John Powys - Ducdame

She moved to the mantelpiece and stood silently regarding a little gold-framed miniature of Rook’s father when a young child. The picture fascinated her by its resemblance to Rook, and a wave of overpowering pity for what she knew well enough he was going through during these agitated hours swept over her like a shivering ague fit.

The odd thing was, and she wondered at it herself, that she felt no anger, no bitterness against him. She longed to rise up against them all and do something — she knew not what — to clear his path for him; to make, as the Bible says, “his way smooth.” She felt glad that she was to be sent on a message to Lexie. She wondered how much Lexie had been told of all that was happening. Had Lady Ann found time to send him news of her marriage, news of Netta’s disappearance? What an irony if this “something” that she was to take to him were nothing less than this double-edged piece of overpowering intelligence!

She looked at the marble and gilt clock. It was already nearly one. Would she be forced to stay and eat lunch with this mother and this daughter?

The idea of such a thing was utterly repulsive to her. It would have been like eating with two judges while the executioner was at work upon the condemned!

A sudden sound of the opening and shutting of doors in the rear of the house made her stand transfixed on the faded hearthrug, her eyes hypnotized by its convoluted pattern, her ears listening, listening— In a moment she lifted her head and made one irrepressible movement toward the door. She had heard a familiar voice outside, engaged in a hurried low-toned dialogue with Pandie. Then there came his step in the passage and the door of the drawing room was flung open.

Nell stared at him for a moment in speechless dismay. He might have served, save for his English clothes, for a picture of Hamlet rushing in upon Ophelia. His clothes were muddy and untidy, his boots unpolished, his chin unshaven, his eyes bloodshot and sunk deep in their sockets as if after many nights of sleeplessness.

He shut the door with studied precaution and fixed a long nervous look upon the girl as if expecting some angry outburst from her. Then, advancing a step or two, he threw down his hat and stick upon the rosewood table and looked wildly round him like a hunted criminal seeking sanctuary.

Nell’s paralyzed dismay melted into infinite tenderness when she saw how broken he was. She went straight up to him and threw her arms round his neck.

His face felt cold and clammy to her kiss, as if it had been something carved out of the pith of elder-wood, and the unshaven hairs upon his chin pricked her cheek.

“Hush,” he whispered nervously. “Hush, for God’s sake! They haven’t any idea that I’m here. They’re upstairs. Pandie told me you were alone. I’ve come back for money and my shaving things. Twiney’s waiting for me in the road. I wouldn’t let him drive up. Pandie’s gone to my room to get everything. She won’t breathe a word. So you mustn’t either, my sweet Nell! Oh! I shall find her; I shall find her; or never come back here again!”

The young girl released his neck but clung still to his shoulders, gazing up into his face.

“You will find her, Rook dear. I know you’ll find her! I never believed it for a moment when they said she’d gone to that dreadful place.”

He took her hands gently from his shoulders and held her at arm’s length away from him. In his excitement the grip of his fingers was so powerful that he bruised her flesh.

“You don’t know what it is to feel as I feel, Nell,” he muttered huskily. “It’s like being a murderer.”

“It was not your fault, Rook darling,” she whispered. “It was not your fault. I know all about it. I saw it all happening; but what could I do? Oh, Rook, my dear, dear love, what could I do?”

“It’s like being a murderer, Nell,” he repeated, gripping her thin arms so tightly that she could not refrain from a little smothered cry. “It’s just as if I had deliberately killed her! And she was so good! Oh! Nell, I was all she had. And she was so dear and good!”

He loosed her arms and uttered a sigh that shook his bony frame to its centre.

“You will find her, Rook dear! You will find her!” the girl kept repeating; and then, feeling suddenly faint with the tension of this encounter, she sank down on one of the tall, embroidered, Louis Quatorze chairs, heart-shaped and gilded.

He fell on his knees at her side and taking her face in his hands kissed her pitifully and blindly. Under his kisses her colour came back and she leaned forward, her hands clasping his head.

“Rook, dear, dear Rook, you’ll find her!” she chanted, in a kind of crooning monotone, swaying a little as if rocking an infant. “You’ll find her, Rook. Have no fear! Something tells me that you and she will meet again.”

He rose to his feet and glanced nervously at the door.

“If I do, Nell,” he whispered, “you’ll be my friend, won’t you, and help me through with all this?”

She never knew what he really meant by this last appeal, for with a quick tap at the door Pandie put her head into the room and beckoned to him.

“I’m with you, Pandie,” he cried. “Good-bye, Nell!”

And before she had found the strength to get up from the rose-embroidered chair with the stiff gilded arms, he had got out of the room and the door was shut.

Once upon her feet she felt her normal strength coming back; and with that strength she felt a certain strange deep happiness stirring in her heart, a happiness that was different from the happiness she had experienced earlier that morning, and yet was not, it may be, altogether remote from that! She bent down over a great shallow vase of primroses that stood in the middle of the table where Rook had thrown his hat and stick, and she buried her face in those pale virginal blooms.

She approached the verge, as she inhaled that penetrating sweetness, of nothing less than the open secret which “many prophets and kings” have died without knowing, namely, that when love passes a certain subjective barrier and flows outward over the life of the person loved, it liberates itself for that moment at least from the sting that is “cruel as the grave.”

She was still smelling these flowers when Mrs. Ashover came in; carrying in her hand a folded note.

“Will you take this to Lexie for me, my dear?” she said. “I would have loved to keep you to lunch with us, but as you can see, everything is at sixes and sevens!”

For no reason at all except from an inherent and invincible capriciousness in the very texture of all terrestrial happenings, it was this silly phrase “sixes and sevens” rather than anything that any other human being had said to her that day that kept teasingly and mechanically forming itself upon her lips as she recrossed the two bridges over the river, on her way to be the first messenger to inform Lexie Ashover that his historic name was in less danger than it had been, two days ago, of disappearing altogether from the face of the earth!

EMERGING from the ex-priest’s house at Bishop’s Forley, the Reverend William Hastings, his head throbbing from the excitement of his metaphysical arguments with the German visitor, found himself walking, about six o’clock in the evening, through a street completely unknown to him in the poorer district of the rambling overcrowded town.

He had walked all the ten miles to the place that morning and when he left his confrères he announced his intention of walking all the way home; but the agitation of the arguments they had had in this singular meeting had left him so exhausted that he began to think he would give up all thought of getting back that night.