I had read this extraordinary confession aloud. Not unnaturally, there was a silence between Holroyd and myself when I had finished it.
‘One sees them,’ Holroyd said.
‘Them?’
‘Otho Senderhill and his Lydia in Baden-Baden. Wandering the little rough-paved streets, or flirting in the grounds of the Conversationshaus. But would that have been there in the Napoleonic period? The countryside can’t have changed much. Those little timber-and-plaster villages peeping out from a tangle of plum-trees.’
‘My dear man!’ I was astonished at my friend’s falling into this evasive chatter, although I faintly knew it was a consequence of his being much disturbed. ‘You realise what this letter tells us?’
‘Yes, yes – but at least they lived long ago.’
‘Otho and Lydia?’
‘Florizel and Perdita. They were really Laon and Cythna – all the time.’
‘What the devil do you mean by that?’
‘Shelley’s lovers were brother and sister – at least in his first shot at the poem. Curious that Bertrand should have copied from its supreme moment into his book.’
‘You mean Bertrand may have known?’
‘No, no. But if this affair confirms us in anything, it’s surely in the knowledge that human minds, living and dead, communicate with one another in remarkably devious ways. Do you know Kipling’s story called Wireless? It’s not about Shelley. But it’s about Keats.’
‘Confound Kipling.’ I paused for a moment. ‘No wonder those wretched Sticklebacks were upset. But they kept mum, and at least Bertrand and his mistress never knew. Indeed, the Sticklebacks must have been the only two human beings who did know. All knowledge of the truth – the full truth – perished with them. Until we opened this’—I tapped the letter—’and put our own small two-and-two together.’
‘That’s the probability, unless the Sticklebacks had a confessional urge too. Perhaps—’ Holroyd broke off. ‘Hullo! That girl has vanished.’
‘Vanished?’ Not unnaturally, I had for the moment quite forgotten Martha Uff.
‘Not in any supernatural fashion.’ Holroyd’s brilliant eyes flashed at me alarmingly. ‘She must just have walked away – following her dream.’
‘Last time, it became my dream too.’
‘Yes, indeed.’ Holroyd was suddenly grave. ‘Don’t think I have no sense of the strangeness of all this.’
I made no reply. I was less concerned with Holroyd’s state of mind than with my own. Several times since coming to Vailes I had felt, not wholly without cause, uneasy enough. But that had been, so to speak, in my head. My sensation now was scarcely cerebral at all. Rather it was visceral: an obscure dismay and dread deep in my body, like a premonitory symptom of depressive sickness. It was in an effort to get rid of this that I did presently speak.
‘Holroyd – Martha couldn’t have heard us? She couldn’t have heard me reading this?’ And again I tapped the yellowing paper and faded brown ink of Lady Otho Senderhill’s letter to the Bishop of Bath and Wells.
‘Not unless she’s endowed with a most remarkable hyperaesthesia of the auditory faculty. Otherwise, she could have heard nothing short of a shout. Not that some other form of rapport—’ Suddenly Holroyd stopped in the middle of his jargon. ‘Listen!’ he said.
The injunction was needless, for I had already heard the sound. Nor was it again repeated after some faint echo had done with it amid the beech woods. It had come from the direction of the lake: a single and despairing cry.
We were running – two elderly and agitated men – down the long green ride that led from the ruined cottage to the water. It was my thought – shocking yet prosaic enough – that we should find Martha as they had found Ophelia: drowned while incapable of her own distress. Martha, however, was still on dry land.
She, too, was running – frantically by the margin of that small, tranquil flood. But, even as we first glimpsed her, she stopped, and flung out her arms strangely in an imploring gesture to empty air. She turned and ran again; stopped; the gesture was repeated in the direction contrary to the first. And this time she sank down upon her knees.
It was thus that we came up with her: a distraught child, her face bathed in streaming tears. I scarcely expected that she would so much as see us. But she did, and our presence brought her to her feet. She faced us, and spoke.
‘You’ve taken them from me!’ she cried. ‘And now I know as wot they’ll come no more.’
I looked beyond her to the unmoving and empty water of the lake. It shone still a heavenly blue. The early evening was indeed one of extraordinary beauty. There was not another soul or living thing in sight. There were only our three selves, required to make what we could of the impassive face of external Nature.
‘Listen, Martha!’ I cried. ‘You must try to understand. They are only—’
The child was running again. I had broken off at the sight of her freshly contorted face. Now that was invisible to me. For she had turned, and it was straight for the lake that she ran. This was in itself no crisis, since the water could not have been for some way deep enough to allow of her doing any mischief to herself. But my thoughts were confused, and I felt that I must stop her at once, must hold her until some sort of calm words were possible. So I too ran, and it was only at the verge that I seized her hand. We both halted – so abruptly that I almost stumbled over a sizable stone at my feet. I glanced quickly down at this, and saw that it lay on top of a short length of rope. And suddenly it was very, very cold.
The little boat was there. I could have put out my disengaged hand and touched its prow. But my gaze rested on it only for a moment, and then I looked beyond; looked to where, that morning, I had seen two lovers hand in hand. The young man in the jeans and sweater was there again now. Only whereas my morning’s experience had been lucid and rational, about this one there was something fantasmal and dreamlike. He was walking slowly away from me, but some breach in the laws of optics permitted me to view his face. I saw it with an extraordinary clarity, as if through an instrument more refined than the one in Holroyd’s pocket now. The young man was very handsome and very pale. And over his features lay an expression of numb horror so unnerving that I could not bear it. I looked to the other side of the lake.
The girl was there. She too was retreating, and her face too I could nevertheless see – or rather I could see the two hands in which she carried it buried. For seconds these two figures – planted solidly on earth despite the strangeness of my vision of them – walked slowly on, sundered by the long vista of water that led to Vailes. Then something seemed to happen to the girl. It was something that made me wonder whether my grip on Martha’s hand had slackened. But it was not so; I held it as firmly as before. I looked again at Perdita, and knew that she was fading from my sight. I looked at Florizel. He was there still, but something was happening to his clothes, to his body – for through and beyond them I saw some further thing: thorn or bramble or hazel-bush it may have been. A moment later and he was there no longer – nor his mistress on the other bank. Yet for some heart-beats in each place something lingered: shadows faintly human like those traces called pentimenti in old pictures, where the artist has repented of some botched creation and expunged on his canvas all but the shade of a shade.
‘You saw them again?’ Holroyd had joined me, and it was as if some spell were broken by his voice.
‘Yes.’ I put my arm round the weeping child at my side ‘But Martha is right. They’ll come no more.’