bridge. Nance, thankful that she had got her sister so near home
without any serious mishap, could not resist, in the impulse of her
relief, the pleasure of stopping for a moment to pick a bunch of
flowers from the path’s reedy edge. The coolness of the earth as she
stooped, the waving grasses, the strongly blowing, marsh-scented wind,
the silence and the darkness, all blent harmoniously together to
strengthen her in her new-found comfort.
She pulled up impetuously, almost by their roots, great heavy-flowered
stalks of loose-strife and willow-herb. She scrambled down into
the wet mud of a shallow ditch to add to her bunch a tall spray of
hemp-agrimony and some wild valerian. All these things, ghostly and
vague and colourless in the faint starlight, had a strange and mystic
beauty, and as she gathered them Nance promised herself that they
should be a covenant between her senses and her spirit; a sign and a
token, offered up in the stillness of that hour, to whatever great
invisible powers still made it possible on earth to renounce and be not
all unhappy. She returned with her flowers to her sister’s side and
together they reached the bridge.
When they were at the very centre of this, Linda suddenly staggered
and swayed. She tore herself from her sister’s support and sank down
on the little stone seat beneath the parapet--the same stone seat upon
which, some months before, that passage of sinister complicity had
occurred between Rachel Doorm and Brand. Falling helplessly back now
in this place, the young girl pressed her hands to her head and moaned
pitifully.
Nance dropped her flowers and flung herself on her knees beside her.
“What is it, darling?” she whispered in a low frightened voice. “Oh,
Linda, what is it?” But Linda’s only reply was to close her eyes and
let her head fall heavily back against the stone-work of the parapet.
Nance rose to her feet and stood looking at her in mute despair.
“Linda! Linda!” she cried. “Linda! What is it?”
But the shadowy white form lay hushed and motionless, the soft hair
across her forehead stirring in the wind, but all else about her,
horribly, deadly still.
Nance rushed across the bridge and down to the river’s brink. She came
back, her hands held cup-wise, and dashed the water over her sister’s
face. The child’s eyelids flickered a little, but that was all. She
remained as motionless and seemingly unconscious as before. With a
desperate effort, Nance tried to lift her up bodily in her arms, but
stiff and limp as the girl was, this seemed an attempt beyond her
strength.
Once more she stood, helpless and silent, regarding the other as she
lay. Then it dawned upon her mind that the only possible thing to do
was to leave her where she was and run to the village for help. She
would arouse her own landlady. She would get the assistance of Dr.
Raughty.
With one last glance at her sister’s motionless form and a quick look
up and down the river on the chance of there being some barge or boat
at hand with people--as sometimes happened--sleeping in it, she set off
running as fast as she could in the direction of the silent town.
As soon as the sound of her retreating steps died away in the distance,
the hitherto helpless Linda leapt quickly and lightly to her feet.
Standing motionless for awhile till she had given her sister time to
reach the high-street, she set off herself with firm and rapid steps
in the same direction. She resolved that she would not risk crossing
the green, but would reach the park wall by a little side alley which
skirted the backs of the houses. She felt certain that when she
did reach this wall it would be easy enough to climb over it. She
remembered its loose uneven stones and its clinging ivy. And once in
the park--ah! she knew well enough what way to take then!
Deserted by its human invaders, the old New Bridge relapsed into its
accustomed mood of silent expectancy. It had witnessed many passionate
loves and many passionate hatreds. It had felt the feet of generations
of Rodmoor’s children, light as gossamer seeds, upon its shoulders,
and it had felt the creaking of the death-wagon carrying the same
persons, heavy as lead then, to the oblong holes dug for them in the
churchyard. All this it had felt, but it still waited, still waited in
patient expectancy, while the tides went up and down beneath it, and
sea airs swept over it and night by night the stars looked down on it;
still waited, with the dreadful patience of the eternal gods and the
eternal elements, something that, after all, would perhaps never come.
Nance’s flowers, meanwhile, lay where she had dropped them, upon the
ground by the stone seat. They were there when, some ten minutes after
her departure, the girl returned with Dr. Raughty and Mrs. Raps to find
Linda gone; and they were there through all the hours of the dawn,
until a farm boy, catching sight of them as he went to his work, threw
them into the river in order that he might observe the precise rapidity
with which they would be carried by the tide under the central arch.
They were carried very swiftly under the central arch; but linger as
the boy might, he did not see them reappear on the other side.
XVII
THE DAWN
The dawn was just faintly making itself felt among the trees of
Oakguard when Philippa Renshaw, restless as she often was on these
summer nights, perceived, as she leaned from her open window, a figure
almost as slender as herself standing motionless at the edge of one
of the terraces and looking up at the house. There was no light in
Philippa’s room, so that she was able to watch this figure without risk
of being herself observed. She was certain at once in her own mind of
its identity, and she took it immediately for granted that Brand was
even now on his way to meet the young girl at the spot where she now
saw her standing.
She experienced, therefore, a certain surprise and even annoyance--for
she would have liked to have witnessed this encounter--when, instead
of remaining where she stood, the girl suddenly slipped away like
a ghostly shadow and merged herself among the park-trees. Philippa
remained for some minutes longer at the window peering intently into
the grey obscurity and wondering whether after all she had been
mistaken and it was one of the servants of the house. There _was_
one of the Oakguard maids addicted to walking in her sleep, and she
confessed to herself that it was quite possible she had been misled by
her own morbid fancy into supposing that the nocturnal wanderer was
Linda Herrick.
She returned to her bed after a while and tried to sleep, but the idea
that it was really Linda she had seen and that the young girl was
even now roaming about the grounds like a disconsolate phantom, took
possession of her mind. She rose once more and cautiously pulling down
the blind and drawing the curtains began hurriedly to dress herself,
taking the precaution to place the solitary candle which she used
behind a screen so that no warning of her wakefulness should reach the
person she suspected.
Opening the door and moving stealthily down the passage, she paused
for a moment at the threshold of her brother’s room. All was silent
within. Smiling faintly to herself, she turned the handle with
exquisite precaution and glided into the room. No! She was right
in her conjecture. The place was without an occupant, and the bed,
it appeared, had not been slept in. She went out, closing the door
silently behind her.
Her mother’s room was opposite Brand’s and the fancy seized her to
enter that also. She entered it, and stepped, softly as a wandering
spirit, to her mother’s side. Mrs. Renshaw was lying in an uneasy
posture with one arm stretched across the counterpane and her head
close to the edge of the bed. She was breathing heavily but was not in
a deep sleep. Every now and then her fingers spasmodically closed and
unclosed, and from her lips came broken inarticulate words. The pallid
light of the early dawn made her face seem older than Philippa had ever
seen it. By her side on a little table lay an open book, but it was
still too dark for the intruder to discern what this book was.
The daughter stood for some minutes in absolute rigidity, gazing upon
the sleeper. Her face as she gazed wore an expression so complicated,
so subtle, that the shrewdest observer seeking to interpret its meaning
would have been baffled. It was not malignant. It certainly was not
tender. It might have been compared to the look one could conceive some
heathen courtesan in the days of early Christianity casting upon a
converted slave.
Uneasily conscious, as people in their sleep often are, without
actually waking, of the alien presence so near her, Mrs. Renshaw
suddenly moved round in her bed and with a low moaning utterance,
settled herself to sleep with her face to the window. It was a human
name she had uttered then. Philippa was sure of that, but it was a name
completely strange to the watcher of her mother’s unconsciousness.
Passing from the room as silently as she had entered, the girl ran
lightly down the staircase, picked up a cloak in the hall, and let
herself out of the front door.
Meanwhile, through the gradually lifting shadows, Linda with rapid and
resolute steps was hastening across the park to the portion of the
avenue where grew the great cedar-trees. This was the place to which
her first instinct had called her. It was only an after-thought, due to
cooler reason that had caused her to deviate from this and approach the
house itself.
As she advanced through the dew-drenched grass, silvery now in the
faint light, she felt that vague indescribable sensation which all
living creatures, even those scourged by passion, are bound to feel, at
the first palpable touch of dawn. Perfumes and odours that could not
be expressed in words, and that seemed to have no natural origin, came
to the girl on the wind which went sighing past her. This--so at least
Linda vaguely felt--was not the west wind any more. It was not any
ordinary wind of day or night. It was the dawn wind, the breath of the
earth herself, indrawn with sweet sharp ecstasy at the delicate terror
of the coming of the sun-god.
As she approached the avenue where the trunks of the cedars rose
dark against the misty white light, she was suddenly startled by the
flapping wings of an enormous heron which, mounting up in front of her
out of the shadow of the trees, went sailing away across the park, its
extended neck and outstretched legs outlined against the eastern sky.
She passed in among the shadows from which the heron had emerged, and
there, as though he had been waiting for her only a few moments, was
Brand Renshaw.
With one swift cry she flung herself into his arms and they clung
together as if from an eternity of separation. In her flimsy dress wet
with mist she seemed like a creature evoked by some desperate prayer of
earth-passion. Her cheeks and breast were cold to his touch, but the
lips that answered his kisses were hot as if with burning fever. She
clung to him as though some abysmal gulf might any moment open beneath
their feet. She nestled against him, she twined herself around him. She
took his head between her hands and with her cold fingers she caressed
his face. So thinly was she clad that he could feel her heart beating
as if it were his own.
“I knew you were calling me,” she gasped at last. “I felt it--I felt
it in my flesh. Oh, my only love, I’m all yours--all, all yours! Take
me, hold me, save me from every one! Hold me, hold me, my only love,
hold me tight from all of them!”
They swayed together as she clung to him and, lifting her up from the
ground he carried her, still wildly kissing him, into the deeper shadow
of the great cedars. Exhausted at last by the extremity of her passion,
she hung limp in his arms, her face white as the white light which now
flooded the eastern horizon. He laid her down then at the foot of one
of the largest trees and bending over her pushed back the hair from her
forehead as if she had been a tired child.
By some powerful law of his strange nature, the very intensity of
her passion for him and her absolute yielding to his will calmed and
quieted his own desire. She was his now, at a touch, at a movement;
but he would as soon have hurt an infant as have embraced her then.
His emotion at that moment was such as never again in his life he was
destined to experience. He felt as though, untouched as she was, she
belonged to him, body and soul. He felt as though they two together
were isolated, separated, divided, from the whole living world. Beneath
the trunks of those black-foliaged cedars they seemed to be floating in
a mystic ship over a great sea of filmy white waves.
He bent down and kissed her forehead, and under his kiss, chaste as the
kiss a father might give to a little girl, she closed her eyes and lay
motionless and still, a faint flickering smile of infinite contentment
playing upon her lips.
They were in this position--the girl’s hand resting passively in
his--and he bending over her, when through an eastward gap between
the trees the sun rose above the mist. It sent towards them a long
blood-coloured finger that stained the cedar trunks and caused the
strangely shaped head of the stooping man to look as if it had been
dipped in blood. It made the girl’s mouth scarlet-red and threw an
indescribable flush over her face, a flush delicate and diaphanous as
that which tinges the petals of wild hedge roses.
Linda opened her eyes and Brand leapt to his feet with a cry. “The
sun!” he shouted, and then, in a lower voice, “what an omen for us,
little one--what an omen! Out of the sea, out of _our_ sea! Come, get
up, and let’s watch the morning in! There won’t be a trace of mist
left, or dew either, in an hour or so.”
He gave her his hand and hurriedly pulled her to her feet. “Quick!” he
cried. “You can see it across the sea from over there. I’ve often seen
it, but never like this, never with you!”
Hand in hand they left the shade of the trees and hastening up
the slope of a little grassy mound--perhaps the grave of some
viking-ancestor of his own--they stood side by side surveying the
wonder of the sunrise.
As they stood there and the sun, mounting rapidly higher and higher,
dispersed the mists and flooded everything with golden light, Brand’s
mood began to change towards his companion. The situation was reversed
now and it was his arms that twined themselves round the girl’s
figure, while she, though only resisting gently and tenderly, seemed
to have recovered the normal instincts of her sex, the instincts of
self-protection and aloofness.
The warmer the sun became and the more clearly the familiar landscape
defined itself before them, the more swiftly did the relations between
the two change and reverse. No longer did Brand feel as though some
mystic spiritual union had annihilated the difference between their
sex. The girl was once more an evasive object of pursuit. He desired
her and his desire irritated and angered him.
“We shan’t have the place to ourselves much longer,” he said.
“Come--let’s say good-bye where we were before--where we weren’t so
much in sight.”
He sought to lead her back to the shade of the cedars; but she--looking
timidly at his face--felt for the first time a vague reaction against
him and an indefinable shrinking.
“I think I’ll say good-bye to you here,” she said, with a faint smile.
“Nance will be looking for me everywhere and I mustn’t frighten her any
further.”
She was astonished and alarmed at the change in his face produced by
her words.
“As you please,” he said harshly, “here, as well as anywhere else, if
that’s your line! You’d better go back the way you came, but the gates
aren’t locked if you prefer the avenue.” He actually left her when he
said this, and without touching her hand or giving her another look,
strode down the slope and away towards the house.
This was more than Linda could bear. She ran after him and caught him
by the arm. “Brand,” she whispered, “Brand, my dearest one, you’re not
really angry with me, are you? Of course, I’ll say good-bye wherever
you wish! Only--only--” and she gave an agitated little sigh, “I don’t
want to frighten Nance more than I can help.”
He led her back to the spot where, under the dark wide-spreading
branches, the red finger of the sun had first touched them. She loved
him too well to resist long, and she loved him too well not to taste,
in the passionate tears that followed her abandonment to his will,
a wild desperate sweetness, even in the midst of all her troubled
apprehensions as to the calamitous issues of their love.
It was in the same place, finally, and under the same dark branches,
that they bade one another good-bye. Brand looked at his watch before
they parted and they both smiled when he announced that it was nearly
six, and that at any moment the milk-cart might pass them coming up
from the village. As he moved away, Linda saw him stoop and pick up
something from the ground. He turned with a laugh and flung the thing
towards her so that it rolled to her feet. It was a fir-cone and
she knew well why he threw it to her as their farewell signal. They
had wondered, only a little while ago, how it drifted beneath their
cedar-tree, and Brand had amused himself by twining it in her hair.
She picked it up. The hair was twisted about it still--of a colour not
dissimilar from the cone, but of a lighter shade. She slipped the thing
into her dress and let it slide down between her breasts. It scratched
and pricked her as soon as she began to walk, but this discomfort gave
her a singular satisfaction. She felt like a nun, wearing for the first
time her symbol of separation from the world--of dedication to her
lord’s service. “I am certainly no nun now,” she thought, smiling sadly
to herself, “but I am dedicated--dedicated forever and a day. Oh, my
dear, dear Love, I would willingly die to give you pleasure!”
She moved away, down the avenue towards the village. She had not gone
very far when she was startled by a rustle in the undergrowth and
the sound of a mocking laugh. She stopped in terror. The laugh was
repeated, and a moment later, from a well-chosen hiding-place in a
thicket of hazel-bushes, Philippa Renshaw, with malignant shining eyes,
rushed out upon her.
“Ah!” she cried joyously, “I thought it was you. I thought it was one
or other of you! And where is our dear Brand? Has he deserted you so
quickly? Does he prefer to have his little pleasures before the sun is
_quite_ so high? Does he leave her to go back all alone and by herself?
Does he sneak off like a thief as soon as daylight begins?”
Linda was too panic-stricken to make any reply to this torrent of
taunts. With drawn white face and wide-open terrified eyes, she stared
at Philippa as a bird might stare at a snake. Philippa seemed delighted
with the effect she produced and stepping in front of the young girl,
barred her way of escape.
“You mustn’t leave us now,” she cried. “It’s impossible. It would never
do. What will they say in the village when they see you like that,
crossing the green, at this hour? What you have to do, Linda Herrick,
is to come back and have breakfast with us up at the house. My mother
will be delighted to see you. She always gets up early, and she’s very,
very fond of you, as you know. You _do_ know my mother’s fond of you,
don’t you?
“Listen, you silly white-faced thing! Listen, you young innocent, who
must needs come wandering round people’s houses in the middle of the
night! Listen--you Linda Herrick! I don’t know whether you’re stupid
enough to imagine that Brand’s going to marry you? Are you stupid
enough for that? Are you, you dumb staring thing? Because, if you are,
I can tell you a little about Brand that may surprise you. Perhaps you
think you’re the first one he’s ever made love to in this precious park
of ours. No, no, my beauty, you’re not the first--and you won’t be the
last. We Renshaws are a curious family, as you’ll find out, you baby,
before you’ve done with us. And Brand’s the most curious of us all!
“Well, are you coming back with me? Are you coming back to have a
nice pleasant breakfast with my mother? You’d better come, Linda
Herrick, you’d better come! In fact, you _are_ coming, so that ends
it. People who spend the night wandering about other people’s grounds
must at least have the decency to show themselves and acknowledge the
hospitality! Besides, how glad Brand will be to see you again! Can’t
you imagine how glad he’ll be? Can’t you see his look?
“Oh, no, Linda Herrick, I can’t possibly let you go like this. You see,
I’m just like my dear mother. I love gentle, sensitive, pure-minded
young girls. I love their shyness and their bashfulness. I love the
unfortunate little accidents that lead them into parks and gardens.
Come, you dumb big-eyed thing! What’s the matter with you? Can’t
you speak? Come! Back with you to the house! We’ll find my mother
stirring--and Brand too, unless he’s sick of girls’ society and has
gone off to Mundham. Come, white-face; there’s nothing else for it. You
must do what I tell you.”
She laid her hand on Linda’s shoulder, and, such was the terror she
excited, the unhappy girl might actually have been magnetized into
obeying her, if a timely and unexpected interruption had not changed
the entire situation. This was the appearance upon the scene of
Adrian Sorio. Sorio had recently acquired an almost daily habit of
strolling a little way up the Oakguard avenue before his breakfast
with Baltazar. On two or three of these occasions he had met Philippa,
and he had always sufficient hope of meeting her to give these walks a
tang of delicate excitement. He had evidently heard nothing of Linda’s
disappearance. Nance in her distress had, it seemed, resisted the
instinct to appeal to him. He was consequently considerably surprised
to see the two girls standing together in the middle of the sunlit path.
Linda, flinging Philippa aside, rushed to meet him. “Adrian! Adrian!”
she cried piteously, “take me home to Nance.” She clung to his arm and
in the misery of her outraged feelings, began sobbing like a child who
has been lost in the dark. Sorio, soothing and petting her as well as
he could, looked enquiringly at Philippa as she came up.
“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s nothing, Adrian. It’s only that I wanted her to
come up to the house. She seems to have misunderstood me and got silly
and frightened. She’s not a very sensible little girl.”
Sorio looked at Philippa searchingly. In his heart he suspected her
of every possible perversity and maliciousness. He realized at that
moment how entirely his attraction to her was an attraction to what
is dangerous and furtive. He did not even respect her intelligence.
He had caught her more than once playing up to his ideas in a manner
that indicated a secret contempt for them. At those moments he had
hated her, and--with her--had hated, as he fancied, the whole feminine
tribe--that tribe which refuses to be impressed even by world-crushing
logic. But how attractive she was to him! How attractive, even at this
moment, as he looked into her defiant, inscrutable eyes, and at her
scornfully curved lips!
“You needn’t pity her, Adrian,” she went on, casting a bitter smile at
Linda’s bowed head as the young girl hid her face against his shoulder.
“There’s no need to pity her. She’s just like all the rest of us, only
she doesn’t play the game frankly and honestly as I do. Send her home
to her sister, as she says, and come with me across the park. I’ll show
you that oak tree if you’ll come--the one I told you about, the one
that’s haunted.”
She threw at him a long deep look, full of a subtle challenge, and
stretched out her hand as if to separate him from the clinging child.
Sorio returned her look and a mute struggle took place between them.
Then his face hardened.
“I must go back with her,” he said. “I must take her to Nance.”
“Nonsense!” she rejoined, her eyes darkening and changing in colour.
“Nonsense, my dear! She’ll find her way all right. Come! I really want
you. Yes, I mean what I say, Adrian. I really want you this time!”
The expression with which she challenged him now would have delighted
the great antique painters of the feminine mystery. The gates of her
soul seemed to open inwards, on magical softly-moving hinges, and an
incalculable power of voluptuous witchcraft emanated from her whole
body.