Chapter VII: Part 7

“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.

“It’s absurd to have any secrets between you and me,” Sorio was saying, his face reflecting the light of the sunset as it poured down the river’s surface to where they sat. “When I become quite impossible to you as a companion, I suppose you’ll tell me so and turn me out. But until then I’m going to assume that I interest you and don’t bore you.”

“It isn’t a question of boring any one,” replied the other. “You annoyed me just now because I thought you were making no effort to control yourself. You seemed trying to rake up every repulsive sensation you’ve ever had and thrust it down my throat. Bored? Certainly I wasn’t bored! On the contrary, I was much more what you might call _bitten_. You go so far, my dear, you go so far!”

“I don’t call that going far at all,” said Sorio sulkily. “What’s the use of living together if we can’t talk of everything? Besides, you didn’t let me finish. What I wanted to say was that for some reason or other, I’ve lately got to a point when every one I meet--every mortal person, and especially every stranger--strikes me as odious and disgusting. I’ve had the feeling before but never quite like this. It’s not a pleasant feeling, my dear, I can assure you of that!”

“But what do you mean--what do you mean by odious and disgusting?” threw in the other. “I suppose they’re made in the same way we are. Flesh and blood is flesh and blood, after all.”

As Baltazar said this, what he thought in his mind was much as follows: “Adriano is evidently going mad again. This kind of thing is one of the symptoms. I like having him here with me. I like looking at his face when he’s excited. He has a beautiful face--it’s more purely antique in its moulding than half the ancient cameos. I especially like looking at him when he’s harassed and outraged. He has a dilapidated wistfulness at those times which exactly suits my taste. I should miss Adriano frightfully if he went away. No one I’ve ever lived with suits me better. I can annoy him when I like and I can appease him when I like. He fills me with a delicious sense of power. If only Philippa would leave him alone, and that Herrick girl would stop persecuting him, he’d suit me perfectly. I like him when his nerves are quivering and twitching. I like the ‘wounded-animal look’ he has then. But it’s these accursed girls who spoil it all. Of course it’s their work, this new mania. They carry everything so far! I like him to get wild and desperate but I don’t want him mad. These girls stick at nothing. They’d drive him into an asylum if they could, poor helpless devil!”

While these thoughts slid gently through Stork’s head, his friend was already answering his question about “flesh and blood.” “It’s just that which gets on my nerves,” he said. “I can stand it when I’m talking to you because I forget everything except your mind, and I can stand it when I’m making love to a girl, because I forget everything but--”

“Don’t say her body!” threw in Baltazar.

“I wasn’t going to,” snarled the other. “I know it isn’t their bodies one thinks of. It’s--it’s--what the devil is it? It’s something much deeper than that. Well, never mind! What I want to say is this. With you and Raughty, and a few others who really interest me, I forget the whole thing. _You_ are individuals to me. I’m interested in you, and I forget what you’re like, or that you have flesh at all.

“It’s when I come upon people I’m neither in love with nor interested in, that I have this sensation, and of course,” and he surveyed a group of women who at that moment were raising angry voices from an archway on the further side of the harbour, “and of course I have it every day.”

Stork looked at him with absorbed attention, holding between his fingers an unlit cigarette. “What exactly _is_ the feeling you have?” he enquired gently.

The light on Sorio’s face had faded with the fading of the glow on the water. There began to fall upon the place where they sat, upon the cobble-stones of the little quay, upon the wharf steps, slimy with green seaweed, upon the harbour mud and the tarred gunwales of the gently rocking barges, upon the pallid tide flowing inland with gurglings and suckings and lappings and long-drawn sighs, that indescribable sense of the coming on of night at a river’s mouth, which is like nothing else in the world. It is, as it were, the meeting of two infinite vistas of imaginative suggestion--the sense of the mystery of the boundless horizons sea-ward, and the more human mystery of the unknown distance inland, its vague fields and marshes and woods and silent gardens--blending there together in a suspended breath of ineffable possibility, sad and tender, and touching the margin of what cannot be uttered.

“What is it?” repeated Sorio dreamily, and in a low melancholy voice. “How can I tell you what it is? It’s a knowledge of the inner truth, I suppose. It’s the fact that I’ve come to know, at last, what human beings are really like. I’ve come to see them stripped and naked--no! worse than that--I’ve come to see them _flayed_. I’ve got to the point, Tassar, my friend, when I see the world _as it is_, and I can tell you it’s not a pleasant sight!”

Baltazar Stork regarded him with a look of the most exquisite pity, a pity which was not the less genuine because the emotion that accompanied it was one of indescribable pleasure. In the presence of his friend’s massive face and powerful figure he felt deliciously delicate and frail, but with this sense of fragility came a feeling of indescribable power--the power of a mind that is capable of contemplating with equanimity a view of things at which another staggers and shivers and grows insane. It was allotted to Baltazar by the secret forces of the universe to know during that hour, one of the most thrilling moments of his life.

“To get to the point I’ve reached,” continued Sorio gently, watching the colour die out from the water’s surface and a whitish glimmer, silvery and phantom-like, take its place, “means to sharpen one’s senses to a point of terrible receptivity. In fact, until you can hear the hearts of people beating--until you can hear their contemptible lusts hissing and writhing in their veins, like evil snakes--you haven’t reached the point. You haven’t reached it until you can smell the graveyard--yes! The graveyard of all mortality--in the cleanest flesh you approach. You haven’t reached it till every movement people make, every word they speak, betrays them for what they are, betrays the vulture on the wing, and the hyena on the prowl. You haven’t reached it till you feel ready to cry out, like a child in a nightmare, and beat the air with your hands, so suffocating is the pressure of loathsome living bodies--bodies marked and sealed and printed with the signs of death and decomposition!”

Baltazar Stork struck a match and lit his cigarette.

“Well?” he remarked, stretching out his legs and leaning back on the wooden bench. “Well? The world is like that, then. You’ve found it out. You know it. You’ve made the wonderful discovery. Why can’t you smoke cigarettes, then, and make love to your lovely friends, and let the whole thing go? You’ll be dead yourself in a year or two in any case.

“Adriano dear,” he lowered his voice to an impressive whisper, “shall I tell you something? You are making all this fuss and driving yourself desperate about a thing which doesn’t really concern you in the least. It’s not your business if the world does reek like a carcass. It’s not your business if people’s brains are full of poisonous snakes and their bellies of greedy lecheries. It’s not your business--do you understand--if human flesh smells of the graveyard. Your affair, my boy, is to get what amusement you can out of it and make yourself as comfortable as you can in it. It might be worse, it might be better. It doesn’t really make much difference either way.

“Listen to me, Adriano! I say to you now, as we sit at this moment watching this water, unless you get rid of this new mania of yours, you’ll end as you did in America. You’ll simply go mad again, my dear, and that would be uncomfortable for you and extremely inconvenient for me. The world is not _meant_ to be taken seriously. It’s meant to be handled as you’d handle a troublesome girl. Take what amuses you and let the rest go to the devil! Anything else--and I know what I’m talking about--tends to simple misery.

“Heigh ho! But it’s a most delicious evening! What nonsense all this talk of ours is! Look at that boy over there. He’s not worrying himself about grave-yards. Here, Harry! Tommy! Whatever you call yourself--come here! I want to speak to you.”

The child addressed was a ragged barelegged urchin, of about eleven, who had been for some while slowly gravitating around the two men. He came at once, at Baltazar’s call, and looked at them both, wonderingly and quizzically.

“Got any pictures?” he asked. Stork nodded and, opening a new box of cigarettes, handed the boy a little oblong card stamped with the arms of some royal European dynasty. “I likes the Honey-Dew ones best,” remarked the boy, “them as has the sport cards in ’em.”

“We can’t always have sport cards, Tommy,” said Baltazar. “Little boys, as the world moves round, must learn to put up with the arms of European princes. Let me feel your muscle, Tommy. I’ve an idea that you’re suffering from deficient nourishment.” The child extended his arm, and then bent it, with an air of extreme and anxious gravity. “Pretty good,” said Stork, smiling. “Yes, I may say you’re decidedly powerful for your size. What’s your opinion, Tommy, about things in general? This gentleman here thinks we’re all in a pretty miserable way. He thinks life’s a hell of a bad job. What do you think about it?”

The boy looked at him suspiciously. “Ben Porter, what cleans the knives up at the Admiral’s, tried that game on with me. But I let him know, soon enough, who he were talking to.” He moved off hastily after this, but a moment later ran back, pointing excitedly at a couple of sea-gulls which were circling near them.

“A man shot one of them birds last night,” he said, “and it fell into the water. Lordy! But it did splash! ’Tweren’t properly killed, I reckon--just knocked over.”

“What’s that?” said Sorio sharply. “What became of it then? Who picked it up?”

The boy looked at him with a puzzled stare. “_They_ ain’t no good to eat,” he rejoined, “they be what you call cannibal-birds. They feeds on muck. Cats’ll eat ’em, though,” he added.

“What became of it?” shouted Sorio, in a threatening voice.

“Went out with the tide, Mister, most like,” answered the child, moving apprehensively away from him. “I saw some fellows in a boat knock at it with their oars, but they couldn’t get it. It sort o’ flapped and swimmed away.”

Sorio rose from his seat and strode to the edge of the quay. He looked eastward, past the long line of half-submerged wooden stakes which marked the approach to the harbour. “When did that devil shoot it, do you say?” he asked, turning to the boy. But the youngster had taken to his heels. Angry-looking bronze-faced gentlemen who interested themselves in wounded sea-gulls were something new in his experience.

“Let’s get a boat and row out to those stakes,” said Adrian suddenly. “I seem to see something white over there. Look! Don’t you think so?”

Baltazar moved to his side. “Heavens! my dear,” he remarked languidly, “you don’t suppose the thing would be there now, after all this time? However,” he added, shrugging his shoulders, “if it’ll put you into a better mood, by all means let’s do it.”

It was, when it came to the point, Baltazar who untied an available boat from its moorings, and Baltazar who appropriated a pair of oars that were leaning against a fish shed. In details of this kind the passionate Sorio was always seized with a paralysis of nervous incompetence. Once in the boat, however, the younger man refused to do anything but steer. “I’m not going to pull against this current, for all the sea-gulls in the world,” he remarked.

Sorio rowed with desperate impetuosity, but it was a slow and laborious task. Several fishermen, loitering on the quay after their supper, surveyed the scene with interest. “The gentleman wants to exercise ’isself afore dinner-time,” observed one. “’Tis a wonder if he moves ’er,” rejoined another, “but ’e’s rowin’ like ’twas a royal regatta.”

With the sweat pouring down his face and the muscles of his whole body taut and quivering, Sorio tugged and strained at the oars. At first it seemed as though the boat hardly moved at all. Then, little by little, it forged ahead, the tide’s pressure diminishing as the mouth of the harbour widened. After several minutes’ exhausting effort, they reached the place where the first of the wooden piles rose out of the water. It was tangled with seaweed and bleached with sun and wind. The tide gurgled and foamed round it. Baltazar yawned.

“They’re all like this one,” he said. “You see what they’re like. Nothing could possibly cling to them, unless it had hands to cling with.”

Sorio, resting on his oars, glared at the darkening waters. “Let’s get to the last of them anyway,” he muttered. He pulled on, the effort becoming easier and easier as they escaped from the in-flow of the river-mouth and reached the open sea. When at last the boat rubbed its side against the last of the stakes, they were nearly a quarter of a mile from land. No, there was certainly no sea-gull here, alive or dead!

A buoy, with a bell attached to it, sent at intervals, over the water, a profoundly melancholy cry--a cry subdued and yet tragic, not absolutely devoid of hope and yet full of heart-breaking wistfulness. The air was hot and windless; the sky heavy with clouds; the horizon concealed by the rapidly falling night. Sorio seized the stake with his hand to keep the boat steady. There were already lights in the town, and some of these twinkled out towards them, in long, radiating, quivering lines.

“Tassar!” whispered Sorio suddenly, in a tone strangely and tenderly modulated.

“Well, my child, what is it?” returned the other.

“I only want to tell you,” Adrian went on, “that whatever I may say or do in the future, I recognize that you’re the best friend I’ve got, except one.” As he said the words “except one,” his voice had a vibrant softness in it.

“Thank you, my dear,” replied his friend calmly. “I should certainly be extremely distressed if you made a fool of yourself in any way. But who is my rival, tell me that! Who is this one who’s a better friend than I? Not Philippa, I hope--or Nance Herrick?”

Sorio sighed heavily. “I vowed to myself,” he muttered, “I would never talk to any one again about him: but the sound of that bell--isn’t it weird, Tassar? Isn’t it ghostly?--makes me long to talk about him.”

“Ah! I understand,” and Baltazar Stork drew in his breath with a low whistle, “I understand! You’re talking about your boy over there. Well, my dear, I don’t blame you if you’re homesick for him. I have a feeling that he’s an extraordinarily beautiful youth. I always picture him to myself like my Venetian. Is he like Flambard, Adrian?”

Sorio sighed again, the sigh of one who sins against his secret soul and misses the reward of his sacrilege. “No--no,” he muttered, “it isn’t that! It isn’t anything to do with his being beautiful. God knows if Baptiste _is_ beautiful! It’s that I want him. It’s that he understands what I’m trying to do in the darkness. It’s simply that I want him, Tassar.”

“What do you mean by that ‘trying in the darkness,’ Adriano? What ‘darkness’ are you talking about?”

Sorio made no immediate answer. His hand, as he clung to the stake amid the rocking of the boat, encountered a piece of seaweed of that kind which possesses slippery, bubble-like excrescences, and he dug his nails into one of these leathery globes, with a vague dreamy idea that if he could burst it he would burst some swollen trouble in his brain.

“Do you remember,” he said at last, “what I showed you the other night, or have you forgotten?”

Baltazar looked at his mistily outlined features and experienced, what was extremely unusual with him, a faint sense of apprehensive remorse. “Of course I remember,” he replied. “You mean those notes of yours--that book you’re writing?”

But Sorio did not hear him. All his attention was concentrated just then upon the attempt to burst another seaweed bubble. The bell from the unseen buoy rang out brokenly over the water; and between the side of their boat and the stake to which the man was clinging there came gurglings and lappings and whispers, as if below them, far down under the humming tide, some sad sea-creature, without hope or memory or rest, were tossing and moaning, turning a drowned inhuman face towards the darkened sky.

XVI

THE FENS

Nance was able, in a sort of lethargic obstinacy, to endure the strain of her feelings for Sorio, now that she had the influence of her familiar work to dull her nerves. She tried hard to make things cheerful for her not less heart-weary sister, devising one little scheme after another to divert and distract the child, and never permitting her own trouble to interfere with her sympathy.

But behind all this her soul ached miserably, and her whole nature thirsted and throbbed for the satisfaction of her love. Her work played its part as a kind of numbing opiate and the evenings spent among Letitia Pontifex’ flower-beds were not devoid of moments of restorative hope, but day and night the pain of her passion hurt her and the tooth of jealousy bit into her flesh.

It was worst of all in the nights. The sisters slept in two small couches in the same room and Nance found herself dreading more and more, as July drew to its close, that hour when they came in from their neighbour’s garden and undressing in silence, lay down so near to one another. They both tried hard, Linda no less than her sister, to put the thoughts that vexed them out of their minds and behave as if they were fancy-free and at peace, but the struggle was a difficult one. If they only hadn’t known, so cruelly well, just what the other was feeling, as they turned alternately from side to side, and like little feverish animals gasped and fretted, it would have been easier to bear. “Aren’t you asleep yet?” one of them would whisper plaintively, and the submissive, “I’m so sorry, dear; but oh! I wish the morning would come,” that she received in answer, met with only too deep a response.

One unusually hot night--it happened to be the first Sunday in August and the eve of the Bank Holiday--Nance felt as though she would scream out aloud if her sister moved in her bed again.

There was something that humiliated and degraded in this mutual misery. It was hard to be patient, hard not to feel that her own aching heart was in some subtle way mocked and insulted by the presence of the same hurt in the heart of another. It reduced the private sorrow of each to a sort of universal sex pain, to suffer from which was a kind of outrage to what was sacred and secret in their individual souls.

There were two windows in their room, one opening on the street and one upon an enclosed yard at the back of the house. Nance, as she now lay, with the bed-clothes tossed aside from her, and her hands clasped behind her head, was horribly conscious not only of the fact that her sister was just as wide awake as she herself, but that they were listening _together_ to the same sounds. These sounds were two-fold, and they came sometimes separately and sometimes simultaneously. They consisted of the wailing of an infant in a room on the other side of the street, and the whining of a dog in a yard adjoining their own.

The girl felt as though every species of desolation known in the world were concentrated in these two sounds. She kept her eyes tightly shut so as not to see the darkness, but this proceeding only intensified the acute receptivity of her other senses. She visualized the infant and she visualized the dog. The one she imagined with a puckered, wrinkled face--a face such as Mr. Traherne might have had in his babyhood--and plague-spots of a loathsome colour; she saw the colour against her burning eyeballs as if she were touching it with her fingers and it was of a reddish brown. The dog had a long smooth body, without hair, and as it whined she saw it feebly scratching itself, but while it scratched, she knew, with evil certainty, that it was unable to reach the place where the itching maddened it.

There was hardly any air in the room, in spite of the open windows, and Nance fancied that she discerned an odour proceeding from the wainscoting that resembled the dust that had once greeted her from a cupboard in one of the unused bedrooms in Dyke House, dust that seemed to be composed of the moth-eaten garments of generations of dead humanity.

She felt that she could have borne these things--the whining dog, and the wailing infant--if only Linda, lying with her face to the wall, were not listening to them also, listening with feverish intentness. Yes, she could have borne it if the whole night were not listening--if the whole night were not listening to the turnings and tossings of humanity, trying to ease the itch of its desire and never able to reach, toss and turn as it might, the place where the plague-spot troubled it.

With a cry she leapt from her bed and, fumbling on the dressing-table, struck a match and lit a candle. The flickering flame showed Linda sitting bolt-upright with lamentable wide-open eyes.

Nance went to the window which looked out on the yard. Here she turned and threw back from her forehead her masses of heavy hair. “God help us, Linda!” she whispered. “It’s no use. Nothing is any use.”

The young girl slowly and wearily left her bed and, advancing across the room, nestled up against her sister and caressed her in silence.

“What shall we do?” Nance repeated, hardly knowing what she said. “What shall we do? I can’t bear this. I can’t bear it, little one, I can’t bear it!”

As if in response to her appeal, the dog and the infant together sent forth a pitiful wail upon the night.

“What misery there is in the world--what horrible misery!” Nance murmured. “I’m sure we’re all better off dead, than like this. Better off dead, my darling.”

Linda answered by slipping her arms round her waist and hugging her tightly. Then suddenly, “Why don’t we dress ourselves and go out?” she cried. “It’s too hot to sleep. Yes, do let’s do that, Nance! Let’s dress and go out.”

Nance looked at her with a faint smile. There was a childish ardour about her tone that reminded her of the Linda of many years ago. “Very well,” she said, “I don’t mind.”

They dressed hurriedly. The very boldness of the idea helped them to recover their spirits. Bare-headed and in their house-shoes they let themselves out into the street. It was between two and three o’clock. The little town was absolutely silent. The infant in the house opposite made no sound. “Perhaps it’s dead now,” Nance thought.

They walked across the green, and Nance gave a long wistful look at the windows of Baltazar’s cottage. The heavy clouds had lifted a little, and from various points in the sky the stars threw down a faint, uncertain glimmer. It remained, however, still so dark that when they reached the centre of the bridge, neither bank was visible, and the waters of the Loon flowing beneath were hidden in profound obscurity. They leant upon the parapet and inhaled the darkness. What wind there was blew from the west so that the air was heavy with the scent of peat and marsh mud, and the sound of the sea seemed to come from far away, as if it belonged to a different world.

They crossed the bridge and began following the footpath that led to the church. Coming suddenly on an open gate, however, they were tempted, by a curious instinct of unconscious self-cruelty, to deviate from the path they knew and to pursue a strange and unfamiliar track heading straight for the darkened fens. It was on the side of the path removed from the sea that this track began, and it led them, along the edge of a reedy ditch, into a great shadowy maze of silent water-meadows.

Fortunately for the two girls, the particular ditch they followed had a high and clearly marked embankment, an embankment used by the owners of cattle in that district as a convenient way of getting their herds from one feeding-ground to another. No one who has never experienced the sensation of following one of these raised banks, or dyke-tracks, across the fens, can conceive the curious feelings it has the power of evoking. Even by day these impressions are unique and strange. By night they assume a quality which may easily pass into something bordering upon panic-terror. The palpable and immediate cause of this emotion is the sense of being isolated, separated, and cut-off, from all communication with the ordinary world.

On the sea-shore one is indeed in contact with the unknown mass of waters, but there is always, close at hand, the familiar inland landscape, friendly and reassuring. On the slope of a mountain one may look with apprehension at the austere heights above, but there is always behind one the rocks and woods, the terraces and ledges, past which one has ascended, and to which at any moment one can return.

In the midst of the fens there is no such reassurance. The path one has followed becomes merged in the illimitable space around; merged, lost and annihilated. No mark, no token, no sign indicates its difference from other similar tracks. No mark nor token separates north from south or east from west. On all sides the same reeds, the same meadows, the same gates, the same stunted willow-trees, the same desolate marsh pools, the same vast and receding horizons. The mind has nothing to rest itself upon except the general expanse, and the general expanse seems as boundless as infinity.

Nance and her sister were not, of course, far enough away from their familiar haunts to get the complete “fen-terror,” but, aided by the darkness, the power of the thing was by no means unfelt. The instinct to escape from the burden of their thoughts which drove the girls on, became indeed more and more definitely mingled, as they advanced, with a growing sense of alarm. But into this very alarm they plunged forward with a species of exultant desperation. They both experienced, as they went hand in hand, a morbid kind of delight in being cruel to themselves, in forcing themselves to do the very thing--and to do it in the dead of night--which, of all, they had most avoided, even in the full light of day.

Before they had gone much more than a mile from their starting-point they were permitted to witness a curious trick of the elemental powers. Without any warning, there suddenly arose from the west a much more powerful current of wind. Every cloud was driven sea-ward and with the clouds every trace of sea-mist. The vast dome of sky above them showed itself clear and unstained; and across the innumerable constellations--manifest to their eyes in its full length--stretched the Milky Way. Not only did the stars thus make themselves visible. In their visibility they threw a weird and phantom-like light over the whole landscape. Objects that had been mere misty blurs became distinct identities and things that had been absolutely out of sight were now unmistakably recognizable.

The girls stood still and looked around them. They could see the church tower rising squat and square against the line of the distant sand-dunes. They could see the roofs of the village, huddled greyly and obscurely together, beyond the dark curve of the bridge. They could make out the sombre shape of Dyke House itself, just distinguishable against the high tow-path of the river. And Nance, turning westward, could even discern her favourite withy-copse, surrounded by shadowy cornfields.

There was a pitiable pathos in the way each of the girls, now that the scene of their present trouble was thus bared to their view, turned instinctively to the object most associated with the thoughts they were seeking to escape. Nance looked long and wistfully at the little wood of willows and alders, now a mere misty exhalation of thicker shadow above the long reaches of the fens. She thought of how mercilessly her feelings had been outraged there; of how violent and strange and untender Sorio had been. Yet even at that moment, her heart aching with the recollection of what she had suffered, the old fierce passionate cry went up from her soul--“better be beaten by Adrian than loved by all the rest of the world!”

It was perhaps because of her preoccupation with her own thoughts and her long dreamy gaze at the spot which recalled them, that she did not remark a certain sight which set her companion trembling with intolerable excitement. This was nothing less than the sudden appearance, between the trees that almost hid the house from view, of a red light in a window of Oakguard. It was an unsteady light and it seemed to waver and flicker. Sometimes it grew deeply red, like a threatening star, and at other times it paled in colour and diminished in size. All at once, after flickering and quivering for several seconds, it died out altogether.

Only when it had finally disappeared did Linda hastily glance round to see if Nance had discerned it. But her sister had seen nothing.

It was, as a matter of fact, small wonder that this particular light observed in a window of Oakguard, thrilled the young girl with uncontrollable agitation. It had been this very signal, arranged between them during their few weeks of passionate love-making, which had several times flickered across the river to Dyke House and had been answered, unknown to Nance, from the sisters’ room. Linda shivered through every nerve and fibre of her being, and in the darkness her cheeks grew hot as fire. She suddenly felt convinced that by some strange link between her heart and his, Brand knew that she was out in the fens, and was telling her that he knew it, in the old exciting way.

“He is calling me,” she said to herself, “he is calling me!” And as she formed the words, there came over her, with a sick beating of her heart and a dizzy pain in her breast, the certainty that Brand had left the house and was waiting for her, somewhere in the long avenue of limes and cedars, where they had met once before in the early evening.

“He is waiting for me!” she repeated, and the dizziness grew so strong upon her that she staggered and caught at her sister’s arm. “Nance,” she whispered, “I feel sick. My head hurts me. Shall we go back now?”

Nance, full of concern and anxiety, passed her fingers across her sister’s forehead. “Oh, my dear, my dear,” she cried, “you’re in a fever! How silly of me to let you come out on this mad prank!”

Supporting her on her arm she led her slowly back, along the embankment. As they walked, Nance felt more strongly than she had done since she crossed the Loon, that deep maternal pity, infinite in its emotion of protection, which was the basic quality in her nature. For the very reason, perhaps, that Linda now clung to her like a child, she felt happier than she had done for many days. A mysterious detachment from her own fate, a sort of resigned indifference to what happened, seemed to liberate her at that moment from the worst pang of her loss. The immense shadowy spaces about her, the silence of the fens, broken only by the rustling of the reeds and an occasional splash in the stream by their side as a fish rose, the vast arch of starlit sky above her, full of a strange and infinite reassurance--all these things thrilled the girl’s heart, as they moved, with an emotion beyond expression.

At that hour there came to her, with a vividness unfelt until then, the real meaning of Mr. Traherne’s high platonic mystery. She told herself that whatever henceforth happened to her or did not happen, it was not an illusion, it was not a dream--this strange spiritual secret. It was something palpable and real. She had felt it--at least she had touched the fringe of it--and even if the thing never quite returned or the power of it revived as it thrilled her now, it remained that it _had been_, that she had known it, that it was there, somewhere in the depths, however darkly hidden.

Very different were the thoughts that during that walk back agitated the mind of the younger girl. Her whole nature was obsessed by one fierce resolve, the resolve to escape at once to the arms of her lover. He was waiting for her; he was expecting her; she felt absolutely convinced of that. An indefinable pain in her breast and a throbbing in her heart assured her that he was watching, waiting, drawing her towards him. The same large influences of the night, the same silent spaces, the same starlit dome, which brought to Nance her spiritual reassurance, brought to the frailer figure she supported only a desperate craving.

She could feel through every nerve of her feverish body the touch of her love’s fingers. She ached and shivered with pent-up longing, with longing to yield herself to him, to surrender herself absolutely into his power. She was no longer a thing of body, soul, and senses. The normal complexity of our mortal frame was annihilated in her. She was one trembling, quivering, vibrant chord, a chord of feverish desire, only waiting to break into one wild burst of ecstatic music, when struck by the hand she loved.

Her desire at that moment was of the kind which tears at the root of every sort of scruple. It did not only endow her with the courage of madness, it inspired her with the cunning of the insane. All the way along the embankment she was devising desperate plans of escape, and by the time they reached the church path these plans had shaped themselves into a definite resolution.

They emerged upon the familiar way and turned southward towards the bridge. Nance, thankful that she had got her sister so near home without any serious mishap, could not resist, in the impulse of her relief, the pleasure of stopping for a moment to pick a bunch of flowers from the path’s reedy edge. The coolness of the earth as she stooped, the waving grasses, the strongly blowing, marsh-scented wind, the silence and the darkness, all blent harmoniously together to strengthen her in her new-found comfort.

She pulled up impetuously, almost by their roots, great heavy-flowered stalks of loose-strife and willow-herb. She scrambled down into the wet mud of a shallow ditch to add to her bunch a tall spray of hemp-agrimony and some wild valerian. All these things, ghostly and vague and colourless in the faint starlight, had a strange and mystic beauty, and as she gathered them Nance promised herself that they should be a covenant between her senses and her spirit; a sign and a token, offered up in the stillness of that hour, to whatever great invisible powers still made it possible on earth to renounce and be not all unhappy. She returned with her flowers to her sister’s side and together they reached the bridge.

When they were at the very centre of this, Linda suddenly staggered and swayed. She tore herself from her sister’s support and sank down on the little stone seat beneath the parapet--the same stone seat upon which, some months before, that passage of sinister complicity had occurred between Rachel Doorm and Brand. Falling helplessly back now in this place, the young girl pressed her hands to her head and moaned pitifully.

Nance dropped her flowers and flung herself on her knees beside her. “What is it, darling?” she whispered in a low frightened voice. “Oh, Linda, what is it?” But Linda’s only reply was to close her eyes and let her head fall heavily back against the stone-work of the parapet. Nance rose to her feet and stood looking at her in mute despair. “Linda! Linda!” she cried. “Linda! What is it?”

But the shadowy white form lay hushed and motionless, the soft hair across her forehead stirring in the wind, but all else about her, horribly, deadly still.

Nance rushed across the bridge and down to the river’s brink. She came back, her hands held cup-wise, and dashed the water over her sister’s face. The child’s eyelids flickered a little, but that was all. She remained as motionless and seemingly unconscious as before. With a desperate effort, Nance tried to lift her up bodily in her arms, but stiff and limp as the girl was, this seemed an attempt beyond her strength.

Once more she stood, helpless and silent, regarding the other as she lay. Then it dawned upon her mind that the only possible thing to do was to leave her where she was and run to the village for help. She would arouse her own landlady. She would get the assistance of Dr. Raughty.

With one last glance at her sister’s motionless form and a quick look up and down the river on the chance of there being some barge or boat at hand with people--as sometimes happened--sleeping in it, she set off running as fast as she could in the direction of the silent town.

As soon as the sound of her retreating steps died away in the distance, the hitherto helpless Linda leapt quickly and lightly to her feet. Standing motionless for awhile till she had given her sister time to reach the high-street, she set off herself with firm and rapid steps in the same direction. She resolved that she would not risk crossing the green, but would reach the park wall by a little side alley which skirted the backs of the houses. She felt certain that when she did reach this wall it would be easy enough to climb over it. She remembered its loose uneven stones and its clinging ivy. And once in the park--ah! she knew well enough what way to take then!

Deserted by its human invaders, the old New Bridge relapsed into its accustomed mood of silent expectancy. It had witnessed many passionate loves and many passionate hatreds. It had felt the feet of generations of Rodmoor’s children, light as gossamer seeds, upon its shoulders, and it had felt the creaking of the death-wagon carrying the same persons, heavy as lead then, to the oblong holes dug for them in the churchyard. All this it had felt, but it still waited, still waited in patient expectancy, while the tides went up and down beneath it, and sea airs swept over it and night by night the stars looked down on it; still waited, with the dreadful patience of the eternal gods and the eternal elements, something that, after all, would perhaps never come.

Nance’s flowers, meanwhile, lay where she had dropped them, upon the ground by the stone seat. They were there when, some ten minutes after her departure, the girl returned with Dr. Raughty and Mrs. Raps to find Linda gone; and they were there through all the hours of the dawn, until a farm boy, catching sight of them as he went to his work, threw them into the river in order that he might observe the precise rapidity with which they would be carried by the tide under the central arch. They were carried very swiftly under the central arch; but linger as the boy might, he did not see them reappear on the other side.

XVII

THE DAWN

The dawn was just faintly making itself felt among the trees of Oakguard when Philippa Renshaw, restless as she often was on these summer nights, perceived, as she leaned from her open window, a figure almost as slender as herself standing motionless at the edge of one of the terraces and looking up at the house. There was no light in Philippa’s room, so that she was able to watch this figure without risk of being herself observed. She was certain at once in her own mind of its identity, and she took it immediately for granted that Brand was even now on his way to meet the young girl at the spot where she now saw her standing.

She experienced, therefore, a certain surprise and even annoyance--for she would have liked to have witnessed this encounter--when, instead of remaining where she stood, the girl suddenly slipped away like a ghostly shadow and merged herself among the park-trees. Philippa remained for some minutes longer at the window peering intently into the grey obscurity and wondering whether after all she had been mistaken and it was one of the servants of the house. There _was_ one of the Oakguard maids addicted to walking in her sleep, and she confessed to herself that it was quite possible she had been misled by her own morbid fancy into supposing that the nocturnal wanderer was Linda Herrick.

She returned to her bed after a while and tried to sleep, but the idea that it was really Linda she had seen and that the young girl was even now roaming about the grounds like a disconsolate phantom, took possession of her mind. She rose once more and cautiously pulling down the blind and drawing the curtains began hurriedly to dress herself, taking the precaution to place the solitary candle which she used behind a screen so that no warning of her wakefulness should reach the person she suspected.

Opening the door and moving stealthily down the passage, she paused for a moment at the threshold of her brother’s room. All was silent within. Smiling faintly to herself, she turned the handle with exquisite precaution and glided into the room. No! She was right in her conjecture. The place was without an occupant, and the bed, it appeared, had not been slept in. She went out, closing the door silently behind her.

Her mother’s room was opposite Brand’s and the fancy seized her to enter that also. She entered it, and stepped, softly as a wandering spirit, to her mother’s side. Mrs. Renshaw was lying in an uneasy posture with one arm stretched across the counterpane and her head close to the edge of the bed. She was breathing heavily but was not in a deep sleep. Every now and then her fingers spasmodically closed and unclosed, and from her lips came broken inarticulate words. The pallid light of the early dawn made her face seem older than Philippa had ever seen it. By her side on a little table lay an open book, but it was still too dark for the intruder to discern what this book was.

The daughter stood for some minutes in absolute rigidity, gazing upon the sleeper. Her face as she gazed wore an expression so complicated, so subtle, that the shrewdest observer seeking to interpret its meaning would have been baffled. It was not malignant. It certainly was not tender. It might have been compared to the look one could conceive some heathen courtesan in the days of early Christianity casting upon a converted slave.

Uneasily conscious, as people in their sleep often are, without actually waking, of the alien presence so near her, Mrs. Renshaw suddenly moved round in her bed and with a low moaning utterance, settled herself to sleep with her face to the window. It was a human name she had uttered then. Philippa was sure of that, but it was a name completely strange to the watcher of her mother’s unconsciousness.

Passing from the room as silently as she had entered, the girl ran lightly down the staircase, picked up a cloak in the hall, and let herself out of the front door.

Meanwhile, through the gradually lifting shadows, Linda with rapid and resolute steps was hastening across the park to the portion of the avenue where grew the great cedar-trees. This was the place to which her first instinct had called her. It was only an after-thought, due to cooler reason that had caused her to deviate from this and approach the house itself.

As she advanced through the dew-drenched grass, silvery now in the faint light, she felt that vague indescribable sensation which all living creatures, even those scourged by passion, are bound to feel, at the first palpable touch of dawn. Perfumes and odours that could not be expressed in words, and that seemed to have no natural origin, came to the girl on the wind which went sighing past her. This--so at least Linda vaguely felt--was not the west wind any more. It was not any ordinary wind of day or night. It was the dawn wind, the breath of the earth herself, indrawn with sweet sharp ecstasy at the delicate terror of the coming of the sun-god.

As she approached the avenue where the trunks of the cedars rose dark against the misty white light, she was suddenly startled by the flapping wings of an enormous heron which, mounting up in front of her out of the shadow of the trees, went sailing away across the park, its extended neck and outstretched legs outlined against the eastern sky. She passed in among the shadows from which the heron had emerged, and there, as though he had been waiting for her only a few moments, was Brand Renshaw.

With one swift cry she flung herself into his arms and they clung together as if from an eternity of separation. In her flimsy dress wet with mist she seemed like a creature evoked by some desperate prayer of earth-passion. Her cheeks and breast were cold to his touch, but the lips that answered his kisses were hot as if with burning fever. She clung to him as though some abysmal gulf might any moment open beneath their feet. She nestled against him, she twined herself around him. She took his head between her hands and with her cold fingers she caressed his face. So thinly was she clad that he could feel her heart beating as if it were his own.

“I knew you were calling me,” she gasped at last. “I felt it--I felt it in my flesh. Oh, my only love, I’m all yours--all, all yours! Take me, hold me, save me from every one! Hold me, hold me, my only love, hold me tight from all of them!”

They swayed together as she clung to him and, lifting her up from the ground he carried her, still wildly kissing him, into the deeper shadow of the great cedars. Exhausted at last by the extremity of her passion, she hung limp in his arms, her face white as the white light which now flooded the eastern horizon. He laid her down then at the foot of one of the largest trees and bending over her pushed back the hair from her forehead as if she had been a tired child.

By some powerful law of his strange nature, the very intensity of her passion for him and her absolute yielding to his will calmed and quieted his own desire. She was his now, at a touch, at a movement; but he would as soon have hurt an infant as have embraced her then. His emotion at that moment was such as never again in his life he was destined to experience. He felt as though, untouched as she was, she belonged to him, body and soul. He felt as though they two together were isolated, separated, divided, from the whole living world. Beneath the trunks of those black-foliaged cedars they seemed to be floating in a mystic ship over a great sea of filmy white waves.

He bent down and kissed her forehead, and under his kiss, chaste as the kiss a father might give to a little girl, she closed her eyes and lay motionless and still, a faint flickering smile of infinite contentment playing upon her lips.

They were in this position--the girl’s hand resting passively in his--and he bending over her, when through an eastward gap between the trees the sun rose above the mist. It sent towards them a long blood-coloured finger that stained the cedar trunks and caused the strangely shaped head of the stooping man to look as if it had been dipped in blood. It made the girl’s mouth scarlet-red and threw an indescribable flush over her face, a flush delicate and diaphanous as that which tinges the petals of wild hedge roses.

Linda opened her eyes and Brand leapt to his feet with a cry. “The sun!” he shouted, and then, in a lower voice, “what an omen for us, little one--what an omen! Out of the sea, out of _our_ sea! Come, get up, and let’s watch the morning in! There won’t be a trace of mist left, or dew either, in an hour or so.”