Rodmoor (5 page)

T
HE night of her first meeting with Adrian Sorio, found the daughter of the house of
Renshaw
restless and wakeful. She listened to the hall clock striking the hour of twelve with an intentness that would have suggested to any one observing her that she had only been waiting for that precise moment to plunge into some nocturnal enterprise fraught with both sweetness and peril.

The night was chilly, the sky starless and overcast. The heavy curtains were drawn but the window,
wide-open
behind them, let in a breath of rain-scented air which stirred the flames of the two silver candles on the dressing table and fluttered the thin skirt of the girl’s night-dress as she sat, tense and expectant, over the red coals of a dying fire.

A tall gilt-framed mirror of antique design stood on the left of the fireplace.

As the last stroke of midnight sounded, the girl leapt to her feet and swiftly divesting herself of her only garment, stood straight and erect, her hands clasped
behind
her head, before this mirror. The firelight cast a red glow over her long bare limbs and the flickering candle flames threw wavering shadows across her lifted arms and slender neck. Her hair remained tightly braided round her head and this, added to the boyish outlines of her body, gave her the appearance of one of those androgynous forms of later Greek art whose
ambiguous 
loveliness wins us still, even in the cold marble, with so touching an appeal. Her smooth forehead and small delicately moulded face showed phantom-like in the mirror. Her scarlet lips quivered as she gazed at herself, quivered into that enigmatic smile challenging and inscrutable which seems, more than any other
human
expression, to have haunted the imagination of
certain
great artists of the past.

Permitted for a brief moment to catch a glimpse of that white figure, an intruder, if possessed of the
smallest
degree of poetic fancy, would have been tempted to dream that the dust of the centuries had indeed been quickened and some delicate evocation of perverse pagan desire restored to breath and consciousness.

Such a dream would not, perhaps, have survived a glance at the girl’s face. With distended pupils and irises so large that they might have been under the
influence
of some exciting drug, her eyes had that
particular
look, sorrowful and heavy with mystery, which one feels
could not have been in the world
before the death of Christ.

With her epicene figure, she resembled some
girl-priestess
of Artemis invoking a mocking image of her own defiant sexlessness. With her sorrowful inhuman eyes she suggested some strange elf-creature, born of mediæval magic.

Turning away from the mirror, Philippa Renshaw blew out the candles and flung open the curtains. Standing thus for a moment in the presence of the vague starless night full of chilly earth odours, she drew several long deep breaths and seemed to inhale the very essence of the darkness as if it had been the kiss of some elemental lover. Then she shivered a little, closed
the window and began hurriedly to dress herself by the fire-light. Bare-headed, but with a dark cloak
reaching
to her feet, she softly left her room and crept
silently
down the staircase. One by one she drew the heavy bolts of the hall door and turned the ponderous key.

Letting herself out into the night air with the
movements
of one not unaccustomed to such escapades, she hurried down the stone pathway, passed through the iron entrance gates, and emerged into the park.
Catching
up the skirt of her cloak, and drawing it tightly round her so that it should not impede her steps, she plunged into the wet grass and directed her course
towards
the thickest group of oak trees. Between the immense trunks and mossy roots of these sea-deformed and wind-stunted children of the centuries she groped her way, her feet stumbling over fallen branches and her face whipped by the young wet leaves.

A mad desire seemed to possess her, to throw off every vestige and token of her human imprisonment and to pass forth free and unfettered into the embrace of the primeval powers. One would have thought, to have watched her as she flung herself, at last, on her face under one of the oldest of the trees and liberating her arms from her cloak, stretched them round its trunk, that she was some worshipper of a banished divinity
invoking
her god while her persecutors slept, and
passionately
calling upon him to return to his forsaken shrine. Releasing her fierce clasp upon the rough bark of the tree, not however before it had bruised her flesh, the girl dug her nails into the soft damp leaf-mould and rubbed her forehead against the wet moss. She
shuddered
as she lay like this, and as she shuddered she
clutched yet more tightly, as if in a kind of ecstasy, the roots of grass and the rubble of earth into which her fingers dug.

Meanwhile, within the house, another little drama
unrolled
itself. In the old-fashioned library collected by many generations of Renshaws, where the noble
Rabelaisian
taste of the eighteenth century jostled
unceremoniously
with the attenuated banalities of a later epoch, there sat, at the very moment when the girl
descended
the stairs, a tall powerfully built man in
evening
dress.

Brand Renshaw was a figure of striking and
formidable
appearance. Immensely muscular and very tall, he carried upon his massive shoulders a head of so strange a shape that had he been a mediæval chieftain he would doubtless have gone down to posterity as Brand Hatchet-pate, or Brand Hammer-skull. His head receded from a forehead narrow and high, and rose at the back into a dome-like protrusion which, in spite of the closely-clipt, reddish hair that covered it,
suggested
, in a manner that was almost sinister, the actual bony substructure of the cranium beneath.

The fire was out. The candles on the table were
guttering
and flickering with little spitting noises as their wicks sank and the cold hearth in front of him was littered with the ashes of innumerable cigarettes. He was neither reading nor smoking them. He sat with his hands on the arms of his chair, staring into vacancy.

Brand Renshaw’s eyes were like the eyes of a morose animal, an animal endowed perhaps with intellectual powers denied to the human race, but still an animal, and when he fixed his gaze in his concentrated manner
upon the unknown objects of his thought there was a weight of heavily focussed intensity in his stare that was unpleasantly threatening.

He was staring in this way at the empty grate when, in the dead silence of the house, he caught the sound of a furtive step in the hall without, and immediately
afterwards
the slight rasping noise of bolts carefully shot back.

In a flash he leapt to his feet and extinguished the guttering candles. Quietly and on tip-toe he moved to the door and soundlessly turning the handle peered into the hall. He was just in time to see the heavy front door closed. Without the least token of haste or surprise he slipped on an overcoat, took his hat and stick and went forth in pursuit of the escaped one.

At first he saw only the darkness and heard no sound but the angry flutterings of some bird in the high trees, and—a long way off, perhaps even beyond the park—the frightened squeal of a hunted rabbit. But by the time he got to the gate, taking care to walk on the flower-beds rather than on the stone pathway, he could make out the figure of the girl no great way in front of him. She ran on, so straight and so blindly, towards the oak trees that he was able without difficulty to
follow
her even though, every now and then, her
retreating
figure was absorbed and swallowed up by the
darkness
.

When at last he came up to her side as she lay stretched out at the foot of the tree, he made no
immediate
attempt to betray his presence. With his arms folded he stood regarding her, a figure as silent and
inhuman
as herself, and over them both the vague
immensities
and shadowy obscurities of the huge
earth-scented
night hung lowering and tremendous, like
powers
that held their breath, waiting, watching.

At intervals an attenuated gust of wind, coming from far away across the marshes, moved the dead leaves upon the ground and made them dance a little death dance. This it did without even stirring the young living shoots on the boughs above them.

The darkness seemed to rise and fall about the two figures, to advance, to recede, to dilate, to diminish, in waves of alternate opacity and tenuity. In its
in-drawings
and outbreathings, in the ebb and flow of its
fluctuating
presence, it seemed to beat—at least that is how Brand Renshaw felt it—like the pulse of an immense heart charged with unutterable mysteries.

This illusion, if it were an illusion, may have been due to nothing more recondite than the fact that, in the silence of the heavy night, the sound of the tide on the Rodmoor sands was the background of everything.

It was not till the girl rose from the ground that she saw him standing there, a shadow among the shadows. She uttered a low cry and made a movement as if to rush away, but he stepped quickly forward and caught her in his arms. Tightly and almost savagely he held her, pressing her lithe body against his own and
caressing
it with little, deep-voiced mutterings as if he were soothing a desperate child. She submitted passively to his endearments and then, with a sound that was something between a moan and a laugh, she whispered brokenly into his ear, “Let me go, Brand, I was silly to come out. I couldn’t help it. I won’t do it again. I won’t, I swear.”

“No, I think you won’t!” the man muttered,
keeping
his arm securely round her waist and striding swiftly towards the house. “No, I think you won’t!”

He paused when they reached the entrance into the garden and, taking her by the wrists, pressed her fiercely against one of the stone pillars upon which the gate hung.

“I know what it is,” he whispered. “You can’t
deceive
me. You’ve been with those people from London. You’ve been with that friend of Baltazar’s. That’s the cause of all this, isn’t it? You’ve been with that damned fool—that idiotic, good-for-nothing down at the
village
. Haven’t you been with him? Haven’t you?”

The arms with which he pressed her hands against her breast trembled with anger as he said these words.

“Baltazar told me,” he went on, “only this morning—down at Mundham—everything about these
people
. They’re of no interest, none, not the least. They’re just like every one else. That fellow’s
half-foreign
, that’s all. An American half-breed, of some mongrel sort or other, that’s all there is to be said of him! So if you’ve been letting any mad fancies get into your head about Mr. Sorio, the sooner you get rid of them the better. He’s not for you. Do you hear? He’s—not—for—you!” These last words were
accompanied
by so savage a tightening of the hands that held her that the girl was compelled to bite her lip to stop herself from crying.

“You hurt me,” she said calmly. “Let me go, Brand.” The self-contained tone of her voice seemed to quiet him and he released her. She raised one of her wrists to her mouth and softly caressed it with her lips.

“You’ll be interested, yourself, in these people
before
very long,” she murmured, flashing a mocking look 
at him over her bare arm. “The second girl is very young and very pretty. She confided in me that she was extremely afraid of the sea. She appealed to mother’s protective instincts at once. I’ve no doubt she’ll appeal to your—protective instincts! So don’t be too quick in your condemnation.”

“Damn you!” muttered her brother, pushing the gate open. “Come! Get in with you! You talk to me as if I were a professional rake. I take no interest—not the slightest—in your young innocents with their
engaging
terrors. To bed! To bed! To bed!”

He pushed her before him along the path, but
Philippa
knew well that the hand on her shoulder was lighter and less angry than the one that had held her a moment ago, and as she ascended the steps of
Oakguard
—the name borne by the Renshaw house since the days of the Conqueror—there flickered over her shadowy face the same equivocal smile of dubious
meaning
that had looked out at its owner, not so long since, from the mirror in her room.

When the dawn finally crept up, pallid and cold out of the North Sea and lifted, with a sort of mechanical weariness, the weight of the shadows, it was neither Brand nor Philippa who was awake.

Roused, as always, by the slightest approach of an unusual sound, the mother of that strange pair had lain in her bed listening ever since her daughter’s first
emerging
from the house.

Once she had risen, and had stood for a moment at the window, her loose grey hair mixed with the folds of an old, faded, dusky-coloured shawl. That, however, was when both of her children were away in the middle of the park and absolute silence prevailed. With this
single exception she had remained listening, always
silently
listening, lying on her back and with an
expression
of tragic and harassed expectation in her great, hollow, brown eyes. She might have been taken, lying there alone in the big four-posted bed, surrounded by an immense litter of stored-up curios and mementoes, for a symbolic image of all that is condemned, as this mortal world goes round, to watch and wait and invoke the gods and cling fast to such pathetic relics and memorials as time consents to leave of the days that it has annihilated.