Part 13

Baltazar’s expression as he listened to his half-brother’s speech was a palimpsest of conflicting emotions. The look that predominated, however, was the look of a woman under the lash, waiting her hour. He smiled lightly enough and gesticulated with his delicate hand.

“We all have our secret,” he declared gaily. “Brand thinks he knows mine but he’s as far from knowing it as that new moon over there is from knowing the secret of the tide.”

His words caused them to glance at the window. The clouds had vanished and the thin ghostly crescent peered at them from between the curtains.

“The tide obeys it,” he added significantly, “but it keeps its own counsel.”

“And it has,” put in Sorio fiercely, “depths below depths which it were better for no corpse-world to interfere with!”

Dr. Raughty, who had cleared his throat uneasily several times during the last few moments, now called the attention of the company to a scorched moth which, hurt by one of the candles, lay shuddering upon the edge of the table.

“Hasn’t it exquisite markings?” he said, touching the creature with the tip of his forefinger, and bending forward over it like a lover. “It’s a puss-moth! I wish I had my killing-bottle here. I’d keep it for Horace Pod.”

Sorio suddenly leapt from his seat and made a snatch at the moth.

“Shame!” he cried, addressing indiscriminately the Doctor, Horace Pod and the universe. “Poor little thing!” he added, seizing it in his fist and carrying it to the window. When, with some difficulty and many muttered imprecations he had flung it out, “it tickled me,” he remarked gravely. “Moths flutter so in your hand.”

“Most things flutter,” remarked Brand, “when you try to get rid of them. Some of them,” he added in a significant tone, “don’t confine themselves to fluttering.”

The incident of the moth seemed to break up, more than any of the preceding interruptions, the harmony of the evening. Dr. Raughty, looking nervously at Sorio and replacing his pipe in his pocket, announced that he intended to depart. Brand Renshaw rose too and with him, Mr. Traherne.

“May I walk with you a little way?” said the priest.

The master of Oakguard stared at him blankly.

“Of course, of course,” he replied, “but I’m afraid it’ll take you out of your road.”

It was some time before they got clear of the house as Baltazar with a thousand delicate attentions to each of them and all manner of lively speeches, did his best, in the stir of their separation, to smooth over and obliterate from their minds the various little shocks that had ruffled his entertainment. They got away, however, at last and Brand and the priest, bidding the rest good night, took the road to the park. The sky as they entered the park gates was clear and starry and the dark trees of the avenue up which they walked, rose beside them in immovable stillness.

Mr. Traherne, putting his hand into the pocket of his ulster to derive courage from contact with his pet, plunged without preamble into the heart of the perilous subject.

“You may not know, Renshaw,” he said, “that Miss Herrick and her sister are leaving Dyke House and are going to live in the village. Nance has got work at Miss Pontifex’ and Linda is going to play the organ regularly for me. I believe there’s been something--lately”--he hesitated and his voice shook a little but, recovering himself with a tremendous effort, “something,” he went on, “between Linda and yourself. Now, of course, in any other case I should be very reluctant to say anything. Interference in these things is usually both impertinent and useless. But this case is quite different. The girl is a young girl. She has no parents. Her sister is herself quite young and they are both, in a sense, dependent on me as the priest of this place for all the protection I can give. I feel responsible for these girls, Renshaw, responsible for them, and no feelings of a personal kind with regard to any one,” here he squeezed Ricoletto so tightly that the rat emitted a frightened little squeal, “shall interfere with what I feel is my duty. No, hear me out, hear me out, Renshaw!” he continued hurriedly, as his companion began to speak. “The matter is one about which we need not mind being quite open. I want you, in fact, to promise me--to promise me on your word of honour--that you’ll leave this child alone. I don’t know how far things have gone between you. I can’t imagine, it would be shameful to imagine, that it has gone beyond a flirtation. But whatever it has been, it must stop now. It’s only your word of honour I want, nothing but your word of honour, and I can’t believe you’ll hesitate, as a gentleman, to give me that. You’ll give me that, won’t you, Renshaw? Just say yes and the matter’s closed.”

He removed his hand from his pocket and laid it on his companion’s wrist. Brand was sufficiently cool at that moment to remark as an interesting fact that the priest was trembling. Not only was he trembling but as he removed his hat to give further solemnity to his appeal, large drops of perspiration, known only to himself, for darkness dimmed his face, trickled down into his eyes. Brand quietly freed himself and moved back a step.

“I’m not in the least surprised,” he said, “at your speaking to me like this, and strange as it may seem it does not annoy me. In fact it pleases me. I like it. It raises the value of the girl--of Linda, I mean--and it makes me respect you. But if you imagine, my good Mr. Traherne, that I’m going to make any such promise as you describe, you can have no more notion of what I’m like than you have of what Linda’s like. Talk to _her_, Hamish Traherne, talk to her, and see what she says!”

The priest clenched his fingers round the handle of his oak stick. He felt rising in him a tide of natural human anger. Mentally he prayed to his God that he might retain his self-control and not make matters worse by violence.

“If it interests you to know,” Brand continued, “I may tell you that it’s quite possible I shall marry Linda. She attracts me, I confess it freely, more than I could possibly explain to you or to any one. I presume you wouldn’t carry your responsibility so far as to make trouble about my marrying her, eh? But that’s nothing. That’s neither here nor there. Married or unmarried, I do what I please. Do I convey my meaning sufficiently clearly? I--do--what--I--please. Let that be your clue henceforth, Mr. Hamish Traherne, and the clue of everybody else in Rodmoor, in dealing with me. Listen to me, sir. I do you the honour of talking more openly to you to-night than I’m ever likely to talk again. Perhaps you have the idea that I’m a mere commonplace sensualist, snatching at every animal pleasure that comes my way? Perhaps you fancy I’ve a vicious--what do you call it?--‘penchant’--for the seduction of young girls? Let me tell you this, Mr. Hamish, a thing that may somewhat surprise you. I’ve walked these woods till I know every scent in them by night and day--do you catch that fungus-smell now? That’s one of the smells I love best of all!--and in these walks, absolutely alone,--I love being alone!--I’ve faced possibilities of evil--faced them and resisted them, mind you!--compared with which these mere normal sexual lapses we’re talking about are silly child’s play! Linda does me good. Do you hear? She does me good. She saves me from things that never in your wildest dreams you’d suppose any one capable of. Oh, you priests! You priests! You shut yourselves up among your crucifixes and your little books, and meanwhile--beyond your furthest imagination--the great tides of evil sweep backwards and forwards! Listen! I needn’t tell you what that sound is? Yes--you can hear it. In every part of this place you can hear it! I was born to that tune, Traherne, and I shall die to that tune. It’s better than rustling leaves, isn’t it? It’s deeper. It’s the kind of music a man might have in his head when doing something compared with which such little sins as you’re blaming me for are virtues! Did you see that bat? I’ve watched them under these trees from midnight to morning. A bat in the light of dawn is a curious thing to see. Do you like bats, Mr. Traherne, or do you confine yourself to rats?

“Bah! I’m talking like an idiot. But what I want you to understand is this. When you’re dealing with me, you are dealing with some one who’s lost the power of being frightened by words, some one who’s broken the world’s crust and peeped behind it, some one who’s seen the black pools--did you guess there were black pools in this world?--and has seen the red stains in them and who knows what caused those stains! Damn it all--Hamish Traherne--what did you take me for when you talked to me like that? A common, sensual pig? A vulgar seducer of children? A fellow to be frightened back into the fold by talk of honour and the manners of gentlemen? I tell you _I’ve seen bats in the dawn_--and seen them too, with images in my memory that only _that sound_--do you hear it still?--could equal for horror.

“It’s because Linda knows the horror of the sea that I love her. I love to lead her to it, to feel her draw back and not to let her draw back! And she loves me _for the same reason_! That’s a fact, Mr. Hamish, that may be hard for you to realize. Linda and I understand each other. Do you hear that, you lover of rats? We understand each other. She does me good. She distracts me. She keeps those black pools out of my mind. She keeps Philippa’s eyes from following me about. She takes the taste of funguses out of my mouth. She suits me, I tell you! She’s what I need. She’s what I need and must have!

“Bah! I’m chattering like an idiot. I must be drunk. I _am_ drunk. But that’s nothing. That’s one of the vices that are _my_ virtues. I’ll tell you another thing, while I’m about it, Hamish Traherne. You’ve wondered sometimes, I expect, why I’m so good to Baltazar. Quite Christian of me, you’ve thought it, eh? Quite noble and Christian--considering what he is and what I am? That just shows how little you know us, how little you know either of us! Tassar can no more get away from me than I can get away from him. We’re bound together for life, my boy, bound together by what those black pools mean and what _that sound_--you wouldn’t think you could hear it here, would you?--never stops meaning.

“Bah! I’m drunk as a pig to-night! I’ve not talked like this to any one, not for years. Listen, Traherne! You have an ugly face but you’re not a fool. Wasn’t it Saint Augustine who said once that evil was a mere rent in the cloak of goodness? The simple innocent! I tell you, evil goes down to the bottom of life and out beyond! I know that, for I’ve gone with it. _I’ve seen the bats in the dawn._

“Yes, Tassar’s gone far, Hamish Traherne, farther than you guess. Sometimes I think he’s gone farther than _I_ guess. _He_ never talks, you know. You’ll never catch _him_ drunk. Tassar could look the devil in the face, and worse, and keep his pretty head cool!--Oh, damn it all, Traherne, it’s not easy for a person never to open his mouth! But Tassar’s got the secret of that. He must get it from my father. There was a man for you! You wouldn’t have dared to talk to him like this.”

Several times during this long outburst, Mr. Traherne’s fingers had caused pain to Ricoletto. But now he flung out his long arms and clutched Brand fiercely by the shoulders.

“Pray--you poor lost soul,” he shouted, “pray the great God above us to have mercy upon you and have mercy upon us all!”

His arms trembled as he uttered these words and, hardly conscious of what he was doing, he shook the heavy frame of the man before him backwards and forwards as if he had been a child in his hands. There was dead silence for several seconds and, unheeded by either of them, a weasel ran furtively across the path and disappeared among the trees. The damp odours of moss and leaf-mould rose up around them and, between the motionless branches above, the stars shone like pin-pricks through black parchment. Suddenly Brand broke away with a harsh laugh.

“Enough of this!” he cried. “We’ve had enough melodramatic nonsense for one night. You’d better go back to bed, Traherne, or you’ll be oversleeping yourself to-morrow and my mother will miss her matins.”

He held out his hand.

“Good night!--and sleep soundly!” he added, in his accustomed dull, sarcastic tone.

The priest sighed heavily and groped about on the ground for the hat he had dropped. Just as he had secured it and was moving off, Brand called out to him laughingly,

“Don’t you believe a word of what I said just now. I’m not drunk at all. I was only fooling. I’m just a common ruffian who knows a pretty face when he sees it. Talk to Linda about me and see what she says!” He strode off up the avenue and the priest turned heavily on his heel.

XV

BROKEN VOICES

Nance and Linda were not long in growing accustomed to their new mode of life. Nance, after her London experiences, found Miss Pontifex’ little work-room, looking out on a pleasant garden, a place of refuge rather than of irksome labour. The young girls under her charge were good-tempered and docile; and Miss Pontifex herself--an excitable little woman with extravagantly genteel manners, and a large Wedgewood brooch under her chin--seemed to think that the girl’s presence in the establishment would redound immensely to its reputation and distinction.

“I’m a conservative born and bred,” she remarked to Nance, “and I can tell a lady out of a thousand. I won’t say what I might say about the people here. But we know--we know what we think.”

Nance’s intimate knowledge of the more recondite aspects of the trade took an immense load off the little dressmaker’s mind. She had more time to devote to her garden, which was her deepest passion, and it filled her with pride to be able to say to her friends, “Miss Herrick from Dyke House works with me now. Her father was a Captain in the Royal Navy.”

The month of July went by without any further agitating incidents. As far as Nance knew, Brand left Linda in peace, and the young girl, though looking weary and spiritless, seemed to be reconciling herself fairly well to the loss of him and to be deriving definite distraction and satisfaction from her progress in organ-playing. Day by day in the early afternoon, she would cross the bridge, under all changes of the weather, and make her way to the church. Her mornings were spent in household duties, so that her sister might be free to give her whole time to the work in the shop, and in the evenings, when it was pleasant to be out of doors, they both helped Miss Pontifex watering her phloxes and delphiniums.

Nance herself--as July drew to its close and the wheat fields turned yellow--was at once happier and less happy in her relations with Sorio. Her happiness came from the fact that he treated her now more gently and considerately than he had ever done before; her unhappiness from the fact that he had grown more reserved and a queer sort of nervous depression seemed hanging over him. She knew he still saw Philippa, but what the relations between the two were, or how far any lasting friendship had arisen between them, it was impossible to discover. They certainly never met now, under conditions open to the intrusion of Rodmoor scandal.

Nance went more than once, before July was over, to see Rachel Doorm, and the days when these visits occurred were the darkest and saddest of all she passed through during that time. The mistress of Dyke House seemed to be rapidly degenerating. Nance was horrified to find how inert and indifferent to everything she had come to be. The interior of the house was now as dusty and untidy as the garden was desolate, and judging from her manner on the last visit she paid, the girl began to fear she had found the same solace in her loneliness as that which consoled her father.

Nance made one desperate attempt to improve matters. Without saying anything to Miss Doorm, she carried with her to the house one of Mrs. Raps’ own buxom daughters, who was quite prepared, for an infinitesimal compensation, to go every day to help her. But this arrangement collapsed hopelessly. On the third day after her first appearance, the young woman returned to her home, and with indignant tears declared she had been “thrown out of the nasty place.”

One evening at the end of the month, just as the sisters were preparing to go out for a stroll together, their landlady, with much effusion and agitation, ushered in Mrs. Renshaw. Tired with walking, and looking thinner and whiter than usual, she seemed extremely glad to sit down on their little sofa and sip the raspberry vinegar which Nance hastened to prepare. She ate some biscuits, too, as if she were faint for want of food, but all the time she ate there was in her air an apologetic, deprecatory manner, as though eating had been a gross vice or as though never in her life before had she eaten in public. She kept imploring Nance to share the refreshment, and it was not until the girl made at least a pretence of doing so that she seemed to recover her peace of mind.

Her great, hollow, brown eyes kept surveying the little apartment with nervous admiration. “I like it here,” she remarked at last. “I like little rooms much better than large ones.” She picked up from the table a well-worn copy of Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury” and Nance had never seen her face light up so suddenly as when, turning the pages at random, she chanced upon Keats’ “Ode to Autumn.” “I know that by heart,” she said, “every word of it. I used to teach it to Philippa. You’ve no idea how nicely she used to say it. But she doesn’t care for poetry any more. She reads more learned books, more clever books now. She’s got beyond me. Both my children have got beyond me.” She sighed heavily and Nance, with a sense of horrible pity, seemed to visualize her--happy in little rooms and with little anthologies of old-world verse--condemned to the devastating isolation of Oakguard.

“I see you’ve got ‘The Bride of Lammermoor’ up there,” she remarked presently, and rising impetuously from her seat on the sofa, she took the book in her hands. Nance never forgot the way she touched it, or the infinite softness that came into her eyes as she murmured, “Poor Lucy! Poor Lucy!” and began turning the pages.

Suddenly another book caught her attention and she took down “Humphrey Clinker” from the shelf. “Oh!” she cried, a faint flush coming into her sunken cheeks, “I haven’t seen that book for years and years. I used to read it before I was married. I think Smollett was a very great writer, don’t you? But I suppose young people nowadays find him too simple for their taste. That poor dear Mr. Bramble! And all that part about Tabitha, too! I seem to remember it all. I believe Dickens used to like Smollett. At least, I think I read somewhere that he did. I expect he liked that wonderful mixture of humour and pathos, though of course, when it comes to that, I suppose none of them can equal Dickens himself.”

As Mrs. Renshaw uttered these words and caressed the tattered volume she held as if it had been made of pure gold, her face became irradiated with a look of such innocent and guileless spirituality, that Nance, in a hurried act of mental contrition, wiped out of her memory every moment when she had not loved her. “What she must suffer!” the girl said to herself as she watched her. “What she must _have_ suffered--with those people in that great house.”

Mrs. Renshaw sighed as she replaced the book in the shelf. “Writers seem to have got so clever in these last years,” she said plaintively. “They use so many long words. I wonder where they get them from--out of dictionaries, do you think?--and they hurt me, they hurt me, by the way they speak of our beloved religion. They can’t _all_ of them be great philosophers like Spinoza and Schopenhauer, can they? They can’t all of them be going to give the world new and comforting thoughts? I don’t like their sharp, snappy, sarcastic tone. And oh, Nance dear!”--she returned to her seat on the sofa--“I can’t bear their slang! Why is it that they feel they must use so much slang, do you think? I suppose they want to make their books seem real, but _I_ don’t hear real people talking like that. But perhaps it comes from America. American writers seem extraordinarily clever, and American dictionaries--for Dr. Raughty showed me one--seem much bigger than ours.”

She was silent for a while and then, looking gently at Linda, “I think it’s wonderful, dear, how well you play now. I thought last Sunday evening you played the hymns better than I’ve ever heard them! But they were beautiful hymns, weren’t they? That last one was my favourite of all.”

Once more she was silent, and Nance seemed to catch her lips moving, as she fixed her great sorrowful eyes upon the book-shelf, and began slowly pulling on her gloves.

“I must be going now,” she said, with a little sigh. “I thank you for the raspberry vinegar and the biscuits. I think I was tired. I didn’t sleep very well last night. Good-bye, dears. No, don’t, please, come down. I can let myself out. It’s a lovely evening, isn’t it, and the poppies in the cornfields are quite red now. I can see a big patch of them from our terrace, just across the river. Poppies always make me think of the days when I was a young girl. We used to think a lot of them then. We used to make fairies out of them.”

Nance insisted on seeing her into the street. When she entered the room again, she was not altogether surprised to find Linda convulsed with sobs. “I can’t--I can’t help it,” gasped the young girl. “She’s too pitiful. She’s too sad. You feel you want to hug her and hug her, but you’re afraid even to touch her hand!” She made an effort to recover herself, and then, with the tears still on her cheeks, “Nance dear,” she said solemnly, “I don’t believe she’ll live to the end of this year. I believe, one of these days, when the Autumn comes, we shall hear she’s been found dead in her bed. Nance, listen!”--and the young girl’s voice became awe-struck and very solemn--“won’t it be dreadful for _those two_, over there, when they find her like that, and feel how little they’ve done to make her happy? Can’t you imagine it, Nance? The wind wailing and wailing round that house, and she lying there all white and dreadful--and Philippa with a candle standing over her--”

“Why do you say ‘with a candle’?” said Nance brusquely. “You’re talking wildly and exaggerating everything. If they found her in the morning, like that, Philippa wouldn’t come with a candle.”

Linda stared dreamily out of the window. “No, I suppose not,” she said, “and yet I can’t see it without Philippa holding a candle. And there’s something else I see, too,” she added in a lower voice.

“I don’t want--” Nance began and then, more gently, “_What_ else, you silly child?”

“Philippa’s red lips,” she murmured softly, “red as if she’d put rouge on them. Do you think she ever does put rouge on them? That’s, I suppose, what made me think of the candle. I seemed to see it flickering against her mouth. Oh, I’m silly--I’m silly, I know, but I couldn’t help seeing it like that--her lips, I mean.”

“You’re morbid to-day, Linda,” said Nance abruptly. “Well? Shall we go to the garden? I feel as though carrying watering-pots and doing weeding will be good for both of us.”

While this conversation was going on between the sisters in their High Street lodging, Sorio and Baltazar were seated together on a bench by the harbour’s side. The tide was flowing in and cool sea-breaths, mixed with the odour of tar and paint and fisherman’s tobacco, floated in upon them as they talked.