Rodmoor (33 page)

She kissed her again, and with a final wave of the hand and an encouraging smile, she left the room and ran down the stairs. She walked slowly to the top of the street, her head bent, wondering in her mind whether she should ask Adrian to go with her to the Renshaws’ or whether she should go alone.

The question was decided for her. As she emerged on the green she suddenly came upon Sorio himself, standing side by side with Philippa. They both turned quickly as, in the flare of a wind-blown lamp, they
perceived
her approach. They turned and awaited her without a word.

Without a word, too—and in that slow dreamlike manner which human beings assume at certain crises in their lives, when fate like a palpable presence among them takes their movements into its own hand—they moved off, all three together, in the direction of the park gates. Not a word did any of them utter, till, having passed the gates, they were quite far advanced along that dark and lonely avenue.

Then Philippa broke the silence. “I can say to her, Adrian, what I’ve just said to you—mayn’t I?”

In the thick darkness, full of the heavy smell of rain-soaked leaves, Sorio walked between them. Nance’s hand was already resting upon his arm, and now, as she spoke, Philippa’s fingers searched for his, and took them in her own and held them feverishly.

“You can say what you please, Phil,” he muttered, “but you’ll see what she answers—just what I told you just now.”

Their tone of intimate association stabbed like a knife at the heart of Nance. A moment ago—in
fact, ever since she had left her by the weir—she had been feeling less antagonistic and more pitiful towards her vanquished rival. But this pronoun “she”
applied
mutually by them to herself, seemed to push her back—back and away—outside the circle of some mysterious understanding between the two. Her heart hardened fiercely. Was this girl still possessed of some unknown menacing power?

“What I asked Adrian,” said Philippa quietly, while the pressure of her burning fingers within the man’s hand indicated the strain of this quietness, “was whether you would be generous and noble enough to give him up to me for his last free day—the last day
before
you’re married. Would you be large-hearted enough for that?”

“What do you mean—‘give him up’ to you?”
murmured
Nance.

Philippa burst in a shrill unearthly laugh. “Oh, you needn’t be frightened!” she exclaimed. “You needn’t be jealous. I only mean let me go with him, for the whole day, a long walk—you know—or
something
like that—perhaps a row up the river. It doesn’t matter what, as long as I feel that that day is
my
day, my day
with him
—the last, and the
longest
!”

She was silent, feverish, her fingers twining and
twisting
themselves round her companion’s, and her breath coming in quick gasps. Nance was silent also, and they all three moved forward through the heavy
fragrant
darkness.

“You two seem to have settled it between yourselves definitely enough,” Nance remarked at last. “I don’t
really see why you need bring me into it at all. Adrian is, of course, entirely free to do what he likes. I don’t see what I have to do with it!”

Philippa’s hot fingers closed tightly upon Sorio’s as she received this rebuff. “You see!” she murmured in a tone that bit into Nance’s flesh like the tooth of an adder. “You see, Adriano!” She shrugged her shoulders and gave a low vindictive laugh. “She’s a thorough woman,” she added with stinging emphasis. “She’s what my mother would call a sweet, tender, sensitive girl. But we mustn’t expect too much from her, Adrian, must we? I mean in the way of
generosity
.”

Nance withdrew her hand from the arm of her
betrothed
and they all three walked on in silence.

“You see what you’re in for, my friend,” Philippa began again. “Once married it’ll be always like this. That is what you seem unable to realize. It’s a mistake, as I’ve often said, this mixing of classes.”

Nance could no longer restrain herself. “May I ask what you mean by that last remark?” she
whispered
in a low voice.

Philippa laughed lightly. “It doesn’t need much explanation,” she replied. “Adrian is, of course, of very ancient blood, and you—well, you betray
yourself
naturally by this lack of nobility, this common middle-class jealousy!”

Nance turned fiercely upon them, and clutching Sorio’s arm spoke loudly and passionately. “And
you
—what are
you
, who, like a girl of the streets, are ready to pick up what you can of a man’s attentions and attract him with mere morbid physical attraction?
You
—what are
you
, who, as you say yourself, are
ready to
share
a man with some one else? Do you call
that
a sign of good-breeding?”

Philippa laughed again. “It’s a sign at any rate of being free from that stupid, stuffy, bourgeois
respectability
, which Adrian is going to get a taste of now! That very sneer of yours—’ a girl of the streets’—shows the class to which you belong, Nance Herrick! We don’t say those things. It’s what one hears among tradespeople.”

Nance’s fingers almost hurt Sorio’s arms as she tightened her hold upon him. “It’s better than being what
you
are, Philippa Renshaw,” she burst out. “It’s better than deliberately helping your brother to ruin innocent young girls—yes, and taking pleasure in seeing him ruining them—and then taunting them cruelly in their shame, and holding him back from doing them justice! It’s better than that, Philippa
Renshaw
, though it
may
be what most simple-minded
decent
-hearted women feel. It’s better than being
reduced
by blind passion to have to come to another woman and beg her on your knees for a ‘last day’ as you call it! It’s better than
that
—though it
may
be what ordinary unintellectual people feel!”

Philippa’s fingers grew suddenly numb and stiff in Sorio’s grasp. “Do you know,” she murmured, “you ‘decent-feeling’ woman—if that’s what you call
yourself
—that a couple of hours ago, when you left me on the river bank, I was within an ace of drowning myself? I suppose ‘decent-feeling’ women never run such a risk! They leave that to ‘street-girls ‘and—and—and to us others!”

Nance turned to Sorio. “So she’s been telling you that she was thinking of drowning herself? I thought
it was something of that kind! And I suppose you
believed
her. I suppose you always believe her!”

“And he always believes
you!
” Philippa cried. “Yes, he’s always deceived—the easy fool—by your womanly sensitive ways and your touching refinement! It’s women like you, without intelligence and without imagination, who are the ruin of men of genius. A lot
you
care for his work! A lot
you
understand of his thoughts! Oh, yes, you may get him, and cuddle him, and spoil him, but, when it comes to the point, what
you
are to him is a mere domestic drudge! And not only a drudge, you’re a drag, a burden, a
dead-weight
! A mere mass of ‘decent-feeling’
womanliness
—weighing him down. He’ll never be able to write another line when once you’ve really got hold of him!”

Nance had her answer to this. “I’d sooner he never
did
write another line,” she cried, “and remain in his sober senses, than be left to
your
influence, and be driven mad by you—you and your diseased, morbid, wicked imagination!”

Their two voices, rising and falling in a lamentable litany of elemental antagonism—antagonism cruel as life and deeper than death—floated about Sorio’s head, in that perfumed darkness, like opposing streams of poison. It was only that he himself, harassed by long irritating debates with Baltazar, was too troubled, too obsessed by a thousand agitating doubts, to have the energy or the spirit to bring the thing to an end, or he could not have endured it up to this point. With his nerves shaken by Baltazar’s corrosive arts, and the weight of those rain-heavy trees and thick darkness all around him, he felt as if he were in some kind of trance, and were withheld by a paralysing interdict from
lifting
 
a finger. There came to him a sort of half-savage, half-humorous remembrance of a conversation he had once had with some one or other—his mind was too confused to recall the occasion—in which he had
upheld
the idealistic theory of the arrival of a day when sex jealousy would disappear from the earth.

But as the girls continued to outrage each other’s most secret feelings, each unconsciously quickening her pace as she poured forth her taunts, and both dragging Sorio forward with them, the feeling grew upon him that he was watching some deep cosmic struggle, that was, in its way, as inhuman and elemental as a
conflict
between wind and water. With this idea lodged in his brain, he began to derive a certain wild and
fantastic
pleasure from the way they lacerated one
another
. There was no coxcombry in this. He was far too wrought-upon and shaken in his mind. But there was a certain grim exultant enjoyment, as if he were, at that moment, permitted a passing glimpse into some dark forbidden “cellarage” of Nature, where the primordial elements clash together in eternal conflict.

Inspired by this strange mood, he returned the
pressure
of Philippa’s fingers, and entwined his arm round the trembling form of his betrothed, drawing both the girls closer towards him, and, in consequence, closer towards one another.

They continued their merciless encounter, almost
unconscious
, it seemed, of the presence of the man who was the cause of it, and without strength left to resist the force with which he was gradually drawing them together.

Suddenly the wind, which had dropped a little
during
the previous hour, rose again in a violent and
furious gust. It tore at the dark branches above their heads and went moaning and wailing through the
thickets
on either side of them. Drops of rain, held in
suspension
by the thicker leaves, splashed suddenly upon their faces, and from the far distance, with a
long-drawn
ominous muttering, that seemed to come from some unknown region of flight and disaster, the sound of thunder came to their ears.

Sorio dropped Philippa’s hand and embracing her tightly, drew her, too, closely towards him. Thus
interlocked
by the man’s arms, all three of them
staggered
forward together, lashed by the wind and
surrounded
by vague wood-noises that rose and fell
mysteriously
in the impenetrable darkness.

The powers of the earth seemed let loose, and strange magnetic currents in fierce antipodal conflict, surged about them, and tugged and pulled at their hearts. The sound of the thunder, the wild noises of the night, the strange dark evocations of elemental hatred which at once divided and united his companions, surged through Sorio’s brain and filled him with a sort of intoxication.

The three of them together might have been taken, had the clock of time been put back two thousand years, for some mad Dionysian worshippers following their god in a wild inhuman revel.

Inspired at last by a sort of storm-frenzy, while the wind came wailing and shrieking down the avenue into their faces, Sorio suddenly stopped.

“Come, you two little fools,” he cried, “let’s end this nonsense! Here—kiss one another! Kiss one another, and thank God that we’re alive and free and
conscious, and not mere inert matter, like these dead drifting leaves!”

As he spoke he stepped back a little, and with a swing of his powerful arms, brought both the girls face to face with one another. Nance struggled fiercely, and resisted with all her strength. Philippa, with a strange whispering laugh, remained passive in his hands.

“Kiss one another!” he cried again. “Are you
kissing
or are you holding back? It’s too dark for me to see!”

Philippa suddenly lost her passivity, slipped like a snake from under his encircling arms, and rushed away among the trees. “I leave her to you!” she called back to them out of the darkness. “I leave her to you! You won’t endure her long.
And what will Baptiste do
, Adriano?”

This last word of hers calmed Sorio’s mood and threw him back upon his essential self. He sighed heavily.

“Well, Nance,” he said, “shall we go back? It’s no use waiting for her. She’ll find her way to
Oakguard
. She knows every inch of these woods.” He sighed again, as if bidding farewell, in one fate-burdened moment, both to the woods and the girl who knew them.

“
You
can go back if you like,” Nance answered curtly. “I’m going to speak to Brand”; and she told him in a brief sentence what she had learned from Linda.

Sorio seized her hand and clutched it savagely. “Yes, yes,” he cried, “yes, yes, let’s go together. He must be taught a lesson—this Brand! Come, let’s go together!”

They moved on rapidly and soon approached the end of the avenue and the entrance to the garden. As Sorio pushed open the iron gates, a sharp crack of thunder, followed by reverberating detonations, broke over their heads. The sudden flash that succeeded the sound brought into vivid relief the dark form of the house, while a long row of fading dahlias, drooping on their rain-soaked stems, stood forth in ghastly
illumination
.

Nance had time to catch on Adrian’s face a look that gave her a premonition of danger. Had she not herself been wrought-up to an unnatural pitch of
excitement
by her contest with Philippa, she would
probably
have been warned in time and have drawn back, postponing her interview with Brand till she could have seen him alone. As it was, she felt herself driven
forward
by a force she could not resist. “Now—very now,” she must face her sister’s seducer.