by any one of an origin different from Sorio’s. But he had in
him--capable of being roused at moments--the blood of that race in
which of all others women have met their match. To this witchcraft of
the north he opposed the marble-like disdain of the south--the disdain
which has subtlety and knowledge in it--the disdain which is like
petrified hatred.
His face darkened and hardened until it resembled a mask of bronze.
“Good-bye,” he said, “for the present. We shall meet again--perhaps
to-morrow. But anyway, good-bye! Come, Linda, my child.”
“Perhaps to-morrow--and perhaps _not_!” returned Philippa bitterly.
“Good-bye, Linda. I’ll give your love to Brand!”
Sorio said little to his companion as he escorted her back to her
lodging in the High Street. He asked her no questions and seemed to
take it as quite a natural thing that she should have been out at that
early hour. They discovered Dr. Raughty in the house when they arrived,
doing his best to dissuade Nance from any further desperate hunt after
the wanderer, and it was in accordance with the doctor’s advice, as
well as their own weariness that the two sisters spent the later
morning hours of their August Bank-holiday in a profound and exhausted
sleep.
XVIII
BANK-HOLIDAY
It was nearly two o’clock in the afternoon when Nance woke out of
a heavy dreamless sleep. She went to the window. The shops in the
little street were all closed and several languid fishermen and
young tradesmen’s apprentices were loitering about at the house
doors, chaffing lazily and with loud bursts of that peculiarly empty
laughter which seems the prerogative of rural idleness, the stray
groups of gaily dressed young women who, in the voluptuous contentment
of after-dinner repletion, were setting forth to take the train for
Mundham or to walk with their sweethearts along the sea-shore. She
turned and looked closely at her still sleeping sister.
Linda lay breathing softly. On her lips was a childlike smile of
serene happiness. She had tossed the bed-clothes away and one of her
arms, bare to the elbow, hung over the edge of the bed. It seemed she
was holding fast, in the hand thus pathetically extended, some small
object round which her fingers were tightly closed. Nance moved to her
side and took this hand in her own. The girl turned her head uneasily
but continued to sleep. Nance opened the fingers which lay helplessly
in her own and found that what they held so passionately was a small
fir-cone. The bright August sunshine pouring down upon the room enabled
her to catch sight of several strands of light brown hair woven round
the thing’s rough scales. She let the unconscious fingers close once
more round the fir-cone and glanced anxiously at the sleeping girl. She
guessed in a moment the meaning of that red scratch across the girl’s
bosom. She must have been carrying this token pressed close against her
flesh and its rough prickly edges had drawn blood.
Nance sighed heavily and remained for a moment buried in gloomy
thought. Then, stepping softly to the door, she ran downstairs to see
if Mrs. Raps were still in her kitchen or had left any preparations
for their belated dinner. Their habit was to make their own breakfast
and tea, but to have their midday meal brought up to them from their
landlady’s table. She found an admirable collation carefully prepared
for them on a tray and a little note on the dresser telling her that
the family had gone to Mundham for the afternoon.
“Bless your poor, dear heart,” the note ended, “the old man and I
thought best not to disappoint the children.”
Nance felt faint with hunger. She put the kettle on the fire and made
tea and with this and Mrs. Raps’ tray she returned to her sister’s side
and roused her from her sleep.
Linda seemed dazed and confused when she first woke. For the moment it
was difficult not to feel as though all the events of the night and
morning were a troubled and evil dream. Nance noticed the nervous and
bewildered way in which she put her hand to the mark upon her breast
as if wondering why it hurt her and the hasty disconcerted movement
with which she concealed the fir-cone beneath her pillow. In spite of
everything, however, their meal was not by any means an unhappy one.
The sun shone warm and bright upon the floor. Pleasant scents, in which
garden-roses, salt-sea freshness and the vague smell of peat and tar
mingled together, came in through the window, blent with the lazy,
cheerful sounds of the people’s holiday. After all they were both young
and neither the unsatisfied ache in the soul of the one nor the vague
new dread, bitter-sweet and full of strange forebodings, in the mind of
the other could altogether prevent the natural life-impulse with which,
like two wind-shaken plants in an intermission of quiet, they raised
their heads to the sky and the sunshine. They were young. They were
alive. They knew--too well, perhaps!--but still they knew what it was
to love, and the immense future, with all its infinite possibilities,
lay before them. “Sursum Corda!” the August airs whispered to them.
“Sursum Corda!” “Lift up your hearts!” their own young flesh and blood
answered.
Linda did not hesitate as she ate and drank to confess to Nance how she
had betrayed her and how she had seen Brand in the park. Of the cedar
trees and their more ominous story she said nothing, but she told how
Philippa had sprung upon her in the avenue and of wild, cruel taunts.
“She frightened me,” the girl murmured. “She always frightens me.
Do you think she would really have made me go back with her to the
house--to meet Brand and Mrs. Renshaw and all? I couldn’t have done
it,” she put her hands to her cheeks and trembled as she spoke, “I
couldn’t--I couldn’t! It would have been too shameful! And yet I
believe she was really going to make me. Do you think she was, Nance?
Do you think she _could_ have done such a thing?”
Nance gripped the arms of her chair savagely.
“Why didn’t you leave her, dear?” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t you simply
leave her and run off? She isn’t a witch. She’s simply a girl like
ourselves.”
Linda smiled. “How fierce you look, darling! I believe if it had been
you you’d have slapped her face or pushed her down or something.”
Nance gazed out of the window, frowning. She wondered to herself
by what spiritual magic Mr. Traherne and his white rat proposed to
obliterate the poisonous rage of jealousy. She wondered what he would
say, the devoted priest, to this uncalled for and cruel attack upon her
sister. She had never heard him mention Philippa at any time in their
talks. Was he as much afraid of _her_ beauty as he pretended to be of
her own? Did he make Philippa hide her ankles in her skirt when she
visited him? But she supposed she never did visit him. It was somehow
very difficult to imagine the sister of Brand Renshaw in the priest’s
little study.
From Traherne, Nance’s mind wandered to Dr. Raughty. How kind he had
been to her when she was in despair about Linda! She had never seen
him half so serious or troubled. She could hardly help smiling as she
remembered the peculiar expression he wore and the way he pulled on his
coat and laced up his boots. She had let him give her a little glass of
_crême de menthe_ and she could see now, with wonderful distinctness,
the gravity with which he had watched her drink it. She felt certain
his hand had shaken with nervousness when he took the glass from her.
She could hear him clearing his throat and muttering some fantastic
invocation to what sounded like an Egyptian divinity. Surely the
effect of extreme anxiety could produce upon no one else in the world
but Dr. Raughty a tendency to allude to the great god Ra! And what
extraordinary things he had put into his little black bag as he sallied
forth with her to the bridge! Linda might have been in need of several
kinds of surgical operations from the preparations he made.
He had promised to spend that day on a fishing trip, out to sea, with
Adrian and Baltazar. She wondered whether their boat was still in sight
or whether they had got beyond the view of Rodmoor harbour.
“Linda, dear,” she said presently, catching her sister’s hand feeling
about under her pillows for the fir-cone she had hidden, “Linda, dear,
if I’m to forgive you for what you did last night, for running away
from me, I mean, and pretending things, will you do something that
I want now? Will you come down to the shore and see if we can see
anything of Adrian’s boat? He’s fishing with Dr. Raughty and Mr. Stork,
and I’d love to get a sight of their sail. I know it’s a sailing boat
they’ve gone in because Dr. Raughty said he was going to take his
mackintosh so that when they went fast and the water splashed over
the side he might be protected. I think he was a little scared of the
expedition. Poor dear man, between us all, I’m afraid we give him a lot
of shocks!”
Linda jumped up quite eagerly. She felt prepared at that moment to do
anything to please her sister. Besides, there were certain agitating
thoughts in her brain which cried aloud for any kind of distraction.
They dressed and went out, choosing, as suited the holiday occasion,
brighter frocks and gayer hats than they had worn for many weeks.
Nance’s position in the Pontifex shop was a favourable one as far as
their wardrobe was concerned.
They made their way down to the harbour. They were surprised, and
in Linda’s case at any rate not very pleasantly surprised, to find
tied to a post where the wharf widened and the grass grew between the
cobble-stones the little grey pony and brown pony-cart which Mrs.
Renshaw was in the habit of using when the hot weather made it tiring
for her to walk.
“Let’s go back! Oh, Nance, let’s go back!” whispered Linda in a
panic-stricken voice. “I don’t feel I _can_ face her to-day.”
They stood still, hesitating.
“There she is,” cried Nance suddenly, “look--who’s she got there with
her?”
“Oh, Nance, it’s Rachel, yes, it’s Rachel!”
“She must have gone to Dyke House to fetch her,” murmured the other.
“Quick! Let’s go back.”
But it was already too late. Rising from the seat where they were
talking together at the harbour’s edge, the two women moved towards the
girls, calling them by name. There was no escape now and the sisters
advanced to meet them.
They made a strange foreground to the holiday aspect of the little
harbour, those two black-gowned figures. Mrs. Renshaw was a little in
front and her less erect and less rigid form had a certain drooping
pathos in its advance as though she deprecated her appearance in the
midst of so cheerful a scene. Both the women wore old-fashioned bonnets
of a kind that had been discarded for several years; but the dress and
the bonnet of Rachel Doorm presented the appearance of having been
dragged out of some ancient chest and thrust upon her in disregard
of the neglected condition of her other clothes. Contrasted with the
brightly rocking waters of the river mouth and the gay attire of the
boat-load of noisy lads and girls that was drifting sea-ward on the
out-flowing tide, the look of the two women, as they crossed the little
quay, might have suggested the sort of scene that, raised to a poetic
height by the genius of the ancient poets, has so often in classical
drama symbolized the approach of messengers of ill-omen.
Mrs. Renshaw greeted the two sisters very nervously. Nance caught her
glancing with an air of ascetic disapproval at their bright-coloured
frocks and hats. Rachel, avoiding their eyes, extended a cold limp hand
to each in turn. They exchanged a few conventional and embarrassed
sentences, Nance as usual under such circumstances, giving vent to
little uncalled for bursts of rather disconcerting laughter. She had a
trick of opening her mouth very wide when she laughed like this, and
her grey eyes even wider still, which gave her an air of rather foolish
childishness quite inexpressive of what might be going on in her mind.
After a while they all moved off, as if by an instinctive impulse,
away from the harbour mouth and towards the sea-shore. To do this they
had to pass a piece of peculiarly desolate ground littered with dead
fish, discarded pieces of nets and dried heaps of sun-bleached seaweed.
Nance had a moment’s quaint and morbid intimation that the peculiar
forlornness of this particular spot gratified in some way the taste
of Mrs. Renshaw, for her expression brightened a little and she moved
more cheerfully than when under the eyes of the loiterers on the wharf.
There were some young women paddling in the sea just at that place and
some young men watching them so that Mrs. Renshaw, who with Nance kept
in advance of the other two, led the way along the path immediately
under the sand-dunes. This was the very spot where, on the day of their
first exploration of the Rodmoor coast, they had seen the flowerless
leaves of the little plant called the rock-rose. The flowers of this
plant, as Nance observed them now, were already faded and withered, but
other sea growths met her eye which were not unfamiliar. There were
several tufts of grey-leaved sea-pinks and still greyer sea-lavender.
There were also some flaccid-stalked, glaucous weeds which she had
never noticed before and which seemed in the moist sappy texture of
their foliage as though their natural place was rather beneath than
above the salt water whose propinquity shaped their form. But what made
her pause and stoop down with sudden startled attention, was her first
sight of that plant described to her by Mr. Traherne as peculiarly
characteristic of the Rodmoor coast. Yes, there it was--the yellow
horned poppy! As she bent over it Nance realized how completely right
the priest had been in what he said. The thing’s oozy, clammy leaves
were of a wonderful bluish tint, a tint that nothing in the world short
of the sea itself, could have possibly called into existence. They were
spiked and prickly, these leaves, and their shape was clear-edged and
threatening, as if modelled in sinister caprice, by some Da Vinci-like
Providence, willing enough to startle and shock humanity. But what
struck the girl more vividly than either the bluish tint or the
threatening spikes were the large, limply-drooping flowers of a pallid
sulphurous yellow which the plant displayed. They were flowers that
bore but small resemblance to the flowers of other poppies. They had a
peculiarly melancholy air, even before they began to fade, an air as
though the taste of their petals would produce a sleep of a deeper,
more obliterating kind than any “drowsy syrups” or “mandragora” which
the sick soul might crave, to “rase out” its troubles.
Mrs. Renshaw smiled as Nance rose from her long scrutiny of this weird
plant, a plant that might be imagined “rooting itself at ease on
Lethe’s wharf” while the ghost-troops swept by, whimpering and wailing.
“I always like the horned poppy,” she remarked, “it’s different from
other flowers. You can’t imagine it growing in a garden, can you? I
like that. I like things that are wild--things no one can imprison.”
She sighed heavily when she had said this and, turning her head away as
they walked on, looked wearily across the water.
“Bank-holidays are days for the young,” she went on, after a pause.
“The poor people look forward to them and I’m glad they do for they
have a hard life. But you must have a young heart, Nance, a young heart
to enjoy these things. I feel sometimes that we don’t live enough in
other people’s happiness but it’s hard to do it when one gets older.”
She was silent again and then, as Nance glanced at her
sympathetically, “I like Rodmoor because there are no grand people
here and no motor-cars or noisy festivities. It’s a pleasure to see the
poor enjoying themselves but the others, they make my head ache! They
trouble me. I always think of Sodom and Gomorrah when I see them.”
“I suppose,” murmured the girl, “that they’re human beings and have
their feelings, like the rest of us.”
A shadow of almost malignant bitterness crossed Mrs. Renshaw’s face.
“I can’t bear them! I can’t bear them!” she cried fiercely. “Those
that laugh shall weep,” she added, looking at her companion’s prettily
designed dress.
“Yes, I’m afraid happy people are often hard-hearted,” remarked Nance,
anxious if possible to fall in with the other’s mood, but feeling
decidedly uneasy. Mrs. Renshaw suddenly changed the conversation.
“I went over to see Rachel,” she said, “because I heard you had left
her and were working in the shop.”
She took a deep breath and her voice trembled.
“I think it was wrong of you to leave her,” she went on, “I think it
was cruel of you. I know what you will say. I know what all you young
people nowadays say about being independent and so forth. But it was
wrong all the same, wrong and cruel! Your duty was clearly to your
mother’s friend. I suppose,” she added bitterly, “you didn’t like her
sadness and loneliness. You wanted more cheerful companionship.”
Nance wondered in her heart whether Mrs. Renshaw’s hostility to the
complacent and contented ones of the earth was directed, in this case,
against the hard-worked sewing girls or against poor Miss Pontifex and
her little garden.
“I did it,” she replied, “for Linda’s sake. She and Miss Doorm didn’t
seem happy together.”
As she spoke, she glanced apprehensively round to ascertain how
near the others were, but it seemed as though Rachel had resumed
her ascendency over the young girl. They appeared to be engaged in
absorbing conversation and had stopped side by side, looking at the
sea. Mrs. Renshaw turned upon her resentfully, a smouldering fire of
anger in her brown eyes.
“Rachel has spoken to me about that,” she said. “She told me you were
displeased with her because she encouraged Linda to meet my son. I
don’t like this interference with the feelings of people! My son is
of an age to choose for himself and so is your sister. Why should you
set yourself to come between them? I don’t like such meddling. It’s
interfering with Nature!”
Nance stared at her blankly, watching mechanically the feverish way her
fingers closed and unclosed, plucking at a stalk of sea-lavender which
she had picked.
“But you said--you said--” she protested feebly, “that Mr. Renshaw was
not a suitable companion for young girls.”
“I’ve changed my mind since then,” continued the other, “at any rate in
this case.”
“Why?” asked Nance hurriedly. “Why have you?”
“Because,” and the lady raised her voice quite loudly, “because he
told me himself the other day that it was possible that he would marry
before long.”
She glanced triumphantly at Nance. “So you see what you’ve been doing!
You’ve been trying to interfere with the one thing I’ve been praying
for for years!”
Nance positively gasped at this. Had Brand really said such a thing? Or
if he had, was it possible that it was anything but a blind to cover
the tracks of his selfishness? But whatever was the reason of the son’s
remark it was clear that Nance could not, especially in the woman’s
present mood, justify her dark suspicions of him to his mother. So she
did nothing but continue to stare, nervously and helplessly, at the
stalk which Mrs. Renshaw’s excited fingers were pulling to pieces.
“I know why you’re so opposed to my son,” continued Mrs. Renshaw in
a lower and somewhat gentler tone. “It’s because he’s so much older
than your sister. But you’re wrong there, Nance. It’s always better
for the man to be older than the woman. Tennyson says that very thing,
in one of his poems, I think in ‘The Princess.’ He puts it poetically
of course, but he must have felt the truth of it very strongly or he
wouldn’t have brought it in. Nance, you’ve no idea how I have been
praying and longing for Brand to see some one he felt he could marry! I
know it’s what he needs to make him happy. That is to say, of course,
if the girl is good and gentle and obedient.”
The use of the word “obedient” in this connection was too much
for Nance’s nerves. Her feelings towards Mrs. Renshaw were always
undergoing rapid and contradictory changes. When she had talked of
Smollett and Dickens in their little sitting room the girl felt she
could do anything for her, so exquisitely guileless her soul seemed,
so spiritual and, as it were, transparent. But at this moment, as she
observed her, there was an obstinate, pinched look about her face and a
rigid tightening of all its lines. It was an expression that harmonized
only too well with her next remark.
“Your setting yourself against my son,” she said, “is only what I
expected. Philippa would be just like you if I said anything to her.
All you young people are too much for me. You are too much for me. But
I hear what you say and go on just the same.”
The look of dogged and inflexible resolution with which she uttered
this last sentence contrasted strangely with her frail aspect and her
weary drooping frame.
But that phrase about “obedience” still rankled in Nance’s mind, and
she could not help saying, “Why is it, Mrs. Renshaw, that you always
speak as though all the duty and burden of marriage rested upon the
woman? I don’t see why it’s more necessary for her to be good and
gentle than it is for the man!”
Her companion’s pallid lips quivered at this into a smile of
complicated irony and a strange light came into her hollow eyes.
“Ah, my dear, my dear!” she exclaimed, “you are indeed young yet. When
you’re a few years older and have come to know better what the world
is like, you will understand the truth of what I say. God has ordered,
in his inscrutable wisdom, that there should be a different right and
wrong for us women, from what there is for men. It may seem unjust. It
may _be_ unjust. We can no more alter it or change it than we can alter
or change the shape of our bodies. A woman is _made_ to obey. She finds
her happiness in obeying. You young people may say what you please, but
any deviation from this rule is contrary to Nature. Even the cleverest
people,” she added with a smile, “can’t interfere with Nature without
suffering for it.”
Nance felt absolutely nonplussed. The woman’s words fell from her with
such force and were uttered with such a melancholy air of finality,
that her indignation died down within her like a flame beneath the
weight of a rain-soaked garment. Mrs. Renshaw looked sadly over the
brightly-rocking expanse of sunlit water, dotted with white sails.
“It may appear to us unjust,” she went on. “It may _be_ unjust. God
does not seem in his infinite pleasure to have considered our ideas of
justice in making the world. Perhaps if he had there would be no women
in the world at all! Ah, Nance, my dear, it’s no use kicking against
the pricks. We were made to bear, to endure, to submit, to suffer. Any
attempt to escape this great law necessarily ends in misery. Suffering
is not the worst evil in the world. Yielding to brutal force is not the
worst, either. I sometimes think, from what I’ve observed in my life,
that there are depths of horror known to men, depths of horror through
which men are driven, compared with which all that _we_ suffer at their
hands is paradise!”
Her eyes had so strange and illumined an expression as she uttered
these words that Nance could not help shuddering.
“We, too,” she murmured, “fall into depths of horror sometimes and it
is men who drive us into them.”
Mrs. Renshaw did not seem to hear her. She went on dreamily.
“We can console ourselves. We have our duties. We have our little
things which must be done. God has given to these little things a
peculiar consecration. He has touched them with his breath so that they
are full of unexpected consolations. There are horizons and vistas in
them such as no one who hasn’t experienced what I mean can possibly
imagine. They are like tiny ferns or flowers--our ‘little things,’
Nance, growing at the bottom of a precipice.”
The girl could restrain herself no longer.
“I don’t agree with you! I don’t, I don’t!” she cried. “Life is large
and infinite and splendid and there are possibilities in it for all of
us--for women just as much as men; just, just as much!”