Rodmoor (8 page)

“Adrian,” she said, glancing shyly at him. “Why did you kiss me like that, just now?”

He propped himself up and gazed gloomily across the barley field. “Why—did—I—kiss you?” he muttered, as if speaking in a dream.

“Yes—why, like that, just then,” she went on. “It wasn’t like you and me at all. You were rough, Adrian. You weren’t yourself. Oh, my dear, my dear! I don’t believe you care for me half as you used to!”

He beat his fists irritably on the ground and an
almost
vindictive look came into his eyes.

“That’s the way!” he flung out, “that’s the way I knew you’d take it. You girls want to be loved but you must be loved just thus and so. A touch too near, a word too far—and you’re all up in arms.”

Nance felt as though an ice-cold wedge had been thrust between her breasts.

“Adrian,” she cried, “how can you treat me in this way? How can you say these things to me? Have I ever stopped you kissing me? Have I ever been
unresponsive
to you?”

He looked away from her and began pulling up a patch of moss by its roots. “What are you annoyed about, then?” he muttered.

She sighed bitterly. Then with a strong effort to give her voice a natural tone. “I didn’t feel as though you were kissing me at all just now. I was simply a girl in your arms—any girl! It was a shame, Adrian. It hurt me. Surely, dear,”—her voice grew gentle and pleading—“you
must
know what I mean.”

“I don’t know in the least what you mean,” he cried. “It’s some silly, absurd scruple some one’s been
putting
in your head. I can’t always make love to you as if we were two children, can I—two babes in the wood?”

Nance’s mouth quivered at this and she stretched out her arm towards him and then, letting it drop, fumbled with her fingers at a blade of grass. A curious line, rarely visible on her face, wrinkled her forehead and twitched a little as if it had been a nerve beneath the skin. This line had a pathos in it beyond a mere frown. It would have been well if the Italian had recalled,
as he saw it, certain ancient tragic masks of his native country, but it is one of life’s persistent ironies that the tokens of monumental sorrow, which serve so nobly the purposes of art, should only excite peevish
irritation
when seen near at hand. Sorio did not miss that line of suffering but instead of softening him it
increased
his bitterness.

“You’re really not angry about my kissing you,” he said. “That’s what all you women do—you pitch upon something quite different and revenge yourself with it, when all the time you’re thinking about—God knows what!—some mad grievance of your own that has no connection with what you say!”

She leapt up at this, as if bitten by an adder and looked at him with flashing eyes.

“Adrian! You’ve no right—I’ve never given you the right—to speak to me so. Come! We’d better go back to the house. I wish—oh, how I wish—I’d never asked you to meet me here.”

She stooped to pick up her hat. “I liked it so here,” she added with a wistful catch in her voice, “but it’s all spoilt now.” Sorio did not move. He looked at her gravely.

“You’re a little fool, Nance,” he said, “absolutely a little fool. But you look extraordinarily lovely at this moment, now you’re in a fury. Come here, child, come back and sit down and let’s talk sensibly. There are other things and much more important things in the world than our ridiculous quarrels.”

The tone of his voice had its effect upon her but she did not yield at once.

“I think perhaps to-day,” she murmured, “it would be better to go back.” She continued to stand in front
of him, swaying a little—an unconscious trick of hers—and smiling sadly.

“Come and sit down,” he repeated in a low voice. She obeyed him, for it was what her heart ached for, and clinging tightly to him she let her suppressed
emotions
have full vent. With her head pressed awkwardly against his coat she sobbed freely and without restraint.

Sorio gently buttoned up the fastening of one of her long sleeves which had come unloosed. He did this gravely and without a change of expression. That
peculiar
and tragic pathos which emanates from a girl’s forgetfulness of her personal appearance did not
apparently
cross his consciousness. Nance, as she leant against him, had a pitiable and even a grotesque air. One of her legs was thrust out from beneath her skirt. Sorio noticed that her brown shoes were a little worn and did not consort well with her white stockings. It momentarily crossed his mind that he had fancied Nancy’s ankles to be slenderer than it seemed they were.

Her sobs died away at last in long shuddering gasps which shook her whole frame. Sorio kept stroking her head, but his eyes were fixed on the distant river bank along which a heavily labouring horse was tugging at a rope. Every now and then his face contracted a little as if he were in physical pain. This was due to the fact that from the girl’s weight pressing against his knee he began to suffer from cramp. Though her sobs had died down, Nance still seemed unwilling to stir.

With one of her hands she made a tremulous
movement
in search of his, and he answered it by tightly gripping her fingers. While he held her thus his gaze wandered from the horse on the tow-path and fixed
itself
upon a large and beautifully spotted fly that was
moving slowly and tentatively up a green stalk. With its long antennæ extended in front of it the fly felt its way, every now and then opening and shutting its gauzy wings.

Sorio hated the horse, hated the fly and hated
himself
. As for the girl who leant so heavily upon him, he felt nothing for her just then but a dull, inert
patience
and a kind of objective pity such as one might feel for a wounded animal. One deep, far-drawn
channel
of strength and hope remained open in the remote depths of his mind—associated with his inmost identity and with what in the fortress of his soul he loved to call his “secret”—and far off, at the end of this vista, visualized through clouds of complicated memories—was the image of his boy, his boy left in America, from whom, unknown even to Nance, he received letters week by week, letters that were the only thing, so it seemed to him at this moment, which gave sweetness to his life.

He had sought, in giving full scope to his attraction to Nance, to cover up and smooth over certain jagged, bleeding edges in his outraged mind, and in this, even now, as he returned the pressure of her soft fingers, he recognized that he had been successful.

It was, he knew well, only the appearance of this
other one
—this insidious “rose au regard saphique”—this furtive child of marsh and sea—who had spoilt his delight in Nance—Nance had not changed, nor
indeed
had he, himself. It was only the discovery of Philippa, the revelation of Philippa, which had altered everything.

With his fingers entangled in the shining hair,
beneath
his hand, he found himself cursing the day he had ever come to Rodmoor. And yet—as far as his “
secret
”
went—that “fleur hypocrite” of the
salt-marshes
came nearer, nearer than mortal soul except Baptiste—to understanding the heart of his mystery. The sun sinking behind them, had for some while now thrown long dark shadows across the field at their feet.

The flies which hovered over the girl’s prostrate form were no longer radiantly illuminated and from the vague distances in every direction came those fitful sounds of the closing day—murmurs and whispers and subtle breathings, sweet and yet profoundly sad, which
indicate
the ebb of the life-impulse and approach of
twilight
.

The girl moved at last, and lifting up a tear-stained face, looked timidly and shyly into his eyes. She
appeared
at that moment so submissive, so pitiful, and so entirely dependent on him that Sorio would have been hardly human if he had not thrown his arms
reassuringly
round her neck and kissed her wet flushed cheek.

They rose together from the ground and both laughed merrily to see how stained and crumpled her newly starched frock had become.

“I’ll meet you here again—to-morrow if you like,” he said gently. She smiled but did not answer.
Simple
-hearted though she was, she was enough of a woman to know well that her victory, if it could be called
victory
, over his morose mood was a mere temporary
matter
. The future of their love seemed to her more than ever dubious and uncertain, and it was with a chilled heart, in spite of her gallant attempts to make their return pleasant to them both, that she re-entered the forlorn garden of Dyke House and waved good-bye to him from the door.

N
ANCE continued to resort to her withy-bed, in spite of the spoiling of its charm, but she did not again ask Sorio to meet her there. She met him still, however,—sometimes in Rachel’s desolate garden which seemed inspired by some occult influence antipathetic to every softening touch, and sometimes—and these latter encounters were the
happier
ones—in the little graveyard of Mr. Traherne’s church. She found him affectionate enough in these ambiguous days and even tender, but she was
constantly
aware of a barrier between them which nothing she could say or do seemed able to surmount.

Her anxiety with regard to the relations between Rachel and Linda did not grow less as days went on. Sometimes the two seemed perfectly happy and Nance accused herself of having a morbid imagination, but then again something would occur—some quite slight and unimportant thing—which threw her back upon all her old misgivings.

Once she was certain she heard Linda crying in the night and uttering Rachel’s name but the young girl, when roused from her sleep, only laughed gaily and vowed she had no recollection of anything she had dreamed.

As things thus went on and there seemed no outlet from the difficulties that surrounded her, Nance began making serious enquiries as to the possibility of finding
work in the neighbourhood. She read the
advertisements
in the local papers and even answered some of them but the weeks slipped by and nothing tangible seemed to emerge.

Her greatest consolation at this time was a
friendship
she struck up with Hamish Traherne, the
curate-in
-charge of Rodmoor upon whose organ in the forlorn little Norman church, Linda was now daily practising.

Dr. Raughty, too, when she chanced to meet him, proved a soothing distraction. The man’s evident
admiration
for her gratified her vanity, while her tender and playful way of expressing it put a healing ointment upon his wounded pride.

One late afternoon when the sun at last seemed to have got some degree of hold upon that sea-blighted country, she found herself seated with Mr. Traherne on a bench adjoining the churchyard, waiting there in part for the service—for Hamish was a rigorous ritualist in these things and rang his bell twice a day with devoted patience—and in part for the purpose of meeting Mrs. Renshaw, who, as she knew, came
regularly
to church, morning and evening.

Linda was playing inside the little stone edifice and the sound of her music came out to them as they talked, pleasantly softened by the intervening walls. Mr. Traherne’s own dwelling, a battered, time-worn
fragment
of monastic masonry, clumsily adapted to modern use, lay behind them, its unpretentious garden passing by such imperceptible degrees into the sacred enclosure that the blossoms raised, in defiance of the winds that swept the marshes, in the priest’s flower-beds, shed their petals upon the more recently dug of his parishioners’ graves.

It may have been the extreme ugliness of Rodmoor’s curate-in-charge that drew Nance so closely to him. Mr. Traherne was certainly in bodily appearance the least prepossessing person she had ever beheld. He
resembled
nothing so much as an over-driven and
excessively
patient horse, his long, receding chin, knobbed bulbous nose, and corrugated forehead not even being relieved by any particular quality in his small,
deeply-set
colourless eyes—eyes which lacked everything such as commonly redeems an otherwise insignificant face and which stared out of his head upon the world with a fixed expression of mild and dumb protest.

Whether it was his ugliness, or something indefinable in him that found no physical or even vocal expression—for his voice was harsh and husky—the girl herself would have been puzzled to say, but whatever it was, it drew her and held her and she experienced curious relief in talking with him.

This particular afternoon she had permitted herself to go further than usual in these relieving confidences and had treated the poor man as if he were actually and in very truth her father-confessor.

“I’ve had no luck so far,” she said, speaking of her attempts to get work, “but I think I shall have before long. I’m right, am I not, in
that
at any rate?
Whatever
happens, it’s better Linda and I should be
independent
.”

The priest nodded vigorously and clasped his bony hands over his knees.

“I wish,” he said, “that I knew Mr. Sorio as I know you. When I know people I like them, and as a rule—” he opened his large twisted mouth and smiled
humorously
at her—“as a rule they like me.”

“Oh, don’t misunderstand what I said just now,” cried Nance anxiously. “I didn’t mean that Adrian doesn’t like you. I know he likes you very much. It’s that he’s afraid of your influence, of your religion, of your goodness. He’s afraid of you. That’s what it is.”

“Of course we know,” said Hamish Traherne,
prodding
the ground with his oak stick and tucking his long cassock round his legs, “of course we know that it’s really Mr. Sorio who ought to find work. He ought to find it soon, too, and as soon as he’s got it he ought to marry you! That’s how I would see this affair
settled
.” He smiled at her with humorous benignity.

Nance frowned a little. “I don’t like it when you talk like that,” she remarked, “it makes me feel as though I’d done wrong in saying anything about it. It makes me feel as though I had been disloyal to
Adrian
.”

For so ugly and clumsy a man, there was a pathetic gentleness in the way he laid his hand, at that, upon his companion’s arm. “The disloyalty,” he said in a low voice, “would have been
not
to have spoken to me. Who else can help our friend? Who else is anxious to help him?”

“I know, I know,” she cried, “you’re as sweet to me as you can be. You’re my most faithful friend. It’s only that I feel—sometimes—as though Adrian wouldn’t like it for me to talk about him at all—to any one. But that’s silly, isn’t it? And besides I must, mustn’t I? Otherwise there’d be no way of
helping
him.”

“I’ll find a way,” muttered the priest. “You needn’t mention his name again. We’ll take him for granted in
future, little one, and we’ll both work together in his interests.”

“If he could only be made to understand,” the girl went on, looking helplessly across the vast tract of fens, “what his real feelings are! I believe he loves me at the bottom of his heart. I know I can help him as no one else can. But how to make him understand that?”

They were interrupted at this point by the
appearance
of Mrs. Renshaw who, standing in the path leading to the church door, looked at them hesitatingly as if wondering whether she ought to approach them or not.

They rose at once and crossed the grass to meet her. At the same time Linda, emerging from the building, greeted them with excited ardour.

“I’ve done so well to-day, Mr. Traherne,” she cried, “you’d be astonished. I can manage those pedals
perfectly
now, and the stops too. Oh, it’s lovely! It’s lovely! I feel I’m going really to be a player.”

They all shook hands with Mrs. Renshaw, and then, while the priest went in to ring his bell, the three women strolled together to the low stone parapet built as a
protection
against floods, which separated the churchyard from the marshes.

Tiny, delicate mosses grew on this wall, interspersed with small pale-flowered weeds. On its further side was a wide tract of boggy ground, full of deep amber-
coloured
pools and clumps of rushes and terminated, some half mile away, by a raised dyke. There was a
pleasant
humming of insects in the air, and although a
procession
of large white clouds kept crossing the low, horizontal sun, and throwing their cold shadows over the landscape, the general aspect of the place was more friendly and less desolate than usual.

They sat down upon the parapet and began to talk. “Brand promised to come and fetch me to-night,” said Mrs. Renshaw. “I begged him to come in time for the service but—” and she gave a sad, expressive little laugh, “he said he wouldn’t be early enough for that. Why is it, do you think, that men in these days are so unwilling to do these things? It isn’t that they’re wiser than their ancestors. It isn’t that they’re cleverer. It isn’t that they have less need of the
Invisible
. Something has come over the world, I think—something that blots out the sky. I’ve thought that often lately, particularly when I wake up in the
mornings
. It seems to me that the dawns used to be fresher and clearer than they are now. God has got tired of helping us, my dears,” and she sighed wearily.

Linda extended her warm little hand with a caressing movement, and Nance said, gently, “I know well what you mean, but I feel sure—oh, I feel quite sure—it’s only for a time. And I think, too, in some odd way, that it’s our own fault—I mean the fault of women. I can’t express clearly what’s in my mind but I feel as though we’d all changed—changed, that is, from what we used to be in old days. Don’t you think there’s something in that, Mrs. Renshaw? But of course that only applies to Linda and me.”

The elder woman’s countenance assumed a pinched and withered look as the girl spoke, the lines in it
deepening
and the pallor of it growing so noticeable that Nance found herself recalling the ghastly whiteness of her father’s face as she saw him at the last, laid out in his coffin. She shivered a little and let her fingers stray over the crumbling masonry and tangled weeds at her side, seeking there, in a fumbling, instinctive manner,
to get into touch with something natural, earthy, and reassuring.

The procession of clouds suffered a brief interlude at that moment in their steady transit and the sinking sun shone out warm and mellow, full of odours of peat and moss and reedy mud. Swarms of tiny midges danced in the long level light and several drowsy butterflies rose out of nowhere and fluttered over the mounds.

“Oh, there’s Brand coming!” cried Mrs. Renshaw, suddenly, with a queer contraction of her pale
forehead
, “and the bell has stopped. How strange we none of us noticed that! Listen! Yes—he’s begun the service. Can’t you hear? Oh, what a pity! I can’t bear going in after he’s begun.”

Brand Renshaw, striding unceremoniously over the graves, approached the group. They rose to greet him. Nance felt herself surveyed from head to foot, weighed in the balances and found wanting. Linda hung back a little, shamefaced and blushing deeply. It was upon her that Brand kept his eyes fixed all the while he was being introduced. She—as Nance recognized in a flash—was
not
found wanting.

They stood talking together, easily and freely enough, for several minutes, but nothing that Nance heard or said prevented her mind from envisaging the fact that there had leapt into being, magnetically, mysteriously, irresistibly, one of those sudden attractions between a man and a girl that so often imply—as the world is now arranged—the emergence of tragedy upon the horizon.

“I think—if you don’t mind, Brand,” said Mrs. Renshaw when a pause arrived in their conversation, “we’ll slip into the church now for a minute or two.
He’s got to the Psalms. I can hear. And it hurts me, somehow, for the poor man to have to go through them alone.”

Nance moved at once, but Linda pouted and looked shyly at Brand. “I’m tired of the church,” she
murmured
. “I’ll wait for you out here. Are you going in with them, Mr. Renshaw?”

Brand made no reply to this, but walked gravely with the two others as far as the porch.

“Don’t be surprised if your sister’s spirited away when you come out, Miss Herrick,” he said smilingly as he left them at the door.

Returning with a quick step to where Linda stood gazing across the marshes, he made some casual remark about the quietness of the evening and led her forth from the churchyard. Neither of them uttered any definite reference to what they were doing. Indeed, a queer sort of nervous dumbness seemed to have seized them both, but there was a suppressed surge of
excitement
in the man’s resolute movements and under the navy blue coat and skirt which hung so delicately and closely round her slender figure. The girl’s pulses beat a wild excited tune.

He led her straight along the narrow, reed-bordered path, with a ditch on either side of it which ended in the bridge across the Loon. Before they reached the bridge, however, he swerved to the left and helped her over a low wooden railing. From this point, by
following
a rough track along the edge of one of the water meadows it was possible to reach the sand-dunes
without
entering the village.

“Not to the sea,” pleaded Linda, holding back when she perceived the direction of their steps.

“Yes, to the sea!” he cried, pulling her forward with merciless determination. She made no further
resistance
. She did not even protest when, arrived at the end of their path, he lifted her bodily over the gate that barred their way. She let him help her across the heavily sinking sand, covered with pallid, coarse grass which yielded to every step they took. She let him, when at last they reached the summit of the dunes and saw the sea spread out before them, retain the hand she had given him and lead her down, hardly holding back at all now, to the very edge of the water.

They were both at that moment like persons under the power of some sort of drug. Their eyes were wild and bright and when they spoke their voices had an
unnatural
solemnity. In the absoluteness of the magnetic current which swept them together, they could do
nothing
, it seemed, but take all that happened to them for granted—take all—all—as if it could not be
otherwise
, as if it were
unthinkable
otherwise.

When they reached the place where the tide turned and the tremulous line of spindrift glimmered in the dying sunlight, the girl stopped at last. Her lips and cheeks were pale as the foam itself. She tried to tear her fingers from his grasp. Her feet, sinking in the wet sand, were splashed by the inflowing water.