She had finished her breakfast. She sat with her chin on her hands‚ her elbows on the table‚ her eyes staring in front of her.
There were no other people in the room. Rook and Lady Ann had breakfasted together earlier. Mrs. Ashover never appeared till midday. The same situation had repeated itself many times already; and these lonely morning meals were by no means distasteful to Netta.
As she sat now in that straight-backed chair her eyes were fixed steadily on the rain; but her thoughts were focussed on the figure of a little old lady in a black satin dress who had just passed her on the staircase.
It was not a nice experience to be looked through as if you were transparent and as if the balustrade on the other side of your body were requiring a new coat of paint; but it was a still more unpleasant sensation to be given a glance that resembled a sharp stinging smack on the cheek; and Netta, in recalling these incidents‚ was conscious that her resentment at them was something new; was something different from the weary habitual patience into which the buffets of life had beaten her.
But this sort of thing had been going on for a year; and she still could be quite happy at certain moments.
Not one single time, since Rook had brought her to the house, had Mrs. Ashover spoken to her, or smiled at her, or eaten at the same table with her.
The servants‚ too, old-fashioned and eccentric, had taken their cue from the old lady and had missed no opportunity of making the intruder feel her position.
Well! that, at any rate, was quite different now. The appearance of Cousin Ann upon the scene had changed all that. Netta did not quite understand Cousin Ann’s kindness. But, on the other hand, she did not suspect it of any hidden treachery. She just accepted it as she had accepted so much else. And it certainly had made the whole difference as far as the servants were concerned. Lady Ann could not apparently coax Mrs. Ashover into a different mood; but she had forced her to retreat from position after position of overt contempt, and she had cast such a spell over the rest of the household that the girl no longer went to and fro among them like a convicted criminal.
Everybody in the place had felt the new influence. The worst of the village gossips, when they saw the daughter of Lord Poynings grow friendlier and friendlier with “the kept woman,” had begun to wonder if it wouldn’t after all result in Master Rook’s marrying “the poor harmless body.”
Even that formidable entity “the neighbourhood” showed signs of a certain restlessness under its own verdict. It was one thing to punish the impoverished Ashovers. It was another thing to be denied the pleasure of meeting Ann Wentworth Gore.
A tentative gesture, however, which was made from a certain quarter to propitiate Lady Ann without relaxing the proprieties, met with such an annihilating rebuff that it would have needed a bolder person than any who lived just then on the banks of the Frome to repeat that offence. The Ashover family was therefore left in peace to work out its own destiny.
Many other images besides those of the ungracious old lady and the friendly young one rose between Netta and the streaming window panes that November morning.
Rain more than anything else in the world carries the mind back to early associations, and Netta saw herself as a little girl in a starched pinafore watching it beat on the roof of the Black Dog at Portsmouth.
She saw herself as an overworked barmaid at the King George in Southampton, watching it turn the little stone gutter into a turbid flood.
She saw herself as the ambiguously protected “niece” of Major-General Sir James Carton watching it drip‚ drip, drip from a Hammersmith waterspout upon a galvanized-iron roof.
She saw herself as a second-rate actress in a second-rate stock company watching it from the common dressing room as it changed the colour from yellow ochre to rusty brown of a Bristol alley wall.
She saw herself in a boat at Abingdon, watching it leap up in a million tiny water tongues from the surface of the great smooth river, the day when a Guy’s Hospital student took her to Pangbourne. She could feel at that very moment the touch of his young feverish hand upon her body. She could hear the harsh-throated sedge warblers chattering in the reeds.
Netta loved these solitary interludes in the Ashover dining room.
She could dream things there and tell herself stories there, untroubled by any agitation. She could even think without hopeless regret of that rash proceeding that had for ever ruined her chance of having a child. She could even try to imagine what sort of child Rook and she would have had if things had been different!
So far off and so soothingly vague were Netta’s thoughts that morning that she scarcely turned in her chair when Pandie, the red-haired housemaid, came in to set light to the fire.
“No, you’ll never see no rain like our rain, miss, in all the countries you do travel through! ’Tain’t in nature that water should fall from dry clouds same as from wet clouds, and there aren’t no clouds this side of Salisbury Plain so wet as ours!”
Thanks to Cousin Ann, Pandie was always affable now; and the sound of her voice and the look of her sturdy broad back bent over the coals filled Netta with a delicious feeling of security.
Oh, how often in former times she had longed to be at once thoroughly idle and thoroughly respectable!
It was her craving for this particular combination that had betrayed her into the Major-General episode, the single one of all her experiences that she would have liked blotted completely out of her memory.
“I like your rain very much,” she said softly. “Were you born in Ashover, Pandie?”
“Me, miss? Me, mum? The Lord love us! No, mum. I were born down Somerset-way atween Tarnton and Durston. ‘Twas fresh water, too, where Father lived. But ’tweren’t Frome-water. ’Twas Parret-water; and there were big willow trees over’n and terrible black mud under’n. Corpses themselves would turn to water where I was born‚ miss; but that’s not saying anything against these parts.”
When Pandie was gone the crackling of the newly lit sticks increased Netta’s content.
The effect of rain-lashed windows was to give to the light that filled the room a curious atmospheric quality; a quality that roused in the woman who sat there an indefinable feeling connected with a mysterious dream she had sometimes, the exact outlines of which, though repeated again and again‚ she invariably lost.
What the rain really did was to throw a greenish-gray shadow into the room, a shadow that was broken at this moment by spurts and splashes of redness coming from the grate.
She drank her remaining cup of tea in quick little sips, holding up the cup with a certain nonchalant air as she had seen Cousin Ann do, the little finger stiffly extended, the elbow resting on the table.
Over the fireplace was a portrait of Sir Robert Ashover, the unfortunate Cavalier; and the sad eyes and melancholy forehead of this picture met her gaze with penetrating sympathy.
From the very first she had taken a fancy to Sir Robert. She loved his carefully combed curls and his dreamy sensuous lips. She looked at him now with renewed reassurance. He was certainly the last person in the world to will any harm to a poor girl.
She found herself on the point of wishing that Rook was more like Sir Robert and less like his mother.
But Rook had something in him that separated him from all of them; from her most of all.
Oh, dear! She hurriedly jerked up her consciousness, like an entangled fishing line, out of that trouble; and threw it again, with a clear fresh swing, into less weedy waters.
How wonderful it was to be free from worry.
She had worried a great deal when she first came to this place. She wondered what her Bristol friends, Madge and Minnie, would feel if they were in her shoes.