The Ballad and the Source (38 page)

“Where on your
face,
I mean?”

“Oh
…”
I touched my cheek, where the spot still seemed to burn. “There.” Her expression was cryptic, her manner clinical; and regretting my impulse, I added: “It was rather a surprise.”

“Were you upset?”

“N-no.”

“Pleased?”

“Well, not exactly.
…”
My regrets were now wild. “It wasn't anything. He was thinking about the war—or something. I didn't mind. I'd almost forgotten it till you. … Do go on about that night.”

“I told you,” she said rather scoldingly, “he always makes people feel he's fond of them.”

“Yes. Do go on.”

“Where was I when you interrupted?
…”
She drew a hissing breath; paused, frowned; then went on: “I watched Tanya disappear towards the river. She had a white frock on, so she was very visible. Below the terrace is a paved rose garden with a pool and a fountain in the middle of it. I thought I'd take a walk round and smell the roses. I was feeling worked up and queer, too restless to go to bed. I kept on seeing that person in the bright skirt, and wanting to see her again, and hoping I never should. I strolled around the pool, and then I went to the end and leaned up against the low sort of stone parapet at the farther edge of the terrace and had a good stare at the house. It did look a thundering great pile in the moonlight, so steep and naked, with all its long windows glittering like black ice. I looked to see if there was a light in Sibyl's room. There wasn't. Her room is in the middle of the front, on the first floor. The windows reach from floor to ceiling. They were open. Then,” said Maisie, casual, stirring and stretching softly in her chair, “I saw her.”

“You saw her?”

“Standing by the edge of the curtain. With a pale-coloured cloak wrapped around her. I could see her plainly.”

“What was she doing?”

“She was in ambush. Watching.”

The words, the flat way in which she spoke them, made my skin crawl. I saw the apparition.

“It gave me a turn,” went on Maisie. “Last I'd seen of her, stretched in white lace and ruffles on her sofa, stitching at her embroidery,—the portrait of a lady; then being carried off, smiling, in Gil's arms. Next view—straight, upright, posted there, towering above us like an avenging Fury. Oh, it seemed as if she'd been there for centuries—that she was the ghost of the wicked old house, and now I understood the secret of its sinister face! I could almost see her eyes glitter.”

“What could have happened,” I said, “in that short time?”

“She must have spotted Tanya going through the garden,” said Maisie, “and all of a sudden put two and two together. Or maybe she
had
begun to get suspicious before she went upstairs. The atmosphere was certainly electric. She wouldn't, of course, give a sign; but later on, alone in her room, she'd begin to think, and prowl. She'd have Gil on her mind, and—that strange woman. Then Tanya making off
…”

“Yes, I see,” I said, pacing the room in France with Mrs.
Jardine,
feeling the thread in the maze vibrate, lead on through her to me, to Tanya and the river. “Did she see you?”

“I don't know. She probably did, but she never stirred. I got the feeling she was looking far far beyond me, down to the river and the mill. She wasn't thinking about me.”

“What did you do?”

“I could only think of one thing: to get down as quick as possible to somewhere where I could keep a look-out for Tanya. I thought, if I could join her when she left Gil and come back with her, it wouldn't look so shady. If Sibyl was still watching she'd see us reappear together, and we could say we'd been for a swim by moonlight. And get away with it.
Maybe.”

“What a good idea.”

“So I went in a leisurely way down the steps that lead from the paved garden to the lawn. At the end of the lawn there are railings and you go through into rough meadows where the cattle and horses graze. I strolled down the lawn till I got into the shadow of the big trees at the bottom. Then I was over the railings and I ran for it. I zigzagged from tree to tree in the fields until I got to where it slopes down sharply and I knew I must be out of sight. And then—oh! I fairly pelted down till I came to the river.”

Maisie stopped speaking. She stared into the fire and bit her thumb. I heard my own breath loud and fast as if I were running behind her, down through the steep fields to—what destination?

She was silent for some time; then she said:

“It all began to seem like dreaming. I wondered what on earth I could be doing there—the only person left in the world, and the world nothing but water, moon, trees and shadows; and in the middle of it all the mill house sticking up blank and flat like a great white tombstone with nothing written on it; and the only sound the weir pouring, pouring. I thought:
‘
Anything
might happen; and if it did,
who should I be?'
I wasn't inside myself any longer, if you see what I mean.”

“Yes, yes,” I said, thinking of my own phantasmagoric excursions by moonlight alone, over the lawn, among the garden trees at home.

“I went into the inn garden by a little wicket gate. I went down to the landing stage and looked across. Not a sign of life. It seemed queer to think there were two human beings loving each other there, inside that mausoleum. I thought the only thing to do was to sit and wait where I couldn't miss her when she did come out. I went and sat in the summer-house I told you about. It's a rustic affair with white roses and jasmine climbing up the wooden pillars and tumbling over the roof. The scent was unbelievable. I sat there and began to get my breath back. I wondered which room the woman had, and whether she was asleep.”

“Were there any lights in the inn?”

“None. I don't know how long I sat there. What with the moon and the weir I felt absolutely dazed. There wasn't a breath of breeze, it was stifling. All of a sudden I
felt
someone was near me … and then I saw a figure steal across the grass, not ten yards from me. It went very rapidly, in a stealthy way, to the edge of the water, then stood still on the landing stage and looked across at the mill. Then it started across the bridge.”

“Tanya?”

“Not Tanya. I thought for a moment: Sibyl! But it wasn't.”

“Her?”

“Yes. I thought: ‘This is it. What I was waiting for.'”

“What did you do?”

“I got up straight as if I was sleep-walking and went after her across the bridge.”

“Did you realise for certain then who—who you were following?”

Maisie paused, drawing her brows together, hesitating.

“I wasn't surprised,” she said.

For the first time since the beginning of her narrative she turned her large luminous eyes full on me. A faint bewilderment shot through them. I saw that she confronted not my face of simple goggle-eyed expectancy, but the image that had once stunned her. In that one momentary contraction, I saw memory struggle, brace itself to deal with its too-heavy burden. Once more, and for the last time, and vanishing even as I became aware of it, the lonely face of the child Maisie, umbrageous, vulnerable, lit with the passionate effort to communicate, glowed out of our lost place in the walnut tree.

“I wasn't surprised,” she repeated. “It seemed as natural as meeting her in a dream; and I'd had plenty of those dreams. … There's a kind of grove of poplar trees on the other bank close by the mill. She stopped under them—I stopped too. Then she moved out into the open, over the blinding white grass and on to the door of Gil's house. I went after her in a hurry … and she heard me then. She whirled round on me as if I'd thumped her on the back. She stared at me. She had the moon full on her: I saw her face plain.”

“Was she the same?” I breathed.

“No, she wasn't,” said Maisie. “She looked frightful.”

“In what way frightful?”

“Oh … all fallen in round her mouth. An expression—I can't describe it—peevish and—
glaring.
Haughty. What's the word?—autocratic. And petty, feeble as well.”

One after another she hammered in the epithets, to my desolation.

“I'm pretty sure,” she went on, drawing her brows together, “that's how women in lunatic asylums look. It's not like what you imagine, when people are really bats. They're not vacant, or gibbering and tearing their hair. I see them looking
mincing
—full of airs and graces. Drawing themselves up as if they were empresses, and giving orders in furious, pompous, venomous voices.
Sly
…
Sidling up. … Oh, and so
self-important.
That's how I see them. I should very much like to know what goes on in lunatic asylums. One day I will. It would be fascinating. … The worst is, they seem so obscene. I'm sure they have a bad smell. They're not mad all the year round, you know. Part of the time they're as sane as any one else. Then it comes on; and they're
absolutely different
from ordinary people. It's not like managing someone in a raging temper or depression or hysterics. There's no way to reason or argue or scold or sympathise or appeal—or show you love them. You might as well put on a smashed gramophone record and expect it to play the right notes in order. It's their
separateness
which seems so—shocking.” She drew a sharp breath. “I told you I would never marry and have children—even in the unlikely event of some ass offering me the chance—and that's the reason. There's madness in my family. Malcolm doesn't know, and I don't propose to tell him. The chances are he'll be killed, anyway, before he can start to become a father.”

“You know for certain?” I inquired, impressed by this distinguished fate.

“For dead certain.” She uttered a brief laugh.

“What happened next?” I said. “Did she speak? Or you?”

“I said: ‘Don't be frightened. It's Maisie.'”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. It didn't seem possible to say: ‘Hallo, Mother,' or anything of that sort.”

“And what did she say?”

Maisie paused, then said with a smile:

“She told me to go away.”

“Didn't she know you?”

“She said: ‘Ah, Maisie. Yes.' Very formal and polite and distant, as if I was a slight surprise and nuisance she'd come on by chance out walking.”

“Oh,
Maisie!
…”

“Yes, it was peculiar. Though I can't say I was exactly hurt at the time. It was all so like a dream; and then I was too busy trying to make out what she was up to. She told me in a condescending way to run away now, like a good girl. When she said it, I suddenly remembered something.”

“What?”

“She'd said the very same thing once before, in that particular voice.”

“When?”

“I can't get it back, when it was exactly; but I think it must have been a short time before she went away from us. I remember seeing her from the window one evening, dressed in her best, going up the street towards the town moor. I ran after her … and she told me to go back. I remember how her voice came out through her veil—
smooth;
and she gave me a little push. I knew Father didn't like her to go out alone because she wasn't well. I went back, and he was just coming into the house. I told him she'd gone out, and it acted like a squib under him. Auntie Mack was just coming downstairs from putting Cherry to bed. He let out a shout at her—she jumped as if she'd been shot—and then he went haring off down the street. I couldn't make head or tail of it … but I'd given up trying to understand what went on in our house, it was all so mystifying. Auntie Mack told me to come along upstairs at once; and she brought us up supper later with a flaming red, choked sort of face. But that was always happening. Poor old goose. Poor Father. When I think about his life, I
cannot
bear it.”

Maisie leaped violently from her chair, stood rigid for a minute, head lifted, glowering at the copper pots and pans on the shelf above the range; then sat down again.

Unwilling to encourage, at this juncture, any deflection from the main stream, I said hastily:

“What happened next?”

“She was carrying a big fat envelope. I said, if she'd got something for the person who lived here wouldn't she give it to me and I'd see he got it in the morning, I thought he'd be in bed and asleep at this time of night. I spoke in a perfectly ordinary way—I knew I must.
‘
Certainly not. He's expecting me,' she said, very dignified. She said she'd given him all the facts, and as he wished to take the matter in hand immediately she had promised to deliver the document in person.
‘
So that he will know, once and for all,' she said in a crisp, efficient sort of way—it reminded me of Sibyl
—‘
what is necessary to be done.' I was stumped. Then I said: ‘Couldn't I read it too? I'm very interested.' She looked at me horribly cunningly and stuffed it under her arm. It was that look that made me realise, all in a rush that she was plumb crazy.”

“Oh Maisie! Weren't you terrified?”

“Yes,” said Maisie simply. “I nearly yelled for Gil. Then I pulled myself together and thought: ‘I
will
manage. Years and years I've spent telling myself I'd find her, wherever she was; and whatever it was like, whatever had happened, I'd—I'd make it come right. Now I've found her, and I've
got to.'
I heard myself say in a very confidential, sincere sort of way: ‘I've always been on your side, you know. If you tell me all about it, I give you my word of honour I'll help you.' Her face worked, and she started whimpering and crying and looking all round. I took her hand. I thought: I'll make her know me, or die. I said: ‘Look at me. It's Maisie.' She didn't look at me, but she went quiet and—sort of attentive. Then I noticed she'd got on her pearl necklace: I remembered it so well. She always wore it when we were little: her father used to add two pearls a year to it, she'd told us, on every birthday till he died, so you can imagine it was a beauty. She was just the person for pearls. I said: ‘Oh, you still wear your lovely pearls. I
am
glad.' She looked at me then, quickly, in a startled way—or puzzled—and fingered them.”