was with throbbing pulses and quickened step that she approached it
now, longing to associate its security with her master-feeling, and
yet fearful lest, by finding her lover unkind or estranged, the place
should lose its magic forever. She had dressed herself with care that
afternoon, putting on--though the weather was hardly warm enough to
make such airy attire quite suitable--a white print frock, covered with
tiny roses. Several times in front of the mirror she had smoothed down
her dress and unloosened and tied back again her shining masses of
hair. She held her hat in her hand now, as she approached the spot, for
he had told her once in London that he liked her better when she was
bareheaded.
She had left her parasol behind, too, and as she hastened along the
narrow path from the river to the withy-bed, she nervously switched the
green stalks by her side with a dead stick she had unconsciously picked
up.
Her print dress hung straight and tight over her softly moulded figure
and her limbs, as she walked, swayed with a free and girlish grace.
Passionately, intently, she scanned the familiar outlines of the spot,
hoping and yet fearing to see him. Not yet--not yet! Nothing visible
yet, but the low-lying little copse and the stretch of arable land
around it. She drew near. She was already within a few paces of the
place. Nothing! He was not there--he had failed her!
She drew a deep breath and stood motionless, the dead stick fallen from
her hand and her gloveless fingers clasping and unclasping one another
mechanically.
“Oh, Adrian! Adrian!” she moaned. “You don’t care any more--not any
more.”
Suddenly she heard a swish of leafy branches and a crackle of broken
twigs. He was there, after all.
“Adrian!” she cried. “Is that you, Adrian?”
There was more rustling and swishing, and then with a discordant laugh
he burst out from the undergrowth.
“You frightened me,” she said, looking at him with quivering lips. “Why
did you hide away like that, Adrian?”
He went straight up to her, seized her fiercely in his arms and covered
her mouth, her throat and neck with hot, furious kisses. This was
not what Nance’s heart craved. She longed to sob out her suppressed
feelings on his shoulder. She longed to be petted and caressed,
gently, quietly, and with soft endearing words.
Instead of which, it seemed to her that he was seeking, as he embraced
her body and clung to her flesh with his lips, to escape from his own
thoughts, to suppress _her_ thoughts, to sweep them both away--away
from all rational consciousness--on the brutal impulse of mere animal
passion.
Her tears which were on the point of flowing, in a tide of heart-easing
abandonment, were driven inwards by his violence, and in her grey
eyes, if he had cared to look, he would have seen a frightened
appeal--pitiful and troubled--like the wild glance of a deer harried by
dogs.
His violence brought its own reaction at last and, letting her go, he
flung himself panting upon the ground. She stood above him for a while,
flushed and silent, smoothing down her hair with her hands and looking
into his face with a puzzled frown.
“Sit down,” he gasped. “Why do you stare at me like that?”
Obediently she placed herself by his side, tucked her skirt around her
ankles and let her hands fall on her lap.
“Adrian,” she said, glancing shyly at him. “Why did you kiss me like
that, just now?”
He propped himself up and gazed gloomily across the barley field.
“Why--did--I--kiss you?” he muttered, as if speaking in a dream.
“Yes--why, like that, just then,” she went on. “It wasn’t like you and
me at all. You were rough, Adrian. You weren’t yourself. Oh, my dear,
my dear! I don’t believe you care for me half as you used to!”
He beat his fists irritably on the ground and an almost vindictive look
came into his eyes.
“That’s the way!” he flung out, “that’s the way I knew you’d take it.
You girls want to be loved but you must be loved just thus and so. A
touch too near, a word too far--and you’re all up in arms.”
Nance felt as though an ice-cold wedge had been thrust between her
breasts.
“Adrian,” she cried, “how can you treat me in this way? How can you say
these things to me? Have I ever stopped you kissing me? Have I ever
been unresponsive to you?”
He looked away from her and began pulling up a patch of moss by its
roots. “What are you annoyed about, then?” he muttered.
She sighed bitterly. Then with a strong effort to give her voice
a natural tone. “I didn’t feel as though you were kissing me at
all just now. I was simply a girl in your arms--any girl! It was a
shame, Adrian. It hurt me. Surely, dear,”--her voice grew gentle and
pleading--“you _must_ know what I mean.”
“I don’t know in the least what you mean,” he cried. “It’s some silly,
absurd scruple some one’s been putting in your head. I can’t always
make love to you as if we were two children, can I--two babes in the
wood?”
Nance’s mouth quivered at this and she stretched out her arm towards
him and then, letting it drop, fumbled with her fingers at a blade
of grass. A curious line, rarely visible on her face, wrinkled her
forehead and twitched a little as if it had been a nerve beneath the
skin. This line had a pathos in it beyond a mere frown. It would have
been well if the Italian had recalled, as he saw it, certain ancient
tragic masks of his native country, but it is one of life’s persistent
ironies that the tokens of monumental sorrow, which serve so nobly
the purposes of art, should only excite peevish irritation when seen
near at hand. Sorio did not miss that line of suffering but instead of
softening him it increased his bitterness.
“You’re really not angry about my kissing you,” he said. “That’s what
all you women do--you pitch upon something quite different and revenge
yourself with it, when all the time you’re thinking about--God knows
what!--some mad grievance of your own that has no connection with what
you say!”
She leapt up at this, as if bitten by an adder and looked at him with
flashing eyes.
“Adrian! You’ve no right--I’ve never given you the right--to speak
to me so. Come! We’d better go back to the house. I wish--oh, how I
wish--I’d never asked you to meet me here.”
She stooped to pick up her hat. “I liked it so here,” she added with a
wistful catch in her voice, “but it’s all spoilt now.” Sorio did not
move. He looked at her gravely.
“You’re a little fool, Nance,” he said, “absolutely a little fool. But
you look extraordinarily lovely at this moment, now you’re in a fury.
Come here, child, come back and sit down and let’s talk sensibly. There
are other things and much more important things in the world than our
ridiculous quarrels.”
The tone of his voice had its effect upon her but she did not yield at
once.
“I think perhaps to-day,” she murmured, “it would be better to go
back.” She continued to stand in front of him, swaying a little--an
unconscious trick of hers--and smiling sadly.
“Come and sit down,” he repeated in a low voice. She obeyed him, for
it was what her heart ached for, and clinging tightly to him she let
her suppressed emotions have full vent. With her head pressed awkwardly
against his coat she sobbed freely and without restraint.
Sorio gently buttoned up the fastening of one of her long sleeves
which had come unloosed. He did this gravely and without a change of
expression. That peculiar and tragic pathos which emanates from a
girl’s forgetfulness of her personal appearance did not apparently
cross his consciousness. Nance, as she leant against him, had a
pitiable and even a grotesque air. One of her legs was thrust out from
beneath her skirt. Sorio noticed that her brown shoes were a little
worn and did not consort well with her white stockings. It momentarily
crossed his mind that he had fancied Nancy’s ankles to be slenderer
than it seemed they were.
Her sobs died away at last in long shuddering gasps which shook her
whole frame. Sorio kept stroking her head, but his eyes were fixed
on the distant river bank along which a heavily labouring horse was
tugging at a rope. Every now and then his face contracted a little as
if he were in physical pain. This was due to the fact that from the
girl’s weight pressing against his knee he began to suffer from cramp.
Though her sobs had died down, Nance still seemed unwilling to stir.
With one of her hands she made a tremulous movement in search of his,
and he answered it by tightly gripping her fingers. While he held her
thus his gaze wandered from the horse on the tow-path and fixed itself
upon a large and beautifully spotted fly that was moving slowly and
tentatively up a green stalk. With its long antennæ extended in front
of it the fly felt its way, every now and then opening and shutting its
gauzy wings.
Sorio hated the horse, hated the fly and hated himself. As for the girl
who leant so heavily upon him, he felt nothing for her just then but
a dull, inert patience and a kind of objective pity such as one might
feel for a wounded animal. One deep, far-drawn channel of strength and
hope remained open in the remote depths of his mind--associated with
his inmost identity and with what in the fortress of his soul he loved
to call his “secret”--and far off, at the end of this vista, visualized
through clouds of complicated memories--was the image of his boy, his
boy left in America, from whom, unknown even to Nance, he received
letters week by week, letters that were the only thing, so it seemed to
him at this moment, which gave sweetness to his life.
He had sought, in giving full scope to his attraction to Nance, to
cover up and smooth over certain jagged, bleeding edges in his outraged
mind, and in this, even now, as he returned the pressure of her soft
fingers, he recognized that he had been successful.
It was, he knew well, only the appearance of this _other one_--this
insidious “rose au regard saphique”--this furtive child of marsh and
sea--who had spoilt his delight in Nance--Nance had not changed, nor
indeed had he, himself. It was only the discovery of Philippa, the
revelation of Philippa, which had altered everything.
With his fingers entangled in the shining hair, beneath his hand, he
found himself cursing the day he had ever come to Rodmoor. And yet--as
far as his “secret” went--that “fleur hypocrite” of the salt-marshes
came nearer, nearer than mortal soul except Baptiste--to understanding
the heart of his mystery. The sun sinking behind them, had for some
while now thrown long dark shadows across the field at their feet.
The flies which hovered over the girl’s prostrate form were no longer
radiantly illuminated and from the vague distances in every direction
came those fitful sounds of the closing day--murmurs and whispers and
subtle breathings, sweet and yet profoundly sad, which indicate the ebb
of the life-impulse and approach of twilight.
The girl moved at last, and lifting up a tear-stained face, looked
timidly and shyly into his eyes. She appeared at that moment so
submissive, so pitiful, and so entirely dependent on him that Sorio
would have been hardly human if he had not thrown his arms reassuringly
round her neck and kissed her wet flushed cheek.
They rose together from the ground and both laughed merrily to see how
stained and crumpled her newly starched frock had become.
“I’ll meet you here again--to-morrow if you like,” he said gently.
She smiled but did not answer. Simple-hearted though she was, she was
enough of a woman to know well that her victory, if it could be called
victory, over his morose mood was a mere temporary matter. The future
of their love seemed to her more than ever dubious and uncertain, and
it was with a chilled heart, in spite of her gallant attempts to make
their return pleasant to them both, that she re-entered the forlorn
garden of Dyke House and waved good-bye to him from the door.
VII
VESPERS
Nance continued to resort to her withy-bed, in spite of the spoiling of
its charm, but she did not again ask Sorio to meet her there. She met
him still, however,--sometimes in Rachel’s desolate garden which seemed
inspired by some occult influence antipathetic to every softening
touch, and sometimes--and these latter encounters were the happier
ones--in the little graveyard of Mr. Traherne’s church. She found him
affectionate enough in these ambiguous days and even tender, but she
was constantly aware of a barrier between them which nothing she could
say or do seemed able to surmount.
Her anxiety with regard to the relations between Rachel and Linda did
not grow less as days went on. Sometimes the two seemed perfectly
happy and Nance accused herself of having a morbid imagination, but
then again something would occur--some quite slight and unimportant
thing--which threw her back upon all her old misgivings.
Once she was certain she heard Linda crying in the night and uttering
Rachel’s name but the young girl, when roused from her sleep, only
laughed gaily and vowed she had no recollection of anything she had
dreamed.
As things thus went on and there seemed no outlet from the difficulties
that surrounded her, Nance began making serious enquiries as to the
possibility of finding work in the neighbourhood. She read the
advertisements in the local papers and even answered some of them but
the weeks slipped by and nothing tangible seemed to emerge.
Her greatest consolation at this time was a friendship she struck up
with Hamish Traherne, the curate-in-charge of Rodmoor upon whose organ
in the forlorn little Norman church, Linda was now daily practising.
Dr. Raughty, too, when she chanced to meet him, proved a soothing
distraction. The man’s evident admiration for her gratified her vanity,
while her tender and playful way of expressing it put a healing
ointment upon her wounded pride.
One late afternoon when the sun at last seemed to have got some degree
of hold upon that sea-blighted country, she found herself seated with
Mr. Traherne on a bench adjoining the churchyard, waiting there in part
for the service--for Hamish was a rigorous ritualist in these things
and rang his bell twice a day with devoted patience--and in part for
the purpose of meeting Mrs. Renshaw, who, as she knew, came regularly
to church, morning and evening.
Linda was playing inside the little stone edifice and the sound of
her music came out to them as they talked, pleasantly softened by the
intervening walls. Mr. Traherne’s own dwelling, a battered, time-worn
fragment of monastic masonry, clumsily adapted to modern use, lay
behind them, its unpretentious garden passing by such imperceptible
degrees into the sacred enclosure that the blossoms raised, in defiance
of the winds that swept the marshes, in the priest’s flower-beds, shed
their petals upon the more recently dug of his parishioners’ graves.
It may have been the extreme ugliness of Rodmoor’s curate-in-charge
that drew Nance so closely to him. Mr. Traherne was certainly in bodily
appearance the least prepossessing person she had ever beheld. He
resembled nothing so much as an over-driven and excessively patient
horse, his long, receding chin, knobbed bulbous nose, and corrugated
forehead not even being relieved by any particular quality in his
small, deeply-set colourless eyes--eyes which lacked everything such
as commonly redeems an otherwise insignificant face and which stared
out of his head upon the world with a fixed expression of mild and dumb
protest.
Whether it was his ugliness, or something indefinable in him that found
no physical or even vocal expression--for his voice was harsh and
husky--the girl herself would have been puzzled to say, but whatever
it was, it drew her and held her and she experienced curious relief in
talking with him.
This particular afternoon she had permitted herself to go further than
usual in these relieving confidences and had treated the poor man as if
he were actually and in very truth her father-confessor.
“I’ve had no luck so far,” she said, speaking of her attempts to get
work, “but I think I shall have before long. I’m right, am I not, in
_that_ at any rate? Whatever happens, it’s better Linda and I should be
independent.”
The priest nodded vigorously and clasped his bony hands over his knees.
“I wish,” he said, “that I knew Mr. Sorio as I know you. When I know
people I like them, and as a rule--” he opened his large twisted mouth
and smiled humorously at her--“as a rule they like me.”
“Oh, don’t misunderstand what I said just now,” cried Nance anxiously.
“I didn’t mean that Adrian doesn’t like you. I know he likes you very
much. It’s that he’s afraid of your influence, of your religion, of
your goodness. He’s afraid of you. That’s what it is.”
“Of course we know,” said Hamish Traherne, prodding the ground with
his oak stick and tucking his long cassock round his legs, “of course
we know that it’s really Mr. Sorio who ought to find work. He ought to
find it soon, too, and as soon as he’s got it he ought to marry you!
That’s how I would see this affair settled.” He smiled at her with
humorous benignity.
Nance frowned a little. “I don’t like it when you talk like that,” she
remarked, “it makes me feel as though I’d done wrong in saying anything
about it. It makes me feel as though I had been disloyal to Adrian.”
For so ugly and clumsy a man, there was a pathetic gentleness in
the way he laid his hand, at that, upon his companion’s arm. “The
disloyalty,” he said in a low voice, “would have been _not_ to have
spoken to me. Who else can help our friend? Who else is anxious to help
him?”
“I know, I know,” she cried, “you’re as sweet to me as you can be.
You’re my most faithful friend. It’s only that I feel--sometimes--as
though Adrian wouldn’t like it for me to talk about him at all--to
any one. But that’s silly, isn’t it? And besides I must, mustn’t I?
Otherwise there’d be no way of helping him.”
“I’ll find a way,” muttered the priest. “You needn’t mention his name
again. We’ll take him for granted in future, little one, and we’ll both
work together in his interests.”
“If he could only be made to understand,” the girl went on, looking
helplessly across the vast tract of fens, “what his real feelings are!
I believe he loves me at the bottom of his heart. I know I can help him
as no one else can. But how to make him understand that?”
They were interrupted at this point by the appearance of Mrs. Renshaw
who, standing in the path leading to the church door, looked at them
hesitatingly as if wondering whether she ought to approach them or not.
They rose at once and crossed the grass to meet her. At the same time
Linda, emerging from the building, greeted them with excited ardour.
“I’ve done so well to-day, Mr. Traherne,” she cried, “you’d be
astonished. I can manage those pedals perfectly now, and the stops too.
Oh, it’s lovely! It’s lovely! I feel I’m going really to be a player.”
They all shook hands with Mrs. Renshaw, and then, while the priest
went in to ring his bell, the three women strolled together to the low
stone parapet built as a protection against floods, which separated the
churchyard from the marshes.
Tiny, delicate mosses grew on this wall, interspersed with small
pale-flowered weeds. On its further side was a wide tract of boggy
ground, full of deep amber-coloured pools and clumps of rushes and
terminated, some half mile away, by a raised dyke. There was a pleasant
humming of insects in the air, and although a procession of large white
clouds kept crossing the low, horizontal sun, and throwing their cold
shadows over the landscape, the general aspect of the place was more
friendly and less desolate than usual.
They sat down upon the parapet and began to talk. “Brand promised to
come and fetch me to-night,” said Mrs. Renshaw. “I begged him to come
in time for the service but--” and she gave a sad, expressive little
laugh, “he said he wouldn’t be early enough for that. Why is it, do you
think, that men in these days are so unwilling to do these things? It
isn’t that they’re wiser than their ancestors. It isn’t that they’re
cleverer. It isn’t that they have less need of the Invisible. Something
has come over the world, I think--something that blots out the sky.
I’ve thought that often lately, particularly when I wake up in the
mornings. It seems to me that the dawns used to be fresher and clearer
than they are now. God has got tired of helping us, my dears,” and she
sighed wearily.
Linda extended her warm little hand with a caressing movement, and
Nance said, gently, “I know well what you mean, but I feel sure--oh,
I feel quite sure--it’s only for a time. And I think, too, in some
odd way, that it’s our own fault--I mean the fault of women. I can’t
express clearly what’s in my mind but I feel as though we’d all
changed--changed, that is, from what we used to be in old days. Don’t
you think there’s something in that, Mrs. Renshaw? But of course that
only applies to Linda and me.”
The elder woman’s countenance assumed a pinched and withered look
as the girl spoke, the lines in it deepening and the pallor of it
growing so noticeable that Nance found herself recalling the ghastly
whiteness of her father’s face as she saw him at the last, laid out
in his coffin. She shivered a little and let her fingers stray over
the crumbling masonry and tangled weeds at her side, seeking there,
in a fumbling, instinctive manner, to get into touch with something
natural, earthy, and reassuring.
The procession of clouds suffered a brief interlude at that moment in
their steady transit and the sinking sun shone out warm and mellow,
full of odours of peat and moss and reedy mud. Swarms of tiny midges
danced in the long level light and several drowsy butterflies rose out
of nowhere and fluttered over the mounds.
“Oh, there’s Brand coming!” cried Mrs. Renshaw, suddenly, with a
queer contraction of her pale forehead, “and the bell has stopped.
How strange we none of us noticed that! Listen! Yes--he’s begun the
service. Can’t you hear? Oh, what a pity! I can’t bear going in after
he’s begun.”
Brand Renshaw, striding unceremoniously over the graves, approached the
group. They rose to greet him. Nance felt herself surveyed from head
to foot, weighed in the balances and found wanting. Linda hung back a
little, shamefaced and blushing deeply. It was upon her that Brand kept
his eyes fixed all the while he was being introduced. She--as Nance
recognized in a flash--was _not_ found wanting.
They stood talking together, easily and freely enough, for several
minutes, but nothing that Nance heard or said prevented her mind from
envisaging the fact that there had leapt into being, magnetically,
mysteriously, irresistibly, one of those sudden attractions between a
man and a girl that so often imply--as the world is now arranged--the
emergence of tragedy upon the horizon.
“I think--if you don’t mind, Brand,” said Mrs. Renshaw when a pause
arrived in their conversation, “we’ll slip into the church now for a
minute or two. He’s got to the Psalms. I can hear. And it hurts me,
somehow, for the poor man to have to go through them alone.”
Nance moved at once, but Linda pouted and looked shyly at Brand. “I’m
tired of the church,” she murmured. “I’ll wait for you out here. Are
you going in with them, Mr. Renshaw?”
Brand made no reply to this, but walked gravely with the two others as
far as the porch.
“Don’t be surprised if your sister’s spirited away when you come out,
Miss Herrick,” he said smilingly as he left them at the door.
Returning with a quick step to where Linda stood gazing across the
marshes, he made some casual remark about the quietness of the evening
and led her forth from the churchyard. Neither of them uttered any
definite reference to what they were doing. Indeed, a queer sort of
nervous dumbness seemed to have seized them both, but there was a
suppressed surge of excitement in the man’s resolute movements and
under the navy blue coat and skirt which hung so delicately and closely
round her slender figure. The girl’s pulses beat a wild excited tune.