his back against the trunk of an alder, he returned her caress in
a perfunctory, absent-minded manner, precisely as if she were an
importunate child.
“I love you! I love you!” she whispered and then leaping to her feet,
“Good-bye!” she cried, “I’ll never forgive you if you desert me.”
She ran off, her slender figure moving through the growing twilight
like a swaying birch tree half seen through mist. Sorio’s mind left her
altogether. An immense yearning for his son took possession of him and
he set himself to recall every precise incident of their separation.
He saw himself standing at the side of the crowded liner. He saw the
people waving and shouting from the wooden jetty of the great dock. He
saw Baptiste, standing a little apart from the rest, motionless, not
raising even a hand, paralyzed by the misery of his departure. He too
was sick with misery then. He remembered the exact sensation of it and
how he envied the sea-gulls who never knew these human sufferings and
the gay people on the ship who seemed to have all they loved with them
at their side.
“Oh, God,” he muttered to himself, “give me back my son and you may
take everything--my book, my pride, my brain--everything! everything!”
Meanwhile Philippa was rapidly approaching Dyke House. A cold damp air
met her as she drew near, rising with the white mists from off the
surface of the river. She walked round the house and pushed open the
little wooden gate. The face of desolation itself looked at her from
that neglected garden. A few forlorn dahlias raised their troubled
wine-dark heads from among strangling nettles and sickly plants of
pallid-leaved spurge. Tangled raspberry canes and over-grown patches
of garden-mint mingled with wild cranesbill and darnel. Grass was
growing thickly on the gravel path and clumps of green damp moss clung
to the stone-work of the entrance. The windows, as she approached
the house, stared at her like eyes--eyes that have lost the power to
close their lids. There were no blinds down and no curtains drawn but
all the windows were dark. No smoke issued from the chimney and not a
flicker of light came from any portion of the place. Silent and cold
and hushed, it might have been only waiting for her appearance to sink
like an apparition into the misty earth. With a beating heart the
girl ascended the steps and rang the bell. The sound clanged horribly
through the empty passages. There was a faint hardly perceptible
stir, such as one might imagine being made by the fall of disturbed
dust or the rustle of loose paper, but that was all. Dead unbroken
silence flowed back upon everything like the flow of water round a
submerged wreck. There was not even the ticking of a clock to break
the stillness. It was more than the mere absence of any sound, that
silence which held the Doorm house. It was silence such as possesses
an individuality of its own. It took on, as Philippa waited there, the
shadowy and wavering outlines of a palpable shape. The silence greeted
the girl and welcomed her and begged her to enter and let it embrace
her. In a kind of panic Philippa seized the handle of the door and
shook it violently. More to her terror than reassurance it opened and a
cold wave of air, colder even than the mist of the river, struck her in
the face. She advanced slowly, her hand pressed against her heart and a
sense as if something was drumming in her ears.
The parlour door was wide open. She entered the room. A handful of
dead flowers--wild flowers of some kind but they were too withered
to be distinguishable--hung dry and sapless over the edge of a vase
of rank-smelling water. Otherwise the table was bare and the room
in order. She came out again and went into the kitchen. Here the
presence of more homely and unsentimental objects relieved a little the
tension of her nerves. But the place was absolutely empty--save for an
imprisoned tortoise-shell butterfly that was beating itself languidly,
as if it had done the same thing for days, against the pane.
Mindful of Sorio’s habit and with even the faint ghost of a smile, she
opened the window and set the thing free. It was a relief to smell the
river-smell that came in as she did this. She moved out of the kitchen
and once more stood breathless, listening intently in the silent
hall-way. It was growing rapidly darker; she longed to rush from the
place and return to Sorio but some indescribable power, stronger than
her own will, retained her. Suddenly she uttered a little involuntary
cry. Struck by a light gust of wind, the front door which she had left
open, swung slowly towards her and closed with a vibrating shock. She
ran to the back and opened the door which led to the yard. Here she
was genuinely relieved to catch the sound of a sleepy rustling in the
little wood-shed and to see through its dusty window a white blur of
feathers. There were fowls alive anyway about Dyke House. That, at
least, was some satisfaction. Propping the door open by means of an
iron scraper she returned to the hall-way and looked apprehensively at
the staircase. Dared she ascend to the rooms above? Dared she enter
Rachel Doorm’s bedroom? She moved to the foot of the staircase and laid
her hand upon the balustrade. A dim flicker of waning light came in
through the door she had propped open and fell upon the heavy chairs
which stood in the hall and upon a fantastic picture representing the
eruption of Vesuvius. The old-fashioned colouring of this print was
now darkened, but she could see the outlines of the mountain and its
rolling smoke. Once again she listened. Not a sound! She took a few
steps up the stairs and paused. Then a few more and paused again. Then
with her hands tightly clenched and a cold shivering sensation making
her feel sick and dizzy, she ran up the remainder and stood weak and
exhausted, leaning against the pillar of the balustrade and gazing with
startled eyes at a half-open door.
It is extraordinary the power of the dead over the living! Philippa
knew that in that room, behind that door, was the thing that had once
called itself a woman and had talked and laughed and eaten and drunk
with other women. When Rachel Doorm was about the age she herself had
now reached and she was a little child, she could remember how she
had built sand-castles for her by the sea-shore and sang to her old
Rodmoor songs about drowned sailors and sea-kings and lost children.
And now she knew--as surely as if her hand was laid upon her cold
forehead--that behind that door, probably in some ghastly attitude of
eternal listening, the corpse of all that, of all those memories and
many more that she knew nothing of, was waiting to be found, to be
found and have her eyes shut and her jaw bandaged--and be prepared for
her coffin. The girl gripped tight hold of the balustrade. The terror
that took possession of her then was not that Rachel Doorm should be
dead--dead and so close to her, but that she should _not_ be dead!
At that moment, could she have brought herself to push that door
wide open and pass in, it would have been much more awful, much more
shocking, to find Rachel Doorm alive and see her rise to meet her and
hear her speak! After all, what did it matter if the body of the woman
was twisted and contorted in some frightful manner--or _standing_
perhaps--Rachel Doorm was just the one to die standing!--or if her face
were staring up from the floor? What did it matter, supposing she _did_
go straight in and feel about in the darkness and perhaps lay her hand
upon the dead woman’s mouth? What did it matter even if she _did_ see
her hanging, in the faint light of the window, from a hook above the
curtain with her head bent queerly to one side and a lock of her hair
falling loose? None of these things mattered. None of them prevented
her going straight into that room! What did prevent her and what
sent her fleeing down the stairs and out of the house with a sudden
scream of intolerable terror was the fact that at that moment, quite
definitely, there came the sound of _breathing_ from the room she was
looking at. A simple thing, a natural thing, for an old woman to retire
to her bedroom early and to lie, perhaps with all her clothes on, upon
her bed, to rest for a while before undressing. A simple and a natural
thing! But the fact remains as has just been stated, when the sound of
breathing came from that room Philippa screamed and ran panic-stricken
out into the night. She hardly stopped running, indeed, till she
reached the willow copse and found Sorio where she had left him. He did
not resist now when breathlessly she implored him to accompany her back
to the house. They walked hurriedly there together, Adrian in spite
of a certain apprehension smiling in the darkness at his companion’s
certainty that Rachel Doorm was dead and her equal certainty that she
had heard her breathing.
“But I understand your feeling, Phil,” he said. “I understand it
perfectly. I used to have the same sensation at night in a certain
great garden in the Campagna--the fear of meeting the boy I used to
play with before I _expected_ to meet him! I used to call out to him
and beg him to answer me so as to make sure.”
Philippa refused to enter the house again and waited for him outside
by the garden gate. He was long in coming, so long that she was seized
with the strangest thoughts. But he came at last, carrying a lantern in
his hand.
“You’re right, Phil,” he said, “the gods have taken her. She’s
stone-dead. And what’s more, she’s been dead a long time, several
weeks, I should think.”
“But the breathing, Adrian, the breathing? I heard it distinctly.”
Sorio put down his lantern and leant against the gate. In spite of his
calm demeanor she could see that he also had experienced something over
and above the finding of Rachel’s body.
“Yes,” he said, “and you were right about that, too. Guess, child, what
it was!”
And as he spoke he put his hand against the front of his coat which was
tightly buttoned up. Philippa was immediately conscious of the same
stertorous noise that she had heard in the room of death.
“An animal!” she cried.
“An owl,” he answered, “a young owl. It must have fallen from a nest
in the roof. I won’t show it to you now, as it might escape and a cat
might get it. I’m going to try and rear it if Tassar will let me.
Baptiste will be so amused when he finds me with a pet owl! He has
quite a mania for things like that. He can make the birds in the park
come to him by whistling. Well! I suppose what we must do now is to
get back to Rodmoor as quick as we can and report this business to the
police. She must have been dead a week or more! I’m afraid this will be
a great shock to Nance.”
“How did you find her?” enquired the girl as they walked along the road
towards the New Bridge.
“Don’t ask me, Phil--don’t ask me,” he replied, “She’s out of her
troubles anyway and had an owl to look after her.”
“Should I have been--” began his companion.
“Don’t ask me, girl!” he reiterated. “I tell you it’s all past and
over. Rachel Doorm will be buried in the Rodmoor churchyard and I shall
have her owl. An old woman stops breathing and an owl begins breathing.
It’s all natural enough.”
XXII
THE NORTHWEST WIND
The funeral of Rachel Doorm was a dark and troubled day for both Nance
and Linda. Even the sympathy of Mr. Traherne seemed unable to console
them or lift the settled gloom from their minds. Nance especially was
struck dumb with comfortless depression. She felt doubly guilty in the
matter. Guilty in her original acquiescence in the woman’s desire to
have them with her in Rodmoor and guilty in her neglect of her during
the last weeks of her life. For the immediate cause of her death, or
of the desperation that led to it, their leaving Dyke House for the
village, she did not feel any remorse. That was inevitable after what
had occurred. But this did not lessen her responsibility in the other
two cases. Had she resolutely refused to leave London the probability
was that Rachel would have been persuaded to go on living with them as
she had formerly done. She might even have sold Dyke House and with
the proceeds bought some cottage in the city suburbs for them all. It
was her own ill-fated passion for Sorio, she recognized that clearly
enough, that was the cause of all the disasters that had befallen them.
Linda’s feeling with regard to Rachel’s death was quite different. She
had to confess in the depths of her heart that she was glad of it,
glad to be relieved of the constant presence of something menacing and
vindictive on the outskirts of her life. Her trouble was of a more
morbid and abnormal kind, was, indeed, the fact that in spite of the
woman’s death, she _hadn’t_ really got rid of Rachel Doorm. The night
before the funeral she dreamed of her almost continually, dreamed that
she herself was a child again and that Rachel had threatened her with
some unknown and mysterious punishment. The night after the funeral it
was still worse. She woke Nance by a fit of wild and desperate crying
and when the elder girl tried to discover the nature of her trouble she
grew taciturn and reserved and refused to say anything in explanation.
All the following week she went about her occupations with an air of
abstraction and remoteness as if her real life were being lived on
another plane. Nance learnt from Mr. Traherne, who was doing all he
could think of to keep her attention fixed on her organ-playing, that
as a matter of fact she frequently came out of the church after a few
minutes’ practise and went and stood, for long periods together, by
Rachel’s grave. The priest confessed that on one of the occasions when
he had surprised her in this posture, she had turned upon him quite
savagely and had addressed him in a tone completely different from her
ordinary one.
It was especially dreadful to Nance to feel she was thrust out and
alienated in some mysterious way from her sister’s confidence.
One morning towards the end of September, when they were dressing
together in the hazy autumnal light and listening to the cries of
sea-gulls coming up from the harbour, Nance caught upon her sister’s
face, as the girl’s eyes met one another in their common mirror, that
same inscrutable look that she had seen upon it five months before
when, in their room at Dyke House they had first become acquainted with
the eternal iteration of the North Sea’s waves. Nance tried in vain
all the remainder of that day to think out some clue to what that look
implied. It haunted her and tantalized her. Linda had always possessed
something a little pleading and sad in her eyes. It was no doubt the
presence of that clinging wistfulness in them which had from the first
attracted Brand. But this look contained in it something different.
It suggested to Nance, though she dismissed the comparison as quite
inadequate almost as soon as she had made it, the cry of a soul that
was being _pulled backwards_ into some interior darkness yet uttering
all the while a desperate prayer to be let alone as if the least
interference with what destiny was doing would be the cause of yet
greater peril.
The following night as she lay awake watching a filmy trail of vaporous
clouds sail across a wasted haggard moon, a moon that seemed to betray
as that bright orb seldom does the fact that it was a corpse-world
hung there with almost sacrilegious and indecent exposure, under the
watchful stars, she noticed with dismay the white-robed figure of her
sister rise from her bed and step lightly across the room to the open
window. Nance watched her with breathless alarm. Was she awake or
asleep? She leant out of the window, her long hair falling heavily to
one side. Nance fancied she heard her muttering something but the noise
of the sea, for the tide was high then in the early morning hours,
prevented her catching the words. Nance threw off the bed-clothes and
stole noiselessly towards her. Yes, certainly she was speaking. The
words came in a low, plaintive murmur as if she were pleading with
some one out there in the misty night. Nance crept gently up to her and
listened, afraid to touch her lest she should cause her some dangerous
nervous shock but anxious to be as close to her as she could.
“I am good now,” she heard her say, “I am good now, Rachel. You can let
me out now! I will say those words, I am good now. I won’t disobey you
again.”
There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of the Sea and the
beating of Nance’s heart. Then once more, the voice rose.
“It’s down too deep, Rachel, you can’t reach it with that. But I’ll
go in. I’m not afraid any more! If only you’ll let me out. I’ll go in
deep--deep--and get it for you. She can’t hold it tight. The water
is too strong. Oh, I’ll be good, Rachel. I’ll get it for you if only
you’ll let me out!”
Nance, unable to endure any more of this, put her arms gently round her
sister’s body and drew her back into the room. The young girl did not
resist. With wide-open but utterly unconscious eyes she let herself be
led across the room. Only when she was close to her bed she held back
and her body became rigid.
“Don’t put me in there again, Rachel. Anything but that!”
“Darling!” cried Nance desperately, “don’t you know me? I’m with you,
dear. This is Nance with you. No one shall hurt you!”
The young girl shuddered and looked at her with a bewildered and
troubled gaze as if everything were vague and obscure. At that moment
there came over Nance that appalling terror of the unconscious, of the
_sub-human_ which is one of the especial dangers of those who have to
look after the insane or follow the movements of somnambulists. But the
shudder passed and the bewildered look was superseded by one of gradual
obliviousness. The girl’s body relaxed and she swayed as she stood.
Nance, with a violent effort, lifted her in her arms and laid her down
on the bed. The girl muttered something and turned over on her side.
Nance watched her anxiously but she was soon relieved to catch the
sound of her quiet breathing. She was asleep peacefully now. She looked
so pathetically lovely, lying there in a childish position of absolute
abandonment that Nance could not resist bending over her and lightly
kissing her cheek.
“Poor darling!” she said to herself, “how blind I’ve been! How wickedly
blind I’ve been!” She pulled the blanket from her own bed and threw it
over her sister so as not to disturb her by altering the bed-clothes.
Then, wrapping herself in her dressing-gown she lay back upon her
pillows resigned for the rest of the night to remaining wakeful.
The next day she noticed no difference in Linda’s mood. There was the
same abstraction, the same listless lack of interest in anything about
her and worst of all that same inscrutable look which filled Nance with
every sort of wild imagination. She cast about in despair for some way
of breaking the evil spell under which the girl was pining. She went
again and again to see Mr. Traherne and the good man devoted hours of
his time to discussing the matter with her but nothing either of them
could think of seemed a possible solution.
At last one morning, some days after that terrifying night, she met
Dr. Raughty in the street. She walked with him as far as the bridge
explaining to him as best she could her apprehensions about her sister
and asking him for his advice. Dr. Raughty was quite definite and
unhesitating.
“What Linda wants is a mother,” he said laconically. Nance stared at
him.
“Yes, I know,” she said. “I know well enough, poor darling! But that’s
the worst of it, Fingal. Her mother’s been dead years and years and
years.”
“There are other mothers in Rodmoor, aren’t there?” he remarked.
Nance frowned. “You think I don’t look after her properly,” she
murmured. “No, I suppose I haven’t. And yet I’ve tried to--I’ve tried
my very best.”
“You’re as hopeless as your Adrian with his owl,” cried the Doctor. “He
was feeding it with cake the other day. Cake! He’d better not bring
his owl and our friend’s rat together. There won’t be much of the rat
left. Cake!” And the Doctor put back his head and uttered an immense
gargantuan laugh. Nance looked a little disturbed and even a little
indignant at his merriment.
“What do you mean by _other_ mothers?” she asked. They had just reached
the bridge and Dr. Raughty bade her look over the parapet.
“What exquisite bellies those dace have!” he remarked, snuffing the
air as he spoke. “There’ll be rain before night. Do you feel it? I
know from the way those fish rise. The sea too, it has a different
voice--has that ever caught your attention?--when there’s rain on the
wind. Those dace are shrewd fellows. They’re after the bits of garbage
the sea-gulls drop on their way up the river. You might think they
were after flies, but they’re not. I suppose George Crabbe or George
Borrow would switch ’em out with some bait such as was never dreamed
of--the droppings of rabbits perhaps or ladybird grubs. I suppose old
Doctor Johnson would wade in up to his knees and try and scoop ’em up
in his hands. There’s a big one! Do you see? The one waving his tail
and turning sideways. I expect he weighs half a pound or more. Fish are
beautiful things, especially dace. Isn’t it wonderful to think that if
you pulled any of those things backwards through the water they would
be drowned, simply by the rush of water through their gills? Look,
Nance, at that one! What a silver belly! What a delicate, exquisite
tail! A plague on these fellows who philander with owls and rats! Give
me fish--if you want to make a cult of something.” He lowered his voice
to a whisper, “I should think Lubric de Lauziere must have kept a pet
fish in his round pond!”
“Good-bye, Fingal,” said Nance, holding out her hand.
“What! Well! Where! God help us! What’s wrong, Nance? You’re not
annoyed with me, are you? Do you think I’m talking through my hat?
Not at all! I’m leading up to it. A mother--that’s what she wants.
She wants it just as those dace want the water to flow in their
faces and not backwards through their gills. She’s being dragged
backwards--that’s what’s the matter with her. She wants her natural
element and it must flow in the right direction. _You_ won’t do.
Traherne won’t do. A mother is the thing! A woman, Nance, who has borne
children has certain instincts in dealing with young girls which make
the wisest physicians in the world look small!”
Nance smiled helplessly at him.
“But, Fingal, dear,” she said, “what can I do? I can’t appeal to Mrs.
Raps, can I--or your friend Mrs. Sodderley? When you come to think,
there are very few mothers in Rodmoor!”
The Doctor sighed. “I know it,” he observed mournfully, “I know it.
The place will die out altogether in fifty years. It’s as bad as the
sand-dunes with their sterile flora. Women who bear children are the
only really sane people in the world.”
He ran his thumb, as he spoke, backwards and forwards over a little
patch of vividly green moss that grew between the stones of the
parapet. The air, crisp and autumnal with that vague scent of burning
weeds in it which more than anything else suggests the outskirts of a
small town at the end of the summer, flowed round them both with a mute
appeal to her, so it seemed to Nance, to let all things drift as they
might and submit to destiny. She looked at the Doctor dreamily in one
of those queer intermissions of human consciousness in which we stand
apart, as it were, from our own fate and listen to the flowing of the
eternal tide.
A small poplar tree growing at the village end of the bridge had
already lost some of its leaves and a few of these came drifting, one
by one, along the raised stone pathway to the girl’s feet. Over the
misty marsh lands in the other direction, she could see the low tower
of the church. The gilded weather-vane on the top of it shimmered and
glittered in a vaporous stream of sunlight that seemed to touch nothing
else.
Dreamily she looked at the Doctor, too weary of the struggle of life to
make an effort to leave him and yet quite hopeless as to his power to
help her. Fingal Raughty continued to discourse upon the instinctive
wisdom of maternity.