John Powys - Ducdame

“Ann! What are you doing here?”

She made a little gesture that kept him at a distance while she recovered her breath.

“I — thought — I—would like — a little stroll — but it — it has been rather too much for me.”

She spoke in gasps, but she smiled quite naturally into his face and her tone was calm.

“You’d better come into Nell’s with me,” he said. “You can’t walk back in that state. She’ll be able to look after you.”

“I think — if you don’t mind, Rook — I’d prefer to rest a little where I am.”

As she spoke she sank down, easily and spontaneously, among the grasses of the hedge. Her movement disturbed several white butterflies which fluttered away along the edge of the field, while a scarlet-and-black cinnabar moth flew heavily from a tuft of clover to a patch of hedge parsley; where it paused, as if to regard the tulips in her hat, its wings drawn close against its body.

Rook knelt down anxiously by her side, his face sad and puzzled; his heart infinitely weary of the whole business of living. Above them, lost in the cerulean blue, not one lark, or two or three or four, but it might well have been a whole classic chorus of larks kept up that arrogant, brazen, importunate monotone of ecstasy, such as no instrument of string or pipe, no voice of man or woman, could lift from the earth; the very voice, so it might well seem, of the griefless, merciless, exultant sky, whose colour mocks all human passion by the impact of its appalling simplicity.

IT DID not need a long interlude under that June hedge to bring the colour back to Lady Ann’s cheeks and a more even beat to her indignant heart.

The savage and primitive portion of her nature was soothed and satisfied by the fact that she was keeping Rook away from Nell; and something more subtle within her was quick enough to divine that Rook’s attitude under this turn of events was not at all the attitude of a baffled and disappointed amorist.

He seemed just simply concerned and agitated at her own state and apparently took it for granted, without any other thought, that he would now have to support her back to Ashover.

He took her back there, indeed, leaning on his arm, by the very same path she herself had followed an hour ago; and his tenderness and solicitude were so obviously genuine that, though her anger against him still smouldered on in the depths, she confined its expression to nothing more serious than a few bitter sarcasms. It still remained possible that “everything,” including that carefully prepared table, was on Nell’s side; possible, after all, that Rook had not wilfully deceived her, that he had not, in fact, himself been aware of the convenient absence of Mr. Hastings.

Though she was feminine enough to derive a wicked satisfaction in the thought of that table left there without a guest; those yellow, purple, and black pansies lying unseen by any eye except her own, she was practical enough to insist on Mr. Twiney’s being sent back at once to the village with orders to call in at Toll-Pike Cottage on his way to his own house. “And put the back seat in, Twiney, please,” she said, as they encountered the gardener on their return. “And don’t forget to call for Mrs. Hastings as well as Mr. Lexie! I shall drive; so there will be just four people. Mr. Ashover will walk.”

Perhaps even the outraged feelings of Lady Ann would have been subdued into pity if she could have seen the forlorn figure in Toll-Pike Cottage removing one by one the plates from the dining room and the dishes from the kitchen stove. Nell had seen from her bedroom, to which she had fled to escape the mocking sight of her preparations, the husband and wife making their way back across the fields; and the sight had filled her with a cold, miserable hopelessness and a bitter shame.

Lady Ann’s intrusion had been particularly cruel because there had been a pitiable struggle in her own conscience over the whole affair. She had seen very little of Rook since the fatal day of Netta’s flight. He had given her very few chances to see him. And though she had struggled heroically to keep up the level of her emotion to what she had felt when they met in that drawing room, there were occasions when, as in the case of this unfortunate lunch, her longing to be with him, to have him to herself alone, overpowered her conscientious scruples.

The fact that she had steadily struggled to efface every instinct of possessiveness from her feelings so as to be of genuine use to him as a friend made it all the bitterer and more shameful to be thus exposed in her lapse from her self-imposed standard by Lady Ann’s appearance.

Nothing is harder to bear than a fall from one’s own ideal when it is grossly interpreted. A portion of oneself ranges itself then on the side of the accuser and the rest of one’s being writhes helplessly under a double shame.

By degrees she managed to calm herself enough so as to restore her house to its normal appearance. She hadn’t the heart to taste any of the things she had prepared. Standing by the cleared and empty table she nibbled a few biscuits and drank a glass of milk. Of those three pansies, she slipped one without a smile into a little apple-green volume of Shelley and squeezed the other two into a vase of wild flowers.

She had just done this when she saw Mr. Twiney at the gate. She went out to meet him. He announced in a circuitous rigmarole that he had been ordered to call for her with his gig.

“’Tisn’t as if me cart were a gentleman’s cart; but the lady up there,” and he jerked his thumb toward Ashover House, “be going to drive me mare, and she expects ’ee to sit on thik back-seat ’long wi’ Mr. Lexie.”

Nell was on the point of explaining to the man that she had not the least intention of coming to Antiger High Mead; but she suddenly changed her mind.

“I am going up to see Mr. Lexie in a minute or two,” she said, “and I’ll tell him to expect you.”

She let Mr. Twiney depart then; and running back into the house and up into her room began to put on her walking shoes and her newest hat.

Half an hour later she was sitting in Lexie’s little garden at the rear of his cottage; confessing everything that had occurred. The enclosure was a small one, defended on two sides by rough gray walls and divided from a small orchard at the back by a briar-rose hedge.

The girl sat opposite Lexie in a low deck chair; and as she talked to him from beneath the shady brim of her hat she kept pulling at the green blades and brittle daisy-stalks of the grass patch beneath them.

From one of the apple trees in the orchard came the sweet reiterated quinquapartite moan of a wood pigeon; and Lexie, as he listened to what his guest was saying, found himself repeating the measured Shakespearean quatrain that he loved so well:

Whereupon it made this threne

To the phœnix and the dove,

Co-supremes and stars of love,

As chorus to their tragic scene.

“And so she came right into my room and saw how I was expecting your brother — saw everything. And I could tell just how it struck her, just what she thought.” Nell sighed miserably and threw away a little handful of squeezed-up daisy-stalks which fell across the burnished golden face of a dandelion.

“She thought what was the truth,” said Lexie, the leathery folds and humorous wrinkles about his eyes deepening into a hundred crevices and furrows as ruggedly emphatic as those on the bark of his favourite elm tree.

The girl lifted her chin and leaned forward. “You know it wasn’t like that,” she said. “You know I hadn’t the least wish to make her feel badly. It just happened that William was out for the day and I thought it would be nice to cook a meal for him — for Rook, I mean. I hadn’t talked quietly and properly to him for weeks and weeks.”