encountered Mrs. Renshaw returning from a visit to Baltazar’s grave.
The mistress of Oakguard stopped for a little while to speak to her,
and to express, in her own way, her sympathy over Adrian’s recovery.
She did this, however, in a manner so characteristic of her that it
depressed rather than encouraged the girl. Her attitude seemed to
imply that it was better, wiser, more reverent, not to cherish any
buoyant hopes, but to assume that the worst that could come to us from
the hands of God was what ought to be expected and awaited in humble
submissiveness.
She seemed in some strange way to _resent_ any lifting of the heavy
folds of the pall of fate and with a kind of obstinate weariness, to
lean to the darker and more sombre aspect of every possibility.
She carried in her hands a bunch of faded flowers brought from the
grave she had visited and which she seemed reluctant to throw away,
and Nance never forgot the appearance of her black-gowned drooping
figure and white face, as she stood there, by the edge of the misty,
sun-illumined fens, holding those dead stalks and withered leaves.
As they parted, Nance whispered hesitatingly some little word about
Baltazar. She half expected her to answer with tears, but in place of
that, her eyes seemed to shine with a weird exultant joy.
“When you’re as old as I am, dear,” she said, “and have seen life as
I have seen it, you will not be sad to lose what you love best. The
better we love them, the happier we must be when they are set free from
the evil of the world.”
She looked down on the ground, and when she raised her head, her eyes
had an unearthly light in them. “I am closer to him now,” she said,
“closer than ever before. And it will not be long before I go to join
him.”
She moved slowly away, dragging her limbs heavily.
Nance, as she went on, kept seeing again and again before her that
weird unearthly look. It left the impression on her mind that Mrs.
Renshaw had actually secured some strange and unnatural link with the
dead which made her cold and detached in her attitude towards the
living.
Perhaps it had been all the while like this, the girl thought. Perhaps
it was just this habitual intercourse with the Invisible which
rendered her so entirely a votary of moonlight and of shadows, and
so unsympathetic towards the sunshine and towards all genial normal
expressions of natural humanity.
Nance had the sensation--when at last, with Linda at her side, she
returned dreamily to the village--of having encountered some creature
from a world different from ours, a world of grey vapours and shadowy
margins, a world where the wraiths of the unborn meet the ghosts of the
dead, a world where the “might-have-been” and the “never-to-be-again”
weep together by the shores of Lethe.
The little party which assembled presently round a table in the
bow-window of the Rodmoor confectioner’s proved a cheerful and happy
one. The day was Saturday, so that the street was full of a quiet stir
of people preparing to leave their shops and begin the weekly holiday.
There was a vague feeling of delicate sadness, dreamy yet not unhappy,
in the air, as though the year itself were pausing for a moment in its
onward march towards the frosts of winter and gathering for the last
time all its children, all its fading leaves and piled-up fruits and
drooping flowers, into a hushed maternal embrace, an embrace of silent
and everlasting farewell.
The sun shone gently and tenderly from a sky of a faint, sad, far-off
blue--the sort of blue which, in the earlier and more reserved of
Florentine painters, may be seen in the robes of Our Lady caught up to
heaven out of a grave of lilies.
The sea was calm and motionless, its hardly stirring waves clearer
and more translucent in their green depths than when blown upon by
impatient winds or touched by shameless and glaring light.
A soft opalescent haze lay upon the houses, turning their gables, their
chimneys, their porches, and their roofs, into a pearl-dim mystery of
vague illusive forms; forms that might have arisen out of the “perilous
sea” itself, on some “beachéd margent” woven of the stuff of dreams.
The queer old-fashioned ornaments of the room where the friends ate
their meal took to themselves, as Nance in her dreamy emotion drew them
into the circle of her thoughts, a singular and symbolic power. They
seemed suggestive, these quaint things, of all that world of little
casually accumulated mementoes and memories with which our troubled
and turbulent humanity strews its path and fills the places of its
passionate sojourning. Mother-of-pearl shells, faded antimacassars,
china dogs, fruit under glass-cases, old faded photographs of
long-since dead people, illuminated texts embroidered in bright wool,
tarnished christening mugs of children that were now old women,
portraits of celebrities from days when Victoria herself was in her
cradle, all the sweet impossible bric-a-brac of a tea-parlour in a
village shop surrounded them as they sat there, and thrilled at least
two of their hearts--for Linda’s mood was as receptive and as sensitive
as Nance’s--with an indescribable sense of the pathos of human life.
It was of “life”--in general terms--that Dr. Raughty was speaking, as
the two young girls gave themselves up to the influence of the hour and
played lightly with their food.
“It’s all nonsense,” the doctor cried, “this confounded perpetual
pessimism! Why can’t these people read Rabelais and Montaigne, and
drink noble wine out of great casks? Why can’t they choose from among
the company of their friends gay and honest wenches and sport with them
under pleasant trees? Why can’t they get married to comfortable and
comely girls and regale themselves in cool and well-appointed kitchens?”
He helped himself as he spoke to another slice of salmon and sprinkled
salt upon a plateful of tomatoes and lettuce.
“Whose pessimism are you talking about, Fingal?” inquired Nance,
playing up to his humour.
“Don’t get it only for me,” Mr. Traherne cried, addressing the demure
and freckled damsel who waited on them. “I’m asking for a glass of ale,
Doctor. They can send out for it. But I don’t want it unless--”
The Doctor’s eyes shone across the table at him like soft lamps
of sound antique wisdom. “Burton’s,” he exclaimed emphatically.
“None of friend Renshaw’s stuff! Burton’s! And let it be that old
dark mahogany-coloured liquor we drank once under the elm-trees at
Ashbourne.”
The waitress regarded him with a coquettish smile. She laboured under
the perpetual illusion that every word the Doctor uttered was some
elaborate and recondite gallantry directed towards herself.
The conversation ran on in lively spasmodic waywardness. It was not
long before the ale appeared, of the very body and colour suggested by
the Doctor’s memories. Nance refused to touch it.
“Have some ginger-pop, instead, then,” murmured Fingal, pouring the
brown ale into a china jug decorated with painted pansies. “Linda would
like some of that, I know.”
The priest held out his glass in the direction of the jug.
“A thousand deep-sea devils--pardon me, Nance, dear!--carry off these
pessimists,” went on the Doctor, filling up the clergyman’s glass and
his own with ritualistic solemnity while the little maid, the victim
of an irrepressible laughing-fit, retired to fetch ginger-beer. “Let
us remember how the great Voltaire served God and defended all honest
people. Here’s to Voltaire’s memory and a fig for these neurotic
scribblers who haven’t the gall to put out their tongues!” He raised
his glass to his lips, his eyes shining with humorous enjoyment.
“What scribblers are you talking about?” inquired Nance, peeling a
golden apple and glancing at the misty roofs through the window at her
side.
“All of these twopenny-halfpenny moderns,” cried the Doctor, “who
haven’t the gall in their stomachs to take the world by the scruff of
its neck and lash out. A fig for them! Our poor dear Adrian, when he
gets cured, will write something--you mark my words--that’ll make ’em
stir themselves and sit up!”
“But Adrian is pessimistic too, isn’t he?” said Nance, looking
wistfully at the speaker.
“Nonsense!” cried the Doctor. “Adrian has more Attic salt in him than
you women guess. I believe, myself, that this book of his will be
worthy to be put beside the ‘Thoughts’ of Pascal. Have you ever seen
Pascal’s face? He isn’t as good-looking as Adrian but he has the same
intellectual fury.”
“What’s your opinion, Fingal,” remarked Mr. Traherne, peering anxiously
into the pansied jug, “about the art of making life endurable?”
Dr. Raughty surveyed him with a placid and equable smile. “Courage and
gaiety,” he said, “are the only recipe, and I don’t mind sprinkling
these, in spite of our modern philosophers, with a little milk of human
kindness.”
The priest nodded over what was left of his ale. “_De fructu operum
tuorum, Domine, satiabitur terra: ut educas panem de terra, et vinum
lætificet cor hominis; ut exhilaret faciem in oleo, et panis cor
hominis confirmet_,” he muttered, stretching out his long legs under
the table and tilting back his chair.
“What the devil does all that mean?” asked the Doctor a little
peevishly. “Can’t you praise God in simple English? Nance and I
couldn’t catch a word except ‘wine’ and ‘bread’ and ‘oil.’”
Mr. Traherne looked unspeakably ashamed. “I’m sorry, Nance,” he
murmured, sitting up very straight and pulling himself together. “It
was out of place. It was rude. I’m not sure that it wasn’t profane. I’m
sorry, Fingal!”
“It’s a beautiful afternoon,” said Nance, keeping her eyes on the
little street, whose very pavements reflected the soft opalescent light
which was spreading itself over Rodmoor.
“Ah!” cried Dr. Raughty, “we left _that_ out in our summary of the
compensations of life. _You_ left that out, too, Hamish, from your
‘fructu’ and ‘panem’ and ‘vinum’ and the rest. But, after all, that
is what we come back to in the end. The sky, the earth, the sea,--the
great cool spaces of night--the sun, like a huge splendid god; the
moon, like a sweet passionate nun; and the admirable stars, like gems
in some great world-peacock’s tail--yes, my darlings, we come back to
these in the end!”
He rose from his seat and with shining eyes surveyed his guests.
“By the body of Mistress Bacbuc,” he cried, in a loud voice, “we do
wrong to sit here any longer! Let’s go down to the sands and cool
our heads. Here, Maggie! Madge! Marjorie! Where the deuce has that
girl gone? There she is! Get me the bill, will you, and bring me a
finger-bowl.”
Mr. Traherne laid his hand gently on the doctor’s arm. “I’m afraid
we’ve been behaving badly, Fingal,” he whispered. “We’ve been drinking
ale and forgetting our good manners. Do I look all right? I mean, do
I look as if I’d been drinking mahogany-coloured Burton? Do I look as
usual?”
The doctor surveyed him with grave intentness. “You look,” he said at
last, “something between Friar John and Bishop Berkeley.” He gave him a
little push. “Go and talk to the girls while I buy them chocolates.”
Having paid the bill, he occupied himself in selecting with delicate
nicety a little box of sweet-meats for each of his friends, choosing
one for Nance with a picture of Leda and the Swan upon it and one for
Linda with a portrait of the Empress Josephine.
As he leant over the counter, his eyes gleamed with a soft benignant
ecstasy and he rallied the shop-woman about some heart-shaped
confectionary adorned with blue ribbons.
Before Mr. Traherne rejoined them Nance had time to whisper to Linda,
“They’re both a little excited, dear, but we needn’t notice it. They’ll
be themselves in a moment. Men are all so babyish.”
Linda smiled faintly at this and nodded her head. She looked a little
sad and a little pale.
Dr. Raughty soon appeared. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go down to the
sea”; and in a low dreamy voice he murmured the following ditty:
“A boat--a boat--to cross the ferry!
And let us all be wise and merry,
And laugh and quaff and drink brown sherry!”
Linda caught at Nance’s sleeve. “I think I’ll let you go without me,”
she whispered. “I feel rather tired.”
Nance looked anxiously into her eyes. “I’d come back with you,” she
murmured, “but it would hurt their feelings. You’d better lie down a
little. I’ll be back soon.” Then, in a lower whisper, “They did it
to cheer us up. They’re dear, absurd people. Take care of yourself,
darling.”
Linda stood for a while after she had bidden them all good-bye and
watched them move down the street. In the misty sunshine there was
something very gentle and appealing about Nance’s girlish figure as she
walked between the two men. They both seemed talking to her at the same
time and, as they talked, they watched her face with affectionate and
tender admiration.
“She treats them like children,” said Linda to herself. “That’s why
they’re all so fond of her.”
She walked slowly back up the street; but instead of entering her
house, she drifted languidly across the green and made her way towards
the park gates.
She felt very lonely, just then--lonely and full of a heart-aching
longing. If only she could catch one glimpse, just one, of the man who
was so dear to her--of the man who was the father of her child.
She thought of Adrian’s recovery and she thought vaguely and wistfully
of the coming of Baptiste. “I hope he will like us,” she said to
herself. “I hope he will like us both.”
Hardly knowing what she did, she passed in through the gates and began
moving up the avenue. All the tragic and passionate emotions associated
with this place came over her like a rushing wave. She stopped and
hesitated. Then with a pitiful effort to control her feelings, she
turned and began retracing her steps.
Suddenly she stopped again, her heart beating wildly. Yes, there were
footsteps approaching her from the direction of Oakguard. She looked
around. Brand Renshaw himself was behind her, standing at a curve of
the avenue, bareheaded, under an enormous pine. The horizontal sunlight
piercing the foliage in front of him shone red on the trunk of the
great tree and red on the man’s blood-coloured head.
She started towards him with a little gasping cry, like an animal that,
after long wandering, catches sight of its hiding-place.
The man had stopped because he had seen her, and now when he saw her
approaching him a convulsive tremor ran through his powerful frame. For
one second he made a movement as if to meet her; but then, raising his
long arms with a gesture as if at once embracing her and taking leave
of her, he plunged into the shadows of the trees and was lost to view.
The girl stood where he had left her--stood as if turned to stone--for
several long minutes, while over her head the misty sky looked down
through the branches, and from the open spaces of the park came the
harsh cry of sea-gulls flying towards the coast.
Then, with drooping head and dazed expressionless eyes, she walked
slowly back, the way she had come.
XXVII
THRENOS
After her encounter with Nance, Mrs. Renshaw, returning to Oakguard,
informed both Philippa and Brand of the improvement in the condition of
Adrian Sorio.
Philippa received the news quietly enough, conscious that the eyes of
her brother were upon her; but as soon as she could get away, which was
not till the afternoon was well advanced, she slipped off hastily and
directed her steps, by a short cut through the park, to the Rodmoor
railway-station. She had one fixed idea now in her mind--the idea of
seeing Adrian and talking with him before any interview was allowed to
the others.
She knew that her name and her prestige as the sister of the largest
local landowner, would win her at any rate respectful consideration for
anything she asked--and everything beyond that she left recklessly in
the hands of fate.
Baltazar’s death had affected her more than she would herself have
supposed possible. She had felt during these last days a sort of
malignant envy of her mother, whose attitude towards her friend’s loss
was so strange and abnormal.
Philippa, with her scarlet lips, her classic flesh, her Circean
feverishness, suffered from her close association with this exultant
mourner, as some heathen boy robbed of his companion might have
suffered from contact with a Christian visionary, for whom death was
“far better.”
At this moment, however, as she hurried towards the station, it was not
of Baltazar, it was of Adrian, and Adrian only, that she thought.
She dismissed the fact of Baptiste’s expected arrival with bitter
contempt. Let the boy go to Nance if he pleased! After all, it was to
herself--much more intimately than to Nance--that Adrian had confided
his passionate idealization of his son and his savage craving for him.
Yes, it was to her he had confided this, and it was to her always,
and never to Nance, that he spoke of his book and of his secret
thoughts. Her _mind_ was what Adrian wanted--her mind, her spirit, her
imagination. These were things that Nance, with all her feminine ways,
was never able to give him.
Why couldn’t she tear him from her now and from all these people?
Let these others be afraid of his madness. He was not mad to her. If he
were, why then, she too, she who loved him and understood him, was mad!
From the long sloping spaces of the park, as she hurried on, she could
see at intervals, through the misty sun-bathed trees, the mouth of the
harbour, with its masts and shipping, and, beyond that, the sea itself.
Ah! the sea was the thing that had mingled their souls! The sea was the
accomplice of their love!
Yes, he was hers--hers in the heights and the depths--and none of them
should tear him from her!
All the whimpering human crowd of them, with their paltry pieties and
vulgar prudence--how she would love to strike them down and pass over
them--over their upturned staring faces--until he and she were together!
Through the dreamy air, with its floating gossamer-seeds and faint
smell of dead leaves, came to her, as she ran on, over the uneven
ground, past rabbit-holes and bracken and clumps of furze, the far
distant murmur of the waves on the sands. Yes! The sea was what had
joined them; and, as long as that sound was in her ears, no power on
earth could hold them apart!
She reached the station just in time. It was five minutes to five and
the train left at the hour. Philippa secured a first-class ticket for
herself and sank down exhausted in the empty compartment.
How long that five minutes seemed!
She was full of a fierce jealous dread lest any of Nance’s friends
might be going that very evening to visit the patient.
She listened to the conversation of two lads on the platform near
her carriage window. They were speaking of a great bonfire which was
to be prepared that day, on the southern side of the harbour, to be
set alight the following evening, in honour of the historic Fifth of
November. In the tension of her nerves Philippa found herself repeating
the quaint lines of the old refrain, associated in her mind with many
childish memories.
“Remember, remember
Fifth of November,
Gunpowder Treason and plot.
We know no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot!”
And the question flashed through her mind as to what would have
happened by the time that great spire of smoke and flame--she recalled
the look of it so well!--rose up and drifted across the water. Would it
be the welcoming signal to bring Baptiste to Rodmoor--to Rodmoor and to
Adrian?
Two minutes more! She watched the hand upon the station-clock. It was
slowly crossing the diminishing strip of white which separated it from
the figure of the hour. Oh, these cruel signs, with their murderous
moving fingers! Why must Love and Hope and Despair depend upon little
patches of vanishing white, between black marks?
Off at last! And she made a little gasping noise in her throat as if
she had swallowed that strip of white.
An hour later, as the November darkness was closing in, she passed
through the iron gates into the Asylum garden. As she moved in, a small
group of inmates of the Asylum, accompanied by a nurse, emerged from
a secluded path. It was shadowy and obscure under those heavy trees,
but led by the childish curiosity of the demented, these unfortunate
persons, instead of obeying their attendant’s command, drifted
waveringly towards her.
A movement took place among them like that described by Dante in his
Inferno as occurring when some single soul, out of a procession of lost
spirits, recognizes in the dubious twilight, a living figure from the
upper air.
For the moment Philippa wondered if Adrian was among them, but if he
was he was given no opportunity to approach her, for the alert guardian
of these people, like some Virgilian watcher of ghostly shadows upon
the infernal stream, shepherded them away, across the darkened lawn,
towards the corner of the building.
The Renshaw name acted like magic when she reached the house. Yes, Mr.
Sorio was much better; practically quite himself again, and there was
no reason at all why Miss Renshaw should not have an interview with
him. A letter had, indeed, only that very afternoon been posted to Miss
Herrick, asking her to come up to the place the following day.
Philippa inquired whether her interview with the patient might take
the form of a little walk with him, before the hour of their evening
meal. This request produced a momentary hesitation on the part of
the official to whom she made it, but ultimately--for, after all,
Miss Renshaw was the sister of the magistrate who had procured the
unhappy man’s admission into the place--that too was granted her, on
condition that she returned in half-an-hour’s time, and did not take
her companion into the streets of the town. Having granted her request
the Asylum doctor left her in the waiting-room, while he went to fetch
her friend.
Philippa sank down upon a plush-covered chair and looked around her.
What a horrible room it was! The shabby furniture, covered with gloomy
drapery, had an air of sombre complicity with all the tragedies that
darkened human life. It was like a room only entered when some one was
dead or dying. It was like the ante-room to a cemetery. Everything
in it drooped, and seemed anxious to efface itself, as if ashamed to
witness the indecent exposures of outraged human thoughts.
They brought Sorio at last, and the man’s sunken eyes gleamed with
a light of indescribable pleasure when his hand met Philippa’s and
clutched it with trembling eagerness.
They went out of the room together and moved down the long passage that
led to the entrance of the place. As she walked by his side, Philippa
experienced the queer sensation of having him as her partner in some
diabolic _danse-macabre_, performed to the mingled tune of all the wild
“songs of madness” created since the beginning of the world.
She couldn’t help noticing that the groups of people they passed on
their way had an air quite different from persons in a hospital or
even in a prison. They made her think--these miserable ones--of some
horrible school for grown-up people; such a school as those who have
been ill-used in childhood see sometimes in their dreams.
They seemed to loiter and gather and peer and mutter, as if, “with
bated breath and whispering humbleness,” they were listening to
something that was going on behind closed doors. Philippa got the
impression of a horrible atmosphere of _guilt_ hanging over the place,
as if some dark and awful retribution were being undergone there, for
crimes committed against the natural instincts of humanity.
A lean, emaciated old woman came shuffling past them, with elongated
neck and outstretched arms. “I’m a camel! I’m a camel! I’m a camel!”
Philippa heard her mutter.
Suddenly Adrian laid his hand on her arm. “They let me have my owl in
here, Phil,” he said. “We mustn’t go far to-night or it’ll get hungry.
It has its supper off my plate. I never told you how I found it, did
I? It was pecking at her eyes, you know. Yes, at her eyes! But that’s
nothing, is it? She had been dead for weeks, and owls are scavengers,
and corpses are carrion!”
They crossed the garden with quick steps.
“How good the air is to-night!” cried Philippa’s companion, throwing
back his head and snuffing the leaf-scented darkness.
They were let out through the iron gates and turning instinctively
south-wards, they wandered slowly down to the river--the girl’s hand
resting on the man’s arm.
They passed, on their way, the blackened wall of a disused factory. A
blurred and feeble street-lamp threw a flickering light upon this wall.
Pasted upon its surface was a staring and coloured advertisement of
some insurance company, representing a phoenix surrounded by flames.