Ducdame (4 page)

They were on the point of moving forward again when the door of the cottage opened and the figure of a young girl presented itself in the doorway.

“I saw you through the window,” said this apparition in a voice so faint that the words hardly reached them. “Come in, won’t you? Come in, please!”

They made their way through the tiny garden and
entered
the house.

Nell took them into her own sitting room and placed them on the sofa opposite the fire. She persuaded Netta to take off her shoes and hold her feet to the blaze.

They spoke of Lexie, how mysterious his illness was and how unwisely he treated himself, taking long exhausting walks when the one thing the doctor implored him to avoid was that kind of exertion.

And then quite suddenly, as she sat on a little stool by the side of the hearth, the visitors became aware that the girl was trembling from head to foot.

Shivering convulsive tremors ran through her slim frame. Her small head, whose wavy light-brown hair framed a face as shell-like in its transparency as an old miniature, straightened itself stiffly on its slender neck as if to defy some mortal weakness.

“What is it?” murmured Cousin Ann, laying her wet gloved hand on the young woman’s knee.

The sympathetic voice and touch seemed to alarm the girl rather than quiet her. Curious twitching lines appeared on her face; and her mouth, which normally had a piteous twist, began to resemble the mouth of an unhappy little gargoyle.

She rose from her seat, biting her under lip, clenching her fingers in the palms of her hands, and stood by the
mantelpiece
.

Lady Ann also rose and for a moment remained hesitating. Netta, who kept glancing timidly from one to another as she stretched her feet nearer and nearer to the fire, was vaguely struck by something brusque and blundering in her friend’s movement. She became conscious of a wish that Cousin Ann would turn her steady glance away from that troubled
figure; and behind that wish she found herself feeling a faint, a very faint hostility to her dear friend.

Lady Ann had never looked more competent, more
high-spirited
, more kind. She seemed on the point of making some pronounced sympathetic gesture, perhaps even of
taking
the hysterical girl in her arms. Netta had a feeble
inclination
to cry out: “Let her alone! let her alone!” But all she could do was to wish herself out in the rain again, out in the road, in the fields, in the middle of Hangdown Cover; out anywhere, so as not to see—she couldn’t tell quite what!

Thank Heaven! The door opened just then and the Vicar of Ashover entered. Netta had not been able yet to make up her mind whether she liked William Hastings or disliked him. He made her think of a picture of Napoleon that hung in the Major-General’s bathroom and
that
association
was horrible. But he also made her think of
Monseigneur
Tallainton, the little old French priest of the Catholic church in Bristol; and that association endeared him to her. She liked something compact and weighty about his rather corpulent body, and she liked his hands, which were very small and very white. It was a certain suppressed passion in his face which puzzled her and
disturbed
her. It was like a ship with its decks covered with great dark guns coming down upon her out of the mist.

The Vicar shook hands cordially with Cousin Ann and bending quickly over Netta herself prevented her from rising. It was while he was doing this that his young wife slipped silently around the outside of the group and escaped from the room.

It was not till after the conversation had begun that the girl’s disappearance was noticed.

“Yes, I’m afraid she was upset by something,” said Lady Ann, catching the Vicar’s eye as it roved from Netta’s
outstretched
feet to her cloth cap.

“It’s the weather,” said William Hastings. “She is always like this when it rains. Nell hates the rain.”

“I think it was more than
that,
Mr. Hastings,” said Lady Ann gravely. “But it’s a pity the climate doesn’t suit her, if you’re going on living here.”

“Dorsetshire suits us better than any other place when the wind’s not in the west.”

As if in response to the clergyman’s words a great gust of wind shook the windows of the house and a splutter of rain came hissing down the chimney.

Netta thought she could hear a bed creaking in the room above them, and the sound troubled her more than the sound of sobs. She drew her feet away from the fire and began putting on her stiff half-dried shoes.

“Yes, we must be going,” said Lady Ann, rising. “But I would have liked to ask you about your book. Is it coming on well?”

The Vicar’s face changed its expression completely. “Seventeen chapters,” he said with a look at Netta as if she and her troublesome shoe-strings were the eighteenth
chapter
. “But it is the old story with me, Lady Ann. I tear most of it up. It isn’t a very cheerful book.”

Lady Ann smiled as she wrapped her plaid round her. She had grown accustomed to this kind of thing from William Hastings and had ceased to take it seriously. No one but the man’s own wife had ever seen this mysterious work, and for some reason or another Nell Hastings never spoke of it.

But Netta was on her feet now and gravely contemplating the faded carpet. Hastings and his book presented
themselves
to her mind as a great plump black crow carrying a little plump black crow in his claws. She fancied she heard that bed creaking again.

She pulled on her mackintosh with such rapidity that the clergyman was not in time to assist her. She was glad when
they were out of the house. She was glad to feel the rain on her face again.

As for Cousin Ann the whole experience of that little room, with its grotesque antimacassars across the backs of
mahogany
chairs and its double row of daguerreotypes, seemed to sail off over the ditches like a bubble of froth. Her only remark, as the rain eddied and gyrated past them like a horizontal cataract, reducing the whole world to the grayness of a cadaver, was a remark that conveyed no meaning at all to the mind of Netta.

“Queen Elizabeth was right. There’s something funny about it. They ought never to have allowed it.”

The rain increased in volume. The village in front of them seemed completely to disappear. The plaid cloak soon became as wringing wet as if it had been flung into the ditch. The drops trickled down Netta’s back in cold
persistent
streamlets that made her shiver. Her shoes were so full of water that they responded with gurgling swishing noises every time she moved her feet.

On and on they struggled, their heads bent, their soaked garments clinging to the curves of their figures like Pheidian drapery, their eyes blurred, the rain tasting salty in their mouths, as if it were the tears of some vast inconsolable Niobe.

It seemed to Netta as though their heavy progress would never end; as though all her troubled life had been only a fantastic preparation for a destiny that meant walking, walking, walking, by the side of a being whose thoughts she could never read, toward a goal that could never be reached!

And obscurely, through the clamminess of her clothes, through the gurglings of her shoes, she kept hearing that invisible bed in the upper room of Toll-Pike Cottage creaking, creaking, creaking, like the hinge of a gate behind a
retreating
assassin.

She began to fall into that mood of indignant pity about
Nell Hastings that used to puzzle the girls so when she
displayed
it over the affairs of poor Madge. Why did she always worry herself about people? Mrs. Hastings was nothing to her. She didn’t want her pity. She did want
something
,
though, and Netta wished she could give it to her.

She found herself giving it to her in her imagination. It took the form of a twenty-pound note, like the one which the manager of the Bristol Theatre gave to Minnie at
Christmas
. She saw that twisted mouth trying to thank her but she hurried away…. Why! They had actually turned down Marsh Alley and were at Lexie’s very gate. “Never mind, dear. I expect we’re both a little dazed.” So Cousin Ann had been speaking to deaf ears! “I must stop fancying things,” Netta said to herself as Lexie’s
housekeeper
let them in and preceded them upstairs.

They found the invalid lying on a deck chair at the edge of his bookcase. On a little table by his side was a china mug and in the mug was a specimen of that curious plant, half fungus, half flower, which the botanists call broom rape.

Lexie sat up very straight and contemplated his visitors with wide-open eyes.

“We mustn’t stay a moment,” announced Cousin Ann. “Rook doesn’t know we came. We’ve brought you these.” And to Netta’s astonishment, out of the deep pocket of her plaid coat the young woman produced a bunch of
dilapidated
chrysanthemums.

Lexie received the flowers, snuffed tentatively at them, remarked that they smelt like muskrats, and laid them down beside the mug.

He looked at Netta then, with something like a furtive appeal on his corrugated face.

“Do you want me to go and talk to Mrs. Bellamy?” Netta said humbly.

A glance of unconcealed irritation was her reward for this.

“You’re both so thoroughly wet,” he grumbled‚ “that I refuse to be responsible for keeping you a second. Thank you for coming, Ann. Thank you for bringing these. And now, for God’s sake, clear off, both of you, and race home!”

He waved them away with both his hands and seemed
seriously
agitated. And yet Netta was once more aware that he was looking at her with that same significant expression. What did he want her to do? To go home alone?

“Why doesn’t Ann stay to lunch with you and let Mrs. Bellamy dry her things?” she murmured.

“And leave you to go home by yourself? Can you see me doing such a thing?” cried Lady Ann.

There was an awkward pause between the three of them, during which Netta loosened the wet mackintosh from her throat and moved away from the support of a table lest her dampness should spoil Lexie’s papers.

The drenched condition of the two women seemed to draw into that little room a desolate melancholy essence composed of fallen leaves, muddy cart ruts, and clammy mist. Toward the water that still clung to their bodies the great moving volume of water outside seemed stretching itself through the little window in irresistible attraction.

The red coals in Lexie’s grate seemed to lose something of their power. The rosy glow reflected from Lexie’s crowded bookcases seemed to fade. The little blue fire devil that danced like a demon butterfly on the top of the coals flagged and drooped. A great blind streaming face was pressed against the window—the gray featureless face of the rain. It was as if a corpse-cold cloudy arm, wavering and shadowy, fumbled and plucked at those two dripping figures; as though, drenched as they were, they belonged to the drowning fields outside and not to this warm human interior. Lexie
himself
, as he looked from the one to the other, felt conscious that something from those miles of soaked pastures, something
beyond the mere drenched clothes and rain-draggled hair of the two girls, was separating them from him by an impassable barrier.

The thing made him petulant, querulous. It was always like this with women, he thought. They were so damnably absorbent of the chemistry of nature! They were so easily submerged by these elemental forces! When one wanted them to be especially rational and attentive, their bodies were drifting off, tissue by tissue, cell by cell, upon some long inhuman tide, leading God knows where!

He got up now with a painful effort, an effort that made Netta instinctively spring forward, while Cousin Ann fell back against the wall as if to ward off a blow.

“Do you know why she comes to me like this?” he said, leaning forward and addressing Netta.

Netta hurriedly withdrew the hand she had stretched out to support him.

“Don’t!” she murmured, shaking her head. “Don’t!” And then with a voice that gathered a sudden unexpected power: “Please sit down again, Mr. Lexie, and let me leave her here. Rook will understand.”

The rugged-faced thin man leaned still farther forward. His hands pressed hard against the little table, shook it so that the broom-rape trembled.

“Rook!” he cried. “I should think he
will
understand! She comes to me to
square
me! Do you hear, you dear little fool? To square me! Did you think she came for anything else?”

His voice died away in his mouth like an echo in an open doorway; but his mouth still hung open, the under lip
pendulous
and quivering; and a drop of saliva ran down to the tip of his chin.

“Go! Both of you!” he cried hoarsely; and sinking back into his chair he turned obstinately toward the fire, hugging his thin knees.

Netta was conscious of nothing else but a desire to bend over that figure and press that heavy curly head against her breast; but Cousin Ann with a fierce little red spot
burning
on each of her cheeks had become completely mistress of the situation.

“Good-bye, Lexie,” she said quietly. “Come, Netta.”

They moved toward the door, but as they went out he turned again.

“Why don’t you go to Hastings and square
him?
He’ll give you reasons. But you’d better not read his book. Do you hear? Don’t you dare to read his book! You have reasons enough without that. Ask Nell. She can tell you.” His haggard profile and deep-set sombre-lidded eye seemed thrusting a pike into Cousin Ann’s retreating figure.

“
It’s
all
in
the
book
!
” he shouted after them as they closed the door and ran down the stairs.

M
RS. ASHOVER walked with a firm quick step. No one would have guessed, to see her little thin black figure making its way through the long grass of the orchard, that this was the seventy-third November the power of which she had defied.

The gate leading from the orchard to the sloping hill called Battlefield was a gate heavy on its latch. But it was a gate that Mrs. Ashover had manipulated as a young bride fifty years before and she was not to be daunted by it now. She rubbed her forefinger thoughtfully up and down its gray lichen-grown top bar. The sun was warm around her, a slanting autumn sun, and it fell pleasantly on the ancient gate and on the rough yellow patches of lichen which filled the crevices of that half-century-old plank. A piece of woodwork exposed to all the elements is a very different thing from a piece of woodwork protected within a barn or a church. Its life is five times as intense; its experiences five times as acute. That top bar by the time this particular afternoon sun reached it must have been, if vividness of
experience
were allowed to count, older than Dürer’s
famous
Madonna in Nuremberg.

Mrs. Ashover looked from the gate to an old apple tree that grew beside it and from the tree she looked to the ground. A sprinkling of yellow apples had been left there, and many of them were half buried in the rank thick-bladed grass.

Mrs. Ashover tapped the gate with her knuckles. It was annoying that Rook was so careless and so casual in his handling of the place. In John’s day good cooking apples
such as these would have been gathered to the last
rain-soaked
pippin.

With a shrug of her shoulders and a fierce little sigh the old lady forced the stubborn latch and pushed the gate open.

When it was shut behind her she resolutely ascended the hill. She stepped carefully over the mole runs, avoided the patches of brown bracken and the mysterious hollow places that broke the ascent, and finally, a little out of breath,
arrived
at the summit of Heron’s Ridge.

The horizontal sun threw her slim erect shadow along the close-cropped turf as emphatically as it threw the shadows of the Scotch firs. They were twice as old as she was, these trees; but she felt just then as if she were their
contemporary
. She prodded the trunk of one of them with her ebony stick. The gesture relieved her feelings; and she
continued
it till a piece of red-brown bark fell upon the ground.

With a flickering smile on her thin lips she left the tree and, moving to the farther crest of the ridge, looked down into the less familiar valley. A grassy slope, patched with bracken and furze, locally named Dorsal, led down to a
narrow
muddy lane. Beyond this lane a thick undergrowth of small oaks and hazels mounted up to a high leafy skyline called Antiger Great Knoll. There was only one human habitation visible between Dorsal and the Antiger Woods and upon this habitation she now fixed her eyes.

It was a small gamekeeper’s cottage surrounded by pheasant coops and fowl runs. A footpath led down to it from where she stood; and an untidy vegetable garden, in which a bonfire of weeds was then burning, separated it from the lane.

Mrs. Ashover contemplated this scene for some moments in an attitude of intense thought. She knew every tuft of furze, every bracken patch, every grassy excrescence, every gravelly hollow, as well as she knew the furniture in her own bedroom.

There was the dead ash tree struck by lightning forty
years before, at the roots of which she used to sit and sketch and read, before Lexie was born.

There was the rabbit burrow, with the earth mould freshly disturbed and the little pellets of excrement freshly dropped, just as it had looked, with the sun falling aslant upon it, when she used to bring out her writing case and write long letters about her children and her husband to dear Edith, Cousin Ann’s mother.

She could actually recall a certain sentence she had used, on one of these occasions, which poor dear Edith had
commented
upon and been greatly shocked by.

“I have washed all Wentworth blood out of me,” she had written, “and gone over body and soul to John’s people. John’s gods have become my gods; John’s dead, my dead.”

Setting her face with renewed determination and clutching her stick tightly the old lady made her way down the hill to the back door of the house in the lane.

The gamekeeper and his wife were engaged in feeding the fowls, assisted by their idiot son. This child, whose
half-articulate
utterances and facial distortions would have been horrible in a city, fell naturally into his place among wilting hemlocks and lightning-struck trees and birds eaten by hawks and rabbits eaten by weasels.

Mr. and Mrs. Drool were thrifty, decent people who were able to increase their income very considerably by this fowl run of theirs; especially since Lord Antiger’s agent had ceased to invite any one to shoot in those particular preserves and had gone to live himself in Bishop’s Forley, five miles away.

“Mrs. Ashover! Well, I never!”

“The missus her own self! Well, I’ll be jiggered!”

“Blub … blub … blub! Binnory good boy! Give Binnory summat.”

“Don’t drag at the missus, Binnory!”

“Don’t ’ee mind him, Mrs. Ashover! Don’t ’ee mind him! He do know who you be as well as he knows who we
be! ’Tis a windle-wandle innocent; but you should hear’n holler to the hoot owls when sun be down. And he do know the gentry when he sees ’un as well as any God-fearing man.”

Mrs. Ashover responded to these various voices with
unruffled
equanimity. She patted Binnory on the head and told him never to kill slowworms. She steered the
conversation
to Mr. Drool’s pheasants and to Mrs. Drool’s Wyandottes. She answered their questions about Rook and Lexie with becoming vagueness.

At the first pause in the conversation, however, she moved straight to her purpose.

“I want to see Mr. Richard,” she said. “Is he in the house?”

“She wants to see Corporal Dick,” repeated the woman, glancing with a certain obvious embarrassment at her husband.

“He be weed-burning in garden, mum,” she went on. “It be a job he have always a mind for. He do like the smell o’t and the flare o’t. Joe and me have always marked it in him. He do look as eager for bonfire-time as ’twere for the King’s birthday.”

“May I go round and speak to him, Polly?”

“Certainly you may, ’m; mayn’t she, Joe? Certainly she may speak to Granfer Dick. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t speak to the Corporal, is there, Joe?”

Mrs. Drool looked extremely uncomfortable as she uttered these words; and the gamekeeper’s uneasiness was so great that without knowing what he did he picked up his corduroy coat from the clothes line and shook it in the air.

“Binnory’ll take you to see Granfer Dick burnin’ things. Binnory’ll take you”; and the idiot tugged at Mrs. Ashover’s skirt, uttering while he did so the peculiar inhuman sound represented by the syllables, “blub-a-blub …
blub-a-blub
.”

Mrs. Ashover did not hesitate. Taking the boy by the hand she walked rapidly round the house, leaving the
gamekeeper
and his wife staring blankly at each other.

The reason of their embarrassment became quite plain when the strangely assorted pair reached the place. Granfer Dick, for some reason of his own, had stripped himself not only of his coat and waistcoat but of his shirt, too; and, armed with a pitchfork, was throwing weeds on the fire in nothing but a pair of old military trousers.

The Corporal was a man of gigantic size; and the sight of such an extremely old man in such scanty clothing
surrounded
by smoke and flame was certainly a thing
calculated
to disturb a stranger.

Mrs. Ashover was no stranger, however; nor did her
appearance
cause the least discomfort to the octogenarian. He leaned on his pitchfork and with a wave of his hand sent Binnory away.

“Well, sister Joan, what mischief brings
you
here this day of all days? You’ve only been three times to see me since John died and now you come on the very day he died.”

The resolute little woman did not wince or draw back. She brushed a flying spark from her dress and pointed at the Corporal with her stick.

Between the fading November sunset and the clouds of blue smoke she looked like an aristocratic sorceress
summoning
up some great fire spirit. She was in one of her most reckless moods; but it was with a quiet affectionate
gesture
that she beckoned the old man to move nearer to her out of the smoke. Ever since her husband had first
introduced
her to this bastard brother of his she had felt friendly to him and free of her usual prejudices. She called him “Corporal” though now; and, as they fell to exchanging
confidences
, he did not repeat the “sister Joan,” but addressed her without any appellation at all.

“I’ve no one to go to! I’ve no one to go to,” Mrs.
Ashover
found herself saying. “Doctor Twickenham is a fool. William Hastings is mad; and Lexie is worse than mad where Rook is concerned. I told you a year ago, Richard”—“She drops the Corporal when she wants help,” thought the old man—“where it seemed to me Ann Gore might come in. Well! I’ve had her with me for several months, and what’s the result? I am besieged in my own house. That woman is everywhere. I meet her on the staircase. I meet her in the garden. I only
don’t
meet her in the dining room and the drawing room because I stay in my own bedroom! I tell you the place doesn’t belong to me any more. I am just an uncomfortable visitor, staying with my son and his mistress. That’s how it must appear to all our neighbours; and that’s how it is.”

The Corporal threw his pitchfork away and led his
agitated
visitor back to the house. Opening the front door he took her straight into his own little room where there was a big wood fire. He placed her in a dilapidated
armchair
with the utmost courtesy and then began muttering and groaning while he fumbled for his best clothes in the chest of drawers.

“So Ann has gone over to the harlot? Ay, John. Ay, John. Ay, John. That I should have lived to see this.”

“I’ve no one to go to,” repeated Mrs. Ashover. “That’s why I came to you. John always used to come to you. I can hear him saying it now—‘I’ll just run across and talk to Richard’—so, my friend,” and she smiled almost wistfully at the wrinkled contorted features appearing under the upheld coat, “you must help us at this pinch or see us go right down to the bottom.”

Granfer Dick pulled a chair to the opposite side of the fire, took his seat deliberately, and stared with concentrated intensity at his kinswoman.

“Smoke if you want to, Corporal,” said the old lady. He
shook his head and continued to survey her with frowning forehead and screwed-up eyes, thinking many things.

“It’s funny…. It’s as funny as a bad dream,” murmured the old woman. “But if something isn’t done soon nothing will change it. Rook will get older and older till he dies childless; and the family will die out with him.”

A fierce light came into the Corporal’s pale eyes and the skin of his closely shaven face tightened itself over its bony framework like parchment that is pulled taut.

“What’s that?” he cried. “Die out? The Ashovers ‘die out’?”

“Certainly they will, if you can’t think of how to help me. When once I’m buried and out of the way, things will go on exactly as they are now, till Lexie is dead and Rook is dead. That woman is certain to outlive them both; and then … Well! that’ll be the end. There’ll be nobody else.”

The two old people looked each other full in the eyes and all manner of wild fantastic thoughts passed between them. They were like a pair of aged priests, servants for innumerable years at a venerable altar, who suddenly awake to the fact that the great god of their idolatry is stricken with a mortal disease.

Terrible with a kind of mad panic such priests might
become
. They might slaughter holocausts of sheep and oxen. They might steal the flocks from the shepherd and the swine from the swineherd. Nothing might be safe from their
sacrificial
depredations unless their god himself intervened.

But how could the shadowy god of Squire John’s widow and Squire Ralph’s bastard express its pleasure or
displeasure
?

Could the sad-eyed cavalier come forth from his gilt
picture
frame and say: “Let the family end!”? Could Sir Benjamin come forth with his marble smirk and say: “Let the family end!”? Could the Crusader uncross his feet, or
John Ashover lift the slab from his more recent dissolution, and cry with one united sepulchral voice: “Let the family be as though it had never been!”?

Without a word interchanged these two crack-brained old people, the elegant lady and the social outcast, let their wild fancies circle round the figure of Cousin Ann—Cousin Ann, who seemed dedicated by Nature herself to be a mother of distinguished offspring. It was incredible that a girl like that should really betray them. But what was she doing? It looked like callous, careless, cynical caprice; Girls
have
ways of getting hold of men. They have absolutely
sure
ways when they can be persuaded to sacrifice their pride.

The unspoken thoughts of the two fanatics grew queerer and madder every moment, as the November mist, blending with the smoke of the bonfire, darkened the windows of the room.

“What can I do?” murmured Mrs. Ashover at last, making a pitiful little movement with one thin arm toward her
companion
. But the Corporal had lifted himself up very straight now and sat bolt upright, his long fingers on the arms of the chair, his little eyes almost shut.

“With buck-rabbits who won’t come to’t, with buck-ferrets who won’t come to’t, with hound-dogs who won’t come to’t, ’tis only a matter of putting the right mate to ’em; shutting her up with him and taking yourself off. You know that and I know that. It’s only a question of the hour and the maid.”