1 JOHN COWPER POWYS THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE ^ r R O D M O O R Books by JOHN COWPER POWYS The War and Cultxire, 1914 $ .60 Visions and Revisions, Essays, 1915 . . . $2,00 Wood and Stone, A Romance, 1915 . . . $1.50 Wolf's-bane, Rhymes, 1916 $1.25 One Hundred Best Books with Commen- tary, 1916 $ .75 Suspended Judgments, Essays, 1916 . . . $2.00 By THEODORE FRANCIS POWYS The Soliloquy of a Hermit, 1916 . . . $1.00 Published by G. ARNOLD SHAW GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL, NEW YORK RODMOOR A ROMANCE JOHN COWPER POWYS Author of "Wood and Stone," etc. O they rade on, and farther on. And they waded rivers abune the knee. And they saw neither sun nor moon But they heard the roaring of the sea. A>'0NYM0?r8. 1916 G. ARNOLD SHAW NEW YORK I .A c COPYRIGHT. 191« BY G. ARNOLD SH AW COPYRIGHT, IN GREAT BRITAIN AND THE COLONIES VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK DEDICATED TO THE SPIRIT OF EMILY BRONTE CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I The Borough 1 II Dyke House 24- III Sea-Drift 40 IV Oakguard 49 V A Symposium 58 VI Bridge-Head and Withy-Bed ... 73 VII Vespers 87 VIII Sun and Sea 102 IX Priest and Doctor 118 X Low Tide 129 XI The Sisters 139 XII Hamish Traherne 152 XIII Departure 160 XIV Brand Renshaw 175 XV Broken Voices 194 XVI The Fens 212 XVII The Dawn 226 XVIII Bank-Holiday 239 XIX Listeners 264 CONTENTS PAGE Ravelston Grange 282 The Windmill 311 The Northwest Wind 337 Warden of the Fishes 352 The Twenty-Eighth of October . . 375 Baltazar Stork 409 November Mist 430 Theenos 447 CHAPTER XX XXI XXII XXIII XXIV XXV XXVI XXVII RODMOOR THE BOROUGH IT was not that he concealed anything from her. He told her quite frankly, in that first real con- versation they had together — on the little se- cluded bench in the South London park — about all the morbid sufferings of his years in America and his final mental collapse. He even indicated to her — while the sound of grass- mowing came to them over the rain-wet tulips — some of the most secret causes of this event ; his savage reac- tion, for instance, against the circle he was thrown into there ; his unhappy habit of deadly introspection ; his aching nostalgia for things less murderously new and raw. He explained how his mental illness had taken so dan- gerous, so unlooked for a shape, that it was only by the merest chance he had escaped long incarceration. No; it was not that he concealed anything. It was rather that she experienced a remote uneasy feeling that, say what he might, — and in a certain sense he said too much rather than too little — she did not really understand him. Her feminine instinct led her to persuade him that she understood; led her to say what was most reassur- 1 RODMOOR ing to him, and most consolatory; but in her heart of hearts she harboured a teasing doubt; a doubt which only the rare sweetness of these first love-days of her life enabled her to hide and cover over. Nor was this feeling about her lover's confessions the only little cloud on Nance Herrick's horizon during these memorable weeks — weeks that, after all, she was destined to look back upon as so strangely happy. She found herself, in the few moments when her pas- sionate emotion left her free to think of such things, much more anxious than she cared to admit about the ambiguous relations existing between the two persons dependent upon her. Ever since the death of her father — that prodigal sailor — three years ago, when she had taken it upon herself to support both of them by her work in the dressmaker's shop, she had known that all was not well between the two. Rachel Doorm had never forgiven Captain Herrick for marrying again ; she felt that instinctively, but it was only quite recently that she had grown to be really troubled by the eccentric woman's attitude to the little half-sister. Linda's mother, she knew, had in her long nervous decline rather clung than otherwise to this grim friend of the former wife ; but Linda's mother had always been different from other women ; and Nance could remem- ber how, in quite early days, she never interfered when Miss Doorm took the child away to punish her. To Nance herself Rachel had always been something of an anxiety. Her savage devotion had proved over and over again more of a burden than a pleasure; and now that there was this increased tension between her and Linda, the thing began to appear invidious, rapa- cious, sinister. THE BOROUGH 8 She was torn, in fact, two wajs over the situation. Her own mother had long ago — and it was one of her few definite recollections of her — made her swear sol- emnly never to desert this friend of former days; and the vows she had registered then to obey this covenant had grown into a kind of religious rite ; the only rite, in fact, after all these years, she was able to perform for her dead. And yet if loyalty to her mother kept her patiently tender with Rachel's eccentricities, the much warmer feeling she had for her other parent was stirred indig- nantly by the thought of any unkindness dealt out to Linda. And just at present, it was clear, Linda was not happy. The young girl seemed to be losing her vivacity and to be growing silent and reserved. She was now nearly eighteen ; and yet Nance had caught her once or twice lately looking at Rachel Doorm with the same expression of frightened entreaty as she used to wear when led away from her mother's side for some childish fault. Rachel's father, a taci- turn and loveless old man, had recently died, leaving his daughter, whom he had practically cast off, a small but secure annuity and a little house on the east coast. It was now to this home of her ancestors, in the vil- lage of Rodmoor, that Rachel Doorm was anxious to transport both sisters ; partly as a return for what Nance's mother, and more recently Nance herself, had done for her support, and partly out of fanatical devo- tion to Nance. The girl could not help experiencing a feeling of in- finite relief at the thought of being freed from her un- 4 RODMOOR congenial work in the dressmaker's establishment. Her pleasure, nevertheless, had been considerably marred, in the last few days, by the attitude of her sister towards the projected change. And now, with the realisation of this thrilling new passion possessing her, her own feeling about leaving London was different from what it had been at first. None of these questions interrupted, however, on that particular afternoon, the girl's dreamy and absorbed happiness. In the long delicious intervals that fell between her and her lover with a perfume sweeter than that of the arrested rain, she let her mind wander in languid ret- rospect, from that seat in Kensington Park, over every one of the wonderful events that had led her to this. She recalled her first sight of Adrian and how it had come over her, like an intimation from some higher sphere of being, that her fate was henceforth to lie, for good and for evil, in that man's hands. It was quite early in April when she saw him ; and she remembered, sitting now by his side, how, as each day grew milder, and the first exquisite tokens of Spring penetrated one by one — here a basket of daffodils, and there a spray of almond-blossom — into the street she traversed to her work, she felt less and less inclined to struggle against the deep delicious thrill that suffused itself, like a warm indrawing wave, through every pulse of her body. That it should never have come to her be- fore — that she should have lived absolutely fancy-free until so near her twenty-third birthday — only made her abandonment to what she felt now the more sweet and entire. THE BOROUGH " It is love, — it is love," she thought ; " and I will give myself up to it ! " And she had given herself up to it. It had pene- trated her with an exultant inner spring of delight. She had immersed herself in it. She had gone through her tedious drudgery as if she were floating, languidly and at ease, on a softly rocking tide. She had lived entirely in the present. She had not made the least movement even to learn the name of the man whose word- less pursuit of her had stirred her senses to this exultant response. She had felt an indescribable desire to prolong these hours of her first love, these hours so unreturning, so new and so sweet ; a desire — she remembered it well now — that had a tinge of unformulated fear about it; as though the very naming, even to herself, of what she enjoyed, would draw down the jealousy of the invisible powers. So she had been careful never to stop or linger, in her hurried morning walks to the historic bridge ; care- ful — after she had once passed him, and their eyes had met — never so much as to turn her head, to see if he were following. And yet she knew — as well in those first days as she knew now — that every morning and night he waited, wet or fine, to see her go by. And she had known, too — how could she not know? — that this mute signalling of two human souls must change and end; must become something nearer or something farther as time went on. But day b}^ day she put off this event ; too thrilled by the sweet dream in which she moved, to wish to destroy it, either for bet- ter or for worse. 6 RODMOOR If she had doubted him; doubted that he cared for her ; all would have been different. Then she would have taken some desperate step — some step that would have forced him to recognise her for what she was, his one of all, ready as none else could be ready, to cry with a great cry — " Lord, behold thine hand-maid ; do unto her according to Thy will ! " But she had known he did care. She had felt the magnetic current of his longing, as if it had been a hand laid down upon her breast. And in answer she had given herself up to him ; given herself, she thought, with no less complete a yielding than that with which, as she heard his voice by her side, reaching her through a delicate mist of delicious dream- ing, she gave herself up to him now. She recalled with a proud gladness the fact that she had never — never for a moment — in all those days, bestowed a thought on the question of any possible fu- ture with him. In the trance-like hours wherein she had brooded so tenderly over the form and face of her name- less lover, she always pictured him as standing waiting for her, a tall, bowed, foreign-looking figure, clothed in the long weather-stained Inverness — the very tex- ture of which she seemed to know the touch of — by that corner curb-stone where the flower-shop was. Just in that manner, with just that air of ardent ex- pectation, he might be found standing, she had felt, through unnumbered days of enchantment, and she pass- ing by, in silence, with the same expectant thrill. Such a love draught, not drained, not feverishly drunk of, but sweet in her mouth with the taste of a mystic consecration, seemed still, even now that she had him there beside her, to hold the secret, amid this warm THE BOROUGH breath of London's first lilacs, of a triumphant Present, wherein both Past and Future were abolished. It seemed to the happy girl on this unique April afternoon, while the sliding hours, full of the city's monotonous murmur, sank unnoticed away, and the gardeners planted their pansies and raked lethargically in the scented mould, as though nothing that could ever happen to her afterwards, could outweigh what she felt then, or matter so very greatly in the final reckoning. With every pulse of her young body she uttered her litany of gratitude. '* Ite; missa est " her heart cried — " It is enough." As they walked home afterwards, hand in hand through the dusk of the friendly park, she made him tell her, detail by detail, every least incident of those first days of their encountering. And Adrian Sorio, catch- ing the spirit of that exquisite entreaty, grew voluble even beyond his wont. He told her how, in the confusion of his mind, when it was first revealed to him that the devastation he was suffering from did not deny him the sweet sting of " what men call love," he found it impossible to face with any definite resolution the problem of his doubtful future. He had recognised that in a week or so every penny he possessed would be gone ; yet it was impossible — and his new emotion did not, he confessed, alter this in the least — to make any move to secure employment. A kind of misanthropic timidity, so he explained to her, made the least thought of finding what is popularly known as " work " eminently repellant to him ; yet it was obvious that work must be found, unless he wished, simply and quietly, to end the affair by starvation. This, as things went then, he told her, giving her 8 RODMOOR hand a final pressure as they emerged into the lighted streets, he did not at all urgently want — though in the first days of his return from America he had pondered more than once on the question of an easy and agreeable exit. It was as they settled down side by side, — her hat no longer held languidly in her gloveless hand, — to their long and discreet walk home through the crowded thoroughfares, that she was first startled by hearing the name " Rodmoor " from his lips. How amazing a coincidence ! What a miraculous gift of the gods ! Fate was indeed sweeping her away on a full tide. It seemed like a thing in some old fantastic romance. Could it be possible even before she had time to con- template her separation from him that she should learn that they were not to separate at all ! Rachel Doorra was indeed a witch — was indeed working things out for her favourite with the power of a sorceress. She kept back her natural cry of delight, " But that is where we are going," and let him, all un- conscious, as it seemed, of the effect of his words, un- ravel in his own way the thread of his story. It was about a certain Baltazar Stork she found he was telling her when her startled thoughts, like a flock of disturbed pigeons, alighted once more on the field of his discourse. Baltazar, it appeared, was an old friend of Sorio's and had written to offer him a sort of in- definite hospitality in his village on the North Sea. The name of this place — had she ever heard of Rod- moor? — had repeated itself very strangely in his mind ever since he first made it out in his friend's abominable hand. At that point in their walk, under the glare of a great provision shop, she suddenly became conscious that he THE BOROUGH 9 was watching her with laughing excitement. " You know ! " she cried, " you know ! " And it was with diffi- culty that he persuaded her to let him tell her how he knew, in his own elaborate manner. This refuge — offered to him thus out of a clear sky, he told her — did in a considerable sense lend him an excuse for taking no steps to find work. And the name of the place — he confessed this with an excited em- phasis — had from the beginning strangely affected his imagination. He saw it sometimes, so he said, that particular word, in a queer visualised manner, dark brown against a colourless and livid sky; and in an odd sort of way it had related itself, dimly, obscurely, and with the in- coherence of a half-learnt language, to the wildest and most pregnant symbols of his life. Rodmoor ! The word at the same time allured and troubled him. What it suggested to him — and he made her admit that his ideas of it were far more definite than her own — was no doubt what it really implied: leagues and leagues of sea-bleached forlorn- ness, of sand-dunes and glaucous marshes, of solitary willows and pallid-leaved poplars, of dark pools and night-long-murmuring reeds. " We'll have long walks together there ! " he ex- claimed, interrupting himself suddenly with an almost savage gesture of ardent possession. If it had been any one but Baltazar Stork, he went on, who had sent him this timely invitation, he would have rejected it at once, but from Baltazar he had no hesitation in accept- ing anything. They had been friends too long to make any other attitude possible. No, it was no scruple of pride that led him to hesitate — as he admitted to her 10 RODMOOR he had done. It was rather the strange and inde- finable reaction set up in his brain by those half-sinister half-romantic syllables — syllables that kept repeating themselves in his inner consciousness. Nance remembered more than once in a later time the fierce sudden way he turned upon her as they stood on the edge of the crowded square waiting the opportunity to cross and asked, with a solemn intensity in his voice, whether she had any presentiment as to how things would turn out for them in this place. " It hangs over me," he said, " it hangs over us both. I see it like a heavy sunset weighted with purple bars." And then, when the girl did nothing but shake her head and smile tenderly, " I warn you," he went on, " you are risking much — I feel it — I know it. I have had this sort of instinct before about things." He shivered a little and laid his hand on her arm as if he clung to her for reassurance. Nance remembered long afterwards the feelings in her that made her turn her face full upon him and whisper proudly, as if in defiance of his premonitions, " What can happen to us that can hurt us, my dear, as long as we are together, and as long as we love one another? " He was silent after this and apparently satisfied, for he did not scruple to return to the subject of Rod- moor. The word gave him in those first days, he said, that curious sensation we receive when we suddenly say to ourselves in some new locality, " I have been here ; I have seen all this before." Had he at that time, he told her, been less distracted by the emotions she aroused in him, he would have analysed to the bottom the dim mental augury — or THE BOROUGH 11 was it reminiscence? — called up by this name. As it was he just kept the thing at the back of his mind as something which, whatever its occult significance, at least spared him the necessity of agitating himself about his future. Nance's thoughts were brought back from their half- attention with a shock of vivid interest when he came to the point, amid his vague recollections, of his first entrance into her house. It was exactly a week ago, he reminded her, that he found himself one sunny morning securely established as a new lodger under her roof. In his impatient longing to secure the desirable room — across the narrow floor of which, he confessed to her, he paced to and fro that day like a hungry tiger — he had even forgotten to make the obvious inquiry as to the quarter of the London sky from which his particu- lar portion of light and air was to come. It was only, he told her, with a remote segment of his consciousness that he became aware of the fine, full flood of sunshine which poured in from the southern- opening window and lay, mellow and warm, upon his littered books and travel-stained trunk. Casual and preoccupied were the glances he cast, each time his mechanical perambulation brought him to that pleasant window, at the sun-bathed trafiic and the hurrying crowd. London Bridge Road melted into his thought; or rather his thought took possession of London Bridge Road and reduced it to a mere sound- ing-board for the emotion that obsessed him. That emotion — and Nance got exquisite pleasure from hearing him say the words, though she turned her face away from him as he said them — took, as he paced his room, passionate and ardent shape. He did 12 RODMOOR not re-vivify the whole of her, — of the fair young being whose sweetness had got into his blood. He confined himself to thinking of the delicate tilt of her head and of the spaciousness between her breasts, spaciousness that somehow reminded him of Pheidian sculpture. He hadn't anticipated this particular kind of escape — though it was certainly the escape he had been seek- ing — amid the roar of London's streets ; but after all, if it did give him his cup of nepenthe, his desired ano- dyne, how much the more did he gain when it gave him so thrilling an experience in addition? Why, indeed, should he not dream that the gods were for once help- ing him out and that the generous grace of his girl's form was symbolic of the restorative virtue of the great Mother herself? Restoration was undoubtedly the thing he wanted — and in recalling his thoughts of that earlier hour, to her now walking with him, he found himself enlarging upon it all quite unscrupulously in terms of what he now felt — restoration on any terms, at any cost, to the kindly normal paths out of which he had been so roughly thrown. He thrust indignantly back, he told her, that eventful morning the intrusive thought that it was only the Spring that worked so prosperously upon him. He did not want it to be the Spring; he wanted it to be the girl. The Spring would pass ; the girl, if his feeling for her — and he glanced at the broad-rimmed hat and shadowy profile at his side — were not altogether illusive, would remain. And it was the faculty for remaining that he especially required in his raft of refuge. Up and down his room, at any rate, he walked that day with a heightened consciousness such as he had THE BOROUGH 13 not known for many clouded months. " The Spring " — and in his imaginative reaction to his own memories he grew, so Nance felt with what was perhaps her first serious pang, almost feverishly eloquent — " the Spring, whether I cared to recognise it or not, waved thrilling arms towards me. I felt it " — and he raised his voice so loud that the girl looked uneasily round them — " in the warmth of the sun, in the faces of the wistful shop girls, in the leaves budding against the smoke of the Borough. It had come to me again, and you — you had brought it 1 It had come to me again, the Eternal Return, the antiphonal world-deep Renewal. It had come, Nance, and all the slums of Rotherhithe and Wapping, and all the chimney's, workshops, wharves and tenements of the banks of this river of yours could not stop the rising of the sap. The air came to me that morning, my girl ! " — and he unconsciously quick- ened his steps as he spoke till, for all her long youthful limbs she could hardly keep pace with him — " as if it had passed over leagues of green meadows. And it had! It had, Nance! And it throbbed for me, child, with the sweetness of your very soul." He paused for a moment and, as they debouched more directly east- ward through a poor and badly lit street, she caught him muttering to himself what she knew was Latin. He answered her quick look — her look that had a dim uneasiness in it — with a slow repetition of the fa- mous line, and Nance was still quite enough of a young girl to feel a thrill of pride that she had a lover who, within a stone's throw of the " Elephant and Castle," could quote for her on an April evening that " eras amet qui nunquam amaiit " of the youth of the centuries! The rich, antique flavour of the words blent well 14 RODMOOR enough as far as she was concerned with the homely houses and taverns of that dilapidated quarter. The night was full of an indescribable balm, felt through the most familiar sounds and sights, and, after all, there was always something mellow and pagan and free about the streets of London. It was the security, the friendly solidity, of the immense city which more than anything just then seemed to harmonise with this classical mood in her wonderful foreigner and she wished he would quote more Latin as they went along, side by side, past the lighted fruit stalls. The overhanging shadow of Adrian's premonitions, or whatever they were, about Rodmoor, and her own anxieties about Rachel Doorm and Linda withdrew themselves into the remotest background of the girl's mind as she gave herself to her happiness in this fa- voured hour. It was in a quiet voice, after that, that he resumed his stor3\ The sound, he said, of one of the Borough clocks striking the hour of ten brought a pause to his agitated pacing. He stretched himself, he told her, when he heard the clock, stretched his arms out at full length, with that delicious shivering sensation which accompanies the near fulfilment of deferred hope. Then he chuckled to himself, from sheer childish ecstasy, and made goblinish faces. Nance could not help noticing as he told her all this, how quaintly he reproduced in his exaggerated way the precise gestures he had indulged in. " Per Bacco ! I had only three pounds left," he said, and as he shrugged his shoulders and glowered at her under a flickering lamp from eyes sunken deep in his heavy face, she real- ised of what it was he had been all this while vaguely THE BOROUGH 15 rt'ininding her — of nothing less, in fact, than one of those saturnine portrait-busts of the Roman decadence, at which as a child she used to stare, half-frightened and half-attracted, in the great Museum. The first thing he did, he told her, when the sound of the clock brought him to his senses, was to empty his pockets on the top of the chest-of-drawers which was, except for the bed and a couple of rickety chairs, the only article of furniture in the room. An errant penny, rolling aside from the rest, tinkled against the edge of his washing basin. "Not three pounds !" he mut- tered and leered at himself in his wretched looking glass. It was precisely at that moment that the sound of voices struck his ears, proceeding from the adjoining room. " I had spent half the night," he whispered, drawing his companion closer to his side as a couple of tipsy youths pushed roughly by them, " lying awake listen- ing. I felt a queer kind of shame, yes, shame, as I realised how near I w'as to you. You know I knew nothing of you then, absolutely nothing except that you went to work every day and lived with some sort of elderly person and a younger sister. It was this ig- norance about you, child, that made my situation so exciting. I waited breathlessly, literally petrified, in the middle of the room." Nance at this point felt herself compelled to utter a little cry of protest. " You ought to have made some kind of noise," she said, " to let us know you were listening." But he waved aside her objection, and continued: " I remained petrified in the centre of the room, feeling as though the persons I listened to might at any mo- 16 RODMOOR ment stop their conversation and listen, in their turn, to the frantic beating of ni}' heart. I heard your voice. I knew it in a moment to be yours — it had the round, full sweetness " — his arm was about her now — " of your darling figure. ' Good-bye ! ' you called out and there came the sound of a door opening upon the passage, ' Good-bye ! I'm off. Meet me to-night if you like. Yes, soon after six. Good-bj'e ! Look after each other.' " The door shut and I heard you running down the stairs. I felt as though that ' Meet me to-night ' had been addressed to myself. I crossed over to the win- dow and watched you thread your way through the crowd in the direction of the Bridge. I knew you were late. I hoped you would not be scolded for it by some shrewish or brutal employer. I wished I had had the courage to go out on the landing and see you off. Why is one always so paralysed when these chances offer themselves.'' I might easily have taken a fellow-lodger's privilege and bidden you good morning. Then I found myself wondering whether you had any inkling that I had been sleeping so near you that night. Had you, you darling, had you any such instinct.'' " Nance shook her head, nor could he see the expres- sion of her eyes in the quiet darkened square, across which they were then moving. They came upon a wooden bench, under some iron railings, and he made her sit down while he completed his tale. The spot was unfrequented at that hour, and above their heads — as they leaned back, sighing tranquilly, and he took pos- session of her hand — the branch of a stunted beech- tree stretched itself out, hushed and still, enjoying THE BOROUGH 17 some secret dream of its own amid tlie balmy perfumes of the amorous night. " jMay I go on?" he enquired, looking tenderly at her. In her heart Nance longed to cry, " No ! No ! No more of these tiresome memories ! Make love to me ! Make love to me!" but she only pressed his fingers gently and remained silent. " I took up a book," he went on, " from the heap on the floor and drawing one of those miserable chairs to the window, I opened it at random. It happened to be that mad lovely thing of Rcmy de Gourmont. I forgot whether you said y^ou had got as far as French poetry in that collection of yours that Miss Doorm is so suspicious of. It was, in fact, ' Le livre des Litanies,' and shall I tell you the passage I read? I was too excited to gather its meaning all at once, and then such a curious thing happened to me ! But I will say the lines to you, child, and 3'ou will under- stand better." Nance could only press his hand again, but her heart sank with an unaccountable forebodincp. " It was the Litany of the Rose," he said, and his voice floated out into the embalmed stillness with the same ominous treachery in its tone, so the poor girl fancied, as the ambiguous words he chanted. " Rose au regard saphique, plus pale que les lys, rose au regard saphique, off re-nous le parfum de ton illusoire tirginitc, feur hypocrite, fieur de silence." The strange invocation died away on the air, and a singular oppression, heavy as if with some undesired spiritual presence, weighed upon them both. Sorio did 18 RODMOOR not speak for some minutes, and when he did so there was an uneasy vibration in liis voice. " As soon as I had read those lines, there came over me one of the most curious experiences I have ever had. I seemed to see, yes, you may smile," — Nance was far from smiling — " but it is actually true — I seemed to see a living human figure outline itself against the wall of my room. To the end of my days I shall never forget it! It was a human form, Nance, but it was unlike all human forms I've ever beheld — unless it be one of those weird drawings, you know? of Aubrey Beardsley. It was neither the form of a boy nor of a girl, and yet it had the nature of both. It gazed at me with a fixed sorrowful stare, and I felt — was not that a strange experience — that I had known it be- fore, somewhere, far off, and long ago. It was the very embodiment of tragic supplication, and yet, in the look it fixed on me, there was a cold, merciless mockery. " It was the kind of form, Nance, that one can imag- ine wandering in vain helplessness down all the years of human history, seeking amid the dreams of all the great, perverse artists of the world for the incarnation it has been denied by the will of God." He paused again, and an imperceptible breath of hot balmy air stirred the young leaves of the beech branch above them. " Ah ! " he whispered, " I know what I thought of then. I thought of that ' Secret Rose Garden ' where the timid boy-girl thing — you know the picture I mean, Nance.'' — is led forth by some wanton lamp bearer between rose branches that are less soft than her defenceless sides." Once more he was silent and the hot wind, rising a THE 330ROUGH 10 little, uttered a perceptible murmur in the leaves above their heads. " But what was more startling to me, Nance," he went on, " even than the figure I saw (and it only stayed a moment before disappearing) was the fact tliat at the very second it vanished, I heard, spoken quite distinctly, in the room next to mine, the word ' Rodmoor.' " I threw down the * Book of Litanies ' and once more stood breathlessly listening. I caught the word again, uttered in a tone that struck mc as having some- thing curiously threatening about it. It was your Miss Doorm, Nance. No wonder she and I instinc- tively hated each other when we met. She must have known that I had heard this interesting conversation. Your sister's voice — and you must think about that, Nance, you must think about that — sounded like the voice of a little girl that has been punished — yes, pun- ished into frightened submissiveness. " Miss Doorm was evidently talking to her about this Rodmoor scheme. ' It's what I've waited for, for years and years,' I heard her say. ' Every Spring that came round I hoped he would die, and he didn't. It seemed that he wouldn't — just to spite me, just to keep me out of my own. But now he's gone — the old man — gone with all his wickedness upon him, and my place returns to me — my own place. It's mine, I tell you, mine! mine! mine!' It was extraordinary, Nance, the tone in which she said these things. Then she went on to speak of you. * I can free her now,' she said, ' I can free her at last. Aren't you glad I can free her? Aren't you glad? ' " I confess it made me at that moment almost indig- 20 RODMOOR nant with your sister that she should need such pressing on such a subject. Her voice, however, when she mur- mured some kind of an answer, appeared, as I have said, quite obsequious in its humility. " ' O my precious, my precious ! ' the woman cried again, evidently apostrophising you, ' you've worked for me, and saved for me, and now I can return it — I can return it 1 ' There was a few minutes' silence then, and I moved," Sorio continued, " quite close to the wall so as to catch if I could your sister's whispers. " Miss Doorm soon began once more and 1 liked her tone still less. ' Why don't you speak? Why do you sit silent and sulky like that? Aren't you glad she'll be free of all this burden — of all this miserable drudgery? Aren't you glad for her? She kept you here like a Duchess, you with your music lessons ! A lot of money you'll ever earn with your music ! And now it's my turn. She shall be a lady in my house, a lady!'" Nance's head hung low down over her knees as she listened to all this and the hand that her lover still retained grew colder and colder. " I remember her next words," Sorio went on, " par- ticularly well because a lovely fragrance of lilacs came suddenly into the window from a cart in the street and I thought how to my dying day I should associate that scent with this first morning under your roof. "'You say you don't like the sea?' Miss Doorm went on, ' and you actually suppose that your not lik- ing the sea will stop my freeing her ! No ! No ! You'll have the sea, my beauty, at Rodmoor — the sea and the wind. No more dilly-dallying among the pretty shop windows and the nice young music students. The THE BOROUGH 21 Wind and the Sea ! Those are the things that arc wait- ing for you at Kodinoor — at Rodmoor, in my house, where she will be a lady at last ! ' " You see, Nance," Adrian observed, letting her hand go and preparing to light a cigarette, " Miss Doorm's idea seems to be that you will receive quite a social lift from your move to her precious Rodmoor. She evi- dently holds the view that no lady has ever earned her living with her own hands. Does she propose to keep a horde of servants in this small house, I wonder, and stalk about among them, grim and majestic, in a black silk gown? " I must confess I feel at this moment a certain understanding of your sister's reluctance to plunge into this ' milieu.' I can see that house — oh, so clearly! — surrounded by a dark back-water and swept by horribly cold winds. I'm sure I don't know, Nance, what kind of neighbours 3'ou're going to have on the Doorm estate. Probably half the old hags of East Anglia will troop in upon you, like descendants of the Valkyries. And the North Sea ! You realise, my dear, I suppose, what the North Sea is ? I don't blame little Linda for shivering at the thought of it." 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 ! " 22 RODMOOU " There seems more chance, as I see it now," ob- served Sorio, *' that Miss Doorm will make Linda un- happy. I think I may take it that Linda's mother wasn't much of a favourite of hers? Isn't that so, m}^ 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 aro- matic 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 ab- surd 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 per- fectly 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 s «?emed to me outrageous that the selfish silliness of a chj'ld like that should interfere with your emancipation. Bcsio^^-"' I liked the thought of walking with her by the shore o/lJ^i^ sea and calming her curious fear." THE BOROUCxH 23 He threw away his cigarette and, fising to liis feet, drew the girl's arm within his own and led her home- wards. 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 con- strained 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." n 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. 0! I shall be perfectly happy ! " Nance extricated herself from the young girl's arms 24 DYKE HOUSE 25 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 w^as 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 move- ment and clasped her hands tightly together. Her eyes grew wide and her breast rose and fell. 26 RODMOOR "Listen!" Nance repeated. A low, deep-drawn murmur, reiterated, and again re- iterated, 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. Mak- ing 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 camiC 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 mo- ment 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 DYKE HOUSE 27 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 clearly 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 complete har- mony 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. 28 RODMOOR 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 proc- esses of their natural order, and the land left, a nue- tral, 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 cer- tain whether the village itself lay on the right or the left of the river mouth. JMiss 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 DYKE HOUSE 29 fcn-liind 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 Ad- rian, 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 30 RODMOOR 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 de- fined 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 strik- ing feature of his face, being extremely long and pointed like the nose of a rodent, and with large quivering nos- .trils 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 fore- head 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 Aveighty and thoughtful ; the forehead of a scholar or a philosopher. DYKE IIOT^SE 31 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 attrac- tion 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 im- petuous that though she gave a start she could not feel angry, picked up her discarded flowers and gravely pre- sented 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. 32 RODMOOR "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, smil- ing with exquisite sweetness. " You have been here be- fore," 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 reas- suring 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, sud- denly 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 pe- culiarly fascinating. When he reached the hedge he hovered momentarily in front of it and then pounced at something. " Missed ! " he cried in 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 DYKE HOUSE 33 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 ap- pearance, 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 dis- regarded 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 equa- nimity. " 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. " We must introduce ourselves," she said. " My 34 RODMOOR name is jNIiss Herrick. This is Mr. Adrian Sorio." She paused and waited. A long shrill cry followed by a most melancholy wail which gradually died away in the distance, came to them over the marshes. " A curlew," remarked the intruder. " Beautiful and curious — and with very interesting mating habits. They are rare, too." " Come along, Nance," Sorio burst out. But the girl turned to her new acquaintance and extended her hand. " You haven't told us your name yet," she said. " I hope we shall meet again." The stranger gave her a look which, for caressing softness, could only be compared to a virtuoso's finger laid upon an incomparable piece of Egyptian pottery. " Certainly we shall meet," he murmured. " Of course, most certainly. I know every one here. My name is Raughty — Doctor Fingal Raughty. I was with old Doorm when he died. A noble head, though rather malformed behind the ears. He had a peculiar smell too — not unpleasant — rather musky in fact. They called him Badger in the village. He could drink more gin at a sitting than any man I have ever seen. He resembled the portraits of Descartes. Good-bye, Miss — Nance ! " As soon as the lovers were alone Sorlo's rage broke forth. " What a man ! " he cried. " Who gave him leave to talk like that of Mr. Doorm .'' How did he know you weren't related to him? And what surpassing coolness to call you by your Christian name! Con- found him — he's gone the way we wanted to go. I believe he knew that. Look! He's fooling about in the ditch, waiting for us to overtake him ! " DYKE HOUSE 85 j> Nance could not help laughing a little at this " Not at all, my dear. He's looking for shrew-mice. " What? " rejoined the other crossly. *' On the pub- lic road? He's mad. Come, we must get round him somehow. Let's go through here and hit the tow path." They had no more interruptions as they strolled slowly back along the river's bank. Nance was per- plexed, however, by Adrian's temper. He seemed ir- ritable and brusque. She had never known him in such a mood, and a dim, obscure apprehension to which she could assign no adequate cause, began to invade her heart. They had both become so silent, and the girl's nerves had been so set on edge by his unusual attitude towards her, that she gave a quite perceptible start when he suddenly pointed across the stream to a clump of oak trees, the only ones, he told her, to be found in the neighbourhood. " There's something behind them," she remarked, " a house of some kind. I shouldn't like to live out in that place. How they must hear the wind ! It must howl and moan sometimes — mustn't it?" She smiled at him and shivered. " I think I miss London Bridge Road a little, and — Kensington Park. Don't you, too, Adrian?" " Yes, there's a house behind them," Sorio repeated, disregarding her last words and staring fixedly at the oak trees. " There's a house behind them." His manner was so queer that the girl looked at him with serious alarm. "What's the matter with you, Adrian?" she said. " I've never known you like this — " 36 RODMOOR " It's where the Renshaws live," her lover continued. " They have a kind of park. Its wall runs close to the village. Some of the trees are very old. I walked there this morning before breakfast. Baltazar advised me to." Nance looked at him still more nervously. Then she gave a little forced laugh. " That is why you were so late in coming to see me, I suppose! Well, you say the Renshaws live there. May one ask who the Ren- shaws are? '* He took the girl's arm in his own and dragged her forward at a rapid pace. She remarked that it was not until some wide-spreading willows on the further side of the river concealed the clump of oaks that he replied to her question. " Baltazar told me everything about them. He ought to know, for he's one of them himself. Yes, he's one of them. He's the son of old Herman, Brand's father; not legitimate, of course, and Brand isn't al- ways kind to him. But he's one of them." He stopped abruptly on this last word and Nance caught him throwing a furtive glance across the stream. "Who are they, Adrian? Who are they?" re- peated the girl. " I'll tell you," he cried, with strange irritation. "I'll tell you everything! When haven't I told you everything? They are brewers. That isn't very ro- mantic, is it? And I suppose you might call them landowners, too. They've lived here forever, it seems, and in the same house." He burst into an uneasy laugh. " In the same house for centuries and centuries ! The churchyard is full of them. It's only lately DYKE HOUSE 37 they've taken to be brewers — I suppose the land don't pay for their vices." And again he laughed in the same jarring and un- genial way. "Brand employs Baltazar — just as if he wasn't his brother at all — in the office at JMundham. You remember Mundham? We came through it in the train. It's over there," he waved his hand in front of him, " about seven miles off. It's a horrid place — all slums and canals. That's where they make their beer. Their beer ! " He laughed again. " You haven't yet told me who they are — I mean who else there is," observed Nance while, for some rea- son or other, her heart began to beat tumultuously. " Haven't I said I'd tell you everything? " Sorio flung out. " I'll tell you more than you bargain for, if you tease me. Oh, confound it! There's Rachel and Linda ! Look now, do they appear as if they were happy?" Favoured by the wind which blew seawards, the lovers had been permitted to approach quite close to their friends without any betrayal of their presence. Linda was seated on the river bank, her head in her hands, while Miss Doorm, like a black-robed priestess of some ancient ritual, leant against the trunk of a leafless pollard. " They were perfectly happy when I left them," whispered Nance, but she was conscious as she spoke of a cold, miserable misgiving in her inmost spirit. Like a flash her mind reverted to the lilac bushes of the London garden, and a sick loneliness seized her. " Linda ! " she cried, w ith a quiver of remorse in her voice. The young girl leapt hurriedly to her feet, and 38 RODMOOR Miss Doorm removed her hand from the tree. A quick look passed between the sisters, but Nance understood nothing of what Linda's expression conveyed. They moved on together, Adrian with Linda and Nance with Rachel. " What do they call this river? " Nance enquired of her companion, as soon as she felt reassured by the sound of the girl's laugh. " The Loon, my dear," replied Miss Doorm. " They call it the Loon. It runs through Mundham and then through the fens. It forms the harbour at Rodmoor." Nance sat silent. In the depths of her heart she made a resolution. She would find some work to do here in Rodmoor. It was intolerable to be dependent on any one. Yes, she would find work, and, if need be, take Linda to live with her. She felt now, though she would have found it hard to explain the obscure reason for it, more reluctant than ever to return to London. Every pulse of her body vibrated with a strange excitement. A reckless fighting spirit surged up within her. Not easily, not quickly, should her hold on the man she loved be loosed ! But she felt danger on the horizon — nearer than the horizon. She felt it in her bones. They had now reached the foot of Rachel's garden and there was a general pause in order that Adrian might do justice to the heavy architecture of Dyke House, as it was called — that house which the Bad- ger — to follow Doctor Raughty's tale — had taken into his " noble " but " malformed " head to leave to his solitary descendant. As they passed in one by one through the little dilap- DYKE HOUSE 39 idated gate, Nance had a sudden inspiration. She seized her lover by the wrist. " Adrian," she whis- pered, " has there been anything — any one — to re- mind you — of what — you saw — that morning.'' " She could not but believe that he had heard her and caught her meaning, yet it was hard to assume it, for his tone was calm and natural as he answered her, ap- parently quite misunderstanding her words : "The sea, j'ou mean.'' Yes, I've heard it all night and all day. We'll go down there this afternoon, and Linda with us." He raised his voice. " You'll come to the sea, Linda; eh, child.? To the Rodmoor sea.? " The words died away over the river and across the fens. The others had already entered the house, but a laughing white face at one of the windows and the tap- ping of girlish hands on the closed pane seemed to in- dicate acquiescence in what he suggested. Ill SEA-DRIFT THE wind had dropped but no gleam of sunshine interrupted the monotonous stretch of grey sky, grey dunes and grey sea, as the sisters with their two companions strolled slowly in the late afternoon along the Rodmoor sands. Linda was a little pale and silent, and Nance fancied she discerned now and again, in the glances Miss Doorm threw upon her, a certain sinister exultation, but she was prevented from watching either of them very closely by reason of the extraordinary excitement which the occasion seemed to arouse in Sorio. He kept shout- ing bits of poetry, some of which Nance caught the drift of, while others — they might have been Latin or Greek, for all she knew — conveyed nothing to her but a vague feeling of insecurity. He was like an excited magician uttering incantations and invoking strange gods. The sea was neither rough nor calm. Wisps of tossed-up foam appeared and disappeared at far dis- tant points in its vast expanse, and every now and then the sombre horizon was broken in its level line by the emergence of a wave larger and darker than the rest. Flocks of. gulls disturbed by their approach rose, wheeling and screaming, from their feeding-grounds on the stranded seaweed and flapped away over the water. The four friends advanced along the hard sand, close to the changing line of the tide's retreat, and from the 40 SEA-DRIFT 41 blackened windrow there, of broken shells and anony- mous sea refuse they stopped, each one of them, at dif- ferent moments, to pick up some particular object which attracted or surprised them. It was Nance who was the first to become aware that they were not the only frequenters of that solitude. She called Adrian's at- tention to two figures moving along the edge of the sand-dunes and apparently, from the speed with which they advanced, anxious to reach a protruding headland and disappear from observation. Adrian stopped and surveyed the figures long and in- tently. Then to her immense surprise, and it must be confessed a little to her consternation, he started off at a run in pursuit of them. His long, lean, hatless figure assumed so emphatic and strange an appearance as he crossed the intervening sands that Linda burst into peals of laughter. " I wish they'd run away from him," she cried. " We should see a race! Who are they? Does he know them?" Nance made no reply, but Miss Doorm, who had been watching the incident with sardonic interest, muttered under her breath, " It's begun, has it? Soon enough, in all conscience ! " Nance turned sharply upon her. " What do 30U mean, Rachel? Does Adrian know them? Do you know who they are? " No answer was vouchsafed to this, nor indeed was one necessary, for the mystery, whatever it was, was on the point of resolving itself. Adrian had overtaken the objects of his pursuit and was bringing them back with him, one on either hand. Nance was not long in mak- ing out the general characteristics of the strangers. 42 RODMOOR They were both women, one elderly, the other quite young, and from what she could see of their appearance and dress, they were clearly ladies. It was not, how- ever, till they came within speaking distance that the girl's heart began to beat an unmistakable danger- signal. This happened directly she obtained a definite view of the younger of Adrian's companions. Before any greeting could be given Rachel had whispered ab- ruptly into her ear, " They're the Renshaws — I haven't seen them since Philippa was a child, but they're the Renshaws. He must have met them this morning. Look out for yourself, dearie." Nance only vaguely heard her. Every fibre of at- tention in her body and soul was fixed upon that slender equivocal figure by Adrian's side. The introduction which followed was of a sufficiently curious character. Between Nance and the young woman designated by Rachel as Philippa there was an exchange of glances when their fingers touched like the crossing of two naked blades. Mrs. Renshaw retained Linda's hand in her own longer than convention re- quired, and Linda herself seemed to cling to the brown- eyed, grey-haired lady with a movement of childish con- fidence. Nance was calm enough, for all the beating of her heart, to remark as an interesting fact that her rival's mother, though oppressively timid and retiring in her manner towards them all, seemed to exercise a quelling and restraining influence upon Rachel Doorm, who began at once speaking to her with unusual defer- ence and respect. The whole party, after some desul- tory conversation, began to drift away from the sea towards the town and Nance found herself in spite of some furtive efforts to the contrary, wedged closely in SEA-DRIFT 43 between Mrs. Kensliaw and Rachel — with Linda walk- ing in front of them — as they followed the narrow un- even path between the sand-dunes and the heavy sand of the upper shore. Every now and then Mrs. Renshaw would bend down and call their attention to some little sea plant, telling them its name in slow sweet tones, as if repeating some liturgical formula, and indicating into what precise colour its pale glaucous buds would unsheathe as the weather grew warm. On these occasions Nance quickly turned her head ; but do what she could, she could only grow helplessly conscious that Adrian and his companion were slipping further and further behind. Once, as the tender-voiced lady touched lightly, with the tips of her ungloved fingers, a cluster of insignifi- cant leaves and asked Nance if she knew the lesser rock- rose the agitated girl found herself on the point of ut- tering a strangely irrelevant cry. " Rose au regard saphique,'^ her confused heart murmured, " plus pale que les lys, rose au regard saphique, off re-nous le parfum de ton illusoire virginite fleur hypocrite, flour de silence." They approached at last the entrance of the little harbour, and to Nance's ineffable relief Mrs. Renshaw paused and made them sit down on a fish-smelling bench, among coils of rope, and wait the appearance of the missing ones.