Ducdame (2 page)

What Rook saw was an emaciated figure whose large fair head, covered with thick curly hair and out of all proportion to the leanness of his person, had been moulded, in some fit of divine whimsicality, into a startling resemblance to the well-known portrait bust of the Emperor Claudius.

Both brothers were bareheaded. Both were lifted at that moment above their ordinary level of feeling. But the excitement that was agitating them took in Rook the form of morose abruptness; in Lexie the form of nervous volubility.

It was a peculiarity of these two to display their affection for each other with a shameless freedom. They kissed each
other now in the middle of the moonlit road as if they had been agitated conspirators‚ sealing some covenant of fatal complicity.

With his fingers twitching nervously at his brother’s overcoat‚ Lexie began talking in a hurried eager voice‚ as if someone or something at any moment might interrupt him.

“I saw Nell last night; here at this very spot. Our priestly friend had stayed inside the church for some reason; and she had wandered out and was waiting for him just here. Rook‚ I know I’m right in what I told you about her. She’s unhappy. She’s very unhappy.”

The elder Ashover’s gaze transferred itself from his brother’s face to the wall of the churchyard. “Unhappy‚” he repeated after a pause‚ and the word sounded like the splash of a stone that someone had thrown into a deep well.

“But, Rook‚ what a girl she is! What a girl! She feels things with her whole body. Do you know what I mean? She
thinks
with her body.”

Rook turned his head still farther away.

“The brain is better for that‚” he muttered; but Lexie went on:

“I believe she’s reached the point of absolute hatred for him. And shall I tell you what has done it? It’s that book of his—that book.” His brother emitted a sound that might have been a chuckle or a groan. “That book——” repeated Lexie. But the other remained silent.

“What do you do to all these women, Rook‚ to make them so fond of you? The thing’s getting ridiculous. There’s Cousin Ann—well! We all know what she and Mother are up to! And now it seems as if I’ve only to
mention
your name to Nell and she jumps out of her skin. Do you know what she said? She said you had a perfect right to live with Netta if you wanted to; and that it was outrageous of people to make such a fuss. She trembled all over like a bit of quaking grass when she talked about it.”

Rook Ashover made no reply of any kind to this. His face grew hard. But Lexie rambled on without the least
embarrassment
.

“It’s no use beating about the bush any more, Rook. You’ve got yourself into a pretty bloody predicament. No one can possibly tell what the upshot will be.”

The elder man’s sullenness did melt at this.

“The upshot will be that you and I will be the last of the Ashovers,” he remarked grimly.

Lexie’s resemblance to the least heroic of the Cæsars
became
strikingly marked.

“Mother hasn’t said anything more, has she?” he enquired anxiously. “God! It was awful when she actually talked of you and Netta before Ann. Rook, tell me. Would you send Netta away and marry Ann if
I
went over to the enemy? Or would you hold out even against
me?”

His brother seemed to regard this question as unworthy of any serious answer. He simply disregarded it.

“You’re sure you do right in risking these walks, my dear?” He touched Lexie’s forehead as he spoke and ran his fingers through the young man’s thick hair as if he had been a woman.

“I can’t help feeling,” he went on, “that you
may,
after all, be sacrificing everything by not doing what that doctor said. As long as we’re together you’ll always be tempted to go beyond your strength; and I’m the worst person in the world for the business of reminding you. I can’t realize things as I ought. I forget so.”

Lexie had begun fumbling once more with one of the buttonholes of his brother’s overcoat; but he dropped his hand now.

“I’m as fit as a badger in Field-Cover!” he cried. “It’s when you talk like that——”

The malignant mechanism of chance stopped the words in his mouth.

He swayed a little and bent his head, poking automatically
with his stick at the mud under his feet which showed faint traces of frost marks.

Rook clutched at his shoulder.

“Lexie, don’t! Lexie, what is it? You’re not going to faint, are you?”

But the young man had already gained his composure.

“Let’s go into the churchyard‚” he said, taking his
brother’s
arm.

They moved together through the gate and followed the path that led to the base of the tower.

“Do sit down for a bit,” pleaded Rook. “It frightens me when you get like that.”

“Here? Near the old man?” and Lexie made a scarcely perceptible grimace in the direction of their father’s grave.

“Yes; here.”

And they sat down side by side on a flat tombstone, the name and date of which had been obliterated by many Novembers.

The rank autumnal grass in the uncut portion of the enclosure rose before them in the moonlight or lay in tangled swathes on the ground like the uncombed hair of a titanic skull.

The bent stems and rain-battered leaves of the hedge parsley that grew where the graves ended resembled now an enchanted Lilliputian forest through which some fairy beasts had trampled, leaving it outraged and desolate.

There was only one tree in that portion of the
churchyard
, a very old elm, lopped and beheaded and almost leafless, but with a trunk of such sturdy proportions and so deeply indented that it resembled the torso of a gigantic pillar, half buried in the earth but still bearing witness to its old obscure importance.

The two men contemplated this colossal relic, their
attention
drawn to it by a low sound that suddenly emerged from its headless jagged top and died away.

“Do you hear?” whispered Lexie. “What’s that? There’s no wind. There’s something alive up there.”

They both listened intently but the sound was not
repeated
.

“It’s queer to think of these women—Nell, Netta, Cousin Ann, and our mother—all lying in their beds in the
moonlight
and all agitated in some way over you.”

“Damn you, Lexie! Why over me? Why the devil not over
you?
With all this refusing to do what Twickenham tells you and all this walking too far, there’s enough in your goings-on to keep every one of us awake at night.”

He had hardly spoken the words when, with a wild
tumbling
of soft feathery wings, a couple of brown owls flew out of the headless tree. One flew straight across the water
meadows
; while the other, swinging round and rising over the heads of the two men, vanished behind the masonry of the tower.

“Netta is absurd about owls,” said Rook. “She says that she must have been a field mouse once and owls ate her. I tell her that she was much more likely a great stoat who ate little owls. What are you laughing at, you devil? I
suppose
you think Netta hasn’t the brain of a sparrow? And you think she can’t appreciate the country? And you think. I’m making an absolute idiot of myself by having her here?”

“We needn’t go into all that now,” responded Lexie. “Have a cigarette?” And with a series of movements that were concentrated in their punctiliousness he proceeded to light a match.

Rook shook his head. But he watched with curious
interest
the tiny Promethean flame lift up its eternal living protest between cold moonlight and cold mortality.

They were both silent for a space. Then Lexie suddenly uttered the words: “The left side would be better than the right.”

Rook stared blankly at the little rings of smoke that followed one another into the phantasmal air.

“What on earth are you talking about? What left side?”

Lexie deposited a carefully preserved ash end upon the stone between them, where the little gray heap lay
undisturbed
, like the excrement of a wandering moon moth.

“Of the tree, brother Rook‚” he said, contorting the
imperial
ruggedness of his face into one of his humorous
grimaces
; “of the tree. And don’t let the matter pass out of your forgetful mind! Mother’s sure to want to bury me over there by the old man. And I don’t want to be buried there. I want to be on the left side of the tree. Only for the Lord’s sake let me lie deep. You know what elms are! It’s one of those funny tricks of Nature; like the throats of whales. Monstrous trunks; and then silly little tendrils hardly bigger than turf-roots. I don’t want to be exposed, brother Rook. So get that fixed in your mind. The left side of the tree; and
seven
feet down!”

The voice of the sick man died away into space; just as, a little while before, the fluttering of the owls had died away. Both sounds were now travelling, at a rate measurable to science, toward the moon. If the vibration of them
survived
the loss of the earth’s atmosphere it would soon be reaching a point from which, if sounds had sight, the other side of the moon would be visible!

Some such fantasy as this passed obscurely through Rook’s mind as he delayed his response.

In his abstracted fashion he sent his soul wandering over the wide expanse of water meadows, intersected by reedy ditches, which lay beyond the low wall of the churchyard.

He could actually feel the chill of those cold fields, of those flooded ditches, as if his mind had the power of carrying his senses with it on such a voyage. He seemed to himself to become a moving nebulous shadow, acting as sentinel to the very floor of silence upon which the world is built.

What he felt most conscious of at that moment was not the menace of mortality by which his brother was
threatened
,
but the indrawn breath of multitudes upon multitudes of grass blades, full of the pallid greenish sap of that late season‚ that seemed answering the attraction of the moon with a conscious answer; just as the vast swaying sea growths are said to do under their fathoms of salt water.

“Why do you keep harping upon death?” he said at last. “Lots of people with your particular trouble live for years and years. You’ll probably see
me
buried by the side of the old man long before they disturb the roots of your elm for you.”

Lexie looked at him with the peculiar look that death-threatened people have in the presence of the ultimate treachery. The luminousness that surrounded them made it impossible that Rook could miss that look—a look that begged and pleaded, a look that howled, like a dog driven to its kennel.

“This is my last November,” the look said, “and I love every moment of every hour of life!”

“Can’t you see that I am sinking into absolute loneliness?” the look said. “Hold me! Clutch me! Save me!”

Rook glanced at his brother; saw the look; but still
continued
to allow his soul to wander over the fields. He wanted his brother to die least of all things in the world. He could not imagine life without him. And yet in some mysterious way, just because of the ghastly threat to the bond between them, he experienced an actual enhancing of the beauty of that night.

Something in the depths of his nature gathered itself
together
under his brother’s words, focussed itself, roused
itself
to a strange pitch of exaltation. The white tombstones, the headless tree, the motionless shadow of the tower, the spellbound meadows, became so beautiful to him that death itself seemed hardly less beautiful.

Those pastures seemed to stretch away and away, until they crossed the borderline between death and life. They
seemed to reach out to something dim and vague and
wonderful
; to some unearthly ghost garden‚ far from all human troubling, where nothing but solemn milk-white cattle moved up and down through a pearl-gray mist, licking every now and then with great languid tongues the drooping rims of huge moon mushrooms.

There must have been a long silence between the two brothers just then; for when Rook returned to himself it seemed that it was across an immeasurable gulf that his own last words returned to him.

By one of the quick simultaneous movements of thought that often occurred between them when they were alone
together
they both fixed their eyes upon their father’s grave.

It was Lexie who finally put into words the thing that was in their minds.

“The old man won’t like it if we’re the last of his race. But I suppose that’s nothing to you, Rook.”

The face of the elder Ashover certainly did not at that moment suggest the passion of piety. Never had it worn more obstinately its characteristic look of truculent
abstraction
.

But Lexie was undeterred.

“Are you absolutely certain,” he said, “that Netta can’t have a child?”

Rook nodded.

“You’d marry her, of course, if she did?”

“I suppose so.”

“And nothing any of us can do or say will ever make you get rid of her?”

Rook shook his head.

“Well, for God’s sake, let’s tell the old gentlemen inside that the family’s done for, and see what
they
say!”

Lexie rose to his feet as he spoke and, hobbling between the graves, passed into the shadow of the tower.

Rook came slowly after him. There was an illusory
chilliness 
within the shadow that gave to both men the sensation of crossing the mouth of a sepulchre. And in very definite sense this building
was
the sepulchre of their people.

They moved round to the south side of the church and followed the wall till they reached the east end. Then
stepping
close up to an unstained widow they peered straight into the chancel.

The moonlight streaming in behind them threw its ghostly light on everything there. The little church looked as if it had been illuminated for some nocturnal office.

The Norman arch, the carved mediæval niches, the brass lectern, the tall Puritan pulpit, seemed all of them
emphatically
conscious of some invisible ceremony. Was it an unending platonic dialogue they listened to, between
nothingness
and the dust of the generations? or did the living souls of all the animate creatures that were asleep just then—men and women under their blankets, cattle under their hurdles, wild fowl under their marsh reeds—gather together “on such a night as this,” a queer, twittering, bleating, weeping, bodiless crowd,
animulœ,
vagulœ,
blandulœ,
and hold a secular consistory above those cold slabs?