CHAPTER VI
DECEMBER had come; and with the coming of December there fell upon that country of pastures and orchards a warm trance-like stillness.
The earth seemed to lie back upon itself, relaxed and lethargic. The days slid by imperceptibly, each one resembling the one before it, in a heavy, damp, windless atmosphere, steamy and misty, with large sun-warmed, earth-brown noons followed by amber-coloured twilights.
On one of these rich mellow placid days, imperturbable and languid as a woman in bed with her first-born, Mrs. Ashover and Lady Ann sat in the former’s luxurious room, enjoying afternoon tea.
Any one who could have peered into this privileged chamber would have displayed little surprise at learning that its occupant preferred to have all her meals brought up to her there.
The place was really an almost flawless work of art. It had the qualities of a drawing room and yet it was more delicate, more dainty, more personal, than any drawing room Lady Ann had ever seen.
Mrs. Ashover had a fire in the grate, but it was so warm that she had opened one of the windows, and the rich earth-heavy smell of ploughed furrows and mud-muffled lanes came floating in and hovered over the delicate bric-à-brac and over the Queen Anne chairs and tables.
It was perhaps because of the millions and millions of dead leaves that were dissolving back into the flesh of their great drowsy mother that, with this air from the woods and meadows, there came a perceptible savour, acrid and penetrating, of the very sweat of death itself.
It was the sort of day that has an especial appeal to the nerves of women, perhaps because the passivity, the inertness, the lethargy of the earth at these times, its preparturient fallowness, moribund and yet magnetic, self-absorbed and yet germinative, has something in it that answers to one of their own most profound and secret moods.
The land, thus lying fallow and immobile, might be said to have sunk down, to have sunk back, into some interior level or stratum of being, where it was unapproachable to the sun’s generative warmth, and yet had a mysterious life of its own.
Hardly conscious of the systole and diastole of its faint breath, of the subterranean beating of its muffled pulses, the vast rain-soaked countryside seemed, during this placid winter solstice, to be in some mysterious way enjoying the ecstasy of its own virginal languor, of its own deep peace, as a “still unravished bride of quietness.”
Something of this appeasement, of this self-amorous quiescence, must have floated in through that open window, must have worked its relaxing charm upon the old woman and the young woman, as they sat on the sofa side by side, their skirts touching, the supple athletic wrist in its tweed sleeve, the slender aged wrist in its lace sleeve, hovering over the little rosewood tea table, over the polished silver, over the Meissen china.
The influence of the day, the immense languid emanation that diffused itself through the room, endowed with a vague but very formidable power the subtle conspiracy, evasive, ambiguous, which rose like the scent of a sweet but poisonous flower from their intimate conversation.
“She is thinking over what I said,” threw out Lady Ann, helping herself to another piece of thin bread and butter and lifting it to her finely curved mouth with the impetuousness of a greedy child.
“But what good will that do us?” murmured the old woman, flicking an errant tea leaf from the edge of her cup as if she would dispose of their enemy in the same more effective, more drastic way.
“No thinking that she does will take her off, switch her back to Bristol, or wherever it is he picked her up. That’s what I feel about all this roundabout method of yours. It just doesn’t get us anywhere! I told you from the beginning that the way you treated her would only give her a false impression; only make her settle down more snugly than ever in her warm nest. And now by giving her a jolt you’ve only made her suspicious of you. You haven’t changed her. How could you change her? Why should she change?”
Lady Ann swallowed her bread and butter and stretched out her hand for another piece. She felt very hungry and for some occult reason very formidable. She moved her supple body inside her closely fitting clothes with a slow feline movement of muscular relaxation. “I’ll go for a long walk after tea. I’ll take Lion,” she said to herself. And her mind visualized the enormous Newfoundland dog bounding over the gorse bushes and sniffing at the rabbit burrows. Between herself and this dog of Rook’s a close attachment had sprung up. She had been shocked to find how little Rook cared for it. People who didn’t understand dogs oughtn’t to have dogs! They either neglected them heartlessly, or they corrupted them by ill-timed petting.
“How long will you give me, Auntie, to try out my method?” she asked, holding up her teacup and smiling, with the conquering smile of youth, at her companion.
“How long, my dear child? Goodness! I give you as long as you like! What else can I do? Nothing that I can say to the poor boy seems to make the least difference.”
As the old woman uttered these words she thought within her heart: “Can’t I make this proud creature see what our only chance is? Can’t I make her see that our only chance is nothing else than her own reckless, unscrupulous beauty?” And the brutal game-preserving expressions of Corporal Dick, still redolent of rank weed-smoke, thumped and heel-tapped in her obsessed brain.
“She’s been thinking a great deal lately,” went on the younger woman, stretching out her long legs and sliding both hands into her jacket pockets. “She can’t get what I said to her out of her mind. She’s beginning to feel pricks of conscience. There’s no doubt about that. And once get her to feel that sort of thing to a point of spoiling her illusion—well! there we are!”
Mrs. Ashover rose from the sofa and, impatiently pushing the tea table a little farther away, reached for her woolwork. Then sinking back by her companion’s side she turned a querulous, anxious, disturbed face toward her.
“Spoiling her illusion? What are you talking about, child?” She sighed heavily and smoothed the lace cuff of one of her wrists with nervous fingers.
“I believe you have a sort of liking for the baggage!” she burst out.
Lady Ann lifted her eyebrows and regarded her with a mocking, slightly contemptuous smile. The daughter of a long line of courtly diplomatists, she began to feel a little irritated with her aunt. “It’s the Gresham blood in her,” she thought. “They always had a second-rate streak.”
“Well!” she said slowly. “I don’t feel that it’s necessary to quarrel with people. One puts oneself on their level in that way, doesn’t one? I daresay the poor little woman has had a hard enough time of it. If I could give her a good round income; a trim little villa down at Weymouth or somewhere; with a couple of servants and an old enamoured sea captain, shall we say, across the hedge—gracious! I would willingly do it!”
Mrs. Ashover’s countenance expressed the sort of astonishment that she would have felt if Cousin Ann had suddenly kicked one of her neat shoes right across the room.
“You young people are too much for me,” she murmured. “Too much for me. I suppose it’s Rook who has put these ideas into your head,” she added, with a quick glance of stealthy malevolence. “In my time designing minxes like that were not given incomes. They were given the stick!”
Lady Ann leaned forward and laid her strong young hand on the old woman’s knee.
“Do you suppose, Auntie dear, that if I wasn’t sure it would be all right, I should feel as happy as I do to-day?”
Mrs. Ashover’s face cleared a little. There certainly did seem to gleam forth an overpowering confidence and assurance from the girl’s limpid, mysterious gray eyes.
There was a tone of impassioned pleading in the old lady’s voice as she murmured eagerly: “You give me your word? You will save him? You will save him from her?”
Ann Gore dropped her eyelids at this and a smile of deep, sweet, implacable power crossed her mouth, making her full lips, exquisitely childish in their perfect Cupid’s bow, curve so divinely that her aunt leaned over and im
pulsively kissed her.
“We won’t talk about it any more, child. I understand you. There! I expect you’re wanting to get out now and have your walk. You mustn’t give up the whole of a lovely afternoon to an old troublesome thing like me.”
They both rose to their feet. The air from the open window, treacherous-sweet with the death smell of a world of dying leaves, flowed through them; rousing a poignant response in their deepest nerves.
The wide-stretching unsown plough lands, the patient indrawn leafless woods, the great inert, apathetic breasts of the earth, drew these women toward them in answering reciprocity. To the elder it was as if the strong invisible hands of the dead generations were urging her on, comforting her, sustaining her, in her struggle against her adversary. To the younger it was as if the very spirit of that hibernating countryside, lying fallow, secretive, implacable, were calling to her to share in some tremendous waiting, through rain, through frost, through everything—for the hour of the sowing of the seed.
They stood together for a perceptible space of time, caught, as two people often are, by the very beat of the wings of fate. Then all in a moment they became conscious that they were both listening, intently, absorbingly, to a sound in the garden outside.
It was the sound of a man’s footsteps moving up and down, up and down, with irritating regularity, along the gravel path that ran parallel to the lawn.
They both felt instinctively that the man was Rook; and for that very reason they were each reluctant to go to the window and look out. Rook’s personality had certainly hovered over their tea table, but neither of them was at all anxious for the intrusion of his actual presence at that juncture.
The situation was indeed, for one second, humorously disconcerting; one of those situations with which the clumsy gaucherie of men copes more easily than the finesse of women.
But Lady Ann kept her head, and soon proved herself a true daughter of the diplomatic Lord Poynings.
Without the flicker of an eyelid to indicate that she knew that both of them had heard those steps: “There’s Lion!” she cried. “I’m sure he’s dying for a run on Battlefield. Good-bye, Auntie! I’ve enjoyed my tea so much!”
The door was hardly shut behind her when Mrs. Ashover hurried to the window. There he was—her son the Squire—pacing abstractedly up and down, as if the little gravel path were the wall of a fortress.
Presently she heard the voice of Cousin Ann, a clear careless young girl’s voice, calling: “Lion! Lion! Lion!” Apparently Rook Ashover also heard that voice; for he stopped suddenly in his abstracted walk, stood hesitating for a moment, looking nervously toward the sound; and then with a quick furtive stride and without so much as once glancing behind him, made off in the direction of the Frome bridge.
“Why doesn’t she run after him?” cried the old lady in her indignant heart, tapping the window sill with her knuckles.
“Lion! Lion! Lion!” came the girlish voice from the stable yard.
“You fool! He’s across the bridge! You stupid! He’s across the river!” And the belligerent little woman positively shook the window frame in her impetuous annoyance.
Rook was across the river. He was not only across the river but he was also—very soon—across the churchyard and out into the water meadows behind it. He felt such an intense desire for movement, for action, for self-escape.
No doubt the peculiar quality of that pacing up and down the gravel path had been the outward sign of the rending and tearing within him of two opposite motive forces.
He had made a sort of half-appointment to meet Nell Hastings that afternoon; but something in Netta’s mood, something illuminated, magnetic, had made him feel uneasy and perplexed.
Netta had seemed to escape him as she never had escaped him. She seemed to have acquired some mysterious independence. She had spoken to him and looked at him in such a strange, remote, exultant way! He felt piqued and confused. He found himself half-wishing that he hadn’t made this appointment with Nell.
Rook did not realize how deeply the great goddess Artemis—the mysterious immortal whose love is for her own body—had come into her own that day. He did not realize that it was a day for the triumph of woman’s nerves over man’s nerves. On such a day, he ought to have told himself, had the dangerous thyrsus-bearing son of Semele come stealthily into the city of Pentheus. On such a day had the wild Bassarids and Mænads sent the gory head of Orpheus “down the swift Hebrus, to the Lesbian shore”! On such a day had the dogs and maidens of Diana torn the luckless Actæon limb from limb. It was a woman’s day; a day that lay virginal, inscrutable, relaxed; yet with a magnetism in its inertness that could trouble a man’s deepest soul.
And Rook Ashover hated the day. He felt a queer, nervous, reluctant uneasiness even about meeting Nell. He would have given anything for a hard, nipping black frost to get its grip upon these misty meadows, to turn all this clinging earth-flesh into frozen rock! He loathed the sodden, relaxed clay with its incense-reek of insidious mortality. He longed to escape from it all, into some clear, purged, bitter air. He felt homesick for the tang of the salt, unharvested, unfecund sea.
Blindly striding across the meadows—full of whirling, contradictory thoughts—he was suddenly brought to a standstill by a wide black ditch.
“Double-dyed ass! Of course there’s no path over these cursed fens!”
He walked along the edge of the ditch, looking for a plank or a dam by which to cross.
No plank! No dam! Only another black ditch still wider than the one he was following!
He had a queer horrid moment; caught there, by those two black ditches. The reeds had been dead and rotten for some time and their brown stalks stood up like twisted feathers from some obscene bird’s skull whose skeleton was mud-engulfed. One ditch was full of dead willow leaves. The other had a dead alder branch floating on its surface. And from both of them there emerged a heavy thick acrid odour that seemed as if it must be the very final exhalation of the dead flesh of a world.
Turning his heel in an angry desperation he caught sight of a human figure emerging from the shadow of the church and moving hesitatingly among the graves.
His heart, in spite of himself, began to beat violently. She was earlier than he had expected!
Had there been some new trouble with that mad priest?
Well! Never mind the reason. She was there. And he quickened his steps to something approaching a run, fearful that she might take fright when she saw him and out of some crazy perversity elude him and vanish.
She gave no sign of retreating, however. She just remained passive—leaning against a tombstone; waiting for him. He scrambled over the low wall and strode straight up to her, holding his hat in his hand.
“I knew it was you,” she said simply; and made room for him at her side; so that he could lean also against the monument to “Timothy Edward Foraker, yeoman of this Parish.”
“I knew it was you,” she repeated, letting her fingers remain clasped in his as they stared together across the misty expanse.
Rook did not speak a word to her for several minutes. His soul seemed divided into three separate beings. One of these beings was obsessed with a simple concentrated desire to get hold of the inmost fluttering identity of this passive creature. To get hold of that—to take it for his own—to make it his unresisting, helpless, abandoned possession.
Another being in him was full of nervous considerations that were tremulous with a thousand fears, like the quivering antennæ of moths, the agitated feelers of sea anemones, the twitching nostrils of horses; considerations that included Netta, Cousin Ann, his mother—Nell herself.
But the third being in him just looked on, with absolute detachment and indifference, at the whole turbid stream of his life. It hovered over both their heads, this third being, and over the gravestone of Timothy Edward against which they leaned. It hovered over the ragged, mournful trunk of Lexie’s elm tree. It voyaged out over the misty fens, over the gates and dams and poplars and ditch
es—over the rim of the horizon. And it was already out of its body, this third being, out of its malice-ridden, nerve-jangled body, drinking with deep, thirsty draughts the great calm under lake of hateless, loveless oblivion!
His first words to her came from the second being in him, the one with the twitching nostrils of a nervous animal. “Why did you come earlier than you said? It’s only beginning to get dark now.”
Even while he spoke, the first being in him was clutching her thin fingers more tightly, possessing itself of them more unscrupulously.
“Why didn’t I wait?” she murmured. “It wasn’t because I was in such a desperate hurry that I couldn’t wait, Rook. Was that what you were thinking?” And she turned her head toward him with a faint little-girl smile, answering the pressure of his fingers.
“No, Rook dear,” she went on. “It was because he is after all going to have vespers to-night. He told me yesterday he wasn’t; that he had something else to do; and that’s why I said to you to come to-night. But he is. So I came early; on the chance. I shall have to wait for him here,” she added. “He likes me to be in the church.”
Rook cast a slow, cautious glance toward the corner of the building. “But we’ve got a long time before vespers, haven’t we?” he said.
“About an hour, I should think.” And she, too, cast an anxious glance in the direction of the village. “Well, nearly an hour, anyway; but you’ll go when I tell you, Rook, won’t you? Sometimes I like to have you near me when I meet him. But not to-day. Oh, Rook! I saw Lexie this morning and he’s worrying about himself. He says this damp weather’ll kill him if it goes on. I thought he looked rather better, if anything. But he’s worrying.”
Rook dropped her hand and stood up. “Damn! I must go and see him,” he said. “I haven’t seen him for three days. I’ll go straight over there to-night.”
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