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Discovering Diverse Content Through
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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 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 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 tow-path,” 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.
“We must introduce ourselves,” she said. “My name is Miss
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 Sorio’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! Confound
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!”
 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 public 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 perplexed, however, by Adrian’s temper.
He seemed irritable 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—”
“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 Renshaws 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
always 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?” repeated 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 romantic, 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 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 ungenial way.
“Brand employs Baltazar—just as if he wasn’t his brother at all—in
the office at Mundham. 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 reason 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 sea-wards, 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, with a quiver of remorse in her voice. The
young girl leapt hurriedly to her feet, and 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
Badger—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 dilapidated gate,
Nance had a sudden inspiration. She seized her lover by the wrist.
“Adrian,” she whispered, “has there been anything—any one—to
remind 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, apparently quite misunderstanding her
words:
“The sea, you 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 tapping of girlish hands on the closed
pane seemed to indicate acquiescence in what he suggested.
 III
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 shouting 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 distant 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 blackened windrow
there, of broken shells and anonymous sea refuse they stopped,
each one of them, at different 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 attention 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 intently. 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 you 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
making out the general characteristics of the strangers. 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, however, 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 abruptly 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 attention 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 required,
and Linda herself seemed to cling to the brown-eyed, grey-haired
lady with a movement of childish confidence. 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 deference and respect. The whole
party, after some desultory 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 between Mrs.
Renshaw and Rachel—with Linda walking in front of them—as they
followed the narrow uneven 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 insignificant leaves and asked
Nance if she knew the lesser rock-rose the agitated girl found herself
on the point of uttering a strangely irrelevant cry.
“Rose au regard saphique,” her confused heart murmured, “plus
pâle que les lys, rose au regard saphique, offre-nous le parfum de
ton illusoire virginité, fleur hypocrite, fleur 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.
The tide was low and between great banks of mud the water
rushed sea-ward in a narrow, swirling current. A heavy fishing smack
with high tarred sides and red, unfurled sails, was being steered
down this channel by two men armed with enormous poles. Through
the masts of several other boats, moored to iron rings in the wooden
wharf, and between the slate roofs of some ramshackle houses on
the other side, they got a glimpse, looking westward across the fens,
of a low, rusty-red streak of sombrely illuminated sky. This
apparently was all the sunset Rodmoor was destined to know that
evening and Nance, as she listened vaguely to Mrs. Renshaw’s
gentle voice describing to Linda the various “queer characters”
among the harbour people, had a strange, bewildered sense of
being carried far and far and far down a remorseless tide, with a
heavy sky above her and interminable grey sands around her, and all
the while something withheld, withdrawn, inexplicable in the power
that bore her forward.
They came at last—Adrian and Philippa Renshaw, and Nance had,
in one heart-rending moment, the pitiless suspicion that the battle
was lost already and that this fragile thing with the great ambiguous
eyes and the reserved manner, this thing whose slender form and
tight-braided, dusky hair might have belonged to a masquerading
boy, had snatched from her already what could never for all the
years of her life be won again!
As they left the harbour and entered the main village street,
Adrian made one or two deliberate efforts to detach Nance from the
rest. He pointed out little things to her in the homely shop-windows
and seemed surprised and disappointed when she made no
response to his overtures. She could not make any response. She
could not bring herself so much as to look into his face. It was not
from any capricious pride or mere feminine pique that she thus
turned away but from a profound and lamentable numbness of every
emotion. The wound seemed to have gone further even than she
herself had known. Her heart felt like a dead cold weight—like a
murdered, unborn child—beneath her breast, and out of her lethargy
and inertness, as in certain tragic dreams, she could not move. Her
limbs seemed formed of lead, and her lips—at least as far as he was
concerned—became those of a dumb animal.
A man, viewing the situation from outside, the slightness and
apparent triviality of the incident, would have been astounded at the
effect upon her of so insubstantial a blow, but women move in a
different world, a world where the drifting of the tiniest straw is
indicative of crushing catastrophes, and to the instinct of the least
sensitive among women Nance’s premonitions would have been
quite explicable.
It was at that moment that it was sharply borne in upon her how
slight her actual knowledge of her lover was. Her absorption in him
was devoted and complete but in regard to the intricacies and
complications of his character she was as much in the dark to-day as
when they first met in London Bridge Road.
Strangely enough, in the paralysis of her feelings, Nance was
unconscious of any definite antagonism to the cause of her distress.
She found she could talk quite naturally and spontaneously to Miss
Renshaw when chance threw them together as they emerged upon
the village green.
“Oh, I like those trees!” she cried, as the row of ancient sycamores
which gave the forlorn little square its chief appeal first struck her
attention.
The cottage of Baltazar Stork, it turned out, was just behind these
sycamores and next door to the building which, with its immense
and faded sign-board, offered the natives of Rodmoor their unique
dissipation. “The Admiral’s Head!” Nance repeated, surveying the
sign and thinking to herself that it must have been under that
somewhat sordid roof that Miss Doorm’s parent had drunk himself to
death.
“Don’t look at it,” she heard Mrs. Renshaw say. “I feel ashamed
every time I pass it.”
Philippa gave Nance a quick and rather bitter smile.
“Mother is telling them that it is our beer which they sell there.
You know we are brewers, don’t you? Mother thinks it her duty to
remind every one of that fact. She gets a curious pleasure out of
talking about it. It’s her morbid conscience. You’ll find we’re all
rather morbid here,” she added, looking searchingly into Nance’s
face.
“It’s the sea. Our sea is not the same as other seas. It eats into
us.”
“Why do you say just that—and in that tone—to me?” Nance
gravely enquired, answering the other’s gaze. “My father was a
sailor. I love the salt-water.”
Philippa Renshaw shrugged her shoulders. “You may love being on
it. That’s a different thing. It remains to be seen how you like being
near it.”
“I like it always, everywhere,” repeated Nance obstinately, “and
I’m afraid of nothing it can do to me!”
They overtook the others at this point and Mrs. Renshaw turned
rather querulously to her daughter.
“Don’t talk to her about the sea, Philippa—I know that’s what
you’re doing.”
The girl with the figure of a boy let her eyes meet Adrian’s and
Nance felt the dead weight in her heart grow more ice-cold than
before, as she watched the effect of that look upon her lover.
It was Rachel who broke the tension. “It wasn’t so very long ago,”
she said, “that Rodmoor was quite an inland place. There are houses
now, they say, and churches under the water. And it swallows up the
land all the time, inch by inch. The sand-dunes are much nearer the
town, I am sure of that, and the mouth of the river, too, than when I
lived here in old days.”
Mrs. Renshaw looked by no means pleased at this speech.
“Well,” she said, “we must be getting home for dinner. Shall we
walk through the park, Philippa? It’s the nicest way—if the grass isn’t
too wet.”
In the general chorus of adieus that followed, Nance was not
surprised when Sorio bade good-night to her as well as to the
others. He professed to be going to the station to meet the
Mundham train.
“Baltazar will have a lot of things to carry,” he said, “and I must be
at hand to help.”
Mrs. Renshaw pressed Linda’s hand very tenderly as they parted
and a cynical observer might have been pardoned for suspecting
that under the suppressed sigh with which she took Philippa’s arm
there lurked a wish that it had been the more docile and less difficult
child that fate had given her for a daughter.
Linda, at any rate, proved to be full of enthusiastic and excited
praise for the sad-voiced lady, as the sisters went off with Rachel.
She chattered, indeed, so incessantly about her that Nance, whose
nerves were in no tolerant state, broke out at last into a quite
savage protest.
“She’s the sort of person,” she threw in, “who’s always sentimental
about young girls. Wait till you find her with some one younger than
you are, and you’ll soon see! Am I not right, Rachel?”
“She’s not right at all, is she?” interposed the other. Miss Doorm
looked at them gravely.
“I don’t think either of you understand Mrs. Renshaw. Indeed
there aren’t many who do. She’s had troubles such as you may both
pray to God you’ll never know. That wisp of a girl will be the cause
of others before long.”
 She glanced at Nance significantly.
“Hold tight to your Adrian, my love. Hold tight to him, my dearie!”
Thus, as they emerged upon the tow path spoke Rachel Doorm.
Meanwhile, from his watch above the Inn, the nameless Admiral
saw the shadows of night settle down upon his sycamores. His faded
countenance, with its defiant bravado, stared insolently at what he
could catch between trees and houses, of the darkening harbour and
if Rodmoor had been a ship instead of a village, and he a figurehead
instead of a sign-board, he could not have confronted the unknown
and all that the unknown might bring more indifferently, more
casually, more contemptuously.
 IV
OAKGUARD

The night of her first meeting with Adrian Sorio, found the
daughter of the house of Renshaw restless and wakeful. She listened
to the hall clock striking the hour of twelve with an intentness that
would have suggested to any one observing her that she had only
been waiting for that precise moment to plunge into some nocturnal
enterprise fraught with both sweetness and peril.
The night was chilly, the sky starless and overcast. The heavy
curtains were drawn but the window, wide-open behind them, let in
a breath of rain-scented air which stirred the flames of the two silver
candles on the dressing table and fluttered the thin skirt of the girl’s
night-dress as she sat, tense and expectant, over the red coals of a
dying fire.
A tall gilt-framed mirror of antique design stood on the left of the
fireplace.
As the last stroke of midnight sounded, the girl leapt to her feet
and swiftly divesting herself of her only garment, stood straight and
erect, her hands clasped behind her head, before this mirror. The
firelight cast a red glow over her long bare limbs and the flickering
candle flames threw wavering shadows across her lifted arms and
slender neck. Her hair remained tightly braided round her head and
this, added to the boyish outlines of her body, gave her the
appearance of one of those androgynous forms of later Greek art
whose ambiguous loveliness wins us still, even in the cold marble,
with so touching an appeal. Her smooth forehead and small
delicately moulded face showed phantom-like in the mirror. Her
scarlet lips quivered as she gazed at herself, quivered into that
enigmatic smile challenging and inscrutable which seems, more than
any other human expression, to have haunted the imagination of
certain great artists of the past.
Permitted for a brief moment to catch a glimpse of that white
figure, an intruder, if possessed of the smallest degree of poetic
fancy, would have been tempted to dream that the dust of the
centuries had indeed been quickened and some delicate evocation of
perverse pagan desire restored to breath and consciousness.
Such a dream would not, perhaps, have survived a glance at the
girl’s face. With distended pupils and irises so large that they might
have been under the influence of some exciting drug, her eyes had
that particular look, sorrowful and heavy with mystery, which one
feels could not have been in the world before the death of Christ.
With her epicene figure, she resembled some girl-priestess of
Artemis invoking a mocking image of her own defiant sexlessness.
With her sorrowful inhuman eyes she suggested some strange elf-
creature, born of mediæval magic.
Turning away from the mirror, Philippa Renshaw blew out the
candles and flung open the curtains. Standing thus for a moment in
the presence of the vague starless night full of chilly earth odours,
she drew several long deep breaths and seemed to inhale the very
essence of the darkness as if it had been the kiss of some elemental
lover. Then she shivered a little, closed the window and began
hurriedly to dress herself by the firelight. Bare-headed, but with a
dark cloak reaching to her feet, she softly left her room and crept
silently down the staircase. One by one she drew the heavy bolts of
the hall door and turned the ponderous key.
Letting herself out into the night air with the movements of one
not unaccustomed to such escapades, she hurried down the stone
pathway, passed through the iron entrance gates, and emerged into
the park. Catching up the skirt of her cloak, and drawing it tightly
round her so that it should not impede her steps, she plunged into
the wet grass and directed her course towards the thickest group of
oak trees. Between the immense trunks and mossy roots of these
sea-deformed and wind-stunted children of the centuries she groped
her way, her feet stumbling over fallen branches and her face
whipped by the young wet leaves.
A mad desire seemed to possess her, to throw off every vestige
and token of her human imprisonment and to pass forth free and
unfettered into the embrace of the primeval powers. One would
have thought, to have watched her as she flung herself, at last, on
her face under one of the oldest of the trees and liberating her arms
from her cloak, stretched them round its trunk, that she was some
worshipper of a banished divinity invoking her god while her
persecutors slept, and passionately calling upon him to return to his
forsaken shrine. Releasing her fierce clasp upon the rough bark of
the tree, not however before it had bruised her flesh, the girl dug
her nails into the soft damp leaf-mould and rubbed her forehead
against the wet moss. She shuddered as she lay like this, and as she
shuddered she clutched yet more tightly, as if in a kind of ecstasy,
the roots of grass and the rubble of earth into which her fingers dug.
Meanwhile, within the house, another little drama unrolled itself.
In the old-fashioned library collected by many generations of
Renshaws, where the noble Rabelaisian taste of the eighteenth
century jostled unceremoniously with the attenuated banalities of a
later epoch, there sat, at the very moment when the girl descended
the stairs, a tall powerfully built man in evening dress.
Brand Renshaw was a figure of striking and formidable
appearance. Immensely muscular and very tall, he carried upon his
massive shoulders a head of so strange a shape that had he been a
mediæval chieftain he would doubtless have gone down to posterity
as Brand Hatchet-pate, or Brand Hammer-skull. His head receded
from a forehead narrow and high, and rose at the back into a dome-
like protrusion which, in spite of the closely-clipt, reddish hair that
covered it, suggested, in a manner that was almost sinister, the
actual bony substructure of the cranium beneath.
The fire was out. The candles on the table were guttering and
flickering with little spitting noises as their wicks sank and the cold
hearth in front of him was littered with the ashes of innumerable
cigarettes. He was neither reading nor smoking them. He sat with
his hands on the arms of his chair, staring into vacancy.
Brand Renshaw’s eyes were like the eyes of a morose animal, an
animal endowed perhaps with intellectual powers denied to the
human race, but still an animal, and when he fixed his gaze in his
concentrated manner upon the unknown objects of his thought there
was a weight of heavily focussed intensity in his stare that was
unpleasantly threatening.
He was staring in this way at the empty grate when, in the dead
silence of the house, he caught the sound of a furtive step in the hall
without, and immediately afterwards the slight rasping noise of bolts
carefully shot back.
In a flash he leapt to his feet and extinguished the guttering
candles. Quietly and on tip-toe he moved to the door and
soundlessly turning the handle peered into the hall. He was just in
time to see the heavy front door closed. Without the least token of
haste or surprise he slipped on an overcoat, took his hat and stick
and went forth in pursuit of the escaped one.
At first he saw only the darkness and heard no sound but the
angry flutterings of some bird in the high trees, and—a long way off,
perhaps even beyond the park—the frightened squeal of a hunted
rabbit. But by the time he got to the gate, taking care to walk on the
flower-beds rather than on the stone pathway, he could make out
the figure of the girl no great way in front of him. She ran on, so
straight and so blindly, towards the oak trees that he was able
without difficulty to follow her even though, every now and then, her
retreating figure was absorbed and swallowed up by the darkness.
When at last he came up to her side as she lay stretched out at
the foot of the tree, he made no immediate attempt to betray his
presence. With his arms folded he stood regarding her, a figure as
silent and inhuman as herself, and over them both the vague
immensities and shadowy obscurities of the huge earth-scented
night hung lowering and tremendous, like powers that held their
breath, waiting, watching.
At intervals an attenuated gust of wind, coming from far away
across the marshes, moved the dead leaves upon the ground and
made them dance a little death dance. This it did without even
stirring the young living shoots on the boughs above them.
The darkness seemed to rise and fall about the two figures, to
advance, to recede, to dilate, to diminish, in waves of alternate
opacity and tenuity. In its indrawings and outbreathings, in the ebb
and flow of its fluctuating presence, it seemed to beat—at least that
is how Brand Renshaw felt it—like the pulse of an immense heart
charged with unutterable mysteries.
This illusion, if it were an illusion, may have been due to nothing
more recondite than the fact that, in the silence of the heavy night,
the sound of the tide on the Rodmoor sands was the background of
everything.
It was not till the girl rose from the ground that she saw him
standing there, a shadow among the shadows. She uttered a low cry
and made a movement as if to rush away, but he stepped quickly
forward and caught her in his arms. Tightly and almost savagely he
held her, pressing her lithe body against his own and caressing it
with little, deep-voiced mutterings as if he were soothing a
desperate child. She submitted passively to his endearments and
then, with a sound that was something between a moan and a
laugh, she whispered brokenly into his ear, “Let me go, Brand, I was
silly to come out. I couldn’t help it. I won’t do it again. I won’t, I
swear.”
“No, I think you won’t!” the man muttered, keeping his arm
securely round her waist and striding swiftly towards the house. “No,
I think you won’t!”
He paused when they reached the entrance into the garden and,
taking her by the wrists, pressed her fiercely against one of the
stone pillars upon which the gate hung.
 “I know what it is,” he whispered. “You can’t deceive me. You’ve
been with those people from London. You’ve been with that friend of
Baltazar’s. That’s the cause of all this, isn’t it? You’ve been with that
damned fool—that idiotic, good-for-nothing down at the village.
Haven’t you been with him? Haven’t you?”
The arms with which he pressed her hands against her breast
trembled with anger as he said these words.
“Baltazar told me,” he went on, “only this morning—down at
Mundham—everything about these people. They’re of no interest,
none, not the least. They’re just like every one else. That fellow’s
half-foreign, that’s all. An American half-breed, of some mongrel sort
or other, that’s all there is to be said of him! So if you’ve been letting
any mad fancies get into your head about Mr. Sorio, the sooner you
get rid of them the better. He’s not for you. Do you hear? He’s—not
—for—you!” These last words were accompanied by so savage a
tightening of the hands that held her that the girl was compelled to
bite her lip to stop herself from crying.
“You hurt me,” she said calmly. “Let me go, Brand.” The self-
contained tone of her voice seemed to quiet him and he released
her. She raised one of her wrists to her mouth and softly caressed it
with her lips.
“You’ll be interested, yourself, in these people before very long,”
she murmured, flashing a mocking look at him over her bare arm.
“The second girl is very young and very pretty. She confided in me
that she was extremely afraid of the sea. She appealed to mother’s
protective instincts at once. I’ve no doubt she’ll appeal to your—
protective instincts! So don’t be too quick in your condemnation.”
“Damn you!” muttered her brother, pushing the gate open. “Come!
Get in with you! You talk to me as if I were a professional rake. I
take no interest—not the slightest—in your young innocents with
their engaging terrors. To bed! To bed! To bed!”
He pushed her before him along the path, but Philippa knew well
that the hand on her shoulder was lighter and less angry than the
one that had held her a moment ago, and as she ascended the steps
of Oakguard—the name borne by the Renshaw house since the days
of the Conqueror—there flickered over her shadowy face the same
equivocal smile of dubious meaning that had looked out at its owner,
not so long since, from the mirror in her room.
When the dawn finally crept up, pallid and cold out of the North
Sea and lifted, with a sort of mechanical weariness, the weight of
the shadows, it was neither Brand nor Philippa who was awake.
Roused, as always, by the slightest approach of an unusual sound,
the mother of that strange pair had lain in her bed listening ever
since her daughter’s first emerging from the house.
Once she had risen, and had stood for a moment at the window,
her loose grey hair mixed with the folds of an old, faded, dusky-
coloured shawl. That, however, was when both of her children were
away in the middle of the park and absolute silence prevailed. With
this single exception she had remained listening, always silently
listening, lying on her back and with an expression of tragic and
harassed expectation in her great, hollow, brown eyes. She might
have been taken, lying there alone in the big four-posted bed,
surrounded by an immense litter of stored-up curios and
mementoes, for a symbolic image of all that is condemned, as this
mortal world goes round, to watch and wait and invoke the gods and
cling fast to such pathetic relics and memorials as time consents to
leave of the days that it has annihilated.
Slowly the dawn came up upon the trees and roofs of Oakguard.
With a wan grey light it filled the pallid squares of the windows. With
a livid grey light it made definite and ghastly every hollow and every
wrinkle in that patient watcher’s face.
Travelling far up in the sky, a long line of marsh-fowl with
outstretched necks sought the remoter solitudes of the fens. In the
river marshes the sedge-birds uttered their harsh twitterings while,
gathered in flocks above the sand-dunes, the sea-gulls screamed to
the inflowing tide their hunger for its drifted refuse.
 Wearily, at last, Helen Renshaw closed her eyes and it was the
first streak of sunshine that Rodmoor had known for many days
which, several hours later, kissed her white forehead—and the grey
hairs that lay disordered across it—softly, gently, tenderly, as it might
have kissed the forehead of the dead.
 V
A SYMPOSIUM

Adrian Sorio sat opposite his friend over a warm brightly burning
fire.
Baltazar Stork was a slight frail man of so delicate and dainty an
appearance that many people were betrayed into behaving towards
him as gently and considerately as if he had been a girl. This,
though a compliment to his fragility, was bad policy in those who
practised it, for Baltazar was an egoist of inflexible temper and under
his velvet glove carried a hand of steel.
The room in which the two friends conversed was furnished in
exquisite and characteristic taste. Old prints, few in number and rare
in quality, adorned its walls. Precious pieces of china, invaluable
statuettes in pottery and metal, stood charmingly arranged, with due
space round each, in every corner. On either side of the mantelpiece
was a Meissen-ware figure of engaging aspect and Watteau-like
design, while in the centre, in the place where a clock is usually to
be found, was a piece of statuary of ravishing delicacy and grace
representing the escape of Syrinx from the hands of Pan.
The most remarkable picture in the room, attracting the attention
at once of all who entered, was a dark, richly coloured, oval-shaped
portrait—a portrait of a young man in a Venetian cloak, with a broad,
smooth forehead, heavy-lidded penetrating eyes, and pouting
disdainful mouth. This picture, said to have been painted under the
influence of Giorgione by that incomparable artist’s best loved friend,
passed for a portrait of Eugenio Flambard, the favourite secretary of
the Republic’s most famous ambassador during his residence at the
Papal Court.
 The majority of these treasures had been picked up by Baltazar
during certain prolonged holidays in various parts of the Continent.
This, however, was several years ago before the collapse of the
investment, or whatever it was, which he inherited from Herman
Renshaw.
Since that time he had been more or less dependent upon Brand,
a dependence which nothing but his happy relations with Brand’s
mother and sister and his unfailing urbanity could have made
tolerable.
“Adrian, you old villain, why didn’t you tell me you’d seen Philippa.
Brand informed me yesterday that you’ve seen her twice. This isn’t
the kind of thing that pleases me at all. I don’t approve of these
clandestine meetings. Do you hear me, you old reprobate? You don’t
think it’s very nice, do you, for me to learn by accident—by a sort of
wretched accident—of an event like this? If you must be at these
little games you might at least be open about them. Besides, I have
a brotherly interest in Philippa. I don’t want to have her innocence
corrupted by an old satyr like you.”
Sorio contented himself by murmuring the word “Rats.”
“It’s all very well for you to cry ‘Rats!’ in that tone,” went on the
other. “The truth is, this affair is going to become serious. You don’t
suppose for a moment, do you, that your Nance is going to lie down,
as they say, and let my extraordinary sister walk over her?”
Adrian got up from his seat and began pacing up and down the
little room.
“It’s absurd,” he muttered, “it’s all absurd. I feel as if the whole
thing were a kind of devilish dream. Yes, the whole thing! It’s all
because I’ve got nothing to do but walk up and down these damned
sands!”
Baltazar watched him with a serene smile, his soft chin supported
by his feminine fingers and his fair, curly head tilted a little on one
side.
 “But you know, mon enfant,” he threw in with a teasing caress in
his voice, “you know very well you’re the last person to talk of work.
It was work that did for you in America. You don’t want to start that
over again, do you?”
Adrian stood still and glared at him.
“Do you think I’m going to let that—as you call it—finish me
forever? My life’s only begun. In London it was different. By God! I
wish I’d stayed in London! Nance feels just the same. I know she
does. She’ll have to get something, too, or we shall both go mad.
It’s this cursed sea of yours! I’ve a good mind to marry her, out of
hand, and clear off. We’d find something—somewhere—anywhere—
to keep body and soul together.”
“Why did you come to us at all, my dear, if you find us so
dreadful?” laughed Baltazar, bending down to tie his shoe-string and
pull up more tightly one of his silk socks.
Adrian made no answer but continued his ferocious pacing of the
room.
“You’ll knock something over if you’re not careful,” protested his
friend, shrugging his shoulders. “You’re the most troublesome fellow.
You accept a person’s offer and make no end of a fuss over it, and
then a couple of weeks later you roar like a bull and send us all to
the devil. What’s the matter with us? What’s the matter with the
place? Why can’t you and your precious Nance behave like ordinary
people and make love to one another and be happy? She’s got all
her time to herself and you’ve got all your time to yourself. Why
can’t you enjoy yourselves and collect seaweed or starfish or
something?”
Adrian paused in his savage prowl for the second time.
“It’s your confounded sea that’s at the bottom of it,” he shouted.
“It gets on her nerves and it gets on mine. Little Linda was perfectly
right to be scared of it.”
 “I fancied,” drawled the other, selecting a cigarette from an
enamelled box and turning up the lamp, “you found little Linda’s
fears rather engaging than otherwise.”
“It works upon us,” Sorio went on, heedless of the interruption, “it
works upon us in some damnable kind of way! Nance says she hears
it in her sleep. I’m sure I do. I hear it without a moment’s cessation.
Listen to the thing now—shish, shish, shish, shish! Why can’t it make
some other noise? Why can’t it stop altogether? It makes me long
for the whole damned farce to end. It annoys me, Tassar, it annoys
me!”
“Sorry you find the elements so trying, Adriano,” replied the other
languidly, “but I really don’t know what I can do to help you—I can
only advise you to keep out of Philippa’s way. She’s an element more
troublesome than any of them.”
“Tassar!” shouted the enraged man in a burst of fury, “if you don’t
stop dragging Philippa in, I’ll murder you! What’s Philippa to me? I
hate her—do you hear? I hate the very sound of her name!”
“Her name?” murmured Stork, meditatively, “her name? Oh, I
think you’re quite wrong to hate that. Her name suggests all sorts of
interesting things. Her name has quite a historic sound. It’s
mediæval in colour and Greek in form. It makes me think of
Euripides.”
“This whole damned Rodmoor of yours,” moaned Adrian, “gets too
much for me. Where on earth else, could a man find it so hard to
collect his thoughts and look at things as they are? There’s
something here which works upon the mind, Tassar, something
which works upon the mind.”
“What’s working on your mind, my friend,” laughed Baltazar Stork,
“is not anything so vague as dreams or anything so simple as the
sea. It’s just the quite definite but somewhat complicated business
of managing two love affairs at the same time! I’m sorry for you,
little Adrian, I’m extremely sorry for you. It’s a situation not
unknown in the history of the world, in fact, it might be called quite
common. But I’m afraid that doesn’t make it any pleasanter for you.
However, it can be dealt with, with a little skill, Adrian, with just a
little skill!”
The man accused in this teasing manner turned furiously round,
an angry outburst of blind protest trembling on his tongue. At that
moment there was a low knock at the outer door. Baltazar jumped to
his feet. “That must be Raughty,” he cried. “I begged him to come
round to-night. I so longed for you to meet him.” He hastened out
and admitted the visitor with a cordial welcome. After a momentary
pause and a good deal of shuffling—for Dr. Raughty was careful to
wear not only an overcoat but also goloshes and even gaiters when
the weather was inclement—the two men entered the room and
Stork began an elaborate introduction.
“Dr. Fingal Raughty,” he said, “Mr. Adrian—” but to his
astonishment Sorio intervened, “The Doctor and I have already
become quite well acquainted,” he remarked, shaking the visitor
vigorously by the hand. “I’m afraid I wasn’t as polite as I ought to
have been on that occasion,” he went on, speaking in an unnaturally
loud voice and with a forced laugh, “but the Doctor will forgive me.
The Doctor I’m sure will make allowances.”
Dr. Raughty gave him a quick glance, at once friendly and ironical,
and then he turned to Stork. “Mother Lorman’s dead,” he remarked
with a little sigh, “dead at last. She was ninety-seven and had thirty
grandchildren. She gurgled in her throat at the last with a noise like
a nightingale when its voice breaks in June. I prefer deaths of this
kind to any other, but they’re all pitiful.”
“Nance tells me you were present at old Doorm’s death, Doctor,”
said Adrian while their host moved off to the kitchen to secure
glasses and refreshment.
The Doctor nodded. “I measured that fellow’s skull,” he remarked
gravely. “It was asymmetrical and very curiously so. The interesting
thing is that there exists in this part of the coast a definite tradition
of malformed skulls. They recur in nearly all the old families. Brand
Renshaw is a splendid example. His skull ought to be given to a
museum. It is beautiful, quite beautiful, in the anterior lobes.”
Baltazar returned carrying a tray. The eyes of Dr. Raughty gleamed
with a mellow warmth. “Nutmeg,” he remarked, approaching the
tray and touching every object upon it lightly and reverently.
“Nutmeg, lemon, hot water, gin—and brandy! It’s an admirable
choice and profoundly adapted to the occasion. May I put the hot
water on the hob until we’re ready for it?”
While Baltazar once more withdrew from the scene, Dr. Raughty
remarked, gravely and irritably, to Sorio that it was a mistake to
substitute brandy for rum. “He does it because he can’t get the best
rum, but it’s a ridiculous thing to do. Any rum is better than no rum
when it’s a question of punch-making. Are you with me in this, Mr.
Sorio?”
Adrian expressed such complete and emphatic agreement that for
the moment the Doctor seemed almost embarrassed.
On Baltazar’s return to the room, however, he hazarded another
suggestion. “What about having the kettle itself brought in here?”
Stork looked at him without speaking and placed on the table a
small plate of macaroons. The Doctor glanced whimsically at Sorio
and, helping himself from the little plate, muttered in a low voice
after he had nibbled the edge of a biscuit, “Yes, these seem perfectly
up to par to-day.”
The three men had scarcely settled themselves down in their
respective chairs around the fire than Adrian began speaking
hurriedly and nervously.
“I have an extraordinary feeling,” he said, “that this evening is full
of fatal significance. I suppose it’s nothing to either of you, but it
seems to me as though this damned shish, shish, shish, shish of the
sea were nearer and louder than usual. Doctor, you don’t mind my
talking freely to you? I like you, though I was rude to you the other
day—but that’s nothing—” he waved his hand, “that’s what any fool
might fall into who didn’t know you. I feel I know you now. That
word about the rum—forgive me, Tassar!—and the kettle—yes,
particularly about the kettle—hit me to the heart. I love you, Doctor
Raughty. I announce to you that my feeling at this moment amounts
to love—yes, actually to love!
“But that’s not what I wanted to say.” He thrust his hands deep
into his pockets, stretched his legs straight out, let his chin sink upon
his chest and glared at them with sombre excitement. “I feel to-
night,” he went on, “as though some great event were portending.
No, no! What am I saying? Not an event. Event isn’t the word.
Event’s a silly expression, isn’t it, Doctor,—isn’t it—dear, noble-
looking man? For you do look noble, you know, Doctor, as you drink
that punch—though to say the truth your nose isn’t quite straight as
I see it from here, and there are funny blotches on your face. No,
not there. There! Don’t you see them, Tassar? Blotches—curious
purply blotches.”
While this outburst proceeded Mr. Stork fidgeted uneasily in his
chair. Though sufficiently accustomed to Sorio’s eccentricities and
well aware of his medical friend’s profound pathological interest in all
rare types, there was something so outrageous about this particular
tirade that it offended what was a very dominant instinct in him, his
sense, namely, of social decency and good breeding. Possibly in a
measure because of the “bar sinister” over his own origin, but much
more because of the nicety of his æsthetic taste, anything
approaching a social fiasco or faux pas always annoyed him
excessively. Fortunately, however, on this occasion nothing could
have surpassed the sweetness with which Adrian’s wild phrases were
received by the person addressed.
“One would think you’d drunk half the punch already, Sorio,”
Baltazar murmured at last. “What’s come over you to-night? I don’t
think I’ve ever known you quite like this.”
“Remind me to tell you something, Mr. Sorio, when you’ve finished
what you have to say,” remarked Dr. Raughty.
 “Listen, you two!” Adrian began again, sitting erect, his hands on
the arms of his chair. “There’s a reason for this feeling of mine that
there’s something fatal on the wind to-night. There’s a reason for it.”
“Tell us as near as you can,” said Dr. Raughty, “what exactly it is
that you’re talking about.”
Adrian fixed upon him a gloomy, puzzled frown.
“Do you suppose,” he said slowly, “that it’s for nothing that we
three are together here in hearing of that—”
Baltazar interrupted him. “Don’t say ‘shish, shish, shish’ again, my
dear. Your particular way of imitating the Great Deep gives me no
pleasure.”
“What I meant was,” Sorio raised his voice, “it’s a strange thing
that we three should be sitting together now like this when two
months ago I was in prison in New York.”
Baltazar made a little deprecatory gesture, while the Doctor
leaned forward with grave interest.
“But that’s nothing,” Sorio went on, “that’s a trifle. Baltazar knows
all about that. The thing I want you two to recognise is that
something’s on the wind,—that something’s on the point of
happening. Do you feel like that—or don’t you?”
There was a long and rather oppressive silence, broken only by
the continuous murmur which in every house in Rodmoor was the
background of all conversation.
“What I was going to say a moment ago,” remarked the Doctor at
last, “was that in this place it’s necessary to protect oneself from
that.” He jerked his thumb towards the window. “Our friend Tassar
does it by the help of Flambard over there.” He indicated the
Venetian. “I do it by the help of my medicine-chest. Hamish
Traherne does it by saying his prayers. What I should like to know is
how you,” he stretched a warning finger in the direction of Sorio,
“propose to do it.”
 Baltazar at this point jumped up from his seat.
“Oh, shut up, Fingal,” he cried peevishly. “You’ll make Adrian
unendurable. I’m perfectly sick of hearing references to this absurd
salt-water. Other people have to live in coast towns besides
ourselves. Why can’t you let the thing take its proper position? Why
can’t you take it for granted? The whole subject gets on my nerves.
It bores me, I tell you, it bores me to tears. For Heaven’s sake, let’s
talk of something else—of any damned thing. You both make me
thoroughly wretched with your sea whispers. It’s as bad as having to
spend an evening at Oakguard alone with Aunt Helen and Philippa.”
His peevishness had an instantaneous effect upon Sorio who
pushed him affectionately back into his chair and handed him his
glass. “So sorry, Tassar,” he said. “I won’t do it again. I was
beginning to feel a little odd to-night. One can’t go through the
experience of cerebral dementia—doesn’t that sound right, Doctor?
—without some little trifling after-effects. Come, let’s be sensible and
talk of things that are really important. It’s not an occasion to be
missed, is it, Tassar, having the Doctor here and punch made with
brandy instead of rum, on the table? What interests me so much just
now,” he placed himself in front of the fireplace and sighed heavily,
“is what a person’s to do who hasn’t got a penny and is unfit for
every sort of occupation. What do you advise, Doctor? And by the
way, why have you eaten up all the macaroons while I was talking?”
This remark really did seem a little to embarrass the person
indicated, but Sorio continued without waiting for a reply.
“Yes, I suppose you’re right, Tassar. It’s a mistake to be sensitive
to the attraction of young girls. But it’s difficult—isn’t it, Doctor?—not
to be. They’re so maddeningly delicious, aren’t they, when you come
to think of it? It’s something about the way their heads turn—the
line from the throat, you know—and about the way they speak—
something pathetic, something—what shall I call it?—helpless. It
quite disarms a person. It’s more than pathetic, it’s tragic.”
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