Part 26

“I’m surprised,” she said, “to hear you speak of love. I thought you considered all that sort of thing sentimental and idiotic.”

Philippa’s hand went up in a quick and desperate gesture, almost an imploring one.

“Miss Herrick,” she whispered in a very low and very clear tone, “you needn’t do that. You needn’t say those things. You needn’t hurt me more than is necessary.”

“Come away, Nance. Oh, please come away and leave her!” interjected Linda.

“Miss Herrick, listen to me one moment!” Philippa continued, speaking so low as almost to be inaudible. “I have something to ask of you, something that you can do for me. It isn’t very much. It isn’t anything that you need suspect. It is a little thing. It’s nothing you could possibly mind.”

“Don’t listen to her, Nance,” cried Linda again. “Don’t listen to her.”

Philippa’s voice trembled as she went on, “I beg you, I beg you on my knees to hear me. We two may never meet again after this. Nance Herrick, will you, will you let me speak?”

Linda leapt forward. She was shaking from head to foot with fear and anger. “No,” she cried, “she shall not listen to you. She shall not, she shall not.”

Nance hesitated, weary and sick at heart. She had so hoped and prayed that all these lacerating contests were over and done with.

Finally she said, “I think you must see, you must feel, that between you and me there can be nothing--nothing more--nothing further. I think you’ll be wise, I think you’ll recognize it afterwards, to let me go now, to let me go and leave us alone.” As she spoke she drew away from her and put her arm round Linda’s waist. “In any case,” she added, “I can’t possibly hear you before this child. Perhaps, but I can’t promise anything, but perhaps, some other day, when I’m by myself.”

She gave one sad, half-sympathetic, half-reproachful glance, at the frail shadowy figure standing mute and silent; and then turning quickly, let herself be led away.

Linda swung round when they were some few paces away. “She’ll never listen to you!” She called out, in a shrill vibrating voice, “I won’t ever let her listen to you.”

The growing darkness, made thicker by the river-mists, closed in between them, and in a brief while their very footsteps ceased to be heard. Philippa was left alone. She looked round her. On the fen side of the pathway there was nothing but a thick fluctuating shadow, out of which the forms of a few pollard-willows rose like panic-stricken ghosts. On the river itself there shimmered at intervals a faint whitish gleam as if some lingering relics of the vanished day, slow in their drowning, struggled to rise to the surface.

She moved back again to the place where she had been standing at the edge of the weir. Leaning upon the time-worn plank rotten with autumn rains, she gazed down into the dense blackness beneath. Nothing could be seen but darkness. She might have been looking down into some unfathomable pit, leading to the caverns of the mid-earth.

A deathly cold wave of damp air met her face as she leaned over the plank, and a hollow gurgling roar, from the heavy volume of water swirling in the darkness, rose to her ears. She could smell the unseen water; and the smell of it was like the smell of dead black leaves plucked forth from a rain pool in the heart of a forest.

As she leaned forward with her soft breast pressing against the wooden bar and her long slender fingers clutching its edge, a sinister line of poetry, picked up somewhere--she could not recall where--came into her mind, and she found her lips mechanically echoing it. “Like a wolf, sucked under a weir,” the line ran, and over and over again she repeated those words.

Meanwhile Nance, as they returned across the bridge, did her best to soothe and quiet her sister. The sudden appearance of Philippa seemed to have thrown the girl into a paroxysm of frenzy. “Oh, how I hate her!” she kept crying out, “oh, how I loathe and hate her!”

Nance was perplexed and bewildered by Linda’s mood. Never had she known the girl to give way to feelings of this sort. When at last she got her into their house, and had seen her take off her things and begin tidying herself up for their evening meal quite in her accustomed way, she asked her point-blank what was the matter, and why to-day, on this twenty-eighth of October, she had suddenly grown different from her ordinary self.

Linda, standing with bare arms by the mirror and passing a comb through her heavy hair, turned almost fiercely round.

“Do you want to know? Do you really want to know?” she cried, throwing back her head and holding the hair back with her hands. “It’s because of Philippa that _he_ has deserted me! It’s because of Philippa that he hasn’t seen me nor spoken to me for a whole month! It’s because of Philippa that he won’t answer my letters and won’t meet me anywhere! It’s because of Philippa that now--now when I most want him”--and she threw the comb down and flung herself on her bed--“he refuses to come to me or to speak a word.”

“How do you know it’s because of Philippa?” Nance asked, distressed beyond words to find that in spite of all her efforts Linda was still as obsessed by Brand as ever before.

“I know _from him_,” the girl replied. “You needn’t ask me any more. She’s got power over him, and she uses it against me. If it wasn’t for her he’d have married me before now.” She sat up on the edge of her bed and looked woefully at her sister with large sunken eyes. “Yes,” she went on, “if it wasn’t for her he’d marry me now--to-day--and, oh, Nance, I want him so! I want him so!”

Nance felt an oppressive weight of miserable helplessness in the presence of this heart-stricken cry. As she looked round the room and saw her various preparations for leaving it and for securing the happiness of her own love, she felt as though in some subtle way she had once more betrayed the unhappy child. She knew herself, only too well, what that famished and starving longing is--that cry of the flesh and blood, and the heart and the spirit, for what the eternal destinies have put out of our reach!

And she could do nothing to help her. What _could_ she do? Now for the first time in her life, as she looked at that lamentable youthful figure, dumbly pleading with her for some kind of miracle, Nance was conscious of a vague unformulated indignation against the whole system of things that rendered this sort of suffering possible. If only _she_ were a powerful and a tender deity, how she would hasten to end this whole business of sex-life which made existence so intolerable! Why could not people be born into the world like trees or plants? And being born, why could not love instinctively create the answering passion it craved, and not be left to beat itself against cruel walls, after scorching itself in the irresistible flame?

“Nance!” said the young girl suddenly. “Nance! Come here. Come over to me. I want to tell you something.”

The elder sister obeyed. It was not long--for hard though it may be to break silence, these things are quickly spoken--before she knew the worst. Linda, with her arms clutched tightly round her, and her face hidden, confessed that she was with child.

Nance leapt to her feet. “I’ll go to him,” she cried, “I’ll go to him at once! Of course he must marry you now. He must! He must! I’ll go to him. I’ll go to Hamish. I’ll go to Adrian--to Fingal! He _must_ marry you, Linda. Don’t cry, little one. I’ll make it all right. It _shall_ be all right! I’ll go to him this very evening.”

A faint flush appeared in Linda’s pale cheeks and a glimmer of hope in her eyes. “Do you think, possibly, that there’s any chance? _Can_ there be any chance? But no, no, darling, I know there’s none--I know there’s none.”

“What makes you so sure, Linda?” asked Nance, rapidly changing her dress, and as she did so pouring herself out a glass of milk.

“It’s Philippa,” murmured the other in a low voice. “Oh, how I hate her! How I hate her!” she continued, in a sort of moaning refrain, twisting her long hair between her fingers and tying the ends of it into a little knot.

“Well, I’m off, my dear,” cried Nance at length, finishing her glass of milk and adjusting her hat-pins. “I’m going straight to find him. I may pick up Adrian on the way, or I may not. It rather depends. And I _may_ have a word or two with Philippa. The chances are that I shall overtake her if I go now. She can’t have waited much longer down by the river.”

Linda rushed up to her and clasped her in her arms. “My own darling!” she murmured, “how good you are to me--how good you are! Do you know, I was _afraid_ to tell you this--afraid that you’d be angry and ashamed and not speak to me for days. But, oh, Nance, I do love him so much! I love him more than my life--more than my life _even now_!”

Nance kissed her tenderly. “Make yourself some tea, my darling, won’t you? We’ll have supper whenever I come back, and that’ll be--I hope--with good news for you! Good-bye, my sweetheart! Say your prayers for me, and don’t be frightened however late I am. And have a good tea!”

She kissed her again, and with a final wave of the hand and an encouraging smile, she left the room and ran down the stairs. She walked slowly to the top of the street, her head bent, wondering in her mind whether she should ask Adrian to go with her to the Renshaws’ or whether she should go alone.

The question was decided for her. As she emerged on the green she suddenly came upon Sorio himself, standing side by side with Philippa. They both turned quickly as, in the flare of a wind-blown lamp, they perceived her approach. They turned and awaited her without a word.

Without a word, too--and in that slow dreamlike manner which human beings assume at certain crises in their lives, when fate like a palpable presence among them takes their movements into its own hand--they moved off, all three together, in the direction of the park gates. Not a word did any of them utter, till, having passed the gates, they were quite far advanced along that dark and lonely avenue.

Then Philippa broke the silence. “I can say to her, Adrian, what I’ve just said to you--mayn’t I?”

In the thick darkness, full of the heavy smell of rain-soaked leaves, Sorio walked between them. Nance’s hand was already resting upon his arm, and now, as she spoke, Philippa’s fingers searched for his, and took them in her own and held them feverishly.

“You can say what you please, Phil,” he muttered, “but you’ll see what she answers--just what I told you just now.”

Their tone of intimate association stabbed like a knife at the heart of Nance. A moment ago--in fact, ever since she had left her by the weir--she had been feeling less antagonistic and more pitiful towards her vanquished rival. But this pronoun “she” applied mutually by them to herself, seemed to push her back--back and away--outside the circle of some mysterious understanding between the two. Her heart hardened fiercely. Was this girl still possessed of some unknown menacing power?

“What I asked Adrian,” said Philippa quietly, while the pressure of her burning fingers within the man’s hand indicated the strain of this quietness, “was whether you would be generous and noble enough to give him up to me for his last free day--the last day before you’re married. Would you be large-hearted enough for that?”

“What do you mean--‘give him up’ to you?” murmured Nance.

Philippa burst in a shrill unearthly laugh. “Oh, you needn’t be frightened!” she exclaimed. “You needn’t be jealous. I only mean let me go with him, for the whole day, a long walk--you know--or something like that--perhaps a row up the river. It doesn’t matter what, as long as I feel that that day is _my_ day, my day _with him_--the last, and the longest!”

She was silent, feverish, her fingers twining and twisting themselves round her companion’s, and her breath coming in quick gasps. Nance was silent also, and they all three moved forward through the heavy fragrant darkness.

“You two seem to have settled it between yourselves definitely enough,” Nance remarked at last. “I don’t really see why you need bring me into it at all. Adrian is, of course, entirely free to do what he likes. I don’t see what I have to do with it!”

Philippa’s hot fingers closed tightly upon Sorio’s as she received this rebuff. “You see!” she murmured in a tone that bit into Nance’s flesh like the tooth of an adder. “You see, Adriano!” She shrugged her shoulders and gave a low vindictive laugh. “She’s a thorough woman,” she added with stinging emphasis. “She’s what my mother would call a sweet, tender, sensitive girl. But we mustn’t expect too much from her, Adrian, must we? I mean in the way of generosity.”

Nance withdrew her hand from the arm of her betrothed and they all three walked on in silence.

“You see what you’re in for, my friend,” Philippa began again. “Once married it’ll be always like this. That is what you seem unable to realize. It’s a mistake, as I’ve often said, this mixing of classes.”

Nance could no longer restrain herself. “May I ask what you mean by that last remark?” she whispered in a low voice.

Philippa laughed lightly. “It doesn’t need much explanation,” she replied. “Adrian is, of course, of very ancient blood, and you--well, you betray yourself naturally by this lack of nobility, this common middle-class jealousy!”

Nance turned fiercely upon them, and clutching Sorio’s arm spoke loudly and passionately. “And _you_--what are _you_, who, like a girl of the streets, are ready to pick up what you can of a man’s attentions and attract him with mere morbid physical attraction? _You_--what are _you_, who, as you say yourself, are ready to _share_ a man with some one else? Do you call _that_ a sign of good-breeding?”

Philippa laughed again. “It’s a sign at any rate of being free from that stupid, stuffy, bourgeois respectability, which Adrian is going to get a taste of now! That very sneer of yours--‘a girl of the streets’--shows the class to which you belong, Nance Herrick! We don’t say those things. It’s what one hears among tradespeople.”

Nance’s fingers almost hurt Sorio’s arms as she tightened her hold upon him. “It’s better than being what _you_ are, Philippa Renshaw,” she burst out. “It’s better than deliberately helping your brother to ruin innocent young girls--yes, and taking pleasure in seeing him ruining them--and then taunting them cruelly in their shame, and holding him back from doing them justice! It’s better than that, Philippa Renshaw, though it _may_ be what most simple-minded decent-hearted women feel. It’s better than being reduced by blind passion to have to come to another woman and beg her on your knees for a ‘last day’ as you call it! It’s better than _that_--though it _may_ be what ordinary unintellectual people feel!”

Philippa’s fingers grew suddenly numb and stiff in Sorio’s grasp. “Do you know,” she murmured, “you ‘decent-feeling’ woman--if that’s what you call yourself--that a couple of hours ago, when you left me on the river bank, I was within an ace of drowning myself? I suppose ‘decent-feeling’ women never run such a risk! They leave that to ‘street-girls’ and--and--and to us others!”

Nance turned to Sorio. “So she’s been telling you that she was thinking of drowning herself? I thought it was something of that kind! And I suppose you believed her. I suppose you always believe her!”

“And he always believes _you_!” Philippa cried. “Yes, he’s always deceived--the easy fool--by your womanly sensitive ways and your touching refinement! It’s women like you, without intelligence and without imagination, who are the ruin of men of genius. A lot _you_ care for his work! A lot _you_ understand of his thoughts! Oh, yes, you may get him, and cuddle him, and spoil him, but, when it comes to the point, what _you_ are to him is a mere domestic drudge! And not only a drudge, you’re a drag, a burden, a dead-weight! A mere mass of ‘decent-feeling’ womanliness--weighing him down. He’ll never be able to write another line when once you’ve really got hold of him!”

Nance had her answer to this. “I’d sooner he never _did_ write another line,” she cried, “and remain in his sober senses, than be left to _your_ influence, and be driven mad by you--you and your diseased, morbid, wicked imagination!”

Their two voices, rising and falling in a lamentable litany of elemental antagonism--antagonism cruel as life and deeper than death--floated about Sorio’s head, in that perfumed darkness, like opposing streams of poison. It was only that he himself, harassed by long irritating debates with Baltazar, was too troubled, too obsessed by a thousand agitating doubts, to have the energy or the spirit to bring the thing to an end, or he could not have endured it up to this point. With his nerves shaken by Baltazar’s corrosive arts, and the weight of those rain-heavy trees and thick darkness all around him, he felt as if he were in some kind of trance, and were withheld by a paralysing interdict from lifting a finger. There came to him a sort of half-savage, half-humorous remembrance of a conversation he had once had with some one or other--his mind was too confused to recall the occasion--in which he had upheld the idealistic theory of the arrival of a day when sex jealousy would disappear from the earth.

But as the girls continued to outrage each other’s most secret feelings, each unconsciously quickening her pace as she poured forth her taunts, and both dragging Sorio forward with them, the feeling grew upon him that he was watching some deep cosmic struggle, that was, in its way, as inhuman and elemental as a conflict between wind and water. With this idea lodged in his brain, he began to derive a certain wild and fantastic pleasure from the way they lacerated one another. There was no coxcombry in this. He was far too wrought-upon and shaken in his mind. But there was a certain grim exultant enjoyment, as if he were, at that moment, permitted a passing glimpse into some dark forbidden “cellarage” of Nature, where the primordial elements clash together in eternal conflict.

Inspired by this strange mood, he returned the pressure of Philippa’s fingers, and entwined his arm round the trembling form of his betrothed, drawing both the girls closer towards him, and, in consequence, closer towards one another.

They continued their merciless encounter, almost unconscious, it seemed, of the presence of the man who was the cause of it, and without strength left to resist the force with which he was gradually drawing them together.

Suddenly the wind, which had dropped a little during the previous hour, rose again in a violent and furious gust. It tore at the dark branches above their heads and went moaning and wailing through the thickets on either side of them. Drops of rain, held in suspension by the thicker leaves, splashed suddenly upon their faces, and from the far distance, with a long-drawn ominous muttering, that seemed to come from some unknown region of flight and disaster, the sound of thunder came to their ears.

Sorio dropped Philippa’s hand and embracing her tightly, drew her, too, closely towards him. Thus interlocked by the man’s arms, all three of them staggered forward together, lashed by the wind and surrounded by vague wood-noises that rose and fell mysteriously in the impenetrable darkness.

The powers of the earth seemed let loose, and strange magnetic currents in fierce antipodal conflict, surged about them, and tugged and pulled at their hearts. The sound of the thunder, the wild noises of the night, the strange dark evocations of elemental hatred which at once divided and united his companions, surged through Sorio’s brain and filled him with a sort of intoxication.

The three of them together might have been taken, had the clock of time been put back two thousand years, for some mad Dionysian worshippers following their god in a wild inhuman revel.

Inspired at last by a sort of storm-frenzy, while the wind came wailing and shrieking down the avenue into their faces, Sorio suddenly stopped.

“Come, you two little fools,” he cried, “let’s end this nonsense! Here--kiss one another! Kiss one another, and thank God that we’re alive and free and conscious, and not mere inert matter, like these dead drifting leaves!”

As he spoke he stepped back a little, and with a swing of his powerful arms, brought both the girls face to face with one another. Nance struggled fiercely, and resisted with all her strength. Philippa, with a strange whispering laugh, remained passive in his hands.

“Kiss one another!” he cried again. “Are you kissing or are you holding back? It’s too dark for me to see!”

Philippa suddenly lost her passivity, slipped like a snake from under his encircling arms, and rushed away among the trees. “I leave her to you!” she called back to them out of the darkness. “I leave her to you! You won’t endure her long. _And what will Baptiste do_, Adriano?”

This last word of hers calmed Sorio’s mood and threw him back upon his essential self. He sighed heavily.

“Well, Nance,” he said, “shall we go back? It’s no use waiting for her. She’ll find her way to Oakguard. She knows every inch of these woods.” He sighed again, as if bidding farewell, in one fate-burdened moment, both to the woods and the girl who knew them.

“_You_ can go back if you like,” Nance answered curtly. “I’m going to speak to Brand”; and she told him in a brief sentence what she had learned from Linda.

Sorio seized her hand and clutched it savagely. “Yes, yes,” he cried, “yes, yes, let’s go together. He must be taught a lesson--this Brand! Come, let’s go together!”

They moved on rapidly and soon approached the end of the avenue and the entrance to the garden. As Sorio pushed open the iron gates, a sharp crack of thunder, followed by reverberating detonations, broke over their heads. The sudden flash that succeeded the sound brought into vivid relief the dark form of the house, while a long row of fading dahlias, drooping on their rain-soaked stems, stood forth in ghastly illumination.

Nance had time to catch on Adrian’s face a look that gave her a premonition of danger. Had she not herself been wrought-up to an unnatural pitch of excitement by her contest with Philippa, she would probably have been warned in time and have drawn back, postponing her interview with Brand till she could have seen him alone. As it was, she felt herself driven forward by a force she could not resist. “Now--very now,” she must face her sister’s seducer.

A light, burning behind heavy curtains, in one of the lower mullioned windows, enabled them to mount the steps. As she rang the bell, a second peal of thunder, but this time farther off, was followed by a vivid flash of lightning, throwing into relief the wide spaces of the park and the scattered groups of monumental oak trees. For some queer psychic reason, inexplicable to any material analysis, Nance at that moment saw clearly before her mind’s eye, a little church almanac, which Linda had pinned up above their dressing-table, and on this almanac she saw the date--the twenty-eighth of October--printed in Roman figures.

To the servant who opened the door Nance gave their names, and asked whether they could see Mr. Renshaw. “_Mr._ Renshaw,” she added emphatically, “and please tell him it’s an urgent and important matter.”

The man admitted them courteously and asked them to seat themselves in the entrance hall while he went to look for his master. He returned after a short time and ushered them into the library, where a moment later Brand joined them.

During their moment of waiting, both in the hall and in the room, Sorio had remained taciturn and inert, sunk in a fit of melancholy brooding, his chin propped on the handle of his stick. He had refused to allow the servant to take out of his hands either his stick or his hat, and he still held them both, doggedly and gloomily, as he sat by Nance’s side opposite the carved fireplace.