Rodmoor

by John Cowper Powys

  Nance stared at her aghast. “Oh, Linda, my little Linda!” she whispered, “how can you say these terrible things? My only thought, all the time, is for you.”

  Linda struggled feebly to her feet, refusing her sister’s help.

  “I can walk,” she said, and then, with a bitterness that seemed to poison the air between them, “you needn’t be afraid of my escaping from you. He wouldn’t like me now, you’ve hurt me and made me ugly.”

  Nance picked up her bundle of mud-stained clothes. The smell of the river which still clung to them gave her a sense of nausea.

  “Come,” she said, “we’ll follow the park wall.”

  They moved off slowly together without further speech and never did any hour, in either of their lives, pass more miserably. As they came within sight of Oakguard, Linda looked so white and exhausted that Nance was on the point of taking her boldly in and begging Mrs. Renshaw’s help, but somehow the thought of meeting Philippa just at that moment was more than she was able to endure, and they dragged on towards the village.

  Emerging from the park gates and coming upon the entrance to the green, Nance became aware that it would be out of the question to make Linda walk any further and, after a second’s hesitation, she led her across the grass and under the sycamores to Baltazar’s cottage.

  The door was opened by Mr. Stork himself. He started back in astonishment at the sight of their two figures pale and shivering in the wind. He led them into his sitting-room and at once proceeded to light the fire. He wrapped warm rugs round them both and made them some tea. All this he did without asking them any questions, treating the whole affair as if it were a thing of quite natural occurrence. The warmth of the fire and the pleasant taste of the epicure’s tea restored Nance, at any rate, to some degree of comfort. She explained that they had walked too far and that she had tried to cross the river to get help for her sister. Linda said hardly anything but gazed despairingly at the picture of the Ambassador’s secretary. The young Venetian seemed to answer her look and Baltazar, always avid of these occult sympathies, watched this spiritual encounter with sly amusement. He had wrapped an especially brilliant oriental rug round the younger girl and the contrast between its rich colours and the fragile beauty of the face above them struck him very pleasantly.

  In his heart he shrewdly guessed that some trouble connected with Brand was at the bottom of this and the suspicion that she had been interfering with her sister’s love affair did not diminish the prejudice he had already begun to cherish against Nance. Stork was constitutionally immune from susceptibility to feminine charm and the natural little jests and gaieties with which the poor girl tried to “carry off” a sufficiently embarrassing Situation only irritated him the more.

  “Why must they always play their tricks and be pretty and witty?” he thought. “Except when one wants to make love to them they ought to sit still.” And with a malicious desire to annoy Nance he began making much of Linda, persuading her to lie down on the sofa and wrapping an exquisite cashmere shawl round her feet.

  To test the truth of his surmise as to the cause of their predicament, he unexpectedly brought in Brand’s name.

  “Our friend Adrian,” he remarked, “refuses to allow that Mr. Renshaw’s a handsome man. What do you ladies think about that?”

  His device met with instant success. Linda turned crimson and Nance made a gesture as if to stop him.

  “Ha! Ha!” he laughed to himself, “so that’s how the wind blows. Our little sister must be allowed no kind of fun, though we ourselves may flirt with the whole village.”

  He continued to pay innumerable attentions to Linda. Professing that he wished to tell her fortune he drew his chair to her side and began a long rigamarole about heart lines and life lines and dark men and fair men. Nance simply moved closer to the fire while this went on and warmed her hands at its blaze.

  “I must ask him to fetch us a trap from the Inn,” she thought. “I wish Adrian would come. I wonder if he will, before we go.”

  Partly by reason of the fact that he had himself arranged her drapery and partly because of a touch of something in the child’s face which reminded him of certain pictures of Pinturicchio, Baltazar began to feel tenderer towards Linda than he had done for years towards any feminine creature. This amused him immensely and he gave the tenuous emotion full rein. But it irritated him that he couldn’t really vex his little protégé’s sister.

  “I expect,” he said, replacing Linda’s white fingers upon the scarlet rug, “I expect, Miss Herrick, you’re beginning to feel the effects of our peculiar society. Yes, that’s my Venetian boy, Flambard”—this was addressed to Linda—“isn’t he delicious? Wouldn’t you like to have him for a lover?—for Rodmoor is a rather curious place. It’s a disintegrating place, you know, a place where one loses one’s identity and forgets the rules. Of course it suits me admirably because I never consider rules, but you—I should think—must find it somewhat disturbing? Fingal maintains there’s a definite physiological cause for the way people behave here. For we all behave very badly, you know, Miss Herrick. He says it’s the effect of the North Sea. He says all the old families that live by the North Sea get queer in time,—take to drink, I mean, or something of that sort. It’s an interesting idea, isn’t it? But I suppose that sort of thing doesn’t appeal to you? You take—what do you call it?—a more serious view of life.”

  Nance turned round towards him wearily.

  “If Adrian doesn’t come in a minute or two,” she thought, “I shall ask him to get a trap for us, or I shall go to Dr. Raughty.”

  “It’s an odd thing,” Baltazar continued, lighting a cigarette and walking up and down the room, “how quickly I know whether people are serious or not. It must be something in their faces. Linda, now”—he looked caressingly at the figure on the sofa—“is obviously never serious. She’s like me. I saw that in her hand. She’s destined to go through life as I do, playing on the surface like a dragon-fly on a pond.”

  The young girl answered his look with a soft but rather puzzled smile, and once more he sat down by her side and renewed his fortune-telling. His fingers, as he held her hand, looked almost as slender as her own and his face, as Nance saw it in profile, had a subtle delicacy of outline that made her think of Philippa. There was, to the mind of the elder girl, a refined inhumanity about every gesture he made and every word he spoke which filled her with aversion. The contours of his face were exquisitely moulded and his round small head covered with tight fair curls was supported on a neck as soft and white as a woman’s; but his eyes, coloured like some glaucous sea plant, were to the girl’s thinking extraordinarily sinister. She could not help a swift mental comparison between Baltazar’s attitude as he leaned over Linda and that of Dr. Raughty when, on various occasions, that honest man had made playful love to herself. It was hard to define the difference but, as she watched Baltazar she came to the conclusion that there was a soul of genuine affectionateness in the doctor’s amorous advances which made them harmless as compared with this other’s.

  Linda, however, was evidently very pleased and flattered. She lay with her head thrown back and a smile of languid contentment. She did not even make an attempt to draw away her hand when the fortune-telling was over. Nance resolved that she would wait five minutes more by their host’s elegant French time-piece and then, if Adrian had not come, she would make Mr. Stork fetch them a conveyance. It came over her that there was something morbid and subtly unnatural about the way Baltazar was treating Linda and yet she could not put her finger upon what was wrong. She felt, however, by a profound instinct, an instinct which she could not analyse, that nothing that Brand Renshaw could possibly do—even were he the unscrupulous seducer she suspected him of being—could be as dangerous for the peace of her sister’s mind as what she was now undergoing. With Brand there was quite simply a strong magnetic attraction, formidable and overpowering, and that was all, but she trembled to think what elements of complicated morbidity Baltazar’s o
vertures were capable of arousing.

  “Look,” he said presently, “Flambard’s watching us! I believe he’s jealous of me because of you, or of you because of me. I don’t believe he’s ever seen any one so near being his rival as you are! I think you must have something in you that he understands. Perhaps you’re a re-incarnation of one of his Venetians! Don’t you think, Miss Herrick,” and he turned urbanely to Nance, “she’s got something that suggests Venice in her as she lies there—with that smile?”

  The languorous glance of secret triumph which Linda at that moment threw upon her sister was more than Nance could endure.

  “Do you mind getting us a trap of some sort at the Admiral’s Head?” she said brusquely, rising from her seat.

  Baltazar assented at once with courteous and even effusive politeness and left the room. As soon as he was gone, Nance moved to Linda’s side.

  “Little one,” she said, with trembling lips, “I seem not to know you to-day. You’re not my Linda at all.”

  The child’s face stiffened spasmodically and her whole expression hardened. She fixed her gaze on the ambiguous Flambard and made no answer.

  “Linda, darling—I’m only thinking all the time of you,” pleaded Nance, putting out her hand.

  A gleam of positive hatred illuminated the child’s eyes. She suddenly snatched at the proffered hand and surveyed it vindictively.

  “I can see where I bit you just now. I’m glad I did!” she cried, and once more she set herself to stare at Flambard.

  Nance went over to the fire-place and sat down. But something seemed to impel Linda to strike her again.

  “You thought you were going to have every one in Rodmoor to yourself, didn’t you?” she said. “You thought you’d have Adrian and Dr. Raughty and Mr. Traherne and everybody. You never thought any one would begin liking me!”

  Nance looked at her in sheer terrified astonishment. Certainly the influence of Baltazar was making itself felt.

  “You brought me here,” Linda went on. “I didn’t want to come and you knew I didn’t. Now—as he says, we must make the best of it.”

  The phrase “and you knew I didn’t” went through Nance’s heart like a poisoned dagger. Yes, she had known! She had tried to put the thing far from her—to throw the responsibility for it upon her reluctance to hurt Rachel. But she had known. And now her punishment was beginning. She bowed her head upon her hands and covered her face.

  “You came,” the girl’s voice went on, “because you hated leaving Adrian. But Adrian doesn’t want you any more now. He wants Philippa. Do you know, Nance, I believe he’d marry Philippa, if he could—if Brand would let him!”

  The hands that hid Nance’s face trembled. She longed to run away and sob her heart out. She had thought she was at the bottom of all possible misery. She had never expected this. Linda, as if drawing inspiration for the suffering she inflicted, continued to look Flambard in the eyes.

  “Brand told me Philippa meets Adrian every night in the park. He said he spied on them once and found them kissing each other. He said they were leaning against one of the oak trees and Adrian bent her head back against the trunk and kissed her like that. He showed me just how he did it. And he made me laugh like anything afterwards by something else he said. But I don’t think I’ll tell you that—unless you want to hear very much—Do you want to hear?”

  Nance, at this moment, lifted up her head. She had a look in her eyes that nothing except the inexhaustible pitilessness of a woman thwarted in her passion could have endured without being melted.

  “Are you trying to kill me, Linda?” she murmured.

  Her sister gave her one quick glance and looked away again at Flambard. She remained silent after that, while the French clock ticked out the seconds with a jocular malignity.

  The wind, rising steadily, swept large drops of rain against the window and the noise of the waves which it brought with it sounded louder and clearer than before as if the sea itself had advanced several leagues across the land since first they entered the house.

  XII

  HAMISH TRAHERNE

  NANCE said nothing to Rachel Doorm on the night they returned, driven home by the landlord of the Admiral’s Head. What Rachel feared, or what she imagined, as the sisters entered the house in their thin attire carrying the bundle of drenched clothes, it was impossible to surmise. She occupied herself with lighting a fire in their room and while they undressed she brought them up their supper with her own hands. It was a wretched night for both of the sisters and few were the words exchanged between them as they ate their meal. Once in bed and the light extinguished, it was Nance, in spite of all, who fell asleep first. “The pangs of despised love” have not the same corrosive poison as the sting of passion embittered by rancour.

  Nance was up early and took her breakfast alone. She felt an irresistible need to see Mr. Traherne. She arrived at the priest’s house almost as early as she had done on a former occasion, only this time, the day being overcast and the wind high, he received her within-doors. She found him reading “Don Quixote” and, without giving her time to speak, he made her listen to the gentle and magnanimous story of the poor knight’s death.

  “There’s no book,” he said, when he had finished, “which so recovers my spirits as this one. Cervantes is the noblest soul of them all and the bravest. He’s the only author who never gives up his humility before God or his pride before the Universe. He’s the author for me! He’s the author for us poor priests!”

  Mr. Traherne lit a cigarette and looked at Nance through its smoke with a grotesque scowl of infinite reassurance.

  “Cheer up, little one!” he said, “the spirit of the great Cervantes is not dead in the world. God has not deserted us. Nothing can hurt us while we hold to Christ and defy the Devil!”

  Nance smiled at him. The conviction with which he spoke was like a cup of refreshing water to her in a dry desert.

  “Mr. Traherne,” she began, but he interrupted her with a wave of his arm.

  “My name’s Hamish,” he said.

  “Hamish, then,” she went on, smiling at the ghoulish countenance before her, round which the cigarette smoke ascended like incense about the head of an idol, “I’ve more to tell you than I can say. So you must listen and be very good to me!”

  He settled himself in his deep horse-hair chair with one leg over the other and his ancient, deplorably-stained cassock over both. And she poured forth the full history of her troubles, omitting nothing—except one or two of Linda’s cruel speeches. When she had completed her tale she surveyed him anxiously. One terrible fear made her heart beat—the fear lest he should tell her she must carry Linda back to London. He seemed to read her thoughts in her eyes. “One thing,” he began, “is quite clear. You must both of you leave Dyke House. Don’t look so scared, child. I don’t mean you must leave Rodmoor. You can’t kidnap your sister by force and nothing short of force would get her, in her present mood, to go away with you. But I think—I think, “he added,” we could persuade her to leave Miss Doorm.”

  He straightened out his legs, puckered his forehead and pouted his thick lips.

  “Have a strawberry,” he said suddenly, reaching with his hand for a plate lying amid a litter of books and papers, and stretching it out towards her. “Oh, there are ashes on it. I’m sorry! But the fruit’s all right. There! keep it by you—on the floor—anywhere—and help yourself!”

  He once more subsided into his chair and frowned thoughtfully. Nance, with a smile of infinite relief—for had he not said that to leave Rodmoor was impossible?—kept the plate on her lap and began eating the fruit. She longed to blow the ashes away but fear of hurting his feelings restrained her. She brushed each strawberry surreptitiously with the tips of her fingers before lifting it to her mouth.

  “You’re not cold, are you?” he said suddenly, “because I could light a fire.”

  Nance looked at the tiny grate filled with a heap of bracken-leaves and wondered how this would be achieved
.

  “Oh, no!” she said, smiling again. “I’m perfectly warm.”

  “Then, if you don’t mind,” he added, making the most alarming grimace, “pull your skirt down. I can see your ankles.”

  Nance hurriedly drew up her feet and tucked them under her. “All right now?” she asked, with a faint flush.

  “Sorry, my dear,” said Hamish Traherne, “but you must remember I’m a lonely monk and ankles as pretty as yours disturb my mind.” He glared at her so humorously and benevolently that Nance could not be angry with him. There was something so boyish in his candour that it would have seemed inhuman to take offence.

  “I believe I could think better if I had Ricoletto,” he cried a moment later, jumping up and leaving the room. Nance took the opportunity of blowing every trace of cigarette-ash from her strawberry plate into the fender. She had hardly done this and demurely tucked herself up again in her chair when Mr. Traherne re-entered the room carrying in his hands a large white rat.

  “Beautiful, isn’t he?” he remarked, offering the animal for the girl to stroke. “I love him. He inspires me with all my sermons. He pities the human race, don’t you, Ricoletto? And doesn’t hate a living thing except cats. He has a seraphic temper and no wish to marry. Ankles are nothing to him—are they, Ricoletto?—but he likes potatoes.”

  As he spoke the priest brushed aside a heap of papers and laid bare the half-gnawed skin of one of these vegetables.

  “Come, darling!” he said, reseating himself in his chair and placing rat and potato-skin together upon his shoulder, “enjoy yourself and give me wisdom to defeat the wiles of all the devils. Devils are cats, Ricoletto darling, great, fluffy, purring cats with eyes as big as saucers.”