Ducdame (6 page)

Lexie’s countenance had grown graver and graver while she spoke, and its expression, under his corrugated Claudian brows, more and more sympathetic. But at her final
question
, flung at him so unexpectedly and recklessly, his very soul seemed to draw back into some interior impregnable fortress, out of the little arrow slits of which he peered forth at her, over moat and portcullis, with a watchful and
suspicious
cunning.

“I don’t see,” he said slowly, “why you women have always to make such a coil. I’d like you so much better, Nell, if you just honestly told me you’d fallen out of love with that cold-blooded word-spinner of yours; that you hated him like a dead fish; that you’d adore giving him a shrewd blow in the gizzard!”

Two expressions overlapped each other, quick as thought, across Mrs. Hastings’s tremulous face. The first one was sheer pain. The second was irrepressible childish
amusement
.

“Dear Lexie!” she murmured; and then in a calmer voice, “I expect I do seem to you silly. But it isn’t as simple as you think it is. If you only knew, you wouldn’t look at me as you’re looking now. I’m not putting this on. I’m not playing on your sympathy. There may be quite natural reasons for these things; but I tell you William’s a different
person from what any of you dream. He’s not an ordinary person at all. He’s—he’s—he’s either
mad
or he’s thinking—thinking something—that destroys—you know?—that
destroys
everything!”

Lexie withdrew even from behind the narrow aperture of his defensive tower. He withdrew backward, backward, till nothing was visible of him but a suspicious pair of fox’s eyes blinking out of the darkness.

The girl sighed, but something seemed to drive her on to betray herself. “Don’t you believe in good Powers and evil Powers? You must! You must! Don’t you believe in people being obsessed?”

He made a movement with his hand as if to interrupt her.

“I could
make
you believe!” she cried, raising her voice. “I could
make
you!”

He came back again to the arrow-slit in his tower.

“Poppycock!” he murmured; and it was almost as if he had been a brutal schoolboy putting out his tongue.

She winced and fell back in her chair. A kind of
bewildered
anger seized her heart against all these men. She visualized the corrugated leathery countenance in front of her, smiling that superior smile, as if it were a burrowing badger, digging itself obstinately into its familiar hole when the sky was full of flaring comets.

“You don’t believe in anything, then,” she remarked faintly, “that doesn’t happen under your very nose?”

“I don’t believe in all these mystical fol-de-rols,” cried Lexie; “and it would be a damned good thing for you if I could shake them out of
your
head.”

The mere sight of her twisted mouth, quivering there before him as if he had struck it with the back of his hand, seemed to aggravate him to further abuse.

“The worst of you women,” he began again, “is that you always find some mysterious fantastic reason for a perfectly legitimate and natural thing. You are thoroughly sick of
that good man of yours; sick to death of him; and I don’t blame you. Why don’t you honestly say so, then, instead of dragging in all these metaphysical cantraps, and trying to make out that the poor devil’s a bloody magician or God knows what?”

She turned away from him with a hopeless sigh and stared into the fire, her elbow on the arm of her chair, her long thin arm supporting her chin.

The reaction from his scolding tone, from his “beating her up” as he called it, caused a delicious warmth toward her to pass through his veins. Watching her sitting there, so much at his mercy, he experienced a sudden twinge of jealousy over his brother’s prerogative. In the present sweetness of his feeling toward her, now that he had chastised her for her silliness, he felt greatly tempted to give his brother’s
monopoly
a timely jolt.

His eyes narrowed under their heavy Cæsarean lids. She was a highly strung little wench. She would probably let him embrace her out of pure craving for sympathy, for refuge, for protection. The image of Rook’s figure, as it had leant by his side at the moonlit window, the outline of that profile, high-cheekboned like a Red Indian, the shape of that closely cropped dark-haired skull, rose up irrelevantly, accusingly. And life was so short—so atrociously short—especially—
his
life!

He rose and came over to Nell’s side. He laid his hand on the back of the girl’s chair and caressed its polished
woodwork
with little jerky movements of his fingers. “Shall I touch her hair?” be thought, “or put my hand on her shoulder?”

He stood there very awkwardly for a perceptible passage of time while the girl beside him made herself more
comfortable
by a little indrawing movement. She seemed to be absorbed in a not unpleasant but very complicated piece of thinking.

“To the devil with these haverings!” he said to himself. “But why does a person’s heart beat so absurdly at the mere thought of doing such a natural, such an inevitable thing? And why this sickening sensation in the pit of one’s stomach?”

“You’re not angry with me, Nell dear?” he asked. His voice must have had a quaver, a huskiness, a strained note in it, as quickly recognized by feminine nerves as the flick of a pike’s tail is recognized by suspicious minnows. She gave him a scared sidelong look. But even in the act of turning her head toward him and meeting his gaze the fear went out of her face. There is always something pathetic and childish to a woman in a man’s physical desire. To the man’s own consciousness he may appear a veritable devil. To his would-be victim he is much more like a greedy infant.

Nell Hastings was not conscious at that moment of the least quiver of moral indignation. She just lifted her chin from her hand, pulled up her feet under her in the big chair and looked straight back at him with an understanding smile; a smile of more direct girlish happiness than had crossed her face for many a long month!

In the simple glow of finding herself desired by a man she respected, the nameless horror she had run away from
receded
and receded. What made Lexie’s embarrassed
overture
the more touching was the very fact of his illness. He stirred something within her that had never been stirred before, her inborn protective instinct. She felt toward him what a lover of woods might feel who comes upon a rugged sturdy tree marked with a great staring notch and a chalk number. The last thing she had expected was that Lexie, as well as his mysterious brother, should look at her like that. Of course, it was different from what Rook made her feel. That was a thing by itself. She had not decided yet what that was. But she was far too grateful to poor dear Lexie for wanting her at all, and he so stricken and threatened, to
fuss herself much as to how
this
situation dovetailed in with the other.

“Poor little Nell! Poor little Nell!” He had taken both her wrists now in one of his hands and had put the other lightly on her shoulder.

What she meant to do was to laugh affectionately and snatch her hands away, but instead of doing that she found herself standing by his side. Had he pulled her out of the chair or had she, to release herself from him, slipped out of it herself?

“Don’t do that! No! No! Don’t do that!” Her voice sounded calm and sensible enough, but what was the use of a calm voice when she was already in his arms and yielding to his agitated caresses?

Her mind raced about in all sorts of funny directions while she submitted to his love-making. She caught sight, over his shoulder, of a row of books entitled “Mermaid Classics” and she wondered what the girls in those books did when people took them in their arms. She found herself listening to see if she could hear Mrs. Bellamy moving about in the house. Then, in the midst of her feeble movements of
resistance
, she caught sight of a little bust of Voltaire on the mantelpiece. How benignly that malicious old man was watching her!

Suddenly she drew away from him and shook off his hands.

“Please don’t, Lexie! I don’t want it to be like this. I don’t want it.”

His face looked haggard as she pushed him back and she felt a wave of dangerous pity for him. How could he know that she had brought it to an end not because of indifference but because of the opposite of indifference? It was all right as long as she was a passive rag doll in his hands; but if she began to come to life—it wouldn’t do.

In a moment she became stiff as a block of wood; and though she still smiled at him and displayed no shadow of
anger against him, he felt that, for that day at least, he must be just the friend again, just the kind, disinterested friend.

They both moved to the window and looked out.

“Damn these niceties and nuances!” he said to himself. “She’s in love with Rook and thinks it wrong to care for both of us. Yet she
does
care for both of us. Oh, when will human beings put all this business on a simple natural earthy basis?”

The look of the pools in the road reflecting the pale, chilly sunlight brought the girl’s mind back to her immediate trouble.

“What am I to do now, Lexie?” she whispered. “It must be nearly time for his meal. He’ll wonder where I am. He has to go to see Mrs. Drool this afternoon.” She stopped and shivered. “I can’t imagine what he says to these people or what he does. Think of seeing him sitting on a cottage chair!” And she suddenly burst into an uncomfortable laugh that made Lexie look at her very gravely.

“Nell, my dear,” he said after a pause, “I fancy the only thing to do now is to go back and endure it as well as you can for a little while. One never knows! I tell you, my sweet Nelly, one never knows! The world is much more malleable than people realize. Go on as you are for a
little
longer: something’s sure to happen.”

She did not seem to be listening very intently. Her eyes had left his face and were gazing into the distance. A curious, inscrutable look came over her features and her twisted mouth quivered.

“Very well, Lexie dear,” she said. “I will go back to him. Don’t bother to come down. I can let myself out.”

T
HERE was no reason why Cousin Ann shouldn’t have tripped over a tree root during her walk with Rook and strained her knee. People
did
stumble over things and hurt themselves.

There was no reason why she shouldn’t have answered Rook laughingly, jestingly, just as she
did
answer him: “I’d love you to do it for me!”

That was all. That was her way of flinging back his
suggestion
that he should “massage” the injured knee. It was natural enough. Nothing to complain of. They were old friends, old playmates from infancy. They met in a world totally outside
her
world. It was natural they should have their jokes. But it wasn’t a very pretty joke this time. If Minnie or Madge had made it she would have cried: “Don’t be vulgar!”

It was just that—just that Rook should make that sort of joke at all, that had driven her to make a scene. It wasn’t jealousy, as Rook had said. She wasn’t jealous of Ann Gore. It was only that she never could bear vulgarity. It made her sick in her stomach. And all men were like that, gentlemen and counter-jumpers, lords and bookmakers! They all loved to make vulgar jokes. But there was no need for Rook to get so angry. He ought to know that a girl doesn’t always mean what she says; especially when her feelings have been hurt. But that was the way. Men were so stupid. They took things wrongly. They listened to your
words
instead of caring what you felt.

Netta’s feet ware on the fender of her empty bedroom grate
as these thoughts pounded and hammered in her indignant consciousness, making her head ache with the strain.

She had been too upset to ring for Pandie to light the fire. She did not want Pandie to see that she’d been crying. She did not want any one’s pity, least of all that of a gossiping servant.

Mercy! How cold it was and how the wind howled round the house! It didn’t feel like the morning, somehow. It felt like the afternoon; and yet it was only eleven—and all that trouble had happened since nine o’clock!

She rose stiffly to her feet and, though she was fully dressed, she snatched a cloak out of the cupboard and wrapped it round her neck like a shawl. Oh, what was that?—someone knocking at the door? A gentle knock; different from Pandie’s; different from Rook’s; who on earth was it?

She hurriedly hung up the cloak again and closed the
cupboard
. Then she glanced quickly round the room. Yes, it looked like a real lady’s room: the vase of flowers on the dressing table; the pillows undisturbed; no stray petticoats lying about. “Come in!” she called in a firm, quiet,
self-controlled
voice; and rubbed her cheeks with both hands.

The door opened and was shut again, very noiselessly shut; and Cousin Ann stood before her. Cousin Ann looked very young and very girlish; not nearly so athletic and
sportsmanlike
as usual. This look was partly explained by the fact that she still wore her nightgown and dressing gown and had tied her hair back with nothing but a broad ribbon; but it was also due to a certain psychological softness brought about by her recent hurt. Cousin Ann limped as she moved to Netta’s bed and sat down upon it. The other bed in the room, Rook’s bed, seemed to take an unkind pleasure at that moment in emphasizing its presence. “Why doesn’t one of you sit down on me?” it seemed to say. “I am here—Rook Ashover’s bed—and this encounter interests me greatly!”

“I couldn’t rest in that room,” were the first words Lady
Ann uttered. “Pandie came and talked and talked; and Mrs. Ashover said she was coming; and so I thought I’d take refuge with you.”

“It’s very nice of you, Ann, I’m sure,” murmured the elder woman, catching sight of herself, as she spoke, in the great gilt mirror and feeling dismay at the lack of youth in her own face. “It’s very nice of you to come. Does your knee hurt you very much?”

Lady Ann glanced at the door. “Do you mind locking us in?” she said. The smile that accompanied these words had almost a schoolgirlish look of mischievous complicity.

Netta walked across the room and turned the key.

“I wish
you’d
massage me!” laughed Lady Ann, making a little half-playful groan of distress as she stretched herself out at full length on the bed.

“There, just there!” she murmured, struggling to rise on her elbow to draw her clothes aside.

“I see. I’ll do it!” interjected Netta. “There! Is
that
where it is? I expect when it swells up it will stop hurting. It isn’t swollen yet, is it?”

Lady Ann gave her a quick penetrating glance; but Netta’s face was grave and sympathetic. “No,” she said. “You can’t see very much, can you? But it feels perfectly awful.”

Netta sat down by the girl’s side and moved her fingers gently across a knee that might have belonged to Artemis herself. She could not help a faint pang of envy at the extraordinary whiteness of the skin she touched. With a scarcely perceptible movement she rearranged her visitor’s dressing gown and went on in silence, passing her fingers up and down the injured knee.

“How dark it is!” the younger girl cried. “And how the wind does howl! I fancy there must be a storm coming up.”

“It’s not so
very
dark,” said Netta quietly, letting her hands sink wearily. “It’s gray. I noticed it directly I got up. It’s all gray, the sky, the garden, and everything. Rook
said this was the sort of weather when you can
see
the wind! You know the way he talks! It’s funny sometimes. It makes a person laugh.”

Lady Ann smiled and let her fingers seek those of her friend. They both remained quite still for a time, listening to the rattling of the windows and the long-drawn moan that kept filling the chimney and then dying away again.

“Netta dear,” said Ann suddenly, “are you very, very fond of Rook?”

The first effect of these words upon the woman sitting on the bed was a dull physical tremor, as if from a narrow path below a great mountain slope she had heard the beginning of an avalanche.

Wow
ho
!
Wow
ho!
Wow
ho!
moaned the wind in the chimney.

Gathering up all her forces to deal with this crisis she
extracted
her fingers from Lady Ann’s clasp and straightened her shoulders.

“Why have you waited to ask me that till to-day?” she said, in a low, flat, level tone.

She wanted to look Lady Ann straight in the eyes; but an indescribable timidity compelled her to fix her glance on the gray window.

“But are you, dear, are you, so
very
fond of him?”

Her lips made an effort to form the suitable words; but her throat seemed to be playing some tiresome trick upon her. It seemed to be necessary that she should keep swallowing.

“Because if you’re not,” Lady Ann went on, “I mean if you’re not
very
fond of him, it’s much easier to understand all you’re doing.”

“What—
do
—you mean? Oh, what
are
you saying to me?” stammered the troubled girl.

“Don’t get excited, dear.” And the aristocratic fingers sought the plebeian ones again. “There’s no need to get agitated. I know well enough that nothing I say will make
any difference. But it’s like this, Netta. I sometimes think you don’t quite realize, and never have quite realized, all that this means to Rook.”

This time Netta Page did turn a scared, troubled face directly upon the beautiful head lying on her pillow.

“You’ve never spoken like this to me before,” she said slowly. “Have I done anything? Is it because I got cross just now when he said—when he said that about your knee?”

Lady Ann folded her hands and closed her eyes for a
moment
. Her face in the gray light looked mysteriously lovely. Was she praying to her gods to give her strength to go through with the discomfort of acting the rôle of executioner?

“Have I done anything?” Netta repeated in a
monotonous
sing-song. “Have I done anything?”

“You’ve done this, my dear,” said Cousin Ann gravely, opening her eyes and lifting her head a little. “You’ve made it impossible for Rook to have children—and if he doesn’t have a child—if he doesn’t have a son—there’ll be no
Ashovers
left after he and Lexie are dead. And you know what Lexie’s health is like? He’s a dying man!”

Ah! The avalanche had begun to move. Thoughts and images pursued one another madly through Netta’s
bewildered
brain. Fantastic images some of them were! One was the image of Cousin Ann herself—with her beautiful marbly limbs—lying on a bed like this, big with a boy-child of Rook’s.

She said nothing for a long while. Her thoughts gathered about the knob of the bedpost above Cousin Ann’s head. The bedpost marched in and out of her thoughts like a drill sergeant among shifty recruits.

Wow
ho
!
Wow
ho
!
Wow
ho
!
moaned the wind in the chimney.

She kept forming words in the depths of her mind and then rejecting them.

One of these sentences got as far as the tip of her tongue.

“How do you know that
I
shan’t have a dead?” it
protested
. But
that
sentence would have been a lie; a lie to her own heart; for she knew only too well that fate had written her down childless.

“Of course I understand it all perfectly,” Cousin Ann’s voice went on; “if you are not very fond of Rook. In that case you are naturally, as we say, out for your own hand. But what I find
to
puzzling is, how, if you
are
very fond of him, you can have the heart to blight his whole future and doom him to childlessness?
That
is what puzzles me, Netta.”

Still the bedpost kept trying to play its part as the master of the ceremonies. But the convicted woman was not conscious any more of these little things. Slowly, with a thick woolly movement, blind and massive, the great
avalanche
was beginning to bear down upon her. Before the weight of it, before the reverberation of its descending, a landslide seemed to have begun that made the oasis in which she was living, with all its sweet earth and peaceful grass, rock and sway beneath her feet.

With the surface of her mind she was prepared to fight for every inch of her happiness; but, down in her soul, she felt conquered already. Something in herself betrayed her, with a dark subterranean treachery. Something called out: “I yield! I yield!” to the life-destroying whisper of this girl with these beautiful knees.

She found her tongue at last; but what she said was the merest froth of her mind’s turmoil, the merest spindrift of the tragic turn of the tide.

It was a gross thing, too, a venomous, petty, poisonous thing—the thing a jealous chorus girl would say, quarrelling over some beau at the stage door.

“Did you really hurt your knee walking with Rook this morning?”

Cousin Ann lifted her arched eyebrows.

Netta was standing in the middle of the room now, her face a pitiable mirror of contesting feelings.

“Will you please go now?” she stammered helplessly; and then with a faint return of the ugly mood—“that’s to say, if you can walk.”

Cousin Ann rose up from the bed and certainly there was little evidence of lameness as she moved across the room.

“There’s no need for us to quarrel,” she said quietly as she unlocked the door. “I like you, Netta, and I am sorry for you. You’re bound to suffer, whichever way things work out. One can’t carry off a situation like this beyond a certain point; even
you
can’t do that; though I do think you’re rather wonderful!”

She was alone again; alone in that fireless room. The indent left by Lady Ann’s head still remained in the pillow. The coverlet of the bed still showed the imprint of her body.

Netta walked to the window and looked out. The great lime tree was bowing and clutching at space under the wind’s lash. High up in the air dark specks were being lifted and dropped, dropped and lifted, that once were green budding leaves.

There was a soughing noise in the bushes, as if some great invisible animal were panting there; and what she could see of the water meadows beyond the river looked dark and troubled as though under the persecution of some evil power the menace of whose purpose was still obscure.

The woman shivered, but did not leave the window. She found a certain comfort in sharing with so much helplessness and dumbness the concentrated malice of this invisible enemy.

Her nature had a peculiar passivity in it, an almost
voluptuous
inertness; and now, when her whole blind instinct was to put off the moment of thinking, there was a real relief in becoming part of these struggling trees and sullen, persecuted meadows.

The wind did actually seem to take on a palpable shape as she watched, a shape that
was
a shape, though it was chaotic, formless, wavering. And she could not escape the sense that in some definite malignant manner the invisible creature was directing its murderous violence against herself, against this intruder, this invader, this stranger within the gates!

She was still standing at the window when Rook, after a hurried knock, came quickly into the room. She glanced at him for one swift moment and then lifting up her arms, with a swaying staggering lurch forward, she flung herself upon him and clung round his neck.

“I am sorry. I am sorry. I am so sorry!” she moaned. “You
will
forgive me, Rook, my own? I ought not to have behaved like that. I know I ought not. I was mad, just mad!”

Rook answered her appeal with hurried soothing
exclamations
: “It’s all right, little one. It’s all right. It’s absolutely all right. There! There! No, don’t cry,
sweetheart
! I tell you it was nothing. Nothing at all! I’ve quite forgotten it. It’s all over. You are my little Netta again—you are, aren’t you?”

Feeling his arms so firm and tight around her and his lips upon her forehead Netta was sorely tempted to yield to an impassioned fit of desperate sobbing. Her whole nature craved for that relief. But long and bitter experience had taught her that men shrink from these abandonments, shrink from them and grow cold beneath their weight. So with an heroic effort she calmed herself and remained limp and
exhausted
but untrembling, unshaken, within his grasp.