John Powys - Rodmoor

Linda was too panic-stricken to make any reply to this torrent of taunts. With drawn white face and wide-open terrified eyes, she stared at Philippa as a bird might stare at a snake. Philippa seemed delighted with the effect she produced and stepping in front of the young girl, barred her way of escape.

“You mustn’t leave us now,” she cried. “It’s impossible. It would never do. What will they say in the village when they see you like that, crossing the green, at this hour? What you have to do, Linda Herrick, is to come back and have breakfast with us up at the house. My mother will be delighted to see you. She always gets up early, and she’s very, very fond of you, as you know. You do know my mother’s fond of you, don’t you?

“Listen, you silly white-faced thing! Listen, you young innocent, who must needs come wandering round people’s houses in the middle of the night! Listen — you Linda Herrick! I don’t know whether you’re stupid enough to imagine that Brand’s going to marry you? Are you stupid enough for that? Are you, you dumb staring thing? Because, if you are, I can tell you a little about Brand that may surprise you. Perhaps you think you’re the first one he’s ever made love to in this precious park of ours. No, no, my beauty, you’re not the first — and you won’t be the last. We Renshaws are a curious family, as you’ll find out, you baby, before you’ve done with us. And Brand’s the most curious of us all!

“Well, are you coming back with me? Are you coming back to have a nice pleasant breakfast with my mother? You’d better come, Linda Herrick, you’d better come! In fact, you are coming, so that ends it. People who spend the night wandering about other people’s grounds must at least have the decency to show themselves and acknowledge the hospitality! Besides, how glad Brand will be to see you again! Can’t you imagine how glad he’ll be? Can’t you see his look?

“Oh, no, Linda Herrick, I can’t possibly let you go like this. You see, I’m just like my dear mother. I love gentle, sensitive, pure-minded young girls. I love their shyness and their bashfulness. I love the unfortunate little accidents that lead them into parks and gardens. Come, you dumb big-eyed thing! What’s the matter with you? Can’t you speak? Come! Back with you to the house! We’ll find my mother stirring — and Brand too, unless he’s sick of girls’ society and has gone off to Mundham. Come, white-face; there’s nothing else for it. You must do what I tell you.”

She laid her hand on Linda’s shoulder, and, such was the terror she excited, the unhappy girl might actually have been magnetized into obeying her, if a timely and unexpected interruption had not changed the entire situation. This was the appearance upon the scene of Adrian Sorio. Sorio had recently acquired an almost daily habit of strolling a little way up the Oakguard avenue before his breakfast with Baltazar. On two or three of these occasions he had met Philippa, and he had always sufficient hope of meeting her to give these walks a tang of delicate excitement. He had evidently heard nothing of Linda’s disappearance. Nance in her distress had, it seemed, resisted the instinct to appeal to him. He was consequently considerably surprised to see the two girls standing together in the middle of the sunlit path.

Linda, flinging Philippa aside, rushed to meet him. “Adrian! Adrian!” she cried piteously, “take me home to Nance.” She clung to his arm and in the misery of her outraged feelings, began sobbing like a child who has been lost in the dark. Sorio, soothing and petting her as well as he could, looked enquiringly at Philippa as she came up.

“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s nothing, Adrian. It’s only that I wanted her to come up to the house. She seems to have misunderstood me and got silly and frightened. She’s not a very sensible little girl.”

Sorio looked at Philippa searchingly. In his heart he suspected her of every possible perversity and maliciousness. He realized at that moment how entirely his attraction to her was an attraction to what is dangerous and furtive. He did not even respect her intelligence. He had caught her more than once playing up to his ideas in a manner that indicated a secret contempt for them. At those moments he had hated her, and — with her — had hated, as he fancied, the whole feminine tribe — that tribe which refuses to be impressed even by world-crushing logic. But how attractive she was to him! How attractive, even at this moment, as he looked into her defiant, inscrutable eyes, and at her scornfully curved lips!

“You needn’t pity her, Adrian,” she went on, casting a bitter smile at Linda’s bowed head as the young girl hid her face against his shoulder. “There’s no need to pity her. She’s just like all the rest of us, only she doesn’t play the game frankly and honestly as I do. Send her home to her sister, as she says, and come with me across the park. I’ll show you that oak tree if you’ll come — the one I told you about, the one that’s haunted.”

She threw at him a long deep look, full of a subtle challenge, and stretched out her hand as if to separate him from the clinging child. Sorio returned her look and a mute struggle took place between them. Then his face hardened.

“I must go back with her,” he said. “I must take her to Nance.”

“Nonsense!” she rejoined, her eyes darkening and changing in colour. “Nonsense, my dear! She’ll find her way all right. Come! I really want you. Yes, I mean what I say, Adrian. I really want you this time!”

The expression with which she challenged him now would have delighted the great antique painters of the feminine mystery. The gates of her soul seemed to open inwards, on magical softly-moving hinges, and an incalculable power of voluptuous witchcraft emanated from her whole body.

It is doubtful whether a spell so provocative could have been resisted by any one of an origin different from Sorio’s. But he had in him — capable of being roused at moments — the blood of that race in which of all others women have met their match. To this witchcraft of the north he opposed the marble-like disdain of the south — the disdain which has subtlety and knowledge in it — the disdain which is like petrified hatred.

His face darkened and hardened until it resembled a mask of bronze.

“Good-bye,” he said, “for the present. We shall meet again — perhaps to-morrow. But anyway, goodbye! Come, Linda, my child.”

“Perhaps to-morrow — and perhaps not! ” returned Philippa bitterly. “Good-bye, Linda. I’ll give your love to Brand!”

Sorio said little to his companion as he escorted her back to her lodging in the High Street. He asked her no questions and seemed to take it as quite a natural thing that she should have been out at that early hour. They discovered Dr. Raughty in the house when they arrived, doing his best to dissuade Nance from any further desperate hunt after the wanderer, and it was in accordance with the doctor’s advice, as well as their own weariness that the two sisters spent the later morning hours of their August Bank-holiday in a profound and exhausted sleep.

IT was nearly two o’clock in the afternoon when Nance woke out of a heavy dreamless sleep. She went to the window. The shops in the little street were all closed and several languid fishermen and young tradesmen’s apprentices were loitering about at the house doors, chaffing lazily and with loud bursts of that peculiarly empty laughter which seems the prerogative of rural idleness, the stray groups of gaily dressed young women who, in the voluptuous contentment of after-dinner repletion, were setting forth to take the train for Mundham or to walk with their sweethearts along the sea-shore. She turned and looked closely at her still sleeping sister.