note, asking me to dine with her on a date not far distant. I
telephoned a delighted acceptance, for, indeed, I wanted then, even
as I did this morning, to convince myself that I was wholly in error
concerning my interpretation of that incident concerning the thrush.
Though I hold that no man has the right to accept the hospitality
offered by one he does not like, in all points except one I admired
and liked Lady Rorke immensely and wished to get rid of that one. So
I gratefully accepted, and then hurried out on a dismal and overdue
visit to the dentist’s. In the waiting-room was a girl of about twelve,
with a hand nursing a rueful face, and from time to time she stifled
a sob of pain or apprehension. I was just wondering whether it would
be a breach of waiting-room etiquette to attempt to administer comfort
or supply diversion, when the door opened and in came Lady Rorke. She
laughed delightfully when she saw me.
“Hurrah! You’re another occupant of the condemned cell,” she said, “and
very soon we shall both be sent for to the scaffold. I can’t describe
to you what a coward I am about it. Why haven’t we got beaks like
birds?----”
Her glance fell on the forlorn little figure by the window, with the
rueful face and the wet eyes.
“Why, here’s another of us,” she said. “And have they sent you to the
dentist’s all alone, my dear?”
“Y--yes.”
“How horrid of them!” said Lady Rorke. “They’ve sent me alone, too,
and I think it’s most unfeeling. But you shan’t be alone, anyhow, I’ll
come in with you, and sit by you, if you like that, and box the man’s
ears for him if he hurts you. Or shall you and I set on him, as soon
as we’ve got him by himself, and take out all his teeth one after the
other? Just to teach him to be a dentist.”
A faint smile began the break through the clouds.
“Oh, will you come in with me?” she asked. “I shan’t mind nearly so
much, then. It’s--it’s got to come out, you know, and I mayn’t have
gas.”
Just the same gleam of a smile as I had seen on Lady Rorke’s face once
before quivered there now, a light not of pity, surely.
“Ah, but it won’t ache any more after that,” she said, “and after all,
it is so soon over. You’ll just open your mouth as if you were going to
put the largest of all strawberries into it, and you’ll hold tight on
to my hand, and the dentist takes up something which you needn’t look
at----”
There was a want of tact in the vividness of this picture, and the
child began to sob again.
“Oh, don’t, don’t!” she cried.
Again the door opened, and she clung to Lady Rorke.
“Oh, I know it’s for me!” she wailed.
Lady Rorke bent over her, scanning her terrified face.
“Come along, my dear,” she said, “and it will be over in no time.
You’ll be back here again before this gentleman can count a hundred,
and he’ll have all his troubles in front of him still.”
Again this morning I tried to expunge from that picture, so trivial and
yet so vivid to me, the sinister something which seemed to connect it
with the incident about the thrush, and, leaving it, my mind strayed
on over other reminiscences of Lady Rorke. Before the season was over
I had got to know her well, and the better I knew her the more I
marvelled at that many-petalled vitality, which never ceased unfolding
itself. She entertained largely, and had that crowning gift of a good
hostess, namely, that she enjoyed her own parties quite enormously. She
was a very fine horsewoman, and after being up till dawn at some dance,
she would be in the Row by half-past eight on a peculiarly vicious mare
to whom she seemed to pay only the most cursory attention. She had a
good knowledge of music, she dressed amazingly, she was charming to her
meagre little husband, playing piquet with him by the hour (which was
the only thing, apart from herself, that he cared about), and if in
this modern democratic London there could be said to be a queen, there
is no doubt who that season would have worn the crown. Less publicly,
she was a great student of the psychical and occult, and I remembered
hearing that she was herself possessed of very remarkable mediumistic
gifts. But to me that was a matter of hearsay, for I never was present
at any séance of hers.
Yet through the triumphant music of her pageant, there sounded, to
my ears at least, fragments of a very ugly tune. It was not only in
these two instances of its emergence that I heard it, it was chiefly
and most persistently audible in her treatment of Archie Rorke, her
husband’s cousin. Everyone knew, for none could help knowing, that
he was desperately in love with her, and it is impossible to imagine
that she alone was ignorant of it. It is, no doubt, the instinct
of many women to fan a passion which they do not share, and which
they have no intention of indulging, just as the male instinct is to
gratify a passion that he does not really feel, but there are limits
to mercilessness. She was not “cruel to be kind”; she was kind to be
demoniacally cruel. She had him always by her; she gave him those
little touches and comrade-like licences which meant nothing to her,
but crazed him with thirst; she held the glass close to his lips
and then tilted it up and showed it him empty. The more charitable
explanation was that she, perhaps, knew that her husband could not
live long, and that she intended to marry Archie, and such, so it
subsequently appeared, her intentions were. But when I saw her feeding
him with husks and putting an empty glass to his lips, nothing, to
my mind, could account for her treatment of him except a rapture of
cruelty at the sight of his aching. And somehow, awfully and aptly,
that seemed to fit in with the affair of the thrush, and the meeting
with the forlorn child in the dentist’s waiting-room. Yet ever, through
that gruesome twilight, there blazed forth her charm and her beauty and
the beam of her joyous vitality, and I would cudgel myself for my nasty
interpretations.
It was early in the spring of next year that I was spending a week-end
with her and her husband at Lincote. She had suggested my coming down
on Saturday morning before the party assembled later in the day, and
at lunch I was alone with her husband and her. Sir Ernest was very
silent; he looked ill and haggard, and, in fact, hardly spoke a word
except when suddenly he turned to the butler and said, “Has anything
been heard of the child yet?” He was told that there was no news, and
subsided into silence again. I thought that some queer shadow as of
suspense or anxiety crossed Lady Rorke’s face at the question; but
on the answer, it cleared off again, and, as if to sweep the subject
wholly away, she asked me if I could tolerate a saunter with her
through the woods till her guests arrived.
Out she came like some splendid Diana of the Forests, and like the
goddess’s was the swift, swinging pace of her saunter. Spring all round
was riotous in blossom and bird-song; it was just that ecstatic moment
of the year when the hounds of spring have run winter to death, and as
we gained the high ridge of down above the woods she stopped and threw
her arms wide.
“Oh, the sense of spring!” she cried. “The daffodils, and the west
wind, and the shadows of the clouds. How I wish I could take the
whole lot into my arms and hug them. Miracles are flowering every
moment now in the country, while the only miracle in London is the
mud. What sunshine, what air! Drink them in, for they are the one
divine medicine. One wants that medicine sometimes, for there are sad
things and terrible things all round us, pain and anguish, and decay.
Yet I suppose that even those call out the splendour of fortitude
or endurance. Even when one looks on a struggle which one knows is
hopeless, it warms the heart to see it.”
The gleam that shone from her paled, her arms dropped, and she moved
on. Then, soft of voice and soft of eye, she spoke again.
“Such a sad thing happened here two days ago,” she said. “A small
girl--now what was her name? Yes--Ellen Davenport--brought a note from
the village up to the house. I was out, so she left it, and started, it
is supposed, to go back home. She has not been seen since. Descriptions
of her were circulated in all the villages for miles round; but, as
you heard at lunch, there has been no news of her, and the copses and
coverts in the park have been searched, but with no result. And yet out
of that comes splendour. I went to see her mother yesterday, bowed down
with grief, but she won’t give up hope. ‘If it is God’s will,’ she said
to me, ‘we shall find my Ellen alive; and if we find her dead, it will
be God’s will, too.’”
She paused.
“But I didn’t ask you down here to moan over tragedies,” she said.
“I wanted you after all your weeks in town to come and have a
spring-cleaning. Doesn’t the wind take the dust out of you, like one of
those sucking-machines which you put on to carpets? And the sun! Make a
sponge of yourself and soak it up till you’re dripping with it.”
For a couple of miles, at the least, we kept along this high ridge of
down, and the larks were springing from the grass, vocal with song
uncongealed, as they aspired and sank again, dropping at last dumb
and spent with rapture. Then we descended steeply, through the woods
and glades of the park, past thickets of catkinned sallows, and of
willows with soft moleskin buttons, and in the hollows the daffodils
were dancing, and the herbs of the springtime were pushing up through
the brittle withered stuff of the winter. Then, passing along the one
street of the red-tiled village, in which my companion pointed me out
the house where the poor vanished girl had lived, we turned homewards
across the grass and joined the road again at the bottom of the great
lake that lies below the terraced gardens of the house.
This lake was artificial, made a hundred years ago by the erection of a
huge dam across the dip of the valley, so that the stream which flowed
down it was thereby confined and must needs form this sheet of water
before it found outlet again through the sluices. At the centre the dam
is some twenty-five feet in height, and by the side of the road which
crosses it clumps of rhododendrons lean out over the deep water. The
margin on the side towards the lake is reinforced with concrete, now
mossy and overgrown with herbage, and the face of it, burrows down
to the level of the bottom of the dam through four fathoms of dusky
water. The lake was high and the overflow poured sonorously through the
sluices, and the sun in the west made broken rainbows in the foam of
its outpouring.
As we paused there a moment, my companion seemed the incarnation of the
sights and sounds that went to the spell of the spring; singing larks
and dancing daffodils, west wind and rain-bowed foam and, no less, the
dark, deep water, were all distilled into her radiant vitality.
“And now for the house again,” she said, going briskly up the steep
slope. “Is it inhospitable of me to wish that no one was coming except,
of course, our delightful Archie? A houseful brings London into the
country, and we shall talk scandal and stir up mud instead of watching
miracles.”
Another faint memory of her lingered somewhere in the dusk, and I
groped for it, as one gropes in slime for the roots of a water-plant,
and pulled it out. A notorious murderer had been guillotined that
morning in France, and in some Sunday paper next day there was a
brutal, brilliant, inexcusable little sketch of his being led out
between guards for the final scene at dawn outside the prison at
Versailles. And, as I wrote my name in Lady Rorke’s visitors’ book
on Monday morning, I spilt a blot of ink on the page and hastily
had recourse to the blotting-pad on her writing-table in order to
minimize the disfigurement. Inside it was this unpardonable picture,
cut out and put away, and I thought of the thrush and the dentist’s
waiting-room----
A month afterwards her husband died, after three weeks of intolerable
torment. The doctor insisted on his having two trained nurses, but
Lady Rorke never left him. She was present at the painful dressings
of the wound from the operation that only prolonged the misery of his
existence, and even slept on the sofa of the room where he lay.
* * * * *
Archie Rorke arrived that evening. He let me know at once that he had
seen the announcement of Lady Rorke’s death, and said no more about
it till later, when he and I were left alone over the fire in the
smoking-room. He looked round to see that the door was shut behind the
last bedgoer of my little party, and then turned to me.
“I’ve got to tell you something,” he said. “It’ll take half an hour, so
to-morrow will do if you want to be off.”
“But I don’t,” said I.
He pulled himself together from his sprawling sunkenness in his chair.
“Very well,” he said. “What I want to tell you is the story of the
breaking-off of my engagement with Sybil. I have often wanted to do so
before, but while she was alive, as you will presently see, I could
tell nobody. I shall ask you, when you know everything, whether you
think I could have done otherwise. And please do not interrupt me till
I have finished, unless there is something you don’t understand, for it
won’t be very easy to get through with it. But I think I can make it
intelligible.”
He was silent a moment, and I saw his face working and twitching.
“I must tell somebody,” he said, “and I choose you, unless you mind it
awfully. But I simply can’t bear it alone any more.”
“Go on, then, old boy,” I said. “I’m glad you chose me, do you know.
And I won’t interrupt.”
Archie spoke.
“A week or two only before our marriage was to have taken place,” he
said, “I went down to Lincote for a couple of days. I had had the house
done up and re-decorated, and now the work was finished and I wanted to
see that all was in order. Nothing could be worthy of Sybil, but--well,
you can guess, more or less, what my feelings were.
“For a week before there had been very heavy rains, and the lake--you
know it--below the garden was very high, higher than I had ever seen
it: the water poured over the road across the dam which leads to the
village. Under the weight and press of it a great crack had appeared
in the concrete with which it is faced, and there was danger of the
dam being carried away. If that happened the whole lake would have
been suddenly released and no end of damage might have been done. It
was therefore necessary to draw off the water as fast as possible to
relieve the pressure and repair the crack. This was done by means of
big siphons. For two days we had them working, but the crack seemed
to extend right to the foundations of the dam, and before it could be
repaired all the water in the lake would have to be drawn off. I was
just leaving for town, when the foreman came up to the house to tell me
that they had found something there. In the ooze and mud at the base
of the dam, twenty-five feet below water-level, they had come upon the
body of a young girl.”
He gripped the arms of his chair tight. Little did he know that I was
horribly aware of what he was going to tell me next.
“About a month before my cousin Ernest’s death,” he said, “a mysterious
affair happened in the village. A girl named Ellen Davenport had
disappeared. She came up one afternoon to the house with a note,
and was never seen again, dead or alive. Her disappearance was now
explained. A chain of beads round the neck and various fragments of
clothing established, beyond any doubt, the identity of what they had
found at the bottom of the lake. I waited for the inquest, telegraphing
to Sybil that business had detained me, and then returned to town, not
intending to tell her what that business was, for our marriage was
close at hand and it was not a topic one would choose. She was very
superstitious, you know, and I thought that it would shock her. That
she would feel it to be unlucky and ill-omened. So I said nothing to
her.
“Sybil had extraordinary mediumistic powers. She did not often exercise
them and she never would give a séance to any one she did not know
extremely well, for she believed that people brought with them the
spiritual influences with which they were surrounded, and that there
was the possibility of very evil intelligences being set free. But she
had sat several times with me, and I had witnessed some very remarkable
manifestations. Her procedure was to put herself, by abstraction of
her mind, into a state of trance, and spirits of the dead who were
connected with the sitters could then communicate through her. On
one occasion my mother, whom she had never seen, and who died many
years ago, spoke through her and told me certain facts which Sybil
could not have known, and which I did not know. But an old friend of
my mother’s, still alive, told me that they were correct. They were
of an exceedingly private nature. Sybil also, so she told me, could
produce materialisations, but up till now I had never seen any. A
remarkable thing about her mediumship was that she would sometimes
regain consciousness from her trance while still these communications
were being made, and she knew what was going on. She could hear herself
speak and be mentally aware of what she was saying. On the occasion,
for instance, of which I have told you, when my mother spoke to me she
was in this state. The same thing occurred at the sitting of which I
shall now speak.
“That night, on my return to London, she and I dined alone. I felt a
very strong desire, for which I could not account, that she should
hold a sitting--just herself and me--and she consented. We sat in her
room, with a shaded lamp, but there was sufficient illumination for me
to see her quite distinctly, for her face was towards the light. There
was a small table in front of us covered with a dark cloth. She sat
close to it, in a high chair, composed herself, and almost immediately
went into trance. Her head fell forward and by her slow breathing and
her absolute immobility I knew she was unconscious. For a long time
we sat there in silence, and I began to think that we should get no
manifestations at all, and that the sitting, as sometimes was the case,
would be a failure; but then I saw that something was happening.”
His hands, with which he gripped the arms of his chair, were trembling.
Twice he tried to speak, but it was not till the third attempt that he
mastered himself.
“There was forming a mist above the table,” he said. “It was slightly
luminous and it spread upwards, pillar-shaped, in height between
two and three feet. Then I saw that below the outlying skeins of it
something was materialising. It moulded itself into human shape, rising
waist-high from the table, and presently shoulders and arms and neck
and head were visible, and features began to outline themselves. For
some time it remained vague and fluid, swaying backwards and forwards a
little; then very quickly it solidified, and there, close in front of
me, was the half-figure of a young girl. The eyes were still closed,
but now they opened. Round her neck was a chain of beads just such as I
had seen laid by the body that had been found in the lake. And then I
spoke to her, asking her who she was, though I already knew.
“Her answer was no more than a whisper, but quite distinct.
“‘Ellen Davenport,’ she said.
“A disordered terror seized me. Yet perhaps this little white figure,
with its wide-gazing eyes, was some hallucination, something that had
no objective existence at all. All day the thought of the poor kiddie
whose remains I had seen taken out of the ooze at the bottom of the
lake had been vivid in my mind, and I tried to think that what I saw
was no more than some strange projection of my thought. And yet I
felt it was not so; it was independent of myself. And why was it made
manifest, and on what errand had it come? I had pressed Sybil to give
me this séance, and God knows what I would have given not to have done
so! For one thing I was thankful, namely, that she was in unconscious
trance. Perhaps the phantom would fade again before she came out of it.
“And then I heard a stir of movement from the chair where she sat, and,
turning, I saw that she had raised her head. Her eyes were open and on
her face such a mask of terror as I have never known human being could
wear. Recognition was there, too; I saw that Sybil knew who the phantom
was.
“The figure that palely gleamed above the table turned its head towards
her, and once more the white lips opened.
“‘Yes, I am Ellen Davenport,’ she said.
“The whisper grew louder.
“‘You might have saved me,’ she said, ‘or you might have tried to save
me; but you watched me struggling till I sank.’
“And then the apparition vanished. It did not die away; it was there
clear and distinct one moment, at the next it was gone. Sybil and I
were sitting alone in her room with the low-burning lamp, and the
silence sang in my ears.
“I got up and turned on the switch that kindled the electric lights,
and knew that something within me had grown cold and that something
had snapped. She still sat where she was, not looking at me at all,
but blankly in front of her. She said no word of denial in answer to
the terrible accusation that had been uttered. And I think I was glad
of that, for there are times when it is not only futility to deny, but
blasphemy. For my part, I could neither look at her nor speak to her. I
remember holding out my hands to the empty grate, as if there had been
a fire burning there. And standing there I heard her rise, and drearily
wondered what she would say and knew how useless it would be. And then
I heard the whisper of her dress on the carpet and the noise of the
door opening and shutting, and when I turned I found that I was alone
in the room. Presently I let myself out of the house.”
There was a long pause, but I did not break it, for I felt he had not
quite finished.
“I had loved her with my whole heart,” he said, “and she knew it.
Perhaps that was why I never attempted to see her again and why she did
not attempt to see me. That little white figure would always have been
with us, for she could not deny the reality of it and the truth of that
which it had spoken. That’s my story, then. You needn’t even tell me if
you think I could have done differently, for I knew I couldn’t. And she
couldn’t.”
He rose.
“I see there is to be an inquest,” he said. “I hope they will find
that she killed herself. It will mean, won’t it, that her remorse was
unbearable. And that’s atonement.”
He moved towards the door.
“Inscrutable decrees,” he said.
The Gardener
The Gardener
Two friends of mine, Hugh Grainger and his wife, had taken for a
month of Christmas holiday the house in which we were to witness such
strange manifestations, and when I received an invitation from them to
spend a fortnight there I returned them an enthusiastic affirmative.
Well already did I know that pleasant heathery country-side, and most
intimate was my acquaintance with the subtle hazards of its most
charming golf-links. Golf, I was given to understand, was to occupy the
solid day for Hugh and me, so that Margaret should never be obliged to
set her hand to the implements with which the game, so detestable to
her, was conducted....