The Damned Read Online

But no desire came that night to change my mind. I was doing the

right, the necessary thing. I was even in something of a hurry to get

down to The Towers as soon as possible. I chose an early afternoon

train.

III

I was saved the crawling train to the local station, and travelled

down by an express. As soon as we left London the fog cleared off, and

an autumn sun, though without heat in it, painted the landscape with

golden browns and yellows. My spirits rose as I lay back in the

luxurious motor and sped between the woods and hedges. Oddly enough,

my anxiety of overnight had disappeared. It was due, no doubt, to that

exaggeration of detail which reflection in loneliness brings. Frances

and I had not been separated for over a year, and her letters from The

Towers told so little. It had seemed unnatural to be deprived of those

intimate particulars of mood and feeling I was accustomed to. We had

such confidence in one another, and our affection was so deep. Though

she was but five years younger than myself, I regarded her as a child.

My attitude was fatherly.

In return, she certainly mothered me with a solicitude that never

cloyed. I felt no desire to marry while she was still alive. She

painted in watercolours with a reasonable success, and kept house for

me; I wrote, reviewed books and lectured on aesthetics; we were a

humdrum couple of quasi-artists, well satisfied with life, and all I

feared for her was that she might become a suffragette or be taken

captive by one of these wild theories that caught her imagination

sometimes, and that Mabel, for one, had fostered. As for myself, no

doubt she deemed me a trifle solid or stolid—I forget which word she

preferred—but on the whole there was just sufficient difference of

opinion to make intercourse suggestive without monotony, and certainly

without quarrelling.

Drawing in deep draughts of the stinging autumn air, I felt happy

and exhilarated. It was like going for a holiday, with comfort at the

end of the journey instead of bargaining for centimes.

But my heart sank noticeably the moment the house came into view.

The long drive, lined with hostile monkey trees and formal

wellingtonias that were solemn and sedate, was mere extension of the

miniature approach to a thousand semidetached suburban ‘residences’;

and the appearance of The Towers, as we turned the corner with a rush,

suggested a commonplace climax to a story that had begun

interestingly, almost thrillingly. A villa had escaped from the shadow

of the Crystal Palace, thumped its way down by night, grown suddenly

monstrous in a shower of rich rain, and settled itself insolently to

stay. Ivy climbed about the opulent red-brick walls, but climbed

neatly and with disfiguring effect, sham as on a prison or—the simile

made me smile— an orphan asylum. There was no hint of the comely

roughness of untidy ivy on a ruin. Clipped, trained and precise it

was, as on a brand-new protestant church. I swear there was not a

bird’s nest nor a single earwig in it anywhere. About the porch it was

particularly thick, smothering a seventeenth-century lamp with a

contrast that was quite horrible. Extensive glass-houses spread away

on the farther side of the house; the numerous towers to which the

building owed its name seemed made to hold school bells; and the

window-sills, thick with potted flowers, made me.think of the desolate

suburbs of Brighton or Bexhill. In a commanding position upon the crest

of a hill, it overlooked miles of undulating, wooded country

southwards to the Downs, but behind it, to the north, thick banks of

ilex, holly and privet protected it from the cleaner and more

stimulating winds.