John Powys - Ducdame

“Didn’t I tell ’ee?” the old woman triumphantly protested, taking her seat on the narrow bed. “Them’s queer to look on and that’s God’s truth, dearie, but if it hadn’t been for the drink, them ’ud be as natural-like as your own self.”

“Who are they?” enquired Mr. Hastings, looking with a good deal of relief at Netta who had now overcome her shivering fit.

“Me partners,” repeated the hag. “Them as has got old Betsy her poor living, day in, day out, these twenty years. ’Ee should see ’un dance, Mister. Them can dance same as real poppets.”

“But who are they?” repeated the misanthrope, displaying more curiosity than Netta had ever seen in him before. She herself had now completely recovered her sober senses, and dimly through a turbid cloud of dream-like images there began to rise before her the vision of what she had run away from and the stark question of what she was to do next.

“Them be the childer of me own daughter, Mister,” replied the woman. “Of me own daughter, Nancy Cooper, what Squire Ashover sweeted. When Squire broke with she, her married a decent market-man, what grew ’taties and such-like. But ’twas no use. Squire’d learned her to drink terrible; and ’twas along o’ that she runned off wi’ Colpepper Thomas the horse-dealer. He were the drunkenest brute between Exeter and London, and it was my own self who buried her. She left me her two, them as has been my partners for twenty years. She swore they were Squire’s, and we got hundreds of pounds out of ’ee for they, unbeknown to his lady.”

Old Betsy paused, and Netta, who had been staring at her in consternation ever since she began, now began stammering: “Do you mean that those poor things are — half-brothers — to — to — the present Mr. Ashover?”

“That’s what old Betsy means and not a word less,” chuckled the old woman. “We bain’t gipsies, as folks do say; not a bit o’t. We be a good Frome-side family same as Squire ’isself. Them Ashovers be Satan’s own tribe, every one of them. There be old man Dick who went and hanged ’isself so I’ve a-heard. He was Squire John’s brother. And now they say Squire Rook have got some doxy or other in house wi’ ’ee. He ’ d look silly, would Squire Rook, if I askit he for a few hundred for me partners here!”

William Hastings was not surprised to notice that Netta avoided meeting his eye. He had summed up her situation pretty shrewdly by this time and was vaguely considering in his own mind what line of action he ought to take. What he did not feel sure of was whether she had left Ashover with its master’s concurrence; or whether, out of sheer weariness of her equivocal position there, she had just drifted off.

Having relieved her feelings by her long confession Betsy Cooper now became taciturn and practical. She indicated that in return for a small sum of money she would retire for the night behind the Paisley shawl, leaving the rest of the interior of her retreat at the disposal of her guests.

“There be a horse-trough under hedge,” she remarked, pointing at the door of the caravan, “if so be that either of ’ee want to wet your hands afore night.”

The idea of setting out again to look for a more conventional shelter was appalling to Netta. She slipped down the caravan steps upon the roadside for a moment; and did dip her fingers in the receptacle described by the pseudo-gipsy; but the night was so dark and the air so chilly that she was glad enough to return to her seat by the stove. She would have given a great deal just then for a taste of what the old woman had designated as “adder’s gall”; but her whole life seemed so broken up that she was thankful enough to have someone, even if it were only William Hastings, to cling to as a raft in that blind sea.

Hastings also made a temporary exit into the environs of their shelter with a view of collecting his thoughts and deciding upon his course of action. He made up his mind to accept this chance-given hospitality, leaving the problem of what to do next undecided till the morning. Netta had begun to look as if she longed for nothing so much as sleep. Well! Sleep would perhaps clear his own mind and give him the clue to the best course of action.

While the old woman herself was filling up her water jugs at a spring that adjoined the trough, Hastings contemplated his companion, who sat on the bed, her head buried in her hands, and wondered what the circumstances actually were that had led to this flight from peace and comfort.

“Netta!” he began, anxious to get some insight into her thoughts.

“Yes, Mr. Hastings.”

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings or be impertinent, but you must know what I feel, meeting you in a place like this, after knowing you as well as I have.”

She looked at him with her forehead wrinkled in hesitation. Could she make a confidant of such a man? Something in her yearned to unburden itself in a torrent of pitiful words, but something else — a queer mixture of pride and timidity — made her feel as if it would be a sacrilege to speak to any living soul of what had happened. With the recovery of her normal self there rose up before her mind, as the one anchor to which she must cling, through ruin, through disaster, through blind misery, the fixed idea that she had effaced herself by her own will for the sake of her love.

“I don’t think you know me very well, Mr. Hastings,” she said, smiling.

He was curiously nonplussed by the ease and naturalness of her tone. Seeing her as he had seen her in the street that night he had forgotten how far she had gone in her acceptance of the light social tone of the Ashover circle.

“No — no! Of course not,” he muttered hurriedly; but in his heart he thought: “Oh, these women! These women! One minute they fling themselves upon your neck and the next they take this society air and bow you out of the room.”

“I mean it’s difficult to explain everything to-night,” she pleaded, not missing the clouded expression that had come over his face.

He remained silent for a moment; while she looked at him rather wistfully, wishing that he was the kind of person to whom it would be easy to unlock the secrets of her heart. Then he said suddenly: “You won’t mind staying the night here with me, will you? I don’t see what we can do except leave everything till the morning.”

For the moment she misunderstood him and a deep indignant flush mounted into her cheeks, but his matter-of-fact air reassured her and she felt ashamed of herself.

“Don’t think I’m ungrateful, Mr. Hastings. You’ve been most kind to me.” And then she added as an afterthought: “But I shall hate taking the only bed in the place!”

Once more Hastings got that funny impression of something put on and artificial in her tone. But he let it pass and the return of Betsy Cooper brought their dialogue to a close.

The arrangements for the night were simple enough after all when they were actually made. Old Betsy retired behind the suspended shawl from the recesses of which emerged the most extraordinary succession of inhuman sounds that Hastings had ever heard in his life.

The clergyman himself, notwithstanding the libidinous leer to which the old woman treated him as she disappeared, a look that was made doubly significant by her manifest recognition of his profession, proceeded to wrap his overcoat round Netta’s passive form as she lay on the bed and then, making himself as comfortable as he could in the wicker chair, prepared to spend the night in metaphysical reverie, his pipe lit, and his feet on the stove.

Netta’s quiet breathing soon showed she was free from her troubles among the eidolons of sleep, and the man was left to his own thoughts.