John Powys - Rodmoor

He paused when they reached the entrance into the garden and, taking her by the wrists, pressed her fiercely against one of the stone pillars upon which the gate hung.

“I know what it is,” he whispered. “You can’t deceive me. You’ve been with those people from London. You’ve been with that friend of Baltazar’s. That’s the cause of all this, isn’t it? You’ve been with that damned fool — that idiotic, good-for-nothing down at the village. Haven’t you been with him? Haven’t you?”

The arms with which he pressed her hands against her breast trembled with anger as he said these words.

“Baltazar told me,” he went on, “only this morning — down at Mundham — everything about these people. They’re of no interest, none, not the least. They’re just like every one else. That fellow’s half-foreign, that’s all. An American half-breed, of some mongrel sort or other, that’s all there is to be said of him! So if you’ve been letting any mad fancies get into your head about Mr. Sorio, the sooner you get rid of them the better. He’s not for you. Do you hear? He’s — not — for — you!” These last words were accompanied by so savage a tightening of the hands that held her that the girl was compelled to bite her lip to stop herself from crying.

“You hurt me,” she said calmly. “Let me go, Brand.” The self-contained tone of her voice seemed to quiet him and he released her. She raised one of her wrists to her mouth and softly caressed it with her lips.

“You’ll be interested, yourself, in these people before very long,” she murmured, flashing a mocking look at him over her bare arm. “The second girl is very young and very pretty. She confided in me that she was extremely afraid of the sea. She appealed to mother’s protective instincts at once. I’ve no doubt she’ll appeal to your — protective instincts! So don’t be too quick in your condemnation.”

“Damn you!” muttered her brother, pushing the gate open. “Come! Get in with you! You talk to me as if I were a professional rake. I take no interest — not the slightest — in your young innocents with their engaging terrors. To bed! To bed! To bed!”

He pushed her before him along the path, but Philippa knew well that the hand on her shoulder was lighter and less angry than the one that had held her a moment ago, and as she ascended the steps of Oakguard — the name borne by the Renshaw house since the days of the Conqueror — there flickered over her shadowy face the same equivocal smile of dubious meaning that had looked out at its owner, not so long since, from the mirror in her room.

When the dawn finally crept up, pallid and cold out of the North Sea and lifted, with a sort of mechanical weariness, the weight of the shadows, it was neither Brand nor Philippa who was awake.

Roused, as always, by the slightest approach of an unusual sound, the mother of that strange pair had lain in her bed listening ever since her daughter’s first emerging from the house.

Once she had risen, and had stood for a moment at the window, her loose grey hair mixed with the folds of an old, faded, dusky-coloured shawl. That, however, was when both of her children were away in the middle of the park and absolute silence prevailed. With this single exception she had remained listening, always silently listening, lying on her back and with an expression of tragic and harassed expectation in her great, hollow, brown eyes. She might have been taken, lying there alone in the big four-posted bed, surrounded by an immense litter of stored-up curios and mementoes, for a symbolic image of all that is condemned, as this mortal world goes round, to watch and wait and invoke the gods and cling fast to such pathetic relics and memorials as time consents to leave of the days that it has annihilated.

Slowly the dawn came up upon the trees and roofs of Oakguard. With a wan grey light it filled the pallid squares of the windows. With a livid grey light it made definite and ghastly every hollow and every wrinkle in that patient watcher’s face.

Travelling far up in the sky, a long line of marsh-fowl with outstretched necks sought the remoter solitudes of the fens. In the river marshes the sedge-birds uttered their harsh twitterings while, gathered in flocks above the sand-dunes, the sea-gulls screamed to the inflowing tide their hunger for its drifted refuse.

Wearily, at last, Helen Renshaw closed her eyes and it was the first streak of sunshine that Rodmoor had known for many days which, several hours later, kissed her white forehead — and the grey hairs that lay disordered across it — softly, gently, tenderly, as it might have kissed the forehead of the dead.

ADRIAN SORIO sat opposite his friend over a warm brightly burning fire.

Baltazar Stork was a slight frail man of so delicate and dainty an appearance that many people were betrayed into behaving towards him as gently and considerately as if he had been a girl. This, though a compliment to his fragility, was bad policy in those who practised it, for Baltazar was an egoist of inflexible temper and under his velvet glove carried a hand of steel.

The room in which the two friends conversed was furnished in exquisite and characteristic taste. Old prints, few in number and rare in quality, adorned its walls. Precious pieces of china, invaluable statuettes in pottery and metal, stood charmingly arranged, with due space round each, in every corner. On either side of the mantelpiece was a Meissen-ware figure of engaging aspect and Watteau-like design, while in the centre, in the place where a clock is usually to be found, was a piece of statuary of ravishing delicacy and grace representing the escape of Syrinx from the hands of Pan.

The most remarkable picture in the room, attracting the attention at once of all who entered, was a dark, richly coloured, oval-shaped portrait — a portrait of a young man in a Venetian cloak, with a broad, smooth forehead, heavy-lidded penetrating eyes, and pouting disdainful mouth. This picture, said to have been painted under the influence of Giorgione by that incomparable artist’s best loved friend, passed for a portrait of Eugenio Flambard, the favourite secretary of the Republic’s most famous ambassador during his residence at the Papal Court.

The majority of these treasures had been picked up by Baltazar during certain prolonged holidays in various parts of the Continent. This, however, was several years ago before the collapse of the investment, or whatever it was, which he inherited from Herman Renshaw.

Since that time he had been more or less dependent upon Brand, a dependence which nothing but his happy relations with Brand’s mother and sister and his unfailing urbanity could have made tolerable.

“Adrian, you old villain, why didn’t you tell me you’d seen Philippa. Brand informed me yesterday that you’ve seen her twice. This isn’t the kind of thing that pleases me at all. I don’t approve of these clandestine meetings. Do you hear me, you old reprobate? You don’t think it’s very nice, do you, for me to learn by accident — by a sort of wretched accident — of an event like this? If you must be at these little games you might at least be open about them. Besides, I have a brotherly interest in Philippa. I don’t want to have her innocence corrupted by an old satyr like you.”

Sorio contented himself by murmuring the word “Rats.”

“It’s all very well for you to cry ‘Rats!’ in that tone,” went on the other. “The truth is, this affair is going to become serious. You don’t suppose for a moment, do you, that your Nance is going to lie down, as they say, and let my extraordinary sister walk over her?”

Adrian got up from his seat and began pacing up and down the little room.