Ducdame (34 page)

As to what would happen later on, as to what permanent arrangements Rook might wish to make, or Netta might be prepared to make,
that
must be left to the future to decide. She and William would have done their part, as soon as Netta and Rook had been brought together again! Her own desire
was simply to reinstate her husband’s dignity in Rook’s eyes, and Rook’s dignity in her husband’s eyes; and to break up the unhealthy and sinister duel between them which had converted that August into one of the most morbid epochs in her life.

Of any deliberate revenge upon Lady Ann her mind was quite unconscious. She just ruled Lady Ann out of court as a person who could be trusted to strike out for herself, whatever happened. She had not forgotten the intrusion into her dining room, or the exposure of the plate with the three pansies beside it. That incident had made a dent upon her mind which the intervening months had not obliterated, but it played no part in what she felt now. The waves of thought that kept overleaping one another in her small
oval-shaped
head as she stared at the square panes, at the racing yellow-tinged clouds, at the formless moon, were almost all generous and romantic.

The most dominant and most recurrent of these thoughts if they had been translated into definite words would have run as follows: “Rook is pining for Netta, who will never understand him as
I
understand him. But he wants her; he is full of remorse about her. Left to Ann and Ann’s child, he will eat his heart out in utter misery.
I
alone can save him by bringing Netta into his life again.”

The day that dawned upon this eventful night was a dark and strange one even for that unusual September. It suggested rain; but it was not raining. It suggested thunder; but there was no thunder. Only, without the assistance of any frost or of any apparent wind, the first fluttering down of leaves took place in all manner of unexpected directions.

Even Hastings felt the influence of the day. “Don’t you smell something queer in the air this morning, Nell?” he said to her at breakfast.

The girl nodded in silence, waiting for the right moment to make her momentous announcement.

“It’s extraordinarily odd,” he went on, “but I keep being conscious of some subtle smell—in this room—in the garden—in the road—that I haven’t noticed since I was a child. It’s not exactly a smell, either! It’s more than that. It’s a taste in the mouth and a strange indescribable feeling through every pore of the body.”

Nell did begin to listen to him now, lifting up her chin between a vase of salpiglossis and a vase of cinerarias, both of them brought from the Ashover garden by Rook.

“I keep thinking of all sorts of little objects connected with my life when I was a child,” Hastings continued. “I see the backs of certain volumes of the Latin classics my father used to read. My father was a cobbler, Nell. Have I ever told you that? But he had a mania for reading Latin. He was not a learned man. It was a sort of fantastic game with him. And there’s something about the smell of this air that makes me think of London pavements and the peculiar feeling of the wet city mist on your face when you open a window into a room lit by gas and crowded with leather-bound books.”

He sank into silence again; but his face bore such a happy, dreamy expression that Nell was quite shocked by his next words when, after a long pause, he looked across at her with a light in his eyes.

“I shall take my book up again this morning,” he said. “I’ve been getting a new angle on it during these nights with Ashover. I’ve been tapping his brain without his knowing it—not for ideas exactly—but to get my own thoughts into focus.”

He rose from the table as he spoke and going to the window opened it a little farther.

“There’s the smell of something more than rain out there,” he said. “If you want to know what I really think, Nell, I think there’s a terrific thunderstorm coming up! Perhaps it’s
that
which brings what I have to write next in my book—
my chapter of all chapters, Nell!—with such a mad rush into my mind.”

He moved back to his chair, but instead of reseating himself, he leant against it, keeping his eyes fixed upon her and growing more and more excited.

“I believe I could finish the whole thing if I really got started to-day, Nell. I’ve only four more chapters. But they’re the difficult ones. That’s why I’ve been letting it go lately. They’re the ones that explain the actual process of cosmic unravelling. They’re the ones that give the clue to the unwinding of the clock!”

She looked at his illuminated and disturbed face with a scrutinizing eye. Had he the natural human intelligence to grasp all she meant to do by having Netta here? One could never tell with him! There was an obstinate wilfulness in the man that might sheer off at any tangent, at any moment. “Shall I speak to him now?” she thought. “Or shall I wait?”

Her decision, like so many human decisions, was brought to a head by something entirely outside her control. She caught sight of the village postman passing their gate, an occurrence that meant that in the space of about half an hour, giving him time to reach Ashover House and return, he would be passing it again and consequently be at hand to enable her to carry out her precipitate plan.

She moved straight up to her husband, and in a low, hurried, eager voice confessed what she had overheard and what she wished to do.

The criss-cross currents that tossed themselves into spray within the depths of the priest’s mind took two main
directions
as he listened to her breathless suggestion.

The first of these tidal currents was full of a heavy
sulkiness
at being betrayed into giving up his secret; a secret which had become a sort of fetish with him as being the symbol of his malignant advantage over Rook Ashover.
It was just because those harmless syllables, “Thirteen Walpole Street,” had become a kind of mania with the man that he had been overheard muttering them in his sleep; and now Nell was in possession of them!

But the second of these two mental tides contradicted the mood of the first. By having Nell and Rook so often recently under his eye his jealousy had gathered momentum; while the perverse forms of malignity which at the start had supplied an antidote to this jealousy were beginning to lose their savour and to grow tiresome and insipid.

There were several reasons why Nell’s surprising suggestion did not altogether displease him. For one thing he felt sure it would mean the end of this platonic philandering between his wife and Ashover. Rook could hardly make use of Toll-Pike Cottage as a rendezvous for two love affairs! In the second place, it would cause definite and emphatic annoyance to Lady Ann; for whom, ever since he had learnt that she was to be a mother, he had nourished one of his queer half-neurotic, half-metaphysical aversions.

As Nell talked to him now she could see from his expression that his feelings were not by any means simple. She had recourse therefore to a grand feminine
coup
,
which came to her by a sort of inspiration.

“You know what you have so often felt,” she pleaded, “with regard to all our friends here? Well—
that
,
at any rate, will be quite different when you’ve asserted yourself between Netta and Rook.”

He stared at her in clouded bewilderment. What on earth did she mean? He could not believe that she saw quite as clearly as her hint implied the gaping depths of the hurt to his self-love which his position as the priest of the village had worked in him.

“You mean?” he murmured tentatively.

She looked straight at him now; and, like so many
essentially
honest and unscheming women, she found that the
very integrity of her nature gave her a power, when she
was
embarked on a campaign of diplomacy, far more effective than any actual cunning in argument.

“I mean that it’ll be more of a relief to me than I can tell you for you to be worthy of yourself and in the open over Mr. Ashover. I can’t explain to you what it’ll mean to me, William, to be free of this horrid sense that you’re doing something shameful and unkind, like this hiding up Netta’s address! It’s made a difference to me already—just our talking freely like this about it! And if we send our telegram and have Netta here I shall feel still happier! I
do
think, William dear, that none of them have looked to you for your help and advice in their lives, as they naturally might have done, considering, after all, that you
are
the vicar of the place!”

She watched him anxiously; and a glow of excitement came into her face when she saw that her words had not been without their effect.

“You mustn’t think,” she went on, “that my friendship with Mr. Ashover prevents my seeing how coolly, to say the least of it, both he and Lexie treat you in your position as priest. It’s the one thing about them that I’ve never
understood
.” She stopped and glanced quickly at him, wondering whether she had let herself go too far.

“I’m glad to have been able to tell you this, William,” she added. “Because I feel so much that it only wants a little more respect on both sides for you and Mr. Ashover to get on splendidly together.”

She had won her point. She knew it as clearly as if he had thrown up both his hands and cried out: “I yield!” Her victory was almost as unexpected as it was complete. She did not estimate, because it was outside her knowledge of the man’s metaphysical mania, the part played in his yielding by his mysterious hostility to Rook’s wife. Still less did she realize how much of it was due to a certain queer tenderness
which he had come to feel for Netta herself, a tenderness that was, in the last resort, a kind of sympathy of pariah for pariah, of one child of the people for another child of the people.

“Then I can write the telegram?” she cried impulsively. And making a swift childish clutch at one of Hastings’s hands she raised it to her mouth.

It was this gesture more than anything that she had done which reconciled him to her victory. There is nothing in the world more calculated to establish a man in his own esteem than to feel the lips of a young girl against his fingers! The psychological effect of such a thing, reverting to dim, far-off pre-Homeric times, carries a magic along with it capable of seducing the coldest-blooded philosopher.

Hastings watched her scribbling the telegram on a piece of paper. He heard her muttering aloud those familiar syllables: “Thirteen Walpole Street,” which he had himself been so malignantly and triumphantly whispering under his breath for the last half year. He derived a peculiar physical relief, like the drawing of a piece of rusty iron out of his flesh, at the mere sound of those words on another’s lips, and while his wife rushed out with the telegram to the postman he found himself running up the stairs to his room with a clearer mind and a more lively desire to continue his life’s work than he had felt since the day of Netta’s flight.

The woman had been more on his mind than he had acknowledged to himself; and his recondite revenge upon Rook, by refusing her address, had been a severer strain upon his nerves than he had calculated upon. Well! He was clear of it. He would have the whip hand of them all now. He would henceforth be in a position to assert himself as the formidable spiritual director of all these people!

He sat down at his table and drew out his manuscript. The sight of these closely written impassioned pages changed the current of his thoughts once more. What did it matter
whether these people treated him properly or not? What did it matter whether he was an effective parish priest or not? What did it matter whether his gentle Nell kissed his hand or not? Long, long years after he was dust in dust, after there was no longer any living creature who remembered him, his work would still be exercising its effect upon the universe; the wonder of the disillusioned, the terror of the illusioned!

For the rest of that day Hastings worked silently,
passionately
, upon his book. When he came down to lunch he was like a different man. Nell had never known him in such high spirits. He gossiped about the village people. He told her stories about his early struggles, his desperate youthful attempts to get an adequate education, his experiences at various theological colleges.

The girl thought to herself, “If he’d been like this a year ago, I would never have gone out so much with Lexie.” Had Nell been more superstitious than she was she would have felt uneasy in the presence of this unnatural exuberance. An occult-minded person would have watched William Hastings very closely at that juncture and would perhaps have endeavoured to calm and allay this stream of excited talk. But Nell’s own spirits were so exalted just then at the despatching of the telegram and the idea of Netta’s arrival that she responded to his mood with a mood of like kind. Never had Toll-Pike Cottage heard such voices and such laughter. It would have taught the evasive Rook something he did not know as to the nature of women could he have seen the apparently complete and radiant accord that existed between these two. All through the afternoon, until
tea-time
, Hastings worked on; writing with scarcely a glance out of the window or away from the page; as if it were necessary to finish the book that very day.

After one of the happiest teas they had ever had since they were married, Nell announced that she intended to make
Mr. Twiney drive her down to Bishop’s Forley station; so that, in case Netta had been at home when the telegram reached her and had started at once by the first train, she might not be left stranded.

Hastings shook his head. “You’re assuming too much, young lady,” he remarked. “The chances are all against her being in the house when your message arrives. And why should she start in such a hurry? The natural thing would be to give herself at least a night to think over it.”

Nell looked at him significantly. “
That
shows how little you know about women,” she said. “There’s probably not been a day since she left when she hasn’t imagined herself rushing off back again just like this! What I said in the telegram was that we both thought that she ought to come, that it was important she should come. That would bring
me
without waiting overnight, if
I
were in her place!”