John Powys - Rodmoor

“It’s you — it’s you,” she called aloud, “it’s you who’ve done this — who’ve turned my heart’s darling against me, and may you be cursed for it! May your love turn to poison and eat your white flesh! May your soul pray and pray for comfort and find none! Never — never — never — find any! Oh, you may well hide yourself! But he will find you. Brand will find you and make you pay for this! Brand and the sea will. find you. Listen! Do you hear me? Listen! It’s crying out for you now!”

Whether it was the sudden cessation of her voice, intensifying the stillness, or a slight veering of the wind to the eastward, it is certain that at that moment, above the noise of the creaking gate and the rustling bushes, came the sound which, of all others, seemed the expression of Rodmoor’s troubled soul. Linda herself may not have heard it for at that moment she was feverishly helping Nance to pile up their belongings in the cart. But the driver of their vehicle heard it.

“The wind’s changing,” he remarked. “Can you hear that? That’s the darned sea!”

The trap carrying the two sisters was already some distance along the road when Nance turned her head and looked back. They had blown out their candles before leaving and the kitchen fire had died down so that there was no reason to be surprised that no light shone from any of the windows. Yet it was with a cold sinking of the heart that the girl leaned forward once more by the driver’s side. She could not help seeing in imagination a broken figure stumbling round the walls of that dark house, or perhaps even now standing in their dismantled room alone amid emptiness and silence, alone amid the ghosts of the past.

WHILE the sisters were taking possession of their new abode and trying to eat — though neither had much appetite — the supper provided for them by Mrs. Raps, Hamish Traherne, his cassock protected from the threatening storm by a heavy ulster, was making his promised effort to “talk” with the master of Oakguard. Impelled by an instinct he could not resist, perhaps with a vague notion that the creature’s presence would sustain his courage, he carried, curled up in an inside pocket of his cloak, his darling Ricoletto. The rat’s appetite had been unusually good that evening and it now slept peacefully in its warm nest, oblivious of the beating heart of its master. Carrying his familiar oak stick in his hand and looking to all appearance quite as formidable as any highwayman the priest made his way through the sombre avenue of gnarled and weather-beaten trees that led to the Renshaw mansion. He rang the bell with an impetuous violence, the violence of a visitor whose internal trepidation mocks his exterior resolution. To his annoyance and surprise he learnt that Mr. Renshaw was spending the evening with Mr. Stork down in the village. He asked to be allowed to see Mrs. Renshaw, feeling in some obscure way suspicious of the servant’s statement and unwilling to give up his enterprise at the first rebuff. The lady came out at once into the hall.

“Come in, come in, Mr. Traherne,” she said, quite eagerly. “I suppose you’ve already dined but you can have dessert with us. Philippa always sits long over dessert. She likes eating fruit better than anything else. She’s eating gooseberries to-night.”

Mrs. Renshaw always had a way of detaching herself from her daughter and speaking of her as if she were a strange and somewhat menacing animal with whom destiny had compelled her to live. But the priest refused to remove his ulster. The interest of seeing Philippa eat gooseberries was not strong enough to interrupt his purpose.

“Your son won’t be home till late, I’m afraid?” he said. “I particularly — yes, particularly — wanted to see him to-night. I understand he’s at the cottage.”

“Wait a minute,” cried the lady in her hurried, low-voiced tone. “Sit down here, won’t you? I’ll just — I’ll just see Philippa.”

She returned to the dining-room and the priest sat down and waited. Presently she came hurrying back carrying in her hands a plate upon which was a bunch of grapes.

“These are for you,” she said. “Philippa won’t touch them. There! Let me choose you out some nice ones.”

The servant had followed her and now stood like a pompous and embarrassed policeman uncertain of his duty. It seemed to give Mrs. Renshaw some kind of inscrutable satisfaction to cause this embarrassment. She sat down beside the priest and handed him the grapes, one by one, as if he were a child.

“Brand orders these from London,” she remarked, “that’s why we get them now. I call it extravagance, but he will do it.” She sighed heavily. “Philippa,” she repeated, “prefers garden fruit so you mustn’t mind eating them. They’ll get bad if they’re not eaten.”

The servant hastened on tip-toe to the dining-room door, peered in, and returned to his post. He looked for all the world, thought Mr. Traherne, like a ruffled and disconsolate heron. “He’ll stand on one leg soon,” he said to himself.

“When do you expect your son home?” he enquired again. “Perhaps I might call at the cottage and walk back with him.”

“Yes, do!” Mrs. Renshaw cried with unexpected eagerness. “Do call at the cottage. It’ll be nice for you to join them. They’ll all be there — Mr. Sorio and the Doctor and Brand. Yes, do go in! It’ll be a relief to me to think of you with them. I’m sometimes afraid that cousin Tassar encourages dear Brand to drink too much of that stuff he likes to make. They will put spirits into it. I’m always telling them that lime juice would be just as nice. Yes, do go, Mr. Traherne, and insist on having lime juice!”

The priest looked at the lady, looked at the servant and looked at the hall door. He felt a faint scratching going on inside his cloak. Ricoletto was beginning to wake up.

“Well, I’ll go!” he exclaimed, rising to his feet.

At that moment the figure of Philippa, exquisitely dressed in a dark crimson gown, emerged from the dining-room. She advanced slowly towards them with more than her usual air of dramatic reserve. Mr. Traherne noticed that her lips were even redder than her dress. Her eyes looked dark and tired but they shone with a mischievous menace. She held out her hand sedately and as he took it, fumbling with his ulster, “I hope you enjoyed your grapes,” she said.

“You ought to apologize to Mr. Traherne for appearing before him at all in that wild costume,” remarked Mrs. Renshaw. “You wouldn’t think she’d been at the dentist’s all day, would you? She looks as if she were in a grand London house, doesn’t she, just waiting to go to a ball?

“Yes, at the dentist’s,” Mrs. Renshaw went on, speaking quite loudly, “at the dentist’s in Mundham. She’s got an abscess under one of her teeth. It kept her awake in the night. I think your face is still a little swollen, dear, isn’t it? She oughtn’t to stand in this cold hall, ought she, Mr. Traherne? And with so much of her neck exposed. It was quite a large abscess. Let me look, dear.” She moved towards her daughter, who drew hastily back.

“She won’t let me look at it,” she added plaintively. “She never would, not even when she was a child.”

Hamish, fumbling with his fingers inside his ulster, made a grotesque grimace of sympathy and once more intimated his desire to say good-night. He discerned in the look the girl had now fixed upon her mother an expression which indicated how little sympathy there was between them. It was nearly half past nine when he reached Rodmoor and knocked at Baltazar’s door. There was some sort of village revel going on inside the tavern and the sound of this blended, in intermittent bursts of uproar, with the voices from Stork’s little sitting-room. Both wind and rain had subsided and the thunder-feeling in the air had grown less oppressive.