But Nelly Moreton bade him goodbye at that point in so very definite a manner that his project was nipped in the bud. Canyot, pleased at the thought of having his friend to himself for that pleasant walk through the buttercups, shook hands with him graciously, almost apologetically. And Richard himself turned away not unpleased, since her final word to him was emphatic. ‘You must come over and see my father.’
It was not till much later in the day, when recalling every incident of that afternoon, that he remembered a sharp piercing look that Canyot had turned upon him and Nelly at one moment during their conversation. That fellow can’t be easily fooled, he thought.
Chapter 3
It was always a luxurious and pleasant moment for Nelly, when after a knock as gentle as her round knuckles could administer, the all-competent Grace brought her hot water and tea. It was delicious to lie with closed eyes, still half-wrapped in the filmy cloud of sleep, while the sweet airs floated in through the open windows, mingled with the crooning of the dove and the reedy call of the blackbird.
Generally she let Grace put down the tray and the bright-polished can, and carry off her outdoor shoes, without movement or sign. But on the morning after her day in Selshurst she sat up in bed with wide-open eyes.
‘I likes to see ’ee with all that pretty hair, Miss Nelly. Mercy, ‘tis a shame a lovely young lady like you should have to fasten ‘un up. None do know,’ cept those as sees ’ee like this and They Above, how winsome a body ’ee be grown into.’
Nelly pushed back her hair with both hands. ‘Where’s my ribbon?’ she said. Grace stooped, picked it up from the floor, lifted the hair carefully from the slender neck and tied it back, giving it a final caress with her great hand as if it belonged to a favourite doll.
‘How’s Mr Moreton this morning, Grace?’
The maid’s countenance became grave. ‘He ’ave worked in’s study since afore I was up, Miss, I do fear it; working and thinking, thinking and muttering to ’isself. Not that it’s my place to sy anything, Miss Nelly; but us remembers what us do remember, and how ’twas like this afore ’ee wrote that letter to them great ones wot worrited ’ee so dreadful. I didn’t mean like to trouble ’ee with what ’ee do know as well as I, Miss. But I ’eard the Master with my own ears telling Mr Lintot only yesterday that there ’baint no God in Heaven.’ Twas terrible to listen to ’un, strike me blind, if it weren’t; for ’a did carry on so about one thing and another that Mr Lintot he up and said he couldn’t listen to any more on’t.’ Tweren’t right nor natural that he should listen to such things, spoke by one of Master’s holy profession. There, Miss Nelly,’ ee mustn’t take on. What must be must be; what’s writ to come’ll surely come; and them as calls down Tuesday’s rain on Monday’s roses will never see the gates of Jerusalem.’
Saying this with a consolatory leer, as if it were a piece of the most cynical worldly wisdom, Grace picked up her mistress’s shoes, still all covered with gold-dust from the walk through the buttercups, and left the room.
Nelly jumped hastily out of bed and pulled the curtains across the open windows. She bathed and dressed rapidly today, cutting short the long leisurely peeps she was accustomed to take in intervals of her dressing at the familiar face of the distant Downs.
The little house they lived in had quite recently been ‘done over’, and as the girl ran down and entered the breakfast room she felt proud of the effect of the labour she and Grace had bestowed upon it. Everything looked so peculiarly cheerful with fresh-painted wood and whitewashed walls and clean chintz covers and curtains.
She had got rid of a drawing room altogether and she and her father had their meals in a lightly furnished south-aspected room which she used during the rest of the day as her own resort.
But the nicest room in the house was her father’s study, a large airy place with a low ceiling and french windows opening on the garden.
Here her father kept his natural history collections – cabinets of birds’ eggs and bureau drawers full of butterflies and moths – and here he read an endless sequence of scientific volumes.
The Vicar of Littlegate was a lean Don Quixote-looking old man with a long narrow face and melancholy blue eyes. He was very tall and his knotted fingers, as he stooped over his food, touching, the bread as if it were a botanical specimen laid out to be examined, hung from his thin arms like the fantastic hands of a withered ash tree.
On this particular morning Mr Moreton seemed to have no appetite for anything but bread, which he ate in large mouthfuls, washing it down with enormous cups of sugarless, milkless tea. He kept rising from his chair when his daughter needed anything from the sideboard, and was always putting things on her plate and encouraging her to eat, with little friendly exclamations as if she were some pet animal rather than the mistress of the house.
‘Some more furniture came yesterday for that little place of Canyot’s,’ he remarked with a glance at the window. ‘He ought to be able to move in in a day or two. It’ll be nice for him after the farm. I hope Betsy-Anne’s Rose will look after him all right. She’ll be able to be there most of the days. She’s a funny rough girl; but a good girl I daresay. She comes to the Sacrament.’ And he sighed heavily.
‘Yes, it’ll certainly be much nicer for Robert up there than down at the farm,’ responded Nelly, looking anxiously at the old man’s troubled face.
‘It’s what he’s been aiming at ever since you and he were engaged,’ continued Mr Moreton. ‘He’s good to me, is Rob Canyot. He understands my difficulty. He agrees with me that I can’t go on as I’m going on now. It was because he saw how I love this place for the sake of the plants and the birds and the insects that he first thought of taking it, I believe. It was a good kind thought of his, my dear, and I hope you’ll make a good wife to him.’
Nelly’s delicate transparent cheeks lost every drop of colour. ‘But, dear Father, you don’t mean to say that Robert wants us to be married quite soon? I thought – oh, I thought – that it wasn’t to be for several years! I didn’t dream that he intended me to live in Hill Cottage.’
The old man fidgeted a little and looked uneasy. ‘Well, I ought to tell you, perhaps,’ he said, ‘that I did discuss things with Rob Canyot quite openly the other night. I told him frankly that if I resigned my living I should be totally without an income. He agreed with me that at my age and with my book on Sussex flora unfinished it would be wrong for me to try my hand at any other work. And so – to cut it short – he was very kind and said that of course I could live with you at the cottage. He said that his pictures had begun to sell well and that in addition to what he made that way he had a generous allowance from his mother. In fact he told me not to worry about the matter any further, but to consider it settled. He put it in such a way as to make me feel quite happy about living with you – as if my being with him, you know, and our conversations about science and the local flora and the insects and everything, were a real help to him in his work.‘
As Nelly looked at her father uttering these words, the old man’s fanatical head, with the furrowed forehead and the noticeable wart on the high-bridged nose, took to itself the appearance of some ancient remorseless idol upon whose mechanical decision, entirely divorced from all reason and pity, her whole future depended. Her delicately moulded white face stiffened into a rigid mask of nervous tension and little twitching wrinkles appeared between her eyebrows.
The low-voiced crooning of the doves, in the sycamore outside, teased her as something ill-timed, and the flowers on the table, picked by herself the day before, assumed the curious look which flowers have when they attend on some mortal disaster.
The more she contemplated the fatal cul-de-sac, into which an evil focusing of apparently malleable circumstances had pushed her, the more devastating the prospect looked.
The trap she had so innocently, step by step, walked into, narrowed upon her at that moment with what seemed like iron bands. She felt almost afraid of making the least movement of resistance lest the t
hing’s remorseless teeth should close with a snap. And yet, resist she must! A way of escape in some direction there must be. Life couldn’t intend to crush her with a stone before she had even begun to live.
‘I suppose, Father,’ she began, in a voice that sounded like someone else’s voice, some voice of a harassed young woman in some unreal story. ‘I suppose there’s no chance of the bishop being willing to let you keep your work, in spite of your change of views?’
The old man looked fiercely at her. ‘Haven’t I told you, child? It’s not our bishop. It’s the authority in London. But it’s not really that either. It’s my own conscience and self-respect. How can I go on reading the services here when I have ceased to believe a word of it? My plain duty, as an honest man, is to resign.’
The corners of Nelly’s mouth drooped piteously. Tears came into her eyes. She bit her lip. ‘I don’t believe it would have happened – any of it – if mother had lived.’
‘Your mother would have completely understood me,’ said the old man severely. ‘She always did understand me. However, if you’re determined to make it harder for me—’
With a brave effort she swallowed her tears and spoke more calmly. ‘But, Father dear, I know you still believe in Christ. You couldn’t not believe in Him and consecrate the Sacrament every morning as you do. It is only some theological difficulty you have, quite separate from what is really important. You know what the bishop said when you went to see him.’
The old man rose to his feet before her, a quavering tower of inarticulate passion. His long fingers twisted and trembled as they hung by his side. His hands jerked at the end of his long thin arms. The fleshy portion of his face seemed to draw itself tightly in, over the bony substructure, and his eyes glared as if from a cavernous pit.
‘How dare you quote that man to me! Didn’t I tell you? He treated me like a silly woman with some ridiculous mania that meant nothing. He wouldn’t even hear what I had to say. He just talked and talked, pretty conventional nothings, and then took me into his garden and showed me his sweet-peas! And I had come to let him know, as my spiritual superior, the deepest thoughts of my soul. His sweet-peas! His episcopal sweet-peas!’ and the old man sank down again into his chair, exhausted with his outburst. His face quickly changed from that queer drawn look and assumed his normal expression but Nelly noted a weary world-tired droop about him that startled her. Yes, it was clear that something must be done. His mind was troubled to its very foundations.
She moved over to his side. ‘Dearest Father!’ she said gently – ‘I think I do understand you.’ She bent down and kissed his high grizzled forehead, upon which the hair grew rough and stubbly, as one sees it in portraits of the philosopher Schopenhauer.
But after that, she left the sitting room and went out hatless into the garden, and beyond the garden into a cornfield behind the churchyard, where the early rye was already up to her waist. She walked slowly along a little path with the green rye on both sides of her, the ground at her feet tangled with red pimpernel and rose-coloured fumitory and tiny wild pansies. But she had no heart just then for these things. The very song of the skylark above her seemed to harden itself into a cruel screen of mockery, separating her from the heavens and the healing of their remote peace.
Never had her mind been so shaken from its normal quietness. She had known vaguely that her feeling for Canyot was not what she expected from ‘being in love’. But like so many others before her, she had, in her ignorance of what that real feeling meant, taken the romance and the passionate idealism of her own heart and woven them around her respect, her admiration, her girlish hero-worship.
And now this sudden coming of Richard on the scene, this mysterious poet from Paris, had revealed to her the limits, the bare, hard, clear limits, of what she felt for her betrothed. It was not that she dared yet to give any name to the obscure attraction she was aware of towards the older man. It was only that his appearance upon the stage at all altered her perspective and revealed the outlines of the trap she had innocently walked into.
And the teeth of the trap, the iron clutch against which she had not yet the courage to press her weight, lest she could not move it, was this new development with regard to her father. Here was indeed a trick, a cunning device, a malevolent ambush of fate, such as she had never expected life was capable of!
It was quite clear that they couldn’t be left adrift, without a roof and without a penny. Her father was of course far too old to do anything for himself, except this business with plants and insects which after all was only an old man’s hobby. She supposed that in these days of women’s freedom she could find something for herself. But she had no experience. She had not even done any serious ‘war work’. And how could she support both herself and her father?
They had no relations to whom she could appeal, her father’s eccentricity and pride having completely estranged his own connections, whereas her aunts, her dead mother’s sisters, were far too poor themselves to be of any help.
Weary and sick in soul the girl turned back to the house to assist Grace in her various household tasks. One tiny faint stream of sweetness, like the up-flow of an inland spring underneath a weight of brackish water, filtered through to her troubled brain through all the bitterness. This exciting newcomer into the circle of her life, this Parisian descendant of old Dr Storm, did undoubtedly seem to want her sympathy.
She knew well enough, by an instinct as direct and sure as that by which the birds build their nests, that the man had grievous need of such as she was, and she knew by the same instinct how angrily he was reacting against his need of her.
Those cynical conclusions of dispassionate scrutiny he called his ‘demons’ were not by any means so hidden from her as the good man dreamed in his vain masculine aloofness that they were.
Indeed, what really attracted her to him was not the power in him but the weakness in him; or to put it quite precisely the peculiar mingling of power and weakness which made up that troubled essence he named his soul.
That was where the difference lay between him and Robert. Robert was always something to lean upon, something to look up to, something to rely upon and be sure of. But Robert never made any attempt to drag her into the circle of his deepest thoughts. He treated her tenderly but he never confided in her. To him she was a child to be protected.
This man from Paris, for all his heavier weight of years and certainly in spite of himself and to his evident annoyance, could not, it seemed, do anything else than lay bare his deepest soul before her – and in doing this he could not prevent himself, in spite of his immense vanity, from appealing to her maternal instinct. Her betrothed was always the strong elder brother, though his years were so near her own; whereas this man, twice her own age, began to look like that grown-up child which, once in every woman’s life, becomes her most fatal attraction when, among all the other appeals, he at last takes to himself a palpable embodiment.
Nelly saw nothing more of her father till half the morning was over, and nothing of Robert Canyot. This hardly surprised her, as they had had a serious misunderstanding – if it was a misunderstanding – on their way home the night before; and she guessed he had gone off, to punish her, upon some long solitary excursion.
This is what he invariably did when anything clouded their intercourse; and his returns from these excursions had hitherto been marked by their happiest rapprochements.
It was in a strangely mingled mood that Nelly busied herself with her various domestic labours that morning. The sense of being most evilly hemmed in remained with her – a feeling as if she were an unsheared sheep pushed from behind down a narrow lane of hurdles towards the fatal jump into the sheep wash – but with it all there moved within her a new delicious thrill, vague and indistinct as the scent of an unknown flower, causing her every now and then to stop in the midst of her work and stand dreaming, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, oblivious to Grace’s chatter. Grace came from the West Country and was more voluble and less civil
ized than the local Sussex maidens. But on this particular occasion she found her young mistress singularly distraite. When the morning was well advanced she left the servant to prepare their mid-day meal and went out into the garden. In an old straw hat and a still older apron she set herself to weed one of the flower borders, the one which adjoined the churchyard wall.
The wall was not a low one, but by clambering up on a little ledge created by the collapse of some ancient cement she was just able to peep over it. She found it difficult to prevent herself from repeating this manoeuvre more than once. And every time she did it she had a vague hope that she might catch sight of Richard Storm standing by his grandfather’s headstone.
It was somewhere about her seventh peep – she would always henceforth associate that visionary figure with the pungent smell of ivy and its queer bitterness against her mouth – that she became aware, as she rested her chin against the tiny succulent wall plants that grew in the loose mould and moss, that her father had appeared on the scene and was doing something to her mother’s grave.
Cecily Moreton had not had a particularly happy life. She had been too hard-worked. But neither had she been unhappy. And Nelly had a clear recollection of a gentle soft-eyed creature bending over her pillow. She associated her mother with the Evening Hymn of Bishop Kern, the courtier-saint of King Charles the Second, and also (such is memory!) with one rare moment of passion in which the lady had flung the big hand-bell, which stood on the hall table, full against the door through which her husband had just passed! The dent in the door, though painted over, still remained. The hand that had thrown it was less distinguishable.
What was her father doing to the grave? He seemed to be prodding at it with a trowel or spud.
She ran round to the gate and hurried anxiously to the old man’s side. What he was doing was inoffensive and natural enough. He was planting a somewhat rare wild orchid, of the kind known as ‘maculata’, in the grass by the side of the monument. He was indeed ‘botanizing’ on his wife’s grave; but with no intent except to do her honour.
After My Fashion Page 6