John Powys - Rodmoor

As they left the harbour and entered the main village street, Adrian made one or two deliberate efforts to detach Nance from the rest. He pointed out little things to her in the homely shop-windows and seemed surprised and disappointed when she made no response to his overtures. She could not make any response. She could not bring herself so much as to look into his face. It was not from any capricious pride or mere feminine pique that she thus turned away but from a profound and lamentable numbness of every emotion. The wound seemed to have gone further even than she herself had known. Her heart felt like a dead cold weight — like a murdered, unborn child — beneath her breast, and out of her lethargy and inertness, as in certain tragic dreams, she could not move. Her limbs seemed formed of lead, and her lips — at least as far as he was concerned — became those of a dumb animal.

A man, viewing the situation from outside, the slightness and apparent triviality of the incident, would have been astounded at the effect upon her of so insubstantial a blow, but women move in a different world, a world where the drifting of the tiniest straw is indicative of crushing catastrophes, and to the instinct of the least sensitive among women Nance’s premonitions would have been quite explicable.

It was at that moment that it was sharply borne in upon her how slight her actual knowledge of her lover was. Her absorption in him was devoted and complete but in regard to the intricacies and complications of his character she was as much in the dark to-day as when they first met in London Bridge Road.

Strangely enough, in the paralysis of her feelings, Nance was unconscious of any definite antagonism to the cause of her distress. She found she could talk quite naturally and spontaneously to Miss Renshaw when chance threw them together as they emerged upon the village green.

“Oh, I like those trees!” she cried, as the row of ancient sycamores which gave the forlorn little square its chief appeal first struck her attention.

The cottage of Baltazar Stork, it turned out, was just behind these sycamores and next door to the building which, with its immense and faded signboard, offered the natives of Rodmoor their unique dissipation. “The Admiral’s Head!” Nance repeated, surveying the sign and thinking to herself that it must have been under that somewhat sordid roof that Miss Doorm’s parent had drunk himself to death.

“Don’t look at it,” she heard Mrs. Renshaw say, “I feel ashamed every time I pass it.”

Philippa gave Nance a quick and rather bitter smile.

“Mother is telling them that it is our beer which they sell there. You know we are brewers, don’t you? Mother thinks it her duty to remind every one of that fact. She gets a curious pleasure out of talking about it. It’s her morbid conscience. You’ll find we’re all rather morbid here,” she added, looking searchingly into Nance’s face.

“It’s the sea. Our sea is not the same as other seas. It eats into us.”

“Why do you say just that — and in that tone — to me?” Nance gravely enquired, answering the other’s gaze. “My father was a sailor. I love the salt-water.”

Philippa Renshaw shrugged her shoulders. “You may love being on it. That’s a different thing. It remains to be seen how you like being near it.”

“I like it always, everywhere,” repeated Nance obstinately, “and I’m afraid of nothing it can do to me!”

They overtook the others at this point and Mrs. Renshaw turned rather querulously to her daughter.

“Don’t talk to her about the sea, Philippa — I know that’s what you’re doing.”

The girl with the figure of a boy let her eyes meet Adrian’s and Nance felt the dead weight in her heart grow more ice-cold than before, as she watched the effect of that look upon her lover.

It was Rachel who broke the tension. “It wasn’t so very long ago,” she said, “that Rodmoor was quite an inland place. There are houses now, they say, and churches under the water. And it swallows up the land all the time, inch by inch. The sand-dunes are much nearer the town, I am sure of that, and the mouth of the river, too, than when I lived here in old days.”

Mrs. Renshaw looked by no means pleased at this speech.

“Well,” she said, “we must be getting home for dinner. Shall we walk through the park, Philippa? It’s the nicest way — if the grass isn’t too wet.”

In the general chorus of adieus that followed, Nance was not surprised when Sorio bade good-night to her as well as to the others. He professed to be going to the station to meet the Mundham train.

“Baltazar will have a lot of things to carry,” he said, “and I must be at hand to help.”

Mrs. Renshaw pressed Linda’s hand very tenderly as they parted and a cynical observer might have been pardoned for suspecting that under the suppressed sigh with which she took Philippa’s arm there lurked a wish that it had been the more docile and less difficult child that fate had given her for a daughter.

Linda, at any rate, proved to be full of enthusiastic and excited praise for the sad-voiced lady, as the sisters went off with Rachel. She chattered, indeed, so incessantly about her that Nance, whose nerves were in no tolerant state, broke out at last into a quite savage protest.

“She’s the sort of person,” she threw in, “who’s always sentimental about young girls. Wait till you find her with some one younger than you are, and you’ll soon see! Am I not right, Rachel?”

“She’s not right at all, is she?” interposed the other. Miss Doorm looked at them gravely.

“I don’t think either of you understand Mrs. Renshaw. Indeed there aren’t many who do. She’s had troubles such as you may both pray to God you’ll never know. That wisp of a girl will be the cause of others before long.”

She glanced at Nance significantly.

“Hold tight to your Adrian, my love. Hold tight to him, my dearie!”

Thus, as they emerged upon the tow path spoke Rachel Doorm.

Meanwhile, from his watch above the Inn, the nameless Admiral saw the shadows of night settle down upon his sycamores. His faded countenance, with its defiant bravado, stared insolently at what he could catch between trees and houses, of the darkening harbour and if Rodmoor had been a ship instead of a village, and he a figurehead instead of a sign-board, he could not have confronted the unknown and all that the unknown might bring more indifferently, more casually, more contemptuously.

THE night of her first meeting with Adrian Sorio, found the daughter of the house of Renshaw restless and wakeful. She listened to the hall clock striking the hour of twelve with an intentness that would have suggested to any one observing her that she had only been waiting for that precise moment to plunge into some nocturnal enterprise fraught with both sweetness and peril.

The night was chilly, the sky starless and overcast. The heavy curtains were drawn but the window, wide-open behind them, let in a breath of rain-scented air which stirred the flames of the two silver candles on the dressing table and fluttered the thin skirt of the girl’s night-dress as she sat, tense and expectant, over the red coals of a dying fire.

A tall gilt-framed mirror of antique design stood on the left of the fireplace.

As the last stroke of midnight sounded, the girl leapt to her feet and swiftly divesting herself of her only garment, stood straight and erect, her hands clasped behind her head, before this mirror. The firelight cast a red glow over her long bare limbs and the flickering candle flames threw wavering shadows across her lifted arms and slender neck. Her hair remained tightly braided round her head and this, added to the boyish outlines of her body, gave her the appearance of one of those androgynous forms of later Greek art whose ambiguous loveliness wins us still, even in the cold marble, with so touching an appeal. Her smooth forehead and small delicately moulded face showed phantom-like in the mirror. Her scarlet lips quivered as she gazed at herself, quivered into that enigmatic smile challenging and inscrutable which seems, more than any other human expression, to have haunted the imagination of certain great artists of the past.