John Powys - Ducdame

“It’s absolutely all right,” she murmured aloud to these exacting spirits of the race she served. “It’s absolutely all right.”

There was something in the mere fact of Mrs. Ashover’s revealing her thoughts in this way to a comparative stranger that startled and astonished the young girl. This insanity of devotion to so impersonal a thing as the survival of a family was so entirely outside Nell’s own life illusion that she felt like a person who watches the clash of phantom armies upon a phantom shore. And yet she was intelligent enough not to miss the note of something almost sublime in the old woman’s crazy loyalty.

“It’ll kill me if they can’t put up with me here.” That desperate sentence kept repeating itself in the girl’s brain like the beat of a drum that outlasts all the other sounds as the mêlée rolls itself away over the muffling hills.

Absorbed, each of them, in their own thoughts, the old woman and the young woman could hardly be expected to be aware of the full power of the occult influences that streamed forth on that enchanted spring day from the mouse-coloured dust underneath those marble slabs. It was as though the rejuvenative stirrings in earth and air had actually pierced through the slow dissolution of the centuries and roused some hidden vital force down there in the darkness, latent and potential, beyond all annihilation.

Some sort of obscure summoning from these tombs of the race she had saved must anyway have carried its exultant vibration into the nerves of the new mistress of Ashover; for, after a long lapse of silence between them, both the women seated there, with a pool of sunshine under their feet and a wavering stream of sunshine falling on their heads, became suddenly conscious that they were no longer alone in the church. They turned round simultaneously. They simultaneously stood up. And there was Lady Ann, erect and bareheaded in the doorway, regarding them with a blank, dazed, inexpressive face, like the face of a noctambulist.

They extricated themselves quickly from the narrow pew and walked down the aisle to meet her. She smiled faintly at Nell and held out her hand, but it was from behind the same impassive mask — the mask of a hypnotized sleepwalker — that she addressed her words to Mrs. Ashover.

“I came to tell you, Aunt, that Rook has got on the track of our lost lady. It appears she was seen, by someone who knew her, in Bishop’s Forley last night. I know there’s a great mass of slums round those glove factories. I’ve seen awful places down there — lodging houses and public houses and that sort of thing where any one of that kind might naturally go.”

Mrs. Ashover glanced at Nell, her instinct as a woman of the world warning her that this was not the moment for any interchange of unholy triumph between herself and her new daughter. But Lady Ann seemed strangely oblivious just then to all the conventions.

“You’re lucky to be able to enjoy a day like this with a clear mind,” she said, looking Nell straight in the face with her formidable gray eyes. “You’re lucky to be free of any contact with our crazy family.”

“William is in Bishop’s Forley to-day,” murmured Mrs. Hastings.

“Perhaps he’ll be the one, then, to find our lost sheep and bring her back!” responded Lady Ann with a joyless laugh. “Rook drove over there hours ago,” she added.

Walking side by side the three women skirted the angle of the church wall and moved toward the gate leading to the road. They walked in silence, the old woman and the young woman on either side of the newcomer, whose personality seemed endowed at that moment with an immense passivity of weight and power, capable of reducing them both to the rôle of irrelevant supernumeraries.

The warm spring sunshine covered them, all three, with its fecund benediction, and gave to their silent association an almost biblical solemnity. It was as if they had been moving, in accordance with some preordained religious rite, from flower-strewn altar to flower-strewn altar! They seemed, all of them, relegated to subordinate yet essential parts in some vast mystery play, some vernal celebration, complicated and dumb, in honour of Persephone or her mother. The cawings of jackdaws, the chittering of sparrows, the harsh cries of a flock of starlings as they settled for a moment on the edge of the roof, did not disturb, any more than did the bleatings of some distant hurdled ewes, the almost supernatural seriousness with which those three figures moved to the entrance of the churchyard.

Were they subconsciously aware, just then, in that magnetic weather, of the invisible pressure of the countless spirits of the dead, rushing forward through the body of the half-formed nameless one, hid in the womb of a new mother of the generations, forward, forward, into the dim, uncreated future?

If it were so, if the sublime mystery of the continuity of human life, beautiful and terrible, withdrew from these three sensitive female frames on that fatal morning all power of individual resistance, all power of personal choice, it is easy enough to understand how it was that they moved so slowly toward the gate. Such is the clairvoyant link between all women in their knowledge of themselves as living channels between what was and is and is to come it is likely enough that the strange passivity that emanated from the nerves of one of them on this occasion passed insensibly into the nerves of the other two.

No sooner were they out of the consecrated enclosure, however, and on the sunlit road than the whole mental atmosphere about them changed.

“May I come with you as far as the bridle path?” said Nell. “I made up my mind this morning that I would go to Antiger Woods to look for primroses, and I think I shall still do that — unless,” she added with a gentle glance at Cousin Ann, “I can be of any help to any one?”

Rook’s wife and Rook’s mother exchanged a quick significant look.

“I think, my dear,” said the latter with a sudden sharp eagerness, “you may be of immense use to us a little later. If my son, for instance, succeeds in finding Miss Page, and brings her back here, as I’m afraid he’s only too likely to do, it would be a blessed relief to all of us if you could — perhaps — for just a few days — till other arrangements were made — take her in at the cottage?”

Nell was unable to prevent the blood rushing to her cheeks. Had this aunt-mother and this niece-daughter, with their merciless aristocratic gray eyes, sounded her heart’s secret to its uttermost depths? Were they bent upon punishing her for her temerity? Was this extraordinary suggestion their premeditated revenge?

“I am sure William and I will do everything we can to help you, Mrs. Ashover,” the girl answered gravely. “I only trust no harm has come to Netta. I can’t believe that she went to any of those dreadful places. I expect she just took the night train to Bristol. I know she’s got people she knows there. Or she may have gone to London.”

Mrs. Ashover had ceased to listen. A new thought had come into her mind.

“Will you walk back with us to the house, Nelly? There is something I’d be most grateful to you if you’d do for me. Something I want to send to Lexie.”

The girl permitted herself to be led prisoner by these two dominant spirits and they all three crossed the bridge.

A few minutes later Nell found herself waiting alone in the great chilly unused drawing room whose spacious ceremoniousness seemed to embrace and envelop her as if she were just one more primrose or crocus or snowdrop to be “arranged” in a slender glass vase.

Never did the room look more stately, in its gilt and its whiteness, in its water colours and French prints; but the young visitor felt an intense and increasing hostility to the whole atmosphere there, as if the great room were consciously emphasizing a sort of victory over her and over all the wayward romance she represented.