pitiful and half ironical. “You don’t like my talk of ‘little things.’
You want great things. You want Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus!
Even your sacrifice--if you _do_ sacrifice yourself--must be striking,
stirring, wonderful! Ah, my dear, my dear, wait a little, wait a
little. A time will come when you’ll learn what the secret is of a
woman’s life on this earth.”
Nance made a desperate gesture of protest. Something treacherous in her
own heart seemed to yield to her companion’s words but she struggled
vigorously against it.
“What we women have to do,” Mrs. Renshaw continued pitilessly, “is to
make some one need us--need us with his whole nature. That is what is
meant by loving a man. Everything else is mere passion and tends to
misery. The more submissive we are, the more they need us. I tell you,
Nance, the deepest instinct in our blood is the instinct to be needed.
When a person needs us we love him. Everything else is mere animal
instinct and burns itself out.”
Nance fumbled vaguely and helplessly in her mind, as she listened,
to get back something of the high, inspiring tone of Mr. Traherne’s
mystical doctrine. _That_ had thrilled her and strengthened her, while
_this_ flung her into the lowest depths of despondency. Yet, in a
certain sense, as she was compelled to admit to herself, there was very
little practical difference between the two points of view. It was only
that, with Mrs. Renshaw, the whole thing took on a certain desolate and
disastrous colour as if high spirits and gaiety and adventurousness
were wrong in themselves and as if nothing but what was pitched in a
low unhappy key could possibly be the truth of the universe. The girl
had a curious feeling, all the while she was speaking, that in some
subtle way the unfortunate woman was deriving a morbid pleasure from
putting thrilling and exalted things upon a ground that annihilated the
emotion of heroism.
“Shall we go down to the sea now, dear?” said Mrs. Renshaw suddenly.
“The others will see us and follow.”
They moved together across the clinging sand. When they approached
the water’s edge, now deserted of holiday-makers, Nance searched the
skyline for any sail that might be the one carrying Sorio and his
friends. She made out two or three against the blue distance but it was
quite impossible to tell which of these, if any, was the one that bore
the man who, according to her companion’s words, would only “need” her
if she served him like a slave.
Mrs. Renshaw began picking up shells from the debris-scattered windrow
at the edge of the wet tide-mark. As she did this and showed them one
by one to Nance, her face once more assumed that clear, transparent
look, spiritual beyond description and touched with a childish
happiness, which the girl had noticed upon it when she spoke of the
books she loved. Could it be that only where religion or the opposite
sex were concerned this strange being was diseased and perverted? If
so, how dreadful, how cruel, that the two things which were to most
people the very mainspring of life were to this unhappy one the deepest
causes of wretchedness! Yet Nance was far from satisfied with her
reading of the mystery of Mrs. Renshaw. There was something in the
woman, in spite of her almost savage outbursts of self-revelation, so
aloof, so proud, so reserved that the girl felt only vaguely assured
she was on the right track with regard to her. Perhaps, after all,
below that tone of self-humiliating sentiment with which she habitually
spoke of both God and man, there was some deep and passionate current
of feeling, hidden from all the world? Or was she, essentially and in
secret truth, cold and hard and pagan and only forcing herself to drink
the cup of what she conceived to be Christianity out of a species of
half-insane pride? In all her utterances with regard to religion and
sex there was, Nance felt, a kind of heavy materiality, as if she got
an evil satisfaction in rendering what is usually called “goodness”
as colourless and contemptible as possible. But now as she picked up
a trumpet-shaped shell from the line of debris and held it up, her
eyes liquid with pleasure, to the girl’s view, Nance could not resist
the impression that she was in some strange way a creature forced and
driven out of her natural element into these obscure perversities.
“I used to paint these shells when I was a girl,” Mrs. Renshaw remarked.
“What colour?” Nance answered, still thinking more of the woman than
of her words. Her companion looked at her and burst into quite a merry
laugh.
“I don’t mean paint the shell itself,” she said. “You’re not listening
to me, Nance. I mean copy it, of course, and paint the drawing. I used
to collect sea-weeds too, in those days, and dry them in a book. I have
that book somewhere still,” she added, wistfully, “but I don’t know
where.”
She had won the girl’s attention completely now. Nance seemed to
visualize with a sudden sting of infinite pity the various little
relics so entirely dissociated from Rodmoor and its inhabitants which
this reserved woman must keep stored up in that gloomy house.
“It’s a funny thing,” Mrs. Renshaw went on, “but I can smell at this
moment quite distinctly (I suppose it’s being down here by the sea that
makes it come to me) the very scent of that book! The pages used to
get stuck together and when I pulled them apart there was always the
imprint of the seaweed on the paper. I used to like to see that. It was
as though Nature had drawn it.”
“It’s lovely, collecting things,” Nance remarked sympathetically. “I
used to collect butterflies when I was a child. Dad used to say I was
more like a boy than a girl.”
Mrs. Renshaw glanced at her with a curious look.
“Nance, dear,” she said in a low, trembling voice, “don’t ever get into
the habit of trying to be boyish and that sort of thing. Don’t ever do
that! The only good women are the women who accept God’s will and bow
to his pleasure. Anything else leads to untold wretchedness.”
Nance made no reply to this and they both began searching for more
shells among the stranded sea-drift.
Over their heads the sea-gulls whirled with wild disturbed screams.
There was only one sail on the horizon now and Nance fixed her thoughts
upon it and an immense longing for Adrian surged up in her heart.
Meanwhile, between Linda and Miss Doorm a conversation much more
sinister was proceeding. Rachel seemed from their first encounter and
as soon as the girl came into contact with her to reassert all her old
mastery. She deliberately overcame the frightened child’s instinctive
movement to keep pace with the others and held her closely to her side
as if by the power of some ancient link between them, too strong to be
overcome.
“Let me look at you,” she said as soon as their friends were out of
hearing. “Let me look into your eyes, my pretty one!”
She laid one of her gaunt hands on the girl’s shoulder and with the
other held up her chin.
“Yes,” she remarked after a long scrutiny during which Linda seemed
petrified into a sort of dumb submission, “yes, I can see you’ve
struggled against him. I can see you’ve not given up without an effort.
That means that you _have_ given up! If you hadn’t fought against him
he wouldn’t have followed you. He’s like that. He always _was_ like
that.” She removed her hands but kept her eyes fixed gloomily on the
girl’s face. “I expect you’re wishing now you’d never seen this place,
eh? Aren’t you wishing that? So this is the end of all your selfishness
and your vanity? Yes, it’s the end, Linda Herrick. It’s the end.”
She dragged the girl slowly forward along the path. On their right
as they advanced, the sun flickered upon the rank grasses which grew
intermittently in the soft sand and on their left the glittering sea
lay calm and serene under the spacious sky.
Linda felt her feet grow heavy beneath her and her heart sank with a
sick misgiving as she saw how far they had permitted the others to
outstrip them. Beyond anything else it was the power of cruel memories
which held the young girl now so docile, so helpless, in the other’s
hands. The old panic-stricken terror which Rachel had the power of
exciting in her when a child seemed ineluctable in its endurance.
Faintly and feebly in her heart Linda struggled against this spell.
She longed to shake herself free and rush desperately in pursuit of
the others but her limbs seemed turned to lead and her will seemed
paralyzed.
Rachel’s face was white and haggard. She seemed animated by some
frenzied impulse--some inward, demoniac force which drove her on. Drops
of perspiration stood out upon her forehead and made the grey hair that
fell across it moist and clammy under the rim of her dusty black hat.
Her clothes, as she held the girl close to her side, threw upon the air
a musty, fetid odour.
“Where are your soft ways now?” she went on, “your little clinging
ways, your touching little babyish ways? Where are your whims and your
fancies? Your caprices and your blushes? Where are your white-faced
pretences, and your sham terrors, only put on to make you look sweet?”
She had her hand upon the girl’s arm as she spoke and she tightened her
grasp, almost shaking her in her mad malignity.
“Before you were born your mother was afraid of me,” she went on. “Oh,
she gained little by cutting me out with her pretty looks! She gained
little, Linda Herrick! She dared scarcely look me in the face in those
days. She was afraid even to hate me. That is why _you_ are what you
are. You’re the child of her terror, Linda Herrick, the child of her
terror!”
She paused for a moment while the girl’s breath came in gasps through
her white lips as if under the burden of an incubus.
“Listen!” the woman hissed at last, staggering a little and actually
leaning against the girl as though the frenzy of her malignity deprived
her of her strength. “Listen, Linda. Do you remember what I used to
tell you about your father? How in his heart all the time he loved only
me? How he would sooner have got rid of your mother than have got rid
of me? Do you remember that? Listen, then! There’s something else I
must say to you--something that you’ve never guessed, something that
you couldn’t guess. When you were--” she stopped, panting heavily and
if Linda had not mechanically assisted her she would have fallen. “When
you were--when I was--” Her breath seemed to fail her then completely.
She put her hand to her side and in spite of the girl’s feeble effort
to support her she sank, moaning, to the ground.
Linda looked helplessly round. Nance and Mrs. Renshaw had passed beyond
a little promontory of sand-hills and were concealed from view. She
knelt down by Rachel’s side. Even then--even when those vindictive
dark eyes looked at her without a sign of consciousness, they seemed
to hold her with their power. As they remained mute and motionless in
this manner, the prostrate woman and the kneeling girl, a faint gust
of wind, blowing the sand in a little cloud before it and rustling the
leaves of the horned poppies, brought to Linda’s senses an odour of
inland fields. She felt a dim return, under this air, of her normal
faculties and taking one of the woman’s hands in her own she began
gently chafing it. Rachel answered to the touch and a shiver passed
through her frame. Then, in a flash, intelligence came back into her
eyes and her lips moved. Linda bent lower so as to catch her words.
They came brokenly, and in feeble gasps.
“I loved him so, I loved him more than my life. He took my life and
killed it. He killed my heart. He brought me those beads from far
across the sea. They were for me--not for her. He brought them for me,
I tell you. I gave him my heart for them and he killed it. He killed
it and buried it. This isn’t Rachel’s heart any more. No! No! It isn’t
Rachel’s. Rachel’s heart has gone with him--with the Captain--over
great wide seas. He got it--out of me--when--he--kissed my mouth.”
Her voice died away in inarticulate mutterings. Then once more her
words grew human and clear.
“My heart went with him long ago, after that, over the sea. It was in
all his ships. It was in every ship he sailed in--over far-off seas.
And in place of my heart--something else--something else--came and
lived in Rachel. It is this that--that--” The intelligence once more
faded out of her eyes and she lay stiff and motionless. Linda had a
sudden thought that she was dead and, with the thought, her fear of her
rolled away. Looking at her now, lying there, in her black dress and
crumpled bonnet, she seemed to see her as she was, a mad, wretched,
passion-scorched human being. It crossed the young girl’s mind how
inconceivable it was that this haggard image of desolation had once
been young and soft-limbed, had once danced out on summer mornings
to meet the sun as any other child! But even as this thought came to
her, Rachel stirred and moved again. Her eyes had a dazed expression
now--a clouded, sullen, hopeless expression. Slowly and with laborious
effort, refusing Linda’s assistance, she rose to her feet.
“Go and call them,” she said in a low voice. “Go and call them. Tell
Mrs. Renshaw that I’m ill--that she must take me home. You won’t be
troubled with me much longer--not much longer! But you won’t forget me.
Brand will see to that! No, you won’t forget me, Linda Herrick.”
The girl ran off without looking back. When the three of them returned,
Rachel Doorm seemed to have quite resumed her normal taciturnity.
They walked back, all four together, to the harbour mouth. The sisters
helped the two women into the little cart and untied the pony. As they
clattered away over the cobble-stones, Nance received from Mrs. Renshaw
a smile of gratitude, a smile of such illumined and spiritual gaiety
that it rendered the pale face which it lit up beautiful with the
beauty of some ancient picture.
When the pony-cart had disappeared, Nance and Linda sat down together
on the wooden bench watching the white sail upon the horizon and
talking of Rachel Doorm.
Most of the holiday-makers had now retired to their tea and a fresh
breeze, coming in with the turn of the tide, blew pleasantly upon
the girls’ foreheads and ruffled the soft hair under their daintily
beribboned hats. Nance, holding in her fingers the trumpet-shaped
shell, found herself suddenly wondering--perhaps because the shape
of the shell reminded her of it--whether Linda had left that ominous
fir-cone behind her in her room or whether at the last moment she had
again slipped it into her dress. She glanced sideways at her sister’s
girlish bosom, scarcely stirring now as with her head turned she looked
at the full-brimmed tide, and she wondered if, under that white and
pink frock so coquettishly open at the throat, there were any newly
created blood-stains from the rasping impact of that rough-edged trophy
of the satyr-haunted woods of Oakguard.
The afternoon light was so beautiful upon the water at that moment and
the cries of the circling sea-gulls so full of an elemental callousness
that the elder girl experienced a sort of fierce reaction against
the whole weight of this intolerable sex-passion that was spoiling
both their lives. Something hard, free and reckless seemed to rise up
within her, in defiance of every sort of feminine sentiment and, hardly
thinking what she did or of the effect of her words, “Quick, my dear,”
she cried suddenly, “give me that fir-cone you’ve got under your dress!”
Linda’s hands rose at once and she clutched at her bosom, but her
sister was too quick for her and too strong. Nance’s feeling at that
moment was as if she were plucking a snake away. Rising to her feet
when she had secured the trophy, she lifted up her arm and, with a
fierce swing of her whole body, flung both it and the shell she had
herself been holding far into the centre-current of the inflowing tide.
“So much for Love!” she cried fiercely.
The shell sank at once to the bottom but the fir-cone floated. For a
moment, when she saw Linda’s dismay, she felt a pang of remorse. But
she crushed it fiercely down. Behind her whole mood at that moment was
a savage reaction from Mrs. Renshaw’s emotional perversity.
“Come!” she cried, snatching at her sister’s hand as Linda wavered on
the wharf-brink and watched the fir-cone drift behind an anchored barge
and disappear. “Come! Let’s go back and help Miss Pontifex water her
garden. Then we’ll have tea and then we’ll go for a row if it isn’t too
dark! Perhaps Dr. Raughty will be home by then and we’ll make him take
us.”
She was so resolute and so dominant that Linda could do nothing but
meekly submit to her. Strangely enough she, too, felt a certain rebound
of youthful vivacity now she was conscious no longer of the rough
wood-token pressing against her flesh. She also, after what she had
heard from the lips of Rachel, experienced a reaction against the
sorrow of “what men call love.” Their mood continued unaltered until
they reached the gate of the dressmaker’s garden.
“Then it’s Dr. Raughty--not Adrian,” the younger girl remarked with a
smile, “that we’re to have to row us to-night?”
Nance looked quickly back at her and made an effort to smile too. But
the sight of the flower-beds and the carefully tended box-hedges of
the little garden, had been associated too long and too deeply with
the pain at her heart. Her smile died away from her face and it was in
silence after all and still bowed, for all their brave revolt under
the burden of their humanity, that the two girls set themselves to
water, as the August sun went down into the fens, the heavily-scented
phloxes and sweet lavender of the admirable Miss Pontifex. That little
lady was herself at that moment staring demurely, under the escort of
a broad-shouldered nephew from London, at a stirring representation of
“East Lynne” in a picture show in Mundham!
XIX
LISTENERS
August, now it had once come, proved hotter than was usual in that
windy East Anglian district. Before the month was half over the harvest
had begun and the wheat fields by the river bank stood bare and stubbly
round their shocks of corn. Twined with the wheat stalks and fading
now, since their support had been cut away, were all those bright and
brilliant field flowers which Nance had watched with so tender an
emotion in their yet unbudded state from her haunt by the willow bed.
Fumitory and persicaria, succory and corn cockles, blent together in
those fragrant holocausts with bindweed and hawkweed. At the edges of
the fields the second brood of scarlet poppies still lingered on like
thin streaks of spilt red blood round the scalps of closely cropped
heads. In the marshy places and by the dykes and ditches the newly
grown rush spears were now feathery and high, overtopping their own
dead of the year before and gradually hiding them from sight. The last
of all the season’s flowers, the lavender-coloured Michaelmas daisies
alone refused to anticipate their normal flowering. But even these, in
several portions of the salt marshes, were already high-grown and only
waiting the hot month’s departure to put forth their autumnal blossoms.
In the dusty corners of Rodmoor yards and in the littered outskirts
of Mundham, where there were several gravel-quarries, camomile and
feverfew--those pungent children of the late summer, lovers of rubbish
heaps and deserted cow sheds--trailed their delicate foliage and
friendly flowers. In the wayside hedges, wound-wort was giving place
to the yellow spikes of the flower called “archangel,” while those
“buds of marjoram,” appealed to in so wistful and so bitter a strain
by the poet of the _Sonnets_, were superseding the wild basil. The
hot white dust of the road between Rodmoor and Mundham rose in clouds
under the wheels of every kind of vehicle and, as it rose, it swept in
spiral columns across that grassy expanse which, in accordance with
the old liberal custom of East Anglian road-makers, separated the
highway on both sides from the enclosing hedges. With the sound of the
corn-cutting machine humming drowsily all day and, in the twilight,
with the shouts and cries of the children as their spirits rose with
the appearance of the moths and bats, there mingled steadily, day in
and day out, the monotonous splash of the waves on Rodmoor beach.
To those in the vicinity, whom Nature or some ill-usage of destiny had
made morbidly sensitive to that particular sound, there was perhaps
something harder to bear in its placid reiterated rhythm under these
halcyon influences than when, in rougher weather, it broke into
fury. The sound grew in intensity as it diminished in volume and
with the _beat, beat, beat_, of its eternal refrain, sharpened and
brought nearer in the silence of the hot August noons there came to
such nervously sensitive ears as were on the alert to receive it, an
increasingly disturbing resemblance to the sistole and diastole, the
inbreathing and outbreathing of some huge, half-human heart.
Among the various persons in Rodmoor from whom the greater and more
beneficent gods seemed turning away their faces and leaving them a prey
to the lesser and more vindictive powers, it is probable that not one
felt so conscious of this note of insane repetition, almost bestial
in its blind persistence, as did Philippa Renshaw. Philippa, in those
early August weeks, became more and more aloof from both her mother
and Brand. She met Sorio once or twice but that was rather by chance
than by design and the encounters were not happy for either of them.
Insomnia grew upon her and her practise of roaming at night beneath
the trees of the park grew with it. Brand often followed her on these
nocturnal wanderings but only once was he successful in persuading her
to return with him to the house. In proportion as she drew away from
him he seemed to crave her society.
One night, after Mrs. Renshaw had retired to bed, the brother and
sister lingered on in the darkened library. It was a peculiarly
sultry evening and a heavy veil of mist obscured the young crescent
moon. Through the open windows came hot gusts of air, ruffling the
curtains and making the candle flames flicker. Brand rose and blew
out all the lights except one which he placed on a remote table below
the staring dark-visaged portrait, painted some fifty years before,
of Herman Renshaw, their father. The other pictures that hung in
the spaces between the book-shelves were now reduced to a shadowy
and ghostly obscurity, an obscurity well adapted to the faded and
melancholy lineaments of these older, but apparently no happier,
Renshaws of Oakguard. Round the candle he had left alight a little
group of agitated moths hovered and at intervals as one or other of
them got singed it would dash itself with wild blind flutterings, into
the remotest corners of the room. From the darkness outside came an
occasional rustle of leaves and sighing of branches as the gusts of hot
air rose and died away. The oppressive heat was like the burden of a
huge, palpable hand laid upon the roof of the house. Now and again some
startled creature pursued by owl or weasel uttered a panic-stricken
cry, but whether its enemy seized upon it, or whether it escaped, the
eyes of the darkness alone knew. Its cry came suddenly and stopped
suddenly and the steady beat of the rhythm of the night went on as
before.
Brand flung himself down in a low chair and his sister balanced
herself on the arm of it, a lighted cigarette between her mocking
lips. Hovering thus in the shadow above him, her flexible form swaying
like a phantom created out of mist, she might have been taken for the
embodiment of some perverse vision, some dream avatar from the vices of
the dead past.
“After all,” Brand murmured in a low voice, a voice that sounded as
though his thoughts were taking shape independently of his conscious
will, “after all, what do I want with Linda or any of them since I’ve
got you?”
She made a mocking inclination of her head at this but kept silence,
only letting her eyes cling, with a strange light in them, to his
disturbed face. After a pause he spoke again.
“And yet she suits me better than any one--better than I expected it
was possible for a girl like that to suit me. She’ll never get over her
fear of me and that means she’ll never get over her love. I ought to be
contented with that, oughtn’t I?”