Ducdame (9 page)

Toom! Toom! Toom!

T
HE black frost prayed for by Rook came at last. It came a few days before Christmas, and on the morning of Christmas Eve it held all Frome-side in stark iron-bound rigidity.

The long-drawn-out dissolution of the leaves was over now. Except for a few holly bushes on the Tollminster Road and the line of Scotch firs on Heron’s Ridge it might have been supposed that the whole phenomenon of foliage, of
umbrageousness
, had never existed upon the planet.

Brown and gray, gray and brown, the bare bushes, the bare branches, rose abruptly from the naked frost-bitten soil. In holes, in crevices, in rabbit burrows, under tree roots, in the bottom of ponds, in the minute tunnels of lobworms, certain shapeless nonentities that once vibrated to sun and moon and all the winds lay hidden, forgotten, annihilated, done for.

To any human being who loved form better than colour in material things the effect of this change amounted to positive ecstasy. Such an one was Rook; and the pleasure which he enjoyed hour by hour during these iron-bound days was
b
eyond
description.

An essential puritanism in his nature answered exultantly to this stark bleak time. To see the silhouette of the world gray upon gray; to see the stiff, constricted, sombre mornings pass abruptly into the space-dark, wind-bitten, frozen
evenings
; to see the hours between eleven o’clock and three o’clock blotted out, as it were, from the diurnal calendar—all this was like a deep, silent, magical satisfaction to his whole nature.

He was so happy that his happiness became a mesmeric tyranny over those who surrounded him. He seemed able to lift his hand against the very march of events; to keep fate itself petrified, immobile, suspended; harmless as the icicles that hung above the water under Frome Bridge.

He was especially happy that morning of Christmas Eve. He had had a long, shamelessly candid conversation with Lexie the night before, and the savour of Lexie’s cynical sagacity was sweetening the taste of his early breakfast as he sat with Cousin Ann and Netta drinking cup after cup of tea and watching the reddening logs.

It was so dark that they had candles on the table; and the flames of these candles increased Rook’s happiness, both by the way they drew their purity from the frost-bitten air and by something almost mystical in their quivering up-burning.

Netta, too, for some secret reason of her own, seemed in unnaturally high spirits. From where she was sitting she looked straight into the eyes of the melancholy cavalier; and if ever any particular atmospheric condition lent itself to the inner soul of a picture, this candle-lighted refuge from the black frost was the dedicated background for that of Sir Robert Ashover.

Cousin Ann was less in harmony with herself. She talked graciously enough. She kept her head. But her gaiety was of a conventional, external kind: a laughing curve here of her fine lips; a seductive glance there of her gray eyes; and all the while a little puckered frown that twitched and deepened between her arched eyebrows! She had, as King Lear would say, her “frontlet on.”

If the mute gaze of the sad Sir Robert kept murmuring “a brave wench! a brave wench!” to the ex-actress from Bristol, something in the nerves of Cousin Ann responded to a chill of absolute isolation. She felt herself to be cut off from every support, human or inhuman. The frost had so petrified the rich life saps of the countryside, those sweet,
rank, procreative forces that usually sustained her, that she had the sense of being separated from her gods by a glacial barrier.

Not that she relented in her purpose or relinquished one jot of her resolution. She continued to “steer right onward.” But the mood that upheld her was a thing of blind human obstinacy.

As the hours drew on toward the birth of Christ the earth constricted itself in its primordial, inert malice; and against this tightening of brute matter round about her, the heart of the young girl hardened itself within itself, as if beneath bands of triple steel.

But even as this very thing went on, Cousin Ann’s manner toward Rook became more coaxing and more provocative; her manner toward Netta more intimate and more disarming.

It was this exuberance in her that by degrees acted like an irritant upon the man’s nerves and impinged upon his happiness. Something radiated from the girl that was alien to the temper of the day; alien to the frozen starkness in which he delighted, alien to that corpse-like rigidity that must be broken by a power beyond nature or not broken at all!

The atmosphere round their three heads, as they sat
beneath
the flickering candles listening to Lady Ann’s chatter, began to grow intolerable to Rook. The very tingling in his blood, due to the electric contest going on between the
burning
logs inside and the frost outside, increased this feeling.

Finally he could endure the sound of that rich young voice no longer. He rose from the table abruptly, almost rudely, and muttering something about “giving Lion a run,” went out into the hall.

No sooner was the door shut behind him than Netta also rose as if to follow him; but Cousin Ann laid her hand on Netta’s arm and pulled her back into her chair.

The younger woman’s heart was beating violently at that moment and a sort of dizziness like that which she felt on the
hunting field when her horse approached an impossible jump made Netta’s figure seem dim and wavering.

Having got her antagonist there before her, resigned and patient, it seemed as if the grand diplomatic stroke she had been meditating was infinitely more difficult than she had expected. The way, at that juncture, she clasped and
unclasped
her fingers may have reproduced on a smaller stage the very gesture with which her notorious great-grandfather, Lord Harry Poynings, had persuaded a crown prince to
renounce
his birthright.

“He
is
a dear, isn’t he?” she murmured, in an impulsive tone which seemed signalling for an exchange of confidences. “There he goes, banging the kitchen door! Have you noticed how he always goes out through the kitchen? It’s an old instinct, I expect. His father used to go out that way. He kept his guns there and used to meet the gamekeeper there. It
would
seem a pity, wouldn’t it, Netta, if all these old ways died out? And of course they
will
die out if Rook doesn’t marry.”

The ex-actress did not wince. Her gaze remained fixed upon the melancholy face in the gilt frame. “Brave wench! Brave wench!” those sympathetic eyes seemed reiterating. But Netta stared back sadly enough at that sorrowful
countenance
.

An immense wave of weariness and disillusionment swept over her. Her exalted mood wilted and sank. The
situation
had been hard enough to bear when she first came to Ashover. Cousin Ann’s appearance on the scene had relieved her from a tension that was becoming well-nigh intolerable. But now that her friendly rescuer had joined forces with the enemy she felt that the powers against her were more than she had strength to resist.

She could have resisted them, perhaps—for she was not devoid of the kind of stubbornness that passive natures of her quality possess—if it had not been for this fatal doubt in
her own heart, this doubt which the blind humility of her love for Rook kept feeding with a sweet poison.

That love had assumed during these last days the form of a vague excited impulse, leading her she knew not where; ruffling the quiet of her mind with all manner of wild and wavering projects. She was only faintly affected by this matter of the Ashovers and their threatened extinction. The clamouring shadows from that crowded chancel might have beaten at her windows night by night and found her
impervious
to their entreaty. It was with Rook, and Rook only, she was concerned; and the gist of the excitement that had buoyed her up of late had been a desire to do something, something unexpected and new, that would make him know her as he had never known her before.

“If Rook
did
marry,” Cousin Ann continued, “there’s no earthly reason why he shouldn’t go on taking care of you, Netta. You and he could find some delicious little place to hide away in; somewhere where you’d be quite free from the sort of thing that annoys you here.”

Netta heard these words as if they were spoken in a dream. She withdrew her eyes from Sir Robert’s face and let them rest upon her own hands folded tightly upon her lap.

“You
do
see what I mean?” went on the diplomatic voice. “Once get Rook safely married—married to anybody, Netta—to anybody!—and you and he need not be really
separated
.”

She stretched out her arm and extinguished one of the candles which had begun guttering and hissing. She did this quite casually with her finger and thumb; and Netta could not help feeling as if she herself were that quickly despatched flame.

“Heavens, yes!” cried Lady Ann. “I can see you and me now, gossiping round some lovely little fire in Chelsea or Bloomsbury!”

Netta lifted her head at this.

“And the wife, too?” she said, with the shadow of a smile.

Ann received the retort in the spirit of a master fencer
taking
a well-directed thrust.

“Oh, the wife! Well! not quite
that,
Netta. Though these silly old embarrassments are fast breaking up. But, no! Not the wife, too, Netta. We’ll leave
her
to the happy old lady upstairs. And we’ll share Rook between us—as we’re sharing him now.”

The tone in which Cousin Ann spoke of “the wife” was really in the great manner of diplomatic badinage. It pulled Netta across some intimate threshold toward herself and thrust this poor imaginary lady into the outer darkness of conventional unimportance.

“The wife’s affair,” the girl continued, with a richly toned youthful chuckle, “will be to produce little Ashovers!
Beyond
that
there’s no need for any pathetic heroics,
I
should treat Rook just as I’ve always treated him, if he had a dozen wives!”

Netta looked past Cousin Ann’s flushed cheeks, past the three still burning candles, to the gray square of the one
unfrozen
mullioned window. The naked boughs of the lime tree outside made a tracery of extraordinary beauty against this pane. And this tracery seemed to be actually reproduced in the mysterious frost marks which covered all the other windows with a lacework filigree.

It was as if that bitter weather had been an old German woodcarver, from Nuremberg or Rothenburg, outlining with his bony knuckles and iron tool a convoluted image of the very platonic “soul” or spiritual “eidolon” of some
frost-benumbed
growth of the Black Forest.

It was the impression she got from those mysterious frost marks and those knotted twigs, an old buried impression leaping suddenly into life, that created the resignation of her tone in what came next.

“Tell me what to do then—tell me—what to do—and I will do it!”

The words might have come from the clock above the chimneypiece, from the Cavalier’s picture, from the ghost of the tree itself, so stern and faint and impersonal did they sound as they floated over the empty cups and over the charred logs.

Lady Ann heard these words with every sense she
possessed
. She heard them as a prick-eared fox might have heard the rustle of a plump guinea fowl settling down to sleep in a blackthorn hedge. She heard them with such a thrill of triumph that she rose instinctively to her feet. Whatever may have been the emotion of her great-
grandfather
when his royal victim capitulated it could hardly have surpassed what she felt just then.

The incredible good luck of this unexpected victory fairly took her breath away.

“You
will
give up? You
will?”

Just for one flickering second there was a vibration in the air about them as if the excited girl were actually going to bend down and kiss her conquered antagonist.

But there must have been something in Netta’s face that nipped in the bud any gesture of that sort.

The woman seemed to be collecting her strength very much as a person who had lost a lot of blood might weakly try to get up from the ground.

“Don’t go yet,” she murmured, misunderstanding Ann’s restlessness. “Don’t go away yet. It isn’t as simple as you think. I must tell you something.”

Cousin Ann moved across to the fireplace and relieved her feelings by striking one of the half-burnt logs a series of violent blows with the poker.

Returning to her seat she flung her plate and cup aside with a gesture more like that of a man than a woman and hurriedly lit another cigarette.

What she craved for at that moment was violent physical exertion. Her thoughts instinctively leaped from one
blood-stirring
activity to another. She saw the little white “scuts” of vanishing rabbits as she pursued them with her dog. She felt the blue-black ice crack beneath her feet as she skated over the Tollminster mill pond. She felt the kick of the gun against her shoulder as she shot wild duck with her father on Forley Marsh.

She would have liked to put the unhappy and wounded Netta “out of her pain” as she would have done to any other flying creature. She had “brought her down,” But that was no reason why she should not treat her in a sporting manner. She wished she could finish her off as she would a moor hen dragged to her feet by Lion—wring her neck quickly and kindly, and then swing on over the frozen fields!

“Not as simple as I think?” she enquired brusquely. “It seems simple enough to me.”

Netta appeared still to be struggling with a profound interior lassitude, as if out of the channel of some cut vein her blood was making a crimson pool on the floor. She uttered a little clicking sound in her throat. Then she spoke, exaggerating the genteel pronunciation of the words, as if what would really have relieved her feelings would have been to talk like a Portsmouth barmaid.

“One finds it difficult sometimes to make a person agree, you know, to accept one’s decision. I
have
suggested the very thing you are now saying. I have
begged
Rook to take a room for me in Tollminster or Bristol. I have begged him not to let me be a drag on his life. I have told him I would perfectly understand his marrying; that I thought he
ought
to marry. I have said all those things to him, Lady Ann.”