“Oh, the wife! Well! not quite that, Netta. Though these silly old embarrassments are fast breaking up. But, no! Not the wife, too, Netta. We’ll leave her to the happy old lady upstairs. And we’ll share Rook between us—as we’re sharing him now.”
The tone in which Cousin Ann spoke of “the wife” was really in the great manner of diplomatic badinage. It pulled Netta across some intimate threshold toward herself and thrust this poor imaginary lady into the outer darkness of conventional unimportance.
“The wife’s affair,” the girl continued, with a richly toned youthful chuckle, “will be to produce little Ashovers! Beyond that there’s no need for any pathetic heroics, I should treat Rook just as I’ve always treated him, if he had a dozen wives!”
Netta looked past Cousin Ann’s flushed cheeks, past the three still burning candles, to the gray square of the one unfrozen mullioned window. The naked boughs of the lime tree outside made a tracery of extraordinary beauty against this pane. And this tracery seemed to be actually reproduced in the mysterious frost marks which covered all the other windows with a lacework filigree.
It was as if that bitter weather had been an old German woodcarver, from Nuremberg or Rothenburg, outlining with his bony knuckles and iron tool a convoluted image of the very platonic “soul” or spiritual “eidolon” of some frost-benumbed growth of the Black Forest.
It was the impression she got from those mysterious frost marks and those knotted twigs, an old buried impression leaping suddenly into life, that created the resignation of her tone in what came next.
“Tell me what to do then—tell me—what to do—and I will do it!”
The words might have come from the clock above the chimneypiece, from the Cavalier’s picture, from the ghost of the tree itself, so stern and faint and impersonal did they sound as they floated over the empty cups and over the charred logs.
Lady Ann heard these words with every sense she possessed. She heard them as a prick-eared fox might have heard the rustle of a plump guinea fowl settling down to sleep in a blackthorn hedge. She heard them with such a thrill of triumph that she rose instinctively to her feet. Whatever may have been the emotion of her great-grandfather when his royal victim capitulated it could hardly have surpassed what she felt just then.
The incredible good luck of this unexpected victory fairly took her breath away.
“You will give up? You will?”
Just for one flickering second there was a vibration in the air about them as if the excited girl were actually going to bend down and kiss her conquered antagonist.
But there must have been something in Netta’s face that nipped in the bud any gesture of that sort.
The woman seemed to be collecting her strength very much as a person who had lost a lot of blood might weakly try to get up from the ground.
“Don’t go yet,” she murmured, misunderstanding Ann’s restlessness. “Don’t go away yet. It isn’t as simple as you think. I must tell you something.”
Cousin Ann moved across to the fireplace and relieved her feelings by striking one of the half-burnt logs a series of violent blows with the poker.
Returning to her seat she flung her plate and cup aside with a gesture more like that of a man than a woman and hurriedly lit another cigarette.
What she craved for at that moment was violent physical exertion. Her thoughts instinctively leaped from one blood-stirring activity to another. She saw the little white “scuts” of vanishing rabbits as she pursued them with her dog. She felt the blue-black ice crack beneath her feet as she skated over the Tollminster mill pond. She felt the kick of the gun against her shoulder as she shot wild duck with her father on Forley Marsh.
She would have liked to put the unhappy and wounded Netta “out of her pain” as she would have done to any other flying creature. She had “brought her down,” But that was no reason why she should not treat her in a sporting manner. She wished she could finish her off as she would a moor hen dragged to her feet by Lion—wring her neck quickly and kindly, and then swing on over the frozen fields!
“Not as simple as I think?” she enquired brusquely. “It seems simple enough to me.”
Netta appeared still to be struggling with a profound interior lassitude, as if out of the channel of some cut vein her blood was making a crimson pool on the floor. She uttered a little clicking sound in her throat. Then she spoke, exaggerating the genteel pronunciation of the words, as if what would really have relieved her feelings would have been to talk like a Portsmouth barmaid.
“One finds it difficult sometimes to make a person agree, you know, to accept one’s decision. I have suggested the very thing you are now saying. I have begged Rook to take a room for me in Tollminster or Bristol. I have begged him not to let me be a drag on his life. I have told him I would perfectly understand his marrying; that I thought he ought to marry. I have said all those things to him, Lady Ann.”
Ann’s gray eyes scrutinized her coldly and critically.
“I expect you told him that you would not accept a penny from him after you left here and after he was married?”
Netta stared in surprise. How did this girl know that?
“Yes,” she answered, “that was just what I did say.”
A smile of malicious subtlety crossed Ann’s, beautiful lips. “And while you said it, of course, you knew that just that very thing would effectively stop him?”
The frowning bewilderment on Netta’s face indicated without the defence of words her freedom from such elaborate guile.
But Cousin Ann went on: “I daresay it was all unconscious, the line you took. But I’m afraid we’re responsible for these shifty moves, even though we don’t realize it when we make them.”
She was silent for a moment, tapping the table with her cigarette case.
“Damn it all!” she burst out at last. “You must pull yourself together, Netta, and make him realize you’re serious. This offering to live without help, this offering to just disappear is only putting spokes in your own wheel. Of course he won’t let you go off like that! What decent man could? When you take that line you leave him no alternative.”
Netta’s face showed quite clearly that this argument had gone through her like a sword.
“I thought——” she began; but even as she spoke the deadly implication of all that this meant stopped her words in mid-utterance. She sat staring at Cousin Ann with her mouth open.
That young lady’s earliest playmate had been her father’s gamekeeper. Missy Sparrow-hawk the old man used to call her. Certainly no raptorial hoverer over the wintry fields knew better the exact moment wherein to drop from the sky.
“One has to face the means to a thing when one wants a thing,” said Cousin Ann. “You and I both care, I take it, for Rook’s happiness above everything else. And Rook’s real happiness, whatever he may say, is in carrying out his destiny. And his destiny, Netta, is in playing his part in life as his people have played it before him.”
The ex-actress from the Bristol Empire closed her mouth, lowered her eyelids till it almost seemed as if her eyes were shut, too, and gave an imperceptible nod of the head.
“Rook must have a son!” added the excited girl, clenching one of her hands and beating it upon her knee as if she were annihilating the very possibility of female Ashovers. “And we’ve got to manage it. You’ve got to manage it.”
What Netta was struggling to keep at that moment was the lovely vague impulse to do something wonderful and unexpected for Rook, some passionate effacement of herself, some act of desperate humility, that would bring him back to her in his thoughts, whatever became of her in reality.
The thought of something like that had been the last refuge of her weariness and her weakness. It had been a beautiful revenge upon them all and a complete escape from them all. But it was so difficult, when Cousin Ann talked in this way, to feel this any more. Cousin Ann made it seem as if she would be only tricking and fooling Rook. That was not at all what had been in her mind,
filling her with this vague secret exultation.
“You mean that I should go off without his knowing?”
Cousin Ann indicated that she did mean just exactly that.
“But he’d come after me. Oh, you don’t know him! You don’t know him at all! You think it all depends on how little he cares for me. It doesn’t depend on that! It depends on his own pride; on what he feels he has chosen to do, in defiance of everyone!”
Netta’s voice as she went on became more and more careless and confidential. It became like the voice of a dying person confessing half-forgotten sins to a stranger priest.
“He would follow me and find me out wherever I went. To get some job somewhere and hide away from him would be absolutely impossible. He’d find me out. Nothing would stop him. He’d just bring me back here—and—and——”
Cousin Ann remained completely oblivious of the ricochet of pride in the woman’s voice; pride that kept beating against her calm rational statement, like the wind against a beleaguered rampart.
“Don’t you understand what I mean?” said Netta almost crossly. And then a sudden smile of irony, irony deep and simple as the earth itself, passed over her haggard face.
“No!” repeated the other. “Tell me, quick! What would he do then?”
Netta looked her full in the face.
“He’d insist on marrying me then!” she said.
“Ah! he would, would he?” cried Cousin Ann, making an attempt to return Netta’s smile with appropriate playfulness.
The attempt was not a very successful one. The response hung in the wind a bit. For the pulse beat of a second the victory was with the late mistress of Major-General Caxton. For once in her proud hoverings Missy Sparrow-hawk blinked and swerved. That nuance of irony on her rival’s face became something she could not discount or deal with. For a couple of ticks of the great dining-room clock Lady Ann Poynings was no better than a baffled barbarian.
The result of this momentary defeat, however, was to add a fiercer momentum to her next stroke, which certainly did not miss its mark.
“Then there’s only one thing left for you to do if you’re serious in what you said just now.”
The strange illuminated look came back into Netta’s eyes.
“You mean—to do away with myself?” she whispered.
Lady Ann gave a spontaneous start of surprise at this. Among the various issues she had projected for her campaign, the suicide of her victim had, so far, taken no place.
“Good Lord, Netta Page! What must you think of me! Of course I wasn’t dreaming of horrors like that!”
Once more there came into the other’s countenance the same disconcerting smile.
“I don’t think you’d dream of anything for many nights,” she said. “But what is this one thing left, if it isn’t killing myself?”
Plumb-down, like a falling meteorite, came Missy Sparrow-hawk this time.
“A woman can always,” she whispered savagely, “kill the illusion which a man builds up about her or about himself in connection with her. And when that’s done, there is nothing left.”
The deadliness of this stroke was promptly proved by a curious case of obliteration. What was obliterated was the unearthly eagerness in Netta’s eyes; that exaltation which had carried their struggle to a level of emotion outside the scope of a winner of “scuts” and “pads” and “brushes.”
The look did not merely fade from Netta’s face; for that would imply a process. It sank and was extinguished. It went out. It disappeared as completely as the light in a ship’s stern disappears when the ship sinks into the sea trough.
“Nothing left but just disgust with the whole thing,” added Cousin Ann, driving the stroke home with ferocious finality. “They don’t hang on as we do, Netta Page. We’ve only to let ourselves drift and drop our form a bit and they’re off! They’re awfully fastidious, men are. You’d think sometimes that they’d never seen anything born or anything die!”
Netta’s face expressed a comprehension so bleak and stark that every vestige of beauty seemed frozen out of its haggardness.
“You mean that I should make him hate me?” she said humbly.
“I’m not dictating to you,” breathed the other, with a deep sigh of relief and leaning back in her chair. “It’s you who will have to do it. I’m not impertinent enough to suggest how it’s to be done. I only know, Netta, that if you don’t do just that, nothing that you do will make any difference.”
Why should it have happened that at that critical moment, in place of glancing at the gentle Sir Robert, Netta’s eyes fell upon the one unfrozen pane of the Elizabethan window, across which the lime tree stretched its branch? However it happened, the sight of that branch, motionless and benumbed in the leaden-coloured air reminded her of those drab wintry days when Florrie would bring back to their room from the Turk’s Head, hidden under her cloak, a bottle of Gordon’s gin.
She seemed actually to hear Florrie’s voice at that moment; and there was a branch across the frozen window there, too.
“You get quite like the other girls when you’re squiffy, Net!”
It was in that room that she had vowed to herself, one sickeningly gray morning, that she would never, never, never be “like the other girls” again!
She felt a sudden overpowering necessity to be quite alone. She felt that whatever happened it would be a heavenly relief, like the cessation of physical nausea, not to see Cousin Ann’s brightly flushed cheeks and clear gray eyes any more!
Rather stiffly, for the frost seemed to have got into her bones, she rose from her seat and stood quite still, looking straight down at her enemy.
Cousin Ann felt as though she were riding an unknown horse without spur or bridle or bit. She experienced a sense of abominable embarrassment. She felt as she had felt once when her father caught her stamping on a slowworm. She felt more clumsy than cruel, more thick-skinned than victorious. She felt a fool.
This feeling was not diminished when her rival gave her what seemed to resemble the melancholy shadow of an ironic curtsey. It remained when, with a movement that could not have been more dignified if it had been the exit of the betrayed crown prince, the friend of Florrie and Minnie bowed herself out into the empty hall.
CHAPTER VIII
NETTA never forgot the final hour of that Christmas Eve as she watched from their bed the figure of Rook standing in his dressing gown by the window. He was as one who reports to his companion from some solitary Childe Roland Tower the signs and portents of a world dark with mysterious travail throes.
So as not to chill her with the night air as she sat up erect in the bed, her brown hair hanging loose over each shoulder and her eyes big with her hidden purpose, he did not open the window, though he longed to do so; but since their only light was the last flicker of their fire, the great hollow spaces of the hushed midnight gave up their secret to him.
“There’s a thaw beginning,” he said, half turning toward the bed.
“Does that mean that it’ll rain to-morrow?” she asked in a low voice as if she were afraid of disturbing something, afraid of interrupting some deep dark purpose of nature, as sacred and hidden as her own.
“It means a white Christmas—that’s what it means,” replied the Squire of Ashover. “I can’t see one single star. Wait a moment! Cover yourself up, will you? And I’ll open the window.”
Netta obediently sank down on the pillow and pulled the bedclothes close under her chin. Lying warm and quiet there she closed her eyes. In spite of everything she felt strangely happy.
Rook opened the upper window sash and leaned out, inhaling great breaths of dark damp air.
“There are clouds over everything,’ he reported. “And they’re not rain clouds, Netta. I can smell the snow coming.”
“Can you really smell the snow?” whispered the woman; and as the night air swept in about her she, too, was conscious of an indescribable presence there in the great brooding spaces, a presence like that of some enormous
, formless, feathery body, the approach of which did actually send out some vague impalpable essence, recognizable by human senses—the smell of the snow!
Netta lay for several minutes in silence, giving herself up to this mysterious elemental process that was going on out there in the vast night.
Then suddenly she was conscious of a vague uneasiness. Why did not Rook close the window and come back into the room?
She raised her head. He was still leaning out, staring into the darkness, motionless as a sentinel, and she became conscious from the very pose of his head that he was absorbed in watching something or listening to something. Was he listening to the relaxing of the crust of the earth as it yielded to the thaw?
All at once he closed the window and turned round.
“Did you see anything?” she asked.
He looked at her in surprise. “How did you know?” he returned. And she saw by his face that he had received some kind of shock.
He came and sat down on the bed, taking the hand which she thrust out toward him.
“What was it, Rook?” she whispered.
He fixed her with his eyes, seeing her and yet not seeing her, like a man who is recreating in his mental vision some disturbing image.
“Rook!” she repeated, this time with real concern in her voice; “Rook! What did you see out there?”
His natural and somewhat morose humour came back into his eyes.
“There’s no point in making a secret of it,” he said. “There’s someone out there with a lantern, standing by the shrubbery, behind the trees. He moved off when I opened the window and slunk into the bushes. My dear, I don’t like it! It’s nearly midnight. Who the devil would be in our garden in the middle of the night?”
Netta drew away her hand and sat up very straight, staring at him with wide-open eyes.
“I believe I know who it is, Rook!” she cried excitedly. “It’s Corporal Dick! Pandie was rambling on just now about him. Oh, Rook, do you think he’s gone mad?”
Rook leapt to his feet and strode to the window.
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