in fierce antipodal conflict, surged about them, and tugged and pulled
at their hearts. The sound of the thunder, the wild noises of the
night, the strange dark evocations of elemental hatred which at once
divided and united his companions, surged through Sorio’s brain and
filled him with a sort of intoxication.
The three of them together might have been taken, had the clock of time
been put back two thousand years, for some mad Dionysian worshippers
following their god in a wild inhuman revel.
Inspired at last by a sort of storm-frenzy, while the wind came wailing
and shrieking down the avenue into their faces, Sorio suddenly stopped.
“Come, you two little fools,” he cried, “let’s end this nonsense!
Here--kiss one another! Kiss one another, and thank God that we’re
alive and free and conscious, and not mere inert matter, like these
dead drifting leaves!”
As he spoke he stepped back a little, and with a swing of his powerful
arms, brought both the girls face to face with one another. Nance
struggled fiercely, and resisted with all her strength. Philippa, with
a strange whispering laugh, remained passive in his hands.
“Kiss one another!” he cried again. “Are you kissing or are you holding
back? It’s too dark for me to see!”
Philippa suddenly lost her passivity, slipped like a snake from under
his encircling arms, and rushed away among the trees. “I leave her to
you!” she called back to them out of the darkness. “I leave her to you!
You won’t endure her long. _And what will Baptiste do_, Adriano?”
This last word of hers calmed Sorio’s mood and threw him back upon his
essential self. He sighed heavily.
“Well, Nance,” he said, “shall we go back? It’s no use waiting for her.
She’ll find her way to Oakguard. She knows every inch of these woods.”
He sighed again, as if bidding farewell, in one fate-burdened moment,
both to the woods and the girl who knew them.
“_You_ can go back if you like,” Nance answered curtly. “I’m going to
speak to Brand”; and she told him in a brief sentence what she had
learned from Linda.
Sorio seized her hand and clutched it savagely. “Yes, yes,” he cried,
“yes, yes, let’s go together. He must be taught a lesson--this Brand!
Come, let’s go together!”
They moved on rapidly and soon approached the end of the avenue and the
entrance to the garden. As Sorio pushed open the iron gates, a sharp
crack of thunder, followed by reverberating detonations, broke over
their heads. The sudden flash that succeeded the sound brought into
vivid relief the dark form of the house, while a long row of fading
dahlias, drooping on their rain-soaked stems, stood forth in ghastly
illumination.
Nance had time to catch on Adrian’s face a look that gave her a
premonition of danger. Had she not herself been wrought-up to an
unnatural pitch of excitement by her contest with Philippa, she would
probably have been warned in time and have drawn back, postponing her
interview with Brand till she could have seen him alone. As it was, she
felt herself driven forward by a force she could not resist. “Now--very
now,” she must face her sister’s seducer.
A light, burning behind heavy curtains, in one of the lower mullioned
windows, enabled them to mount the steps. As she rang the bell, a
second peal of thunder, but this time farther off, was followed by a
vivid flash of lightning, throwing into relief the wide spaces of the
park and the scattered groups of monumental oak trees. For some queer
psychic reason, inexplicable to any material analysis, Nance at that
moment saw clearly before her mind’s eye, a little church almanac,
which Linda had pinned up above their dressing-table, and on this
almanac she saw the date--the twenty-eighth of October--printed in
Roman figures.
To the servant who opened the door Nance gave their names, and asked
whether they could see Mr. Renshaw. “_Mr._ Renshaw,” she added
emphatically, “and please tell him it’s an urgent and important matter.”
The man admitted them courteously and asked them to seat themselves in
the entrance hall while he went to look for his master. He returned
after a short time and ushered them into the library, where a moment
later Brand joined them.
During their moment of waiting, both in the hall and in the room, Sorio
had remained taciturn and inert, sunk in a fit of melancholy brooding,
his chin propped on the handle of his stick. He had refused to allow
the servant to take out of his hands either his stick or his hat, and
he still held them both, doggedly and gloomily, as he sat by Nance’s
side opposite the carved fireplace.
When Brand entered they both rose, but he motioned them to remain
seated, and drawing up a chair for himself close by the side of the
hearth, looked gravely and intently into their faces.
At that moment another rolling vibration of thunder reached them, but
this time it seemed to come from very far away, perhaps from several
miles out to sea.
Brand’s opening words were accompanied by a fierce lashing of rain
against the window, and a spluttering, hissing noise, as several heavy
drops fell through the old-fashioned chimney upon the burning logs.
“I think I can guess,” he said, “why you two have come to me. I am
glad you have come, especially you, Miss Herrick, as it simplifies
things a great deal. It has become necessary that you and I should
have an explanation. I owe it to myself as well as to you. Bah! What
nonsense I’m talking. It isn’t a case of ‘owing.’ It isn’t a case of
‘explaining.’ I can see that clearly enough”--he laughed a genial
boyish laugh--“in your two faces! It’s a case of our own deciding, with
all the issues of the future clearly in mind, what will be really best
for your sister’s happiness.”
“She has not sent--” began Nance hurriedly.
“What you’ve got to understand--you Renshaw--” muttered Adrian, in a
strange hoarse voice, clenching and unclenching his fingers.
Brand interrupted them both. “Pardon me,” he cried, “you do not wish,
I suppose, either of you, to cause any serious shock to my mother?
It’s absurd of her, of course, and old-fashioned, and all that sort
of thing; but it would actually _kill_ her--” he rose as he spoke and
uttered the words clearly and firmly. “It would actually _kill_ her to
get any hint of what we’re discussing now. So, if you’ve no objection,
we’ll continue this discussion in the work-shop.” He moved towards the
door.
Sorio followed him with a rapid stride. “You must understand,
Renshaw--” he began.
“If it’ll hurt your mother so,” cried Nance hurriedly, “what must Linda
be suffering? You didn’t think of this, Mr. Renshaw, when you--”
Brand swung round on his heel. “You shall say all this to me, all that
you wish to say--everything, do you hear, everything! Only it must and
_shall_ be where she cannot overhear us. Wait till we’re alone. We
shall be alone in the work-shop.”
“If this ‘work-shop’ of yours,” muttered Sorio savagely, seizing him by
the arm, “turns out to be one of your English tricks, you’d better--”
“Silence, you fool!” whispered the other. “Can’t you stop him, Miss
Herrick? It’ll be pure murder if my mother hears this!”
Nance came quickly between them. “Lead on, Mr. Renshaw,” she said.
“We’ll follow you.”
He led them across the hall and down a long dimly lit passage. At the
end of this there was a heavily panelled door. Brand took a key from
his pocket and after some ineffectual attempts turned the lock and
stood aside to let them enter. He closed the door behind them, leaving
the key on the outside. The “work-shop” Brand had spoken of turned out
to be nothing more or less than the old private chapel of Oakguard,
disassociated, however, for centuries from any religious use.
Nance glanced up at the carved ceiling, supported on foliated corbels.
The windows, high up from the ground, were filled with Gothic tracery,
but in place of biblical scenes their diamonded panes showed the
armorial insignia of generations of ancient Renshaws. There was a
raised space at the east end, where, in former times, the altar stood,
but now, in place of an altar, a carpenter’s table occupied the central
position, covered with a litter of laths and wood-chippings. The middle
portion of the chapel was bare and empty, but several low cane chairs
stood round this space, like seats round a toy coliseum.
Brand indicated these chairs to his visitors, but neither Nance nor
Sorio seemed inclined to avail themselves of the opportunity to rest.
They all three, therefore, stood together, on the dark polished oak
floor.
On first entering the chapel, Brand had lit one of a long row of
tapers that stood in wooden candlesticks along the edge of what
resembled choir stalls. Now, leaving his companions, he proceeded very
deliberately to set light to the whole line of these. The place thus
illuminated had a look strangely weird and confused.
Certain broken flower-pots on the ground, and one or two rusty
gardening implements, combined with the presence of the wicker-chairs
to produce the impression of some sort of “Petit Trianon,” or manorial
summer-house, into which all manner of nondescript rubbish had in
process of long years come to drift.
The coats-of-arms in the windows above, as the tapers flung their light
upon them, had an air almost “collegiate,” as if the chamber were some
ancient dining-hall of a monastic order. The carpenter’s table upon the
raised dais, with some dimly coloured Italianated picture behind it,
inserted in the panelling, gave Nance a most odd sensation. Where had
she seen an effect of that kind before? In a picture--or in reality?
But the girl had no heart to analyse her emotions. There was too much
at stake. The rain, pattering heavily on the roof of the building,
seemed to remind her of her task. She faced Brand resolutely as he
strolled back towards them across the polished floor.
“Linda has told me everything,” she said. “She is going to have a
child, and you, Mr. Renshaw, are the father of it.”
Sorio made an inarticulate exclamation and approached Brand
threateningly. But the latter, disregarding him, continued to look
Nance straight in the face.
“Miss Herrick,” he said quietly, “you are a sensible woman and not
one, I think, liable to hysteric sentimentalism. I want to discuss this
thing quite freely and openly with you, but I would greatly prefer it
if your husband--I beg your pardon--if Mr. Sorio would let us talk
without interrupting. I haven’t got unlimited time. My mother and
sister will be both waiting dinner for me and sending people to find
me, perhaps even coming themselves. So it’s obviously in the interests
of all of us--particularly of Linda--that we should not waste time in
any mock heroics.”
Nance turned quickly to her betrothed. “You’ll hear all we say, Adrian,
but if it makes things easier, perhaps--”
Without a word, in mute obedience to her sad smile, Sorio left their
side, and drawing back, seated himself in one of the wicker chairs,
hugging his heavy stick between his knees.
The rain continued falling without intermission upon the leaden roof,
and from a pipe above one of the windows they could hear a great jet of
water splashing down outside the wall.
Brand spoke in a low hurried tone, without embarrassment and without
any sort of shame. “Yes, Miss Herrick, what she says is quite true.
But now come down to the facts, without any of this moral vituperation,
which only clouds the issues. You have, no doubt, come here with the
idea of asking me to marry Linda. No! Don’t interrupt me. Let me
finish. But I want to ask you this--how do you know that if I marry
Linda, she’ll be _really_ any happier than she is to-day? Suppose I
were to say to you that I would marry her--marry her to-morrow--would
_that_, when you come to think it over in cold blood, really make you
happy in your mind about her future?
“Come, Miss Herrick! Put aside for a moment your natural anger against
me. Grant what you please as to my being a dangerous character and a
bad man, does that make me a suitable husband for your sister? Your
instinct is a common instinct--the natural first instinct of any
protector of an injured girl, but is it one that will stand the light
of quiet and reasonable second thoughts?
“I am, let us say, a selfish and unscrupulous man who has seduced
a young girl. Very well! You want to punish me for my ill-conduct,
and how do you go about it? By giving up your sister into my hands!
By giving up to me--a cruel and unscrupulous wretch, at your own
showing--the one thing you love best in the world! Is that a punishment
such as I deserve? In one moment you take away all my remorse, for no
one remains remorseful _after_ he has been punished. And you give my
victim up--bound hand and foot--into my hands.
“Linda may love me enough to be glad to marry me, quite apart from the
question of her good fame. But will you, who probably know me better
than Linda, feel happy at leaving her in my hands? Your idea may be
that I should marry her and then let her go. But suppose I wouldn’t
consent to let her go? And suppose she wouldn’t consent to leave me?
“There we are--tied together for life--and she as the weaker of the
two the one to suffer for the ill-fated bargain! _That_ will not have
been a punishment for me, Nance Herrick, nor will it have been a
compensation for her. It will simply have worked out as a temporary
boredom to one of us, and as miserable wretchedness to the other!
“Is that what you wish to bring about by this interference on her
behalf? It’s absurd to pretend that you think of me as a mere
hot-headed amorist, desperately in love with Linda, as she is with me,
and that, by marrying us, you are smoothing out her path and settling
her down happily for the rest of her life. You think of me as a
cold-blooded selfish sensualist, and to punish me for being what I am,
you propose to put Linda’s entire happiness absolutely in my hands!
“Of course, I speak to you like this knowing that, whatever your
feelings are, you have the instincts of a lady. A different type
of woman from yourself would consider merely the worldly aspect of
the matter and the advantage to your sister of becoming mistress of
Oakguard. _That_, I know, does not enter, for one moment, into your
thoughts, any more than it enters into hers. I am not ironical in
saying this. I am not insulting you. I am speaking simply the truth.
“Forgive me, Miss Herrick! Even to mention such a thing is unworthy
of either of us. I am, as you quite justly realize--and probably more
than you realize--what the world calls unscrupulous. But no one has
ever accused me of truckling to public opinion or social position. I
care nothing for those things, any more than you do or Linda does. As
far as those things go I would marry her to-morrow. My mother, as you
doubtless know, hopes that I _shall_ marry her--wishes and prays for
it. My mother has never given a thought, and never will give a thought,
to the opinion of the world. It isn’t in her nature, as no doubt you
quite realize. We Renshaws have always gone our own way, and done what
we pleased. My father did--Philippa does; and I do.
“Come, Miss Herrick! Try for a moment to put your anger against me out
of the question. Suppose you did induce me to marry Linda, and Linda
to marry me, does that mean that you make me change my nature? We
Renshaws never change and _I_ never shall, you may be perfectly sure of
that! I _couldn’t_ even if I wanted to. My blood, my race, my father’s
instincts in me, go too deep. We’re an evil tribe, Nance Herrick, an
evil tribe, and especially are we evil in our relations with women.
Some families are like that, you know! It’s a sort of tradition with
them. And it is so with us. It may be some dark old strain of Viking
blood, the blood of the race that burnt the monasteries in the days of
Æthelred the Unready! On the other hand it may be some unaccountable
twist in our brains, due--as Fingal says--to--oh! to God knows what!
“Let it go! It doesn’t matter what it is; and I daresay you think me a
grotesque hypocrite for bringing such a matter into it at all. Well!
Let it go! There’s really no need to drag in Æthelred the Unready!
What you and I have to do, Miss Herrick, is, seriously and quietly,
without passion or violence, to discuss what’s best for your sister’s
happiness. Put my punishment out of your mind for the present--that can
come later. Your friend Mr. Sorio will be only too pleased to deal with
that! The point for _us_ to consider, for us who both love your sister,
is, what will really be happiest for her in the long run--and I can
assure you that no woman who ever lived could be happy long tied hand
and foot to a Renshaw.
“Look at my mother! Does she suggest a person who has had a happy life?
I tell you she would give all she has ever enjoyed here--every stick
and stone of Oakguard--never to have set eyes on my father--never to
have given birth to Philippa or to me! We Renshaws may have our good
qualities--God knows what they are--but we may have them. But one thing
is certain. We are worse than the very devil for any woman who tries to
live with us! It’s in our blood, I tell you. We can’t help it. We’re
made to drive women mad--to drive them into their graves!”
He stopped abruptly with a bitter and hopeless shrug of his shoulders.
Nance had listened to him, all the way through his long speech, with
concentrated and frowning attention. When he had finished she stood
staring at him without a word, almost as if she wished him to continue;
almost as if something about his personality fascinated her in spite of
herself, and made her sympathetic.
But Sorio, who had been fidgetting with his heavy stick, rose now,
slowly and deliberately, to his feet. Nance, looking at his face, saw
upon it an expression which from long association she had come to
regard with mingled tenderness and alarm. It was the look his features
wore when on the point of rushing to the assistance of some wounded
animal or ill-used child.
He uttered no word, but flinging Nance aside with his left hand, with
the other he struck blindly with his stick, aiming a murderous blow
straight at Brand’s face.
Brand had barely time to raise his hand. The blow fell upon his wrist,
and his arm sank under it limp and paralysed.
Nance, with a loud cry for assistance, clung frantically to Sorio’s
neck, trying to hold him back. But apparently beyond all consciousness
now of what he was doing, Sorio flung her roughly back and drove his
enemy with savage repeated strokes into a corner of the room. It was
not long before Brand’s other arm was rendered as useless as the first,
and the blows falling now on his unprotected head, soon felled him to
the ground.
Nance, who had flung open the door and uttered wild and panic-stricken
cries for help, now rushed across the room and pinioned the exhausted
flagellant in her strong young arms. Seeing his enemy motionless
and helpless with a stream of blood trickling down his face, Adrian
resigned himself passively to her controlling embrace.
They were found in this position by the two men-servants, who came
rushing down the passage in answer to her screams. Mrs. Renshaw,
dressing in her room on the opposite side of the house, heard nothing.
The steady downpour of the rain dulled all other sounds. Philippa had
not yet returned.
Under Nance’s directions, the two men carried their master out of the
“work-shop,” while she herself continued to cling desperately to Sorio.
There had been something hideous and awful to the girl’s imagination
about the repeated “thud--thud--thud” of the blows delivered by her
lover. This was especially so after the numbing of his bruised arms
reduced Adrian’s victim to helplessness.
As she clung to him now she seemed to hear the sound of those
blows--each one striking, as it seemed, something resistless and
prostrate in her own being. And once more, with grotesque iteration,
the figures upon Linda’s almanac ticked like a clock in answer to
the echo of that sound. “October the twenty-eighth--October the
twenty-eighth,” repeated the church-almanac, from its red-lettered
frame.
The extraordinary thing was that as her mind began to function more
naturally again, she became conscious that, all the while, during that
appalling scene, even at the very moment when she was crying out for
help, she had experienced a sort of wild exultation. She recalled that
emotion quite clearly now with a sense of curious shame.
She was also aware that while glancing at Brand’s pallid and
unconscious face as they carried him from the room, she had felt a
sudden indescribable softening towards him and a feeling for him that
she would hardly have dared to put into words. She found herself, even
now, as she went over in her mind with lightning rapidity every one of
the frightful moments she had just gone through, changing the final
episode in her heart, to quite a different one; to one in which she
herself knelt down by their enemy’s side, and wiped the blood from his
forehead, and brought him back to consciousness.
Left alone with Sorio, Nance relaxed her grasp and laid her hands
appealingly upon his shoulder. But it was into unseeing eyes that
she looked, and into a face barely recognizable as that of her
well-beloved. He began talking incoherently and yet with a kind of
terrible deliberation and assurance.
“What’s that you say? Only the rain? They say it’s only the rain
when they want to fool me and quiet me. But I know better! They
can’t fool me like that. It’s blood, of course; it’s Nance’s blood.
_You_, Nance? Oh, no, no, no! I’m not so easily fooled as that.
Nance is at the bottom of that hole in the wood, where I struck
her--_one_--_two_--_three_! It took three hits to do it--and she didn’t
speak a word, not a word, nor utter one least little cry. It’s funny
that I had to hit her three times! She is so soft, so soft and easy
to hurt. No, no, no, no! I’m not to be fooled like that. My Nance had
great laughing grey eyes. Yours are horrible, horrible. I see terror in
them. _She_ was afraid of nothing.”
His expression changed, and a wistful hunted look came into his
face. The girl tried to pull him towards one of the chairs, but he
resisted--clasping her hand appealingly.
“Tell me, Phil,” he whispered, in a low awe-struck voice, “tell me why
you made me do it. Did you think it would be better, better for all of
us, to have her lying there cold and still? No, no, no! You needn’t
look at me with those dreadful eyes. Do you know, Phil, since you made
me kill her I think your eyes have grown to look like hers, and your
face, too--and all of you.”
Nance, as he spoke, cried out woefully and helplessly. “I am! I am! I
am! Adrian--my own--my darling--don’t you know me? I am your Nance!”
He staggered slowly now to one of the chairs, moving each foot as he
did so with horrible deliberation as if nothing he did could be done
naturally any more, or without a conscious effort of will. Seating
himself in the chair, he drew her down upon his knee and began passing
his fingers backwards and forwards over her face.
“Why did you make me do it, Phil?” he moaned, rocking her to and fro as
if she were a child. “Why did you make me do it? She would have given
me sleep, if you’d only let her alone, cool, deep, delicious sleep! She
would have smoothed away all my troubles. She would have destroyed the
old Adrian and made a new one--a clear untroubled one, bathed in great
floods of glorious white light!”
His voice sank to an awe-struck and troubled murmur. “Phil, my dear,”
he whispered, “Phil, listen to me. There’s something I can’t remember!
Something--O God! No! It’s _some one_--some one most precious to
me--and I’ve forgotten. Something’s happened to my brain, and I’ve
forgotten. It was after I struck those blows, those blows that made her
mouth look so twisted and funny--just like yours looks now, Phil! Why
is it, do you think, that dead people have that look on their mouths?
Phil, tell me; tell me what it is I’ve forgotten! Don’t be cruel now. I
can’t stand it now. I _must_ remember. I always seem just on the point
of remembering, and then something in my brain closes up, like an iron
door. Oh, Phil--my love, my love, tell me what it is!”