Rodmoor Read Free

thus out of a clear sky, he told her—did in a considerable sense lend him an excuse for taking no steps to find work. And the name of the place—he confessed this with an excited emphasis —had from the beginning strangely affected his imagination.
    He saw it sometimes, so he said, that particular word, in a queer visualised manner, dark brown against a colourless and livid sky; and in an odd sort of way it had related itself, dimly, obscurely, and with the incoherence of a half-learnt language, to the wildest and most pregnant symbols of his life.
    Rodmoor! The word at the same time allured and troubled him. What it suggested to him—and he made her admit that his ideas of it were far more definite than her own—was no doubt what it really implied: leagues and leagues of sea-bleached forlornness , of sand-dunes and glaucous marshes, of solitary willows and pallid-leaved poplars, of dark pools and night-long-murmuring reeds.
    “We’ll have long walks together there!” he exclaimed , interrupting himself suddenly with an almost savage gesture of ardent possession. If it had been any one but Baltazar Stork, he went on, who had sent him this timely invitation, he Would have rejected it at once, but from Baltazar he had no hesitation in accepting anything. They had been friends too long to make any other attitude possible. No, it was no scruple of pride that led him to hesitate—as he admitted to herhe had done. It was rather the strange and indefinable reaction set up in his brain by those half-sinister half-romantic syllables—syllables that kept repeating themselves in his inner consciousness.
    Nance remembered more than once in a later time the fierce sudden way he turned upon her as they stood on the edge of the crowded square waiting the opportunity to cross and asked, with a solemn intensity in his voice, whether she had any presentiment as to how things would turn out for them in this place.
    “It hangs over me,” he said, “it hangs over us both. I see it like a heavy sunset weighted with purple bars.” And then, when the girl did nothing but shake her head and smile tenderly, “I warn you,” he went on, “you are risking much—I feel it—I know it. I have had this sort of instinct before about things.” He shivered a little and laid his hand on her arm as if he clung to her for reassurance.
    Nance remembered long afterwards the feelings in her that made her turn her face full upon him and whisper proudly, as if in defiance of his premonitions, “What can happen to us that can hurt us, my dear, as long as we are together, and as long as we love one another?”
    He was silent after this and apparently satisfied, for he did not scruple to return to the subject of Rodmoor . The word gave him in those first days, he said, that curious sensation we receive when we suddenly say to ourselves in some new locality, “I have been here; I have seen all this before.”
    Had he at that time, he told her, been less distracted by the emotions she aroused in him, he would have analysed to the bottom the dim mental augury—orwas it reminiscence?—called up by this name. As it was he just kept the thing at the back of his mind as something which, whatever its occult significance, at least spared him the necessity of agitating himself about his future.
    Nance’s thoughts were brought back from their half-attention with a shock of vivid interest when he came to the point, amid his vague recollections, of his first entrance into her house. It was exactly a week ago, he reminded her, that he found himself one sunny morning securely established as a new lodger under her roof. In his impatient longing to secure the desirable room—across the narrow floor of which, he confessed to her, he paced to and fro that day like a hungry tiger—he had even forgotten to make the obvious inquiry as to the quarter of the London sky from which his particular portion of light and air was to come.
    It was only, he told her, with a