“I thought—” she began; but even as she spoke the deadly implication of all that this meant stopped her words in mid-utterance. She sat staring at Cousin Ann with her mouth open.
That young lady’s earliest playmate had been her father’s gamekeeper. Missy Sparrow-hawk the old man used to call her. Certainly no raptorial hoverer over the wintry fields knew better the exact moment wherein to drop from the sky.
“One has to face the means to a thing when one wants a thing,” said Cousin Ann. “You and I both care, I take it, for Rook’s happiness above everything else. And Rook’s real happiness, whatever he may say, is in carrying out his destiny. And his destiny, Netta, is in playing his part in life as his people have played it before him.”
The ex-actress from the Bristol Empire closed her mouth, lowered her eyelids till it almost seemed as if her eyes were shut, too, and gave an imperceptible nod of the head.
“Rook must have a son!” added the excited girl, clenching one of her hands and beating it upon her knee as if she were annihilating the very possibility of female Ashovers. “And we’ve got to manage it. You’ve got to manage it.”
What Netta was struggling to keep at that moment was the lovely vague impulse to do something wonderful and unexpected for Rook, some passionate effacement of herself, some act of desperate humility, that would bring him back to her in his thoughts, whatever became of her in reality.
The thought of something like that had been the last refuge of her weariness and her weakness. It had been a beautiful revenge upon them all and a complete escape from them all. But it was so difficult, when Cousin Ann talked in this way, to feel this any more. Cousin Ann made it seem as if she would be only tricking and fooling Rook. That was not at all what had been in her mind, filling her with this vague secret exultation.
“You mean that I should go off without his knowing?”
Cousin Ann indicated that she did mean just exactly that.
“But he’d come after me. Oh, you don’t know him! You don’t know him at all! You think it all depends on how little he cares for me. It doesn’t depend on that! It depends on his own pride; on what he feels he has chosen to do, in defiance of everyone!”
Netta’s voice as she went on became more and more careless and confidential. It became like the voice of a dying person confessing half-forgotten sins to a stranger priest.
“He would follow me and find me out wherever I went. To get some job somewhere and hide away from him would be absolutely impossible. He’d find me out. Nothing would stop him. He’d just bring me back here — and — and—”
Cousin Ann remained completely oblivious of the ricochet of pride in the woman’s voice; pride that kept beating against her calm rational statement, like the wind against a beleaguered rampart.
“Don’t you understand what I mean?” said Netta almost crossly. And then a sudden smile of irony, irony deep and simple as the earth itself, passed over her haggard face.
“No!” repeated the other. “Tell me, quick! What would he do then?”
Netta looked her full in the face.
“He’d insist on marrying me then!” she said.
“Ah! he would, would he?” cried Cousin Ann, making an attempt to return Netta’s smile with appropriate playfulness.
The attempt was not a very successful one. The response hung in the wind a bit. For the pulse beat of a second the victory was with the late mistress of Major-General Caxton. For once in her proud hoverings Missy Sparrow-hawk blinked and swerved. That nuance of irony on her rival’s face became something she could not discount or deal with. For a couple of ticks of the great dining-room clock Lady Ann Poynings was no better than a baffled barbarian.
The result of this momentary defeat, however, was to add a fiercer momentum to her next stroke, which certainly did not miss its mark.
“Then there’s only one thing left for you to do if you’re serious in what you said just now.”
The strange illuminated look came back into Netta’s eyes.
“You mean — to do away with myself?” she whispered.
Lady Ann gave a spontaneous start of surprise at this. Among the various issues she had projected for her campaign, the suicide of her victim had, so far, taken no place.
“Good Lord, Netta Page! What must you think of me! Of course I wasn’t dreaming of horrors like that!”
Once more there came into the other’s countenance the same disconcerting smile.
“I don’t think you’d dream of anything for many nights,” she said. “But what is this one thing left, if it isn’t killing myself?”
Plumb-down, like a falling meteorite, came Missy Sparrow-hawk this time.
“A woman can always,” she whispered savagely, “kill the illusion which a man builds up about her or about himself in connection with her. And when that’s done, there is nothing left.”
The deadliness of this stroke was promptly proved by a curious case of obliteration. What was obliterated was the unearthly eagerness in Netta’s eyes; that exaltation which had carried their struggle to a level of emotion outside the scope of a winner of “scuts” and “pads” and “brushes.”
The look did not merely fade from Netta’s face; for that would imply a process. It sank and was extinguished. It went out. It disappeared as completely as the light in a ship’s stern disappears when the ship sinks into the sea trough.
“Nothing left but just disgust with the whole thing,” added Cousin Ann, driving the stroke home with ferocious finality. “They don’t hang on as we do, Netta Page. We’ve only to let ourselves drift and drop our form a bit and they’re off! They’re awfully fastidious, men are. You’d think sometimes that they’d never seen anything born or anything die!”
Netta’s face expressed a comprehension so bleak and stark that every vestige of beauty seemed frozen out of its haggardness.
“You mean that I should make him hate me?” she said humbly.
“I’m not dictating to you,” breathed the other, with a deep sigh of relief and leaning back in her chair. “It’s you who will have to do it. I’m not impertinent enough to suggest how it’s to be done. I only know, Netta, that if you don’t do just that, nothing that you do will make any difference.”
Why should it have happened that at that critical moment, in place of glancing at the gentle Sir Robert, Netta’s eyes fell upon the one unfrozen pane of the Elizabethan window, across which the lime tree stretched its branch? However it happened, the sight of that branch, motionless and benumbed in the leaden-coloured air reminded her of those drab wintry days when Florrie would bring back to their room from the Turk’s Head, hidden under her cloak, a bottle of Gordon’s gin.
She seemed actually to hear Florrie’s voice at that moment; and there was a branch across the frozen window there, too.
“You get quite like the other girls when you’re squiffy, Net!”
It was in that room that she had vowed to herself, one sickeningly gray morning, that she would never, never, never be “like the other girls” again!
She felt a sudden overpowering necessity to be quite alone. She felt that whatever happened it would be a heavenly relief, like the cessation of physical nausea, not to see Cousin Ann’s brightly flushed cheeks and clear gray eyes any more!
Rather stiffly, for the frost seemed to have got into her bones, she rose from her seat and stood quite still, looking straight down at her enemy.
Cousin Ann felt as though she were riding an unknown horse without spur or bridle or bit. She experienced a sense of abominable embarrassment. She felt as she had felt once when her father caught her stamping on a slowworm. She felt more clumsy than cruel, more thick-skinned than victorious. She felt a fool.