His thoughts were interrupted by an unexpected remark from his brother.
“Nell is quite certain now,” said Lexie gravely, “that Hastings does know where Netta is. She got it out of him last night that he knows. She told me to tell you.”
The whole face of the surrounding scene changed in a moment for Rook Ashover. He rose and pulled his brother up by his hands.
“Damn the man!” he cried fiercely. “I thought there was something of that kind. Come on; let me get you down to the cart. Twiney’s been waiting long enough.” He took Lexie by the arm and held the hornbeam branches back while he passed through.
The sound of their footsteps, the rustling of leaves and cracking of twigs died away in the distance. The light wind lifted the grasses of Titty’s Ring with an undulating airy softness that was neither melancholy nor cheerful, a remote softness that did not correspond with any emotions known to the human race.
Clouds of wavering gnats rose and fell, veered and drifted, across that sunlit space; and in their movements there was a sort of rhythm as if they were obeying some unseen fairy orchestration.
The two spotted green snakes, secure now of any interruption, came forth side by side. They might have been drawing the beechnut chariot of Titania herself; so carefully did they advance, every now and then lifting their purple-stained heads and darting out their tiny forked tongues. No other living thing appeared. Sunlight and shadow lay peacefully side by side; and silence fell upon silence like water upon water.
But nothing that stirs the magnetic currents between human beings, those waves of emotion that are like invisible harp strings and are so cruelly jarred, can be altogether lost in the atmosphere where it was begotten.
Something remains, some faint disturbance, some ghostly ripple, in that particular air, of which minds that are sensitive to such vibrations must for ever afterward be conscious.
Limned in that enclosure between woodland and woodland, some shadowy residue, some tenuous adumbration of those three human forms would thenceforth tremble there on the verge of visibility.
Long afterward when those three persons were dead and buried, the eidolons of what had happened to them in that agitated moment would be ready to resume their shape.
The rains might disfigure that spot and the storms dismantle it. Titania’s snakes might reach their appointed sum of years and cast no more skins. It still would remain as an evidence of the potency of human passion that something in the quality of that place would never again be quite as it was before. Less palpable than any revenant of definite shape, these airy essences would only touch the nerves of such as were responsive enough to feel them. But as long as Titania’s Ring did not lose altogether the character it held then there would be that upon its air that would not pass with the passing of any summer.
CHAPTER XXII
ALL through the rest of that hot August, night alter night in the small book-littered room at Toll-Pike Cottage, Rook wrestled with William Hastings over the matter of Netta’s address. The priest did not deny, on the contrary he quite openly admitted, that he knew where she was; but weeks passed and nothing that Rook could say or do was able to shake his obstinate resolution.
“I promised Miss Page not to betray her and I won’t betray her.”
They gradually became occasions of a curious and complicated perversity, these recurrent and prolonged conversations in that stuffy little room. Nell did not by any means always absent herself from the arguments between the two men; and her presence, when she joined them, added its own troubled implication to the increasing morbidity of these strange encounters.
In her reaction against both Rook and Lexie after that incident in Titty’s Ring she had drawn insensibly closer to her husband. What had gone on in the depths of that entangled system of nervous susceptibilities which her slight frame enclosed would have required the elucidation of a book far nearer to the mysteries of life than that sinister manuscript in her husband’s bureau now so seldom looked upon!
Her romantic devotion to Rook, already removed from the turmoil of her disturbed senses, sublimated itself during these hot August weeks into a passionate longing to do something, to do anything, to restore his peace of mind. She had begun to believe that if only she could bring Netta into his life again, that restless fever that seemed eating out his soul would be allayed and quieted.
Her unsatisfied craving for love, roused and irritated by days and days of feebler and feebler resistance to Lexie’s ardour, turned now, in her reaction from her yielding mood of that one unfortunate afternoon, into a less fastidious and more complying attitude toward her legal companion.
Hastings himself began to be vaguely aware of unsuspected depths of perversity in his own feelings, especially in regard to his contest with Rook. He found himself deriving a vicious triumph from drawing out to further and further lengths the protracted struggle between them and he was even tempted sometimes to pretend to be weakening in his resistance in order that his opponent should not lose hope and retire in anger and disgust.
But if there were unsounded levels of morbidity in his desire that their strange duel should not end too quickly, there were still more furtive depths in his attitude to Rook and Nell when he had them together under his eye. He did not hesitate at these times to make the very utmost of the newly established relations between himself and his young wife, playing unscrupulously upon Nell’s desperate desire that he should reveal his treasured secret and exploiting her touching attempts to persuade him.
Nell had not the remotest inkling of all that was going on in his mind. She herself, with a young girl’s erotic egoism, was living just then in a sort of lingered-out trance of dreamy self-effacement. Had she known what ambiguous motives were mingling with his refusal to yield up Netta’s secret she would have shrunk from his caresses as from those of a hooded snake. But her indignant disgust, as in so many similar cases, would not have been altogether just or fair. Hastings had, until that eventful summer, lived so completely in his metaphysical thoughts that he might be said to have had no normal human life at all; and now when, for the first time under the biting whip of jealousy, his natural self-assertion rose up and demanded satisfaction, it was only to find that this long-starved, long-delayed burgeoning was afflicted at the very root.
Against the corrosive poison of the humiliation he endured from the mere sight of Rook and Nell together his wounded vanity turned and turned upon itself, like an animal that turns against its own flesh; and by a strange obscure law, working in that dark inner world, he found his account in lacerating his own deep hurt still further; because, in so doing, he dragged the others down with him in a morbid complicity of shame.
As August drew to a close and the ninth month of Lady Ann’s pregnancy approached, Rook felt himself becoming more and more of a lean, lifeless, motiveless shadow of the man he had formerly been. The preparations for his son’s birth—for no one seemed for a moment to doubt the sex of the newcomer—caused him nothing but irritation. It was as though, as the infant came nearer and nearer to birth, it drew to itself every magnetic current of vitality that stirred in the air about it. The atmosphere of Ashover House seemed to exist for no other purpose than for nourishing this insatiable intruder; and Rook went to and fro among his people with a sense of seeing his most cherished fancies and illusions reduced to insignificant wind-wafted straws blown up and down the steps of the Capitolium in the path of a young Cæsar!
There were moments when that strange hallucination of the rider on the gray horse who had overtaken him on the road to Comber’s End returned with a dim rebuking gesture at the excess of his pusillanimity; but for the most part he found himself shrinking away from the flushed triumphant languor of Lady Ann, from the nervous excitement of Mrs. Ashover, from the gloating whispers and glances of Pandie and Mrs. Vabbin.
It was indeed with the feeling of an escape from something that had grown well-nigh unbearable that he kept returning, every few days, to his attacks upon the secretive malignit
y of Mr. Hastings. To his conscious mind it was always of Netta that he thought; but in reality the mere neighbourhood of Nell’s devotion, the mere propinquity of that supple youthful body and those clinging idealizing glances, was something that restored him to his lost place in the centre of his universe, something that transformed him back, from a negligible courtier mannikin in the train of his offspring, to an authentic protagonist in his own life tragedy, dealing with existence on equal terms!
The last day of August came and went; and with its departure the weather showed signs of changing. Gusty westerly winds, blowing up from the Bristol Channel across Sedgemoor and Blackmore, began troubling the sun-bleached trees and moaning disconsolately through the deserted stubble fields.
Rook had begun to grow conscious that he was playing no very dignified part in this psychological chess game. He felt certain uneasy misgivings as to whether his determination to drag the secret at all costs out of the husband had resulted in anything more palpable than the distraction of his own troubled nerves by the society of the wife.
There came over him, too, as he began to recognize that Hastings had an obstinacy in him that no importunity and no persuasion could influence, an ugly and unpleasant sense of having been entangled in some equivocal spiritual orgy that was exercising a drug-like and sinister effect upon all three of them.
He felt ashamed that he had permitted this Toll-Pike obsession, whatever its nature might be, to interfere with the frequency of his visits to Lexie. Lexie had not been so well after that Titty’s Ring excursion; and though whenever he and his brother did meet it was quite on the old unassailable footing, the younger Ashover could not help being conscious that the only permanent effect of the summer jaunts which he had found so sweet was to throw his timid companion back more unhesitatingly into the arms of her husband, more absorbingly into her platonic passion for Rook.
If Lexie could have pierced with his sagacious weather eye the mile or so of gusty autumn-smelling air and the few inches of brick and mortar which separated his candle-lit chamber from these nocturnal encounters at Toll-Pike Cottage, he would have made more than his usual grimace of disgust at the neurotic tricks of the human mind. It would have seemed to him that the very atmosphere of that room of Hastings’s was penetrated with unnatural suppressions. He would have denounced every one of its three occupants as being engaged in spinning out, like so many demented silkworms, a thick unhealthy cocoon of meretricious emotion. He would have cast upon his brother one of those looks of indignant moral contempt such as a shrewd horse-dealer turns upon a showy but short-winded nag. And if he could have appeared before the three of them with an appropriate protest upon his tongue, it would have referred to the superiority of the most gross and the most unsophisticated bawdiness over this super-subtle mental dissipation!
As one rain-swept day followed another over the roofs of that Frome-side village the sense of expectancy, in the minds of all the persons with whom we are concerned, grew steadily heavier and heavier; until it became something that could hardly be borne.
This expectant mood, with the burden of gathering fate pressing upon it, is a natural enough phenomenon in all cases of child-birth. In this case, however, it went further. It affected Marsh Alley and Toll-Pike as well as Ashover House. It entered the innocent domicile of Mr. Pod. It sat down like a veiled figure upon the lintel of Mr. Twiney. It even seemed to visit the stable of the long-necked mare; so ominous and plaintive were the whinnyings that proceeded from that square window abutting on the village street.
More than ten days of these September gusts had passed; when, one stormy night, Nell Hastings found herself suddenly and unaccountably wide awake in her bed. There was a waning half-moon observable through her window which kept throwing a pallid stream of light across her husband’s sleeping head, before it was swallowed up once more by swift-travelling clouds.
The girl felt impelled to prop herself up on her elbows and stare out upon that patch of troubled changing sky. She had that uncomfortable sense of vast world-wide impending catastrophe which often comes to people, when, at some moment usually associated with oblivion, they catch the face of the world off-guard, so to speak, and in unsuspecting disarray.
She glanced over her shoulder at Hastings’s face. Was it some movement, some muttering of his, that had roused her into this unnatural wakefulness? She looked at his watch on the little table beside them. It pointed to half-past two; just that particular hour of the night which Rook always maintained was associated with the lowest ebb of vitality in mortal pulses; the hour when ships sank, when wild geese failed in their flight, when old trees and old men turned cold, and when animals and children were stillborn.
Ah! It must have been Hastings who had disturbed her; for he was beginning to talk in his sleep now.
His words were broken and incoherent; fragments, it might well have seemed, and wind-tossed straws, of that troubled substance, the whole compact rondure of which seemed to be bearing them gustily through space, buffeted up—down—here—there—by winds that had no mercy and no purpose.
All at once she bent down above him and listened with every sense in her body; listened with the beatings of her heart above all; and with a cold tension of her muscles.
“I’ll see you dead before I’ll tell you!”
Her brain became one petrified conch of listening. It became a brittle shell through which some mysterious sound was destined to pass which it found almost unbearable.
But she had to bear it; and it did not fail to come in that commonplace, realistic, matter-of-fact manner characteristic of all true oracles.
“Thirteen Walpole Street” came the words from the sleeping man. “Walpole Street.” And then there followed more incoherent mutterings and once again that ferocious sentence the words of which seemed to glow with a smouldering lava-like fury. “I’ll see you dead before I’ll tell you!”
He rambled on a little further after that; but his words carried no more significance to her ear than does the wash of the tide upon the pier-posts of a ferry when the traveller has once stepped ashore. She sank down again by his side in that wind-tossed half-moonlight and lay staring at the little squares of the window.
As so often happens with momentous human decisions, such as carry in their train drastic issues and devastating results, the first knowledge she had herself of the thing she was going to do seemed in some curious way to precede and antedate all the motives that subsequently accounted for it.
It was as if she were making a discovery in the mind of another person, the definite discovery, in fact, that this other person had decided, for reasons absolutely hidden from everyone, to bring Netta Page back to Ashover!
What she really discovered, as she stared at those window squares, was that she herself had irrevocably decided to bring Netta back; but this decision—based upon nothing that could be accounted for by any rational argument—required every kind of rational argument to support it and make it plausible!
What she felt within herself as she considered her plan—this plan that she suddenly discovered to be already existing—was that, now she knew Netta’s address, it would be impossible to hide it from Rook; and if Rook knew it he would take the next train for London. It seemed so much better for Netta to be the one to make the journey. If Rook went off in his present mood, God knows when he would come back. And obviously he would go. She knew him well enough to know that for an absolute certainty. Well, then, if she didn’t want to think of him breaking away from everyone and staying on blindly with Netta in London, the only thing to do was to bring Netta to him.
She had begun to feel an unmitigated reaction against the morbid entanglement into which the existence of that secret had brought the three of them. She hated to think of her husband in that particular light. She hated to think of his having that advantage over Rook. To bring Netta herself upon the scene was to clear the air in every direction. She did feel a moment’s qualm at the thought of doing it when Ann’s child was so near birth.
But Ann had never been considerate of her feelings or indeed of any one’s. Ann had always struck out remorselessly for her own hand! So drastically had she done so that it seemed a kind of Quixotism to consider Ann in the matter at all. The person to be considered was Rook and as far as Rook was concerned, now that she knew where Netta was, there seemed to be only two conceivable alternatives: either to give him the address without comment, which would mean his going off pell-mell to London, to return God knew when; or to wire Netta straight away and send her the money to make the journey herself!
As to what would happen later on, as to what permanent arrangements Rook might wish to make, or Netta might be prepared to make, that must be left to the future to decide. She and William would have done their part, as soon as Netta and Rook had been brought together again! Her own desire was simply to reinstate her husband’s dignity in Rook’s eyes, and Rook’s dignity in her husband’s eyes; and to break up the unhealthy and sinister duel between them which had converted that August into one of the most morbid epochs in her life.
Of any deliberate revenge upon Lady Ann her mind was quite unconscious. She just ruled Lady Ann out of court as a person who could be trusted to strike out for herself, whatever happened. She had not forgotten the intrusion into her dining room, or the exposure of the plate with the three pansies beside it. That incident had made a dent upon her mind which the intervening months had not obliterated, but it played no part in what she felt now. The waves of thought that kept overleaping one another in her small oval-shaped head as she stared at the square panes, at the racing yellow-tinged clouds, at the formless moon, were almost all generous and romantic.
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