Pandie’s face got as red as her hair as she made this announcement. She looked at the gardener with austere gravity, as much as to say: “You see before you the possessor and revealer of all hidden things.”
But Mr. Twiney’s composure was unshaken. “I’ve a-known all that these last two days, maidie,” he replied, “and I’ve got somethink to tell ’ee what’ll make ’ee stare like an owl to hear of! I heard tell of it from our policeman when he was last round here. It seems that that old bitch-wife Betsy Cooper, what folks call a gippoo though she be no more a gippoo than I be, have moved her cart up from Bishop’s Forley to thik crossroad where Gorm Lane do meet Antiger Lane. ’Tis where the old bitch can snare all the rabbits she’ve a mind to and where there be a fresh-water spring. The place have naught to do with our Squire. All that belongs to he over thik way is that Antiger High Mead where I be to drive the Missus.”
Pandie’s face, which had been growing more and more downcast under this recital, which transferred the glory of knowledge from herself to Mr. Twiney, now brightened again.
“There be nothink in the move of a gippoo’s cart to make an ado over,” she murmured complacently.
“That’ll be all thee do know on’t,” retorted the gardener. “It’ll open your eyes a bit wider, me maidie, when I tell ’ee that Squire have gone and gived old Betsy two ten-pound notes for to clear out of thik lane; while she be biding where she be to get more from ’un! They say them innocents she do take money for be Squire John’s by-throws; seeing as how he was so smitten wi’ Nancy, what was their mother.”
Pandie did indeed open her eyes at this. She even became a little pale. She had more than once heard this legend about Nancy Cooper, but the idea of her master being actually compelled to hand money over to Nancy’s mother shocked and startled her feudal pride.
She opened her mouth to utter an indignant protest, when the voice of Martha from the scullery behind her put an abrupt end to the colloquy.
“Pandie, where be ’ee? Missus be ringing for you, Pandie!” And then in a tone intended to be heard across the currant bushes as far as Mr. Pod’s wheelbarrow: “What be come to ’ee, lass, that you go interrupting a man’s work like that? Come into house, lazy-bones! Come into house!”
While the family’s dependents were thus discussing affairs in the kitchen garden the new lady of the house was displaying signs of unusual agitation as she sat in her favourite place under the lime tree. The tree above her was in full blossom and the air hummed and murmured with the innumerable bees that hovered about it. All the sweetness of the early summer flowed in upon her senses, one little thing and then another bringing its own especial evocation of delicate memory. The sudden sound, and equally sudden cessation of sound, as a blue-bottle fly droned past her; the rich lazy movements of two tortoise-shell butterflies, the swifter flight of a great yellow brimstone butterfly; the gleam of the pearl-white blossoms of an elder bush in the shrubbery, held up like a cluster of filigreed chalices to catch the distilled quintessence of that golden morning; all these things and something beyond them all, something which might have been defined as the accumulated anonymous fragrance of all those flowers of the field that lack any definite scent and yet from their very number must fling some sort of essence of themselves upon the air, such as buttercups and moon daisies, flowed in upon the mind of Cousin Ann and blended themselves with her troubled thoughts.
Every now and then she would cast a nervous glance at the three windows of Mrs. Ashover’s boudoir; windows which projected from the eaves of the house, above the level of her own and her husband’s more spacious bedrooms. She seemed to shrink from the idea that the old lady was aware of the agitated state of her mind, to shrink from the thought of that erect little figure watching her inquisitively, anxiously, from one of those three windows!
She kept rising from her seat under the tree and making little impatient excursions, first to one flower bed and then to another, as if to assure herself that the green stalks of this or that plant of the later summer had not blossomed into sudden miraculous bloom. What a rush of turbulent thoughts whirled that morning through Lady Ann’s brain! What troubled her most through it all was the agitating change that seemed to have taken place in her own nature. She had always regarded herself as being “in love” with her cousin; but, as she looked back on those early days of her association with him, the feelings she had then, compared with what she suffered from now, seemed a mere girlish fancy.
She would have supposed, from her own abrupt and straight-cut psychological insight, that the condition of being pregnant would have completely saved her from this miserable infatuation. She would have predicted, had the case been that of another woman, that the new interest, the looking forward to a new life, would have detached her from the child’s father, numbed her emotional nerves, lulled her into a kind of lethargic trance and nourished her upon vague, sweet, half-animal dreams.
Nothing of the kind! She found herself wretchedly and shamefully in love with her husband, torn by the most humiliating of all forms of jealousy, jealousy for a rival whose personality she despised and whose existence had melted into air and become nothing.
She was jealous of a ghost, of a shadow, of a memory, of an unreal image conceived by pity and begotten by insane remorse.
Every incident in her new life with Rook hurt her to the inmost nerve of her. personal pride. It was humiliating that he refused to share her room. It was gall and wormwood to her to see him day by day so submerged by his own fixed idea that he went to and fro like a man in a trance, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, noticing nothing; taking not the least interest in any of her projects, taking no interest at all in this child of theirs which was now so emphatically beginning to manifest its presence. She had broken down under the strain once or twice; and, as Pandie alone in that household knew, there had been some terrible and lacerating scenes between them.
But on the whole she had just suffered in silence; and she was at least thankful that the sagacious old mother remained, as far as she was able to detect, completely oblivious of what was going on.
What was preying on her nerves at that particular moment was not, as it happened, connected with Netta at all. It was connected with Nell. Rook that morning had carelessly announced that he had been invited to lunch at Toll-Pike Cottage. Well! There was nothing but what was perfectly natural in that! It was only by pure accident that she had that very morning, about half an hour ago, caught sight of William Hastings, mounted on his bicycle, riding at a steady speed in the direction of Bishop’s Forley.
He might of course have been on his way to visit some outlying districts of their own estate. He might easily have been running over to Antiger Lane to call upon Mrs. Drool, to buy honey or eggs from her, or because Binnory had got into some trouble. At the thought of Binnory she instinctively shuddered, remembering the experiences of her wedding day. Her nerves were all jangled that fine June morning. The chances were surely all against the man’s having set out on so long a ride.
And yet were they?
It was unusual for Hastings to go visiting in the morning. He generally wrote in the morning and went his rounds in the afternoon. Besides, Ann knew that he had a philosophical colleague in that squalid town.
She wished she could remember what the reply had been to Mrs. Ashover’s invitation, asking the vicar and his wife to picnic with them in Antiger High Mead. Had Nell Hastings accepted for them both or only for herself?
The abnormal condition of Ann’s nerves was proved by the fact that she actually got up now with the intention of going straight to Mrs. Ashover’s room to satisfy her mind on this point; and then, no sooner had she reached the front door than she felt so invincible a repugnance at the thought of encountering the old lady that she reversed her steps and came hurriedly back to the shelter of the lime tree.
She had “The Bride of Lammermoor” with her in the old Ballantyne edition; but in vain she tried to forget the sting of her trouble in following the proud grie
fs of the unhappy Ravenswood! All she could do was to gaze absentmindedly on those quaint illustrations; too abstracted even to brush away the little ivory-coloured yellow-stamened blossoms that kept falling on the open pages.
The uncertainty of it all was the thing that seemed to hurt her most. She visualized the thin harassed face of Rook, as she had seen it that morning, as he perfunctorily kissed her cheek, preparatory to setting out on some too-long-delayed piece of business connected with his property. He had been growing steadily thinner, steadily sadder and quieter, ever since his marriage. He was invariably kind and considerate to her. The only violent scenes they had were scenes deliberately and wantonly brought on by herself in the irritation of her nerves.
Over and over again she had told herself to wait till the birth of her child. Then, surely, if it were a son—and she had made up her mind that it would be a son—Rook’s interest in her, in life, in everything would come back!
All would be well if only this poisonous stabbing of jealousy would cease.
What a thing jealousy was!
It was like an actual sharp thorn pressing into her flesh; a thorn through which a little rankling stream of fermenting poison ran like a corrosive acid through her secretest veins.
Cousin Ann smiled bitterly and miserably with her beautiful full lips. How she would have mocked at herself half a year ago! How she would have sworn that such emotion as this was nothing but a silly female affectation! It was like a definite material malady. She could almost localize it; as if it were a malignant growth within her physical frame, counteracting with its persistent throb the sweet lethargy of pregnancy.
The thing was made worse for her—though she herself was unconscious of this—by the innate primitiveness of her nature. With all her social breeding Ann Gore was essentially an unsophisticated, natural, savagely simple creature of earth. Rook’s ingrained cerebralism, those dehumanized ponderings upon life, into which he used to fall, even in the early days of their companionship, had never so much as penetrated the outer surface of her smooth feline skin.
But it was this uncertainty that maddened her most!
Was Rook unfaithful to her with this funny-looking little clergyman’s wife, as well as with the ghost, the phantasm, the wraith of Netta?
She had felt so confident that if once she got hold of him, in complete intimacy, the spirit of her youth, her vitality, her strength would soon put an end to these aimless philanderings!
But there had been no intimacy! The ghost of Netta stood unappeased upon their bridal threshold holding them apart. And kept like this at a distance from him, all that was most formidable in her, the beauty and power of her body, the pathos of her pregnancy, the resilience of her spirit, remained unused, unexerted, disallowed.
She was like a strong and beautiful plant cut off from water and sunshine by some invisible yet insurmountable barrier.
The uncertainty, the miserable uncertainty! It was becoming more than she could bear. With a resolute movement, more obstinate than any she had yet made, she rose now from that sun-warmed seat, adjusted her summer hat, pulled her embroidered smock smoothly down over her rounded hips, picked up her long-handled parasol, and started off toward the entrance of the garden.
She emerged into the road and, with slow deliberate steps, without hurry or hesitation, proceeded to cross the bridge.
All that enchanted summer landscape quivered and vibrated around her in an air that was almost windless. The tall grasses of the ditches and hedges seemed like undulating ripples in a vast umbrageous sea, of which the deep-grassed hayfields, full of buttercups and red-stalked sorrel and white daisies, were the untraversed ocean floor, and the hills and copses and orchards the spray-flecked waves!
The Frome itself flowed high and strong that day between its banks, where tarnished marigold stalks and freshly sprouting rushes gave to the muddy roots of willow and alder the dignity of microscopic African swamps, with newts for alligators and tiny green frogs for hippopotami.
The fecundity of summer filled every little hollow and crevice in those banks with infinitesimal growths, nameless except to botanists, many of them the embryonic sproutings of plants destined to wait a couple of months, or even longer, for their time of flowering.
Crossing the bridge and following the familiar road, now white and dusty between its uncut grass borders, Lady Ann walked forward with a firmer, surer pace. She used her red parasol as a walking stick. Her summer hat, with a cluster of tulips beneath its wide brim, was held high and straight on her proud young head. Her mind, as she walked, was not oblivious of the singing of at least three invisible skylarks, out of a sky as blue as a Della Robbia plaque; and in the vigour of her youth, even against her conscious mood, her senses began to respond to the jocund pulse beat of a prodigal, lavish, irrepressible countryside!
It was about half-past twelve when she arrived at the wooden bridge near the sheep-washing pool which marked the halfway point between Ashover Church and Ashover village. Just beyond this bridge, on the side of the road opposite to the water meadows, there was a little field path which mounted slowly, through a couple of green barley fields, to the rough open country below the northern extremity of Heron’s Ridge.
Cousin Ann climbed over the stile leading to this path and began slowly ascending the incline between the divided masses of immature green stalks. Skylarks trilled and trilled above her head, one song blending with another song in that peculiar timeless ecstasy which seems to have more in common with the scarlets and blues of some great Venetian picture than with any musical instrument.
She had crossed the first barley field and had reached a thickset hedge which was now a mass of new leafage mingled with a weight of dim, half-faded hawthorn blossoms. She turned to her right at this point and moving slowly through the feathery grasses between the green barley and the hedgerow advanced to a spot on that sloping hill from which she could look straight down to the back entrance to Toll-Pike Cottage.
All the wide stretch of the Frome valley lay before her, green and lovely in the quivering translucent noon heat of that summer day. Out of the level plain of the brook meadows the familiar outlines of the church and its gravestones stood like a reef of gray rocks in a green halcyon sea.
Between the excited woman and the mysterious power emanating from the mortality of that place there was a formidable and strange correspondence—a correspondence that did not rise to the level of the girl’s mental consciousness, but affected her, none the less, and strengthened, so to speak, the despotism and magnetism of her will. Lady Ann had all the Ashover dead behind her; supporting her, sustaining her, protecting her; as if she were a faithful seaworthy ship into whose care they had entrusted their last forlorn hope.
The kitchen door of Toll-Pike Cottage stood wide open and from where she stood she fancied she could detect the form of Nell’s enormous tabby cat asleep on the sun-warmed threshold.
She hesitated a little now; not for any emotional reason, but because her instinct as a landowner’s daughter relucted at the notion of crossing a field of corn that was already ankle-high.
She moved on a few hundred yards, searching for the faintest vestige of a path. The brown mould as she continued to thrust her parasol between those spears of diaphanous green was not yet so devoid of moisture as not to emit its own peculiar smell—the smell of the actual flesh of the earth—which mingled so naturally with the sharp sour scent of the growing stalks. In spite of the obstinate anger in her heart which was driving her forward, her whole physical being found itself responding to that immemorial contact, the contact of a woman who has conceived, with that which conceives and brings forth all life.
Suddenly her spirits rose in triumph. There was a little path!
From a gap in the hedge, evidently an ancient secretive way, for the sticks that had been twisted across it had burst into leaf, right down to Nell’s very door, ran a narrow ribbon of brown soil dividing the expanse of barley.
Lady Ann hurried down this path, her s
kirts swishing against the growing corn, her parasol grasped tightly in her hand. The back door of the house was wide open and Nell’s great cat, the Marquis of Carabas, was fast asleep on the threshold. Cousin Ann with noiseless fingers unhooked a little wire gate which was there, and stepping over the ridges of William Hastings’s potatoes, approached the door.
The thrill of action, of any kind of action, had so quickened the pulses of her energetic spirit that, strange though it may sound, she felt happier at that moment than she had actually felt since she came back from Tollminster on her wedding night. A situation that would have appalled a different type of woman seemed to rouse some ancestral fighting spirit in Cousin Ann; seemed, in fact, to assuage, with a sort of sporting or hunting recklessness, the lodged and rooted trouble within her….
What was that?
She paused, listening, one hand pressed against the lintel of the door; the other stroking the Marquis with her parasol, as he rubbed his back against her ankles.
From within the little front dining room came the sound of the arranging of knives and forks, of plates and glasses; a sound which conveyed instantaneously to Cousin Ann’s mind the fact that whoever they might be who were to partake of that meal, the meal itself was not ready.
And then, all suddenly, she heard Nell begin to sing as she put the finishing touches to her luncheon table. She sang the famous song of the exiled courtier in “As You Like It”:
Who doth ambition shun
And loves to live i’ the sun,
Seeking the food he eats,
And pleased with what he gets,
Come hither, come hither, come hither
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.
The girl had no power of voice and no very good ear. She sang in a careless and irresponsible way, but the jealous heart of the listener did not fail to catch the strain of thrilling feminine happiness that underlay the notes of the old song.
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