through the park, Philippa? It’s the nicest way--if the grass isn’t too
wet.”
In the general chorus of adieus that followed, Nance was not surprised
when Sorio bade good-night to her as well as to the others. He
professed to be going to the station to meet the Mundham train.
“Baltazar will have a lot of things to carry,” he said, “and I must be
at hand to help.”
Mrs. Renshaw pressed Linda’s hand very tenderly as they parted and a
cynical observer might have been pardoned for suspecting that under the
suppressed sigh with which she took Philippa’s arm there lurked a wish
that it had been the more docile and less difficult child that fate had
given her for a daughter.
Linda, at any rate, proved to be full of enthusiastic and excited
praise for the sad-voiced lady, as the sisters went off with Rachel.
She chattered, indeed, so incessantly about her that Nance, whose
nerves were in no tolerant state, broke out at last into a quite savage
protest.
“She’s the sort of person,” she threw in, “who’s always sentimental
about young girls. Wait till you find her with some one younger than
you are, and you’ll soon see! Am I not right, Rachel?”
“She’s not right at all, is she?” interposed the other. Miss Doorm
looked at them gravely.
“I don’t think either of you understand Mrs. Renshaw. Indeed there
aren’t many who do. She’s had troubles such as you may both pray to
God you’ll never know. That wisp of a girl will be the cause of others
before long.”
She glanced at Nance significantly.
“Hold tight to your Adrian, my love. Hold tight to him, my dearie!”
Thus, as they emerged upon the tow path spoke Rachel Doorm.
Meanwhile, from his watch above the Inn, the nameless Admiral saw the
shadows of night settle down upon his sycamores. His faded countenance,
with its defiant bravado, stared insolently at what he could catch
between trees and houses, of the darkening harbour and if Rodmoor
had been a ship instead of a village, and he a figurehead instead
of a sign-board, he could not have confronted the unknown and all
that the unknown might bring more indifferently, more casually, more
contemptuously.
IV
OAKGUARD
The night of her first meeting with Adrian Sorio, found the daughter
of the house of Renshaw restless and wakeful. She listened to the hall
clock striking the hour of twelve with an intentness that would have
suggested to any one observing her that she had only been waiting for
that precise moment to plunge into some nocturnal enterprise fraught
with both sweetness and peril.
The night was chilly, the sky starless and overcast. The heavy curtains
were drawn but the window, wide-open behind them, let in a breath of
rain-scented air which stirred the flames of the two silver candles
on the dressing table and fluttered the thin skirt of the girl’s
night-dress as she sat, tense and expectant, over the red coals of a
dying fire.
A tall gilt-framed mirror of antique design stood on the left of the
fireplace.
As the last stroke of midnight sounded, the girl leapt to her feet
and swiftly divesting herself of her only garment, stood straight and
erect, her hands clasped behind her head, before this mirror. The
firelight cast a red glow over her long bare limbs and the flickering
candle flames threw wavering shadows across her lifted arms and slender
neck. Her hair remained tightly braided round her head and this,
added to the boyish outlines of her body, gave her the appearance of
one of those androgynous forms of later Greek art whose ambiguous
loveliness wins us still, even in the cold marble, with so touching an
appeal. Her smooth forehead and small delicately moulded face showed
phantom-like in the mirror. Her scarlet lips quivered as she gazed at
herself, quivered into that enigmatic smile challenging and inscrutable
which seems, more than any other human expression, to have haunted the
imagination of certain great artists of the past.
Permitted for a brief moment to catch a glimpse of that white figure,
an intruder, if possessed of the smallest degree of poetic fancy, would
have been tempted to dream that the dust of the centuries had indeed
been quickened and some delicate evocation of perverse pagan desire
restored to breath and consciousness.
Such a dream would not, perhaps, have survived a glance at the girl’s
face. With distended pupils and irises so large that they might have
been under the influence of some exciting drug, her eyes had that
particular look, sorrowful and heavy with mystery, which one feels
_could not have been in the world_ before the death of Christ.
With her epicene figure, she resembled some girl-priestess of Artemis
invoking a mocking image of her own defiant sexlessness. With her
sorrowful inhuman eyes she suggested some strange elf-creature, born of
mediæval magic.
Turning away from the mirror, Philippa Renshaw blew out the candles and
flung open the curtains. Standing thus for a moment in the presence of
the vague starless night full of chilly earth odours, she drew several
long deep breaths and seemed to inhale the very essence of the darkness
as if it had been the kiss of some elemental lover. Then she shivered a
little, closed the window and began hurriedly to dress herself by the
firelight. Bare-headed, but with a dark cloak reaching to her feet, she
softly left her room and crept silently down the staircase. One by one
she drew the heavy bolts of the hall door and turned the ponderous key.
Letting herself out into the night air with the movements of one not
unaccustomed to such escapades, she hurried down the stone pathway,
passed through the iron entrance gates, and emerged into the park.
Catching up the skirt of her cloak, and drawing it tightly round her
so that it should not impede her steps, she plunged into the wet grass
and directed her course towards the thickest group of oak trees.
Between the immense trunks and mossy roots of these sea-deformed and
wind-stunted children of the centuries she groped her way, her feet
stumbling over fallen branches and her face whipped by the young wet
leaves.
A mad desire seemed to possess her, to throw off every vestige and
token of her human imprisonment and to pass forth free and unfettered
into the embrace of the primeval powers. One would have thought, to
have watched her as she flung herself, at last, on her face under
one of the oldest of the trees and liberating her arms from her
cloak, stretched them round its trunk, that she was some worshipper
of a banished divinity invoking her god while her persecutors slept,
and passionately calling upon him to return to his forsaken shrine.
Releasing her fierce clasp upon the rough bark of the tree, not however
before it had bruised her flesh, the girl dug her nails into the soft
damp leaf-mould and rubbed her forehead against the wet moss. She
shuddered as she lay like this, and as she shuddered she clutched yet
more tightly, as if in a kind of ecstasy, the roots of grass and the
rubble of earth into which her fingers dug.
Meanwhile, within the house, another little drama unrolled itself. In
the old-fashioned library collected by many generations of Renshaws,
where the noble Rabelaisian taste of the eighteenth century jostled
unceremoniously with the attenuated banalities of a later epoch, there
sat, at the very moment when the girl descended the stairs, a tall
powerfully built man in evening dress.
Brand Renshaw was a figure of striking and formidable appearance.
Immensely muscular and very tall, he carried upon his massive shoulders
a head of so strange a shape that had he been a mediæval chieftain he
would doubtless have gone down to posterity as Brand Hatchet-pate, or
Brand Hammer-skull. His head receded from a forehead narrow and high,
and rose at the back into a dome-like protrusion which, in spite of the
closely-clipt, reddish hair that covered it, suggested, in a manner
that was almost sinister, the actual bony substructure of the cranium
beneath.
The fire was out. The candles on the table were guttering and
flickering with little spitting noises as their wicks sank and the
cold hearth in front of him was littered with the ashes of innumerable
cigarettes. He was neither reading nor smoking them. He sat with his
hands on the arms of his chair, staring into vacancy.
Brand Renshaw’s eyes were like the eyes of a morose animal, an animal
endowed perhaps with intellectual powers denied to the human race, but
still an animal, and when he fixed his gaze in his concentrated manner
upon the unknown objects of his thought there was a weight of heavily
focussed intensity in his stare that was unpleasantly threatening.
He was staring in this way at the empty grate when, in the dead silence
of the house, he caught the sound of a furtive step in the hall
without, and immediately afterwards the slight rasping noise of bolts
carefully shot back.
In a flash he leapt to his feet and extinguished the guttering candles.
Quietly and on tip-toe he moved to the door and soundlessly turning the
handle peered into the hall. He was just in time to see the heavy front
door closed. Without the least token of haste or surprise he slipped on
an overcoat, took his hat and stick and went forth in pursuit of the
escaped one.
At first he saw only the darkness and heard no sound but the angry
flutterings of some bird in the high trees, and--a long way off,
perhaps even beyond the park--the frightened squeal of a hunted
rabbit. But by the time he got to the gate, taking care to walk on
the flower-beds rather than on the stone pathway, he could make out
the figure of the girl no great way in front of him. She ran on,
so straight and so blindly, towards the oak trees that he was able
without difficulty to follow her even though, every now and then, her
retreating figure was absorbed and swallowed up by the darkness.
When at last he came up to her side as she lay stretched out at the
foot of the tree, he made no immediate attempt to betray his presence.
With his arms folded he stood regarding her, a figure as silent and
inhuman as herself, and over them both the vague immensities and
shadowy obscurities of the huge earth-scented night hung lowering and
tremendous, like powers that held their breath, waiting, watching.
At intervals an attenuated gust of wind, coming from far away across
the marshes, moved the dead leaves upon the ground and made them dance
a little death dance. This it did without even stirring the young
living shoots on the boughs above them.
The darkness seemed to rise and fall about the two figures, to advance,
to recede, to dilate, to diminish, in waves of alternate opacity and
tenuity. In its indrawings and outbreathings, in the ebb and flow of
its fluctuating presence, it seemed to beat--at least that is how
Brand Renshaw felt it--like the pulse of an immense heart charged with
unutterable mysteries.
This illusion, if it were an illusion, may have been due to nothing
more recondite than the fact that, in the silence of the heavy night,
the sound of the tide on the Rodmoor sands was the background of
everything.
It was not till the girl rose from the ground that she saw him standing
there, a shadow among the shadows. She uttered a low cry and made a
movement as if to rush away, but he stepped quickly forward and caught
her in his arms. Tightly and almost savagely he held her, pressing her
lithe body against his own and caressing it with little, deep-voiced
mutterings as if he were soothing a desperate child. She submitted
passively to his endearments and then, with a sound that was something
between a moan and a laugh, she whispered brokenly into his ear, “Let
me go, Brand, I was silly to come out. I couldn’t help it. I won’t do
it again. I won’t, I swear.”
“No, I think you won’t!” the man muttered, keeping his arm securely
round her waist and striding swiftly towards the house. “No, I think
you won’t!”
He paused when they reached the entrance into the garden and, taking
her by the wrists, pressed her fiercely against one of the stone
pillars upon which the gate hung.
“I know what it is,” he whispered. “You can’t deceive me. You’ve
been with those people from London. You’ve been with that friend of
Baltazar’s. That’s the cause of all this, isn’t it? You’ve been with
that damned fool--that idiotic, good-for-nothing down at the village.
Haven’t you been with him? Haven’t you?”
The arms with which he pressed her hands against her breast trembled
with anger as he said these words.
“Baltazar told me,” he went on, “only this morning--down at
Mundham--everything about these people. They’re of no interest,
none, not the least. They’re just like every one else. That fellow’s
half-foreign, that’s all. An American half-breed, of some mongrel
sort or other, that’s all there is to be said of him! So if you’ve
been letting any mad fancies get into your head about Mr. Sorio, the
sooner you get rid of them the better. He’s not for you. Do you hear?
He’s--not--for--you!” These last words were accompanied by so savage a
tightening of the hands that held her that the girl was compelled to
bite her lip to stop herself from crying.
“You hurt me,” she said calmly. “Let me go, Brand.” The self-contained
tone of her voice seemed to quiet him and he released her. She raised
one of her wrists to her mouth and softly caressed it with her lips.
“You’ll be interested, yourself, in these people before very long,”
she murmured, flashing a mocking look at him over her bare arm. “The
second girl is very young and very pretty. She confided in me that she
was extremely afraid of the sea. She appealed to mother’s protective
instincts at once. I’ve no doubt she’ll appeal to your--protective
instincts! So don’t be too quick in your condemnation.”
“Damn you!” muttered her brother, pushing the gate open. “Come! Get
in with you! You talk to me as if I were a professional rake. I take
no interest--not the slightest--in your young innocents with their
engaging terrors. To bed! To bed! To bed!”
He pushed her before him along the path, but Philippa knew well that
the hand on her shoulder was lighter and less angry than the one
that had held her a moment ago, and as she ascended the steps of
Oakguard--the name borne by the Renshaw house since the days of the
Conqueror--there flickered over her shadowy face the same equivocal
smile of dubious meaning that had looked out at its owner, not so long
since, from the mirror in her room.
When the dawn finally crept up, pallid and cold out of the North Sea
and lifted, with a sort of mechanical weariness, the weight of the
shadows, it was neither Brand nor Philippa who was awake.
Roused, as always, by the slightest approach of an unusual sound, the
mother of that strange pair had lain in her bed listening ever since
her daughter’s first emerging from the house.
Once she had risen, and had stood for a moment at the window, her
loose grey hair mixed with the folds of an old, faded, dusky-coloured
shawl. That, however, was when both of her children were away in the
middle of the park and absolute silence prevailed. With this single
exception she had remained listening, always silently listening, lying
on her back and with an expression of tragic and harassed expectation
in her great, hollow, brown eyes. She might have been taken, lying
there alone in the big four-posted bed, surrounded by an immense litter
of stored-up curios and mementoes, for a symbolic image of all that
is condemned, as this mortal world goes round, to watch and wait and
invoke the gods and cling fast to such pathetic relics and memorials as
time consents to leave of the days that it has annihilated.
Slowly the dawn came up upon the trees and roofs of Oakguard. With a
wan grey light it filled the pallid squares of the windows. With a
livid grey light it made definite and ghastly every hollow and every
wrinkle in that patient watcher’s face.
Travelling far up in the sky, a long line of marsh-fowl with
outstretched necks sought the remoter solitudes of the fens. In the
river marshes the sedge-birds uttered their harsh twitterings while,
gathered in flocks above the sand-dunes, the sea-gulls screamed to the
inflowing tide their hunger for its drifted refuse.
Wearily, at last, Helen Renshaw closed her eyes and it was the first
streak of sunshine that Rodmoor had known for many days which, several
hours later, kissed her white forehead--and the grey hairs that lay
disordered across it--softly, gently, tenderly, as it might have kissed
the forehead of the dead.
V
A SYMPOSIUM
Adrian Sorio sat opposite his friend over a warm brightly burning fire.
Baltazar Stork was a slight frail man of so delicate and dainty an
appearance that many people were betrayed into behaving towards him
as gently and considerately as if he had been a girl. This, though a
compliment to his fragility, was bad policy in those who practised it,
for Baltazar was an egoist of inflexible temper and under his velvet
glove carried a hand of steel.
The room in which the two friends conversed was furnished in exquisite
and characteristic taste. Old prints, few in number and rare in
quality, adorned its walls. Precious pieces of china, invaluable
statuettes in pottery and metal, stood charmingly arranged, with due
space round each, in every corner. On either side of the mantelpiece
was a Meissen-ware figure of engaging aspect and Watteau-like design,
while in the centre, in the place where a clock is usually to be found,
was a piece of statuary of ravishing delicacy and grace representing
the escape of Syrinx from the hands of Pan.
The most remarkable picture in the room, attracting the attention at
once of all who entered, was a dark, richly coloured, oval-shaped
portrait--a portrait of a young man in a Venetian cloak, with a broad,
smooth forehead, heavy-lidded penetrating eyes, and pouting disdainful
mouth. This picture, said to have been painted under the influence of
Giorgione by that incomparable artist’s best loved friend, passed for a
portrait of Eugenio Flambard, the favourite secretary of the Republic’s
most famous ambassador during his residence at the Papal Court.
The majority of these treasures had been picked up by Baltazar during
certain prolonged holidays in various parts of the Continent. This,
however, was several years ago before the collapse of the investment,
or whatever it was, which he inherited from Herman Renshaw.
Since that time he had been more or less dependent upon Brand, a
dependence which nothing but his happy relations with Brand’s mother
and sister and his unfailing urbanity could have made tolerable.
“Adrian, you old villain, why didn’t you tell me you’d seen Philippa.
Brand informed me yesterday that you’ve seen her twice. This isn’t
the kind of thing that pleases me at all. I don’t approve of these
clandestine meetings. Do you hear me, you old reprobate? You don’t
think it’s very nice, do you, for me to learn by accident--by a sort
of wretched accident--of an event like this? If you _must_ be at these
little games you might at least be open about them. Besides, I have
a brotherly interest in Philippa. I don’t want to have her innocence
corrupted by an old satyr like you.”
Sorio contented himself by murmuring the word “Rats.”
“It’s all very well for you to cry ‘Rats!’ in that tone,” went on the
other. “The truth is, this affair is going to become serious. You
don’t suppose for a moment, do you, that your Nance is going to lie
down, as they say, and let my extraordinary sister walk over her?”
Adrian got up from his seat and began pacing up and down the little
room.
“It’s absurd,” he muttered, “it’s all absurd. I feel as if the whole
thing were a kind of devilish dream. Yes, the whole thing! It’s all
because I’ve got nothing to do but walk up and down these damned sands!”
Baltazar watched him with a serene smile, his soft chin supported by
his feminine fingers and his fair, curly head tilted a little on one
side.
“But you know, mon enfant,” he threw in with a teasing caress in his
voice, “you know very well you’re the last person to talk of work. It
was work that did for you in America. You don’t want to start _that_
over again, do you?”
Adrian stood still and glared at him.
“Do you think I’m going to let _that_--as you call it--finish me
forever? My life’s only begun. In London it was different. By God! I
wish I’d stayed in London! Nance feels just the same. I know she does.
She’ll have to get something, too, or we shall both go mad. It’s this
cursed sea of yours! I’ve a good mind to marry her, out of hand, and
clear off. We’d find something--somewhere--anywhere--to keep body and
soul together.”
“Why did you come to us at all, my dear, if you find us so dreadful?”
laughed Baltazar, bending down to tie his shoe-string and pull up more
tightly one of his silk socks.
Adrian made no answer but continued his ferocious pacing of the room.
“You’ll knock something over if you’re not careful,” protested his
friend, shrugging his shoulders. “You’re the most troublesome fellow.
You accept a person’s offer and make no end of a fuss over it, and then
a couple of weeks later you roar like a bull and send us all to the
devil. What’s the matter with us? What’s the matter with the place? Why
can’t you and your precious Nance behave like ordinary people and make
love to one another and be happy? She’s got all her time to herself and
you’ve got all your time to yourself. Why can’t you enjoy yourselves
and collect seaweed or starfish or something?”
Adrian paused in his savage prowl for the second time.
“It’s your confounded sea that’s at the bottom of it,” he shouted. “It
gets on her nerves and it gets on mine. Little Linda was perfectly
right to be scared of it.”
“I fancied,” drawled the other, selecting a cigarette from an enamelled
box and turning up the lamp, “you found little Linda’s fears rather
engaging than otherwise.”
“It works upon us,” Sorio went on, heedless of the interruption, “it
works upon us in some damnable kind of way! Nance says she hears it in
her sleep. I’m sure _I_ do. I hear it without a moment’s cessation.
Listen to the thing now--_shish, shish, shish, shish!_ Why can’t it
make some other noise? Why can’t it stop altogether? It makes me long
for the whole damned farce to end. It annoys me, Tassar, it annoys me!”
“Sorry you find the elements so trying, Adriano,” replied the other
languidly, “but I really don’t know what I can do to help you--I can
only advise you to keep out of Philippa’s way. She’s an element more
troublesome than any of them.”
“Tassar!” shouted the enraged man in a burst of fury, “if you don’t
stop dragging Philippa in, I’ll murder you! What’s Philippa to me? I
_hate_ her--do you hear? I hate the very sound of her name!”
“Her name?” murmured Stork, meditatively, “her name? Oh, I think you’re
quite wrong to hate that. Her name suggests all sorts of interesting
things. Her name has quite a historic sound. It’s mediæval in colour
and Greek in form. It makes me think of Euripides.”
“This whole damned Rodmoor of yours,” moaned Adrian, “gets too much for
me. Where on earth else, could a man find it so hard to collect his
thoughts and look at things as they are? There’s something here which
works upon the mind, Tassar, something which works upon the mind.”
“What’s working on _your_ mind, my friend,” laughed Baltazar Stork, “is
not anything so vague as dreams or anything so simple as the sea. It’s
just the quite definite but somewhat complicated business of managing
two love affairs at the same time! I’m sorry for you, little Adrian,
I’m extremely sorry for you. It’s a situation not unknown in the
history of the world, in fact, it might be called quite common. But I’m
afraid that doesn’t make it any pleasanter for you. However, it can be
dealt with, with a little skill, Adrian, with just a little skill!”