John Powys - Rodmoor

“What’s that you say? Only the rain? They say it’s only the rain when they want to fool me and quiet me. But I know better! They can’t fool me like that. It’s blood, of course; it’s Nance’s blood. You , Nance? Oh, no, no, no! I’m not so easily fooled as that. Nance is at the bottom of that hole in the wood, where I struck her— one — two — three! It took three hits to do it — and she didn’t speak a word, not a word, nor utter one least little cry. It’s funny that I had to hit her three times! She is so soft, so soft and easy to hurt. No, no, no, no! I’m not to be fooled like that. My Nance had great laughing grey eyes. Yours are horrible, horrible. I see terror in them. She was afraid of nothing.”

His expression changed, and a wistful hunted look came into his face. The girl tried to pull him towards one of the chairs, but he resisted — clasping her hand appealingly.

“Tell me, Phil,” he whispered, in a low awe-struck voice, “tell me why you made me do it. Did you think it would be better, better for all of us, to have her lying there cold and still? No, no, no! You needn’t look at me with those dreadful eyes. Do you know, Phil, since you made me kill her I think your eyes have grown to look like hers, and your face, too — and all of you.”

Nance, as he spoke, cried out woefully and helplessly. “I am! I am! I am! Adrian — my own — my darling — don’t you know me? I am your Nance!”

He staggered slowly now to one of the chairs, moving each foot as he did so with horrible deliberation as if nothing he did could be done naturally any more, or without a conscious effort of will. Seating himself in the chair, he drew her down upon his knee and began passing his fingers backwards and forwards over her face.

“Why did you make me do it, Phil?” he moaned, rocking her to and fro as if she were a child. “Why did you make me do it? She would have given me sleep, if you’d only let her alone, cool, deep, delicious sleep! She would have smoothed away all my troubles. She would have destroyed the old Adrian and made a new one — a clear untroubled one, bathed in great floods of glorious white light!”

His voice sank to an awe-struck and troubled murmur. “Phil, my dear,” he whispered, “Phil, listen to me. There’s something I can’t remember! Something — O God! No! It’s some one —some one most precious to me — and I’ve forgotten. Something’s happened to my brain, and I’ve forgotten. It was after I struck those blows, those blows that made her mouth look so twisted and funny — just like yours looks now, Phil! Why is it, do you think, that dead people have that look on their mouths? Phil, tell me; tell me what it is I’ve forgotten! Don’t be cruel now. I can’t stand it now. I must remember. I always seem just on the point of remembering, and then something in my brain closes up, like an iron door. Oh, Phil — my love, my love, tell me what it is!”

As he spoke he clasped the girl convulsively, crushing her and hurting her by the strength of his arms. To hear him address her thus by the name of her rival was such misery to Nance that she was hardly conscious of the physical distress caused by his violence. It was still worse when, relaxing the force of his grasp, he began to fondle and caress her, stroking her face with his fingers and kissing her cheeks.

“Phil, my love, my darling!” he kept repeating, “please tell me — please, please tell me, what it is I’ve forgotten!”

Nance suffered at that moment the extreme limit of what she was capable of enduring. She dreaded every moment that Philippa herself would come in. She dreaded the re-appearance of the servants, perhaps with more assistance, ready to separate them and carry Adrian away from her. To feel his caresses and to know that in his wild thoughts they were not meant for her at all — that was more, surely more, than God could have intended her to suffer!

Suddenly she had an inspiration. “Is it Baptiste that you’ve forgotten?”

The word had an electrical effect upon him. He threw her off his lap and leapt to his feet.

“Yes,” he cried savagely and wildly, the train of his thoughts completely altered, “you’re all keeping him away from me! That’s what’s at the bottom of it! You’ve hidden Nance from me and given me this woman who looks like her but who can’t smile and laugh like my Nance, to deceive me and betray me! I know you — you staring, white-faced, frightened thing! You don’t deceive me! You don’t fool Adrian. I know you. You are not my Nance.”

She had staggered away, a few paces from him, when he first threw her off, and now, with a heart-rending effort, she tried to smooth the misery out of her face and to smile at him in her normal, natural way. But the effort was a ghastly mockery. It was little wonder, seeing her there, so lamentably trying to smile into his eyes, that he cried out savagely: “That’s not my Nance’s smile. That’s the smile of a cunning mask! You’ve hidden her away from me. Curse you all — you’ve hidden her away from me — and Baptiste, too! Where is my Baptiste — you staring white thing? Where is my Baptiste, you woman with a twisted mouth?”

He rushed fiercely towards her and seized her by the throat. “Tell me what you’ve done with him,” he cried, shaking her to and fro, and tightening his grasp upon her neck. “Tell me, you devil! Tell me, or I’ll kill you.”

Nance’s brain clouded and darkened. Her senses grew confused and misty. “He’s going to strangle me,” she thought, “and I don’t care! This pain won’t last long, and it will be death from his hand.”

All at once, however, in a sudden flash of blinding clearness, she realized what this moment meant. If she let him murder her, passively, unresistingly, what would become of him when she was dead? Simultaneously with this thought something seemed to rise up, strong and clear, from the depths of her being, something powerful and fearless, ready to wrestle with fate to the very end.

“He shan’t kill me!” she thought. “I’ll live to save us both.” Tearing frantically at his hands, she struggled backwards towards the open door, dragging him with her. In his mad blood-lust he was horribly, murderously strong; but this new life-impulse, springing from some supernatural level in the girl’s being, proved still stronger. With one tremendous wrench at his wrists she flung him from her; flung him away with such violence that he slipped and fell to the ground.

In a moment she had rushed through the doorway and closed and locked the heavy door behind her. Even at the very second she achieved this and staggered faint and weak against the wall, what seemed to her rapidly clouding senses a large concourse of noisy people carrying flickering lights, swept about her. As they came upon her she sank to the floor, her last impression being that of the great dark eyes of Philippa Renshaw illuminated by an emotion which was beyond her power of deciphering, an emotion in which her mind lost itself, as she tried to understand it, in a deep impenetrable mist, that changed to absolute darkness as she fainted away.

THE morning of the twenty-ninth of October crept slowly and greyly through the windows of the sisters’ room. Linda had done her best to forget her own trouble and to offer what she could of consolation and hope to Nance. It was nearly three o’clock before the unhappy girl found forgetfulness in sleep, and now with the first gleam of light she was awake again.

The worst she could have anticipated was what had happened. Adrian had been taken away — not recognizing any one — to that very Asylum at Mundham which they had glanced at together with such ominous forebodings. She herself — what else could she do? — had been forced to sign her name to the official document which, before midnight fell upon Oakguard, made legal his removal.