Though thou hast sore broken us, in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death.”
Once more she was silent but with a slight veering of the wind, the sound of the waves beyond the sand-dunes came to them with pitiless distinctness. It seemed to mock—this voice of the earth’s antagonist—mock, in triumphant derision, the forlorn hope which that solemn invocation had roused in the girl’s heart. But in contending against Mrs. Renshaw’s knowledge of the Psalms even the North Sea had met its match. With her pale face uplifted and a wild light in her eyes, she continued to utter the old melodious incantations with their constant references to a Power more formidable than “all thy waves and storms.” She might have been one of the early converts to the faith that came from the sacred Desert, wrestling in spiritual ecstasy with the gods and powers of those heathen waters.
Either by one of the fortunate coincidences which sometimes interrupt even the irony of nature or, as Mrs. Renshaw would herself have maintained, by a direct answer to her prayer, the weathercock on the church tower swung round again. North-east it swung, then north-north-east, then due north. And finally, even while she was uttering her last antiphony, it pointed to north-west, the quarter most alien and antagonistic to the Rodmoor sea, the portion of the horizon from which blew the wind of the great fens.
In a country like East Anglia so peculiarly at the mercy of the elements, every one of the winds has its own peculiar burden and brings with it something healing and restorative or baleful and malefic. The east wind here is, in a paramount sense, the evil wind, the accomplice and confederate of the salt deep, the blighter of hopes, the herald of disaster. The north-west wind, on the contrary, is the wind that brings the sense of inland spaces, the smell of warm, wet earth and the fragrance of leaf mould in sweet breathing woods. It is the wind that fills the rivers and the wells and brings the fresh purifying rain. It is a wind full of memories and its heart is strong with the power of ancient love, revived even out of graves and sepulchres. To those sensitive to finer and rarer earth influences among the dwellers by the east coast there may be caught sometimes upon the north-west wind the feeling of pine woods and moorland heather. For it comes from the opposite side of the great plain, from Brandon Heath and even beyond and it finds nothing in the wide fen country to intercept it or break the rush of its sea-ward passage.
Thus, when the two women rose finally to their feet it was to be met by a cool, healing breath which, as it bowed the ranks of the hollyhocks and rustled through the trees, had in it a delicious odour of inland brooks and the coming of pure rain.
“Listen to me, child,” said Mrs. Renshaw as they passed out of the churchyard, “I want to say this to you. You mustn’t think that God allows any intercourse between the living and the dead. That is a wicked invention of our own sinful hearts. It is a temptation, darling—a temptation of the devil—and we must struggle against it. Whenever we feel it we must struggle against it and pray. It is perfectly right for you to think gently and forgivingly of poor Miss Doorm. It were wrong to think otherwise. But you mustn’t think of her as anywhere near us or about us now. She’s in the hands of God and in the mercy of God and we must leave her there. Do you hear what I’m saying, Linda? Do you understand me? Anything else is wrong and evil. We are all sinners together and we are all in the same merciful hands.”
Never was the exorcising of powers hurtful to humanity more effective. Linda bowed her head at her words and then raising it freely, walked with a lighter step than for seven long days. She wished in her heart that she had the courage to talk to Mrs. Renshaw about an anxiety much more earthly, much less easy to be healed, than the influence of Rachel Doorm, alive or dead, but so immense was her relief at that moment to be free from the haunting phantom that had been pulling her towards that mound in the churchyard that she found it in her heart to be hopeful and reckless even though she knew that, whatever happened, there was bound to be pain and trouble in store for her in the not far distant future.