John Powys - Ducdame

Pandie’s face, which had been growing more and more downcast under this recital, which transferred the glory of knowledge from herself to Mr. Twiney, now brightened again.

“There be nothink in the move of a gippoo’s cart to make an ado over,” she murmured complacently.

“That’ll be all thee do know on’t,” retorted the gardener. “It’ll open your eyes a bit wider, me maidie, when I tell ’ee that Squire have gone and gived old Betsy two ten-pound notes for to clear out of thik lane; while she be biding where she be to get more from ’un! They say them innocents she do take money for be Squire John’s by-throws; seeing as how he was so smitten wi’ Nancy, what was their mother.”

Pandie did indeed open her eyes at this. She even became a little pale. She had more than once heard this legend about Nancy Cooper, but the idea of her master being actually compelled to hand money over to Nancy’s mother shocked and startled her feudal pride.

She opened her mouth to utter an indignant protest, when the voice of Martha from the scullery behind her put an abrupt end to the colloquy.

“Pandie, where be ’ee? Missus be ringing for you, Pandie!” And then in a tone intended to be heard across the currant bushes as far as Mr. Pod’s wheelbarrow: “What be come to ’ee, lass, that you go interrupting a man’s work like that? Come into house, lazy-bones! Come into house!”

While the family’s dependents were thus discussing affairs in the kitchen garden the new lady of the house was displaying signs of unusual agitation as she sat in her favourite place under the lime tree. The tree above her was in full blossom and the air hummed and murmured with the innumerable bees that hovered about it. All the sweetness of the early summer flowed in upon her senses, one little thing and then another bringing its own especial evocation of delicate memory. The sudden sound, and equally sudden cessation of sound, as a blue-bottle fly droned past her; the rich lazy movements of two tortoise-shell butterflies, the swifter flight of a great yellow brimstone butterfly; the gleam of the pearl-white blossoms of an elder bush in the shrubbery, held up like a cluster of filigreed chalices to catch the distilled quintessence of that golden morning; all these things and something beyond them all, something which might have been defined as the accumulated anonymous fragrance of all those flowers of the field that lack any definite scent and yet from their very number must fling some sort of essence of themselves upon the air, such as buttercups and moon daisies, flowed in upon the mind of Cousin Ann and blended themselves with her troubled thoughts.

Every now and then she would cast a nervous glance at the three windows of Mrs. Ashover’s boudoir; windows which projected from the eaves of the house, above the level of her own and her husband’s more spacious bedrooms. She seemed to shrink from the idea that the old lady was aware of the agitated state of her mind, to shrink from the thought of that erect little figure watching her inquisitively, anxiously, from one of those three windows!

She kept rising from her seat under the tree and making little impatient excursions, first to one flower bed and then to another, as if to assure herself that the green stalks of this or that plant of the later summer had not blossomed into sudden miraculous bloom. What a rush of turbulent thoughts whirled that morning through Lady Ann’s brain! What troubled her most through it all was the agitating change that seemed to have taken place in her own nature. She had always regarded herself as being “in love” with her cousin; but, as she looked back on those early days of her association with him, the feelings she had then, compared with what she suffered from now, seemed a mere girlish fancy.

She would have supposed, from her own abrupt and straight-cut psychological insight, that the condition of being pregnant would have completely saved her from this miserable infatuation. She would have predicted, had the case been that of another woman, that the new interest, the looking forward to a new life, would have detached her from the child’s father, numbed her emotional nerves, lulled her into a kind of lethargic trance and nourished her upon vague, sweet, half-animal dreams.

Nothing of the kind! She found herself wretchedly and shamefully in love with her husband, torn by the most humiliating of all forms of jealousy, jealousy for a rival whose personality she despised and whose existence had melted into air and become nothing.

She was jealous of a ghost, of a shadow, of a memory, of an unreal image conceived by pity and begotten by insane remorse.

Every incident in her new life with Rook hurt her to the inmost nerve of her. personal pride. It was humiliating that he refused to share her room. It was gall and wormwood to her to see him day by day so submerged by his own fixed idea that he went to and fro like a man in a trance, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, noticing nothing; taking not the least interest in any of her projects, taking no interest at all in this child of theirs which was now so emphatically beginning to manifest its presence. She had broken down under the strain once or twice; and, as Pandie alone in that household knew, there had been some terrible and lacerating scenes between them.

But on the whole she had just suffered in silence; and she was at least thankful that the sagacious old mother remained, as far as she was able to detect, completely oblivious of what was going on.

What was preying on her nerves at that particular moment was not, as it happened, connected with Netta at all. It was connected with Nell. Rook that morning had carelessly announced that he had been invited to lunch at Toll-Pike Cottage. Well! There was nothing but what was perfectly natural in that! It was only by pure accident that she had that very morning, about half an hour ago, caught sight of William Hastings, mounted on his bicycle, riding at a steady speed in the direction of Bishop’s Forley.

He might of course have been on his way to visit some outlying districts of their own estate. He might easily have been running over to Antiger Lane to call upon Mrs. Drool, to buy honey or eggs from her, or because Binnory had got into some trouble. At the thought of Binnory she instinctively shuddered, remembering the experiences of her wedding day. Her nerves were all jangled that fine June morning. The chances were surely all against the man’s having set out on so long a ride.

And yet were they?

It was unusual for Hastings to go visiting in the morning. He generally wrote in the morning and went his rounds in the afternoon. Besides, Ann knew that he had a philosophical colleague in that squalid town.

She wished she could remember what the reply had been to Mrs. Ashover’s invitation, asking the vicar and his wife to picnic with them in Antiger High Mead. Had Nell Hastings accepted for them both or only for herself?

The abnormal condition of Ann’s nerves was proved by the fact that she actually got up now with the intention of going straight to Mrs. Ashover’s room to satisfy her mind on this point; and then, no sooner had she reached the front door than she felt so invincible a repugnance at the thought of encountering the old lady that she reversed her steps and came hurriedly back to the shelter of the lime tree.

She had “The Bride of Lammermoor” with her in the old Ballantyne edition; but in vain she tried to forget the sting of her trouble in following the proud griefs of the unhappy Ravenswood! All she could do was to gaze absentmindedly on those quaint illustrations; too abstracted even to brush away the little ivory-coloured yellow-stamened blossoms that kept falling on the open pages.

The uncertainty of it all was the thing that seemed to hurt her most. She visualized the thin harassed face of Rook, as she had seen it that morning, as he perfunctorily kissed her cheek, preparatory to setting out on some too-long-delayed piece of business connected with his property. He had been growing steadily thinner, steadily sadder and quieter, ever since his marriage. He was invariably kind and considerate to her. The only violent scenes they had were scenes deliberately and wantonly brought on by herself in the irritation of her nerves.