There was still no one to be seen. He walked a little way down the hill, drawn by his favourite corner where gallica and bourbon, moss and damask, made with their more luscious and ferny foliage a welcome haze of green beyond the gawky sterus of younger breeds. He passed a tool shed and impulsively entered and picked up a pair of secateurs. All was in order in the shed. He noticed, half with disappointment, that the place did not seem to be deteriorating.
The old roses were at the height of their season, and Randall stood still among them, completely absorbed into a heaven of vision. There were moments when he knew that he loved nothing in the world so much as he loved these roses; and that he loved them with a love of such transcendent purity that they made him, for the moment, like to themselves. He could have knelt before these flowers, wept before them, knowing them to be not only the most beautiful things in existence but the most beautiful things conceivable. God in his dreams did not see anything lovelier. Indeed the roses were God, and Randall worshipped.
Moving slightly in the breeze the intense little heads surrounded him and drowned him in their odour. Lifting a few towards him he looked with his ever new amazement at the close packed patterns of petals, those formulae that Nature never forgot, those forms that were the most desirable of all things and so exquisite that it was impossible to carry them in belief and memory through the winter; so that every year one saw them as if for the first time, and as they must have looked in the Garden of Eden when in a felicitous moment God said: let there be roses. So Randall moved on, deeper into the rose forest, between the tall thickets with their crossing and interlacing boughs, and as he went he picked them, snipping off here a faintly blushing alba and here a golden-stamened wine-dark rose of Provence.
A woman started up suddenly, appearing on the grass path between the bushes with the sudden illuminated presence of a Pre-Raphaelite angel. He turned with a gasp of fear. But it was Nancy Bowshott; She came up to him breathless, her dress billowing, her eyes wide, her chestnut hair wild and bushy after running fast down the hill. 'Are you going away, Mr Peronett? I had to see you.
He contemplated her: pretty buxom Nancy, a rose of a different sort. No one could have been farther from his thoughts. She had indeed never really occupied his thoughts at all, and he resented her intrusion now upon the rite of farewell.
'Yes, Nancy, going away.
«For good, is that, Mr Peronett?
'For good, Nancy.
'Ah —’ she said, and turned from him, her eyes filling with tears.
Randall was shocked. The roses had put him into a trance-like state, and Nancy's red face, her heaving bosom, her moist and spilling eyes were suddenly too real, too close. He said, 'Come, come, Nancy. You mustn't be upset. It had to be, you know.
'I can't stay here without yon. she said. 'The place will be horrible without you.
The thought that he would leave at least this aching heart behind him at Grayhallock did not altogether displease Randall. He said, 'Now don't be tiresome, Nancy. Don't be so emotional. You'll get on perfectly well without me.
'No, I won't, she said. 'I shall die here without you. Please let me come too. You'll want a servant or something. Let me come with you, Mr Peronett. I'd work for you, I'd be no trouble, I promise I'd be no trouble »
'What nonsense! said Randall. But he was touched. 'Your place is here, Nancy. You must help Mrs. Peronett. You know how much she relies on you. And after all, there's Bowshott. You can't leave him, can you?
'If you can leave her I can leave him. She looked at him fiercely, her tears mastered, suddenly his equal.
'What you ask is impossible, said Randall. 'I'm sorry. You'll soon settle down again. Now stop being so foolish. They stared at each other. He saw her, but only for a second, as a separate being with troubles and desires of her own. Then the silence between them took on a new quality. She seemed to him with her flushed face and her fierce brow and her disordered hair suddenly beautiful. The wind from Dungeness drew her dress tight about her.
They stood for another moment, close together, perfectly still.
Then Randall took her in his arms and as her body yielded to him, faint and sighing, he began to kiss her savagely. The roses fell to the ground.
Chapter Twenty-three
THE news that Randall Peronett was off, that he had left his wife and gone away, positively and definitively gone away with Lindsay Rimmer, was greeted with almost universal satisfaction. There are few persons, even among those most apparently straitlaced, who are not pleased by the flouting of a convention, and glad 'deep inside themselves to think that their society contains deplorable elements. Randall indeed, when it came to it, did his job properly. He did practically everything except announce it to the press. His timing was careful. Nothing was said to anyone until the day when the plane was due to leave for Rome. Then Randall fired off a number of decisive letters. He had even with demonic efficiency arranged that Ann should receive the letter from his solicitor about the divorce arrangements by the same post as his own letter announcing his final and irrevocable departure from her life. His thoroughness amazed and impressed his father; and Hugh felt, at the spectacle of his son's ability so ruthlessly to kick things to pieces, admiration, revulsion, distress, disapproval, and envy.
The whole world now converged upon Ann. She had never been, to persons who had throughout years neglected her, almost forgotten her, a more interesting object. She was besieged by inquisitive and sympathetic visitors and received by every post letters of condolence in which scandalized exclamations and offers of help mingled with the triumphant satisfaction of the virtuous in what had occurred. She was simultaneously invited to ten different houses: she should come and rest, be looked after, stay as long as she liked. Randall and Ann were become, overnight, universal favourites.
Hugh learnt the news from Ann, who rang him up half an hour after the receipt of Randall's letter. Ann asked him to come to Grayhallock at once. Hugh answered vaguely. He would come. But he had, for the moment, urgent business in town. She was to ring him up whenever she liked, and of course if there was anything he could do for her without actually coming to Kent. He would ring her up in any case at least once a day. She was to look after herself and keep cheerful. Why not have Mildred or Clare Swann to stay with her in the house? What a blessing Miranda was at home. He thought about her constantly and would come down at the earliest possible.
Since the sale of the picture Hugh had been in a curious frame of mind. He felt like someone who had lit a long fuse to a barrel of gunpowder. He had done his task and now had only to wait for the explosion. But how odd the waiting was; and when it occurred to him sometimes that perhaps nothing would happen at all he did not know whether he was glad or sorry. Since the moment when Hugh had indicated to Randall that he would get the money, communication between father and son had ceased by tacit mutual consent.