It was not until her moods, her fits of crying, her childish obstinacies, her cravings for romance, had thoroughly wearied him and got on his nerves that he began to treat her with a studied callousness, hardening his heart against her, in an unphilosophic anger with her, for having ever crossed the threshold of his monastic cell.
It was a shock to the girl from which only her encounter with Rook saved her, when she first realized how little of natural warmth there was in the awkward tenderness which was Hastings’s nearest approach to human passion; but even this new feeling, so satisfying to her suppressed craving for romance, did not obliterate the disastrous effect of that first revelation of what the sex instinct can sink into, in a personality dominated by the tyranny of thought.
It did make her cling, however, with a desperate and pathetic tenacity, to whatever romantic elements there were — and there were not many — in Rook’s response to her infatuation. It was doubtless the fact that what the girl had so far never encountered, either in Hastings or in Rook, was just warm natural human amorousness that led to the contentment and complaisance with which she had received the shameless advances of the invalid Lexie. Lexie, with whom she had no responsible link of any kind, seemed the only one whose erotic proclivities left behind them no poison, no sting, no regret.
The ill-timed embrace between these two remote and alien human beings was interrupted by the sound of the door bell. They pulled themselves together at once, the girl smiling, the man grave, and after opening the door and listening for a moment to the colloquy below, they went downstairs side by
It was a wonder to watch Nell’s little villager in cap and apron assume the airs of an experienced servant as she informed Cousin Ann and Netta that “Mrs. Hastings be expecting their ladyships; and please would they take off their cloaks and go straight into parlour.”
Nell’s dinner party, when it was once under way, proved successful beyond her utmost expectation. The thought that when it was over she was going to Lexie’s to meet Rook gave animation and freedom to her chatter and something almost approaching loveliness to her thin face.
William Hastings, too, was in excellent spirits, and all went smoothly till the time came for the sweets and nuts.
Perhaps it was a glass of the Vicar’s port wine that broke the spell and put mischief into the heart of Cousin Ann; for the little servant had scarcely retired to begin washing the dishes when that young woman said, turning to her host: “Have you got yet to the really exciting part of your book, Mr. Hastings?”
The look which the author of the work in question turned upon his guest startled even the daughter of Lord Poynings. It must have resembled the look with which the famous Dean Swift actually killed the unfortunate Vanessa.
“Has my wife been talking to you?” he asked in a tone that made Nell wish the ceiling would fall down on their heads. “Have you,” he went on, “got the slightest idea of what my book means?”
“Means?” stammered Cousin Ann. “I understood you to imply that it was slightly heretical. But beyond that — I–I have no notion, of course. I’ve never heard you read a line of it!”
The countenance of Mr. Hastings expressed the passing within him of a terrific struggle. The veins in the man’s neck stood out like whipcord. Beads of perspiration appeared on his forehead. His cheeks grew flushed and then very pale. His fingers, which were playing with the blade of a silver fruit knife, bent it back until it looked as though it would snap. He remained as if petrified in his seat; breathing heavily, like a person on the verge of some kind of fit.
The three women stared at him in dead silence. They all seemed to recognize that a chance spark might set off a terrific explosion. But, in their silence, their own whirling thoughts must have resembled, for any occult initiate, three differently coloured lighthouses, projecting upon a mysterious storm their divergent rays!
The enormous magnetism of the man, in the turmoil of his suppressed fury, stirred up all manner of latent emotions in these three feminine bosoms.
Cousin Ann thought to herself that if she were destined to conceive a child for Rook, she must be careful to avoid the risk of any more shocks of this kind.
Nell thought to herself how odd it was that when William’s madness was directed toward others instead of toward her, she felt a queer perverted pride in him and even sympathy for him.
Netta was swept out, beyond the little room, beyond the four candles, beyond the convulsed countenance of the man opposite, into the bleak country of her own bitter resolution. “I’ll do it to-night,” she thought. “I’ll drink to-night at Lexie’s all I can, so that he won’t be able to bear the sight of me when he comes!”
William Hastings rose from the table. He had got his emotion into control, and he held it down within him as a man holds a maddened horse with an iron bit.
“Well, young ladies,” he said with a benevolent smile, “I expect we’d better start, if we’re not going to disturb Mrs. Bellamy’s arrangements.”
A quarter of an hour later they were all four entering the village. The lamps from the cottage windows shone out upon the littered yards, with their pails and wood piles and pig troughs and chicken pens; out upon the disconsolate vegetable patches where forlorn potato stumps and melancholy cabbage stalks carried the crisp whiteness of the beginnings of a heavy hoar frost.
As they turned into the alley where Lexie’s cottage stood, they could see, at the end of the narrow lane, the dark-stretching expanse of the water meadows.
“There’s a new moon this evening,” said Mr. Hastings. “I shouldn’t be surprised if we could see it from the end of the lane. It may be behind the house at this moment.”
“Let’s go and see,” cried Cousin Ann.
“No, no,” said Nell. “We’re late already. Mrs. Bellamy begged me not to be late.”
“It’s no distance,” protested the other, “and it would be so wonderful to see it over the ditches! Let’s go, Mr. Hastings!”
“You go in with Miss Page, then, Nell,” said Hastings. “Lady Ann and I won’t be five minutes. You can tell them we are just coming.”
The young girl obeyed with alacrity. She felt in a state of complete psychic sympathy with Netta and it was more than she had dared to hope for to meet Rook without either her husband or Cousin Ann!
These two unwanted ones walked rapidly together down to the end of the little road.
In a softer humour than usual, because of the pressure upon mind and body of the oldest interrogation-mark in the world, Cousin Ann was less oblivious than might have been expected to the recondite magic of that place and that hour.
The dark flat surface of a tall house by the edge of the fields rose above them like the bastion of an ancient city. Perhaps just because she felt herself at that moment on the verge of becoming a living bridge by which the Past might go over into the Future, she experienced the feeling that long ago, and even many times, she had come to a road’s end like this, where was just such a dark-walled house, and just such a smell of muddy, reedy fens stretching away under the burden of hoar frost!
Coming round the corner of the wall they found themselves on the edge of a little deserted paddock, bordered by a fence of loose stones and extending clear down to the first of the ditches, over the dark surface of which hung, sideways and drooping, the heavy trunks of a couple of pollard willows.
“Look!” cried Cousin Ann. “There it is!” and she pointed to the extreme edge of the western horizon, above which, sure enough, floated the thinnest, frailest moon-sickle that she had ever seen!
Squadrons of vaporous clouds kept up a perpetual march across it; but there it was—“Astarte, Queen of Heaven, with crescent horns!”—and the power of its presence, like the presence of the youngest, most fragile daughter of an old tragic dynasty, reached them through the night and blended with the vague earthy smells that came floating up from the shadowy fens.