She took in all this with a calm, inexpressive face. “What had I better do, then?” she asked him.
“Do you mind going over Uncle Richard’s belongings?” he said. “There isn’t much, but you might put aside the kind of things one would wish to keep and tell Mrs. Drool she can have the rest. Poor old chap! I think we owe some thing to him, eh, my dear?”
She smiled faintly. It gave her a queer sensation to think of standing in that room again, and in her heart she was conscious of a bitter disappointment that she was not to be with him there. She had had at the back of her mind during the whole length of their walk the image of a cozy little tea tray shared between them in that familiar place. But there it was! Better let him do what he had to do for them both while the mood was on him.
There was a moment, when, as he held her hand at the gamekeeper’s gate and felt the warmth and pathos of her youth in its magnetic pressure, they both were conscious of a closer reciprocity than they had ever known before; but the peculiar quality of that moment did not outlast his vision of her figure passing slowly up the little garden path and disappearing into the house.
Her reluctance to leave him and his reluctance to go seemed based on a sad clairvoyant recognition in them both that chance had given them that one brief interim of understanding only to take it away again for ever; and when he did turn aside at last and clamber up through a certain gap in the hedge which he had known from childhood the nerves of his mind were so strung-out and taut that the briar thorns that pricked his hands and face were a sort of assuagement to its tension.
Beginning to ascend the uneven slope of Dorsal he was unable to prevent all the little aromatic tufts of ground ivy over which he stepped from associating themselves with his thought. The pale-green fronds of the bracken, too, like miniature motley-coloured giraffe necks transferred to the realm of vegetation, uncurled themselves amid the images of his brain, as if they had been so many motionless sea horses among dark-finned, swift-flashing fish.
And most of all did the peculiar fragrance of the yellow gorse pass into his troubled consciousness, bringing with it, as he avoided those piercing spikes, a sense of honey upon the air.
As he approached the fir trees on the summit Rook found himself gathering up the tangled threads of his consciousness into one ravelled wretched skein. A feeling of miserable self-reproach took possession of him, mixed with a helplessness in the presence of this rush of events. He looked back woefully to the days when he first inherited Ashover, to the days when all his available emotions were centred round the personality of Lexie; round the long, delicious, irresponsible conversations they had had together under sweet-flowering hedgerows, in hot cornfields, and by the banks of the river!
He remembered one particular June evening when, as he watched by his brother’s side a great orange-bellied newt sink languidly down into the depth of a meadow pond, while the hum of the heavy mowing machine went round the field followed by the scent of newly cut clover and the flicker of careless-winged dragon-flies, he had responded to Lexie’s expression of unruffled happiness by an ill-advised desire that “something new and strange should turn up.”
It was only a twelvemonth after that ill-fated wish that he had first met Netta; and ay! what troubles, what troubles his restlessness had brought upon them all! He tried to analyze the weakness, nay! the deformity in his nature, that had betrayed him into this cul-de-sac. If only he had been capable of one natural simple human passion it would have been all so different! It was this accursed detachment of his brain, mingled with his particular kind of cold sensuality, that had rendered him so fatal an influence in the lives of all his friends. If only he had kept altogether clear of the love of women! His temperament must resemble, he thought, that of those mediæval monks, for whom any feminine contact was an evil thing just because of this queer lack of genuine normal emotion.
Arrived at Heron’s Ridge and standing motionless there under one of the Scotch firs with his eyes fixed on the fresh green shoots, moist and glossy, of a chance-sown patch of Lords-and-Ladies, Rook made a forlorn attempt, in a kind of weary desperation, to visualize his life in some sort of perspective.
He saw this cold, this saurian viciousness of his as present in every case. He saw his relation with Netta as viciousness mingled with pity; with Ann as viciousness and camaraderie; with Nell as viciousness and romance. Unconsciously taking note of the extraordinary shape of the queer plant at which he stared, he found himself associating his own ambiguity with the contours of its leaves, and Lexie’s more direct and more wholesome nature with the shameless purple spear which those leaves encircled; and it came over him, as he stared at this wanton outgrowth of the huge indifferent universe, that he would have done far better to concentrate all his affection on Lexie alone, and satisfy his satyrishness, if it had to be satisfied, with chance encounters in the city streets!
It came over him that his whole relation with every one of these people, with Ann, with Netta, with Nell, was in reality a superficial thing, external to his inmost life illusion, external to the deep, subconscious link that bound him to Lexie.
And as he let his thoughts drift dangerously along this road there suddenly gathered about him a sickening, panic-stricken fear of life; a fear of life burdened and sharpened by the responsibilities he had incurred in regard to these three women. He felt as though he could lift up in that sweet spring air a howl like the howl of a trapped animal. Why, oh! why had he got himself so miserably entangled? And then, like a bitter undertide, like salt sea water in the midst of an inland river, there swept over him the weight of these different human existences upon which he had so disastrously impinged. Their lives to them were as important as his own to himself; and yet he had presumed, in his blind selfishness, to treat them as he might have treated insensitive, inanimate objects. Oh, he deserved every inch of the iron which now pierced him through his bones! With cold clairvoyance he reviewed the stages of philosophic scepticism, of spiritual disillusionment, that had gradually made him so indifferent to what he did, so indifferent to work, to ambition, to any purpose in things at all. He recognized the fact now that it was this refusal to take the ultimate issues of life seriously that had laid him open to these disasters. Lexie, who was far more materialistic than he was, could never have got entangled so; because he treated life as a work of art, and was consequently sagacious, meticulous, cautious, in spite of his scandalous humour.
With a sigh that came from the depths of his soul the unfortunate man lifted his feet from the spot where the patch of Lords-and-Ladies had seemed to paralyze him, and proceeded to run down the slope of Battlefield, running with a certain rather awkward movement of his long legs, such as used to make Lexie laugh at him and tease him when they were boys together.
Something seemed to be turning a kind of screw inside him with a squeeze and a twinge that scraped upon the very parchment of his soul as a lead pencil upon a slate; and it is likely enough that nothing that Ann or Netta or Nell had ever suffered, or would suffer, because of him, quite equalled the cold, unmitigated misery that hounded him on then, down that hill, like a murderous ice dog!
Arrived at his house he entered it, as was his wont and the wont of his father before him, through the kitchen door. He told Pandie to put on her things and run down to the village to order Twiney and his mare.
“Have you taken up tea yet to Miss Page?” he asked.
Pandie hummed and hawed and hovered, doing the thing that Lexie always described as “standing on one foot.” He saw that she had something on her mind beyond her courage to express, but he cut her short with a gesture.