Ducdame (39 page)

She sat down to rest on the identical spot where she had rested before. The hedge protected her from the rising mists, and the ground was still warm except where the longer grass had caught the dew. With her cloak wrapped round her she sank luxuriously back against the furrow of sweet-smelling earth mould. The largeness of that autumn day, its indrawn breath, its immense passivity, lulled her into a delicious
relaxation
.

She lay there for nearly an hour, living intensely and
absorbingly
in the great parturient process that was going on
within her. Then, at last, feeling the approach of the
evening
chill, she rose to her feet, and, rested and comforted in mind and body, pushed open the ancient ramshackle gate into the remembered barley field.

It was then that quite suddenly, and, as it were, quite naturally, that tiresome, ungrammatical refrain, “Till book be burned no child’ll be borned,” repeated itself in her ears as if someone at her very side had whispered it.

Lady Ann became grave and stood motionless, like a beautiful animal scenting some species of ambiguous danger. “What’s up with me?” she thought to herself. “Is this nerves? Or am I growing superstitious?”

And then without reasoning about it at all she suddenly felt an irresistible instinct driving her to go straight down to Toll-Pike Cottage and face this life-hating conjurer whose sorcery was so inimical to herself and her child.

She tried to find, for her own justification, some quite reasonable motive for stopping at Toll-Pike Cottage just then; nor was such a motive very difficult to find. She felt not the slightest embarrassment at being seen either by Nell or Hastings in her present condition. As for Netta’s
presence
there, she did not permit it to affect her one way or the other. Her attitude to both these rivals of hers was that of an indifferent conqueror of superior race, whose caprices may be indulged to the furthest limit in sublime contempt for any reaction, favourable or unfavourable, that they might
produce
on the vanquished.

It did not take her long to reach the cottage. This time there was no Marquis of Carabas lying on the back porch. But Lady Ann did not intend to enter in that unconventional manner this time. She walked round to the front door and rang the bell. To her surprise she heard excited and agitated voices in the room above.

She waited. No one seemed to have noticed her ring. There was evidently something serious going on upstairs.

Was this crazy priest quarrelling with these two women? Was he ill-using them, perhaps? All her social instincts as a member of the English ruling class rose up in indignation. It was no more to her then that Rook had taken his pleasure with these girls than if they had been daughters of Twiney or of Pod! What was unpardonable was that in the village of Ashover, within a mile of Ashover House, an English clergyman should be behaving like a drunken blacksmith. For it
was
that. She was not country-born for nothing. She had heard so often that particular mingling of female clamour with masculine threats from under the eaves of thatched cottages, as she rode home, dreamy and content, through Sturminster, through Shaftesbury, through
Stalbridge
, from a successful hunt with the Blackmore pack!

With her practical and realistic mind she came to the prompt conclusion that in “his weakness and his melancholy” this hedge priest of theirs had taken to drink. Accustomed from her earliest childhood to high-handed interference, and entirely free from any physical apprehensions on her own behalf, the intrepid girl boldly turned the handle of the door, entered the little hallway, and walked resolutely and
unflinchingly
up the narrow staircase.

Her steps on the stairs were no more audible to the persons in that room than had been the sound of her ring. She heard scuffling and struggling in there as well as this turmoil of voices.

With a quick movement of her strong young wrist she turned the handle of the door and swung it wide open. The sight that met her eyes was disturbing enough; though it was not quite on a par with the violent ruffianism she had been imagining. Like all people of her kind she lumped the middle classes and the proletariat together, and took for granted that any of them might at any moment break all laws of decency and self-respect.

She was not surprised, therefore, to see William Hastings with a white distorted countenance struggling to release
himself 
from the arms of Mr. Pod, who, very red in the face and obviously much embarrassed at being found in such a
situation
, was holding the priest down on a sofa-bed.

This article of furniture must have been recently dragged in from the room opposite, for it was placed awkwardly and grotesquely between the philosopher’s desk and the round table in the centre of the chamber.

On one side of this makeshift bed stood Netta, evidently doing her best to soothe the afflicted man; while at its foot, leaning across it so as to touch her husband’s hands with her own, was the slender form of Nell, from whose eyes the tears were streaming and whose whole body was trembling with agitation and concern.

“Lordy! Your Ladyship did give I a start!” cried the breathless sexton, relaxing his hold upon the man on the bed. “Us all thought as you was drownded in sheep wash or summat!”

“Thank God, you’re all right, Lady Ann,” said Netta gravely, glancing anxiously down at the man beneath her to see that he did not take advantage of this new apparition to make a fresh struggle to escape.

But Hastings was staring at Ann with wild intensity, every line in his face expressive of the passing of one
complicated
emotion after another across the clouded mirror of his mind. He had worked at the completion of his book so passionately that now it was finished the actual volume itself, its leather binding, its ink-stained pages, had become to his unsettled brain a magical engine of destruction, a nihilistic catapult as it were, that it now behoved him to hurl at the citadels of life!

Two of these life ramparts had got themselves lodged in his mind as especially challenging to his campaign—those Ashover tombs in the church chancel, and the living body of Lady Ann Ashover! From those tombs, Hastings had come to be obstinately convinced, emanated the very essence of
this unscrupulous life force, which in its relentless strivings disturbed the placid pools of non-existence. And here was Lady Ann herself, now standing before him, the incarnation of the remorseless urge! With the extravagant fanaticism of a mad logician, Hastings formulated, even as he looked at the woman, a monstrous and diabolic project. He would make her herself hug to her heart his “Book of Annihilation,” and carry it to the place of those living dead.

To his distorted vision this hurling of his book among his enemies presented itself as the supreme stroke in an abysmal spiritual warfare whereof he was the protagonist and this woman, big with child, the antagonist.

The man’s intellectual magnetism was so great that as he sat up there in bed with the veins in his forehead distended and his face quivering with conflicting emotion the four persons in that room remained awed and silent. When he did speak it was with a mingling of insane cunning and
disordered
impetuousness.

“They won’t let me take it and hide it!” he cried. “I want to hide it under those chancel slabs … I could easily get up those stones and put it there; but they won’t let me! And now you’ve come and you’ll join with them. If you hadn’t come I’d have done it. Wouldn’t I have done it, fellow?” And he turned his distracted glance upon the embarrassed Mr. Pod, who stood watching him with one of his great fists ostentatiously clenched, as if Hastings were a troublesome bullock at Tollminster Fair.

“’Tis true enough, your ladyship, what Parson do say,” acquiesced the sexton. “’A would have rinned all the way to church and have scrabbled with’s own hands at they paving stones! ’A would have done that; and maybe heaved up some of they ancient Squires what do bide under them moniments! ’Tis God’s truth what ’a do say, your ladyship. ’A be a terrible strong man, and there be none to hold ’un but only I and these two young leddies!”

Lady Ann became suddenly aware of the actual presence of Hastings’s book. The manuscript occupied a large leather-bound volume as big as a business ledger, and it lay on the priest’s desk just above his bed. She knew the look of the book, as she had seen it in his hands before; and she surveyed it now with a peculiar and unusual interest.

Nell, who was standing at the foot of the bed, caught the direction of the visitor’s glance.

“My husband had just finished his last chapter, Lady Ann, when this idea of hiding it in the church came into his head. You feel better now, William, don’t you? You won’t frighten us again, will you, William?”

The man rose a little higher on the bed, straightening his legs and propping himself up on his two hands. He stared at Nell’s face with that pathetic and puzzled frown with which people whose mental processes have grown jangled
become
for a moment aware of something wrong and unusual.

It was as if he were peering helplessly at the young girl through the entangled boughs of his own obscuring delusion. Fancying that he did hear her and understand her Nell flung herself down on her knees at his side and began chafing one of his hands.

Lady Ann exchanged glances with Netta; but neither of them, nor indeed Mr. Pod himself, who looked as if he would be thankful if the floor sank beneath him, seemed anxious to intervene between these two.

Lady Ann’s thoughts wandered off to all that buried dust under the church pavement which seemed to be so persistent an influence in the movement of events in this place. She recalled the man’s wild discourse to her on New Year’s Eve, at the end of Marsh Alley, and how he had associated, even then, the negations of his ferocious logic with the extinction of the House of Ashover. He was disarmed and innocuous enough now; but she, in her sanity, began just then, as she saw the book lying there within her reach, to be betrayed into
the same illusion as the one which this madman held, namely, that this mysterious destructive force had actually passed from the living man’s intellect into the inanimate potency of the work he had just completed.

Once more that jingle of Betsy’s—“Till book be burned no child’ll be borned”—sounded in her brain with the appalling distinctness of a warning sea bell rocked by rising waves.

Nell was keeping up, in a kind of crooning tone, a sort of lullaby to the man on the bed. She seemed to forget the presence of the others.

Suddenly Hastings bent forward, stretched out his arm, and possessed himself of the volume on the desk. He turned over some of its pages with a sort of malignant awe; while a moment later with a glance at Lady Ann that had a flicker of demonic subtlety in it, he tossed the book down at the foot of the bed.

Then it seemed as if he forgot its existence; for he began to talk incoherently of certain early memories of his in the slums of London. He mentioned names that were completely strange to them all; and with those names he mixed the names of Latin writers and the titles of Latin books. And he talked of the lily pond in Kew Gardens, which must have been the. objective of some thrilling childish excursion. And then he muttered something about park railings, with deer behind them. “Let me feed them, Mother! Let
me
feed them!” he cried out in a loud voice; and then, without any apparent connection, he began reciting the old grammar-school tag:

Mr. Pod manifested considerable apprehension when he heard these strange syllables. He looked from one to another of the three ladies as if he expected them to call upon him to clap his great hand over the mouth of the delirious man.

“This do come of praying and preaching,” he whispered in an awestruck voice. “Parson be calling upon the Lord in Greek and Hebrew, same as ’tis writ the Blessed Saviour did. ’Tis enough to make a man’s wits turn to have to say ‘Dearly Beloved’ and ‘Scripture moveth us in sundry places’ every seventh day, wet
or
fine! ’Tis a wonder more on ’em don’t start hollerin’ and forgetting theyselves!”

Lady Ann heard these words of the sexton with the sort of attention a starving man on a raft might give to the
screaming
of a sea gull while his companions were casting lots as to which of them should die first.

The sight of that volume lying at the foot of the bed
obsessed
her with an irresistible fascination. Suddenly she could endure it no longer; and, without a word said, she just slipped forward a couple of steps, snatched up the volume, thrust it under her arm beneath her cloak and moved quickly back to the open door.

The voice of the delirious man went on mumbling inanely the classic doggerel:

It was as though, having completed his categorical
Domesday
Book of all life’s progeny, he were waiting in sardonic expectation for the explosion of his train of dynamite.

Nell and Netta both made instinctive movements toward her. There was something treacherous and outrageous to their minds in this arbitrary despoiling of an unconscious man.

“What are you doing, Lady Ann?” cried Netta. “You’re not going to take his book really away, are you?”

“Give it back…. Give it back…. Oh, how
dare
you?” protested Nell.

There was, however, at that moment such a dangerous light in the eyes of the girl in the doorway that neither of them had the courage to approach her. In any case, so tightly was she holding the book, it could not have been taken from her without a struggle; and the idea of anything of that sort, in the condition in which she was and under the eyes of
Hastings
, was inconceivable.