John Powys - Rodmoor

His voice which had risen to a loud pitch of excitement died away in a sort of apologetic murmur.

“Sorry,” he muttered, “only don’t look at me like that, you girl. There, clear off and sit further away! It’s that look of yours that makes me talk in this silly fashion. God help us! I don’t blame that foreign fellow for getting queer in his head. You’ve got something in those eyes of yours, Philippa, that no living girl ought to be allowed to have! Bah! You’ve made me talk like an absolute fool.”

Instead of moving away as she had been bidden, Philippa touched her brother with a light caress. Never had she looked so entirely a creature of the old perverse civilizations as she looked at that moment.

“Mother thinks you’re going to marry that girl,” she whispered, “but I know better than that, and I’m always right in these things, am I not, Brand darling?”

He fell back under her touch and the shadowy lines of his face contracted. He presented the appearance of something withered and crumpled. Her mocking smile still divided her curved lips, curved in the subtle, archaic way as in the marbles of ancient Greece. Whatever may have been the secret of her power over him, it manifested itself now in the form of a spiritual cruelty which he found very difficult to bear. He made a movement that was almost an appeal.

“Say I’m right, say I’m always right in these things!” she persisted.

But at that moment a diversion occurred, caused by the sudden entrance of a large bat. The creature uttered a weird querulous cry, like the cry of a newborn babe and went wheeling over their heads in desperate rapid circles, beating against the bookcase and the picture frames. Presently, attracted by the light, it swooped down upon the flame of the candle and in a moment had extinguished it, plunging the room into complete darkness.

Philippa, with a low taunting laugh, ran across the room and wrapped herself in one of the window curtains.

“Open the door and drive it out,” she cried. “Drive it out, I say! Are you afraid of a thing like that?”

But Brand seemed either to have sunk into a kind of trance or to be too absorbed in his thoughts to make any movement. He remained reclining in his chair, silent and motionless.

The girl cautiously withdrew from her shelter and, fumbling about for matches, at last found a box and struck a light. The bat flew past her as she did so and whirled away into the night. She lit several candles and held one of them close to her brother’s face. Thus illuminated, Brand’s sinister countenance had the look of a mediæval wood-carving. He might have been the protagonist of one of those old fantastic prints representing Doctor Faustus after some hopeless struggle with his master-slave.

“Take it away, you! Let me alone. I’ve talked too much to you already. This is a hot night, eh? A hot night and the kind that sets a person thinking. Bah! I’ve thought too much. It’s thinking that causes all the devilries in the world. Thinking, and hearing hearts beating, that ought to be stopped!”

He pushed her aside and rose, stretching himself and yawning.

“What’s the time? What? Only ten o’clock? How early mother must have gone to bed! This is the kind of night in which people kill their mothers. Yes, they do, Philippa. You needn’t peer at me like that! And they do it when their mothers have daughters that look like you — just like you at this very moment.”

He leaned against the back of a chair and watched her as she stood negligently by the mantelpiece, her arm extended along its marble surface.

“Why does mother always say these things to you about my marrying?” he continued in a broken thick voice. “You lead her on to think of these things and then when she comes out with them you bring them to me, to make me angry with her. Tell me this, Philippa, why do you hate mother so? Why did you have that look in your face just now when I talked of killing her? What — would — you — Hang it all, girl, stop staring and smiling at me like that or it’ll be you I’ll kill! Oh, Heaven above, help us! This hot flight will send us all into Bedlam!”

He suddenly stopped and began intently listening, his eyes on his sister’s face. “Did you hear that?” he whispered huskily. “She’s walking up and down the passage — walking in her slippers, that’s why you can hardly hear her. Hush! Listen! She’ll go presently into father’s room. She always does that in the end. What do you think she does there, Philippa? Rummages about, I suppose, and opens and shuts drawers and changes the pictures! What people we are! God — what people we are! I suppose the sound of her doing all that irritates you till your brain nearly bursts. It’s a strange thing, isn’t it, this family life! Human beings like us weren’t meant to be stuck in a hole together like wasps in a bottle. Listen! Do you hear that? She’s doing something to his window now. A lot he cares, six feet under the clay! But it shows how he holds her still, doesn’t it?” He made a gesture in the direction of his father’s picture upon which the candle-light shone clearly now, animating its heavy features.

“Do you know,” he continued solemnly, looking closely at his sister again, “I believe one of these nights, when she walks up and down like that, in her soft slippers, you’ll go straight up and kill her yourself. Yes, I believe you listen like this every night till you could put your fingers in your ears and scream.”

He moved across the room and, approaching his sister, shook her roughly by the arm. Some psychic change in the atmosphere about them seemed to have completely altered their relations.

“Confess — confess — you girl!” he muttered harshly. “Confess now — when you go rushing off like that into the park it isn’t to see that foreign fellow at all? It isn’t even to lie, as I know you love to do, touching the stalks of the poison funguses with the tip of your tongue under the oak trunks? It’s to escape from hearing her, that’s what it is! Confess now. It’s to escape from hearing her!”

He suddenly relaxed his grasp and stood erect, listening intently. The sweet heavy scent of magnolia petals floated in through the window and somewhere — far off among the trees — a screech-owl uttered a broken wail, followed by the flapping of wings. The clock in the hall outside began striking the hour. Before each stroke a ponderous metallic vibration trembled through the silent house.

“It’s only ten now,” he said. “The clock in here is fast.”

As he spoke there was a loud ring at the entrance door. The brother and sister stared blankly at one another and then Philippa gave a low unnatural laugh. “We might be criminals,” she whispered. They instinctively assumed more easy and less dramatic positions and waited in silence, while from the distant servants’ quarters some one came to answer the summons. They heard the door opened and the sound of suppressed voices in the hall. There was a moment’s pause, during which Philippa looked mockingly and enquiringly at Brand.

“It’s our dear priest,” she whispered, “and some one else, too.”

“Surely the fool’s not going to try—” began Brand.

“Mr. Traherne and Dr. Raughty!” announced the servant, opening the library door and holding it open while the visitors entered.

The clergyman advanced first. He shook hands with Brand and bowed with old-fashioned courtesy to Philippa. Dr. Raughty, following him, shook hands with Philippa and nodded nervously at her brother. The two men sank into the seats offered them and accepted an invitation to smoke. Brand moved to a side table and mixed for them, with an air of resigned politeness, cool and appropriate drinks. He drank nothing himself, however, but his sister, with a mocking apology to Mr. Traherne, lit herself a cigarette.