At six o’clock they were ready and Nance went down to announce their departure to Rachel Doorm. She found their driver asleep by the kitchen fire and, having roused him and told him to put his horse into the trap, she went out to look for her mother’s friend.
She found Rachel standing on the tow path gazing gloomily at the river. She was bareheaded and the wind, wailing round her, fluttered a wisp of her grey hair against her forehead. Beneath this her sunken eyes seemed devoid of all light. She turned when she heard Nance’s step, her heavy skirt flapping in the wind as she did so, like a funereal flag.
“I see,” she said, pointing at the light in the sisters’ room where the figure of Linda could be observed passing and re-passing, “I see you’re taking her away. I suppose it’s because of Mr. Renshaw. May I ask — if it’s of any interest to you that I should care at all — what you’re going to do with her? She’s been — she and her mother — the curse of my life, and I fancy she’s now going to be the curse of yours.”
Nance wrapped herself more tightly in a cloak she had picked up as she came out and looked unflinchingly into the woman’s haggard face.
“Yes, we’re going away — both of us,” she said. “We’re going to the village.”
“To live on air and sea-water?” enquired the other bitterly.
“No,” rejoined Nance gently, “to live in lodgings and to work for our living. I’ve got a place already at the Pontifex shop and Mr. Traherne’s going to pay Linda for playing the organ. It’ll be better like that. I couldn’t let her go on here after what happened yesterday.”
Her voice trembled but she continued to look Miss Doorm straight in the face.
“You were away on purpose yesterday, Rachel,” she said gravely, “so that those two might be together. It was only some scruple, or fear, on Mr. Renshaw’s part that stopped him meeting her in the house. How often this has happened before — his seeing her like this — I don’t know, and I don’t want to know — I only pray to God that no harm’s been done. If it has been done, the child’s ruin’s on our head. I cannot understand you, Rachel, I cannot understand you.”
Miss Doorm’s haggard mouth opened as if to utter a cry but she breathed deeply and restrained it. Her gaunt fingers twined and untwined themselves and the wind, blowing at her skirt, displayed the tops of her old-fashioned boots with their worn, elastic sides.
“So she’s separated us, has she?” she hissed. “I thought she would. She was born for that. And it’s nothing to you that I’ve nursed you and cared for you and planned for you since you were a baby? Nothing! Nothing at all! She comes between us now as her mother came before. I knew it would happen so! I knew it would! She’s just like her mother — soft and clinging — soft and white — and this is the end of it.”
Her voice changed to a low, almost frightened tone.
“Do you realize that her mother comes to me every night and sits looking at me with her great eyes just as she used to do when Linda had been rude to me in the old days? Do you realize that she walks backwards and forwards outside my door when I’ve driven her away? Do you realize that when I go to bed I find her there, waiting for me, white and soft and clinging?”
Her voice rose to a kind of moan and the wind carried it across the empty road and tossed it over the fields.
“And she speaks, too, Nance. She says things to me, soft, clinging, crying things that drive me distracted. One day, she told me that only last night, one day she’s going to kiss me and never let me go — going to kiss me with soft, pleading, terrified lips through all eternity, kiss me just as she did once when Linda lost my beads. You remember my beads, Nance? Real jade, they were, with funny red streaks. I often see them round her neck. They’ll be round her neck when she kisses me, jade, you know, my dear, with red streaks. I shall see nothing else then, nothing else while we lie buried together!”
She lowered her voice to a whisper.
“It was the Captain who brought them. He brought them over far seas. He brought them for me, do you hear — for me! But they’re always round her neck now, after that day.”
Nance listened to this wild outburst with a set stern face. She had always suspected that there was something desperate and morbid about Rachel’s attachment to her father but never, until this moment, had she dreamed how far the thing went. She looked at the woman’s face now and sighed and with that sigh she flung to the blowing wind the covenant between herself and her own mother. All the girl’s natural sanity and sense of proportion were awake now and she stiffened her nerves and hardened her heart for what she had to do.
“Between a vow to the dead,” she thought, “and the safety of the living, there can be only one choice for me.”
“So you’re going away,” began Miss Doorm again. “Well, go, my dear, go and leave me! I shan’t trouble the earth much longer after you’re gone.”
She turned her face to the river and remained motionless, watching the flowing water. The heavy weight of the threatening storm, the storm that seemed as though some powerful earth-god, with uplifted hand, were holding back its descent, had destroyed all natural and normal daylight without actually plunging the world into darkness. A strange greenish-coloured shadow, like the shadow of water seen through water, hung over the trees of the park and the opposite bank of the river. The same greenish shadow, only touched there with something darker and more mysterious, brooded over the far fens out of which, in the remote distance, a sort of reddish exhalation indicated the locality of the Mundham factories. The waters of the Loon — as Rachel and Nance looked at them now — had a dull whitish gleam, like the gleam of a dead fish’s eye. The sense of thunder in the air, though no sound of it had yet been heard, seemed to evoke a kind of frightened expectancy. The smaller birds had been reduced to absolute stillness, their twitterings hushed as if under the weight of a pall. Only a solitary plover’s scream, at rare intervals, went whirling by on the wind.
“Come back, come in, will you?” said Nance at last, “and say good-bye to us, Rachel. I shall come and see you, of course. We shall not be far away.”
She stretched out her hand to help her down the slope of the embankment. Rachel made no response to this overture but followed her in silence. No sooner, however, had they entered the garden and closed the little gate behind them, than the woman fell on her knees on the ground and caught the girl round the waist.
“Nance, my treasure!” she cried pitifully, “Nance, my heart’s baby! Nance, oh, Nance, you won’t leave me like this after all these years? No, I won’t let you go! Nance, you can’t mean it? You can’t really mean it?”
The wind, blowing in gusts about them, made the gate behind them swing open on its hinges. Rachel’s dishevelled tress of grey hair flapped like a tattered piece of rag against the girl’s side.
“Look,” the woman wailed, “I pray you on my knees not to desert me! You don’t know what you’re doing to me. You don’t, Nance, you don’t! It’s all my life you’re taking. Oh, my darling, won’t you have pity? You’re the only thing I’ve got — the only thing I love. Nance, Nance, have pity on me!”
Nance, with tears in her eyes but her face still firm and hard-set, tried to free herself from the hands that held her. She tried gently and tenderly at first but Rachel’s despair made the attempt difficult. Then she realized that this appalling tension must be brought at all costs to an end. With a sudden, relentless jerk, she tore herself away and rushed towards the house. Rachel fell forward on her face, her hands clutching the damp mould. Then she staggered up and raised her hand towards the lighted window above at which Linda’s figure was clearly visible.