Nelly pondered long and deeply as she walked slowly home. So many contrary emotions had seized her and shaken her during the last twenty-four hours that her young brain was in a whirl. This unexpected hesitation in herself, in her own heart, in the very depths of her soul, was a quite new element in the situation. What had happened? Had she got out of her trap, broken its iron teeth, tossed it away from her, only to find herself regretting her freedom? The more she tried to analyse her feelings the more puzzled she became. She had never suspected that any appeal from Robert could move and stir her as she had been stirred. She had imagined him getting angry, calling her evil names, abusing her, and going off in a rage. She had called up all her pride, in advance, to meet the onslaught of his pride.
But it had not been like that at all. He had shown no pride, no anger. He had only shown a pitiful gentleness, a puzzled unhappiness. And it was nice, it was soothing and sweet, to be hugged so tight by him and to feel his poor dear unlost arm so strong and firm about her.
What an ironic thing it would be, she thought, if the pity she felt for him as soon as she had made up her mind to jilt him brought her at last, for the first time, really to love him!
She did love him, in a way. She knew that well enough. But it wasn’t the ‘in-love’ way. It was different perhaps from his being a brother — but not very different. Was it, after all, a horrid and unnatural thing to love a young man one wasn’t ‘in love’ with? Ought one to have hated being touched by him, being hugged and kissed by him? She certainly hadn’t hated it. She had liked it. But that was only as long as she could stop it just when she liked! But when you were married to a person you couldn’t stop these things just when you liked. Therefore it was not right to marry someone you only loved, but weren’t in love with — because of not being able to arrange these things! Nelly reached home thoroughly confused, a little ashamed of herself, and very remorseful because she had talked so freely to Mrs Shotover. That had certainly been a mistake! If, as the old adage says, ‘it is better to be off with the old love before you are on with the new’ it is certainly a very unsafe thing to talk about ‘the new one’ before you have made up your own mind! She wished most heartily that she had waited a little before going to West Horthing. As a matter of honest fact, if Nelly’s guardian angel could have been induced to reveal to us what the girl hid scrupulously even from her own heart, it would have been shown that the cynical assumptions poured into her ears by Mrs Shotover had in an imperceptible manner dropped a tiny drop of poison into her vague delicious dreamings about Richard Storm. She seemed to know where she was so well with Robert, and to know so little where she was with the more shadowy figure of the visitor from Paris!
Chapter 5
An aeroplane traveller armed with a good telescope would have been able to observe from his airy watchtower during the midafternoon hours of that eventful day three separate groups of human beings linked together by thoughtwaves but completely ignorant of each other’s movements. He would have seen Nelly among the roses of her friend’s garden. He would have seen Canyot talking to the farm men by the edge of Toat Great Pond. And finally he would have seen, seated in absorbed conversation under the churchyard wall, the Reverend John Mbreton and Mr Richard Storm.
His telescope would have revealed these various persons and he would have regarded them with the Olympian indifference of the high careless gods of the Epicurean hierarchy.
What he would not have seen — unless he had been a god himself — were those quivering invisible magnetic waves, which it is difficult not to believe must pass backwards and forwards, fast as thought itself, between persons who are linked together by some impending dramatic crisis.
Storm had arrived at Littlegate not long after Nelly’s departure for West Horthing and he had boldly presented himself at the vicarage door. Grace, issuing forth, in her young mistress’s absence, on an emotional errand of her own, had been reluctantly compelled to turn back into the house and convey the visitor into her master’s study. This she hurriedly did with no anterior warning, flinging open the door and announcing in stentorian tones, ‘Mr Worm to see you, sir!’
Richard, hearing the door closed with a bang behind him and becoming immediately conscious of a vague zoological garden odour caused by the innumerable stuffed birds and beasts with which the room was crowded, felt for the moment as if he had been pushed into the den of some sort of formidable animal. His consciousness of something odd about it all and a little disturbing was not diminished when he remarked the grizzled scalp of the old man and his wrinkled forehead emerging from beyond the edge of a littered table very much as some horrific ‘manifestation’ might materialize at a successful seance.
John Moreton did not get up from his knees to greet his visitor. He just blinked at him and frowned, placing one large hand, like a great paw, upon an open sheet of botanical specimens and the other upon a bottle of glue as if he were apprehensive lest the intruder should pounce upon them and clear them away or carry them off.
He looked so exactly like a medieval miser caught in the act of counting his treasure that Richard was tempted to open the conversation by assuring his host that he was not a thief.
Instead of doing this, however, a happy instinct led him to remove from his buttonhole and display to the old man a little flower, quite unknown to him, which he had picked by the edge of a muddy ditch.
This well-omened plant turned out to be a stray specimen of water avens which the old man assured him must have been carried there, in its embryonic state, by some migratory bird out of a neighbouring county.
To investigate the water avens the Reverend Moreton did get up from behind the table and was induced to give a certain portion of the attention demanded by the flower to the guest who held it in his hand.
To retain his hold upon the naturalist’s attention, thus with difficulty won, Richard hurriedly began putting questions to him, more imaginative than scientific, about the various stuffed birds hanging on the wall. He began, as a matter of fact, to display a genuine curiosity about some of the less usual among these, and in admiring their beauty made a few allusions to such of their kind as he had seen, or fancied he had seen, in his travels through France.
One naturalistic topic led to another, and it was not long before Storm was examining, this time with actual enthusiasm, the vicar’s fine collection of British birds’ eggs. It was delightful to ransack the recesses of childish memories in regard to these beautiful little microcosms of the mysterious maternal forces. He suppressed a mischievous desire to ask the old fanatic some wild Sir Thomas Browne question as to the mother of Apollo or the offspring of the phoenix, and he reverently held up to the light, one by one, the strangely scrawled eggs of buntings, the beautiful blue eggs of redstarts, the olive-green eggs of nightingales and that incredibly small rondure, like an ivory-coloured pellet, out of which, if science had not interfered, should have emerged a tiny golden-crested wren!
He made himself so agreeable to the old man by his sincere delight in the beauty of these things, and his modest relish for the pedantic pleasure of ‘calling them all by name’, that John Moreton did what he very rarely did for any human being — his own daughter not excepted — and invited him to come out into the churchyard that he might show him an inviolate specimen of the nest of a meadow pipit.
Having enjoyed the spectacle of the snug security of the wise pipit’s retreat — for the old collector had his full compliment of this species — Richard found no difficulty in cajoling the vicar to sit down with him for a while under the high sunny wall and engage in philosophical conversation.