LITMIR.BIZ

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have gone down to posterity as Brand Hatchet-pate, or Brand Hammer-skull. His head receded from a forehead narrow and high, and rose at the back into a dome-like protrusion which, in spite of the closely-clipt, reddish hair that covered it, suggested, in a manner that was almost sinister, the actual bony substructure of the cranium beneath.

      The fire was out. The candles on the table were guttering and flickering with little spitting noises as their wicks sank and the cold hearth in front of him was littered with the ashes of innumerable cigarettes. He was neither reading nor smoking them. He sat with his hands on the arms of his chair, staring into vacancy.

      Brand Renshaw’s eyes were like the eyes of a morose animal, an animal endowed perhaps with intellectual powers denied to the human race, but still an animal, and when he fixed his gaze in his concentrated manner upon the unknown objects of his thought there was a weight of heavily focussed intensity in his stare that was unpleasantly threatening.

      He was staring in this way at the empty grate when, in the dead silence of the house, he caught the sound of a furtive step in the hall without, and immediately afterwards the slight rasping noise of bolts carefully shot back.

      In a flash he leapt to his feet and extinguished the guttering candles. Quietly and on tip-toe he moved to the door and soundlessly turning the handle peered into the hall. He was just in time to see the heavy front door closed. Without the least token of haste or surprise he slipped on an overcoat, took his hat and stick and went forth in pursuit of the escaped one.

      At first he saw only the darkness and heard no sound but the angry flutterings of some bird in the high trees, and—a long way off, perhaps even beyond the park—the frightened squeal of a hunted rabbit. But by the time he got to the gate, taking care to walk on the flower-beds rather than on the stone pathway, he could make out the figure of the girl no great way in front of him. She ran on, so straight and so blindly, towards the oak trees that he was able without difficulty to follow her even though, every now and then, her retreating figure was absorbed and swallowed up by the darkness.

      When at last he came up to her side as she lay stretched out at the foot of the tree, he made no immediate attempt to betray his presence. With his arms folded he stood regarding her, a figure as silent and inhuman as herself, and over them both the vague immensities and shadowy obscurities of the huge earth-scented night hung lowering and tremendous, like powers that held their breath, waiting, watching.

      At intervals an attenuated gust of wind, coming from far away across the marshes, moved the dead leaves upon the ground and made them dance a little death dance. This it did without even stirring the young living shoots on the boughs above them.

      The darkness seemed to rise and fall about the two figures, to advance, to recede, to dilate, to diminish, in waves of alternate opacity and tenuity. In its indrawings and outbreathings, in the ebb and flow of its fluctuating presence, it seemed to beat—at least that is how Brand Renshaw felt it—like the pulse of an immense heart charged with unutterable mysteries.

      This illusion, if it were an illusion, may have been due to nothing more recondite than the fact that, in the silence of the heavy night, the sound of the tide on the Rodmoor sands was the background of everything.

      It was not till the girl rose from the ground that she saw him standing there, a shadow among the shadows. She uttered a low cry and made a movement as if to rush away, but he stepped quickly forward and caught her in his arms. Tightly and almost savagely he held her, pressing her lithe body against his own and caressing it with little, deep-voiced mutterings as if he were soothing a desperate child. She submitted passively to his endearments and then, with a sound that was something between a moan and a laugh, she whispered brokenly into his ear, “Let me go, Brand, I was silly to come out. I couldn’t help it. I won’t do it again. I won’t, I swear.”

      “No, I think you won’t!” the man muttered, keeping his arm securely round her waist and striding swiftly towards the house. “No, I think you won’t!”

      He paused when they reached the entrance into the garden and, taking her by the wrists, pressed her fiercely against one of the stone pillars upon which the gate hung.

      “I know what it is,” he whispered. “You can’t deceive me. You’ve been with those people from London. You’ve been with that friend of Baltazar’s. That’s the cause of all this, isn’t it? You’ve been with that damned fool—that idiotic, good-for-nothing down at the village. Haven’t you been with him? Haven’t you?”

      The arms with which he pressed her hands against her breast trembled with anger as he said these words.

      “Baltazar told me,” he went on, “only this morning—down at Mundham—everything about these people. They’re of no interest, none, not the least. They’re just like every one else. That fellow’s half-foreign, that’s all. An American half-breed, of some mongrel sort or other, that’s all there is to be said of him! So if you’ve been letting any mad fancies get into your head about Mr. Sorio, the sooner you get rid of them the better. He’s not for you. Do you hear? He’s—not—for—you!” These last words were accompanied by so savage a tightening of the hands that held her that the girl was compelled to bite her lip to stop herself from crying.

      “You hurt me,” she said calmly. “Let me go, Brand.” The self-contained tone of her voice seemed to quiet him and he released her. She raised one of her wrists to her mouth and softly caressed it with her lips.

      “You’ll be interested, yourself, in these people before very long,” she murmured, flashing a mocking look at him over her bare arm. “The second girl is very young and very pretty. She confided in me that she was extremely afraid of the sea. She appealed to mother’s protective instincts at once. I’ve no doubt she’ll appeal to your—protective instincts! So don’t be too quick in your condemnation.”

      “Damn you!” muttered her brother, pushing the gate open. “Come! Get in with you! You talk to me as if I were a professional rake. I take no interest—not the slightest—in your young innocents with their engaging terrors. To bed! To bed! To bed!”

      He pushed her before him along the path, but Philippa knew well that the hand on her shoulder was lighter and less angry than the one that had held her a moment ago, and as she ascended the steps of Oakguard—the name borne by the Renshaw house since the days of the Conqueror—there flickered over her shadowy face the same equivocal smile of dubious meaning that had looked out at its owner, not so long since, from the mirror in her room.

      When the dawn finally crept up, pallid and cold out of the North Sea and lifted, with a sort of mechanical weariness, the weight of the shadows, it was neither Brand nor Philippa who was awake.

      Roused, as always, by the slightest approach of an unusual sound, the mother of that strange pair had lain in her bed listening ever since her daughter’s first emerging from the house.

      Once she had risen, and had stood for a moment at the window, her loose grey hair mixed with the folds of an old, faded, dusky-coloured shawl. That, however, was when both of her children were away in the middle of the park and absolute silence prevailed. With this single exception she had remained listening, always silently listening, lying on her back and with an expression of tragic and harassed expectation in her great, hollow, brown eyes. She might have been taken, lying there alone in the big four-posted bed, surrounded by an immense litter of stored-up curios and mementoes, for a symbolic image of all that is condemned, as this mortal world goes round, to watch and wait and invoke the gods and cling fast to such pathetic relics and memorials as time consents to leave of the days that it has annihilated.

      Slowly the dawn came up upon the trees and roofs of Oakguard. With a wan grey light it filled the pallid squares of the windows. With a livid grey light it made definite and ghastly every hollow and every wrinkle in that patient watcher’s face.

      Travelling far up in the sky, a long line of marsh-fowl with outstretched necks sought the remoter solitudes of the fens. In the river marshes the sedge-birds uttered their harsh twitterings while, gathered in flocks above the sand-dunes, the sea-gulls screamed to the inflowing tide their hunger for its drifted

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