quietness.”

Something of this appeasement, of this self-amorous quiescence, must have floated in through that open window, must have worked its relaxing charm upon the old woman and the young woman, as they sat on the sofa side by side, their skirts touching, the supple athletic wrist in its tweed sleeve, the slender aged wrist in its lace sleeve, hovering over the little rosewood tea table, over the polished silver, over the Meissen china.

The influence of the day, the immense languid emanation that diffused itself through the room, endowed with a vague but very formidable power the subtle conspiracy, evasive, ambiguous, which rose like the scent of a sweet but poisonous flower from their intimate conversation.

“She is thinking over what I said,” threw out Lady Ann, helping herself to another piece of thin bread and butter and lifting it to her finely curved mouth with the impetuousness of a greedy child.

“But what good will
that
do us?” murmured the old woman, flicking an errant tea leaf from the edge of her cup as if she would dispose of their enemy in the same more effective, more drastic way.

“No thinking that
she
does will take her off, switch her back to Bristol, or wherever it is he picked her up. That’s what I feel about all this roundabout method of yours. It just doesn’t get us anywhere! I told you from the beginning that the way you treated her would only give her a false
impression
; only make her settle down more snugly than ever in her warm nest. And now by giving her a jolt you’ve only made her suspicious of you. You haven’t changed her. How could you change her? Why
should
she change?”

Lady Ann swallowed her bread and butter and stretched out her hand for another piece. She felt very hungry and for some occult reason very formidable. She moved her supple body inside her closely fitting clothes with a slow feline movement of muscular relaxation. “I’ll go for a long walk after tea. I’ll take Lion,” she said to herself. And her mind visualized the enormous Newfoundland dog bounding over the gorse bushes and sniffing at the rabbit burrows. Between herself and this dog of Rook’s a close attachment had sprung up. She had been shocked to find how little Rook cared for it. People who didn’t understand dogs oughtn’t to have dogs! They either neglected them
heartlessly
, or they corrupted them by ill-timed petting.

“How long will you give me, Auntie, to try out my method?” she asked, holding up her teacup and smiling, with the conquering smile of youth, at her companion.

“How long, my dear child? Goodness! I give you as long as you like! What else can I do? Nothing that
I
can say to the poor boy seems to make the least difference.”

As the old woman uttered these words she thought within her heart: “Can’t I make this proud creature see what our only chance is? Can’t I make her see that our only chance
is nothing else than her own reckless, unscrupulous beauty?” And the brutal game-preserving expressions of Corporal Dick, still redolent of rank weed-smoke, thumped and
heel-tapped
in her obsessed brain.

“She’s been thinking a great deal lately,” went on the younger woman, stretching out her long legs and sliding both hands into her jacket pockets. “She can’t get what I said to her out of her mind. She’s beginning to feel pricks of conscience. There’s no doubt about that. And once get her to feel
that
sort of thing to a point of spoiling her
illusion
—well! there we are!”

Mrs. Ashover rose from the sofa and, impatiently pushing the tea table a little farther away, reached for her woolwork. Then sinking back by her companion’s side she turned a querulous, anxious, disturbed face toward her.

“Spoiling her illusion? What are you talking about, child?” She sighed heavily and smoothed the lace cuff of one of her wrists with nervous fingers.

“I believe you have a sort of liking for the baggage!” she burst out.

Lady Ann lifted her eyebrows and regarded her with a mocking, slightly contemptuous smile. The daughter of a long line of courtly diplomatists, she began to feel a little irritated with her aunt. “It’s the Gresham blood in her,” she thought. “They always had a second-rate streak.”

“Well!” she said slowly. “I don’t feel that it’s necessary to quarrel with people. One puts oneself on their level in that way, doesn’t one? I daresay the poor little woman has had a hard enough time of it. If I could give her a good round
income
; a trim little villa down at Weymouth or somewhere; with a couple of servants and an old enamoured sea captain, shall we say, across the hedge—gracious! I would willingly do it!”

Mrs. Ashover’s countenance expressed the sort of
astonishment
that she would have felt if Cousin Ann had suddenly kicked one of her neat shoes right across the room.

“You young people are too much for me,” she murmured. “Too much for me. I suppose it’s Rook who has put these ideas into your head,” she added, with a quick glance of stealthy malevolence. “In my time designing minxes like that were not given incomes. They were given the stick!”

Lady Ann leaned forward and laid her strong young hand on the old woman’s knee.

“Do you suppose, Auntie dear, that if I wasn’t sure it would be all right, I should feel as happy as I do to-day?”

Mrs. Ashover’s face cleared a little. There certainly did seem to gleam forth an overpowering confidence and
assurance
from the girl’s limpid, mysterious gray eyes.

There was a tone of impassioned pleading in the old lady’s voice as she murmured eagerly: “You give me your word? You
will
save him? You
will
save him from her?”

Ann Gore dropped her eyelids at this and a smile of deep, sweet, implacable power crossed her mouth, making her full lips, exquisitely childish in their perfect Cupid’s bow, curve so divinely that her aunt leaned over and impulsively kissed her.

“We won’t talk about it any more, child. I understand you. There! I expect you’re wanting to get out now and have your walk. You mustn’t give up the whole of a lovely afternoon to an old troublesome thing like me.”

They both rose to their feet. The air from the open window, treacherous-sweet with the death smell of a world of dying leaves, flowed through them; rousing a poignant
response
in their deepest nerves.

The wide-stretching unsown plough lands, the patient indrawn leafless woods, the great inert, apathetic breasts of the earth, drew these women toward them in answering reciprocity. To the elder it was as if the strong invisible hands of the dead generations were urging her on, comforting her, sustaining her, in her struggle against her adversary. To the younger it was as if the very spirit of that hibernating
countryside, lying fallow, secretive, implacable, were calling to her to share in some tremendous
waiting
,
through rain, through frost, through everything—for the hour of the sowing of the seed.

They stood together for a perceptible space of time, caught, as two people often are, by the very beat of the wings of fate. Then all in a moment they became conscious that they were both listening, intently, absorbingly, to a sound in the garden outside.

It was the sound of a man’s footsteps moving up and down, up and down, with irritating regularity, along the gravel path that ran parallel to the lawn.

They both felt instinctively that the man was Rook; and for that very reason they were each reluctant to go to the window and look out. Rook’s personality had certainly hovered over their tea table, but neither of them was at all anxious for the intrusion of his actual presence at that juncture.

The situation was indeed, for one second, humorously disconcerting; one of those situations with which the clumsy gaucherie of men copes more easily than the finesse of women.

But Lady Ann kept her head, and soon proved herself a true daughter of the diplomatic Lord Poynings.

Without the flicker of an eyelid to indicate that she knew that both of them had heard those steps: “There’s Lion!” she cried. “I’m sure he’s dying for a run on Battlefield. Good-bye, Auntie! I’ve enjoyed my tea so much!”

The door was hardly shut behind her when Mrs. Ashover hurried to the window. There he was—her son the Squire—pacing abstractedly up and down, as if the little gravel path were the wall of a fortress.

Presently she heard the voice of Cousin Ann, a clear
careless
young girl’s voice, calling: “Lion! Lion! Lion!” Apparently Rook Ashover also heard that voice; for he stopped suddenly in his abstracted walk, stood hesitating for
a moment, looking nervously toward the sound; and then with a quick furtive stride and without so much as once glancing behind him, made off in the direction of the Frome bridge.

“Why doesn’t she run after him?”
cried the old lady in her indignant heart, tapping the window sill with her knuckles.

“Lion! Lion! Lion!” came the girlish voice from the stable yard.

“You fool! He’s across the bridge! You stupid! He’s across the river!” And the belligerent little woman
positively
shook the window frame in her impetuous annoyance.

Rook
was
across the river. He was not only across the river but he was also—very soon—across the churchyard and out into the water meadows behind it. He felt such an intense desire for movement, for action, for self-escape.

No doubt the peculiar quality of that pacing up and down the gravel path had been the outward sign of the rending and tearing within him of two opposite motive forces.

He had made a sort of half-appointment to meet Nell Hastings that afternoon; but something in Netta’s mood, something illuminated, magnetic, had made him feel uneasy and perplexed.

Netta had seemed to escape him as she never had escaped him. She seemed to have acquired some mysterious
independence
. She had spoken to him and looked at him in such a strange, remote, exultant way! He felt piqued and confused. He found himself half-wishing that he hadn’t made this appointment with Nell.

Rook did not realize how deeply the great goddess Artemis—the mysterious immortal whose love is for her own body—had come into her own that day. He did not realize that it was a day for the triumph of woman’s nerves over man’s nerves. On such a day, he ought to have told himself, had the dangerous thyrsus-bearing son of Semele come stealthily
into the city of Pentheus. On such a day had the wild Bassarids and Mænads sent the gory head of Orpheus “down the swift Hebrus, to the Lesbian shore”! On such a day had the dogs and maidens of Diana torn the luckless Actæon limb from limb. It was a woman’s day; a day that lay virginal, inscrutable, relaxed; yet with a magnetism in its inertness that could trouble a man’s deepest soul.

And Rook Ashover hated the day. He felt a queer,
nervous
, reluctant uneasiness even about meeting Nell. He would have given anything for a hard, nipping black frost to get its grip upon these misty meadows, to turn all this clinging earth-flesh into frozen rock! He loathed the sodden, relaxed clay with its incense-reek of insidious mortality. He longed to escape from it all, into some clear, purged, bitter air. He felt homesick for the tang of the salt, unharvested, unfecund sea.

Blindly striding across the meadows—full of whirling, contradictory thoughts—he was suddenly brought to a
standstill
by a wide black ditch.

“Double-dyed ass! Of course there’s no path over these cursed fens!”

He walked along the edge of the ditch, looking for a plank or a dam by which to cross.