The old man rose to his feet before her, a quavering tower of inarticulate passion. His long fingers twisted and trembled as they hung by his side. His hands jerked at the end of his long thin arms. The fleshy portion of his face seemed to draw itself tightly in, over the bony substructure, and his eyes glared as if from a cavernous pit.
‘How dare you quote that man to me! Didn’t I tell you? He treated me like a silly woman with some ridiculous mania that meant nothing. He wouldn’t even hear what I had to say. He just talked and talked, pretty conventional nothings, and then took me into his garden and showed me his sweet-peas! And I had come to let him know, as my spiritual superior, the deepest thoughts of my soul. His sweet-peas! His episcopal sweet-peas!’ and the old man sank down again into his chair, exhausted with his outburst. His face quickly changed from that queer drawn look and assumed his normal expression but Nelly noted a weary world-tired droop about him that startled her. Yes, it was clear that something must be done. His mind was troubled to its very foundations.
She moved over to his side. ‘Dearest Father!’ she said gently — ‘I think I do understand you.’ She bent down and kissed his high grizzled forehead, upon which the hair grew rough and stubbly, as one sees it in portraits of the philosopher Schopenhauer.
But after that, she left the sitting room and went out hatless into the garden, and beyond the garden into a cornfield behind the churchyard, where the early rye was already up to her waist. She walked slowly along a little path with the green rye on both sides of her, the ground at her feet tangled with red pimpernel and rose-coloured fumitory and tiny wild pansies. But she had no heart just then for these things. The very song of the skylark above her seemed to harden itself into a cruel screen of mockery, separating her from the heavens and the healing of their remote peace.
Never had her mind been so shaken from its normal quietness. She had known vaguely that her feeling for Canyot was not what she expected from ‘being in love’. But like so many others before her, she had, in her ignorance of what that real feeling meant, taken the romance and the passionate idealism of her own heart and woven them around her respect, her admiration, her girlish hero-worship.
And now this sudden coming of Richard on the scene, this mysterious poet from Paris, had revealed to her the limits, the bare, hard, clear limits, of what she felt for her betrothed. It was not that she dared yet to give any name to the obscure attraction she was aware of towards the older man. It was only that his appearance upon the stage at all altered her perspective and revealed the outlines of the trap she had innocently walked into.
And the teeth of the trap, the iron clutch against which she had not yet the courage to press her weight, lest she could not move it, was this new development with regard to her father. Here was indeed a trick, a cunning device, a malevolent ambush of fate, such as she had never expected life was capable of!
It was quite clear that they couldn’t be left adrift, without a roof and without a penny. Her father was of course far too old to do anything for himself, except this business with plants and insects which after all was only an old man’s hobby. She supposed that in these days of women’s freedom she could find something for herself. But she had no experience. She had not even done any serious ‘war work’. And how could she support both herself and her father?
They had no relations to whom she could appeal, her father’s eccentricity and pride having completely estranged his own connections, whereas her aunts, her dead mother’s sisters, were far too poor themselves to be of any help.
Weary and sick in soul the girl turned back to the house to assist Grace in her various household tasks. One tiny faint stream of sweetness, like the up-flow of an inland spring underneath a weight of brackish water, filtered through to her troubled brain through all the bitterness. This exciting newcomer into the circle of her life, this Parisian descendant of old Dr Storm, did undoubtedly seem to want her sympathy.
She knew well enough, by an instinct as direct and sure as that by which the birds build their nests, that the man had grievous need of such as she was, and she knew by the same instinct how angrily he was reacting against his need of her.
Those cynical conclusions of dispassionate scrutiny he called his ‘demons’ were not by any means so hidden from her as the good man dreamed in his vain masculine aloofness that they were.
Indeed, what really attracted her to him was not the power in him but the weakness in him; or to put it quite precisely the peculiar mingling of power and weakness which made up that troubled essence he named his soul.
That was where the difference lay between him and Robert. Robert was always something to lean upon, something to look up to, something to rely upon and be sure of. But Robert never made any attempt to drag her into the circle of his deepest thoughts. He treated her tenderly but he never confided in her. To him she was a child to be protected.
This man from Paris, for all his heavier weight of years and certainly in spite of himself and to his evident annoyance, could not, it seemed, do anything else than lay bare his deepest soul before her — and in doing this he could not prevent himself, in spite of his immense vanity, from appealing to her maternal instinct. Her betrothed was always the strong elder brother, though his years were so near her own; whereas this man, twice her own age, began to look like that grown-up child which, once in every woman’s life, becomes her most fatal attraction when, among all the other appeals, he at last takes to himself a palpable embodiment.
Nelly saw nothing more of her father till half the morning was over, and nothing of Robert Canyot. This hardly surprised her, as they had had a serious misunderstanding — if it was a misunderstanding — on their way home the night before; and she guessed he had gone off, to punish her, upon some long solitary excursion.
This is what he invariably did when anything clouded their intercourse; and his returns from these excursions had hitherto been marked by their happiest rapprochements.
It was in a strangely mingled mood that Nelly busied herself with her various domestic labours that morning. The sense of being most evilly hemmed in remained with her — a feeling as if she were an unsheared sheep pushed from behind down a narrow lane of hurdles towards the fatal jump into the sheep wash — but with it all there moved within her a new delicious thrill, vague and indistinct as the scent of an unknown flower, causing her every now and then to stop in the midst of her work and stand dreaming, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, oblivious to Grace’s chatter. Grace came from the West Country and was more voluble and less civilized than the local Sussex maidens. But on this particular occasion she found her young mistress singularly distraite. When the morning was well advanced she left the servant to prepare their mid-day meal and went out into the garden. In an old straw hat and a still older apron she set herself to weed one of the flower borders, the one which adjoined the churchyard wall.
The wall was not a low one, but by clambering up on a little ledge created by the collapse of some ancient cement she was just able to peep over it. She found it difficult to prevent herself from repeating this manoeuvre more than once. And every time she did it she had a vague hope that she might catch sight of Richard Storm standing by his grandfather’s headstone.
It was somewhere about her seventh peep — she would always henceforth associate that visionary figure with the pungent smell of ivy and its queer bitterness against her mouth — that she became aware, as she rested her chin against the tiny succulent wall plants that grew in the loose mould and moss, that her father had appeared on the scene and was doing something to her mother’s grave.