“Has he eaten anything?” enquired Lexie.
“Hardly anything. I took him some milk and biscuits. He hasn’t locked the door. But when I go in he looks so wild and haggard and gets so angry at being disturbed that I daren’t stop more than a minute. I’m afraid for his mind if he goes on like this. He sat up till three or four this morning. He couldn’t have slept more than two hours. And I didn’t like what he said when I went in.”
“What did he say?”
“It was about Lady Ann and her child. It was awful, Lexie! I can’t think how a sane man can think such appalling thoughts. I don’t believe he is quite sane,” she breathed.
“Can you see him from here?” enquired Lexie, speaking in the tone he might have used if Hastings had been a dangerous otter or badger.
“No. You see? The window’s open but he’s got the blind down. Come here, Lexie. I don’t want Rook to hear us.” They moved away to the other side of the geranium bed.
“Netta, you can’t mean that you’re going back to London without letting me see you once more alone?” Rook spoke these words wistfully and pleadingly but there was an undertone of indignant sullenness in his voice and his eyes had an angry glint.
The girl’s face was very pale; a pallor which the golden September light clinging to her brown hair threw into touching relief. She seemed as Rook looked at her, standing there resolute and sad in her loose black dress, to be thinner and more girlish than in former times.
She was aware that his look had in it a recognition of her physical desirableness; the half-conscious non-mental renewal of an ancient magnetism. She knew that he was recalling with a certain tantalized sulkiness his former possession of her.
“I cannot bear it, Rook dear,” she said gently. “I could bear it if I didn’t love you. But I love you far too well. Don’t make it harder for me, Rook, than it is already!”
He glanced gloomily round; but Lexie and Nell had seated themselves on a wooden bench under the hedge, their eyes directed, not toward himself and Netta, but toward the window of Hastings’s room.
“Come into the house,” he said brusquely, taking her by the shoulder.
She felt so strong in her sadness and in her pity that she allowed him to take her into Nell’s little parlour and shut the door upon them; but her instinctive response to the familiar touch of his hands surprised her by its independence of her conscious mind.
The very moment they were alone the room began to assume that cunning, furtive, pandar-like look that rooms take on when human skeletons of opposite sexes stand in one another’s presence, silent, obsessed, with beating pulses and hammering hearts! Rook’s eyes mechanically noted a grotesquely sentimental picture of Nell as a little girl which stood on the mantelpiece and then without regarding her feeble protests he took Netta in his arms.
Those two human bodies seemed to rush together in a strange complicity of contempt for what was happening to those minds or to those wills. The man pressed his mouth so savagely upon the girl’s mouth that before their kiss was over her lips had parted in helpless abandonment.
He had sworn in his anger that she was “like all women” and she knew in her heart that she had proved herself like many among them in the manner in which she yielded at that moment without really yielding at all She just let him do with her as he pleased because her body already belonged to his body and seemed to return to its possessor with the inevitableness of a compass needle. And yet not for one second did she deviate or collapse from her mental resolution.
As soon as he had removed his mouth from her mouth and had begun to kiss her chin and her neck, this unseduced spirit in her revolted and flung him off. He became suddenly conscious that he was holding a limp, cold, unresponsive husk in his arms, something whose essence was not there at all, a stiff, lifeless simulacrum of the real Netta. He let her sink down into Nell’s one available armchair, the very chair in which she had sat nearly a year ago, when on that day of torrential autumn rain she had come into the room with Cousin Ann.
“There … you see!” he gasped breathlessly. “All this mania of yours is just a morbid fancy that you’ve fallen into by living too much alone. You’re my same Netta … you’ll always be my Netta … nothing that can possibly happen can change that!”
An expression of pitiable sadness came into her face. She looked not only very pale but actually old and haggard at that moment. With the sunlight gone from her hair and her hair itself ruffled by their embrace the gray streaks in its heavy masses became lamentably apparent.
“When you say that it’s wrong for you to live with me any more, does that mean that you and I are to be as if we’d never lived as we have?”
She made an effort to answer him, but it was too much. Those big tears, the sight of which brought back the pathos of her personality more than anything else could have done, those tears as big as the eggs of golden-crested wrens, began one by one to run down her cheeks. She made no effort to dry them. She seemed unconscious of their presence. Nor did the lines of her countenance distort themselves as most people’s faces do when they cry. Her eyes remained wide open and fixed upon his own. Her mouth, too, remained strangely untremulous, its quiet curves set fast in an expression of weary composure.
Very slowly she shook her head; and then, after making some little swallowing movements in her throat, she spoke to him firmly and gently.
“I shall never love any one but you, Rook,” she said, “but I must go back where I came from. The Fathers have been very kind to me and they’ve found me work to do. I’ve got my life to lead somehow, Rook dear. And they’ve been very good to me. I owe them everything, everything!”
In her desire to explain she had touched just the one chord whose vibration was calculated to hurt him most.
“Everything, Netta?” he repeated with bitter sarcasm. For it was just that, that she should have turned in her despair to other comforters, to other responses, to a different refuge than anything he could supply which hit him to the depths of his nature.
It seemed to him as if what she had done was something worse than ingratitude. She had taken their love, which was the expression of all that had been best and tenderest and most delicate in him, and had treated it as something evil and sinful. He had given her a pity, an understanding, a recognition, that went beyond anything those priests could give her; and now she was capable of this enthusiastic cry: “I owe them everything!”
The window of the room was wide open to the garden and there floated in upon them the distant murmur of Lexie’s and Nell’s voices and the musky scent of geraniums.
Rook found that he had counted much more upon Netta’s attitude to him than he had until that moment realized. It was not that he had anything to offer her; any reasonable alternative to this new life she had found for herself. If there had been anything definite in his mind he could have dealt with this blow more effectively, have found an antidote for its smart. He was standing before her there, pleading angrily and helplessly for something that had no shape, no substance, no form. He was pleading with her to have pity upon his life illusion, pity upon his soul’s inmost self, pity upon that ultimate reflection of himself before himself which lay in the abysmal mirror of his self-deception as the sky lies in a mirage of water above arid sands! He was pleading with her to save from destruction something that was so tenuous that he himself could hardly define it. Like a thin film of autumn mist his self-love wavered and undulated between them in that geranium-scented air. It became a drooping filament of unreal vapour. It faded; it hovered; it sank. A sense of intolerable emptiness came over him. Netta’s Fathers had saved her soul; but they had stricken his. But how could she know that? How could she know that his feeling for her was the one affair of his life that exactly lent itself to that morbid peculiarity in the depths of his being, his desire to love a person who in some way was dependent upon him, helpless before him, different from what he was by some impassable gulf?