The girl got up, too. She felt only softly and gently sorry for Lexie. There was a queer exaltation in her that made it difficult to be more sorry than that for any one.
“He’ll outlive us all,” she said. “His mania for life is like the jump of that salmon trout I saw at Tollminster Mill. I told you about it. It jumped over the edge of the boat. It jumped over everything. And it got back, too, into the mill pond.”
For some reason or other it gave Nell a peculiar satisfaction to think of Lexie as a silvery salmon jumping for his life. She felt that she would like to hold that struggling, arrowy, smooth-scaled fish tightly in her hand before seeing it go splashing back.
She became quiet and still, thinking of Lexie in this way; but in the end she wanted to stop thinking of him; for she suddenly recalled the particular look in the eyes of the animal in her childhood’s Bible, entitled: “The Ram caught by its Horns.” No fish, even with hooked gills, even with the tragic eye-sockets of the Dolphins of Scopas, could ever feel quite what that beast felt; and if a man felt more——
She found herself being led by Rook to the door of the church. The sun had been invisible for some time past; and now the whole scene was losing its distinctness, losing its familiar landmarks one by one as the night fell.
Gloom that drew its quality from dampness, a positive thing, was rapidly being replaced by gloom that drew its quality from darkness, a negative thing.
Rook pushed open the door of the church and drew her inside. It was like night within the building, a night that was faintly touched by a pallid greenish luminousness that seemed to have no connection with sun or moon.
As the heavy door closed behind them the girl felt she had passed into a different world, a world smelling of some sort of chilly-fleshed fungous growths that had taken centuries to mature.
Rook took her by the hand and led her up the narrow aisle, past the brass lectern, under the Norman archway, to where the tombs of the Ashovers of old days lay in their pallid immobility. Standing behind her, while her knees touched the sleeping Crusader, he took her in his arms and kissed her cold cheek. Letting her head sink back and turning her face sideways she met his lips, while her slender body yielded itself to him.
She felt strangely and profoundly happy in his embrace. It was a different kind of happiness altogether from what she felt when Lexie kissed her on the day she had fled from her home. She had had Rook on her mind then, so that she could not lie back content upon the dark flood; but it was Rook himself whose desire was that flood now, and her whole nature was free to respond.
A queer remembrance came into her mind as she yielded to his caresses, the remembrance of a salt marsh by the Dorset coast, where the greenish-white light of a protracted sunset hung like livid phosphorus in the black pools, stained with pale blood. She remembered how a solitary heron with wide-stretched wings and trailing legs had descended into the water; and how she had felt that it was those livid pools in the black earth, rather than the darkened sky overhead, that offered an escape to her soul.
Here in the church with the man she loved she felt as if she were hidden safe away from all responsibility, from all pursuit. She felt as long as she could keep his desire concentrated upon her, that Time itself stood still; and a lovely, deep, enchanted Eternity substituted itself for the little poisonous rankling minutes that throbbed like evil ulcers.
Rook’s mind also had its own obscure journeys to make. He was aware—as she never for a moment seemed to be—of the presence of his dead people. He was aware of an angry menace rising from all that human dust under his feet, threatening him if he did not open the gates of the future to their race, cursing him if he barred and locked those gates in the selfish enjoyment of uncreative, unproductive emotion.
As he caressed her there in that dark church on that curious day he felt as though he were inflicting a definite wound upon the accumulated yearning, the gathered tension, stretching out into the future, of six long human centuries.
So many fathers begetting so many children; so many children begetting so many fathers; and all to end in his striking them back into the annihilating dark, with a mocking “Down, wantons, down!”
It was as if all the life energy of all that proud human tribe had been concentrated in one invisible gesture of intense creation, only to be derided, jeered at, spurned, by his flippant indifference.
Indifference? It was defiance; since he had chosen their very resting place to flaunt his sterile malice. Into this very shrine of their vitality, of their hope, of their unconquerable life urge he had come to parade his disillusionment, his alliance with emptiness, with nothingness, with the eternal No of the abyss!
He had come to fool them. How did the sentinel Crusader know that this girl he had brought with him was inhibited and disallowed; a mocking mirage to their hope? He had come to fool them. So at least that smirking infidel of a great-grandfather Benjamin seemed to guess as he leered at them over the plump cupids.
For it was against the very monument of the crafty Deist that the two were leaning now; and, as they clung together there, Rook felt he was taking a kind of revenge on fate itself.
He was certainly revenging himself upon the life lust of his own race. He was denying that race any future at all. He was saying to the vast dim company of future Ashovers, “Ye shall not live!”
It was a feeling of this kind, deep, cold, malicious, that made every caress he gave this girl a kind of flouting of the gods. Each kiss was a malignant sacrilege directed against the helpless invisible company of the Future.
He had decided to cut the living navel cord between these two. Let the one be totally forgotten! Let the other never be born!
Something of the viciousness of these thoughts must have passed into the very touch of his hands; but if it did, the girl neither regarded it nor was affected by it.
Rook was startled—as if it were something upon which he had not calculated—when he became aware of the spiritual exaltation of his companion.
The girl’s white features, as he caught a glimpse of them in that spectral light, wore an expression of childlike beatitude. He knew there had been a mysterious attraction of some kind between himself and this woebegone little creature; but when he saw that illuminated look on her face, endowing her with an utterly unexpected beauty, he was conscious of a sharp secret pang, as if his nature had suddenly touched some “fourth dimension” whose superiority to his own level of existence shocked and troubled him.
Many months after this he remembered what he felt at that moment, when that white face swirled up to him as if on the crest of a dark wave, looking at him and through him and past him in an ecstasy of which he himself touched barely the fringe.
It was certainly in league with the nerves of women, the peculiar atmosphere of that December day.
Whether it was in league with the remorseless umbilical cord of those insistent generations was a different matter. Rook Ashover had only commenced his fatal struggle with that dark mandate!
The two companions found themselves back again at the door at last; the man troubled, anxious, perturbed, his mind abnormally alert to every shape and sound of the external world; the girl drugged, dazed, numbed, but unfathomably happy.
“It’s like death to make love to you,” he muttered when they were out of the church.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I felt like that, too.”
She lied with an entranced luxuriousness, careless of what he said or what she answered.
“I shall wait for William now without minding a bit,” she added. “You go off quickly, Rook. No! No! No good-byes! I’ll go back and light all the candles! You look when you get to the bridge and see if the windows aren’t lit up! When you hear him ringing the bell you may think of me saying my prayers by those tombs! There! Go off quick—— No! No! I won’t say any good-bye!”
Rook did turn round when he reached the bridge; and sure enough, the windows were lighted up as he had never seen them lighted up before. It was a sort o
f heathen Candlemas; a twilight celebration of the tutelary Powers of that riverside, as they reassumed, with the fall of darkness, their ancestral domination.
The smell of the water washing against the mossy arches, the smell of the black mud in the banked-up ditches, the smell of miles and miles of damp grass sinking down, blade by misty blade, under the weight of the night, flowed like a palpable exhalation around the yellowish gleam of those Gothic windows.
He leaned against the parapet and listened intently. The air about him seemed supernaturally hushed; all the great gulfs of the night listening there, even as he was listening.
And then in a moment, with a suddenness that made Rook gasp, for he had heard no footstep upon the road, the great cracked reverberating bell rang out from the church tower.
Toom! Toom! Toom!
The very cattle and sheep must have stirred uneasily in their sheds and bartons. It was as if that heathen illumination had actually summoned forth out of the air the tangible presence of something that had been gathering upon Ashover since the dawn of the day.
Toom! Toom! Toom!
It was as if the gigantic feet of Cybele herself, Magna Mater, Bona Dea, were striding bronze-sandalled over the dark bedrock of Frome-side.
Toom! Toom! Toom!
CHAPTER VII
THE black frost prayed for by Rook came at last. It came a few days before Christmas, and on the morning of Christmas Eve it held all Frome-side in stark iron-bound rigidity.
The long-drawn-out dissolution of the leaves was over now. Except for a few holly bushes on the Tollminster Road and the line of Scotch firs on Heron’s Ridge it might have been supposed that the whole phenomenon of foliage, of umbrageousness, had never existed upon the planet.
Brown and gray, gray and brown, the bare bushes, the bare branches, rose abruptly from the naked frost-bitten soil. In holes, in crevices, in rabbit burrows, under tree roots, in the bottom of ponds, in the minute tunnels of lobworms, certain shapeless nonentities that once vibrated to sun and moon and all the winds lay hidden, forgotten, annihilated, done for.
To any human being who loved form better than colour in material things the effect of this change amounted to positive ecstasy. Such an one was Rook; and the pleasure which he enjoyed hour by hour during these iron-bound days was beyond description.
An essential puritanism in his nature answered exultantly to this stark bleak time. To see the silhouette of the world gray upon gray; to see the stiff, constricted, sombre mornings pass abruptly into the space-dark, wind-bitten, frozen evenings; to see the hours between eleven o’clock and three o’clock blotted out, as it were, from the diurnal calendar—all this was like a deep, silent, magical satisfaction to his whole nature.
He was so happy that his happiness became a mesmeric tyranny over those who surrounded him. He seemed able to lift his hand against the very march of events; to keep fate itself petrified, immobile, suspended; harmless as the icicles that hung above the water under Frome Bridge.
He was especially happy that morning of Christmas Eve. He had had a long, shamelessly candid conversation with Lexie the night before, and the savour of Lexie’s cynical sagacity was sweetening the taste of his early breakfast as he sat with Cousin Ann and Netta drinking cup after cup of tea and watching the reddening logs.
It was so dark that they had candles on the table; and the flames of these candles increased Rook’s happiness, both by the way they drew their purity from the frost-bitten air and by something almost mystical in their quivering up-burning.
Netta, too, for some secret reason of her own, seemed in unnaturally high spirits. From where she was sitting she looked straight into the eyes of the melancholy cavalier; and if ever any particular atmospheric condition lent itself to the inner soul of a picture, this candle-lighted refuge from the black frost was the dedicated background for that of Sir Robert Ashover.
Cousin Ann was less in harmony with herself. She talked graciously enough. She kept her head. But her gaiety was of a conventional, external kind: a laughing curve here of her fine lips; a seductive glance there of her gray eyes; and all the while a little puckered frown that twitched and deepened between her arched eyebrows! She had, as King Lear would say, her “frontlet on.”
If the mute gaze of the sad Sir Robert kept murmuring “a brave wench! a brave wench!” to the ex-actress from Bristol, something in the nerves of Cousin Ann responded to a chill of absolute isolation. She felt herself to be cut off from every support, human or inhuman. The frost had so petrified the rich life saps of the countryside, those sweet, rank, procreative forces that usually sustained her, that she had the sense of being separated from her gods by a glacial barrier.
Not that she relented in her purpose or relinquished one jot of her resolution. She continued to “steer right onward.” But the mood that upheld her was a thing of blind human obstinacy.
As the hours drew on toward the birth of Christ the earth constricted itself in its primordial, inert malice; and against this tightening of brute matter round about her, the heart of the young girl hardened itself within itself, as if beneath bands of triple steel.
But even as this very thing went on, Cousin Ann’s manner toward Rook became more coaxing and more provocative; her manner toward Netta more intimate and more disarming.
It was this exuberance in her that by degrees acted like an irritant upon the man’s nerves and impinged upon his happiness. Something radiated from the girl that was alien to the temper of the day; alien to the frozen starkness in which he delighted, alien to that corpse-like rigidity that must be broken by a power beyond nature or not broken at all!
The atmosphere round their three heads, as they sat beneath the flickering candles listening to Lady Ann’s chatter, began to grow intolerable to Rook. The very tingling in his blood, due to the electric contest going on between the burning logs inside and the frost outside, increased this feeling.
Finally he could endure the sound of that rich young voice no longer. He rose from the table abruptly, almost rudely, and muttering something about “giving Lion a run,” went out into the hall.
No sooner was the door shut behind him than Netta also rose as if to follow him; but Cousin Ann laid her hand on Netta’s arm and pulled her back into her chair.
The younger woman’s heart was beating violently at that moment and a sort of dizziness like that which she felt on the hunting field when her horse approached an impossible jump made Netta’s figure seem dim and wavering.
Having got her antagonist there before her, resigned and patient, it seemed as if the grand diplomatic stroke she had been meditating was infinitely more difficult than she had expected. The way, at that juncture, she clasped and unclasped her fingers may have reproduced on a smaller stage the very gesture with which her notorious great-grandfather, Lord Harry Poynings, had persuaded a crown prince to renounce his birthright.
“He is a dear, isn’t he?” she murmured, in an impulsive tone which seemed signalling for an exchange of confidences. “There he goes, banging the kitchen door! Have you noticed how he always goes out through the kitchen? It’s an old instinct, I expect. His father used to go out that way. He kept his guns there and used to meet the gamekeeper there. It would seem a pity, wouldn’t it, Netta, if all these old ways died out? And of course they will die out if Rook doesn’t marry.”
The ex-actress did not wince. Her gaze remained fixed upon the melancholy face in the gilt frame. “Brave wench! Brave wench!” those sympathetic eyes seemed reiterating. But Netta stared back sadly enough at that sorrowful countenance.
An immense wave of weariness and disillusionment swept over her. Her exalted mood wilted and sank. The situation had been hard enough to bear when she first came to Ashover. Cousin Ann’s appearance on the scene had relieved her from a tension that was becoming well-nigh intolerable. But now that her friendly rescuer had joined forces with the enemy she felt that the powers against her were more than she had strength to resist.
She could have resisted
them, perhaps—for she was not devoid of the kind of stubbornness that passive natures of her quality possess—if it had not been for this fatal doubt in her own heart, this doubt which the blind humility of her love for Rook kept feeding with a sweet poison.
That love had assumed during these last days the form of a vague excited impulse, leading her she knew not where; ruffling the quiet of her mind with all manner of wild and wavering projects. She was only faintly affected by this matter of the Ashovers and their threatened extinction. The clamouring shadows from that crowded chancel might have beaten at her windows night by night and found her impervious to their entreaty. It was with Rook, and Rook only, she was concerned; and the gist of the excitement that had buoyed her up of late had been a desire to do something, something unexpected and new, that would make him know her as he had never known her before.
“If Rook did marry,” Cousin Ann continued, “there’s no earthly reason why he shouldn’t go on taking care of you, Netta. You and he could find some delicious little place to hide away in; somewhere where you’d be quite free from the sort of thing that annoys you here.”
Netta heard these words as if they were spoken in a dream. She withdrew her eyes from Sir Robert’s face and let them rest upon her own hands folded tightly upon her lap.
“You do see what I mean?” went on the diplomatic voice. “Once get Rook safely married—married to anybody, Netta—to anybody!—and you and he need not be really separated.”
She stretched out her arm and extinguished one of the candles which had begun guttering and hissing. She did this quite casually with her finger and thumb; and Netta could not help feeling as if she herself were that quickly despatched flame.
“Heavens, yes!” cried Lady Ann. “I can see you and me now, gossiping round some lovely little fire in Chelsea or Bloomsbury!”
Netta lifted her head at this.
“And the wife, too?” she said, with the shadow of a smile.
Ann received the retort in the spirit of a master fencer taking a well-directed thrust.
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