Chapter IX: Part 9

Linda’s hands rose at once and she clutched at her bosom, but her sister was too quick for her and too strong. Nance’s feeling at that moment was as if she were plucking a snake away. Rising to her feet when she had secured the trophy, she lifted up her arm and, with a fierce swing of her whole body, flung both it and the shell she had herself been holding far into the centre-current of the inflowing tide.

“So much for Love!” she cried fiercely.

The shell sank at once to the bottom but the fir-cone floated. For a moment, when she saw Linda’s dismay, she felt a pang of remorse. But she crushed it fiercely down. Behind her whole mood at that moment was a savage reaction from Mrs. Renshaw’s emotional perversity.

“Come!” she cried, snatching at her sister’s hand as Linda wavered on the wharf-brink and watched the fir-cone drift behind an anchored barge and disappear. “Come! Let’s go back and help Miss Pontifex water her garden. Then we’ll have tea and then we’ll go for a row if it isn’t too dark! Perhaps Dr. Raughty will be home by then and we’ll make him take us.”

She was so resolute and so dominant that Linda could do nothing but meekly submit to her. Strangely enough she, too, felt a certain rebound of youthful vivacity now she was conscious no longer of the rough wood-token pressing against her flesh. She also, after what she had heard from the lips of Rachel, experienced a reaction against the sorrow of “what men call love.” Their mood continued unaltered until they reached the gate of the dressmaker’s garden.

“Then it’s Dr. Raughty--not Adrian,” the younger girl remarked with a smile, “that we’re to have to row us to-night?”

Nance looked quickly back at her and made an effort to smile too. But the sight of the flower-beds and the carefully tended box-hedges of the little garden, had been associated too long and too deeply with the pain at her heart. Her smile died away from her face and it was in silence after all and still bowed, for all their brave revolt under the burden of their humanity, that the two girls set themselves to water, as the August sun went down into the fens, the heavily-scented phloxes and sweet lavender of the admirable Miss Pontifex. That little lady was herself at that moment staring demurely, under the escort of a broad-shouldered nephew from London, at a stirring representation of “East Lynne” in a picture show in Mundham!

XIX

LISTENERS

August, now it had once come, proved hotter than was usual in that windy East Anglian district. Before the month was half over the harvest had begun and the wheat fields by the river bank stood bare and stubbly round their shocks of corn. Twined with the wheat stalks and fading now, since their support had been cut away, were all those bright and brilliant field flowers which Nance had watched with so tender an emotion in their yet unbudded state from her haunt by the willow bed. Fumitory and persicaria, succory and corn cockles, blent together in those fragrant holocausts with bindweed and hawkweed. At the edges of the fields the second brood of scarlet poppies still lingered on like thin streaks of spilt red blood round the scalps of closely cropped heads. In the marshy places and by the dykes and ditches the newly grown rush spears were now feathery and high, overtopping their own dead of the year before and gradually hiding them from sight. The last of all the season’s flowers, the lavender-coloured Michaelmas daisies alone refused to anticipate their normal flowering. But even these, in several portions of the salt marshes, were already high-grown and only waiting the hot month’s departure to put forth their autumnal blossoms. In the dusty corners of Rodmoor yards and in the littered outskirts of Mundham, where there were several gravel-quarries, camomile and feverfew--those pungent children of the late summer, lovers of rubbish heaps and deserted cow sheds--trailed their delicate foliage and friendly flowers. In the wayside hedges, wound-wort was giving place to the yellow spikes of the flower called “archangel,” while those “buds of marjoram,” appealed to in so wistful and so bitter a strain by the poet of the _Sonnets_, were superseding the wild basil. The hot white dust of the road between Rodmoor and Mundham rose in clouds under the wheels of every kind of vehicle and, as it rose, it swept in spiral columns across that grassy expanse which, in accordance with the old liberal custom of East Anglian road-makers, separated the highway on both sides from the enclosing hedges. With the sound of the corn-cutting machine humming drowsily all day and, in the twilight, with the shouts and cries of the children as their spirits rose with the appearance of the moths and bats, there mingled steadily, day in and day out, the monotonous splash of the waves on Rodmoor beach.

To those in the vicinity, whom Nature or some ill-usage of destiny had made morbidly sensitive to that particular sound, there was perhaps something harder to bear in its placid reiterated rhythm under these halcyon influences than when, in rougher weather, it broke into fury. The sound grew in intensity as it diminished in volume and with the _beat, beat, beat_, of its eternal refrain, sharpened and brought nearer in the silence of the hot August noons there came to such nervously sensitive ears as were on the alert to receive it, an increasingly disturbing resemblance to the sistole and diastole, the inbreathing and outbreathing of some huge, half-human heart.

Among the various persons in Rodmoor from whom the greater and more beneficent gods seemed turning away their faces and leaving them a prey to the lesser and more vindictive powers, it is probable that not one felt so conscious of this note of insane repetition, almost bestial in its blind persistence, as did Philippa Renshaw. Philippa, in those early August weeks, became more and more aloof from both her mother and Brand. She met Sorio once or twice but that was rather by chance than by design and the encounters were not happy for either of them. Insomnia grew upon her and her practise of roaming at night beneath the trees of the park grew with it. Brand often followed her on these nocturnal wanderings but only once was he successful in persuading her to return with him to the house. In proportion as she drew away from him he seemed to crave her society.

One night, after Mrs. Renshaw had retired to bed, the brother and sister lingered on in the darkened library. It was a peculiarly sultry evening and a heavy veil of mist obscured the young crescent moon. Through the open windows came hot gusts of air, ruffling the curtains and making the candle flames flicker. Brand rose and blew out all the lights except one which he placed on a remote table below the staring dark-visaged portrait, painted some fifty years before, of Herman Renshaw, their father. The other pictures that hung in the spaces between the book-shelves were now reduced to a shadowy and ghostly obscurity, an obscurity well adapted to the faded and melancholy lineaments of these older, but apparently no happier, Renshaws of Oakguard. Round the candle he had left alight a little group of agitated moths hovered and at intervals as one or other of them got singed it would dash itself with wild blind flutterings, into the remotest corners of the room. From the darkness outside came an occasional rustle of leaves and sighing of branches as the gusts of hot air rose and died away. The oppressive heat was like the burden of a huge, palpable hand laid upon the roof of the house. Now and again some startled creature pursued by owl or weasel uttered a panic-stricken cry, but whether its enemy seized upon it, or whether it escaped, the eyes of the darkness alone knew. Its cry came suddenly and stopped suddenly and the steady beat of the rhythm of the night went on as before.

Brand flung himself down in a low chair and his sister balanced herself on the arm of it, a lighted cigarette between her mocking lips. Hovering thus in the shadow above him, her flexible form swaying like a phantom created out of mist, she might have been taken for the embodiment of some perverse vision, some dream avatar from the vices of the dead past.

“After all,” Brand murmured in a low voice, a voice that sounded as though his thoughts were taking shape independently of his conscious will, “after all, what do I want with Linda or any of them since I’ve got you?”

She made a mocking inclination of her head at this but kept silence, only letting her eyes cling, with a strange light in them, to his disturbed face. After a pause he spoke again.

“And yet she suits me better than any one--better than I expected it was possible for a girl like that to suit me. She’ll never get over her fear of me and that means she’ll never get over her love. I ought to be contented with that, oughtn’t I?”

He paused again and still Philippa uttered no word. “I don’t think you quite understand,” he went on, “all that there is between her and me. We touch one another _in the depths_, there’s no doubt about that, and our boat takes us where there are no soundings, none at least that I’ve ever made! We touch one another where that noise--oh, damn the wind! I don’t mean the wind!--is absolutely still. Have _you_ ever reached a point when you’ve got that noise out of your ears? No--you know very well you haven’t! You were born hearing it--just as I was--and you’ll die hearing it. But with her, just because she’s so afraid, so madly afraid--do you understand?--I _have_ reached that point. I reached it the other night when we were together. Yes! You may smile--you little devil--but it’s quite true. She put it clear out of my head just as if she’d driven the tide back!”

He stared at the cloud of faint blue smoke that floated up round his sister’s white face and then he met her eyes again.

“Bah!” he flung out angrily. “What absurd nonsense it all is! We’ve been living too long in this place, we Renshaws, that’s what’s the matter with us! We ought to sell the confounded house and clear out altogether! I will too, when mother dies. Yes, I will--brewery or no brewery--and go off with Tassar to one of his foreign places. I’ll sell the whole thing, the land and the business! It’s begun to get on my nerves. It _must_ have got on my nerves, mustn’t it, when that simple _break, break, break_, as mother’s absurd poem says of this damned sea, sounds to me like the beating heart of something, of something whose heart ought to be _stopped_ from beating!”

His voice which had risen to a loud pitch of excitement died away in a sort of apologetic murmur.

“Sorry,” he muttered, “only don’t look at me like that, you girl. There, clear off and sit further away! It’s that look of yours that makes me talk in this silly fashion. God help us! I don’t blame that foreign fellow for getting queer in his head. You’ve got something in those eyes of yours, Philippa, that no living girl ought to be allowed to have! Bah! You’ve made me talk like an absolute fool.”

Instead of moving away as she had been bidden, Philippa touched her brother with a light caress. Never had she looked so entirely a creature of the old perverse civilizations as she looked at that moment.

“Mother thinks you’re going to marry that girl,” she whispered, “but I know better than that, and I’m always right in these things, am I not, Brand darling?”

He fell back under her touch and the shadowy lines of his face contracted. He presented the appearance of something withered and crumpled. Her mocking smile still divided her curved lips, curved in the subtle, archaic way as in the marbles of ancient Greece. Whatever may have been the secret of her power over him, it manifested itself now in the form of a spiritual cruelty which he found very difficult to bear. He made a movement that was almost an appeal.

“Say I’m right, say I’m always right in these things!” she persisted.

But at that moment a diversion occurred, caused by the sudden entrance of a large bat. The creature uttered a weird querulous cry, like the cry of a newborn babe and went wheeling over their heads in desperate rapid circles, beating against the book-case and the picture frames. Presently, attracted by the light, it swooped down upon the flame of the candle and in a moment had extinguished it, plunging the room into complete darkness.

Philippa, with a low taunting laugh, ran across the room and wrapped herself in one of the window curtains.

“Open the door and drive it out,” she cried. “Drive it out, I say! Are you afraid of a thing like that?”

But Brand seemed either to have sunk into a kind of trance or to be too absorbed in his thoughts to make any movement. He remained reclining in his chair, silent and motionless.

The girl cautiously withdrew from her shelter and, fumbling about for matches, at last found a box and struck a light. The bat flew past her as she did so and whirled away into the night. She lit several candles and held one of them close to her brother’s face. Thus illuminated, Brand’s sinister countenance had the look of a mediæval wood-carving. He might have been the protagonist of one of those old fantastic prints representing Doctor Faustus after some hopeless struggle with his master-slave.

“Take it away, you! Let me alone. I’ve talked too much to you already. This is a hot night, eh? A hot night and the kind that sets a person thinking. Bah! I’ve thought too much. It’s thinking that causes all the devilries in the world. Thinking, and hearing hearts beating, that ought to be stopped!”

He pushed her aside and rose, stretching himself and yawning.

“What’s the time? What? Only ten o’clock? How early mother must have gone to bed! This is the kind of night in which people kill their mothers. Yes, they do, Philippa. You needn’t peer at me like that! And they do it when their mothers have daughters that look like you--just like you at this very moment.”

He leaned against the back of a chair and watched her as she stood negligently by the mantelpiece, her arm extended along its marble surface.

“Why does mother always say these things to you about my marrying?” he continued in a broken thick voice. “You lead her on to think of these things and then when she comes out with them you bring them to me, to make me angry with her. Tell me this, Philippa, why do you hate mother so? Why did you have that look in your face just now when I talked of killing her? What--would--you--Hang it all, girl, stop staring and smiling at me like that or it’ll be you I’ll kill! Oh, Heaven above, help us! This hot night will send us all into Bedlam!”

He suddenly stopped and began intently listening, his eyes on his sister’s face. “Did you hear that?” he whispered huskily. “She’s walking up and down the passage--walking in her slippers, that’s why you can hardly hear her. Hush! Listen! She’ll go presently into father’s room. She always does that in the end. What do you think she does there, Philippa? Rummages about, I suppose, and opens and shuts drawers and changes the pictures! What people we are! God--what people we are! I suppose the sound of her doing all that irritates you till your brain nearly bursts. It’s a strange thing, isn’t it, this family life! Human beings like us weren’t meant to be stuck in a hole together like wasps in a bottle. Listen! Do you hear that? She’s doing something to his window now. A lot he cares, six feet under the clay! But it shows how he holds her still, doesn’t it?” He made a gesture in the direction of his father’s picture upon which the candle-light shone clearly now, animating its heavy features.

“Do you know,” he continued solemnly, looking closely at his sister again, “I believe one of these nights, when she walks up and down like that, in her soft slippers, you’ll go straight up and kill her yourself. Yes, I believe you listen like this every night till you could put your fingers in your ears and scream.”

He moved across the room and, approaching his sister, shook her roughly by the arm. Some psychic change in the atmosphere about them seemed to have completely altered their relations.

“Confess--confess--you girl!” he muttered harshly. “Confess now--when you go rushing off like that into the park it isn’t to see that foreign fellow at all? It isn’t even to lie, as I know you love to do, touching the stalks of the poison funguses with the tip of your tongue under the oak trunks? It’s to escape from hearing her, that’s what it is! Confess now. It’s to escape from hearing her!”

He suddenly relaxed his grasp and stood erect, listening intently. The sweet heavy scent of magnolia petals floated in through the window and somewhere--far off among the trees--a screech-owl uttered a broken wail, followed by the flapping of wings. The clock in the hall outside began striking the hour. Before each stroke a ponderous metallic vibration trembled through the silent house.

“It’s only ten now,” he said. “The clock in here is fast.”

As he spoke there was a loud ring at the entrance door. The brother and sister stared blankly at one another and then Philippa gave a low unnatural laugh. “We might be criminals,” she whispered. They instinctively assumed more easy and less dramatic positions and waited in silence, while from the distant servants’ quarters some one came to answer the summons. They heard the door opened and the sound of suppressed voices in the hall. There was a moment’s pause, during which Philippa looked mockingly and enquiringly at Brand.

“It’s our dear priest,” she whispered, “and some one else, too.”

“Surely the fool’s not going to try--” began Brand.

“Mr. Traherne and Dr. Raughty!” announced the servant, opening the library door and holding it open while the visitors entered.

The clergyman advanced first. He shook hands with Brand and bowed with old-fashioned courtesy to Philippa. Dr. Raughty, following him, shook hands with Philippa and nodded nervously at her brother. The two men sank into the seats offered them and accepted an invitation to smoke. Brand moved to a side table and mixed for them, with an air of resigned politeness, cool and appropriate drinks. He drank nothing himself, however, but his sister, with a mocking apology to Mr. Traherne, lit herself a cigarette.

“How’s the rat?” she began, throwing a teasing and provocative smile upon the priest’s perturbed countenance.

“Out there,” he replied, emptying his glass at one gulp.

“What? In your coat pocket on such a night as this?”

Mr. Traherne put down his glass and inserted his huge workman’s fingers into the bosom of his cassock.

“Nothing under this but a shirt,” he said. “Cassocks have no pockets.”

“Haven’t they?” laughed Brand. “They have something then where you can put money. That is, unless you parsons are like kangaroos and have some natural little orifice in which to hide the offerings of the faithful.”

“Is he happy always in your pocket?” enquired Philippa.

“Do you want me to see?” replied the priest, rising with a movement that almost upset the table. “I’ll bring him in and I’ll make him go scimble-scamble all about the room.”

The tone in which he uttered these words said, as plainly as words could say, “You’re a pretty, silly, flirtatious piece of femininity! You only talk about my rat for the sake of fooling me. You don’t really care whether he’s happy in my pocket or not. It’s only out of consideration for your silly nerves that I don’t play with him now. And if you tease me an inch more I will, and make him run up your petticoats, too!”

“Sit down again, Traherne,” said Brand, “and let me fill up your glass. We’ll all visit the rat presently and find him some supper. Just at present I’m anxious to know how things are in the village. I haven’t been down that way for weeks.”

This was a direct challenge to the priest to come, without further delay, to the matter of his visit. Hamish Traherne accepted it.

“We came really,” he said, “to see _you_, Renshaw. A little later, perhaps before we go, we must have our conversation. We hardly expected to have the pleasure of finding Miss Philippa sitting up so late.”

Dr. Raughty, who all this while had been watching with the most intense delight the beauty of the girl’s white skin and scarlet lips and the indescribable charm of her sinuous figure, now broke in impetuously.

“But it can wait! It can wait! Oh, please don’t go to bed yet, Miss Renshaw. Look, your cigarette’s out! Throw it away and try one of these. They’re French, they’re the yellow packets, I know you like them. They’re what you smoked once when we were on the river--when you caught that great perch.”

Philippa, who had risen to her feet at Traherne’s somewhat brusque remark, came at once to the Doctor’s side.

“Oh, the perch,” she cried, “yes, I should think I do remember! You insisted on killing it at once so that it shouldn’t jump back into the water. You put your thumb into its mouth and bent back its head. Oh, yes! That yellow packet brings it all back to me. I can smell the sticky dough we tried to catch dace with afterwards and I can see the look of your hands all smeared with blood and silver scales. Oh, that was a lovely day, Doctor! Do you remember how you twisted those things, bryony leaves they were, round my head when the others had gone? Do you remember how you said you’d like to treat me as you treated the perch? Do you remember how you ran after a dragon-fly or something?”

She stopped breathlessly and, balancing herself on the arm of the Doctor’s chair, blew a great cloud of smoke over his head, filling the room in a moment with the pungent odour of French tobacco.

Both Traherne and Brand regarded her with astonishment. She seemed to have transformed herself and to have become a completely different person. Her eyes shone with childish gaiety and when she laughed, as she did a moment afterwards at some sally of the Doctor’s, there was a ring of unforced, spontaneous merriment in the sound such as her brother had not heard for many years. She continued to bend over Dr. Raughty’s chair, covering them both in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke, and the two of them soon became absorbed in some intricate discussion concerning, as far as the others could make out, the question of the best bait to be used for pike.

The priest took the opportunity of delivering himself of what was on his mind.

“I’m afraid, Renshaw,” he said, “you’ve gone your own way in that matter of Linda Herrick. No! Don’t deny it. You may not have seen her as often as before our last conversation, but you’ve seen her. She’s confessed as much to me herself. Now look here, Renshaw, you and I have known one another for some good few years. How long is it, man? Fifteen, twenty? It can’t be less. Long enough, anyway, for me to have earned the right to speak quite plainly and I tell you this, you must stop the whole business!”

His voice sank as he spoke to a formidable whisper. Brand glanced round at the others but apparently they were quite preoccupied. Mr. Traherne continued.

“The whole business, Renshaw! After this you must leave that child absolutely alone. If you don’t--if you insist on going on seeing her--I shall take strong measures with you. I shall--but I needn’t say any more! I think you can make a pretty shrewd guess what I shall do.”

Brand received this solemn ultimatum in a way calculated to cause the agitated man who addressed it to him a shock of complete bewilderment. He yawned carelessly and stretched out his long arms.

“As you please, Hamish,” he said, “I’m perfectly ready not to see her. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have seen her in any case. To tell you the truth, I’ve got a bit sick of the whole thing. These young girls are silly little feather-weights at best. It’s first one mood and then another! You can’t be sure of them for two hours at a stretch. So it’s all right, Hamish Traherne! I won’t interfere with her. You can make a nun of her if you like--or whatever else you fancy. All I beg of you is, don’t go round talking about me to your parishioners. Don’t talk about me to Raughty! I don’t want my affairs discussed by any one--not even by my friends. All right, my boy--you needn’t look at me like that. You’ve known me, as you say, long enough to know what I am. So there you are! You’ve had your answer and you’ve got my word. I don’t mind even your calling it ‘the word of a gentleman’ as you did the other night. You can call it what you like. I’m not going to see Linda for a reason quite personal and private but if you like to make it a favour to yourself that I don’t--well! throw that in, too!”

Hamish Traherne thrust his hand into his cassock thinking, for the moment, that it was his well-worn ulster and that he would feel the familiar form of Ricoletto.

It may be noted from this futile and unconscious gesture, how much hangs in this world upon insignificant threads. Had the priest’s fingers touched at that moment the silky coat of his little friend he would have derived sufficient courage to ask his formidable host point-blank whether, in leaving Linda in this way, he left her as innocent and unharmed as when he crossed her path at the beginning. Not having Ricoletto with him, however, and his fingers encountering nothing but his own woolen shirt, he lacked the inspiration to carry the matter to this conclusion. Thus, upon the trifling accident of a tame rodent having been left outside a library or, if you will, upon an eccentric parson having no pocket, depended the whole future of Linda Herrick. For, had he put that question and had Brand confessed the truth, the priest would undoubtedly, under every threat in his power, have commanded him to marry her and it is possible, considering the mood the man was in at that moment and considering also the nature of the threat held over him, he would have bowed to the inevitable and undertaken to do it.

The intricate and baffling complications of human life found further illustration in the very nature of this mysterious threat hinted at so darkly by Mr. Traherne. It was in reality--and Brand knew well that it was--nothing more or less than the making clear to Mrs. Renshaw beyond all question or doubt, of the actual character of the son she tried so conscientiously to idealize. For some basic and profound reason, inherent in his inmost nature, it was horrible to Brand to think of his mother knowing him. She might suspect and _she might know that he knew she suspected_, but to have the thing laid quite bare between them would be to send a rending and shattering crack through the unconscious hypocrisy of twenty years. For certain natures any drastic cleavage of slowly built-up moral relations is worse than death. Brand would have felt less remorse in being the cause of his mother’s death than of being the cause of her knowing him as he really was. The matter of Linda being thus settled between the two men, if the understanding so reached could be regarded as settling it, they both turned round, anxious for some distraction, to the quarter of the room where their friends had been conversing. But Philippa and the Doctor were no longer with them. Brand looked whimsically at the priest who, shrugging his shoulders, poured himself out a third glass from the decanter on the table. They then moved to the window which reached almost to the ground. Stepping over its low ledge, they passed out upon the terrace. They were at once aware of a change in the atmospheric conditions. The veil of mist had entirely been swept away from the sky. The vast expanse twinkled with bright stars and, far down among the trees, they could discern the crescent form of the new moon.

Brand pulled towards him a spray of damask roses and inhaled their sweetness. Then he turned to his companion and gave him an evil leer.

“The Doctor and Philippa have taken advantage of our absorbing conversation,” he remarked.

“Nonsense, man, nonsense!” exclaimed the priest. “Raughty’s only showing her some sort of moth or beetle. Can’t you stop your sneering for once and look at things humanly and naturally?”

His words found their immediate justification. Turning the corner of the house they discovered the two escaped ones on their knees by the edge of the dew-drenched lawn watching the movements of a toad. The Doctor was gently directing its advance with the stalk of a dead geranium and Philippa was laughing as merrily as a little girl.

They now realized the cause of the disappearance of the sultriness and the heat. From over the wide-stretching fens came, with strong steady breath, the north-west wind. It came with a full deep coolness in it which the plants and the trees seemed to drink from as out of some immortal cistern. It brought with it the odour of immense marsh-lands and fresh inland waters and as it bowed the trees and rustled over the flower-beds, it seemed to obliterate and drive back all indications of their nearness to the sea.

Raughty and Philippa rose to their feet at the approach of their friends.

“Doctor,” said Brand, “what’s the name of that great star over there--or planet--or whatever it is?”

They all surveyed the portion of the sky he indicated and contemplated the unknown luminary.

“I wish they’d taught me astronomy instead of Greek verses when I was at school,” sighed Mr. Traherne.

“It’s Venus, I suppose,” remarked Dr. Raughty. “Isn’t it Venus, Philippa?”

The girl looked from the men to the sky, and from the sky to the men.

“Well, you _are_ a set of wise fellows,” she cried, “not to know the star which rules us all! And that’s _not_ Venus, Doctor! Don’t any of you really know? Brand--you surely do? Well, I’ll tell you then, that’s Jupiter, that’s the lord-star Jupiter!”

And she burst into a peal of ringing boyish laughter. Brand turned to the Doctor, who had moved away to cast a final glance at the toad.

“What have you done to her, Fingal?” he called out. “She hasn’t laughed like that for years.”

The only answer he received to this was an embarrassed cough, but when they returned to the library and began looking at some of the more interesting of the volumes in its shelves it was noticed by both Brand and Mr. Traherne that the Doctor treated the young girl with a frank, direct, simple and humorous friendliness as if completely oblivious of her sex.

XX

RAVELSTON GRANGE

The hot weather continued with the intermission of only a few wet and windy days all through the harvest. One Saturday afternoon Sorio, who had arranged to take Nance by train to Mundham, loitered with Baltazar at the head of the High Street waiting the girl’s appearance. She had told him to meet her there rather than at her lodging because since the occasion when they took refuge in the cottage it had been agitating to her to see Linda and Baltazar together. She knew without any question asked that for several weeks her sister had seen nothing of Brand and she was extremely unwilling, now that the one danger seemed removed, that the child should risk falling into another.

Nance herself had lately been seeing more of her friend’s friend than she liked. It was difficult to avoid this, however, now that they lived so near, especially as Mr. Stork’s leisure times between his journeys to Mundham, coincided so exactly with her own hours of freedom from work at the dressmaker’s. But the more she saw of Baltazar, the more difficult she found it to tolerate him. With Brand, whenever chance threw him across her path, she was always able to preserve a dignified and conventional reserve. She saw that he knew how deep her indignation on behalf of her sister went and she could not help respecting him for the tact and discretion with which he accepted her tacit antagonism and made any embarrassing clash between them easy to avoid. At the bottom of her heart she had never felt any personal dislike of Brand Renshaw, nor did that peculiar fear which he seemed to inspire in the majority of those who knew him affect her in the least. She would have experienced not the slightest trepidation in confronting him on her sister’s behalf if circumstances demanded it and meanwhile she only asked that they should be left in peace.

But with Baltazar it was different. She disliked him cordially and, with her dislike, there mingled a considerable element of quite definite fear. The precise nature of this fear she was unable to gauge. In a measure it sprang from his unfailing urbanity and the almost effusive manner in which he talked to her and rallied her with little witticisms whenever they met. Nance’s own turn of mind was singularly direct and simple and she could not avoid a perpetual suspicion in dealing with Mr. Stork that the man was covertly mocking at her and seeking to make her betray herself in some way. There was something about his whole personality which baffled and perplexed her. His languid and effeminate manner seemed to conceal some hard and inflexible attitude towards life which, like a steel blade in a velvet scabbard, was continually on the point of revealing its true nature and yet never actually did. She completely distrusted his influence over Sorio and indeed carried her suspicion of him to the extreme point of even doubting his affection for his old-time friend. Nothing about him seemed to her genuine or natural. When he spoke of art, as he often did, or uttered vague, cynical commentaries upon life in general, she felt towards him just as a girl feels towards another girl whose devices to attract attention seem to be infringing the legitimate limit of recognized rivalry. It was not only that she suspected him of every sort of hypocritical diplomacy or that every attitude he adopted seemed a deliberate pose; it was that in some indescribably subtle way he seemed to make her feel as if her own gestures and speeches were false. He troubled and agitated her to such an extent that she was driven sometimes into a mood of such desperate self-consciousness that she did actually become insincere or at any rate felt herself saying and doing things which failed to express what she really had in her mind. This was especially the case when he was present at her encounters with Sorio. She found herself on such occasions uttering sometimes the wildest speeches, speeches quite far from her natural character, and even when she tried passionately to be herself she was half-conscious all the while that Baltazar was watching her and, so to speak, clapping his hands encouragingly and urging her on. It was just as if she heard him whispering in her ear and saying, “That’s a pretty speech, that’s an effective turn of the head, that’s a happily timed smile, that’s an appealing little silence!”

His presence seemed to perplex and bewilder the very basis and foundation of her confidence in herself. What was natural he made unnatural and what was spontaneous he made premeditated. He seemed to dive down into the very depths of her soul and stir up and make muddy and clouded what was clearest and simplest there. The little childish impulses and all the impetuous girlish movements of her mind became silly and forced when he was present, became something that might have been different had she willed them to be different, something that she was deliberately using to bewitch Adrian.

The misery of it was that she _couldn’t_ be otherwise, that she couldn’t look and talk and laugh and be silent, in any other manner. And yet he made her feel as if this were not only possible but easy. He was diabolically and mercilessly clever in his malign clairvoyance. Nance was not so simple as not to recognize that there are a hundred occasions when a girl quite legitimately and naturally “makes the best” of her passing moods and feelings. She was not so stupid as not to know that the very diffusion of a woman’s emotions, through every fibre and nerve of her being, lends itself to innumerable little exaggerations and impulsive underscorings, so to speak, of the precise truth. But it was just these very basic or, if the phrase may be permitted, these “organic” characteristics of her self-expression, that Baltazar’s unnatural watchfulness was continually pouncing on. In some curious way he succeeded, though himself a man, in betraying the very essence of her sex-dignity. He threw her, in fact, into a position of embarrassed self-defence over what were really the inevitable accompaniments of her being a woman at all.

The unfairness of the thing was constantly being accentuated and made worse by the fact of her having so often to listen to bitter and sarcastic diatribes from both Adrian and his friend, directed towards her sex in general. A sort of motiveless jibing against women seemed indeed one of the favourite pastimes of the two men and Nance’s presence, when this topic came forward, appeared rather to enhance than mitigate their hostility.

On one or two occasions of this kind, Dr. Raughty had happened to be present and Nance felt she would never forget her gratitude to this excellent man for the genial and ironical way he reduced them to silence.

“I’m glad you have invented,” he would say to them, “so free and inexpensive a way of getting born. You’ve only to give us a little more independence and death will be equally satisfactory.”

On this particular afternoon, however, Baltazar was not encouraging Sorio in any misogynistic railings. On the contrary he was endeavouring to soothe his friend who at that moment was in one of his worst moods.

“Why doesn’t she come?” he kept jerking out. “She knows perfectly how I hate waiting in the street.”

“Come and sit down under the trees,” suggested Baltazar. “She’s sure to come out on the green to look for you and we can see her from there.”

They moved off accordingly and sat down, side by side, with a group of village people under the ancient sycamores. Above them the nameless Admiral looked steadily sea-wards and in the shadow thrown by the trees several ragged little girls were playing sleepily on the burnt-up grass.

“It’s extraordinary,” Sorio remarked, “what a lot of human beings there are in the world who would be best out of it! They get on my nerves, these people. I think I hear them more clearly and feel them nearer me here than ever before in my life. Every person in a place like this becomes more important and asserts himself more, and the same is true of every sound. If you want really to escape from humanity there are only two things to do, either go right away into the desert where there’s not a living soul or go into some large city where you’re absolutely lost in the crowd. This half-and-half existence is terrible.”

“My dear, my dear,” protested his companion, “you keep complaining and grumbling but for the life of me I can’t make out what it is that actually annoys you. By the way, don’t utter your sentiments too loudly! These honest people will not understand.”

“What annoys me--you don’t understand what annoys me?” muttered the other peevishly. “It annoys me to be stared at. It annoys me to be called out after. It annoys me to be recognized. I can’t move from your door without seeing some face I know and what’s still worse, seeing that face put on a sort of silly, inquisitive, jeering look, as much as to say, ‘Ho! Ho! here is that idiot again. Here is that fool who sponges upon Mr. Stork! Here is that spying foreign devil!’”

“Adrian--Adrian,” protested his companion, “you really are becoming impossible. I assure you these people don’t say or think anything of the kind! They just see you and greet you and wish you well and pass on upon their own concerns.”

“Oh, don’t they, don’t they,” cried the other, forgetting in his agitation to modulate his voice and causing a sudden pause in the conversation that was going on at their side. “Don’t they think these things! I know humanity better. Every single person who meets another person and knows anything at all about him wants to show that he’s a match for his little tricks, that he’s not deceived by his little ways, that he knows where he gets his money or doesn’t get it and what woman he wants or doesn’t want and which of his parents he wishes dead and buried! I tell you you’ve no idea what human beings are really like! You haven’t any such idea, for the simple reason that you’re absolutely hard and self-centred yourself. You go your own way. You think your own thoughts. You create your own fancy-world. And the rest of humanity are nothing--mere pawns and puppets and dream-figures--nothing--simply nothing! I’m a completely different nature from you, Tassar. I’ve got my idea--my secret--but I’d rather not talk about that and you’d rather not hear. But apart from that, I’m simply helpless. I mean I’m helplessly conscious of everything round me! I’m porous to things. It’s really quite funny. It’s just as if I hadn’t any skin, as if my soul hadn’t any skin. Everything that I see, or hear, Tassar--and the hearing is worse, oh, ever so much worse--passes straight through me, straight through the very nerves of my inmost being. I feel sometimes as though my mind were like a piece of parchment, stretched out taut and tight and every single thing that comes near me taps against it, tip-tap, tip-tap, tip-tap, as if it were a drum! That wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t that I know so horribly clearly what people are thinking. For instance, when I go down that alley to the station, as I shall soon with Nance, and pass the workmen at their doors, I know perfectly well that they’ll look at me and say to themselves, ‘There goes that fool again,’ or, ‘There goes that slouching idiot from the cottage,’ but that’s not all, Tassar. They soon have the sense to see that I’m the kind of person who shrinks from being noticed and that pleases them. They nudge one another then and look more closely at me. They do their best to make me understand that they know their power over me and intend to use it, intend to nudge one another and look at me every time I pass. I can read exactly what their thoughts are. They say to themselves, ‘He may slink off now but he’ll have to come this way again and then we’ll see! Then we’ll look at him more closely. Then we’ll find out what he’s after in these parts and why that pretty girl puts up with him so long!’”

He was interrupted at that moment by a roar of laughter from the group beside them and Baltazar rose and pulled him away. “Upon my soul, Adrian,” he whispered, as he led him back across the green, “you must behave better! You’ve given those honest fellows something to gossip about for a week. They’ll think you really are up to something, you can’t shout like that without being listened to and you can’t quarrel with the whole of humanity.”

Adrian turned fiercely round on him. “Can’t I?” he exclaimed. “Can’t I quarrel with humanity? You wait, my friend, till I’ve got my book published. Then you’ll see! I tell you I’ll strike this cursed human race of yours such a blow that they’ll wish they’d treated a poor wanderer on the face of the earth a little better and spared him something of their prying and peering!”

“Your book!” laughed Baltazar. “A lot they’ll care for your book! That’s always the way with you touchy philosophers. You stir up the devil of a row with your bad temper and make the most harmless people into enemies and then you think you can settle it all and prove yourselves right and everybody else wrong by writing a book. Upon my soul, Adrian, if I didn’t love you very much indeed I’d be inclined to let you loose on life just to see whether you or it could strike the hardest blows!”

Sorio looked at him with a curiously bewildered look. He seemed puzzled. His swarthy Roman face wore a clouded, weary, crushed expression. His brow contracted into an anxious frown and his mouth quivered. His air at that moment was the air of a very young child that suddenly finds the world much harder to deal with than it expected.

Baltazar watched him with secret pleasure. These were the occasions when he always felt strangely drawn towards him. That look of irresolute and bewildered weakness upon a countenance so powerfully moulded filled him with a most delicate sense of protective pity. He could have embraced the man as he watched him, blinking there in the afternoon sunshine, and fumbling with the handle of his stick.

But at that moment Nance appeared, walking rapidly with bent head, up the narrow street. Baltazar looked at her with a gleam of hatred in his sea-coloured eyes. She came to rob him of one of the most exquisite pleasures of his life, the pleasure of reducing this strong creature to humiliated submissiveness and then petting and cajoling him back into self-respect. The knowledge that he left Sorio in her hands in this particular mood of deprecatory helplessness, remorseful and gentle and like a wild beast beaten into docility, caused him the most acute pain. With poisonous antagonism under his urbane greeting he watched furtively the quick glance she threw at Adrian and the way her eyes lingered upon his, feeling her way into his mood. He cast about for some element of discord that he could evoke and leave behind with them to spoil the girl’s triumph for he knew well that Adrian was now, after what had just occurred, in the frame of mind most adapted of all to the influence of feminine sympathy. Nance, however, did not give him an opportunity for this.

“Come on,” she said, “we’ve only just time to catch the three o’clock train. Come on! Good-bye for a while, Mr. Stork. I’ll bring him back safe to you, sooner or later. Come on, Adrian, we really must be quick!”

They went off together and Baltazar wandered slowly back across the green. He felt for the moment so lonely that even his hatred drifted away and sank to nothingness under the inflowing wave of bitter universal isolation. As he approached his cottage he stopped stone-still with his eyes on the ground and his hands behind his back. Elegantly dressed in pleasant summer clothes, his slight graceful figure, easy bearing, and delicate features, gave without doubt to the casual bystanders who observed him, an impression of unmitigated well-being. As a matter of fact, had that discerning historic personage who is reported to have exclaimed after an interview with Jonathan Swift, “there goes the unhappiest man who ever lived,” exercised his insight now, he might have modified his conclusion in favour of Baltazar Stork.

It would certainly have required more than ordinary discernment to touch the tip of the iron wedge that was being driven just then into this graceful person’s brain. Looking casually into the man’s face one would have seen nothing perhaps but a dreamy, pensive smile--a smile a little bitter maybe, and self-mocking but with no particularly sinister import. A deeper glance, however, would have disclosed a curious compression of the lines about the mouth and a sort of indrawing of the lips as if Mr. Stork were about to emit the sound of whistling. Below the smiling surface of the eyes, too, there might have been seen a sort of under-flicker of shuddering pain as if, without any kind of anæsthetic, Mr. Stork were undergoing some serious operation. The colour had deserted his cheeks as if whatever it was he was enduring the endurance of it had already exhausted his physical energies. Passing him by, as we have remarked, casually and hastily, one might have said to oneself--“Ah! a handsome fellow chuckling there over some pleasant matter!” but coming close up to him one would have instinctively stretched out a hand, so definitely would it then have appeared that, whatever his expression meant, he was on the point of fainting. It was perhaps a fortunate accident that, at this particular moment as he stood motionless, a small boy of his acquaintance, the son of one of the Rodmoor fishermen, came up to him and asked whether he had heard of the great catch there had been that day.

“There’s a sight o’ fish still there, Mister,” the boy remarked, “some of them monstrous great flounders and a heap of Satans such as squirts ink out of their bellies!”

Baltazar’s twisted lips gave a genuine smile now. A look of extraordinary tenderness came into his face.

“Ah, Tony, my boy,” he said, “so there are fish down there, are there? Well, let’s go and see! You take me, will you? And I’ll make those fellows give you some for supper.”

They walked together across the green and down the street. Baltazar’s hand remained upon the child’s shoulder and he listened as he walked, to his chatter; but all the while his mind visualized an immense, empty plain--a plain of steely-blue ice under a grey sky--and in the center of this plain a bottomless crevasse, also of steely-blue ice, and on the edge of this crevasse, gradually relinquishing their hold from exhaustion, two human hands. This image kept blending itself as they walked with all the little things which his eyes fell upon. It blent with the cakes in the confectioner’s window. It blent with the satiny blouses, far too expensive for any local purchaser, in Miss Pontifex’s shop. It blent with the criss-cross lines of the brick-work varied with flint of the house where Dr. Raughty lived. It blent with their first glimpse of the waters of the harbour, seen between two ramshackle houses with gable roofs. Nor when they finally found themselves standing with a little crowd of men and boys round a circle of fish-baskets upon the shore did it fail to associate itself both with the blue expanse of waveless sea stretched before them and with the tangled mass of sea shells, seaweed and sea creatures which lay exposed to the sunlight, many-coloured and glistening as the deeper folds of the nets which had drawn them from the deep were explored and dragged forward.

Meanwhile Adrian and Nance, having safely caught their train, were being carried with the leisurely steadiness of a local line, from Rodmoor to Mundham. Jammed tightly into a crowded compartment full of Saturday marketers, they had little opportunity during the short journey to do more than look helplessly across their perspiring neighbours at the rising and falling of the telegraph wires against a background of blue sky. The peculiar manner in which, as a train carries one forward, these wires sink slowly downwards as if they were going to touch the earth and then leap up with an unexpected jerk as the next pole comes by, was a phenomenon that always had a singular fascination for Sorio. He associated it with his most childish recollections of railway travelling. Would the wires ever succeed in sinking out of sight before the next pole jerked them high up across the window again? That was the speculation that fascinated him even at this moment as he watched them across the brim of his companion’s brightly trimmed hat. There was something human in the attempts the things made to sink down, down, down and escape their allotted burden and there was certainly something very like the ways of Providence in the manner in which they were pulled up with a remorseless jolt to perform their duties once more.