way this worthy man treated her, for not only did he return upon his
steps immediately after he had passed her, but he permitted his eyes,
both in passing and repassing, to search her smilingly up and down from
her boots to the top of her head, precisely as if he were a connoisseur
in a gallery observing the “values” of a famous picture.
And yet, for she was not by any means oblivious to such distinctions,
the girl was unable to feel even for one second that this surprising
admirer was anything but a gentleman--a gentleman, however, with very
singular manners. That she certainly did feel. And yet, she liked
him, liked him before he uttered a word, liked him with that swift,
irrational, magnetic attraction which, with women even more than with
men, is the important thing.
Passing her for the third time he suddenly darted into the grass, and
with a movement so comically impetuous that though she gave a start
she could not feel angry, picked up her discarded flowers and gravely
presented them to her, saying as he did so, “Perhaps you’ll be annoyed
at leaving these behind--or do you wish them at the devil?”
Nance took them from him and smiled frankly into his face.
“I suppose I oughtn’t to have picked them,” she said. “People don’t
like dandelions brought into houses.”
“What an Attic chin you have!” was the stranger’s next remark. There
was such an absence in his tone of all rakish or conventional gallantry
that the girl still felt she could not repulse him.
“You are staying here--in Rodmoor?” he went on.
Nance explained that she had come to live with Miss Doorm.
“Ah!” The stranger looked at her curiously, smiling with exquisite
sweetness. “You have been here before,” he said. “You came in a coach,
pulled by six black horses. You know every sort of reed and every kind
of moss in all the fens. You know all the shells on the shore and all
the seaweed in the sea.”
Nance was less puzzled than might be supposed by this fantastic
address, as she had the advantage of interpreting it in the light of
the humorous and reassuring smile which accompanied its utterance.
She brought him back to reality by a direct question. “Can you tell me
where Mr. Stork lives, please? I’ve a friend staying with him and I
want to know which way a person would naturally take coming from there
to us. I had rather hoped,” she hesitated a little, “to have met my
friend already. But perhaps Mr. Stork is a late riser.”
The stranger, who had been looking very intently at the opposite hedge
while she asked her question, suddenly darted towards it. The queer way
in which he ran with his arms swinging loosely from his shoulders, and
his body bent a little forward, struck Nance as peculiarly fascinating.
When he reached the hedge he hovered momentarily in front of it and
then pounced at something. “Missed!” he cried in a peevish voice. “Damn
the little scoundrel! A shrew-mouse! That’s what it was! A shrew-mouse!”
He came hurrying back as fast as he went, almost as if Nance herself
had been some kind of furred or feathered animal that might disappear
if it were not held fast.
“I beg your pardon, Madam,” he said, breathlessly, “but you don’t often
see those so near the town. Hullo!” This last exclamation was caused
by the appearance, not many paces from them, of Adrian Sorio himself
who emerged from a gap in the hedge, hatless and excited.
“I was on the tow-path,” he gasped, “and I caught sight of you. I was
afraid you’d have started. Baltazar made me go with him to the station.”
He paused and stared at Nance’s companion.
The latter looked so extremely uncomfortable that the girl hastened to
come to his rescue.
“This gentleman was just going to show me the way,” she said, “to your
friend’s house. Look, Adrian! Aren’t these lovely?”
She held out the dandelions towards him, but he disregarded them.
“Well,” he remarked rather brusquely, “now I’ve found you, I fancy we’d
better go back the way we came. I’m longing to see how Linda feels. I
want to take her down to the sea this afternoon. Shall we do that? Or
perhaps you can’t both leave Miss Doorm at the same time?”
He stared at the stranger as if bidding him clear off. But the admirer
of shrew-mice had recovered his equanimity. “I know Mr. Stork well,” he
remarked to Sorio. “He and I are quite old friends. I was just asking
this lady if she had ever been in the fens before, but I gather this is
her first visit.”
Adrian had by this time begun to look so morose that Nance broke in
hurriedly.
“We must introduce ourselves,” she said. “My name is Miss Herrick.
This is Mr. Adrian Sorio.” She paused and waited. A long shrill cry
followed by a most melancholy wail which gradually died away in the
distance, came to them over the marshes.
“A curlew,” remarked the intruder. “Beautiful and curious--and with
very interesting mating habits. They are rare, too.”
“Come along, Nance,” Sorio burst out. But the girl turned to her new
acquaintance and extended her hand.
“You haven’t told us _your_ name yet,” she said. “I hope we shall meet
again.”
The stranger gave her a look which, for caressing softness, could only
be compared to a virtuoso’s finger laid upon an incomparable piece of
Egyptian pottery.
“Certainly we shall meet,” he murmured. “Of course, most certainly. I
know every one here. My name is Raughty--Doctor Fingal Raughty. I was
with old Doorm when he died. A noble head, though rather malformed
behind the ears. He had a peculiar smell too--not unpleasant--rather
musky in fact. They called him Badger in the village. He could drink
more gin at a sitting than any man I have ever seen. He resembled the
portraits of Descartes. Good-bye, Miss--Nance!”
As soon as the lovers were alone Sorio’s rage broke forth.
“What a man!” he cried. “Who gave him leave to talk like that of Mr.
Doorm? How did he know you weren’t related to him? And what surpassing
coolness to call you by your Christian name! Confound him--he’s gone
the way we wanted to go. I believe he knew that. Look! He’s fooling
about in the ditch, waiting for us to overtake him!”
Nance could not help laughing a little at this. “Not at all, my dear.
He’s looking for shrew-mice.”
“What?” rejoined the other crossly. “On the public road? He’s mad.
Come, we must get round him somehow. Let’s go through here and hit the
tow path.”
They had no more interruptions as they strolled slowly back along the
river’s bank. Nance was perplexed, however, by Adrian’s temper. He
seemed irritable and brusque. She had never known him in such a mood,
and a dim, obscure apprehension to which she could assign no adequate
cause, began to invade her heart.
They had both become so silent, and the girl’s nerves had been so set
on edge by his unusual attitude towards her, that she gave a quite
perceptible start when he suddenly pointed across the stream to a
clump of oak trees, the only ones, he told her, to be found in the
neighbourhood.
“There’s something behind them,” she remarked, “a house of some kind. I
shouldn’t like to live out in that place. How they must hear the wind!
It must howl and moan sometimes--mustn’t it?” She smiled at him and
shivered.
“I think I miss London Bridge Road a little, and--Kensington Park.
Don’t you, too, Adrian?”
“Yes, there’s a house behind them,” Sorio repeated, disregarding her
last words and staring fixedly at the oak trees. “There’s a house
behind them.”
His manner was so queer that the girl looked at him with serious alarm.
“What’s the matter with you, Adrian?” she said. “I’ve never known you
like this--”
“It’s where the Renshaws live,” her lover continued. “They have a kind
of park. Its wall runs close to the village. Some of the trees are very
old. I walked there this morning before breakfast. Baltazar advised me
to.”
Nance looked at him still more nervously. Then she gave a little forced
laugh. “That is why you were so late in coming to see me, I suppose!
Well, you say the Renshaws live there. May one ask who the Renshaws
are?”
He took the girl’s arm in his own and dragged her forward at a rapid
pace. She remarked that it was not until some wide-spreading willows
on the further side of the river concealed the clump of oaks that he
replied to her question.
“Baltazar told me everything about them. He ought to know, for he’s one
of them himself. Yes, he’s one of them. He’s the son of old Herman,
Brand’s father; not legitimate, of course, and Brand isn’t always kind
to him. But he’s one of them.”
He stopped abruptly on this last word and Nance caught him throwing a
furtive glance across the stream.
“Who are they, Adrian? Who are they?” repeated the girl.
“I’ll tell you,” he cried, with strange irritation. “I’ll tell you
everything! When _haven’t_ I told you everything? They are brewers.
That isn’t very romantic, is it? And I suppose you might call them
landowners, too. They’ve lived here forever, it seems, and in the same
house.”
He burst into an uneasy laugh.
“In the same house for centuries and centuries! The churchyard is full
of them. It’s only lately they’ve taken to be brewers--I suppose the
land don’t pay for their vices.”
And again he laughed in the same jarring and ungenial way.
“Brand employs Baltazar--just as if he wasn’t his brother at all--in
the office at Mundham. You remember Mundham? We came through it in the
train. It’s over there,” he waved his hand in front of him, “about
seven miles off. It’s a horrid place--all slums and canals. That’s
where they make their beer. Their beer!” He laughed again.
“You haven’t yet told me who they are--I mean who else there is,”
observed Nance while, for some reason or other, her heart began to beat
tumultuously.
“Haven’t I said I’d tell you everything?” Sorio flung out. “I’ll tell
you more than you bargain for, if you tease me. Oh, confound it!
There’s Rachel and Linda! Look now, do they appear as if they were
happy?”
Favoured by the wind which blew sea-wards, the lovers had been
permitted to approach quite close to their friends without any betrayal
of their presence.
Linda was seated on the river bank, her head in her hands, while Miss
Doorm, like a black-robed priestess of some ancient ritual, leant
against the trunk of a leafless pollard.
“They were perfectly happy when I left them,” whispered Nance, but she
was conscious as she spoke of a cold, miserable misgiving in her inmost
spirit. Like a flash her mind reverted to the lilac bushes of the
London garden, and a sick loneliness seized her.
“Linda!” she cried, with a quiver of remorse in her voice. The young
girl leapt hurriedly to her feet, and Miss Doorm removed her hand from
the tree. A quick look passed between the sisters, but Nance understood
nothing of what Linda’s expression conveyed. They moved on together,
Adrian with Linda and Nance with Rachel.
“What do they call this river?” Nance enquired of her companion, as
soon as she felt reassured by the sound of the girl’s laugh.
“The Loon, my dear,” replied Miss Doorm. “They call it the Loon. It
runs through Mundham and then through the fens. It forms the harbour at
Rodmoor.”
Nance sat silent. In the depths of her heart she made a resolution. She
would find some work to do here in Rodmoor. It was intolerable to be
dependent on any one. Yes, she would find work, and, if need be, take
Linda to live with her.
She felt now, though she would have found it hard to explain the
obscure reason for it, more reluctant than ever to return to London.
Every pulse of her body vibrated with a strange excitement. A reckless
fighting spirit surged up within her. Not easily, not quickly, should
her hold on the man she loved be loosed! But she felt danger on the
horizon--nearer than the horizon. She felt it in her bones.
They had now reached the foot of Rachel’s garden and there was a
general pause in order that Adrian might do justice to the heavy
architecture of Dyke House, as it was called--that house which the
Badger--to follow Doctor Raughty’s tale--had taken into his “noble” but
“malformed” head to leave to his solitary descendant.
As they passed in one by one through the little dilapidated gate,
Nance had a sudden inspiration. She seized her lover by the wrist.
“Adrian,” she whispered, “has there been anything--any one--to remind
you--of what--you saw--that morning?”
She could not but believe that he had heard her and caught her meaning,
yet it was hard to assume it, for his tone was calm and natural as he
answered her, apparently quite misunderstanding her words:
“The sea, you mean? Yes, I’ve heard it all night and all day. We’ll go
down there this afternoon, and Linda with us.” He raised his voice.
“You’ll come to the sea, Linda; eh, child? To the Rodmoor sea?”
The words died away over the river and across the fens. The others had
already entered the house, but a laughing white face at one of the
windows and the tapping of girlish hands on the closed pane seemed to
indicate acquiescence in what he suggested.
III
SEA-DRIFT
The wind had dropped but no gleam of sunshine interrupted the
monotonous stretch of grey sky, grey dunes and grey sea, as the sisters
with their two companions strolled slowly in the late afternoon along
the Rodmoor sands.
Linda was a little pale and silent, and Nance fancied she discerned
now and again, in the glances Miss Doorm threw upon her, a certain
sinister exultation, but she was prevented from watching either of
them very closely by reason of the extraordinary excitement which the
occasion seemed to arouse in Sorio. He kept shouting bits of poetry,
some of which Nance caught the drift of, while others--they might have
been Latin or Greek, for all she knew--conveyed nothing to her but a
vague feeling of insecurity. He was like an excited magician uttering
incantations and invoking strange gods.
The sea was neither rough nor calm. Wisps of tossed-up foam appeared
and disappeared at far distant points in its vast expanse, and every
now and then the sombre horizon was broken in its level line by the
emergence of a wave larger and darker than the rest.
Flocks of gulls disturbed by their approach rose, wheeling and
screaming, from their feeding-grounds on the stranded seaweed and
flapped away over the water.
The four friends advanced along the hard sand, close to the changing
line of the tide’s retreat, and from the blackened windrow there,
of broken shells and anonymous sea refuse they stopped, each one of
them, at different moments, to pick up some particular object which
attracted or surprised them. It was Nance who was the first to become
aware that they were not the only frequenters of that solitude. She
called Adrian’s attention to two figures moving along the edge of the
sand-dunes and apparently, from the speed with which they advanced,
anxious to reach a protruding headland and disappear from observation.
Adrian stopped and surveyed the figures long and intently. Then
to her immense surprise, and it must be confessed a little to her
consternation, he started off at a run in pursuit of them. His long,
lean, hatless figure assumed so emphatic and strange an appearance
as he crossed the intervening sands that Linda burst into peals of
laughter.
“I wish they’d run away from him,” she cried. “We should see a race!
Who are they? Does he know them?”
Nance made no reply, but Miss Doorm, who had been watching the incident
with sardonic interest, muttered under her breath, “It’s begun, has it?
Soon enough, in all conscience!”
Nance turned sharply upon her. “What do you mean, Rachel? Does Adrian
know them? Do _you_ know who they are?”
No answer was vouchsafed to this, nor indeed was one necessary, for
the mystery, whatever it was, was on the point of resolving itself.
Adrian had overtaken the objects of his pursuit and was bringing them
back with him, one on either hand. Nance was not long in making out the
general characteristics of the strangers. They were both women, one
elderly, the other quite young, and from what she could see of their
appearance and dress, they were clearly ladies. It was not, however,
till they came within speaking distance that the girl’s heart began to
beat an unmistakable danger-signal. This happened directly she obtained
a definite view of the younger of Adrian’s companions. Before any
greeting could be given Rachel had whispered abruptly into her ear,
“They’re the Renshaws--I haven’t seen them since Philippa was a child,
but they’re the Renshaws. He must have met them this morning. Look out
for yourself, dearie.”
Nance only vaguely heard her. Every fibre of attention in her body and
soul was fixed upon that slender equivocal figure by Adrian’s side.
The introduction which followed was of a sufficiently curious
character. Between Nance and the young woman designated by Rachel as
Philippa there was an exchange of glances when their fingers touched
like the crossing of two naked blades. Mrs. Renshaw retained Linda’s
hand in her own longer than convention required, and Linda herself
seemed to cling to the brown-eyed, grey-haired lady with a movement of
childish confidence. Nance was calm enough, for all the beating of her
heart, to remark as an interesting fact that her rival’s mother, though
oppressively timid and retiring in her manner towards them all, seemed
to exercise a quelling and restraining influence upon Rachel Doorm,
who began at once speaking to her with unusual deference and respect.
The whole party, after some desultory conversation, began to drift
away from the sea towards the town and Nance found herself in spite
of some furtive efforts to the contrary, wedged closely in between
Mrs. Renshaw and Rachel--with Linda walking in front of them--as they
followed the narrow uneven path between the sand-dunes and the heavy
sand of the upper shore.
Every now and then Mrs. Renshaw would bend down and call their
attention to some little sea plant, telling them its name in slow
sweet tones, as if repeating some liturgical formula, and indicating
into what precise colour its pale glaucous buds would unsheathe as the
weather grew warm.
On these occasions Nance quickly turned her head; but do what she
could, she could only grow helplessly conscious that Adrian and his
companion were slipping further and further behind.
Once, as the tender-voiced lady touched lightly, with the tips of her
ungloved fingers, a cluster of insignificant leaves and asked Nance if
she knew the lesser rock-rose the agitated girl found herself on the
point of uttering a strangely irrelevant cry.
“_Rose au regard saphique_,” her confused heart murmured, “_plus pâle
que les lys, rose au regard saphique, offre-nous le parfum de ton
illusoire virginité, fleur hypocrite, fleur de silence_.”
They approached at last the entrance of the little harbour, and to
Nance’s ineffable relief Mrs. Renshaw paused and made them sit down on
a fish-smelling bench, among coils of rope, and wait the appearance of
the missing ones.
The tide was low and between great banks of mud the water rushed
sea-ward in a narrow, swirling current. A heavy fishing smack with
high tarred sides and red, unfurled sails, was being steered down
this channel by two men armed with enormous poles. Through the masts
of several other boats, moored to iron rings in the wooden wharf,
and between the slate roofs of some ramshackle houses on the other
side, they got a glimpse, looking westward across the fens, of a low,
rusty-red streak of sombrely illuminated sky. This apparently was
all the sunset Rodmoor was destined to know that evening and Nance,
as she listened vaguely to Mrs. Renshaw’s gentle voice describing to
Linda the various “queer characters” among the harbour people, had a
strange, bewildered sense of being carried far and far and far down
a remorseless tide, with a heavy sky above her and interminable grey
sands around her, and all the while something withheld, withdrawn,
inexplicable in the power that bore her forward.
They came at last--Adrian and Philippa Renshaw, and Nance had, in one
heart-rending moment, the pitiless suspicion that the battle was lost
already and that this fragile thing with the great ambiguous eyes and
the reserved manner, this thing whose slender form and tight-braided,
dusky hair might have belonged to a masquerading boy, had snatched from
her already what could never for all the years of her life be won again!
As they left the harbour and entered the main village street, Adrian
made one or two deliberate efforts to detach Nance from the rest. He
pointed out little things to her in the homely shop-windows and seemed
surprised and disappointed when she made no response to his overtures.
She _could_ not make any response. She could not bring herself so much
as to look into his face. It was not from any capricious pride or
mere feminine pique that she thus turned away but from a profound and
lamentable numbness of every emotion. The wound seemed to have gone
further even than she herself had known. Her heart felt like a dead
cold weight--like a murdered, unborn child--beneath her breast, and out
of her lethargy and inertness, as in certain tragic dreams, she could
not move. Her limbs seemed formed of lead, and her lips--at least as
far as he was concerned--became those of a dumb animal.
A man, viewing the situation from outside, the slightness and apparent
triviality of the incident, would have been astounded at the effect
upon her of so insubstantial a blow, but women move in a different
world, a world where the drifting of the tiniest straw is indicative of
crushing catastrophes, and to the instinct of the least sensitive among
women Nance’s premonitions would have been quite explicable.
It was at that moment that it was sharply borne in upon her how slight
her actual knowledge of her lover was. Her absorption in him was
devoted and complete but in regard to the intricacies and complications
of his character she was as much in the dark to-day as when they first
met in London Bridge Road.
Strangely enough, in the paralysis of her feelings, Nance was
unconscious of any definite antagonism to the cause of her distress.
She found she could talk quite naturally and spontaneously to Miss
Renshaw when chance threw them together as they emerged upon the
village green.
“Oh, I like those trees!” she cried, as the row of ancient sycamores
which gave the forlorn little square its chief appeal first struck her
attention.
The cottage of Baltazar Stork, it turned out, was just behind these
sycamores and next door to the building which, with its immense
and faded sign-board, offered the natives of Rodmoor their unique
dissipation. “The Admiral’s Head!” Nance repeated, surveying the sign
and thinking to herself that it must have been under that somewhat
sordid roof that Miss Doorm’s parent had drunk himself to death.
“Don’t look at it,” she heard Mrs. Renshaw say. “I feel ashamed every
time I pass it.”
Philippa gave Nance a quick and rather bitter smile.
“Mother is telling them that it is our beer which they sell there. You
know we are brewers, don’t you? Mother thinks it her duty to remind
every one of that fact. She gets a curious pleasure out of talking
about it. It’s her morbid conscience. You’ll find we’re all rather
morbid here,” she added, looking searchingly into Nance’s face.
“It’s the sea. Our sea is not the same as other seas. It eats into us.”
“Why do you say just that--and in that tone--to me?” Nance gravely
enquired, answering the other’s gaze. “My father was a sailor. I love
the salt-water.”
Philippa Renshaw shrugged her shoulders. “You may love being _on_ it.
That’s a different thing. It remains to be seen how you like being
_near_ it.”
“I like it always, everywhere,” repeated Nance obstinately, “and I’m
afraid of nothing it can do to me!”
They overtook the others at this point and Mrs. Renshaw turned rather
querulously to her daughter.
“Don’t talk to her about the sea, Philippa--I know that’s what you’re
doing.”
The girl with the figure of a boy let her eyes meet Adrian’s and Nance
felt the dead weight in her heart grow more ice-cold than before, as
she watched the effect of that look upon her lover.
It was Rachel who broke the tension. “It wasn’t so very long ago,” she
said, “that Rodmoor was quite an inland place. There are houses now,
they say, and churches under the water. And it swallows up the land all
the time, inch by inch. The sand-dunes are much nearer the town, I am
sure of that, and the mouth of the river, too, than when I lived here
in old days.”
Mrs. Renshaw looked by no means pleased at this speech.