John Powys - Ducdame

Along with the emptiness that filled his soul there came the sting of a peculiarly masculine resentment; the resentment which arises when a woman with whom one has dropped one’s mask and put aside one’s reserve suddenly reassumes her mask and her reserve at the very moment when one is most unarmed and at her mercy!

“And so your Fathers have taught you to look back upon our life together as sin? ” His tone was strained and harsh; and the girl saw clearly that he was on the verge of breaking out into a torrent of indignant words, bitter, corrosive, capable of leaving behind them scars that would never be effaced.

She must stop him. She must explain to him. She must make him realize what she had been feeling when she deliberately began drinking in order to degrade herself in his eyes. It was intolerable to her that he should take her present mood, her new life, and make of it something that diminished the value of all that had been between them. What she wanted to make him understand was that never from her — never, never from her! — could come any diminishing, any undervaluing of their love or of all that that love had meant. And if she could not make him see this without saying what was too hard to say, well, she must say it!

Woman-like, what hurt her most was that she should have blurred the image of herself that their love had created in his mind, nay, spoilt his response to that image by giving him the idea that it was possible for her to have changed so much as to be ready to betray their past together, to blaspheme against what they had shared.

She looked at him with that expressive look with which one human being beats at the closed shutters of another’s conciousness, like a starving traveller whose language is so remote, so foreign, that it might be mistaken for the wind in the trees, for the rain on the porch! What she wanted to lay before him was nothing less than the full measure of her love. That he should accuse her of not recognizing the worth of their days together or the value of the sympathy he had given her — it was blind, unfair, distorted, mad!

That was what men were always doing in this world; they were laying stress on external, outward, logical aspects of relations between people and missing the one thing needful! They were always working themselves up into rational indignation about aspects of love that were accidental, occasional, relative; whereas, all the while, Love Himself, absolute and immeasurable, remained dumb and inarticulate on the threshold!

As she looked at him now with this mystery lying unspoken, unspeakable, at the heart of her existence, and that turmoil of wild accusation trembling upon his tongue, it came over her what a tragic chasm it was that separated the love of a woman from the love of a man.

“It is thus. It is so. There are these evidences. There is this proof,” cries the exacting reason of the one. “I love you! Can’t you see that I love you?” answers the blind instinct of the other. Netta began to feel heart-sick and dizzy as she watched him, standing there like a judge; waiting, waiting, till some self-betraying murmur on her part brought down on her head the already formulated sentence. She seemed to herself to be beating back with her hands a clamour of discordant voices, of confused inexplicable sounds. Why did those steps keep marching up and down, up and down, in the room above? Or were they, too, only the beating of her heart? Surely that must be Lexie and Nell just outside the door! But their murmurings reached her as if they were not human at all; as if Rook’s pulses full of unjust anger had acquired some horrid goblin speech and were rushing upon her like an infuriated mob—

And then, without any reason for it, she saw with incredible clearness a little thin gold ring that the “Father” had worn on his finger when she was first pouring out to him the misery of her shame, of her loneliness; and as that vision disappeared, mingling strangely with a fierce red spot on Rook’s lowering forehead, she found herself experiencing that lightning-rapid panorama of her whole previous existence, such as, people had told her, persons underwent when, in drowning, they sank for the third time.

She certainly had begun to feel actually faint. What was Rook doing standing there, so funnily stern, in front of her? What was it she had to make him understand? Something that a person could do when he loved another person very much — but something that it was impossible to speak of!

“Rook!” she brought out with a kind of gasp.

At that moment the door flew open and Lexie and Nell precipitated themselves into the room. They both showed signs of extreme agitation and they both began speaking at once.

“Pandie is out there—”

“Pandie has come to say that—”

Rook turned pale. Had the moment arrived? Was he even now the father of an heir to Ashover?

Netta rose to her feet, also very white and trembling.

“Is it Lady Ann?” she asked.

Lexie was the one to explain; for Nell’s attention was distracted at that moment by the sound of her husband’s steps moving backward and forward in his room above.

“Pandie is at the gate,” said Lexie hurriedly. “She says your wife can’t be found.”

The first feeling that Rook had under the shock of this unexpected news was — strangely enough — a queer spasm of relief! For some profound subconscious reason anything seemed more tolerable to him just then than to hear that his child had come into the world.

“Can’t be found?” he repeated. And then, taking advantage of the strangeness of the communication to give vent to his unnatural emotion in the form of blind anger against the messenger: “What does the little fool come running here for?” he cried sternly. “Why doesn’t she look about in the garden, in the kitchen garden, in the orchard, up Battlefield, even? Ann has been walking quite far some of these days. She’s taken into her head to go a farther stroll than usual, that’s all! What’s the use of coming here to tell us a thing like that? Let me see her.” And he made a step toward the open door, where Nell was still standing, nervously preoccupied by the sounds overhead. “Let me see her! Let me talk to her!”

But Lexie intervened and stopped him. “It’s more serious than you think, Rook,” he said gravely. “For God’s sake keep your wits about you! They’ve searched the garden and the orchard already. Pandie says they’ve been everywhere. Mother has been herself to the top of Heron’s Ridge looking for her. God knows what may not have happened! Women are apt to go crazy at these times and do the maddest things. Pandie says old Betsy Cooper has turned up, dragging the idiot Binnory after her, with some wild story about having seen her in Antiger Lane near Drool’s cottage. Martha Vabbin has gone to get Drool himself; and to see if by some lucky chance she just went in there to rest. But from what Betsy and the idiot say she didn’t go into the cottage at all—” He broke off suddenly, disturbed by the sight of Nell rushing wildly up the stairs.

“There’s something wrong up there, too,” he added, with a shrug of his shoulders.

Rook without a word hurried into the garden. He found Pandie standing on the gravel path like a comic image of desperation, her head bare and her hand clutching an enormous garden rake.

“Oh, Master Rook, Master Rook! What have come upon our heads to-day?” cried the distracted servant. “Missus says I was to fetch ’ee to come home at once; and Mr. Lexie, too, if he were well enough to walk on his feet. And she says you was to fetch Mr. Twiney and Mr. Pod up along! And she says you was to summon the police; and I reckon myself ’twould be only right, considering how them gippoos be abroad, to send to Forley Barracks for the Military. Lord alive! Lord alive! That I should be the woman to tell the Squire of Ashover that his lady be gone to find a hole in the river deep enough to commit ’fanticide in!”