Ducdame (15 page)

But the phenomenon which had struck Lexie and was now holding his companion spellbound was not the fact that the stars were red and orange and blue as well as white; it was the fact that certain atmospheric conditions, connected with the hoar frost, had given to the diffused starlight a quality that properly belonged to moonlight; in other words, had thrown into pallid and phantasmal emphasis objects and distances that were normally obscured by darkness.

“What’s the matter, you two?” called out Rook at last.

“Nothing, my dear,” answered Lexie, pulling the girl back into the room and closing the window.

“Nothing,” echoed William Hastings hoarsely, removing his clasped hands and lifting up his face with an expression like that of an opium-eater returning miserably to normal consciousness.

Netta burst into a peal of plebeian laughter. Her
countenance
in its convulsed state was not pretty to look upon and Rook after one glance turned away with a shiver of repugnance.

“Nothing—nothing—” gasped Netta at last. “It’s like a game. It’s like hunt-the-slipper. It makes a person
laugh.” And once more a peal of merriment more suitable to a Southsea bar-room than to the sedate bookshelves of Lexie’s classical retreat rang through the room.

“Look at Rook’s face!” she gasped out, when her fit
subsided
. “He’s angry with me. He’s furious at me! And doesn’t it make him look funny?” And she laughed again.

The discordant note had sunk so deeply by this time into the consciousness of them all that an uncomfortable silence filled the room; a silence that was more than a mere negation of sound; a brutal, malignant, positive silence, such as seemed to possess a tangible though an invisible body of its own.

The fire on the hearth was almost extinct; the great silver punch bowl was empty; most of the candles had guttered down till nothing but flimsy blue flames hovered like
shapeless
astral lights over the prostrate wicks and liquid grease.

The window curtains had been left open; and Lexie
Ashover
, who alone of them all retained his habitual alertness, was aware of the contrast between that shining galaxy of many-coloured worlds out there and these abashed, disordered representatives of the race who had dared to divide the universal flux, the motions of those immense orbits, into days and weeks and months and years.

He moved the empty bowl from the centre of the room and replaced it by a vase containing some sprigs of untimely born yellow jasmine that had, without rule or reason and by the haphazard of accident alone, started budding under his eaves.

It had pleased him to see these wayward children of life and chance, and he bent over them now and smelt them as if to draw from their unfrustratable sap encouragement and strength for himself.

Cousin Ann, seeing him thus employed, threw off the antimacassar from her neck and moved up to his side.

Rook had resumed his original place by Nell in the corner of the room, but he was not speaking to her; in fact, he seemed
unconscious of her presence. He was staring in front of him with the expression of one who, in place of a vague
undetermined
future, finds himself suddenly confronted by the hooked horns of an implacable dilemma.

A mysterious flickering smile kept crossing the lips of Cousin Ann as she stood by Lexie’s table, caressing the jasmine buds with her fingers and murmuring little
mischievous
nothings. She felt at that moment & sudden wave of exultant assurance, beyond all rational scrutiny, that she was already upon the path of becoming the mother of Rook’s child.

Woman-like, she could glance at him now, as he sat
scowling
and abstracted by Nell’s side, with a furtive possessive triumph in her eyes which was tolerant of everything! She had won in the life-and-death struggle between them! She held all the court cards—every one of them—in her firm hands, and the trump cards as well. She looked at Netta, who had begun to show signs of falling asleep. Strangely enough, instead of feeling remorse for the evil suggestion that had begun this business, and instead of feeling any admiration for the exalted heroism that underlay this pitiful
dégringolade
,
she began actually to share Rook’s ignorant repugnance, justifying to herself her betrayal of Netta on the ground that under the influence of drink the woman’s real character displayed itself in its true colours.

Netta’s appearance, as she began to give up struggling against the approach of what was really a drunken sleep, was certainly calculated to shock any sensitive nerves. Her hair was disordered, her dress ruffled, her forehead beaded with perspiration, and she kept pulling up her legs into her
armchair
and rearranging her petticoats with that maudlin air of exaggerated sex-consciousness which, of all things, is the most jarring and offensive to women.

“Oh, it’s been a huge success, your party!” murmured Cousin Ann. “Don’t you feel that yourself, my dear?”

Lexie looked at her sardonically and even went so far as to put out the tip of his tongue.

“Well? Hasn’t it?” she continued, sweeping aside his humorous grimace.

The young man shrugged his shoulders. “We shan’t know whether it’s been a success or not until the year is over.”

“Oh, that’s it, is it?” she laughed. “Well, I’ve a strong presentiment it’ll prove a success to
you
!
”

The lower part of Lexie’s face, the heavy Claudian contours of his cheeks and chin, stiffened, at her personal allusion, into panic-stricken apprehension. He positively pinched her arm in his agitation.

“Ann! How can you say such things? Don’t you know that to talk of the luck of the year
after
twelve o’clock is the height of dangerous folly?”

Lady Ann was absolutely nonplussed as to whether she had committed a real
faux
pas
or whether Lexie was fooling. His beautifully moulded lips, as classical as her own, did actually display vexation; but directly she met his eyes they seemed to be mocking her with a mischievous and reckless raillery. He changed the emphasis of her attention before she had solved this mystery.

“There isn’t a person in this room, Ann, except you and me, whose soul has not been reduced to something pallid and drivelling by this party! I oughtn’t to have put so much gin into the punch. Mrs. Bellamy was all for more rum and less
gin. But I’ve always had a
penchant
for that
turpentin-ish
, bark-like taste, like the style of Dean Swift.”

Cousin Ann looked round the room, and it really did seem to her as if the place were full of woebegone, abject wraiths—wraiths that floated, like stiff corpses, in front of the brains that had begotten them. At the end of any long
entertainment
between the same four walls there is something of this effect, with the forlornness of which the very furniture seems to conspire; as if the chaos in human brains had the power
of ruffling the natural decorum of the inanimate and reducing it to a lamentable simulacrum of its own littered
wretchedness
.

The girl got no comfort from looking at the cold glittering sky through the uncurtained window. There certainly was something that night not only remote but actually
unsympathetic
about those points of fire.

She had put out her hand again and touched the yellow buds. She felt at that moment isolated from the rest of the world; menaced and threatened by a thousand perils.
Nothing
was clear to her as to the significance of this sorry end of a pleasant party; but she felt as if something hostile to the very essence of her happiness was abroad in that room. Cousin Ann did not often let her imagination run away with her; but at this moment, while she contemplated the inert misery that had fallen upon that group of people; when she saw the ungraceful sleep of Netta, the exposed infatuation of Nell, the morose lethargy of Rook, the suppressed malice of Hastings; she felt as if the place were a sort of hospital ward over which the high stars twinkled like the brilliant electric bulbs over an operating table.

She was just on the point of opening her lips to suggest their return home when, with a shock that made them all stare bewilderedly at each other, the door bell rang violently.

“What’s that?” cried Rook, leaping to the window and leaning out. “Who’s there?” he called, for the intruder was concealed by the porch.

“Mrs. Bellamy has gone to bed long ago,” said Lexie. “Do you mind running down and seeing who it is, Rook?”

“I’ll go,” cried William Hastings who happened to be nearest the door.

As he went down there was an intense moment of
expectancy
. Even Netta, who had been waked from sleep, realized that there was something serious in the air.

Nell was visibly trembling. “I feel,” she whispered to Rook, “as if a goose were walking over my grave.”

They could all hear the door opened and shut, the sound being followed by the tones of a man’s voice talking in a low, hurried murmur. Then there was the creaking of a hall chair as Hastings made the messenger sit down, and almost immediately the clergyman reappeared.

“It’s Drool, from Antiger Lane,” he said gravely. “Mr. Richard Ashover died two hours ago.”

M
ORE
than three months had passed over the precincts of Ashover, and before this space of time had elapsed the greatest transfiguration possible to the life of the earth was already growing visible and audible. The passing of autumn into winter, for all its stark relief of bare branches and frozen hills, has nothing comparable to this miraculous reversion, taking place in the heart of the vegetable world, heralded from the yellow bills of blackbirds and from the throats of wind-tossed missel thrushes mating in the high trees.

The poignance of the change has slid into the very word we use to mark and note it, a word that seems to be itself the essence of this jargoning from brown and yellow beaks, this rising of bubbling freshets between green banks, this mounting of sticky sap in cool-growing stalks!

For there is something in our northern syllable “spring” which suggests, not only the vernal fragilities themselves, but all that damp, chilly, earthy, moss-scented world out of which these little emerald-coloured blades and sheaths and filmy spears pierce their path into the air.

Latinized words, like the word “primavera,” have their own sophisticated allurement; but the word “spring,” full as it is of the very greenness of hyacinth stalks, the very blueness of hedge-sparrows’ eggs, the very glint of celandine petals, has a sadder, more human significance; has something that carries the mind back, beyond the suppliance of any particular spring sound or spring sight, into the dark rain-soaked background which gave all these things birth; into cold wet places where stinging hazel twigs switch the skin, where the ground
is treacherous with hidden swamps, where young birds and young rabbits are devoured by hawks, where the winds bring a perilous relaxation and heart-hurting memories, where the beech drippings are black and poisonous, where the
blackthorn
buds are ominous with fate and sorrow and sudden death.

It was by a gate in Antiger Lane, as they were on their way, at the end of a long, rambling walk, to make some final arrangements as to Uncle Dick’s scanty belongings, that Lady Ann revealed to Rook that she was destined to have a child.

The girl never forgot the tiniest aspect of the scene they looked at at that moment. Her condition seemed to have softened something in her; seemed to have made her sensitive, in a way she had never been sensitive before, to the little things of nature and life.

As they leaned now side by side upon this gate the faint, almost sickly smell of primroses stole over her senses and made it harder than ever to break the silence. She had a little bunch of them in her dress, loose pink-tinged stalks and diaphanous blooms mingled with large vegetable-like leaves.

She could see the crimson buds of a large pink campion hanging loosely down against a mass of dog mercury; and not far from it, at the edge of a fallen trunk spotted with fungi, she could make out what she imagined to be the fragile greenish-yellow petals of the little plant called moschatel.

The deeper interstices of the wood as she let her gaze wander into them were not of one uniform green. It was as if there were in Nature some living spirit of growth and life that trembled and wavered into one nuance of colour after another, from faint coral to elusive purple, according to the manner in which the filmy sheaths and coverings of the buds and the sap-filled tenuous twigs took the character of their particular tree. Something in the inmost nature of the young sycamores, for example, gave to their large, clumsy, sticky
embryo leaves an embronzed glossiness that was as
different
from the diaphanous green of the beech buds flecked with translucent threads of moth-soft whiteness as was the delicate freshness of the larches, as if an emerald-coloured waterfall had splashed down upon them, from the sturdy outgrowths of the dogwood.

“I ought to tell you, Rook, that it is certain now. It’s no good not telling you, is it?”

Some obstinate maliciousness in him made him refuse to let her off with this.

“What’s certain now? What are you talking about?”

She knew that he knew perfectly well, but she was too much softened by the season and by her mood to answer his obstinacy in like coin. “I am talking about the fact that unless anything goes wrong I am to have a child, Rook.”

As she spoke she looked straight into his face. Her gray eyes, a little distended, were solemn and almost infantile in their appeal.

“You’re not angry, Rook, are you? You’re pleased, Rook, aren’t you?”

His obstinacy did melt at this and he kissed and embraced her in all tenderness.

“Yes—I suppose I am,” he murmured, as he released her. “More than I like to admit to myself, I expect! But what the devil are we going to do now, my sweet Coz?”

“
Do
, Rook?”

The reproachfulness in her tone was obliterated for him by the droop in the corners of her mouth which had the look of a child who, whatever happens, must be brave and not weep, though it has “full cause for weeping.”

He made the great decision quickly now. Probably he had really, in his unconscious nature, been gradually making it all through that warm, relaxed, balmy-breathed spring.

“We must be married at once, of course; without a
moment’s 
delay. I don’t want to make use of Hastings. In fact, he’s been so odd lately in his manner to me that he might easily refuse to have anything to do with us, and that would be the kind of thing we want to avoid just now. No! I’ll run over to Tollminster, get a special license, and see my little friend Tishmarsh. He’d marry us like a shot and nothing said! There’d be no difficulty if we did it like that. You’ve not been married before and I’ve not been married before.” He paused, and after a second found himself drawing a deep breath: “Heigh-ho!”

The sigh of the Master of Ashover floated away into the Antiger Woods and lost itself amid the chatterings of hedge sparrows and chittering of wrens. Cousin Ann bit her lip and repressed an instinctive rush of Poynings pride that might have altered the whole course of subsequent events if she had given way to it.

All she said was: “I shall put myself in your hands, Rook. You must do with me as you think best for us both.”

He drew her arm within his own and they walked on silently together toward the gamekeeper’s cottage.

Had any stranger approached them, as they loitered thoughtfully side by side, his first thought would have been: “What a splendid typical pair of English lovers!” His second thought, on catching sight of their faces, would have been: “Those people have quarrelled and neither of them is of the stuff to forgive!”

When they reached Mr. Drool’s cottage Rook looked at his watch.

“I think,” he said, “I’d better go straight back to the house, get the necessary funds, and make Twiney drive me over there before dark. It’s four o’clock now and I should catch young Tishmarsh at his tea. Twiney’s mare could easily run me over in half an hour.”

She took in all this with a calm, inexpressive face. “What had I better do, then?” she asked him.

“Do you mind going over Uncle Richard’s belongings?” he said. “There isn’t much, but you might put aside the kind of things one
would wish to keep and tell Mrs. Drool she can have the rest. Poor old chap! I think we owe some thing to him, eh, my dear?”

She smiled faintly. It gave her a queer sensation to think of standing in that room again, and in her heart she was conscious of a bitter disappointment that she was not to be with him there. She had had at the back of her mind during the whole length of their walk the image of a cozy little tea tray shared between them in that familiar place. But there it was! Better let him do what he had to do for them both while the mood was on him.

There was a moment, when, as he held her hand at the gamekeeper’s gate and felt the warmth and pathos of her youth in its magnetic pressure, they both were conscious of a closer reciprocity than they had ever known before; but the peculiar quality of that moment did not outlast his vision of her figure passing slowly up the little garden path and disappearing into the house.

Her reluctance to leave him and his reluctance to go seemed based on a sad clairvoyant recognition in them both that chance had given them that one brief interim of
understanding
only to take it away again for ever; and when he did turn aside at last and clamber up through a certain gap in the hedge which he had known from childhood the nerves of his mind were so strung-out and taut that the briar thorns that pricked his hands and face were a sort of assuagement to its tension.

Beginning to ascend the uneven slope of Dorsal he was unable to prevent all the little aromatic tufts of ground ivy over which he stepped from associating themselves with his thought. The pale-green fronds of the bracken, too, like miniature motley-coloured giraffe necks transferred to the realm of vegetation, uncurled themselves amid the images
of his brain, as if they had been so many motionless sea horses among dark-finned, swift-flashing fish.

And most of all did the peculiar fragrance of the yellow gorse pass into his troubled consciousness, bringing with it, as he avoided those piercing spikes, a sense of honey upon the air.

As he approached the fir trees on the summit Rook found himself gathering up the tangled threads of his consciousness into one ravelled wretched skein. A feeling of miserable self-reproach took possession of him, mixed with a
helplessness
in the presence of this rush of events. He looked back woefully to the days when he first inherited Ashover, to the days when all his available emotions were centred round the personality of Lexie; round the long, delicious,
irresponsible
conversations they had had together under
sweet-flowering
hedgerows, in hot cornfields, and by the banks of the river!

He remembered one particular June evening when, as he watched by his brother’s side a great orange-bellied newt sink languidly down into the depth of a meadow pond, while the hum of the heavy mowing machine went round the field followed by the scent of newly cut clover and the flicker of careless-winged dragon-flies, he had responded to Lexie’s expression of unruffled happiness by an ill-advised desire that “something new and strange should turn up.”

It was only a twelvemonth after that ill-fated wish that he had first met Netta; and ay! what troubles, what troubles his restlessness had brought upon them all! He tried to analyze the weakness, nay! the deformity in his nature, that had betrayed him into this cul-de-sac. If only he had been capable of one natural simple human passion it would have been all so different! It was this accursed detachment of his brain, mingled with his particular kind of cold sensuality, that had rendered him so fatal an influence in the lives of all his friends. If only he had kept altogether clear of the love
of women! His temperament must resemble, he thought, that of those mediæval monks, for whom any feminine
contact
was an evil thing just because of this queer lack of genuine normal emotion.

Arrived at Heron’s Ridge and standing motionless there under one of the Scotch firs with his eyes fixed on the fresh green shoots, moist and glossy, of a chance-sown patch of Lords-and-Ladies, Rook made a forlorn attempt, in a kind of weary desperation, to visualize his life in some sort of perspective.

He saw this cold, this saurian viciousness of his as present in every case. He saw his relation with Netta as viciousness mingled with pity; with Ann as viciousness and camaraderie; with Nell as viciousness and romance. Unconsciously taking note of the extraordinary shape of the queer plant at which he stared, he found himself associating his own ambiguity with the contours of its leaves, and Lexie’s more direct and more wholesome nature with the shameless purple spear which those leaves encircled; and it came over him, as he stared at this wanton outgrowth of the huge indifferent universe, that he would have done far better to concentrate all his affection on Lexie alone, and satisfy his satyrishness, if it
had
to be satisfied, with chance encounters in the city streets!

It came over him that his whole relation with every one of these people, with Ann, with Netta, with Nell, was in reality a superficial thing, external to his inmost life illusion, external to the deep, subconscious link that bound him to Lexie.

And as he let his thoughts drift dangerously along this road there suddenly gathered about him a sickening,
panic-stricken
fear of life; a fear of life burdened and sharpened by the responsibilities he had incurred in regard to these three women. He felt as though he could lift up in that sweet spring air a howl like the howl of a trapped animal.
Why, oh! why had he got himself so miserably entangled? And then, like a bitter undertide, like salt sea water in the midst of an inland river, there swept over him the weight of these different human existences upon which he had so disastrously impinged.
Their
lives to them were as
important
as his own to himself; and yet he had presumed, in his blind selfishness, to treat them as he might have treated insensitive, inanimate objects. Oh, he deserved every inch of the iron which now pierced him through his bones! With cold clairvoyance he reviewed the stages of philosophic scepticism, of spiritual disillusionment, that had gradually made him so indifferent to what he did, so indifferent to work, to ambition, to any purpose in things at all. He recognized the fact now that it was this refusal to take the ultimate issues of life seriously that had laid him open to these
disasters
. Lexie, who was far more materialistic than he was, could never have got entangled so; because he treated life as a work of art, and was consequently sagacious, meticulous, cautious, in spite of his scandalous humour.

With a sigh that came from the depths of his soul the unfortunate man lifted his feet from the spot where the patch of Lords-and-Ladies had seemed to paralyze him, and
proceeded
to run down the slope of Battlefield, running with a certain rather awkward movement of his long legs, such as used to make Lexie laugh at him and tease him when they were boys together.