Читать книгу Rodmoor - John Cowper Powys - Страница 3

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It was not that he concealed anything from her. He told her quite frankly, in that first real conversation they had together—on the little secluded bench in the South London park—about all the morbid sufferings of his years in America and his final mental collapse.

He even indicated to her—while the sound of grass-mowing came to them over the rain-wet tulips—some of the most secret causes of this event; his savage reaction, for instance, against the circle he was thrown into there; his unhappy habit of deadly introspection; his aching nostalgia for things less murderously new and raw.

He explained how his mental illness had taken so dangerous, so unlooked for a shape, that it was only by the merest chance he had escaped long incarceration.

No; it was not that he concealed anything. It was rather that she experienced a remote uneasy feeling that, say what he might—and in a certain sense he said too much rather than too little—she did not really understand him.

Her feminine instinct led her to persuade him that she understood; led her to say what was most reassuring to him, and most consolatory; but in her heart of hearts she harboured a teasing doubt; a doubt which only the rare sweetness of these first love-days of her life enabled her to hide and cover over. Nor was this feeling about her lover’s confessions the only little cloud on Nance Herrick’s horizon during these memorable weeks—weeks that, after all, she was destined to look back upon as so strangely happy.

She found herself, in the few moments when her passionate emotion left her free to think of such things, much more anxious than she cared to admit about the ambiguous relations existing between the two persons dependent upon her. Ever since the death of her father—that prodigal sailor—three years ago, when she had taken it upon herself to support both of them by her work in the dressmaker’s shop, she had known that all was not well between the two. Rachel Doorm had never forgiven Captain Herrick for marrying again; she felt that instinctively, but it was only quite recently that she had grown to be really troubled by the eccentric woman’s attitude to the little half-sister.

Linda’s mother, she knew, had in her long nervous decline rather clung than otherwise to this grim friend of the former wife; but Linda’s mother had always been different from other women; and Nance could remember how, in quite early days, she never interfered when Miss Doorm took the child away to punish her.

To Nance herself Rachel had always been something of an anxiety. Her savage devotion had proved over and over again more of a burden than a pleasure; and now that there was this increased tension between her and Linda, the thing began to appear invidious, rapacious, sinister.

She was torn, in fact, two ways over the situation. Her own mother had long ago—and it was one of her few definite recollections of her—made her swear solemnly never to desert this friend of former days; and the vows she had registered then to obey this covenant had grown into a kind of religious rite; the only rite, in fact, after all these years, she was able to perform for her dead.

And yet if loyalty to her mother kept her patiently tender with Rachel’s eccentricities, the much warmer feeling she had for her other parent was stirred indignantly by the thought of any unkindness dealt out to Linda.

And just at present, it was clear, Linda was not happy.

The young girl seemed to be losing her vivacity and to be growing silent and reserved.

She was now nearly eighteen; and yet Nance had caught her once or twice lately looking at Rachel Doorm with the same expression of frightened entreaty as she used to wear when led away from her mother’s side for some childish fault. Rachel’s father, a taciturn and loveless old man, had recently died, leaving his daughter, whom he had practically cast off, a small but secure annuity and a little house on the east coast.

It was now to this home of her ancestors, in the village of Rodmoor, that Rachel Doorm was anxious to transport both sisters; partly as a return for what Nance’s mother, and more recently Nance herself, had done for her support, and partly out of fanatical devotion to Nance.

The girl could not help experiencing a feeling of infinite relief at the thought of being freed from her uncongenial work in the dressmaker’s establishment. Her pleasure, nevertheless, had been considerably marred, in the last few days, by the attitude of her sister towards the projected change.

And now, with the realisation of this thrilling new passion possessing her, her own feeling about leaving London was different from what it had been at first.

None of these questions interrupted, however, on that particular afternoon, the girl’s dreamy and absorbed happiness.

In the long delicious intervals that fell between her and her lover with a perfume sweeter than that of the arrested rain, she let her mind wander in languid retrospect, from that seat in Kensington Park, over every one of the wonderful events that had led her to this.

She recalled her first sight of Adrian and how it had come over her, like an intimation from some higher sphere of being, that her fate was henceforth to lie, for good and for evil, in that man’s hands.

It was quite early in April when she saw him; and she remembered, sitting now by his side, how, as each day grew milder, and the first exquisite tokens of Spring penetrated one by one—here a basket of daffodils, and there a spray of almond-blossom—into the street she traversed to her work, she felt less and less inclined to struggle against the deep delicious thrill that suffused itself, like a warm indrawing wave, through every pulse of her body. That it should never have come to her before—that she should have lived absolutely fancy-free until so near her twenty-third birthday—only made her abandonment to what she felt now the more sweet and entire.

“It is love—it is love,” she thought; “and I will give myself up to it!”

And she had given herself up to it. It had penetrated her with an exultant inner spring of delight. She had immersed herself in it. She had gone through her tedious drudgery as if she were floating, languidly and at ease, on a softly rocking tide. She had lived entirely in the present. She had not made the least movement even to learn the name of the man whose wordless pursuit of her had stirred her senses to this exultant response.

She had felt an indescribable desire to prolong these hours of her first love, these hours so unreturning, so new and so sweet; a desire—she remembered it well now—that had a tinge of unformulated fear about it; as though the very naming, even to herself, of what she enjoyed, would draw down the jealousy of the invisible powers.

So she had been careful never to stop or linger, in her hurried morning walks to the historic bridge; careful—after she had once passed him, and their eyes had met—never so much as to turn her head, to see if he were following.

And yet she knew—as well in those first days as she knew now—that every morning and night he waited, wet or fine, to see her go by.

And she had known, too—how could she not know?—that this mute signalling of two human souls must change and end; must become something nearer or something farther as time went on. But day by day she put off this event; too thrilled by the sweet dream in which she moved, to wish to destroy it, either for better or for worse.

If she had doubted him; doubted that he cared for her; all would have been different.

Then she would have taken some desperate step—some step that would have forced him to recognise her for what she was, his one of all, ready as none else could be ready, to cry with a great cry—“Lord, behold thine hand-maid; do unto her according to Thy will!” But she had known he did care. She had felt the magnetic current of his longing, as if it had been a hand laid down upon her breast.

And in answer she had given herself up to him; given herself, she thought, with no less complete a yielding than that with which, as she heard his voice by her side, reaching her through a delicate mist of delicious dreaming, she gave herself up to him now.

She recalled with a proud gladness the fact that she had never—never for a moment—in all those days, bestowed a thought on the question of any possible future with him. In the trance-like hours wherein she had brooded so tenderly over the form and face of her nameless lover, she always pictured him as standing waiting for her, a tall, bowed, foreign-looking figure, clothed in the long weather-stained Inverness—the very texture of which she seemed to know the touch of—by that corner curb-stone where the flower-shop was.

Just in that manner, with just that air of ardent expectation, he might be found standing, she had felt, through unnumbered days of enchantment, and she passing by, in silence, with the same expectant thrill.

Such a love draught, not drained, not feverishly drunk of, but sweet in her mouth with the taste of a mystic consecration, seemed still, even now that she had him there beside her, to hold the secret, amid this warm breath of London’s first lilacs, of a triumphant Present, wherein both Past and Future were abolished.

It seemed to the happy girl on this unique April afternoon, while the sliding hours, full of the city’s monotonous murmur, sank unnoticed away, and the gardeners planted their pansies and raked lethargically in the scented mould, as though nothing that could ever happen to her afterwards, could outweigh what she felt then, or matter so very greatly in the final reckoning. With every pulse of her young body she uttered her litany of gratitude. “Ite; missa est” her heart cried—“It is enough.”

As they walked home afterwards, hand in hand through the dusk of the friendly park, she made him tell her, detail by detail, every least incident of those first days of their encountering. And Adrian Sorio, catching the spirit of that exquisite entreaty, grew voluble even beyond his wont.

He told her how, in the confusion of his mind, when it was first revealed to him that the devastation he was suffering from did not deny him the sweet sting of “what men call love,” he found it impossible to face with any definite resolution the problem of his doubtful future. He had recognised that in a week or so every penny he possessed would be gone; yet it was impossible—and his new emotion did not, he confessed, alter this in the least—to make any move to secure employment.

A kind of misanthropic timidity, so he explained to her, made the least thought of finding what is popularly known as “work” eminently repellant to him; yet it was obvious that work must be found, unless he wished, simply and quietly, to end the affair by starvation.

This, as things went then, he told her, giving her hand a final pressure as they emerged into the lighted streets, he did not at all urgently want—though in the first days of his return from America he had pondered more than once on the question of an easy and agreeable exit. It was as they settled down side by side—her hat no longer held languidly in her gloveless hand—to their long and discreet walk home through the crowded thoroughfares, that she was first startled by hearing the name “Rodmoor” from his lips. How amazing a coincidence! What a miraculous gift of the gods!

Fate was indeed sweeping her away on a full tide.

It seemed like a thing in some old fantastic romance. Could it be possible even before she had time to contemplate her separation from him that she should learn that they were not to separate at all!

Rachel Doorm was indeed a witch—was indeed working things out for her favourite with the power of a sorceress. She kept back her natural cry of delight, “But that is where we are going,” and let him, all unconscious, as it seemed, of the effect of his words, unravel in his own way the thread of his story.

It was about a certain Baltazar Stork she found he was telling her when her startled thoughts, like a flock of disturbed pigeons, alighted once more on the field of his discourse. Baltazar, it appeared, was an old friend of Sorio’s and had written to offer him a sort of indefinite hospitality in his village on the North Sea. The name of this place—had she ever heard of Rodmoor?—had repeated itself very strangely in his mind ever since he first made it out in his friend’s abominable hand.

At that point in their walk, under the glare of a great provision shop, she suddenly became conscious that he was watching her with laughing excitement. “You know!” she cried, “you know!” And it was with difficulty that he persuaded her to let him tell her how he knew, in his own elaborate manner.

This refuge—offered to him thus out of a clear sky, he told her—did in a considerable sense lend him an excuse for taking no steps to find work. And the name of the place—he confessed this with an excited emphasis—had from the beginning strangely affected his imagination.

He saw it sometimes, so he said, that particular word, in a queer visualised manner, dark brown against a colourless and livid sky; and in an odd sort of way it had related itself, dimly, obscurely, and with the incoherence of a half-learnt language, to the wildest and most pregnant symbols of his life.

Rodmoor! The word at the same time allured and troubled him. What it suggested to him—and he made her admit that his ideas of it were far more definite than her own—was no doubt what it really implied: leagues and leagues of sea-bleached forlornness, of sand-dunes and glaucous marshes, of solitary willows and pallid-leaved poplars, of dark pools and night-long-murmuring reeds.

“We’ll have long walks together there!” he exclaimed, interrupting himself suddenly with an almost savage gesture of ardent possession. If it had been any one but Baltazar Stork, he went on, who had sent him this timely invitation, he would have rejected it at once, but from Baltazar he had no hesitation in accepting anything. They had been friends too long to make any other attitude possible. No, it was no scruple of pride that led him to hesitate—as he admitted to her he had done. It was rather the strange and indefinable reaction set up in his brain by those half-sinister half-romantic syllables—syllables that kept repeating themselves in his inner consciousness.

Nance remembered more than once in a later time the fierce sudden way he turned upon her as they stood on the edge of the crowded square waiting the opportunity to cross and asked, with a solemn intensity in his voice, whether she had any presentiment as to how things would turn out for them in this place.

“It hangs over me,” he said, “it hangs over us both. I see it like a heavy sunset weighted with purple bars.” And then, when the girl did nothing but shake her head and smile tenderly, “I warn you,” he went on, “you are risking much—I feel it—I know it. I have had this sort of instinct before about things.” He shivered a little and laid his hand on her arm as if he clung to her for reassurance.

Nance remembered long afterwards the feelings in her that made her turn her face full upon him and whisper proudly, as if in defiance of his premonitions, “What can happen to us that can hurt us, my dear, as long as we are together, and as long as we love one another?”

He was silent after this and apparently satisfied, for he did not scruple to return to the subject of Rodmoor. The word gave him in those first days, he said, that curious sensation we receive when we suddenly say to ourselves in some new locality, “I have been here; I have seen all this before.”

Had he at that time, he told her, been less distracted by the emotions she aroused in him, he would have analysed to the bottom the dim mental augury—or was it reminiscence?—called up by this name. As it was he just kept the thing at the back of his mind as something which, whatever its occult significance, at least spared him the necessity of agitating himself about his future.

Nance’s thoughts were brought back from their half-attention with a shock of vivid interest when he came to the point, amid his vague recollections, of his first entrance into her house. It was exactly a week ago, he reminded her, that he found himself one sunny morning securely established as a new lodger under her roof. In his impatient longing to secure the desirable room—across the narrow floor of which, he confessed to her, he paced to and fro that day like a hungry tiger—he had even forgotten to make the obvious inquiry as to the quarter of the London sky from which his particular portion of light and air was to come.

It was only, he told her, with a remote segment of his consciousness that he became aware of the fine, full flood of sunshine which poured in from the southern-opening window and lay, mellow and warm, upon his littered books and travel-stained trunk.

Casual and preoccupied were the glances he cast, each time his mechanical perambulation brought him to that pleasant window, at the sun-bathed traffic and the hurrying crowd. London Bridge Road melted into his thought; or rather his thought took possession of London Bridge Road and reduced it to a mere sounding-board for the emotion that obsessed him.

That emotion—and Nance got exquisite pleasure from hearing him say the words, though she turned her face away from him as he said them—took, as he paced his room, passionate and ardent shape. He did not re-vivify the whole of her—of the fair young being whose sweetness had got into his blood. He confined himself to thinking of the delicate tilt of her head and of the spaciousness between her breasts, spaciousness that somehow reminded him of Pheidian sculpture.

He hadn’t anticipated this particular kind of escape—though it was certainly the escape he had been seeking—amid the roar of London’s streets; but after all, if it did give him his cup of nepenthe, his desired anodyne, how much the more did he gain when it gave him so thrilling an experience in addition? Why, indeed, should he not dream that the gods were for once helping him out and that the generous grace of his girl’s form was symbolic of the restorative virtue of the great Mother herself?

Restoration was undoubtedly the thing he wanted—and in recalling his thoughts of that earlier hour, to her now walking with him, he found himself enlarging upon it all quite unscrupulously in terms of what he now felt—restoration on any terms, at any cost, to the kindly normal paths out of which he had been so roughly thrown. He thrust indignantly back, he told her, that eventful morning the intrusive thought that it was only the Spring that worked so prosperously upon him. He did not want it to be the Spring; he wanted it to be the girl. The Spring would pass; the girl, if his feeling for her—and he glanced at the broad-rimmed hat and shadowy profile at his side—were not altogether illusive, would remain. And it was the faculty for remaining that he especially required in his raft of refuge.

Up and down his room, at any rate, he walked that day with a heightened consciousness such as he had not known for many clouded months. “The Spring”—and in his imaginative reaction to his own memories he grew, so Nance felt with what was perhaps her first serious pang, almost feverishly eloquent—“the Spring, whether I cared to recognise it or not, waved thrilling arms towards me. I felt it”—and he raised his voice so loud that the girl looked uneasily round them—“in the warmth of the sun, in the faces of the wistful shop girls, in the leaves budding against the smoke of the Borough. It had come to me again, and you—you had brought it! It had come to me again, the Eternal Return, the antiphonal world-deep Renewal. It had come, Nance, and all the slums of Rotherhithe and Wapping, and all the chimneys, workshops, wharves and tenements of the banks of this river of yours could not stop the rising of the sap. The air came to me that morning, my girl!”—and he unconsciously quickened his steps as he spoke till, for all her long youthful limbs she could hardly keep pace with him—“as if it had passed over leagues of green meadows. And it had! It had, Nance! And it throbbed for me, child, with the sweetness of your very soul.” He paused for a moment and, as they debouched more directly eastward through a poor and badly lit street, she caught him muttering to himself what she knew was Latin.

He answered her quick look—her look that had a dim uneasiness in it—with a slow repetition of the famous line, and Nance was still quite enough of a young girl to feel a thrill of pride that she had a lover who, within a stone’s throw of the “Elephant and Castle,” could quote for her on an April evening that “cras amet qui nunquam amavit” of the youth of the centuries!

The rich, antique flavour of the words blent well enough as far as she was concerned with the homely houses and taverns of that dilapidated quarter. The night was full of an indescribable balm, felt through the most familiar sounds and sights, and, after all, there was always something mellow and pagan and free about the streets of London. It was the security, the friendly solidity, of the immense city which more than anything just then seemed to harmonise with this classical mood in her wonderful foreigner and she wished he would quote more Latin as they went along, side by side, past the lighted fruit stalls.

The overhanging shadow of Adrian’s premonitions, or whatever they were, about Rodmoor, and her own anxieties about Rachel Doorm and Linda withdrew themselves into the remotest background of the girl’s mind as she gave herself to her happiness in this favoured hour. It was in a quiet voice, after that, that he resumed his story. The sound, he said, of one of the Borough clocks striking the hour of ten brought a pause to his agitated pacing.

He stretched himself, he told her, when he heard the clock, stretched his arms out at full length, with that delicious shivering sensation which accompanies the near fulfilment of deferred hope. Then he chuckled to himself, from sheer childish ecstasy, and made goblinish faces.

Nance could not help noticing as he told her all this, how quaintly he reproduced in his exaggerated way the precise gestures he had indulged in. “Per Bacco! I had only three pounds left,” he said, and as he shrugged his shoulders and glowered at her under a flickering lamp from eyes sunken deep in his heavy face, she realised of what it was he had been all this while vaguely reminding her—of nothing less, in fact, than one of those saturnine portrait-busts of the Roman decadence, at which as a child she used to stare, half-frightened and half-attracted, in the great Museum.

The first thing he did, he told her, when the sound of the clock brought him to his senses, was to empty his pockets on the top of the chest-of-drawers which was, except for the bed and a couple of rickety chairs, the only article of furniture in the room. An errant penny, rolling aside from the rest, tinkled against the edge of his washing basin. “Not three pounds!” he muttered and leered at himself in his wretched looking glass.

It was precisely at that moment that the sound of voices struck his ears, proceeding from the adjoining room.

“I had spent half the night,” he whispered, drawing his companion closer to his side as a couple of tipsy youths pushed roughly by them, “lying awake listening. I felt a queer kind of shame, yes, shame, as I realised how near I was to you. You know I knew nothing of you then, absolutely nothing except that you went to work every day and lived with some sort of elderly person and a younger sister. It was this ignorance about you, child, that made my situation so exciting. I waited breathlessly, literally petrified, in the middle of the room.”

Nance at this point felt herself compelled to utter a little cry of protest.

“You ought to have made some kind of noise,” she said, “to let us know you were listening.”

But he waved aside her objection, and continued: “I remained petrified in the centre of the room, feeling as though the persons I listened to might at any moment stop their conversation and listen, in their turn, to the frantic beating of my heart. I heard your voice. I knew it in a moment to be yours—it had the round, full sweetness”—his arm was about her now—“of your darling figure. ‘Good-bye!’ you called out and there came the sound of a door opening upon the passage, ‘Good-bye! I’m off. Meet me to-night if you like. Yes, soon after six. Good-bye! Look after each other.’

“The door shut and I heard you running down the stairs. I felt as though that ‘Meet me to-night’ had been addressed to myself. I crossed over to the window and watched you thread your way through the crowd in the direction of the Bridge. I knew you were late. I hoped you would not be scolded for it by some shrewish or brutal employer. I wished I had had the courage to go out on the landing and see you off. Why is one always so paralysed when these chances offer themselves? I might easily have taken a fellow-lodger’s privilege and bidden you good morning. Then I found myself wondering whether you had any inkling that I had been sleeping so near you that night. Had you, you darling, had you any such instinct?”

Nance shook her head, nor could he see the expression of her eyes in the quiet darkened square, across which they were then moving. They came upon a wooden bench, under some iron railings, and he made her sit down while he completed his tale. The spot was unfrequented at that hour, and above their heads—as they leaned back, sighing tranquilly, and he took possession of her hand—the branch of a stunted beech-tree stretched itself out, hushed and still, enjoying some secret dream of its own amid the balmy perfumes of the amorous night.

“May I go on?” he enquired, looking tenderly at her.

In her heart Nance longed to cry, “No! No! No more of these tiresome memories! Make love to me! Make love to me!” but she only pressed his fingers gently and remained silent.

“I took up a book,” he went on, “from the heap on the floor and drawing one of those miserable chairs to the window, I opened it at random. It happened to be that mad lovely thing of Remy de Gourmont. I forgot whether you said you had got as far as French poetry in that collection of yours that Miss Doorm is so suspicious of. It was, in fact, ‘Le livre des Litanies,’ and shall I tell you the passage I read? I was too excited to gather its meaning all at once, and then such a curious thing happened to me! But I will say the lines to you, child, and you will understand better.”

Nance could only press his hand again, but her heart sank with an unaccountable foreboding.

“It was the Litany of the Rose,” he said, and his voice floated out into the embalmed stillness with the same ominous treachery in its tone, so the poor girl fancied, as the ambiguous words he chanted.

“Rose au regard saphique, plus pâle que les lys, rose au regard saphique, offre-nous le parfum de ton illusoire virginité, fleur hypocrite, fleur de silence.”

The strange invocation died away on the air, and a singular oppression, heavy as if with some undesired spiritual presence, weighed upon them both. Sorio did not speak for some minutes, and when he did so there was an uneasy vibration in his voice.

“As soon as I had read those lines, there came over me one of the most curious experiences I have ever had. I seemed to see, yes, you may smile,”—Nance was far from smiling—“but it is actually true—I seemed to see a living human figure outline itself against the wall of my room. To the end of my days I shall never forget it! It was a human form, Nance, but it was unlike all human forms I’ve ever beheld—unless it be one of those weird drawings, you know? of Aubrey Beardsley. It was neither the form of a boy nor of a girl, and yet it had the nature of both. It gazed at me with a fixed sorrowful stare, and I felt—was not that a strange experience—that I had known it before, somewhere, far off, and long ago. It was the very embodiment of tragic supplication, and yet, in the look it fixed on me, there was a cold, merciless mockery.

“It was the kind of form, Nance, that one can imagine wandering in vain helplessness down all the years of human history, seeking amid the dreams of all the great, perverse artists of the world for the incarnation it has been denied by the will of God.” He paused again, and an imperceptible breath of hot balmy air stirred the young leaves of the beech branch above them.

“Ah!” he whispered, “I know what I thought of then. I thought of that ‘Secret Rose Garden’ where the timid boy-girl thing—you know the picture I mean, Nance?—is led forth by some wanton lamp bearer between rose branches that are less soft than her defenceless sides.”

Once more he was silent and the hot wind, rising a little, uttered a perceptible murmur in the leaves above their heads.

“But what was more startling to me, Nance,” he went on, “even than the figure I saw (and it only stayed a moment before disappearing) was the fact that at the very second it vanished, I heard, spoken quite distinctly, in the room next to mine, the word ‘Rodmoor.’

“I threw down the ‘Book of Litanies’ and once more stood breathlessly listening. I caught the word again, uttered in a tone that struck me as having something curiously threatening about it. It was your Miss Doorm, Nance. No wonder she and I instinctively hated each other when we met. She must have known that I had heard this interesting conversation. Your sister’s voice—and you must think about that, Nance, you must think about that—sounded like the voice of a little girl that has been punished—yes, punished into frightened submissiveness.

“Miss Doorm was evidently talking to her about this Rodmoor scheme. ‘It’s what I’ve waited for, for years and years,’ I heard her say. ‘Every Spring that came round I hoped he would die, and he didn’t. It seemed that he wouldn’t—just to spite me, just to keep me out of my own. But now he’s gone—the old man—gone with all his wickedness upon him, and my place returns to me—my own place. It’s mine, I tell you, mine! mine! mine!’ It was extraordinary, Nance, the tone in which she said these things. Then she went on to speak of you. ‘I can free her now,’ she said, ‘I can free her at last. Aren’t you glad I can free her? Aren’t you glad?’

“I confess it made me at that moment almost indignant with your sister that she should need such pressing on such a subject. Her voice, however, when she murmured some kind of an answer, appeared, as I have said, quite obsequious in its humility.

“ ‘O my precious, my precious!’ the woman cried again, evidently apostrophising you, ‘you’ve worked for me, and saved for me, and now I can return it—I can return it!’ There was a few minutes’ silence then, and I moved,” Sorio continued, “quite close to the wall so as to catch if I could your sister’s whispers.

“Miss Doorm soon began once more and I liked her tone still less. ‘Why don’t you speak? Why do you sit silent and sulky like that? Aren’t you glad she’ll be free of all this burden—of all this miserable drudgery? Aren’t you glad for her? She kept you here like a Duchess, you with your music lessons! A lot of money you’ll ever earn with your music! And now it’s my turn. She shall be a lady in my house, a lady!’ ”

Nance’s head hung low down over her knees as she listened to all this and the hand that her lover still retained grew colder and colder.

“I remember her next words,” Sorio went on, “particularly well because a lovely fragrance of lilacs came suddenly into the window from a cart in the street and I thought how to my dying day I should associate that scent with this first morning under your roof.

“ ‘You say you don’t like the sea?’ Miss Doorm went on, ‘and you actually suppose that your not liking the sea will stop my freeing her! No! No! You’ll have the sea, my beauty, at Rodmoor—the sea and the wind. No more dilly-dallying among the pretty shop windows and the nice young music students. The Wind and the Sea! Those are the things that are waiting for you at Rodmoor—at Rodmoor, in my house, where she will be a lady at last!’

“You see, Nance,” Adrian observed, letting her hand go and preparing to light a cigarette, “Miss Doorm’s idea seems to be that you will receive quite a social lift from your move to her precious Rodmoor. She evidently holds the view that no lady has ever earned her living with her own hands. Does she propose to keep a horde of servants in this small house, I wonder, and stalk about among them, grim and majestic, in a black silk gown?

“I must confess I feel at this moment a certain understanding of your sister’s reluctance to plunge into this ‘milieu.’ I can see that house—oh, so clearly!—surrounded by a dark back-water and swept by horribly cold winds. I’m sure I don’t know, Nance, what kind of neighbours you’re going to have on the Doorm estate. Probably half the old hags of East Anglia will troop in upon you, like descendants of the Valkyries. And the North Sea! You realise, my dear, I suppose, what the North Sea is? I don’t blame little Linda for shivering at the thought of it.”

For the first time since she had known him Nance’s voice betrayed irritation. “Don’t tease me, Adrian. I can’t stand it to-night. You don’t know what all this means to Rachel.”

Adrian smiled. “Your dear Rachel,” he said, “seems to have got you both fairly well under her thumb.”

“She was my mother’s best friend!” the girl burst out. “I should never forgive myself if I made her unhappy!”

“There seems more chance, as I see it now,” observed Sorio, “that Miss Doorm will make Linda unhappy. I think I may take it that Linda’s mother wasn’t much of a favourite of hers? Isn’t that so, my dear?”

“We must be getting home now,” the girl remarked, rising from the bench. But Sorio remained seated, coolly puffing wreaths of cigarette smoke into the aromatic night.

“There’s not the slightest need to get cross with me,” he said gently, giving the sleeve of her coat a little deprecatory caress.

“As a matter of fact, when I heard that woman scold Linda for not wanting to set you free I felt, in a most odd and subtle manner, curiously anxious to scold her, too; I quite longed to overcome and override her absurd reluctance. I even felt a strange excitement in the thought of walking with her along the edge of this water, and in the face of this wind. O! I became Miss Doorm’s accomplice, Nance! You may be perfectly happy. I made up my mind that very moment that I would write at once to Baltazar and accept his invitation. Indeed I did write to him, the minute I could hear no more talking. I was too excited to write much. I just wrote: ‘Amico mio:—I will come to you very soon,’ and when I’d finished the letter I went straight out and posted it. I believe I heard Linda crying as I went downstairs, but, as I tell you, Nance, I had become quite an accomplice of Miss Doorm! It seemed to me outrageous that the selfish silliness of a child like that should interfere with your emancipation. Besides I liked the thought of walking with her by the shore of this sea and calming her curious fear.”

He threw away his cigarette and, rising to his feet, drew the girl’s arm within his own and led her homewards.

The beech-tree, as if relieved by their departure, gave itself up with more delicious abandonment than ever to the embraces of the warm Spring night. They had not far to go now, and Nance only spoke once before they arrived at their door in the London Bridge Road.

“Had that figure you saw,” she asked in a low constrained voice, “the same look Linda has—now that you know what she is like?”

“Linda?” he answered, “Oh, no, my dear, no, no! That one had nothing to do with Linda. But I think,” he added, after a pause, “it had something to do with Rodmoor.”