John Powys - Ducdame

“Why don’t you apply to the detectives, Ashover!” he went on. “To the detectives!” And suddenly without the least intention he broke into a loud harsh rasping laugh. “The detectives!” he kept on gasping in a choking voice. “The detectives!”

It was Rook who felt a longing to go to the window now. That little room was becoming intolerable to him. He did, in fact, get up from his seat and stagger to the window sill, his legs numb and stiff; but Hastings was still rocking himself to and fro in such an alarming spasm of laughter that he remained leaning there with his face to the interior of the room.

The priest’s sinister explosion died down at last and he lifted his head from his hands.

“So I suppose now,” he said, addressing the dark figure that concealed so much of the starlit window frame, “you’ll have an heir to your historic family.”

Rook was too surprised by this rude remark to make any answer at all. He began to think the moment had arrived for bidding his host good-night. There evidently was nothing more to be got out of him with regard to Netta and he was in no mood for prolonging this scene.

But the ferment he had unwittingly aroused in Hastings’s soul had not exhausted its vindictive ricochets. “And so it’s a boy you’re expecting, is it?” His voice became hoarse as he went on with unrestrained malice: “I saw Binnory Drool to-night. He talked about you and about Betsy and the others. You’ve seen the others, I suppose, Ashover?”

Rook struck a match now and advancing to the table lit one of the candles full in his host’s face. He was so startled and shocked by the expression upon that suddenly ilhuminated countenance that he drew back with an unconscious exclamation of dismay.

“Ay! What’s the matter, man? What’s up? Are you angry with me about anything? What have I done?”

The priest jerked his chair farther back. “What was that word of yours?” he whispered huskily. “Phantasmagoric! A good word, phantasmagoric!”

Rook took up the other candle in his hand and lit it from the one that was already burning. The two small flames rose now between the two men like the horns of the ultimate Dilemma.

“Your people in the family vault must be in high feather these days, Ashover,” the priest went on. “They’ve been working and working for this, for many a long year. They were getting quite anxious, down there under the stones! It would have been a pity to disappoint them, wouldn’t it? I wonder what it feels like to have a long line of ancestors regulating one’s private affairs? It must be an interesting feeling.”

Rook looked round the room to see where he had put his hat and stick. He walked to the spot where they were and took them up. “Good-night, Hastings,” he said. “I must be off now.”

The priest rose to his feet like a man drunk or drugged.

“What would you have done,” he said, “if I had known anything about Netta? Known, for instance, where her address was now? Would you have gone straight off to her? Would you have left your wife and have gone to live with her? Not a bit of it! You’d have given her a little flattery and a little money and come right back here to your walks and your meals and your ‘phantasmagoric shadows’! Tell me this, Rook Ashover. How does a phantasmagoric shadow look when its female shadow has been decoyed away? Does it dance like a good obedient puppet on well-pulled wires? Does it, Ashover — does it?”

It must have happened then that some mysterious nerve in the man’s inmost identity, some nerve which had been strained by his struggle with Rook to the breaking-point, did actually break at that moment, destroying the normal intellectual self-control that renders certain actions impossible. For what occurred seemed monstrous and fantastic when Rook recalled it afterward. Repeating the words: “Does it dance, does it, does it, does it?” the man skipped up toward Rook, his arms grotesquely stretched out, his face distorted into a goblinish leer, one leg bent and raised in the air, the other hopping along the floor.

Rook drew back in apprehension, thinking that Hastings would end by striking him; but instead of that what he did was to seize one of the brass candlesticks from the table and fling it with a wild swing of his arm against the door.

Rook made a half-defensive, half-protective movement toward him; but the gesture proved unnecessary. The man clapped his hands to his head, staggered across the room, and falling into the cane chair where the other had been sitting burst into a passionate fit of weeping.

Two things occurred one after the other then, that were afterward so closely associated together in Rook’s mind that it was difficult to separate them. From the silence of the darkness outside there came suddenly to his ears, carried as it seemed from, somewhere beyond the garden and beyond the immediate meadows, that same extraordinary sound which he had heard on the occasion of his night with Ann in the Drool cottage.

He had no time to analyze the nature of the sound, but there did flash across his consciousness a vague and irrational notion connecting it with the savage outburst with which this huddled and sobbing object in the chair had derided his unborn child. Had the prophet of annihilation been answered by a howl of counter-mockery from those silent tombs under the chancel slabs? Or was the whole thing a ghastly trick of his own disturbed brain, an auditory hallucination practised upon him by the agitation of that extraordinary encounter?

He bad no time to question further this “supernatural soliciting,” to use the Shakespearean word, when the door of the room opened silently and, by the light of the one candle that still burned upon the table, appeared the white figure of Nell, her hair loose about her shoulders, her feet bare.

She had been awakened from a deep sleep by the noise of the candlestick hurled against the door, and without any clear consciousness of where she was or what she was doing she had rushed blindly across the landing.

Rook, who had flung down his hat and stick upon Hastings’s desk, now made a mechanical movement toward them, feeling that it was not the moment to intrude any longer upon these two people.

Nell stopped him with a quick gesture.

“Oh, what is the matter?” she cried. “No! No! I can’t let you go like that until I know what’s happened! What is it, Rook? What have you done to him? Have you two been quarrelling?”

There was no need for Rook to reply for Hastings himself got up from the chair.

“Go back to your room, Nelly dear,” he said gently, but in a tone that made it difficult for the girl not to obey him. “I’ll just see Mr. Ashover out and then I’ll come. Have you got everything, Ashover? I don’t think you’d anything but your stick, had you?”

Rook could do nothing but just press Nell’s hand as he passed. Her eyes clung to his in that dim candlelight in a way he never forgot. He left her standing with the light in her hand at the top of the stairs.

“Good-night, Ashover. I’m afraid I lost my wits just now. I have quite got them back.”

“Good-night, Hastings, and I beg you not to think any more about it or indeed about any of these things too much. It’s better sometimes to wake up in the morning as if you were newly born.”

He held out his hand as he spoke and Hastings, after a moment’s hesitation, took it.

“Perhaps it’s just as well once in a way to lose one’s wits,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. If ever I hear from Netta I shall let you know. Good-night, Ashover.” And he closed the door behind him with a faint recrudescence of his lost sense of formidableness.

At least he had not revealed to him Netta’s secret. It was necessary to his very life, at this moment of the supreme wreck of his self-respect, that the simple chance-given vantage ground of having the girl’s address in his hands should act as a counterpoise to his abasement.