Chapter IV: Part 4

“Women have to learn what duty means,” she said, “and the sooner they learn it the better. Those among us who are privileged to make one good man happy have the best that life can give. It’s natural to be restless till you have this. But we must try to overcome our restlessness. We must ask for help.”

She was silent. Her white face drooped and bowed itself, while her tired fingers relaxed their hold on her skirt which trailed in the dust of the road. Her profile, as Nance glanced sideways at it, had a look of hopeless and helpless passivity.

The girl withdrew into herself, irritated and yet remorseful. She felt an obscure longing to be of some service to this unhappy one; yet as she watched her, thus bowed and impenetrable, she felt shut out and excluded.

Before they reached the centre of the village--for Nance felt unwilling to leave Mrs. Renshaw until she had seen her safe within her park gates--they suddenly came upon Baltazar Stork returning from his daily excursion to Mundham.

He was as elegantly dressed as usual and in one hand carried a little black bag, in the other a bunch of peonies. Nance, to her surprise, caught upon her companion’s face a look of extraordinary illumination as the man advanced towards them. In recalling the look afterwards, she found herself thinking of the word “vivacity” in regard to it.

“Oh, I’m always the same,” Mr. Stork replied to the elder lady’s greeting. “I grow more annoyingly the same every day. I say the same things, think the same thoughts and meet the same people. It’s--lovely!”

“I’m glad you ended like that,” observed Nance, laughing. It was one of her peculiarities to laugh--a little foolishly--when she was embarrassed and though she had encountered Sorio’s friend once or twice before, she felt for some reason or other ill at ease with him.

With exquisite deliberation Mr. Stork placed the black bag upon the ground and selecting two of the freshest blooms from his gorgeous bunch, handed one by the light of a little shop window to each of the women.

“How is your friend?” enquired Mrs. Renshaw with a touch of irony in her tone. “This young lady has not seen him to-day.”

At that moment Nance realized that she hated this melancholy being whom a chance encounter with her husband’s son seemed to throw into such malicious spirits. She felt that everything Mrs. Renshaw was destined to say from now till they separated, would be designed to humiliate and annoy her. This may have been a fantastic illusion, but she acted upon it with resolute abruptness.

“Good-bye,” she exclaimed, turning to her companion, “I’ll leave you in Mr. Stork’s care. I promised Rachel not to be late to-night. Good-bye--and thank you,” she bowed to the young man and held up the peony, “for this.”

“She’s jealous,” remarked Baltazar as he led Mrs. Renshaw across the green under the darkening sycamores. “She is abominably jealous! She was in a furious temper--I saw it myself--when Adrian took her sister out the other day and now she’s wild because he’s friendly with Philippa. Oh, these girls, these girls!”

An amused smile flickered for a moment across the lady’s face but she suppressed it instantly. She sighed heavily. “You are all too much for me,” she said, “too much for me. I’m getting old, Tassar. God be merciful! This world is not an easy place to live in.”

She walked by his side after this in heavy silence till they reached the entrance of the park.

VIII

SUN AND SEA

As the days began to grow warmer and in the more sheltered gardens the first roses appeared, Nance was not the only one who showed signs of uneasiness over Adrian Sorio’s disturbed state of mind.

Baltazar was frequently at a loss to know where, in the long twilights, his friend wandered. Over and over again, after June commenced, the poor epicure was doomed to take his supper in solitude and sit companionless through the evening in the grassy enclosure at the back of his house.

As the longest day approached and the heavily scented hawthorn tree which was the chief ornament of his small garden had scattered nearly all its red blossoms, Stork’s uneasiness reached such a pitch that he protested vigorously to the wanderer, using violent expressions and, while not precisely accusing him of ingratitude, making it quite plain that this was neither the mood nor the treatment he expected from so old a friend.

Sorio received this outburst meekly enough--indeed he professed himself entirely penitent and ready to amend his ways--but as the days went on, instead of any improvement in the matter, things became rapidly worse and worse.

Baltazar could learn nothing definitely of what he did when he disappeared but the impression gradually emphasized itself that he spent these lonely hours in immense, solitary walks along the edge of the sea. He returned sometimes like a man absolutely exhausted and on these occasions his friend could not help observing that his shoes were full of sand and his face scorched.

One especially hot afternoon, when Stork had returned from Mundham by the midday train in the hope of finding Adrian ready to stroll with him under the trees in the park, there occurred quite a bitter and violent scene between them when the latter insisted, as soon as their meal was over, on setting off alone.

“Go to the devil!” Adrian finally flung back at his entertainer when--his accustomed urbanity quite broken down--the aggrieved Baltazar gave vent to the suppressed irritation of many days. “Go to the devil!” the unconscionable man repeated, putting down his hat over his head and striding across the green.

Once clear of the little town, he let his speed subside into a more ordinary pace and, crossing the bridge over the Loon, made his way to the sea shore. The blazing sunshine, pouring down from a sky that contained no trace of a cloud, seemed to have secured the power that day of reducing even the ocean itself to a kind of magnetised stupor. The waters rolled in, over the sparkling sands, with a long, somnolent, oily ripple that spent itself and drew back without so much as a flicker or flake of foam. The sea-gulls floated languidly on the unruffled tide, or quarrelled with little, short, petulant screams over the banks of bleached pungent-smelling seaweed where swarms of scavenging flies shared with them their noonday fretfulness.

On the wide expanse of the sea itself there lay a kind of glittering haze, thin and metallic, as if hammered out of some marine substance less resistant but not less dazzling than copper or gold. This was in the mid-distance, so to speak, of the great plain of water. In the remote distance the almost savage glitter diminished and a dull livid glare took its place, streaked in certain parts of the horizon by heavy bars of silvery mist where the sea touched the sky. The broad reaches of hard sand smouldered and flickered under the sun’s blaze and little vibrating heat waves danced like shapeless demons over the summit of the higher dunes.

Turning his face northward, Sorio began walking slowly now and with occasional glances at the dunes, along the level sand by the sea’s edge. He reached in this way a spot nearly two miles from Rodmoor where for leagues and leagues in either direction no sign of human life was visible.

He was alone with the sun and the sea, the sun that was dominating the water and the water that was dominating the land.

He stood still and waited, his heart beating, his pulses feverish, his deep-sunken eyes full of a passionate, expectant light. He had not long to wait. Stepping down slowly from the grass-covered dunes, past a deserted fisherman’s hut which had become their familiar rendezvous, came the desired figure. She walked deliberately, slowly, with a movement that, as Sorio hastened to meet her, had something almost defiant in its dramatic reserve.

They greeted one another with a certain awkwardness. Neither held out a hand--neither smiled. It might have been a meeting of two conspirators fearful of betrayal. It was only after they had walked in silence, side by side and still northwards for several minutes, that Sorio began speaking, but his words broke from him then with a tempestuous vehemence.

“None of these people here know me,” he cried, “not one of them. They take me for a dawdler, an idler, an idiotic fool. Well! That’s nothing. Nance doesn’t know me. She doesn’t care to know me. She--she _loves_! As if love were what I wanted--as if love were enough!”

He was silent and the girl looked at him curiously, waiting for him to say more.

“They’d be a bit surprised, wouldn’t they,” he burst out, “if they knew about the manuscripts _he_”--he uttered this last word with concentrated reverence,--“is guarding for me over there? _He_ understands me, Phil, and not a living person except him. Listen, Phil! Since I’ve known you I’ve been able to breathe--just able to breathe--in this damned England. Before that--God! I shudder to think of it--I was dumb, strangled, suffocated, paralyzed, dead. Even now--even with you, Phil,--I’m still fumbling and groping after it--after what I have to say to the world, after my secret, my idea!

“It hurts me, my idea. You know that feeling, Phil. But I’m getting it into order--into shape. Look here!”

He pulled out of his pocket a small thick notebook closely written, blurred with erasures and insertions, stained with salt-water.

“That’s what I’ve done since I’ve known you--in this last month--and it’s better than anything I’ve written before. It’s clearer. It hits the mark more crushingly. Phil, listen to me! I _know_ I’ve got it in me to give to the world something it’s never dreamed of--something with a real madness of truth in it--something with a bite that gets to the very bone of things. I know I’ve got that in me.”

He stooped down and picked up a stranded jelly-fish that lay--a mass of quivering, helpless iridescence--in the scorching sun. He stepped into the water till it was over his shoes and flung the thing far out into the oily sea. It sank at once to the bottom, leaving a small circle of ripples.

“Go on, go on!” cried the girl, looking at him with eyes that darkened and grew more insatiable as she felt his soul stir and quiver and strip itself before her.

“Go on! Tell me more about Nance.”

“I _have_ told you,” he muttered, “I’ve told you everything. She’s good and faithful and kind. She gives me love--oh, endless love!--but that’s not what I want. She no more understands me than _I_ understand--eternity! Little Linda reads me better.”

“Tell me about Linda,” murmured the girl.

Sorio threw a wild glance around them. “It’s her fear that taught her what she knew--what she guessed. Fear reads deep and far. Fear breaks through many barriers. But she’s changed now since she’s been with Brand. She’s become like the rest.”

“Oh, Brand--!” Philippa shrugged her shoulders. “So _he’s_ come into it? Well, let them go. Tell me more about Nance. Does she cling to you and make a fuss? Does she try the game of tears?”

Sorio looked at her sharply. A vague suspicion invaded the depths of his heart. They walked along in silence for several minutes. The power of the sun seemed to increase. A mass of seaweed, floating below the water, caused in one place an amber-coloured shadow to break the monotony of the glittering surface.

“Does your son believe in you--as I do?” she asked gently.

As soon as the words had crossed her lips she knew they were the very last she ought to have uttered. The man withdrew into himself with a rigid tightening of every nerve. No one--certainly not Nance--had ever dared to touch this subject. Once to Nance, in London, and twice recently to his present companion, had he referred to Baptiste but this direct question about the boy was too much; it outraged something in him which was beyond articulation. The shock given him was so intense and the reaction upon his feelings so vivid that, hardly conscious of what he did, he thrust his hand into his pocket and clutched tightly with his fingers the book containing his work, as though to protect it from aggression. As he thus stood there before her, stiff and speechless, she could only console herself by the fact that he avoided her eyes.

Her mind moved rapidly. She must invent, at all costs, some relief to this tension. She had trusted her magnetism too far.

“Adriano,” she said, imitating with feminine instinct Baltazar’s caressing intonation, “I want to bathe. We’re out of sight of every one. We know each other well enough now. Shall we--together?”

He met her eyes now. There was a subtile appeal in their depths which drew him to her and troubled his senses. He nodded and uttered an embarrassed laugh. “Why not?” he answered.

“Very well,” she said quickly, clinching her suggestion before he had time to revoke his assent, “I’ll just run behind these sand hills and take off my things. You undress here and get into the water. And swim out, too, Adrian, with your back to me! I’ll soon join you.”

She left him and he obeyed her mechanically--only looking nervously round for a moment as he folded his coat containing the precious manuscript and laid a heavy stone upon it.

He plunged out into the waveless sea with fierce, impetuous strokes. The water yielded to his violent movements like a lake of quicksilver. Dazzling threads and flakes and rainbows flashed up, wavered, trembled, glittered and vanished as he swam forward. With his eyes fixed on the immense dome of sky above him, where, like the rim of a burnished shield, it cut down into the horizon, he struck out incessantly, persistently, seeking, in thus embracing a universe of white light, to find the escape he craved.

Strange thoughts poured through his brain as he swam on. The most novel, the most terrific of the points contained in those dithyrambic notes left behind under the stone surged up before him and, mingling with them in fierce exultant affection, the image of Baptiste beckoned to him out of a molten furnace of white light.

Far away behind him at last he heard the voice of his companion. Whether she intended him to turn he did not know, for her words were inaudible, but when he did he perceived that she was standing, a slim white figure, at the water’s edge. He watched her with feelings that were partly bitter and partly tender.

“Why does she stand there so long?” he muttered to himself. “Why doesn’t she get in and start swimming?”

As if made aware of his thought by some telepathic instinct the girl at that moment slipped into the water and began walking slowly forward, her hands clasped behind her head. When the water reached above her knees she swung up her hands and with a swift spring of her white body, disappeared from view. She remained so long invisible that Sorio grew anxious and took several vigorous strokes towards her. She reappeared at last, however, and was soon swimming vigorously to meet him.

When they met she insisted on advancing further and so, side by side, with easy, leisurely movements, they swam out to sea, their eyes on the far horizon and their breath coming and going in even reciprocity.

“Far enough!” cried Sorio at last, treading water and looking closely at her.

There was a strange wild light in the girl’s face. “Why go back?” her look seemed to say--“Why not swim on and on together--until the waters cover us and all riddles are solved?” There was something in her expression at that moment--as, between sky and sea, the two gazed mutely at one another--which seemed to interpret some terrible and uttermost mystery. It was, however, too rare a moment to endure long, and they turned their heads landwards.

The return took longer than they had anticipated and the girl was swimming very slowly and displaying evident signs of exhaustion before they got near shore. As soon as she could touch the bottom with her feet she hurried out and staggered, with stiff limbs, across the sands to where she had left her clothes.

When she came back, dressed and in lively spirits, her unbound hair shimmering in the sunshine like wet silk, she found him pacing the sea’s edge with an expression of gloomy resolution.

“I shall have to rewrite every word of these notes,” he said, striking his hand against his pocket. “I had a new thought just now as I was in the water and it changes everything.”

She threw herself down on the hot sand and spread out her hair to let it dry.

“Don’t let’s go yet, Adrian,” she pleaded. “I feel so sleepy and happy.”

He looked at her thoughtfully, hardly catching the drift of her words. “It changes everything,” he repeated.

“Lie down here,” she murmured softly, letting her gaze meet his with a wistful entreaty.

He placed himself beside her. “Don’t get hurt by the sun,” he said. She smiled at that--a long, slow, dreamy smile--and drawing him towards her with her eyes, “I believe you’re afraid of me to-day, Adrian,” she whispered.

Her boyish figure, outlined beneath the thin dress she wore, seemed to breathe a sort of classic voluptuousness as she languidly stretched her limbs. As she did this, she turned her head sideways, till her chin rested on her shoulder and a tress of brown hair, wet and clinging, fell across her slender neck.

A sudden impulse of malice seemed to seize the man who bent over her. “Your hair isn’t half as long as Nance’s,” he said, turning abruptly away and hugging his knees with his arms.

The girl drew herself together, at that, like a snake from under a heavy foot and, propping herself up on her hands, threw a glance upon him which, had he caught it, might have produced a yet further change in the book of philosophic notes. Her eyes, for one passing second, held in them something that was like livid fire reflected through blue ice.

For several minutes after this they both contemplated the level mass of illuminated waters with absorbed concentration. At last Adrian broke the silence.

“What I’m aiming at in my book,” he said, “is a revelation of how the essence of life is found in the instinct of destruction. I want to show--what is simply the truth--that the pleasure of destruction, destruction entered upon out of sheer joy and for its own sake, lies behind every living impulse that pushes life forward. Out of destruction alone--out of the rending and tearing of something--of something in the way--does new life spring to birth. It isn’t destruction for cruelty’s sake,” he went on, his fingers closing and unclosing at his side over a handful of sand. “Cruelty is mere inverted sentiment. Cruelty implies attraction, passion, even--in some cases--love. Pure destruction--destruction for its own sake--such as I see it--is no thick, heavy, muddy, perverted impulse such as the cruel are obsessed by. It’s a burning and devouring flame. It’s a mad, splendid revel of glaring whiteness like this which hurts our eyes now. I’m going to show in my book how the ultimate essence of life, as we find it, purest and most purged in the ecstasies of the saints, is nothing but an insanity of destruction! That’s really what lies at the bottom of all the asceticism and all the renunciation in the world. It’s the instinct to destroy--to destroy what lies nearest to one’s hand--in this case, of course, one’s own body and the passions of the body. Ascetics fancy they do this for the sake of their souls. That’s their illusion. They do it for its own sake--for the sake of the ecstasy of destruction! Man is the highest of all animals because he can destroy the most. The saints are the highest among men because they can destroy humanity.”

He rose to his feet and, picking up a flat stone from the sea’s edge, sent it skimming across the water.

“Five!” he cried, as the stone sank at last.

The girl rose and stood beside him. “I can play at ‘Ducks and Drakes’ too,” she said, imitating his action with another stone which, however, sank heavily after only three cuttings of the shiny surface.

“You can’t play ‘Ducks and Drakes’ with the universe,” retorted Sorio. “No girl can--not even you, with your boy-arms and boy-legs! You can’t even throw a stone out of pure innocence. You only threw that--just now--because I did and because you wanted me to see you swing your arm--and because you wanted to change the conversation.”

He looked her up and down with an air of sullen mockery. “What the saints and the mystics seek,” he went on, “is the destruction of everything within reach--of everything that sticks out, that obtrudes, that is simply _there_. That is why they throw their stones at every form of natural life. But the life they attack is doing the same thing itself in a cruder way. The sea is destroying the land; the grass is destroying the flowers; the flowers one another; the woods, the marshes, the fens, are all destroying something. The saints are only the maddest and wisest of all destroyers--”

“Sorio! There’s a starfish out there--being washed in. Oh, let me try and reach it!”

She snatched his stick from him and catching up her skirt stepped into the water.

“Let it be!” he muttered, “let it be!”

She gave up her attempt with an impatient shrug but continued to watch the steady pressure of the incoming tide with absorbed interest.

“What the saints aim at,” Sorio continued, “and the great poets too, is that absolute _white light_, which means the drowning, the blinding, the annihilating, of all these paltry-coloured things which assert themselves and try to make themselves immortal. The only godlike happiness is the happiness of seeing world after world tumbled into oblivion. That’s the mad, sweet secret thought at the back of all the religions. God--as the great terrible minds of antiquity never forgot--is the supreme name for that ultimate destruction of all things which is the only goal. That’s why God is always visualised as a blaze of blinding white light. That’s why the Sun-God, greatest of destroyers, is pictured with burning arrows.”

While Adrian continued in this wild strain, expounding his desperate philosophy, it was a pity there was no one to watch the various expressions which crossed in phantasmal sequence, like evil ghosts over a lovely mirror, the face of Philippa Renshaw.

The conflict between the man and woman was, indeed, at that moment, of curious and elaborate interest. While he flung out, in this passionate way, his metaphysical iconoclasm, her instinct--the shrewd feminine instinct to reduce everything to the personal touch--remained fretting, chafing, irritable, and unsatisfied. It was nothing to her that the formula he used was the formula of her own instincts. She loved destruction but in her subtle heart she despised, with infinite contempt, all philosophical theories--despised them as being simply irrelevant and off the track of actual life--off the track, in fact, of those primitive personal impulses which alone possess colour, perfume, salt and sweetness!

Vaguely, at the bottom of his soul, even while he was speaking, Sorio knew that the girl was irritated and piqued; but the consciousness of this, so far from being unpleasant, gave an added zest to his words. He revenged himself on her for the attraction he felt towards her by showing her that in the metaphysical world at any rate, he could reduce her to non-existence! Her annoyance at last gave her, in desperation, a flash of diabolic cunning. She tossed out to him as a bait for his ravening analysis, her own equivocal nature.

“I know well what you mean,” she said, as they moved slowly back towards Rodmoor. “Poor dear, you must have been torn and rent, yourself, to have come to such a point of insight! I, too, in my way, have experienced something of the sort. My brain--you know _that_, by this time, don’t you, Adriano?--is the brain of a man while my body is the body of a woman. Oh, I hate this woman’s body of mine, Adrian! You can’t know how I hate it! All that annoys you in me, and all that annoys myself too, comes from this,” and she pressed her little hands savagely to her breast as she spoke, as though, there before him, she would tear out the very soul of her femininity.

“From earliest childhood,” she went on, “I’ve loathed being a girl. Long nights, sometimes, I’ve lain awake, crying and crying and crying, because I wasn’t born different. I’ve hated my mother for it. I hate her still, I hate her because she has a morbid, sentimental mania for what she calls the sensitiveness of young girls. The sensitiveness! As if they weren’t the toughest, stupidest, sleepiest things in the world! They’re not sensitive at all. They’ve neither sensitiveness nor fastidiousness nor modesty nor decency! It’s all put on--every bit of it. I _know_, for I’m like that myself--or half of me is. I betray myself to myself and lacerate myself for being myself. It’s a curious state of things--isn’t it, Adriano?”

She had worked herself up into such a passion of emotional self-pity that great swimming tears blurred the tragic supplication of her eyes. The weary swing of her body as she walked by his side and the droop of her neck as she let her head fall when his glance did not respond were obviously not assumed. The revelation of herself, entered upon for an exterior purpose, had gone further than she intended and this very stripping of herself bare which was to have been her triumph became her humiliation when witnessed so calmly, so indifferently.

After this they walked for a long while in silence, he so possessed by the thrilling sense of having a new vista of thought under his command that he was hardly conscious of her presence, and she in obstinate bitter resolution wrestling with the remorse of her mistake and searching for some other means--any means--of sapping the strength of his independence.

As they moved on and the afternoon advanced, a large and striking change took place in the appearance of the scene. A narrow, clear-cut line of shadow made itself visible below the sand-dunes. The sky lost its metallic glitter and became a deep hyacinthine blue, a blue which after a while communicated itself, with hardly any change in its tint, to the wide-spread volume of water beneath it. In those spots where masses of seaweed floated beneath the surface, the omnipresent blue deepened to a rich indescribable purple, that amazing purple more frequent in southern than in northern seas, which we may suppose is indicated in the Homeric epithet “wine dark.”

As the friends approached the familiar environs of Rodmoor they suddenly came upon a fisherman’s boat pulled up upon the sand, with some heavy nets left lying beside it.

“Sorio!” cried the girl, stooping down and lifting the meshes of one of these, “Sorio! there’s something alive left here. Look!”

He bent over the net beside her and began hastily disentangling several little silvery fish which were struggling and flapping feebly and opening their tiny gills in labouring gasps.

“All right--all right!” cried the man, addressing in his excitement the tiny prisoners, “I’ll soon set you free.”

“What are you doing, Adrian?” expostulated the girl. “No--no! You mustn’t throw them back--you mustn’t! The children always come round when school’s over and search the nets. It’s a Rodmoor custom.”

“It’s a custom I’m going to break, then!” he shouted, rushing towards the sea with a handful of gasping little lives. His fingers when he returned, were covered with glittering scales but they did not outshine the gleam in his face.

“You should have seen them dash away,” he cried. “I’m glad those children won’t find them!”

“They’ll find others,” remarked Philippa Renshaw. “There’ll always be some nets that have fish left in them.”

IX

PRIEST AND DOCTOR

There are hours in every man’s day when the main current of his destiny, rising up from some hidden channel, becomes a recognizable and palpable element in his consciousness. Such hours, if a man’s profoundest life is--so to speak--in harmony with the greater gods, are hours of indescribable and tremulous happiness.

It was nothing less than an experience of this kind which flowed deliciously, like a wave of divine ether, over the consciousness of Hamish Traherne on the day following the one when Sorio and Philippa walked so far.

As he crossed his garden in the early morning and entered the church, the warm sun and clear-cut shadows filled him with that sense of indestructible joy to which one of the ancient thinkers has given the beautiful name of μονοχρονος ἡδονὴ--the Pleasure of the Ideal Now.

From the eastern window, flooding the floor of the little chancel, there poured into the cool, sweet-smelling place a stream of quivering light. He had opened wide the doors under the tower and left them open and he heard, as he sank on his knees, the sharp clear twittering of swallows outside and the chatter of a flock of starlings. Through every pulse and fibre of his being, as he knelt, vibrated an unutterable current of happiness, of happiness so great that the words of his prayer melted and dissolved and all definite thought melted with them into that rare mood where prayer becomes ecstasy and ecstasy becomes eternal.

Returning to his house without spilling one golden drop of what was being allowed him of the wine of the Immortals, he brought his breakfast out into the garden and ate it, lingeringly and dreamily, by the side of his first roses. These were of the kind known as “the seven sisters”--small and white-petaled with a faint rose-flush--and the penetrating odour of them as he bent a spray down towards his face was itself suggestive of old rich wine, “cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth.”

From the marshes below the parapet came exquisite scents of water-mint and flowering-rush and, along with these, the subtle fragrance, pungent and aromatic, of miles and miles of sun-heated fens.

The grass of his own lawn and the leaves of the trees that overshadowed it breathed the peculiar sweetness--a sweetness unlike anything else in the world--of the first hot days of the year in certain old East Anglian gardens. Whether it is the presence of the sea which endows these places with so rare a quality or the mere existence of reserve and austere withholding in the ways of the seasons there, it were hard to say, but the fact remains that there are gardens in Norfolk and Suffolk--and to Hamish Traherne’s flower-beds in spite of the modesty of their appeal, may well be conceded something of this charm--which surpass all others in the British Isles in the evocation of wistful and penetrating beauty.

The priest had just lit his cigarette and was sipping his tea when he was startled by the sudden appearance of Nance Herrick, white and desperate and panting for breath.

“I had to come to you,” she gasped, refusing his proffered chair and sinking down on the grass. “I had to! I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop in that house. I saw him last night. He was walking with _her_ near the harbour. I spoke to them. I was quiet--not angry or bitter at all and he let her insult me. He let her whip me with her tongue, wickedly, cruelly and yet so under cover, so sideways--you know the kind of thing, Hamish?--that I couldn’t answer. If I’d been alone with her I could have, but his being there made me stupid, miserable, foolish! And she took advantage of it. She said--oh, such mean, biting things! I can’t say them to you. I hate to think of them. They went right through me like a steel lash. And he stood there and did nothing. He was like a man in a trance. He stood there and let her do it. Hamish--Hamish--I wish I were at the bottom of the sea!”

She bowed her white, grief-distorted face until it was buried in the grass. The sun, playing on her bright hair, made it look like newly-minted gold. Mr. Traherne sank on his knees beside her. His ugliness, intensified by the agitation of his pity, reached a pitch that was almost sublime. He was like a gargoyle consoling a goddess.

“Child, child, listen to me!” he cried, his husky grating voice flinging itself upon the silence of her misery like a load of rubble upon a marble pavement.

“There are moments in our life when no words, however tender, however wise, can do any good. The only way--child, it is so--it is so!--the only way is to find in love itself the thing that can heal. For love _can_ do this, I know it, I have proved it.”

He raised one of his arms with a queer, spasmodic gesture and let it drop as suddenly as he had raised it.

“Love rejoices to bear everything,” he went on. “It forgives and forgives again. It serves its beloved night and day, unseen and unfelt, it draws strength from suffering. When the blows of fate strike it, it sinks into its own heart and rises stronger than fate. When the passing hour’s cruel to it, it sinks away within, below the passing of every possible hour, beyond the hurt of every conceivable stroke. Love does not ask anything. It does not ask to be recognized. It is its own return, its own recognition. Listen to me, child! If what I’m saying to you is not true, if love is not like this, then the whole world is dust and ashes and ‘earth’s base built on stubble’!”

His harsh voice died away on the air and for a little while there was no sound in that garden except the twitter of birds, the hum of insects, and the murmur of the sea. Then she moved, raised herself from the ground and rubbed her face with her hands.

“Thank you, Hamish,” she said.

He got up from his knees and she rose too and they walked slowly together up and down the little grass plot. His harsh voice, harsher than ever when its pitch was modulated, rose and fell monotonously in the sunny air.

“I don’t say to you, Nance, that you shouldn’t expect the worst. I think we always should expect that and prepare to meet it. What I say is that in the very power of the love you feel there is a strength capable of sustaining you through your whole life, whatever happens. And it is out of this very strength--a strength stronger than all the world, my dear--than all the world!--that you’ll be able to give your Adrian what he needs. He needs your love, little one, not your jealousy, nor your self-pity, nor your anger. God knows how much he needs it! And if you sink down into your heart and draw upon that and wait for him and pray for him and endure for him you will see how, in the end, he’ll come back to you! No--I won’t even say that. For in this world he may never realize whose devotion is sustaining him. I’ll say, whether he comes back or not, you’ll have been his only true love and he’ll know it, child, in this world or another, he’ll know you for what you are!”

The sweet, impossible doctrine, older than the centuries, older than Plato, of the supremacy of spiritual passion had never--certainly not in that monastic garden--found a more eloquent apologist. As she listened to his words and her glance lingered upon a certain deeply blue border of larkspurs, which, as they paced up and down mingled with the impression he made upon her, Nance felt that a crisis had indeed arrived in her life--had arrived and gone--the effect of which could never, whatever happened, altogether disappear. She was still unutterably sad. Her new mood brought no superficial comfort. But her sadness had nothing in it now of bitterness or desperation. She entered, at any rate for that hour, into the company of those who resolutely put life’s sweetness away from them and find in the accepted pressure of its sharp sword-point a pride which is its own reward.

This mood of hers still lasted on, when, some hours later, she found herself in the main street of the little town, staring with a half-humorous smile at the reflection of herself in the bow-window of the pastry-cook’s. She had just emerged from the shop adjoining this one, a place where she had definitely committed herself to accept the post of “forewoman” in the superintendence of half a dozen young girls who worked in the leisurely establishment of Miss Pontifex, “the only official dressmaker,” as the advertisement announced, “on that side of Mundham.”

She felt unspeakably relieved at having made this plunge. She had begun to weary of idleness--idleness rendered more bitter by the misery of her relations with Sorio--and the independence guaranteed by the eighteen shillings a week which Miss Pontifex was to pay her seemed like an oasis of solid assurance in a desert of ambiguities. She cared nothing for social prestige. In that sense she was a true daughter of her father, the most “democratic” officer in the British Navy. What gave her a profound satisfaction in the midst of her unhappiness was the thought that now, without leaving Rodmoor, she could, if Rachel’s jealousy or whatever it was, became intolerable, secure some small, separate lodging for herself and her sister.

Linda even, now her organ-playing had advanced so far, might possibly be able to earn something. There were perhaps churches in Mundham willing to pay for such assistance if the difficulty of getting over there on Sundays when the trains were few, could in some way be surmounted. At any rate, she felt, she had made a move in the right direction. For the present, living at Dyke House, she would be able to save every penny Miss Pontifex gave her, and the sense of even this relative independence would strengthen her hand and afford her a sort of vantage-ground whatever happened in the future.

She was still standing in front of the confectioner’s window when she heard a well-known voice behind her and, turning quickly round, found herself face to face with Fingal Raughty. The Doctor looked at her with tender solicitude.

“Feeling the heat?” he said, retaining her fingers in his own and stroking them as one might stroke the petals of a rare orchid.

She smiled affectionately into his eyes and thought how strange an irony it was that every one, except the person she cared most for, should treat her thus considerately.

“Come,” the Doctor said, “now I’ve got you I’m not going to let you go. You must see my rooms! You promised you would, you know.”

She hadn’t the heart to refuse him and together they walked up the street till they came to the tiny red-brick house which the Doctor shared with the family of a Mundham bank-clerk. He opened the door and led her upstairs.

“All this floor is mine,” he explained. “There’s where I see my patients, and here,” he led her into the room looking out on the street, “here’s my study.”

Nance was for the moment inclined to smile at the use of the word “study” as applied to any room in Rodmoor High Street, but when she looked round at walls literally lined with books and at tables and chairs covered with books, some of them obviously rare and valuable, she felt she had not quite done justice to the Doctor’s taste. He fluttered round her now with a hundred delicate attentions, made her remove her hat and gloves and finally placed her in a large comfortable armchair close to the open window. He pulled one of the green blinds down a little way to soften the stream of sunshine and, rushing to his book-case, snatched at a large thin volume which stood with others of the same kind on the lowest shelf. This he dusted carefully with his sleeve and laid gently upon her lap.

“I think you’ll like it,” he murmured. “It’s of no value as an edition, but it’s in his best style. I suppose Miss Doorm has all the old masters up at Dyke House bound in morocco and vellum? Or has she only county histories and maps?”

While his visitor turned over the pages of the work in question, her golden head bent low and her lips smiling, the doctor began piling up more books, one on the top of another, at her side.

“Apuleius!--he’s a strange old fellow, not without interest, but you know him, of course? Petronius Arbiter! you had better not read the text but the illustrations may amuse you. William Blake! There are some drawings here which have a certain resemblance to--to one or two people we know! Bewick! Oh, you’ll enjoy this, if you don’t know it. I’ve got the other volume, too. You mustn’t look at _all_ the vignettes but some of them will please you.”

“But--Fingal--” the girl protested, lifting her head from Pope’s Rape of the Lock illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley--“what are _you_ going to do? I feel as if you were preparing me for a voyage. I’d sooner talk to you than look at any books.”

“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said, throwing at her a nervous and rather harassed look, “I must wash my hands.”

He hurried precipitously from the room and Nance, lifting her eyebrows and shrugging her shoulders, returned to the “Rape of the Lock.”

The doctor’s bathroom was situated, it appeared, in the immediate vicinity of the study. Nance was conscious of the turning of what sounded like innumerable taps and of a rush of mighty waters.

“Is the dear man going to have a bath?” she said to herself, glancing at the clock on the chimney-piece. If her conjecture was right, Dr. Raughty took a long while getting ready for his singularly timed ablution for she heard him running backwards and forwards in the bathroom like a mouse in a cage. She uttered a little sigh and, laying the “Rape of the Lock” on the top of “Bewick,” looked wearily out of the window, her thoughts returning to Sorio and the event of the preceding evening.

Quite ten minutes elapsed before her host returned. He returned in radiant spirits but all that was visible to the eye as the result of his prolonged toilet was a certain smoothness in the lock of hair which fell across his forehead and a certain heightening of the colour of his cheeks. This latter change was obviously produced by vigorous rubbing, not by the application of any cosmetic.

He drew a chair close to her side and ignored with infinite kindness the fact that his pile of books lay untouched where he had placed them.

“Your neck is just like a column of white marble,” he said. “Are your arms the same--I mean are they as white--under this?”

Very gently and using his hands as if they belonged to someone else, he began rolling up the sleeve of her summer frock. Nance was sufficiently young to be pleased at his admiration and sufficiently experienced not to be shocked at his audacity. She let him turn the sleeve quite far back and smiled sadly to herself as she saw how admirably its freshly starched material showed off the delicacy and softness of the arm thus displayed. She was not even surprised or annoyed when she found that the Doctor, having touched several times with the tips of his fingers the curve of her elbow, possessed himself of her hand and tenderly retained it. She continued to look wistfully and dreamily out of the window, her lips smiling but her heart weary, thinking once more what an ironic and bitter commentary it was on the little ways of the world that amorousness of this sort--gentle and delicate though it might be--was all that was offered her in place of what she was losing.

“You ought to be running barefooted and full of excellent joy,” the voice of Dr. Raughty murmured, “along the sands to-day. You ought to be paddling in the sea with your skirts pinned round your waist! Why don’t you let me take you down there?”

She shook her head, turning her face towards him and releasing her fingers.

“I must get back now,” she remarked, looking him straight in the eyes, “so please give me my things.”

He meekly obeyed her and she put on her hat and gloves. As they were going downstairs, she in front of him, Nance had a remote consciousness that Dr. Raughty murmured something in which she caught Adrian’s name. She let this pass, however, and gave him her hand gratefully as he opened the door for her.

“Mayn’t I even see you home?” he asked.

Once more she shook her head. She felt that her nerves, just then, had had enough of playful tenderness.

“Good-bye!” she cried, leaving him on his threshold.

She cast a wistful glance at Baltazar’s cottage as she crossed the green.

“Oh, Adrian, Adrian,” she moaned, “I’d sooner be beaten by you than loved by all the rest of the world!”

It was with a slow and heavy step that Dr. Raughty ascended his little staircase after he had watched her disappear. Entering his room he approached the pile of books left beside her chair and began transporting them, one by one, to their places in the shelves.

“A sweet creature,” he murmured to himself as he did this, “a sweet creature! May ten thousand cartloads of hornified devils carry that damned Sorio into the pit of Hell!”

X

LOW TIDE

Nance was so absorbed, for several days after this, in making her final arrangements with the dressmaker and getting into touch with the work required of her that she was able to keep her nerves in quite reasonable control. She met Sorio more than once during this time and was more successful than she had dared to hope in the effort of suppressing her jealous passion. Her feelings did not remain, she admitted that to herself sadly enough, on the sublime platonic level indicated by Mr. Traherne, but as long as she made no overt reference to Philippa nor allowed her intercourse with her friend to be poisoned by her wounded pride, she felt she had not departed far from the priest’s high doctrine.

It was from Sorio himself, however, that she learned at last of a new and alarming turn of events, calculated to upset all her plans. This was nothing less than that her fatal presentiment in the churchyard had fulfilled itself and that Brand and Linda were secretly meeting. Sorio seemed surprised at the tragic way she received this news and she was equally indignant at his equanimity over it. The thing that made it worse to her was her deep-rooted suspicion that Rachel Doorm was implicated. Adrian laughed when she spoke of this.

“What did you expect?” he said. “Your charming friend’s an old crony of the Renshaws and nothing would please her better than to see Linda in trouble. She probably arranges their meetings for them. She has the look of a person who’d do that.”

They were walking together along the Mundham road when this conversation took place. It was then about three o’clock and Nance remembered with a sudden sinking of her heart how cheerfully both of her companions had encouraged her to make this particular excursion. She was to walk with Sorio to Mundham and return late in the evening by train.

“I shall go back,” she cried, standing still and looking at him with wild eyes. “This is too horrible! They must have plotted for me to be out of the way. How could Linda do it? But she’s no more idea than a little bird in the hedge what danger she’s in.”

Sorio shrugged his shoulders.

“You can’t go back now,” he protested. “We’re more than two miles away from the bridge. Besides, what’s the use? You can’t do anything. You can’t stop it.”

Nance looked at him with flashing eyes.

“I don’t understand what you mean, Adrian. She’s in danger. Linda’s in danger. Of course I shall go. I’m not afraid of Brand.”

She glanced across the wide expanse of fens. On the southern side of the road, as she looked back, the park trees of Oakguard stood out against the sky and nearer, on the northern side, the gables of Dyke House itself rose above the bank of the river.

“Oh, my dear, my dear,” she cried distractedly, “I must get back to them! I must! I must! Look--there’s our house! You can see its roof! There’s some way--surely--without going right back to the bridge? There _must_ be some way.”

She dragged him to the side of the road. A deep black ditch, bordered by reeds, intersected the meadow and beyond this was the Loon. A small wooden enclosure, isolated and forlorn, lay just inside the field and from within its barrier an enormous drab-coloured sow surveyed them disconsolately, uttering a lamentable squeal and resting its front feet upon the lower bar of its prison, while its great, many-nippled belly swung under it, plain to their view. Their presence as they stood in a low gap of the hedge tantalized the sow and it uttered more and more discordant sounds. It was like an angry impersonation of fecundity, mocking Nance’s agitation.

“Nothing short of wading up to your waist,” said Sorio, surveying the scene, “would get you across that ditch, and nothing short of swimming would get you over the river.”

Angry tears came into Nance’s eyes. “I would do it,” she gasped, “I would do it if I were a man.”

Sorio made a humorous grimace and nodded in the direction of the sow.

“What’s your opinion about it--eh, my beauty?”

At that moment there came the sound of a trotting horse.

“Here’s something,” he added, “that may help you if you’re bent on going.”

They returned to the road and the vehicle soon approached, showing itself, as it came near, to be the little pony-cart of Dr. Raughty. The Doctor proved, as may be imagined, more than willing to give Nance a lift. She declared she was tired but wouldn’t ask him to take her further than the village.

“I’ll take you wherever you wish,” said Fingal Raughty, giving a nervous little cough and scrambling down to help her in.

“Ah! I forgot! Excuse me one minute. Hold the pony, please. I promised to get some water-mint for Mrs. Sodderly.”

He ran hurriedly into the field and Nance, sitting in the cart, looked helplessly at Sorio who, making a gesture as if all the world had gone mad, proceeded to stroke the pony’s forehead. They waited patiently and the Doctor let them wait. They could see him through the gap in the hedge running hither and thither and every now and then stooping down and fumbling in the grass. He seemed entirely oblivious of their discomfort.

“This water-mint business,” muttered Sorio, “is worse than the shrew-mouse hunt. I suppose he collects groundsel and feverfew for all the old women in Rodmoor.”

Nance soon reached the limit of her patience. “Dr. Raughty!” she cried, and then in feminine desperation, “Fingal! Fingal!” she shouted.

The Doctor came hurrying back at that and to Sorio’s astonishment it appeared he had secured his desired plants. As he clambered up into the little cart a delicious aromatic fragrance diffused itself around Nance.

“I’ve found them all right,” he said. “They’re under my hat. Sorry I’ve only got room for one of you. Get on, Elizabeth!”

They drove off, Sorio making a final, Pilate-like gesture of complete irresponsibility.

“A noble creature--that sow,” the Doctor observed, glancing nervously at his companion, “a noble, beautiful animal! I expect it likes to feed on watermelons as well as any one. Did you observe its eye? Like a small yellow daisy! A beautiful eye, but with something wicked in it--didn’t you think so?--something menacing and malicious.”

Nance compelled herself to smile at this sally but her hands itched to snatch the whip and hasten the pony’s speed. They arrived at last at the New Bridge and Nance wondered whether the Doctor would be really amenable to her wishes or whether he would press her to visit his study again. But he drove on without a word, over the Loon, and westward again on the further side of it straight in the direction of Dyke House.

As they drew near the place Nance’s heart began to beat furiously and she cast about in her mind for some excuse to prevent her companion taking her any further. He seemed to read her thoughts for, with almost supernatural tact, he drew up when they were within a few hundred yards of the garden gate.

“I won’t come in if you don’t mind,” he said. “I have several patients to see before supper and I want to take Mrs. Sodderly her water-mint.”

Nance jumped quickly out of the cart and thanked him profusely.