On the sea-shore one is indeed in contact with the unknown mass of waters, but there is always, close at hand, the familiar inland landscape, friendly and reassuring. On the slope of a mountain one may look with apprehension at the austere heights above, but there is always behind one the rocks and woods, the terraces and ledges, past which one has ascended, and to which at any moment one can return.
In the midst of the fens there is no such reassurance. The path one has followed becomes merged in the illimitable space around; merged, lost and annihilated. No mark, no token, no sign indicates its difference from other similar tracks. No mark nor token separates north from south or east from west. On all sides the same reeds, the same meadows, the same gates, the same stunted willow-trees, the same desolate marsh pools, the same vast and receding horizons. The mind has nothing to rest itself upon except the general expanse, and the general expanse seems as boundless as infinity.
Nance and her sister were not, of course, far enough away from their familiar haunts to get the complete “fen-terror,” but, aided by the darkness, the power of the thing was by no means unfelt. The instinct to escape from the burden of their thoughts which drove the girls on, became indeed more and more definitely mingled, as they advanced, with a growing sense of alarm. But into this very alarm they plunged forward with a species of exultant desperation. They both experienced, as they went hand in hand, a morbid kind of delight in being cruel to themselves, in forcing themselves to do the very thing—and to do it in the dead of night—which, of all, they had most avoided, even in the full light of day.
Before they had gone much more than a mile from their starting-point they were permitted to witness a curious trick of the elemental powers. Without any warning, there suddenly arose from the west a much more powerful current of wind. Every cloud was driven sea-ward and with the clouds every trace of sea-mist. The vast dome of sky above them showed itself clear and unstained; and across the innumerable constellations—manifest to their eyes in its full length—stretched the Milky Way. Not only did the stars thus make themselves visible. In their visibility they threw a weird and phantom-like light over the whole landscape. Objects that had been mere misty blurs became distinct identities and things that had been absolutely out of sight were now unmistakably recognizable.
The girls stood still and looked around them. They could see the church tower rising squat and square against the line of the distant sand-dunes. They could see the roofs of the village, huddled greyly and obscurely together, beyond the dark curve of the bridge. They could make out the sombre shape of Dyke House itself, just distinguishable against the high tow-path of the river. And Nance, turning westward, could even discern her favourite withy-copse, surrounded by shadowy cornfields.
There was a pitiable pathos in the way each of the girls, now that the scene of their present trouble was thus bared to their view, turned instinctively to the object most associated with the thoughts they were seeking to escape. Nance looked long and wistfully at the little wood of willows and alders, now a mere misty exhalation of thicker shadow above the long reaches of the fens. She thought of how mercilessly her feelings had been outraged there; of how violent and strange and untender Sorio had been. Yet even at that moment, her heart aching with the recollection of what she had suffered, the old fierce passionate cry went up from her soul—“better be beaten by Adrian than loved by all the rest of the world!”
It was perhaps because of her preoccupation with her own thoughts and her long dreamy gaze at the spot which recalled them, that she did not remark a certain sight which set her companion trembling with intolerable excitement. This was nothing less than the sudden appearance, between the trees that almost hid the house from view, of a red light in a window of Oakguard. It was an unsteady light and it seemed to waver and flicker. Sometimes it grew deeply red, like a threatening star, and at other times it paled in colour and diminished in size. All at once, after flickering and quivering for several seconds, it died out altogether.
Only when it had finally disappeared did Linda hastily glance round to see if Nance had discerned it. But her sister had seen nothing.
It was, as a matter of fact, small wonder that this particular light observed in a window of Oakguard, thrilled the young girl with uncontrollable agitation. It had been this very signal, arranged between them during their few weeks of passionate love-making, which had several times flickered across the river to Dyke House and had been answered, unknown to Nance, from the sisters’ room. Linda shivered through every nerve and fibre of her being, and in the darkness her cheeks grew hot as fire. She suddenly felt convinced that by some strange link between her heart and his, Brand knew that she was out in the fens, and was telling her that he knew it, in the old exciting way.
“He is calling me,” she said to herself, “he is calling me!” And as she formed the words, there came over her, with a sick beating of her heart and a dizzy pain in her breast, the certainty that Brand had left the house and was waiting for her, somewhere in the long avenue of limes and cedars, where they had met once before in the early evening.
“He is waiting for me!” she repeated, and the dizziness grew so strong upon her that she staggered and caught at her sister’s arm. “Nance,” she whispered, “I feel sick. My head hurts me. Shall we go back now?”
Nance, full of concern and anxiety, passed her fingers across her sister’s forehead. “Oh, my dear, my dear,” she cried, “you’re in a fever! How silly of me to let you come out on this mad prank!”
Supporting her on her arm she led her slowly back, along the embankment. As they walked, Nance felt more strongly than she had done since she crossed the Loon, that deep maternal pity, infinite in its emotion of protection, which was the basic quality in her nature. For the very reason, perhaps, that Linda now clung to her like a child, she felt happier than she had done for many days. A mysterious detachment from her own fate, a sort of resigned indifference to what happened, seemed to liberate her at that moment from the worst pang of her loss. The immense shadowy spaces about her, the silence of me fens, broken only by the rustling of the reeds and an occasional splash in the stream by their side as a fish rose, the vast arch of starlit sky above her, full of a strange and infinite reassurance—all these things thrilled the girl’s heart, as they moved, with an emotion beyond expression.
At that hour there came to her, with a vividness unfelt until then, the real meaning of Mr. Traherne’s high platonic mystery. She told herself that whatever henceforth happened to her or did not happen, it was not an illusion, it was not a dream—this strange spiritual secret. It was something palpable and real. She had felt it—at least she had touched the fringe of it—and even if the thing never quite returned or the power of it revived as it thrilled her now, it remained that it had been, that she had known it, that it was there, somewhere in the depths, however darkly hidden.
Very different were the thoughts that during that walk back agitated the mind of the younger girl. Her whole nature was obsessed by one fierce resolve, the resolve to escape at once to the arms of her lover. He was waiting for her; he was expecting her; she felt absolutely convinced of that. An indefinable pain in her breast and a throbbing in her heart assured her that he was watching, waiting, drawing her towards him. The same large influences of the night, the same silent spaces, the same starlit dome, which brought to Nance her spiritual reassurance, brought to the frailer figure she supported only a desperate craving.
She could feel through every nerve of her feverish body the touch of her love’s fingers. She ached and shivered with pent-up longing, with longing to yield herself to him, to surrender herself absolutely into his power. She was no longer a thing of body, soul, and senses. The normal complexity of our mortal frame was annihilated in her. She was one trembling, quivering, vibrant chord, a chord of feverish desire, only waiting to break into one wild burst of ecstatic music, when struck by the hand she loved.
Her desire at that moment was of the kind which tears at the root of
every sort of scruple. It did not only endow her with the courage of madness, it inspired her with the cunning of the insane. All the way along the embankment she was devising desperate plans of escape, and by the time they reached the church path these plans had shaped themselves into a definite resolution.
They emerged upon the familiar way and turned southward towards the bridge. Nance, thankful that she had got her sister so near home without any serious mishap, could not resist, in the impulse of her relief, the pleasure of stopping for a moment to pick a bunch of flowers from the path’s reedy edge. The coolness of the earth as she stooped, the waving grasses, the strongly blowing, marsh-scented wind, the silence and the darkness, all blent harmoniously together to strengthen her in her new-found comfort.
She pulled up impetuously, almost by their roots, great heavy-flowered stalks of loose-strife and willow-herb. She scrambled down into the wet mud of a shallow ditch to add to her bunch a tall spray of hemp-agrimony and some wild valerian. All these things, ghostly and vague and colourless in the faint starlight, had a strange and mystic beauty, and as she gathered them Nance promised herself that they should be a covenant between her senses and her spirit; a sign and a token, offered up in the stillness of that hour, to whatever great invisible powers still made it possible on earth to renounce and be not all unhappy. She returned with her flowers to her sister’s side and together they reached the bridge.
When they were at the very centre of this, Linda suddenly staggered and swayed. She tore herself from her sister’s support and sank down on the little stone seat beneath the parapet—the same stone seat upon which, some months before, that passage of sinister complicity had occurred between Rachel Doorm and Brand. Falling helplessly back now in this place, the young girl pressed her hands to her head and moaned pitifully.
Nance dropped her flowers and flung herself on her knees beside her. “What is it, darling?” she whispered in a low frightened voice. “Oh, Linda, what is it?” But Linda’s only reply was to close her eyes and let her head fall heavily back against the stone-work of the parapet. Nance rose to her feet and stood looking at her in mute despair. “Linda! Linda!” she cried. “Linda! What is it?”
But the shadowy white form lay hushed and motionless, the soft hair across her forehead stirring in the wind, but all else about her, horribly, deadly still.
Nance rushed across the bridge and down to the river’s brink. She came back, her hands held cup-wise, and dashed the water over her sister’s face. The child’s eyelids flickered a little, but that was all. She remained as motionless and seemingly unconscious as before. With a desperate effort, Nance tried to lift her up bodily in her arms, but stiff and limp as the girl was, this seemed an attempt beyond her strength.
Once more she stood, helpless and silent, regarding the other as she lay. Then it dawned upon her mind that the only possible thing to do was to leave her where she was and run to the village for help. She would arouse her own landlady. She would get the assistance of Dr. Raughty.
With one last glance at her sister’s motionless form and a quick look up and down the river on the chance of there being some barge or boat at hand with people—as sometimes happened—sleeping in it, she set off running as fast as she could in the direction of the silent town.
As soon as the sound of her retreating steps died away in the distance, the hitherto helpless Linda leapt quickly and lightly to her feet. Standing motionless for awhile till she had given her sister time to reach the high-street, she set off herself with firm and rapid steps in the same direction. She resolved that she would not risk crossing the green, but would reach the park wall by a little side alley which skirted the backs of the houses. She felt certain that when she did reach this wall it would be easy enough to climb over it. She remembered its loose uneven stones and its clinging ivy. And once in the park—ah! she knew well enough what way to take then!
Deserted by its human invaders, the old New Bridge relapsed into its accustomed mood of silent expectancy. It had witnessed many passionate loves and many passionate hatreds. It had felt the feet of generations of Rodmoor’s children, light as gossamer seeds, upon its shoulders, and it had felt the creaking of the death-wagon carrying the same persons, heavy as lead then, to the oblong holes dug for them in the churchyard. All this it had felt, but it still waited, still waited in patient expectancy, while the tides went up and down beneath it, and sea airs swept over it and night by night the stars looked down on it; still waited, with the dreadful patience of the eternal gods and the eternal elements, something that, after all, would perhaps never come.
Nance’s flowers, meanwhile, lay where she had dropped them, upon the ground by the stone seat. They were there when, some ten minutes after her departure, the girl returned with Dr. Raughty and Mrs. Raps to find Linda gone; and they were there through all the hours of the dawn, until a farm boy, catching sight of them as he went to his work, threw them into the river in order that he might observe the precise rapidity with which they would be carried by the tide under the central arch. They were carried very swiftly under the central arch; but linger as the boy might, he did not see them reappear on the other side.
XVII
THE DAWN
THE dawn was just faintly making itself felt among the trees of Oakguard when Philippa Renshaw, restless as she often was on these summer nights, perceived, as she leaned from her open window, a figure almost as slender as herself standing motionless at the edge of one of the terraces and looking up at the house. There was no light in Philippa’s room, so that she was able to watch this figure without risk of being herself observed. She was certain at once in her own mind of its identity, and she took it immediately for granted that Brand was even now on his way to meet the young girl at the spot where she now saw her standing.
She experienced, therefore, a certain surprise and even annoyance—for she would have liked to have witnessed this encounter—when, instead of remaining where she stood, the girl suddenly slipped away like a ghostly shadow and merged herself among the park-trees. Philippa remained for some minutes longer at the window peering intently into the grey obscurity and wondering whether after all she had been mistaken and it was one of the servants of the house. There was one of the Oakguard maids addicted to walking in her sleep, and she confessed to herself that it was quite possible she had been misled by her own morbid fancy into supposing that the nocturnal wanderer was Linda Herrick.
She returned to her bed after a while and tried to sleep, but the idea that it was really Linda she had seen and that the young girl was even now roaming about the grounds like a disconsolate phantom, took possession of her mind. She rose once more and cautiously pulling down the blind and drawing the curtains began hurriedly to dress herself, taking the precaution to place the solitary candle which she used behind a screen so that no warning of her wakefulness should reach the person she suspected.
Opening the door and moving stealthily down the passage, she paused for a moment at the threshold of her brother’s room. All was silent within. Smiling faintly to herself, she turned the handle with exquisite precaution and glided into the room. No! She was right in her conjecture. The place was without an occupant, and the bed, it appeared, had not been slept in. She went out, closing the door silently behind her.
Her mother’s room was opposite Brand’s and the fancy seized her to enter that also. She entered it, and stepped, softly as a wandering spirit, to her mother’s side. Mrs. Renshaw was lying in an uneasy posture with one arm stretched across the counterpane and her head close to the edge of the bed. She was breathing heavily but was not in a deep sleep. Every now and then her fingers spasmodically closed and unclosed, and from her lips came broken inarticulate words. The pallid light of the early dawn made her face seem older than Philippa had ever seen it. By her side on a little table lay an open book, but it was still too dark for the intruder to discern what this book was.
The daughter stood for some minutes in absolute rigidity, gazing upon the sleeper. He
r face as she gazed wore an expression so complicated, so subtle, that the shrewdest observer seeking to interpret its meaning would have been baffled. It was not malignant. It certainly was not tender. It might have been compared to the look one could conceive some heathen courtesan in the days of early Christianity casting upon a converted slave.
Uneasily conscious, as people in their sleep often are, without actually waking, of the alien presence so near her, Mrs. Renshaw suddenly moved round in her bed and with a low moaning utterance, settled herself to sleep with her face to the window. It was a human name she had uttered then. Philippa was sure of that, but it was a name completely strange to the watcher of her mother’s unconsciousness.
Passing from the room as silently as she had entered, the girl ran lightly down the staircase, picked up a cloak in the hall, and let herself out of the front door.
Meanwhile, through the gradually lifting shadows, Linda with rapid and resolute steps was hastening across the park to the portion of the avenue where grew the great cedar-trees. This was the place to which her first instinct had called her. It was only an after-thought, due to cooler reason that had caused her to deviate from this and approach the house itself.
As she advanced through the dew-drenched grass, silvery now in the faint light, she felt that vague indescribable sensation which all living creatures, even those scourged by passion, are bound to feel, at the first palpable touch of dawn. Perfumes and odours that could not be expressed in words, and that seemed to have no natural origin, came to the girl on the wind which went sighing past her. This—so at least Linda vaguely felt—was not the west wind any more. It was not any ordinary wind of day or night. It was the dawn wind, the breath of the earth herself, indrawn with sweet sharp ecstasy at the delicate terror of the coming of the sun-god.
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