Gathering up all her forces to deal with this crisis she extracted her fingers from Lady Ann’s clasp and straightened her shoulders.
“Why have you waited to ask me that till to-day?” she said, in a low, flat, level tone.
She wanted to look Lady Ann straight in the eyes; but an indescribable timidity compelled her to fix her glance on the gray window.
“But are you, dear, are you, so very fond of him?”
Her lips made an effort to form the suitable words; but her throat seemed to be playing some tiresome trick upon her. It seemed to be necessary that she should keep swallowing.
“Because if you’re not,” Lady Ann went on, “I mean if you’re not very fond of him, it’s much easier to understand all you’re doing.”
“What—do—you mean? Oh, what are you saying to me?” stammered the troubled girl.
“Don’t get excited, dear.” And the aristocratic fingers sought the plebeian ones again. “There’s no need to get agitated. I know well enough that nothing I say will make any difference. But it’s like this, Netta. I sometimes think you don’t quite realize, and never have quite realized, all that this means to Rook.”
This time Netta Page did turn a scared, troubled face directly upon the beautiful head lying on her pillow.
“You’ve never spoken like this to me before,” she said slowly. “Have I done anything? Is it because I got cross just now when he said—when he said that about your knee?”
Lady Ann folded her hands and closed her eyes for a moment. Her face in the gray light looked mysteriously lovely. Was she praying to her gods to give her strength to go through with the discomfort of acting the rôle of executioner?
“Have I done anything?” Netta repeated in a monotonous sing-song. “Have I done anything?”
“You’ve done this, my dear,” said Cousin Ann gravely, opening her eyes and lifting her head a little. “You’ve made it impossible for Rook to have children—and if he doesn’t have a child—if he doesn’t have a son—there’ll be no Ashovers left after he and Lexie are dead. And you know what Lexie’s health is like? He’s a dying man!”
Ah! The avalanche had begun to move. Thoughts and images pursued one another madly through Netta’s bewildered brain. Fantastic images some of them were! One was the image of Cousin Ann herself—with her beautiful marbly limbs—lying on a bed like this, big with a boy-child of Rook’s.
She said nothing for a long while. Her thoughts gathered about the knob of the bedpost above Cousin Ann’s head. The bedpost marched in and out of her thoughts like a drill sergeant among shifty recruits.
Wow ho! Wow ho! Wow ho! moaned the wind in the chimney.
She kept forming words in the depths of her mind and then rejecting them.
One of these sentences got as far as the tip of her tongue.
“How do you know that I shan’t have a dead?” it protested. But that sentence would have been a lie; a lie to her own heart; for she knew only too well that fate had written her down childless.
“Of course I understand it all perfectly,” Cousin Ann’s voice went on; “if you are not very fond of Rook. In that case you are naturally, as we say, out for your own hand. But what I find to puzzling is, how, if you are very fond of him, you can have the heart to blight his whole future and doom him to childlessness? That is what puzzles me, Netta.”
Still the bedpost kept trying to play its part as the master of the ceremonies. But the convicted woman was not conscious any more of these little things. Slowly, with a thick woolly movement, blind and massive, the great avalanche was beginning to bear down upon her. Before the weight of it, before the reverberation of its descending, a landslide seemed to have begun that made the oasis in which she was living, with all its sweet earth and peaceful grass, rock and sway beneath her feet.
With the surface of her mind she was prepared to fight for every inch of her happiness; but, down in her soul, she felt conquered already. Something in herself betrayed her, with a dark subterranean treachery. Something called out: “I yield! I yield!” to the life-destroying whisper of this girl with these beautiful knees.
She found her tongue at last; but what she said was the merest froth of her mind’s turmoil, the merest spindrift of the tragic turn of the tide.
It was a gross thing, too, a venomous, petty, poisonous thing—the thing a jealous chorus girl would say, quarrelling over some beau at the stage door.
“Did you really hurt your knee walking with Rook this morning?”
Cousin Ann lifted her arched eyebrows.
Netta was standing in the middle of the room now, her face a pitiable mirror of contesting feelings.
“Will you please go now?” she stammered helplessly; and then with a faint return of the ugly mood—“that’s to say, if you can walk.”
Cousin Ann rose up from the bed and certainly there was little evidence of lameness as she moved across the room.
“There’s no need for us to quarrel,” she said quietly as she unlocked the door. “I like you, Netta, and I am sorry for you. You’re bound to suffer, whichever way things work out. One can’t carry off a situation like this beyond a certain point; even you can’t do that; though I do think you’re rather wonderful!”
She was alone again; alone in that fireless room. The indent left by Lady Ann’s head still remained in the pillow. The coverlet of the bed still showed the imprint of her body.
Netta walked to the window and looked out. The great lime tree was bowing and clutching at space under the wind’s lash. High up in the air dark specks were being lifted and dropped, dropped and lifted, that once were green budding leaves.
There was a soughing noise in the bushes, as if some great invisible animal were panting there; and what she could see of the water meadows beyond the river looked dark and troubled as though under the persecution of some evil power the menace of whose purpose was still obscure.
The woman shivered, but did not leave the window. She found a certain comfort in sharing with so much helplessness and dumbness the concentrated malice of this invisible enemy.
Her nature had a peculiar passivity in it, an almost voluptuous inertness; and now, when her whole blind instinct was to put off the moment of thinking, there was a real relief in becoming part of these struggling trees and sullen, persecuted meadows.
The wind did actually seem to take on a palpable shape as she watched, a shape that was a shape, though it was chaotic, formless, wavering. And she could not escape the sense that in some definite malignant manner the invisible creature was directing its murderous violence against herself, against this intruder, this invader, this stranger within the gates!
She was still standing at the window when Rook, after a hurried knock, came quickly into the room. She glanced at him for one swift moment and then lifting up her arms, with a swaying staggering lurch forward, she flung herself upon him and clung round his neck.
“I am sorry. I am sorry. I am so sorry!” she moaned. “You will forgive me, Rook, my own? I ought not to have behaved like that. I know I ought not. I was mad, just mad!”
Rook answered her appeal with hurried soothing exclamations: “It’s all right, little one. It’s all right. It’s absolutely all right. There! There! No, don’t cry, sweetheart! I tell you it was nothing. Nothing at all! I’ve quite forgotten it. It’s all over. You are my little Netta again—you are, aren’t you?”
Feeling his arms so firm and tight around her and his lips upon her forehead Netta was sorely tempted to yield to an impassioned fit of desperate sobbing. Her whole nature craved for that relief. But long and bitter experience had taught her that men shrink from these abandonments, shrink from them and grow cold beneath their weight. So with an heroic effort she calmed herself and remained limp and exhausted but untrembling, unshaken, within his grasp.
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 o
f 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 be
nt 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!
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