John Powys - Ducdame

Rook was too bewildered by this time even to smile at these aberrations of the native of Somersetshire.

“What have you got that rake for, Pandie?” he asked.

“For to drag the ponds and ditches with, Master Rook! They say that when a body’s expecting, like as your lady be, there ain’t no pond water near or far that Providence don’t tempt ’un with. ’Tis a pity her legs bain’t swelled up! When their legs be swelled up they can’t go suiciding and such-like. ’Tis a dispensation of Nature!”

Rook turned away from her.

“Lexie! Nell! Netta!” he called out. “I’m off to the house!”

He strode to the gate. “You go on to the village, Pandie,” he cried, “and get Twiney and Pod and bring them back with you in Twiney’s cart and don’t go shouting all this nonsense to everyone you meet. I expect I shall find Lady Ann safe at home when I get back!”

He was already in the road when he heard his brother’s voice calling him by name. He turned and met Lexie at the gate.

“Nell has just come down from talking to that beggar upstairs,” said the younger man, “and she says she’s had the greatest difficulty in quieting him. I couldn’t get the drift of what the trouble was; but he’s got his confounded book mixed up with your child. The chap seems to have gone all to pieces. I’m glad Netta is with them. Nell oughtn’t to be left alone with him.” He laid his hand on his brother’s arm. “You’re not letting this fuss about Ann upset you, Rook, are you? This day seems dedicated to one agitation after another! But don’t you worry, dear Rook. Ann’s probably turned up by now.”

Rook suddenly bent forward, took his brother’s grave and anxious countenance between his hands and kissed him rapidly. “I shall look in at the church,” he said. “That’s just the place none of them would think of! But, as you say, she’s probably safe back in her room by now. There’s something about this day that seems to make everyone nervous. I’ve noticed it before. Whenever the wind drops dead in Ashover and the air is absolutely still, something’s sure to happen with us. We’re a funny family. The gods must be perfectly sick of us. Well, I’m off! Don’t leave Nell alone with Hastings, I beg you, Lexie!”

He strode off down the road.

Lexie saw Pandie staring up at Hastings’s window as if she had been mesmerized. With one hand on her rake she was mechanically moving it about among the geraniums. Whether in that waking dream she imagined she was dredging a pond to find Ann’s body or whether she was reverting to some childish memory of helping her father amid the rich loam of Sedgemoor, no one will ever know. There are instinctive actions and gestures of human beings, especially at some great crisis of drastic events such as was then gathering about these people, which will always retain an element of the grotesque and the inexplicable.

“I’ll come with you to the village, Pandie,” said the young man, breaking in upon her trance. “Here! For God’s sake drop that rake of yours and pull yourself together! What’s the matter with you, woman?”

The red-haired servant turned toward him a face that was distorted with emotion.

“She told I we be all flummoxed by thik parson up there.”

“ Who told you?” cried Lexie impatiently; and then, catching sight of Netta at the door, “Don’t you leave Nell alone with that chap, will you? Pandie and I are going to the village.”

Netta made a sign that she understood him and returned into the house. Lexie took the rake from Pandie’s unconscious hands and led her into the road.

“Who told you?” he repeated as they moved off together.

“That gippoo bitch, Bet Cooper, ’twere what warned I of ’ee. ’Twas for that she be come, so ’a did say. She’d a-seen thik parson murdering our Squire, or summat o’ that, in a girt wold crystal-stone, what she have stoled from some foreign scollard! I did tell thee mother what she did say; but not a thought would she give to it. Your mother’s not one to attend to God his wone self when she be put about.”

Lexie found his strength barely sufficient to reach the first house in the village, which by good luck happened to be that of Mr. Pod, the Sexton. Here he decided to rest, sending Pandie on to find Mr. Twiney.

Sitting in Mr. Pod’s little kitchen through which not a breath of air passed, either by door or window, he could not help recalling his brother’s words about these days when the wind was dead in Ashover.

“I don’t like it,” he said to himself. “I don’t like it! Things are beginning to get out of control; and I can’t tell what the upshot will be.”

THE inviolable stillness of that last day of September prevented Lady Ann from enjoying her usual rest in the afternoon. An unaccountable malaise came upon her, a sense of suffocation, of being shut in, imprisoned, sepulchred, buried alive. She had suffered from the same species of nervousness once or twice before, but never so badly as now.

She went to the window of her room and looked out.

Everything was hushed and death-still in the somnolent garden. The branches of the great cedar swam motionless upon the air and seemed borne up by vibrant aërial waves of soft blue mist.

“I’ll go for a walk,” she said to herself. “I’ll take Lion.”

She put on her prettiest summer hat, threw a thin loose dust-coloured cloak round her shoulders and slipped quietly down the stairs. Very cautiously, so as not to arouse any one’s attention, she let herself out of the front door and walked round to the rear of the house.

She knew that Rook was out with Lexie somewhere and she knew that Mrs. Ashover was resting in her big upstairs room. As she came past the kitchen door she was met by that peculiar complicated odour which in English houses of the Ashover sort seems synonymous with two o’clock in the afternoon, might indeed be the very smell of the gamboge-coloured hide of two o’clock, that enemy of romance and all delicate joy! It was an odour in which the “washing-up” beginning in the scullery mingled with the servants’ dinner ending in the kitchen and both of these with the indescribable sense of the crowding together of the various house pets, canine and feline, who had “followed the dishes out.”

Lady Ann had not been able to eat much lunch and this two-o’clock smell made her feel for a moment a little dizzy and sick. But the great point was that nobody about the place saw her as she hurried past. Lion was neither at the kitchen door nor in his kennel by the stable. “Oh, I forgot!” she said to herself. “I told them to take him down to Drool’s.” She had vexed herself lately about the dog; feeling that, now her own walks were curtailed, it didn’t get enough exercise, Rook being teased rather than entertained by the animal’s company.

Her momentary malaise passed off after she had crossed the orchard and got clear away on the slope of Battlefield, and when she reached the top of Heron’s Ridge she felt better than she had felt for several weeks.

She felt happier, too. That rich, indolent, windless autumn day was profoundly adapted to her mood. The sense of the apples and pears growing riper and mellower every day among those lichen-covered branches, of the hazelnuts growing browner and plumper among their crumpled leaves, of the mushrooms in the lush grass meadows appearing so suddenly and so quickly, that even those who knew their privileged haunts would wonder at their coming; the sense of all these things around and about her seemed to soothe her mind and liberate her spirit, as if the immense fecundity of Nature were something she could draw upon to enlarge and replenish her own vitality.

She had not been as far as Drool’s cottage for several weeks; but to-day it seemed to her that it would be very nice to pay a visit to the place. She felt a queer emotional craving to stand once more, whatever might be the result of what she had soon to go through, in that little room of Binnory’s. And besides, she would greatly love to catch a final glimpse of the dog, her one completely faithful and loyal supporter, before she entered upon this life-and-death struggle.