Rodmoor (23 page)

“Confess—confess—you girl!” he muttered harshly. “Confess now—when you go rushing off like that into the park it isn’t to see that foreign fellow at all? It isn’t even to lie, as I know you love to do, touching the stalks of the poison funguses with the tip of your tongue under the oak trunks? It’s to escape from hearing her, that’s what it is! Confess now. It’s to escape from hearing her!”

He suddenly relaxed his grasp and stood erect,
listening
intently. The sweet heavy scent of magnolia petals floated in through the window and somewhere—far off among the trees—a screech-owl uttered a broken wail, followed by the flapping of wings. The clock in the hall outside began striking the hour.
Before
each stroke a ponderous metallic vibration trembled through the silent house.

“It’s only ten now,” he said. “The clock in here is fast.”

As he spoke there was a loud ring at the entrance
door. The brother and sister stared blankly at one another and then Philippa gave a low unnatural laugh. “We might be criminals,” she whispered. They
instinctively
assumed more easy and less dramatic
positions
and waited in silence, while from the distant
servants
’ quarters some one came to answer the summons. They heard the door opened and the sound of
suppressed
voices in the hall. There was a moment’s pause, during which Philippa looked mockingly and enquiringly at Brand.

“It’s our dear priest,” she whispered, “and some one else, too.”

“Surely the fool’s not going to try—” began Brand.

“Mr. Traherne and Dr. Raughty!” announced the servant, opening the library door and holding it open while the visitors entered.

The clergyman advanced first. He shook hands with Brand and bowed with old-fashioned courtesy to Philippa. Dr. Raughty, following him, shook hands with Philippa and nodded nervously at her brother. The two men sank into the seats offered them and
accepted
an invitation to smoke. Brand moved to a side table and mixed for them, with an air of resigned
politeness
, cool and appropriate drinks. He drank nothing himself, however, but his sister, with a mocking apology to Mr. Traherne, lit herself a cigarette.

“How’s the rat?” she began, throwing a teasing and provocative smile upon the priest’s perturbed
counteance
.

“Out there,” he replied, emptying his glass at one gulp.

“What? In your coat pocket on such a night as this?”

Mr. Traherne put down his glass and inserted his huge workman’s fingers into the bosom of his cassock.

“Nothing under this but a shirt,” he said. “
Cassocks
have no pockets.”

“Haven’t they?” laughed Brand. “They have something then where you can put money. That is, unless you parsons are like kangaroos and have some natural little orifice in which to hide the offerings of the faithful.”

“Is he happy always in your pocket?” enquired Philippa.

“Do you want me to see?” replied the priest, rising with a movement that almost upset the table. “I’ll bring him in and I’ll make him go scimble-scamble all about the room.”

The tone in which he uttered these words said, as plainly as words could say, “You’re a pretty, silly, flirtatious piece of femininity! You only talk about my rat for the sake of fooling me. You don’t really care whether he’s happy in my pocket or not. It’s only out of consideration for your silly nerves that I don’t play with him now. And if you tease me an inch more I will, and make him run up your petticoats, too!”

“Sit down again, Traherne,” said Brand, “and let me fill up your glass. We’ll all visit the rat presently and find him some supper. Just at present I’m anxious to know how things are in the village. I haven’t been down that way for weeks.”

This was a direct challenge to the priest to come, without further delay, to the matter of his visit.
Hamish
Traherne accepted it.

“We came really,” he said, “to see
you
, Renshaw. A little later, perhaps before we go, we must have our
conversation. We hardly expected to have the
pleasure
of finding Miss Philippa sitting up so late.”

Dr. Raughty, who all this while had been watching with the most intense delight the beauty of the girl’s white skin and scarlet lips and the indescribable charm of her sinuous figure, now broke in impetuously.

“But it can wait! It can wait! Oh, please don’t go to bed yet, Miss Renshaw. Look, your cigarette’s out! Throw it away and try one of these. They’re French, they’re the yellow packets, I know you like them. They’re what you smoked once when we were on the river—when you caught that great perch.”

Philippa, who had risen to her feet at Traherne’s somewhat brusque remark, came at once to the Doctor’s side.

“Oh, the perch,” she cried, “yes, I should think I do remember! You insisted on killing it at once so that it shouldn’t jump back into the water. You put your thumb into its mouth and bent back its head. Oh, yes! That yellow packet brings it all back to me. I can smell the sticky dough we tried to catch dace with afterwards and I can see the look of your hands all smeared with blood and silver scales. Oh, that was a lovely day, Doctor! Do you remember how you twisted those things, bryony leaves they were, round my head when the others had gone? Do you
remember
how you said you’d like to treat me as you treated the perch? Do you remember how you ran after a dragon-fly or something?”

She stopped breathlessly and, balancing herself on the arm of the Doctor’s chair, blew a great cloud of smoke over his head, filling the room in a moment with the pungent odour of French tobacco.

Both Traherne and Brand regarded her with
astonishment
. She seemed to have transformed herself and to have become a completely different person. Her eyes shone with childish gaiety and when she laughed, as she did a moment afterwards at some sally of the Doctor’s, there was a ring of unforced, spontaneous merriment in the sound such as her brother had not heard for many years. She continued to bend over Dr. Raughty’s chair, covering them both in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke, and the two of them soon became absorbed in some intricate discussion
concerning
, as far as the others could make out, the question of the best bait to be used for pike.

The priest took the opportunity of delivering
himself
of what was on his mind.

“I’m afraid, Renshaw,” he said, “you’ve gone your own way in that matter of Linda Herrick. No! Don’t deny it. You may not have seen her as often as
before
our last conversation, but you’ve seen her. She’s confessed as much to me herself. Now look here,
Renshaw
, you and I have known one another for some good few years. How long is it, man? Fifteen, twenty? It can’t be less. Long enough, anyway, for me to have earned the right to speak quite plainly and I tell you this, you must stop the whole business!”

His voice sank as he spoke to a formidable whisper. Brand glanced round at the others but apparently they were quite preoccupied. Mr. Traherne continued.

“The whole business, Renshaw! After this you must leave that child absolutely alone. If you don’t—if you insist on going on seeing her—I shall take strong measures with you. I shall—but I needn’t say any
more! I think you can make a pretty shrewd guess what I shall do.”

Brand received this solemn ultimatum in a way
calculated
to cause the agitated man who addressed it to him a shock of complete bewilderment. He yawned carelessly and stretched out his long arms.

“As you please, Hamish,” he said, “I’m perfectly ready not to see her. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have seen her in any case. To tell you the truth, I’ve got a bit sick of the whole thing. These young girls are silly little feather-weights at best. It’s first one mood and then another! You can’t be sure of them for two hours at a stretch. So it’s all right, Hamish Traherne! I won’t interfere with her. You can make a nun of her if you like—or whatever else you fancy. All I beg of you is, don’t go round talking about me to your parishioners. Don’t talk about me to Raughty! I don’t want my affairs discussed by any one—not even by my friends. All right, my boy—you needn’t look at me like that. You’ve known me, as you say, long enough to know what I am. So there you are! You’ve had your answer and you’ve got my word. I don’t mind even your calling it ‘the word of a gentleman ‘as you did the other night. You can call it what you like. I’m not going to see Linda for a reason quite personal and private but if you like to make it a favour to yourself that I don’t—well! throw that in, too!”

Hamish Traherne thrust his hand into his cassock thinking, for the moment, that it was his well-worn ulster and that he would feel the familiar form of Ricoletto.

It may be noted from this futile and unconscious gesture, how much hangs in this world upon
insignificant
threads. Had the priest’s fingers touched at that moment the silky coat of his little friend he would have derived sufficient courage to ask his formidable host point-blank whether, in leaving Linda in this way, he left her as innocent and unharmed as when he crossed her path at the beginning. Not having Ricoletto with him, however, and his fingers encountering nothing but his own woolen shirt, he lacked the inspiration to carry the matter to this conclusion. Thus, upon the trifling accident of a tame rodent having been left outside a library or, if you will, upon an eccentric parson having no pocket, depended the whole future of Linda
Herrick
. For, had he put that question and had Brand confessed the truth, the priest would undoubtedly,
under
every threat in his power, have commanded him to marry her and it is possible, considering the mood the man was in at that moment and considering also the nature of the threat held over him, he would have bowed to the inevitable and undertaken to do it.

The intricate and baffling complications of human life found further illustration in the very nature of this mysterious threat hinted at so darkly by Mr.
Traherne
. It was in reality—and Brand knew well that it was—nothing more or less than the making clear to Mrs. Renshaw beyond all question or doubt, of the actual character of the son she tried so conscientiously to idealize. For some basic and profound reason,
inherent
in his inmost nature, it was horrible to Brand to think of his mother knowing him. She might
suspect
and
she might know that he knew she suspected,
but to have the thing laid quite bare between them
would be to send a rending and shattering crack through the unconscious hypocrisy of twenty years. For certain natures any drastic cleavage of slowly built-up moral relations is worse than death. Brand would have felt less remorse in being the cause of his mother’s death than of being the cause of her knowing him as he really was. The matter of Linda being thus settled between the two men, if the understanding so reached could be regarded as settling it, they both turned round, anxious for some distraction, to the
quarter
of the room where their friends had been conversing. But Philippa and the Doctor were no longer with them. Brand looked whimsically at the priest who, shrugging his shoulders, poured himself out a third glass from the decanter on the table. They then moved to the window which reached almost to the ground. Stepping over its low ledge, they passed out upon the terrace. They were at once aware of a change in the
atmospheric
conditions. The veil of mist had entirely been swept away from the sky. The vast expanse twinkled with bright stars and, far down among the trees, they could discern the cresent form of the new moon.

Brand pulled towards him a spray of damask roses and inhaled their sweetness. Then he turned to his companion and gave him an evil leer.

“The Doctor and Philippa have taken advantage of our absorbing conversation,” he remarked.

“Nonsense, man, nonsense!” exclaimed the priest. “Raughty’s only showing her some sort of moth or beetle. Can’t you stop your sneering for once and look at things humanly and naturally?”

His words found their immediate justification.
Turning the corner of the house they discovered the two escaped ones on their knees by the edge of the
dew-drenched
lawn watching the movements of a toad. The Doctor was gently directing its advance with the stalk of a dead geranium and Philippa was laughing as
merrily
as a little girl.

They now realized the cause of the disappearance of the sultriness and the heat. From over the
wide-stretching
fens came, with strong steady breath, the northwest wind. It came with a full deep coolness in it which the plants and the trees seemed to drink from as out of some immortal cistern. It brought with it the odour of immense marsh-lands and fresh inland waters and as it bowed the trees and rustled over the flower-beds, it seemed to obliterate and drive back all indications of their nearness to the sea.

Raughty and Philippa rose to their feet at the
approach
of their friends.

“Doctor,” said Brand, “what’s the name of that great star over there—or planet—or whatever it is?”

They all surveyed the portion of the sky he indicated and contemplated the unknown luminary.

“I wish they’d taught me astronomy instead of Greek verses when I was at school,” sighed Mr.
Traherne
.

“It’s Venus, I suppose,” remarked Dr. Raughty. “Isn’t it Venus, Philippa?”

The girl looked from the men to the sky, and from the sky to the men.

“Well, you
are
a set of wise fellows,” she cried, “not to know the star which rules us all! And that’s
not
Venus, Doctor! Don’t any of you really know?
Brand—you surely do? Well, I’ll tell you then, that’s Jupiter, that’s the lord-star Jupiter!”

And she burst into a peal of ringing boyish
laughter
. Brand turned to the Doctor, who had moved away to cast a final glance at the toad.

“What have you done to her, Fingal?” he called out. “She hasn’t laughed like that for years.”