CHAPTER I
UNDER-CURRENTS
Spring waxed full, buds burst into flower, then petals dropped and the hard green fruit began to swell, and the blades of the corn showed perceptibly higher every week. Summer, warm and lazy, big with all her ripening store, brooded upon the land, and Phoebe Ruan, guarding the growing life she held, seemed, with all the care taken of her, to lose vigour and gaiety. She seemed to wish to withdraw from everyone, from Ishmael most of all, as though she only wished to sit and commune with the secret soul of the child beneath her heart. She was almost beautiful these days, touched by a gravity new to her, and with an added poise. For the first time it was as though she found sufficient support in her own company and did not need to be for ever following and leaning upon other people. To look at, sitting so withdrawn, her eyes watching something unseen of human gaze, she was perfect; even in intercourse she would have been more nearly so than ever before had it not been for the fits of irritability gave unwonted bitterness to her tongue. There were days when nothing would please her, when she showed all her common strain in the taunts she found to fling at Ishmael and the rest of her little world. Only Archelaus was immune, and in his presence she maintained a sullen silence, so marked that a third person with them could, if he were sensitive, feel her ever-deepening resentment emanating from her.
Archelaus himself was as though unaware of it, for he came to the house with increasing frequency. About this time he began to walk out with a Botallack girl, the daughter of a mine captain, and indeed asked Ishmael's congratulations on the match. But, in his brotherly fashion, he was always eager to do anything to help Phoebe, whether it were to ride into Penzance and buy her anything she wished for, or to wait on her at home, adjusting a hammock at exactly the right height and carrying out cushions. Only Phoebe knew the taunt that underlay every word, the subtle scheme for making her uncomfortable that he carried on under cover of his solicitude. And she was not clever enough to combat it; when he told her she had ruined his life by marrying Ishmael, she was not brave enough to retort that he had had opportunity enough to marry her and never breathed the wish; when she hinted as much, he retorted that he had only been waiting to make more money so that she could have a position worthy of her. He declared that all she had married Ishmael for was to get the position that should by rights have belonged to him, Archelaus. That there had been a month of terror when she would, if he had not already left, have begged him to marry her she never told him. That fear had been groundless and had passed, but she never forgave it him.
Since his return she could not have told what swelled her resentment the more—that he should dare to come back at all, or that his fascination for her, the plainer to her since intimacy with another man had proved so much less wonderful, should prick at her perpetually in spite of her dislike of him. Ishmael she still regarded as a superior being whom she admired, but the touch of Archelaus's casual hand had power over her that was more intensified than stilled both by her resentment and her distrust.
So the months went by, and the time drew nearer, and all seemed more peaceful at Cloom than it had ever been. One day Phoebe happened to be alone; Ishmael and John-James were in the fields, and Phoebe lay on a plush sofa in the parlour. Ishmael had bought that sofa for her in Penzance when she admired its glossy crimson curves. She had not been at all grateful; she had merely told him that he bought it, as he did everything else for which she expressed a wish, because he wanted to do everything possible to ensure a healthy and happy child, and there was enough of truth in her accusation to justify it. Now she lay upon the sofa, staring at the mahogany arm that ran along one side of it and wishing that she were dead or that Archelaus would go away and not torment her with his taunts and his kisses—his whole presence that made her feel so helpless. While she lay there thus thinking he came in, walking straight into the hall as of right, whistling carelessly; and she heard his stick, flung against the wall, go sliding and clattering down upon the stone flags.
The next moment he was in the room and standing looking down at her with a smile. She did not move, but lay looking back at him like a small bird stricken motionless and staring beneath a hawk. Wanda, who was curled up by her feet, growled softly. What strange twist it was in Archelaus, what sardonic cruelty, inherited perhaps from the old Squire, that made him take pleasure in tormenting the helpless Phoebe it would have been hard to say. Though always latent in him, it may have been waked to activity by the wound on his head which had left the scar. Some nice balance may have been overset in his brain, though there was bitterness enough in his sense of grudge to stimulate him to a perpetual nagging at this vulnerable part of Ishmael. He had lately discovered a new way to frighten her; in addition to his passionate urgings of what he called his love, he vowed that he would not be able to bear his life much longer, that in losing Cloom he had been sent out to wander the earth a disappointed man, but in losing her he had lost all that had made his life worth living. He threatened to kill himself, with so many picturesque details and so much grim emphasis, that there were moments when he could almost have deceived himself, let alone poor simple Phoebe. His feeling for her had been of the most animal even at its strongest, but he had to the full the primitive instinct for possession; he had made her his woman, and, though he might have felt a mere blind jealousy if she had married any other man, to find her taken by Ishmael, the younger brother who had dispossessed him of all, awoke in him a surge of anger stronger than any emotion he had ever known.
He stooped down and deliberately took a long kiss from her mouth, hitting the back of his hand against Wanda's sensitive nose to stop her growling. She whimpered and slunk off the sofa, and Archelaus helped her departure with his boot. Phoebe was too taken up with his cruelty to herself to reproach him on behalf of the dog.
"You ought to be ashamed, Archelaus!" she complained. "Oh, sometimes I think you're the wickedest man in the world, that I do…!"
"Who's made me so, then? Who went and wed another man as soon as I'd gone off to make a fortune for her, eh? Tell me that!"
"I don't believe it; if it had been that you'd have told me."
"How could I tell 'ee? Wouldn't you, wouldn't any woman, have bidden me hold my tongue till I'd shown what I could do? Would your Da have looked at I for a son?"
"Well, you can't be heart-broken, anyway, or you wouldn't be going to marry Senath Pollard…."
He came and bent over her again, bringing his face very close to hers and trying to hold her eyes with his look, as only a liar does.
"You knaw why I be walking out with Senath … so as to be able to come here and have no one thinkin' anything. You knaw that as well as my tongue and heart can tell 'ee. Look at me … don't 'ee knaw it, Phoebe? Don't 'ee?"
She turned her head this way and that to avoid his insistence, but at last she yielded as on that night long ago beside the stile and met look and lips. "I don't believe it," she murmured in a choked whisper, her mouth against his; "but I'm a sinful woman, and there's something in me wishes I could…."
She had come thus far, she whose total lack of moral sense had not suggested to her any reason why, having been the lover of one brother, she should not be the wife of the other; but her stereotyped views, missing the essentials, did revolt, though vainly, against his kisses when she was a wife, even while she burned beneath them. She really was very miserable. Suddenly he released her and leant back with a dark look on his face, a look she knew and dreaded. She resorted to her little wiles to make him shake it off.
"Archelaus!…" she breathed, sliding her hand across his eyes; "don't look like that…. To please me!" She pulled his head towards her and dropped light kisses on his lids to charm the expression out of his eyes, but he remained impassive. She was in a condition when wiles leave a certain kind of man very untouched, and hate for Ishmael, not any charm left for him in her, urged his cunning love-making.
"I can't go on weth it," he declared; "it's no good, Phoebe. What does life hold for I now? Last week I was down in the mine when there was a fall of rock, and for a bit we thought we'd never get out, and I said to myself what did it matter?… it'll only save I the trouble of doen it for myself."
"Archelaus!…"
"I put the barrel of my gun against my head t'other day and pulled the trigger, but it missed fire. And then I dedn't try again, because I thought all of a sudden that I must see you once more, Phoebe, and tell 'ee plain all about it—what you and that husband of yours have driven a man to."
"Don't talk to me about Ishmael! At least he's a good man, so he is, and we're neither of us fit to live along of him!"
"Good, is he? Yes; but is he the man for 'ee? Do 'ee ever feel your lil' heart beating the quicker against his? If he'm a man, why don't 'ee tell him everything and let him kick me out, eh?"
"You know I can't tell him—that I couldn't ever."
"He'll knaw when I'm dead, because I'll lave word to show all men how one brother took everything in life from another…. He'll knaw then."
"I don't believe you; I don't believe anyone would be so wicked, even you."
"Ah! there's things in life even you don't knaw anything about, though you'm so wicked yourself," said Archelaus grimly; "but you too 'll knaw a bit more by-and-bye. I won't be able to keep off it for long, Phoebe. Maybe it'll take me suddenly when I'm here one day. You'll hear my life-blood running away, lil' 'un, and think for a minute it's water drippen' somewhere. Or perhaps I'll just take a rope and hang myself, and you'll hear I choken'. I saw a man hung in Australy once for stealen' another man's gold, and he took an awful time to die, he did. You could hear the choken' of him loud as bellows…." Phoebe had turned sickly pale, she screamed out, and thrust him away from her. "Katie!" she called. Archelaus went to the door and shouted into the kitchen. "Your missus is feelen' faint," he informed the maids. "I just looked into the parlour and saw her lyen' all wisht like." Katie bustled past with an odd look at him, and Phoebe was taken up to bed. She was better again next day, but she feared after that to leave her room, and in spite of Ishmael's protests stayed in bed, pleading that she felt giddy whenever she stood up. Twice Archelaus came to the house and had to be content with calling to her through the door, and each time she replied she was not well enough to see him.
He began to fume that his hidden delight of torment, which in his distorted mind was part of his scheme for revenge against Ishmael, was being thwarted; and day by day as he brooded to himself, his thoughts ever on the same theme, the end of all his anger and her fear began to loom, as he had planned. It was chance that eventually played into his hands, but the will and the cunning that made him ripe to catch at it were his already.