Ducdame

by John Cowper Powys

  She had already got up from the bed and was smoothing out her ruffled hair at Uncle Dick’s looking glass. When he entered she turned round to him, smiling; and Rook had his second lesson that day as to the variable nature of women’s smiles.

  This smile of Cousin Ann’s was whimsically penitent, full of the deprecating cajolery of a child. She put her hands on Rook’s shoulders and kissed him on the forehead.

  “I couldn’t help it, my dear,” she said. “I was alone in the house with him and he teased me and teased me. I was doing what you told me—making a list of the things—but he wouldn’t let me alone. He must have heard those people talking about us. I was feeling upset and I lost my temper. I hit him. It was dreadful of me; but that’s what I did. I hit him! And after that he wouldn’t go away but kept peeping at me through that hole in the wall. It was awful, Rook! It was like a nightmare. I kept dragging him away from that hole and pushing him downstairs. But he’s so strong. He always came back, and then kept jeering at me. But you’ve locked him out now, have you? Oh, I am so glad!” And she sucked in her breath with a little gurgling sibilance, as if it were all she could do not to burst into a fit of unnatural laughter.

  Her mood touched Rook’s heart more than she realized. He had always associated her with such complete independence that to see her in this agitated state struck home at him through all his defences.

  The vague intention which had formulated itself in his mind at the moment when he saw the word “Gorm” on the signpost now hardened into a definite resolution.

  “Get your things on quickly, my dear,” he said. “I’m going to take you with me to Tollminster.”

  More passive and docile than she had ever been in her life, Cousin Ann allowed herself to be led down the stairs, hurried along the little garden path‚ and lifted into the cart. Rook placed her between himself and Mr. Twiney, and as they rattled through the muddy lanes and through the gathering spring twilight the girl abandoned herself without restraint to a delicious wave of voluptuous contentment which cradled and rocked her and obliterated all doubt and responsibility.

  She had fallen into a kind of trance wherein all objects lost their substantiality and became porous and dream-like, when the lighted lamps of the cheerful High Street and the rough cobblestones of the inn yard made her realize that they had reached Tollminster.

  Rook gave orders to Peter Twiney to meet them in that same inn yard later in the evening, and he and Cousin Ann made their way through the narrow old-fashioned streets to the lodging of his friend the curate.

  The closing of spring days in an ancient country town has a glamour about it of a quality more delicate and penetrating than anything that can be reached in the leafiest and remotest solitudes. The sense of the open roads stretching out from the lighted thoroughfares into the embalmed darkness; the fragrance of lilac bushes from invisible walled gardens; the emerging of the impression of new-leafed greenness from behind the moss-covered gates of church precincts and almshouse precincts; the twilit presence of newly planted pansies and primulas in old Georgian window frames; all these things together, mingled with sudden breaths of mud-scented coolness coming up from river banks, where the great moist marigold buds are swelling and swelling in the darkness, give to the streets of such a town an enchantment that has the power to summon up and embody the rarest memories of our race consciousness.

  The curate of Saint Mark’s Church received his visitors with undissembled delight. Full of a youthful idolatry for the Squire of Ashover, in which a natural and innocent snobbishness mingled with a quaint personal hero worship‚ the young clergyman was quick enough to catch every emotional nuance of this unexpected visit.

  “I’m proud to be the one to launch you,” he kept repeating‚ as he dragged them out again, up Antiger Street, up South Street, until they reached the necessary office.

  The place was closed; but the energetic curate, with his knowledge of local ways, was able to follow up the official trail to such excellent effect that when they returned to his lodging the desired special license was safe in Rook’s possession.

  What followed was even more dream-like to Lady Ann’s irresponsible and reckless mood than was their drive through the muddy lanes. Mr. Tishmarsh rummaged up his sexton and his verger as witnesses; opened the little postern-gate of the dark Henry the Seventh church with his own private key, slipped on his vestments in the easy familiar manner of a disciple of the Bishop of Oxford, repeated his nervous formula: “I’m proud to be able to launch you!” so unconsciously that it struck the girl as falling into a sort of allotted rhythm amid the austere hieratic injunctions of the fatal service, and finally made them write their names in the parchment-bound book as man and wife, leaving both of them with a queer impression in their minds that they had been hypnotized by a romantic schoolboy.

  “Couldn’t have been worked like this for any one but you, Mr. Ashover,” remarked the exultant little cleric as he escorted them toward the yard of the Red Lion. “Nor for any woman but yourself, Lady Ashover!” he hurried to add, fumbling in his confusion over the bride’s new name.

  Rook was exceedingly anxious to shake off the little man before they encountered their driver’s inquisitive sympathy, but Mr. Tishmarsh had at least this in common with his professional enemy the Devil that, when once he had been made use of, it was not easy to get out of his clutches.

  “I must help you into your vehicle, Lady Ashover,” the youth announced. “That’s only my right, isn’t it, as I was the one to launch you?”

  Rook found himself damning the kind little priest in his heart with vindictive fury out of all proportion to the slight occasion. His nerves, now the drastic step had actually been taken, were feeling the effects of the unnatural tension of this long day.

  They were off at last, but not before Mr. Peter Twiney had thrown a most quizzical and knowing leer in the direction of the curate of Saint Mark’s, left bare-headed and excited among the staring ostlers of the Red Lion.

  It was nearly eleven o’clock when they reached Ashover House. Rook made Mr. Twiney drive round to the back door, so as not to disturb any one; but it soon appeared that this familiar precaution was, for once in the history of that quiet dwelling, ironically unnecessary.

  The whole house was stirring with lights and voices and emotional confusion.

  Pandie met them in the doorway; and not only Mr. Twiney, but also, it appeared, his long-necked horse as well, listened with an attention that suggested one of the rarest dramatic sensations in two blameless lives, while the white-faced servant, her apron and cap awry, and her hands waving in the air like the flappers of an unhappy penguin, explained that Miss Page had runned away unbeknown to any one; that in her own opinion, she had drownded herself in Saunders’ Hole; while in the opinion of Mrs. Vabbin she had been kidnapped and ravaged by them murdering gippoos.

  CHAPTER XIII

  IT WAS almost as if the momentous event that had happened to Cousin Ann—that secret victory of the Ashover dust under the chancel floor—had laid a paralyzing finger upon the life-hating pen of William Hastings.

  Nell awoke late on the morning after the events just described, awoke with a mysterious sense of some great load having been lifted from her life during her sleep. To her surprise she found a note from her husband‚ fixed to the pincushion in front of her looking-glass, tellingher that he had had his breakfast and had gone off for the day to Bishop’s Forley.

  She knew why this had happened. A celebrated theologian from Germany, one of the few modern thinkers whose writings interested this lonely nihilist, had come to stay with an ex-priest there; and it was at the invitation of this man that Hastings had gone.

  Brushing her hair before the open window with the scent of the young leaves and the new-grown grass floating in upon her and the songs of thrushes and blackbirds answering each other across the road, the girl abandoned herself to a thrilling current of happiness that seemed composed of every magical sound and every ecstatic scent that the great reserv
oirs of life held in their hidden springs.

  It was as though she could catch, behind the shrill bird notes and the arrowy odours, the very stir and movement of the green sap as it pressed upward to meet the warmth of the generative sun.

  Out of the recesses of her nature where they had been so long hidden rose a thousand indescribable memories.

  Pale-green cowslip stalks mingled, in these faint evocations, with the transparent lilac of cuckoo-flowers, with the unique thrill of the first purple crocuses against the brown earth mould‚ with the crimson-tipped petals of innumerable daisies on dew-wet mossy lawns. Sharp birth pangs at once jocund and poignant seemed to answer from the depths of her being the unsealings and unsheathings that were going on in wood and garden and field.

  All her buried responses to Nature, responses that had seemed to come to her in the form of pure ecstasies of childish happiness but in reality were associated with quite definite impressions of warmth and coolness, of stalks and leaves, of earth mould and roots and moss, of sun-motes and shadows, now rushed upward to the level of her brain, flooding her with a rapture that was beyond human description.

  She tied up her hair, put on her shift, and ran down, bare-armed as she was, to make the preparations for her breakfast, against the moment she should be washed and dressed. There was not much to be done, for Hastings had built up an excellent fire and had put both kettles on the stove.

  Hurrying through her ablutions with the impatience of a child, delaying just long enough to open her trunk and take out therefrom a real spring dress, in an incredibly short time she was seated at the kitchen table, with the door into the garden open in front of her, eating bread and butter and drinking tea with a face so radiant that had a sub-human elemental wayfarer lingered on the threshold watching her it would have certainly thought that the lives of the daughters of men were the ones to be envied throughout all space!

  It then came over her what she would do when she had washed up the breakfast things, made her bed, and watered the purple and pink hyacinths that were budding now under the south wall. She decided that she would cross the Ashover bridge, skirt the Ashover garden by a little path she knew well, and make her way over the hill to the Antiger Woods. She would not let herself think of an encounter with Rook; in fact, she was by no means sure that she wished to see him that day; but she wished to associate him with her unusual mood; she wished to be near him, to feel the pulses of the spring in the locality haunted by his presence.

  She was so impatient to get out of the house that in the end she forgot all about the hyacinths; and it was not until she had reached the entrance to the churchyard that, with a little funny smile on her twisted mouth, she remembered this omission.

  Drawn, against her intention and against her will, by the memory of that afternoon in the darkened church, she lingeringly and slowly entered the enclosure and moved round toward the west door.

  Her astonishment was great when, turning the corner of the building, she suddenly found herself faced by Rook’s mother. Mrs. Ashover was standing by the grave of her husband. Nell got a quick glimpse of her before she was observed and she was amazed at the expression on her face.

  The old woman looked like an exultant and malignant witch, who had come to confide some unholy triumph to the responsive bones of a heathen corpse. She showed herself disconcerted and annoyed at the apparition of Nell, but she did not make any effort to conceal the causes of her wicked satisfaction.

  “You’d better know at once what has occurred, Mrs. Hastings,” she said, “and then you can tell your husband, if Rook hasn’t told him already.”

  Nell’s face grew white. What blow was this, then, that had chosen this day of all days to fall upon her head?

  “What?” she murmured, her mouth open and her eyes wide. “Has anything happened—to any one?”

  “Happened? I should think things have happened! You may be interested to learn that my son and his cousin were married yesterday by special license in Tollminster; and that that woman has run away.”

  Mrs. Ashover fixed upon the girl, as she brought this out‚ a look of such evil exultation that Nell felt as though every secret of her own heart were stripped bare. She could only make a little gasping noise in her throat in response to this overwhelming information and instinctively she pressed her hand upon the late Squire’s head-stone.

  “What’s the matter?” said the old lady, laying her gloved hand on the girl’s wrist and retaining it in her nervous clutch. “Come, come. This won’t do! Why, you’re as white as a Wyandotte hen. Come into the church and sit down a minute. No! No! I’m not going to have you fainting here by my John.” And she chuckled with a high-pitched quavering chuckle such as might have emerged from the leathery lungs of an agitated bat.

  She dragged the girl with her into the building and they sat down side by side. As the blood began to come back to Nell’s cheeks and she began to make an attempt to visualize Cousin Ann as Rook’s wife, her deeper consciousness was aware of the Ashover tombs and of the difference between the way they looked now and the way they looked on that dark‚ misty evening.

  “Where has Netta Page gone?” she whispered to her companion.

  “Gone to the gutter!” was the unspoken response of the old woman. But what she actually said was: “We have no idea, child. Not Rook or any of us! They’ve been scouring the country all night; they’ve been to the police and they’ve been to the railway stations. Not a sign or trace anywhere! The curious thing about it is that she didn’t take anything; nothing but her handbag; and that, from what my son says, must have been practically empty. I think myself that she took money, but Rook says not. If he’s right there, it’s because she’s gone with someone, with some man or other with whom she’s been keeping in touch all the time. You know they’re like that! That’s what they always do: go back to some lazy bully who takes all their earnings!”

  As Nell listened to this tirade her disgust grew greater and greater. If it had not been for those tombs in the chancel, whose presence had never been more emphatic, she would have protested indignantly and rushed away. As it was she just leaned back with half-closed eyes, trying to imagine what Netta must have actually felt as she stole out of that unconscious house with her empty handbag. In her growing sympathy with Netta she began to feel calmer and less hurt under her own personal blow. After all, she had never let her thoughts or feelings wander off beyond the romance of the immediate present. With regard to Lady Ann she felt no individual jealousy; only a sickening weight of troubled concern as to what the whole thing must have meant for Rook.

  “I shall leave them alone for a while.”

  Nell heard the old lady’s voice through the thick screen of her own agitation, as if it came to her through a tapestried wall.

  “Alone for a while. You can tell your husband that. And if Lady Ann would rather have the place to herself after that, I shall be all right. It’ll kill me, very likely, if they find they can’t put up with me here; but I shall die happy.”

  Mrs. Ashover lapsed into silence; and her gaze, as well as that of her youthful companion, wandered from the Voltairean lawyer to the melancholy Cavalier; and from the Cavalier to the austere Crusader.

  “It’s absolutely all right,” she murmured aloud to these exacting spirits of the race she served. “It’s absolutely all right.”

  There was something in the mere fact of Mrs. Ashover’s revealing her thoughts in this way to a comparative stranger that startled and astonished the young girl. This insanity of devotion to so impersonal a thing as the survival of a family was so entirely outside Nell’s own life illusion that she felt like a person who watches the clash of phantom armies upon a phantom shore. And yet she was intelligent enough not to miss the note of something almost sublime in the old woman’s crazy loyalty.

  “It’ll kill me if they can’t put up with me here.” That desperate sentence kept repeating itself in the girl’s brain like the beat of a drum that outlasts all the other sounds as the mêlée
rolls itself away over the muffling hills.

  Absorbed, each of them, in their own thoughts, the old woman and the young woman could hardly be expected to be aware of the full power of the occult influences that streamed forth on that enchanted spring day from the mouse-coloured dust underneath those marble slabs. It was as though the rejuvenative stirrings in earth and air had actually pierced through the slow dissolution of the centuries and roused some hidden vital force down there in the darkness, latent and potential, beyond all annihilation.

  Some sort of obscure summoning from these tombs of the race she had saved must anyway have carried its exultant vibration into the nerves of the new mistress of Ashover; for, after a long lapse of silence between them, both the women seated there, with a pool of sunshine under their feet and a wavering stream of sunshine falling on their heads, became suddenly conscious that they were no longer alone in the church. They turned round simultaneously. They simultaneously stood up. And there was Lady Ann, erect and bareheaded in the doorway, regarding them with a blank, dazed, inexpressive face, like the face of a noctambulist.

  They extricated themselves quickly from the narrow pew and walked down the aisle to meet her. She smiled faintly at Nell and held out her hand, but it was from behind the same impassive mask—the mask of a hypnotized sleepwalker—that she addressed her words to Mrs. Ashover.

  “I came to tell you, Aunt, that Rook has got on the track of our lost lady. It appears she was seen, by someone who knew her, in Bishop’s Forley last night. I know there’s a great mass of slums round those glove factories. I’ve seen awful places down there—lodging houses and public houses and that sort of thing where any one of that kind might naturally go.”

  Mrs. Ashover glanced at Nell, her instinct as a woman of the world warning her that this was not the moment for any interchange of unholy triumph between herself and her new daughter. But Lady Ann seemed strangely oblivious just then to all the conventions.