A Little Treachery

10

A flying swan glided out of the mist. It came silently, drooping its head and wings to the water, so close to her that she met its black eye frowning from the dark berry which makes a swan’s glance irate and menacing.

Startled, she looked up after it, and thus did not notice the man on the opposite bank until he stepped out of the bushes directly before her. Then she could not turn quickly enough to avoid an appearance of flight.

She did everything to avoid her neighbours nowadays, sickened by the shameless, probing curiosity which she felt to have burst out all round her in the spring. But this man she took to be a stranger. At least she did not remember to have seen him before, a middle-aged man with the air of belonging to an educated class and in any case she could not avoid him, for he called out to her at once in a nasal, authoritative voice, ‘You have a problem, with that ground.’

She saw no reason to humour him, for she fancied that he was amused and joking cruelly or tactlessly. ‘Can’t you see it has already been dealt with?’ she could only return in irony. But his answer seemed serious.

‘Pooh, you went the wrong way about it. It was no good thinking to make a lawn down there. Besides, those drains you’ve had to put in are useless, they’ll go to pieces at the first frost. They’re too near the surface, you should have had soil imported. Since we’re neighbours, allow me to offer you a little neighbourly advice.’

She had no wish to carry on the conversation, but as he had come right down to the bank and stood there facing her squarely across the water, she felt obliged to remain; and then he told her what could be done for the ground, how it might be transformed, in time, into a delightful garden. She listened with interest, in spite of herself, though making no response.

Meanwhile, she studied him. Perhaps it was the deadened light, or else some gleam off the water, which imparted a glistening look to his yellowed skin; or he might have been sweating from some unusual exertion. She was close enough to observe, with disconcerting particularity, a face of a receding type, in which the close-set eyes were small, bright and black, and seemed peculiarly piercing, while the large, thick nose jutted out thrustingly and the large, sensual mouth had the lines of a faint sneer and disclosed big, ugly teeth. So that the thought, ‘He looks like a dog grinning,’ struck her fleetingly. A wet, grinning dog, come panting up out of the sedges – but without examining this thought or tracing its origin, she pushed it sharply away.

She did not even trouble to praise his scheme, convinced that he knew how little she could afford to carry it out.

However, he went on. ‘There are few more charming spots than a well-managed water-garden. You have a situation there where many unusual and delectable plants could be got to flourish. That soil is bursting with richness – it’s acid as a marsh, but it only needs treatment. Ah, I see you feel it would be too much of an undertaking?’ She vaguely moved her head, and then, looking across, had the queer sight of him throwing up one hand with a curiously florid gesture. ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘you could make that ground blossom like the rose!’

This unexpected phraseology, and the whole moment with its air of exaggeration and falsity, made a disagreeable impression on her. She turned away.

‘Well, come now,’ he called, immediately dropping this tone for a highly prosaic, bargaining one. ‘Come now! Look here, I would make you an offer for that ground – and take the house off your hands, too, at break-up price. I’m about to build here in the valley, and a road driven straight up that plot and coming out close on the high street –. Ground in that state’s of little value – you know that, of course?’

She was startled and, uttering the words which had so often beaten about in her mind, exclaimed, ‘Why, it would leave me in the gutter. Do you think I stay here from choice? Yes, everyone must think so!’

‘Oh, you’d still get maintenance through the Court of Protection,’ he said carelessly and as if perfectly informed about all their business. ‘What made you buy the place, eh? I spoke to your surveyor-fellow when he came to look over it for you – when was it? – summer before last. You paid a swingeing fancy price for that house – I told him so – didn’t he warn you? The young Ransoms would never have stuck out for it, they’d have dropped hundreds without a murmur –’ and he gave a brief, appreciative laugh. ‘Why, damn the fellow, what was his game? Wanted to oblige the little woman, eh?’

She did not even take all this in, but to end it said hastily, ‘Two years ago, that would have been helpful.’

‘But perhaps I can help you now?’

‘If you mean the house, I’m not in a position to sell. You can have no other interest in our affairs.’

‘But,’ he answered, smiling, his loose, wide mouth again stretching into a grin, disclosing those big, strong teeth, ‘of course all your neighbours must feel considerable interest in the owner of old Flytton’s cottage, as they call it! Do you know the tradition is that the old man was a “sin-eater”?’

She was silent, from distress, attributing to him now the usual malice.

She returned up the garden but, having gone a little way, came to a halt among the frames of the great weeds, suddenly amazed at herself for having failed to catch at this hand which had been extended, perhaps actually in help. For a moment her spirits soared crazily at the bare idea of escape from this abhorred scene of their judgment; for a moment she only saw that help had been offered. She had been repelled by the man at sight. Yet his manner had been reasonably friendly, and of course she saw clearly, now, that he could never have uttered even his last, smiling words in the same spirit as that of the cottage people – only a rough and limited mind could have found amusement in her plight. And she actually turned and scrambled through the thickets again, looking eagerly towards the bank of the stream. But he was gone.

At that, a light changed, the blighting truth overwhelmed her. ‘Am I losing my senses? What possible object could this man have for helping me?’ Suddenly all the tips of her nerves seemed to recoil as if she had only just avoided yet another trap. This impression was so overpowering that her muscles stiffened, she felt really afraid to move lest the ground should give way or some crashing blow fall from behind on her skull; almost afraid to look lest some further dire discovery should meet her eye; such a miasma of betrayal and black treachery did the whole place breathe at her. Conspiracy was all around her, she could not see the detail, but had a confused, shadowy picture of many persons whispering and conspiring to Clem’s and her own ruin.

With a shudder, she saw the path she was on and tried to reach safer ground.

She touched cautiously the great decorative heads of the seeding angelicas. Her deliberately exploring eye fell to the roots, fell then upon a hole full of the stagnant, iridescent water, on the surface of which floated the reddish scum of the barstone – a foul, evil-looking puddle, in which some filthy rubbish was embedded. The sky, then, the feathery tree-tops in the pure, soft mist –

But suddenly the thought she had been trying to suppress was in full view. It came quietly, under the figure of the match, the lighted match, the little mischievous, weak agent, behind which and as if lighted by it, appeared Hungerford’s pale, weakly handsome face, wearing the cold, bored smile she had more than once noticed with uneasiness and pained affront.

Before the final catastrophe, she had begun to reason things out and to see Hungerford’s conduct in its true perspective: something to be mildly despised, best dismissed from the mind once and for all; a thing one would not care to have done oneself, yet a piece of human fallibility not to be judged too weightily.

But her sense of proportion was no longer true. It had warped under a strain too terrible to be borne without deep injury. ‘Didn’t he warn you? . . . What was his game?’ One instant of this, and then, as if a great collection of inflammable matter had been heaped up, a little more and a little more, her whole mind burst into a red flare of rage. ‘One word – only one word of warning – and that costing him nothing!’ With a great effort of will, she tremblingly attempted to concentrate upon the linear beauties of the tangle of branches against the sky, and to think of that alone. But a fearful heat was in her head, her limbs were shaking, and she went up through the garden she did not know now – like a mad creature, perhaps, talking to herself, all but crying out, and moving her hands helplessly.

And without even waiting till she was calmer, she began to write, with a hand that trembled, a long, wild letter to Mrs Forrester. But how could she give intelligible expression to that atmosphere of hell into which they had dropped at that time – the fearful change really impossible to describe except in the words ‘there was no more pity’ and ‘people did what they liked with us’?

Still she wrote. Still she sought to reduce the pain by crying out. She covered two pages, but hardly legibly, and sentence after sentence rose to a climax, then broke off, stifled, like a voice choked with passion, as if the thing had become unspeakable, beyond expression altogether. She saw that it was so at last. Then she dropped her pen and sat resting her forehead on her fists, trying to see things clearly.

But that could only result in a frightfully vivid picture of Clem and herself waiting in the middle room.