Part 17

After a while they all moved off, as if by an instinctive impulse, away from the harbour mouth and towards the sea-shore. To do this they had to pass a piece of peculiarly desolate ground littered with dead fish, discarded pieces of nets and dried heaps of sun-bleached seaweed. Nance had a moment’s quaint and morbid intimation that the peculiar forlornness of this particular spot gratified in some way the taste of Mrs. Renshaw, for her expression brightened a little and she moved more cheerfully than when under the eyes of the loiterers on the wharf. There were some young women paddling in the sea just at that place and some young men watching them so that Mrs. Renshaw, who with Nance kept in advance of the other two, led the way along the path immediately under the sand-dunes. This was the very spot where, on the day of their first exploration of the Rodmoor coast, they had seen the flowerless leaves of the little plant called the rock-rose. The flowers of this plant, as Nance observed them now, were already faded and withered, but other sea growths met her eye which were not unfamiliar. There were several tufts of grey-leaved sea-pinks and still greyer sea-lavender. There were also some flaccid-stalked, glaucous weeds which she had never noticed before and which seemed in the moist sappy texture of their foliage as though their natural place was rather beneath than above the salt water whose propinquity shaped their form. But what made her pause and stoop down with sudden startled attention, was her first sight of that plant described to her by Mr. Traherne as peculiarly characteristic of the Rodmoor coast. Yes, there it was--the yellow horned poppy! As she bent over it Nance realized how completely right the priest had been in what he said. The thing’s oozy, clammy leaves were of a wonderful bluish tint, a tint that nothing in the world short of the sea itself, could have possibly called into existence. They were spiked and prickly, these leaves, and their shape was clear-edged and threatening, as if modelled in sinister caprice, by some Da Vinci-like Providence, willing enough to startle and shock humanity. But what struck the girl more vividly than either the bluish tint or the threatening spikes were the large, limply-drooping flowers of a pallid sulphurous yellow which the plant displayed. They were flowers that bore but small resemblance to the flowers of other poppies. They had a peculiarly melancholy air, even before they began to fade, an air as though the taste of their petals would produce a sleep of a deeper, more obliterating kind than any “drowsy syrups” or “mandragora” which the sick soul might crave, to “rase out” its troubles.

Mrs. Renshaw smiled as Nance rose from her long scrutiny of this weird plant, a plant that might be imagined “rooting itself at ease on Lethe’s wharf” while the ghost-troops swept by, whimpering and wailing.

“I always like the horned poppy,” she remarked, “it’s different from other flowers. You can’t imagine it growing in a garden, can you? I like that. I like things that are wild--things no one can imprison.”

She sighed heavily when she had said this and, turning her head away as they walked on, looked wearily across the water.

“Bank-holidays are days for the young,” she went on, after a pause. “The poor people look forward to them and I’m glad they do for they have a hard life. But you must have a young heart, Nance, a young heart to enjoy these things. I feel sometimes that we don’t live enough in other people’s happiness but it’s hard to do it when one gets older.”

She was silent again and then, as Nance glanced at her sympathetically, “I like Rodmoor because there are no grand people here and no motor-cars or noisy festivities. It’s a pleasure to see the poor enjoying themselves but the others, they make my head ache! They trouble me. I always think of Sodom and Gomorrah when I see them.”

“I suppose,” murmured the girl, “that they’re human beings and have their feelings, like the rest of us.”

A shadow of almost malignant bitterness crossed Mrs. Renshaw’s face.

“I can’t bear them! I can’t bear them!” she cried fiercely. “Those that laugh shall weep,” she added, looking at her companion’s prettily designed dress.

“Yes, I’m afraid happy people are often hard-hearted,” remarked Nance, anxious if possible to fall in with the other’s mood, but feeling decidedly uneasy. Mrs. Renshaw suddenly changed the conversation.

“I went over to see Rachel,” she said, “because I heard you had left her and were working in the shop.”

She took a deep breath and her voice trembled.

“I think it was wrong of you to leave her,” she went on, “I think it was cruel of you. I know what you will say. I know what all you young people nowadays say about being independent and so forth. But it was wrong all the same, wrong and cruel! Your duty was clearly to your mother’s friend. I suppose,” she added bitterly, “you didn’t like her sadness and loneliness. You wanted more cheerful companionship.”

Nance wondered in her heart whether Mrs. Renshaw’s hostility to the complacent and contented ones of the earth was directed, in this case, against the hard-worked sewing girls or against poor Miss Pontifex and her little garden.

“I did it,” she replied, “for Linda’s sake. She and Miss Doorm didn’t seem happy together.”

As she spoke, she glanced apprehensively round to ascertain how near the others were, but it seemed as though Rachel had resumed her ascendency over the young girl. They appeared to be engaged in absorbing conversation and had stopped side by side, looking at the sea. Mrs. Renshaw turned upon her resentfully, a smouldering fire of anger in her brown eyes.

“Rachel has spoken to me about that,” she said. “She told me you were displeased with her because she encouraged Linda to meet my son. I don’t like this interference with the feelings of people! My son is of an age to choose for himself and so is your sister. Why should you set yourself to come between them? I don’t like such meddling. It’s interfering with Nature!”

Nance stared at her blankly, watching mechanically the feverish way her fingers closed and unclosed, plucking at a stalk of sea-lavender which she had picked.

“But you said--you said--” she protested feebly, “that Mr. Renshaw was not a suitable companion for young girls.”

“I’ve changed my mind since then,” continued the other, “at any rate in this case.”

“Why?” asked Nance hurriedly. “Why have you?”

“Because,” and the lady raised her voice quite loudly, “because he told me himself the other day that it was possible that he would marry before long.”

She glanced triumphantly at Nance. “So you see what you’ve been doing! You’ve been trying to interfere with the one thing I’ve been praying for for years!”

Nance positively gasped at this. Had Brand really said such a thing? Or if he had, was it possible that it was anything but a blind to cover the tracks of his selfishness? But whatever was the reason of the son’s remark it was clear that Nance could not, especially in the woman’s present mood, justify her dark suspicions of him to his mother. So she did nothing but continue to stare, nervously and helplessly, at the stalk which Mrs. Renshaw’s excited fingers were pulling to pieces.

“I know why you’re so opposed to my son,” continued Mrs. Renshaw in a lower and somewhat gentler tone. “It’s because he’s so much older than your sister. But you’re wrong there, Nance. It’s always better for the man to be older than the woman. Tennyson says that very thing, in one of his poems, I think in ‘The Princess.’ He puts it poetically of course, but he must have felt the truth of it very strongly or he wouldn’t have brought it in. Nance, you’ve no idea how I have been praying and longing for Brand to see some one he felt he could marry! I know it’s what he needs to make him happy. That is to say, of course, if the girl is good and gentle and obedient.”

The use of the word “obedient” in this connection was too much for Nance’s nerves. Her feelings towards Mrs. Renshaw were always undergoing rapid and contradictory changes. When she had talked of Smollett and Dickens in their little sitting room the girl felt she could do anything for her, so exquisitely guileless her soul seemed, so spiritual and, as it were, transparent. But at this moment, as she observed her, there was an obstinate, pinched look about her face and a rigid tightening of all its lines. It was an expression that harmonized only too well with her next remark.

“Your setting yourself against my son,” she said, “is only what I expected. Philippa would be just like you if I said anything to her. All you young people are too much for me. You are too much for me. But I hear what you say and go on just the same.”

The look of dogged and inflexible resolution with which she uttered this last sentence contrasted strangely with her frail aspect and her weary drooping frame.

But that phrase about “obedience” still rankled in Nance’s mind, and she could not help saying, “Why is it, Mrs. Renshaw, that you always speak as though all the duty and burden of marriage rested upon the woman? I don’t see why it’s more necessary for her to be good and gentle than it is for the man!”

Her companion’s pallid lips quivered at this into a smile of complicated irony and a strange light came into her hollow eyes.

“Ah, my dear, my dear!” she exclaimed, “you are indeed young yet. When you’re a few years older and have come to know better what the world is like, you will understand the truth of what I say. God has ordered, in his inscrutable wisdom, that there should be a different right and wrong for us women, from what there is for men. It may seem unjust. It may _be_ unjust. We can no more alter it or change it than we can alter or change the shape of our bodies. A woman is _made_ to obey. She finds her happiness in obeying. You young people may say what you please, but any deviation from this rule is contrary to Nature. Even the cleverest people,” she added with a smile, “can’t interfere with Nature without suffering for it.”

Nance felt absolutely nonplussed. The woman’s words fell from her with such force and were uttered with such a melancholy air of finality, that her indignation died down within her like a flame beneath the weight of a rain-soaked garment. Mrs. Renshaw looked sadly over the brightly-rocking expanse of sunlit water, dotted with white sails.

“It may appear to us unjust,” she went on. “It may _be_ unjust. God does not seem in his infinite pleasure to have considered our ideas of justice in making the world. Perhaps if he had there would be no women in the world at all! Ah, Nance, my dear, it’s no use kicking against the pricks. We were made to bear, to endure, to submit, to suffer. Any attempt to escape this great law necessarily ends in misery. Suffering is not the worst evil in the world. Yielding to brutal force is not the worst, either. I sometimes think, from what I’ve observed in my life, that there are depths of horror known to men, depths of horror through which men are driven, compared with which all that _we_ suffer at their hands is paradise!”

Her eyes had so strange and illumined an expression as she uttered these words that Nance could not help shuddering.

“We, too,” she murmured, “fall into depths of horror sometimes and it is men who drive us into them.”

Mrs. Renshaw did not seem to hear her. She went on dreamily.

“We can console ourselves. We have our duties. We have our little things which must be done. God has given to these little things a peculiar consecration. He has touched them with his breath so that they are full of unexpected consolations. There are horizons and vistas in them such as no one who hasn’t experienced what I mean can possibly imagine. They are like tiny ferns or flowers--our ‘little things,’ Nance, growing at the bottom of a precipice.”

The girl could restrain herself no longer.

“I don’t agree with you! I don’t, I don’t!” she cried. “Life is large and infinite and splendid and there are possibilities in it for all of us--for women just as much as men; just, just as much!”

Mrs. Renshaw smiled at her with a look in her face that was half pitiful and half ironical. “You don’t like my talk of ‘little things.’ You want great things. You want Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus! Even your sacrifice--if you _do_ sacrifice yourself--must be striking, stirring, wonderful! Ah, my dear, my dear, wait a little, wait a little. A time will come when you’ll learn what the secret is of a woman’s life on this earth.”

Nance made a desperate gesture of protest. Something treacherous in her own heart seemed to yield to her companion’s words but she struggled vigorously against it.

“What we women have to do,” Mrs. Renshaw continued pitilessly, “is to make some one need us--need us with his whole nature. That is what is meant by loving a man. Everything else is mere passion and tends to misery. The more submissive we are, the more they need us. I tell you, Nance, the deepest instinct in our blood is the instinct to be needed. When a person needs us we love him. Everything else is mere animal instinct and burns itself out.”

Nance fumbled vaguely and helplessly in her mind, as she listened, to get back something of the high, inspiring tone of Mr. Traherne’s mystical doctrine. _That_ had thrilled her and strengthened her, while _this_ flung her into the lowest depths of despondency. Yet, in a certain sense, as she was compelled to admit to herself, there was very little practical difference between the two points of view. It was only that, with Mrs. Renshaw, the whole thing took on a certain desolate and disastrous colour as if high spirits and gaiety and adventurousness were wrong in themselves and as if nothing but what was pitched in a low unhappy key could possibly be the truth of the universe. The girl had a curious feeling, all the while she was speaking, that in some subtle way the unfortunate woman was deriving a morbid pleasure from putting thrilling and exalted things upon a ground that annihilated the emotion of heroism.

“Shall we go down to the sea now, dear?” said Mrs. Renshaw suddenly. “The others will see us and follow.”

They moved together across the clinging sand. When they approached the water’s edge, now deserted of holiday-makers, Nance searched the skyline for any sail that might be the one carrying Sorio and his friends. She made out two or three against the blue distance but it was quite impossible to tell which of these, if any, was the one that bore the man who, according to her companion’s words, would only “need” her if she served him like a slave.

Mrs. Renshaw began picking up shells from the debris-scattered windrow at the edge of the wet tide-mark. As she did this and showed them one by one to Nance, her face once more assumed that clear, transparent look, spiritual beyond description and touched with a childish happiness, which the girl had noticed upon it when she spoke of the books she loved. Could it be that only where religion or the opposite sex were concerned this strange being was diseased and perverted? If so, how dreadful, how cruel, that the two things which were to most people the very mainspring of life were to this unhappy one the deepest causes of wretchedness! Yet Nance was far from satisfied with her reading of the mystery of Mrs. Renshaw. There was something in the woman, in spite of her almost savage outbursts of self-revelation, so aloof, so proud, so reserved that the girl felt only vaguely assured she was on the right track with regard to her. Perhaps, after all, below that tone of self-humiliating sentiment with which she habitually spoke of both God and man, there was some deep and passionate current of feeling, hidden from all the world? Or was she, essentially and in secret truth, cold and hard and pagan and only forcing herself to drink the cup of what she conceived to be Christianity out of a species of half-insane pride? In all her utterances with regard to religion and sex there was, Nance felt, a kind of heavy materiality, as if she got an evil satisfaction in rendering what is usually called “goodness” as colourless and contemptible as possible. But now as she picked up a trumpet-shaped shell from the line of debris and held it up, her eyes liquid with pleasure, to the girl’s view, Nance could not resist the impression that she was in some strange way a creature forced and driven out of her natural element into these obscure perversities.

“I used to paint these shells when I was a girl,” Mrs. Renshaw remarked.

“What colour?” Nance answered, still thinking more of the woman than of her words. Her companion looked at her and burst into quite a merry laugh.

“I don’t mean paint the shell itself,” she said. “You’re not listening to me, Nance. I mean copy it, of course, and paint the drawing. I used to collect sea-weeds too, in those days, and dry them in a book. I have that book somewhere still,” she added, wistfully, “but I don’t know where.”

She had won the girl’s attention completely now. Nance seemed to visualize with a sudden sting of infinite pity the various little relics so entirely dissociated from Rodmoor and its inhabitants which this reserved woman must keep stored up in that gloomy house.

“It’s a funny thing,” Mrs. Renshaw went on, “but I can smell at this moment quite distinctly (I suppose it’s being down here by the sea that makes it come to me) the very scent of that book! The pages used to get stuck together and when I pulled them apart there was always the imprint of the seaweed on the paper. I used to like to see that. It was as though Nature had drawn it.”

“It’s lovely, collecting things,” Nance remarked sympathetically. “I used to collect butterflies when I was a child. Dad used to say I was more like a boy than a girl.”

Mrs. Renshaw glanced at her with a curious look.

“Nance, dear,” she said in a low, trembling voice, “don’t ever get into the habit of trying to be boyish and that sort of thing. Don’t ever do that! The only good women are the women who accept God’s will and bow to his pleasure. Anything else leads to untold wretchedness.”

Nance made no reply to this and they both began searching for more shells among the stranded sea-drift.

Over their heads the sea-gulls whirled with wild disturbed screams. There was only one sail on the horizon now and Nance fixed her thoughts upon it and an immense longing for Adrian surged up in her heart.

Meanwhile, between Linda and Miss Doorm a conversation much more sinister was proceeding. Rachel seemed from their first encounter and as soon as the girl came into contact with her to reassert all her old mastery. She deliberately overcame the frightened child’s instinctive movement to keep pace with the others and held her closely to her side as if by the power of some ancient link between them, too strong to be overcome.

“Let me look at you,” she said as soon as their friends were out of hearing. “Let me look into your eyes, my pretty one!”

She laid one of her gaunt hands on the girl’s shoulder and with the other held up her chin.

“Yes,” she remarked after a long scrutiny during which Linda seemed petrified into a sort of dumb submission, “yes, I can see you’ve struggled against him. I can see you’ve not given up without an effort. That means that you _have_ given up! If you hadn’t fought against him he wouldn’t have followed you. He’s like that. He always _was_ like that.” She removed her hands but kept her eyes fixed gloomily on the girl’s face. “I expect you’re wishing now you’d never seen this place, eh? Aren’t you wishing that? So this is the end of all your selfishness and your vanity? Yes, it’s the end, Linda Herrick. It’s the end.”

She dragged the girl slowly forward along the path. On their right as they advanced, the sun flickered upon the rank grasses which grew intermittently in the soft sand and on their left the glittering sea lay calm and serene under the spacious sky.

Linda felt her feet grow heavy beneath her and her heart sank with a sick misgiving as she saw how far they had permitted the others to outstrip them. Beyond anything else it was the power of cruel memories which held the young girl now so docile, so helpless, in the other’s hands. The old panic-stricken terror which Rachel had the power of exciting in her when a child seemed ineluctable in its endurance. Faintly and feebly in her heart Linda struggled against this spell. She longed to shake herself free and rush desperately in pursuit of the others but her limbs seemed turned to lead and her will seemed paralyzed.

Rachel’s face was white and haggard. She seemed animated by some frenzied impulse--some inward, demoniac force which drove her on. Drops of perspiration stood out upon her forehead and made the grey hair that fell across it moist and clammy under the rim of her dusty black hat. Her clothes, as she held the girl close to her side, threw upon the air a musty, fetid odour.

“Where are your soft ways now?” she went on, “your little clinging ways, your touching little babyish ways? Where are your whims and your fancies? Your caprices and your blushes? Where are your white-faced pretences, and your sham terrors, only put on to make you look sweet?”

She had her hand upon the girl’s arm as she spoke and she tightened her grasp, almost shaking her in her mad malignity.

“Before you were born your mother was afraid of me,” she went on. “Oh, she gained little by cutting me out with her pretty looks! She gained little, Linda Herrick! She dared scarcely look me in the face in those days. She was afraid even to hate me. That is why _you_ are what you are. You’re the child of her terror, Linda Herrick, the child of her terror!”

She paused for a moment while the girl’s breath came in gasps through her white lips as if under the burden of an incubus.

“Listen!” the woman hissed at last, staggering a little and actually leaning against the girl as though the frenzy of her malignity deprived her of her strength. “Listen, Linda. Do you remember what I used to tell you about your father? How in his heart all the time he loved only me? How he would sooner have got rid of your mother than have got rid of me? Do you remember that? Listen, then! There’s something else I must say to you--something that you’ve never guessed, something that you couldn’t guess. When you were--” she stopped, panting heavily and if Linda had not mechanically assisted her she would have fallen. “When you were--when I was--” Her breath seemed to fail her then completely. She put her hand to her side and in spite of the girl’s feeble effort to support her she sank, moaning, to the ground.

Linda looked helplessly round. Nance and Mrs. Renshaw had passed beyond a little promontory of sand-hills and were concealed from view. She knelt down by Rachel’s side. Even then--even when those vindictive dark eyes looked at her without a sign of consciousness, they seemed to hold her with their power. As they remained mute and motionless in this manner, the prostrate woman and the kneeling girl, a faint gust of wind, blowing the sand in a little cloud before it and rustling the leaves of the horned poppies, brought to Linda’s senses an odour of inland fields. She felt a dim return, under this air, of her normal faculties and taking one of the woman’s hands in her own she began gently chafing it. Rachel answered to the touch and a shiver passed through her frame. Then, in a flash, intelligence came back into her eyes and her lips moved. Linda bent lower so as to catch her words. They came brokenly, and in feeble gasps.