She smiled to herself as she thought of such a possibility. They would be miserable. They would be pining for shops and picture houses and “boys.” Why was it she didn’t crave for any of these things? Minnie and Madge had always said she was a “funny one‚” and she supposed they were right. She remembered how even Rook had expressed surprise that she could go on like this, month after month, doing nothing at all and wanting nothing at all.
Cousin Ann was the only person who never seemed to get annoyed with her. It did not appear to aggravate Cousin Ann when she wanted to read stories in her bedroom instead of walking through the mud and rain. The young lady even chose books for her, just the ones she liked best, out of the jumble of volumes that filled the house.
Thinking of Cousin Ann she rose from her chair and went out into the hall.
Here she stood for a moment, very still and quiet, listening to the wind and to the voice of Pandie talking in the kitchen.
Then she gave a little jerk to one of her sleeves, glanced at her feet to see that her stockings were unruffled, and opening the door with rather a deprecatory softness, went into the drawing room.
Lady Ann was standing at a large rosewood table which she had covered with newspapers. On the table was a great rain-drenched heap of chrysanthemums, laurustinus, and a few marigolds, together with the wet leaves of certain other plants. Lady Ann was engaged in shaking the water out of these flowers and in arranging them in a row of tall vases.
She welcomed Netta with affectionate gravity, as one priestess might welcome another when engaged in something which implied an hieratic freemasonry.
Nor was their background at that moment unworthy of them. The chairs and sofas of the chilly room wore a kind of grand ghostliness in their chintz covers. They seemed to survey these two warm-blooded persons like so many wistful defunct nuns. The stately ornaments on the chimney-piece were all white and gilt; the landscapes on the walls were all in pale water colour or pastel. The whole room had the look of something that accepted Time and Change and Death as its lords and masters and yet refused to yield one inch of its own dignity and ceremoniousness.
Neither Lady Ann nor Netta spoke much as they went on with their work but they were both obviously very happy in what they were doing. Indeed, as they laughed and spread out fresh paper on the table and poured water from one vase to another one and arranged the cut stalks and the pungent-smelling leaves, it was as if all individual difference between them dropped away; while two depersonalized figures, as in some old faded print entitled “Women Arranging Flowers‚” substituted themselves for the real Ann Gore and the real Netta Page.
“Rook says that Lexie isn’t so well.”
These words, as soon as Netta had uttered them, sounded to her ears as if she had heard them long before, spoken by someone else.
Cousin Ann stared at her in obvious surprise.
“He didn’t tell me that this morning,” she said. “But of course he may have been too worried to talk about it.”
She was silent for a moment, her large gray eyes staring in front of her, her full lips parted, her rounded chin raised.
Then with a sudden almost childish gesture of excitement: “Listen, Netta, I’ve got an idea. Let’s go round there now, this very moment. Let’s take him some of these flowers.”
The blank look with which the older woman received this suggestion and her glance at the windows increased Cousin Ann’s excitement.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she cried. “That’s what we’ll do! We’ll surprise him. There’s heaps of time. I’ll lend you my mackintosh and take my plaid cloak. Oh, you dear, how funny and frightened you look, Come on. I’ll get Pandie to clear these things away. No, no. Of course I can’t go alone. Oh, you dear thing. I do adore you when you look so scared.”
In her impetuosity the young girl seized Netta’s head between her hands and kissed her on the forehead. Then she dragged her out of the room and up the historic staircase.
The road between Ashover Church and Ashover village lay east and west. Between it and the water meadows there was nothing but a stretch of low white railings. Halfway to the village the road crossed a narrow wooden bridge where the river turned sharply to the south.
It was a road that had a distinct character of its own and no reforming county council had yet dared to meddle with that character.
The flooded ruts into which the two women kept stumbling might have been indented by the wagon wheels of Cromwell; and the rough ditch-side grass, now beaten flat by the weather, might have fed the flocks of Wolsey.
Cousin Ann’s excitement seemed rather to increase than to diminish. Her thick boots and stockings kept her feet dry; while the water streaming down her cheeks heightened her eager colour.
Netta, on the contrary, was conscious that her feet were miserably wet, that the draggled ends of her hair were hanging loose, and that the rain was finding its way down her very neck behind the collar of her mackintosh.
Dead yellow leaves whirled past them as they struggled on. The willows bowed down toward the alders. The alders bent desolately toward the reeds. The reeds crouched and shuddered until they touched the surface of the swollen ditches. Tossed wildly on the rain came flocks of starlings, their awkward bodies carried up and down by the wind, their wings beating aimlessly.
The women arrived at last at the cottage of the Vicar of Ashover, a little whitewashed two-story building close to the road, where in former times had stood the turnpike toll-gate.
Lady Ann hesitated here a moment, pulling her cloak closer round herself and adjusting the mackintosh of her companion. She had made Netta wear a cloth cap of Rook’s and the miserable patience of the rain-drenched face beneath it struck her now with a little twinge of remorse.
They were on the point of moving forward again when the door of the cottage opened and the figure of a young girl presented itself in the doorway.
“I saw you through the window,” said this apparition in a voice so faint that the words hardly reached them. “Come in, won’t you? Come in, please!”
They made their way through the tiny garden and entered the house.
Nell took them into her own sitting room and placed them on the sofa opposite the fire. She persuaded Netta to take off her shoes and hold her feet to the blaze.
They spoke of Lexie, how mysterious his illness was and how unwisely he treated himself, taking long exhausting walks when the one thing the doctor implored him to avoid was that kind of exertion.
And then quite suddenly, as she sat on a little stool by the side of the hearth, the visitors became aware that the girl was trembling from head to foot.
Shivering convulsive tremors ran through her slim frame. Her small head, whose wavy light-brown hair framed a face as shell-like in its transparency as an old miniature, straightened itself stiffly on its slender neck as if to defy some mortal weakness.
“What is it?” murmured Cousin Ann, laying her wet gloved hand on the young woman’s knee.
The sympathetic voice and touch seemed to alarm the girl rather than quiet her. Curious twitching lines appeared on her face; and her mouth, which normally had a piteous twist, began to resemble the mouth of an unhappy little gargoyle.
She rose from her seat, biting her under lip, clenching her fingers in the palms of her hands, and stood by the mantelpiece.
Lady Ann also rose and for a moment remained hesitating. Netta, who kept glancing timidly from one to another as she stretched her feet nearer and nearer to the fire, was vaguely struck by something brusque and blundering in her friend’s movement. She became conscious of a wish that Cousin Ann would turn her steady glance away from that troubled figure; and behind that wish she found herself feeling a faint, a very faint hostility to her dear friend.