A deathly cold wave of damp air met her face as she leaned over the plank, and a hollow gurgling roar, from the heavy volume of water swirling in the darkness, rose to her ears. She could smell the unseen water; and the smell of it was like the smell of dead black leaves plucked forth from a rain pool in the heart of a forest.
As she leaned forward with her soft breast pressing against the wooden bar and her long slender fingers clutching its edge, a sinister line of poetry, picked up somewhere—she could not recall where—came into her mind, and she found her lips mechanically echoing it. “Like a wolf, sucked under a weir,” the line ran, and over and over again she repeated those words.
Meanwhile Nance, as they returned across the bridge, did her best to soothe and quiet her sister. The sudden appearance of Philippa seemed to have thrown the girl into a paroxysm of frenzy. “Oh, how I hate her!” she kept crying out, “oh, how I loathe and hate her!”
Nance was perplexed and bewildered by Linda’s mood. Never had she known the girl to give way to feelings of this sort. When at last she got her into their house, and had seen her take off her things and begin tidying herself up for their evening meal quite in her accustomed way, she asked her point-blank what was the matter, and why to-day, on this twenty-eighth of October, she had suddenly grown different from her ordinary self.
Linda, standing with bare arms by the mirror and passing a comb through her heavy hair, turned almost fiercely round.
“Do you want to know? Do you really want to know?” she cried, throwing back her head and holding the hair back with her hands. “It’s because of Philippa that he has deserted me! It’s because of Philippa that he hasn’t seen me nor spoken to me for a whole month! It’s because of Philippa that he won’t answer my letters and won’t meet me anywhere! It’s because of Philippa that now—now when I most want him”—and she threw the comb down and flung herself on her bed—“he refuses to come to me or to speak a word.”
“How do you know it’s because of Philippa?” Nance asked, distressed beyond words to find that in spite of all her efforts Linda was still as obsessed by Brand as ever before.
“I know from him,” the girl replied. “You needn’t ask me any more. She’s got power over him, and she uses it against me. If it wasn’t for her he’d have married me before now.” She sat up on the edge of her bed and looked woefully at her sister with large sunken eyes. “Yes,” she went on, “if it wasn’t for her he’d marry me now—to-day—and, oh, Nance, I want him so! I want him so!”
Nance felt an oppressive weight of miserable helplessness in the presence of this heart-stricken cry. As she looked round the room and saw her various preparations for leaving it and for securing the happiness of her own love, she felt as though in some subtle way she had once more betrayed the unhappy child. She knew herself, only too well, what that famished and starving longing is—that cry of the flesh and blood, and the heart and the spirit, for what the eternal destinies have put out of our reach!
And she could do nothing to help her. What could she do? Now for the first time in her life, as she looked at that lamentable youthful figure, dumbly pleading with her for some kind of miracle, Nance was conscious of a vague unformulated indignation against the whole system of things that rendered this sort of suffering possible. If only she were a powerful and a tender deity, how she would hasten to end this whole business of sex-life which made existence so intolerable! Why could not people be born into the world like trees or plants? And being born, why could not love instinctively create the answering passion it craved, and not be left to beat itself against cruel walls, after scorching itself in the irresistible flame?