At the first relaxing of his embrace she drew herself gently away, and all her endeavour was to retain the sweetness of his tenderness, without spoiling it by any blunder, without spilling a drop of its delicious security.
She pulled him down on the bed beside her, close to the pillows still marked by the imprint of Ann’s head, and remained quite silent for a moment, holding tight to one of his hands and lifting it once — twice — three times — to her lips.
“Little Netta!” he kept repeating. “Little Netta!”
At last feeling his arm round her waist, feeling herself drawn close against him, she gathered up courage to speak again.
“I oughtn’t to have acted like that, Rook. I know I oughtn’t. I can’t think why I did! You’re not angry with me any more, are you?”
“Angry?” he repeated. “Angry? Good God! It’s you who ought to be angry! Netta darling, listen — listen to me.” His voice grew very quiet and resolute, the voice which she had come to associate with her happiest moments; the voice he had used when he first made her come with him to Ashover.
“Cousin Ann and I are very old friends. You do understand that, don’t you? And when I say ‘old friends’ you do know what I mean? There’s no danger to you, none at all, from what Cousin Ann and I are to each other now, you understand. It would be different altogether if we were meeting here for the first time. Then you might have had a right to be worried. But when people have known each other all their lives, there’s a certain — oh, I don’t know — a certain familiarity which to a person like me destroys all the thrill of — well! of love-making, to be quite frank. — Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Netta darling?”
The sweetness to her wounded feelings of the tenderness in his voice was all that concerned the woman at that moment. As to what he actually said, it just excited a vague wonder and amusement in her that her mysterious Rook could be so stupid, so blind. She felt he had not the remotest desire to deceive her, to pull wool over her eyes. But, mercy! what things men could think, what things men could say! An overwhelming wave of pitiful gentleness toward him, just because he was so funny, swept over her heart. She lifted up her chin and gave him a quick, sudden, passionate
“Oh, I know I was mad,” she repeated. “I know I was mad.”
His arm tightened round her in a reassuring hug. Then with a bound he was off the bed and hanging over the dead ashes in the grate.
“Why haven’t they cleared this up?” he grumbled. “Why didn’t Pandie light your fire?”
Wow ho! Wow ho! Wow ho! moaned the wind in the chimney above his head.
He moved to the side of the mantelpiece and rang the bell.
“Tell her to take the ashes away and bring some sticks,” he said. “I’ve got to go round now and meet Uncle Dick. The old man’s been hanging about all morning, they tell me. What he wants I can’t think! You’ve seen him, haven’t you, Netta? I told you about him. My grandfather was a rake in his time. I daresay I’ve got plenty of other relations hidden away somewhere if the truth were known.”
Netta heard him as if his voice came to her through a dense volume of green, humming water. The wind began rattling the window again, as though its invisible fingers itched to get her by the throat.
“Uncle Dick?” she repeated vaguely. “Oh, yes, Corporal Dick! I know. Cousin Ann introduced me to him. He lives over there — beyond Battlefield. Yes, of course you must go if he wants to see you.”
She got up and stood there, passive and hesitating. She would have given anything to be really loved just then — not petted and pitied but loved, so as to drown all her thoughts. But he moved straight to the door.
“Make Pandie light you one of her best fires,” he said.
Rook Ashover found his poor relation waiting for him in the little nondescript place they had acquired the habit of calling “the Master’s Study” since the time of Uncle Dick’s progenitor. Perhaps that was the reason the Corporal always insisted upon being shown in there in preference to any more formal reception.
The old man was sitting on a high-backed chair, his long bony fingers crossed over one of his knees. His hat and stick and muffler lay on the table.
“Well, Uncle Dick, how goes it?” said the nephew, shaking his visitor cordially by the hand. “Sit down, sit down.” And he drew up another high-backed chair and smilingly placed himself opposite him, with the look of one who deprecates an expected reproof.
“Wind rather strong to-day, eh?” went on the younger man. “Found it rough, I expect, coming across the hill? How are they all over there?”
The Corporal regarded the Squire of Ashover with an austere, quizzical eye.
“It’s not about them, Nephew, that I’ve come so far to see ’ee.”
“What is it for, Uncle, then? Just for old companion’s sake and to tell me I’ve been neglecting you lately?”
“They tell me, down Dorsal, that Lexie be no better and that Doctor says there’s no hope for ’n to see another year round.”
Rook’s smile died upon his face. “That’s so, Uncle. I’m afraid that’s so.”
“Well, then, if that’s so,” returned the old man, uncrossing his knees and leaning forward, “how is it that you have the face, Nephew — you that be Squire and all that — to go and fix yourself up with a young woman that may be a decent body and such-like and I’m not saving she isn’t, but one that makes your blessed mother feel lonesome and confounded in her own house, as if the whole world were turned higgledy-piggledy? ’Tisn’t that I’ve anything against Miss Page here. She be a good-hearted young woman by all accounts. But, good or bad, we know that she isn’t your lawful wife; and we know that she be standing in the place of your lawful wife; and the long and short of that is — with Lexie being as he be — that when he’s gone and when in due time you are gone, too, there’ll be no more Ashovers on Frome-side. Young, old, rich, poor, that’ll finish ’em! That’ll be the end.”
Having thus finished the longest consecutive utterance he had ever made in his life the Corporal crossed his legs, straightened himself out in his chair, and solemnly and gravely winked at his obstinate nephew.
Rook had shuffled uneasily more than once during this discourse, but by the time it was over he had taken his cue.
“Uncle Richard,” he began, “I am very grateful to you for speaking your mind so frankly. Of course, I do see how unpleasant all this is for my mother. And I see exactly how you yourself must feel about it. Unfortunately there are certain questions in life that one cannot decide in consideration for other people’s feelings; or even perhaps for one’s own feelings. I don’t think you’d wish me to behave badly, Uncle Richard. I brought Miss Page here to the house with my eyes fully open. She herself, I daresay, would have preferred to remain in seclusion. If I had known, of course, how my mother would take it, shutting herself up in her room and so on, I admit I might have acted differently. I fancied that time and habit would bring her round. They don’t seem to have done so. And there it is! You must see for yourself that I cannot send Miss Page away now. It would be a dishonourable thing, a brutal thing, an impossible thing. No! No! Uncle; there are situations in life when a man must shift for himself. I fully understand your motives in coming to me like this. But it’s no use. My mother is my mother and I am myself. As to the future, We shall see! Not even you can read the future, Uncle!”