John Powys - Ducdame

“Ashover! Rook Ashover!” murmured the clergyman, recovering his own breath in long deep sighs. “You’ll see her again, Ashover! You can find her again!”

As he uttered the words he felt the silly futility of them, and the two pencil scrawls he had in his pocket, the letter and the address, seemed to possess pulses of their own which beat in unison with the beating of his heart.

He got Rook on his feet at last. The wretched man insisted upon going into the station and making enquiries about the next train to London. There was no train at all, it appeared, until six o’clock that night and that was a slow stopping train that did not reach town till after midnight.

Even Rook, distraught as he was, realized the folly of pursuing his friend any farther that day.

It was, however, only by degrees, only after they had walked slowly back to the Antiger Arms together, that the full stark hopelessness of the situation dawned upon the distracted man’s mind. London! How could he possibly find her in London, whatever day he went, or whatever train he took?

While they were waiting in the hotel yard for Mr. Twiney, who had retired to the tap room, Hastings handed over to Rook the letter which Netta had given him. Rook opened this as he stood there and read it leaning against the wheel of the gig; while Hastings went discreetly off to call the driver.

The letter ran as follows:

DEAREST ROOK:

I beg you not to think hard of me because of the drink. I did it because I had to do it. Don’t think hard of me, Rook, my dear, dear love. I did it for the best, but I can’t stand it any longer. Don’t worry about me. I shall be all right. Good-bye, dearest Rook. There’s nothing for you to feel sorry about….

NETTA.

With his eyes full of tears and his mouth drooping at the corners, in that grotesque twitching way in which a proud man struggles against breaking down, Rook folded up this letter and hid it carefully in his pocket.

He had recovered a good deal of his normal equanimity by the time Hastings brought Mr. Twiney back from the tap room; and that excellent man remarked to them both as they drove off, sitting side by side: “’Tis a wonder, gentlemen, ’tis a Bible wonder, how what do seem worse to we than dirty weather by thik old Gorm signpost do in the latter end when us turns about, seem Heaven’s own blessings! ’Tis a wonder that so’t should be. But so ’tis; and us has got to reckon wi’t.”

The long drive back to Ashover was broken by only one brief stop, when both Mr. Twiney and Hastings insisted upon Rook’s drinking a glass of beer and eating a bit of cheese. The sky remained overcast all the way by that same strange filmy veil that Hastings had noted when he first awoke in the caravan.

They reached Ashover by the middle of the afternoon; but when they approached the house Rook commanded Mr. TWiney to stop the gig.

“Hastings!” he said, “would you do a good turn for me?”

The priest, who had been throughout their drive singularly divided in his mind between his loyalty to Netta and his obvious duty to Rook, expressed himself ready to do anything.

“Get out here, then, would you? And run into the house and ask for Lady Ann? You might tell her that I’ve driven on to the village with Mr. Twiney and that I rather think I shall stay the night with Lexie. Will you tell her that? Oh, and you might tell her, too”—he hesitated, conscious of the alert interest of Mr. Twiney—“you might tell her — well! — everything that’s happened; just as it did happen! Will you do that for me?” And he helped the clergyman to descend from the cart, and then, calling upon the driver to drive on, got up again into his place.

IT WAS the third day of June, and Pandie, having “done” the occupied chambers of Ashover House, was busy cleaning the windows and brushing the floors of the two small rooms which opened upon the landing opposite the large front bedrooms.

The bedroom above the dining room looking out upon the linden tree was still used by Rook. Netta’s bed was covered by the same counterpane. Netta’s clothes still hung in the mahogany cupboard. Netta’s modest cold-cream pots and bottles of eau de Cologne still stood on the old-fashioned washstand.

Lady Ann, too, now Lady Ann Ashover, had not moved out of the great “spare room” above the drawing room, which had been allotted to her from the moment she first arrived.

It had been a shock to Rook’s mother and something approaching a scandal to the inhabitants of the kitchen when it became evident that the master and mistress of the house aid not intend to share the same room. Martha spoke of it with hushed voice and gloomy solemnity to Pod, the evangelical sexton.

“It be contrary to nature, that’s what I do say, Mr. Pod. Contrary to nature and contrary to the blessed Scriptures.”

The sexton had no quarrel with this sentiment. Indeed he was prepared to go further than his friend in his reprobation of “these heathen ways what the gentry do pick up in their travels.” He put the case to Mrs. Vabbin with convincing logic. “If the holy Lord had meant us to sleep single He would never have put it into our brains to hammer up these here double beds. Double beds means sleeping double. Any turnip can see that. And who would have thought of girt double beds if the Lord hadn’t whispered into the patriarchs’ ears them holy texts about the Woman being subject to the Man?”

Mrs. Vabbin’s enormous countenance, with its little nose, little mouth, and little eyes, shone with a kind of interior lustre as she imbibed these oracles. “Pod be nothink to look at,” she remarked to Pandie afterward, “but when he opens his mouth to speak, the Holy Spirit do fly out’n and make a person’s heart grow weak, same as they girt drums down at Patchery Fair.”

As April passed into May and May began to take upon itself the appearance of a summer month, Mrs. Ashover’s concern over this unnatural behaviour of the Squire and his bride began to quiet down. As far as she could see, the two treated each other just exactly as they had done before; and the knowledge communicated to her by Ann — for the niece concealed nothing from her aunt — of the child the girl expected before that autumn was over, was so unspeakably gratifying that everything else sank into insignificance in comparison.

It was an infinite relief to her, too, that not for one second would Lady Ann consider the idea of her leaving Ashover. It was also a pleasant surprise to find that in the thousand and one details of managing the establishment, details passionately precious to the old lady’s heart, she was not going to be interfered with in any way by her daughter-in-law.

The return upon the scene, gradual but sure, of the “county families” of the neighbourhood, was also a source of intense and secret satisfaction to the little woman. Lady Ann seemed ready to leave this aspect of her new life as completely as she had left the domestic side of things, entirely to her aunt. Mrs. Ashover found it difficult to persuade either Rook or her to take the least interest in the little society visits that began steadily increasing in number as it became more and more certain that that woman was gone for good.

For the aunt it was a new light on her niece’s character to find that Lady Ann despised the “county families” and detested every sort of “society,” being quite content to spend her days in long rambling walks alone with Rook’s dog, or in just sitting on the seat under the linden listening to the thrushes. It was almost as if Netta’s mania for unsocial solitude had been bequeathed to her successor; but the happy old lady was too preoccupied with the success of her grand scheme to bother her head very much over this new phase or to worry herself as to what it indicated regarding the relations between husband and wife.