“You’re lucky to be able to enjoy a day like this with a clear mind,” she said, looking Nell straight in the face with her formidable gray eyes. “You’re lucky to be free of any contact with our crazy family.”
“William is in Bishop’s Forley to-day,” murmured Mrs. Hastings.
“Perhaps he’ll be the one, then, to find our lost sheep and bring her back!” responded Lady Ann with a joyless laugh. “Rook drove over there hours ago,” she added.
Walking side by side the three women skirted the angle of the church wall and moved toward the gate leading to the road. They walked in silence, the old woman and the young woman on either side of the newcomer, whose personality seemed endowed at that moment with an immense passivity of weight and power, capable of reducing them both to the rôle of irrelevant supernumeraries.
The warm spring sunshine covered them, all three, with its fecund benediction, and gave to their silent association an almost biblical solemnity. It was as if they had been moving, in accordance with some preordained religious rite, from flower-strewn altar to flower-strewn altar! They seemed, all of them, relegated to subordinate yet essential parts in some vast mystery play, some vernal celebration, complicated and dumb, in honour of Persephone or her mother. The cawings of jackdaws, the chittering of sparrows, the harsh cries of a flock of starlings as they settled for a moment on the edge of the roof, did not disturb, any more than did the bleatings of some distant hurdled ewes, the almost supernatural seriousness with which those three figures moved to the entrance of the churchyard.
Were they subconsciously aware, just then, in that magnetic weather, of the invisible pressure of the countless spirits of the dead, rushing forward through the body of the half-formed nameless one, hid in the womb of a new mother of the generations, forward, forward, into the dim, uncreated future?
If it were so, if the sublime mystery of the continuity of human life, beautiful and terrible, withdrew from these three sensitive female frames on that fatal morning all power of individual resistance, all power of personal choice, it is easy enough to understand how it was that they moved so slowly toward the gate. Such is the clairvoyant link between all women in their knowledge of themselves as living channels between what was and is and is to come it is likely enough that the strange passivity that emanated from the nerves of one of them on this occasion passed insensibly into the nerves of the other two.
No sooner were they out of the consecrated enclosure, however, and on the sunlit road than the whole mental atmosphere about them changed.
“May I come with you as far as the bridle path?” said Nell. “I made up my mind this morning that I would go to Antiger Woods to look for primroses, and I think I shall still do that—unless,” she added with a gentle glance at Cousin Ann, “I can be of any help to any one?”
Rook’s wife and Rook’s mother exchanged a quick significant look.
“I think, my dear,” said the latter with a sudden sharp eagerness, “you may be of immense use to us a little later. If my son, for instance, succeeds in finding Miss Page, and brings her back here, as I’m afraid he’s only too likely to do, it would be a blessed relief to all of us if you could—perhaps—for just a few days—till other arrangements were made—take her in at the cottage?”
Nell was unable to prevent the blood rushing to her cheeks. Had this aunt-mother and this niece-daughter, with their merciless aristocratic gray eyes, sounded her heart’s secret to its uttermost depths? Were they bent upon punishing her for her temerity? Was this extraordinary suggestion their premeditated revenge?
“I am sure William and I will do everything we can to help you, Mrs. Ashover,” the girl answered gravely. “I only trust no harm has come to Netta. I can’t believe that she went to any of those dreadful places. I expect she just took the night train to Bristol. I know she’s got people she knows there. Or she may have gone to London.”
Mrs. Ashover had ceased to listen. A new thought had come into her mind.
“Will you walk back with us to the house, Nelly? There is something I’d be most grateful to you if you’d do for me. Something I want to send to Lexie.”
The girl permitted herself to be led prisoner by these two dominant spirits and they all three crossed the bridge.
A few minutes later Nell found herself waiting alone in the great chilly unused drawing room whose spacious ceremoniousness seemed to embrace and envelop her as if she were just one more primrose or crocus or snowdrop to be “arranged” in a slender glass vase.
Never did the room look more stately, in its gilt and its whiteness, in its water colours and French prints; but the young visitor felt an intense and increasing hostility to the whole atmosphere there, as if the great room were consciously emphasizing a sort of victory over her and over all the wayward romance she represented.
She moved to the mantelpiece and stood silently regarding a little gold-framed miniature of Rook’s father when a young child. The picture fascinated her by its resemblance to Rook, and a wave of overpowering pity for what she knew well enough he was going through during these agitated hours swept over her like a shivering ague fit.
The odd thing was, and she wondered at it herself, that she felt no anger, no bitterness against him. She longed to rise up against them all and do something—she knew not what—to clear his path for him; to make, as the Bible says, “his way smooth.” She felt glad that she was to be sent on a message to Lexie. She wondered how much Lexie had been told of all that was happening. Had Lady Ann found time to send him news of her marriage, news of Netta’s disappearance? What an irony if this “something” that she was to take to him were nothing less than this double-edged piece of overpowering intelligence!
She looked at the marble and gilt clock. It was already nearly one. Would she be forced to stay and eat lunch with this mother and this daughter?
The idea of such a thing was utterly repulsive to her. It would have been like eating with two judges while the executioner was at work upon the condemned!
A sudden sound of the opening and shutting of doors in the rear of the house made her stand transfixed on the faded hearthrug, her eyes hypnotized by its convoluted pattern, her ears listening, listening—— In a moment she lifted her head and made one irrepressible movement toward the door. She had heard a familiar voice outside, engaged in a hurried low-toned dialogue with Pandie. Then there came his step in the passage and the door of the drawing room was flung open.
Nell stared at him for a moment in speechless dismay. He might have served, save for his English clothes, for a picture of Hamlet rushing in upon Ophelia. His clothes were muddy and untidy, his boots unpolished, his chin unshaven, his eyes bloodshot and sunk deep in their sockets as if after many nights of sleeplessness.
He shut the door with studied precaution and fixed a long nervous look upon the girl as if expecting some angry outburst from her. Then, advancing a step or two, he threw down his hat and stick upon the rosewood table and looked wildly round him like a hunted criminal seeking sanctuary.
Nell’s paralyzed dismay melted into infinite tenderness when she saw how broken he was. She went straight up to him and threw her arms round his neck.
His face felt cold and clammy to her kiss, as if it had been something carved out of the pith of elder-wood, and the unshaven hairs upon his chin pricked her cheek.
“Hush,” he whispered nervously. “Hush, for God’s sake! They haven’t any idea that I’m here. They’re upstairs. Pandie told me you were alone. I’ve come back for money and my shaving things. Twiney’s waiting for me in the road. I wouldn’t let him drive up. Pandie’s gone to my room to get everything. She won’t breathe a word. So you mustn’t either, my sweet Nell! Oh! I shall find her; I shall find her; or never come back here again!”
The young girl released his neck but clung still to his shoulders, gazing up into his face.
“You will find her, Rook dear. I know you’ll find her! I never believed it for a moment when they said she’d gone to that dreadful
place.”
He took her hands gently from his shoulders and held her at arm’s length away from him. In his excitement the grip of his fingers was so powerful that he bruised her flesh.
“You don’t know what it is to feel as I feel, Nell,” he muttered huskily. “It’s like being a murderer.”
“It was not your fault, Rook darling,” she whispered. “It was not your fault. I know all about it. I saw it all happening; but what could I do? Oh, Rook, my dear, dear love, what could I do?”
“It’s like being a murderer, Nell,” he repeated, gripping her thin arms so tightly that she could not refrain from a little smothered cry. “It’s just as if I had deliberately killed her! And she was so good! Oh! Nell, I was all she had. And she was so dear and good!”
He loosed her arms and uttered a sigh that shook his bony frame to its centre.
“You will find her, Rook dear! You will find her!” the girl kept repeating; and then, feeling suddenly faint with the tension of this encounter, she sank down on one of the tall, embroidered, Louis Quatorze chairs, heart-shaped and gilded.
He fell on his knees at her side and taking her face in his hands kissed her pitifully and blindly. Under his kisses her colour came back and she leaned forward, her hands clasping his head.
“Rook, dear, dear Rook, you’ll find her!” she chanted, in a kind of crooning monotone, swaying a little as if rocking an infant. “You’ll find her, Rook. Have no fear! Something tells me that you and she will meet again.”
He rose to his feet and glanced nervously at the door.
“If I do, Nell,” he whispered, “you’ll be my friend, won’t you, and help me through with all this?”
She never knew what he really meant by this last appeal, for with a quick tap at the door Pandie put her head into the room and beckoned to him.
“I’m with you, Pandie,” he cried. “Good-bye, Nell!”
And before she had found the strength to get up from the rose-embroidered chair with the stiff gilded arms, he had got out of the room and the door was shut.
Once upon her feet she felt her normal strength coming back; and with that strength she felt a certain strange deep happiness stirring in her heart, a happiness that was different from the happiness she had experienced earlier that morning, and yet was not, it may be, altogether remote from that! She bent down over a great shallow vase of primroses that stood in the middle of the table where Rook had thrown his hat and stick, and she buried her face in those pale virginal blooms.
She approached the verge, as she inhaled that penetrating sweetness, of nothing less than the open secret which “many prophets and kings” have died without knowing, namely, that when love passes a certain subjective barrier and flows outward over the life of the person loved, it liberates itself for that moment at least from the sting that is “cruel as the grave.”
She was still smelling these flowers when Mrs. Ashover came in; carrying in her hand a folded note.
“Will you take this to Lexie for me, my dear?” she said. “I would have loved to keep you to lunch with us, but as you can see, everything is at sixes and sevens!”
For no reason at all except from an inherent and invincible capriciousness in the very texture of all terrestrial happenings, it was this silly phrase “sixes and sevens” rather than anything that any other human being had said to her that day that kept teasingly and mechanically forming itself upon her lips as she recrossed the two bridges over the river, on her way to be the first messenger to inform Lexie Ashover that his historic name was in less danger than it had been, two days ago, of disappearing altogether from the face of the earth!
CHAPTER XIV
EMERGING from the ex-priest’s house at Bishop’s Forley, the Reverend William Hastings, his head throbbing from the excitement of his metaphysical arguments with the German visitor, found himself walking, about six o’clock in the evening, through a street completely unknown to him in the poorer district of the rambling overcrowded town.
He had walked all the ten miles to the place that morning and when he left his confrères he announced his intention of walking all the way home; but the agitation of the arguments they had had in this singular meeting had left him so exhausted that he began to think he would give up all thought of getting back that night.
This point being settled he felt half inclined to return to his heretical colleague and ask for hospitality; but the memory of the wretchedly meagre quarters the man lived in, combined with a vision of the abnormal physical size of the foreign guest, made him shrink from such a step. He decided to dispatch a telegram to his wife and find a room in some lodging house or inn.
The hum and stir in his brain, reverberating and richocheting with dark and disturbing oracles, had driven him blindly on so far from the centre of the town that now, when he came to his senses and looked round for any sign of what he wanted, he found himself as much lost and confused as if he were in a completely strange country.
The sun had disappeared behind a bank of clouds, the edges of which wore that peculiar crimson zig-zag, so portentous and menacing, such as long ago the hawk-like eyes of Dante must have lit upon, as appropriate to the dusky walls of Dis!
This jagged torch flare in the west gave a yet more threatening and lurid aspect to the narrow poverty-stricken streets, abutting upon blackened sheds and upon desolate open spaces. There were shallow pools of rain water in some of these open spaces, pools whose metallic surface, livid and motionless, reflected this sunset glow.
Across the path of the sunset rose up certain dilapidated groups of melancholy and lamentable dwellings, from which a tall broken chimney here and a projected roof-corner there isolated themselves from their surroundings and stood out, black and ominous, against what looked like a vast bleeding wound in the ribs of the world.
Vaguely moving in the direction of the sunset, and falling back, as he went, so deeply into his wild cosmic speculations that he became oblivious of everything around him, it was not until he was right under the wall of a hideously recognizable building that he grew conscious once again of his human identity.
It was the Bishop’s Forley Workhouse which he now was skirting, feeling obscurely aggrieved, even as a philosopher, at the rubbish heaps and smouldering rubble mounds that made of this place a sort of Golgotha. One particular spot struck with a vibration of horror the tough nerves of this lover of Nothingness.
It was a sort of local potter’s field or pauper burying-ground, and it was entirely surrounded by iron railings some ten feet high. A fresh instalment of young nettles had come back with the coming of spring, but the old ones were there, too, interspersed with anonymous oblong mounds and with rusty tins and rain-drenched newspapers.
The look of the nettles between those tall iron railings presented itself to the mind of William Hastings in a sudden bleak objective light that was unusual with him. He stood still and stared in front of him.
On one side of the enclosure rose the blank wall of the Workhouse. There was only one iron-barred window in that forlorn expanse, and this window had caught from the afterglow in the western sky a certain greenish phosphorescent tint such as may be observed on the flesh of corpses.
On the other side of the enclosure were the roofless walls of a ruined factory: walls from which emanated that peculiar ghastliness of futility which only the work of men’s hands, when it has fallen into desuetude, is able to evoke.
What came over the mind of the heretic priest at that moment was a certain day, years and years ago, when, in the wretched playground of a second-rate preparatory school, he had watched a couple of his companions throwing handfuls of cinders taken from a galvanized iron ash bin at the body of a dead rat. He had been the laughing stock of the school even before that day for his inability to conform to their standards, but after that day his loathing for every aspect of youthful high spirits hardened into a misanthropic mania.
His mind recalled the loveliness of the country through which he had passed on his way to this town.
It recalled the elaborate patient defence of a certain “hope against hope” advocated by the man from Germany. And there arose in him a ferocious wish that he could take this abomination of desolation, standing here so real and tangible in the twilight, and plant it down among the gracious meadows and the plausible arguments, so that none should escape its terrible significance.
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps and he turned his back to the iron railings and waited, listening.
The steps came drifting along slowly, uneven spasmodic, shuffling, and stumbling. When they came round the corner by the ruined factory he saw that the figure bearing down upon him was that of a woman. She came up to him, muttering as she came, one hand dragging after her a torn umbrella and one clinging tenaciously to a black bag that swung half-open against her side.
When she reached him she stopped short and looked him straight in the face with a long, puzzled, half-understanding stare. Hastings knew her at once. His own mind was so wrought upon by what he had been feeling that it was with something less than a startled shock and yet something more than a casual comprehension that he recognized her and realized what her state implied.
“I’ve left that place—I’m never going back,” she said hurriedly; and then with a pitiable and almost infantile intonation: “You won’t tell them, will you? You won’t tell any one, will you?”
He sighed and made an awkward gesture as if shrugging his shoulders. The sight of her standing there with that wretched open bag and that trailing umbrella was something he had to deal with, to get into focus, to be drastic and practical about.
Like a slowly retreating wave, leaving only wisps of scattered spindrift behind it, to be blown at random hither and thither, his metaphysical thoughts fell back, fell away, displaying him, as the outside world generally found him, a quiet, self-controlled country priest.
What was this woman doing in the slums of Bishop’s Forley? And since he had encountered her there what did it behove him to do? For the flicker of a second his instinct was just to bolt, just to leave her as she was; but a kind of aloof, weary pity, mixed with the mechanical habit of his trade, kept him from such an extreme of callousness.
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