Rodmoor (19 page)

Nance, full of concern and anxiety, passed her
fingers
across her sister’s forehead. “Oh, my dear, my dear,” she cried, “you’re in a fever! How silly of me to let you come out on this mad prank!”

Supporting her on her arm she led her slowly back, along the embankment. As they walked, Nance felt more strongly than she had done since she crossed the Loon, that deep maternal pity, infinite in its emotion of protection, which was the basic quality in her nature. For the very reason, perhaps, that Linda now clung to her like a child, she felt happier than she had done for many days. A mysterious detachment from her own fate, a sort of resigned indifference to what happened,
seemed to liberate her at that moment from the worst pang of her loss. The immense shadowy spaces about her, the silence of me fens, broken only by the rustling of the reeds and an occasional splash in the stream by their side as a fish rose, the vast arch of starlit sky above her, full of a strange and infinite reassurance—all these things thrilled the girl’s heart, as they moved, with an emotion beyond expression.

At that hour there came to her, with a vividness
unfelt
until then, the real meaning of Mr. Traherne’s high platonic mystery. She told herself that
whatever
henceforth happened to her or did not happen, it was not an illusion, it was not a dream—this strange spiritual secret. It was something palpable and real. She had felt it—at least she had touched the fringe of it—and even if the thing never quite returned or the power of it revived as it thrilled her now, it
remained
that it
had been
, that she had known it, that it was there, somewhere in the depths, however darkly
hidden
.

Very different were the thoughts that during that walk back agitated the mind of the younger girl. Her whole nature was obsessed by one fierce resolve, the resolve to escape at once to the arms of her lover. He was waiting for her; he was expecting her; she felt absolutely convinced of that. An indefinable pain in her breast and a throbbing in her heart assured her that he was watching, waiting, drawing her towards him. The same large influences of the night, the same silent spaces, the same starlit dome, which brought to Nance her spiritual reassurance, brought to the frailer figure she supported only a desperate craving.

She could feel through every nerve of her feverish
body the touch of her love’s fingers. She ached and shivered with pent-up longing, with longing to yield herself to him, to surrender herself absolutely into his power. She was no longer a thing of body, soul, and senses. The normal complexity of our mortal frame was annihilated in her. She was one trembling,
quivering
, vibrant chord, a chord of feverish desire, only waiting to break into one wild burst of ecstatic music, when struck by the hand she loved.

Her desire at that moment was of the kind which tears at the root of every sort of scruple. It did not only endow her with the courage of madness, it inspired her with the cunning of the insane. All the way along the embankment she was devising desperate plans of escape, and by the time they reached the church path these plans had shaped themselves into a definite
resolution
.

They emerged upon the familiar way and turned southward towards the bridge. Nance, thankful that she had got her sister so near home without any serious mishap, could not resist, in the impulse of her relief, the pleasure of stopping for a moment to pick a bunch of flowers from the path’s reedy edge. The coolness of the earth as she stooped, the waving grasses, the strongly blowing, marsh-scented wind, the silence and the darkness, all blent harmoniously together to strengthen her in her new-found comfort.

She pulled up impetuously, almost by their roots, great heavy-flowered stalks of loose-strife and
willow-herb
. She scrambled down into the wet mud of a shallow ditch to add to her bunch a tall spray of hemp-agrimony and some wild valerian. All these things, ghostly and vague and colourless in the faint
starlight, had a strange and mystic beauty, and as she gathered them Nance promised herself that they should be a covenant between her senses and her spirit; a sign and a token, offered up in the stillness of that hour, to whatever great invisible powers still made it possible on earth to renounce and be not all unhappy. She returned with her flowers to her sister’s side and
together
they reached the bridge.

When they were at the very centre of this, Linda suddenly staggered and swayed. She tore herself from her sister’s support and sank down on the little stone seat beneath the parapet—the same stone seat upon which, some months before, that passage of sinister complicity had occurred between Rachel Doorm and Brand. Falling helplessly back now in this place, the young girl pressed her hands to her head and moaned pitifully.

Nance dropped her flowers and flung herself on her knees beside her. “What is it, darling?” she
whispered
in a low frightened voice. “Oh, Linda, what is it?” But Linda’s only reply was to close her eyes and let her head fall heavily back against the
stone-work
of the parapet. Nance rose to her feet and stood looking at her in mute despair. “Linda! Linda!” she cried. “Linda! What is it?”

But the shadowy white form lay hushed and
motionless
, the soft hair across her forehead stirring in the wind, but all else about her, horribly, deadly still.

Nance rushed across the bridge and down to the river’s brink. She came back, her hands held cup-wise, and dashed the water over her sister’s face. The child’s eyelids flickered a little, but that was all. She remained as motionless and seemingly unconscious as
before. With a desperate effort, Nance tried to lift her up bodily in her arms, but stiff and limp as the girl was, this seemed an attempt beyond her strength.

Once more she stood, helpless and silent, regarding the other as she lay. Then it dawned upon her mind that the only possible thing to do was to leave her where she was and run to the village for help. She would arouse her own landlady. She would get the assistance of Dr. Raughty.

With one last glance at her sister’s motionless form and a quick look up and down the river on the chance of there being some barge or boat at hand with people—as sometimes happened—sleeping in it, she set off running as fast as she could in the direction of the silent town.

As soon as the sound of her retreating steps died away in the distance, the hitherto helpless Linda leapt quickly and lightly to her feet. Standing motionless for awhile till she had given her sister time to reach the high-street, she set off herself with firm and rapid steps in the same direction. She resolved that she would not risk crossing the green, but would reach the park wall by a little side alley which skirted the backs of the houses. She felt certain that when she did reach this wall it would be easy enough to climb over it. She remembered its loose uneven stones and its clinging ivy. And once in the park—ah! she knew well enough what way to take then!

Deserted by its human invaders, the old New Bridge relapsed into its accustomed mood of silent expectancy. It had witnessed many passionate loves and many
passionate
hatreds. It had felt the feet of generations of Rodmoor’s children, light as gossamer seeds, upon
its shoulders, and it had felt the creaking of the
death-wagon
carrying the same persons, heavy as lead then, to the oblong holes dug for them in the churchyard. All this it had felt, but it still waited, still waited in patient expectancy, while the tides went up and down beneath it, and sea airs swept over it and night by night the stars looked down on it; still waited, with the dreadful patience of the eternal gods and the eternal elements, something that, after all, would perhaps never come.

Nance’s flowers, meanwhile, lay where she had dropped them, upon the ground by the stone seat. They were there when, some ten minutes after her
departure
, the girl returned with Dr. Raughty and Mrs. Raps to find Linda gone; and they were there through all the hours of the dawn, until a farm boy, catching sight of them as he went to his work, threw them into the river in order that he might observe the precise rapidity with which they would be carried by the tide under the central arch. They were carried very swiftly under the central arch; but linger as the boy might, he did not see them reappear on the other side.

T
HE dawn was just faintly making itself felt among the trees of Oakguard when Philippa Renshaw, restless as she often was on these summer nights, perceived, as she leaned from her open window, a figure almost as slender as herself standing motionless at the edge of one of the terraces and
looking
up at the house. There was no light in Philippa’s room, so that she was able to watch this figure without risk of being herself observed. She was certain at once in her own mind of its identity, and she took it immediately for granted that Brand was even now on his way to meet the young girl at the spot where she now saw her standing.

She experienced, therefore, a certain surprise and even annoyance—for she would have liked to have witnessed this encounter—when, instead of remaining where she stood, the girl suddenly slipped away like a ghostly shadow and merged herself among the
park-trees
. Philippa remained for some minutes longer at the window peering intently into the grey obscurity and wondering whether after all she had been mistaken and it was one of the servants of the house. There
was
one of the Oakguard maids addicted to walking in her sleep, and she confessed to herself that it was quite possible she had been misled by her own morbid fancy into supposing that the nocturnal wanderer was Linda Herrick.

She returned to her bed after a while and tried to sleep, but the idea that it was really Linda she had seen and that the young girl was even now roaming about the grounds like a disconsolate phantom, took
possession
of her mind. She rose once more and cautiously pulling down the blind and drawing the curtains
began
hurriedly to dress herself, taking the precaution to place the solitary candle which she used behind a screen so that no warning of her wakefulness should reach the person she suspected.

Opening the door and moving stealthily down the passage, she paused for a moment at the threshold of her brother’s room. All was silent within. Smiling faintly to herself, she turned the handle with exquisite precaution and glided into the room. No! She was right in her conjecture. The place was without an occupant, and the bed, it appeared, had not been slept in. She went out, closing the door silently behind her.

Her mother’s room was opposite Brand’s and the fancy seized her to enter that also. She entered it, and stepped, softly as a wandering spirit, to her mother’s side. Mrs. Renshaw was lying in an uneasy posture with one arm stretched across the counterpane and her head close to the edge of the bed. She was breathing heavily but was not in a deep sleep. Every now and then her fingers spasmodically closed and unclosed, and from her lips came broken inarticulate words. The pallid light of the early dawn made her face seem older than Philippa had ever seen it. By her side on a little table lay an open book, but it was still too dark for the intruder to discern what this book was.

The daughter stood for some minutes in absolute rigidity, gazing upon the sleeper. Her face as she
gazed wore an expression so complicated, so subtle, that the shrewdest observer seeking to interpret its meaning would have been baffled. It was not malignant. It certainly was not tender. It might have been
compared
to the look one could conceive some heathen courtesan in the days of early Christianity casting upon a converted slave.

Uneasily conscious, as people in their sleep often are, without actually waking, of the alien presence so near her, Mrs. Renshaw suddenly moved round in her bed and with a low moaning utterance, settled
herself
to sleep with her face to the window. It was a human name she had uttered then. Philippa was sure of that, but it was a name completely strange to the watcher of her mother’s unconsciousness.

Passing from the room as silently as she had entered, the girl ran lightly down the staircase, picked up a cloak in the hall, and let herself out of the front door.

Meanwhile, through the gradually lifting shadows, Linda with rapid and resolute steps was hastening across the park to the portion of the avenue where grew the great cedar-trees. This was the place to which her first instinct had called her. It was only an after-thought, due to cooler reason that had caused her to deviate from this and approach the house itself.

As she advanced through the dew-drenched grass, silvery now in the faint light, she felt that vague
indescribable
sensation which all living creatures, even those scourged by passion, are bound to feel, at the first palpable touch of dawn. Perfumes and odours that could not be expressed in words, and that seemed to have no natural origin, came to the girl on the wind which went sighing past her. This—so at least Linda
vaguely felt—was not the west wind any more. It was not any ordinary wind of day or night. It was the dawn wind, the breath of the earth herself, indrawn with sweet sharp ecstasy at the delicate terror of the coming of the sun-god.

As she approached the avenue where the trunks of the cedars rose dark against the misty white light, she was suddenly startled by the flapping wings of an enormous heron which, mounting up in front of her out of the shadow of the trees, went sailing away across the park, its extended neck and outstretched legs
outlined
against the eastern sky. She passed in among the shadows from which the heron had emerged, and there, as though he had been waiting for her only a few moments, was Brand Renshaw.

With one swift cry she flung herself into his arms and they clung together as if from an eternity of
separation
. In her flimsy dress wet with mist she seemed like a creature evoked by some desperate prayer of earth-passion. Her cheeks and breast were cold to his touch, but the lips that answered his kisses were hot as if with burning fever. She clung to him as though some abysmal gulf might any moment open beneath their feet. She nestled against him, she twined herself around him. She took his head between her hands and with her cold fingers she caressed his face. So thinly was she clad that he could feel her heart beating as if it were his own.

“I knew you were calling me,” she gasped at last. “I felt it—I felt it in my flesh. Oh, my only love, I’m all yours—all, all yours! Take me, hold me, save me from every one! Hold me, hold me, my only love, hold me tight from all of them!”

They swayed together as she clung to him and,
lifting
her up from the ground he carried her, still wildly kissing him, into the deeper shadow of the great cedars. Exhausted at last by the extremity of her passion, she hung limp in his arms, her face white as the white light which now flooded the eastern horizon. He laid her down then at the foot of one of the largest trees and bending over her pushed back the hair from her forehead as if she had been a tired child.

By some powerful law of his strange nature, the very intensity of her passion for him and her absolute
yielding
to his will calmed and quieted his own desire. She was his now, at a touch, at a movement; but he would as soon have hurt an infant as have embraced her then. His emotion at that moment was such as never again in his life he was destined to experience. He felt as though, untouched as she was, she belonged to him, body and soul. He felt as though they two together were isolated, separated, divided, from the whole living world. Beneath the trunks of those black-foliaged
cedars
they seemed to be floating in a mystic ship over a great sea of filmy white waves.

He bent down and kissed her forehead, and under his kiss, chaste as the kiss a father might give to a little girl, she closed her eyes and lay motionless and still, a faint-flickering smile of infinite contentment playing upon her lips.

They were in this position—the girl’s hand resting passively in his—and he bending over her, when through an eastward gap between the trees the sun rose above the mist. It sent towards them a long
blood-coloured
finger that stained the cedar trunks and caused the strangely shaped head of the stooping man to look
as if it had been dipped in blood. It made the girl’s mouth scarlet-red and threw an indescribable flush over her face, a flush delicate and diaphanous as that which tinges the petals of wild hedge roses.

Linda opened her eyes and Brand leapt to his feet with a cry. “The sun!” he shouted, and then, in a lower voice, “what an omen for us, little one—what an omen! Out of the sea, out of
our
sea! Come, get up, and let’s watch the morning in! There won’t be a trace of mist left, or dew either, in an hour or so.”

He gave her his hand and hurriedly pulled her to her feet. “Quick!” he cried. “You can see it across the sea from over there. I’ve often seen it, but never like this, never with you!”

Hand in hand they left the shade of the trees and hastening up the slope of a little grassy mound—
perhaps
the grave of some viking-ancestor of his own—they stood side by side surveying the wonder of the sunrise.

As they stood there and the sun, mounting rapidly higher and higher, dispersed the mists and flooded everything with golden light, Brand’s mood began to change towards his companion. The situation was
reversed
now and it was his arms that twined themselves round the girl’s figure, while she, though only
resisting
gently and tenderly, seemed to have recovered the normal instincts of her sex, the instincts of self-
protection
and aloofness.

The warmer the sun became and the more clearly the familiar landscape defined itself before them, the more swiftly did the relations between the two change and reverse. No longer did Brand feel as though some mystic spiritual union had annihilated the difference
between their sex. The girl was once more an evasive object of pursuit. He desired her and his desire
irritated
and angered him.

“We shan’t have the place to ourselves much longer,” he said. “Come—let’s say good-bye where we were before—where we weren’t so much in sight.”

He sought to lead her back to the shade of the
cedars
; but she—looking timidly at his face—felt for the first time a vague reaction against him and an
indefinable
shrinking.

“I think I’ll say good-bye to you here,” she said, with a faint smile. “Nance will be looking for me everywhere and I mustn’t frighten her any further.”

She was astonished and alarmed at the change in his face produced by her words.

“As you please,” he said harshly, “here, as well as anywhere else, if that’s your line! You’d better go back the way you came, but the gates aren’t locked if you prefer the avenue.” He actually left her when he said this, and without touching her hand or giving her another look, strode down the slope and away towards the house.

This was more than Linda could bear. She ran after him and caught him by the arm. “Brand,” she
whispered
, “Brand, my dearest one, you’re not really angry with me, are you? Of course, I’ll say good-bye
wherever
you wish! Only—only—” and she gave an
agitated
little sigh, “I don’t want to frighten Nance more than I can help.”

He led her back to the spot where, under the dark wide-spreading branches, the red finger of the sun had first touched them. She loved him too well to resist long, and she loved him too well not to taste, in the
passionate tears that followed her abandonment to his will, a wild desperate sweetness, even in the midst of all her troubled apprehensions as to the calamitous issues of their love.

It was in the same place, finally, and under the same dark branches, that they bade one another good-bye. Brand looked at his watch before they parted and they both smiled when he announced that it was nearly six, and that at any moment the milk-cart might pass them coming up from the village. As he moved away, Linda saw him stoop and pick up something from the ground. He turned with a laugh and flung the thing towards her so that it rolled to her feet. It was a fir-cone and she knew well why he threw it to her as their farewell signal. They had wondered, only a little while ago, how it drifted beneath their cedar-tree, and Brand had amused himself by twining it in her hair.

She picked it up. The hair was twisted about it still—of a colour not dissimilar from the cone, but of a lighter shade. She slipped the thing into her dress and let it slide down between her breasts. It scratched and pricked her as soon as she began to walk, but this discomfort gave her a singular satisfaction. She felt like a nun, wearing for the first time her symbol of separation from the world—of dedication to her lord’s service. “I am certainly no nun now,” she thought, smiling sadly to herself, “but I am dedicated—
dedicated
forever and a day. Oh, my dear, dear Love, I would willingly die to give you pleasure!”

She moved away, down the avenue towards the
village
. She had not gone very far when she was startled by a rustle in the undergrowth and the sound of a mocking laugh. She stopped in terror. The laugh
was repeated, and a moment later, from a well-chosen hiding-place in a thicket of hazel-bushes, Philippa
Renshaw
, with malignant shining eyes, rushed out upon her.

“Ah!” she cried joyously, “I thought it was you. I thought it was one or other of you! And where is our dear Brand? Has he deserted you so quickly? Does he prefer to have his little pleasures before the sun is
quite
so high? Does he leave her to go back all alone and by herself? Does he sneak off like a thief as soon as daylight begins?”

Linda was too panic-stricken to make any reply to this torrent of taunts. With drawn white face and wide-open terrified eyes, she stared at Philippa as a bird might stare at a snake. Philippa seemed
delighted
with the effect she produced and stepping in front of the young girl, barred her way of escape.

“You mustn’t leave us now,” she cried. “It’s
impossible
. It would never do. What will they say in the village when they see you like that, crossing the green, at this hour? What you have to do, Linda
Herrick
, is to come back and have breakfast with us up at the house. My mother will be delighted to see you. She always gets up early, and she’s very, very fond of you, as you know. You
do
know my mother’s fond of you, don’t you?