Chapter III: Part 3

While this outburst proceeded Mr. Stork fidgeted uneasily in his chair. Though sufficiently accustomed to Sorio’s eccentricities and well aware of his medical friend’s profound pathological interest in all rare types, there was something so outrageous about this particular tirade that it offended what was a very dominant instinct in him, his sense, namely, of social decency and good breeding. Possibly in a measure because of the “bar sinister” over his own origin, but much more because of the nicety of his æsthetic taste, anything approaching a social fiasco or _faux pas_ always annoyed him excessively. Fortunately, however, on this occasion nothing could have surpassed the sweetness with which Adrian’s wild phrases were received by the person addressed.

“One would think you’d drunk half the punch already, Sorio,” Baltazar murmured at last. “What’s come over you to-night? I don’t think I’ve ever known you quite like this.”

“Remind me to tell you something, Mr. Sorio, when you’ve finished what you have to say,” remarked Dr. Raughty.

“Listen, you two!” Adrian began again, sitting erect, his hands on the arms of his chair. “There’s a reason for this feeling of mine that there’s something fatal on the wind to-night. There’s a reason for it.”

“Tell us as near as you can,” said Dr. Raughty, “what exactly it is that you’re talking about.”

Adrian fixed upon him a gloomy, puzzled frown.

“Do you suppose,” he said slowly, “that it’s for nothing that we three are together here in hearing of that--”

Baltazar interrupted him. “Don’t say ‘shish, shish, shish’ again, my dear. Your particular way of imitating the Great Deep gives me no pleasure.”

“What I meant was,” Sorio raised his voice, “it’s a strange thing that we three should be sitting together now like this when two months ago I was in prison in New York.”

Baltazar made a little deprecatory gesture, while the Doctor leaned forward with grave interest.

“But that’s nothing,” Sorio went on, “that’s a trifle. Baltazar knows all about that. The thing I want you two to recognise is that something’s on the wind,--that something’s on the point of happening. Do you feel like that--or don’t you?”

There was a long and rather oppressive silence, broken only by the continuous murmur which in every house in Rodmoor was the background of all conversation.

“What I was going to say a moment ago,” remarked the Doctor at last, “was that in this place it’s necessary to protect oneself from _that_.” He jerked his thumb towards the window. “Our friend Tassar does it by the help of Flambard over there.” He indicated the Venetian. “I do it by the help of my medicine-chest. Hamish Traherne does it by saying his prayers. What I should like to know is how _you_,” he stretched a warning finger in the direction of Sorio, “propose to do it.”

Baltazar at this point jumped up from his seat.

“Oh, shut up, Fingal,” he cried peevishly. “You’ll make Adrian unendurable. I’m perfectly sick of hearing references to this absurd salt-water. Other people have to live in coast towns besides ourselves. Why can’t you let the thing take its proper position? Why can’t you take it for granted? The whole subject gets on my nerves. It bores me, I tell you, it bores me to tears. For Heaven’s sake, let’s talk of something else--of any damned thing. You both make me thoroughly wretched with your sea whispers. It’s as bad as having to spend an evening at Oakguard alone with Aunt Helen and Philippa.”

His peevishness had an instantaneous effect upon Sorio who pushed him affectionately back into his chair and handed him his glass. “So sorry, Tassar,” he said. “I won’t do it again. I _was_ beginning to feel a little odd to-night. One can’t go through the experience of cerebral dementia--doesn’t that sound right, Doctor?--without some little trifling after-effects. Come, let’s be sensible and talk of things that are really important. It’s not an occasion to be missed, is it, Tassar, having the Doctor here and punch made with brandy instead of rum, on the table? What interests me so much just now,” he placed himself in front of the fireplace and sighed heavily, “is what a person’s to do who hasn’t got a penny and is unfit for every sort of occupation. What do you advise, Doctor? And by the way, why have you eaten up all the macaroons while I was talking?”

This remark really did seem a little to embarrass the person indicated, but Sorio continued without waiting for a reply.

“Yes, I suppose you’re right, Tassar. It’s a mistake to be sensitive to the attraction of young girls. But it’s difficult--isn’t it, Doctor?--not to be. They’re so maddeningly delicious, aren’t they, when you come to think of it? It’s something about the way their heads turn--the line from the throat, you know--and about the way they speak--something pathetic, something--what shall I call it?--helpless. It quite disarms a person. It’s more than pathetic, it’s tragic.”

The Doctor looked at him meditatively. “I think there’s a poem of Goethe’s which would bear that out,” he remarked, “if I’m not mistaken it was written after he visited Sicily--yes, after that storm at sea, you remember, when the story of Christ’s walking on the waves came into his mind.”

Sorio wrinkled up his eyes and peered at the speaker with a sort of humorous malignity.

“Doctor,” he said, “pardon my telling you, but you’ve still got some crumbs on your moustache.”

“The one word,” put in their host, while Dr. Raughty moved very hastily away from the table and surveyed himself with a whimsical puckering of all the lines in his face, at one of Stork’s numerous mirrors, “the one word that I shall henceforth refuse to have pronounced in my house is the word ‘sea.’ I’m surprised to hear that Goethe--a man of classical taste--ever refers to such Gothic abominations.”

“Ah!” cried Sorio, “the great Goethe! The sly old curmudgeon Goethe! He knew how to deal with these little velvet paws!”

Dr. Raughty, reseating himself, drummed absent-mindedly with his fingers upon the empty macaroon plate. Then with a soft and pensive sigh he produced his tobacco pouch, and filling his pipe, struck a match.

“Doctor,” murmured Sorio, his rebellious lips curved into a sardonic smile and his eyes screwed up till they looked as sinister as those of his namesake, Hadrian, “why do you move your head backwards and forwards like that, when you light your pipe?”

“Don’t answer him, Fingal,” expostulated Baltazar, “he’s behaving badly now. He’s ‘showing off’ as they say of children.”

“I’m not showing off,” cried Sorio loudly, “I’m asking the Doctor a perfectly polite question. It’s very interesting the way he lights his pipe. There’s more in it than appears. There’s a great deal in it. It’s a secret of the Doctor’s; probably a pantheistic one.”

“What on earth do you mean by a ‘pantheistic’ one? How, under Heaven, can the way Fingal holds a match be termed ‘pantheistic’?” protested Stork irritably. “You’re really going a little too far, Adriano mio.”

“Not at all, not at all,” argued Sorio, stretching out his long, lean arms and grasping the back of a chair. “The Doctor can deny it or not, as he pleases, but what I say is perfectly true. He gets a cosmic ecstasy from moving his head up and down like that. He feels as if he were the centre of the universe when he does it.”

The Doctor looked sideways and then upon the ground. Sorio’s rudeness evidently disconcerted him.

“I think,” he said, rising from his chair and putting down his glass, “I must be going now. I’ve an early call to make to-morrow morning.”

Baltazar cast a reproachful look at Adrian and rose too. They went into the hall together and the same shufflings and heavy breathings came to the ears of the listener as on Raughty’s arrival. The Doctor was putting on his goloshes and gaiters.

Adrian went out to see him off and, as if to make up for his bad behaviour, walked with him across the green, to his house in the main street. They parted at last, the best of good friends, but Sorio found Baltazar seriously provoked when he returned.

“Why did you treat him like that?” the latter persisted. “You’ve got no grudge against him, have you? It was just your silly fashion of getting even with things in general, eh? Your nice little habit of venting your bad temper on the most harmless person within reach?”

Sorio stared blankly at his friend. It was unusual for Mr. Stork to express himself so strongly.

“I’m sorry, my dear, very sorry,” muttered the accused man, looking remorsefully at the Doctor’s empty glass and plate.

“You may well be,” rejoined the other. “The one thing I can’t stand is this sort of social lapse. It’s unpardonable--unpardonable! Besides, it’s childish. Hit out by all means when there’s reason for it or you’re dealing with some scurvy dog who needs suppressing but to make a sensitive person like Fingal uncomfortable, out of a pure spirit of bullying--it’s damnable!”

“I’m sorry, Tassar,” repeated the other meekly. “I can’t think why I did it. He’s certainly a charming person. I’ll make up to him, my dear. I’ll be gentle as a lamb when I see him next.”

Baltazar smiled and made a humorous and hopeless gesture with his hands. “We shall see,” he said, “we shall see.”

He locked the door and lit a couple of candles with ritualistic deliberation. “Turn out the lamp, amico mio, and let us sleep on all this. The best way of choosing between two loves is to say one’s prayers and go to bed. These things decide themselves in dreams.”

“In dreams,” repeated the other, submissively following him upstairs, “in dreams. But I wish I knew why the Doctor’s ankles look so thick when he sits down. He must wear extraordinary under-clothes.”

VI

BRIDGE-HEAD AND WITHY-BED

Philippa Renshaw’s light-spoken words about Linda recurred more than once to the mind of the master of Oakguard as April gave place to May and May itself began to slip by. The wet fields and stunted woods of Rodmoor seemed at that time to be making a conscious and almost human effort to throw off the repressive influence of the sea and to respond to the kindlier weather. The grasses began to grow high and feathery by the road-side, and in the water-meadows, buttercups superseded marigolds.

As he went to and fro between his house and his office in Mundham, Brand--though he made as yet no attempt to see her--became more and more preoccupied with the _idea_ of the young girl. That terror of the sea in the little unknown touched, as his sister well knew it would, something strangely deep-rooted in his nature. His ancestors had lived so long in this place that there had come to exist between the man’s inmost being and the voracious tides which year by year devoured the land he owned, an obstinate reciprocity of mood and feeling. That a young and fragile intruder should have this morbid fear of the very element which half-consciously he assimilated to himself, gave him a subtle and sullen exultation. The thing promised to become a sort of perverted link between them, and he pleased himself by fancying, even while, in fear of disillusionment, he kept putting off their encounter, that the girl herself could not be quite free of some sort of premonition of what awaited her.

Thus it happened that Philippa Renshaw’s stroke in her own defence worked precisely as she had anticipated. Brooding, in his slow tenacious way, as the weeks went by, upon this singular projection of his imagination, he let his sister do what she chose, feeling assured that in her pride of race, she would not seriously commit herself with a nameless foreigner, and promising himself to end the business with a drastic hand as soon as it suited him to do so.

It was about the middle of May when an event took place which gave the affair a decisive and fatal impulse. This was a chance encounter, upon the bridge crossing the Loon, between Brand and Rachel Doorm. He would have passed her even then without recognition, but she stopped him and held out her hand.

“Don’t you remember me, Mr. Renshaw?” she said.

He removed his hat, displaying his closely cropped reddish head with its abnormal upward slope, and regarded her smilingly.

“You’ve changed, Miss Rachel,” he remarked, “but your voice is the same. They told me you were here. I knew we should meet sooner or later.”

“Put on your hat, Mr. Renshaw,” she said, seating herself on a little stone bench below the parapet and making room for him at her side. “I knew, too, that we should meet. It’s a long time from those days--isn’t it?--a long time, and a dark one for some of us. Do you remember when you were a child, how you asked me once why they called this place the New Bridge, when it’s obviously so very old? Do you remember that, Mr. Renshaw?”

He looked at her curiously, screwing up his eyes and wrinkling his forehead. “My mother told me you’d come back,” he muttered. “She was always fond of you. She used to hope--well, you know what I mean.”

“That I’d marry Captain Herrick?” Miss Doorm threw in. “Don’t be afraid to say it. The dead can’t hear us and except the dead, there’s none who cares. Yes, she hoped that, and schemed for it, too, dear soul. But it was not to be, Mr. Renshaw. Ellie Story was prettier. Ellie Story was cleverer. And so it happened. The bitter thing was that he swore an oath to Mary before she died, swore it on the head of my darling Nance, that if he did ever marry again, I should be the one. Mary died thinking that certain. Anything else would have hurt her to the heart. I know that well enough; for she and I, Mr. Renshaw, as your mother could tell you, were more than sisters.”

“I thought you and Linda’s mother were friends, too,” observed Brand, looking with a certain dreamy absorption up the straight white road that led to the Doorm house. The mental fantasies the man had woven round the name he now uttered for the first time in his life had so vivid a meaning for him that he let pass unnoticed the spasm of vindictiveness that convulsed his companion’s face.

Rachel Doorm folded her arms across her lean bosom and flung back her head.

“Ellie was _afraid_ of me, Mr. Renshaw,” she pronounced huskily, and then, looking at him sharply: “Yes,” she said, “Mrs. Herrick and I were excellent friends, and so are Linda and I. She’s a soft, nervous, impressionable little thing--our dear Linda--and very pretty, too, in her own way--don’t you think so, Mr. Renshaw?”

It was the man’s turn now to suffer a change of countenance. “Pretty?” he laughed. “I’m sure I don’t know. I’ve never seen her!”

Rachel clasped her hands tightly on the lap of her black dress and fixed her eyes upon him. “You’d like to see her, wouldn’t you?” she murmured eagerly. He answered her look, and a long, indescribable passage of unspoken thoughts flickered, wavered and took shape between them.

“I’ve seen Nance--in the distance--with my mother,” he remarked, letting his glance wander to the opposite parapet and away beyond it where the swallows were skimming, “but I’ve never yet spoken to either of the girls. I keep to myself a good deal, as every one about here knows, Miss Rachel.”

Rachel Doorm rose abruptly to her feet with such unexpected suddenness that the man started as if from a blow.

“Your sister,” she jerked out with concentrated vehemence, “is doing my Nance a deadly injury. She’s given her heart--sweet darling--absolutely and without stint to that foreigner down there.” She waved her hand towards the village. “And if Miss Renshaw doesn’t let him go, there’ll be a tragedy.”

Brand looked at her searchingly, his lips trembling with a smile of complicated significance.

“Do make her let him go!” the woman repeated, advancing as if she were ready to clasp his hand; “you can if you like. You always could. If she takes him away, my darling’s heart will be broken. Mr. Renshaw--please--for the sake of old days, for the sake of old friends, do this for me, and make her give him up!”

He drew back a little, the same subtle and ambiguous smile on his lips. “No promises, Miss Rachel,” he said, “no promises! I never promise any one anything. But we shall see; we shall see. There’s plenty of time. I’m keeping my eye on Philippa; you may be sure of that.”

He held out his hand as he spoke to the agitated woman. She took it in both of her own and quick as a flash raised it to her lips.

“I knew I should meet you, Mr. Renshaw,” she said, turning away from him, “and you see it has happened! I won’t ask why you didn’t come to me before. I haven’t asked _that_ yet--have I?--and I won’t ever ask it. We’ve met at last; that’s the great thing. That’s the only thing. Now we’ll see what’ll come of it all.”

They separated, and Brand proceeded to cross the Bridge. He had hardly done so when he heard her voice calling upon him to stop. He turned impatiently.

“When you were a little boy, Mr. Renshaw,”--her words came in panting gasps--“you said once, down by the sea, that Rachel was the only person in the world who really loved you. Your mother heard you say it and looked--you know how she looks! You used always to call me ‘Cousin’ then. Far back, they say, the Renshaws and the Doorms _were_ cousins. But you didn’t know that. It was just your childish fancy. ‘Cousin Rachel,’ you said once--just like that--‘come and take me away from them.’”

Brand acquiesced in all this with an air of strained politeness. But his face changed when he heard her final words. “Listen,” she said, “I’ve talked to Linda about you. She’s got the idea of you in her mind.”

At the very moment when this encounter at the New Bridge ended--which was about six in the afternoon--Nance Herrick was walking with a beating heart to a promised assignation with Sorio. This was to take place at the southern corner of a little withy-bed situated about half a mile from Dyke House in the direction of Mundham. It was Nance’s own wish that her lover--if he could still be called so--should meet her here rather than in the house. She had discovered the spot herself and had grown fond of it. Sheltered from the wind by the clump of low-growing willows, and cut off by the line of the banked-up tow-path from the melancholy horizon of fens, the girl had got into the habit of taking refuge here as if from the pursuit of vague inimical presences. In the immediate neighbourhood of the withy-bed were several corn fields, the beginning of a long strip of arable land which divided the river from the marshes as far as Mundham.

The particular spot where she hoped to find Sorio awaiting her was a low grassy bank overshadowed by alders as well as willows, and bordered by a field of well-grown barley, a field which, though still green, showed already to an experienced eye the kind of grain which a month or so of not too malicious weather would ripen and turn to gold. Already amid the blades of the young corn could be seen the stalks and leaves of newly grown poppies, and mingled with these, also at their early stage of growth, small, indistinguishable plants that would later show themselves as corn-flowers and succory.

The neighbourhood of this barley field, with its friendly look and homely weeds, promising a revel of reassuring colour as the summer advanced, had come to be, to the agitated and troubled girl, a sort of symbol of hope. It was the one place in Rodmoor--for the Doorm garden shared the gloomy influences of the Doorm house--where she could feel something like her old enjoyment in the natural growths of the soil. Here, in the freshly sprouting corn and the friendly weeds that it protected, was the strong, unconquerable pressure of earth-life, refusing to be repressed, refusing to be thwarted, by the malign powers of wind and water.

Here, on the bank she had chosen as her retreat, little childish plants she knew by name--such as pimpernel and milkwort--were already in flower and from the alders and willows above her head sweet and consolatory odours, free from the tang of marsh mist or brackish stream, brought memories of old country excursions into places far removed from fen or sea.

She had never yet revealed this sanctuary of hers to Sorio and it was with throbbing pulses and quickened step that she approached it now, longing to associate its security with her master-feeling, and yet fearful lest, by finding her lover unkind or estranged, the place should lose its magic forever. She had dressed herself with care that afternoon, putting on--though the weather was hardly warm enough to make such airy attire quite suitable--a white print frock, covered with tiny roses. Several times in front of the mirror she had smoothed down her dress and unloosened and tied back again her shining masses of hair. She held her hat in her hand now, as she approached the spot, for he had told her once in London that he liked her better when she was bareheaded.

She had left her parasol behind, too, and as she hastened along the narrow path from the river to the withy-bed, she nervously switched the green stalks by her side with a dead stick she had unconsciously picked up.

Her print dress hung straight and tight over her softly moulded figure and her limbs, as she walked, swayed with a free and girlish grace.

Passionately, intently, she scanned the familiar outlines of the spot, hoping and yet fearing to see him. Not yet--not yet! Nothing visible yet, but the low-lying little copse and the stretch of arable land around it. She drew near. She was already within a few paces of the place. Nothing! He was not there--he had failed her!

She drew a deep breath and stood motionless, the dead stick fallen from her hand and her gloveless fingers clasping and unclasping one another mechanically.

“Oh, Adrian! Adrian!” she moaned. “You don’t care any more--not any more.”

Suddenly she heard a swish of leafy branches and a crackle of broken twigs. He was there, after all.

“Adrian!” she cried. “Is that you, Adrian?”

There was more rustling and swishing, and then with a discordant laugh he burst out from the undergrowth.

“You frightened me,” she said, looking at him with quivering lips. “Why did you hide away like that, Adrian?”

He went straight up to her, seized her fiercely in his arms and covered her mouth, her throat and neck with hot, furious kisses. This was not what Nance’s heart craved. She longed to sob out her suppressed feelings on his shoulder. She longed to be petted and caressed, gently, quietly, and with soft endearing words.

Instead of which, it seemed to her that he was seeking, as he embraced her body and clung to her flesh with his lips, to escape from his own thoughts, to suppress _her_ thoughts, to sweep them both away--away from all rational consciousness--on the brutal impulse of mere animal passion.

Her tears which were on the point of flowing, in a tide of heart-easing abandonment, were driven inwards by his violence, and in her grey eyes, if he had cared to look, he would have seen a frightened appeal--pitiful and troubled--like the wild glance of a deer harried by dogs.

His violence brought its own reaction at last and, letting her go, he flung himself panting upon the ground. She stood above him for a while, flushed and silent, smoothing down her hair with her hands and looking into his face with a puzzled frown.

“Sit down,” he gasped. “Why do you stare at me like that?”

Obediently she placed herself by his side, tucked her skirt around her ankles and let her hands fall on her lap.

“Adrian,” she said, glancing shyly at him. “Why did you kiss me like that, just now?”

He propped himself up and gazed gloomily across the barley field. “Why--did--I--kiss you?” he muttered, as if speaking in a dream.

“Yes--why, like that, just then,” she went on. “It wasn’t like you and me at all. You were rough, Adrian. You weren’t yourself. Oh, my dear, my dear! I don’t believe you care for me half as you used to!”

He beat his fists irritably on the ground and an almost vindictive look came into his eyes.

“That’s the way!” he flung out, “that’s the way I knew you’d take it. You girls want to be loved but you must be loved just thus and so. A touch too near, a word too far--and you’re all up in arms.”

Nance felt as though an ice-cold wedge had been thrust between her breasts.

“Adrian,” she cried, “how can you treat me in this way? How can you say these things to me? Have I ever stopped you kissing me? Have I ever been unresponsive to you?”

He looked away from her and began pulling up a patch of moss by its roots. “What are you annoyed about, then?” he muttered.

She sighed bitterly. Then with a strong effort to give her voice a natural tone. “I didn’t feel as though you were kissing me at all just now. I was simply a girl in your arms--any girl! It was a shame, Adrian. It hurt me. Surely, dear,”--her voice grew gentle and pleading--“you _must_ know what I mean.”

“I don’t know in the least what you mean,” he cried. “It’s some silly, absurd scruple some one’s been putting in your head. I can’t always make love to you as if we were two children, can I--two babes in the wood?”

Nance’s mouth quivered at this and she stretched out her arm towards him and then, letting it drop, fumbled with her fingers at a blade of grass. A curious line, rarely visible on her face, wrinkled her forehead and twitched a little as if it had been a nerve beneath the skin. This line had a pathos in it beyond a mere frown. It would have been well if the Italian had recalled, as he saw it, certain ancient tragic masks of his native country, but it is one of life’s persistent ironies that the tokens of monumental sorrow, which serve so nobly the purposes of art, should only excite peevish irritation when seen near at hand. Sorio did not miss that line of suffering but instead of softening him it increased his bitterness.

“You’re really not angry about my kissing you,” he said. “That’s what all you women do--you pitch upon something quite different and revenge yourself with it, when all the time you’re thinking about--God knows what!--some mad grievance of your own that has no connection with what you say!”

She leapt up at this, as if bitten by an adder and looked at him with flashing eyes.

“Adrian! You’ve no right--I’ve never given you the right--to speak to me so. Come! We’d better go back to the house. I wish--oh, how I wish--I’d never asked you to meet me here.”

She stooped to pick up her hat. “I liked it so here,” she added with a wistful catch in her voice, “but it’s all spoilt now.” Sorio did not move. He looked at her gravely.

“You’re a little fool, Nance,” he said, “absolutely a little fool. But you look extraordinarily lovely at this moment, now you’re in a fury. Come here, child, come back and sit down and let’s talk sensibly. There are other things and much more important things in the world than our ridiculous quarrels.”

The tone of his voice had its effect upon her but she did not yield at once.

“I think perhaps to-day,” she murmured, “it would be better to go back.” She continued to stand in front of him, swaying a little--an unconscious trick of hers--and smiling sadly.

“Come and sit down,” he repeated in a low voice. She obeyed him, for it was what her heart ached for, and clinging tightly to him she let her suppressed emotions have full vent. With her head pressed awkwardly against his coat she sobbed freely and without restraint.

Sorio gently buttoned up the fastening of one of her long sleeves which had come unloosed. He did this gravely and without a change of expression. That peculiar and tragic pathos which emanates from a girl’s forgetfulness of her personal appearance did not apparently cross his consciousness. Nance, as she leant against him, had a pitiable and even a grotesque air. One of her legs was thrust out from beneath her skirt. Sorio noticed that her brown shoes were a little worn and did not consort well with her white stockings. It momentarily crossed his mind that he had fancied Nancy’s ankles to be slenderer than it seemed they were.

Her sobs died away at last in long shuddering gasps which shook her whole frame. Sorio kept stroking her head, but his eyes were fixed on the distant river bank along which a heavily labouring horse was tugging at a rope. Every now and then his face contracted a little as if he were in physical pain. This was due to the fact that from the girl’s weight pressing against his knee he began to suffer from cramp. Though her sobs had died down, Nance still seemed unwilling to stir.

With one of her hands she made a tremulous movement in search of his, and he answered it by tightly gripping her fingers. While he held her thus his gaze wandered from the horse on the tow-path and fixed itself upon a large and beautifully spotted fly that was moving slowly and tentatively up a green stalk. With its long antennæ extended in front of it the fly felt its way, every now and then opening and shutting its gauzy wings.

Sorio hated the horse, hated the fly and hated himself. As for the girl who leant so heavily upon him, he felt nothing for her just then but a dull, inert patience and a kind of objective pity such as one might feel for a wounded animal. One deep, far-drawn channel of strength and hope remained open in the remote depths of his mind--associated with his inmost identity and with what in the fortress of his soul he loved to call his “secret”--and far off, at the end of this vista, visualized through clouds of complicated memories--was the image of his boy, his boy left in America, from whom, unknown even to Nance, he received letters week by week, letters that were the only thing, so it seemed to him at this moment, which gave sweetness to his life.

He had sought, in giving full scope to his attraction to Nance, to cover up and smooth over certain jagged, bleeding edges in his outraged mind, and in this, even now, as he returned the pressure of her soft fingers, he recognized that he had been successful.

It was, he knew well, only the appearance of this _other one_--this insidious “rose au regard saphique”--this furtive child of marsh and sea--who had spoilt his delight in Nance--Nance had not changed, nor indeed had he, himself. It was only the discovery of Philippa, the revelation of Philippa, which had altered everything.

With his fingers entangled in the shining hair, beneath his hand, he found himself cursing the day he had ever come to Rodmoor. And yet--as far as his “secret” went--that “fleur hypocrite” of the salt-marshes came nearer, nearer than mortal soul except Baptiste--to understanding the heart of his mystery. The sun sinking behind them, had for some while now thrown long dark shadows across the field at their feet.

The flies which hovered over the girl’s prostrate form were no longer radiantly illuminated and from the vague distances in every direction came those fitful sounds of the closing day--murmurs and whispers and subtle breathings, sweet and yet profoundly sad, which indicate the ebb of the life-impulse and approach of twilight.

The girl moved at last, and lifting up a tear-stained face, looked timidly and shyly into his eyes. She appeared at that moment so submissive, so pitiful, and so entirely dependent on him that Sorio would have been hardly human if he had not thrown his arms reassuringly round her neck and kissed her wet flushed cheek.

They rose together from the ground and both laughed merrily to see how stained and crumpled her newly starched frock had become.

“I’ll meet you here again--to-morrow if you like,” he said gently. She smiled but did not answer. Simple-hearted though she was, she was enough of a woman to know well that her victory, if it could be called victory, over his morose mood was a mere temporary matter. The future of their love seemed to her more than ever dubious and uncertain, and it was with a chilled heart, in spite of her gallant attempts to make their return pleasant to them both, that she re-entered the forlorn garden of Dyke House and waved good-bye to him from the door.

VII

VESPERS

Nance continued to resort to her withy-bed, in spite of the spoiling of its charm, but she did not again ask Sorio to meet her there. She met him still, however,--sometimes in Rachel’s desolate garden which seemed inspired by some occult influence antipathetic to every softening touch, and sometimes--and these latter encounters were the happier ones--in the little graveyard of Mr. Traherne’s church. She found him affectionate enough in these ambiguous days and even tender, but she was constantly aware of a barrier between them which nothing she could say or do seemed able to surmount.

Her anxiety with regard to the relations between Rachel and Linda did not grow less as days went on. Sometimes the two seemed perfectly happy and Nance accused herself of having a morbid imagination, but then again something would occur--some quite slight and unimportant thing--which threw her back upon all her old misgivings.

Once she was certain she heard Linda crying in the night and uttering Rachel’s name but the young girl, when roused from her sleep, only laughed gaily and vowed she had no recollection of anything she had dreamed.

As things thus went on and there seemed no outlet from the difficulties that surrounded her, Nance began making serious enquiries as to the possibility of finding work in the neighbourhood. She read the advertisements in the local papers and even answered some of them but the weeks slipped by and nothing tangible seemed to emerge.

Her greatest consolation at this time was a friendship she struck up with Hamish Traherne, the curate-in-charge of Rodmoor upon whose organ in the forlorn little Norman church, Linda was now daily practising.

Dr. Raughty, too, when she chanced to meet him, proved a soothing distraction. The man’s evident admiration for her gratified her vanity, while her tender and playful way of expressing it put a healing ointment upon her wounded pride.

One late afternoon when the sun at last seemed to have got some degree of hold upon that sea-blighted country, she found herself seated with Mr. Traherne on a bench adjoining the churchyard, waiting there in part for the service--for Hamish was a rigorous ritualist in these things and rang his bell twice a day with devoted patience--and in part for the purpose of meeting Mrs. Renshaw, who, as she knew, came regularly to church, morning and evening.

Linda was playing inside the little stone edifice and the sound of her music came out to them as they talked, pleasantly softened by the intervening walls. Mr. Traherne’s own dwelling, a battered, time-worn fragment of monastic masonry, clumsily adapted to modern use, lay behind them, its unpretentious garden passing by such imperceptible degrees into the sacred enclosure that the blossoms raised, in defiance of the winds that swept the marshes, in the priest’s flower-beds, shed their petals upon the more recently dug of his parishioners’ graves.

It may have been the extreme ugliness of Rodmoor’s curate-in-charge that drew Nance so closely to him. Mr. Traherne was certainly in bodily appearance the least prepossessing person she had ever beheld. He resembled nothing so much as an over-driven and excessively patient horse, his long, receding chin, knobbed bulbous nose, and corrugated forehead not even being relieved by any particular quality in his small, deeply-set colourless eyes--eyes which lacked everything such as commonly redeems an otherwise insignificant face and which stared out of his head upon the world with a fixed expression of mild and dumb protest.

Whether it was his ugliness, or something indefinable in him that found no physical or even vocal expression--for his voice was harsh and husky--the girl herself would have been puzzled to say, but whatever it was, it drew her and held her and she experienced curious relief in talking with him.

This particular afternoon she had permitted herself to go further than usual in these relieving confidences and had treated the poor man as if he were actually and in very truth her father-confessor.

“I’ve had no luck so far,” she said, speaking of her attempts to get work, “but I think I shall have before long. I’m right, am I not, in _that_ at any rate? Whatever happens, it’s better Linda and I should be independent.”

The priest nodded vigorously and clasped his bony hands over his knees.

“I wish,” he said, “that I knew Mr. Sorio as I know you. When I know people I like them, and as a rule--” he opened his large twisted mouth and smiled humorously at her--“as a rule they like me.”

“Oh, don’t misunderstand what I said just now,” cried Nance anxiously. “I didn’t mean that Adrian doesn’t like you. I know he likes you very much. It’s that he’s afraid of your influence, of your religion, of your goodness. He’s afraid of you. That’s what it is.”

“Of course we know,” said Hamish Traherne, prodding the ground with his oak stick and tucking his long cassock round his legs, “of course we know that it’s really Mr. Sorio who ought to find work. He ought to find it soon, too, and as soon as he’s got it he ought to marry you! That’s how I would see this affair settled.” He smiled at her with humorous benignity.

Nance frowned a little. “I don’t like it when you talk like that,” she remarked, “it makes me feel as though I’d done wrong in saying anything about it. It makes me feel as though I had been disloyal to Adrian.”

For so ugly and clumsy a man, there was a pathetic gentleness in the way he laid his hand, at that, upon his companion’s arm. “The disloyalty,” he said in a low voice, “would have been _not_ to have spoken to me. Who else can help our friend? Who else is anxious to help him?”

“I know, I know,” she cried, “you’re as sweet to me as you can be. You’re my most faithful friend. It’s only that I feel--sometimes--as though Adrian wouldn’t like it for me to talk about him at all--to any one. But that’s silly, isn’t it? And besides I must, mustn’t I? Otherwise there’d be no way of helping him.”

“I’ll find a way,” muttered the priest. “You needn’t mention his name again. We’ll take him for granted in future, little one, and we’ll both work together in his interests.”

“If he could only be made to understand,” the girl went on, looking helplessly across the vast tract of fens, “what his real feelings are! I believe he loves me at the bottom of his heart. I know I can help him as no one else can. But how to make him understand that?”

They were interrupted at this point by the appearance of Mrs. Renshaw who, standing in the path leading to the church door, looked at them hesitatingly as if wondering whether she ought to approach them or not.

They rose at once and crossed the grass to meet her. At the same time Linda, emerging from the building, greeted them with excited ardour.

“I’ve done so well to-day, Mr. Traherne,” she cried, “you’d be astonished. I can manage those pedals perfectly now, and the stops too. Oh, it’s lovely! It’s lovely! I feel I’m going really to be a player.”

They all shook hands with Mrs. Renshaw, and then, while the priest went in to ring his bell, the three women strolled together to the low stone parapet built as a protection against floods, which separated the churchyard from the marshes.

Tiny, delicate mosses grew on this wall, interspersed with small pale-flowered weeds. On its further side was a wide tract of boggy ground, full of deep amber-coloured pools and clumps of rushes and terminated, some half mile away, by a raised dyke. There was a pleasant humming of insects in the air, and although a procession of large white clouds kept crossing the low, horizontal sun, and throwing their cold shadows over the landscape, the general aspect of the place was more friendly and less desolate than usual.

They sat down upon the parapet and began to talk. “Brand promised to come and fetch me to-night,” said Mrs. Renshaw. “I begged him to come in time for the service but--” and she gave a sad, expressive little laugh, “he said he wouldn’t be early enough for that. Why is it, do you think, that men in these days are so unwilling to do these things? It isn’t that they’re wiser than their ancestors. It isn’t that they’re cleverer. It isn’t that they have less need of the Invisible. Something has come over the world, I think--something that blots out the sky. I’ve thought that often lately, particularly when I wake up in the mornings. It seems to me that the dawns used to be fresher and clearer than they are now. God has got tired of helping us, my dears,” and she sighed wearily.

Linda extended her warm little hand with a caressing movement, and Nance said, gently, “I know well what you mean, but I feel sure--oh, I feel quite sure--it’s only for a time. And I think, too, in some odd way, that it’s our own fault--I mean the fault of women. I can’t express clearly what’s in my mind but I feel as though we’d all changed--changed, that is, from what we used to be in old days. Don’t you think there’s something in that, Mrs. Renshaw? But of course that only applies to Linda and me.”

The elder woman’s countenance assumed a pinched and withered look as the girl spoke, the lines in it deepening and the pallor of it growing so noticeable that Nance found herself recalling the ghastly whiteness of her father’s face as she saw him at the last, laid out in his coffin. She shivered a little and let her fingers stray over the crumbling masonry and tangled weeds at her side, seeking there, in a fumbling, instinctive manner, to get into touch with something natural, earthy, and reassuring.

The procession of clouds suffered a brief interlude at that moment in their steady transit and the sinking sun shone out warm and mellow, full of odours of peat and moss and reedy mud. Swarms of tiny midges danced in the long level light and several drowsy butterflies rose out of nowhere and fluttered over the mounds.

“Oh, there’s Brand coming!” cried Mrs. Renshaw, suddenly, with a queer contraction of her pale forehead, “and the bell has stopped. How strange we none of us noticed that! Listen! Yes--he’s begun the service. Can’t you hear? Oh, what a pity! I can’t bear going in after he’s begun.”

Brand Renshaw, striding unceremoniously over the graves, approached the group. They rose to greet him. Nance felt herself surveyed from head to foot, weighed in the balances and found wanting. Linda hung back a little, shamefaced and blushing deeply. It was upon her that Brand kept his eyes fixed all the while he was being introduced. She--as Nance recognized in a flash--was _not_ found wanting.

They stood talking together, easily and freely enough, for several minutes, but nothing that Nance heard or said prevented her mind from envisaging the fact that there had leapt into being, magnetically, mysteriously, irresistibly, one of those sudden attractions between a man and a girl that so often imply--as the world is now arranged--the emergence of tragedy upon the horizon.

“I think--if you don’t mind, Brand,” said Mrs. Renshaw when a pause arrived in their conversation, “we’ll slip into the church now for a minute or two. He’s got to the Psalms. I can hear. And it hurts me, somehow, for the poor man to have to go through them alone.”

Nance moved at once, but Linda pouted and looked shyly at Brand. “I’m tired of the church,” she murmured. “I’ll wait for you out here. Are you going in with them, Mr. Renshaw?”

Brand made no reply to this, but walked gravely with the two others as far as the porch.

“Don’t be surprised if your sister’s spirited away when you come out, Miss Herrick,” he said smilingly as he left them at the door.

Returning with a quick step to where Linda stood gazing across the marshes, he made some casual remark about the quietness of the evening and led her forth from the churchyard. Neither of them uttered any definite reference to what they were doing. Indeed, a queer sort of nervous dumbness seemed to have seized them both, but there was a suppressed surge of excitement in the man’s resolute movements and under the navy blue coat and skirt which hung so delicately and closely round her slender figure. The girl’s pulses beat a wild excited tune.

He led her straight along the narrow, reed-bordered path, with a ditch on either side of it which ended in the bridge across the Loon. Before they reached the bridge, however, he swerved to the left and helped her over a low wooden railing. From this point, by following a rough track along the edge of one of the water meadows it was possible to reach the sand-dunes without entering the village.

“Not to the sea,” pleaded Linda, holding back when she perceived the direction of their steps.

“Yes, to the sea!” he cried, pulling her forward with merciless determination. She made no further resistance. She did not even protest when, arrived at the end of their path, he lifted her bodily over the gate that barred their way. She let him help her across the heavily sinking sand, covered with pallid, coarse grass which yielded to every step they took. She let him, when at last they reached the summit of the dunes and saw the sea spread out before them, retain the hand she had given him and lead her down, hardly holding back at all now, to the very edge of the water.

They were both at that moment like persons under the power of some sort of drug. Their eyes were wild and bright and when they spoke their voices had an unnatural solemnity. In the absoluteness of the magnetic current which swept them together, they could do nothing, it seemed, but take all that happened to them for granted--take all--all--as if it could not be otherwise, as if it were _unthinkable_ otherwise.

When they reached the place where the tide turned and the tremulous line of spindrift glimmered in the dying sunlight, the girl stopped at last. Her lips and cheeks were pale as the foam itself. She tried to tear her fingers from his grasp. Her feet, sinking in the wet sand, were splashed by the inflowing water.

“They told me you were afraid,” he muttered, and his voice sounded to them both as if it came from far away, “but I didn’t believe it. I thought it was some little girl’s nonsense. But I see now they were right. You _are_ afraid.”

He rose to his full height, drawing into his lungs with a breath of ecstasy the sharp salt wind that blew across the water’s surface.

“But out of your fear we’ll make a bond between us,” he went on, raising his voice, “a bond which none of them shall be able to break!”

He suddenly bent down and, scooping with his fingers in the water, lifted towards her a handful of sea-foam that gleamed ghostly white as he held it.

“There, child,” he cried, “you can’t escape from me now!”

As he spoke he flung, with a wild laugh, straight across her face, the foam-bubbles which he had caught. She started back with a little gasp, but recovering herself instantly lifted the hand which held her own and pressed it against her forehead. They stood for a moment, after this, staring at one another, with a hushed, dazed, bewildered stare, as though they felt the very wind of the wing of fate pass over their heads.

Brand broke the spell with a laugh. “I’ve christened you now,” he said, “so I can call you what I like. Come up here, Linda, my little one, and let’s talk of all this.”

Hand in hand they moved away from the sea’s edge and crouched down in the shadow of the sand-dunes. The rose-coloured light died out along the line of foam and the mass of the waters in front of them darkened steadily, as if obscured by the over-hovering of some colossal bird. Far off, on the edge of the horizon, a single fragment of drifting cloud took the shape of a bloody hand with outstretched forefinger but even that soon faded as the sun, sinking into the fens behind them, gave up the struggle with darkness.

With the passing of the light from the sea’s surface, all that was left of the wind sank also into absolute immobility. An immense liberating silence intensified, rather than interrupted by the monotonous splash of the waves, seemed to stream forth from some planetary reservoir and overflow the world.

Not a sea-gull screamed, not a sound came from the harbour, not a plover cried from the marshes, not a step, not a voice, not a whisper, approached their solitude or disturbed their strange communion.

Linda sat with her head sunk low upon her breast and her hands clasped upon her knees. Brand, beside her, caressed her whole figure with an intense gaze of concentrated possession.

Neither of them spoke a word, but one of the man’s heavy hands lay upon hers like a leaden weight bruising a fragile plant.

What he seemed attempting to achieve in that conspiring hour was some kind of magnetizing of the girl’s senses so that the first movement of overt passion should come from her rather than from himself. In this it would seem he was not unsuccessful, for after two or three scarce audible sighs her body trembled a little and leant towards his and a low whisper uttered in a tone quite unlike her ordinary one, tore itself from her lips, as if against her volition.

“What are you doing to me?” she murmured.

While the invisible destinies were thus inaugurating their projected work upon Brand and Linda, Nance and Mrs. Renshaw issued forth from the churchyard.

“If only life were clearer,” the girl was thinking, “it would be endurable. It’s this uncertainty in everything--this dreadful uncertainty--which I can’t bear!”

“That was a beautiful psalm we had just now,” said Mrs. Renshaw, in her gentle penetrating voice as, after some minutes’ silent walking they emerged upon the bridge across the Loon. Nance looked down over the parapet and in her depressed fancy she saw the drowned figure of herself, drifting, face upward, upon the flowing water.

“Yes,” she replied mechanically, “the psalms are always beautiful.”

“I don’t believe,” the lady went on, glancing at her with eyes so hollow and sorrowful that it seemed as though the twilight of a world even sadder than the one they looked upon emanated from them, “I don’t believe I understand that little sister of yours. She’s very highly strung--she’s very nervous. She requires a great deal of care. To tell the truth, I don’t consider my son Brand at all a good companion for her. I wish they’d waited and not gone off like that. He doesn’t always remember what a sensitive thing the heart of a young girl is.”

They had now reached the southern side of the Loon and were on the main road between Rodmoor and Mundham. A few paces further brought them to the first houses of the village. Something in the helpless, apologetic, deprecatory way with which, just then, Mrs. Renshaw greeted an old woman who passed them, had a strangely irritating effect upon Nance’s nerves.

“I don’t see why young people should be considered more than any one else!” she burst out. “It’s a purely conventional idea. We all have our troubles, and what I think is the older you get the more difficult life becomes.”

Mrs. Renshaw’s face assumed a mask of weary obstinacy and she walked more slowly, her head bent forward a little and her feet dragging.