Deadham Hard by Lucas Malet

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"Do you mind if we go back just a little minute," she said.

"Still unsatisfied, my dear?"

"Not unsatisfied--never again that as between us two, Commissioner Sahib.
You have made everything beautifully, everlastingly smooth and clear."

"Then why tempt Providence, or rather human incertitude, by going back?"

"Because--can I say it quite plainly?"

"As plainly as you will."

"Because Henrietta tells me I have--have flirted--have played fast and
loose with--with more than one person."

A pause, and the question came from above her--her head still lying
against his breast--with a trace of severity, or was it anxiety?

"And have you?"

"Not intentionally--not knowingly," Damaris said.

"If that is so, is it not sufficient?"

"No--because she implies that I have raised false hopes, and so entangled
myself--and that I ought to go further, that, as I understand her, I
ought to be ready to marry--that it is not quite honourable to withdraw."

Charles Verity moved slightly, yet held her close. She felt the rise and
fall of his ribs as he breathed slow and deep.

"Do you want to marry?" he at last asked her.

"No," she said, simply. "I'd much rather not, if I can keep out of it
without acting unfairly by anyone--if you don't agree with Henrietta, and
don't think I need. You don't want me to marry do you?"

"God in heaven, no," Charles Verity answered. He put her from him, rose
and moved about the room.

"To me, the thought of giving you in marriage to any man is little short
of abhorrent," he said hoarsely.

For fear clutched him by the throat. The gift of pearls, the little scene
of last night, and Damaris' emotion in bidding Carteret farewell,
confronted him. The idea had never occurred to him before. Now it glared
at him, or rather he glared at it. It would be torment to say "yes"; and
yet very difficult to say his best friend "nay." Anger kindled against
Henrietta Frayling. Must this be regarded as her handiwork? Yet he could
hardly credit it. Or had she some other candidate--Peregrine Ditton,
young Harry Ellice?--But they were mere boys.--Of Marshall Wace he never
thought, the young man being altogether outside his field of vision in
this connection.

Long habit of personal chastity made Charles Verity turn, with a greater
stabbing and rending of repulsion, from the thought of marriage for
Damaris. She asserted she had no wish to marry, that she--bless her sweet
simplicity!--would rather not. But this bare broaching of the subject
threw him into so strange a tumult that, only too evidently, he was no
competent observer, he laboured under too violent a prejudice. He had no
right to demand from others the abstinence he chose himself to practise.
Carteret, in desiring her, was within his rights. Damaris within hers,
were she moved by his suit. Marriage is natural, wholesome, the
God-ordained law and sanction of human increase since man first drew
breath here upon earth. To condemn obedience to that law, by placing any
parental embargo upon Damaris' marriage, would be both a defiance of
nature and act of grossest selfishness.

He sat down on the window-seat again; and forced himself to put his arm
around that fair maiden body, destined to be the prize, one day, of some
man's love; the prey--for he disdained to mince matters, turning the
knife in the wound rather--the prey of some man's lust. He schooled
himself, while Damaris' heart beat a little tempestuously under his hand,
to invite a conclusion which through every nerve and fibre he loathed.

"My dear," he said, "I spoke unadvisedly with my lips just now, letting
crude male jealousy get the mastery of reason and common sense. Put my
words out of your mind. They were unjustifiable, spoken in foolish heat.
If you are in love with anyone"--

Damaris nestled against him.

"Only with you, dearest, I think," she said.

Charles Verity hesitated, unable to speak through the exquisite blow she
delivered and his swift thankfulness.

"Let us put the question differently then--translating it into the
language of ordinary social convention. Tell me, has anyone
proposed to you?"

Damaris, still nestling, shook her head.

"No--no one. And I hope now, no one will. I escaped that, partly thanks
to my own denseness.--It is not an easy thing, Commissioner Sahib, to
explain or talk about. But I have come rather close to it lately,
and"--with a hint of vehemence--"I don't like it. There is something in
it which pulls at me but not at the best part of me. So that I am divided
against myself. Though it does pull, I still want to push it all away
with both hands. I don't understand myself and I don't understand it, I
would rather be without it--forget it--if you think I am free to do so,
if you are satisfied that I haven't intentionally hurt anyone or
contracted a--a kind of debt of honour?"

"I am altogether satisfied," he said. "Until the strange and ancient
malady attacks you in a very much more virulent form, you are free to
cast Henrietta Frayling's insinuations to the winds, to ignore them and
their existence."

BOOK IV

THROUGH SHADOWS TOWARDS THE DAWN

CHAPTER I

WHICH CARRIES OVER A TALE OF YEARS, AND CARRIES ON

The last sentence was written. His work finished. And, looking upon his
completed creation, Charles Verity saw that it was good. Yet, as he put
the pen back in the pen-tray and, laying the last page of manuscript face
downwards upon the blotting-paper passed his hand over it, he was less
sensible of exultation than of a pathetic emptiness. The book had come to
be so much part of him that he felt a nasty wrench when he thus finally
rid himself of it.

He had kept the personal pronoun out of it, strictly and austerely,
desiring neither self-glorification nor self-advertisement. Yet his mind
and attitude towards life seasoned and tempered the whole, giving it
vitality and force. This was neither a "drum-and-trumpet history"
designed to tickle the vulgar ear, nor a blank four-wall depository of
dry facts, names, dates, statistics, such as pedants mustily adore; but a
living thing, seen and felt. Not his subconscious, but that much finer
and--as one trusts--more permanent element in our human constitution, his
super-conscious self found expression in its pages and travelled freely,
fruitfully, through them amid luminous and masterful ideas. At times the
intellectual sweep threatened to be overdaring and overwide; so that, in
the interests of symmetry and balance of construction, he had been forced
to clip the wings of thought, lest they should bear him to regions too
remotely high and rare. Race, religion, customs and the modifications of
these, both by climate and physical conformation of the land on the face
of which they operate, went to swell the interest and suggestion of his
theme. In handling such varied and coloured material the intellectual
exercise had been to him delicious, as he fashioned and put a fine edge
to passages of admirable prose, coined the just yet startling epithet,
perfected the flow of some graceful period, and ransacked the English
language for fearless words in which to portray the mingled splendour and
vileness of a barbaric oriental Court, the naked terrors of tribal feuds
and internecine war.

The occupation had, indeed, proved at once so refreshing and so absorbing
that he went leisurely, lengthening out the process of production until
it came nearer covering the thirty months of elephantine gestation than
the normal human nine.

With but two brief sojourns to England, for the consultation of certain
authorities and of his publishers, the said near on thirty months were
passed in wandering through Southern France, Central Italy, and, taking
ship from Naples to Malaga, finally through Eastern and Northern Spain.
Charles Verity was too practised a campaigner for his power of
concentration to depend on the stability or familiarity of his
surroundings. He could detach himself, go out into and be alone with his
work, at will. But the last chapter, like the first, he elected to write
in the study at The Hard. A pious offering of incense, this, to the
pleasant memory of that excellent scholar and devoted amateur of letters,
his great-uncle, Thomas Clarkson Verity, whose society and conversation
awakened the literary sense in him as a schoolboy, on holiday from
Harchester, now nearly five decades ago. He judged it a matter of good
omen, moreover,--toying for the moment with kindly superstition--that the
book should issue from a house redeemed by his kinsman from base and
brutal uses and dedicated to the worship of knowledge and of the printed
word. That fat, soft-bodied, mercurial-minded little gentleman--to whom
no record of human endeavour, of human speculation, mental or moral
experiment, came amiss--would surely relish the compliment, if his
curious and genial ghost still, in any sort, had cognizance of this, his
former, dwelling-place.

The Hard, just now, showed a remarkably engaging countenance, the year
standing on the threshold of May.--Mild softly bright weather made amends
for a wet and windy April, with sunshine and high forget-me-not blue
skies shading to silver along the sea-line. The flower-beds, before the
garden house-front, were crowded with early tulips, scarlet, golden, and
shell-pink. Shrubberies glowed with rhododendrons, flamed with azaleas.
At the corner of the battery and sea-wall, misty grey-green plumes of
tamarisk veiled the tender background of grey-blue water and yellow-grey
sand. Birds peopled the scene. Gulls, in strong fierce flight, laughed
overhead. Swallows darted back and forth, ceaselessly twittering, as they
built their cup-shaped mud nests beneath the eaves. Upon the lawn
companies of starlings ran, flapping glossy wings, squealing, whistling;
to the annoyance of a song thrush, in spotted waistcoat and neatly
fitting brown _surtout_, who, now tall, now flattened to the level of the
turf, its head turned sideways, peered and listened, locating the
presence of the victim worm.--Three or four vigorous pecks--the starlings
running elsewhere--to loosen the surrounding soil, and the moist pink
living string was steadily, mercilessly, drawn upward into the
uncompromising light of day, to be devoured wriggling, bit by bit, with
most unlovely gusto.--The chaff-chaff sharpened his tiny saw tipping
about the branches of the fir trees in the Wilderness, along with the
linnets, tits, and gold-finches.

Such, out of doors, was the home world which received Damaris after those
many months of continental travel, on the eve of her twenty-first
birthday. To pass from the dynamic to the static mode must be always
something of an embarrassment and trial, especially to the young with
whom sensation is almost disconcertingly direct and lively. Damaris
suffered the change of conditions not without a measure or doubt and
wonder. For they made demands to which she had become unaccustomed, and
to which she found it difficult to submit quite naturally and simply. A
whole social and domestic order, bristling with petty obligations, closed
down upon her, within the bounds of which she felt to move awkwardly, at
first, conscious of constraint.

Sympathetic Mrs. Cooper, comely and comfortable Mary, and the Napoleonic
Patch, still reigned in house and stable. Laura had returned to her
former allegiance on the announcement of "the family's" arrival, and
other underlings had been engaged by the upper servants in conclave. To
these latter entered that Ulysses, Mr. Hordle, so rendering the
establishment once again complete.

The neighbours duly called--Dr. and Mrs. Horniblow, conscious of notable
preferment, since high ecclesiastical powers had seen fit to present the
former to a vacant canonry at Harchester. For three months yearly he
would in future be resident in the cathedral city. This would necessitate
the employment of a curate at Deadham, for the spiritual life of its
inhabitants must by no means suffer through its vicar's promotion. At the
moment of Sir Charles and Damaris' return the curate excitement was at
its height. It swept through the spinster-ranks of the congregation like
an epidemic. They thrilled with unacknowledgeable hopes. The Miss
Minetts, though mature, grew pink and quivered, confessing themselves not
averse to offering board and lodging to a suitable, a well-connected,
well-conducted paying guest. To outpourings on the enthralling subject of
the curate, Damaris found herself condemned to listen from every feminine
visitor in turn. It held the floor, to the exclusion of all other topics.
Her own long absence, long journeys, let alone the affairs of the world
at large, were of no moment to these very local souls. So our young lady
retired within herself, deploring the existence of curates in general,
and the projected, individual, Deadham curate in particular, with a
heartiness she was destined later to remember. Had it been
prophetic?--Not impossibly so, granted the somewhat strange prescience by
which she was, at times, possessed.

For the psychic quality that, from a child, now and again had manifested
itself in her--though happily unattended by morbid or hysteric
tendencies, thanks to her radiant health--grew with her growth. To her,
in certain moods and under certain conditions, the barrier between things
seen and unseen, material and transcendental, was pervious. It yielded
before the push of her apprehension, sense of what it guards, what it
withholds within an ace of breaking through.

Affairs of the heart would, so far, seem to have begun and ended with the
winter spent at St. Augustin. Now and again Damaris met an Englishman, or
foreigner, who stirred her slightly. But if one accident of travel
brought them together, another accident of travel speedily swept them
apart. The impression was fugitive, superficial, fading out and causing
but momentary regret. Colonel Carteret she only saw in London, during
those two brief visits to England. He had been captivating, treating her
with playful indulgence, teasing a little; but far away, somehow--so she
felt him--though infinitely kind. And the dear man with the blue
eyes--for she could use her old name for him again now, though she
couldn't quite tell why--looked older. The sentimental passage at St.
Augustin assumed improbability--a fact over which she should, in all
reason, have rejoiced, yet over which she, in point of fact when safe
from observation, just a little wept.

From Henrietta some few letters reached her. One of them contained the
news that Marshall Wace, surmounting his religious doubts and
scruples--by precisely what process remained undeclared--had at last
taken Holy Orders. Concerning this joyful consummation Henrietta waxed
positively unctuous. "He had gone through so much"--the old cry!--to
which now was added conviction that his own trials fitted him to minister
the more successfully to his brethren among the sorely tried.

"His preaching will, I feel certain, be quite extraordinarily original
and sympathetic--full of poetry. And I need hardly tell you what an
immense relief it is both to the General and to myself to feel he is
settled in life, and that his future is provided for--though not,
alas! in the way I fondly hoped, and which--for his happiness' sake
and my own--I should have chosen," she insidiously and even rather
cynically wrote.

But, if in respect of the affections our maiden, during these two years,
made no special progress and gained no further experimental knowledge of
the perilous workings of sex, her advance in other departments was ample.

For faith now called to her with no uncertain note. The great spiritual
forces laid hold of her intelligence and imagination, drawing, moulding,
enlightening her. In the library of a somewhat grim hotel at Avila, in
old Castile, she lighted upon an English translation of the life of St.
Theresa--that woman of countless practical activities, seer and sybil,
mystic and wit. The amazing biography set her within the magic circle of
Christian feminine beatitude; and opened before her gaze mighty
perspectives of spiritual increase, leading upward through unnumbered
ranks of prophets, martyrs, saints, angelic powers, to the feet of the
Virgin Mother, with the Divine Child on her arm.--He, this last, as
gateway, intermediary, between the human soul and the mystery of God
Almighty, by whom, and in whom, all things visible and invisible subsist.
For the first time some dim and halting perception, some faintest hint
and echo, reached Damaris of the awful majesty, the awful beauty of the
fount of Universal Being; and, caught with a great trembling, she
worshipped.

This culminating perception, in terms of time, amounted to no more than a
single flash, the fraction of an instant's contact. An hour or so later,
being very young and very human, the things of everyday resumed their
sway. A new dress engaged her fancy, a railway journey through--to
her--untrodden country excited her, a picturesque street scene held her
delighted interest. Nevertheless that had taken place within her--call it
conversion, evocation, the spiritual receiving of sight, as you
please--upon which, for those who have once experienced it, there is no
going back while life and reason last. Obscured, overlaid, buried beneath
the dust of the trivial and immediate, the mark of revelation upon the
forehead and the heart can never be obliterated quite. Its resurrection
is not only possible but certain, if not on the near side, then surely on
the farther side of death.

And not only did faith thus call her, at this period, but art, in its
many forms, called her likewise. The two, indeed, according to her
present understanding of them, moved--though at different levels--side by
side, singularly conjoined, art translating faith into terms of sound,
form and colour, faith consecrating and supplementing art. All of which,
as she pondered, appeared to her only fitting and reasonable--the object
of art being to capture beauty and touch reality, the substance of faith
being nothing less than beauty and reality absolute.

With Sir Charles sometimes, but more often with her aunt, Miss
Felicia--most enthusiastic, diligent and ingenuous of sightseers--she
visited buildings of historic interest, galleries of statuary and of
pictures. For here, too, in architecture, in marble god or hero, upon
painted panel or canvas, she caught, at moments, some flickering shadow
of the everlasting light, touched at moments both by its abiding terror
and the ecstasy of its everlasting youth. But this appreciation of the
height and grandeur of man's endeavour was new in her. To Nature she had
from childhood, been curiously near. She sought expression and
confirmation of it with silent ardour, her mind aflame with the joy of
recognition. And, as daily, hourly background to these her many
experiments and excursions, was the stable interest of her father's book.
For in the pages of that, too, she caught sight of beauty and reality of
no mean order, held nobly to ransom through the medium of words.

And while this high humour still possessed her, alive at every point,
her thoughts--often by day, still oftener in dreams or wakeful
intervals by night--rapt away beyond the stars, she was called upon, as
already noted, to pass abruptly from the dynamic to the static mode.
Called on to embrace domestic duties, and meet local social
obligations, including polite endurance of long-drawn disquisitions
regarding Canon Horniblow's impending curate. The drop proved
disconcerting, or would have eminently done so had not another
element--disquieting yet very dear--come into play.

Meantime the change from the stimulating continental atmosphere to the
particularly soft and humid, not to say stagnant, English one, acted as a
drop too. She drooped during the process of acclimatization. The fetid
sweet reek off the mud-flats of the Haven oppressed and strangely pursued
her, so that she asked for the horses to take her to the freshness of the
high lying inland moors, for a boat to carry her across the tide-river to
the less confined air and outlook of the Bar. Sight and sense of the
black wooden houses, upon the forbidden island, hanging like disreputable
boon companions about the grey stone-built inn, oppressed and strangely
pursued her too. She could see them from her bedroom between the red
trunks of the bird-haunted Scotch firs in the Wilderness. First thing, on
clear mornings, the sunlight glittered on the glass of their small
windows. Last thing, at night, the dim glow of lamp-light showed through
open doorway, or flimsy curtain from within. They stood alone, but
curiously united and self-sufficing, upon the treeless inhospitable piece
of land, ringed by the rivers, the great whispering reed-beds and the
tide. Their life was strangely apart from, defiant of, that of the
mainland and the village. It yielded obedience to traditions and customs
of an earlier, wilder age; and in so much was sinister, a little
frightening. Yet out of precisely this rather primitive and archaic
environment came Darcy Faircloth, her half-brother, the human being
closest to her by every tie of blood and sentiment in the world save
one--the father of them both. The situation was startling, alike in its
incongruities and in its claims.

During those two years of continental wandering--following upon her
meeting with him at Marseilles--the whole sweet and perplexing matter of
Faircloth had fallen more or less into line, taking on a measure of
simplicity and of ease. She thought of him with freedom, wrote to him
when he could advise her of his next port of call.--To him at Deadham, by
his request, he being very careful for her, she never wrote.--And
therefore, all the more perhaps, being here at Deadham, his home and all
the suggestive accessories of it so constantly before her eyes, did her
relation to him suffer a painful transformation. In remembrance she had
come to picture him on board his ship, governing his little floating
kingdom with no feeble or hesitating sway. But here every impeding fact
of class and education, every worldly obstacle to his and her
intercourse, above all the hidden scandal of his birth sprang into high
relief. All the dividing, alienating influences of his antecedents, his
social position and her own, swung in upon her with aggravated intensity
and pathos.

Away, she felt sweetly secure of him. Sure his and her bond remained
inviolate. Sure his affection never wavered or paled, but stood always at
the flood, a constant quantity upon which she could draw at need; or--to
change the metaphor--a steady foundation upon which her heart could
safely build. He would not, could not, ever fail her. This had been
sufficient to stay her longing for sight and speech of him, her longing
for his bodily presence. But now, in face of the very concrete facts of
the island, the inn, which bore his name and where his mother lived and
ruled, of the property he owned, the place and people to which--by half
at least of his nature and much more than half his memory--he belonged,
the comfort of this spiritual esoteric relation became but a meagre
evasive thing. It was too unsubstantial. Doubts and fears encircled it.
She grew heart-sick for some fresh testimony, some clear immediate
assurance that time and absence had not staled or undermined the romance.

If only she could speak of it! But that was forbidden by every obligation
of filial piety. Never had her relation to her father been more tender,
more happy; yet only through sudden pressure of outward circumstance
could she speak to him of Faircloth. To do so, without serious necessity,
would be, as she saw it, a wanton endangering of his peace.--If only the
dear man with the blue eyes hadn't removed himself! She had counted upon
his permanent support and counsel, on his smoothing away difficulties
from the path of her dealings with Faircloth; but he appeared to have
given her altogether the go-by, to have passed altogether out of her
orbit. And meditating, in the softly bright May weather beneath those
high forget-me-not blue skies, upon his defection, our maiden felt quite
desperately experienced and grown up, thrown back upon her own resources,
thrown in upon her rather solitary life.

Throughout the summer visitors came and went; but never those two desired
figures, Faircloth or Carteret. Dr. McCabe, vociferous in welcome,
affectionate, whimsical and choleric, trundled over from Stourmouth on a
bicycle of phenomenal height.

"On the horse without wheels I'm proficient enough," he declared. "Know
the anatomy of the darlin' beast as well as I do my own, inside and out.
But, be dashed, if the wheels without the horse aren't beyond me quite.
Lord love you, but the skittish animal's given me some ugly knocks, cast
me away, it has, in the wayside ditch, covering me soul with burning
shame, and me jacket with malodorous mud."

At intervals Aunt Harriet Cowden and Uncle Augustus drove over in state
the twelve miles from Paulton Lacy--the lady faithful to garments dyed,
according to young Tom Verity, in the horrid hues of violet ink. She
expressed her opinions with ruthless frankness, criticized, domineered,
put all and sundry in--what she deemed--"their place"; and departed for
the big house on the confines of Arnewood Forest again, to, had she but
known it, a chorus of sighings of relief from those she left behind her
and on whose emotional and intellectual tastes and toes she so
mercilessly trod.

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