John Powys - Ducdame

But it was not only the alarums and excursions of domestic agitation that reached Netta, during the subsequent hours of that singular Christmas Day, through a dream-like mist. The attitude of each one of the family, their personal characteristic reactions, affected her with the same muffled remoteness.

It seemed to her half-unreal when she learnt that Corporal Dick was suffering from brain fever; still more unreal when she heard his voice, apparently perfectly sane and intelligible, demanding that he should be taken home; most of all unreal when it was decided that he should be taken — in Doctor Twickenham’s closed carriage — to the gamekeeper’s house.

It seemed to her exactly like an event in a dream when, after some talk with the doctor about a trained nurse, Lady Ann volunteered to sleep at the gamekeeper’s and act that very part!

It was only when the church bells were ringing for the three o’clock afternoon service that this vaporous condition of Netta’s mind was dissipated with an unpleasant and shocking suddenness.

The doctor had already carried off his patient, avoiding the snowdrifts in the narrower lanes, when it emerged as a settled arrangement that Rook was to escort Lady Ann across Battlefield and Dorsal to the house of Mr. Drool.

It was curious how bitterly Netta received this information as it was revealed to her during a rather strained and silent Christmas repast. On innumerable other occasions she had seen the cousins go off together without a qualm. But to-day, after her conversation with Lady Ann, she felt a sickening distaste at the thought of their association.

She was the one who had been shot at. She was the one who for Rook’s sake had kept the thing a secret. It seemed an unnecessary stroke of irony that she should be just calmly set aside, and that all the drama of the event should centre in Cousin Ann’s acting the heaven-sent trained nurse!

To Netta’s simple mind an attempted murder was an attempted murder, a thing of bloody violence and notoriety, implying policemen and judges and law courts. There was something weird to her in the way Rook and Lady Ann could enjoy Mrs. Vabbin’s mulled claret and mince pies and Pandie’s chatter about the Corporal’s craziness when, but for a stumble over a log, there would have been a dead body lying in the house — a body that would have been Netta herself!

How could Rook go off in such high spirits with Lady Ann at his side and Lion scattering the snow with flying leaps, when there was nothing for herself to do but put on her cloak and tam-o’-shanter again and set out to church — unless she wished to sit alone in her bedroom thinking of Mrs. Ashover sitting alone in her bedroom?

What her nature really craved at that moment was someone like Minnie or Florrie to whom she could tell the whole story; tell how she felt when she was running; tell how she felt when she saw the lighted windows; tell how she felt when she heard the shots; tell everything and have a good satisfying cry about everything — but instead of that, there were Pandie and Martha whispering over a belated meal in the kitchen and there was Mrs. Ashover upstairs with the Prayer Book on her lap — Netta could just see her! — reading about shepherds and Stars in the East and wishing that Corporal Dick had shot a little straighter while he was about it!

In the end she did slip out and hurry off to that afternoon service. She had never, since she was a child, missed altogether the Christmas Offices, and as she listened to Hastings’s monotonous intonation mumbling over one of them now, like a great belated wasp in a forgotten apple loft, her indignant pity began to melt away.

It was no high supernatural consolation that came to her there. It was simply as if she herself, Netta Page, moving in the wake of those unrealizable turbaned shepherds, with the sound of a gunshot in her ears and a pitiful purpose hugged to her heart, had stumbled upon the presence of an event, which — whether fabulous or not — had covered the sorry footprints of humanity as the snow covered the fields, with a mysterious inviolable beauty.

ROOK’S high spirits did not diminish as, with Lion in front of him and Cousin Ann at his side, he struggled through the snow up the slope of Battlefield.

What Netta had interpreted as but another, darker example of that vein of inhuman detachment in him by which she had been so often hurt was in reality a feeling of immense relief that the Corporal had struck his threatened blow and that the blow had proved harmless. He had not breathed a hint to the girl of Uncle Dick’s threats, but the thing had been a growing weight on his mind, the heavier because of its vagueness; and now that it was all over — for his instinct told him that the old man was henceforth hors de combat —his present sense of escape was proportionate to his former fears.

The darkness that came slowly upon them, as step by labouring step they struggled up the hill, was mingled for Rook with a warm, exhilarating consciousness of his cousin’s proximity. The association of Netta’s figure with complicated agitations threw him back with a peculiar relief, now Netta was safe and sound, to his old careless easy pleasure in Lady Ann’s company.

He had always enjoyed being out in the fields with this warm-blooded creature of his own race, and to-night something in the character of the evening itself intensified that enjoyment.

It seemed to have a special quality of its own, the darkness that was falling about them now and isolating their two figures from the rest of the universe. It had a quality that was almost man-made, so burdened was it with ancient human consciousness of the ways of life upon the earth.

It seemed to carry with it an accumulated sense of the ending of days, of long, fate-charged days, that somehow or another had ended at last.

It was like a vast epitome of the various finalities, upshots, results, conclusions, that had descended, for better or for worse, upon all the eyelids that had ever closed, by sleep or by death, along that countryside!

Not a labourer, not a carter, not a shepherd, that had ever shuffled homeward after his day’s work, but had left some residue of his patience and his resignation upon the burden of that darkness.

And it was a peculiarly English darkness. It was a darkness with an island roughness in it, where a faint tang of seashore fog blended with the breath of hidden moss and heavy mud and with the chill of the snow.

And withal it was saturated with history. Just such a twilight as this must have settled upon Pevensey or Sedgemoor after some great historic battle, when the alarums and excursions had died down!

It was not an easy matter, struggling up that hill through the soft unfrozen snow, between rabbit holes and molehills, between furze bushes and hornbeam stumps; and when at last they reached the top and found themselves among the great dark trunks of the Scotch firs, it was natural enough that they should lean against each other for a moment’s breathing time before commencing the descent.

The touch of his cousin’s cold cheek, the familiar associations aroused in him by the smell of the Irish-tweed jacket she wore, as they leant together against one of those rough tree trunks, plunged him into the irresponsible security of remembered things.

Between the enormous sky spaces above the trees, void of star or planet, and the heavy snow masses that had descended out of their gulfs, there must have been proceeding, all that evening, some magnetic affinity that in the end would result in still further visitations from those airy heights.

Some of these magnetic currents from the elements above the firmament must have passed through these two human bodies on their mysterious journey; for when after a while they began going down the hill on the Dorsal side, Rook became conscious that his former familiarities with his cousin had not blunted the edge of their attraction for each other.