There was no more real conversation between them during the light supper which Nell now brought in upon a tray; but as soon as the visitor had retired to her attic bedroom her hosts exchanged their impressions.
“I don’t believe she’s drinking any more,” said Nell. “That’s the great thing to be thankful for.”
Hastings shook his head.
“And yet there’s something queer about her,” the girl went on, “that scares me somehow. Did you notice it? A sort of unnatural quietness?”
Hastings nodded
“Of course, she always was quiet,” Nell continued, “and very likely we’ve forgotten how quiet she was. But I can’t help feeling it’s more serious than that. I don’t know what to make of it! She talks naturally enough and listens to what you say. But one has the feeling all the time that her mind is only half in the room with you.”
Nell rubbed her face violently with her hands; an habitual gesture with her when she was cornered and bewildered.
“She frightens me!” she burst out. “You don’t suppose she’s taken to drugs, do you, William?”
He shook his head.
“She seemed to realize about Lady Ann’s child,” the girl added, “without being told. I couldn’t stop Twiney talking about it. But it didn’t seem news to her. Perhaps she’d heard about it on the journey. Twiney said, by the way, that Pandie had told him that the child might be born any day now!”
Hastings protruded his under-lip in the manner characteristic of him when any of his manias were touched upon, “It would not trouble me very much,” he said grimly, “if after all this fuss it turned out to be a girl!”
The unwitting cause of this midnight discussion in Toll-Pike Cottage lay awake in her attic bed long after her hosts had wandered off into the paths of sleep.
Strange enough was it to find herself once more on the banks of the Frome! Strange and, in a sense that she was not able herself to analyze, sad with a sadness beyond anything she had ever known.
Vainly she tried to envisage what form her reëncounter with Rook would take. As she watched the rolling banks of whitish-yellow clouds crossing and recrossing that sickly, shapeless object, so distorted, so disfigured, that she knew to be the waning moon, a very curious and disturbing mental experience took possession of her. She had the feeling that some great passage of time had elapsed, some half-century of the journeying years, and that she alone of all the people she had known in Ashover was alive on that September night. She felt vividly conscious of being a solitary disembodied spirit, without desire, without hope, without regret, without any faintest wish to change anything or to alter anything; indeed, with no emotion at all except an infinite sadness.
Why she should be so sad she could not tell. Rook, Lexie, Hastings, Nell, Lady Ann—were they not all lying in absolute quiescence in that enclosure by the water meadows? A new race of men and women filled their places, who cared nothing for them, nothing for their memories, nothing for their names!
Her mind seemed to revert, with a cold, responsive weariness, to the inscrutable melancholy that used to puzzle her upon the face of Sir Robert; and it seemed to her, as she watched that bulging, unhappy, deformed moon, cringing before the clouds, that she now understood the secret of his sadness. It was a sadness that only a certain type of sentiency in this world ever responded to or touched the fringe of, a sadness that had something to do with what the undying elements must feel—the earth, the air, the water—as they submit in their patience to the eternal process; and watch the human generations coming and going and leaving behind so faint a trace!
And then, without any warning, a queer thing happened to Netta Page. She grew suddenly conscious that an actual human face was peering in upon her from outside the window; not pressing itself against the window pane, but regarding her with fixed intentness out of that heart-sick moonlight, its eyes looking straight into her eyes with an expression in them that gathered up and held in suspense the diffused woefulness that filled the great sky tent.
Long years afterward Netta could recall that look. And the curious thing about it was that she never hesitated as to the identity that hovered behind it, out there, in the sick, gusty night!
She knew it for the face of Sir Robert Ashover; and so deep an impression had that portrait of the Cavalier made upon her mind that even now, as she felt a vivid consciousness of his actual presence, it was with no trace of fear but rather with a sort of emotional recognition that she met his gaze. Hardly conscious of what she did she stretched out her arms toward the window; and it seemed to her as if that sorrowful phantom countenance smiled gently and reassuringly at her as it faded away.
When it was gone and she was once more lying back upon her pillow she found herself silently crying; not with bitter self-pitying tears, but with the sort of tears that belong to the winnowed and de-personalized spirit of the human race itself as it draws back from the confused arena of its sufferings and catches the sounds of disaster and calamity, faint and muffled, and almost mellowed as they rise up above the roof tops of the world.
She made up her mind that when she did meet Rook on the ensuing day she would make him take her into the church, to that marble image of the Cavalier there! How strange it was, she thought, as her tears dried upon her cheeks, that the mind of a person dead and buried more than two hundred years should still retain its power to influence and to console! Was it that something actually survived, of such a person’s subtler, more sensitive consciousness, among the places where it had moved in its lifetime? Or was there, behind all the dream stuff of the whole tragic scene, some imperishable cistern or reservoir of superhuman pity into which these nobler, these more imaginative responses sank, as the years moved round, adding always something to this great protest?
Netta’s nature was too simple, her beliefs and half-beliefs too vague and unformed, to be conscious of more than the crudest outlines of these open questions; but the things she had suffered and the things she had done, combined with the pressure upon her mind of her return to a place of so many memories, stirred up within her thoughts and speculations corresponding with these and corresponding with that troubled night sky.
The face at her window may have been a creation of her over-excited nerves; but before she fell asleep at last, in the early dawn, she had immersed all the recent impressions of her London life in these earlier associations; associations saturated with the sights and sounds of the country, and full of a sadness that was more wistful, if not less bruising, than the kind of wretchedness she had superimposed upon it.
The faint light of the dawn as it filled the small attic window with a cold, pale, watery blueness, like the blueness of polished steel, merged with the great concentrated secret thought which had been sustaining her all that agitating day.
She dreaded her meeting with Rook more for his sake than for her own. What would his reaction be to what she had to make him understand? Why, oh, why, she thought, did things that were so clear, so simple, so indisputable, to one human mind, become so strange, so foreign, so insane, when communicated to another?
With something more than the hard bones of ivory skulls were human beings divided, each from each! And she flung out against the pallid, bluish dawn a last desperate prayer that that particular queer-shaped skull that had so often lain by her side should not prove impervious to what she had to communicate to the consciousness within it!
CHAPTER XXIII
IT WAS the last day of September. The Ashover brothers were seated side by side under Lexie’s elm tree in the churchyard, the back of the younger propped up against the trunk, that of the elder against an anonymous tombstone.
The day was misty and warm. The early afternoon shadows had that purplish haze and dew-wet mistiness over their dark outlines on the grass which dwellers in the west of England have long learnt to associate with the red berries of traveller’s joy and the white clusters of old-man’s-beard! It was one of those days when the filmy seeds of dandelions move at random, without
the stirring of a breath, from resting place to resting place; when the purple tufts of knapweed reveal the hard globulous husk below the petals; when the ragwort droops heavily over the mole heaps; when the dominant odour upon the air seems to be a blending of burning weeds and rain-soaked funguses.
“Are you sure she told you all she told me?” Rook was saying, in a voice that seemed as if it might have been the very epitome of that autumnal season, so languid and spiritless did it sound.
“Good Lord, Rook! How can I tell what she told you?” rapped out the other. “The thing is clear enough, anyhow. Those Anglican fathers must have got hold of her soon after she disappeared. She’s had more than six months of their confounded chatter. The wonder is that they haven’t spoilt her more than they have. You know what I’m like over these things; how tough and hard to be fooled I am? And though I can’t forgive them for putting their nonsense into the mind of a sweet creature like that, I have to admit that it’s the genuine thing with her. And I expect, too, it has given her a new interest.” He paused and frowned meditatively. “I expect it’s been for the best, Rook,” he added gravely.
“Did she say anything to you about wanting to join some order?” asked the elder brother.
“She mentioned it as a possibility. But as far as I could make out, these Fathers, whoever they are, weren’t encouraging it. I suppose they want her for other purposes. Oh, I don’t like it—I don’t like it, Rook!”
Rook recalled his own recent talk with Netta in Toll-Pike Cottage; and he also felt that he “didn’t like it.” Indeed, that was putting what he had gone through during that interview very much too mildly.
The encounter had been to him like a draught of coloquintida. It had been one of the master ironies of his life. He had rushed to greet his former mistress with an exultant sense of reconciliation and recovery. He had met her with a glowing wave of tenderness; and then in place of the answering tide of renewed loyalty, in place of the clinging and pathetic affection he had expected, he had been received by a completely different Netta; a Netta who treated their former life as if it had been sin; a Netta who took it for granted that thenceforth to the end of his days he was going to be faithful to Lady Ann!
The situation had been made doubly ironical by the fact that it had been impossible to conceal from his wife that the girl had come back. He had brought the news out boldly and frankly and there had been a distressing scene between them about it; a scene that had been repeated afterward with even more unpleasant nuances of misunderstanding when he had tried to explain the new and unexpected attitude toward him in which his mistress had returned.
Ann had never been more hard, more unyielding, more brutally cynical. She took the line, or pretended to take the line, that the whole thing was an elaborate pretence or pose on Netta’s part. She treated him as if he were a clumsy and conceited victim of a masterpiece of calculated cajolery from an astute adventuress. She flatly refused to see Netta or to listen to any further explanations of her return. “C’est fini! C’est fini!” she had said with a wave of her hand when he brought the matter up for the third time.
“I saw Nell yesterday for a moment——”
Rook’s thoughts had been wandering so far that he felt as if these words of his brother’s had been spoken hours ago instead of a minute since.
“It was Nell who got her address out of him and wired to her to come,” said Rook. “Just think of it! It seems difficult to believe that all these things have happened since you and I talked in this very place last November.”
“That great full moon!” responded the other. “And I thought I shouldn’t last out to the end of the summer; and here we are nearly in October! God! I’m glad to be still alive in this world; able to eat a tasty bit of pigeon pie as well as another; and to bustle over for a bit of back-chat with brother Rook of a fine autumn afternoon! By the way, Twickenham maintains that I must be getting a mania for morphia. He says I finished my last box a couple of weeks too soon!”
The elder Ashover’s fingers instinctively pressed a little cardboard object in his waistcoat pocket; but all he said was: “I hope you’ll need those things less and less as time goes on.”
“I’ve had to go a bit slow on cigarettes this last month,” remarked Lexie, striking a match and lighting one as he spoke with more than his usual deliberation. “My bill with Twiney was terrible, as you may imagine,” he added, watching the heavy-scented circles of smoke ascend into the thick autumnal air.
Rook glanced at him with sardonic solicitude. “I could just manage to lend you five or six pounds,” he muttered, “but of course it’s really Lady Ann’s money.”
“Oh, I shall get on,” chuckled the other. “You’ll want every penny you’ve got when this child of hers appears. Have you decided upon a nurse yet?”
Rook sighed heavily and looked away over the familiar water meadows, over that level plain of grass and reeds which had been so often “a bank and shoal of time “for his mind’s escape. There came over him a grievous sense of being divided from his brother as they had never been divided before. This new responsibility, even if it were his wife’s money that dealt with the material side of it, was something that in a subtle and invisible manner ended his old bachelor association with Lexie. His life with Netta had not impinged upon that at all; had been, in fact, only a more extravagant case of the amorous adventures that in the old days had consolidated their friendship, giving it that heathen predatory touch which adds quality and piquancy and substance, as if they were fellow huntsmen in the same perilous jungle! But this allusion to the nurse of his child, carrying the implication that thenceforward he was bound up with deep traditional issues independent of Lexie altogether, seemed to signify the definite end of something and the definite beginning of something else, seemed to stand out like a great ambiguous signpost in his days—like that obscure “Gorm” signpost; meaning nothing, yet meaning everything!
He looked at Lexie’s face as the younger man puffed out those spirals of blue smoke into an air that was thick with diffused colour, like the palette of some planetary Tiepolo; and it came over him that the real mistake of his life was in having departed, one stone’s throw, from the calm epicurean existence of those first years after their father’s death.
What had made him depart from that unruffled backwater, that earthly paradise of equanimity? Well! Just his viciousness; just that desire to round off his life with some feminine person or other who would satisfy those insatiable instincts that in the nature of the case his brother could not satisfy!
Oh! Could he only have foreseen, could he only have foreseen!—If he’d been tough and hard and callous he would have been able to whistle them all down the wind. In that case he would have made love to Ann and kept her at a distance; love to Nell and kept her at a distance; love to Netta and kept her at a distance! It was this fatal mixture in him of viciousness and pitiful sympathy that had ruined his life.
For his life was ruined. He knew that as definitely as if he had seen himself like a dead horse in a field, with Lady Ann and her beautiful offspring battening upon his flesh like two resplendent-winged dragon-flies!
Another person would have considered him the fortunate possessor of a distinguished wife and—he felt sure it would be so—of a distinguished heir to his name. Outwardly, at this moment, especially now that Netta was off his conscience and independent of him, he was a man any one might reasonably envy. Yet here he was, looking yearningly at Lexie’s seamed and weather-stained face, as he might have looked his last at some lovely enchanted island from which a fatal vessel was irrevocably bearing him away!
Ay! Ay! A human being’s life was not a thing of outward possessions, of outward circumstances. It was a thing of a certain secret abiding life illusion, that must be in some measure satisfied or all was lost! His life illusion implied his freedom from every sort of responsibility, except the responsibility of being a good son and a good brother. He was a man born to make women unhappy if he so much as approached
them! And yet, how not to approach them, being obsessed, as he was, with this insane impersonal desire? What a dilemma! Why wasn’t it possible to have love affairs with trees, with the elements, as those old classical personages used to have?
Oh, how intensely he loved his brother as he looked at him now! If only he could have exchanged with Lexie; he to be the sick one, the doomed one, and Lexie to be the husband of Lady Ann!
“How did Twickenham say you were when he examined you yesterday?” he asked at length, bringing to an end his prolonged melancholy silence.
“Oh, I thought I’d told you,” replied Lexie eagerly. “He was very pleased—really surprised, you know! He seemed to indicate that I might go on quite comfortably through another year. My peculiar trouble seems to lend itself to these prolongations and postponements. And in my own secret mind—though I don’t want to say the words—I have a sort of instinct that if I do last out one other year, it’ll be damnably hard to unloose my hold upon life!”
Rook looked at him with infinite sympathy. He looked at the enormous size of Lexie’s head, at the depths below depths of life energy in his glaucous coloured eyes, at the sweet, rich; almost feminine curves of his sensitive mouth.
“Lexie,” he began, and stopped suddenly.
“Well, Rook, what is it?”
“I oughtn’t to say a thing like that, I suppose. It’s one of those absolutely outrageous things that Nature lets people think, but that no decent person could possibly bring himself to say!”
“What is it? What is it, Rook?”
“Well, I was just thinking how many lives I would offer up, and whose lives, if the gods would make me absolutely assured that yours would go on for thirty more years!”
Lexie threw away his cigarette and made a face at him. “I wouldn’t have the least objection to this holocaust of yours if I didn’t know for a certainty that, no sooner had you done it you’d begin regretting it! You’re a funny person and I doubt if you realize how far your queerness goes.”
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