The old man at least deserved that much consideration from the head of the family he had done so much to keep alive upon the earth!
CHAPTER X
IT WAS the morning of the last day of the year. Characteristic of so many winter days in Dorset the weather was neither warm nor cold nor wet nor dry. It was Laodicean weather, born, like the English Prayer Book, of a genius for compromise. If such weather had had a human soul, it would have been condemned by Dante as being “neither for God nor for His enemies”!
The sun was not sufficiently strong to throw a single shadow or to illumine a single blade of grass; and yet one could see its form up there behind filmy vapours, faint, wistful, like a pallid, age-worn coin, weak as the eye of a dying lion, at which any mongrel cur may bark.
After a breakfast with Netta and his cousin as neutral and colourless as was the sky outside, Rook was buttoning up his gaiters in the kitchen, his foot on a chair, when Pandie approached him with a look of gloating importance. No archaic herald carrying solemn messages from one monarch to another could have displayed, more unctuous gravity than did this exile “from the banks of the Tone” in conveying to Rook the news that he was wanted by his mother.
As soon as his back was turned Pandie hurried to the elbow of Martha Vabbin and began eagerly speaking.
“Twasn’t what the missus spoke aloud that made I know ’twere going to be bad for Squire; ’twere what Missus keepit locked up in her own besom. Missus be terrible sore about this fancy party for year’s end what Master Lexie have prejicted for all o’n. She do want Squire to stay with she, decent and quiet-like, and not go hobby-horsing to brother’s where there be no one to put cork in bottle save Gammer Bellamy, thik old trot!”
Martha Vabbin turned a large impassive face toward her excited colleague.
“Thee and me won’t have nothink to complain of, woman, if folks be down village. Missus won’t want more than her usual; and us can have Martin Pod up-along, same as us did five years agone, when them all was in London; only please God ’a won’t have his rheumatics on him, the poor crotchety man!”
Pandie was unimpressed by the prospect of entertaining the cantankerous sexton. She retained her dramatic manner.
“Did ’ee see how much of thik brandy someone have drunk these last days? If someone do drink to-night like what she’s a been drinking lately, up there by her lone self, Squire’ll have to carry her home piggy-back, same as old Squire carried Nancy Cooper home the night of the eclipse.”
Martha Vabbin tossed a bowlful of peeled potatoes into a pot of clean water and resettled the lid of another pot out of which came a fragrant steam.
“I can’t see who’s to object to a body having a nip between meals, even if she be living with a gentleman. Since Christmas, when she came in here and laid, side of my plate, that pearl and pansy brooch, I’ve ’a had a Christian forbearance for the poor sinner. What you wants to be, Pandie, is more ’vangelical, same as I. Fornication ain’t the only thorn in the blessed Lord’s flesh. This speaking evil of them that’s soft as lambs be a terrible sharp prick for the dear Immanuel; which is to say ‘God with us.’”
Pandie turned away and moved irritably toward the pantry. She knew too well what to expect when Mrs. Vabbin’s voice assumed a certain pious tone, redolent of prayer meetings. “I won’t be the one to give that Pod anythink to drink,” she said to herself. “He do make Martha as high-falutin as ’isself.”
The master of the house found his mother in a state of unusual tension. She had had a series of agitating interviews with Cousin Ann since the affair of the shooting and she had found the younger woman mysteriously reserved and unsympathetic.
“So I’m to be left alone to-night, Rook, it seems,” she began, without rising from her armchair or lifting her eyes from her knitting.
The son did not risk a rebuff by attempting to kiss her. He shut the door and stood with his back to the fire, glancing round at the warm intimacies of the room.
“I don’t see why Lexie should have a lonely New Year any more than you, Mother,” he said slowly. “It’s your own attitude you must blame and nobody else’s.”
The old lady sighed. “I don’t blame anybody,” she said querulously. “I’m past blaming anybody. I thought when you brought that woman here that things could not be worse. But they are worse. How you can find it in you to go on like this is beyond my comprehension. I only hope your dear father is protected from knowing what I’ve gone through. That’s what puzzles me most of all, Rook; that you can bear to think of him looking down at us at this moment and seeing——”
“Stop, for God’s sake, Mother; stop!”
She did stop and with trembling fingers unravelled several inches of her work.
“When you talk like that about my father ‘looking down at us’ it makes me feel absolutely sick! Aren’t you ashamed of such plebeian sentimentality? It makes me feel as if Cousin Ann were right when she says that there’s a streak of common blood in you, Mother. How can you say things like that? ‘Looking down at us!’ It’s a disgusting phrase; worthy of a nonconformist minister; worthy of Martin Pod!”
The old lady met his angry look quite fearlessly, though there was more unravelling of woollen threads in her black-silk lap.
Then the corners of her eyes and mouth began to wrinkle, and a smile that might have been called mischievous flickered across her face.
“Never mind about your father, then,” she said. “You’re a true Ashover, Rook, whatever Cousin Ann thinks of me! Come here, you troublesome boy, and give your old mother a kiss.”
He went across to her and bent down.
“That’s better,” she said as he returned to the hearth. “Oh, Rook, Rook, if you could only once see things as they are. But there! I don’t believe you men live in the same world as we do. I believe you all move about in some crazy unreality of your own fancy. Sometimes I wonder if you’re not all a little bit mad! I teased you just now about your father. But, oh, dear! your father was just the same. Listen, Rook! Have I ever told you about his affair with Nancy Cooper the gipsy? No? But of course you’ve heard of it. You men always hear of those things. It’s probably been tavern gossip for years and years! It was a New Year’s night when he broke with her; found her in the arms of a tramp or something and never spoke to her again. He was easily shocked, was my poor dear John. And when once a thing was over, it was over!”
“I presume the story doesn’t reveal what happened to Nancy?” said Rook with sombre sarcasm.
“Oh, yes, it does! She married a respectable market gardener. Her husband’s potatoes were the best anywhere round here.”
“Well, Mother, I’ve got to do endless things before lunch, so I must make a start. I have to run over to the Drools’ to see if there’s any change.”
Mrs. Ashover sighed. A chilly wave of lonesomeness suddenly swept over her. She would miss Corporal Dick seriously.
“There won’t be any change but the last,” she said.
Rook nodded. “I’m afraid so,” he murmured.
Mrs. Ashover gathered herself together for one more effort. She rose from her chair, holding the whole bundle of knitting in one of her hands.
“Cousin Ann thinks that if you ever did see your way to marry it would be no more than right to provide very liberally for Miss Page.”
Rook looked at her with surprise. This was the first time she had shown the least inclination to recognize Netta’s existence.
“I’ve been wanting to say something to you, Rook,” she went on.
His eyes widened and his lips parted. Could it actually be that his mother was prepared to give up the struggle?
“It’s this, Rook. I want you to know that I’m ready to make any sacrifice of comfort or income for the sake of seeing you happily settled. I would even be ready, if your wife didn’t like my society, to leave the house altogether!”
These words went through Rook like a spear. From a long-suppressed well of feeling in him there arose a blind flood of tende
rness for this little woman standing there before him fumbling with her magenta-coloured wools.
“Leave the house, Mother?” he muttered. “Why, you’d die in a week anywhere else than here!”
The tone of his voice broke down some obstinate inhibition in her, too. She moved a step toward him and a moment afterward he was holding her in his arms. It was the son rather than the mother who lost control just then. There was so much upon his mind. He was beset by so many complications.
She, too, as they clung together, almost yielded to an instinct which had not by any means been the dominant one of her life. Like so many women who exhaust what maternal feeling they possess upon lover or husband, her attitude to her children had fallen far short of anything resembling passion. She had never, for instance, manifested the least preference for one son over the other; nor had she ever felt any regrets at lacking a daughter.
Thus it was only natural that when Rook’s emotion had subsided and he walked away to the fireplace his mother’s habitual feeling toward him as the head of her house rather than as the child of her womb recovered its normal sway.
Following this return to her integral self it was also inevitable that with a woman’s unscrupulousness she should make an instinctive attempt to exploit Rook’s emotion to her own purpose.
“Don’t you realize what all this means to me?” she cried, as soon as he turned a calm face toward her. “Don’t you realize, Rook, that it’s worse than death to me to think of you and Lexie being the last of our people? Will you never understand that I keep thinking day and night about this awful thing? Oh, Rook, my son, my son, don’t be hard and blind! Give me what I ask of you, Rook! Give me a daughter whose children will be mine as well as yours; whose children will be your father’s and his father’s, and will save us all from dying from the earth!”
Rook was stirred more than she knew by this well-timed appeal, but he, too, began to feel a reaction from his momentary collapse. An obscure indignation in him rose up against this exploitation of his emotion. He spoke quite calmly now and even sternly.
“You mustn’t say such things to me, Mother.”
She lifted her eyebrows, shook her head sadly, and resumed her seat.
“Give me my knitting, Rook, please. And you’d better start now on your various engagements. I like a quiet morning and we’ve had a good talk.”
He obeyed her in silence, but just as he had his hand on the handle of the door he suddenly turned round.
“Don’t you love me at all, Mother, apart from the family? Don’t you care whether I am happy or unhappy? Is the family so much to you that your son is nothing?”
She looked him straight in the eyes from where she sat, bolt upright, in her Chippendale chair. She removed her fingers from the magenta-coloured woolwork and let them slide along the chair arms till they clasped the two rounded ends tightly and fiercely, so that her knuckles showed white and sharp in the firelight.
“I have cared for you,” she cried, “since you first walked and talked; but I would have seen you dead in your cradle if I could have had another son, a different son. You make me wish you’d never been born, Rook!”
He stared at her in sombre amazement. His whole world, his whole life illusion, heaved and rocked about his ears.
“Mother!” he blurted out.
The tone of that cry did for just the flicker of a second arrest the hardening of her heart, because it was the exact repetition of the tone of his indignant bewilderment when she had struck him as a child. But the accumulated tide of her anger rolled over the impression as a wave might drown a submerged rock.
“If only Lexie had been the sound one!” she wailed. “If only Lexie had been the sound one!”
Rook shrugged his shoulders, laughed a husky, miserable laugh, and left her as she was, staring desperately into the emptiness of the impossible.
Descending the stairs with a hopeless weight on his heart he found his cousin and Netta standing in the hall, the former holding a letter in her hand, the torn unstamped envelope of which lay on the ground.
“Oh, Rook, listen to this!” cried Lady Ann. “Nell invites us all to dine at Toll-Pike. She says Lexie has asked them, too, to drop in later and she says that William himself was anxious that Netta should come with us!”
Rook turned brusquely round. “Do you want to go?” he enquired harshly, addressing Netta.
“It’s just as you and Cousin Ann like,” replied the girl meekly.
“Very well,” he said. “But I won’t have Hastings patronizing you with any of his confounded priestliness! Ann, you’ll see to that, eh? I won’t have Netta insulted by that chap’s condescension. If he doesn’t treat her exactly as he treats you, she shan’t enter his house!”
A cold chill went through Netta’s heart at these clumsy words. She looked down nervously at the envelope lying on the ground and longed to stoop and pick it up, so as to hide her face from them both.
Cousin Ann gave a quick protesting glance. “Of course,” she said, “he’ll behave as he ought to behave, since he’s invited us. You don’t intend to come yourself, then?”
He shook his head. “No. You’ll find me at Lexie’s. I’m going to the village now and I’ll tell him. We haven’t had a meal together for much too long.”
“Where are you going now, Rook?” enquired Netta, making an obvious effort to speak lightly and casually.
“I?” replied Rook shortly. “I’m going first to the village and then over to Drools’. One of us must see Uncle Dick to-day.”
What had been in her mind was the thought of having him to herself, for some little time anyhow, that last day of such an eventful year; but she let it pass humbly enough.
“I only thought you’d have to lunch somewhere, Rook. Wouldn’t it be easier to come back here and then go to Antiger Lane afterward?”
“I don’t want to come back here,” he retorted sharply. “I must have a walk to-day.”
“You’re not very polite, Rook,” said Cousin Ann. “I expect that what you’ve really got in your mind is a jug of Mrs. Drool’s ale. I expect he intends to lunch better than any of us. Don’t you think so, Netta?”
Netta looked wearily from one to the other. She had not missed the glance that passed between them at the allusion to the ale.
“And what are you two going to do with yourselves this gray day? You’re both so amiable that the only difficulty will be to find out what the other really wants!”
“Oh, we shall get on, sha’n’t we, Netta?” said Cousin Ann, slipping her hand over the other’s wrist.
Netta felt a wild plebeian desire to slap the handsome girl’s face, but her shame at her own impulse gave her answer its appropriate lightness.
“Of course we shall, Rook. You needn’t think that we can’t get on without a man to amuse us, even though it is New Year’s Eve!”
Rook looked at them, standing together there, and a sort of baffled moroseness took possession of him. What was this power in women that enabled them to carry things off with such disconcerting indifference? What was this mental fluidity that enabled them to enter into some strange subconscious alliance with one another from which a man was ejected like an alien, like a stranger?
With each of these two alone he had felt the thrill of possession. But now that they were together, he felt as if all that must have been an arrogant hallucination! He hated to see them together. It substituted femininity in the abstract—a thing he found almost repulsive—for the individual clinging arms which could carry him out of himself!
He moved off to the door into the kitchen, sulky and baffled.
“Well! Good-bye, till we meet at Lexie’s!” he said, opening the door and sweeping them together in one weary dismissing gesture. “I hope Mrs. Bellamy mixes the punch as well as she did last New Year’s Eve!”
Before that day was over there was a distinct alteration in the drab colourlessness of the weather. Little by little the puddles in the roads turned into cat’s-ice. A faint film of soli
dification formed over the ponds at the meadow corners. Hieroglyphic patterns made themselves visible in the mud of secluded lanes. Wrinkled crisscross imprints appeared on the top of the new molehills, imprints made by lighter touches than the feet of mice or birds or the trail of worm or snail.
Dead leaves that had lain softly one upon another in the mouths of old enmossed fox holes or under clumps of fungi at the edges of woods were now soldered together, as if by tinkling metal, with a thin filigree of crisp white substance. The wet vapour distillations clinging to the yellow reeds down by the ditches began to transform themselves into minute icicles. Birds that had reassumed their natural thinness fluffed out their feathers again as they hopped about searching for sheltered roosting places. In every direction there were tiny rustlings and tightenings and crackings as the crust of the planet yielded to the windless constriction, crisp and crystalline, of a gathering hoar frost.
Nell Hastings had procured a young girl from the village to help her to make her preparations. She herself set the table for her little party; arranged the fruit and the nuts and the sweets; and even lit the four red candles half an hour before the time for the appearance of her guests.
When all was ready below stairs and she had placed her villager as sentinel over the various pots and pans in the kitchen, she ran up to her room to change her dress.
She found her husband seated on their bed, in his trousers and vest, struggling with an immaculate evening shirt. He had brushed his hair so carefully and was taking so much trouble with his clothes that for one moment Nell was aware of a wave of tenderness toward him. His profile, as she watched it furtively in the mirror, had really a certain Napoleonic majesty; and the naïve solemnity of his struggle with his evening clothes touched that particular chord in her woman’s nature which must have responded to just such childish self-ornamentation of the preoccupied male for thousands and thousands of years.
She left the brushing of her own hair for a minute or two to hover over him with bare arms, her proffered assistance being itself a kind of subtle caress.
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