With the coming of September there was a noticeable change in the weather. The air got perceptibly colder, the sea rougher and there were dark days when the sun was hardly seen at all. Sometimes the prevailing west wind brought showers, but so far, in spite of the cooler atmosphere, there was little heavy rain. The rain seemed to be gathering and massing on every horizon, but though its presence was felt, its actual coming was delayed and the fields and gardens remained scorched and dry. The ditches in the fens were low that season—lower than they had been for many years. Some of them were actually empty and in others there was so little water that the children could catch eels and minnows with their naked hands. In many portions of the salt marshes it was possible to walk dry-shod where, in the early Spring, one would have sunk up to the waist, or even up to the neck.

Driven by the hot weather from their usual feeding-grounds several rare and curious birds visited the fens that year. The immediate environs of Rodmoor were especially safe for these, as few among the fishermen carried guns and none of the wealthier inhabitants cared greatly for shooting. Brand Renshaw, for instance, like his father before him, refused to preserve any sort of game and indeed it was one of the chief causes of his unpopularity with the neighbouring gentry that he was so little of a sportsman.

One species of visitor brought by that unusually hot August was less fortunate than the birds. This was a swallow-tail butterfly, one of the rarer of the two kinds known to collectors in that part of the country. Dr. Raughty was like a man out of his senses with delight when he perceived this beautiful wanderer. He bribed a small boy who was with him at the moment to follow it wherever it flew while he hurried back to his rooms for his net. Unluckily for the swift-flying nomad, instead of making for the open fens it persisted in hovering about the sand-dunes where grew a certain little glaucous plant and it was upon the sand dunes, finally, that the Doctor secured it, after a breathless and exhausting chase.

It seemed to cause Fingal Raughty real distress when he found that neither Nance nor Linda was pleased at what he had done. He met, indeed, with scanty congratulations from any of his friends. With Sorio he almost quarreled over the incident, so vituperative did the Italian become when reference was made to it in his presence. Mrs. Renshaw was gently sympathetic, evidently regarding it as one of the privileges of masculine vigour to catch and kill whatever was beautiful and endowed with wings, but even she spoilt the savour of her congratulations with a faint tinge of irony.

Two weeks of September had already passed when Sorio, in obedience to a little pencilled note he had received the night before, set off in the early afternoon to meet Philippa at one of their more recently discovered haunts. In spite of his resolution in the little dairy shop in Mundham he had made no drastic change in his life, either in the direction of finding work to do or of breaking off his relations with the girl from Oakguard. That excursion with Nance in which they tried so ineffectively to find the great painter’s house left, in its final impression, a certain cruel embarrassment between them. It became difficult for him not to feel that she was watching him apprehensively now and with a ghastly anxiety at the back of her mind and this consciousness poisoned his ease and freedom with her. He felt that her tenderness was no longer a natural, unqualified affection but a sort of terrified pity, and this impression set his nerves all the more on edge when they were together.

With Philippa, on the other hand, he felt absolutely free. The girl lived herself so abnormal and isolated a life, for Mrs. Renshaw disliked visitors and Brand discouraged any association with their neighbours, that she displayed nothing of that practical and human sense of proportion which was the basis of Nance’s character. For the very reason, perhaps, that she cared less what happened to him, she was able to humour him more completely. She piqued and stimulated his intelligence too, in a way Nance never did. She had flashes of diabolical insight which could always rouse and astonish him. Something radically cold and aloof in her made it possible for her to risk alienating him by savage and malicious blows at his pride. But the more poisonous her taunts became, the more closely he clung to her, deriving, it might almost seem, an actual pleasure from what he suffered at her hands. Anxious for both their sakes to avoid as much as possible the gossip of the village, he had continued his habit of meeting her in all manner of out-of-the-way places, and the spot she had designated as their rendezvous for this particular afternoon was one of the remotest and least accessible of all these sanctuaries of refuge. It was, in fact, an old disused windmill, standing by itself in the fens about two miles north of that willow copse where he had on one fatal occasion caused Nance Herrick such distress.

Philippa was an abnormally good walker. From a child she had been accustomed to roam long distances by herself, so that it did not strike him as anything unusual that she should have chosen a place so far off from Oakguard as the scene of their encounter. One of her most marked peculiarities was a certain imaginative fastidiousness in regard to the milieu of her interviews with him. That was, indeed, one of the ways by which she held him. It amounted to a genius for the elimination of the commonplace or the “familiar” in the relations between them. She kept a clear space, as it were, around her personality, only approaching him when the dramatic accessories were harmonious, and vanishing again before he had time to sound the bottom of her evasive mood.

On this occasion Sorio walked with a firm and even gay bearing towards their rendezvous. He followed at first the same path as that taken by Nance and her sister on the eve of their eventful bank-holiday but when he reached Nance’s withy-bed he debouched to his left and plunged straight across the fens. The track he now followed was one used rarely, even by the owners of cattle upon the marshes and in front of him, as far as his eye could reach, nothing except isolated poplars and a few solitary gates, marking the bridges across the dykes, broke the grey expanse of the horizon. The deserted windmill towards which he made his way was larger than any of the others but while, in the gently-blowing wind the sails of the rest kept their slow and rhythmic revolution, this particular one stretched out its enormous arms in motionless repose as if issuing some solemn command to the elements or, like the biblical leader, threatening the overthrow of a hostile army.

As he walked, Sorio noticed that at last the Michaelmas daisies were really in bloom, their grey leaves and sad autumnal flowers blending congruously enough with the dark water and blackened reed-stems of the stagnant ditches. The sky above him was covered with a thin veil of leaden-coloured clouds, against which, flying so high as to make it difficult to distinguish their identity, an attenuated line of large birds—Sorio wondered if they were wild swans—moved swiftly towards the west. He arrived at last at the windmill and entered its cavernous interior. She rose to meet him, shaking the dust from her clothes. In the semi-darkness of the place, her eyes gleamed with a dangerous lustre like the eyes of an animal.

“Do you want to stay where we are?” he said when he had relinquished the hand she gave him, after lifting it in an exaggerated foreign manner, to his lips. She laughed a low mocking laugh.

“What’s the alternative, Adriano mio? Even I can’t walk indefinitely and it isn’t nice sitting over a half-empty dyke.”

“Well,” he remarked, “let’s stay here then! Where were you sitting before I came?”

She pointed to a heap of straw in the furthest corner of the place beneath the shadow of the half-ruined flight of steps leading to the floor above. Adrian surveyed this spot without animation.

“It would be much more interesting,” he said, “if we could get up that ladder. I believe we could. I tried it clumsily the other day when I broke that step.”

“But how do we know the floor above will bear us if we do get up there?”

“Oh, it’ll bear us all right. Look! You can see. The middle boards aren’t rotted at all and that hole there is a rat-hole. There aren’t any dangerous cracks.”

“It would be so horrid to tumble through, Adrian.”

“Oh, we shan’t tumble through. I swear to you it’s all right, Phil. We’re not going to dance up there, are we?”

The girl put her hand on the dilapidated balustrade and shook it. The whole ladder trembled from top to bottom and a cloud of ancient flour-dust, grey and mouldy, descended on their heads.

“You see, Adrian?” she remarked. “It really isn’t safe!”

“I don’t care,” he said stubbornly. “What’s it matter? It’s dull and stuffy down here. I’m going to try anyway.”

He began cautiously ascending what remained intact of the forlorn ladder. The thing creaked ominously under his weight. He managed, however, to get sufficiently high to secure a hold upon the threshold-beam of the floor above when, with the aid of a projecting plank from the side-wall of the building, he managed to retain his position and after a brief struggle, disappeared from his companion’s view.

His voice came down to her from above, muffled a little by the intervening wood-work.

“It’s lovely up here, Phil! There are two little windows and you can see all over the fens. Wait a minute, we’ll soon have you up.”

There was a pause and she heard him moving about over her head.

“You’d much better come down,” she shouted. “I’m not going up there. There’s no possible way.”

He made no answer to this and there was dead silence for several minutes. She went to the entrance and emerged into the open air. The wide horizon around her seemed void and empty. Upon the surface of the immense plain only a few visible objects broke the brooding monotony. To the south and east she could discern just one or two familiar landmarks but to the west there was nothing—nothing but an eternal level of desolation losing itself in the sky. She gave an involuntary shudder and moved away from the windmill to the edge of a reed-bordered ditch. There was a pool of gloomy water in the middle of the reeds and across this pool and round and round it whirled, at an incredible speed, a score or so of tiny water-beetles, never leaving the surface and never pausing for a moment in their mad dance. A wretched little moth, its wings rendered useless by contact with the water, struggled feebly in the centre of this pool, but the shiny-coated beetles whirled on round it in their dizzy circles as if it had no more significance than the shadow of a leaf. Philippa smiled and walked back to the building.

“Adrian,” she called out, entering its dusty gloom and looking up at the square hole in the ceiling, from which still hung a remnant of broken wood-work.

“Well? What is it?” her friend’s voice answered. “It’s all right; we’ll soon have you up here!”

“I don’t want to go up there,” she shouted back. “I want you to come down. Please come down, Adrian! You’re spoiling all our afternoon.”

Once more there was dead silence. Then she called out again.

“Adrian,” she said, “there’s a moth being drowned in the ditch out here.”

“What? Where? What do you say?” came the man’s reply, accompanied by several violent movements. Presently a rope descended from the hole and swung suspended in the air.

“Look out, my dear,” Sorio’s voice ejaculated and a moment later he came swinging down, hand over hand, and landed at her side. “What’s that?” he gasped breathlessly, “what did you say? A moth in the water? Show me, show me!”

“Oh, it’s nothing, Adrian,” she answered petulantly. “I only wanted you to come down.”

But he had rushed out of the door and down to the stream’s edge.

“I see it! I see it!” he called back at her. “Here, give me my stick!” He came rushing back, pushed roughly past her, seized his stick from the ground and returned to the ditch. It was easy enough to effect the moth’s rescue. The same fluffy stickiness in the thing’s wet wings that made it helpless in the water, made it adhere to the stick’s point. He wiped it off upon the grass and pulled Philippa back into the building.

“I’m glad I came down,” he remarked. “I know it’ll hold now. You won’t mind my tying it round you, will you? I’ll have both the ends down here presently. It’s round a strong hook. It’s all right. And then I’ll pull you up.”

Philippa looked at him with angry dismay. All this agitating fuss over so childish an adventure irritated her beyond endurance. His proposal had, as a matter of fact, a most subtle and curious effect upon her. It changed the relations between them. It reduced her to the position of a girl playing with an elder brother. It outraged, with an element of the comic, her sense of dramatic fastidiousness. It humiliated her pride and broke the twisted threads of all kinds of delicate spiritual nets she had in her mind to cast over him. It placed her by his side as a weak and timid woman by the side of a willful and strong-limbed man. Her ascendency over him, as she well knew, depended upon the retaining, on her part, of a certain psychic evasiveness—a certain mysterious and tantalizing reserve. It depended—at any rate that is what she imagined—upon the inscrutable look she could throw into her eyes and upon the tragic glamour of her ambiguous red lips and white cheeks. How could she possibly retain all these characteristics when swinging to and fro at the end of a rope?

Sorio’s suggestion outraged something in her that went down to the very root of her personality. Walking with him, swimming with him, rowing in a boat with him—all those things were harmonious to her mind and congruous with her personal charm. None of these things interfered with the play of her intelligence, with the poise, the reserve, the aloofness of her spiritual challenge. She was exceptionally devoid of fear in these boyish sports and could feel herself when she engaged in them with him, free of the limitations of her sex. She could retain completely, as she indulged herself in them, all the equilibrium of her being—the rhythm of her identity. But this proposal of Sorio’s not only introduced a discordant element that had a shrewd vein of the ludicrous in it, it threw her into a physical panic. It pulled and tugged at the inmost fibres of her self-restraint. It made her long to sit down on the ground and cry like a child. She wondered vaguely whether it was that Adrian was revenging himself upon her at that moment for some accumulated series of half-physical outrages that he had himself in his neurotic state been subjected to lately. As to his actual sanity, it never occurred to her to question that. She herself was too wayward and whimsical in the reactions of her nerves and the processes of her mind to find anything startling, in that sense, in what he was now suggesting. It was simply that it changed their relations—it destroyed her ascendency, it brought things down to brute force, it turned her into a woman.

Her mind, as she stood hesitating, reviewed the moth incident. That sort of situation—Adrian’s fantastic mania for rescuing things—had just the opposite effect on her. He might poke his stick into half the ditches of Rodmoor and save innumerable drowning moths; the only effect that had on her was to make her feel superior to him, better adapted than he to face the essential facts of life, its inherent and integral cruelty for instance. But now—to see that horrible rope-end dangling from that gaping hole and to see the eager, violent, masculine look in her friend’s eyes—it was unendurable; it drove her, so to speak, against the jagged edge of the world’s brute wall.

she found herself quoting, with a horrible sense that the humour of the parody only sharpened the sting of her dilemma.

“I won’t do it,” she said resolutely at last, trying to brave it out with a smile. “It’s a ridiculous idea. Besides, I’m much too heavy. You couldn’t pull me up if you tried till nightfall! No, no, Adriano, don’t be so absurd. Don’t spoil our time together with these mad ideas. Let’s sit down here and talk. Or why not light a fire? That would be exciting enough, wouldn’t it?”

His face as he listened to her darkened to a kind of savage fury. Its despotic and imperious lines emphasized themselves to a degree that was really terrifying.

“You won’t?” he cried, “you won’t, you won’t?” And seizing her roughly by the shoulder he actually began twisting the rope round her body.

She resisted desperately, pushing him away with all the strength of her arms. In the struggle between them, which soon became a dangerous one, her hand thrusting back his head unintentionally drew blood with its delicate finger-nails from his upper lip. The blood trickled into his mouth and, maddened by the taste of it, he let her go and seizing the end of the rope, struck her with it across the breast. This blow seemed to bewilder her. She ceased all resistance. She became docile and passive in his hands.

Mechanically he went on with the task he had set himself, of fastening the rope round her beneath her arm-pits and tying it into a knot. But her absolute submissiveness seemed presently to paralyze him as much as his previous violence had disarmed and paralyzed her. He unloosed the knot he was making and with a sudden jerk pulled the rope away from her. The rope swung back to its former position and dangled in the air, swaying gently from side to side. They stood looking at each other in startled silence and then, quite suddenly, the girl moved forward and flung her arms round his neck.

“I love you!” she murmured in a voice unlike any he had heard her use before. “I love you! I love you!” and her lips clung to his with a long and passionate kiss.

Sorio’s emotions at that moment would have caused her, had she been conscious of them, a reaction even less endurable than that which she had just been through. To confess the truth he had no emotion at all. He mechanically returned her kisses; he mechanically embraced her. But all the while he was thinking of those water-beetles with shiny metallic coats that were gyrating even now so swiftly round that reedy pool.

“Water-beetles!” he thought, as the girl’s convulsive kisses, salt with her passionate tears, hurt his wounded lip. “Water-beetles! We are all like that. The world is like that! Water-beetles upon a dark stream.”

She let him go at last and they moved out together hand in hand into the open air. Above them the enormous windmill still upheld its motionless arms while from somewhere in the fens behind it came a strange whistling cry, the cry of one of those winged intruders from foreign shores, which even now was perhaps bidding farewell to regions of exile and calling out for some companion for its flight over the North Sea.

With his hand still held tightly in hers, Philippa walked silently by his side all that long way across the meadows and dykes. Sorio took advantage of her unusually gentle mood and began plaintively telling her about the nervous sufferings he endured in Rodmoor and about his hatred for the people there and his conviction that they took delight in annoying him. Then little by little, as the girl’s sympathetic silence led him on, he fell to flinging out—in short, jerky, broken sentences—as if each word were torn up by the roots from the very soil of his soul, stammered references to Baptiste. He spoke as if he were talking to himself rather than to her. He kept repeating over and over again some muttered phrase about the bond of abnormal affection which existed between them. And then he suddenly burst out into a description of Baptiste. He rambled on for a long while upon this topic, leaving in the end only a very blurred impression upon his hearer’s mind. All, in fact, the girl was able to definitely arrive at from what he said was that Baptiste resembled his mother—a Frenchwoman of the coast of Brittany—and that he was tall and had dark blue eyes.

“With the longest lashes,” Sorio kept repeating, as if he were describing to her some one it was important she should remember, “that you, or any one else, has ever seen! They lie on his cheek when he’s asleep like—like—”

He fumbled with the feathery head of a reed he had picked as they were walking but seemed unable to find any suitable comparison. It was curious to see the shamefaced, embarrassed way he threw forth, one by one, and as if each word caused him definite pain in the uttering, these allusions to his boy.

Philippa let him ramble on as he pleased, hardly interrupting him by a gesture, listening to him, in fact, as if she were listening to a person talking in his sleep. She learnt that it was only with the greatest difficulty that he had persuaded Baptiste to keep his position in New York and not fling everything up and follow him to London. She learnt that Baptiste had copied out with his own hand the larger portion of Sorio’s book and that now, as he completed each new chapter, he sent it by registered mail straight to the boy in “Eleventh Street.”

“It will explain my life, my whole life, that book,” Adrian muttered. “You’ve only heard a few of its ideas, Phil, only a few. The secret of things being found, not in the instinct of creation but in the instinct of destruction, is only the beginning of it. I go further—much further than that. Don’t laugh at me, Phil, if I just say this—only just this: I show in my book how what every living thing really aims at is to escape from itself, to escape from itself by the destruction of itself. Do you get the idea in that, Phil? Everything in the world is—how shall I put it?—these ideas are not easy, they tear at a person’s brain before they become clear!—everything in the world is on the edge, on the verge, of dissolving away into what people call nothingness. That is what Shakespeare had in his mind when he said, ‘the great globe itself, yea! all which it inherits, shall dissolve and—and—’ I forget exactly how it runs but it ends with ‘leave not a rack behind.’ But the point I make in my book is this. This ‘nothingness,’ this ‘death,’ if you like, to which everything struggles is only a name for what lies beyond life—for what lies, I mean, beyond the extreme limit of the life of every individual thing. We shrink back from it, everything shrinks back from it, because it is the annihilation of all one’s familiar associations, the destruction of the impulse to go on being oneself! But though we shrink back from it, something in us, something that is deeper than ourselves pushes us on to this destruction. This is why, when people have been outraged in the very roots of their being, when they have been lacerated and flayed more than they can bear, when they have been, so to speak, raked through and combed out, they often fall back upon a soft delicious tide of deep large happiness, indescribable, beyond words.”

He was too absorbed in what he was saying to notice that as he made this remark his companion murmured a passionate assent.

“They do! They do! They do!” the girl repeated, with unrestrained emotion.

“That is why,” he continued without heeding her, “there is always a fierce pleasure in what fools call ‘cynicism.’ Cynicism is really the only philosophy worth calling a philosophy because it alone recognizes ‘that everything which exists ought to be destroyed.’ Those are the very words used by the devil in Faust, do you remember? And Goethe himself knew in his heart the truth of cynicism, only he loved life so well,—the great child that he was!—that he couldn’t endure the thought of destruction. He understood it though, and confessed it, too. Spinoza helped him to see it. Ah, Phil, my girl, there was a philosopher! The only one—the only one! And see how the rabble are afraid of Spinoza! See how they turn to the contemptible Hegel, the grocer of philosophy, with his precious ‘self-assertion’ and ‘self-realization’! And there are some idiots who fail to see that Spinoza was a cynic, that he hated life and wished to destroy life. They pretend that he worshipped Nature. Nature! He denied the existence of it. He wished to annihilate it, and he did annihilate it, in his terrible logic. He worshipped only one thing, that which is beyond the limit, beyond the extremest verge, beyond the point where every living thing ceases to exist and becomes nothing! That’s what Spinoza worshipped and that’s what I worship, Phil. I worship the blinding white light which puts out all the candles and all the shadows in the world. It blinds you and ends you and so you call it darkness. But it only begins where darkness is destroyed with everything else! Darkness is like cruelty. It’s the opposite of love. But what I worship is as far beyond love as it is beyond the sun and all the shadows thrown by the sun!”

He paused and contemplated a nervous water-rat that was running along close to the water of the ditch they walked by, desperately searching for its hole.

“I call it white light,” he continued, “but really it’s not light at all, any more than it’s darkness. It’s something you can’t name, something unutterable, but it’s large and cool and deep and empty. Yes, it’s empty of everything that lives or makes a sound! It stops all aching in one’s head, Phil. It stops all the persecution of people who stare at you! It stops all the sickening tiredness of having to hate things. It’ll stop all my longing for Baptiste, for Baptiste is there. Baptiste is the angel of that large, cool, quiet place. Let me once destroy everything in the way and I get to Baptiste—and nothing can ever separate us again!”

He looked round at the grey monotony about them, streaked here and there by patches of autumnal yellow where the stubble fields intersected the fens.

“I prove that I’m right about this principle of destruction, Phil,” he went on, “by bringing up instances of the way all human beings instinctively delight to overthrow one another’s illusions and to fling doubt upon one another’s sincerity. We all do that. You do, Phil, more than any one. You do it to me. And you’re right in doing it. We’re all right in doing it! That accounts for the secret satisfaction we all feel when something or other breaks up the complacency of another person’s life. It accounts for the mad desire we have to destroy the complacency of our own life. What we’re seeking is the line of escape—that’s the phrase I use in my book. The line of escape from ourselves. That’s why we turn and turn and turn, like fish gasping on the land or like those beetles we saw just now, or like that water-rat!”

They had now reached the outskirts of Nance’s withy-bed. The path Sorio had come by deviated here sharply to the east, heading sea-wards, while another path, wider and more frequented, led on across the meadows to the bank of the Loon where the roof and chimneys of Dyke House were vaguely visible. The September twilight had already begun to fall and objects at any considerable distance showed dim and wraith-like. Damp mists, smelling of stagnant water, rose in long clammy waves out of the fens and moved in white ghostly procession along the bank of the river. Sorio stood at this parting of the ways and surveyed the shadowy outline of the distant tow-path and the yet more obscure form of Dyke House. He looked at the stubble field and then at the little wood where the alder trees differentiated themselves from the willows by their darker and more melancholy foliage.

“How frightening Dyke House looks from here,” remarked Philippa, “it looks like a haunted house.”

A sudden idea struck Sorio’s mind.

“Phil,” he said, letting go his companion’s hand and pointing with his stick to the house by the river, “you often tell me you’re afraid of nothing weird or supernatural. You often tell me you’re more like a boy in those things than a girl. Look here, now! You just run over to Dyke House and see how Rachel Doorm is getting on. I often think of her—alone in that place, now Nance and Linda have gone. I’ve been thinking of her especially to-day as we’ve come so near here. It’s impossible for me to go. It’s impossible for me to see any one. My nerves won’t stand it. But I must say I should be rather glad to know she hadn’t quite gone off her head. It isn’t very nice to think of her in that large house by herself, the house where her father died. Nance told me she feared she’d take to drink just as the old man did. Nance says it’s in the Doorm family, that sort of thing, drink or insanity, I mean—or both together, perhaps!” and he broke into a bitter laugh.

Philippa drew in her breath and looked at the white mist covering the river and at the ghostly outlines of the Doorm inheritance.

“You always say you’re like a boy,” repeated Sorio, throwing himself down where four months ago he had sat with Nance, “well, prove it then! Run over to Dyke House and give Rachel Doorm my love. I’ll wait for you here. I promise faithfully. You needn’t do more than just greet the old thing and wish her well. She loves all you Renshaws. She idealizes you.” And he laughed again.

Philippa regarded him silently. For one moment the old wicked flicker of subtle mockery seemed on the point of crossing her face. But it died instantly away and her eyes grew childish and wistful.

“I’m not a boy, I’m a woman,” she murmured in a low voice.

Sorio frowned. “Well, go, whatever you are,” he cried roughly. “You’re not tired, are you?” he added a little more gently.

She smiled at this. “All right, Adrian,” she said, “I’ll go. Give me one kiss first.”

She knelt down hurriedly and put her arms round his neck. Lying with his back against the trunk of an alder, he returned her caress in a perfunctory, absent-minded manner, precisely as if she were an importunate child.

“I love you! I love you!” she whispered and then leaping to her feet, “Good-bye!” she cried, “I’ll never forgive you if you desert me.”

She ran off, her slender figure moving through the growing twilight like a swaying birch tree half seen through mist. Sorio’s mind left her altogether. An immense yearning for his son took possession of him and he set himself to recall every precise incident of their separation. He saw himself standing at the side of the crowded liner. He saw the people waving and shouting from the wooden jetty of the great dock. He saw Baptiste, standing a little apart from the rest, motionless, not raising even a hand, paralyzed by the misery of his departure. He too was sick with misery then. He remembered the exact sensation of it and how he envied the sea-gulls who never knew these human sufferings and the gay people on the ship who seemed to have all they loved with them at their side.

“Oh, God,” he muttered to himself, “give me back my son and you may take everything—my book, my pride, my brain—everything! everything!”

Meanwhile Philippa was rapidly approaching Dyke House. A cold damp air met her as she drew near, rising with the white mists from off the surface of the river. She walked round the house and pushed open the little wooden gate. The face of desolation itself looked at her from that neglected garden. A few forlorn dahlias raised their troubled wine-dark heads from among strangling nettles and sickly plants of pallid-leaved spurge. Tangled raspberry canes and over-grown patches of garden-mint mingled with wild cranesbill and darnel. Grass was growing thickly on the gravel path and clumps of green damp moss clung to the stone-work of the entrance. The windows, as she approached the house, stared at her like eyes—eyes that have lost the power to close their lids. There were no blinds down and no curtains drawn but all the windows were dark. No smoke issued from the chimney and not a flicker of light came from any portion of the place. Silent and cold and hushed, it might have been only waiting for her appearance to sink like an apparition into the misty earth. With a beating heart the girl ascended the steps and rang the bell. The sound clanged horribly through the empty passages. There was a faint hardly perceptible stir, such as one might imagine being made by the fall of disturbed dust or the rustle of loose paper, but that was all. Dead unbroken silence flowed back upon everything like the flow of water round a submerged wreck. There was not even the ticking of a clock to break the stillness. It was more than the mere absence of any sound, that silence which held the Doorm house. It was silence such as possesses an individuality of its own. It took on, as Philippa waited there, the shadowy and wavering outlines of a palpable shape. The silence greeted the girl and welcomed her and begged her to enter and let it embrace her. In a kind of panic Philippa seized the handle of the door and shook it violently. More to her terror than reassurance it opened and a cold wave of air, colder even than the mist of the river, struck her in the face. She advanced slowly, her hand pressed against her heart and a sense as if something was drumming in her ears.

The parlour door was wide open. She entered the room. A handful of dead flowers—wild flowers of some kind but they were too withered to be distinguishable—hung dry and sapless over the edge of a vase of rank-smelling water. Otherwise the table was bare and the room in order. She came out again and went into the kitchen. Here the presence of more homely and unsentimental objects relieved a little the tension of her nerves. But the place was absolutely empty—save for an imprisoned tortoise-shell butterfly that was beating itself languidly, as if it had done the same thing for days, against the pane.

Mindful of Sorio’s habit and with even the faint ghost of a smile, she opened the window and set the thing free. It was a relief to smell the river-smell that came in as she did this. She moved out of the kitchen and once more stood breathless, listening intently in the silent hall-way. It was growing rapidly darker; she longed to rush from the place and return to Sorio but some indescribable power, stronger than her own will, retained her. Suddenly she uttered a little involuntary cry. Struck by a light gust of wind, the front door which she had left open, swung slowly towards her and closed with a vibrating shock. She ran to the back and opened the door which led to the yard. Here she was genuinely relieved to catch the sound of a sleepy rustling in the little wood-shed and to see through its dusty window a white blur of feathers. There were fowls alive anyway about Dyke House. That, at least, was some satisfaction. Propping the door open by means of an iron scraper she returned to the hall-way and looked apprehensively at the staircase. Dared she ascend to the rooms above? Dared she enter Rachel Doorm’s bedroom? She moved to the foot of the staircase and laid her hand upon the balustrade. A dim flicker of waning light came in through the door she had propped open and fell upon the heavy chairs which stood in the hall and upon a fantastic picture representing the eruption of Vesuvius. The old-fashioned colouring of this print was now darkened, but she could see the outlines of the mountain and its rolling smoke. Once again she listened. Not a sound! She took a few steps up the stairs and paused. Then a few more and paused again. Then with her hands tightly clenched and a cold shivering sensation making her feel sick and dizzy, she ran up the remainder and stood weak and exhausted, leaning against the pillar of the balustrade and gazing with startled eyes at a half-open door.

It is extraordinary the power of the dead over the living! Philippa knew that in that room, behind that door, was the thing that had once called itself a woman and had talked and laughed and eaten and drunk with other women. When Rachel Doorm was about the age she herself had now reached and she was a little child, she could remember how she had built sand-castles for her by the sea-shore and sang to her old Rodmoor songs about drowned sailors and sea-kings and lost children. And now she knew—as surely as if her hand was laid upon her cold forehead—that behind that door, probably in some ghastly attitude of eternal listening, the corpse of all that, of all those memories and many more that she knew nothing of, was waiting to be found, to be found and have her eyes shut and her jaw bandaged—and be prepared for her coffin. The girl gripped tight hold of the balustrade. The terror that took possession of her then was not that Rachel Doorm should be dead—dead and so close to her, but that she should not be dead!

At that moment, could she have brought herself to push that door wide open and pass in, it would have been much more awful, much more shocking, to find Rachel Doorm alive and see her rise to meet her and hear her speak! After all, what did it matter if the body of the woman was twisted and contorted in some frightful manner—or standing perhaps—Rachel Doorm was just the one to die standing!—or if her face were staring up from the floor? What did it matter, supposing she did go straight in and feel about in the darkness and perhaps lay her hand upon the dead woman’s mouth? What did it matter even if she did see her hanging, in the faint light of the window, from a hook above the curtain with her head bent queerly to one side and a lock of her hair falling loose? None of these things mattered. None of them prevented her going straight into that room! What did prevent her and what sent her fleeing down the stairs and out of the house with a sudden scream of intolerable terror was the fact that at that moment, quite definitely, there came the sound of breathing from the room she was looking at. A simple thing, a natural thing, for an old woman to retire to her bedroom early and to lie, perhaps with all her clothes on, upon her bed, to rest for a while before undressing. A simple and a natural thing! But the fact remains as has just been stated, when the sound of breathing came from that room Philippa screamed and ran panic-stricken out into the night. She hardly stopped running, indeed, till she reached the willow copse and found Sorio where she had left him. He did not resist now when breathlessly she implored him to accompany her back to the house. They walked hurriedly there together, Adrian in spite of a certain apprehension smiling in the darkness at his companion’s certainty that Rachel Doorm was dead and her equal certainty that she had heard her breathing.

“But I understand your feeling, Phil,” he said. “I understand it perfectly. I used to have the same sensation at night in a certain great garden in the Campagna—the fear of meeting the boy I used to play with before I expected to meet him! I used to call out to him and beg him to answer me so as to make sure.”

Philippa refused to enter the house again and waited for him outside by the garden gate. He was long in coming, so long that she was seized with the strangest thoughts. But he came at last, carrying a lantern in his hand.

“You’re right, Phil,” he said, “the gods have taken her. She’s stone-dead. And what’s more, she’s been dead a long time, several weeks, I should think.”

“But the breathing, Adrian, the breathing? I heard it distinctly.”

Sorio put down his lantern and leant against the gate. In spite of his calm demeanor she could see that he also had experienced something over and above the finding of Rachel’s body.

“Yes,” he said, “and you were right about that, too. Guess, child, what it was!”

And as he spoke he put his hand against the front of his coat which was tightly buttoned up. Philippa was immediately conscious of the same stertorous noise that she had heard in the room of death.

“An animal!” she cried.

“An owl,” he answered, “a young owl. It must have fallen from a nest in the roof. I won’t show it to you now, as it might escape and a cat might get it. I’m going to try and rear it if Tassar will let me. Baptiste will be so amused when he finds me with a pet owl! He has quite a mania for things like that. He can make the birds in the park come to him by whistling. Well! I suppose what we must do now is to get back to Rodmoor as quick as we can and report this business to the police. She must have been dead a week or more! I’m afraid this will be a great shock to Nance.”

“How did you find her?” enquired the girl as they walked along the road towards the New Bridge.

“Don’t ask me, Phil—don’t ask me,” he replied, “She’s out of her troubles anyway and had an owl to look after her.”

“Should I have been—” began his companion.

“Don’t ask me, girl!” he reiterated. “I tell you it’s all past and over. Rachel Doorm will be buried in the Rodmoor churchyard and I shall have her owl. An old woman stops breathing and an owl begins breathing. It’s all natural enough.”