Rodmoor Read online

  For the first time since she had known him Nance’s voice betrayed irritation. “Don’t tease me, Adrian. I can’t stand it to-night. You don’t know what all this means to Rachel.”

  Adrian smiled. “Your dear Rachel,” he said, “seems to have got you both fairly well under her thumb.”

  “She was my mother’s best friend!” the girl burst out. “I should never forgive myself if I made her unhappy!”

  “There seems more chance, as I see it now,” observed Sorio, “that Miss Doorm will make Linda unhappy. I think I may take it that Linda’s mother wasn’t much of a favourite of hers? Isn’t that so, my dear?”

  “We must be getting home now,” the girl remarked, rising from the bench. But Sorio remained seated, coolly puffing wreaths of cigarette smoke into the aromatic night.

  “There’s not the slightest need to get cross with me,” he said gently, giving the sleeve of her coat a little deprecatory caress.

  “As a matter of fact, when I heard that woman scold Linda for not wanting to set you free I felt, in a most odd and subtle manner, curiously anxious to scold her, too; I quite longed to overcome and override her absurd reluctance. I even felt a strange excitement in the thought of walking with her along the edge of this water, and in the face of this wind. O! I became Miss Doorm’s accomplice, Nance! You may be perfectly happy. I made up my mind that very moment that I would write at once to Baltazar and accept his invitation. Indeed I did write to him, the minute I could hear no more talking. I was too excited to write much. I just wrote: ‘Amico mio:—I will come to you very soon.’ and when I’d finished the letter I went straight out and posted it. I believe I heard Linda crying as I went downstairs, but, as I tell you, Nance, I had become quite an accomplice of Miss Doorm! It seemed to me outrageous that the selfish silliness of a child like that should interfere with your emancipation. Besides I liked the thought of walking with her by the shore of this sea and calming her curious fear.”

  He threw away his cigarette and, rising to his feet, drew the girl’s arm within his own and led her homewards.

  The beech-tree, as if relieved by their departure, gave itself up with more delicious abandonment than ever to the embraces of the warm Spring night. They had not far to go now, and Nance only spoke once before they arrived at their door in the London Bridge Road.

  “Had that figure you saw,” she asked in a low constrained voice, “the same look Linda has—now that you know what she is like?”

  “Linda?” he answered, “Oh, no, my dear, no, no! That one had nothing to do with Linda. But I think,” he added, after a pause, “it had something to do with Rodmoor.”

  II

  DYKE HOUSE

  NANCE HERRICK stood at her window in the Doorm dwelling the morning after their arrival thinking desperately of what she had done. The window, open at the top, let in a breath of chilly, salt-tasting wind which stirred the fair loose hair upon her forehead and cooled her throat and shoulders. At the sound of her sister’s voice she closed the window, cast one swift, troubled look at the river flowing so formidably near, and moved across to Linda’s side. Drowsy and warm after her deep sleep, the younger girl stretched out her long, youthful arms from the bed and clasped them round Nance’s neck.

  “Are you glad,” she whispered, “are you glad, after all, that I made you come I couldn’t have borne to be selfish, dear. I should have had no peace. No!—,” she interrupted an ejaculation from Nance, “—it wasn’t anything to do with Rachel. It wasn’t, Nancy darling, it really and truly wasn’t! I’m going to be perfectly good now. I’m going to be so good that you’ll hardly know me. Shall I tell you what I’m going to do? I’m going to learn the organ. Rachel says there’s a beautiful one in the church here, and Mr. Traherne—he’s the clergyman, you know—plays upon it himself. I’m going to persuade him to teach me. O! I shall be perfectly happy!”

  Nance extricated herself from the young girl’s arms and, stepping back into the middle of the room, stood contemplating her in silence. The two sisters, thus contrasted, in the hard white light of that fen-land morning, would have charmed the super-subtle sense of some late Venetian painter. Nance herself, without being able precisely to define her feeling, felt that the mere physical difference between them was symbolic of something dangerously fatal in their conjunction. Her sister was not an opposite type. She too was fair—she too was tall and flexible—she too was emphatically feminine in her build—she even had eyes of the same vague grey colour. And yet, as Nance looked at her now, at her flushed excited cheeks, her light brown curls, her passionate neurotic attitude, and became at the same time conscious of her own cold pure limbs, white marble-like skin and heavily-hanging shining hair, she felt that they were so essentially different, even in their likeness, that the souls in their two bodies could never easily comprehend one another nor arrive at any point of real instinctive understanding.

  Something of the same thought must have troubled Linda too at that moment, for as they fixed their eyes on each other’s faces there fell between them that sort of devastating silence which indicates the struggle of two human spirits, seeking in vain to break the eternal barrier in whose isolating power lies all the tragedy and all the interest of life.

  Suddenly Nance moved to the window and threw it wide open.

  “Listen!” she said.

  The younger sister made a quick apprehensive movement and clasped her hands tightly together. Her eyes grew wide and her breast rose and fell.

  “Listen!” Nance repeated.

  A low, deep-drawn murmur, reiterated, and again reiterated, in menacing monotony, filled the room.

  “The sea!” cried both sisters together.

  Nance shivered, closed the window and sank down on a chair. With lowered eyes she remained for some seconds absorbed and abstracted. When she lifted her head she saw that her sister was watching her and that there was a look on her face such as she had never seen there before. It was a look she was destined to be unable to thrust from her memory, but no effort of hers could have described it then or afterwards. Making an effort of will which required all the strength of her soul, Nance rose to her feet and spoke solemnly and deliberately.

  “Swear to me, Linda, that nothing I could have said or done would have made you agree to stay in London. I told you I was ready to stay, didn’t I, that night I came back with Adrian and found you awake? I begged and begged you to tell me the truth, to tell me whether Rachel was forcing you into going. I offered to leave her for good and all—didn’t I?—if she was unkind to you. It’s only the truth I want—only the truth! We’ll go back—now—to-morrow—the moment you say you wish it. But if you don’t wish it, make me know you don’t! Make me know it—here—in my heart!”

  In her emotion, pressing her hand to her side, she swayed with a pathetic, unconscious movement. Linda continued to watch her, the same indescribable look upon her face.

  “Will you swear that nothing I could have done would have made you stay? Will you swear that, Linda?”

  The younger girl in answer to this appeal, leapt from her bed and rushing up to her sister hugged her tightly in her arms.

  “You darling thing!” she cried, “of course I’ll swear it. Nothing—nothing—nothing! would have made me stay. Oh, you’ll soon see how happy I can be in Rodmoor—in dear lovely Rodmoor!”

  A simultaneous outburst of weeping relieved at that moment the feelings of both of them, and they kissed one another passionately through their falling tears.

  In the hush that followed—whether by reason of a change in the wind or simply because their senses had grown more receptive—they both dearly heard through the window that remained closed, the husky, long-drawn beat, reiterative, incessant, menacing, of the waves of the North Sea.

  During breakfast and the hours which succeeded that meal, Nance was at once surprised and delighted by the excellent spirits of both Miss Doorm and Linda. They even left her to herself before half the morning was over and went off together, apparently in c
omplete harmony along the banks of the tidal stream.

  She herself, loitering in the deserted garden, felt a curious sensation of loneliness and a wonder, not amounting to a sense of discomfort but still remotely disturbing, as to why it was that Adrian had not, as he had promised, appeared to take her out. Acting at last on a sudden impulse, she ran into the house, put on her hat and cloak, and started rapidly down the road leading to the village.

  The Spring was certainly not so far advanced in Rodmoor as it was in London. Nance felt as though some alien influence were at work here, reducing to enforced sterility the natural movements of living and growing things. The trees were stunted, the marigolds in the wet ditches pallid and tarnished. The leaves of the poplars, as they shook in the gusty wind, seemed to her like hundreds and hundreds of tiny dead hands—the hands of ghostly babies beseeching whatever power called them forth to give them more life or to return them to the shadows.

  Yes, some alien influence was at work, and the Spring was ravished and tarnished even while yet in bud. It was as if by an eternal mandate, registered when this portion of the coast first assumed its form, the seasons had been somehow thwarted and perverted in the processes of their natural order, and the land left, a nuetral, sterile, derelict thing, neither quite living nor quite dead, doomed to changeless monotony.

  Nance was still some little distance from the village, but she slackened her pace and lingered now, in the hope that at any moment she might see Adrian approaching. She knew from Rachel’s description only very vaguely where Mr. Stork’s cottage was and she was afraid of missing her lover if she went too far.

  The road she was following was divided from the river by some level water meadows and she did not feel certain whether the village itself lay on the right or the left of the river mouth. Miss Doorm had spoken of a bridge, but among the roofs and trees which she made out in front of her, she was unable at present to see anything of this.

  What she did see was a vast expanse of interminable fen-land stretching away for miles and miles on every side of her, broken against the sky line, towards which she was advancing, by grey houses and grey poplars but otherwise losing itself in misty horizons which seemed infinite in their remoteness. On both sides of the little massed group of roofs and trees and what the girl made out as the masts of boats in the harbour, a long low bank of irregular sand-dunes kept the sea from her view, though the sound of the waves—and Nance fancied it came to her in a more friendly manner now she was closer to it—was insistent and clear.

  Across the fens to her left she discerned what was evidently the village church but the building looked so desolate and isolated—alone there in the midst of the marshes—that she found it difficult to conceive the easily-daunted Linda as practising organ music in such a place. She wondered if the grey building she could just obscurely distinguish, leaning against the wall of the church, were the abode of Mr. Traherne. If so, she thought, he must indeed be a man of God to endure that solitude.

  She had wandered into the wet grass by the road’s edge and was amusing herself by picking a bunch of dandelions, the only flower at that moment in sight, when she saw a man’s figure approaching her from the Rodmoor direction. At first she assumed it was Adrian, and made several quick steps to meet him, but when she recognised her mistake the disappointment made her so irritable that she threw her flowers away. Her irritation vanished, however, after a long survey of him, when the stranger actually drew near.

  He was a middle-sized man wearing at the back of his head a dark soft hat and buttoned up, from throat to

  ankles, in a light-coloured heavy overcoat. His face, plump, smooth, and delicately oval, possessed a winning freshness of tint and outline which was further enhanced by the challenging friendliness of his whimsical smile and the softness of his hazel eyes. What could be seen of his mouth—for he wore a heavy moustache—was sensitive and sensuous, but something about the way he walked—a kind of humorous roll, Nance mentally defined it, of his sturdy figure—gave an impression that this body, so carefully over-coated against the cold, was one whose heart was large, mellow and warm. It was not till after a minute or two, not in fact till he had wavered and hovered at her side like an entomologist over a newly discovered butterfly, that the girl got upon the track of other interesting peculiarities.

  His nose, she found, for instance, was the most striking feature of his face, being extremely long and pointed like the nose of a rodent, and with large quivering nostrils slightly reddened, it happened just then, by the impact of the wind, and tilted forward as the man veered about as though to snuff up the very perfume and essence of the fortunate occasion.

  From the extreme tip of this interesting feature hung a pearly drop of rheum.

  What—next to the man’s nose—struck the girl’s fancy and indeed so disarmed her dignity that even his entomological hoverings were forgiven, was the straight lock of black-brown hair which falling across his forehead gave him a deliciously ruffled and tumbled look, as if he had recently been engaged in a rural game of “blind man’s buff.” The forehead itself, or what could be seen of it, was weighty and thoughtful; the forehead of a scholar or a philosopher.

  Nance had never in all her life been treated by a stranger quite in the way this worthy man treated her, for not only did he return upon his steps immediately after he had passed her, but he permitted his eyes, both in passing and repassing, to search her smilingly up and down from her boots to the top of her head, precisely as if he were a connoisseur in a gallery observing the “values” of a famous picture.

  And yet, for she was not by any means oblivious to such distinctions, the girl was unable to feel even for one second that this surprising admirer was anything but a gentleman—a gentleman, however, with very singular manners. That she certainly did feel. And yet, she liked him, liked him before he uttered a word, liked him with that swift, irrational, magnetic attraction which, with women even more than with men, is the important thing.

  Passing her for the third time he suddenly darted into the grass, and with a movement so comically impetuous that though she gave a start she could not feel angry, picked up her discarded flowers and gravely presented them to her, saying as he did so, “Perhaps you’ll be annoyed at leaving these behind—or do you wish them at the devil?”

  Nance took them from him and smiled frankly into his face.

  “I suppose I oughtn’t to have picked them,” she said. “People don’t like dandelions brought into houses.”

  “What an Attic chin you have!” was the stranger’s next remark. There was such an absence in his tone of all rakish or conventional gallantry that the girl still felt she could not repulse him.

  “You are staying here—in Rodmoor?” he went on.

  Nance explained that she had come to live with Miss Doorm.

  “Ah!” The stranger looked at her curiously, smiling with exquisite sweetness. “You have been here before,” he said. “You came in a coach, pulled by six black horses. You know every sort of reed and every kind of moss in all the fens. You know all the shells on the shore and all the seaweed in the sea.”

  Nance was less puzzled than might be supposed by this fantastic address, as she had the advantage of interpreting it in the light of the humorous and reassuring smile which accompanied its utterance.

  She brought him back to reality by a direct question. “Can you tell me where Mr. Stork lives, please? I’ve a friend staying with him and I want to know which way a person would naturally take coming from there to us. I had rather hoped,” she hesitated a little, “to have met my friend already. But perhaps Mr. Stork is a late riser.”

  The stranger, who had been looking very intently at the opposite hedge while she asked her question, suddenly darted towards it. The queer way in which he ran with his arms swinging loosely from his shoulders, and his body bent a little forward, struck Nance as peculiarly fascinating. When he reached the hedge he hovered momentarily in front of it and then pounced at something. “Missed!” he cried i
n a peevish voice. “Damn the little scoundrel! A shrew-mouse! That’s what it was! A shrew mouse!”

  He came hurrying back as fast as he went, almost as if Nance herself had been some kind of furred or feathered animal that might disappear if it were not held fast.

  “I beg your pardon, Madam,” he said, breathlessly, “but you don’t often see those so near the town. Hullo!” This last exclamation was caused by the appearance, not many paces from them, of Adrian Sorio himself who emerged from a gap in the hedge, hatless and excited. “I was on the towpath,” he gasped, “and I caught sight of you. I was afraid you’d have started. Baltazar made me go with him to the station.” He paused and stared at Nance’s companion.

  The latter looked so extremely uncomfortable that the girl hastened to come to his rescue.

  “This gentleman was just going to show me the way,” she said, “to your friend’s house. Look, Adrian! Aren’t these lovely?”

  She held out the dandelions towards him, but he disregarded them.

  “Well,” he remarked rather brusquely, “now I’ve found you, I fancy we’d better go back the way we came. I’m longing to see how Linda feels. I want to take her down to the sea this afternoon. Shall we do that? Or perhaps you can’t both leave Miss Doorm at the same time?”

  He stared at the stranger as if bidding him clear off. But the admirer of shrew-mice had recovered his equanimity. “I know Mr. Stork well,” he remarked to Sorio. “He and I are quite old friends. I was just asking this lady if she had ever been in the fens before, but I gather this is her first visit.”

  Adrian had by this time begun to look so morose that Nance broke in hurriedly.