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Deadham Hard by Lucas Malet

L >> Lucas Malet >> Deadham Hard




For Lesbia Faircloth, giving her barman and two women servants a holiday,
closed the inn at noon. Alone within the empty house, she locked the
outer doors. Drew the blinds, reducing the interior to uniform,
shadow-peopled obscurity, with the exception of her own bed-chamber.
There she left one small square window--set deep in the stone work of the
wall--open and uncurtained.

It faced the causeway and perspective of lane skirting the warren and
leading to the high road and village. Looking out thence, in winter when
the trees were bare, she could see Deadham church, crowning its
monticule, part of the sloping graveyard and, below these in the middle
distance, the roofs and gables of the village street.

To-day the view was obliterated. For here, at the river level, mist and
drizzle took the form of fog. Opaque, chill and dank, it drifted in
continuous, just perceptible, undulations past and in at the open
casement. Soon the air of the room grew thick and whitish, the dark oak
furniture and the floor boards furred with moisture. Yet, her methodical
closure of the house complete, Lesbia Faircloth elected to sit in full
inward sweep of it, drawing a straight-backed chair, mounted on roughly
carpentered rockers, close to the window.

A handsome woman still, though in her late fifties, erect and of
commanding presence, her figure well-proportioned if somewhat massive.
Her dark hair showed no grey. Her rather brown skin was clear, smooth and
soft in texture. Her eyes clear, too, watchful and reticent; on
occasion--such as the driving of a business bargain say, or of a drunken
client--hard as flint. Her mouth, a wholesome red, inclined to fullness;
but had been governed to straightness of line--will dominant, not only in
her every movement, but in repose as she now sat, the chair rockers at a
backward tilt, her capable and well-shaped hands folded on her black
apron in the hollow of her lap.

Putting aside all work for once, and permitting herself a space of
undisturbed leisure, she proceeded to cast up her account with love and
life in as clear-headed, accurate a fashion as she would have cast up the
columns of cash-book or ledger--and found the balance on the credit side.
So finding it, she turned her head and looked across the room at the wide
half-tester wooden bed, set against the inner wall--the white crochet
counterpane of which, an affair of intricate fancy patterns and
innumerable stitches, loomed up somewhat ghostly and pallid through the
gloom. A flicker of retrospective victory passed across her face,
attesting old scores as paid. For there, through sleepless nights,
nursing the ardours and disgust of her young womanhood, she lay barren
beside her apple-cheeked, piping-voiced spouse, his wife in name only.
There later, times having, as by miracle, changed for her, she gave
birth to her son.

If somewhat pre-christian in instinct and in nature, the child of a more
ancient and a simpler world, she was in no sort slow of intelligence or
wanton. What had been, sufficed her. She cried out neither for further
indulgence of passion, nor against barriers imposed by circumstance and
class. That which she had done, she had done open-eyed, counting and
accepting the cost. Since then wooers were not lacking; but she turned a
deaf ear to all and each. A frank materialist in some ways, she proved an
idealist in this. No subsequent love passage could rival, in wonder or
beauty, that first one; since, compared with Charles Verity, the men who
subsequently aspired to her favours--whether in wedlock or out--were, to
her taste, at best dull, loutish fellows, at worst no more than human
jackasses or human swine.

And, through it all, she possessed the boy on whom to spend her heart, in
whose interests to employ her foresight and singular capacity of
money-making. For love's sake therefore, and for his sake also, she had
lived without reproach, a woman chary even of friendship, chary, too, of
laughter, chary above all of purposeless gaddings and of gossip.
Business, and the boy's sea-going or returning, might take her as far as
Southampton, Plymouth, Cardiff, more rarely London or some northern port.
But Deadham village rarely beheld her, and never, it is to be feared, did
the inside of Deadham church.

Yet Deadham church bell plaintively, insistently tolling, the sound
reaching her muted by the thickness of the fog, kept her attention on the
stretch for the ensuing hour. Startling as it was poignant, Charles
Verity's demand to see her, six days ago, brought the story of her love
to full circle. Their meeting had been of the briefest, for he was
exhausted by pain. But that he had sent, and she had gone, was unlocked
for largesse on the part of fortune, sufficient to give her deep-seated
and abiding sense of healing and of gain. And this stayed by her now,
rather than any active call for mourning.

She inhaled the dank chillness of the fog gratefully. It suited the
occasion better far than sunshine and bright skies. For winter,
darkness, sullen flowing waters and desolate crying winds furnished the
accompaniment of those earlier meetings. Hearing the tolling bell she
strove to relive them, and found she did so with singularly mounting
wealth and precision of detail. Not only vision but sense pushed
backward and inward, revitalizing what had been; until she ached with
suspense and yearning, shrewdly evaded dangers, surmounted obstructions
by action at once bold and wary and tasted the transfiguring rapture of
the end attained.

In the soberness of her middle years, occupied as she was with the rough,
exacting business of the inn, and with the management of accumulating
landed and other property--anxiety born of her son's perilous calling
never absent from her thought--Lesbia Faircloth inclined to live
exclusively in the present. Hence the colours of her solitary passion had
somewhat faded, becoming clouded and dim. Recent events--led by the ugly
publicity of Reginald Sawyer's sermon--served to revive those colours.
To-day they glowed rich and splendid, a robing of sombre glory to her
inward and backward searching sight.

The bell tolled quicker, announcing the immediate approach of the dead.
Lesbia listened, her head raised, her face, turned to open window, felt
over by the clammy, impalpable fingers of the fog.

Now they bore the coffin up the churchyard path, as she timed it. She
wondered who the bearers might be, and whether they carried it shoulder
high? The path was steep; and Charles Verity, though spare and lean,
broad of chest and notably tall. Bone tells. They would feel the weight,
would breathe hard, stagger a little even and sweat.

And with this visualizing of grim particulars, love, bodily love and
desire of that which rested stark and for ever cold within the narrow
darkness of the coffin--shut away from all comfort of human contact and
the dear joys of a woman's embrace--rushed on her like a storm, buffeted
and shook her, so that she looked to right and to left as asking help,
while her hands worked one upon the other in the hollow of her lap.

Nor did Darcy Faircloth figure in Deadham's record funeral gathering.
Upon the day preceding it, having watched by Charles Verity's corpse
during the previous night, he judged it well to take his new command--a
fine, five-thousand-ton steamer, carrying limited number of passengers
as well as cargo, and trading from Tilbury to the far East and to Japan,
via the Cape.

In his withdrawal, at this particular date, Miss Felicia hailed a counsel
of perfection which commanded, and continued to command, alike her
enthusiastic approval and unfeigned regret. For that he should so
seasonably efface himself, argued--in her opinion--so delightful a
nature, such nice thought for others, such chivalrous instincts and
excellent good taste!--All the more lamentable, then, effacement should
be, from social, moral or other seasons, required.--Yet for the family to
gain knowledge of certain facts without due preparation--how utterly
disastrous! Think of her half-sister, Harriet Cowden, for instance, with
a full-grown and, alas! wrong-way-about, step-nephew bounced on her out
of a clear sky, and on such an occasion too.--The bare notion of what
that formidable lady, not only might, but quite certainly would look and
say turned Miss Felicia positively faint.--No--no, clearly it had to
be--it had to be--or rather--she became incoherent--had not to be, if
only for dearest Charles's sake. Yet what a ten thousand pities; for
notwithstanding the plebeian origin on the mother's side, didn't
Faircloth--these reflections came later--really surpass every male Verity
present, young Tom included, though she confessed to a very soft spot in
her heart for young Tom?--Surpass them, just as her brother Charles had
always surpassed them in good looks and charm as in inches, above all in
his air of singular good-breeding? And how extraordinarily he had
transmitted this last to Faircloth, notwithstanding the--well, the
drawback, the obstacle to--Miss Felicia did not finish the sentence,
though in sentiment becoming sweetly abandoned. For how she would have
revelled, other things being equal--which they so deplorably weren't--in
shaking this singularly attractive nephew in the family's collective
face, just to show them what dearest Charles--who they never had quite
understood or appreciated--could do in the matter of sons, when he once
set about it, even against admittedly heavy odds!

As it was, she had to pacify her gentle extravagance by subjecting the
said nephew's hand to a long tremulous pressure at parting.--He, worn,
blanched, a little strange from the night's lonely and very searching
vigil; she patchily pink as to complexion, fluttered, her candid eyes
red-lidded.--Pacify herself by assuring him she could never express how
deeply she had felt his unselfish devotion during this time of
trouble--felt his--his perfect attitude towards her dearest brother--his
father--or the consideration he had shown towards Damaris and herself.

"You can count on my unswerving affection, my dear Darcy," she had
said. Adding with, to him, very touching humility--"And any affection
you have to give me in return I shall cherish most gratefully, be very
sure of that."

All which, as shall presently be shown, brings our narrative, though by
devious courses, back to Damaris sweeping the dog-cart to the left across
the bridge spanning the Arne, and on up the long winding ascent, from the
woods and rich meadows in the valley to the wide prospects and keener air
of the moorland above.

Until now, as already chronicled, she had remained in house or garden,
prey to an apathy which, while not amounting to definite ill-health,
refused interest and exertion. She could not shake it off. To her all
things were empty, blank, immensely purposeless. Religion failed to touch
her state--religion, that is, in the only form accessible. The interior
of some frowning Gothic church of old Castile, or, from another angle, of
some mellow Latin basilica, might have found the required mystic word to
say to her. But Protestantism, even in its mild Anglican form, shuts the
door on its dead children with a heavy hand.--And she suffered this
religious coldness, although any idea that death of the body implies
extinction of the spirit, extinction of personality, never occurred to
her. Damaris' sense of the unseen was too ingrained, her commerce with it
too actual for that. No--the spirit lived on. He, her most beloved, lived
on, himself, his very self; but far away from her. In just this consisted
the emptiness, the unspeakable and blank bitterness--he was somewhere and
she could not reach him. The dreadful going away of his spirit, against
which she had fought during the thirty-six hours of his illness, had
reached its ordained consummation--that was all.

The body which had contained and by that beloved spirit been so nobly
animated, in its present awful peace, its blind dumb majesty, meant
scarcely more to her than some alabaster or waxen effigy of her dead. It
was so like, yet so terrifyingly unlike Charles Verity in life!--She had
visited it morning and evening, since to leave it in solitude appeared
wanting in reverence. Throughout each night she thankfully knew that
either Carteret, McCabe or Faircloth watched by it. Yet to her it hardly
retained as much of her father's natural presence as the clothes he had
worn, the books and papers littering his writing-table, the chair he
preferred to sit in, his guns and swords upon the wall, or the collection
of fishing-rods, walking-sticks and his spud stacked in a corner.

After the strain and publicity of the funeral her apathy deepened,
perplexing and saddening Carteret and bringing Miss Felicia near to
veritable wailing. For while thanking them both she, in fact, put them
both aside. This in no sour or irritable humour; but with a listlessness
and apartness hopeless to overcome. She prayed them to give her time.
Soon she would begin again; but not just yet. She "couldn't begin again
to order--couldn't make herself begin again. They must not trouble, only
be patient with her, please, a little longer--she wasn't, indeed she
wasn't, pretending"--a statement which, in its simplicity, cut Carteret
to the quick--for "she meant to begin again directly she could."

To-day the weather took an encouraging turn for the better. Following
the spell of fog and wet a northerly wind at last arose. It swept the sky
clear of clouds, the land of melancholy vapours, begetting a brilliance
of atmosphere which wooed our maiden to come forth and once more affront
the open. She therefore ordered the dog-cart at two o'clock. Would
herself drive; and, "if Aunt Felicia didn't mind and think her
unsociable, would take Patch for sole company, because then"--renewed
apologies--"she needn't talk and she felt disinclined to do so."

During the first half mile or so, as must be confessed, each prick of
the black horse's ears and change in his pace sent a quake through her,
as did the sight of every vehicle upon the road she passed or met. Her
nerve was nowhere, her self-confidence in tatters. But, since this
parlous state was, in the main, physical, air and movement, along with
the direct call on her attention, steadied the one and knit up the
ravelled edges of the other. By the time the plateau was reached and the
hill lay behind her, she could afford to walk the horse, tentatively
invite her soul, and attempt to hold communion with Nature. Sorrow--as
well as the Napoleonic Patch--still sat very squarely beside her; but
the nightmare of mortality, with consequent blankness and emptiness, was
no longer omnipresent. Interest again stirred in her, the healthy
instinct of going on.

Except in the foreground, where foxy browns of withered bracken and
pink-shot browns of withered heather gave richness of tone, the colouring
of the great view was somewhat cold. It dealt in thin, uncertain green,
the buff of stubble, in sharp slate-like blues blended in places with
indigo, the black purple of hawthorn hedges and grey-brown filigree of
leafless trees.--This did her good, she asking to be strengthened and
stimulated rather than merely soothed. To feel the harsh, untainted wind
break against her, hear it shrill through the dry, shivering grasses of
the roadside and sturdy spires of heath, to see it toss the dark crests
and tufted branches of the outstanding firs at the edge of the
plantation, brought up her morale. Brought her resignation, moreover--not
of the self-indulgent order, of bowed head and languidly folded hands;
but of the sort which acknowledges loss and sorrow as common to the sum
of human experience, places it in its just relation to the rest, and,
though more heavily weighted than before, takes up the onward march,
sobered perhaps yet undismayed.

Sins of omission began to prick her. The domestic establishment ran on
wheels, even during the recent stress and agitation, though she had
ceased to exercise control over it. Now it must be reorganized--and
probably on a less liberal footing.--But these were minor questions,
comparatively simple to cope with. Her life had been full, it must find
fresh purpose, fresh interest and occupation, in a word, be refilled.

Literature allured her. She dreamed of wonderful tellings, dreamed of the
engrossing joys of the written word. But in what form--poetry, essay,
history, novel?--The extreme limitation of her own knowledge, or rather
the immensity of her own ignorance, confronted her. And that partly
through her own fault, for she had been exclusive, fastidious, disposed
to ignore both truths and people who offended her taste or failed to
strike her fancy. Hitherto she had been led by fancy and feeling rather
than by reasoned principle. She must at once simplify, broaden and
democratize her outlook. Must force herself to remember that respect is,
in some sort, due to everything--however unbeautiful, however even vile
or repugnant--which is a constant quantity in human affairs and human
character, due to everything in the realm of Nature also, however
repellent, if it _is_ really so, actually exists.

In this connection the mysterious and haunting question of sex obtruded
itself. And, along with it, the thought of two eminently diverse persons,
namely Lesbia Faircloth and the dear, the more than ever dear, man with
the blue eyes. That, in his agony, her father should have desired the
visit of the former, once his mistress, had been very bitter to bear,
provoking in Damaris a profound though silent jealousy. This had even
come in some degree between her and Faircloth. For, in proportion as
that visit more effectually united father and son, it abolished her
position as intermediary between the two.

Recalling the incident jealousy moved her now, so that she gathered up
the reins hastily and touched the horse with the whip. It sprang
forward, danced and behaved, before settling down to the swinging trot
which, in so handsome a fashion, ate up the blond road crossing the
brown expanse of moor.

Damaris was surprised and distressed by the vehemence of her own emotion.
That her jealousy was retrospective, and belonged to a past now over and
done with, she admitted. Yet, thinking of her father's demand to see
Lesbia, how amazingly deep it went, how profound, and lasting is the
empire of "feeling in _that_ way"--so she put it, falling back on her
phrase of nearly three years ago, first coined at St. Augustin.

And this was where Carteret came in.--For he alone, of all men, had made
her, Damaris, ever consciously "feel in _that_ way."--A fact of immense
significance surely, could she but grasp the full, the inner meaning of
it--and one which entered vitally into the matter of "beginning again."
Therefore, so she argued, the proposed simplifying, broadening,
democratizing of her outlook must cover--amongst how much else!--the
whole astonishing business of "feeling in _that_ way."

She shrank from the conclusion as unwelcome. The question of sex was
still distasteful to her. But she bade herself, sternly, not to shrink.
For without some reasoned comprehension of it--as now dawned on her--the
ways of human beings, of animals, of plants and, so some say, even of
minerals, are unintelligible, arbitrary, and nonsensical. It is the push
of life itself, essential, fundamental, which makes us "feel in _that_
way"--the push of spirit yearning to be clothed upon with flesh, made
visible and given its chance to enter the earthly arena, to play an
individual part in the beautiful, terrible earthly scene. Therefore she
must neglect it, reject it no longer. It had to be met and understood, if
she would graduate in the school of reality; and in what other possible
school is it worth while to graduate?

Reaching which climax in her argument, the selfishness of her recent
behaviour became humiliatingly patent to her. From the whole household,
but especially from Carteret and Aunt Felicia, she had taken all and
given nothing in return. She had added to their grief, their anxieties,
by her silence, her apathy, her whimsies.

"Patch," she asked suddenly, "which is the shortest way home, without
going through Stourmouth and Marychurch? "--And, under his instructions,
turned the dog-cart down a grassy side-track, heading south-east--her back
now to the wind and inland country, her face to the larger horizon, the
larger if more hazardous freedom of the sea.

Conversation, started thus by her enquiry, flourished in friendly,
desultory fashion until, about three-quarters of an hour later, the front
gates of The Hard came in sight. By then afternoon merged itself in early
evening. Lights twinkled in the windows of the black cottages, upon the
Island, and in those of Faircloth's inn. The sky flamed orange and
crimson behind the sand-hills and Stone Horse Head. The air carried the
tang of coming frost. Upon the hard gravel of the drive, the wheels of
the dog-cart grated and the horse's hoofs rang loud.

Another Damaris came home to the Damaris who had set forth--a Damaris
rested, refreshed, invigorated, no longer a passive but an active agent.
Nevertheless, our poor maiden suffered some reaction on re-entering the
house. For, so entering, her loss again confronted her as an actual
entity. It sat throned in the lamp-lit hall. It demanded payment of
tribute before permitting her to pass. Its attitude amounted, in her too
fertile imagination, to a menace. Here, within the walls which had
witnessed not only her own major acquaintance with sorrow, but so many
events and episodes of strange and, sometimes, cruel import--super-normal
manifestations, too, of which last she feared to think--she grew undone
and weak, disposed to let tears flow, and yield once more to depression
and apathy. The house was stronger than she. But--but--only stronger,
surely, if she consented to turn craven and give way to it?--Whereupon
she consciously, of set purpose, defied the house, denied its right to
browbeat thus and enslave her. For had not she this afternoon, up on the
moorland, found a finer manner of mourning than it imposed, a manner at
once more noble and so more consonant with the temper and achievements of
her beloved dead? She believed that she had.

On the hall table lay a little flight of visiting cards. Her mind
occupied in silent battle with the house, Damaris glanced at them
absently and would have passed on. But something in the half-deciphered
printed names caught her attention. She bent lower, doubting if she could
have read aright.

"Brig.-General and Mrs. Frayling."--Two smaller cards, also bearing the
General's name, ranged with two others bearing that of "The Rev. Marshall
Wace." A written inscription, in the corner of each, notified a leading
hotel in Stourmouth as the habitat of their respective owners.

This little discovery affected Damaris to a singular extent. She had
small enough wish for Henrietta Frayling's society at this juncture;
still less for that of her attendant singer-reciter-parson. Yet their
names, and the train of recollections evoked by these, made for the
normal, the average, and, in so far, had on her a wholesome effect. For
Henrietta, of once adored and now somewhat tarnished memory--soulless,
finished, and exquisitely artificial to her finger-tips, beguiling others
yet never herself beguiled beyond the limits of a flawless
respectability--was wonderfully at odds with high tragedies of
dissolution. How had the house received such a guest? How put up with her
intrusion? But wasn't the house, perhaps, itself at a disadvantage, its
sting drawn in presence of such invincible materialism? For how impress a
creature at once so light and so pachydermatous? The position lent itself
to rather mordant comedy.

In this sense, though not precisely in these phrases, did Damaris
apprehend matters as, still holding Henrietta Frayling's visiting card
in her hand, she crossed the hall and went into the drawing-room.

There, from upon the sofa behind the tea-table, through the warm soft
radiance of shaded lamps and glowing fire, Felicia Verity uplifted her
voice in somewhat agitated greeting. She made no preliminary affectionate
enquiries--such as might have been expected--regarding her niece's outing
or general well-being, but darted, not to say exploded, into the
declaration:

"Darling, I am so exceedingly glad you weren't at home!--Mrs.
Frayling's card?"

This, as the girl sat down on the sofa beside her.

"Then you know who's been here. I didn't intend to see anyone--unless
poor little Theresa--But no, truly no one. Both Hordle and Mary were off
duty--I ought not to have let them be away at the same time, perhaps, but
I did feel they both needed a holiday, don't you know.--And either they
had forgotten to give Laura my orders, or she lost her head, or was
talked over. I daresay Mrs. Frayling insisted."

"Henrietta is not easily turned from her purpose," Damaris said.

"Exactly.--A very few minutes' conversation with her convinced me of
that. And so I felt it would be unfair to blame Laura too severely. I
should suppose Mrs. Frayling excessively clever in getting her own way.
Poor Laura--even if she did know my orders, she hadn't a chance."