John Powys - Rodmoor

“She has not sent—” began Nance hurriedly.

“What you’ve got to understand — you Renshaw—” muttered Adrian, in a strange hoarse voice, clenching and unclenching his fingers.

Brand interrupted them both. “Pardon me,” he cried, “you do not wish, I suppose, either of you, to cause any serious shock to my mother? It’s absurd of her, of course, and old-fashioned, and all that sort of thing; but it would actually kill her—” he lose as he spoke and uttered the words clearly and firmly. “It would actually kill her to get any hint of what we’re discussing now. So, if you’ve no objection, we’ll continue this discussion in the work-shop.” He moved towards the door.

Sorio followed him with a rapid stride. “You must understand, Renshaw—” he began.

“If it’ll hurt your mother so,” cried Nance hurriedly, “what must Linda be suffering? You didn’t think of this, Mr. Renshaw, when you—”

Brand swung round on his heel. “You shall say all this to me, all that you wish to say — everything, do you hear, everything! Only it must and shall be where she cannot overhear us. Wait till we’re alone. We shall be alone in the work-shop.”

“If this ‘work-shop’ of yours,” muttered Sorio savagely, seizing him by the arm, “turns out to be one of your English tricks, you’d better—”

“Silence, you fool!” whispered the other. “Can’t you stop him, Miss Herrick? It’ll be pure murder if my mother hears this!”

Nance came quickly between them. “Lead on, Mr. Renshaw,” she said. “We’ll follow you.”

He led them across the hall and down a long dimly lit passage. At the end of this there was a heavily panelled door. Brand took a key from his pocket and after some ineffectual attempts turned the lock and stood aside to let them enter. He closed the door behind them, leaving the key on the outside. The “workshop” Brand had spoken of turned out to be nothing more or less than the old private chapel of Oakguard, disassociated, however, for centuries from any religious use.

Nance glanced up at the carved ceiling, supported on foliated corbels. The windows, high up from the ground, were filled with Gothic tracery, but in place of biblical scenes their diamonded panes showed the armorial insignia of generations of ancient Renshaws. There was a raised space at the east end, where, in former times, the altar stood, but now, in place of an altar, a carpenter’s table occupied the central position, covered with a litter of laths and wood-chippings. The middle portion of the chapel was bare and empty, but several low cane chairs stood round this space, like seats round a toy coliseum.

Brand indicated these chairs to his visitors, but neither Nance nor Sorio seemed inclined to avail themselves of the opportunity to rest. They all three, therefore, stood together, on the dark polished oak floor.

On first entering the chapel, Brand had lit one of a long row of tapers that stood in wooden candlesticks along the edge of what resembled choir stalls. Now, leaving his companions, he proceeded very deliberately to set light to the whole line of these. The place thus illuminated had a look strangely weird and confused.

Certain broken flower-pots on the ground, and one or two rusty gardening implements, combined with the presence of the wicker-chairs to produce the impression of some sort of “Petit Trianon,” or manorial summer-house, into which all manner of nondescript rubbish had in process of long years come to drift.

The coats-of-arms in the windows above, as the tapers flung their light upon them, had an air almost “collegiate,” as if the chamber were some ancient dining-hall of a monastic order. The carpenter’s table upon the raised dais, with some dimly coloured Italianated picture behind it, inserted in the panelling, gave Nance a most odd sensation. Where had she seen an effect of that kind before? In a picture — or in reality?

But the girl had no heart to analyse her emotions. There was too much at stake. The rain, pattering heavily on the roof of the building, seemed to remind her of her task. She faced Brand resolutely as he strolled back towards them across the polished floor.

“Linda has told me everything,” she said. “She is going to have a child, and you, Mr. Renshaw, are the father of it.”

Sorio made an inarticulate exclamation and approached Brand threateningly. But the latter, disregarding him, continued to look Nance straight in the face.

“Miss Herrick,” he said quietly, “you are a sensible woman and not one, I think, liable to hysteric sentimentalism. I want to discuss this thing quite freely and openly with you, but I would greatly prefer it if your husband — I beg your pardon — if Mr. Sorio would let us talk without interrupting. I haven’t got unlimited time. My mother and sister will be both waiting dinner for me and sending people to find me, perhaps even coming themselves. So it’s obviously in the interests of all of us — particularly of Linda — that we should not waste time in any mock heroics.”

Nance turned quickly to her betrothed. “You’ll hear all we say, Adrian, but if it makes things easier, perhaps—”

Without a word, in mute obedience to her sad smile, Sorio left their side, and drawing back, seated himself in one of the wicker chairs, hugging his heavy stick between his knees.

The rain continued falling without intermission upon the leaden roof, and from a pipe above one of the windows they could hear a great jet of water splashing down outside the wall.

Brand spoke in a low hurried tone, without embarrassment and without any sort of shame. “Yes, Miss Herrick, what she says is quite true. But now come down to the facts, without any of this moral vituperation, which only clouds the issues. You have, no doubt, come here with the idea of asking me to marry Linda. No! Don’t interrupt me. Let me finish. But I want to ask you this — how do you know that if I marry Linda, she’ll be really any happier than she is to-day? Suppose I were to say to you that I would marry her — marry her to-morrow — would that , when you come to think it over in cold blood, really make you happy in your mind about her future?

“Come, Miss Herrick! Put aside for a moment your natural anger against me. Grant what you please as to my being a dangerous character and a bad man, does that make me a suitable husband for your sister? Your instinct is a common instinct — the natural first instinct of any protector of an injured girl, but is it one that will stand the light of quiet and reasonable second thoughts?

“I am, let us say, a selfish and unscrupulous man who has seduced a young girl. Very well! You want to punish me for my ill-conduct, and how do you go about it? By giving up your sister into my hands! By giving up to me — a cruel and unscrupulous wretch, at your own showing — the one thing you love best in the world! Is that a punishment such as I deserve? In one moment you take away all my remorse, for no one remains remorseful after he has been punished. And you give my victim up — bound hand and foot — into my hands.

“Linda may love me enough to be glad to marry me, quite apart from the question of her good fame. But will you, who probably know me better than Linda, feel happy at leaving her in my hands? Your idea may be that I should marry her and then let her go. But suppose I wouldn’t consent to let her go? And suppose she wouldn’t consent to leave me?

“There we are — tied together for life — and she as the weaker of the two the one to suffer for the ill-fated bargain! That will not have been a punishment for me, Nance Herrick, nor will it have been a compensation for her. It will simply have worked out as a temporary boredom to one of us, and as miserable wretchedness to the other!