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Rodmoor. John Cowper Powys
Читать онлайн.Название Rodmoor
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isbn 4064066248031
Автор произведения John Cowper Powys
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
John Cowper Powys
Rodmoor
A Romance
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066248031
Table of Contents
XXIV THE TWENTY-EIGHTH OF OCTOBER
I
THE BOROUGH
It was not that he concealed anything from her. He told her quite frankly, in that first real conversation they had together—on the little secluded bench in the South London park—about all the morbid sufferings of his years in America and his final mental collapse.
He even indicated to her—while the sound of grass-mowing came to them over the rain-wet tulips—some of the most secret causes of this event; his savage reaction, for instance, against the circle he was thrown into there; his unhappy habit of deadly introspection; his aching nostalgia for things less murderously new and raw.
He explained how his mental illness had taken so dangerous, so unlooked for a shape, that it was only by the merest chance he had escaped long incarceration.
No; it was not that he concealed anything. It was rather that she experienced a remote uneasy feeling that, say what he might—and in a certain sense he said too much rather than too little—she did not really understand him.
Her feminine instinct led her to persuade him that she understood; led her to say what was most reassuring to him, and most consolatory; but in her heart of hearts she harboured a teasing doubt; a doubt which only the rare sweetness of these first love-days of her life enabled her to hide and cover over. Nor was this feeling about her lover’s confessions the only little cloud on Nance Herrick’s horizon during these memorable weeks—weeks that, after all, she was destined to look back upon as so strangely happy.
She found herself, in the few moments when her passionate emotion left her free to think of such things, much more anxious than she cared to admit about the ambiguous relations existing between the two persons dependent upon her. Ever since the death of her father—that prodigal sailor—three years ago, when she had taken it upon herself to support both of them by her work in the dressmaker’s shop, she had known that all was not well between the two. Rachel Doorm had never forgiven Captain Herrick for marrying again; she felt that instinctively, but it was only quite recently that she had grown to be really troubled by the eccentric woman’s attitude to the little half-sister.
Linda’s mother, she knew, had in her long nervous decline rather clung than otherwise to this grim friend of the former wife; but Linda’s mother had always been different from other women; and Nance could remember how, in quite early days, she never interfered when Miss Doorm took the child away to punish her.
To Nance herself Rachel had always been something of an anxiety. Her savage devotion had proved over and over again more of a burden than a pleasure; and now that there was this increased tension between her and Linda, the thing began to appear invidious, rapacious, sinister.
She was torn, in fact, two ways over the situation. Her own mother had long ago—and it was one of her few definite recollections of her—made her swear solemnly never to desert this friend of former days; and the vows she had registered then to obey this covenant had grown into a kind of religious rite; the only rite, in fact, after all these years, she was able to perform for her dead.
And yet if loyalty to her mother kept her patiently tender with Rachel’s eccentricities, the much warmer feeling she had for her other parent was stirred indignantly by the thought of any unkindness dealt out to Linda.
And just at present, it was clear, Linda was not happy.
The young girl seemed to be losing her vivacity and to be growing silent and reserved.
She was now nearly eighteen; and yet Nance had caught her once or twice lately looking at Rachel Doorm with