“Not at all, not at all,” argued Sorio, stretching out his long, lean arms and grasping the back of a chair. “The Doctor can deny it or not, as he pleases, but what I say is perfectly true. He gets a cosmic ecstasy from moving his head up and down like that. He feels as if he were the centre of the universe when he does it.”
The Doctor looked sideways and then upon the ground. Sorio’s rudeness evidently disconcerted him.
“I think,” he said, rising from his chair and putting down his glass, “I must be going now. I’ve an early call to make to-morrow morning.”
Baltazar cast a reproachful look at Adrian and rose too. They went into the hall together and the same shufflings and heavy breathings came to the ears of the listener as on Raughty’s arrival. The Doctor was putting on his goloshes and gaiters.
Adrian went out to see him off and, as if to make up for his bad behaviour, walked with him across the green, to his house in the main street. They parted at last, the best of good friends, but Sorio found Baltazar seriously provoked when he returned.
“Why did you treat him like that?” the latter persisted. “You’ve got no grudge against him, have you? It was just your silly fashion of getting even with things in general, eh? Your nice little habit of venting your bad temper on the most harmless person within reach?”
Sorio stared blankly at his friend. It was unusual for Mr. Stork to express himself so strongly.
“I’m sorry, my dear, very sorry,” muttered the accused man, looking remorsefully at the Doctor’s empty glass and plate.
“You may well be,” rejoined the other. “The one thing I can’t stand is this sort of social lapse. It’s unpardonable—unpardonable! Besides, it’s childish. Hit out by all means when there’s reason for it or you’re dealing with some scurvy dog who needs suppressing but to make a sensitive person like Fingal uncomfortable, out of a pure spirit of bullying—it’s damnable!”
“I’m sorry, Tassar,” repeated the other meekly. “I can’t think why I did it. He’s certainly a charming person. I’ll make up to him, my dear. I’ll be gentle as a lamb when I see him next.”
Baltazar smiled and made a humorous and hopeless gesture with his hands. “We shall see,” he said, “we shall see.”
He locked the door and lit a couple of candles with ritualistic deliberation. “Turn out the lamp, amico mio, and let us sleep on all this. The best way of choosing between two loves is to say one’s prayers and go to bed. These things decide themselves in dreams.”
“In dreams,” repeated the other, submissively following him upstairs, “in dreams. But I wish I knew why the Doctor’s ankles look so thick when he sits down. He must wear extraordinary under-clothes.”
VI
BRIDGE-HEAD AND WITHY-BED
PHILIPPA RENSHAW’S light-spoken words about Linda recurred more than once to the mind of the master of Oakguard as April gave place to May and May itself began to slip by. The wet fields and stunted woods of Rodmoor seemed at that time to be making a conscious and almost human effort to throw off the repressive influence of the sea and to respond to the kindlier weather. The grasses began to grow high and feathery by the roadside, and in the water-meadows, buttercups superseded marigolds.
As he went to and fro between his house and his office in Mundham, Brand—though he made as yet no attempt to see her—became more and more preoccupied with the idea of the young girl. That terror of the sea in the little unknown touched, as his sister well knew it would, something strangely deep-rooted in his nature. His ancestors had lived so long in this place that there had come to exist between the man’s inmost being and the voracious tides which year by year devoured the land he owned, an obstinate reciprocity of mood and feeling. That a young and fragile intruder should have this morbid fear of the very element which half-consciously he assimilated to himself, gave him a subtle and sullen exultation. The thing promised to become a sort of perverted link between them, and he pleased himself by fancying, even while, in fear of disillusionment, he kept putting off their encounter, that the girl herself could not be quite free of some sort of premonition of what awaited her.
Thus it happened that Philippa Renshaw’s stroke in her own defence worked precisely as she had anticipated. Brooding, in his slow tenacious way, as the weeks went by, upon this singular projection of his imagination, he let his sister do what she chose, feeling assured that in her pride of race, she would not seriously commit herself with a nameless foreigner, and promising himself to end the business with a drastic hand as soon as it suited him to do so.
It was about the middle of May when an event took place which gave the affair a decisive and fatal impulse. This was a chance encounter, upon the bridge crossing the Loon, between Brand and Rachel Doorm. He would have passed her even then without recognition, but she stopped him and held out her hand.
“Don’t you remember me, Mr. Renshaw?” she said.
He removed his hat, displaying his closely cropped reddish head with its abnormal upward slope, and regarded her smilingly.
“You’ve changed, Miss Rachel,” he remarked, “but your voice is the same. They told me you were here. I knew we should meet sooner or later.”
“Put on your hat, Mr. Renshaw,” she said, seating herself on a little stone bench below the parapet and making room for him at her side. “I knew, too, that we should meet. It’s a long time from those days—isn’t it?—a long time, and a dark one for some of us. Do you remember when you were a child, how you asked me once why they called this place the New Bridge, when it’s obviously so very old? Do you remember that, Mr. Renshaw?”
He looked at her curiously, screwing up his eyes and wrinkling his forehead. “My mother told me you’d come back,” he muttered. “She was always fond of you. She used to hope—well, you know what I mean.”
“That I’d marry Captain Herrick?” Miss Doorm threw in. “Don’t be afraid to say it. The dead can’t hear us and except the dead, there’s none who cares. Yes, she hoped that, and schemed for it, too, dear soul. But it was not to be, Mr. Renshaw. Ellie Story was prettier. Ellie Story was cleverer. And so it happened. The bitter thing was that he swore an oath to Mary before she died, swore it on the head of my darling Nance, that if he did ever marry again, I should be the one. Mary died thinking that certain. Anything else would have hurt her to the heart. I know that well enough; for she and I, Mr. Renshaw, as your mother could tell you, were more than sisters.”
“I thought you and Linda’s mother were friends, too,” observed Brand, looking with a certain dreamy absorption up the straight white road that led to the Doorm house. The mental fantasies the man had woven round the name he now uttered for the first time in his life had so vivid a meaning for him that he let pass unnoticed the spasm of vindictiveness that convulsed his companion’s face.
Rachel Doorm folded her arms across her lean bosom and flung back her head.
“Ellie was afraid of me, Mr. Renshaw,” she pronounced huskily, and then, looking at him sharply: “Yes,” she said, “Mrs. Herrick and I were excellent friends, and so are Linda and I. She’s a soft, nervous, impressionable little thing—our dear Linda—and very pretty, too, in her own way—don’t you think so, Mr. Renshaw?”
It was the man’s turn now to suffer a change of countenance. “Pretty?” he laughed. “I’m sure I don’t know. I’ve never seen her!”
Rachel clasped her hands tightly on the lap of her black dress and fixed her eyes upon him. “You’d like to see her, wouldn’t you?” she murmured eagerly. He answered her look, and a long, indescribable passage of unspoken thoughts flickered, wavered and took shape between them.
“I’ve seen Nance—in the distance—with my mother,” he remarked, letting his glance wander to the opposite parapet and away beyond it where the swallows were skimming, “but I’ve never yet spoken to either of the girls. I keep to myself a good deal, as every one about here knows, Miss Rachel.”
Rachel Doorm rose abruptly to her feet with such unexpected suddenness that the ma
n started as if from a blow.
“Your sister,” she jerked out with concentrated vehemence, “is doing my Nance a deadly injury. She’s given her heart—sweet darling—absolutely and without stint to that foreigner down there.” She waved her hand towards the village. “And if Miss Renshaw doesn’t let him go, there’ll be a tragedy.”
Brand looked at her searchingly, his lips trembling with a smile of complicated significance.
“Do make her let him go!” the woman repeated, advancing as if she were ready to clasp his hand; “you can if you like. You always could. If she takes him away, my darling’s heart will be broken. Mr. Renshaw—please—for the sake of old days, for the sake of old friends, do this for me, and make her give him up!”
He drew back a little, the same subtle and ambiguous smile on his lips. “No promises, Miss Rachel,” he said, “no promises! I never promise any one anything. But we shall see; we shall see. There’s plenty of time. I’m keeping my eye on Philippa; you may be sure of that.”
He held out his hand as he spoke to the agitated woman. She took it in both of her own and quick as a flash raised it to her lips.
“I knew I should meet you, Mr. Renshaw,” she said, turning away from him, “and you see it has happened! I won’t ask why you didn’t come to me before. I haven’t asked that yet—have I?—and I won’t ever ask it. We’ve met at last; that’s the great thing. That’s the only thing. Now we’ll see what’ll come of it all.”
They separated, and Brand proceeded to cross the Bridge. He had hardly done so when he heard her voice calling upon him to stop. He turned impatiently.
“When you were a little boy, Mr. Renshaw,”—her words came in panting gasps—“you said once, down by the sea, that Rachel was the only person in the world who really loved you. Your mother heard you say it and looked—you know how she looks! You used always to call me ‘Cousin’ then. Far back, they say, the Renshaws and the Doorms were cousins. But you didn’t know that. It was just your childish fancy. ‘Cousin Rachel,’ you said once—just like that—‘come and take me away from them.’”
Brand acquiesced in all this with an air of strained politeness. But his face changed when he heard her final words. “Listen,” she said, “I’ve talked to Linda about you. She’s got the idea of you in her mind.”
At the very moment when this encounter at the New Bridge ended—which was about six in the afternoon—Nance Herrick was walking with a beating heart to a promised assignation with Sorio. This was to take place at the southern corner of a little withy-bed situated about half a mile from Dyke House in the direction of Mundham. It was Nance’s own wish that her lover—if he could still be called so—should meet her here rather than in the house. She had discovered the spot herself and had grown fond of it. Sheltered from the wind by the clump of low-growing willows, and cut off by the line of the banked-up tow-path from the melancholy horizon of fens, the girl had got into the habit of taking refuge here as if from the pursuit of vague inimical presences. In the immediate neighbourhood of the withy-bed were several corn fields, the beginning of a long strip of arable land which divided the river from the marshes as far as Mundham.
The particular spot where she hoped to find Sorio awaiting her was a low grassy bank overshadowed by alders as well as willows, and bordered by a field of well-grown barley, a field which, though still green, showed already to an experienced eye the kind of grain which a month or so of not too malicious weather would ripen and turn to gold. Already amid the blades of the young corn could be seen the stalks and leaves of newly grown poppies, and mingled with these, also at their early stage of growth, small, indistinguishable plants that would later show themselves as corn-flowers and succory.
The neighbourhood of this barley field, with its friendly look and homely weeds, promising a revel of reassuring colour as the summer advanced, had come to be, to the agitated and troubled girl, a sort of symbol of hope. It was the one place in Rodmoor—for the Doorm garden shared the gloomy influences of the Doorm house—where she could feel something like her old enjoyment in the natural growths of the soil. Here, in the freshly sprouting corn and the friendly weeds that it protected, was the strong, unconquerable pressure of earth-life, refusing to be repressed, refusing to be thwarted, by the malign powers of wind and water.
Here, on the bank she had chosen as her retreat, little childish plants she knew by name—such as pimpernel and milkwort—were already in flower and from the alders and willows above her head sweet and consolatory odours, free from the tang of marsh mist or brackish stream, brought memories of old country excursions into places far removed from fen or sea.
She had never yet revealed this sanctuary of hers to Sorio and it was with throbbing pulses and quickened step that she approached it now, longing to associate its security with her master-feeling, and yet fearful lest, by finding her lover unkind or estranged, the place should lose its magic forever. She had dressed herself with care that afternoon, putting on—though the weather was hardly warm enough to make such airy attire quite suitable—a white print frock, covered with tiny roses. Several times in front of the mirror she had smoothed down her dress and unloosened and tied back again her shining masses of hair. She held her hat in her hand now, as she approached the spot, for he had told her once in London that he liked her better when she was bareheaded.
She had left her parasol behind, too, and as she hastened along the narrow path from the river to the withy-bed, she nervously switched the green stalks by her side with a dead stick she had unconsciously picked up.
Her print dress hung straight and tight over her softly moulded figure and her limbs, as she walked, swayed with a free and girlish grace.
Passionately, intently, she scanned the familiar outlines of the spot, hoping and yet fearing to see him. Not yet—not yet! Nothing visible yet, but the low-lying little copse and the stretch of arable land around it. She drew near. She was already within a few paces of the place. Nothing! He was not there—he had failed her!
She drew a deep breath and stood motionless, the dead stick fallen from her hand and her gloveless fingers clasping and unclasping one another mechanically.
“Oh, Adrian! Adrian!” she moaned. “You don’t care any more—not any more.”
Suddenly she heard a swish of leafy branches and a crackle of broken twigs. He was there, after all.
“Adrian!” she cried. “Is that you, Adrian?”
There was more rustling and swishing, and then with a discordant laugh he burst out from the undergrowth.
“You frightened me,” she said, looking at him with quivering lips. “Why did you hide away like that, Adrian?”
He went straight up to her, seized her fiercely in his arms and covered her mouth, her throat and neck with hot, furious kisses. This was not what Nance’s heart craved. She longed to sob out her suppressed feelings on his shoulder. She longed to be petted and caressed, gently, quietly, and with soft endearing words.
Instead of which, it seemed to her that he was seeking, as he embraced her body and clung to her flesh with his lips, to escape from his own thoughts, to suppress her thoughts, to sweep them both away—away from all rational consciousness—on the brutal impulse of mere animal passion.
Her tears which were on the point of flowing, in a tide of heart-easing abandonment, were driven inwards by his violence, and in her grey eyes, if he had cared to look, he would have seen a frightened appeal—pitiful and troubled—like the wild glance of a deer harried by dogs.
His violence brought its own reaction at last and, letting her go, he flung himself panting upon the ground. She stood above him for a while, flushed and silent, smoothing down her hair with her hands and looking into his face with a puzzled frown.
“Sit down,” he gasped. “Why do you stare at me like that?”
Obediently she placed herself by his side, tucked her skirt around her ankles and let her hands fall on her lap.
“Adrian,” she said, glancing shyly at him. “Why did you kiss me li
ke that, just now?”
He propped himself up and gazed gloomily across the barley field. “Why—did—I—kiss you?” he muttered, as if speaking in a dream.
“Yes—why, like that, just then,” she went on. “It wasn’t like you and me at all. You were rough, Adrian. You weren’t yourself. Oh, my dear, my dear! I don’t believe you care for me half as you used to!”
He beat his fists irritably on the ground and an almost vindictive look came into his eyes.
“That’s the way!” he flung out, “that’s the way I knew you’d take it. You girls want to be loved but you must be loved just thus and so. A touch too near, a word too far—and you’re all up in arms.”
Nance felt as though an ice-cold wedge had been thrust between her breasts.
“Adrian,” she cried, “how can you treat me in this way? How can you say these things to me? Have I ever stopped you kissing me? Have I ever been unresponsive to you?”
He looked away from her and began pulling up a patch of moss by its roots. “What are you annoyed about, then?” he muttered.
She sighed bitterly. Then with a strong effort to give her voice a natural tone. “I didn’t feel as though you were kissing me at all just now. I was simply a girl in your arms—any girl! It was a shame, Adrian. It hurt me. Surely, dear,”—her voice grew gentle and pleading—“you must know what I mean.”
“I don’t know in the least what you mean,” he cried. “It’s some silly, absurd scruple some one’s been putting in your head. I can’t always make love to you as if we were two children, can I—two babes in the wood?”
Nance’s mouth quivered at this and she stretched out her arm towards him and then, letting it drop, fumbled with her fingers at a blade of grass. A curious line, rarely visible on her face, wrinkled her forehead and twitched a little as if it had been a nerve beneath the skin. This line had a pathos in it beyond a mere frown. It would have been well if the Italian had recalled, as he saw it, certain ancient tragic masks of his native country, but it is one of life’s persistent ironies that the tokens of monumental sorrow, which serve so nobly the purposes of art, should only excite peevish irritation when seen near at hand. Sorio did not miss that line of suffering but instead of softening him it increased his bitterness.
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