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Deadham Hard by Lucas Malet

L >> Lucas Malet >> Deadham Hard




This hastily, as Damaris' eyes darkened with displeasure.

--"For the last year, ever since you have nominally been out of the
schoolroom, I have seen my influence over you lessen, and especially
since poor Mrs. Watson's death"--

"We will not talk about Nannie, please," Damaris said quietly.

"Yes, but--as I told your Aunt Felicia--since then I have tried more than
ever to win your entire confidence, to make up to you for the loss of
poor Watson and fill her place with you."

"No one else can ever fill the place of the person one has loved,"
Damaris returned indignantly. "It isn't possible. I should be ashamed to
let it be possible. Nannie was Nannie--she had cared for me all my life
and I had cared for her. She belongs to things about which you"--

And there the girl checked herself, aware of something almost ludicrously
pitiful in the smug tearful countenance and stumpy would-be fashionable
figure. Hit a man your own size, or bigger, by all means if you are game
to take the consequences. But to smite a creature conspicuously your
inferior in fortune--past, present, and prospective--is unchivalrous, not
to say downright mean-spirited. So Damaris, swiftly repentant, put her
arm round the heaving shoulders, bent her handsome young head and kissed
the uninvitingly dabby cheek--a caress surely counting to her for
righteousness.

"Don't find fault with me any more, Billy," she said. "Indeed I never
hurt you on purpose. But there are such loads of things to think
about, that I get absorbed in them and can't attend sometimes directly
on the minute."

"Absent-mindedness should be corrected rather than encouraged," Miss
Bilson announced, sententious even amid her tears.

"Oh! it amounts to more than absent-mindedness I'm afraid--a sort of
absent-every-thingedness when it overtakes me. For the whole of me seems
to go away and away, hand in hand and all together," Damaris said, her
eyes alight with questions and with dreams. "But don't let us discuss
that now," she added. "It would waste time, and it is you who must go
away and away, Billy, if you are not to put the poor Miss Minetts into a
frantic fuss by being late for tea. They will think some accident has
happened to you. Don't beep them in suspense, it is simply
barbarous.--Good-bye, and don't hurry back. I have heaps to amuse me.
I'll not expect you till dinner-time."

Thus did it come about that Damaris reposed in a deck chair, under the
shade of the great ilex trees, gazing idly at the webs of steamer smoke
hanging low in the southern sky, at the long yellow-grey ridge of the Bar
between river and sea, and at the cormorants posturing in the hot
afternoon sunshine upon the sand.

Truly she was free to send forth her soul upon whatever far fantastic
journey she pleased. But souls are perverse, not to be driven at will,
choosing their own times and seasons for travel. And hers, just now,
proved obstinately home-staying--had no wings wherewith to fly, but must
needs crawl a-fourfoot, around all manner of inglorious personal matters.
For that skirmish with her ex-governess, though she successfully bridled
her tongue and conquered by kindness rather than by smiting, had clouded
her inward serenity, not only by its inherent uselessness, but by
reminding her indirectly of an occurrence which it was her earnest desire
to forget.

Indirectly, mention of her beloved nurse, Sarah Watson--who journeying
back from a visit to her native Lancashire, just this time last year, had
met death swift and hideous in a railway collision--recalled to Damaris
the little scene, of a week ago, with Tom Verity when ho had asked her,
in the noonday sunshine out on the Bar, for some explanation of his
strange nocturnal experience. She went hot all over now, with exaggerated
childish shame, thinking of it. For had not she, Damaris Verity, though
nurtured in the creed that courage is the source and mother of all
virtues, shown the white feather, incontinently turned tail and run away?
Remembrance of that running scorched her, so that more than once,
awakening suddenly in the night, her fair young body was dyed rose-red
with the disgrace of it literally from head to heel. She was bitterly
humiliated by her own poltroonery, ingenuously doubtful as to whether she
could ever quite recover her self-respect; glad that every day put two
hundred miles and more of sea between her and Tom Verity, since he had
witnessed that contemptible fall from grace.

Nevertheless, after her first consternation--in which, to avoid further
speech with him she had sought refuge among the unsavoury seine nets in
the fore-part of Jennifer's ferry-boat--Tom Verity's probable opinion of
her undignified action troubled her far less than the cause of the said
action itself. For exactly what, after all, had so upset her, begetting
imperative necessity of escape? Not the apparent confirmation of that
ugly legend concerning ghostly ponies driven up across The Hard garden
from the shore. From childhood, owing both to temperament and local
influences, her apprehension of things unseen and super-normal had been
remarkably acute. From the dawn of conscious intelligence these had
formed an integral element in the atmosphere of her life; and that
without functional disturbance, moral or physical, of a neurotic sort.
She felt no morbid curiosity about such matters, did not care to dwell
upon or talk of them.--Few persons do who, being sane in mind and body,
are yet endowed with the rather questionable blessing of the Seer's sixth
sense.--For while, in never doubting their existence her reason
acquiesced, her heart turned away, oppressed and disquieted, as from
other mysterious actualities common enough to human observation, such as
illness, disease, deformity, old age, the pains of birth and of death.
Such matters might perplex and sadden, or arouse her indignant pity; but,
being strong with the confidence of untouched youth and innocence, they
were powerless, in and by themselves, to terrify her to the contemptible
extremity of headlong flight.

This she recognized, though less by reasoning than by instinct; and so
found herself compelled to search deeper for the cause of her recent
disgrace. Not that she willingly prosecuted that search; but that the
subject pursued her, simply refusing to leave her alone. Continually it
presented itself to her mind, and always with the same call for escape,
the same foreboding of some danger against which she must provide.
Always, too, it seemed to hinge upon Tom Verity's visit, and something in
her relation to the young man himself which she could not define. She
revolved the question now--Theresa being safely packed off to her
tea-party--in shade of the ilex trees, with solemn eyes and finely
serious face.

There was not anything unusual in receiving visitors at The Hard. Men
came often to see her father, and she took her share in entertaining all
such comers as a matter of course. Some she "didn't much care about,"
some she liked. But, with the exception of Colonel Carteret from
childhood her trusted friend and confidant, their coming and going was
just part of the accustomed routine, a survival from the life at the
Indian summer palace of long ago, and made no difference. Yet, though she
was still uncertain whether she did like Tom Verity or not, his coming
and going had indisputably made a difference. It marked, indeed, a new
departure in her attitude and thought. Her world, before his advent, was
other than that in which she now dwelt.

For one thing, Tom was much younger than the majority of her father's
guests--a man not made but still early in the making, the glamour of
promise rather than the stark light of finality upon him. This affected
her; for at eighteen, a career, be it never so distinguished, which has
reached its zenith, in other words reached the end of its tether, must
needs have a touch of melancholy about it. With the heat of going on in
your own veins, the sight of one who has no further go strikes chill to
the heart. And so, while uncertain whether she quite trusted him or not,
Damaris--until the unlucky running away episode--had taken increasing
pleasure in this new cousin's company. It both interested and diverted
her. She had not only felt ready to talk to him; but,--surprising
inclination!--once the ice of her natural reserve broken, to talk to him
about herself.

Half-shyly she dwelt upon his personal appearance.--A fine head and
clever face, the nose astute, slightly Jewish in type, so she thought.
His eyes were disappointing, too thickly brown in colour, too opaque.
They told you nothing, were indeed curiously meaningless; and, though
well set under an ample brow, were wanting in depth and softness owing to
scantiness of eyelash. But his chin satisfied her demands. It was square,
forcible, slightly cleft; and his mouth, below the fly-away reddish
moustache, was frankly delightful.--Damaris flushed, smiling to herself
now as she recalled his smile. Whereupon the humiliation of that thrice
wretched running away took a sharper edge. For she realized, poor child,
how much--notwithstanding her proud little snubbing of him--she coveted
his good opinion, wished him to admire and to like her; wanted, even
while she disapproved his self-complacency and slightly doubted his
truthfulness, to have him carry with him a happy impression of her--carry
it with him to that enchanted far Eastern land in which all the poetry of
her childhood had its root. For, if remembrance of her remained with him,
and that agreeably, she herself also found "Passage to India" in a sense.
And this idea, recondite though it was, touched and charmed her fancy--or
would have done so but for the recollection of her deplorable
flight.--Oh! what--what made her run away? From what had she thus run? If
she could only find out! And find, moreover, the cause sufficient to
palliate, to some extent at least, the woefulness of her cowardice.

But at this point her meditation suffered interruption. The three
cormorants, having finished their sun-bath, rose from the sand and
flapped off, flying low and sullenly in single file over the sea parallel
with the eastward-trending coast-line.

With the departure of the great birds her surroundings seemed to lose
their only element of active and conscious life. The brooding sunlit
evening became oppressive, so that in the space of a moment Damaris
passed from solitude, which is stimulating, to loneliness, which is only
sad. Meanwhile the shadow cast by the ilex trees had grown sensibly
longer, softer in outline, more transparent and finely intangible in
tone, and the reek of the mud-flats more potent, according to its habit
at sundown and low tide.

It quenched the garden scents with a fetid sweetness, symbolic perhaps of
the languorous sheltered character of the scene and of much which had or
might yet happen there--the life breath of the _genius loci_, an at once
seductive and, as Tom Verity had rightly divined, a doubtfully wholesome
spirit! Over Damaris it exercised an unwilling fascination, as of some
haunting refrain ending each verse of her personal experience. Even when,
as a little girl of eight, fresh from the gentle restraints and rare
religious and social amenities of an aristocratic convent school in
Paris, she had first encountered it, it struck her as strangely
familiar--a thing given back rather than newly discovered, making her
mind and innocent body alike eager with absorbed yet half-shuddering
recognition. A good ten years had elapsed since then, but her early
impression still persisted, producing in her a certain spiritual and
emotional unrest.

And at that, by natural transition, her thought turned from Tom Verity to
fix itself upon the one other possible witness of her ignominy--namely,
the young master mariner who, coming ashore in Proud, the
lobster-catcher's cranky boat, had walked up the shifting shingle to the
crown of the ridge and stood watching her, in silence, for a quite
measurable period, before passing on his way down to the ferry. For, from
her first sight of him, had he not seemed to evoke that same sense of
remembrance, to be, like the reek off the mud-flats, already well-known,
something given back to her rather than newly discovered? She was still
ignorant as to who ho was or where he came from, having been far too
engrossed by mortification to pay any attention to the conversation
between her cousin and Jennifer during their little voyage down the
tide-river, and having disdained to make subsequent enquiries.--She had a
rooted dislike to appear curious or ask questions.--But now, reviewing
the whole episode, it broke in on her that the necessity for escape and
foreboding of danger, which culminated in her flight, actually dated
from the advent of this stranger rather than from Tom's request for
enlightenment concerning unaccountable noises heard in the small hours.

Damaris slipped her feet down off the leg-rest, and sat upright, tense
with the effort to grasp and disentangle the bearings of this revelation.
Was her search ended? Had she indeed detected the cause of her
discomfiture; or only pushed her enquiry back a step further, thus
widening rather than limiting the field of speculation? For what
conceivable connection, as she reflected, could the old lobster-catcher's
passenger have with any matter even remotely affecting herself!

Then she started, suddenly sensible of a comfortable, though warmly
protesting, human voice and presence at her elbow.

"Yes, you may well look astonished, Miss Damaris. I know how late it is,
and have been going on like anything to Lizzie over her carelessness.
Mrs. Cooper's walked up the village with Laura about some extra meat
that's wanted, and when I came through for your tea if that girl hadn't
let the kitchen fire right out!--Amusing herself down in the stable-yard,
I expect, Mrs. Cooper being gone.--And the business I've had to get a
kettle to boil!"

Verging on forty, tall, dark, deep-bosomed and comely, a rich flush on
her cheeks under the clear brown skin thanks to a kitchen fire which
didn't burn and righteous anger which did, Mary Fisher, the upper
housemaid, set a tea-tray upon the garden table beside Damaris' chair.

"That's what comes of taking servants out of trades-peoples' houses," she
went on, as she marshalled silver tea-pot and cream-jug--embossed with
flamboyant many-armed Hindu deities--hot cakes, ginger snaps and
saffron-sprinkled buns. "You can't put any real dependence on them, doing
their work as suits themselves just anyhow and anywhen. Mrs. Cooper and I
knew how it would be well enough when Miss Bilson engaged Lizzie Trant
and Mr. Hordle said the same. But it wasn't one atom of use for us to
speak. The Miss Minetts recommended the girl--so there was the finish of
it. And that's at the bottom of your being kept waiting the best part of
a hour for your tea like this, Miss."

Notwithstanding the exactions of a somewhat tyrannous brain and her
conviction of high responsibilities, the child, which delights to be
petted, told stories and made much of, was strong in Damaris still. This
explosion of domestic wrath on her behalf proved eminently soothing. It
directed her brooding thought into nice, amusing, everyday little
channels; and assured her of protective solicitude, actively on the
watch, by which exaggerated shames and alarms were withered and
loneliness effectually dispersed. She felt smoothed, contented. Fell,
indeed, into something of the humour which climbs on to a friendly lap
and thrones it there blissfully careless of the thousand and one ills,
known and unknown, which infant flesh is heir to. She engaged the comely
comfortable woman to stay and minister further to her.

"Pour out my tea for me, Mary, please," she said, "if you're not busy.
But isn't this your afternoon off, by rights?"

And Mary, while serving her, acknowledged that not only was it "by
rights" her "afternoon off;" but that Mr. Patch, the coachman, had
volunteered to drive her into Marychurch to see her parents when he
exercised the carriage horses. But, while thanking him very kindly, she
had refused. Was it likely, she said, she would leave the house with Sir
Charles and Mr. Hordle away, and Miss Bilson taking herself off to visit
friends, too?

From which Damaris gathered that, in the opinion of the servants' hall,
Theresa's offence was rank, it stank to heaven. She therefore, being
covetous of continued contentment, turned the conversation to less
controversial subjects; and, after passing notice of the fair weather,
the brightness of the geraniums and kindred trivialities, successfully
incited Mary to talk of Brockhurst, Sir Richard Calmady's famous place in
the north of the county, where--prior to his retirement to his native
town of Marychurch, upon a generous pension--her father, Lomas Fisher,
had for many years occupied the post of second gardener. Here was
material for story-telling to the child Damaris' heart's content! For
Brockhurst is rich in strange records of wealth, calamity, heroism, and
sport, the inherent romance of which Mary's artless narrative was
calculated to enhance rather than dissipate.

So young mistress listened and maid recounted, until, the former
fortified by cakes and tea, the two sauntered, side by side--a tall
stalwart black figure, white capped and aproned and an equally tall
but slender pale pink one--down across the lawn to the battery where
the small obsolete cannon so boldly defied danger of piracy or
invasion by sea.

The sun, a crimson disc, enormous in the earth-mist, sank slowly, south
of west, behind the dark mass of Stone Horse Head. The upper branches of
the line of Scotch firs in the warren and, beyond them, the upper windows
of the cottages and Inn caught the fiery light. Presently a little wind,
thin, perceptibly chill, drew up the river with the turning of the tide.
It fluttered Mary Fisher's long white muslin apron strings and lifted her
cap, so that she raised her hand to keep it in place upon her smooth
black hair. The romance of Brockhurst failed upon her tongue. She grew
sharply practical.

"The dew's beginning to rise, Miss Damaris," she said, "and you've only
got your house shoes on. You ought to go indoors at once."

But--"Listen," Damaris replied, and lingered.

The whistling of a tune, shrill, but true and sweet, and a rattle of
loose shingle, while a young man climbed the seaward slope of the Bar.
The whistling ceased as he stopped, on the crest of the ridge, and stood,
bare-headed, contemplating the sunset. For a few seconds the fiery light
stained his hands, his throat, his hair, his handsome bearded face; then
swiftly faded, leaving him like a giant leaden image set up against a
vast pallor of sea and sky.

Mary Fisher choked down a hasty exclamation.

"Come, do come, Miss Damaris, before the grass gets too wet," she said
almost sharply. "It's going to be a drenching dew to-night."

"Yes--directly--in a minute--but, Mary, tell me who that is?"

The woman hesitated.

"Out on the Bar, do you mean? No one I am acquainted with, Miss."

"I did not intend to ask if he was a friend of yours," Damaris
returned, with a touch of grandeur, "but merely whether you could tell
me his name."

"Oh! it's Mrs. Faircloth's son I suppose--the person who keeps the Inn. I
heard he'd been home for a few days waiting for a ship"--and she turned
resolutely towards the house. "It's quite time that silver was taken
indoors and the library windows closed. But you must excuse me, Miss
Damaris, I can't have you stay out here in that thin gown in the damp.
You really must come with me, Miss."

And the child in Damaris obeyed. Dutifully it went, though the soul of
the eighteen-year-old Damaris was far away, started once more on an
anxious quest.

She heard the loose shingle shift and rattle under Faircloth's feet as he
swung down the near slope to the jetty. The sound pursued her, and again
she was overtaken--overwhelmed by foreboding and desire of flight.




CHAPTER II

WHICH CANTERS ROUND A PARISH PUMP


Not until the second bell was about to cease ringing did Theresa
Bilson--fussily consequential--reappear at The Hard.

During the absence of the master of the house she would have much
preferred high tea in the schoolroom, combined with a certain laxity as
to hours and to dress; but Damaris, in whom the sense of style was
innate, stood out for the regulation dignities of late dinner and evening
gowns. To-night, however, thanks to her own unpunctuality, Miss Bilson
found ample excuse for dispensing with ceremonial garments.

"No--no--we will not wait," she said, addressing Mary and her attendant
satellite, Laura, the under-housemaid, as--agreeably ignorant of the
sentiment of a servants' hall which thirsted for her blood--she passed
the two standing at attention by the open door of the dining-room. "I am
not going to change. I will leave my hat and things down here--Laura can
take them to my room later--and have dinner as I am."

During the course of that meal she explained how she had really quite
failed to observe the hour when she left the Grey House. Commander and
Mrs. Battye were at tea there; and the vicar--Dr. Horniblow--looked in
afterwards. There was quite a little meeting, in fact, to arrange the
details of the day after to-morrow's choir treat. A number of upper-class
parishioners, she found, were anxious to embrace this opportunity of
visiting Harchester, and inspecting the Cathedral and other sights of
that historic city, under learned escort. It promised to be a most
interesting and instructive expedition, involving moreover but moderate
cost.--And every one present--Theresa bridled over her salmon cutlet and
oyster sauce--everyone seemed so anxious for her assistance and advice.
The vicar deferred to her opinion in a quite pointed manner; and spoke,
which was so nice of him, of her known gift of organization. "So we claim
not only your sympathy, Miss Bilson, but your active co-operation," he
had said. "We feel The Hard should be officially represented."

Here the speaker became increasingly self-conscious and blushed.

"What could I do, therefore, but remain even at the risk of being a
trifle late for dinner?" she asked. "It would have been so extremely
uncivil to the Miss Minetts to break up the gathering by leaving before
full agreement as to the arrangements had been reached. I felt I must
regard it as a public duty, under the circumstances. I really owed it to
my position here, you know, Damaris, to stay to the last."

It may be observed, in passing, that Miss Bilson was fond of food and
made a good deal of noise in eating, particularly when, as on the present
occasion, she combined that operation with continuous speech. This may
account for Damaris bestowing greater attention on the manner than the
matter of her ex-governess' communications. She was sensible that the
latter showed to small advantage being rather foolishly excited and
elate, and felt vexed the maids should hear and see her behaving thus. It
could hardly fail to lower her in their estimation.

As to the impending parochial invasion of Harchester--during the earlier
stages of dinner Damaris hardly gave it a second thought, being still
under the empire of impressions very far removed from anything in the
nature of choir treats. She still beheld the fiery glare of an expiring
sunset, and against the ensuing pallor of sea and sky a leaden-hued
human, figure strangely, almost portentously evident. That it appeared
noble in pose and in outline, even beautiful, she could not deny. But
that somehow it frightened her, she could equally little deny. So it came
about that once again, as Mary and her satellite Laura silently waited
at table, and as Theresa very audibly gobbled food in and words out,
Damaris shrank within herself seeming to hear a shrill sweet whistling
and the shatter of loose pebbles and shifting shingle under Faircloth's
pursuing feet.

The young man's name aroused her interest, not to say her curiosity, the
more deeply because of its association, with a locality exploration of
which had always been denied her--a Naboth's vineyard of the imagination,
near at hand, daily in sight, yet personal acquaintance with which she
failed to possess even yet. The idea of an island, especially a quite
little island, a miniature and separate world, shut off all by itself, is
dreadfully enticing to the infant mind--at once a geographical entity and
a cunning sort of toy. And Faircloth's Inn, with the tarred wooden houses
adjacent, was situated upon what, to all intents and purposes, might pass
as an island since accessible only by boat or by an ancient paved
causeway daily submerged at high tide.

Skirting the further edge of the warren, a wide rutted side lane leads
down to the landward end of the said causeway from the village green,
just opposite Deadham post office and Mrs. Doubleday's general shop.--A
neglected somewhat desolate strip of road this, between broken earthbanks
topped by ragged firs, yet very paintable and dear to the sketch-book of
the amateur. In summer overgrown with grass and rushes, bordered by
cow-parsley, meadowsweet, pink codlings-and-cream, and purple flowered
peppermint, in winter a marsh of sodden brown and vivid green; but at all
seasons a telling perspective, closed by the lonely black and grey island
hamlet set in the gleaming tide.