Ducdame (10 page)

Ann’s gray eyes scrutinized her coldly and critically.

“I expect you told him that you would not accept a penny from him after you left here and after he was married?”

Netta stared in surprise. How did this girl know that?

“Yes,” she answered, “that was just what I did say.”

A smile of malicious subtlety crossed Ann’s, beautiful lips. “And while you said it, of course, you knew that just that very thing would effectively stop him?”

The frowning bewilderment on Netta’s face indicated without the defence of words her freedom from such elaborate guile.

But Cousin Ann went on: “I daresay it was all
unconscious
, the line you took. But I’m afraid we’re responsible for these shifty moves, even though we don’t realize it when we make them.”

She was silent for a moment, tapping the table with her cigarette case.

“Damn it all!” she burst out at last. “You must pull yourself together, Netta, and
make
him realize you’re serious. This offering to live without help, this offering to just
disappear
is only putting spokes in your own wheel. Of course he won’t let you go off like that! What decent man could? When you take
that
line you leave him no alternative.”

Netta’s face showed quite clearly that this argument had gone through her like a sword.

“I thought——” she began; but even as she spoke the deadly implication of all that this meant stopped her words in mid-utterance. She sat staring at Cousin Ann with her mouth open.

That young lady’s earliest playmate had been her father’s gamekeeper. Missy Sparrow-hawk the old man used to call her. Certainly no raptorial hoverer over the wintry fields knew better the exact moment wherein to drop from the sky.

“One has to face the means to a thing when one wants a thing,” said Cousin Ann. “You and I both care, I take it, for Rook’s happiness above everything else. And Rook’s real happiness, whatever he may
say,
is in carrying out his
destiny. And his destiny, Netta, is in playing his part in life as his people have played it before him.”

The ex-actress from the Bristol Empire closed her mouth, lowered her eyelids till it almost seemed as if her eyes were shut, too, and gave an imperceptible nod of the head.

“Rook must have a
son
!
” added the excited girl, clenching one of her hands and beating it upon her knee as if she were annihilating the very possibility of female Ashovers. “And we’ve got to manage it.
You’ve
got to manage it.”

What Netta was struggling to keep at that moment was the lovely vague impulse to do something wonderful and
unexpected
for Rook, some passionate effacement of herself, some act of desperate humility, that would bring him back to her in his thoughts, whatever became of her in reality.

The thought of something like that had been the last refuge of her weariness and her weakness. It had been a beautiful revenge upon them all and a complete escape from them all. But it was so difficult, when Cousin Ann talked in this way, to feel this any more. Cousin Ann made it seem as if she would be only tricking and fooling Rook. That was not at all what had been in her mind, filling her with this vague secret exultation.

“You mean that I should go off without his knowing?”

Cousin Ann indicated that she did mean just exactly that.

“But he’d come after me. Oh, you don’t know him! You don’t know him at all! You think it all depends on how little he cares for me. It doesn’t depend on that! It
depends
on his own pride; on what he feels he has chosen to do, in defiance of everyone!”

Netta’s voice as she went on became more and more
careless
and confidential. It became like the voice of a dying person confessing half-forgotten sins to a stranger priest.

“He would follow me and find me out wherever I went. To get some job somewhere and hide away from him would be absolutely impossible. He’d find me out. Nothing
would stop him. He’d just bring me back here—and—and——”

Cousin Ann remained completely oblivious of the ricochet of pride in the woman’s voice; pride that kept beating against her calm rational statement, like the wind against a
beleaguered
rampart.

“Don’t you understand what I mean?” said Netta almost crossly. And then a sudden smile of irony, irony deep and simple as the earth itself, passed over her haggard face.

“No!” repeated the other. “Tell me, quick! What would he do then?”

Netta looked her full in the face.

“He’d insist on marrying
me
then!” she said.

“Ah! he would, would he?” cried Cousin Ann, making an attempt to return Netta’s smile with appropriate playfulness.

The attempt was not a very successful one. The response hung in the wind a bit. For the pulse beat of a second the victory was with the late mistress of Major-General Caxton. For once in her proud hoverings Missy Sparrow-hawk blinked and swerved. That nuance of irony on her rival’s face
became
something she could not discount or deal with. For a couple of ticks of the great dining-room clock Lady Ann Poynings was no better than a baffled barbarian.

The result of this momentary defeat, however, was to add a fiercer momentum to her next stroke, which certainly did not miss its mark.

“Then there’s only one thing left for you to do if you’re serious in what you said just now.”

The strange illuminated look came back into Netta’s eyes.

“You mean—to do away with myself?” she whispered.

Lady Ann gave a spontaneous start of surprise at this. Among the various issues she had projected for her campaign, the suicide of her victim had, so far, taken no place.

“Good Lord, Netta Page! What must you think of me! Of course I wasn’t dreaming of horrors like that!”

Once more there came into the other’s countenance the same disconcerting smile.

“I don’t think you’d dream of anything for many nights,” she said. “But what is this one thing left, if it isn’t killing myself?”

Plumb-down, like a falling meteorite, came Missy
Sparrow-hawk
this time.

“A woman can always,” she whispered savagely, “kill the illusion which a man builds up about her or about himself in connection with her. And when that’s done, there is nothing left.”

The deadliness of this stroke was promptly proved by a curious case of obliteration. What was obliterated was the unearthly eagerness in Netta’s eyes; that exaltation which had carried their struggle to a level of emotion outside the scope of a winner of “scuts” and “pads” and “brushes.”

The look did not merely fade from Netta’s face; for that would imply a process. It sank and was extinguished.
It
went
out.
It disappeared as completely as the light in a ship’s stern disappears when the ship sinks into the sea trough.

“Nothing left but just disgust with the whole thing,” added Cousin Ann, driving the stroke home with ferocious finality. “They don’t hang on as
we
do, Netta Page. We’ve only to let ourselves drift and drop our form a bit and they’re off! They’re awfully fastidious, men are. You’d think sometimes that they’d never seen anything born or anything die!”

Netta’s face expressed a comprehension so bleak and stark that every vestige of beauty seemed frozen out of its
haggardness
.

“You mean that I should make him hate me?” she said humbly.

“I’m not dictating to you,” breathed the other, with a deep sigh of relief and leaning back in her chair. “It’s you who
will have to do it. I’m not impertinent enough to suggest how it’s to be done. I only know, Netta, that if you don’t do just that, nothing that you do will make any difference.”

Why should it have happened that at that critical moment, in place of glancing at the gentle Sir Robert, Netta’s eyes fell upon the one unfrozen pane of the Elizabethan window, across which the lime tree stretched its branch? However it happened, the sight of that branch, motionless and
benumbed
in the leaden-coloured air reminded her of those drab wintry days when Florrie would bring back to their room from the Turk’s Head, hidden under her cloak, a bottle of Gordon’s gin.

She seemed actually to hear Florrie’s voice at that moment; and there was a branch across the frozen window there, too.

“You get quite like the other girls when you’re squiffy, Net!”

It was in that room that she had vowed to herself, one sickeningly gray morning, that she would never, never, never be “like the other girls” again!

She felt a sudden overpowering necessity to be quite alone. She felt that whatever happened it would be a heavenly relief, like the cessation of physical nausea, not to see Cousin Ann’s brightly flushed cheeks and clear gray eyes any more!

Rather stiffly, for the frost seemed to have got into her bones, she rose from her seat and stood quite still, looking straight down at her enemy.

Cousin Ann felt as though she were riding an unknown horse without spur or bridle or bit. She experienced a sense of abominable embarrassment. She felt as she had felt once when her father caught her stamping on a slowworm. She felt more clumsy than cruel, more thick-skinned than
victorious
. She felt a fool.

This feeling was not diminished when her rival gave her
what seemed to resemble the melancholy shadow of an ironic curtsey. It remained when, with a movement that could not have been more dignified if it had been the exit of the betrayed crown prince, the friend of Florrie and Minnie bowed herself out into the empty hall.

N
ETTA never forgot the final hour of that Christmas Eve as she watched from their bed the figure of Rook
standing
in his dressing gown by the window. He was as one who reports to his companion from some solitary Childe Roland Tower the signs and portents of a world dark with mysterious travail throes.

So as not to chill her with the night air as she sat up erect in the bed, her brown hair hanging loose over each shoulder and her eyes big with her hidden purpose, he did not open the window, though he longed to do so; but since their only light was the last flicker of their fire, the great hollow spaces of the hushed midnight gave up their secret to him.

“There’s a thaw beginning,” he said, half turning toward the bed.

“Does that mean that it’ll rain to-morrow?” she asked in a low voice as if she were afraid of disturbing something, afraid of interrupting some deep dark purpose of nature, as sacred and hidden as her own.

“It means a white Christmas—that’s what it means,” replied the Squire of Ashover. “I can’t see one single star. Wait a moment! Cover yourself up, will you? And I’ll open the window.”

Netta obediently sank down on the pillow and pulled the bedclothes close under her chin. Lying warm and quiet there she closed her eyes. In spite of everything she felt strangely happy.

Rook opened the upper window sash and leaned out,
inhaling
great breaths of dark damp air.

“There are clouds over everything,’ he reported. “And they’re not rain clouds, Netta. I can smell the snow
coming
.”

“Can you really smell the snow?” whispered the woman; and as the night air swept in about her she, too, was conscious of an indescribable presence there in the great brooding spaces, a presence like that of some enormous, formless, feathery body, the approach of which did actually send out some vague impalpable essence, recognizable by human senses—the smell of the snow!

Netta lay for several minutes in silence, giving herself up to this mysterious elemental process that was going on out there in the vast night.

Then suddenly she was conscious of a vague uneasiness. Why did not Rook close the window and come back into the room?

She raised her head. He was still leaning out, staring into the darkness, motionless as a sentinel, and she became
conscious
from the very pose of his head that he was absorbed in watching something or listening to something. Was he listening to the relaxing of the crust of the earth as it yielded to the thaw?

All at once he closed the window and turned round.

“Did you see anything?” she asked.

He looked at her in surprise. “How did you know?” he returned. And she saw by his face that he had received some kind of shock.

He came and sat down on the bed, taking the hand which she thrust out toward him.

“What was it, Rook?” she whispered.

He fixed her with his eyes, seeing her and yet not seeing her, like a man who is recreating in his mental vision some disturbing image.

“Rook!” she repeated, this time with real concern in her voice; “Rook! What did you see out there?”

His natural and somewhat morose humour came back into his eyes.

“There’s no point in making a secret of it,” he said. “There’s someone out there with a lantern, standing by the shrubbery, behind the trees. He moved off when I opened the window and slunk into the bushes. My dear, I don’t like it! It’s nearly midnight. Who the devil would be in our garden in the middle of the night?”

Netta drew away her hand and sat up very straight, staring at him with wide-open eyes.

“I believe I know who it is, Rook!” she cried excitedly. “It’s Corporal Dick! Pandie was rambling on just now about him. Oh, Rook, do you think he’s gone mad?”

Rook leapt to his feet and strode to the window.

“Whoever it was he’s disappeared now,” he said, coming back to the middle of the room and hesitating there with a puzzled frown, his hand on the chair where he had laid his clothes.

“I wonder if I ought to dress and go out and see—I don’t
want
to make a fuss—but if it is Uncle Dick—— What did Pandie say about him?”

“She said he’d been behaving queerly all day; hanging about the garden with a gun and. asking her questions.”

Rook gave a perceptible start.
“What?”
he cried out. Then in a calmer voice: “I don’t see anything very mad in that, Netta! Pandie’s always getting the jumps about something or other. Uncle Dick was no doubt wanting me to go shooting with him. Good Lord! I can’t see the old man wandering round here with a lantern in the middle of the night.”

Netta shook her head. “But you said you saw someone. Did the man you see have a gun, Rook?”

He did not answer, but began pacing up and down the room, cursing under his breath: “The Corporal! Damn the Corporal!”

Each time he came to the chair where his clothes had been thrown, he stopped and picked up his shirt or his vest. Then he would throw the thing down and start walking and
muttering
again.

Nothing could have been more disagreeable to him than the idea of playing hide-and-seek at that confounded hour with a problematical Uncle Dick.

The unpleasant notion that if it
was
his uncle he might have to lock him up for the night, or even escort him back home over Battlefield and Dorsal, made him extremely
unwilling
to begin the business of dressing. And yet something ought to be done!

But perhaps it wasn’t Uncle Dick at all—just some
predatory
night wanderer from the village on the way to his rabbit snares. A nocturnal chase after a poor devil of that kind would be worse than the other possibility.

Rook decided to let the matter rest. He became
conscious
of a superimposing weight in the atmosphere that made nothing seem more desirable than to take Netta in his arms and fall fast asleep.

He flung a shovelful of coal on the fire to keep it alive till morning, and throwing the window wide open to the now absolutely untroubled night, got straight into bed.

It was Netta and not he who stayed a wake long enough to count the strokes, when the solemn Queen Anne timepiece in the hall downstairs, an object brought into the family by one of the sagacious marriages of great-grandfather
Benjamin
, struck twelve of the clock.

Rook was still fast asleep, as fast asleep as if he had spent the night drinking wine with Monsieur Voltaire, when Netta awoke to her first white Christmas at Ashover.

An extraordinary sensation, that sudden consciousness of the fact that the window ledges were thick with a soft feathery muffling substance, and the dark woodwork of the
window a mere frame to the falling, falling, falling of heavy silent flakes!

A miraculous intrusion, this mysterious whiteness, so different from all terrestrial or solar elements; as if some vast meteoric moon, virginal and immaculate, had actually collided, in its mystic orbit, with our motley guilt-stained earth!

Netta glanced at the fire. It was still warm and glowing, while a light that seemed to proceed rather from the snow itself than from any remoter luminary filled the room with a faint bluish mist.

Very noiselessly she slipped out of bed and began hurriedly putting on her clothes. It was a little after seven and she knew that there was a service at eight in Ashover Church.

She had secretly resolved the night before that she would go to this service. Mrs. Ashover always went to the more popular one at eleven o’clock; but Netta had helped Nell Hastings to set up a little straw-thatched manger, overarched with holly, in that famous chancel, and she was filled with an eager desire to see how it looked with the lighting of the candles Cousin Ann, she felt sure, would go rushing through the snow with Lion if she went out at all. In fact, the chances were that there would be no human being at this queer ceremony except the disastrous Mr. Hastings and his equivocal wife.

She took her heavy cloak and muffler, drew a pair of goloshes over her thickest boots, pulled low down over her head a young girl’s tam-o’-shanter that had accompanied her through all her vicissitudes, kissed her hand at the figure in the bed, and let herself out.

She left the house by the kitchen door, greeting Pandie and the cook, who were enjoying a cup of early tea over the stove, in so happy a voice that when she had gone Pandie remarked to the other: “These here actressy gels do love a bit of white Christmas, same as decent-living folks, then; seems so! Her
be gone to hear Parson Hastings say his ‘shed-for-you’ by snow-shine I reckon! Will the poor deceived man give the like o’ she the sacriments, do ’ee suppose?”

Martha Vabbin opened the top of the stove with an iron hook and shifted the kettle.

“Maybe he will and maybe he won’t,” she replied. “But I heard tell that when Corporal Dick askit for a sup o’ them things in bygone days the Reverend that then was talked terrible straight to the poor hedge-dropped lad.”

Netta’s experience of snow in the real country was so slight that she felt an extraordinary sensation of awe as her steps broke the feathery whiteness that covered everything. A cart of some kind had entered the drive gate since the
snow-storm
began; but apart from this, everything was virginal and unstained.

The purity of the new-fallen snow made all the various little objects that displayed themselves in their shameless browns or yellows look more than just dirty; look in some queer way
degraded,
as if Nature had tossed them out in a fit of disgust. Every single twig or gatepost or tree root which
did
dare to assert its identity, bore upon its face the look of being subjected to a kind of penitential exposure, as if the self-respecting reticence with which it had concealed all the little birthmarks, deformities, and discolorations upon its poor skin were being held up to scorn.

Netta had passed round the corner of the house and was making her way through the little shrubbery path bordered by laurels and laurustinus, when she became aware of a sudden rustling and stumbling in the bushes behind her. She stopped and turned round. Could it be that Rook had found she was gone and had followed her? The moment she stopped and remained motionless, the person or animal
behind
her did the same thing; and so instantaneous was the sequence of silence upon sound that it was almost as if the steps of this mysterious pursuer were only an echo of her own.

Something kept her from retracing her way; perhaps a vague fear that it might be Cousin Ann; but each time she advanced and stopped again, the same phenomenon repeated itself. In the end she began to run, stumbling over the hidden roots and shaking the snow down from the smooth leaves of the laurels.

Just at the moment she emerged from the shrubbery near the drive gate and caught sight of the lighted windows of the church on the other side of the river, she tripped up over a dead branch and fell headlong to the ground.

Simultaneously with her fall two sharp reports rang out behind her and two volleys of leaden gunshot rattled against the gate.

She scrambled up on her knees, her face in the direction from which the shots had come. With a rapid movement of thought she wondered if she had been hit; and as she
wondered
, she was distinctly conscious of a delicious wave of relaxation and relief.

Her brain had never been clearer, her thoughts never more clairvoyant.

If only she
had
been hit, how lovely to die just here; especially if Rook came to find her when she was dead! It was with a queer detached observation, almost as if she had been an irresponsible onlooker instead of a muffled-up white-faced woman kneeling in the snow, that she watched the tall form of Corporal Dick emerge from the bushes.

Seeing her kneeling like this and gazing at him with great staring eyes, it must have crossed the crazed wits of the Ashover bastard that the contents of both his barrels had lodged in her body.

With a gasping cry he flung his gun away and stood
panting
, like an animal that has killed its quarry but has burst its own heart in the exhausting pursuit.

For the space of three or four seconds the woman’s eyes and the man’s eyes remained spellbound, entoiled in that
peculiar and unique complicity—unlike anything else in the world—that unites a hunter and his victim.

Then in one swooning moment the effect of his
twelve-hour
vigil in the falling snow darkened the old man’s senses. He reeled like a tree that has been cut with an axe, threw up his arms, and fell heavily on his face.

His fall and the sight of his outstretched figure lying before her broke the spell of Netta’s paralyzed nerves. She
staggered
to her feet and moving toward him knelt down by his side. At first she thought he was dead; but as she turned his gaunt frame over, she felt his heart beating under his snow-dampened clothes.

With some effort, for Corporal Dick’s tall figure was massive-boned though skeleton-lean, she dragged him along the snow to the nearest tree and there propped up his head on her muffler and tam-o’-shanter. Then she took off her cloak and spread it over him; and after standing for a second to see whether the tree trunk kept the snow from falling on his face, she started back at a run toward the house; crossing the lawn between the lime tree and the cedar.

As she ran she heard the church bell begin to ring. It rang unevenly, and she surmised that either Nell herself was
ringing
it or that Mr. Hastings had got some village boy to help him.

By good luck Rook had heard the report of the gun and was already half-dressed when she reached their room.

“Shot at you?” he kept repeating; and he hugged her with more warmth than Netta had experienced for many a long month. “Shot at you? Corporal Dick shot at you? Ay! What a race we are!”

He seemed to Netta to be actually exhilarated by the event. She heard him humming “Good King Wenceslaus” as he pulled on his boots. This was a tendency she was never quite able to fathom in him, this tendency to detach himself from
things that happened and to enjoy them in a sort of inhuman trance, as if they were insubstantial dream pictures!