John Powys - Rodmoor

“Listen!” the woman hissed at last, staggering a little and actually leaning against the girl as though the frenzy of her malignity deprived her of her strength. “Listen, Linda. Do you remember what I used to tell you about your father? How in his heart all the time he loved only me? How he would sooner have got rid of your mother than have got rid of me? Do you remember that? Listen, then! There’s something else I must say to you — something, that you’ve never guessed, something that you couldn’t guess. When you were—” she stopped, panting heavily and if Linda had not mechanically assisted her she would have fallen. “When you were — when I was—” Her breath seemed to fail her then completely. She put her hand to her side and in spite of the girl’s feeble effort to support her she sank, moaning, to the ground.

Linda looked helplessly round. Nance and Mrs. Renshaw had passed beyond a little promontory of sand-hills and were concealed from view. She knelt down by Rachel’s side. Even then — even when those vindictive dark eyes looked at her without a sign of consciousness, they seemed to hold her with their power. As they remained mute and motionless in this manner, the prostrate woman and the kneeling girl, a faint gust of wind, blowing the sand in a little cloud before it and rustling the leaves of the horned poppies, brought to Linda’s senses an odour of inland fields. She felt a dim return, under this air, of her normal faculties and taking one of the woman’s hands in her own she began gently chafing it. Rachel answered to the touch and a shiver passed through her frame. Then, in a flash, intelligence came back into her eyes and her lips moved. Linda bent lower so as to catch her words. They came brokenly, and in feeble gasps.

“I loved him so, I loved him more than my life. He took my life and killed it. He killed my heart. He brought me those beads from far across the sea. They were for me — not for her. He brought them for me, I tell you. I gave him my heart for them and he killed it. He killed it and buried it. This isn’t Rachel’s heart any more. No! No! It isn’t Rachel’s. Rachel’s heart has gone with him — with the Captain — over great wide seas. He got it — out of me — when — he — kissed my mouth.”

Her voice died away in inarticulate mutterings. Then once more her words grew human and clear.

“My heart went with him long ago, after that, over the sea. It was in all his ships. It was in every ship he sailed in — over far-off seas. And in place of my heart — something else — something else — came and lived in Rachel. It is this that — that—” The intelligence once more faded out of her eyes and she lay stiff and motionless. Linda had a sudden thought that she was dead and, with the thought, her fear of her rolled away. Looking at her now, lying there, in her black dress and crumpled bonnet, she seemed to see her as she was, a mad, wretched, passion-scorched human being. It crossed the young girl’s mind how inconceivable it was that this haggard image of desolation had once been young and soft-limbed, had once danced out on summer mornings to meet the sun as any other child! But even as this thought came to her, Rachel stirred and moved again. Her eyes had a dazed expression now — a clouded, sullen, hopeless expression. Slowly and with laborious effort, refusing Linda’s assistance, she rose to her feet.

“Go and call them,” she said in a low voice. “Go and call them. Tell Mrs. Renshaw that I’m ill — that she must take me home. You won’t be troubled with me much longer — not much longer! But you won’t forget me. Brand will see to that! No, you won’t forget me, Linda Herrick.”

The girl ran off without looking back. When the three of them returned, Rachel Doorm seemed to have quite resumed her normal taciturnity.

They walked back, all four together, to the harbour mouth. The sisters helped the two women into the little cart and untied the pony. As they clattered away over the cobble-stones, Nance received from Mrs. Renshaw a smile of gratitude, a smile of such illumined and spiritual gaiety that it rendered the pale face which it lit up beautiful with the beauty of some ancient picture.

When the pony-cart had disappeared, Nance and Linda sat down together on the wooden bench watching the white sail upon the horizon and talking of Rachel Doorm.

Most of the holiday-makers had now retired to their tea and a fresh breeze, coming in with the turn of the tide, blew pleasantly upon the girls’ foreheads and ruffled the soft hair under their daintily beribboned hats. Nance, holding in her fingers the trumpet-shaped shell, found herself suddenly wondering — perhaps because the shape of the shell reminded her of it — whether Linda had left that ominous fir-cone behind her in her room or whether at the last moment she had again slipped it into her dress. She glanced sideways at her sister’s girlish bosom, scarcely stirring now as with her head turned she looked at the full-brimmed tide, and she wondered if, under that white and pink frock so coquettishly open at the throat, there were any newly created blood-stains from the rasping impact of that rough-edged trophy of the satyr-haunted woods of Oakguard.

The afternoon light was so beautiful upon the water at that moment and the cries of the circling sea-gulls so full of an elemental callousness that the elder girl experienced a sort of fierce reaction against the whole weight of this intolerable sex-passion that was spoiling both their lives. Something hard, free and reckless seemed to rise up within her, in defiance of every sort of feminine sentiment and, hardly thinking what she did or of the effect of her words, “Quick, my dear,” she cried suddenly, “give me that fir-cone you’ve got under your dress!”

Linda’s hands rose at once and she clutched at her bosom, but her sister was too quick for her and too strong. Nance’s feeling at that moment was as if she were plucking a snake away. Rising to her feet when she had secured the trophy, she lifted up her arm and, with a fierce swing of her whole body, flung both it and the shell she had herself been holding far into the centre-current of the inflowing tide.

“So much for Love!” she cried fiercely.

The shell sank at once to the bottom but the fir-cone floated. For a moment, when she saw Linda’s dismay, she felt a pang of remorse. But she crushed it fiercely down. Behind her whole mood at that moment was a savage reaction from Mrs. Renshaw’s emotional perversity.

“Come!” she cried, snatching at her sister’s hand as Linda wavered on the wharf-brink and watched the fir-cone drift behind an anchored barge and disappear. “Come! Let’s go back and help Miss Pontifex water her garden. Then we’ll have tea and then we’ll go for a row if it isn’t too dark! Perhaps Dr. Raughty will be home by then and we’ll make him take us.”

She was so resolute and so dominant that Linda could do nothing but meekly submit to her. Strangely enough she, too, felt a certain rebound of youthful vivacity now she was conscious no longer of the rough wood-token pressing against her flesh. She also, after what she had heard from the lips of Rachel, experienced a reaction against the sorrow of “what men call love.” Their mood continued unaltered until they reached the gate of the dressmaker’s garden.

“Then it’s Dr. Raughty — not Adrian,” the younger girl remarked with a smile, “that we’re to have to row us to-night?”

Nance looked quickly back at her and made an effort to smile too. But the sight of the flower-beds and the carefully tended box-hedges of the little garden, had been associated too long and too deeply with the pain at her heart. Her smile died away from her face and it was in silence after all and still bowed, for all their brave revolt under the burden of their humanity, that the two girls set themselves to water, as the August sun went down into the fens, the heavily-scented phloxes and sweet lavender of the admirable Miss Pontifex. That little lady was herself at that moment staring demurely, under the escort of a broad-shouldered nephew from London, at a stirring representation of “East Lynne” in a picture show in Mundham!