Ducdame (27 page)

The priest’s sinister explosion died down at last and he lifted his head from his hands.

“So I suppose now,” he said, addressing the dark figure that concealed so much of the starlit window frame, “you’ll have an heir to your historic family.”

Rook was too surprised by this rude remark to make any answer at all. He began to think the moment had arrived for bidding his host good-night. There evidently was nothing more to be got out of him with regard to Netta and he was in no mood for prolonging this scene.

But the ferment he had unwittingly aroused in Hastings’s soul had not exhausted its vindictive ricochets. “And so it’s a boy you’re expecting, is it?” His voice became hoarse as he went on with unrestrained malice: “I saw Binnory Drool to-night. He talked about you and about Betsy and the others. You’ve seen the others, I suppose, Ashover?”

Rook struck a match now and advancing to the table lit one of the candles full in his host’s face. He was so startled and shocked by the expression upon that suddenly
ilhuminated 
countenance that he drew back with an unconscious exclamation of dismay.

“Ay! What’s the matter, man? What’s up? Are you angry with me about anything? What have I done?”

The priest jerked his chair farther back. “What was that word of yours?” he whispered huskily. “Phantasmagoric! A good word, phantasmagoric!”

Rook took up the other candle in his hand and lit it from the one that was already burning. The two small flames rose now between the two men like the horns of the ultimate Dilemma.

“Your people in the family vault must be in high feather these days, Ashover,” the priest went on. “They’ve been working and working for this, for many a long year. They were getting quite anxious, down there under the stones! It would have been a pity to disappoint them, wouldn’t it? I wonder what it feels like to have a long line of ancestors regulating one’s private affairs? It must be an interesting feeling.”

Rook looked round the room to see where he had put his hat and stick. He walked to the spot where they were and took them up. “Good-night, Hastings,” he said. “I must be off now.”

The priest rose to his feet like a man drunk or drugged.

“What would you have done,” he said, “if I
had
known anything about Netta? Known, for instance, where her address was now? Would you have gone straight off to her? Would you have left your wife and have gone to live with her? Not a bit of it! You’d have given her
a little flattery and a little money and come right back here to your walks and your meals and your ‘phantasmagoric shadows’! Tell me this, Rook Ashover. How does a phantasmagoric shadow look when its female shadow has been decoyed away? Does it dance like a good obedient puppet on well-pulled wires? Does it, Ashover—does it?”

It must have happened then that some mysterious nerve in the man’s inmost identity, some nerve which had been strained by his struggle with Rook to the breaking-point, did actually break at that moment, destroying the normal intellectual self-control that renders certain actions
impossible
. For what occurred seemed monstrous and fantastic when Rook recalled it afterward. Repeating the words: “Does it dance, does it, does it, does it?” the man skipped up toward Rook, his arms grotesquely stretched out, his face distorted into a goblinish leer, one leg bent and raised in the air, the other hopping along the floor.

Rook drew back in apprehension, thinking that Hastings would end by striking him; but instead of that what he did was to seize one of the brass candlesticks from the table and fling it with a wild swing of his arm against the door.

Rook made a half-defensive, half-protective movement toward him; but the gesture proved unnecessary. The man clapped his hands to his head, staggered across the room, and falling into the cane chair where the other had been sitting burst into a passionate fit of weeping.

Two things occurred one after the other then, that were afterward so closely associated together in Rook’s mind that it was difficult to separate them. From the silence of the darkness outside there came suddenly to his ears, carried as it seemed from, somewhere beyond the garden and beyond the immediate meadows, that same extraordinary sound which he had heard on the occasion of his night with Ann in the Drool cottage.

He had no time to analyze the nature of the sound, but there did flash across his consciousness a vague and irrational notion connecting it with the savage outburst with which this huddled and sobbing object in the chair had derided his unborn child. Had the prophet of annihilation been answered by a howl of counter-mockery from those silent tombs under the chancel slabs? Or was the whole thing a
ghastly trick of his own disturbed brain, an auditory
hallucination
practised upon him by the agitation of that
extraordinary
encounter?

He bad no time to question further this “supernatural soliciting,” to use the Shakespearean word, when the door of the room opened silently and, by the light of the one candle that still burned upon the table, appeared the white figure of Nell, her hair loose about her shoulders, her feet bare.

She had been awakened from a deep sleep by the noise of the candlestick hurled against the door, and without any clear consciousness of where she was or what she was doing she had rushed blindly across the landing.

Rook, who had flung down his hat and stick upon
Hastings’s
desk, now made a mechanical movement toward them, feeling that it was not the moment to intrude any longer upon these two people.

Nell stopped him with a quick gesture.

“Oh, what
is
the matter?” she cried. “No! No! I can’t let you go like that until I know what’s happened! What is it, Rook? What have you done to him? Have you two been quarrelling?”

There was no need for Rook to reply for Hastings himself got up from the chair.

“Go back to your room, Nelly dear,” he said gently, but in a tone that made it difficult for the girl not to obey him. “I’ll just see Mr. Ashover out and then I’ll come. Have you got everything, Ashover? I don’t think you’d anything but your stick, had you?”

Rook could do nothing but just press Nell’s hand as he passed. Her eyes clung to his in that dim candlelight in a way he never forgot. He left her standing with the light in her hand at the top of the stairs.

“Good-night, Ashover. I’m afraid I lost my wits just now. I have quite got them back.”

“Good-night, Hastings, and I beg you not to think any more about it or indeed about any of these things too much. It’s better sometimes to wake up in the morning as if you were newly born.”

He held out his hand as he spoke and Hastings, after a moment’s hesitation, took it.

“Perhaps it’s just as well once in a way to lose one’s wits,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. If ever I hear from Netta I shall let you know. Good-night, Ashover.” And he closed the door behind him with a faint recrudescence of his lost sense of formidableness.

At least he had not revealed to him Netta’s secret. It was necessary to his very life, at this moment of the supreme wreck of his self-respect, that the simple chance-given vantage ground of having the girl’s address in his hands should act as a counterpoise to his abasement.

The ultimate duplicity of the universe, whether it were logical or phantasmagorical, had at least given him one way of crying an incontestable “checkmate!” to the Squire of Ashover.

T
HE last day of June found most of the Frome-side hay fields cut and carried. Not only so, but the newly sprouting grass in nearly all of these peaceful enclosures had begun to assume that peculiarly rich shade of green, deeper than the first spring verdure and in a certain sense even fresher, by reason of the fact that at the earlier season the new shoots are surrounded by so many of the old winter-bleached blades and stalks, whereas, at this great midsummer solstice, between the time of the rains and the time of the coming of the roses, the mowing machines have made a clear field for that vivid aftermath.

The wild roses were out already, and in their glory; so were the cream-yellow clusters of honeysuckle; so also the
firstborn
of the foxgloves. Field orchids and bird’s-foot trefoil were taking the place of daisies and cowslips; and down in the water meadows ragged robin and marsh-woundwort were lifting their heads amid the innumerable spear points of the new-grown rushes.

Dragon-flies began to appear in greater numbers over the rain-filled cattle ponds and along the ditches; the most common kind being those whose bodies were as blue as
kingfishers
and their wings like quivering fans of quicksilver chequered with powdered jet dust.

All through that month, through the earlier days of sunshine and through the later days of turbulent rains, Rook had
sullenly
been groping in his mind for some clue to the almost triumphant malice with which Hastings treated him now whenever they met. He found it difficult to believe that it
was simply due to jealousy over Nell; for of late he had hardly seen anything of the girl and when they did meet it was under conditions to which the most jealous husband could hardly take exception.

The fact that his absorbing remorse about Netta had destroyed all desire within him for other women produced the illusion in his mind that he was isolated, cut off, marooned and under a sort of curse. To himself he seemed a moral leper, doomed to produce unhappiness wherever he went or whatever he did; and so, as often happens with egoists of his kind, he took it for granted that others saw him exactly as he saw himself.

That it never occurred to him that he might be paying the penalty now for earlier irresponsibilities was due to the fact that in those first days of his encounters with Nell, Hastings had seemed so entirely removed from all mundane or human emotions. The man had not been exactly what the old books used to call a “wittold”; but he had certainly
produced
the impression that no romance in which his wife chose to be involved was likely to worry him very much. But all that was completely changed! He felt as if Hastings were watching him with the eye of a malignant raven; and though his own sensuality was as dead in him, just then, as if he had been swimming among icebergs, it was an intensification of his self-condemned loneliness not to have the balm of Nell’s sympathy.

This last day of the month was a day of days. It was one of those sequences of twenty-four hours that seem in some way detached and isolated from the rest of the season. There was a mild steady wind blowing from the southwest, a wind that in its journey across the orchards and dairies of the west country seemed to have gathered up the sharp taste of green apples and of green corn, and to have mingled this more astringent essence with the rain-scented breath of heavy-uddered cattle and with the sweetness of old-fashioned
rows of pinks in hot sunny borders, between brick paths and box hedges.

By one of those earth-obsessed intuitions which his growing malady seemed to render more intense and clarified every day, Lexie had predicted the occurrence of this halcyon weather and had arranged to have himself driven out by Mr. Twiney to a place called Comber’s End, which lay on the farther side of the great stretch of water brooks and meadows on the edge of which the village of Ashover stood.

Comber’s End itself was hardly a hamlet; its chief
peculiarity
being an old manorial farmhouse surrounded by a large pond or small lake, of considerable depth, at one
extremity
of which was an ancient water mill.

Rook was to meet his brother at the spot and they were to lunch together there, Lexie bringing the meal with him carefully packed in a basket by Mrs. Bellamy.

There was no road of any kind directly across the marshes. The best toad for driving round them was several miles east of the village, while the way Rook had selected to walk, following narrower and rougher lanes, was nearly as far as that in the western direction.

It was indeed down a narrow grassy road that he found himself walking, in the mid-hours of that unusual morning, with the larks singing above his head, the warblers chattering in the hedges, and the lane itself stretching away in front of him, a long straight line of narrowing perspective bordered by pollard willows. He felt wearily, hopelessly sad, as he walked along, switching aimlessly with his stick the dock leaves and hemlock plants and rousing from their noon siesta, now a long-legged heron, and now a green snake, while the far-travelled wind rustling through the alders and the guelder bushes seemed to him like a trailing army of defeated sighs; sighs that died upon the air, one after another, and were replaced, one after another, by new fugitives from new fields of remote disaster.

Rook would have felt less sad if he could have regarded the impasse in which he was caught as a matter of blind destiny. The poison that rankled in him came from the thought that he could have escaped from the whole thing if only he had been sensible as Lexie was sensible, and had not just run headlong upon the shoals, like a ship with a mad pilot.

He felt responsible at that moment for the unhappiness of all the lives within his reach. His mother alone was free from the curse that seemed to have fallen upon him; his mother, and perhaps his unborn child. Even his love for Netta was not so much a craving for Netta’s society as a wretched remorse at being the cause of her disappearance.

He examined his heart as he went along; and it was borne in upon him that he never had really, in all his life, loved a single human being except his brother. And now his brother was dying.

As he stared at the long lines of pollard willows on either side of the lane, their grotesque trunks, topped by what looked like thick upstanding panic-stricken hairs, became to him a silent avenue of Rook Ashovers, each of them born without a heart and each of them awaiting some kind of retributive judgment day! He wished he could walk along that road for ever and ever; or that, by walking along it till his knees tottered and his soul was sick to death, he might do penance for the misery he had caused.

He saw life at that moment in a different light from any that he had seen it in before. He saw it as a place where not to have become involved in any other existence was the only cause for real thankfulness to the gods; in any other existence than such as was organically linked with his own. For his relation with Lexie had brought only happiness to them both. So had his relation with his mother until she had imbibed this mania about his marriage.

The rest was all misery! Netta he had disappointed and thrown aside. Nell he had tantalized and thrown aside.
Ann he had provoked and humiliated beyond the point of forgiveness. What was there about him that made any intimate association with a woman dangerous and fatal? Not simply his selfishness. Plenty of selfish men enjoyed, after their fashion, eminently successful lives with the girls of their choice. There was something about himself, something about his
kind
of selfishness, that was as deadly to his happiness with these sensitive creatures as was catsbane to cats or wolfsbane to wolves!

He tried to imagine a world in which there were no women at all, or rather a world in which he himself had no dealings with women. Could he have lived, in harmonious and contented happiness, without any amorous dalliance? He remembered a certain day when someone or other, he forgot who the person was, had challenged him about his idleness, had suggested that to go on as the impoverished Squire of Ashover, doing nothing but walk and eat and sleep, was unworthy of a man with any spirit. He swung his stick into a bush of dogwood and chuckled aloud. God! he had intelligence enough to dispose of
that
indictment. What did it matter? The world was full enough of “honourable men” struggling frantically to get the advantage of one another in this race for success, for fame, for recognition, for
achievement
. What did it matter? Better, far better, to live harmlessly in some quiet untroubled place, watching season follow season, month follow month, aloof and detached; leaving the breathless procession of outward events to turn and twist upon itself like a wounded snake!

What did it matter? There was no “great Task-master” in the invisible world waiting to fall upon him with
upbraidings
and penalties. The opinions of his tribe, of his class, of the human race itself—what did they really amount to? His account was with the universe that had tossed him forth and that would receive him again. No! he could sink back deep enough into his own nature to let accusations
of
that
kind fall harmless about him. It was not in
that
direction that his mistake lay. His mistake lay in not recognizing that unless a man has the stomach of a pirate it is better to give these tempting brigs and brigantines a wide berth; better to sail the high seas without meddling with any of them!

If only he had found out how fatally Nature had mingled the elements in him before he committed himself to Netta or Nell or Ann! This blending of an irresistible attraction to the feminine body and mind, with an absolute lack of emotional passion, was nothing less than a monstrous deformity! What kind of a heart
had
he, when he could find it in him to wish that he had never set eyes on any one of the three? His instincts were not perverted. They were only so capricious and elusive, so bloodless and non-human, that they flitted over the flower beds of life very much as those little blue butterflies he was watching now flitted from that patch of St. John’s-wort to that patch of hawk-weed!

He began to walk more slowly and driftingly along that interminable lane. He felt as if he had already been
following
it for half a day; and it still stretched straight in front of him, without any sign of an end or of a turning. It seemed to melt into that leafy horizon as the moon-path across the sea on a moonlit night dips down over the rim of the world.

He felt utterly weary of himself and his familiar destiny. Yet he found it impossible even to conceive of any other. The idea of leaving Ashover and starting life afresh with any new ambition was as far from what his energy could compass as for a perch in Saunders’ Hole to turn into one of the swallows that skimmed its surface.

What he craved, with all the desperation of a fox caught by wire netting in a fowl run, was just to be free; free, to enjoy precisely such an excursion with Lexie as this one was, without feeling a dull throb in his secret conscience, like the throb of a malignant growth in the pit of his stomach!

He stopped for a while, leaning over a gate and gazing into the green slime of a cattle-trodden ditch, across which three orange-bodied dragon-flies were darting with as much
arrogance
as if it were a Venetian lagoon.

He had a feeling that some deep inarticulate grievance, much less clearly defined than these other causes of misery, was obscurely stirring within him. He tried to plumb the recesses of this emotion and he came to the conclusion that it was a blind repulsion at the idea of being married to Lady Ann. He suddenly found himself actually trembling with a convulsive fit of anger against his wife; and not only against his wife. It was as if he had never realized before how profoundly his life illusion was outraged by his marriage. The thought that he was irretrievably committed to this brilliant high-handed companion; the thought that his life was no longer to be a series of sweet solitary sensations, but a thing which was only half his own, stripped the magic from earth and air and sky!

And this was a trick that had been played upon him by a subtle conspiracy of all the persons in his entourage. His mother and Lady Ann had plotted for it. Netta had
sacrificed
herself for it. Nell had accepted it and condoned it. And most of all, that indestructible and accursed entity, the House of Ashover itself, had pushed him into it with urgent, unwearied, importunate hands, all the more powerful because they were invisible!

His mind began running up and down the events of his life. He had drifted into this cul-de-sac in a sort of
anæsthetized
trance. Something vety deep in his nature had always preserved an absurd faith in his power of extricating himself from any trap. This faith no doubt depended on his
emotional
detachment; on those remote translunar journeys of his mind that seemed to reduce all human relations into a misty puppet show, seen through the smaller end of a
telescope
!

He cast about in his brain until his mind trailed its wings and sank huddled and drooping from sheer exhaustion in the attempt to find some outlet from his dilemma.

To and fro those orange-bodied dragon-flies darted. To and fro across the oozing footprints of the cattle, between great heaps of dung, clouds of infinitesimal midgets hovered and wavered; while in a corner of clear water a group of tiny black water beetles whirled round and round, as if they were trying to outpace their own small shadows which answered to their movement, down there on the sunlit mud, in queer radiated circles like little dark-rimmed moons.

The peculiar nature of Rook’s intelligence did not permit him the pragmatic refuge of some drastic change in his system of life. His soul wilted and sagged but he felt no energy to cry: “Hold … enough!” to the cohorts of chance; or to deify them with ethical nicknames.

That the universe could be envisaged as a place where human characters were hammered and chiselled into some premeditated mould of valour or resignation never so much as crossed the threshold of his consciousness. His vision of things would go on to the very end drawing its quality from just such vignettes of the ways of nature as he was staring at at that moment—those casual heaps of cattle dung, those dancing midges, that green pond slime, those revolving
jet-bright
beetles!