XI

Motive, especially in complex natures, is often beyond reach of

accurate discovery, and a mixed motive may prove quite impossible of

complete disentanglement. But for the sense of shame that Eliot felt,

he might never have discerned that with his genuine desire to provide

for Mánya’s future there was also involved a secret satisfaction that

he himself would profit too. The sight of gold demolishes pretence

and artifice; and deep within he felt the old lust of possession

and acquisition assert itself. All these years it had been buried,

not destroyed. His love of the Place, his worship of Memory, his

guardianship of the little dream-estate, compared to the prize of

worldly treasure, were on the surface. They were artificial.

This little thing had proved it. The child’s tears, her significant

question above all, had shown him to himself. If not, whence came this

sense of ignominy before her own purer passion, the loss of confidence,

this inner quailing before Another who gazed reprovingly, resentfully,

upon him from the shadows of the past? That note of menace in Mánya’s

suggestive question was surely not her own. It haunted him. Day and

night he heard it ringing in his brain. This new distrust of himself

that he recognised read into it something almost vindictive and

revengeful.

But Eliot, for all that, was not the man to give in easily. He

resolutely dismissed this birth of morbid fancy. Clinging to the

thought that his duty to his niece came first, he resisted the

suggestion that imputed a grosser selfishness. Cass Murdoch, too,

unwittingly helped; for the side of his character John C.’s visit had

revived--the love of fight and energetic action--came valiantly to

the rescue. To a great extent he persuaded himself that his motive

was--almost entirely--a pure one. Preparations for developing the clay

went forward steadily.

Mánya too appeared to help him. She said no more distressing things;

she showed keen interest in the coming and going of surveyors,

architects, soil experts, and the like. And Murdoch’s discovery was no

false alarm; the bed of clay was deep and extensive as he prophesied,

its quality very fine. Men came with pick and shovel; sample pits were

dug; the stuff was tested and judged excellent; and the verdict of the

manufacturers, to whom ‘lots’ were forwarded on approval, pronounced

it admirable for a large and ready market. There was money in it, and

the supply would last for years. The papers heralded the fortunate

discoverer, and a moderate fortune undeniably was in sight.

The preparations, however, took time, and the finding of the initial

capital, which Murdoch readily supplied, also took time, and spring

meanwhile slipped into summer before the enterprise was fairly on its

feet. Soft winds sighed lazily among the larches, and the scent of

flowers pervaded every valley; the pine-trees basked in the sunshine,

the pearly water laughed and sang; and at night the moon shot every

glade with magic that was like the wings of moths whose flitting

scattered everywhere the fine dust of a thousand silvery dreams. The

beauty of the little haunted estate leaped into a rich maturity that

was utterly enchanting, like wild flowers that are sweetest just before

they die.

And over Mánya, too, there passed slowly a mysterious change, for it

seemed as if for a time she had been standing still, and now with a

sudden leap of beauty passed into the glory of young womanhood. With

her short skirts and tumbled hair, her grave and wistful face, swinging

idly that red tam-o’-shanter from which she was inseparable, he saw

her one evening on the lawn outside his study window, and the change

flashed into him across the moonlight with a positive shock. The child

had suddenly grown up. A barrier stood between them.

But the barrier was not so sudden as it seemed, for, on looking back,

he realised the daily, almost imperceptible manner of its growth. Its

complete erection he realised now, but he had been aware of it for a

long time--ever since his decision to work the clay, in fact. Here was

the proof her deceptive silence had concealed. She had felt it too

deeply for words, for arguing, for disappointment volubly expressed;

but it had struck into the roots of her little being and had changed

her from within outwards. It had aged her. Reality had broken in upon

her world of play and dream. He had destroyed her childhood at a single

blow. She questioned, doubted, and grew old.

But though every one grows older in identically this way, by sudden

leaps, as it were, due to the forcing impulse of some strong emotion,

with Mánya it brought no radical alteration. She deepened rather than

definitely changed. The sense of wonder did not fade, but ripened. The

crude facts of life could never satisfy a nature such as hers, and

though she realised them now for the first time, they could not enter

to destroy. They drove her more deeply into herself. That is, she dealt

with them.

And the change, though he devoted hours of pondering reflection over

it, may be summed up briefly enough in so far as it affected himself.

There was a difference in their relationship. He stood away from her;

while she, on her side, drew nearer to something else that was not

himself. With this elusive and mysterious Thing she lived daily. She

took sides with it and with the Place, against himself. It went on

largely, he felt, behind his back. She grew more and more identified

with some active influence that had always been at work in all the

wild gardened loveliness of the property, but was now more active

than before. Stirred up and roused it was; he could almost imagine

it--aggressive. And Mánya, always knowing it at closer quarters than

himself, was now in definite league with it. There was opposition in

it, though an opposition as yet inactive.

And in the silent watches of the night sometimes, when imagination wove

her pictures all unchecked, he again knew the haunting thought close

beside his bed: that the mind and hand of the dead were here at work,

using the delicate instrument of this rare, sensitive child to convey

protest, resentment, warning. Over the little vales, from all the depth

of forest, and above the spread of moorland just beyond, there breathed

this atmosphere of disapproval.

Mánya, never telling him much, now told him less than before; for he

had forfeited the right to know.

If it made him smile a little to notice that she had made Mother Coove

lengthen her dresses, it did not make him smile to learn that she still

wore her old shorter ones once the darkness fell, or that she now

went out to play in her wild corners of the woods chiefly after dusk.

For he saw the significance of this simple manœuvre, and divined its

meaning. She felt shy now in the daylight. This new thing in the spirit

of the Place had changed it all. She could not be abandoned as before,

go naked and undressed as once she graphically put it. The vulgar

influence from outside had come in. It stared offensively. It asked

questions, leered, turned everything common and unclean.

And she changed from time to time her playground as the workmen drove

her out. She moved from place to place, seeking new corners and going

farther into the moors and open spots. She followed the stream, for

instance, nearer to its source where its waters still ran unstained.

And from the neighbourhood of the sample pits that gaped like open

sores amid the beauty, she withheld herself completely. Nothing could

persuade her to come near them.

Towards himself especially, her attitude was pregnant with suggestion,

and though he made full allowance for the phantoms conscience raises,

there always remained the certainty that the child, and another with

her, watched him sharply from a distance. She was still affectionate

and simple, even with a new touch of resigned docility that was very

sweet, as though resolved to respect his older worldly wisdom, yet

with an air of pity for his great mistake that was half contempt,

half condescension. Her silence about the progress of the work made

him feel small. It so mercilessly judged him. And, while the dignity

he had always recognised in her increased, it seemed now partly

borrowed--his imagination leaned more and more towards this unwelcome

explanation--from this invisible Companion who overshadowed her.

He felt as though this silence temporarily blocked channels along

which something would presently break out with violence and scorn to

overwhelm him; till at last he came to regard her as a prisoner regards

the foreman of the jury who has formed his verdict and is merely

waiting to pronounce it--Guilty. Behind her, as behind the foreman,

gathered the composite decision of more than one, and the decision was

hostile. It urged her on against him. Opposition accumulated towards

positive attack. He dreaded some revelation through the child; and

piling guess on guess he felt certain who was this active Influence

that sought to use her as its instrument. The dead now, day and night,

stood very close beside him.

And meanwhile, things ran far from smoothly with the work itself.

Unforeseen difficulties everywhere arose to baffle him. Even Murdoch

made oppressive, troublesome conditions about the money that seemed

unnecessary, insisting upon details of management with a touch

of domineering interference that exasperated. Obstacles rose up

automatically, involving, as it were, the very processes of Nature

itself. There was a strike that delayed the railway builders for a

month, and when they returned the heavy summer rains had washed yards

of embankment down again. Soon afterwards a falling tree killed a

workman, and there ensued compensation worries that threatened a

law-suit. The clay itself, too, played them sudden tricks, proving

faulty the maps the surveyors had drawn; its depths and direction were

not as supposed, its angle to the lie of the slope deceptive, so that

an extra branch of single line for the trucks became essential. And the

money was insufficient; further advances became imperative, and, though

readily forthcoming, involved more delay. The spirit of lonely peace

and beauty departed from the Place, hiding its injured face among the

moorland reaches further up. Obstruction, with turmoil and confusion at

its back, rose up on every side to baffle him.

Though the advance was steady enough on the whole, and the difficulties

were only such as most similar enterprises encounter, Eliot was

conscious more and more of this sense of obstacles deliberately

interposed. It all seemed so nicely calculated to cause the maximum

of trouble and delay. The interference was so cunningly manœuvred. He

brought all his old energy and force to meet them, but there was ever

this curious sense of advised and determined opposition that began to

sap his confidence.

‘More trouble, sir,’ the foreman said one morning, when Eliot went down

to view the work, unaccompanied as usual by Mánya. ‘There seems no end

to it.’

‘What is it this time?’ He abhorred these conversations now. It always

seemed that Another stood behind his shoulder, listening.

‘The clay has gone,’ was the curious answer. He said it as though it

had gone purposely to spite them like a living thing.

‘Gone!’ he exclaimed incredulously.

‘Sunk away, gone deeper than we expected,’ was the answer. The man

shrugged his shoulders as though something puzzled him. ‘A kind of

subsidence come in the night,’ he added gloomily.

They stared at one another for a full minute with eyes that screened

other meanings. Eliot felt a sort of fury rise within him. Somehow the

idea of foul play crossed his mind, though instantly rejected as absurd.

‘With this loose sandy bottom, and a steep slope that ain’t drained

properly, you’re never very sure of where you are,’ said the man at

length, feeling his position made some explanation necessary. He seemed

to regard the Clay as something ever on the move.

‘I see,’ said Eliot, grateful for a solution that he could apparently

accept. They talked of ways and means to circumvent it.

‘Queerest job I ever come across, sir,’ the foreman muttered, as at

length Eliot turned away, pretending not to hear it.

And scenes like this were frequent. Another time it was the white

weed--with the pretty little flower Mánya loved to twine about her

tam-o’-shanter--that had gathered so thickly on the artificial ponds

where the water was stored, that it clogged the machinery till the

wheels refused to turn; and next, a group of men that quit working

without any reasonable excuse--open symptom of a hidden dissatisfaction

that had been running underground for weeks. There was something

about the job they didn’t like. Rumours for a long time had been

current--queer, unsubstantiated rumours that those in authority

chose to disregard. Superstition hereabouts was rife enough without

encouraging it.

Taken altogether, as products of a single hostile influence at

work, these difficulties easily assumed in his imaginative mind the

importance of a consciously directed opposition. He remembered often

now those words of Mánya, the last time she had opened her lips upon

the subject. For she had credited the Place with the power of resisting

him; only by ‘the Place’ she now meant this mysterious personal

influence that she knew behind it.

Yet he persisted in his consciousness of doing right. His duty to the

child was clear; her future was in his charge; and the fact that he

meant to leave her everything proved that his motive, or part of it at

least, was above suspicion. From John C. he also gathered comfort and

support. He had only to imagine him standing by his side, repeating

that remark about religion, to feel strong again in his determination.

Cass Murdoch recognised no mystery or subtlety anywhere. He discussed

only facts.

The consciousness that he was partly traitor none the less remained,

and with it the feeling that the very Tradition he had nursed and

worshipped all these years was up in arms against him. Mánya, standing

closer to Nature than himself, had divined this Tradition and, in some

fashion curiously her own, had personified it. And this personification

linked on with the dead. His love of the Beauty, and his love of a

particular memory he had read into the Place, she had most marvellously

disentangled. Both were genuine in him; yet he had suffered them in

combination to produce a false and artificial Image existing only in

his own imagination. There was conflict in his being. His motive was

impure.

Behind them stood the giant, naked thing the child divined that

was--Reality. She knew it face to face. What was it? The mere definite

question which he permitted himself made him sometimes hesitate and

wait, not unwilling to call a halt. He was aware that the child stood

ever in the background, waiting her time with that sly laughter of

superior knowledge. These obstacles and difficulties were sent as

warnings; and while he disregarded them of set purpose, something deep

within him paused to question--and while it questioned, trembled. For

protest, he seemed to discern, had become resentment, resentment grown

into resistance; resistance into hostile opposition, and opposition

now, with something horribly like anger at its back, was hinting

already at a blank refusal that involved almost--revenge.

Hitherto he had been hindered, impeded, thwarted merely; soon he could

be deliberately overruled and stopped. Nature, ever defeating an impure

motive, would rise up against him and cry finally No.

‘But, Uncle, tell me one thing: will the Place let you?’ rang now often

through his daily thoughts. He heard it more especially at night. At

night, too, when sleep refused him, he surprised himself more than once

framing sentences of explanation and defence. They rose automatically.

They followed him even into his dreams. ‘My duty to the child is plain.

How can I help it? If you were here beside me now, would you not also

approve?’

For the idea that _she_ was beside him grew curiously persuasive, so

that he almost expected to see her in the corridors or on the stairs,

standing among the trees or waiting for him by the Mill itself where

last she drew the breath of life.

And by way of a climax came then Mánya’s request to change her room,

and his own decision to move himself into the one she vacated. The

reason she gave was that the ‘trees made such a noise at night’ she

could not sleep, and since it had three windows, two of which were

almost brushed by pine branches, the excuse, though discovered late,

seemed natural enough. At any rate he did not press her further. She

occupied a room now at the back where a single window gave a view far

up into the moors. And, turning out the unnecessary furniture to suit

his taste, he moved into the one she had vacated--his wife’s.