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 M ultiphysics
M odeling
U sing COMSOL ®5 and MATLAB ®
S econd E dition

MM2E5X.FM.2pp.indd 1 11/17/2021 4:19:39 PM

 LICENSE, DISCLAIMER OF LIABILITY, AND LIMITED WARRANTY
By purchasing or using this book (the “Work”), you agree that this license grants
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MM2E5X.FM.2pp.indd 2 11/17/2021 4:19:39 PM

 M ultiphysics
M odeling
U sing COMSOL ®5 and MATLAB ®
S econd E dition

Roger W. Pryor, Ph.D.

COMSOL Certified Consultant

MERCURY LEARNING AND INFORMATION

Dulles, Virginia
Boston, Massachusetts
New Delhi

MM2E5X.FM.2pp.indd 3 11/17/2021 4:19:39 PM

 Copyright ©2022 by Mercury Learning and Information LLC. All rights reserved.

This publication, portions of it, or any accompanying software may not be reproduced in any way, stored
in a retrieval system of any type, or transmitted by any means, media, electronic display or mechanical
display, including, but not limited to, photocopy, recording, Internet postings, or scanning, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher.

Publisher: David Pallai

Mercury Learning and Information
22841 Quicksilver Drive
Dulles, VA 20166
[email protected]
www.merclearning.com
(800) 232-0223

Roger W. Pryor. Multiphysics Modeling Using COMSOL®5 and MATLAB®, 2/E

ISBN: 978-1-68392-589-7

The publisher recognizes and respects all marks used by companies, manufacturers, and developers as
a means to distinguish their products. All brand names and product names mentioned in this book are
trademarks or service marks of their respective companies. Any omission or misuse (of any kind) of
service marks or trademarks, etc. is not an attempt to infringe on the property of others.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021942468

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Companion files for this title are available by contacting [email protected]. The sole obligation of
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or faulty workmanship, but not based on the operation or functionality of the product.

MM2E5X.FM.2pp.indd 4 11/17/2021 4:19:39 PM

 Contents
Prefacexi
Introductionxiii

Chapter 1: Modeling Methodology Using COMSOL

Multiphysics 5.x 1
Guidelines for New COMSOL Multiphysics 5.x Modelers 1
Hardware Considerations 2
Simple Model Setup Overview 4
Basic Problem Formulation and Implicit Assumptions 12
1D Window Heat Flow Models 13
1D 1 Pane Window Heat Flow Model 13
1D 2 Pane Window Heat Flow Model 35
1D 3 Pane Window Heat Flow Model 49
First Principles as Applied to Model Definition 60
Some Common Sources of Modeling Errors 62
References63
Suggested Modeling Exercises 63
Chapter 2: Materials Properties Using COMSOL Multiphysics 5.x 65
Materials Properties Guidelines and Considerations 65
COMSOL Materials Properties Sources 66
Other Materials Properties Sources 68

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 vi • Contents

Material Property Entry Techniques 69

Multipane Window Model 69
Set Boundary Conditions 86
References88
Chapter 3: 0D Electrical Circuit Interface Modeling Using
COMSOL Multiphysics 5.x 89
Guidelines for Electrical Circuit Interface Modeling in 5.x 90
Electrical / Electronic Circuit Considerations 90
Simple Electrical Circuit Interface Model
Setup Overview 99
Basic Problem Formulation and Implicit Assumptions 104
0D Basic Circuit Models 105
0D Resistor-Capacitor Series Circuit Model 105
0D Inductor-Resistor Series Circuit Model 112
0D Series-Resistor Parallel-Inductor-Capacitor
Circuit Model 118
0D Basic Circuit Models Analysis and Conclusions 125
First Principles as Applied to 0D Model Definition 126
References127
Suggested Modeling Exercises 128
Chapter 4: 1D Modeling Using COMSOL Multiphysics 5.x 129
Guidelines for 1D Modeling in 5.x 129
1D Modeling Considerations 130
1D Basic Models 131
1D KdV Equation Model 131
1D Telegraph Equation Model 148
1D Spherically Symmetric Transport Model 167
1D Spherically Symmetric Transport Model Animation 184
1D Advanced Model 186
1D Silicon Inversion Layer Model: A Comparison
of the Results obtained from using the
Density-Gradient (DG) Theory and the
Schrodinger-Poisson (SP) Theory Methodologies 186

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 Contents • vii

First Principles as Applied to 1D Model Definition 223

References224
Suggested Modeling Exercises 226
Chapter 5: 2D Modeling Using COMSOL Multiphysics 5.x 227
Guidelines for 2D Modeling in 5.x 227
2D Modeling Considerations 228
2D Basic Models 233
2D Electrochemical Polishing Model 233
2D Hall Effect Model 256
First Principles as Applied to 2D Model Definition 270
References271
Suggested Modeling Exercises 272
Chapter 6: 2D Axisymmetric Modeling Using COMSOL
Multiphysics 5.x 273
Guidelines for 2D Axisymmetric Modeling in 5.x 273
2D Axisymmetric Modeling Considerations 274
2D Axisymmetric Heat Conduction in a Cylinder Model 278
2D Axisymmetric Basic Models 278
2D Axisymmetric Cylinder Conduction Model 278
2D Axisymmetric Transient Heat Transfer Model 290
First Principles as Applied to 2D Axisymmetric
Model Definition 303
References304
Suggested Modeling Exercises 304
Chapter 7: 2D Simple and Advanced Mixed Mode Modeling
Using COMSOL Multiphysics 5.x 307
Guidelines for 2D Simple Mixed Mode Modeling in 5.x 307
2D Simple Mixed Mode Modeling Considerations 308
2D Simple Mixed Mode Models 313
2D Electric Impedance Sensor Model 313
2D Metal Layer on a Dielectric Block Model 332
Heat Transfer 2 (ht2) Interface 346
Heat Transfer in Solids (ht) Interface 358

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 viii • Contents

First Principles as Applied to 2D Simple Mixed Mode

Model Definition 363
References364
Suggested Modeling Exercises 365
Chapter 8: 2D Complex Mixed Mode Modeling Using COMSOL
Multiphysics 5.x 367
Guidelines for 2D Complex Mixed Mode Modeling in 5.x 367
2D Complex Mixed Mode Modeling Considerations 368
2D Complex Mixed Mode Models Using the RF Module 370
Finding the Impedance of a Two (2) Wire,
Parallel-Wire, Air-Dielectric, Transmission Line 370
2D Finding the Impedance of a Two (2) Wire,
Parallel-Wire, Air-Dielectric, Transmission Line Model
Summary and Conclusions 389
2D Finding the Impedance of a Concentric,
Two (2) Wire, Transmission Line (Coaxial Cable) 389
2D Finding the Impedance of a Concentric,
Two (2) Wire  405
2D Axisymmetric Transient Modeling of a
Coaxial Cable 405
First Principles as Applied to 2D Complex Mixed Mode
Model Definition 431
References431
Suggested Modeling Exercises 432
Chapter 9: 3D Modeling Using COMSOL Multiphysics 5.x 433
Guidelines for 3D Modeling in 5.x 433
3D Modeling Considerations 434
3D Models 438
3D Spiral Coil Microinductor Model 438
3D Linear Microresistor Beam Model 455
Multiphysics Thermal Linear Elastic 1 (te1)476
Heat Transfer in Solids (ht)477
First Principles as Applied to 3D Model Definition 489
References489
Suggested Modeling Exercises 490

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 Contents • ix

Chapter 10: Perfectly Matched Layer Models Using COMSOL

Multiphysics 5.x493
Guidelines for Perfectly Matched Layer (PML)
Modeling in 5.x 493
Perfectly Matched Layer (PML) Modeling
Guidelines and Coordinate Considerations 494
Perfectly Matched Layer Models 497
Building the 2D Concave Metallic Mirror PML Model 497
Building the 2D Energy Concentrator PML Model 517
First Principles as Applied to PML Model Definition 539
References540
Suggested Modeling Exercises 540
Chapter 11: Bioheat Models Using COMSOL Multiphysics 5.x 543
Guidelines for Bioheat Modeling in 5.x 543
Bioheat Modeling Considerations 544
Bioheat Transfer Models 547
2D Axisymmetric Microwave Cancer Therapy Model 574
First Principles as Applied to Bioheat Model Definition 601
References602
Suggested Modeling Exercises 602
Appendix: A Brief Introduction to LiveLinkTM for MATLAB®
Using COMSOL Multiphysics 5.x 605
Guidelines for LiveLink Exploration through
Modeling in 5.x 605
Getting Started using LiveLink for MATLAB
with COMSOL Multiphysics 5.x on a
Windows® 10 platform 606
First Principles as Applied to Scripting and GUI Model
Definition614
References615
Suggested Modeling Exercises 615

Index617

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MM2E5X.FM.2pp.indd 10 11/17/2021 4:19:39 PM
 Preface
The purpose of this second edition is to update the model building
­instructions to comply with COMSOL® Version 5.6, MATLAB® R2021a,
and later. The MATLAB material contained in the Appendix is revised and
updated to facilitate LIVELINK® interaction with COMSOL 5.x. This sec-
ond edition also introduces five new hands-on model building and problem-
solving techniques. In this new book, scientists, engineers, biophysicists,
and other readers interested in exploring the behavior of potential physi-
cal device structures built on a computer (a virtual prototype), can develop
exploratory models, before going to the workshop or laboratory and attempt-
ing to physically create the whatever-it-is (a real prototype).
The models presented herein are built within the context of the currently
well-established laws of the physical world (applied physics) and are explored
in light of widely applied, well-known, First Principle Analysis techniques.
As with any other method of problem solution (mathematically computed
answer), the information obtained (derived) through the use of such modeled
solutions, as these computer simulations (virtual prototypes), can ultimately
be only as accurate as the materials properties values and the fundamental
assumptions employed to build (create) these simulations.
The primary advantage of the combination of computer simulation (virtual
prototyping) and First Principles Analysis to explore artifacts (device struc-
tures) is that the modeler can try as many different approaches to the solu-
tion of the same underlying problem as are needed in order to get it right (or
close thereto) before fabrication of the device components and the assem-
bled device (real prototype) in the workshop or laboratory for the first time.

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 xii • Preface

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank David Pallai of Mercury Learning and Information for
his ongoing encouragement. I would also like to thank the many staff mem-
bers of COMSOL, Inc. for their help and encouragement.
I would especially like to thank Beverly E. Pryor, my wife, for her patience
and encouragement during the creation of the manuscript of this book. Any
residual errors in this work are mine and mine alone.
 Roger W. Pryor, Ph.D.
October 2021

MM2E5X.FM.2pp.indd 12 11/17/2021 4:19:39 PM

 Introduction
COMSOL Multiphysics software is a powerful, Partial Differential E­ quation
(PDE) solution engine. The basic COMSOL Multiphysics 5.x software has
over twenty-five (25) add-on modules that expand the capabilities of the
basic software into a broad collection of application areas: AC/DC, acous-
tics, batteries and fuel cells, CFD, chemical reaction engineering, electro-
deposition, geomechanics, heat transfer, MEMS, microfluidics, plasma, RF,
structural mechanics and subsurface flow, to name a few. The COMSOL
Multiphysics software also has other supporting software, such as the Opti-
mization Module, the Material Library Module, the CAD Import Module
and LiveLink™ interfaces for several engineering software programs.
In this book, scientists, engineers, and others interested in exploring the
behavior of different physical device structures through computer modeling
are introduced to the techniques of hands-on building and solving models
through the direct application of the basic COMSOL Multiphysics software,
along with some samples using the AC/DC, heat transfer, rf, ­semiconductor,
and structural mechanics modules. The next to the last technical chapter
explores the use of Perfectly Matched Layers in the RF Module. The final
technical chapter explores the use of the Bioheat Equation in the Heat
Transfer and RF Modules.
The models presented herein are built within the context of the physical
world (applied physics) and are presented in light of First Principle Analysis
techniques. The demonstration models emphasize the fundamental concept
that the information derived from the modeling solutions through the use of
these computer simulations is only as good as the materials coefficients and
the fundamental assumptions employed in building the models.

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 xiv • Introduction

The combination of computer simulation and First Principle Analysis gives

the modeler the opportunity to try a variety of approaches to the solution of
the same problem as needed in order to get the design right or nearly right
in the workshop or laboratory before the first device components are fabri-
cated and tested. The modeler can also use the physical device test results
to modify the model parameters and arrive at an improved solution more
rapidly than by simply using the cut and try methodology.

CHAPTER TOPICS
The eleven (11) technical chapters in this book demonstrate to the reader
the hands-on technique of model building and solving. The COMSOL con-
cepts and techniques used in these chapters are shown in Figure Int.1. The
COMSOL modules employed in the various models in specific chapters are
shown in Figure Int.2, and the physics concepts and techniques employed in
the various models in specific chapters are shown in Figure Int.3.

Concept/Technique 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Chapter:
0D Modeling •
1D Modeling • • •
2D Axisymmetric
• •
Coordinates
2D Axisymmetric
• • •
Modeling
2D Modeling • • • •
3D Modeling •
Animation • • •
Bioheat Equation •
Boolean Operations –
• • • • • •
geometry
Boundary Conditions • • • • • • • • • •
Conductive Media DC • • • • • •
Coupled Multiphysics
• • • • •
Analysis

MM2E5X.FM.2pp.indd 14 11/17/2021 4:19:39 PM

Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 His voice which had risen to a loud pitch of excitement died away
in a sort of apologetic murmur.
“Sorry,” he muttered, “only don’t look at me like that, you girl.
There, clear off and sit further away! It’s that look of yours that
makes me talk in this silly fashion. God help us! I don’t blame that
foreign fellow for getting queer in his head. You’ve got something in
those eyes of yours, Philippa, that no living girl ought to be allowed
to have! Bah! You’ve made me talk like an absolute fool.”
Instead of moving away as she had been bidden, Philippa touched
her brother with a light caress. Never had she looked so entirely a
creature of the old perverse civilizations as she looked at that
moment.
“Mother thinks you’re going to marry that girl,” she whispered,
“but I know better than that, and I’m always right in these things,
am I not, Brand darling?”
He fell back under her touch and the shadowy lines of his face
contracted. He presented the appearance of something withered and
crumpled. Her mocking smile still divided her curved lips, curved in
the subtle, archaic way as in the marbles of ancient Greece.
Whatever may have been the secret of her power over him, it
manifested itself now in the form of a spiritual cruelty which he
found very difficult to bear. He made a movement that was almost
an appeal.
“Say I’m right, say I’m always right in these things!” she persisted.
But at that moment a diversion occurred, caused by the sudden
entrance of a large bat. The creature uttered a weird querulous cry,
like the cry of a newborn babe and went wheeling over their heads
in desperate rapid circles, beating against the book-case and the
picture frames. Presently, attracted by the light, it swooped down
upon the flame of the candle and in a moment had extinguished it,
plunging the room into complete darkness.
Philippa, with a low taunting laugh, ran across the room and
wrapped herself in one of the window curtains.
 “Open the door and drive it out,” she cried. “Drive it out, I say!
Are you afraid of a thing like that?”
But Brand seemed either to have sunk into a kind of trance or to
be too absorbed in his thoughts to make any movement. He
remained reclining in his chair, silent and motionless.
The girl cautiously withdrew from her shelter and, fumbling about
for matches, at last found a box and struck a light. The bat flew past
her as she did so and whirled away into the night. She lit several
candles and held one of them close to her brother’s face. Thus
illuminated, Brand’s sinister countenance had the look of a mediæval
wood-carving. He might have been the protagonist of one of those
old fantastic prints representing Doctor Faustus after some hopeless
struggle with his master-slave.
“Take it away, you! Let me alone. I’ve talked too much to you
already. This is a hot night, eh? A hot night and the kind that sets a
person thinking. Bah! I’ve thought too much. It’s thinking that
causes all the devilries in the world. Thinking, and hearing hearts
beating, that ought to be stopped!”
He pushed her aside and rose, stretching himself and yawning.
“What’s the time? What? Only ten o’clock? How early mother must
have gone to bed! This is the kind of night in which people kill their
mothers. Yes, they do, Philippa. You needn’t peer at me like that!
And they do it when their mothers have daughters that look like you
—just like you at this very moment.”
He leaned against the back of a chair and watched her as she
stood negligently by the mantelpiece, her arm extended along its
marble surface.
“Why does mother always say these things to you about my
marrying?” he continued in a broken thick voice. “You lead her on to
think of these things and then when she comes out with them you
bring them to me, to make me angry with her. Tell me this, Philippa,
why do you hate mother so? Why did you have that look in your face
just now when I talked of killing her? What—would—you—Hang it
all, girl, stop staring and smiling at me like that or it’ll be you I’ll kill!
Oh, Heaven above, help us! This hot night will send us all into
Bedlam!”
He suddenly stopped and began intently listening, his eyes on his
sister’s face. “Did you hear that?” he whispered huskily. “She’s
walking up and down the passage—walking in her slippers, that’s
why you can hardly hear her. Hush! Listen! She’ll go presently into
father’s room. She always does that in the end. What do you think
she does there, Philippa? Rummages about, I suppose, and opens
and shuts drawers and changes the pictures! What people we are!
God—what people we are! I suppose the sound of her doing all that
irritates you till your brain nearly bursts. It’s a strange thing, isn’t it,
this family life! Human beings like us weren’t meant to be stuck in a
hole together like wasps in a bottle. Listen! Do you hear that? She’s
doing something to his window now. A lot he cares, six feet under
the clay! But it shows how he holds her still, doesn’t it?” He made a
gesture in the direction of his father’s picture upon which the candle-
light shone clearly now, animating its heavy features.
“Do you know,” he continued solemnly, looking closely at his sister
again, “I believe one of these nights, when she walks up and down
like that, in her soft slippers, you’ll go straight up and kill her
yourself. Yes, I believe you listen like this every night till you could
put your fingers in your ears and scream.”
He moved across the room and, approaching his sister, shook her
roughly by the arm. Some psychic change in the atmosphere about
them seemed to have completely altered their relations.
“Confess—confess—you girl!” he muttered harshly. “Confess now—
when you go rushing off like that into the park it isn’t to see that
foreign fellow at all? It isn’t even to lie, as I know you love to do,
touching the stalks of the poison funguses with the tip of your
tongue under the oak trunks? It’s to escape from hearing her, that’s
what it is! Confess now. It’s to escape from hearing her!”
 He suddenly relaxed his grasp and stood erect, listening intently.
The sweet heavy scent of magnolia petals floated in through the
window and somewhere—far off among the trees—a screech-owl
uttered a broken wail, followed by the flapping of wings. The clock in
the hall outside began striking the hour. Before each stroke a
ponderous metallic vibration trembled through the silent house.
“It’s only ten now,” he said. “The clock in here is fast.”
As he spoke there was a loud ring at the entrance door. The
brother and sister stared blankly at one another and then Philippa
gave a low unnatural laugh. “We might be criminals,” she whispered.
They instinctively assumed more easy and less dramatic positions
and waited in silence, while from the distant servants’ quarters some
one came to answer the summons. They heard the door opened and
the sound of suppressed voices in the hall. There was a moment’s
pause, during which Philippa looked mockingly and enquiringly at
Brand.
“It’s our dear priest,” she whispered, “and some one else, too.”
“Surely the fool’s not going to try—” began Brand.
“Mr. Traherne and Dr. Raughty!” announced the servant, opening
the library door and holding it open while the visitors entered.
The clergyman advanced first. He shook hands with Brand and
bowed with old-fashioned courtesy to Philippa. Dr. Raughty, following
him, shook hands with Philippa and nodded nervously at her brother.
The two men sank into the seats offered them and accepted an
invitation to smoke. Brand moved to a side table and mixed for
them, with an air of resigned politeness, cool and appropriate drinks.
He drank nothing himself, however, but his sister, with a mocking
apology to Mr. Traherne, lit herself a cigarette.
“How’s the rat?” she began, throwing a teasing and provocative
smile upon the priest’s perturbed countenance.
“Out there,” he replied, emptying his glass at one gulp.
“What? In your coat pocket on such a night as this?”
 Mr. Traherne put down his glass and inserted his huge workman’s
fingers into the bosom of his cassock.
“Nothing under this but a shirt,” he said. “Cassocks have no
pockets.”
“Haven’t they?” laughed Brand. “They have something then where
you can put money. That is, unless you parsons are like kangaroos
and have some natural little orifice in which to hide the offerings of
the faithful.”
“Is he happy always in your pocket?” enquired Philippa.
“Do you want me to see?” replied the priest, rising with a
movement that almost upset the table. “I’ll bring him in and I’ll
make him go scimble-scamble all about the room.”
The tone in which he uttered these words said, as plainly as words
could say, “You’re a pretty, silly, flirtatious piece of femininity! You
only talk about my rat for the sake of fooling me. You don’t really
care whether he’s happy in my pocket or not. It’s only out of
consideration for your silly nerves that I don’t play with him now.
And if you tease me an inch more I will, and make him run up your
petticoats, too!”
“Sit down again, Traherne,” said Brand, “and let me fill up your
glass. We’ll all visit the rat presently and find him some supper. Just
at present I’m anxious to know how things are in the village. I
haven’t been down that way for weeks.”
This was a direct challenge to the priest to come, without further
delay, to the matter of his visit. Hamish Traherne accepted it.
“We came really,” he said, “to see you, Renshaw. A little later,
perhaps before we go, we must have our conversation. We hardly
expected to have the pleasure of finding Miss Philippa sitting up so
late.”
Dr. Raughty, who all this while had been watching with the most
intense delight the beauty of the girl’s white skin and scarlet lips and
the indescribable charm of her sinuous figure, now broke in
impetuously.
“But it can wait! It can wait! Oh, please don’t go to bed yet, Miss
Renshaw. Look, your cigarette’s out! Throw it away and try one of
these. They’re French, they’re the yellow packets, I know you like
them. They’re what you smoked once when we were on the river—
when you caught that great perch.”
Philippa, who had risen to her feet at Traherne’s somewhat
brusque remark, came at once to the Doctor’s side.
“Oh, the perch,” she cried, “yes, I should think I do remember!
You insisted on killing it at once so that it shouldn’t jump back into
the water. You put your thumb into its mouth and bent back its
head. Oh, yes! That yellow packet brings it all back to me. I can
smell the sticky dough we tried to catch dace with afterwards and I
can see the look of your hands all smeared with blood and silver
scales. Oh, that was a lovely day, Doctor! Do you remember how
you twisted those things, bryony leaves they were, round my head
when the others had gone? Do you remember how you said you’d
like to treat me as you treated the perch? Do you remember how
you ran after a dragon-fly or something?”
She stopped breathlessly and, balancing herself on the arm of the
Doctor’s chair, blew a great cloud of smoke over his head, filling the
room in a moment with the pungent odour of French tobacco.
Both Traherne and Brand regarded her with astonishment. She
seemed to have transformed herself and to have become a
completely different person. Her eyes shone with childish gaiety and
when she laughed, as she did a moment afterwards at some sally of
the Doctor’s, there was a ring of unforced, spontaneous merriment
in the sound such as her brother had not heard for many years. She
continued to bend over Dr. Raughty’s chair, covering them both in a
thick cloud of cigarette smoke, and the two of them soon became
absorbed in some intricate discussion concerning, as far as the
others could make out, the question of the best bait to be used for
pike.
The priest took the opportunity of delivering himself of what was
on his mind.
“I’m afraid, Renshaw,” he said, “you’ve gone your own way in that
matter of Linda Herrick. No! Don’t deny it. You may not have seen
her as often as before our last conversation, but you’ve seen her.
She’s confessed as much to me herself. Now look here, Renshaw,
you and I have known one another for some good few years. How
long is it, man? Fifteen, twenty? It can’t be less. Long enough,
anyway, for me to have earned the right to speak quite plainly and I
tell you this, you must stop the whole business!”
His voice sank as he spoke to a formidable whisper. Brand glanced
round at the others but apparently they were quite preoccupied. Mr.
Traherne continued.
“The whole business, Renshaw! After this you must leave that
child absolutely alone. If you don’t—if you insist on going on seeing
her—I shall take strong measures with you. I shall—but I needn’t
say any more! I think you can make a pretty shrewd guess what I
shall do.”
Brand received this solemn ultimatum in a way calculated to cause
the agitated man who addressed it to him a shock of complete
bewilderment. He yawned carelessly and stretched out his long
arms.
“As you please, Hamish,” he said, “I’m perfectly ready not to see
her. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have seen her in any case. To tell
you the truth, I’ve got a bit sick of the whole thing. These young
girls are silly little feather-weights at best. It’s first one mood and
then another! You can’t be sure of them for two hours at a stretch.
So it’s all right, Hamish Traherne! I won’t interfere with her. You can
make a nun of her if you like—or whatever else you fancy. All I beg
of you is, don’t go round talking about me to your parishioners.
Don’t talk about me to Raughty! I don’t want my affairs discussed by
any one—not even by my friends. All right, my boy—you needn’t
look at me like that. You’ve known me, as you say, long enough to
know what I am. So there you are! You’ve had your answer and
you’ve got my word. I don’t mind even your calling it ‘the word of a
gentleman’ as you did the other night. You can call it what you like.
I’m not going to see Linda for a reason quite personal and private
but if you like to make it a favour to yourself that I don’t—well!
throw that in, too!”
Hamish Traherne thrust his hand into his cassock thinking, for the
moment, that it was his well-worn ulster and that he would feel the
familiar form of Ricoletto.
It may be noted from this futile and unconscious gesture, how
much hangs in this world upon insignificant threads. Had the priest’s
fingers touched at that moment the silky coat of his little friend he
would have derived sufficient courage to ask his formidable host
point-blank whether, in leaving Linda in this way, he left her as
innocent and unharmed as when he crossed her path at the
beginning. Not having Ricoletto with him, however, and his fingers
encountering nothing but his own woolen shirt, he lacked the
inspiration to carry the matter to this conclusion. Thus, upon the
trifling accident of a tame rodent having been left outside a library
or, if you will, upon an eccentric parson having no pocket, depended
the whole future of Linda Herrick. For, had he put that question and
had Brand confessed the truth, the priest would undoubtedly, under
every threat in his power, have commanded him to marry her and it
is possible, considering the mood the man was in at that moment
and considering also the nature of the threat held over him, he
would have bowed to the inevitable and undertaken to do it.
The intricate and baffling complications of human life found
further illustration in the very nature of this mysterious threat hinted
at so darkly by Mr. Traherne. It was in reality—and Brand knew well
that it was—nothing more or less than the making clear to Mrs.
Renshaw beyond all question or doubt, of the actual character of the
son she tried so conscientiously to idealize. For some basic and
profound reason, inherent in his inmost nature, it was horrible to
Brand to think of his mother knowing him. She might suspect and
she might know that he knew she suspected, but to have the thing
laid quite bare between them would be to send a rending and
shattering crack through the unconscious hypocrisy of twenty years.
For certain natures any drastic cleavage of slowly built-up moral
relations is worse than death. Brand would have felt less remorse in
being the cause of his mother’s death than of being the cause of her
knowing him as he really was. The matter of Linda being thus
settled between the two men, if the understanding so reached could
be regarded as settling it, they both turned round, anxious for some
distraction, to the quarter of the room where their friends had been
conversing. But Philippa and the Doctor were no longer with them.
Brand looked whimsically at the priest who, shrugging his shoulders,
poured himself out a third glass from the decanter on the table.
They then moved to the window which reached almost to the
ground. Stepping over its low ledge, they passed out upon the
terrace. They were at once aware of a change in the atmospheric
conditions. The veil of mist had entirely been swept away from the
sky. The vast expanse twinkled with bright stars and, far down
among the trees, they could discern the crescent form of the new
moon.
Brand pulled towards him a spray of damask roses and inhaled
their sweetness. Then he turned to his companion and gave him an
evil leer.
“The Doctor and Philippa have taken advantage of our absorbing
conversation,” he remarked.
“Nonsense, man, nonsense!” exclaimed the priest. “Raughty’s only
showing her some sort of moth or beetle. Can’t you stop your
sneering for once and look at things humanly and naturally?”
His words found their immediate justification. Turning the corner
of the house they discovered the two escaped ones on their knees
by the edge of the dew-drenched lawn watching the movements of a
toad. The Doctor was gently directing its advance with the stalk of a
dead geranium and Philippa was laughing as merrily as a little girl.
They now realized the cause of the disappearance of the sultriness
and the heat. From over the wide-stretching fens came, with strong
steady breath, the north-west wind. It came with a full deep
coolness in it which the plants and the trees seemed to drink from as
out of some immortal cistern. It brought with it the odour of
immense marsh-lands and fresh inland waters and as it bowed the
trees and rustled over the flower-beds, it seemed to obliterate and
drive back all indications of their nearness to the sea.
Raughty and Philippa rose to their feet at the approach of their
friends.
“Doctor,” said Brand, “what’s the name of that great star over
there—or planet—or whatever it is?”
They all surveyed the portion of the sky he indicated and
contemplated the unknown luminary.
“I wish they’d taught me astronomy instead of Greek verses when
I was at school,” sighed Mr. Traherne.
“It’s Venus, I suppose,” remarked Dr. Raughty. “Isn’t it Venus,
Philippa?”
The girl looked from the men to the sky, and from the sky to the
men.
“Well, you are a set of wise fellows,” she cried, “not to know the
star which rules us all! And that’s not Venus, Doctor! Don’t any of
you really know? Brand—you surely do? Well, I’ll tell you then, that’s
Jupiter, that’s the lord-star Jupiter!”
And she burst into a peal of ringing boyish laughter. Brand turned
to the Doctor, who had moved away to cast a final glance at the
toad.
“What have you done to her, Fingal?” he called out. “She hasn’t
laughed like that for years.”
 The only answer he received to this was an embarrassed cough,
but when they returned to the library and began looking at some of
the more interesting of the volumes in its shelves it was noticed by
both Brand and Mr. Traherne that the Doctor treated the young girl
with a frank, direct, simple and humorous friendliness as if
completely oblivious of her sex.
 XX
RAVELSTON GRANGE

The hot weather continued with the intermission of only a few wet
and windy days all through the harvest. One Saturday afternoon
Sorio, who had arranged to take Nance by train to Mundham,
loitered with Baltazar at the head of the High Street waiting the girl’s
appearance. She had told him to meet her there rather than at her
lodging because since the occasion when they took refuge in the
cottage it had been agitating to her to see Linda and Baltazar
together. She knew without any question asked that for several
weeks her sister had seen nothing of Brand and she was extremely
unwilling, now that the one danger seemed removed, that the child
should risk falling into another.
Nance herself had lately been seeing more of her friend’s friend
than she liked. It was difficult to avoid this, however, now that they
lived so near, especially as Mr. Stork’s leisure times between his
journeys to Mundham, coincided so exactly with her own hours of
freedom from work at the dressmaker’s. But the more she saw of
Baltazar, the more difficult she found it to tolerate him. With Brand,
whenever chance threw him across her path, she was always able to
preserve a dignified and conventional reserve. She saw that he knew
how deep her indignation on behalf of her sister went and she could
not help respecting him for the tact and discretion with which he
accepted her tacit antagonism and made any embarrassing clash
between them easy to avoid. At the bottom of her heart she had
never felt any personal dislike of Brand Renshaw, nor did that
peculiar fear which he seemed to inspire in the majority of those
who knew him affect her in the least. She would have experienced
not the slightest trepidation in confronting him on her sister’s behalf
if circumstances demanded it and meanwhile she only asked that
they should be left in peace.
But with Baltazar it was different. She disliked him cordially and,
with her dislike, there mingled a considerable element of quite
definite fear. The precise nature of this fear she was unable to
gauge. In a measure it sprang from his unfailing urbanity and the
almost effusive manner in which he talked to her and rallied her with
little witticisms whenever they met. Nance’s own turn of mind was
singularly direct and simple and she could not avoid a perpetual
suspicion in dealing with Mr. Stork that the man was covertly
mocking at her and seeking to make her betray herself in some way.
There was something about his whole personality which baffled and
perplexed her. His languid and effeminate manner seemed to
conceal some hard and inflexible attitude towards life which, like a
steel blade in a velvet scabbard, was continually on the point of
revealing its true nature and yet never actually did. She completely
distrusted his influence over Sorio and indeed carried her suspicion
of him to the extreme point of even doubting his affection for his
old-time friend. Nothing about him seemed to her genuine or
natural. When he spoke of art, as he often did, or uttered vague,
cynical commentaries upon life in general, she felt towards him just
as a girl feels towards another girl whose devices to attract attention
seem to be infringing the legitimate limit of recognized rivalry. It was
not only that she suspected him of every sort of hypocritical
diplomacy or that every attitude he adopted seemed a deliberate
pose; it was that in some indescribably subtle way he seemed to
make her feel as if her own gestures and speeches were false. He
troubled and agitated her to such an extent that she was driven
sometimes into a mood of such desperate self-consciousness that
she did actually become insincere or at any rate felt herself saying
and doing things which failed to express what she really had in her
mind. This was especially the case when he was present at her
encounters with Sorio. She found herself on such occasions uttering
sometimes the wildest speeches, speeches quite far from her natural
character, and even when she tried passionately to be herself she
was half-conscious all the while that Baltazar was watching her and,
so to speak, clapping his hands encouragingly and urging her on. It
was just as if she heard him whispering in her ear and saying,
“That’s a pretty speech, that’s an effective turn of the head, that’s a
happily timed smile, that’s an appealing little silence!”
His presence seemed to perplex and bewilder the very basis and
foundation of her confidence in herself. What was natural he made
unnatural and what was spontaneous he made premeditated. He
seemed to dive down into the very depths of her soul and stir up
and make muddy and clouded what was clearest and simplest there.
The little childish impulses and all the impetuous girlish movements
of her mind became silly and forced when he was present, became
something that might have been different had she willed them to be
different, something that she was deliberately using to bewitch
Adrian.
The misery of it was that she couldn’t be otherwise, that she
couldn’t look and talk and laugh and be silent, in any other manner.
And yet he made her feel as if this were not only possible but easy.
He was diabolically and mercilessly clever in his malign clairvoyance.
Nance was not so simple as not to recognize that there are a
hundred occasions when a girl quite legitimately and naturally
“makes the best” of her passing moods and feelings. She was not so
stupid as not to know that the very diffusion of a woman’s emotions,
through every fibre and nerve of her being, lends itself to
innumerable little exaggerations and impulsive underscorings, so to
speak, of the precise truth. But it was just these very basic or, if the
phrase may be permitted, these “organic” characteristics of her self-
expression, that Baltazar’s unnatural watchfulness was continually
pouncing on. In some curious way he succeeded, though himself a
man, in betraying the very essence of her sex-dignity. He threw her,
in fact, into a position of embarrassed self-defence over what were
really the inevitable accompaniments of her being a woman at all.
The unfairness of the thing was constantly being accentuated and
made worse by the fact of her having so often to listen to bitter and
sarcastic diatribes from both Adrian and his friend, directed towards
her sex in general. A sort of motiveless jibing against women
seemed indeed one of the favourite pastimes of the two men and
Nance’s presence, when this topic came forward, appeared rather to
enhance than mitigate their hostility.
On one or two occasions of this kind, Dr. Raughty had happened
to be present and Nance felt she would never forget her gratitude to
this excellent man for the genial and ironical way he reduced them
to silence.
“I’m glad you have invented,” he would say to them, “so free and
inexpensive a way of getting born. You’ve only to give us a little
more independence and death will be equally satisfactory.”
On this particular afternoon, however, Baltazar was not
encouraging Sorio in any misogynistic railings. On the contrary he
was endeavouring to soothe his friend who at that moment was in
one of his worst moods.
“Why doesn’t she come?” he kept jerking out. “She knows
perfectly how I hate waiting in the street.”
“Come and sit down under the trees,” suggested Baltazar. “She’s
sure to come out on the green to look for you and we can see her
from there.”
They moved off accordingly and sat down, side by side, with a
group of village people under the ancient sycamores. Above them
the nameless Admiral looked steadily sea-wards and in the shadow
thrown by the trees several ragged little girls were playing sleepily
on the burnt-up grass.
“It’s extraordinary,” Sorio remarked, “what a lot of human beings
there are in the world who would be best out of it! They get on my
nerves, these people. I think I hear them more clearly and feel them
nearer me here than ever before in my life. Every person in a place
like this becomes more important and asserts himself more, and the
same is true of every sound. If you want really to escape from
humanity there are only two things to do, either go right away into
the desert where there’s not a living soul or go into some large city
where you’re absolutely lost in the crowd. This half-and-half
existence is terrible.”
“My dear, my dear,” protested his companion, “you keep
complaining and grumbling but for the life of me I can’t make out
what it is that actually annoys you. By the way, don’t utter your
sentiments too loudly! These honest people will not understand.”
“What annoys me—you don’t understand what annoys me?”
muttered the other peevishly. “It annoys me to be stared at. It
annoys me to be called out after. It annoys me to be recognized. I
can’t move from your door without seeing some face I know and
what’s still worse, seeing that face put on a sort of silly, inquisitive,
jeering look, as much as to say, ‘Ho! Ho! here is that idiot again.
Here is that fool who sponges upon Mr. Stork! Here is that spying
foreign devil!’”
“Adrian—Adrian,” protested his companion, “you really are
becoming impossible. I assure you these people don’t say or think
anything of the kind! They just see you and greet you and wish you
well and pass on upon their own concerns.”
“Oh, don’t they, don’t they,” cried the other, forgetting in his
agitation to modulate his voice and causing a sudden pause in the
conversation that was going on at their side. “Don’t they think these
things! I know humanity better. Every single person who meets
another person and knows anything at all about him wants to show
that he’s a match for his little tricks, that he’s not deceived by his
little ways, that he knows where he gets his money or doesn’t get it
and what woman he wants or doesn’t want and which of his parents
he wishes dead and buried! I tell you you’ve no idea what human
beings are really like! You haven’t any such idea, for the simple
reason that you’re absolutely hard and self-centred yourself. You go
your own way. You think your own thoughts. You create your own
fancy-world. And the rest of humanity are nothing—mere pawns and
puppets and dream-figures—nothing—simply nothing! I’m a
completely different nature from you, Tassar. I’ve got my idea—my
secret—but I’d rather not talk about that and you’d rather not hear.
But apart from that, I’m simply helpless. I mean I’m helplessly
conscious of everything round me! I’m porous to things. It’s really
quite funny. It’s just as if I hadn’t any skin, as if my soul hadn’t any
skin. Everything that I see, or hear, Tassar—and the hearing is
worse, oh, ever so much worse—passes straight through me,
straight through the very nerves of my inmost being. I feel
sometimes as though my mind were like a piece of parchment,
stretched out taut and tight and every single thing that comes near
me taps against it, tip-tap, tip-tap, tip-tap, as if it were a drum! That
wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t that I know so horribly clearly what
people are thinking. For instance, when I go down that alley to the
station, as I shall soon with Nance, and pass the workmen at their
doors, I know perfectly well that they’ll look at me and say to
themselves, ‘There goes that fool again,’ or, ‘There goes that
slouching idiot from the cottage,’ but that’s not all, Tassar. They soon
have the sense to see that I’m the kind of person who shrinks from
being noticed and that pleases them. They nudge one another then
and look more closely at me. They do their best to make me
understand that they know their power over me and intend to use it,
intend to nudge one another and look at me every time I pass. I can
read exactly what their thoughts are. They say to themselves, ‘He
may slink off now but he’ll have to come this way again and then
we’ll see! Then we’ll look at him more closely. Then we’ll find out
what he’s after in these parts and why that pretty girl puts up with
him so long!’”
He was interrupted at that moment by a roar of laughter from the
group beside them and Baltazar rose and pulled him away. “Upon
my soul, Adrian,” he whispered, as he led him back across the green,
“you must behave better! You’ve given those honest fellows
something to gossip about for a week. They’ll think you really are up
to something, you can’t shout like that without being listened to and
you can’t quarrel with the whole of humanity.”
Adrian turned fiercely round on him. “Can’t I?” he exclaimed.
“Can’t I quarrel with humanity? You wait, my friend, till I’ve got my
book published. Then you’ll see! I tell you I’ll strike this cursed
human race of yours such a blow that they’ll wish they’d treated a
poor wanderer on the face of the earth a little better and spared him
something of their prying and peering!”
“Your book!” laughed Baltazar. “A lot they’ll care for your book!
That’s always the way with you touchy philosophers. You stir up the
devil of a row with your bad temper and make the most harmless
people into enemies and then you think you can settle it all and
prove yourselves right and everybody else wrong by writing a book.
Upon my soul, Adrian, if I didn’t love you very much indeed I’d be
inclined to let you loose on life just to see whether you or it could
strike the hardest blows!”
Sorio looked at him with a curiously bewildered look. He seemed
puzzled. His swarthy Roman face wore a clouded, weary, crushed
expression. His brow contracted into an anxious frown and his
mouth quivered. His air at that moment was the air of a very young
child that suddenly finds the world much harder to deal with than it
expected.
Baltazar watched him with secret pleasure. These were the
occasions when he always felt strangely drawn towards him. That
look of irresolute and bewildered weakness upon a countenance so
powerfully moulded filled him with a most delicate sense of
protective pity. He could have embraced the man as he watched
him, blinking there in the afternoon sunshine, and fumbling with the
handle of his stick.
But at that moment Nance appeared, walking rapidly with bent
head, up the narrow street. Baltazar looked at her with a gleam of
hatred in his sea-coloured eyes. She came to rob him of one of the
most exquisite pleasures of his life, the pleasure of reducing this
strong creature to humiliated submissiveness and then petting and
cajoling him back into self-respect. The knowledge that he left Sorio
in her hands in this particular mood of deprecatory helplessness,
remorseful and gentle and like a wild beast beaten into docility,
caused him the most acute pain. With poisonous antagonism under
his urbane greeting he watched furtively the quick glance she threw
at Adrian and the way her eyes lingered upon his, feeling her way
into his mood. He cast about for some element of discord that he
could evoke and leave behind with them to spoil the girl’s triumph
for he knew well that Adrian was now, after what had just occurred,
in the frame of mind most adapted of all to the influence of feminine
sympathy. Nance, however, did not give him an opportunity for this.
“Come on,” she said, “we’ve only just time to catch the three
o’clock train. Come on! Good-bye for a while, Mr. Stork. I’ll bring him
back safe to you, sooner or later. Come on, Adrian, we really must
be quick!”
They went off together and Baltazar wandered slowly back across
the green. He felt for the moment so lonely that even his hatred
drifted away and sank to nothingness under the inflowing wave of
bitter universal isolation. As he approached his cottage he stopped
stone-still with his eyes on the ground and his hands behind his
back. Elegantly dressed in pleasant summer clothes, his slight
graceful figure, easy bearing, and delicate features, gave without
doubt to the casual bystanders who observed him, an impression of
unmitigated well-being. As a matter of fact, had that discerning
historic personage who is reported to have exclaimed after an
interview with Jonathan Swift, “there goes the unhappiest man who
ever lived,” exercised his insight now, he might have modified his
conclusion in favour of Baltazar Stork.
It would certainly have required more than ordinary discernment
to touch the tip of the iron wedge that was being driven just then
into this graceful person’s brain. Looking casually into the man’s face
one would have seen nothing perhaps but a dreamy, pensive smile—
a smile a little bitter maybe, and self-mocking but with no
particularly sinister import. A deeper glance, however, would have
disclosed a curious compression of the lines about the mouth and a
sort of indrawing of the lips as if Mr. Stork were about to emit the
sound of whistling. Below the smiling surface of the eyes, too, there
might have been seen a sort of under-flicker of shuddering pain as if,
without any kind of anæsthetic, Mr. Stork were undergoing some
serious operation. The colour had deserted his cheeks as if whatever
it was he was enduring the endurance of it had already exhausted
his physical energies. Passing him by, as we have remarked, casually
and hastily, one might have said to oneself—“Ah! a handsome fellow
chuckling there over some pleasant matter!” but coming close up to
him one would have instinctively stretched out a hand, so definitely
would it then have appeared that, whatever his expression meant,
he was on the point of fainting. It was perhaps a fortunate accident
that, at this particular moment as he stood motionless, a small boy
of his acquaintance, the son of one of the Rodmoor fishermen, came
up to him and asked whether he had heard of the great catch there
had been that day.
“There’s a sight o’ fish still there, Mister,” the boy remarked, “some
of them monstrous great flounders and a heap of Satans such as
squirts ink out of their bellies!”
Baltazar’s twisted lips gave a genuine smile now. A look of
extraordinary tenderness came into his face.
“Ah, Tony, my boy,” he said, “so there are fish down there, are
there? Well, let’s go and see! You take me, will you? And I’ll make
those fellows give you some for supper.”
They walked together across the green and down the street.
Baltazar’s hand remained upon the child’s shoulder and he listened
as he walked, to his chatter; but all the while his mind visualized an
immense, empty plain—a plain of steely-blue ice under a grey sky—
and in the center of this plain a bottomless crevasse, also of steely-
blue ice, and on the edge of this crevasse, gradually relinquishing
their hold from exhaustion, two human hands. This image kept
blending itself as they walked with all the little things which his eyes
fell upon. It blent with the cakes in the confectioner’s window. It
blent with the satiny blouses, far too expensive for any local
purchaser, in Miss Pontifex’s shop. It blent with the criss-cross lines
of the brick-work varied with flint of the house where Dr. Raughty
lived. It blent with their first glimpse of the waters of the harbour,
seen between two ramshackle houses with gable roofs. Nor when
they finally found themselves standing with a little crowd of men and
boys round a circle of fish-baskets upon the shore did it fail to
associate itself both with the blue expanse of waveless sea stretched
before them and with the tangled mass of sea shells, seaweed and
sea creatures which lay exposed to the sunlight, many-coloured and
glistening as the deeper folds of the nets which had drawn them
from the deep were explored and dragged forward.
Meanwhile Adrian and Nance, having safely caught their train,
were being carried with the leisurely steadiness of a local line, from
Rodmoor to Mundham. Jammed tightly into a crowded compartment
full of Saturday marketers, they had little opportunity during the
short journey to do more than look helplessly across their perspiring
neighbours at the rising and falling of the telegraph wires against a
background of blue sky. The peculiar manner in which, as a train
carries one forward, these wires sink slowly downwards as if they
were going to touch the earth and then leap up with an unexpected
jerk as the next pole comes by, was a phenomenon that always had
a singular fascination for Sorio. He associated it with his most
childish recollections of railway travelling. Would the wires ever
succeed in sinking out of sight before the next pole jerked them high
up across the window again? That was the speculation that
fascinated him even at this moment as he watched them across the
brim of his companion’s brightly trimmed hat. There was something
human in the attempts the things made to sink down, down, down
and escape their allotted burden and there was certainly something
very like the ways of Providence in the manner in which they were
pulled up with a remorseless jolt to perform their duties once more.
Emerging with their fellow-passengers upon the Mundham
platform both Sorio and Nance experienced a sense of happiness
and relief. They had both been so long confined to the immediate
surroundings of Rodmoor that this little excursion to the larger town
assumed the proportions of a release from imprisonment. It is true
that it was a release that Adrian might easily have procured for
himself on any day; but more and more recently, in the abnormal
tension of his nerves, he had lost initiative in these things. They
wandered leisurely together into the town and Sorio amused himself
by watching the demure and practical way in which his companion
managed her various economic transactions in the shops which she
entered. He could not help feeling a sense of envy as he observed
the manner in which, without effort or strain, she achieved the
precise objects she had in mind and arranged for the transportation
of her purchases by the carrier’s cart that same evening.
He wondered vaguely whether all women were like this and
whether, with their dearest and best-loved dead at home, or their
own peace of mind permanently shattered by some passage of fatal
emotion only some few hours before, they could always throw
everything aside and bargain so keenly and shrewdly with the alert
tradesmen. He supposed it was the working of some blind atavistic
power in them, the mechanical result of ages of mental
concentration. He was amused, too, to observe how, when in a time
incredibly short she had done all she wanted, instead of rushing off
blindly for the walk they had promised themselves past the old
Abbey church and along the river’s bank, she shrewdly interpreted
their physical necessities and carried him off to a little dairy shop to
have tea and half-penny buns. Had he been the cicerone of their
day’s outing he would have plunged off straight for the Abbey
church and the river fields, leaving their shopping to the end and
dooming them to bad temper and irritable nerves from sheer bodily
exhaustion. Never had Nance looked more desirable or attractive as,
with heightened colour and little girlish jests, she poured out his tea
for him in the small shop-parlour and swallowed half-penny buns
with the avidity of a child.
Baltazar Stork was not wrong in his conjecture. Not since their
early encounters in the streets and parks of South London had Sorio
been in a gentler mood or one more amenable to the girl’s charm.
As he looked at her now and listened to her happy laughter, he felt
that he had been a fool as well as a scoundrel in his treatment of
her. Why hadn’t he cut loose long since from his philandering with
Philippa which led nowhere and could lead nowhere? Why hadn’t he
cast about for some definite employment and risked, without further
delay, persuading her to marry him? With her to look after him and
smooth his path for him, he might have been quite free from this
throbbing pain behind his eyeballs and this nervous tension of his
brain. He hurriedly made up his mind that he would ask her to marry
him—not to-day, perhaps, or to-morrow—for it would be absurd to
commit himself till he could support her, but very soon, as soon as
he had found any mortal kind of an occupation! What that
occupation would be he did not know. It was difficult to think of
such things all in a moment. It required time. Besides, whatever it
was it must be something that left him free scope for his book. After
all, his book came first—his book and Baptiste. What would Baptiste
think if he were to marry again? Would he be indignant and hurt?
No! No! It was inconceivable that Baptiste should be hurt. Besides,
he would love Nance when he knew her! Of that he was quite sure.
Yes, Baptiste and Nance were made to understand one another. It
would be different were it Philippa he was thinking of marrying.
Somehow it distressed and troubled him to imagine Baptiste and
Philippa together. That, at all costs, must never come about. His boy
must never meet Philippa. All of this whirled at immense speed
through Sorio’s head as he smiled back at Nance across the little
marble table and stared at the large blue-china cow which, with
udders coloured a yet deeper ultramarine than its striped back,
placidly, like an animal sacred to Jupiter, contemplated the universe.
There must have been a wave of telepathic sympathy between them
at that moment, for Nance suddenly swallowing the last of her bun,
hazarded a question she had never dared to ask before.
“Adrian, dear, tell me this. Why did you leave your boy behind you
in America when you came to England?”
Sorio was himself surprised at the unruffled manner in which he
received this question. At any other moment it would have fatally
disturbed him. He smiled back at her, quite easily and naturally.
“How could I bring him?” he said. “He’s got a good place in New
York and I have nothing. I had to get away, somewhere. In fact,
they sent me away, ‘deported’ me, as they call it. But I couldn’t drag
the boy with me. How could I? Though he was ready enough to
come. Oh, no! It’s much better as it is—much, much better!”
He became grave and silent and began fumbling in one of his
inner pockets. Nance watched him breathlessly. Was he really
softening towards her? Was Philippa losing her hold on him? He
suddenly produced a letter—a letter written on thin paper and
bearing an American stamp—and taking it with careful hands from
its envelope, stretched it across the table towards her. The action
was suggestive of such intimacy, suggestive of such a new and
happy change in their relations, that the girl looked at the thing with
moist and dazed eyes. She obtained a general sense of the firm
clear handwriting. She caught the opening sentence, written in
caressing Italian and, for some reason or other, the address—
perhaps because of its strangeness to a European eye—fifteen West
Eleventh Street—remained engraved in her memory. More than this
she was unable to take in for the moment out of the sheer rush of
bewildering happiness which swept over her and made her long to
cry.
A moment later two other Rodmoor people, known to them both
by sight, entered the shop, and Sorio hurriedly took the letter back
and replaced it in his pocket. He paid their bill, which came to
exactly a shilling, and together they walked out from the dairy. The
ultramarine cow contemplated the universe as the newcomers took
their vacated table with precisely the same placidity. Its own end—
some fifty years after, amid the debris of a local fire, with the
consequent departure of its shattered pieces to the Mundham
dumping ground—did not enter into its contemplation. Many lovers,
happier and less happy than Sorio and Nance, would sit at that
marble table during that epoch and the blue cow would listen in
silence. Perhaps in its ultimate resting-place its scorched fragments
would become more voluble as the rains dripped upon the tins and
shards around them or perhaps, even in ruins—like an animal sacred
to Jupiter—it would hold its peace and let the rains fall.
 The two friends, still in a mood of delicate and delicious harmony,
threaded the quieter streets of the town and emerged into the
dreamy cathedral-like square, spacious with lawns and trees, that
surrounded the abbey-church. A broad gravel-path, overtopped by
wide-spreading lime trees, separated the grey south wall of the
ancient edifice from the most secluded of these lawns. The grass
was divided from the path by a low hanging chain-rail of that easy
and friendly kind that seems to call upon the casual loiterer to step
over its unreluctant barrier and take his pleasure under the
welcoming trees. They sat down on an empty bench and looked up
at the flying buttresses and weather-stained gargoyles and richly
traceried windows. The sun fell in long mellow streams across the
gravel beside them, broken into cool deep patches of velvet shadow
where the branches of the lime trees intercepted it. From
somewhere behind them came the sound of murmuring pigeons and
from further off still, from one of the high-walled, old-fashioned
gardens of the houses on the remote side of the square, came the
voices of children playing. Sorio sat with one arm stretched out
along the top of the bench behind Nance’s head and with the other
resting upon the handle of his stick. His face had a look of deep,
withdrawn contentment—a contentment so absolute that it merged
into a sort of animal apathy. Any one familiar with the expression so
often seen upon the faces both of street-beggars and prince-
cardinals in the city on the Tiber, would have recognized something
indigenous and racial in the lethargy which then possessed him.
Nance, on the other hand, gave herself up to a sweet and
passionate happiness such as she had not known since they left
London. While they waited thus together, reluctant by even a word
to break the spell of that favoured hour, there came from within the
church the sound of an organ. Nance got up at once.
“Let’s go in for just a minute, Adrian! Do you mind—only just a
minute?”
The slightest flicker of a frown crossed Sorio’s face but it vanished
before she could repeat her request.
 “Of course,” he said, rising in his turn, “of course! Let’s go round
and find the door.”
They had no difficulty in doing this. The west entrance of the
church was wide open and they entered and sat down at the back of
the nave. Above them the spacious vaulted roof, rich with elaborate
fan-tracery, seemed to spread abroad and deepen the echoes of the
music as if it were an immense inverted chalice spilling the odour of
immortal wine. The coolness and dim shadowiness of the place fell
gently upon them both and the mysterious rising and sinking of the
music, with no sight of any human presence as its cause, thrilled
Nance from head to foot as she had never been thrilled in her life.
Oh, it was worth it—this moment—all she had suffered before—all
she could possibly suffer! If only it might never stop, that heavenly
sound, but go on and on and on until all the world came to know
what the power of love was! She felt at that moment as if she were
on the verge of attaining some clue, some signal, some sign, which
should make all things clear to her—clear and ineffably sweet!
The deep crimsons and purples in the coloured windows, the
damp chilly smell of the centuries-old masonry, the large dark
recesses of the shadowy transepts, all blended together to transport
her out of herself into a world kindlier, calmer, quieter, than the
world she knew.
“And—he—shall—feed—” rang out, as they listened, the clear
flutelike voice of some boy-singer, practising for the morrow’s
services, “shall—feed—his—flock.”
The words of the famous antiphony, “staled and rung upon” as
they might be, by the pathetic stammerings of so old a human
repetition, were, coming just at this particular moment, more than
Nance could bear. She flung herself on her knees and, pressing her
hands to her face, burst into convulsive sobs. Sorio stood up and laid
his hand on her shoulder. With the other hand—mindful of early
associations—he crossed himself two or three times and then
remained motionless. Slowly, by the action of that law which is
perhaps the deepest in the universe, the law of ebb and flow, there
began in him a reaction. Had the words the unseen boy singer was
uttering been in Latin, had they possessed that reserve, that
passionate aloofness in emotion, which the instinct of worship in the
southern races protects from sentiment, such a reaction might have
been spared him; but the thing was too facile, too easy. It might
have been the climax of a common melodrama. It fell too pat upon
the occasion. And it was insidiously, treacherously, horribly human. It
was too human. It lacked the ring of style, the reserve of the grand
manner. It wailed and sobbed. It whimpered upon the Almighty’s
shoulder. It wanted the tragic abandonment of the “Dies Irae,” as it
missed the calmer dignity of the “Tantum ergo.” It appealed to what
was below the level of the highest in religious pathos. It humiliated
while it comforted. The boy’s voice died away and the organ
stopped. There was a sound of shuffling in the choir and the mutter
of voices and even a suppressed laugh.
Sorio removed his hand from Nance’s shoulder and stooping down
picked up his hat and stick. He looked round him. A fashionably
dressed lady, carrying a bunch of carnations, moved past them up
the aisle and presently two younger women followed. Then a neatly
attired dapper young clergyman strolled in, adjusting his eye-
glasses. It was evidently approaching the hour of the afternoon
service. The spell was broken.
But the kneeling girl knew nothing, felt nothing, of all this. She, at
all events, was in the church of her fathers—the church that her
most childish memories rendered sacred. Had she been able to
understand Sorio’s feeling, she would have swept it aside. The music
was beautiful, she would have said, and the words were true. From
the heart of the universe they came straight to her heart. Were they
rendered unbeautiful and untrue because so many simple souls had
found comfort in them?
“Ah! Adrian,” she would have said had she argued it out with him.
“Ah, Adrian, it is common. It is the common cry of humanity, set to
the music of the common heart of the world, and is not that more
essential than ‘Latin,’ more important than ‘style’?”
 As a matter of fact, the only controversy that arose between them
when they left the building was brief and final.
“I fancy,” remarked Sorio, “from what you tell me of her, that
that’s the sort of thing that would please Mrs. Renshaw—I mean the
music we heard just now!”
Nance flushed as she answered him. “Yes, it would! It would! And
it pleases me too. It makes me more certain than ever that Jesus
Christ was really God.” Sorio bowed his head at this and held his
peace and together they made their way to the bank of the Loon.
What they were particularly anxious to see was an old house by
the river-side about a mile east of the town which had been, some
hundred years before, the abode of one of the famous East Anglian
painters of the celebrated Norwich school—a painter whose
humorous aplomb and rich earth-steeped colouring rivalled some of
the most notable of the artists of Amsterdam and The Hague.
Their train back to Rodmoor did not leave till half-past seven and
as it was now hardly five they had ample time to make this little
pilgrimage as deliberately as they pleased. They had no difficulty in
reaching the river, and once at its edge, it was only a question of
following its windings till they arrived at Ravelston Grange. Their way
was somewhat impeded at first by a line of warehouses, between
which and a long row of barges fastened to a series of littered dusty
wharves, lay all manner of bales and casks and bundles of hay and
vegetable. There were coal-yards there too, and timber-yards, and in
other places great piles of beer-barrels, all bearing the name “Keith
Radipole” which had been for half a century the business title of
Brand Renshaw’s brewery. These obstacles surmounted, there were
no further interruptions to their advance along the river path.
The aspect of the day, however, had grown less promising. A
somewhat threatening bank of clouds with dark jagged edges, which
the efforts of the sun to scatter only rendered more lurid, had
appeared in the west and when, for a moment, they turned to look
back at the town, they saw its chimneys and houses massed
gloomily together against a huge sombre bastion whose topmost
fringe was illuminated by fiery indentations. Nance expressed some
hesitation as to the wisdom of going further with this phalanx of
storm threatenings following them from behind, but Sorio laughed at
her fears and assured her that in a very short time they would arrive
at the great painter’s house.
It appeared, however, that the “mile” referred to in the little local
history in which they had read about this place did not begin till the
limits of Mundham were reached and Mundham seemed to extend
itself interminably. They were passing through peculiarly dreary
outskirts now. Little half-finished rows of wretchedly built houses
trailed disconsolately towards the river’s edge and mingled with
small deserted factories whose walls, blackened with smoke, were
now slowly crumbling to pieces. Desolate patches of half-cultivated
ground where the stalks of potatoes, yellowing with damp,
alternated with thickly growing weeds, gave the place that peculiar
expression of sordid melancholy which seems the especial
prerogative of such fringes of human habitation. Old decaying
barges, some of them half-drowned in water and others with gaunt,
protruding ribs and rotting planks, lay staring at the sky while the
river, swirling past them, gurgled and muttered round their
submerged keels. It was impossible for the two friends to retain
long, under these depressing surroundings, their former mood of
magical harmony. Little shreds and fragments of their happiness
seemed to fall from them at every step and remain, bleakly flapping
among the mouldering walls and weedy river-piles, like the bits of
old paper and torn rag which fluttered feebly or fell into immobility
as the wind rose or sank. The bank of clouds behind them had now
completely obscured every vestige of the sun and a sort of
premature twilight lay upon the surface of the river and on the fields
on its further side.
“What’s that?” asked Nance suddenly, putting her hand on his arm
and pointing to a large square building which suddenly appeared on
their left. They had been vaguely aware of this building for some
while but one little thing or another in their more immediate
neighbourhood had confined it to the remoter verge of their
consciousness. As soon as she had asked the question Nance felt an
unaccountable unwillingness to carry the investigation further. Sorio,
too, seemed ready enough to let her enquiry remain unanswered.
He shrugged his shoulders as much as to say “how can I tell?” and
suggested that they should rest for a moment on a littered pile of
wood which lay close to the water’s edge.
They stepped down the bank where they were, out of sight of the
building above, and seated themselves. With their arms around their
knees they contemplated the flowing tide and the dull-coloured mud
of the opposite bank. A coil of decaying rope, tossed aside from
some passing barge, lay at Sorio’s feet and, as he sat in gloomy
silence, he thought how like the thing was to something he had once
seen at an inquest in a house in New York. As for Nance, she found
it difficult to remove her eyes from a shapeless bundle of sacking
which the tide was carrying. Sometimes it would get completely
submerged and then again it would reappear.
“Why is it,” she thought, “that there is always something horrible
about tidal rivers? Is it because of the way they have of carrying
things backward and forward, backward and forward, without ever
allowing them either to get far inland or clear out to sea? Is a tidal
river,” she said to herself, “the one thing in all the world in which
nothing can be lost or hidden or forgotten?”
It was curious how difficult they both felt it just then either to
move from where they were or to address a single word to one
another. They seemed hypnotized by something—hypnotized by
some thought which remained unspoken at the back of their minds.
They felt an extreme reluctance to envisage again that large square
building surrounded by weather-stained wall, a wall from which the
ivy had been carefully scraped.
Slowly, little by little, the bank of clouds mounted up to the
meridian, casting over everything as it did so a more and more
ominous twilight. The silence between them became after a while, a
thing with a palpable presence. It seemed to float upon the water to
their feet and, rising about them like a wraith, like a mist, like the
ghost of a dead child, it fumbled with clammy fingers upon their
hearts.
“I’m sure,” Sorio cried at last, with an obvious struggle to break
the mysterious sorcery which weighed on them, “I’m perfectly sure
that Ravelston Grange must be round that second bend of the river
—do you see?—where those trees are! I’m sure it must! At any rate
we must come to it at last if we only go on.”
He looked at his watch.
“Heavens! We’ve taken an hour already getting here! It’s nearly
six. How on earth have we been so long?”
“Do you know, Adrian,” Nance remarked—and she couldn’t help
noticing as she did so that though he spoke so resolutely of going
forward he made not the least movement to leave his seat—“do you
know I feel as if we were in a dream. I have the oddest feeling that
any moment we might wake up and find ourselves back in Rodmoor.
Adrian, dear, let’s go back! Let’s go back to the town. There’s
something that depresses me beyond words about all this.”
“Nonsense!” cried Sorio in a loud and angry voice, leaping to his
feet and snatching up his stick. “Come on, my girl, come, child! We’ll
see that Ravelston place before the rain gets to us!”
They clambered up the bank and walked swiftly forward. Nance
noticed that Sorio looked steadily at the river, looked at the river
without intermission and with hardly a word, till they were well
beyond the very last houses of Mundham. It was an unspeakable
relief to her when, at last, crossing a little footbridge over a weir,
they found themselves surrounded by the open fens.
“Behind those trees, Nance,” Sorio kept repeating, “behind those
trees! I’m absolutely sure I’m right and that Ravelston Grange is
there. By the way, girl, which of your poets wrote the verses—
 ‘She makes her immemorial moan,
She keeps her shadowy kine,
O, Keith of Ravelston,
The sorrows of thy line!’

They’ve been running in my head all the afternoon ever since I

saw ‘Keith Radipole,’ on those beer-barrels.”
Nance, however, was too eager to reach the real Ravelston to pay
much heed to his poetic allusion.
“Oh, it sounds like—oh, I don’t know—Tennyson, perhaps!” and
she pulled him forward towards the trees.
These proved to be a group of tall French poplars which, just
then, were muttering volubly in the rain-smelling wind. They hurried
past them and paused before a gate in a very high wall.
“What’s this?” exclaimed Sorio. “This can’t be Ravelston. It looks
more like a prison.”
For a moment his eyes encountered Nance’s and the girl glanced
quickly away from what she read in his face. She called out to an old
man who was hoeing potatoes behind some iron railings where the
wall ended.
“Could you tell me where Ravelston Grange is?” she enquired.
The old man removed his hat and regarded her with a whimsical
smile.
“’Tis across the river, lady, and there isn’t no bridge for some
many miles. Maybe with any luck ye may meet a cattle-boat to take
ye over but there’s little surety about them things.”
“What’s this place, then?” asked Sorio abruptly, approaching the
iron railings.
“This, mister? Why this be the doctor’s house of the County
Asylum. This be where they keep the superior cases, as you might
say, them what pays summat, ye understand, and be only what you
might call half daft. You must a’ seed the County Asylum as you