John Powys - Rodmoor

Dr. Raughty, reseating himself, drummed absentmindedly with his fingers upon the empty macaroon plate. Then with a soft and pensive sigh he produced his tobacco pouch, and filling his pipe, struck a match.

“Doctor,” murmured Sorio, his rebellious lips curved into a sardonic smile and his eyes screwed up till they looked as sinister as those of his namesake, Hadrian, “why do you move your head backwards and forwards like that, when you light your pipe?”

“Don’t answer him, Fingal,” expostulated Baltazar, “he’s behaving badly now. He’s ‘showing off’ as they say of children.”

“I’m not showing off,” cried Sorio loudly, “I’m asking the Doctor a perfectly polite question. It’s very interesting the way he lights his pipe. There’s more in it than appears. There’s a great deal in it. It’s a secret of the Doctor’s; probably a pantheistic one.”

“What on earth do you mean by a ‘pantheistic’ one? How, under Heaven, can the way Fingal holds a match be termed ‘pantheistic’?” protested Stork irritably. “You’re really going a little too far, Adriano mio.”

“Not at all, not at all,” argued Sorio, stretching out his long, lean arms and grasping the back of a chair. “The Doctor can deny it or not, as he pleases, but what I say is perfectly true. He gets a cosmic ecstasy from moving his head up and down like that. He feels as if he were the centre of the universe when he does it.”

The Doctor looked sideways and then upon the ground. Sorio’s rudeness evidently disconcerted him.

“I think,” he said, rising from his chair and putting down his glass, “I must be going now. I’ve an early call to make to-morrow morning.”

Baltazar cast a reproachful look at Adrian and rose too. They went into the hall together and the same shufflings and heavy breathings came to the ears of the listener as on Raughty’s arrival. The Doctor was putting on his goloshes and gaiters.

Adrian went out to see him off and, as if to make up for his bad behaviour, walked with him across the green, to his house in the main street. They parted at last, the best of good friends, but Sorio found Baltazar seriously provoked when he returned.

“Why did you treat him like that?” the latter persisted. “You’ve got no grudge against him, have you? It was just your silly fashion of getting even with things in general, eh? Your nice little habit of venting your bad temper on the most harmless person within reach?”

Sorio stared blankly at his friend. It was unusual for Mr. Stork to express himself so strongly.

“I’m sorry, my dear, very sorry,” muttered the accused man, looking remorsefully at the Doctor’s empty glass and plate.

“You may well be,” rejoined the other. “The one thing I can’t stand is this sort of social lapse. It’s unpardonable — unpardonable! Besides, it’s childish. Hit out by all means when there’s reason for it or you’re dealing with some scurvy dog who needs suppressing but to make a sensitive person like Fingal uncomfortable, out of a pure spirit of bullying — it’s damnable!”

“I’m sorry, Tassar,” repeated the other meekly. “I can’t think why I did it. He’s certainly a charming person. I’ll make up to him, my dear. I’ll be gentle as a lamb when I see him next.”

Baltazar smiled and made a humorous and hopeless gesture with his hands. “We shall see,” he said, “we shall see.”

He locked the door and lit a couple of candles with ritualistic deliberation. “Turn out the lamp, amico mio, and let us sleep on all this. The best way of choosing between two loves is to say one’s prayers and go to bed. These things decide themselves in dreams.”

“In dreams,” repeated the other, submissively following him upstairs, “in dreams. But I wish I knew why the Doctor’s ankles look so thick when he sits down. He must wear extraordinary under-clothes.”

PHILIPPA RENSHAW’S light-spoken words about Linda recurred more than once to the mind of the master of Oakguard as April gave place to May and May itself began to slip by. The wet fields and stunted woods of Rodmoor seemed at that time to be making a conscious and almost human effort to throw off the repressive influence of the sea and to respond to the kindlier weather. The grasses began to grow high and feathery by the roadside, and in the water-meadows, buttercups superseded marigolds.

As he went to and fro between his house and his office in Mundham, Brand — though he made as yet no attempt to see her — became more and more preoccupied with the idea of the young girl. That terror of the sea in the little unknown touched, as his sister well knew it would, something strangely deep-rooted in his nature. His ancestors had lived so long in this place that there had come to exist between the man’s inmost being and the voracious tides which year by year devoured the land he owned, an obstinate reciprocity of mood and feeling. That a young and fragile intruder should have this morbid fear of the very element which half-consciously he assimilated to himself, gave him a subtle and sullen exultation. The thing promised to become a sort of perverted link between them, and he pleased himself by fancying, even while, in fear of disillusionment, he kept putting off their encounter, that the girl herself could not be quite free of some sort of premonition of what awaited her.

Thus it happened that Philippa Renshaw’s stroke in her own defence worked precisely as she had anticipated. Brooding, in his slow tenacious way, as the weeks went by, upon this singular projection of his imagination, he let his sister do what she chose, feeling assured that in her pride of race, she would not seriously commit herself with a nameless foreigner, and promising himself to end the business with a drastic hand as soon as it suited him to do so.

It was about the middle of May when an event took place which gave the affair a decisive and fatal impulse. This was a chance encounter, upon the bridge crossing the Loon, between Brand and Rachel Doorm. He would have passed her even then without recognition, but she stopped him and held out her hand.

“Don’t you remember me, Mr. Renshaw?” she said.

He removed his hat, displaying his closely cropped reddish head with its abnormal upward slope, and regarded her smilingly.

“You’ve changed, Miss Rachel,” he remarked, “but your voice is the same. They told me you were here. I knew we should meet sooner or later.”

“Put on your hat, Mr. Renshaw,” she said, seating herself on a little stone bench below the parapet and making room for him at her side. “I knew, too, that we should meet. It’s a long time from those days — isn’t it? — a long time, and a dark one for some of us. Do you remember when you were a child, how you asked me once why they called this place the New Bridge, when it’s obviously so very old? Do you remember that, Mr. Renshaw?”

He looked at her curiously, screwing up his eyes and wrinkling his forehead. “My mother told me you’d come back,” he muttered. “She was always fond of you. She used to hope — well, you know what I mean.”

“That I’d marry Captain Herrick?” Miss Doorm threw in. “Don’t be afraid to say it. The dead can’t hear us and except the dead, there’s none who cares. Yes, she hoped that, and schemed for it, too, dear soul. But it was not to be, Mr. Renshaw. Ellie Story was prettier. Ellie Story was cleverer. And so it happened. The bitter thing was that he swore an oath to Mary before she died, swore it on the head of my darling Nance, that if he did ever marry again, I should be the one. Mary died thinking that certain. Anything else would have hurt her to the heart. I know that well enough; for she and I, Mr. Renshaw, as your mother could tell you, were more than sisters.”