Rodmoor (15 page)

“Yes, we’re going away—both of us,” she said. “We’re going to the village.”

“To live on air and sea-water?” enquired the other bitterly.

“No,” rejoined Nance gently, “to live in lodgings and to work for our living. I’ve got a place already at the Pontifex shop and Mr. Traherne’s going to pay Linda for playing the organ. It’ll be better like that. I couldn’t let her go on here after what happened
yesterday
.”

Her voice trembled but she continued to look Miss Doorm straight in the face.

“You were away on purpose yesterday, Rachel,” she said gravely, “so that those two might be together. It was only some scruple, or fear, on Mr. Renshaw’s part that stopped him meeting her in the house. How often this has happened before—his seeing her like this—I don’t know, and I don’t want to know—I only pray to God that no harm’s been done. If it
has
been done, the child’s ruin’s on
our
head. I cannot
understand
you, Rachel, I cannot understand you.”

Miss Doorm’s haggard mouth opened as if to utter a cry but she breathed deeply and restrained it. Her gaunt fingers twined and untwined themselves and the wind, blowing at her skirt, displayed the tops of her old-fashioned boots with their worn, elastic sides.

“So she’s separated us, has she?” she hissed. “I thought she would. She was born for that. And it’s nothing to you that I’ve nursed you and cared for you and planned for you since you were a baby?
Nothing
! Nothing at all! She comes between us now as her mother came before. I knew it would happen so! I knew it would! She’s just like her mother—soft and clinging—soft and white—and this is the end of it.”

Her voice changed to a low, almost frightened tone.

“Do you realize that her mother comes to me every night and sits looking at me with her great eyes just
as she used to do when Linda had been rude to me in the old days? Do you realize that she walks
backwards
and forwards outside my door when I’ve driven her away? Do you realize that when I go to bed I find her there, waiting for me, white and soft and
clinging
?”

Her voice rose to a kind of moan and the wind
carried
it across the empty road and tossed it over the fields.

“And she speaks, too, Nance. She says things to me, soft, clinging, crying things that drive me distracted. One day, she told me
that
only last night, one day she’s going to kiss me and never let me go—going to kiss me with soft, pleading, terrified lips through all eternity, kiss me just as she did once when Linda lost my beads. You remember my beads, Nance? Real jade, they were, with funny red streaks. I often see them round her neck. They’ll be round her neck when she kisses me, jade, you know, my dear, with red streaks. I shall see nothing else then, nothing else while we lie buried together!”

She lowered her voice to a whisper.

“It was the Captain who brought them. He brought them over far seas. He brought them for me, do you hear—for me! But they’re always round her neck now, after that day.”

Nance listened to this wild outburst with a set stern face. She had always suspected that there was
something
desperate and morbid about Rachel’s attachment to her father but never, until this moment, had she dreamed how far the thing went. She looked at the woman’s face now and sighed and with that sigh she flung to the blowing wind the covenant between herself
and her own mother. All the girl’s natural sanity and sense of proportion were awake now and she stiffened her nerves and hardened her heart for what she had to do.

“Between a vow to the dead,” she thought, “and the safety of the living, there can be only one choice for me.”

“So you’re going away,” began Miss Doorm again. “Well, go, my dear, go and leave me! I shan’t trouble the earth much longer after you’re gone.”

She turned her face to the river and remained
motionless
, watching the flowing water. The heavy weight of the threatening storm, the storm that seemed as though some powerful earth-god, with uplifted hand, were holding back its descent, had destroyed all natural and normal daylight without actually plunging the world into darkness. A strange greenish-coloured shadow, like the shadow of water seen through water, hung over the trees of the park and the opposite bank of the river. The same greenish shadow, only touched there with something darker and more mysterious, brooded over the far fens out of which, in the remote distance, a sort of reddish exhalation indicated the
locality
of the Mundham factories. The waters of the Loon—as Rachel and Nance looked at them now—had a dull whitish gleam, like the gleam of a dead fish’s eye. The sense of thunder in the air, though no sound of it had yet been heard, seemed to evoke a kind of frightened expectancy. The smaller birds had been reduced to absolute stillness, their twitterings hushed as if under the weight of a pall. Only a solitary plover’s scream, at rare intervals, went whirling by on the wind.

“Come back, come in, will you?” said Nance at last, “and say good-bye to us, Rachel. I shall come and see you, of course. We shall not be far away.”

She stretched out her hand to help her down the slope of the embankment. Rachel made no response to this overture but followed her in silence. No sooner, however, had they entered the garden and closed the little gate behind them, than the woman fell on her knees on the ground and caught the girl round the waist.

“Nance, my treasure!” she cried pitifully, “Nance, my heart’s baby! Nance, oh, Nance, you won’t leave me like this after all these years? No, I won’t let you go! Nance, you can’t mean it? You can’t really mean it?”

The wind, blowing in gusts about them, made the gate behind them swing open on its hinges. Rachel’s
dishevelled
tress of grey hair flapped like a tattered piece of rag against the girl’s side.

“Look,” the woman wailed, “I pray you on my knees not to desert me! You don’t know what you’re doing to me. You don’t, Nance, you don’t! It’s all my life you’re taking. Oh, my darling, won’t you have pity? You’re the only thing I’ve got—the only thing I love. Nance, Nance, have pity on me!”

Nance, with tears in her eyes but her face still firm and hard-set, tried to free herself from the hands that held her. She tried gently and tenderly at first but Rachel’s despair made the attempt difficult. Then she realized that this appalling tension must be brought at all costs to an end. With a sudden, relentless jerk, she tore herself away and rushed towards the house. Rachel fell forward on her face, her hands clutching
the damp mould. Then she staggered up and raised her hand towards the lighted window above at which Linda’s figure was clearly visible.

“It’s you—it’s you,” she called aloud, “it’s you who’ve done this—who’ve turned my heart’s darling against me, and may you be cursed for it! May your love turn to poison and eat your white flesh! May your soul pray and pray for comfort and find none! Never—never—never—find any! Oh, you may well hide yourself! But
he
will find you. Brand will find you and make you pay for this! Brand and the sea will. find you. Listen! Do you hear me? Listen! It’s crying out for you now!”

Whether it was the sudden cessation of her voice, intensifying the stillness, or a slight veering of the wind to the eastward, it is certain that at that moment, above the noise of the creaking gate and the rustling bushes, came the sound which, of all others, seemed the expression of Rodmoor’s troubled soul. Linda
herself
may not have heard it for at that moment she was feverishly helping Nance to pile up their belongings in the cart. But the driver of their vehicle heard it.

“The wind’s changing,” he remarked. “Can you hear that? That’s the darned sea!”

The trap carrying the two sisters was already some distance along the road when Nance turned her head and looked back. They had blown out their candles before leaving and the kitchen fire had died down so that there was no reason to be surprised that no light shone from any of the windows. Yet it was with a cold sinking of the heart that the girl leaned forward once more by the driver’s side. She could not help
seeing in imagination a broken figure stumbling round the walls of that dark house, or perhaps even now
standing
in their dismantled room alone amid emptiness and silence, alone amid the ghosts of the past.

W
HILE the sisters were taking possession of their new abode and trying to eat—though neither had much appetite—the supper provided for them by Mrs. Raps, Hamish Traherne, his cassock protected from the threatening storm by a heavy ulster, was making his promised effort to “talk” with the master of Oakguard. Impelled by an instinct he could not resist, perhaps with a vague notion that the creature’s presence would sustain his courage, he carried, curled up in an inside pocket of his cloak, his darling Ricoletto. The rat’s appetite had been
unusually
good that evening and it now slept peacefully in its warm nest, oblivious of the beating heart of its master. Carrying his familiar oak stick in his hand and looking to all appearance quite as formidable as any highwayman the priest made his way through the sombre avenue of gnarled and weather-beaten trees that led to the Renshaw mansion. He rang the bell with an impetuous violence, the violence of a visitor whose
internal
trepidation mocks his exterior resolution. To his annoyance and surprise he learnt that Mr.
Renshaw
was spending the evening with Mr. Stork down in the village. He asked to be allowed to see Mrs.
Renshaw
, feeling in some obscure way suspicious of the servant’s statement and unwilling to give up his
enterprise
at the first rebuff. The lady came out at once into the hall.

“Come in, come in, Mr. Traherne,” she said, quite eagerly. “I suppose you’ve already dined but you can have dessert with us. Philippa always sits long over dessert. She likes eating fruit better than anything else. She’s eating gooseberries to-night.”

Mrs. Renshaw always had a way of detaching
herself
from her daughter and speaking of her as if she were a strange and somewhat menacing animal with whom destiny had compelled her to live. But the priest refused to remove his ulster. The interest of seeing Philippa eat gooseberries was not strong enough to interrupt his purpose.

“Your son won’t be home till late, I’m afraid?” he said. “I particularly—yes, particularly—wanted to see him to-night. I understand he’s at the
cottage
.”

“Wait a minute,” cried the lady in her hurried,
low-voiced
tone. “Sit down here, won’t you? I’ll just—I’ll just see Philippa.”

She returned to the dining-room and the priest sat down and waited. Presently she came hurrying back carrying in her hands a plate upon which was a bunch of grapes.

“These are for you,” she said. “Philippa won’t touch them. There! Let me choose you out some nice ones.”

The servant had followed her and now stood like a pompous and embarrassed policeman uncertain of his duty. It seemed to give Mrs. Renshaw some kind of inscrutable satisfaction to cause this embarrassment. She sat down beside the priest and handed him the grapes, one by one, as if he were a child.

“Brand orders these from London,” she remarked,
“that’s why we get them now. I call it extravagance, but he
will
do it.” She sighed heavily. “Philippa,” she repeated, “prefers garden fruit so you mustn’t mind eating them. They’ll get bad if they’re not eaten.”

The servant hastened on tip-toe to the dining-room door, peered in, and returned to his post. He looked for all the world, thought Mr. Traherne, like a ruffled and disconsolate heron. “He’ll stand on one leg soon,” he said to himself.

“When do you expect your son home?” he enquired again. “Perhaps I might call at the cottage and walk back with him.”

“Yes, do!” Mrs. Renshaw cried with unexpected eagerness. “Do call at the cottage. It’ll be nice for you to join them. They’ll all be there—Mr. Sorio and the Doctor and Brand. Yes, do go in! It’ll be a relief to me to think of you with them. I’m sometimes afraid that cousin Tassar encourages dear Brand to drink too much of that stuff he likes to make. They
will
put spirits into it. I’m always telling them that lime juice would be just as nice. Yes, do go, Mr.
Traherne
, and insist on having lime juice!”

The priest looked at the lady, looked at the servant and looked at the hall door. He felt a faint
scratching
going on inside his cloak. Ricoletto was beginning to wake up.

“Well, I’ll go!” he exclaimed, rising to his feet.

At that moment the figure of Philippa, exquisitely dressed in a dark crimson gown, emerged from the
dining
-room. She advanced slowly towards them with more than her usual air of dramatic reserve. Mr.
Traherne
noticed that her lips were even redder than her
dress. Her eyes looked dark and tired but they shone with a mischievous menace. She held out her hand
sedately
and as he took it, fumbling with his ulster, “I hope you enjoyed your grapes,” she said.

“You ought to apologize to Mr. Traherne for
appearing
before him at all in that wild costume,”
remarked
Mrs. Renshaw. “You wouldn’t think she’d been at the dentist’s all day, would you? She looks as if she were in a grand London house, doesn’t she, just waiting to go to a ball?

“Yes, at the dentist’s,” Mrs. Renshaw went on, speaking quite loudly, “at the dentist’s in Mundham. She’s got an abscess under one of her teeth. It kept her awake in the night. I think your face is still a little swollen, dear, isn’t it? She oughtn’t to stand in this cold hall, ought she, Mr. Traherne? And with so much of her neck exposed. It was quite a large
abscess
. Let me look, dear.” She moved towards her daughter, who drew hastily back.

“She won’t let me look at it,” she added plaintively. “She never would, not even when she was a child.”

Hamish, fumbling with his fingers inside his ulster, made a grotesque grimace of sympathy and once more intimated his desire to say good-night. He discerned in the look the girl had now fixed upon her mother an expression which indicated how little sympathy there was between them. It was nearly half past nine when he reached Rodmoor and knocked at Baltazar’s door. There was some sort of village revel going on inside the tavern and the sound of this blended, in
intermittent
bursts of uproar, with the voices from Stork’s little sitting-room. Both wind and rain had subsided
and the thunder-feeling in the air had grown less
oppressive
.

Traherne found himself, as he had been warned, in the presence of Raughty, Sorio and Brand. Ushered in by the urbane Baltazar he greeted them all with a humorous and benignant smile and took, willingly enough, a cup of the admirable wine which they were drinking. They all seemed, except their host himself, a little excited by what they had imbibed and the priest observed that several other bottles waited the moment of uncorking. Dr. Raughty alone appeared seriously troubled at the new-comer’s entrance. He coughed several times, as was his habit when disconcerted, and glanced anxiously at the others.

Sorio, it seemed, was in the midst of some sort of diatribe, and as soon as they had resumed their seats he made no scruple about continuing it.

“It’s all an illusion,” he exclaimed, looking at Mr. Traherne as if he defied him to contradict his words, “it’s all an absolute illusion that women are more
subtle
than men. The idea of their being so is simply due to the fact that they act on impulse instead of by
reason
. Any one who acts on impulse appears subtle if his impulses vary sufficiently! Women are
extraordinarily
simple. What gives them the appearance of subtlety is that they never know what particular
impulse
they’re going to have next. So they just lie back on themselves and wait till it comes. They’re
eminently
physiological
, too, in their reactions. Am I not right there, Doctor? They’re more entirely material than we are,” he went on, draining his glass with a vicious gulp, “they’re simply soaked and drenched in
matter. They’re not really completely or humanly
conscious
. Matter still holds them, still clings to them, still drowns them. That is why the poets represent Nature as a woman. The sentimental writers always speak of women as so responsive, so porous, to the power of Nature. They put it down to their superior sensitiveness. It isn’t their sensitiveness at all! It’s their element. Of course they’re porous to it. They’re part of it! They’ve never emerged from it. It flows round them like waves round seaweed. Take this
question
of drink—of this delicious wine we’re drinking! No woman who ever lived could understand the
pleasure
we’re enjoying now—a pleasure almost purely
intellectual
. They think, in their absurd little heads, that all we get out of it is the mere sensation of
putting
hot stuff or sweet stuff or intoxicating stuff into our mouths. They haven’t the remotest idea that, as we sit in this way together, we enter the company of all great and noble souls, philosophizing upon the nature of the gods and sharing their quintessential happiness! They think we’re simply sensual beasts—as they are themselves, the greedy little devils!—when they eat pastry and suck sugar-candy at the confectioner’s. No woman yet understood, or ever will, the sublime
detachment
from life, the victory over life, which an
honest
company of sensible and self-respecting friends enjoy when they drink, serenely and quietly, a wine as rare, as well chosen, as harmless as this! Women hate to think of the happiness we’re enjoying now. I know perfectly well that every one of the women who are connected with us at this moment—and that only
applies
,” he added with a smile, “to Mr. Renshaw and myself—would suffer real misery to see us at this
moment
.
It’s an instinct and from
their
point of view they’re justified fully enough.

“Wine separates us from Nature. It frees us from sex. It sets us among the gods. It destroys—yes!—that’s what it does, it destroys our physiological
fatality
. With wine like this,” he raised his glass above his head, “we are no longer the slaves of our senses and consequently the slaves of matter. We have freed
ourselves
from matter. We have
destroyed
matter!”

“I’m not quite sure,” said Doctor Raughty, going carefully to the fireplace where, on the fender, he had deposited for later consumption, a saucer of brandied cherries, “I am not sure whether you’re right about wine obliterating sex. I’ve seen quite plain females, in my time, appear like so many Ninons and Thaises when one’s a bit shaky. Of course I know they may appear so,” he went on patiently and assiduously letting every drop of juice evaporate from the skin of the cherry he held between his fingers before placing it in his mouth, “appear desirable wenches, I mean, without our having any inclination to meddle with them but the
impulse
is the same. At least,” he added modestly, “their being there does not detract from the pleasure.”

He paused and, with his head bent down over his cherries, became absolutely oblivious to everything else in the world. What he was trying now was the
delicate
experiment of dipping the fruit, dried by being waved to and fro in the air, in the wine-glass at his side. As he achieved this end, his cheeks flushed and nervous spasmodic quiverings twitched his expressive nostrils.

“I am inclined to agree with the Doctor,” said Brand Renshaw. “It seems mere monkish nonsense to me to
separate things that were so obviously meant to go together. I like drinking while girls dance for me. I like them to dance on and on, and on and on till they’re tired out and then—” He was interrupted by a sudden crash which made all the glasses ring and ting. Mr. Traherne had brought down his fist heavily upon the rosewood table.

“What you people are forgetting,” shouted the priest, “is that God is not dead. No! He’s not dead, even in Rodmoor. Nature, girls, wine, rats,—are all shadows in flickering water. Only one thing’s eternal and that is a pure and loving heart!”

There was a general and embarrassed hush after this and the priest looked round at the four men with a sort of wistful bewilderment. Then an expression of indescribable sweetness came into his face.

“Forgive me, children,” he muttered, pressing his hand to his forehead. “I didn’t mean to be violent. Baltazar, you must have filled my glass too quickly. No, no! I mustn’t touch a drop more.”

Stork leaned forward towards him.

“We understand,” he said. “We understand
perfectly
. You felt we were going a little too far. And so we were! These discourses about the mystery of wine and the secret of women always betray one into absurdity. Adrian ought to have known better than to begin such a thing.”

“It was my fault,” repeated Mr. Traherne humbly. “If you’ll excuse me I’ll get something out of my pocket.”

He rose and went into the passage. Brand
Renshaw
shrugged his shoulders and lifted his glass to his lips.

“I believe it’s his rat,” whispered Dr. Raughty softly. “He lives too much alone.”

The priest returned with Ricoletto in his hand and resuming his seat stroked the animal dreamily.
Baltazar
looked from one to another of his guests and his delicate features assumed a curious expression, an
expression
as though he isolated himself from them all and washed his hands of them all.

“Traherne refers to God,” he began in a flutelike tone, “and it’s no more than what he has a right to do. But I should be in a sorry position myself if my only escape from the nuisance of women was to drag in Eternity. Our dear Adrian, whose head is always full of some girl or another, fancies he can get out of it by drink. Brand here doesn’t want to get out of it. He wants to play the Sultan. Raughty—we know what an amorous fellow
you
are, Doctor!—has his own fantastic way of drifting in and out of the dangerous waters. I alone, of all of you, have the true key to escape. For, between ourselves, my dears, we know well enough that God and Eternity are just Hamish’s innocent illusion.”