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  Netta loved these solitary interludes in the Ashover dining room.

  She could dream things there and tell herself stories there, untroubled by any agitation. She could even think without hopeless regret of that rash proceeding that had for ever ruined her chance of having a child. She could even try to imagine what sort of child Rook and she would have had if things had been different!

  So far off and so soothingly vague were Netta’s thoughts that morning that she scarcely turned in her chair when Pandie, the red-haired housemaid, came in to set light to the fire.

  “No, you’ll never see no rain like our rain, miss, in all the countries you do travel through! ’Tain’t in nature that water should fall from dry clouds same as from wet clouds, and there aren’t no clouds this side of Salisbury Plain so wet as ours!”

  Thanks to Cousin Ann, Pandie was always affable now; and the sound of her voice and the look of her sturdy broad back bent over the coals filled Netta with a delicious feeling of security.

  Oh, how often in former times she had longed to be at once thoroughly idle and thoroughly respectable!

  It was her craving for this particular combination that had betrayed her into the Major-General episode, the single one of all her experiences that she would have liked blotted completely out of her memory.

  “I like your rain very much,” she said softly. “Were you born in Ashover, Pandie?”

  “Me, miss? Me, mum? The Lord love us! No, mum. I were born down Somerset-way atween Tarnton and Durston. ‘Twas fresh water, too, where Father lived. But ’tweren’t Frome-water. ’Twas Parret-water; and there were big willow trees over’n and terrible black mud under’n. Corpses themselves would turn to water where I was born‚ miss; but that’s not saying anything against these parts.”

  When Pandie was gone the crackling of the newly lit sticks increased Netta’s content.

  The effect of rain-lashed windows was to give to the light that filled the room a curious atmospheric quality; a quality that roused in the woman who sat there an indefinable feeling connected with a mysterious dream she had sometimes, the exact outlines of which, though repeated again and again‚ she invariably lost.

  What the rain really did was to throw a greenish-gray shadow into the room, a shadow that was broken at this moment by spurts and splashes of redness coming from the grate.

  She drank her remaining cup of tea in quick little sips, holding up the cup with a certain nonchalant air as she had seen Cousin Ann do, the little finger stiffly extended, the elbow resting on the table.

  Over the fireplace was a portrait of Sir Robert Ashover, the unfortunate Cavalier; and the sad eyes and melancholy forehead of this picture met her gaze with penetrating sympathy.

  From the very first she had taken a fancy to Sir Robert. She loved his carefully combed curls and his dreamy sensuous lips. She looked at him now with renewed reassurance. He was certainly the last person in the world to will any harm to a poor girl.

  She found herself on the point of wishing that Rook was more like Sir Robert and less like his mother.

  But Rook had something in him that separated him from all of them; from her most of all.

  Oh, dear! She hurriedly jerked up her consciousness, like an entangled fishing line, out of that trouble; and threw it again, with a clear fresh swing, into less weedy waters.

  How wonderful it was to be free from worry.

  She had worried a great deal when she first came to this place. She wondered what her Bristol friends, Madge and Minnie, would feel if they were in her shoes.

  She smiled to herself as she thought of such a possibility. They would be miserable. They would be pining for shops and picture houses and “boys.” Why was it she didn’t crave for any of these things? Minnie and Madge had always said she was a “funny one‚” and she supposed they were right. She remembered how even Rook had expressed surprise that she could go on like this, month after month, doing nothing at all and wanting nothing at all.

  Cousin Ann was the only person who never seemed to get annoyed with her. It did not appear to aggravate Cousin Ann when she wanted to read stories in her bedroom instead of walking through the mud and rain. The young lady even chose books for her, just the ones she liked best, out of the jumble of volumes that filled the house.

  Thinking of Cousin Ann she rose from her chair and went out into the hall.

  Here she stood for a moment, very still and quiet, listening to the wind and to the voice of Pandie talking in the kitchen.

  Then she gave a little jerk to one of her sleeves, glanced at her feet to see that her stockings were unruffled, and opening the door with rather a deprecatory softness, went into the drawing room.

  Lady Ann was standing at a large rosewood table which she had covered with newspapers. On the table was a great rain-drenched heap of chrysanthemums, laurustinus, and a few marigolds, together with the wet leaves of certain other plants. Lady Ann was engaged in shaking the water out of these flowers and in arranging them in a row of tall vases.

  She welcomed Netta with affectionate gravity, as one priestess might welcome another when engaged in something which implied an hieratic freemasonry.

  Nor was their background at that moment unworthy of them. The chairs and sofas of the chilly room wore a kind of grand ghostliness in their chintz covers. They seemed to survey these two warm-blooded persons like so many wistful defunct nuns. The stately ornaments on the chimney-piece were all white and gilt; the landscapes on the walls were all in pale water colour or pastel. The whole room had the look of something that accepted Time and Change and Death as its lords and masters and yet refused to yield one inch of its own dignity and ceremoniousness.

  Neither Lady Ann nor Netta spoke much as they went on with their work but they were both obviously very happy in what they were doing. Indeed, as they laughed and spread out fresh paper on the table and poured water from one vase to another one and arranged the cut stalks and the pungent-smelling leaves, it was as if all individual difference between them dropped away; while two depersonalized figures, as in some old faded print entitled “Women Arranging Flowers‚” substituted themselves for the real Ann Gore and the real Netta Page.

  “Rook says that Lexie isn’t so well.”

  These words, as soon as Netta had uttered them, sounded to her ears as if she had heard them long before, spoken by someone else.

  Cousin Ann stared at her in obvious surprise.

  “He didn’t tell me that this morning,” she said. “But of course he may have been too worried to talk about it.”

  She was silent for a moment, her large gray eyes staring in front of her, her full lips parted, her rounded chin raised.

  Then with a sudden almost childish gesture of excitement: “Listen, Netta, I’ve got an idea. Let’s go round there now, this very moment. Let’s take him some of these flowers.”

  The blank look with which the older woman received this suggestion and her glance at the windows increased Cousin Ann’s excitement.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” she cried. “That’s what we’ll do! We’ll surprise him. There’s heaps of time. I’ll lend you my mackintosh and take my plaid cloak. Oh, you dear, how funny and frightened you look, Come on. I’ll get Pandie to clear these things away. No, no. Of course I can’t go alone. Oh, you dear thing. I do adore you when you look so scared.”

  In her impetuosity the young girl seized Netta’s head between her hands and kissed her on the forehead. Then she dragged her out of the room and up the historic staircase.

  The road between Ashover Church and Ashover village lay east and west. Between it and the water meadows there was nothing but a stretch of low white railings. Halfway to the village the road crossed a narrow wooden bridge where the river turned sharply to the south.

  It was a road that had a distinct character of its own and no reforming county council had yet dared to meddle with that character.

  The flooded ruts into which the two women kept stumbling might have been indented by the wagon wheel
s of Cromwell; and the rough ditch-side grass, now beaten flat by the weather, might have fed the flocks of Wolsey.

  Cousin Ann’s excitement seemed rather to increase than to diminish. Her thick boots and stockings kept her feet dry; while the water streaming down her cheeks heightened her eager colour.

  Netta, on the contrary, was conscious that her feet were miserably wet, that the draggled ends of her hair were hanging loose, and that the rain was finding its way down her very neck behind the collar of her mackintosh.

  Dead yellow leaves whirled past them as they struggled on. The willows bowed down toward the alders. The alders bent desolately toward the reeds. The reeds crouched and shuddered until they touched the surface of the swollen ditches. Tossed wildly on the rain came flocks of starlings, their awkward bodies carried up and down by the wind, their wings beating aimlessly.

  The women arrived at last at the cottage of the Vicar of Ashover, a little whitewashed two-story building close to the road, where in former times had stood the turnpike toll-gate.

  Lady Ann hesitated here a moment, pulling her cloak closer round herself and adjusting the mackintosh of her companion. She had made Netta wear a cloth cap of Rook’s and the miserable patience of the rain-drenched face beneath it struck her now with a little twinge of remorse.

  They were on the point of moving forward again when the door of the cottage opened and the figure of a young girl presented itself in the doorway.

  “I saw you through the window,” said this apparition in a voice so faint that the words hardly reached them. “Come in, won’t you? Come in, please!”

  They made their way through the tiny garden and entered the house.

  Nell took them into her own sitting room and placed them on the sofa opposite the fire. She persuaded Netta to take off her shoes and hold her feet to the blaze.

  They spoke of Lexie, how mysterious his illness was and how unwisely he treated himself, taking long exhausting walks when the one thing the doctor implored him to avoid was that kind of exertion.

  And then quite suddenly, as she sat on a little stool by the side of the hearth, the visitors became aware that the girl was trembling from head to foot.

  Shivering convulsive tremors ran through her slim frame. Her small head, whose wavy light-brown hair framed a face as shell-like in its transparency as an old miniature, straightened itself stiffly on its slender neck as if to defy some mortal weakness.

  “What is it?” murmured Cousin Ann, laying her wet gloved hand on the young woman’s knee.

  The sympathetic voice and touch seemed to alarm the girl rather than quiet her. Curious twitching lines appeared on her face; and her mouth, which normally had a piteous twist, began to resemble the mouth of an unhappy little gargoyle.

  She rose from her seat, biting her under lip, clenching her fingers in the palms of her hands, and stood by the mantelpiece.

  Lady Ann also rose and for a moment remained hesitating. Netta, who kept glancing timidly from one to another as she stretched her feet nearer and nearer to the fire, was vaguely struck by something brusque and blundering in her friend’s movement. She became conscious of a wish that Cousin Ann would turn her steady glance away from that troubled figure; and behind that wish she found herself feeling a faint, a very faint hostility to her dear friend.

  Lady Ann had never looked more competent, more high-spirited, more kind. She seemed on the point of making some pronounced sympathetic gesture, perhaps even of taking the hysterical girl in her arms. Netta had a feeble inclination to cry out: “Let her alone! let her alone!” But all she could do was to wish herself out in the rain again, out in the road, in the fields, in the middle of Hangdown Cover; out anywhere, so as not to see—she couldn’t tell quite what!

  Thank Heaven! The door opened just then and the Vicar of Ashover entered. Netta had not been able yet to make up her mind whether she liked William Hastings or disliked him. He made her think of a picture of Napoleon that hung in the Major-General’s bathroom and that association was horrible. But he also made her think of Monseigneur Tallainton, the little old French priest of the Catholic church in Bristol; and that association endeared him to her. She liked something compact and weighty about his rather corpulent body, and she liked his hands, which were very small and very white. It was a certain suppressed passion in his face which puzzled her and disturbed her. It was like a ship with its decks covered with great dark guns coming down upon her out of the mist.

  The Vicar shook hands cordially with Cousin Ann and bending quickly over Netta herself prevented her from rising. It was while he was doing this that his young wife slipped silently around the outside of the group and escaped from the room.

  It was not till after the conversation had begun that the girl’s disappearance was noticed.

  “Yes, I’m afraid she was upset by something,” said Lady Ann, catching the Vicar’s eye as it roved from Netta’s outstretched feet to her cloth cap.

  “It’s the weather,” said William Hastings. “She is always like this when it rains. Nell hates the rain.”

  “I think it was more than that, Mr. Hastings,” said Lady Ann gravely. “But it’s a pity the climate doesn’t suit her, if you’re going on living here.”

  “Dorsetshire suits us better than any other place when the wind’s not in the west.”

  As if in response to the clergyman’s words a great gust of wind shook the windows of the house and a splutter of rain came hissing down the chimney.

  Netta thought she could hear a bed creaking in the room above them, and the sound troubled her more than the sound of sobs. She drew her feet away from the fire and began putting on her stiff half-dried shoes.

  “Yes, we must be going,” said Lady Ann, rising. “But I would have liked to ask you about your book. Is it coming on well?”

  The Vicar’s face changed its expression completely. “Seventeen chapters,” he said with a look at Netta as if she and her troublesome shoe-strings were the eighteenth chapter. “But it is the old story with me, Lady Ann. I tear most of it up. It isn’t a very cheerful book.”

  Lady Ann smiled as she wrapped her plaid round her. She had grown accustomed to this kind of thing from William Hastings and had ceased to take it seriously. No one but the man’s own wife had ever seen this mysterious work, and for some reason or another Nell Hastings never spoke of it.

  But Netta was on her feet now and gravely contemplating the faded carpet. Hastings and his book presented themselves to her mind as a great plump black crow carrying a little plump black crow in his claws. She fancied she heard that bed creaking again.

  She pulled on her mackintosh with such rapidity that the clergyman was not in time to assist her. She was glad when they were out of the house. She was glad to feel the rain on her face again.

  As for Cousin Ann the whole experience of that little room, with its grotesque antimacassars across the backs of mahogany chairs and its double row of daguerreotypes, seemed to sail off over the ditches like a bubble of froth. Her only remark, as the rain eddied and gyrated past them like a horizontal cataract, reducing the whole world to the grayness of a cadaver, was a remark that conveyed no meaning at all to the mind of Netta.

  “Queen Elizabeth was right. There’s something funny about it. They ought never to have allowed it.”

  The rain increased in volume. The village in front of them seemed completely to disappear. The plaid cloak soon became as wringing wet as if it had been flung into the ditch. The drops trickled down Netta’s back in cold persistent streamlets that made her shiver. Her shoes were so full of water that they responded with gurgling swishing noises every time she moved her feet.

  On and on they struggled, their heads bent, their soaked garments clinging to the curves of their figures like Pheidian drapery, their eyes blurred, the rain tasting salty in their mouths, as if it were the tears of some vast inconsolable Niobe.

  It seemed to Netta as though their heavy progress would never end; as though all her troubled life had been only a
fantastic preparation for a destiny that meant walking, walking, walking, by the side of a being whose thoughts she could never read, toward a goal that could never be reached!

  And obscurely, through the clamminess of her clothes, through the gurglings of her shoes, she kept hearing that invisible bed in the upper room of Toll-Pike Cottage creaking, creaking, creaking, like the hinge of a gate behind a retreating assassin.

  She began to fall into that mood of indignant pity about Nell Hastings that used to puzzle the girls so when she displayed it over the affairs of poor Madge. Why did she always worry herself about people? Mrs. Hastings was nothing to her. She didn’t want her pity. She did want something, though, and Netta wished she could give it to her.

  She found herself giving it to her in her imagination. It took the form of a twenty-pound note, like the one which the manager of the Bristol Theatre gave to Minnie at Christmas. She saw that twisted mouth trying to thank her but she hurried away…. Why! They had actually turned down Marsh Alley and were at Lexie’s very gate. “Never mind, dear. I expect we’re both a little dazed.” So Cousin Ann had been speaking to deaf ears! “I must stop fancying things,” Netta said to herself as Lexie’s housekeeper let them in and preceded them upstairs.

  They found the invalid lying on a deck chair at the edge of his bookcase. On a little table by his side was a china mug and in the mug was a specimen of that curious plant, half fungus, half flower, which the botanists call broom rape.

  Lexie sat up very straight and contemplated his visitors with wide-open eyes.

  “We mustn’t stay a moment,” announced Cousin Ann. “Rook doesn’t know we came. We’ve brought you these.” And to Netta’s astonishment, out of the deep pocket of her plaid coat the young woman produced a bunch of dilapidated chrysanthemums.

  Lexie received the flowers, snuffed tentatively at them, remarked that they smelt like muskrats, and laid them down beside the mug.

  He looked at Netta then, with something like a furtive appeal on his corrugated face.