Nance and Linda were not long in growing accustomed to their new mode of life. Nance, after her London experiences, found Miss Pontifex’ little work-room, looking out on a pleasant garden, a place of refuge rather than of irksome labour. The young girls under her charge were good-tempered and docile; and Miss Pontifex herself—an excitable little woman with extravagantly genteel manners, and a large Wedgewood brooch under her chin—seemed to think that the girl’s presence in the establishment would redound immensely to its reputation and distinction.

“I’m a conservative born and bred,” she remarked to Nance, “and I can tell a lady out of a thousand. I won’t say what I might say about the people here. But we know—we know what we think.”

Nance’s intimate knowledge of the more recondite aspects of the trade took an immense load off the little dressmaker’s mind. She had more time to devote to her garden, which was her deepest passion, and it filled her with pride to be able to say to her friends, “Miss Herrick from Dyke House works with me now. Her father was a Captain in the Royal Navy.”

The month of July went by without any further agitating incidents. As far as Nance knew, Brand left Linda in peace, and the young girl, though looking weary and spiritless, seemed to be reconciling herself fairly well to the loss of him and to be deriving definite distraction and satisfaction from her progress in organ-playing. Day by day in the early afternoon, she would cross the bridge, under all changes of the weather, and make her way to the church. Her mornings were spent in household duties, so that her sister might be free to give her whole time to the work in the shop, and in the evenings, when it was pleasant to be out of doors, they both helped Miss Pontifex watering her phloxes and delphiniums.

Nance herself—as July drew to its close and the wheat fields turned yellow—was at once happier and less happy in her relations with Sorio. Her happiness came from the fact that he treated her now more gently and considerately than he had ever done before; her unhappiness from the fact that he had grown more reserved and a queer sort of nervous depression seemed hanging over him. She knew he still saw Philippa, but what the relations between the two were, or how far any lasting friendship had arisen between them, it was impossible to discover. They certainly never met now, under conditions open to the intrusion of Rodmoor scandal.

Nance went more than once, before July was over, to see Rachel Doorm, and the days when these visits occurred were the darkest and saddest of all she passed through during that time. The mistress of Dyke House seemed to be rapidly degenerating. Nance was horrified to find how inert and indifferent to everything she had come to be. The interior of the house was now as dusty and untidy as the garden was desolate, and judging from her manner on the last visit she paid, the girl began to fear she had found the same solace in her loneliness as that which consoled her father.

Nance made one desperate attempt to improve matters. Without saying anything to Miss Doorm, she carried with her to the house one of Mrs. Raps’ own buxom daughters, who was quite prepared, for an infinitesimal compensation, to go every day to help her. But this arrangement collapsed hopelessly. On the third day after her first appearance, the young woman returned to her home, and with indignant tears declared she had been “thrown out of the nasty place.”

One evening at the end of the month, just as the sisters were preparing to go out for a stroll together, their landlady, with much effusion and agitation, ushered in Mrs. Renshaw. Tired with walking, and looking thinner and whiter than usual, she seemed extremely glad to sit down on their little sofa and sip the raspberry vinegar which Nance hastened to prepare. She ate some biscuits, too, as if she were faint for want of food, but all the time she ate there was in her air an apologetic, deprecatory manner, as though eating had been a gross vice or as though never in her life before had she eaten in public. She kept imploring Nance to share the refreshment, and it was not until the girl made at least a pretence of doing so that she seemed to recover her peace of mind.

Her great, hollow, brown eyes kept surveying the little apartment with nervous admiration. “I like it here,” she remarked at last. “I like little rooms much better than large ones.” She picked up from the table a well-worn copy of Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury” and Nance had never seen her face light up so suddenly as when, turning the pages at random, she chanced upon Keats’ “Ode to Autumn.” “I know that by heart,” she said, “every word of it. I used to teach it to Philippa. You’ve no idea how nicely she used to say it. But she doesn’t care for poetry any more. She reads more learned books, more clever books now. She’s got beyond me. Both my children have got beyond me.” She sighed heavily and Nance, with a sense of horrible pity, seemed to visualize her—happy in little rooms and with little anthologies of old-world verse—condemned to the devastating isolation of Oakguard.

“I see you’ve got ‘The Bride of Lammermoor’ up there,” she remarked presently, and rising impetuously from her seat on the sofa, she took the book in her hands. Nance never forgot the way she touched it, or the infinite softness that came into her eyes as she murmured, “Poor Lucy! Poor Lucy!” and began turning the pages.

Suddenly another book caught her attention and she took down “Humphrey Clinker” from the shelf. “Oh!” she cried, a faint flush coming into her sunken cheeks, “I haven’t seen that book for years and years. I used to read it before I was married. I think Smollett was a very great writer, don’t you? But I suppose young people nowadays find him too simple for their taste. That poor dear Mr. Bramble! And all that part about Tabitha, too! I seem to remember it all. I believe Dickens used to like Smollett. At least, I think I read somewhere that he did. I expect he liked that wonderful mixture of humour and pathos, though of course, when it comes to that, I suppose none of them can equal Dickens himself.”

As Mrs. Renshaw uttered these words and caressed the tattered volume she held as if it had been made of pure gold, her face became irradiated with a look of such innocent and guileless spirituality, that Nance, in a hurried act of mental contrition, wiped out of her memory every moment when she had not loved her. “What she must suffer!” the girl said to herself as she watched her. “What she must have suffered—with those people in that great house.”

Mrs. Renshaw sighed as she replaced the book in the shelf. “Writers seem to have got so clever in these last years,” she said plaintively. “They use so many long words. I wonder where they get them from—out of dictionaries, do you think?—and they hurt me, they hurt me, by the way they speak of our beloved religion. They can’t all of them be great philosophers like Spinoza and Schopenhauer, can they? They can’t all of them be going to give the world new and comforting thoughts? I don’t like their sharp, snappy, sarcastic tone. And oh, Nance dear!”—she returned to her seat on the sofa—“I can’t bear their slang! Why is it that they feel they must use so much slang, do you think? I suppose they want to make their books seem real, but I don’t hear real people talking like that. But perhaps it comes from America. American writers seem extraordinarily clever, and American dictionaries—for Dr. Raughty showed me one—seem much bigger than ours.”

She was silent for a while and then, looking gently at Linda, “I think it’s wonderful, dear, how well you play now. I thought last Sunday evening you played the hymns better than I’ve ever heard them! But they were beautiful hymns, weren’t they? That last one was my favourite of all.”

Once more she was silent, and Nance seemed to catch her lips moving, as she fixed her great sorrowful eyes upon the book-shelf, and began slowly pulling on her gloves.

“I must be going now,” she said, with a little sigh. “I thank you for the raspberry vinegar and the biscuits. I think I was tired. I didn’t sleep very well last night. Good-bye, dears. No, don’t, please, come down. I can let myself out. It’s a lovely evening, isn’t it, and the poppies in the cornfields are quite red now. I can see a big patch of them from our terrace, just across the river. Poppies always make me think of the days when I was a young girl. We used to think a lot of them then. We used to make fairies out of them.”

Nance insisted on seeing her into the street. When she entered the room again, she was not altogether surprised to find Linda convulsed with sobs. “I can’t—I can’t help it,” gasped the young girl. “She’s too pitiful. She’s too sad. You feel you want to hug her and hug her, but you’re afraid even to touch her hand!” She made an effort to recover herself, and then, with the tears still on her cheeks, “Nance dear,” she said solemnly, “I don’t believe she’ll live to the end of this year. I believe, one of these days, when the Autumn comes, we shall hear she’s been found dead in her bed. Nance, listen!”—and the young girl’s voice became awe-struck and very solemn—“won’t it be dreadful for those two, over there, when they find her like that, and feel how little they’ve done to make her happy? Can’t you imagine it, Nance? The wind wailing and wailing round that house, and she lying there all white and dreadful—and Philippa with a candle standing over her—”

“Why do you say ‘with a candle’?” said Nance brusquely. “You’re talking wildly and exaggerating everything. If they found her in the morning, like that, Philippa wouldn’t come with a candle.”

Linda stared dreamily out of the window. “No, I suppose not,” she said, “and yet I can’t see it without Philippa holding a candle. And there’s something else I see, too,” she added in a lower voice.

“I don’t want—” Nance began and then, more gently, “What else, you silly child?”

“Philippa’s red lips,” she murmured softly, “red as if she’d put rouge on them. Do you think she ever does put rouge on them? That’s, I suppose, what made me think of the candle. I seemed to see it flickering against her mouth. Oh, I’m silly—I’m silly, I know, but I couldn’t help seeing it like that—her lips, I mean.”

“You’re morbid to-day, Linda,” said Nance abruptly. “Well? Shall we go to the garden? I feel as though carrying watering-pots and doing weeding will be good for both of us.”

While this conversation was going on between the sisters in their High Street lodging, Sorio and Baltazar were seated together on a bench by the harbour’s side. The tide was flowing in and cool sea-breaths, mixed with the odour of tar and paint and fisherman’s tobacco, floated in upon them as they talked.

“It’s absurd to have any secrets between you and me,” Sorio was saying, his face reflecting the light of the sunset as it poured down the river’s surface to where they sat. “When I become quite impossible to you as a companion, I suppose you’ll tell me so and turn me out. But until then I’m going to assume that I interest you and don’t bore you.”

“It isn’t a question of boring any one,” replied the other. “You annoyed me just now because I thought you were making no effort to control yourself. You seemed trying to rake up every repulsive sensation you’ve ever had and thrust it down my throat. Bored? Certainly I wasn’t bored! On the contrary, I was much more what you might call bitten. You go so far, my dear, you go so far!”

“I don’t call that going far at all,” said Sorio sulkily. “What’s the use of living together if we can’t talk of everything? Besides, you didn’t let me finish. What I wanted to say was that for some reason or other, I’ve lately got to a point when every one I meet—every mortal person, and especially every stranger—strikes me as odious and disgusting. I’ve had the feeling before but never quite like this. It’s not a pleasant feeling, my dear, I can assure you of that!”

“But what do you mean—what do you mean by odious and disgusting?” threw in the other. “I suppose they’re made in the same way we are. Flesh and blood is flesh and blood, after all.”

As Baltazar said this, what he thought in his mind was much as follows: “Adriano is evidently going mad again. This kind of thing is one of the symptoms. I like having him here with me. I like looking at his face when he’s excited. He has a beautiful face—it’s more purely antique in its moulding than half the ancient cameos. I especially like looking at him when he’s harassed and outraged. He has a dilapidated wistfulness at those times which exactly suits my taste. I should miss Adriano frightfully if he went away. No one I’ve ever lived with suits me better. I can annoy him when I like and I can appease him when I like. He fills me with a delicious sense of power. If only Philippa would leave him alone, and that Herrick girl would stop persecuting him, he’d suit me perfectly. I like him when his nerves are quivering and twitching. I like the ‘wounded-animal look’ he has then. But it’s these accursed girls who spoil it all. Of course it’s their work, this new mania. They carry everything so far! I like him to get wild and desperate but I don’t want him mad. These girls stick at nothing. They’d drive him into an asylum if they could, poor helpless devil!”

While these thoughts slid gently through Stork’s head, his friend was already answering his question about “flesh and blood.” “It’s just that which gets on my nerves,” he said. “I can stand it when I’m talking to you because I forget everything except your mind, and I can stand it when I’m making love to a girl, because I forget everything but—”

“Don’t say her body!” threw in Baltazar.

“I wasn’t going to,” snarled the other. “I know it isn’t their bodies one thinks of. It’s—it’s—what the devil is it? It’s something much deeper than that. Well, never mind! What I want to say is this. With you and Raughty, and a few others who really interest me, I forget the whole thing. You are individuals to me. I’m interested in you, and I forget what you’re like, or that you have flesh at all.

“It’s when I come upon people I’m neither in love with nor interested in, that I have this sensation, and of course,” and he surveyed a group of women who at that moment were raising angry voices from an archway on the further side of the harbour, “and of course I have it every day.”

Stork looked at him with absorbed attention, holding between his fingers an unlit cigarette. “What exactly is the feeling you have?” he enquired gently.

The light on Sorio’s face had faded with the fading of the glow on the water. There began to fall upon the place where they sat, upon the cobble-stones of the little quay, upon the wharf steps, slimy with green seaweed, upon the harbour mud and the tarred gunwales of the gently rocking barges, upon the pallid tide flowing inland with gurglings and suckings and lappings and long-drawn sighs, that indescribable sense of the coming on of night at a river’s mouth, which is like nothing else in the world. It is, as it were, the meeting of two infinite vistas of imaginative suggestion—the sense of the mystery of the boundless horizons sea-ward, and the more human mystery of the unknown distance inland, its vague fields and marshes and woods and silent gardens—blending there together in a suspended breath of ineffable possibility, sad and tender, and touching the margin of what cannot be uttered.

“What is it?” repeated Sorio dreamily, and in a low melancholy voice. “How can I tell you what it is? It’s a knowledge of the inner truth, I suppose. It’s the fact that I’ve come to know, at last, what human beings are really like. I’ve come to see them stripped and naked—no! worse than that—I’ve come to see them flayed. I’ve got to the point, Tassar, my friend, when I see the world as it is, and I can tell you it’s not a pleasant sight!”

Baltazar Stork regarded him with a look of the most exquisite pity, a pity which was not the less genuine because the emotion that accompanied it was one of indescribable pleasure. In the presence of his friend’s massive face and powerful figure he felt deliciously delicate and frail, but with this sense of fragility came a feeling of indescribable power—the power of a mind that is capable of contemplating with equanimity a view of things at which another staggers and shivers and grows insane. It was allotted to Baltazar by the secret forces of the universe to know during that hour, one of the most thrilling moments of his life.

“To get to the point I’ve reached,” continued Sorio gently, watching the colour die out from the water’s surface and a whitish glimmer, silvery and phantom-like, take its place, “means to sharpen one’s senses to a point of terrible receptivity. In fact, until you can hear the hearts of people beating—until you can hear their contemptible lusts hissing and writhing in their veins, like evil snakes—you haven’t reached the point. You haven’t reached it until you can smell the graveyard—yes! The graveyard of all mortality—in the cleanest flesh you approach. You haven’t reached it till every movement people make, every word they speak, betrays them for what they are, betrays the vulture on the wing, and the hyena on the prowl. You haven’t reached it till you feel ready to cry out, like a child in a nightmare, and beat the air with your hands, so suffocating is the pressure of loathsome living bodies—bodies marked and sealed and printed with the signs of death and decomposition!”

Baltazar Stork struck a match and lit his cigarette.

“Well?” he remarked, stretching out his legs and leaning back on the wooden bench. “Well? The world is like that, then. You’ve found it out. You know it. You’ve made the wonderful discovery. Why can’t you smoke cigarettes, then, and make love to your lovely friends, and let the whole thing go? You’ll be dead yourself in a year or two in any case.

“Adriano dear,” he lowered his voice to an impressive whisper, “shall I tell you something? You are making all this fuss and driving yourself desperate about a thing which doesn’t really concern you in the least. It’s not your business if the world does reek like a carcass. It’s not your business if people’s brains are full of poisonous snakes and their bellies of greedy lecheries. It’s not your business—do you understand—if human flesh smells of the graveyard. Your affair, my boy, is to get what amusement you can out of it and make yourself as comfortable as you can in it. It might be worse, it might be better. It doesn’t really make much difference either way.

“Listen to me, Adriano! I say to you now, as we sit at this moment watching this water, unless you get rid of this new mania of yours, you’ll end as you did in America. You’ll simply go mad again, my dear, and that would be uncomfortable for you and extremely inconvenient for me. The world is not meant to be taken seriously. It’s meant to be handled as you’d handle a troublesome girl. Take what amuses you and let the rest go to the devil! Anything else—and I know what I’m talking about—tends to simple misery.

“Heigh ho! But it’s a most delicious evening! What nonsense all this talk of ours is! Look at that boy over there. He’s not worrying himself about grave-yards. Here, Harry! Tommy! Whatever you call yourself—come here! I want to speak to you.”

The child addressed was a ragged barelegged urchin, of about eleven, who had been for some while slowly gravitating around the two men. He came at once, at Baltazar’s call, and looked at them both, wonderingly and quizzically.

“Got any pictures?” he asked. Stork nodded and, opening a new box of cigarettes, handed the boy a little oblong card stamped with the arms of some royal European dynasty. “I likes the Honey-Dew ones best,” remarked the boy, “them as has the sport cards in ’em.”

“We can’t always have sport cards, Tommy,” said Baltazar. “Little boys, as the world moves round, must learn to put up with the arms of European princes. Let me feel your muscle, Tommy. I’ve an idea that you’re suffering from deficient nourishment.” The child extended his arm, and then bent it, with an air of extreme and anxious gravity. “Pretty good,” said Stork, smiling. “Yes, I may say you’re decidedly powerful for your size. What’s your opinion, Tommy, about things in general? This gentleman here thinks we’re all in a pretty miserable way. He thinks life’s a hell of a bad job. What do you think about it?”

The boy looked at him suspiciously. “Ben Porter, what cleans the knives up at the Admiral’s, tried that game on with me. But I let him know, soon enough, who he were talking to.” He moved off hastily after this, but a moment later ran back, pointing excitedly at a couple of sea-gulls which were circling near them.

“A man shot one of them birds last night,” he said, “and it fell into the water. Lordy! But it did splash! ’Tweren’t properly killed, I reckon—just knocked over.”

“What’s that?” said Sorio sharply. “What became of it then? Who picked it up?”

The boy looked at him with a puzzled stare. “They ain’t no good to eat,” he rejoined, “they be what you call cannibal-birds. They feeds on muck. Cats’ll eat ’em, though,” he added.

“What became of it?” shouted Sorio, in a threatening voice.

“Went out with the tide, Mister, most like,” answered the child, moving apprehensively away from him. “I saw some fellows in a boat knock at it with their oars, but they couldn’t get it. It sort o’ flapped and swimmed away.”

Sorio rose from his seat and strode to the edge of the quay. He looked eastward, past the long line of half-submerged wooden stakes which marked the approach to the harbour. “When did that devil shoot it, do you say?” he asked, turning to the boy. But the youngster had taken to his heels. Angry-looking bronze-faced gentlemen who interested themselves in wounded sea-gulls were something new in his experience.

“Let’s get a boat and row out to those stakes,” said Adrian suddenly. “I seem to see something white over there. Look! Don’t you think so?”

Baltazar moved to his side. “Heavens! my dear,” he remarked languidly, “you don’t suppose the thing would be there now, after all this time? However,” he added, shrugging his shoulders, “if it’ll put you into a better mood, by all means let’s do it.”

It was, when it came to the point, Baltazar who untied an available boat from its moorings, and Baltazar who appropriated a pair of oars that were leaning against a fish shed. In details of this kind the passionate Sorio was always seized with a paralysis of nervous incompetence. Once in the boat, however, the younger man refused to do anything but steer. “I’m not going to pull against this current, for all the sea-gulls in the world,” he remarked.

Sorio rowed with desperate impetuosity, but it was a slow and laborious task. Several fishermen, loitering on the quay after their supper, surveyed the scene with interest. “The gentleman wants to exercise ’isself afore dinner-time,” observed one. “’Tis a wonder if he moves ’er,” rejoined another, “but ’e’s rowin’ like ’twas a royal regatta.”

With the sweat pouring down his face and the muscles of his whole body taut and quivering, Sorio tugged and strained at the oars. At first it seemed as though the boat hardly moved at all. Then, little by little, it forged ahead, the tide’s pressure diminishing as the mouth of the harbour widened. After several minutes’ exhausting effort, they reached the place where the first of the wooden piles rose out of the water. It was tangled with seaweed and bleached with sun and wind. The tide gurgled and foamed round it. Baltazar yawned.

“They’re all like this one,” he said. “You see what they’re like. Nothing could possibly cling to them, unless it had hands to cling with.”

Sorio, resting on his oars, glared at the darkening waters. “Let’s get to the last of them anyway,” he muttered. He pulled on, the effort becoming easier and easier as they escaped from the in-flow of the river-mouth and reached the open sea. When at last the boat rubbed its side against the last of the stakes, they were nearly a quarter of a mile from land. No, there was certainly no sea-gull here, alive or dead!

A buoy, with a bell attached to it, sent at intervals, over the water, a profoundly melancholy cry—a cry subdued and yet tragic, not absolutely devoid of hope and yet full of heart-breaking wistfulness. The air was hot and windless; the sky heavy with clouds; the horizon concealed by the rapidly falling night. Sorio seized the stake with his hand to keep the boat steady. There were already lights in the town, and some of these twinkled out towards them, in long, radiating, quivering lines.

“Tassar!” whispered Sorio suddenly, in a tone strangely and tenderly modulated.

“Well, my child, what is it?” returned the other.

“I only want to tell you,” Adrian went on, “that whatever I may say or do in the future, I recognize that you’re the best friend I’ve got, except one.” As he said the words “except one,” his voice had a vibrant softness in it.

“Thank you, my dear,” replied his friend calmly. “I should certainly be extremely distressed if you made a fool of yourself in any way. But who is my rival, tell me that! Who is this one who’s a better friend than I? Not Philippa, I hope—or Nance Herrick?”

Sorio sighed heavily. “I vowed to myself,” he muttered, “I would never talk to any one again about him: but the sound of that bell—isn’t it weird, Tassar? Isn’t it ghostly?—makes me long to talk about him.”

“Ah! I understand,” and Baltazar Stork drew in his breath with a low whistle, “I understand! You’re talking about your boy over there. Well, my dear, I don’t blame you if you’re homesick for him. I have a feeling that he’s an extraordinarily beautiful youth. I always picture him to myself like my Venetian. Is he like Flambard, Adrian?”

Sorio sighed again, the sigh of one who sins against his secret soul and misses the reward of his sacrilege. “No—no,” he muttered, “it isn’t that! It isn’t anything to do with his being beautiful. God knows if Baptiste is beautiful! It’s that I want him. It’s that he understands what I’m trying to do in the darkness. It’s simply that I want him, Tassar.”

“What do you mean by that ‘trying in the darkness,’ Adriano? What ‘darkness’ are you talking about?”

Sorio made no immediate answer. His hand, as he clung to the stake amid the rocking of the boat, encountered a piece of seaweed of that kind which possesses slippery, bubble-like excrescences, and he dug his nails into one of these leathery globes, with a vague dreamy idea that if he could burst it he would burst some swollen trouble in his brain.

“Do you remember,” he said at last, “what I showed you the other night, or have you forgotten?”

Baltazar looked at his mistily outlined features and experienced, what was extremely unusual with him, a faint sense of apprehensive remorse. “Of course I remember,” he replied. “You mean those notes of yours—that book you’re writing?”

But Sorio did not hear him. All his attention was concentrated just then upon the attempt to burst another seaweed bubble. The bell from the unseen buoy rang out brokenly over the water; and between the side of their boat and the stake to which the man was clinging there came gurglings and lappings and whispers, as if below them, far down under the humming tide, some sad sea-creature, without hope or memory or rest, were tossing and moaning, turning a drowned inhuman face towards the darkened sky.