“I can’t take her back to Ashover to-night,” he thought. “I suppose I must take her to some lodging house.” He stood looking at her, as she let her vacant stare wander away from his face and drift along the wall of the Workhouse and over the Paupers’ Cemetery.
“Will she come with me?” he wondered, “and if she does, will she behave properly and stay in the room I find for her? She looks as if she might refuse to remain in any one place to-night.” And the man began to recall the various hopeless experiences he had had with women in this state.
While he hesitated and wondered what to do, Netta turned away from him and began to shuffle off down the road. This decided him. He stepped quickly after her and offered her his arm. She leaned upon it at once with a hopeless docility like that of some dazed and bewildered animal that has lost all power of individual decision. She even permitted him to take from her the black bag, which he at once proceeded to shut, and then to retain in the same hand with which he held his stick.
He did not dare reverse the direction she was following, knowing by experience that such interference with a person’s obscure desires is apt to cause any sort of outbreak or collapse. As a philosopher he let the whole thing take what course it would. As a clergyman he automatically assumed a kind of professional responsibility that remained on the alert for each new crisis as it might happen to arise.
They were soon outside the limits of the town. The deepening of the twilight about the solitary roadway, bordered by forlorn allotment patches and broken wooden palings, seemed rather to intensify than to diminish the dilemma of the exploited misanthrope.
It was Netta herself, as it happened, who was the first to bring them back to practical urgencies. The effect of whatever it was that she had been drinking began to wear off in the effort of physical movement and in the impact of the chilliness of approaching night.
“Where are we going?” she said suddenly, bringing him to a pause by a field gate through which they could see the dim shapes of a hurdled flock and catch the smell of turnips and damp straw and sheep’s excrement.
“Do ’ee ask the dear gentleman where he be taking of ’ee?” came a startling voice out of the hedge.
Netta pressed instinctively closer to the clergyman’s side; for the figure that followed the voice, from what seemed the very depths of a watery ditch, was strange enough to scare the most preoccupied mind.
It was that of a woman so old as to be almost beyond human recognition. Her face was not so much the colour of ashes as the colour of the inside of a white eggshell that has been exposed on the top of a rubbish heap for many weeks. Out of this face looked forth a pair of ghastly sunken eyes, colourless now in the darkness, but possessed of some kind of demonic vitality that made both Hastings and Netta shrink and draw back, as if from the presence of something malignant and dangerous.
“Betsy must have known ’ee was coming, dearie! What else was I nursing my old bones for on way home from town? ’Twas so when the gentleman from London brought his sweetheart this way fifteen years agone. These things be writ in the stars, sweet lady; they be writ in the stars. What else was it that made old Betsy bide in ditch for best of an hour, and her with her partners waiting for she at home? Well! Well! Ye’ve a-come, ye’ve a-come; and since this be so and partners be waiting, I reckon Betsy’ll be getting home-along before ’tis dark.”
She pulled out of the ditch as she spoke a heavy pedlar’s basket upon which apparently she had been sitting. Netta still clung with obvious dismay to Hastings’s arm and this seemed to arrest the crone’s attention. Her sunken eyes, like those of a hundred-year-old weasel, examined every detail in the appearance of the two intruders. There was nothing in any casual inspection of William Hastings to suggest his profession. He was wearing a dark overcoat and a black cloth cap drawn low over his forehead. He might have been a land agent or a doctor or a well-to-do commercial traveller.
“Be the gentleman nice to ’ee, dearie?” said the woman, moving a little nearer.
Conscious of Netta’s discomposure Hastings waved her off.
“Where do you live, granny?” he asked.
The question evidently put a new idea into the old trot’s head.
“Me partners be waiting for I,” she murmured; and then in a shrill eager voice, “But you mid come and see where old Betsy do bide. You mid come and see! Betsy’ll tell the sweet lady’s fortune and bring down wagonloads o’ luck on both your pretty heads. So come along wi’ I, young folk; and me and my partners will show you Cimmery Land in the girt wold crystal stone!”
Hastings and Netta looked at each other in the darkness. He could see she was expecting him to make a curt refusal to this apparition’s suggestion. It was on his lips to do so and lead her away, but then he imaged to himself the long dreary road they had followed, the hopelessness of hunting for shelter in a district of the town completely unknown to him, and the possibility that even if he did find a lodging of some sort Netta would not settle down in it. The old woman’s words suggested that the escape from their present uncertainty which she offered was not far to seek.
He cast his eyes round them. All was silent. All was obscure and dark. His philosophy was authentic enough to make it easy for him to be led, at a moment like this, by any chance-blown straw. It did not really matter! He was tired and hungry. His companion was near the end of her tether. Why not just resign themselves and see what happened?
He looked at Netta with a little shrug of his shoulders. She, too, was beginning to feel her powers of volition ebbing and sinking.
“Very well, Mother,” he said to the old woman. “Let’s see where you live.”
The issue was more propitious than he could have hoped. Their guide led them forward not more than a few hundred paces, and while they were still, both of them, in a sort of exhausted daze, they found themselves clambering up the steps of a stationary caravan; and in an incredibly short while after that it seemed almost a natural thing in their bewilderment that they should be drinking better tea out of better cups and saucers than any that Hastings, at any rate, was accustomed to enjoy under his Nell’s housekeeping!
The interior of the caravan was spotlessly clean and the old woman herself under the yellow lamplight presented a much less sinister appearance than when she had first materialized, like an evil spirit, at the gate by the sheepfold.
There was one moment when Netta began nervously looking round, as she stirred her tea, as if desirous of something else, that might have had an unfortunate issue; for Hastings, catching the look, enquired of their entertainer if she could give the girl a taste of brandy.
“Not if she askit me till Judgment Day!” cried the woman. “I bain’t a soft-heart and I bain’t one for blunt knives or silver bullets, but I be afeard of liquor as if it were a burning lake of adder’s gall.”
Netta had coloured with pitiful shamefacedness under the exposure of her companion’s remark, but she exchanged a quick glance with him now.
“Why are you afraid of liquor, Granny?” said William Hastings.
“Because of they in there! Because of me partners!” answered the old woman.
Her repeated references to “partners” had already disturbed Netta’s mind and she now looked with much uneasiness at a large Paisley shawl which hung down from an extended rope, concealing a corner of the caravan from view.
No more was said, however, until the gipsy’s guests had finished their meal and the table had been dragged aside against the bed leaving a space in the centre of this curious interior empty and clear.
Then the old woman, with a furtive look at her visitors and a queer sort of inarticulate caressing murmur, such as a person might make to soothe the fears of some species of wild animal, drew aside a piece of the shawl and stood there, holding the fabric in her hand and clicking with her tongue. At first there was no response except a feeble scuffling in the darkness. Then to the horror of Netta and to the amazement of her companion there issued forth, holding each other’s hands, a
pair of creatures that it was difficult to regard as the progeny of the human race.
They were of the masculine sex and wore extravagant clothes; the sort of clothes that one sees on the bodies of dwarfs and midgets in circuses, but it was impossible for either Netta or Hastings to look at anything but their faces, which were more horrible to human sight than if they had been creatures of a monstrous nightmare.
It was only after a second or two that the full ghastliness of the deformity that dehumanized these beings entered the consciousness of the two spectators, but when it did so Netta clapped her hands over her own face and sprang to her feet.
“I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it!” she screamed. “Take them away! Let me go from here!”
The old woman placed herself between her “partners” and the terrified girl.
“It’s all right, Missy,” she mumbled, and then making once more the same sub-human caressing sound and the same clicking noise with her tongue, she shuffled the two unfortunates back again into their hiding place and let fall the covering.
It was several minutes before Hastings succeeded in pacifying Netta and persuading her to sit down again; and even after she was seated and was able to smile faintly at her own weakness, several involuntary spasms of shuddering ran through her frame.
“Didn’t I tell ’ee?” the old woman triumphantly protested, taking her seat on the narrow bed. “Them’s queer to look on and that’s God’s truth, dearie, but if it hadn’t been for the drink, them ’ud be as natural-like as your own self.”
“Who are they?” enquired Mr. Hastings, looking with a good deal of relief at Netta who had now overcome her shivering fit.
“Me partners,” repeated the hag. “Them as has got old Betsy her poor living, day in, day out, these twenty years. ’Ee should see ’un dance, Mister. Them can dance same as real poppets.”
“But who are they?” repeated the misanthrope, displaying more curiosity than Netta had ever seen in him before. She herself had now completely recovered her sober senses, and dimly through a turbid cloud of dream-like images there began to rise before her the vision of what she had run away from and the stark question of what she was to do next.
“Them be the childer of me own daughter, Mister,” replied the woman. “Of me own daughter, Nancy Cooper, what Squire Ashover sweeted. When Squire broke with she, her married a decent market-man, what grew ’taties and such-like. But ’twas no use. Squire’d learned her to drink terrible; and ’twas along o’ that she runned off wi’ Colpepper Thomas the horse-dealer. He were the drunkenest brute between Exeter and London, and it was my own self who buried her. She left me her two, them as has been my partners for twenty years. She swore they were Squire’s, and we got hundreds of pounds out of ’ee for they, unbeknown to his lady.”
Old Betsy paused, and Netta, who had been staring at her in consternation ever since she began, now began stammering: “Do you mean that those poor things are—half-brothers—to—to—the present Mr. Ashover?”
“That’s what old Betsy means and not a word less,” chuckled the old woman. “We bain’t gipsies, as folks do say; not a bit o’t. We be a good Frome-side family same as Squire ’isself. Them Ashovers be Satan’s own tribe, every one of them. There be old man Dick who went and hanged ’isself so I’ve a-heard. He was Squire John’s brother. And now they say Squire Rook have got some doxy or other in house wi’ ’ee. He’d look silly, would Squire Rook, if I askit he for a few hundred for me partners here!”
William Hastings was not surprised to notice that Netta avoided meeting his eye. He had summed up her situation pretty shrewdly by this time and was vaguely considering in his own mind what line of action he ought to take. What he did not feel sure of was whether she had left Ashover with its master’s concurrence; or whether, out of sheer weariness of her equivocal position there, she had just drifted off.
Having relieved her feelings by her long confession Betsy Cooper now became taciturn and practical. She indicated that in return for a small sum of money she would retire for the night behind the Paisley shawl, leaving the rest of the interior of her retreat at the disposal of her guests.
“There be a horse-trough under hedge,” she remarked, pointing at the door of the caravan, “if so be that either of ’ee want to wet your hands afore night.”
The idea of setting out again to look for a more conventional shelter was appalling to Netta. She slipped down the caravan steps upon the roadside for a moment; and did dip her fingers in the receptacle described by the pseudo-gipsy; but the night was so dark and the air so chilly that she was glad enough to return to her seat by the stove. She would have given a great deal just then for a taste of what the old woman had designated as “adder’s gall”; but her whole life seemed so broken up that she was thankful enough to have someone, even if it were only William Hastings, to cling to as a raft in that blind sea.
Hastings also made a temporary exit into the environs of their shelter with a view of collecting his thoughts and deciding upon his course of action. He made up his mind to accept this chance-given hospitality, leaving the problem of what to do next undecided till the morning. Netta had begun to look as if she longed for nothing so much as sleep. Well! Sleep would perhaps clear his own mind and give him the clue to the best course of action.
While the old woman herself was filling up her water jugs at a spring that adjoined the trough, Hastings contemplated his companion, who sat on the bed, her head buried in her hands, and wondered what the circumstances actually were that had led to this flight from peace and comfort.
“Netta!” he began, anxious to get some insight into her thoughts.
“Yes, Mr. Hastings.”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings or be impertinent, but you must know what I feel, meeting you in a place like this, after knowing you as well as I have.”
She looked at him with her forehead wrinkled in hesitation. Could she make a confidant of such a man? Something in her yearned to unburden itself in a torrent of pitiful words, but something else—a queer mixture of pride and timidity—made her feel as if it would be a sacrilege to speak to any living soul of what had happened. With the recovery of her normal self there rose up before her mind, as the one anchor to which she must cling, through ruin, through disaster, through blind misery, the fixed idea that she had effaced herself by her own will for the sake of her love.
“I don’t think you know me very well, Mr. Hastings,” she said, smiling.
He was curiously nonplussed by the ease and naturalness of her tone. Seeing her as he had seen her in the street that night he had forgotten how far she had gone in her acceptance of the light social tone of the Ashover circle.
“No—no! Of course not,” he muttered hurriedly; but in his heart he thought: “Oh, these women! These women! One minute they fling themselves upon your neck and the next they take this society air and bow you out of the room.”
“I mean it’s difficult to explain everything to-night,” she pleaded, not missing the clouded expression that had come over his face.
He remained silent for a moment; while she looked at him rather wistfully, wishing that he was the kind of person to whom it would be easy to unlock the secrets of her heart. Then he said suddenly: “You won’t mind staying the night here with me, will you? I don’t see what we can do except leave everything till the morning.”
For the moment she misunderstood him and a deep indignant flush mounted into her cheeks, but his matter-of-fact air reassured her and she felt ashamed of herself.
“Don’t think I’m ungrateful, Mr. Hastings. You’ve been most kind to me.” And then she added as an afterthought: “But I shall hate taking the only bed in the place!”
Once more Hastings got that funny impression of something put on and artificial in her tone. But he let it pass and the return of Betsy Cooper brought their dialogue to a close.
The arrangements for the night were simple enough after all when they were actually made. Old Betsy retired behind the susp
ended shawl from the recesses of which emerged the most extraordinary succession of inhuman sounds that Hastings had ever heard in his life.
The clergyman himself, notwithstanding the libidinous leer to which the old woman treated him as she disappeared, a look that was made doubly significant by her manifest recognition of his profession, proceeded to wrap his overcoat round Netta’s passive form as she lay on the bed and then, making himself as comfortable as he could in the wicker chair, prepared to spend the night in metaphysical reverie, his pipe lit, and his feet on the stove.
Netta’s quiet breathing soon showed she was free from her troubles among the eidolons of sleep, and the man was left to his own thoughts.
Strange enough were his thoughts!
This lonely wheeled hut in the midst of the darkness seemed to him like a silent ship voyaging through the gulfs of immensity. He visualized the unspeakable deformities behind that curtain, sleeping against the lap of that old woman, like Phorkyads against the knees of Medusa; and it seemed to him as if that invisible group were a fitting enough symbol of all that this whole terrestrial ship carried, in its voyage, through the godless and measureless ether.
He recalled what Betsy had said of that “Cimmery Land” to be revealed by these pariahs in a “girt wold crystal stone”; and he smiled grimly to himself as he thought of how all over the county of Dorset men and women were moving in their dreams through just such an impossible country.
And then he thought of his book and of how during these last spring days he had neglected it; seduced a little, he could not tell why, by a certain quality in his wife he had not noticed before.
And then letting himself go upon the full stream of his misanthropic fancies, he imagined that this caravan, in which he sat, warming himself and smoking, contained all that was left alive in the whole stellar system. He imagined it transported through empty space; through space star-less, planet-less, moon-less; a vast “Cimmery Land” crystal, void of everything except the unconscious spirit of darkness.
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