Every complicated and suppressed irritation he had ever harboured against Lexie rose to the surface. He felt as if he had wilfully allowed his remorse about Netta to tie his hands in a struggle with his brother which had been secretly going on for many months; a struggle as to whether he with his translunar lust, or Lexie, with his humorous satyrishness, should carry off this sensitive little being of the twisted mouth and the slender pliable limbs!
No sooner was he round the first corner and out of sight of Mr. Twiney than he stood stock still, staring at the woods in front of him. He knew well where Titty’s Ring was. It was a clearing in the centre of the wood where the ground became level for a short distance and where in former times there had been a spring. Lexie had had from childhood a curious predilection for this particular spot; for the lusciousness of the long damp grass that grew there, for its complete isolation in the centre of so much undergrowth, for its cuckoo-flowers that were larger and of a deeper lilac there than down in the valley, while all the years he had known it there had been two grass snakes in that place, which every spring cast their spotted skins; of which skins he had collected quite a number, mysterious and unique objects, different in the feeling of their scaly texture from anything else in the whole world!
It was, in fact, as Rook well knew, a symbolic and significant fact that his brother had taken Nell to this favourite spot of his, and had taken her there, too, on an afternoon that seemed, as Lexie himself would have put it, “dedicated” to such a felicitous proceeding.
He approached the fence that separated him from the wood and began staring savagely into its umbrageous recesses. The wood itself became, as he gazed into its leafy shadows, an utterly different thing from what it had been before. It became a classic and Arcadian refuge, “dear to Pan and the Nymphs,” in whose embowered hiding-places all the responsibilities of the world fell away and vanished.
Rook began to visualize the scene in Titty’s Ring with an intensity that caused him a sick sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. He made a faint troubled effort to remember the menace that overhung his brother’s life; but even as he did this he found his own fingers fumbling at the little box containing those morphia tablets, the loss of which, when he returned the other one, Lexie had never discovered. No! He himself, as his mind became more and more morbid, might be driven to die, too. And that being so, the difference between their two fates was not so tremendous as to give him a cruel and outrageous advantage.
And after all, at the bottom of things, when it became a matter of two males fighting for a female, these questions of honour and justice and fairness and even decency, didn’t they always go to the wall? Lexie had flung them over. There had been a sort of tacit understanding between them about Nell; and though he had certainly allowed Lexie to think that he had withdrawn from the field, it was taking his withdrawal a little too literally, to act as if Nell were entirely fancy-free.
Rook’s thoughts, as the August sun beat upon his head, growing even hotter as it sank a little from the zenith, were so wild and unbalanced as to resemble the thoughts of a person in a fever. The shock of what he had just heard and the vivid material images his mind kept conjuring up of what was going on at Titty’s Ring stirred up a certain black mud of human maliciousness which lay dormant in one deep recess of his nature.
The most fantastic ideas entered his mind; the idea, for example, that he was the victim of a conspiracy of persecution, or at least of manipulation, in which everyone in his circle played a definite part, propitiating and managing him to ends that were theirs and not his.
He began to envisage Netta’s disappearance as part of this conspiracy and it presented itself to him that his wife had probably encouraged Lexie in this more serious pursuit of Nell. And his mother, too! He recalled now how often in the last few weeks the old lady had held him at her side, no doubt to keep him away from Toll-Pike Cottage. He felt an angry sensation of being waylaid and humoured and manœuvred at every turn, of being surrounded by the pressure of soft, firm, strong hands that were regulating his life contrary to his deepest life illusion!
Once more he began to feel that in opposition to the free play of his identity all these terrible forces of tribal continuity and tribal self-assertion were using him for purposes utterly foreign to his own personal vision of existence. They intended that the family should have an inheritor; and in order that this should come to pass they were prepared to turn him, Rook Ashover, into a mere passive link in a chain that stretched back to the 13th Century and forward God knows how far!
The old blind vicious feeling came over him that he, a lonely, solitary, hunted figure, was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with “Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, and Powers,” all conspiring to reduce his independent life to a meaningless cipher!
Well! He would fight them all; and if Lexie—the only human soul in the world that he really loved—went over to their side, he would fight him, too, whether he were a dying man or not! All the time that these extravagant thoughts whirled through his brain he held his cloth cap in his hand; and the early afternoon sun, full of the iron virulence which it possesses at that hour, intensified the fever that raged within him.
All at once, driven by a sudden irresistible impulse, he forced his way through the fence and plunged into the wood. Like Lexie he knew every stick and stone of that countryside; and it was not long before he hit upon one of the little mossy paths, formerly game drives but invaded now by every sort of vegetation, which intersected the thick undergrowth.
He followed this path with a stride that grew more and more rapid as he advanced; for he knew by the look of certain outstanding trees that he was not far from the piece of level ground where Titty’s Ring and other smaller nameless expanses of open grass broke the leafy monotony.
Arrived at the first of these woodland greenswards he paused for a minute to take breath. Steady, unflickering shadows, dark as the hollow places in some immense sorrowful upturned face, lay in great silent pools on the deep-rooted grass. Faint vibrations of the air that could hardly be called winds lifted the feathery seed tops of hawkweed and dandelion; while out of the silence all around him came indescribable sighings and rustlings, as if an invisible population of elemental beings, lighter than air itself, were awakening from their noon siesta.
Wiping the sweat from his forehead with the cap he was still clutching in his fingers, he shook his head solemnly and gravely from side to side as if replying to some formidable argument of an unseen antagonist. He then moved away from this first clearing and took a path opposite to the path by which he had come.
A second greensward was followed by yet another, each one more magical in its shadowy seclusion; and Rook felt as if he were passing through a series of sacred groves, the leafy purlieus and outermost “lady-chapels,” it might be, of some thrice-holy place, as yet unvisited by any human votary!
Hush! He was certain that he had heard voices….
He stopped dead still, listening intently, cursing the loud chatter of a jay that broke the surrounding stillness.
It was those two! He knew their tones. He knew the amorousness in his brother’s low chuckling laugh; he knew the faint broken protest—who would not know that if not he?—of Nell’s timid and enchanting reluctance.
The path in which he waited now was narrowed and almost closed by several horn-beam bushes; and to the end of his life he remembered the look of those thick leaves, so olive-green on one side and so ivory-white on the other! One of these bushes had extended clear across the path; and unwilling to force his way noisily through its thick growth he sank down upon hands and knees and crept under it, still holding his cloth cap in one hand and his stick in the other.
A sour-sweet smell rose from the earth as his knuckles pressed against it, that peculiar smell which belongs to dry wood mould that has been so fed by fallen leaves and by the rubble of dead twigs as to become something far more organic than the soil of any ploughed-up open field.
In the m
idst of the blind turmoil of his blood his senses seemed preternaturally acute and alert. He saw the tiny gray cups of a little patch of moss, each cup decorated outside by infinitesimal scales and bosses, as if from the fingers of some fairy Hephæstus, and shining inside as though inlaid with opalescent enamel.
It was extraordinary how clear his mind was as he crept forward, the lower branches of the hornbeam switching the back of his head. He even stopped, for the flicker of a second, to lift up the bent stalk of a minute saxifrage which his hand, as if it had been the paw of an animal, had brushed heavily aside. As far as the sensations of that little cluster of pale green petals were concerned he might have been a love-crazed dinosaur, advancing to interrupt the pleasures of a brother dinosaur. A blind weight, a crushing bruise, and then a great mysterious uplifting! That was all that the saxifrage felt. How could it know that this miraculous uplifting was the result, achieved at a moment when the rest of the man was demented, of the existence of a pitifulness in human nature that was older than its earliest appearance in Antiger Great Wood?
There was a single moment, just before he saw them there in that sunlit glade, when a half-forgotten memory of some childish game with his brother in that very place became a living portion of the olive-green screen before him, a living film of affection, which had to be torn apart by a conscious movement of his will before he leapt out upon them.
But he lifted his head now, very gently, rising up on his knees; and what he saw, as he rose, seemed by its own power, independently of his will, to break that filmy screen of ancient association. Standing locked together in one another’s arms, in the very centre of Titty’s Ring, the long grass in the sunlight showing green as seaweed about their feet, Nell barely touching the ground upon which Lexie’s heels were so masterfully planted, the two figures were swaying to and fro in an ecstasy of amorous enchantment. He rose upright, flung aside the last intervening branch of the hornbeam, and rushed out upon them.
His first impulse was to strike them both down. The accumulated irritations of many months would have been behind that blow; and behind it, too, would have been a deep, subterranean, occult jealousy of Lexie; not merely the immediate jealousy over Nell but a much more subtle thing: a jealousy of Lexie’s sagacity and—who knows?—even of the mysterious advantage in these things that his very illness gave him! And mentally speaking, the blow was given. Rook had the feeling of giving it. He had the relief, the exhaustion, the relaxation of having given it. And yet in the course of his rush toward them, and of his approach till he’ stopped in front of them, he never so much as raised his hand.
Lexie was the one whose head was turned toward him and he at once loosened his hold upon the girl, who sank down upon the grass. Whiter than any human being had ever seen it was the younger Ashover’s Claudian countenance as he moved forward a step or two, putting himself between his brother and the girl upon the ground. As for Nell, she gave one startled cry, stared at the intruder as if he had been a complete stranger, and then covered her face with her two hands.
“So this is it, is it?” said Rook hoarsely, confronting them with a look so menacing that Lexie made a little nervous deprecatory movement.
“Rook—I’m ashamed of you—to follow us like this—to frighten Nell like this—— What’s up now? What’s the matter with you? Nell and I have a perfect right to come out together if we want to on a fine August afternoon!”
His voice took on the old familiar tone of semi-badinage as he said this, and the colour began to come back to his face.
“So this is it!” repeated Rook, staring wildly at Nell who had now removed her hands from her face and was answering his look with a steady scrutinizing gaze that became more and more full of complicated significance.
“So this is how you have decided to treat me,” he went on, throwing down both stick and cap upon the grass and rubbing his forehead as if to obliterate some evil dream. “It’s the sort of thing one expects from Lexie,” he continued bitterly; “but I’d fooled myself into thinking that you were different from the rest of them, Nell.”
The younger Ashover began at this moment to display unmistakable signs of his malady. A quick spasm crossed his features; his mouth quivered; a convulsive tremor ran through him. “Sit down!” said Rook in a commanding tone. “No, you’re perfectly right. I ought not to have come. But you needn’t be afraid, you two; I won’t interrupt your excursions a second time. Sit down, Lexie, can’t you?”
His brother obeyed him and sinking on the ground by Nell’s side hugged his knees with his arms.
“I thought you meant fisticuffs just now, Rook,” he said, smiling. “What would you have done”—and he turned his head toward the young girl—“if Rook and I had started butting at each other like two roaring bulls? God! I’m glad you didn’t go for me with that oak stick of yours, Rook. It looks like the very father of cudgels! Sit down yourself, for the Lord’s sake; and don’t stand on one leg any more.”
But Rook did not change from his dazed, fixed stare at Nell. It was as if he had been some infuriated but puzzled savage, whose spirit was slowly being sapped by the power of a civilized eye.
“I’m sorry, Nell,” he blurted out at last. “I’m very sorry I followed you.”
But the girl rose quietly to her feet. “I think I’ll walk home by myself,” she said. “I’ve had enough of the Ashover family for one afternoon!”
Her tenuous sarcasm, obvious and simple though it was, carried a weight out of all proportion to its justification, by reason of its incongruity upon the lips that uttered it. Lexie made a grimace; and searching about in his pocket for what he wanted lit a cigarette with shaky fingers.
But Rook’s face darkened into an angry frown. “You won’t leave this spot, Nell,” he said fiercely, “till you and I have come to an understanding!”
She made no answer to this challenge; but tossing her head and giving him one quick reproachful look she walked off toward the hornbeam path.
Both the brothers saw her forcing her way through the branch-covered aperture with swift impatient movements of her thin bare arms.
When she was out of sight Rook made a hesitating movement to follow her.
“Stop, you fool, stop!”
The affectionate roughness in Lexie’s tone did more than all his whimsicalities to soothe away the elder brother’s dangerous mood. Curiously enough, too, the mere fact that he had seen the worst, or what he convinced himself was the worst, of that amorous encounter, drew out the sharpest sting of his jealousy. And the girl had gone. Lexie and she were no longer together. And in her going she had reserved her indignation, her hurt pride, her revolt, her sense of shame, entirely for him; her mute reproaches entirely for him; her revenge entirely for him. That “I’ve had enough of you Ashovers” was a barbed dart that she must have known he would be the one to smart under! Lexie would not care. Lexie enjoyed a certain humorous gregariousness in his amours. “Enough of the Ashovers” was a hit at the elder of the Ashovers; and in these cases the one whom the woman wants to hurt the most is the one she loves the best!
So he argued with himself, applying the balm of convoluted reasoning to the wound he had received; a wound that all the while was healing from another cause … from the relief of a blow that had only been delivered on the astral plane! Restrained from following the girl by all these concerted withholdings, Rook himself sank down now on the grass of Titty’s Ring by the side of his brother and accepted from his fingers a cigarette of peace.
“Think of all the hands through which this little white tube has passed,” said Lexie, with a relaxed sententiousness, “only that it may burn itself out into thin air, between two quarrelling men, in the heart of a Dorset wood!”
He pulled out his little box as he spoke and swallowed a couple of the lozenge-shaped tablets. Rook was conscious of a faint sardonic malice as he let his own finger and thumb toy with the companion box in his waistcoat pocket.
They subsided into gloomy silence while the wood murmurs aroun
d them became a sighing echo of the great forward-rushing flood of Time, swallowing everything up.
“By the way, Lexie,” Rook said after a pause, “doesn’t it seem as if it were carrying things a trifle far, for us both to be making love so openly to the wife of the village priest? Hastings, of course, is too lost in his book to care what his girl does; but I did get a hint from Twiney just now that the village had begun to talk.”
Lexie looked at him with narrowed, screwed-up eyelids. Rook got a faint impression of something approaching a lewd wink; but Lexie’s eyes had so many natural wrinkles around them that he may have been deceived.
“I notice,” said the younger Ashover, “that it isn’t until your particular star is suffering a momentary eclipse that this matter of propriety comes to the front. Good Lord! if we’re to begin considering the feelings of the village we might as well give up having any pleasure at all. At least I might, who haven’t been blessed with a mistress like Netta or a wife like Ann! Why! Do you realize that I haven’t had any dalliance with any wench at all since those days when we used to go to Tollminster together?” His voice became high-pitched and even querulous. “I tell you it would be monstrous if I should go down to my grave without having known any pleasure!”
He fell into a fit of bottomless gloom from which his voice emerged again like the sound of a bumble-bee in a great foxglove bell.
“I adore them all!” he muttered. “I adore them all!”
Rook watched him with sympathy; but a mysterious meanness in himself at which he was both surprised and ashamed made the difference of their luck in this particular case not altogether disagreeable to his inmost mind. A very queer sort of vicious irritable malice, akin to the malice with which one regards the struggles of a mob at the ticket office of a theatre, took possession of him as he looked at Lexie’s agitated face. He felt for one second as if it would give him a wicked delight to crowd Titty’s Ring with the forms of sleeping mænads; and then, immediately afterward, to obliterate them with a wave of his hand!
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