“Remember, remember
Fifth of November,
Gunpowder Treason and plot.
We know no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot!”
And the question flashed through her mind as to what would have happened by the time that great spire of smoke and flame — she recalled the look of it so well! — rose up and drifted across the water. Would it be the welcoming signal to bring Baptiste to Rodmoor — to Rodmoor and to Adrian?
Two minutes more! She watched the hand upon the station-clock. It was slowly crossing the diminishing strip of white which separated it from the figure of the hour. Oh, these cruel signs, with their murderous moving fingers! Why must Love and Hope and Despair depend upon little patches of vanishing white, between black marks?
Off at last! And she made a little gasping noise in her throat as if she had swallowed that strip of white.
An hour later, as the November darkness was closing in, she passed through the iron gates into the Asylum garden. As she moved in, a small group of inmates of the Asylum, accompanied by a nurse, emerged from a secluded path. It was shadowy and obscure under those heavy trees, but led by the childish curiosity of the demented, these unfortunate persons, instead of obeying their attendant’s command, drifted waveringly towards her.
A movement took place among them like that described by Dante in his Inferno as occurring when some single soul, out of a procession of lost spirits, recognizes in the dubious twilight, a living figure from the upper air.
For the moment Philippa wondered if Adrian was among them, but if he was he was given no opportunity to approach her, for the alert guardian of these people, like some Virgilian watcher of ghostly shadows upon the infernal stream, shepherded them away, across the darkened lawn, towards the corner of the building.
The Renshaw name acted like magic when she reached the house. Yes, Mr. Sorio was much better; practically quite himself again, and there was no reason at all why Miss Renshaw should not have an interview with him. A letter had, indeed, only that very afternoon been posted to Miss Herrick, asking her to come up to the place the following day.
Philippa inquired whether her interview with the patient might take the form of a little walk with him, before the hour of their evening meal. This request produced a momentary hesitation on the part of the official to whom she made it, but ultimately — for, after all, Miss Renshaw was the sister of the magistrate who had procured the unhappy man’s admission into the place — that too was granted her, on condition that she returned in half-an-hour’s time, and did not take her companion into the streets of the town. Having granted her request the Asylum doctor left her in the waiting-room, while he went to fetch her friend.
Philippa sank down upon a plush-covered chair and looked around her. What a horrible room it was! The shabby furniture, covered with gloomy drapery, had an air of sombre complicity with all the tragedies that darkened human life. It was like a room only entered when some one was dead or dying. It was like the ante-room to a cemetery. Everything in it drooped, and seemed anxious to efface itself, as if ashamed to witness the indecent exposures of outraged human thoughts.
They brought Sorio at last, and the man’s sunken eyes gleamed with a light of indescribable pleasure when his hand met Philippa’s and clutched it with trembling eagerness.
They went out of the room together and moved down the long passage that led to the entrance of the place. As she walked by his side, Philippa experienced the queer sensation of having him as her partner in some diabolic danse-macabre, performed to the mingled tune of all the wild “songs of madness” created since the beginning of the world.
She couldn’t help noticing that the groups of people they passed on their way had an air quite different from persons in a hospital or even in a prison. They made her think — these miserable ones — of some horrible school for grown-up people; such a school as those who have been ill-used in childhood see sometimes in their dreams.
They seemed to loiter and gather and peer and mutter, as if, “with bated breath and whispering humbleness,” they were listening to something that was going on behind closed doors. Philippa got the impression of a horrible atmosphere of guilt hanging over the place, as if some dark and awful retribution were being undergone there, for crimes committed against the natural instincts of humanity.
A lean, emaciated old woman came shuffling past them, with elongated neck and outstretched arms. “I’m a camel! I’m a camel! I’m a camel!” Philippa heard her mutter.
Suddenly Adrian laid his hand on her arm. “They let me have my owl in here, Phil,” he said. “We mustn’t go far to-night or it’ll get hungry. It has its supper off my plate. I never told you how I found it, did I? It was pecking at her eyes, you know. Yes, at her eyes! But that’s nothing, is it? She had been dead for weeks, and owls are scavengers, and corpses are carrion!”
They crossed the garden with quick steps.
“How good the air is to-night!” cried Philippa’s companion, throwing back his head and snuffing the leaf-scented darkness.
They were let out through the iron gates and turning instinctively south-wards, they wandered slowly down to the river — the girl’s hand resting on the man’s arm.
They passed, on their way, the blackened wall of a disused factory. A blurred and feeble street-lamp threw a flickering light upon this wall. Pasted upon its surface was a staring and coloured advertisement of some insurance company, representing a phoenix surrounded by flames.
Philippa thought at once of the bonfire which was being prepared for the ensuing evening. Would Adrian’s boy really arrive in so short a time? And would Adrian himself, like that grotesque bird, so imperturbable in the midst of its funeral pyre, rise to new life after all this misery? Let it be her — oh, great heavenly powers! — let it be her and not Nance, nor Baptiste, nor any other, who should save him and heal him!
Still looking at the picture on the wall, she repeated to her companion a favourite verse of Mrs. Renshaw’s which she had learnt as a child.
“Death is now the phoenix’ nest
And the turtle’s loyal breast
To eternity doth rest.
“Leaving no posterity,
’Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.”
The rich dirge-like music of these Shakespearian rhymes — placed so quaintly under their strange title of “Threnos,” at the end of the familiar volume — had a soothing influence upon them both at that moment.
It seemed to Philippa as if, by her utterance of them, they both came to share some sad sweet obsequies over the body of something that was neither human nor inhuman, something remote, strange, ineffable, that lay between them, and was of them and yet not of them, like the spirit-corpse of an unborn child.
They reached the bank of the river. The waters of the Loon were high and, through the darkness, a murmur as if composed of a hundred vague whispering voices blending together, rose to their ears from its dark surface.
They moved down close to the river’s edge. A small barge, with its long guiding-pole lying across it, lay moored to the bank. Without a moment’s delay — as if the thing had been prepared in advance to receive him — Adrian jumped into the barge and seized the pole.
“Come!” he said quietly.
She was too reckless and indifferent to everything now, to care greatly what they did; so without a word of protest, or any attempt to turn his purpose, she leapt in after him and settling herself in the stern, seized the heavy wooden rudder.
The tide was running sea-ward, fast and strong, and the barge, pushed vigorously by Adrian’s pole away from the bank, swept forward into the darkness.