Gathering up all her forces to deal with this crisis she extracted her fingers from Lady Ann’s clasp and straightened her shoulders.
“Why have you waited to ask me that till to-day?” she said, in a low, flat, level tone.
She wanted to look Lady Ann straight in the eyes; but an indescribable timidity compelled her to fix her glance on the gray window.
“But are you, dear, are you, so very fond of him?”
Her lips made an effort to form the suitable words; but her throat seemed to be playing some tiresome trick upon her. It seemed to be necessary that she should keep swallowing.
“Because if you’re not,” Lady Ann went on, “I mean if you’re not very fond of him, it’s much easier to understand all you’re doing.”
“What—do—you mean? Oh, what are you saying to me?” stammered the troubled girl.
“Don’t get excited, dear.” And the aristocratic fingers sought the plebeian ones again. “There’s no need to get agitated. I know well enough that nothing I say will make any difference. But it’s like this, Netta. I sometimes think you don’t quite realize, and never have quite realized, all that this means to Rook.”
This time Netta Page did turn a scared, troubled face directly upon the beautiful head lying on her pillow.
“You’ve never spoken like this to me before,” she said slowly. “Have I done anything? Is it because I got cross just now when he said — when he said that about your knee?”
Lady Ann folded her hands and closed her eyes for a moment. Her face in the gray light looked mysteriously lovely. Was she praying to her gods to give her strength to go through with the discomfort of acting the rôle of executioner?
“Have I done anything?” Netta repeated in a monotonous sing-song. “Have I done anything?”
“You’ve done this, my dear,” said Cousin Ann gravely, opening her eyes and lifting her head a little. “You’ve made it impossible for Rook to have children — and if he doesn’t have a child — if he doesn’t have a son — there’ll be no Ashovers left after he and Lexie are dead. And you know what Lexie’s health is like? He’s a dying man!”
Ah! The avalanche had begun to move. Thoughts and images pursued one another madly through Netta’s bewildered brain. Fantastic images some of them were! One was the image of Cousin Ann herself — with her beautiful marbly limbs — lying on a bed like this, big with a boy-child of Rook’s.
She said nothing for a long while. Her thoughts gathered about the knob of the bedpost above Cousin Ann’s head. The bedpost marched in and out of her thoughts like a drill sergeant among shifty recruits.
Wow ho! Wow ho! Wow ho! moaned the wind in the chimney.
She kept forming words in the depths of her mind and then rejecting them.
One of these sentences got as far as the tip of her tongue.
“How do you know that I shan’t have a dead?” it protested. But that sentence would have been a lie; a lie to her own heart; for she knew only too well that fate had written her down childless.
“Of course I understand it all perfectly,” Cousin Ann’s voice went on; “if you are not very fond of Rook. In that case you are naturally, as we say, out for your own hand. But what I find to puzzling is, how, if you are very fond of him, you can have the heart to blight his whole future and doom him to childlessness? That is what puzzles me, Netta.”
Still the bedpost kept trying to play its part as the master of the ceremonies. But the convicted woman was not conscious any more of these little things. Slowly, with a thick woolly movement, blind and massive, the great avalanche was beginning to bear down upon her. Before the weight of it, before the reverberation of its descending, a landslide seemed to have begun that made the oasis in which she was living, with all its sweet earth and peaceful grass, rock and sway beneath her feet.
With the surface of her mind she was prepared to fight for every inch of her happiness; but, down in her soul, she felt conquered already. Something in herself betrayed her, with a dark subterranean treachery. Something called out: “I yield! I yield!” to the life-destroying whisper of this girl with these beautiful knees.
She found her tongue at last; but what she said was the merest froth of her mind’s turmoil, the merest spindrift of the tragic turn of the tide.
It was a gross thing, too, a venomous, petty, poisonous thing — the thing a jealous chorus girl would say, quarrelling over some beau at the stage door.
“Did you really hurt your knee walking with Rook this morning?”
Cousin Ann lifted her arched eyebrows.
Netta was standing in the middle of the room now, her face a pitiable mirror of contesting feelings.
“Will you please go now?” she stammered helplessly; and then with a faint return of the ugly mood—“that’s to say, if you can walk.”
Cousin Ann rose up from the bed and certainly there was little evidence of lameness as she moved across the room.
“There’s no need for us to quarrel,” she said quietly as she unlocked the door. “I like you, Netta, and I am sorry for you. You’re bound to suffer, whichever way things work out. One can’t carry off a situation like this beyond a certain point; even you can’t do that; though I do think you’re rather wonderful!”
She was alone again; alone in that fireless room. The indent left by Lady Ann’s head still remained in the pillow. The coverlet of the bed still showed the imprint of her body.
Netta walked to the window and looked out. The great lime tree was bowing and clutching at space under the wind’s lash. High up in the air dark specks were being lifted and dropped, dropped and lifted, that once were green budding leaves.
There was a soughing noise in the bushes, as if some great invisible animal were panting there; and what she could see of the water meadows beyond the river looked dark and troubled as though under the persecution of some evil power the menace of whose purpose was still obscure.
The woman shivered, but did not leave the window. She found a certain comfort in sharing with so much helplessness and dumbness the concentrated malice of this invisible enemy.
Her nature had a peculiar passivity in it, an almost voluptuous inertness; and now, when her whole blind instinct was to put off the moment of thinking, there was a real relief in becoming part of these struggling trees and sullen, persecuted meadows.
The wind did actually seem to take on a palpable shape as she watched, a shape that was a shape, though it was chaotic, formless, wavering. And she could not escape the sense that in some definite malignant manner the invisible creature was directing its murderous violence against herself, against this intruder, this invader, this stranger within the gates!
She was still standing at the window when Rook, after a hurried knock, came quickly into the room. She glanced at him for one swift moment and then lifting up her arms, with a swaying staggering lurch forward, she flung herself upon him and clung round his neck.
“I am sorry. I am sorry. I am so sorry!” she moaned. “You will forgive me, Rook, my own? I ought not to have behaved like that. I know I ought not. I was mad, just mad!”
Rook answered her appeal with hurried soothing exclamations: “It’s all right, little one. It’s all right. It’s absolutely all right. There! There! No, don’t cry, sweetheart! I tell you it was nothing. Nothing at all! I’ve quite forgotten it. It’s all over. You are my little Netta again — you are, aren’t you?”
Feeling his arms so firm and tight around her and his lips upon her forehead Netta was sorely tempted to yield to an impassioned fit of desperate sobbing. Her whole nature craved for that relief. But long and bitter experience had taught her that men shrink from these abandonments, shrink from them and grow cold beneath their weight. So with an heroic effort she calmed herself and remained limp and exhausted but untrembling, unshaken, within his grasp.