John Powys - Ducdame

“Ill?” cried Hastings. “I should think not! And it’s Nell, not I, who’s got this idea of his being so worried. Besides, it’s not only about our Netta that he’s been worrying. I suppose you’ve heard—”

He stopped suddenly, catching a quick warning look on his wife’s face.

“When is the child to be born?” asked Netta quietly.

“Oh, pretty soon now, so they tell me,” Hastings replied. “I daresay it’s the kind of thing that Mr. Ashover finds especially trying,” he added. “But I’m sure he’ll be so thankful to have his mind set at rest about you that he’ll be a different person to-morrow.”

“I sha’n’t be a burden on you long,” said Netta. “I’ve told Nell that it’s only a very short little visit.” She made an affectionate movement toward her hostess and laid her hand upon her arm. “I can’t let Nell’s hospitality make me a trouble to you,” she went on, “and I won’t let it either!” she added with a smile.

Hastings drew back, baffled and puzzled. Netta had teased him before with a certain society air which he regarded as an affectation; but her present tone was different from that. It was the tone of a person who has a definite and unalterable plan in his own mind and who is just diplomatically sparring to gain time. There was something about Netta’s reserve, something in her manner and in the expression of her eyes, that thoroughly puzzled him.

There was no more real conversation between them during the light supper which Nell now brought in upon a tray; but as soon as the visitor had retired to her attic bedroom her hosts exchanged their impressions.

“I don’t believe she’s drinking any more,” said Nell. “That’s the great thing to be thankful for.”

Hastings shook his head.

“And yet there’s something queer about her,” the girl went on, “that scares me somehow. Did you notice it? A sort of unnatural quietness?”

Hastings nodded

“Of course, she always was quiet,” Nell continued, “and very likely we’ve forgotten how quiet she was. But I can’t help feeling it’s more serious than that. I don’t know what to make of it! She talks naturally enough and listens to what you say. But one has the feeling all the time that her mind is only half in the room with you.”

Nell rubbed her face violently with her hands; an habitual gesture with her when she was cornered and bewildered.

“She frightens me!” she burst out. “You don’t suppose she’s taken to drugs, do you, William?”

He shook his head.

“She seemed to realize about Lady Ann’s child,” the girl added, “without being told. I couldn’t stop Twiney talking about it. But it didn’t seem news to her. Perhaps she’d heard about it on the journey. Twiney said, by the way, that Pandie had told him that the child might be born any day now!”

Hastings protruded his under-lip in the manner characteristic of him when any of his manias were touched upon, “It would not trouble me very much,” he said grimly, “if after all this fuss it turned out to be a girl!”

The unwitting cause of this midnight discussion in Toll-Pike Cottage lay awake in her attic bed long after her hosts had wandered off into the paths of sleep.

Strange enough was it to find herself once more on the banks of the Frome! Strange and, in a sense that she was not able herself to analyze, sad with a sadness beyond anything she had ever known.

Vainly she tried to envisage what form her reëncounter with Rook would take. As she watched the rolling banks of whitish-yellow clouds crossing and recrossing that sickly, shapeless object, so distorted, so disfigured, that she knew to be the waning moon, a very curious and disturbing mental experience took possession of her. She had the feeling that some great passage of time had elapsed, some half-century of the journeying years, and that she alone of all the people she had known in Ashover was alive on that September night. She felt vividly conscious of being a solitary disembodied spirit, without desire, without hope, without regret, without any faintest wish to change anything or to alter anything; indeed, with no emotion at all except an infinite sadness.

Why she should be so sad she could not tell. Rook, Lexie, Hastings, Nell, Lady Ann — were they not all lying in absolute quiescence in that enclosure by the water meadows? A new race of men and women filled their places, who cared nothing for them, nothing for their memories, nothing for their names!

Her mind seemed to revert, with a cold, responsive weariness, to the inscrutable melancholy that used to puzzle her upon the face of Sir Robert; and it seemed to her, as she watched that bulging, unhappy, deformed moon, cringing before the clouds, that she now understood the secret of his sadness. It was a sadness that only a certain type of sentiency in this world ever responded to or touched the fringe of, a sadness that had something to do with what the undying elements must feel — the earth, the air, the water — as they submit in their patience to the eternal process; and watch the human generations coming and going and leaving behind so faint a trace!

And then, without any warning, a queer thing happened to Netta Page. She grew suddenly conscious that an actual human face was peering in upon her from outside the window; not pressing itself against the window pane, but regarding her with fixed intentness out of that heart-sick moonlight, its eyes looking straight into her eyes with an expression in them that gathered up and held in suspense the diffused woefulness that filled the great sky tent.

Long years afterward Netta could recall that look. And the curious thing about it was that she never hesitated as to the identity that hovered behind it, out there, in the sick, gusty night!

She knew it for the face of Sir Robert Ashover; and so deep an impression had that portrait of the Cavalier made upon her mind that even now, as she felt a vivid consciousness of his actual presence, it was with no trace of fear but rather with a sort of emotional recognition that she met his gaze. Hardly conscious of what she did she stretched out her arms toward the window; and it seemed to her as if that sorrowful phantom countenance smiled gently and reassuringly at her as it faded away.

When it was gone and she was once more lying back upon her pillow she found herself silently crying; not with bitter self-pitying tears, but with the sort of tears that belong to the winnowed and de-personalized spirit of the human race itself as it draws back from the confused arena of its sufferings and catches the sounds of disaster and calamity, faint and muffled, and almost mellowed as they rise up above the roof tops of the world.

She made up her mind that when she did meet Rook on the ensuing day she would make him take her into the church, to that marble image of the Cavalier there! How strange it was, she thought, as her tears dried upon her cheeks, that the mind of a person dead and buried more than two hundred years should still retain its power to influence and to console! Was it that something actually survived, of such a person’s subtler, more sensitive consciousness, among the places where it had moved in its lifetime? Or was there, behind all the dream stuff of the whole tragic scene, some imperishable cistern or reservoir of superhuman pity into which these nobler, these more imaginative responses sank, as the years moved round, adding always something to this great protest?

Netta’s nature was too simple, her beliefs and half-beliefs too vague and unformed, to be conscious of more than the crudest outlines of these open questions; but the things she had suffered and the things she had done, combined with the pressure upon her mind of her return to a place of so many memories, stirred up within her thoughts and speculations corresponding with these and corresponding with that troubled night sky.