Like so many other women of suppressed romantic emotions, when the moment came for some heroic sacrifice for the sake of her friend, she at once threw into the troubled waters the consecrated oil that had anointed the half-forgotten piety of her childhood.
One curious and interesting psychological fact in connection with this new trend of feeling in her, was the fact that the actual realistic horror of being, in a literal and material sense, at the mercy of Mr. John Goring never presented itself to her mind at all. Its very dreadfulness, being a thing that amounted to sheer death, blurred and softened its tangible and palpable image.
Yet it must not be supposed that she meditated definitely upon any special line of action. She formulated no plan of self-destruction. For some strange reason, it was much less the bodily terror of the idea that rose up awful and threatening before her, than its spiritual and moral counterpart.
Had Lacrima been compelled, like poor Sonia in the Russian novel, to become a harlot for the sake of those she loved, it would have been the mental rather than the physical outrage that would have weighed upon her.
She was of that curious human type which separates the body from the soul, in all these things. She had always approached life rather through her mind than through her senses, and it was in the imagination that she found both her catastrophes andrecoveries. In this particular case, the obsessing image of death had for the moment quite obliterated the more purely realistic aspect of what she was contemplating. Her feeling may perhaps be best described by saying that whenever she imaged the farmer’s possession of her, it was always as if what he possessed was no more than a dead inert corpse, about whose fate none, least of all herself, could have any further care.
She had just counted the strokes of the church clock striking four, when she heard Gladys’ steps in the adjoining room. She hurriedly concealed the little purple-covered volume, and lay back once more upon her pillows. She fervently prayed in her heart that Gladys might be ignorant of what had occurred, but her knowledge of the relations between father and daughter made this a very forlorn hope.
Such as it was, it was entirely dispelled as soon as the fair-haired creature glided in and sat down at the foot of her bed.
Gladys looked at her cousin with intent and luxurious interest; her expression being very much what one might suppose the countenance of a young pagan priestess to have worn, as she gazed, dreamily and sweetly, in a pause of the sacrificial procession, at some doomed heifer “lowing at the skies, and all her silken flanks with garlands dressed.”
“So I hear that you are going to be married,” she began at once, speaking in a slow, liquid voice, and toying indolently with her friend’s shoe-strings.
“Please—please don’t talk about it,” murmured the Italian. “Nothing is settled yet. I would so much rather not think of it now.”
“But, how silly!” cried the other, with a melodious little laugh. “Of course we must talk about it. It is so extremely exciting! I shall be seeing uncle John today and I must congratulate him. I am sure he doesn’t half know how lucky he is.”
Lacrima jumped up from where she lay and stepping to the window looked out over the sunlit park.
Gladys rose too, and standing behind her cousin, put her arms round her waist.
“No, I am sure he doesn’t realize how sweet you are,” she whispered. “You darling little thing,—you little, shy, frightened thing—you must tell me all about it! I’ll try not to tease you—I really will! What a clever, naughty little girl, it has been, peeping and glancing at a poor elderly farmer and inflaming his simple heart! But all your friends are rather well advanced in age, aren’t they, dear? I expect uncle John is really no older than Mr. Quincunx or James Andersen. What tricks do you use, darling, to attract all these people?
“I’ll tell you what it is! It’s the way you clasp your fingers, and keep groping with your hands in the air in front of you, as if you were blind. I’ve noticed that trick of yours for a long time. I expect it attracts them awfully! I expect they all long to take those little wrists and hold them tight! And the drooping, dragging way you walk, too; that no doubt they find quite enthralling. It has often irritatedme, but I can quite see now why you do it. It must make them long to support you in their strong arms! What a crafty little puss she is! And I have sometimes taken her for no better than a little simpleton! I see I shall not for long be the only person allowed to kiss our charming Lacrima! So I must make the best of my opportunities, mustn’t I?”
Suiting her action to her words she turned the girl towards her with a vigorous movement, and overcoming her reluctance, embraced her softly, whispering, as she kissed her averted mouth,—
“Uncle John won’t do this half so prettily as I do, will he? But oh, how you must have played your tricks upon him—cunning, cunning little thing!”
Lacrima had by this time reached the end of her endurance. With a sudden flash of genuine Italian anger she flung her cousin back, with such unexpected violence, that the elder girl would actually have fallen to the floor, if she had not encountered in her collapse the arm of the wicker chair which stood behind her.
She rose silent and malignant.
“So that’s what we gentle, wily ones do, is it, when we lose our little tempers! All right, my friend, all right! I shall remember.”
She walked haughtily to the door that divided their rooms.
“The sooner I am married,” she cried, as a final hit, “the sooneryouwill be—and I shall be married soon—soon—soon; perhaps before this summer is out!”
Lacrima stood for some moments rigid and unmoving. Then there came over her an irresistible longing to escape from this house, and flee far off, anywhere, anyhow, so long as she could be alone with her misery, alone with her tragic resolution.
The invasion of Gladys had made this resolutiona very different thing from what it had seemed an hour ago. But she must recover herself! She must see things again in the clearer, larger light of sublime sacrifice. She must purge the baseness of her cousin’s sensual magnetism out of her brain and her heart!
She hurriedly fastened on her hat, took her faded parasol, slipped the tiny St. Thomas into her dress, and ran down the great oak staircase. She hurried past the entrance without turning aside to greet the impassive Mrs. Romer, seated as usual in her accustomed place, and skirting the east lawns emerged from the little postern-gate into the park. Crossing a half-cut hay-field and responding gravely and gently to the friendly greetings of the hay-makers, she entered the Yeoborough road just below the steep ascent, between high overshadowing hedges, of Dead Man’s Lane.
Whether from her first exit from the house, she had intended to follow this path, she could hardly herself have told. It was the instinct of a woman at bay, seeking out, not the strong that could help her, but the weak that she herself could help. It was also perhaps the true Pariah impulse, which drives these victims of the powerful and the well-constituted, to find rehabilitation in the society of one another.
As she ascended the shadowy lane with its crumbling banks of sandy soil and its overhanging trees, she felt once again how persistently this heavy luxuriant landscape dragged her earthwards and clogged the wings of her spirit. The tall grasses growing thick by the way-side enlaced themselves with the elder-bushes and dog-wood, which in their turn blended indissolubly with the lower branchesof the elms. The lane itself was but a deep shadowy path dividing a flowing sea of foliage, which seemed to pour, in a tidal wave of suffocating fertility, over the whole valley.
The Italian struggled in vain against the depressing influence of all these rank and umbrageous growths, spreading out leafy arms to catch her and groping towards her with moist adhesive tendrils. The lane was full of a warm steamy vapour, like that of a hot-house, to the heavy odour of which, every sort of verdurous growing thing offered its contribution.
There was a vague smell of funguses in the air, though none were visible; and the idea of them may only have been due to the presence of decaying wood or the moist drooping stalks of the dead flowers of the earlier season. Now and again the girl caught, wafted upon a sudden stir of wind, the indescribably sweet scent of honey-suckle—a sweetness almost overpowering in its penetrating voluptuous approach. Once, high up above her head, she saw a spray of this fragrant parasite; not golden yellow, as it is where the sun shines full upon it, but pallid and ivory-white. In a curious way it seemed as if this Nevilton scenery offered her no escape from the insidious sensuality she fled.
The indolent luxuriousness of Gladys seemed to breathe from every mossy spore and to over-hang every unclosing frond. And if Gladys was in the leaves and grass, the remoter terror of Mr. Goring was in the earth and clay. Between the two they monopolized this whole corner of the planet, and made everything between zenith and nadir their privileged pasture.
As she drew nearer to where Mr. Quincunx lived, her burdened mind sought relief in focussing itself upon him. She would be sure to find him in his garden. That she knew, because the day was Saturday. Should she tell him what had happened to her?
Ah! that was indeed the crucial question! Was it necessary that she should sacrifice herself for him without his even knowing what she did?
But he would have to know, sooner or later, of this marriage. Everyone would be talking of it. It would be bound to come to his ears.
And what would he think of her if she said nothing? What would he think of her, in any case, having accepted such a degradation?
Not to tell him at all, would throw a completely false light upon the whole transaction. It would make her appear treacherous, fickle, worldly-minded, shameless—wickedly false to her unwritten covenant with himself.
To tell him, without giving him the true motive of her sacrifice, would be, she felt sure, to bring down his bitterest reproaches on her head.
For a passing second she felt a wave of indignation against him surge up in her heart. This, however, she passionately suppressed, with the instinctive desire of a woman who is sacrificing herself to feel the object of such sacrifice worthy of what is offered.
It was not long before she reached the gate of Mr. Quincunx’s garden. Yes,—there he was—with his wheel-barrow and his hoe—bending over his potatoes. She opened the gate and walked quite close up to him before he observed her. He greeted her in his usual manner, with a smile of half-cynical,half-affectionate welcome, and taking her by the hand as he might have taken a child, he led her to the one shady spot in his garden, where, under a weeping ash, he had constructed a rough bench.
“I didn’t expect you,” he said, when they were seated. “I never do expect you. People like me who have only Saturday afternoons to enjoy themselves in don’t expect visitors. They count the hours which are left to them before the night comes.”
“But you have Sunday, my friend,” she said, laying her hand upon his.
“Sunday!” Mr. Quincunx muttered. “Do you call Sunday a day? I regard Sunday as a sort of prison-exercise, when all the convicts go walking up and down and showing off their best clothes. I can neither work nor read nor think on Sunday. I have to put on my best clothes like the rest, and stand at my gate, staring at the weather and wondering what the hay-crop will be. The only interesting moments I have on Sunday are when that silly-faced Wone, or one of the Andersens, drifts this way, and we lean over my wall and abuse the gentry.”
“Poor dear!” said the girl pityingly. “I expect the real truth is that you are so tired with your work all the week, that you are glad enough to rest and do nothing.”
Mr. Quincunx’s nostrils dilated, and his drooping moustache quivered. A smile of delicious and sardonic humour wavered over the lower portion of his face, while his grey eyes lost their sadness and gleamed with a goblin-like merriment.
“I am getting quite popular at the office,” he said.“I have learnt the secret of it now.”
“And what is the secret?” asked Lacrima, suppressing a queer little gasp in her throat.
“Sucking up,” Mr. Quincunx answered, his face flickering with subterranean amusement, “sucking up to everyone in the place, from the manager to the office boy.”
Lacrima returned to him a very wan little smile.
“I suppose you mean ingratiating yourself,” she said; “you English have such funny expressions.”
“Yes, ingratiating myself, pandering to them, flattering them, agreeing with them, anticipating their wishes, doing their work for them, telling lies for them, abusing God to make them laugh, introducing them to Guy de Maupassant, and even making a few light references, now and again, to what Shakespeare calls ‘country-matters.’”
“I don’t believe a word you say,” protested Lacrima in rather a quavering voice. “I believe you hate them all and that they are all unkind to you. But I can quite imagine you have to do more work than your own.”
Mr. Quincunx’s countenance lost its merriment instantaneously.
“I believe you are as annoyed as Mr. Romer,” he said, “that I should get on in the office. But I am past being affected by that. I know what human nature is! We are all really pleased when other people get on badly, and are sorry when they do well.”
Lacrima felt as though the trees in the field opposite had suddenly reversed themselves and were waving their roots in the air.
She gave a little shiver and pressed her hand to her side.
Mr. Quincunx continued.
“Of course you don’t like it when I tell you the truth. Nobody likes to hear the truth. Human beings lap up lies as pigs lap up milk. And women are worst of all in that! No woman really can love a person—not, at any rate, for long—who tells her the truth! That is why women love clergymen, because clergymen are brought up to lie. I saw you laughing and amusing yourself the other evening with Mr. Clavering—you and your friend Gladys. I went the other way, so as not to interrupt such a merry conversation.”
Lacrima turned upon him at this.
“I cannot understand how you can say such things of me!” she cried. “It is too much. I won’t—I won’t listen to it!”
Her over-strained nerves broke down at last, and covering her face with her hands, she burst into a fit of convulsive sobs.
Mr. Quincunx rose and stood gazing at her, gloomily plucking at his beard.
“And such are women!” he thought to himself. “One can never tell them the least truth but they burst into tears.”
He waited thus in silence for one or two moments, and then an expression of exquisite tenderness and sympathy came into his face. His patient grey eyes looked at her bowed head with the look of a sorrowful god. Gently he sat down beside her and laid his hand on her shoulder.
“Lacrima—dear—I am sorry—I oughtn’t to have said that. I didn’t mean it. On my solemn oath I didn’t mean it! Lacrima, please don’t cry. I can’t bear it when you cry. It was all absolute nonsense what I said just now. It is the devil that gets into me and makes me say those things! Lacrima—darling Lacrima—we won’t tease one another any more.”
Her sobs diminished under the obvious sincerity of his words. She lifted up a tear-stained face and threw her arms passionately round his neck.
“I’ve no one but you,” she cried, “no one, no one!”
For several minutes they embraced each other in silence—the girl’s breast quivering with the after-sighs of her emotion and their tears mingling together and falling on Mr. Quincunx’s beard. Had Gladys Romer beheld them at that moment she would certainly have been strengthened in her healthy-minded mocking contempt for sentimental “slobbering.”
When they had resumed a more normal mood their conversation continued gently and quietly.
“Of course you are right,” said Mr. Quincunx. “I am not really happy at the office. Whocouldbe happy in a place of that kind? But it is my life—and one has to do what one can with one’s life! I have to pretend to myself that they like me there, and that I am making myself useful—otherwise I simply could not go on. I have to pretend. That’s what it is! It is my pet illusion, my little fairy-story. It was that that made me get angry with you—that and the devil. One doesn’t like to have one’s fairy-stories broken into by the brutal truth.”
“Poor dear!” said Lacrima softly, stroking his hand with a gesture of maternal tenderness.
“If there was any hope of this wretched business coming to an end,” Maurice went on, “it would bedifferent. Then I would curse all these people to hell and have done with it. But what can I do? I am already past middle age. I shouldn’t be able to get anything else if I gave it up. And I don’t want to leave Nevilton while you are here.”
The girl looked intently at him. Then she folded her hands on her lap and began gravely.
“I have something to tell you, Maurice dear. Something very important. What would you say if I told you that it was in my power to set you free from all this and make you happy and comfortable for the rest of your life?”
An invisible watcher from some more clairvoyant planet than ours would have been interested at that moment in reading the double weakness of two poor Pariah hearts. Lacrima, brought back from the half-insane attitudes of her heroic resolution by the intermission of natural human emotion, found herself on the brink of half-hoping that her friend would completely and indignantly refuse this shameful sacrifice.
“Surely,” her heart whispered, “some other path of escape must offer itself for them both. Perhaps, after all, Vennie Seldom might discover some way.”
Mr. Quincunx, on the other hand, was most thoroughly alarmed by her opening words. He feared that she was going to propose some desperate scheme by which, fleeing from Nevilton together, she was to help him earn money enough for their mutual support.
“What should I say?” he answered aloud, to the girl’s question. “It would depend upon the manner in which you worked this wonderful miracle. But I warn you I am not hopeful. Things might be worse. After all I have a house to return to. I have food.I have my books. I have you to come and pay me visits. I have my garden. In this world, when a person has a roof over his head, and someone to talk to every other day, he had better remain still and not attract the attention of the gods.”
Silence followed his words. Instead of speaking, Lacrima took off her hat, and smoothed her hair away from her forehead, keeping her eyes fixed upon the ground. An immense temptation seized her to let the moment pass without revealing her secret. She could easily substitute any imaginary suggestion in place of the terrible reality. Her friend’s morbid nerves would help her deception. The matter would be glossed over and be as if it had never been: be, in fact, no more than it was, a hideous nightmare of her own insane and diseased conscience.
But could the thing be so suppressed? Would it be like Nevilton to let even the possible image of such a drama pass unsnatched at by voluble tongues, unenlarged upon by malicious gossip?
He would be bound to hear of Mr. Goring’s offer. That, at least, could not be concealed. And what assurance had she that Mr. Romer would not himself communicate to him the full nature of the hideous bargain? The quarry-owner might think it diplomatic to trade upon Maurice’s weakness.
No—there was no help for it. She must tell him;—only praying now, in the profound depths of her poor heart, that he would not consider such an infamy even for a second. So she told him the whole story, in a low monotonous voice, keeping her head lowered and watching the progress of a minute snail laboriously ascending a stalk of grass.
Maurice Quincunx had never twiddled the point of his Elizabethan beard with more detached absorption than while listening to this astounding narration. When she had quite finished, he regarded her from head to foot with a very curious expression.
The girl breathed hard. What was he thinking? He did not at once, in a burst of righteous indignation, fling the monstrous suggestion to the winds. What was he thinking? As a matter of fact the thoughts of Mr. Quincunx had taken an extraordinary turn.
Being in his personal relation to feminine charm, of a somewhat cold temper, he had never, for all his imaginative sentiment towards his little friend, been at all swayed by any violent sensuous attraction. But the idea of such attraction having seized so strongly upon another person reacted upon him, and he looked at her, perhaps for the first time since they had met, with eyes of something more than purely sentimental regard.
This new element in his attitude towards her did not, however, issue in any excess of physical jealousy. What it did lead to, unluckily for Lacrima, was a certain queer diminution of his ideal respect for her personality. In place of focussing his attention upon the sublime sacrifice she contemplated for his sake, the events she narrated concentrated his mind upon the mere brutal and accidental fact that Mr. Goring had so desperately desired her. The mere fact of her having been so desired by such a man, changed her in his eyes. His cynical distrust of all women led him to conceive the monstrous and grotesque idea that she must in her heart be gratified by havingaroused this passion in the farmer. It did not carry him quite so far as to make him believe that she had consciously excited such emotion; but it led him to the very brink of that outrageous fantasy. Had Lacrima come to him with a shame-faced confession that she had let herself be seduced by the Priory-tenant he could hardly have gazed at her with more changed and troubled eyes. He felt the same curious mixture of sorrowful pity and remote unlawful attraction to the object of his pity, that he would have felt in a casual conversation with some luckless child of the streets. By being the occasion of Mr. Goring’s passion, she became for him no less than such an unfortunate; the purer sentiment he had hitherto cherished changing into quite a different mood.
He lifted her up by the wrists and pressed her closely to him, kissing her again and again. The girl’s heart went on anxiously beating. She could hardly restrain her impatience for him to speak. Why did he not speak?
Disentangling herself from his embrace with a quick feminine instinct that something was wrong, she pulled him down upon the bench by her side and taking his hand in hers looked with pitiful bewilderment into his face.
“So when this thing happens,” she said, “all your troubles will be over. You will be free forever from that horrid office.”
“And you,” said Mr. Quincunx—his mood changing again, and his goblin-like smile twitching his nostrils,—“You will be the mistress of the Priory. Well! I suppose you will not desert me altogether when that happens!”
So that was the tone he adopted! He could afford to turn the thing into a jest—into God knows what! She let his hand drop and stared into empty space, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, understanding nothing.
This time Maurice realized that he had disappointed her; that his cynicism had carried him too far. Unfortunately the same instinct that told him he had made a fool of himself pushed him on to seek an issue from the situation by wading still further into it.
“Come—come,” he said. “You and I must face this matter like people who are really free spirits, and not slaves to any ridiculous superstition. It is noble, it is sweet of you to think of marrying that brute so as to set me free. Of course if Iwasfree, and you were up at the Priory, we should see a great deal more of each other than we do now. I could take one of those vacant cottages close to the church.
“Don’t think—Lacrima dear,” he went on, possessing himself of one of her cold hands and trying to recall her attention, “don’t think that I don’t realize what it is to you to have to submit to such a frightful thing. Of course we know how outrageous it is that such a marriage should be forced on you. But, after all, you and I are above these absurd popular superstitions about all these things. Every girl sooner or later hates the man she marries. It is human nature to hate the people we have to live with; and when it comes down to actual reality, all human beings are much the same. If you were forced to marry me, you would probably hate me just as much as you’ll hate this poor devil. After all, what is this business of being married to people and bearing them children? It doesn’t touch yourmind. It doesn’t affect your soul. As old Marcus Aurelius says, our bodies are nothing! They are wretched corpses, anyway, dragged hither and thither by our imprisoned souls. It is these damned clergymen, with their lies about ‘sin’ and so forth, that upset women’s minds. For you to be married to a man you hate, would only be like my having to go to this Yeoborough office with people I hate. You will always have, as that honest fellow Epictetus says, your own soul to retire into, whatever happens. Heavens! it strikes me as a bit of humorous revenge,”—here his nostrils twitched again and the hobgoblin look reappeared—“this thought of you and me living peacefully at our ease, so near one another, and at these confounded rascals’ expense!”
Lacrima staggered to her feet. “Let me go,” she said. “I want to go back—away—anywhere.”
Her look, her gesture, her broken words gave Mr. Quincunx a poignant shock. In one sudden illuminating flash he saw himself as he was, and his recent remarks in their true light. We all have sometimes these psychic search-light flashes of introspection; but the more healthy-minded and well-balanced among us know how to keep them in their place and how to expel them promptly and effectively.
Mr. Quincunx was not healthy-minded. He had the morbid sensitive mind of a neurotic Pariah. Hence, in place of suppressing this spiritual illumination, he allowed it to irradiate the gloomiest caverns of his being. He rose with a look of abject and miserable concern.
“Stop,” he cried huskily.
She looked at him wondering, the blood returning a little to her cheeks.
“It is the Devil!” he exclaimed. “I must have the Devil in me, to say such things and to treat you like this. You are the bravest, sweetest girl in the world, and I am a brutal idiot—worse than Mr. Romer!”
He struck himself several blows upon the forehead, knocking off his hat. Lacrima could not help noticing that in place of the usual protection, some small rhubarb-leaves ornamented the interior of this appendage.
She smiled at him, through a rain of happy tears,—the first smile that day had seen upon her face.
“We are both of us absurd people, I suppose,” she said, laying her hands upon his shoulders. “We ought to have some friend with a clear solid head to keep us straight.”
Mr. Quincunx kissed her on the forehead and stooped down for his hat.
“Yes,” he said. “We are a queer pair. I suppose we are really both a little mad. I wish there was someone we could go to.”
“Couldn’t you—perhaps—” said Lacrima, “say something to Mrs. Seldom? And yet I would much rather she didn’t know. I would much rather no one knew!”
“I might,” murmured Maurice thoughtfully; “I might tell her. But the unlucky thing is, she is so narrow-minded that she can’t separate you in her thoughts from those frightful people.”
“Shall I try Vennie?” whispered the girl, “or shall we—” here she looked him boldly in the face witheager, brightening eyes—“shall we run away to London, and be married, and risk the future?”
Poor little Italian! She had never made a greater tactical blunder than when she uttered these words. Maurice Quincunx’s mystic illumination had made it possible for him to exorcise his evil spirit. It could not put into his nature an energy he had not been born with. His countenance clouded.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he remarked. “You don’t know what a sour-tempered devil I am, and how I am sure to make any girl who lives with me miserable. You would hate me in a month more than you hate Mr. Romer, and in a year I should have either worried you into your grave or you would have run away from me. No—no—no! I should be a criminal fool to let you subject yourself to such a risk as that.”
“But,” pleaded the girl, with flushed cheeks, “we should be sure to find something! I could teach Italian,—and you could—oh, I am sure there are endless things you could do! Please, please, Maurice dear, let us go. Anything is better than this misery. I have got quite enough money for the journey. Look!”
She pulled out from beneath her dress a little chain purse, that hung, by a small silver chain, round her slender neck. She opened it and shook three sovereigns into the palm of her hand. “Enough for the journey,” she said, “and enough to keep us for a week if we are economical. We should be sure to find something by that time.”
Mr. Quincunx shook his head. It was an ironical piece of psychic malice that the very illuminationwhich had made him remorseful and sympathetic should have also reduced to the old level of tender sentiment the momentary passion he had felt. It was the absence in him of this sensual impulse which made the scheme she proposed seem so impossible. Had he been of a more animal nature, or had she possessed the power of arousing his senses to a more violent craving, instead of brooding, as he did, upon the mere material difficulties of such a plan, he would have plunged desperately into it and carried her off without further argument. The very purity of his temperament was her worst enemy.
Poor Lacrima! Her hands dropped once more helplessly to her side, and the old hopeless depression began to invade her heart. It seemed impossible to make her friend realize that if she refused the farmer and things went on as before, her position in Mr. Romer’s establishment would become more impossible than ever. What—for instance—would become of her when this long-discussed marriage of Gladys with young Ilminster took place? Could she conceive herself going on living under that roof, with Mr. Romer continually harassing her, and his brother-in-law haunting every field she wandered into?
“It was noble of you,” began her bearded friend again, resuming his work at the weeds, while she, as on a former occasion, leant against his wheel-barrow,“to think of enduring this wretched marriage for my sake. But I cannot let you do it. I should not be happy in letting you do it. I have some conscience—though you may not think so—and it would worry me to feel you were putting up with that fool’s companionship just to make me comfortable. It would spoil my enjoyment of my freedom, to know that you were not equally free. Of course it would be paradise to me to have the money you speak of. I should be able to live exactly as I like, and these damned villagers would treat me with proper respect then. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take my pleasure at the expense of such a strain on you. It would spoil everything!
“I don’t deny, however,” he went on, evidently deriving more and more virtuous satisfaction from his somewhat indecisive rejection of her sacrifice, “that it is a temptation to me. I hate that office so profoundly! You were quite right there, Lacrima. All I said about getting on with those people was damned bluff. I loathe them and they loathe me. It is simply like a kind of death, my life in that place. Yes, what you suggest is a temptation to me. I can’t help feeling rather like that poor brother of the girl in ‘Measure for Measure’ when she comes to say that she could save his life by the loss of her virtue, and he talks about his feelings on the subject of death. She put him down fiercely enough, poor dog! She evidently thought her virtue was much more important than his life. I am glad you are just the opposite of that puritanical young woman. I shouldn’t like you very much if you took her line!
“But just because you don’t do that, my dear,” Mr. Quincunx went on, tugging at the obstinate roots of a great dock, “I couldn’t think of letting you sacrifice yourself. If youwerelike that woman in the play, and made all that damned silly fuss about your confounded virtue, I should be inclined to wish that Mr. Goring had got his hands upon you. Womenwho think as much of themselves as that,oughtto be given over to honest fellows like Mr. Goring. It’s the sort of punishment they deserve for their superstitious selfishness. For it’s all selfishness, of course. We know that well enough!”
He flung the defeated weed so vindictively upon his barrow that some of the earth from its roots was sprinkled into Lacrima’s lap. He came to help her brush it away, and took the opportunity to kiss her again,—this time a shade more amorously.
“All this business of ‘love,’” he went on, returning to his potatoes, “is nothing but the old eternal wickedness of man’s nature. The only kind of love which is worth anything is the love that gets rid of sex altogether, and becomes calm and quiet and distant—like the love of a planetary spirit. Apart from this love, which is not like human love at all, everything in us is selfish. Even a mother’s care for its child is selfish.”
“I shall never have a child,” said Lacrima in a low voice.
“I wonder what your friend James Andersen would say to all this,” continued Mr. Quincunx. “Why, by the way, don’t you gethimto marry you? He would do it, no doubt, like a shot, if you gave him a little encouragement; and then make you work all day in his kitchen, as his father made his mother, so they say.”
Lacrima made a hopeless gesture, and looked at the watch upon her wrist. She began to feel dizzy and sick for want of food. She had had nothing since breakfast, and the shadows were beginning to grow long.
“I know what Luke Andersen would say if we asked him,” added Mr. Quincunx. “He would advise you to marry this damned farmer, wheedle his money out of him, and then sheer off with some fine youth and never see Nevilton again! Luke Andersen’s the fellow for giving a person advice in these little matters. He has a head upon his shoulders, that boy! I tell you what it is, my dear, your precious Miss Gladys had better be careful! She’ll be getting herself into trouble with that honest youth if she doesn’t look out. I know him. He cares for no mortal soul in the world, or above the world. He’s a master in the art of life! We are all infants compared with him. If you do need anyone to help you, or to help me either, I tell you Luke Andersen’s the one to go to. He has more influence in this village than any living person except Romer himself, and I should be sorry for Romer if his selfishness clashed with the selfishness of that young Machiavel!”
“Do you mind,” said Lacrima suddenly, “if I go into your kitchen and make myself a cup of tea? I feel rather exhausted. I expect it is the heat.”
Mr. Quincunx looked intently at her, leaning upon his hoe. He had only once before—on an exceptionally cold winter’s day—allowed the girl to enter the cottage.
He had a vague feeling that if he did so he would in some way commit himself, and be betrayed into a false position. He almost felt as though, if she were once comfortably established there, he would never be able to get her out again! He was nervous, too, about her seeing all his little household peculiarities. If she saw, for instance, how cheaply, howvery cheaply, he managed to live, eating no meat and economizing in sugar and butter, she might be encouraged still further in her attempts to persuade him to run away.
He was also strangely reluctant that she should get upon the track of his queer little lonely epicurean pleasures, such as his carefully guarded bottle of Scotch whiskey; his favourite shelf of mystical and Rabelaisian books; his jar of tobacco, with a piece of bread under its lid, to keep the contents moist and cool; his elaborate arrangements for holding draughts out; his polished pewter; his dainty writing-desk with its piled-up, vellum-bound journals, all labelled and laid in order; his queer-coloured oriental slippers; his array of scrupulously scrubbed pots and pans. Mr. Quincunx was extremely unwilling that his lady-love should poke her pretty fingers into all these mysteries.
What he liked, was to live in two distinct worlds: his world of sentiment with Lacrima as its solitary centre, and his world of sacramental epicurism with his kitchen-fire as its solitary centre. He was extremely unwilling that the several circumferences of these centres should intersect one another. Both were equally necessary to him. When days passed without a visit from his friend he became miserably depressed. But he saw no reason for any inartistic attempt to unite these two spheres of interest. A psychologist who defined Mr. Quincunx’s temper as the temper of a hermit would have been far astray. He was profoundly dependent on human sympathy. But he liked human sympathy that kept its place. He did not like humansociety. Perhaps of all well-knownpsychological types, the type of the philosopher Rousseau was the one to which he most nearly approximated. And yet, had he possessed children, Mr. Quincunx would certainly never have been persuaded to leave them at the foundling hospital. He would have lived apart from them, but he would never have parted with them. He was really a domestic sentimentalist, who loved the exquisite sensation of being alone with his own thoughts.
With all this in mind, one need feel no particular surprise that the response he gave to Lacrima’s sudden request was a somewhat reluctant one. However, he did respond; and opening the cottage-doors for her, ushered her into the kitchen and put the kettle on the fire.
It puzzled him a little that she should feel no embarrassment at being alone with him in this secluded place! In the depths of his heart—like many philosophers—Mr. Quincunx, in spite of his anarchistic theories, possessed no slight vein of conventional timidity. He did not realize this in the least. Women, according to his cynical code, were the sole props of conventionality. Without women, there would be no such thing in the world. But now, brought face to face with the reckless detachment of a woman fighting for her living soul, he felt confused, uncomfortable, and disconcerted.
Lacrima waited in patient passivity, too exhausted to make any further mental or moral effort, while her friend made the tea and cut the bread-and-butter.
As soon as she had partaken of these things, her exhaustion gave place to a delicious sense—the firstshe had known for many weeks—of peaceful and happy security. She put far away, into the remote background of her mind, all melancholy and tragic thoughts, and gave herself up to the peacefulness of the moment. The hands of Mr. Quincunx’s clock pointed to half-past six. She had therefore a clear thirty minutes left, before she need set out on her return walk, in order to have time to dress for dinner.
“I wonder if your Miss Gladys,” remarked Lacrima’s host, lighting a cigarette as he sipped his tea, “will marry the Honourable Mr. Ilminster after all, or whistle him down the wind, and make up to our American friend? I notice that Dangelis is already considerably absorbed in her.”
“Please, dear, don’t let us talk any more about these people,” begged Lacrima softly. “Let me be happy for a little while.”
Mr. Quincunx stroked his beard. “You are a queer little girl,” he said. “But what I should do if the gods took you away from me I have not the least idea. I should not care then whether I worked in an office or in a factory. I should not care what I did.”
The girl jumped up impulsively from her seat and went over to him. Mr. Quincunx took her upon his knees as he might have taken a child and fondled her gravely and gently. The smoke of his cigarette ascended in a thin blue column above their two heads.
At that moment there was a mocking laugh at the window. Lacrima slid out of his arms and they both rose to their feet and turned indignantly.
The laughing face of Gladys Romer peered inupon them, her eyes shining with delighted malevolence. “I saw you,” she cried. “But you needn’t look so cross! I like to see these things. I have been watching you for quite a long time! It has been such fun! I only hoped I could keep quiet for longer still, till one of you began to cry, or something. But you looked so funny that I couldn’t help laughing. And that spoilt it all. Mr. Dangelis is at the gate. Shall I call him up? He came with me across the park. He tried to stop me from pouncing on you, but I wouldn’t listen to him. He said it was a ‘low-down stunt.’ You know the way he talks, Lacrima!”
The two friends stood staring at the intruder in petrified horror. Then without a word they quickly issued from the cottage and crossed the garden. Neither of them spoke to Gladys; and Mr. Quincunx immediately returned to his house as soon as he saw the American advance to greet Lacrima with his usual friendly nonchalance.
The three went off down the lane together; and the poor philosopher, staring disconsolately at the empty tea-cups of his profaned sanctuary, cursed himself, his friend, his fate, and the Powers that had appointed that fate from the beginning of the world.
June was drawing to an end, and the days, though still free from rain, grew less and less bright. A thin veil of greyish vapour, which never became thick enough or sank low enough to resolve itself into definite clouds, offered a perpetual hindrance to the shining of the sun. The sun was present. Its influence was felt in the warmth of the air; but when it became visible, it was only in the form of a large misty disc, at which the weakest eyes might gaze without distress or discomfort.
On a certain evening when this vaporous obscurity made it impossible to ascertain the exact moment of the sun’s descent and when it might be said that afternoon became twilight before men or cattle realized that the day was over, Mr. Wone was assisting his son Philip in planting geraniums in his back garden.
The Wone house was neither a cottage nor a villa. It was one of those nondescript and modest residences, which, erected in the mid-epoch of Victoria’s reign, when money was circulating freely among the middle-classes, win a kind of gentle secondary mellowness in the twentieth century by reason of something solid and liberal in their original construction. It stood at the corner of the upper end of Nevilton, where, beyond the fountain-square, the road fromYeoborough takes a certain angular turn to the north. The garden at the back of it, as with many of the cottages of the place, was larger than might have been expected, and over the low hedge which separated it from the meadows behind, the long ridge of wooded upland, with its emphatic lines of tall Scotch firs that made the southern boundary of the valley, was pleasantly and reassuringly visible.
Philip Wone worked in Yeoborough. He was a kind of junior partner in a small local firm of tombstone makers—the very firm, in fact, which under the direction of the famous Gideon, had constructed the most remarkable monument in Nevilton churchyard. It was doubtful whether he would ever attain the position of full partner in this concern, for his manner of life was eccentric, and neither his ways nor his appearance were those of a youth who succeeds in business. He was a tall pallid creature. His dark coarse hair fell in a heavy wave over his white forehead, and his hands were thin and delicate as the hands of an invalid.
He was an omnivorous reader and made incessant use of every subscription library that Yeoborough offered. His reading was of two kinds. He read romantic novels of every sort—good, bad, and indifferent—and he read the history of revolutions. There can hardly have been, in any portion of the earth’s surface, a revolution with whose characters and incidents Philip was unacquainted. His chief passion was for the great French Revolution, the personalities of which were more real to him than the majority of his own friends.
Philip was by temperament and conviction anardent anarchist; not an anarchist of Mr. Quincunx’s mild and speculative type, but of a much more formidable brand. He had also long ago consigned the idea of any Providential interference with the sequence of events upon earth, into the limbo of outworn superstitions.
It was Philip’s notion, this, of planting geraniums in the back-garden. Dressed nearly always in black, and wearing a crimson tie, it was his one luxurious sensuality to place in his button-hole, as long as they were possibly available, some specimen or other of the geranium tribe, with a preference for the most flaming varieties.
The Christian Candidate regarded his son with a mixture of contempt and apprehension. He despised his lack of business ability, and he viewed his intellectual opinions as the wilful caprices of a sulky and disagreeable temper.
It was as a sort of pitying concession to the whim of a lunatic that Mr. Wone was now assisting Philip in planting these absurd geraniums. His own idea was that flower-gardens ought to be abolished altogether. He associated them with gentility and toryism and private property in land. Under the régime he would have liked to have established, all decent householders would have had liberal small holdings, where they would grow nothing but vegetables. Mr. Wone liked vegetables and ate of them very freely in their season. Flowers he regarded as the invention of the upper classes, so that their privately owned world might be decorated with exclusive festoons.
“I shall go round presently,” he said to his son,“and visit all these people. I see no reason why Taxater and Clavering, as well as the two Andersens, should not make themselves of considerable use to me. I am tired of talking to these Leo’s Hill labourers. One day theywillstrike, and the next theywon’t. All they think of is their own quarrel with Lickwit. They have no thought of the general interest of the country.”
“No thought of your interests, you mean,” put in the son.
“With these others it is different,” went on Mr. Wone, oblivious of the interruption. “It would be a real help to me if the more educated people of the place came out definitely on my side. They ought to do it. They know what this Romer is. They are thinking men. They must see that what the country wants is a real representative of the people.”
“What the country wants is a little more honesty and a little less hypocrisy,” remarked the son.
“It is abominable, this suppression of our Social Meeting. You have heard about that, I suppose?” pursued the candidate.
“Putting an end to your appeals to Providence, eh?” said Philip, pressing the earth down round the roots of a brilliant flower.
“I forbid you to talk like that,” cried his father. “I might at least expect thatyouwould do something for me. You have done nothing, since my campaign opened, but make these silly remarks.”
“Why don’t you pray about it?” jeered the irrepressible young man. “Mr Romer has not suppressed prayer, has he, as well as Political Prayer-Meetings?”
“They were not political!” protested the aggrieved parent. “They were profoundly religious. Whatyou young people do not seem to realize nowadays is that the soul of this country is still God-fearing and religious-minded. I should myself have no hope at all for the success of this election, if I were not sure that God was intending to make His hand felt.”
“Why don’t you canvass God, then?” muttered the profane boy.
“I cannot allow you to talk to me in this way, Philip!” cried Mr. Wone, flinging down his trowel. “You know perfectly well that you believe as firmly as I do, in your heart. It is only that you think it impressive and original to make these silly jokes.”
“Thank you, father,” replied Philip. “You certainly remove my doubts with an invincible argument! But I assure you I am quite serious. Nobody with any brain believes in God in these days. God died about the same time as Mr. Gladstone.”
The Christian Candidate lost his temper. “I must beg you,” he said, “to keep your infidel nonsense to yourself. Your mother and I are sick of it! You had better stay in Yeoborough, and not come home at all, if you can’t behave like an ordinary person and keep a civil tongue.”
Philip made no answer to this ultimatum, but smiled sardonically and went on planting geraniums.
But his father was loath to let the matter drop.
“What would the state of the country be like, I wonder,” he continued, “if people lost their faith in the love of a merciful Father? It is only because we feel, in spite of all appearances, the love of God must triumph in the end, that we can go on with our great movement. The love of God, young man, whatever you foolish infidels may say, is at the bottom of allattempts to raise the people to better things. Do you think I would labour as I do in this excellent cause if I did not feel that I had the loving power of a great Heavenly Father behind me? Why do I trouble myself with politics? Because His love constrains me. Why have I brought you up so carefully—though to little profit it seems!—and have been so considerate to your mother—who, as you know, isn’t always very cheerful? Because His love constrains me. Without the knowledge that His love is at the bottom of everything that happens, do you think I could endure to live at all?”
Philip Wone lifted up his head from the flower-border.
“Let me just tell you this, father, it is not the love of God, or of anyone else, that’s at the bottom of our grotesque world. There is nothing at the bottom! The world goes back—without limit or boundary—upwards and downwards, and everywhere. It has no bottom, and no top either! It is all quite mad and we are all quite mad. Love? Who knows anything of love, except lovers and madmen? If these Romers and Lickwits are to be crushed, they must be crushed by force. By force, I tell you! This love of an imaginary Heavenly Father has never done anything for the revolution and never will!”
Mr. Wone, catching at a verbal triumph, regained his placable equanimity.
“Because, dear boy,” he remarked, “it is not revolution that we want, but reconstruction. Force may destroy. It is only love that can rebuild.”
No words can describe the self-satisfied unctionwith which the Christian Candidate pronounced this oracular saying.
“Well, boy,” he added, “I must be off. I want to see Taxater and Clavering and both the Andersens tonight. I might see Quincunx too. Not that I thinkhecan do very much.”
“There’s only one way you’ll get James Andersen to help you,” remarked Philip, “and I doubt whether you’ll bring yourself to use that.”
“I suppose you mean,” returned his father, “that Traffio girl, up at the House. I have heard that they have been seen together. But I thought she was going to marry John Goring.”
“No, I don’t mean her,” said the son. “She’s all right. She’s a fine girl, and I am sorry for her, whether she marries Goring or not. The person I mean is little Ninsy Lintot, up at Wild Pine. She’s the only one in this place who can get a civil word out of Jim Andersen.”
“Ninsy?” echoed his father, “but I thought Ninsy was dead and buried. There was some one died up at Wild Pine last spring, and I made sure ’twas her.”
“That was her sister Glory,” affirmed Philip. “But Ninsy is delicate, too. A bad heart, they say—too bad for any thoughts of marrying. But she and Jim Andersen have been what you might call sweethearts ever since she was in short frocks.”
“I have never heard of this,” said Mr. Wone.
“Nor have many other people here,” returned Philip, “but ’tis true, none the less. And anyone who wants to get at friend James must go to him through Ninsy Lintot.”
“I am extremely surprised at what you tell me,” said Mr. Wone. “Do you really mean that if I got this sick child to promise me Andersen’s help, he really would give it?”
“Certainly I do,” replied Philip. “And what is more, he would bring his brother with him.”
“But his brother is thick with Miss Romer. All the village is talking about them.”
“Never mind the village—father! You think too much of the village and its talk. I tell you—Miss Romer or no Miss Romer—if you get James to help you, you get Luke. I know something of the ways of those two.”
A look of foxy cunning crossed the countenance of the Christian Candidate.
“Doyouhappen to have any influence with this poor Ninsy?” he asked abruptly, peering into his son’s face.
Philip’s pale cheeks betrayed no embarrassment.
“I know her,” he said. “I like her. I lend her books. She will die before Christmas.”
“I wish you would go up and see her for me then,” said Mr. Wone eagerly. “It would be an excellent thing if wecouldsecure the Andersens. They must have a lot of influence with the men they work with.”
Philip glanced across the rich sloping meadows which led up to the base of the wooded ridge. From where they stood he could see the gloomy clump of firs and beeches which surrounded the little group of cottages known as Wild Pine.
“Very well,” he said. “I don’t mind. But no more of this nonsense about my not coming home! I prefer for the present”—and he gave vent to rather an ominous laugh—“to live with my dear parents.But, mind—I can’t promise anything. These Andersens are queer fellows. One never knows how things will strike them. However, we shall see. If anyone could persuade our friend James, it would be Ninsy.”
The affair being thus settled, the geraniums were abandoned; and while the father proceeded down the village towards the Gables, the son mounted the slope of the hill in the direction of Wild Pine.
The path Philip followed soon became a narrow lane running between two high sandy banks, overtopped by enormous beeches. At all hours, and on every kind of day, this miniature gorge between the wooded fields was a dark and forlorn spot. On an evening of a day like the present one, it was nothing less than sinister. The sky being doubly dark above, dark with the coming on of night, and dark with the persistent cloud-veil, the accumulated shadows of this sombre road intensified the gloom to a pitch of darkness capable of exciting, in agitated nerves, an emotion bordering upon terror. Though the sun had barely sunk over Leo’s Hill, between these ivy-hung banks it was as obscure as if night had already fallen.
But the obscurity of Root-Thatch Lane was nothing to the sombreness that awaited him when, arrived at the hill-top, he entered Nevil’s Gully. This was a hollow basin of close-growing beech-trees, surrounded on both sides by impenetrable thickets of bramble and elder, and crossed by the path that led to Wild Pine cottages. Every geographical district has its typical and representative centre,—some characteristic spot which sums up, as it were, and focuses, inlimited bounds, qualities and attributes that are diffused in diverse proportions through the larger area. Such a centre of the Nevilton district was the place through which Philip Wone now hurried.
Nevil’s Gully, however dry the weather, was never free from an overpowering sense of dampness. The soil under foot was now no longer sand but clay, and clay of a particularly adhesive kind. The beech roots, according to their habit, had created an empty space about them—a sort of blackened floor, spotted with green moss and pallid fungi. Out of this, their cold, smooth trunks emerged, like silent pillars in the crypt of a mausoleum.
The most characteristic thing, as we have noted, in the scenery of Nevilton, is its prevalent weight of heavy oppressive moisture. For some climatic or geographical reason the foliage of the place seems chillier, damper, and more filled with oozy sap, than in other localities of the West of England. Though there may have been no rain for weeks—as there had been none this particular June—the woods in this district always give one the impression of retaining an inordinate reserve of atmospheric moisture. It is this moisture, this ubiquitous dampness, that to a certain type of sun-loving nature makes the region so antipathetic, so disintegrating. Such persons have constantly the feeling of being dragged earthward by some steady centripedal pull, against which they struggle in vain. Earthward they are pulled, and the earth, that seems waiting to receive them, breathes heavy damp breaths of in-drawing voracity, like the mouth of some monster of the slime.
And if this is true of the general conditions of Nevilton geography, it is especially and accumulatively true of Nevil’s Gully, which, for some reason or other, is a very epitome of such sinister gravitation. If one’s latent mortality feels the drag of its clayish affinity in all quarters of this district, in Nevil’s Gully it becomes conscious of such oppression as a definite demonic presence. For above the Gully and above the cottages to which the Gully leads, the umbrageous mass of entangled leafiness hangs, fold upon fold, as if it had not known the woodman’s axe since the foot of man first penetrated these recesses. The beeches, to which reference has been made, are overtopped on the higher ground by ashes and sycamores, and these, in their turn, are surmounted, on the highest level of all, by colossal Scotch firs, whose forlorn grandeur gives the cottages their name.
Philip hurried, in the growing darkness, across the sepulchral gully, and pushed open the gate of the secluded cattle-yard which was the original cause of this human hamlet. The houses of men in rural districts follow the habitations of beasts. Where cattle and the stacks that supply their food can conveniently be located, there must the dwelling be of those whose business it is to tend them. The convenience of Wild Pine as a site for a spacious and protected farm-yard was sufficient reason for the erection of a human shelter for the hands by whose labour such places are maintained.
He crossed the yard with quick steps. A light burned in one of the sheds, throwing a fitful flicker upon the heaps of straw and the pools of dung-colouredwater. Some animal, there—a horse or a cow or a pig—was probably giving birth to young.
From the farm-yard he emerged into the cottage-garden, and stumbling across this, he knocked at the first door he reached. There was not the least sound in answer. Dead unbroken stillness reigned, except for an intermittent shuffling and stamping from the watcher or the watched in the farm-yard behind.
He knocked again, and even the sounds in the yard ceased. Only, high up among the trees above him, some large nocturnal bird fluttered heavily from bough to bough.
For the third time he knocked and then the door of the next house opened suddenly, emitting a long stream of light into which several startled moths instantly flew. Following the light came a woman’s figure.
“If thee wants Lintot,” said the voice of this figure, “thee can’t see ’im till along of most an hour. He be tending a terrible sick beast.”
“I want to see Ninsy,” shouted Philip, knocking again on the closed door.
“Then thee must walk in and have done with it,” returned the woman. “The maid be laid up with heart-spasms again and can open no doors this night, not if the Lord his own self were hammering.”
Philip boldly followed her advice and entered the cottage, closing the door behind him. A faint voice from a room at the back asked him what he wanted and who he was.
“It is Philip,” he answered, “may I come in and see you, Ninsy? It is Philip—Philip Wone.”
He gathered from the girl’s low-voiced murmur that he was welcome, and crossing the kitchen he opened the door of the further room.
He found Ninsy dressed and smiling, but lying in complete prostration upon a low horse-hair sofa. He closed the door, and moving a chair to her side, sat down in silence, gazing upon her wistfully with his great melancholy eyes.
“Don’t look so peaked and pining, Philip-boy,” she said, laying her white hand upon his and smiling into his face. “’Tis only the old trouble. ’Tis nothing more than what I expect. I shall be about again tomorrow or the day after. But I be real glad to see ’ee here! Father’s biding down in the yard, and ’tis a lonesome place to be laid-up in, this poor old house.”
Ninsy looked exquisitely fragile and slender, lying back in this tender helplessness, her chestnut-coloured hair all loose over her pillow. Philip was filled with a flood of romantic emotion. The girl had always attracted him but never so much as now. It was one of his ingrained peculiarities to find hurt and unhappy people more engaging than healthy and contented ones. He almost wished Ninsy would stop smiling and chattering so pleasantly. It only needed that she should shed tears, to turn the young man’s commiseration into passion.
But Ninsy did not shed tears. She continued chatting to him in the most cheerful vein. It was only by the faintest shadow that crossed her face at intervals, that one could have known that anything serious was the matter with her. She spoke of the books he had lent her. She spoke of theprobable break-up of the weather. She talked of Lacrima Traffio.
“I think,” she said, speaking with extreme earnestness, “the young foreign lady is lovely to look at. I hope she’ll be happy in this marriage. They do say, poor dear, she is being driven to it. But with the gentry you never know. They aren’t like us. Father says they have all their marriages thought out for them, same as royalty. I wonder who Miss Gladys will marry after all! Father has met her several times lately, walking with that American gentleman.”
“Has Jim Andersen been up to see you, Ninsy,” put in Mr. Wone’s emissary, “since this last attack of yours?”
The fact that this question left his lips simultaneously with a rising current of emotion in his heart towards her is a proof of the fantastic complication of feeling in the young anarchist.
He fretted and chafed under the stream of her gentle impersonal talk. He longed to rouse in her some definite agitation, even though it meant the introduction of his rival’s image. The fact that such agitation was likely to be a shock to her did not weigh with him. Objective consideration for people’s bodily health was not one of Philip’s weaknesses. His experiment met with complete success. At the mention of James Andersen’s name a scarlet flush came into the girl’s cheeks.
“No—yes—no!” she answered stammering.“That is—I mean—not since I have been ill. But before—several times—lately. Why do you look at me like that, Philip? You’re not angry with me, are you?”
Philip’s mind was a confused arena of contradictory emotions. Among the rest, two stood out and asserted themselves—this unpardonable and remorseless desire to trouble her, to embarrass her, to make her blush yet more deeply—and a strange wild longing to be himself as ill as she was, and of the same disease, so that they might die together!
“My father wanted me to ask you,” he blurted out, “whether you would use your influence over Jim to get him to help in this election business. I told my father Jim would do anything you asked him.”
The girl’s poor cheeks burned more deeply than ever at this.
“I wish you hadn’t told him that, Philip,” she said. “I wish you hadn’t! You know very well I have no more influence over James than anyone else has. It was unkind of you to tell him that! Now I am afraid he’ll be disappointed. For I shall never dare to worry Jim about a thing like that.Youdon’t take any interest in this election, Philip, do you?”
From the tone of this last remark the young anarchist gathered the intimation that Andersen had been talking about the affair to his little friend and had been expressing opinions derogatory to Mr. Wone’s campaign. She would hardly have spoken of so lively a local event in such a tone of weary disparagement, if some masculine philosopher had not been “putting ideas into her head.”
“You ought to make him join in,” continued Philip. “He has such influence down at the works. It would be a great help to father. We labouring people ought to stand by one another, you know.”
“But I thought—I thought—,” stammered poor Ninsy, pushing back her hair from her forehead, “that you had quite different opinions from Mr. Wone.”
“Damn my opinions!” cried the excited youth. “What do my opinions matter? We are talking of Jim Andersen. Why doesn’t he join in with the other men and help father in getting up the strike?”
“He—he doesn’t believe in strikes,” murmured the girl feebly.
“Why doesn’t he!” cried the youth. “Does he think himself different, then, from the rest of us, because old Gideon married the daughter of a vicar? He ought to be told that he is a traitor to his class. Yes—a traitor—a turn-coat—a black-leg! That’s what he is—if he won’t come in. A black-leg!”
They were interrupted by a sharp knock at the outer door. The girl raised herself on her elbow and became distressingly agitated.
“Oh, I believe thatisJim,” she cried. “What shall I do? He won’t like to find you here alone with me like this. What a dreadful accident!”
Philip without a moment’s delay went to the door and opened it. Yes, the visitor was James Andersen. The two men looked at one another in silence. James was the first to speak.