“But I understand your feeling, Phil,” he said. “I understand it perfectly. I used to have the same sensation at night in a certain great garden in the Campagna — the fear of meeting the boy I used to play with before I expected to meet him! I used to call out to him and beg him to answer me so as to make sure.”
Philippa refused to enter the house again and waited for him outside by the garden gate. He was long in coming, so long that she was seized with the strangest thoughts. But he came at last, carrying a lantern in his hand.
“You’re right, Phil,” he said, “the gods have taken her. She’s stone-dead. And what’s more, she’s been dead a long time, several weeks, I should think.”
“But the breathing, Adrian, the breathing? I heard it distinctly.”
Sorio put down his lantern and leant against the gate. In spite of his calm demeanor she could see that he also had experienced something over and above the finding of Rachel’s body.
“Yes,” he said, “and you were right about that, too. Guess, child, what it was!”
And as he spoke he put his hand against the front of his coat which was tightly buttoned up. Philippa was immediately conscious of the same stertorous noise that she had heard in the room of death.
“An animal!” she cried.
“An owl,” he answered, “a young owl. It must have fallen from a nest in the roof. I won’t show it to you now, as it might escape and a cat might get it. I’m going to try and rear it if Tassar will let me. Baptiste will be so amused when he finds me with a pet owl! He has quite a mania for things like that. He can make the birds in the park come to him by whistling. Well! I suppose what we must do now is to get back to Rodmoor as quick as we can and report this business to the police. She must have been dead a week or more! I’m afraid this will be a great shock to Nance.”
“How did you find her?” enquired the girl as they walked along the road towards the New Bridge.
“Don’t ask me, Phil — don’t ask me,” he replied, “She’s out of her troubles anyway and had an owl to look after her.”
“Should I have been—” began his companion.
“Don’t ask me, girl!” he reiterated. “I tell you it’s all past and over. Rachel Doorm will be buried in the Rodmoor churchyard and I shall have her owl. An old woman stops breathing and an owl begins breathing. It’s all natural enough.”
XXII THE NORTHWEST WIND
THE funeral of Rachel Doorm was a dark and troubled day for both Nance and Linda. Even the sympathy of Mr. Traherne seemed unable to console them or lift the settled gloom from their minds. Nance especially was struck dumb with comfortless depression. She felt doubly guilty in the matter. Guilty in her original acquiescence in the woman’s desire to have them with her in Rodmoor and guilty in her neglect of her during the last weeks of her life. For the immediate cause of her death, or of the desperation that led to it, their leaving Dyke House for the village, she did not feel any remorse. That was inevitable after what had occurred. But this did not lessen her responsibility in the other two cases. Had she resolutely refused to leave London the probability was that Rachel would have been persuaded to go on living with them as she had formerly done. She might even have sold Dyke House and with the proceeds bought some cottage in the city suburbs for them all. It was her own ill-fated passion for Sorio, she recognized that clearly enough, that was the cause of all the disasters that had befallen them.
Linda’s feeling with regard to Rachel’s death was quite different. She had to confess in the depths of her heart that she was glad of it, glad to be relieved of the constant presence of something menacing and vindictive on the outskirts of her life. Her trouble was of a more morbid and abnormal kind, was, indeed, the fact that in spite of the woman’s death, she hadn’t really got rid of Rachel Doorm. The night before the funeral she dreamed of her almost continually, dreamed that she herself was a child again and that Rachel had threatened her with some unknown and mysterious punishment. The night after the funeral it was still worse. She woke Nance by a fit of wild and desperate crying and when the elder girl tried to discover the nature of her trouble she grew taciturn and reserved and refused to say anything in explanation. All the following week she went about her occupations with an air of abstraction and remoteness as if her real life were being lived on another plane. Nance learnt from Mr. Traherne, who was doing all he could think of to keep her attention fixed on her organ-playing, that as a matter of fact she frequently came out of the church after a few minutes’ practise and went and stood, for long periods together, by Rachel’s grave. The priest confessed that on one of the occasions when he had surprised her in this posture, she had turned upon him quite savagely and had addressed him in a tone completely different from her ordinary one.
It was especially dreadful to Nance to feel she was thrust out and alienated in some mysterious way from her sister’s confidence.
One morning towards the end of September, when they were dressing together in the hazy autumnal light and listening to the cries of sea-gulls coming up from the harbour, Nance caught upon her sister’s face, as the girl’s eyes met one another in their common mirror, that same inscrutable look that she had seen upon it five months before when, in their room at Dyke House they had first become acquainted with the eternal iteration of the North Sea’s waves. Nance tried in vain all the remainder of that day to think out some clue to what that look implied. It haunted her and tantalized her. Linda had always possessed something a little pleading and sad in her eyes. It was no doubt the presence of that clinging wistfulness in them which had from the first attracted Brand. But this look contained in it something different. It suggested to Nance, though she dismissed the comparison as quite inadequate almost as soon as she had made it, the cry of a soul that was being pulled backwards into some interior darkness yet uttering all the while a desperate prayer to be let alone as if the least interference with what destiny was doing would be the cause of yet greater peril.
The following night as she lay awake watching a filmy trail of vaporous clouds sail across a wasted haggard moon, a moon that seemed to betray as that bright orb seldom does the fact that it was a corpse-world hung there with almost sacrilegious and indecent exposure, under the watchful stars, she noticed with dismay the white-robed figure of her sister rise from her bed and step lightly across the room to the open window. Nance watched her with breathless alarm. Was she awake or asleep? She leant out of the window, her long hair falling heavily to one side. Nance fancied she heard her muttering something but the noise of the sea, for the tide was high then in the early morning hours, prevented her catching the words. Nance threw off the bed-clothes and stole noiselessly towards her. Yes, certainly she was speaking. The words came in a low, plaintive murmur as if she were pleading with some one out there in the misty night. Nance crept gently up to her and listened, afraid to touch her lest she should cause her some dangerous nervous shock but anxious to be as close to her as she could.