entered the shop, and Sorio hurriedly took the letter back and replaced
it in his pocket. He paid their bill, which came to exactly a shilling,
and together they walked out from the dairy. The ultramarine cow
contemplated the universe as the newcomers took their vacated table
with precisely the same placidity. Its own end--some fifty years after,
amid the debris of a local fire, with the consequent departure of its
shattered pieces to the Mundham dumping ground--did not enter into
its contemplation. Many lovers, happier and less happy than Sorio and
Nance, would sit at that marble table during that epoch and the blue
cow would listen in silence. Perhaps in its ultimate resting-place
its scorched fragments would become more voluble as the rains dripped
upon the tins and shards around them or perhaps, even in ruins--like
an animal sacred to Jupiter--it would hold its peace and let the rains
fall.
The two friends, still in a mood of delicate and delicious harmony,
threaded the quieter streets of the town and emerged into the dreamy
cathedral-like square, spacious with lawns and trees, that surrounded
the abbey-church. A broad gravel-path, overtopped by wide-spreading
lime trees, separated the grey south wall of the ancient edifice from
the most secluded of these lawns. The grass was divided from the path
by a low hanging chain-rail of that easy and friendly kind that seems
to call upon the casual loiterer to step over its unreluctant barrier
and take his pleasure under the welcoming trees. They sat down on an
empty bench and looked up at the flying buttresses and weather-stained
gargoyles and richly traceried windows. The sun fell in long mellow
streams across the gravel beside them, broken into cool deep patches
of velvet shadow where the branches of the lime trees intercepted it.
From somewhere behind them came the sound of murmuring pigeons and
from further off still, from one of the high-walled, old-fashioned
gardens of the houses on the remote side of the square, came the
voices of children playing. Sorio sat with one arm stretched out along
the top of the bench behind Nance’s head and with the other resting
upon the handle of his stick. His face had a look of deep, withdrawn
contentment--a contentment so absolute that it merged into a sort of
animal apathy. Any one familiar with the expression so often seen upon
the faces both of street-beggars and prince-cardinals in the city
on the Tiber, would have recognized something indigenous and racial
in the lethargy which then possessed him. Nance, on the other hand,
gave herself up to a sweet and passionate happiness such as she had
not known since they left London. While they waited thus together,
reluctant by even a word to break the spell of that favoured hour,
there came from within the church the sound of an organ. Nance got up
at once.
“Let’s go in for just a minute, Adrian! Do you mind--only just a
minute?”
The slightest flicker of a frown crossed Sorio’s face but it vanished
before she could repeat her request.
“Of course,” he said, rising in his turn, “of course! Let’s go round
and find the door.”
They had no difficulty in doing this. The west entrance of the church
was wide open and they entered and sat down at the back of the nave.
Above them the spacious vaulted roof, rich with elaborate fan-tracery,
seemed to spread abroad and deepen the echoes of the music as if it
were an immense inverted chalice spilling the odour of immortal wine.
The coolness and dim shadowiness of the place fell gently upon them
both and the mysterious rising and sinking of the music, with no sight
of any human presence as its cause, thrilled Nance from head to foot
as she had never been thrilled in her life. Oh, it was worth it--this
moment--all she had suffered before--all she could possibly suffer! If
only it might never stop, that heavenly sound, but go on and on and on
until all the world came to know what the power of love was! She felt
at that moment as if she were on the verge of attaining some clue, some
signal, some sign, which should make all things clear to her--clear and
ineffably sweet!
The deep crimsons and purples in the coloured windows, the damp chilly
smell of the centuries-old masonry, the large dark recesses of the
shadowy transepts, all blended together to transport her out of herself
into a world kindlier, calmer, quieter, than the world she knew.
“And--he--shall--feed--” rang out, as they listened, the clear
flutelike voice of some boy-singer, practising for the morrow’s
services, “shall--feed--his--flock.”
The words of the famous antiphony, “staled and rung upon” as they might
be, by the pathetic stammerings of so old a human repetition, were,
coming just at this particular moment, more than Nance could bear. She
flung herself on her knees and, pressing her hands to her face, burst
into convulsive sobs. Sorio stood up and laid his hand on her shoulder.
With the other hand--mindful of early associations--he crossed himself
two or three times and then remained motionless. Slowly, by the action
of that law which is perhaps the deepest in the universe, the law
of _ebb and flow_, there began in him a reaction. Had the words the
unseen boy singer was uttering been in Latin, had they possessed that
reserve, that passionate aloofness in emotion, which the instinct of
worship in the southern races protects from sentiment, such a reaction
might have been spared him; but the thing was too facile, too easy. It
might have been the climax of a common melodrama. It fell too pat upon
the occasion. And it was insidiously, treacherously, horribly human.
It was too human. It lacked the ring of style, the reserve of the
grand manner. It wailed and sobbed. It whimpered upon the Almighty’s
shoulder. It wanted the tragic abandonment of the “Dies Irae,” as it
missed the calmer dignity of the “Tantum ergo.” It appealed to what was
below the level of the highest in religious pathos. It humiliated while
it comforted. The boy’s voice died away and the organ stopped. There
was a sound of shuffling in the choir and the mutter of voices and even
a suppressed laugh.
Sorio removed his hand from Nance’s shoulder and stooping down picked
up his hat and stick. He looked round him. A fashionably dressed
lady, carrying a bunch of carnations, moved past them up the aisle
and presently two younger women followed. Then a neatly attired
dapper young clergyman strolled in, adjusting his eye-glasses. It was
evidently approaching the hour of the afternoon service. The spell was
broken.
But the kneeling girl knew nothing, felt nothing, of all this. She,
at all events, was in the church of her fathers--the church that her
most childish memories rendered sacred. Had she been able to understand
Sorio’s feeling, she would have swept it aside. The music was
beautiful, she would have said, and the words were true. From the heart
of the universe they came straight to her heart. Were they rendered
unbeautiful and untrue because so many simple souls had found comfort
in them?
“Ah! Adrian,” she would have said had she argued it out with him. “Ah,
Adrian, it _is_ common. It is the common cry of humanity, set to the
music of the common heart of the world, and is not that more essential
than ‘Latin,’ more important than ‘style’?”
As a matter of fact, the only controversy that arose between them when
they left the building was brief and final.
“I fancy,” remarked Sorio, “from what you tell me of her, that that’s
the sort of thing that would please Mrs. Renshaw--I mean the music we
heard just now!”
Nance flushed as she answered him. “Yes, it would! It would! And it
pleases _me_ too. It makes me more certain than ever that Jesus Christ
was really God.” Sorio bowed his head at this and held his peace and
together they made their way to the bank of the Loon.
What they were particularly anxious to see was an old house by the
river-side about a mile east of the town which had been, some hundred
years before, the abode of one of the famous East Anglian painters of
the celebrated Norwich school--a painter whose humorous aplomb and
rich earth-steeped colouring rivalled some of the most notable of the
artists of Amsterdam and The Hague.
Their train back to Rodmoor did not leave till half-past seven and
as it was now hardly five they had ample time to make this little
pilgrimage as deliberately as they pleased. They had no difficulty in
reaching the river, and once at its edge, it was only a question of
following its windings till they arrived at Ravelston Grange. Their
way was somewhat impeded at first by a line of warehouses, between
which and a long row of barges fastened to a series of littered dusty
wharves, lay all manner of bales and casks and bundles of hay and
vegetable. There were coal-yards there too, and timber-yards, and in
other places great piles of beer-barrels, all bearing the name “Keith
Radipole” which had been for half a century the business title of Brand
Renshaw’s brewery. These obstacles surmounted, there were no further
interruptions to their advance along the river path.
The aspect of the day, however, had grown less promising. A somewhat
threatening bank of clouds with dark jagged edges, which the efforts of
the sun to scatter only rendered more lurid, had appeared in the west
and when, for a moment, they turned to look back at the town, they saw
its chimneys and houses massed gloomily together against a huge sombre
bastion whose topmost fringe was illuminated by fiery indentations.
Nance expressed some hesitation as to the wisdom of going further with
this phalanx of storm threatenings following them from behind, but
Sorio laughed at her fears and assured her that in a very short time
they would arrive at the great painter’s house.
It appeared, however, that the “mile” referred to in the little local
history in which they had read about this place did not begin till the
limits of Mundham were reached and Mundham seemed to extend itself
interminably. They were passing through peculiarly dreary outskirts
now. Little half-finished rows of wretchedly built houses trailed
disconsolately towards the river’s edge and mingled with small deserted
factories whose walls, blackened with smoke, were now slowly crumbling
to pieces. Desolate patches of half-cultivated ground where the stalks
of potatoes, yellowing with damp, alternated with thickly growing
weeds, gave the place that peculiar expression of sordid melancholy
which seems the especial prerogative of such fringes of human
habitation. Old decaying barges, some of them half-drowned in water
and others with gaunt, protruding ribs and rotting planks, lay staring
at the sky while the river, swirling past them, gurgled and muttered
round their submerged keels. It was impossible for the two friends to
retain long, under these depressing surroundings, their former mood of
magical harmony. Little shreds and fragments of their happiness seemed
to fall from them at every step and remain, bleakly flapping among the
mouldering walls and weedy river-piles, like the bits of old paper
and torn rag which fluttered feebly or fell into immobility as the
wind rose or sank. The bank of clouds behind them had now completely
obscured every vestige of the sun and a sort of premature twilight lay
upon the surface of the river and on the fields on its further side.
“What’s that?” asked Nance suddenly, putting her hand on his arm and
pointing to a large square building which suddenly appeared on their
left. They had been vaguely aware of this building for some while but
one little thing or another in their more immediate neighbourhood had
confined it to the remoter verge of their consciousness. As soon as she
had asked the question Nance felt an unaccountable unwillingness to
carry the investigation further. Sorio, too, seemed ready enough to let
her enquiry remain unanswered. He shrugged his shoulders as much as to
say “how can I tell?” and suggested that they should rest for a moment
on a littered pile of wood which lay close to the water’s edge.
They stepped down the bank where they were, out of sight of the
building above, and seated themselves. With their arms around their
knees they contemplated the flowing tide and the dull-coloured mud of
the opposite bank. A coil of decaying rope, tossed aside from some
passing barge, lay at Sorio’s feet and, as he sat in gloomy silence,
he thought how like the thing was to something he had once seen at an
inquest in a house in New York. As for Nance, she found it difficult to
remove her eyes from a shapeless bundle of sacking which the tide was
carrying. Sometimes it would get completely submerged and then again it
would reappear.
“Why is it,” she thought, “that there is always something horrible
about tidal rivers? Is it because of the way they have of carrying
things backward and forward, backward and forward, without ever
allowing them either to get far inland or clear out to sea? Is a tidal
river,” she said to herself, “the one thing in all the world in which
nothing can be lost or hidden or forgotten?”
It was curious how difficult they both felt it just then either to
move from where they were or to address a single word to one another.
They seemed hypnotized by something--hypnotized by some thought which
remained unspoken at the back of their minds. They felt an extreme
reluctance to envisage again that large square building surrounded by
weather-stained wall, a wall from which the ivy had been carefully
scraped.
Slowly, little by little, the bank of clouds mounted up to the
meridian, casting over everything as it did so a more and more ominous
twilight. The silence between them became after a while, a thing with a
palpable presence. It seemed to float upon the water to their feet and,
rising about them like a wraith, like a mist, like the ghost of a dead
child, it fumbled with clammy fingers upon their hearts.
“I’m sure,” Sorio cried at last, with an obvious struggle to break the
mysterious sorcery which weighed on them, “I’m perfectly sure that
Ravelston Grange must be round that second bend of the river--do you
see?--where those trees are! I’m sure it must! At any rate we _must_
come to it at last if we only go on.”
He looked at his watch.
“Heavens! We’ve taken an hour already getting here! It’s nearly six.
How on earth have we been so long?”
“Do you know, Adrian,” Nance remarked--and she couldn’t help noticing
as she did so that though he spoke so resolutely of going forward he
made not the least movement to leave his seat--“do you know I feel as
if we were in a dream. I have the oddest feeling that any moment we
might wake up and find ourselves back in Rodmoor. Adrian, dear, let’s
go back! Let’s go back to the town. There’s something that depresses me
beyond words about all this.”
“Nonsense!” cried Sorio in a loud and angry voice, leaping to his feet
and snatching up his stick. “Come on, my girl, come, child! We’ll see
that Ravelston place before the rain gets to us!”
They clambered up the bank and walked swiftly forward. Nance noticed
that Sorio looked steadily at the river, looked at the river without
intermission and with hardly a word, till they were well beyond the
very last houses of Mundham. It was an unspeakable relief to her
when, at last, crossing a little footbridge over a weir, they found
themselves surrounded by the open fens.
“Behind those trees, Nance,” Sorio kept repeating, “behind those trees!
I’m absolutely sure I’m right and that Ravelston Grange is there. By
the way, girl, which of your poets wrote the verses--
‘She makes her immemorial moan,
She keeps her shadowy kine,
O, Keith of Ravelston,
The sorrows of thy line!’
They’ve been running in my head all the afternoon ever since I saw
‘Keith Radipole,’ on those beer-barrels.”
Nance, however, was too eager to reach the real Ravelston to pay much
heed to his poetic allusion.
“Oh, it sounds like--oh, I don’t know--Tennyson, perhaps!” and she
pulled him forward towards the trees.
These proved to be a group of tall French poplars which, just then,
were muttering volubly in the rain-smelling wind. They hurried past
them and paused before a gate in a very high wall.
“What’s this?” exclaimed Sorio. “_This_ can’t be Ravelston. It looks
more like a prison.”
For a moment his eyes encountered Nance’s and the girl glanced quickly
away from what she read in his face. She called out to an old man who
was hoeing potatoes behind some iron railings where the wall ended.
“Could you tell me where Ravelston Grange is?” she enquired.
The old man removed his hat and regarded her with a whimsical smile.
“’Tis across the river, lady, and there isn’t no bridge for some many
miles. Maybe with any luck ye may meet a cattle-boat to take ye over
but there’s little surety about them things.”
“What’s this place, then?” asked Sorio abruptly, approaching the iron
railings.
“This, mister? Why this be the doctor’s house of the County Asylum.
This be where they keep the superior cases, as you might say, them what
pays summat, ye understand, and be only what you might call half daft.
You must a’ seed the County Asylum as you came along. ’Tis a wonderful
large place, one of the grandest, so they say, on this side of the
kingdom.”
“Thank you,” said Sorio curtly. “That’s just what we wanted to know.
Yes, we saw the house you speak of. It certainly looks big enough. Have
there been many new cases lately? Is this what you might call a good
year for mental collapses?”
As he spoke he peered curiously between the iron bars as if anxious to
get some sight of the “half daft,” who could afford to pay for their
keep.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘a good year,’ mister,” answered the
man, watching him with little twinkling eyes, “but I reckon folk have
been as liable to go shaky this year as most other years. ’Tisn’t in
the season, I take it, ’tis in the man or for the matter of that,” and
he cast an apologetic leer in Nance’s direction, “in the woman.”
“Come on, Adrian,” interposed his companion, “you see that guide-book
told us all wrong. We’d better get back to the station.”
But Sorio held tightly to the railings with both his hands.
“Don’t tease me, Nance,” he said irritably. “I want to talk to this
excellent man.”
“You’d better do what your missus says, mister,” observed the gardener,
returning to his work. “The authorities don’t like no loitering in
these places.”
But Sorio disregarded the hint.
“I should think,” he remarked, “it wouldn’t be so very difficult to
escape out of here.” He received no reply to this and Nance pulled him
by the sleeve.
“Please, Adrian, please come away,” she pleaded, with tears in her
voice. The old man lifted up his head.
“You go back where you be come from,” he observed, “and thank the good
Lord you’ve got such a pretty lady to look after you. There be many
what envies you and many what ’ud like to stand in your shoes, and
that’s God’s truth.”
Sorio sighed heavily, and letting go his hold upon the railings, turned
to his companion.
“Let’s find another way to the town,” he said. “There must be some road
over there, or at worst, we can walk along the line.”
They moved off hastily in the direction opposite from the river and
the old man, after making an enigmatic gesture behind their backs,
spat upon his hands and returned to his work. The sky was now entirely
overclouded but still no rain fell.
XXI
THE WINDMILL
With the coming of September there was a noticeable change in the
weather. The air got perceptibly colder, the sea rougher and there
were dark days when the sun was hardly seen at all. Sometimes the
prevailing west wind brought showers, but so far, in spite of the
cooler atmosphere, there was little heavy rain. The rain seemed to be
gathering and massing on every horizon, but though its presence was
felt, its actual coming was delayed and the fields and gardens remained
scorched and dry. The ditches in the fens were low that season--lower
than they had been for many years. Some of them were actually empty
and in others there was so little water that the children could catch
eels and minnows with their naked hands. In many portions of the salt
marshes it was possible to walk dry-shod where, in the early Spring,
one would have sunk up to the waist, or even up to the neck.
Driven by the hot weather from their usual feeding-grounds several rare
and curious birds visited the fens that year. The immediate environs
of Rodmoor were especially safe for these, as few among the fishermen
carried guns and none of the wealthier inhabitants cared greatly for
shooting. Brand Renshaw, for instance, like his father before him,
refused to preserve any sort of game and indeed it was one of the chief
causes of his unpopularity with the neighbouring gentry that he was so
little of a sportsman.
One species of visitor brought by that unusually hot August was less
fortunate than the birds. This was a swallow-tail butterfly, one of
the rarer of the two kinds known to collectors in that part of the
country. Dr. Raughty was like a man out of his senses with delight when
he perceived this beautiful wanderer. He bribed a small boy who was
with him at the moment to follow it wherever it flew while he hurried
back to his rooms for his net. Unluckily for the swift-flying nomad,
instead of making for the open fens it persisted in hovering about the
sand-dunes where grew a certain little glaucous plant and it was upon
the sand dunes, finally, that the Doctor secured it, after a breathless
and exhausting chase.
It seemed to cause Fingal Raughty real distress when he found that
neither Nance nor Linda was pleased at what he had done. He met,
indeed, with scanty congratulations from any of his friends. With Sorio
he almost quarreled over the incident, so vituperative did the Italian
become when reference was made to it in his presence. Mrs. Renshaw was
gently sympathetic, evidently regarding it as one of the privileges of
masculine vigour to catch and kill whatever was beautiful and endowed
with wings, but even she spoilt the savour of her congratulations with
a faint tinge of irony.
Two weeks of September had already passed when Sorio, in obedience to
a little pencilled note he had received the night before, set off in
the early afternoon to meet Philippa at one of their more recently
discovered haunts. In spite of his resolution in the little dairy shop
in Mundham he had made no drastic change in his life, either in the
direction of finding work to do or of breaking off his relations with
the girl from Oakguard. That excursion with Nance in which they tried
so ineffectively to find the great painter’s house left, in its final
impression, a certain cruel embarrassment between them. It became
difficult for him not to feel that she was watching him apprehensively
now and with a ghastly anxiety at the back of her mind and this
consciousness poisoned his ease and freedom with her. He felt that her
tenderness was no longer a natural, unqualified affection but a sort of
terrified pity, and this impression set his nerves all the more on edge
when they were together.
With Philippa, on the other hand, he felt absolutely free. The girl
lived herself so abnormal and isolated a life, for Mrs. Renshaw
disliked visitors and Brand discouraged any association with their
neighbours, that she displayed nothing of that practical and human
sense of proportion which was the basis of Nance’s character. For the
very reason, perhaps, that she cared less what happened to him, she
was able to humour him more completely. She piqued and stimulated
his intelligence too, in a way Nance never did. She had flashes
of diabolical insight which could always rouse and astonish him.
Something radically cold and aloof in her made it possible for her to
risk alienating him by savage and malicious blows at his pride. But
the more poisonous her taunts became, the more closely he clung to
her, deriving, it might almost seem, an actual pleasure from what he
suffered at her hands. Anxious for both their sakes to avoid as much
as possible the gossip of the village, he had continued his habit of
meeting her in all manner of out-of-the-way places, and the spot she
had designated as their rendezvous for this particular afternoon was
one of the remotest and least accessible of all these sanctuaries of
refuge. It was, in fact, an old disused windmill, standing by itself in
the fens about two miles north of that willow copse where he had on one
fatal occasion caused Nance Herrick such distress.