Rodmoor (20 page)

“Listen, you silly white-faced thing! Listen, you young innocent, who must needs come wandering round people’s houses in the middle of the night! Listen—you Linda Herrick! I don’t know whether you’re stupid enough to imagine that Brand’s going to marry you? Are you stupid enough for that? Are you, you dumb staring thing? Because, if you are, I can tell
you a little about Brand that may surprise you.
Perhaps
you think you’re the first one he’s ever made love to in this precious park of ours. No, no, my beauty, you’re not the first—and you won’t be the last. We Renshaws are a curious family, as you’ll find out, you baby, before you’ve done with us. And Brand’s the most curious of us all!

“Well, are you coming back with me? Are you
coming
back to have a nice pleasant breakfast with my mother? You’d better come, Linda Herrick, you’d
better
come! In fact, you
are
coming, so that ends it. People who spend the night wandering about other
people
’s grounds must at least have the decency to show themselves and acknowledge the hospitality! Besides, how glad Brand will be to see you again! Can’t you imagine how glad he’ll be? Can’t you see his look?

“Oh, no, Linda Herrick, I can’t possibly let you go like this. You see, I’m just like my dear mother. I love gentle, sensitive, pure-minded young girls. I love their shyness and their bashfulness. I love the
unfortunate
little accidents that lead them into parks and gardens. Come, you dumb big-eyed thing! What’s the matter with you? Can’t you speak? Come! Back with you to the house! We’ll find my mother stirring—and Brand too, unless he’s sick of girls’
society
and has gone off to Mundham. Come, white-face; there’s nothing else for it. You must do what I tell you.”

She laid her hand on Linda’s shoulder, and, such was the terror she excited, the unhappy girl might actually have been magnetized into obeying her, if a timely and unexpected interruption had not changed the entire situation. This was the appearance upon the scene
of Adrian Sorio. Sorio had recently acquired an
almost
daily habit of strolling a little way up the
Oakguard
avenue before his breakfast with Baltazar. On two or three of these occasions he had met Philippa, and he had always sufficient hope of meeting her to give these walks a tang of delicate excitement. He had evidently heard nothing of Linda’s disappearance. Nance in her distress had, it seemed, resisted the
instinct
to appeal to him. He was consequently
considerably
surprised to see the two girls standing
together
in the middle of the sunlit path.

Linda, flinging Philippa aside, rushed to meet him. “Adrian! Adrian!” she cried piteously, “take me home to Nance.” She clung to his arm and in the misery of her outraged feelings, began sobbing like a child who has been lost in the dark. Sorio, soothing and petting her as well as he could, looked enquiringly at Philippa as she came up.

“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s nothing, Adrian. It’s only that I wanted her to come up to the house. She seems to have misunderstood me and got silly and frightened. She’s not a very sensible little girl.”

Sorio looked at Philippa searchingly. In his heart he suspected her of every possible perversity and
maliciousness
. He realized at that moment how entirely his attraction to her was an attraction to what is
dangerous
and furtive. He did not even respect her
intelligence
. He had caught her more than once
playing
up to his ideas in a manner that indicated a secret contempt for them. At those moments he had hated her, and—with her—had hated, as he fancied, the whole feminine tribe—that tribe which refuses to be impressed even by world-crushing logic. But how
attractive
she was to him! How attractive, even at this moment, as he looked into her defiant, inscrutable eyes, and at her scornfully curved lips!

“You needn’t pity her, Adrian,” she went on, casting a bitter smile at Linda’s bowed head as the young girl hid her face against his shoulder. “There’s no need to pity her. She’s just like all the rest of us, only she doesn’t play the game frankly and honestly as I do. Send her home to her sister, as she says, and come with me across the park. I’ll show you that oak tree if you’ll come—the one I told you about, the one that’s haunted.”

She threw at him a long deep look, full of a subtle challenge, and stretched out her hand as if to separate him from the clinging child. Sorio returned her look and a mute struggle took place between them. Then his face hardened.

“I must go back with her,” he said. “I must take her to Nance.”

“Nonsense!” she rejoined, her eyes darkening and changing in colour. “Nonsense, my dear! She’ll find her way all right. Come! I really want you. Yes, I mean what I say, Adrian. I really want you this time!”

The expression with which she challenged him now would have delighted the great antique painters of the feminine mystery. The gates of her soul seemed to open inwards, on magical softly-moving hinges, and an incalculable power of voluptuous witchcraft emanated from her whole body.

It is doubtful whether a spell so provocative could have been resisted by any one of an origin different from Sorio’s. But he had in him—capable of being
roused at moments—the blood of that race in which of all others women have met their match. To this
witchcraft
of the north he opposed the marble-like disdain of the south—the disdain which has subtlety and knowledge in it—the disdain which is like petrified hatred.

His face darkened and hardened until it resembled a mask of bronze.

“Good-bye,” he said, “for the present. We shall meet again—perhaps to-morrow. But anyway,
goodbye
! Come, Linda, my child.”

“Perhaps to-morrow—and perhaps
not!
” returned Philippa bitterly. “Good-bye, Linda. I’ll give your love to Brand!”

Sorio said little to his companion as he escorted her back to her lodging in the High Street. He asked her no questions and seemed to take it as quite a natural thing that she should have been out at that early hour. They discovered Dr. Raughty in the house when they arrived, doing his best to dissuade Nance from any further desperate hunt after the wanderer, and it was in accordance with the doctor’s advice, as well as their own weariness that the two sisters spent the later morning hours of their August Bank-holiday in a
profound
and exhausted sleep.

I
T was nearly two o’clock in the afternoon when Nance woke out of a heavy dreamless sleep. She went to the window. The shops in the little street were all closed and several languid fishermen and young tradesmen’s apprentices were loitering about at the house doors, chaffing lazily and with loud bursts of that peculiarly empty laughter which seems the
prerogative
of rural idleness, the stray groups of gaily dressed young women who, in the voluptuous
contentment
of after-dinner repletion, were setting forth to take the train for Mundham or to walk with their sweethearts along the sea-shore. She turned and looked closely at her still sleeping sister.

Linda lay breathing softly. On her lips was a
child-like
smile of serene happiness. She had tossed the
bed-clothes
away and one of her arms, bare to the elbow, hung over the edge of the bed. It seemed she was
holding
fast, in the hand thus pathetically extended, some small object round which her fingers were tightly closed. Nance moved to her side and took this hand in her own. The girl turned her head uneasily but continued to sleep. Nance opened the fingers which lay
helplessly
in her own and found that what they held so passionately was a small fir-cone. The bright August sunshine pouring down upon the room enabled her to catch sight of several strands of light brown hair
woven round the thing’s rough scales. She let the
unconscious
fingers close once more round the fir-cone and glanced anxiously at the sleeping girl. She guessed in a moment the meaning of that red scratch across the girl’s bosom. She must have been carrying this token pressed close against her flesh and its rough prickly edges had drawn blood.

Nance sighed heavily and remained for a moment buried in gloomy thought. Then, stepping softly to the door, she ran downstairs to see if Mrs. Raps were still in her kitchen or had left any preparations for their belated dinner. Their habit was to make their own breakfast and tea, but to have their midday meal brought up to them from their landlady’s table. She found an admirable collation carefully prepared for them on a tray and a little note on the dresser telling her that the family had gone to Mundham for the
afternoon
.

“Bless your poor, dear heart,” the note ended, “the old man and I thought best not to disappoint the
children
.”

Nance felt faint with hunger. She put the kettle on the fire and made tea and with this and Mrs. Raps’ tray she returned to her sister’s side and roused her from her sleep.

Linda seemed dazed and confused when she first woke. For the moment it was difficult not to feel as though all the events of the night and morning were a troubled and evil dream. Nance noticed the nervous and
bewildered
way in which she put her hand to the mark upon her breast as if wondering why it hurt her and the hasty disconcerted movement with which she concealed the fir-cone beneath her pillow. In spite of everything,
however, their meal was not by any means an unhappy one. The sun shone warm and bright upon the floor. Pleasant scents, in which garden-roses, salt-sea
freshness
and the vague smell of peat and tar mingled
together
, came in through the window, blent with the lazy, cheerful sounds of the people’s holiday. After all they were both young and neither the unsatisfied ache in the soul of the one nor the vague new dread, bitter-sweet and full of strange forebodings, in the mind of the other could altogether prevent the natural life-impulse with which, like two wind-shaken plants in an intermission of quiet, they raised their heads to the sky and the
sunshine
. They were young. They were alive. They knew—too well, perhaps!—but still they knew what it was to love, and the immense future, with all its infinite possibilities, lay before them. “Sursum Corda!” the August airs whispered to them. “Sursum Corda!” “Lift up your hearts!” their own young flesh and blood answered.

Linda did not hesitate as she ate and drank to
confess
to Nance how she had betrayed her and how she had seen Brand in the park. Of the cedar trees and their more ominous story she said nothing, but she told how Philippa had sprung upon her in the avenue and of wild, cruel taunts.

“She frightened me,” the girl murmured. “She
always
frightens me. Do you think she would really have made me go back with her to the house—to meet Brand and Mrs. Renshaw and all? I couldn’t have done it,” she put her hands to her cheeks and trembled as she spoke, “I couldn’t—I couldn’t! It would have been too shameful! And yet I believe she was really going to make me. Do you think she was,
Nance? Do you think she
could
have done such a thing?”

Nance gripped the arms of her chair savagely.

“Why didn’t you leave her, dear?” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t you simply leave her and run off? She isn’t a witch. She’s simply a girl like ourselves.”

Linda smiled. “How fierce you look, darling! I believe if it had been you you’d have slapped her face or pushed her down or something.”

Nance gazed out of the window, frowning. She wondered to herself by what spiritual magic Mr.
Traherne
and his white rat proposed to obliterate the
poisonous
rage of jealousy. She wondered what he would say, the devoted priest, to this uncalled for and cruel attack upon her sister. She had never heard him
mention
Philippa at any time in their talks. Was he as much afraid of
her
beauty as he pretended to be of her own? Did he make Philippa hide her ankles in her skirt when she visited him? But she supposed she never did visit him. It was somehow very difficult to imagine the sister of Brand Renshaw in the priest’s little study.

From Traherne, Nance’s mind wandered to Dr. Raughty. How kind he had been to her when she was in despair about Linda! She had never seen him half so serious or troubled. She could hardly help smiling as she remembered the peculiar expression he wore and the way he pulled on his coat and laced up his boots. She had let him give her a little glass of
crême de menthe
and she could see now, with wonderful
distinctness
, the gravity with which he had watched her drink it. She felt certain his hand had shaken with nervousness when he took the glass from her. She could hear him clearing his throat and muttering some
fantastic invocation to what sounded like an Egyptian divinity. Surely the effect of extreme anxiety could produce upon no one else in the world but Dr. Raughty a tendency to allude to the great god Ra! And what extraordinary things he had put into his little black bag as he sallied forth with her to the bridge! Linda might have been in need of several kinds of surgical
operations
from the preparations he made.

He had promised to spend that day on a fishing trip, out to sea, with Adrian and Baltazar. She wondered whether their boat was still in sight or whether they had got beyond the view of Rodmoor harbour.

“Linda, dear,” she said presently, catching her
sister
’s hand feeling about under her pillows for the
fir-cone
she had hidden, “Linda, dear, if I’m to forgive you for what you did last night, for running away from me, I mean, and pretending things, will you do
something
that I want now? Will you come down to the shore and see if we can see anything of Adrian’s boat? He’s fishing with Dr. Raughty and Mr. Stork, and I’d love to get a sight of their sail. I know it’s a sailing boat they’ve gone in because Dr. Raughty said he was going to take his mackintosh so that when they went fast and the water splashed over the side he might be protected. I think he was a little scared of the
expedition
. Poor dear man, between us all, I’m afraid we give him a lot of shocks!”

Linda jumped up quite eagerly. She felt prepared at that moment to do anything to please her sister. Besides, there were certain agitating thoughts in her brain which cried aloud for any kind of distraction. They dressed and went out, choosing, as suited the
holiday
occasion, brighter frocks and gayer hats than they
had worn for many weeks. Nance’s position in the Pontifex shop was a favourable one as far as their
wardrobe
was concerned.

They made their way down to the harbour. They were surprised, and in Linda’s case at any rate not very pleasantly surprised, to find tied to a post where the wharf widened and the grass grew between the
cobble-stones
the little grey pony and brown pony-cart which Mrs. Renshaw was in the habit of using when the hot weather made it tiring for her to walk.

“Let’s go back! Oh, Nance, let’s go back!”
whispered
Linda in a panic-stricken voice. “I don’t feel I
can
face her to-day.”

They stood still, hesitating.

“There she is,” cried Nance suddenly, “look—who’s she got there with her?”

“Oh, Nance, it’s Rachel, yes, it’s Rachel!”

“She must have gone to Dyke House to fetch her,” murmured the other. “Quick! Let’s go back.”

But it was already too late. Rising from the seat where they were talking together at the harbour’s edge, the two women moved towards the girls, calling them by name. There was no escape now and the sisters
advanced
to meet them.

They made a strange foreground to the holiday aspect of the little harbour, those two black-gowned
figures
. Mrs. Renshaw was a little in front and her less erect and less rigid form had a certain drooping pathos in its advance as though she deprecated her appearance in the midst of so cheerful a scene. Both the women wore old-fashioned bonnets of a kind that had been
discarded
for several years; but the dress and the bonnet of Rachel Doorm presented the appearance of having
been dragged out of some ancient chest and thrust upon her in disregard of the neglected condition of her other clothes. Contrasted with the brightly rocking waters of the river mouth and the gay attire of the boat-load of noisy lads and girls that was drifting sea-ward on the out-flowing tide, the look of the two women, as they crossed the little quay, might have suggested the sort of scene that, raised to a poetic height by the genius of the ancient poets, has so often in classical drama symbolized the approach of messengers of ill-omen.

Mrs. Renshaw greeted the two sisters very nervously. Nance caught her glancing with an air of ascetic
disapproval
at their bright-coloured frocks and hats. Rachel, avoiding their eyes, extended a cold limp hand to each in turn. They exchanged a few conventional and embarrassed sentences, Nance as usual under such circumstances, giving vent to little uncalled for bursts of rather disconcerting laughter. She had a trick of opening her mouth very wide when she laughed like this, and her grey eyes even wider still, which gave her an air of rather foolish childishness quite inexpressive of what might be going on in her mind.

After a while they all moved off, as if by an
instinctive
impulse, away from the harbour mouth and towards the sea-shore. To do this they had to pass a piece of peculiarly desolate ground littered with dead fish, discarded pieces of nets and dried heaps of
sun-bleached
seaweed. Nance had a moment’s quaint and morbid intimation that the peculiar forlornness of this particular spot gratified in some way the taste of Mrs. Renshaw, for her expression brightened a little and she moved more cheerfully than when under the eyes of the loiterers on the wharf. There were some young women
paddling in the sea just at that place and some young men watching them so that Mrs. Renshaw, who with Nance kept in advance of the other two, led the way along the path immediately under the sand-dunes. This was the very spot where, on the day of their first
exploration
of the Rodmoor coast, they had seen the flowerless leaves of the little plant called the rock-rose. The flowers of this plant, as Nance observed them now, were already faded and withered, but other sea growths met her eye which were not unfamiliar. There were several tufts of grey-leaved sea-pinks and still greyer sea-lavender. There were also some flaccid-stalked, glaucous weeds which she had never noticed before and which seemed in the moist sappy texture of their foliage as though their natural place was rather beneath than above the salt water whose propinquity shaped their form. But what made her pause and stoop down with sudden startled attention, was her first sight of that plant described to her by Mr. Traherne as peculiarly characteristic of the Rodmoor coast. Yes, there it was—the yellow horned poppy! As she bent over it Nance realized how completely right the priest had been in what he said. The thing’s oozy, clammy leaves were of a wonderful bluish tint, a tint that nothing in the world short of the sea itself, could have possibly called into existence. They were spiked and prickly, these leaves, and their shape was clear-edged and threatening, as if modelled in sinister caprice, by some Da
Vinci-like
Providence, willing enough to startle and shock humanity. But what struck the girl more vividly than either the bluish tint or the threatening spikes were the large, limply-drooping flowers of a pallid sulphurous yellow which the plant displayed. They were flowers
that bore but small resemblance to the flowers of other poppies. They had a peculiarly melancholy air, even before they began to fade, an air as though the taste of their petals would produce a sleep of a deeper, more obliterating kind than any “drowsy syrups” or “mandragora” which the sick soul might crave, to “rase out” its troubles.

Mrs. Renshaw smiled as Nance rose from her long scrutiny of this weird plant, a plant that might be imagined “rooting itself at ease on Lethe’s wharf” while the ghost-troops swept by, whimpering and
wailing
.

“I always like the horned poppy,” she remarked, “it’s different from other flowers. You can’t imagine it growing in a garden, can you? I like that. I like things that are wild—things no one can imprison.”