Rodmoor (29 page)

“How frightening Dyke House looks from here,”
remarked
Philippa, “it looks like a haunted house.”

A sudden idea struck Sorio’s mind.

“Phil,” he said, letting go his companion’s hand and pointing with his stick to the house by the river, “you often tell me you’re afraid of nothing weird or
supernatural
. You often tell me you’re more like a boy in those things than a girl. Look here, now! You just run over to Dyke House and see how Rachel Doorm is getting on. I often think of her—alone in that place, now Nance and Linda have gone. I’ve been thinking of her especially to-day as we’ve come so near here. It’s impossible for me to go. It’s impossible for me to see any one. My nerves won’t stand it. But I must say I should be rather glad to know she hadn’t quite gone off her head. It isn’t very nice to think of her in that large house by herself, the house where her father died. Nance told me she feared she’d take to drink just as the old man did. Nance says it’s in the Doorm family, that sort of thing, drink or insanity, I mean—or both
together
, perhaps!” and he broke into a bitter laugh.

Philippa drew in her breath and looked at the white mist covering the river and at the ghostly outlines of the Doorm inheritance.

“You always say you’re like a boy,” repeated Sorio, throwing himself down where four months ago he had sat with Nance, “well, prove it then! Run over to Dyke House and give Rachel Doorm my love. I’ll wait for you here. I promise faithfully. You needn’t do more than just greet the old thing and wish her well.
She loves all you Renshaws. She idealizes you.” And he laughed again.

Philippa regarded him silently. For one moment the old wicked flicker of subtle mockery seemed on the point of crossing her face. But it died instantly away and her eyes grew childish and wistful.

“I’m not a boy, I’m a woman,” she murmured in a low voice.

Sorio frowned. “Well, go, whatever you are,” he cried roughly. “You’re not tired, are you?” he added a little more gently.

She smiled at this. “All right, Adrian,” she said, “I’ll go. Give me one kiss first.”

She knelt down hurriedly and put her arms round his neck. Lying with his back against the trunk of an alder, he returned her caress in a perfunctory,
absentminded
manner, precisely as if she were an importunate child.

“I love you! I love you!” she whispered and then leaping to her feet, “Good-bye!” she cried, “I’ll never forgive you if you desert me.”

She ran off, her slender figure moving through the growing twilight like a swaying birch tree half seen through mist. Sorio’s mind left her altogether. An immense yearning for his son took possession of him and he set himself to recall every precise incident of their separation. He saw himself standing at the side of the crowded liner. He saw the people waving and
shouting
from the wooden jetty of the great dock. He saw Baptiste, standing a little apart from the rest, motionless, not raising even a hand, paralyzed by the misery of his departure. He too was sick with misery then. He remembered the exact sensation of it and how he
envied
the sea-gulls who never knew these human sufferings and the gay people on the ship who seemed to have all they loved with them at their side.

“Oh, God,” he muttered to himself, “give me back my son and you may take everything—my book, my pride, my brain—everything! everything!”

Meanwhile Philippa was rapidly approaching Dyke House. A cold damp air met her as she drew near, rising with the white mists from off the surface of the river. She walked round the house and pushed open the little wooden gate. The face of desolation itself looked at her from that neglected garden. A few forlorn dahlias raised their troubled wine-dark heads from among strangling nettles and sickly plants of
pallid-leaved
spurge. Tangled raspberry canes and
overgrown
patches of garden-mint mingled with wild
cranesbill
and darnel. Grass was growing thickly on the gravel path and clumps of green damp moss clung to the stone-work of the entrance. The windows, as she
approached
the house, stared at her like eyes—eyes that have lost the power to close their lids. There were no blinds down and no curtains drawn but all the windows were dark. No smoke issued from the chimney and not a flicker of light came from any portion of the place. Silent and cold and hushed, it might have been only waiting for her appearance to sink like an apparition into the misty earth. With a beating heart the girl ascended the steps and rang the bell. The sound clanged horribly through the empty passages. There was a faint hardly perceptible stir, such as one might imagine being made by the fall of disturbed dust or the rustle of loose paper, but that was all. Dead unbroken silence flowed back upon everything like the flow of
water round a submerged wreck. There was not even the ticking of a clock to break the stillness. It was more than the mere absence of any sound, that silence which held the Doorm house. It was silence such as possesses an individuality of its own. It took on, as Philippa waited there, the shadowy and wavering
outlines
of a palpable shape. The silence greeted the girl and welcomed her and begged her to enter and let it embrace her. In a kind of panic Philippa seized the handle of the door and shook it violently. More to her terror than reassurance it opened and a cold wave of air, colder even than the mist of the river, struck her in the face. She advanced slowly, her hand pressed against her heart and a sense as if something was
drumming
in her ears.

The parlour door was wide open. She entered the room. A handful of dead flowers—wild flowers of some kind but they were too withered to be
distinguishable
—hung dry and sapless over the edge of a vase of rank-smelling water. Otherwise the table was bare and the room in order. She came out again and went into the kitchen. Here the presence of more homely and
unsentimental
objects relieved a little the tension of her nerves. But the place was absolutely empty—save for an imprisoned tortoise-shell butterfly that was beating itself languidly, as if it had done the same thing for days, against the pane.

Mindful of Sorio’s habit and with even the faint ghost of a smile, she opened the window and set the thing free. It was a relief to smell the river-smell that came in as she did this. She moved out of the kitchen and once more stood breathless, listening intently in the silent hall-way. It was growing rapidly darker; she longed
to rush from the place and return to Sorio but some
indescribable
power, stronger than her own will, retained her. Suddenly she uttered a little involuntary cry. Struck by a light gust of wind, the front door which she had left open, swung slowly towards her and closed with a vibrating shock. She ran to the back and opened the door which led to the yard. Here she was genuinely relieved to catch the sound of a sleepy rustling in the little wood-shed and to see through its dusty window a white blur of feathers. There were fowls alive anyway about Dyke House. That, at least, was some
satisfaction
. Propping the door open by means of an iron scraper she returned to the hall-way and looked
apprehensively
at the staircase. Dared she ascend to the rooms above? Dared she enter Rachel Doorm’s
bedroom
? She moved to the foot of the stair-case and laid her hand upon the balustrade. A dim flicker of waning light came in through the door she had propped open and fell upon the heavy chairs which stood in the hall and upon a fantastic picture representing the
eruption
of Vesuvius. The old-fashioned colouring of this print was now darkened, but she could see the outlines of the mountain and its rolling smoke. Once again she listened. Not a sound! She took a few steps up the stairs and paused. Then a few more and paused again. Then with her hands tightly clenched and a cold shivering sensation making her feel sick and dizzy, she ran up the remainder and stood weak and exhausted, leaning against the pillar of the balustrade and gazing with startled eyes at a half-open door.

It is extraordinary the power of the dead over the living! Philippa knew that in that room, behind that door, was the thing that had once called itself a woman 
and had talked and laughed and eaten and drunk with other women. When Rachel Doorm was about the age she herself had now reached and she was a little child, she could remember how she had built sand-castles for her by the sea-shore and sang to her old Rodmoor songs about drowned sailors and sea-kings and lost children. And now she knew—as surely as if her hand was laid upon her cold forehead—that behind that door,
probably
in some ghastly attitude of eternal listening, the corpse of all that, of all those memories and many more that she knew nothing of, was waiting to be found, to be found and have her eyes shut and her jaw bandaged—and be prepared for her coffin. The girl gripped tight hold of the balustrade. The terror that took possession of her then was not that Rachel Doorm should be dead—dead and so close to her, but that she should
not
be dead!

At that moment, could she have brought herself to push that door wide open and pass in, it would have been much more awful, much more shocking, to find Rachel Doorm alive and see her rise to meet her and hear her speak! After all, what did it matter if the body of the woman was twisted and contorted in some frightful
manner
—or
standing
perhaps—Rachel Doorm was just the one to die standing!—or if her face were staring up from the floor? What did it matter, supposing she did go straight in and feel about in the darkness and perhaps lay her hand upon the dead woman’s mouth? What did it matter even if she
did
see her hanging, in the faint light of the window, from a hook above the curtain with her head bent queerly to one side and a lock of her hair falling loose? None of these things mattered. None of them prevented her going straight
into that room! What did prevent her and what sent her fleeing down the stairs and out of the house with a sudden scream of intolerable terror was the fact that at that moment, quite definitely, there came the sound of
breathing
from the room she was looking at. A simple thing, a natural thing, for an old woman to
retire
to her bedroom early and to lie, perhaps with all her clothes on, upon her bed, to rest for a while before undressing. A simple and a natural thing! But the fact remains as has just been stated, when the sound of breathing came from that room Philippa screamed and ran panic-stricken out into the night. She hardly stopped running, indeed, till she reached the willow copse and found Sorio where she had left him. He did not resist now when breathlessly she implored him to accompany her back to the house. They walked hurriedly there together, Adrian in spite of a certain apprehension smiling in the darkness at his companion’s certainty that Rachel Doorm was dead and her equal certainty that she had heard her breathing.

“But I understand your feeling, Phil,” he said. “I understand it perfectly. I used to have the same
sensation
at night in a certain great garden in the
Campagna
—the fear of meeting the boy I used to play with before I
expected
to meet him! I used to call out to him and beg him to answer me so as to make sure.”

Philippa refused to enter the house again and waited for him outside by the garden gate. He was long in coming, so long that she was seized with the strangest thoughts. But he came at last, carrying a lantern in his hand.

“You’re right, Phil,” he said, “the gods have taken
her. She’s stone-dead. And what’s more, she’s been dead a long time, several weeks, I should think.”

“But the breathing, Adrian, the breathing? I heard it distinctly.”

Sorio put down his lantern and leant against the gate. In spite of his calm demeanor she could see that he also had experienced something over and above the finding of Rachel’s body.

“Yes,” he said, “and you were right about that, too. Guess, child, what it was!”

And as he spoke he put his hand against the front of his coat which was tightly buttoned up. Philippa was immediately conscious of the same stertorous noise that she had heard in the room of death.

“An animal!” she cried.

“An owl,” he answered, “a young owl. It must have fallen from a nest in the roof. I won’t show it to you now, as it might escape and a cat might get it. I’m going to try and rear it if Tassar will let me. Baptiste will be so amused when he finds me with a pet owl! He has quite a mania for things like that. He can make the birds in the park come to him by whistling. Well! I suppose what we must do now is to get back to
Rodmoor
as quick as we can and report this business to the police. She must have been dead a week or more! I’m afraid this will be a great shock to Nance.”

“How did you find her?” enquired the girl as they walked along the road towards the New Bridge.

“Don’t ask me, Phil—don’t ask me,” he replied, “She’s out of her troubles anyway and had an owl to look after her.”

“Should I have been—” began his companion.

“Don’t ask me, girl!” he reiterated. “I tell you it’s
all past and over. Rachel Doorm will be buried in the Rodmoor churchyard and I shall have her owl. An old woman stops breathing and an owl begins breathing. It’s all natural enough.”

T
HE funeral of Rachel Doorm was a dark and troubled day for both Nance and Linda. Even the sympathy of Mr. Traherne seemed unable to console them or lift the settled gloom from their minds. Nance especially was struck dumb with comfortless depression. She felt doubly guilty in the matter. Guilty in her original acquiescence in the woman’s desire to have them with her in Rodmoor and guilty in her neglect of her during the last weeks of her life. For the immediate cause of her death, or of the desperation that led to it, their leaving Dyke House for the village, she did not feel any remorse. That was
inevitable
after what had occurred. But this did not lessen her responsibility in the other two cases. Had she resolutely refused to leave London the probability was that Rachel would have been persuaded to go on living with them as she had formerly done. She might even have sold Dyke House and with the proceeds bought some cottage in the city suburbs for them all. It was her own ill-fated passion for Sorio, she recognized that clearly enough, that was the cause of all the disasters that had befallen them.

Linda’s feeling with regard to Rachel’s death was quite different. She had to confess in the depths of her heart that she was glad of it, glad to be relieved of the constant presence of something menacing and
vindictive
 
on the outskirts of her life. Her trouble was of a more morbid and abnormal kind, was, indeed, the fact that in spite of the woman’s death, she
hadn’t
really got rid of Rachel Doorm. The night before the funeral she dreamed of her almost continually, dreamed that she herself was a child again and that Rachel had threatened her with some unknown and mysterious
punishment
. The night after the funeral it was still worse. She woke Nance by a fit of wild and desperate crying and when the elder girl tried to discover the nature of her trouble she grew taciturn and reserved and refused to say anything in explanation. All the following week she went about her occupations with an air of
abstraction
and remoteness as if her real life were being lived on another plane. Nance learnt from Mr. Traherne, who was doing all he could think of to keep her
attention
fixed on her organ-playing, that as a matter of fact she frequently came out of the church after a few
minutes
’ practise and went and stood, for long periods
together
, by Rachel’s grave. The priest confessed that on one of the occasions when he had surprised her in this posture, she had turned upon him quite savagely and had addressed him in a tone completely different from her ordinary one.

It was especially dreadful to Nance to feel she was thrust out and alienated in some mysterious way from her sister’s confidence.

One morning towards the end of September, when they were dressing together in the hazy autumnal light and listening to the cries of sea-gulls coming up from the harbour, Nance caught upon her sister’s face, as the girl’s eyes met one another in their common mirror, that same inscrutable look that she had seen upon it
five months before when, in their room at Dyke House they had first become acquainted with the eternal
iteration
of the North Sea’s waves. Nance tried in vain all the remainder of that day to think out some clue to what that look implied. It haunted her and tantalized her. Linda had always possessed something a little pleading and sad in her eyes. It was no doubt the presence of that clinging wistfulness in them which had from the first attracted Brand. But this look
contained
in it something different. It suggested to Nance, though she dismissed the comparison as quite
inadequate
almost as soon as she had made it, the cry of a soul that was being
pulled backwards
into some interior darkness yet uttering all the while a desperate prayer to be let alone as if the least interference with what destiny was doing would be the cause of yet greater peril.

The following night as she lay awake watching a filmy trail of vaporous clouds sail across a wasted
haggard
moon, a moon that seemed to betray as that bright orb seldom does the fact that it was a corpse-world hung there with almost sacrilegious and indecent
exposure
, under the watchful stars, she noticed with
dismay
the white-robed figure of her sister rise from her bed and step lightly across the room to the open
window
. Nance watched her with breathless alarm. Was she awake or asleep? She leant out of the window, her long hair falling heavily to one side. Nance fancied she heard her muttering something but the noise of the sea, for the tide was high then in the early morning hours, prevented her catching the words. Nance threw off the bed-clothes and stole noiselessly towards her. Yes, certainly she was speaking. The words came in a low, plaintive murmur as if she were pleading with
some one out there in the misty night. Nance crept gently up to her and listened, afraid to touch her lest she should cause her some dangerous nervous shock but anxious to be as close to her as she could.

“I am good now,” she heard her say, “I am good now, Rachel. You can let me out now! I will say those words, I am good now. I won’t disobey you again.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of the Sea and the beating of Nance’s heart. Then once more, the voice rose.

“It’s down too deep, Rachel, you can’t reach it with that. But I’ll go in. I’m not afraid any more! If only you’ll let me out. I’ll go in deep—deep—and get it for you. She can’t hold it tight. The water is too strong. Oh, I’ll be good, Rachel. I’ll get it for you if only you’ll let me out!”

Nance, unable to endure any more of this, put her arms gently round her sister’s body and drew her back into the room. The young girl did not resist. With wide-open but utterly unconscious eyes she let herself be led across the room. Only when she was close to her bed she held back and her body became rigid.

“Don’t put me in there again, Rachel. Anything but that!”

“Darling!” cried Nance desperately, “don’t you know me? I’m with you, dear. This is Nance with you. No one shall hurt you!”

The young girl shuddered and looked at her with a bewildered and troubled gaze as if everything were vague and obscure. At that moment there came over Nance that appalling terror of the unconscious, of the
sub-human
which is one of the especial dangers of those
who have to look after the insane or follow the
movements
of somnambulists. But the shudder passed and the bewildered look was superseded by one of gradual obliviousness. The girl’s body relaxed and she swayed as she stood. Nance, with a violent effort, lifted her in her arms and laid her down on the bed. The girl muttered something and turned over on her side. Nance watched her anxiously but she was soon relieved to catch the sound of her quiet breathing. She was asleep peacefully now. She looked so pathetically lovely, lying there in a childish position of absolute abandonment that Nance could not resist bending over her and lightly kissing her cheek.

“Poor darling!” she said to herself, “how blind I’ve been! How wickedly blind I’ve been!” She pulled the blanket from her own bed and threw it over her sister so as not to disturb her by altering the bed-clothes. Then, wrapping herself in her dressing-gown she lay back upon her pillows resigned for the rest of the night to
remaining
wakeful.

The next day she noticed no difference in Linda’s mood. There was the same abstraction, the same
listless
lack of interest in anything about her and worst of all that same inscrutable look which filled Nance with every sort of wild imagination. She cast about in despair for some way of breaking the evil spell under which the girl was pining. She went again and again to see Mr. Traherne and the good man devoted hours of his time to discussing the matter with her but
nothing
either of them could think of seemed a possible solution.

At last one morning, some days after that terrifying night, she met Dr. Raughty in the street. She walked
with him as far as the bridge explaining to him as best she could her apprehensions about her sister and asking him for his advice. Dr. Haughty was quite definite and unhesitating.

“What Linda wants is a mother,” he said laconically. Nance stared at him.

“Yes, I know,” she said. “I know well enough, poor darling! But that’s the worst of it, Fingal. Her mother’s been dead years and years and years.”

“There are other mothers in Rodmoor, aren’t there?” he remarked.

Nance frowned. “You think I don’t look after her properly,” she murmured. “No, I suppose I haven’t. And yet I’ve tried to—I’ve tried my very best.”

“You’re as hopeless as your Adrian with his owl,” cried the Doctor. “He was feeding it with cake the other day. Cake! He’d better not bring his owl and our friend’s rat together. There won’t be much of the rat left. Cake!” And the Doctor put back his head and uttered an immense gargantuan laugh. Nance looked a little disturbed and even a little indignant at his merriment.

“What do you mean by
other
mothers?” she asked. They had just reached the bridge and Dr. Raughty bade her look over the parapet.

“What exquisite bellies those dace have!” he
remarked
, snuffing the air as he spoke. “There’ll be rain before night. Do you feel it? I know from the way those fish rise. The sea too, it has a different voice—has that ever caught your attention?—when there’s rain on the wind. Those dace are shrewd fellows. They’re after the bits of garbage the sea-gulls drop on their way up the river. You might think they were
after flies, but they’re not. I suppose George Crabbe or George Borrow would switch ’em out with some bait such as was never dreamed of—the droppings of
rabbits
perhaps or ladybird grubs. I suppose old
Doctor
Johnson would wade in up to his knees and try and scoop ’em up in his hands. There’s a big one! Do you see? The one waving his tail and turning
sideways
. I expect he weighs half a pound or more. Fish are beautiful things, especially dace. Isn’t it
wonderful
to think that if you pulled any of those things
backwards
through the water they would be drowned, simply by the rush of water through their gills? Look, Nance, at that one! What a silver belly! What a delicate, exquisite tail! A plague on these fellows who philander with owls and rats! Give me fish—if you want to make-a cult of something.” He lowered his voice to a whisper, “I should think Lubric de Lauziere must have kept a pet fish in his round pond!”

“Good-bye, Fingal,” said Nance, holding out her hand.

“What! Well! Where! God help us! What’s wrong, Nance? You’re not annoyed with me, are you? Do you think I’m talking through my hat? Not at all! I’m leading up to it. A mother—that’s what she wants. She wants it just as those dace want the water to flow in their faces and not backwards through their gills. She’s being dragged backwards—that’s what’s the matter with her. She wants her natural
element
and it must flow in the right direction.
You
won’t do. Traherne won’t do. A mother is the thing! A woman, Nance, who has borne children has certain instincts in dealing with young girls which make the wisest physicians in the world look small!”

Nance smiled helplessly at him.

“But, Fingal, dear,” she said, “what can I do? I can’t appeal to Mrs. Raps, can I—or your friend Mrs. Sodderley? When you come to think, there are very few mothers in Rodmoor!”

The Doctor sighed. “I know it,” he observed
mournfully
, “I know it. The place will die out altogether in fifty years. It’s as bad as the sand-dunes with their sterile flora. Women who bear children are the only really sane people in the world.”

He ran his thumb, as he spoke, backwards and
forwards
over a little patch of vividly green moss that grew between the stones of the parapet. The air, crisp and autumnal with that vague scent of burning weeds in it which more than anything else suggests the outskirts of a small town at the end of the summer, flowed round them both with a mute appeal to her, so it seemed to Nance, to let all things drift as they might and submit to destiny. She looked at the Doctor dreamily in one of those queer intermissions of human consciousness in which we stand apart, as it were, from our own fate and listen to the flowing of the eternal tide.

A small poplar tree growing at the village end of the bridge had already lost some of its leaves and a few of these came drifting, one by one, along the raised stone pathway to the girl’s feet. Over the misty marsh lands in the other direction, she could see the low tower of the church. The gilded weather-vane on the top of it
shimmered
and glittered in a vaporous stream of sunlight that seemed to touch nothing else.

Dreamily she looked at the Doctor, too weary of the struggle of life to make an effort to leave him and yet quite hopeless as to his power to help her. Fingal
Raughty continued to discourse upon the instinctive wisdom of maternity.

“Women who’ve had children,” he went on, “are the only people in the world who possess the open secret. They know what it is to find the ultimate virtue in
exquisite
resignation. They do not only submit to fate—they joyfully embrace it. I suppose we might
maintain
that they even ‘love it’—though I confess that that idea of ‘loving’ fate has always seemed to me weird and fantastic. But I laugh, and so do you, I
expect
, when our friends Sorio and Tassar talk in their absurd way about women. What do they know of women? They’ve only met, in all their lives (forgive me, Nance!) a parcel of silly young girls. They’ve no right to speak of life at all, the depraved children that they are! They are outside life, they’re ignorant of the essential mystery. Goethe was the fellow to
understand
these things, and you know the name
he
gives to the unutterable secret?
The Mothers
. That’s a good name, isn’t it? The Mothers! Listen, Nance! All the people in this place suffer from astigmatism and asymmetry. Those are the outward signs of their mental departure from the normal. And the clever ones among them are proud of it. You know the way they talk! They think abnormality is the only kind of beauty. Nance, my dear, to tell you the truth, I’m sick of them all.
My
idea of beauty is the perfect masculine type, such as you see it in that figure they call ‘the Theseus’—in the Elgin marbles—or the perfect feminine type as you see it in the great Demeter. Do you suppose they can, any of them, get round that? Do you suppose they can fight against the rhythm of Nature?”