John Powys - Ducdame

Brushing her hair before the open window with the scent of the young leaves and the new-grown grass floating in upon her and the songs of thrushes and blackbirds answering each other across the road, the girl abandoned herself to a thrilling current of happiness that seemed composed of every magical sound and every ecstatic scent that the great reservoirs of life held in their hidden springs.

It was as though she could catch, behind the shrill bird notes and the arrowy odours, the very stir and movement of the green sap as it pressed upward to meet the warmth of the generative sun.

Out of the recesses of her nature where they had been so long hidden rose a thousand indescribable memories.

Pale-green cowslip stalks mingled, in these faint evocations, with the transparent lilac of cuckoo-flowers, with the unique thrill of the first purple crocuses against the brown earth mould‚ with the crimson-tipped petals of innumerable daisies on dew-wet mossy lawns. Sharp birth pangs at once jocund and poignant seemed to answer from the depths of her being the unsealings and unsheathings that were going on in wood and garden and field.

All her buried responses to Nature, responses that had seemed to come to her in the form of pure ecstasies of childish happiness but in reality were associated with quite definite impressions of warmth and coolness, of stalks and leaves, of earth mould and roots and moss, of sun-motes and shadows, now rushed upward to the level of her brain, flooding her with a rapture that was beyond human description.

She tied up her hair, put on her shift, and ran down, bare-armed as she was, to make the preparations for her breakfast, against the moment she should be washed and dressed. There was not much to be done, for Hastings had built up an excellent fire and had put both kettles on the stove.

Hurrying through her ablutions with the impatience of a child, delaying just long enough to open her trunk and take out therefrom a real spring dress, in an incredibly short time she was seated at the kitchen table, with the door into the garden open in front of her, eating bread and butter and drinking tea with a face so radiant that had a sub-human elemental wayfarer lingered on the threshold watching her it would have certainly thought that the lives of the daughters of men were the ones to be envied throughout all space!

It then came over her what she would do when she had washed up the breakfast things, made her bed, and watered the purple and pink hyacinths that were budding now under the south wall. She decided that she would cross the Ashover bridge, skirt the Ashover garden by a little path she knew well, and make her way over the hill to the Antiger Woods. She would not let herself think of an encounter with Rook; in fact, she was by no means sure that she wished to see him that day; but she wished to associate him with her unusual mood; she wished to be near him, to feel the pulses of the spring in the locality haunted by his presence.

She was so impatient to get out of the house that in the end she forgot all about the hyacinths; and it was not until she had reached the entrance to the churchyard that, with a little funny smile on her twisted mouth, she remembered this omission.

Drawn, against her intention and against her will, by the memory of that afternoon in the darkened church, she lingeringly and slowly entered the enclosure and moved round toward the west door.

Her astonishment was great when, turning the corner of the building, she suddenly found herself faced by Rook’s mother. Mrs. Ashover was standing by the grave of her husband. Nell got a quick glimpse of her before she was observed and she was amazed at the expression on her face.

The old woman looked like an exultant and malignant witch, who had come to confide some unholy triumph to the responsive bones of a heathen corpse. She showed herself disconcerted and annoyed at the apparition of Nell, but she did not make any effort to conceal the causes of her wicked satisfaction.

“You’d better know at once what has occurred, Mrs. Hastings,” she said, “and then you can tell your husband, if Rook hasn’t told him already.”

Nell’s face grew white. What blow was this, then, that had chosen this day of all days to fall upon her head?

“What?” she murmured, her mouth open and her eyes wide. “Has anything happened — to any one?”

“Happened? I should think things have happened! You may be interested to learn that my son and his cousin were married yesterday by special license in Tollminster; and that that woman has run away.”

Mrs. Ashover fixed upon the girl, as she brought this out‚ a look of such evil exultation that Nell felt as though every secret of her own heart were stripped bare. She could only make a little gasping noise in her throat in response to this overwhelming information and instinctively she pressed her hand upon the late Squire’s head-stone.

“What’s the matter?” said the old lady, laying her gloved hand on the girl’s wrist and retaining it in her nervous clutch. “Come, come. This won’t do! Why, you’re as white as a Wyandotte hen. Come into the church and sit down a minute. No! No! I’m not going to have you fainting here by my John.” And she chuckled with a high-pitched quavering chuckle such as might have emerged from the leathery lungs of an agitated bat.

She dragged the girl with her into the building and they sat down side by side. As the blood began to come back to Nell’s cheeks and she began to make an attempt to visualize Cousin Ann as Rook’s wife, her deeper consciousness was aware of the Ashover tombs and of the difference between the way they looked now and the way they looked on that dark‚ misty evening.

“Where has Netta Page gone?” she whispered to her companion.

“Gone to the gutter!” was the unspoken response of the old woman. But what she actually said was: “We have no idea, child. Not Rook or any of us! They’ve been scouring the country all night; they’ve been to the police and they’ve been to the railway stations. Not a sign or trace anywhere! The curious thing about it is that she didn’t take anything; nothing but her handbag; and that, from what my son says, must have been practically empty. I think myself that she took money, but Rook says not. If he’s right there, it’s because she’s gone with someone, with some man or other with whom she’s been keeping in touch all the time. You know they’re like that! That’s what they always do: go back to some lazy bully who takes all their earnings!”

As Nell listened to this tirade her disgust grew greater and greater. If it had not been for those tombs in the chancel, whose presence had never been more emphatic, she would have protested indignantly and rushed away. As it was she just leaned back with half-closed eyes, trying to imagine what Netta must have actually felt as she stole out of that unconscious house with her empty handbag. In her growing sympathy with Netta she began to feel calmer and less hurt under her own personal blow. After all, she had never let her thoughts or feelings wander off beyond the romance of the immediate present. With regard to Lady Ann she felt no individual jealousy; only a sickening weight of troubled concern as to what the whole thing must have meant for Rook.

“I shall leave them alone for a while.”

Nell heard the old lady’s voice through the thick screen of her own agitation, as if it came to her through a tapestried wall.

“Alone for a while. You can tell your husband that. And if Lady Ann would rather have the place to herself after that, I shall be all right. It’ll kill me, very likely, if they find they can’t put up with me here; but I shall die happy.”

Mrs. Ashover lapsed into silence; and her gaze, as well as that of her youthful companion, wandered from the Voltairean lawyer to the melancholy Cavalier; and from the Cavalier to the austere Crusader.