Lady Ann had never looked more competent, more high-spirited, more kind. She seemed on the point of making some pronounced sympathetic gesture, perhaps even of taking the hysterical girl in her arms. Netta had a feeble inclination to cry out: “Let her alone! let her alone!” But all she could do was to wish herself out in the rain again, out in the road, in the fields, in the middle of Hangdown Cover; out anywhere, so as not to see — she couldn’t tell quite what!
Thank Heaven! The door opened just then and the Vicar of Ashover entered. Netta had not been able yet to make up her mind whether she liked William Hastings or disliked him. He made her think of a picture of Napoleon that hung in the Major-General’s bathroom and that association was horrible. But he also made her think of Monseigneur Tallainton, the little old French priest of the Catholic church in Bristol; and that association endeared him to her. She liked something compact and weighty about his rather corpulent body, and she liked his hands, which were very small and very white. It was a certain suppressed passion in his face which puzzled her and disturbed her. It was like a ship with its decks covered with great dark guns coming down upon her out of the mist.
The Vicar shook hands cordially with Cousin Ann and bending quickly over Netta herself prevented her from rising. It was while he was doing this that his young wife slipped silently around the outside of the group and escaped from the room.
It was not till after the conversation had begun that the girl’s disappearance was noticed.
“Yes, I’m afraid she was upset by something,” said Lady Ann, catching the Vicar’s eye as it roved from Netta’s outstretched feet to her cloth cap.
“It’s the weather,” said William Hastings. “She is always like this when it rains. Nell hates the rain.”
“I think it was more than that, Mr. Hastings,” said Lady Ann gravely. “But it’s a pity the climate doesn’t suit her, if you’re going on living here.”
“Dorsetshire suits us better than any other place when the wind’s not in the west.”
As if in response to the clergyman’s words a great gust of wind shook the windows of the house and a splutter of rain came hissing down the chimney.
Netta thought she could hear a bed creaking in the room above them, and the sound troubled her more than the sound of sobs. She drew her feet away from the fire and began putting on her stiff half-dried shoes.
“Yes, we must be going,” said Lady Ann, rising. “But I would have liked to ask you about your book. Is it coming on well?”
The Vicar’s face changed its expression completely. “Seventeen chapters,” he said with a look at Netta as if she and her troublesome shoe-strings were the eighteenth chapter. “But it is the old story with me, Lady Ann. I tear most of it up. It isn’t a very cheerful book.”
Lady Ann smiled as she wrapped her plaid round her. She had grown accustomed to this kind of thing from William Hastings and had ceased to take it seriously. No one but the man’s own wife had ever seen this mysterious work, and for some reason or another Nell Hastings never spoke of it.
But Netta was on her feet now and gravely contemplating the faded carpet. Hastings and his book presented themselves to her mind as a great plump black crow carrying a little plump black crow in his claws. She fancied she heard that bed creaking again.
She pulled on her mackintosh with such rapidity that the clergyman was not in time to assist her. She was glad when they were out of the house. She was glad to feel the rain on her face again.
As for Cousin Ann the whole experience of that little room, with its grotesque antimacassars across the backs of mahogany chairs and its double row of daguerreotypes, seemed to sail off over the ditches like a bubble of froth. Her only remark, as the rain eddied and gyrated past them like a horizontal cataract, reducing the whole world to the grayness of a cadaver, was a remark that conveyed no meaning at all to the mind of Netta.
“Queen Elizabeth was right. There’s something funny about it. They ought never to have allowed it.”
The rain increased in volume. The village in front of them seemed completely to disappear. The plaid cloak soon became as wringing wet as if it had been flung into the ditch. The drops trickled down Netta’s back in cold persistent streamlets that made her shiver. Her shoes were so full of water that they responded with gurgling swishing noises every time she moved her feet.
On and on they struggled, their heads bent, their soaked garments clinging to the curves of their figures like Pheidian drapery, their eyes blurred, the rain tasting salty in their mouths, as if it were the tears of some vast inconsolable Niobe.
It seemed to Netta as though their heavy progress would never end; as though all her troubled life had been only a fantastic preparation for a destiny that meant walking, walking, walking, by the side of a being whose thoughts she could never read, toward a goal that could never be reached!
And obscurely, through the clamminess of her clothes, through the gurglings of her shoes, she kept hearing that invisible bed in the upper room of Toll-Pike Cottage creaking, creaking, creaking, like the hinge of a gate behind a retreating assassin.
She began to fall into that mood of indignant pity about Nell Hastings that used to puzzle the girls so when she displayed it over the affairs of poor Madge. Why did she always worry herself about people? Mrs. Hastings was nothing to her. She didn’t want her pity. She did want something, though, and Netta wished she could give it to her.
She found herself giving it to her in her imagination. It took the form of a twenty-pound note, like the one which the manager of the Bristol Theatre gave to Minnie at Christmas. She saw that twisted mouth trying to thank her but she hurried away…. Why! They had actually turned down Marsh Alley and were at Lexie’s very gate. “Never mind, dear. I expect we’re both a little dazed.” So Cousin Ann had been speaking to deaf ears! “I must stop fancying things,” Netta said to herself as Lexie’s housekeeper let them in and preceded them upstairs.
They found the invalid lying on a deck chair at the edge of his bookcase. On a little table by his side was a china mug and in the mug was a specimen of that curious plant, half fungus, half flower, which the botanists call broom rape.
Lexie sat up very straight and contemplated his visitors with wide-open eyes.
“We mustn’t stay a moment,” announced Cousin Ann. “Rook doesn’t know we came. We’ve brought you these.” And to Netta’s astonishment, out of the deep pocket of her plaid coat the young woman produced a bunch of dilapidated chrysanthemums.
Lexie received the flowers, snuffed tentatively at them, remarked that they smelt like muskrats, and laid them down beside the mug.
He looked at Netta then, with something like a furtive appeal on his corrugated face.
“Do you want me to go and talk to Mrs. Bellamy?” Netta said humbly.
A glance of unconcealed irritation was her reward for this.
“You’re both so thoroughly wet,” he grumbled‚ “that I refuse to be responsible for keeping you a second. Thank you for coming, Ann. Thank you for bringing these. And now, for God’s sake, clear off, both of you, and race home!”
He waved them away with both his hands and seemed seriously agitated. And yet Netta was once more aware that he was looking at her with that same significant expression. What did he want her to do? To go home alone?
“Why doesn’t Ann stay to lunch with you and let Mrs. Bellamy dry her things?” she murmured.
“And leave you to go home by yourself? Can you see me doing such a thing?” cried Lady Ann.
There was an awkward pause between the three of them, during which Netta loosened the wet mackintosh from her throat and moved away from the support of a table lest her dampness should spoil Lexie’s papers.