“Soyouare looking after our invalid?” he said. “I only heard this afternoon that she was bad again.”
He did not wait for the other’s response, but pushing past him went straight into Ninsy’s room.
“Poor child!” he said, “Poor dear little girl! Why didn’t you send a message to me? I saw your father in the yard and he told me to come on in. How are you? Why aren’t you in bed? I’m sure you ought to be in bed, and not talking to such an exciting person as our friend Philip.”
“She won’t be talking to me much longer,” threw in that youth, following his rival to the side of the girl’s sofa. “I only came to ask her to do something for us in this election. She will tell you what I mean. Ask her to tell you. Don’t forget! Good-bye Ninsy,” and he held out his hand with a searching look into the girl’s face, a look at once wistfully entreating and fiercely reproachful.
She took his hand. “Good night, Philip,” she said. “Think kindly of me, and think—” this was said in a voice so low that only the young man could hear—“think kindly of Jim. Good night!”
He nodded to Andersen and went off, a sombre dangerous expression clouding the glance he threw upon the clock in the corner.
“You pay late visits, James Andersen,” he called back, as he let himself out of the cottage-door.
Left alone with Ninsy, the stone-carver possessed himself of the seat vacated by the angry youth. The girl remained quiet and motionless, her hands crossed on her lap and her eyes closed.
“Poor child!” he murmured, in a voice of tender and affectionate pity. “I cannot bear to see you like this. It almost gives me a sense of shame—my being so strong and well—and you so delicate. But you will be better soon, won’t you? And we will go for some of our old walks together.”
Ninsy’s mouth twitched a little, and big tears forced their way through her tightly shut eyelids.
“When your father comes in,” he went on, “you must let me help him carry you upstairs. And I am sure you had better have the doctor tomorrow if you are not better. Won’t you let me go to Yeoborough for him tonight?”
Ninsy suddenly struck the side of her sofa with her clenched hand. “I don’t want the doctor!” she burst out, “and I don’t want to get better. I want to end it all—that’s what I want! I want to end it all.”
Andersen made a movement as if to caress her, but she turned her head away.
“I am sick and tired of it all,” she moaned. “I wish I were dead. Oh, I wish I were dead!”
The stone-carver knelt down by her side. “Ninsy,” he murmured, “Ninsy, my child, my friend, what is it? Tell me what it is.”
But the girl only went on, in a low soft wail, “I knew it would come to this. I knew it. I knew it. Oh, why was I ever born! Why wasn’t it me, and not Glory, who died! Ishalldie. Iwantto die!”
Andersen rose to his feet. “Ninsy!” he said in a stern altered voice. “Stop this at once—or I shall go straight away and call your father!”
He assumed an air and tone as if quieting a petulant infant. It had its effect upon her. She swallowed down her rising fit of sobs and looked up at him with great frightened tearful eyes.
“Now, child,” he said, once more seating himself, and this time successfully taking possession of a submissive little hand, “tell me what all this is about.Tell me everything.” He bent down and imprinted a kiss upon her cold wet cheek.
“It is—” she stammered, “it is that I think you are fond of that Italian girl.” She hid her face in a fold of her rich auburn hair and went on. “They do tell me you walk with her when your brother goes with Miss Gladys. Don’t be angry with me, Jim. I know I have no right to say these things. I know I have no claim, no power over you. But we did keep company once, Jim, didn’t us? And it do stab my heart,—to hear them tell of you and she!”
James Andersen looked frowningly at the window.
The curtains were not drawn; and a dark ash-branch stretched itself across the casement like an extended threatening arm. Its form was made visible by a gap in the surrounding trees, through which a little cluster of stars faintly twinkled. The cloud veil had melted.
“What a world this is!” the stone-carver thought to himself. His tone when he spoke was irritable and aggrieved.
“How silly you are, Ninsy—with your fancies! A man can’t be civil to a poor lonesome foreign wench, without your girding at him as if he had done something wrong! Of course I speak to Miss Traffio and walk with her too. What else do you expect when the poor thing is left lonesome on my hands, with Luke and Miss Gladys amusing themselves? But you needn’t worry,” he added, with a certain unrestrained bitterness. “It’s only when Luke and his young lady are together that she and I ever meet, and I don’t think they’ll often be together now.”
Ninsy looked at him with questioning eyes.
“He and she have quarrelled,” he said curtly.
“Over the American?” asked the girl.
“Over the American.”
“And you won’t be walking with that foreigner any more?”
“I shan’t be walking with her any more.”
Ninsy sank back on her pillow with a sigh of ineffable relief. Had she been a Catholic she would have crossed herself devoutly. As it was she turned her head smilingly towards him and extended her arms. “Kiss me,” she pleaded. He bent down, and she embraced him with passionate warmth.
“Then we belong to each other again, just the same as before,” she said.
“Just the same as before.”
“Oh, I wish that cruel doctor hadn’t told me I mustn’t marry. He told father it would kill me, and the other one who came said the same thing. But wouldn’t it be lovely if you and I, Jim—”
She stopped suddenly, catching a glimpse of his face. Her happiness was gone in a moment.
“You don’t love me. Oh, you don’t love me! I know it. I have known it for many weeks! That girl has poisoned you against me—the wicked, wicked thing! It’s no use denying it. I know it. I feel it,—oh, how can I bear it! How can I bear it!”
She shut her eyes once more and lay miserable and silent. The wood-carver looked gloomily out of the window. The cluster of stars now assumed a shape well-known to him. It was Orion’s Belt. His thoughts swept sadly over the field of destiny.
“What a world it is!” he said to himself. “There is that boy Philip gone with a tragic heart becausehis girl loves me. And I—I have to wait and wait in helplessness, and see the other—the one I care for—driven into madness. And she cares not a straw for me, who could help her, and only cares for that poor fool who cannot lift a finger. And meanwhile, Orion’s Belt looks contemptuously down upon us all! Ninsy is pretty well right. The lucky people are the people who are safe out of it—the people that Orion’s Belt cannot vex any more!”
He rose to his feet. “Well, child,” he said, “I think I’ll be going. It’s no use our plaguing one another any further tonight. Things will right themselves, little one. Things will right themselves! It’s a crazy world—but the story isn’t finished yet.
“Don’t you worry about it,” he added gently, bending over her and pushing the hair back from her forehead. “Your old James hasn’t deserted you yet. He loves you better than you think—better than he knows himself perhaps!”
The girl seized the hand that caressed her and pressed it against her lips. Her breast rose and fell in quick troubled breathing.
“Come again soon,” she said, and then, with a wan smile, “if you care to.”
Their eyes met in a long perplexed clinging farewell. He was the first to break the tension.
“Good-night, child,” he said, and turning away, left the room without looking back.
While these events were occurring at Wild Pine, in the diplomatist’s study at the Gables Mr. Wone was expounding to Mr. Taxater the objects and purposes of his political campaign.
Mrs. Wotnot, leaner and more taciturn than ever,had just produced for the refreshment of the visitor a bottle of moderately good burgundy. Mr. Taxater had demanded “a little wine,” in the large general manner which his housekeeper always interpreted as a request for something short of the very best. It was clear that for the treasures of innermost wine-cellars Mr. Wone was not among the privileged.
The defender of the papacy had placed his visitor so that the light of the lamp fell upon his perspiring brow, upon his watery blue eyes, and upon his drooping, sandy-coloured moustache. Mr. Taxater himself was protected by a carefully arranged screen, out of the shadow of which the Mephistophelian sanctity of his patient profile loomed forth, vague and indistinct.
Mr. Wone’s mission was in his own mind tending rapidly to a satisfactory conclusion. The theologian had heard him with so much attention, had asked such searching and practical questions, had shown such sympathetic interest in all the convolutions and entanglements of the political situation, that Mr. Wone began to reproach himself for not having made use of such a capable ally earlier in the day.
“It is,” he was saying, “on the general grounds of common Christian duty that I ask your help. We who recognize the importance of religion would be false to our belief if we did not join together to defeat so ungodly and worldly a candidate as this Romer turns out to be.”
It must be confessed that in his heart of hearts Mr. Wone regarded Roman Catholics as far more dangerous to the community than anarchists or infidels, but he prided himself upon a discretionworthy of apostolic inspiration in thus seeking to divide and set asunder the enemies of evangelical truth. He found the papist so intelligent a listener,—that hardly one secret of his political designs remained unshared between them.
“The socialism,” he finally remarked, “which you and I are interested in, is Christian Socialism. You may be sure that in nothing I do or say there will be found the least tincture of this deplorable modern materialism. My own feeling is that the closer our efforts for the uplifting of the people are founded upon biblical doctrines the more triumphant their success will be. It is the ethical aspect of this great struggle for popular rights which I hold most near my heart. I wish to take my place in Parliament as representing not merely the intelligence of this constituency but its moral and spiritual needs—its soul, in fact, Mr. Taxater. There is no animosity in my campaign. I am scrupulous about that. I am ready, always ready, to do our opponents justice. But when they appeal to the material needs of the country, I appeal to its higher requirements—to its soul, in other words. It is for this reason that I am so glad to welcome really intelligent and highly educated men, like yourself. We who take this loftier view must of course make use of many less admirable methods. I do so myself. But it is for us to keep the higher, the more ethical considerations, always in sight.
“As I was saying to my son, this very evening, the grand thing for us all to remember is that it is only on the assumption of Divine Love being at the bottom of every confusion that we can go to work at all.The Tory party refuse to make this assumption. They refuse to recognize the ethical substratum of the world. They treat politics as if they were a matter of merely imperial or patriotic importance. In my view politics and religion should go hand in hand. In the true democracy which I aim at establishing, all these secular theories—evidently due to the direct action of the Devil—such as Free Love and the destruction of the family—will not be tolerated for a moment.
“Let no one think,”—and Mr. Wone swallowed a mouthful of wine with a gurgling sound,—“that because we attack capitalism and large estates, we have any wish to interfere with the sacredness of the home. There are, I regret to say, among some of our artizans, wild and dangerous theories of this kind, but I have always firmly discountenanced them and I always will. That is why, if I may say so, I am so well adapted to represent this district. I have the support of the large number of Liberal-minded tradesmen who would deeply regret the introduction of such immoral theories into our movement. They hold, as I hold, that this unhappy tendency to atheistic speculation among our working-classes is one of the gravest dangers to the country. They hold, as I hold, that the cynical free thought of the Tory party is best encountered, not by the equally deplorable cynicism of certain labor-leaders, but by the high Christian standards of men like—like ourselves, Mr. Taxater.”
He paused for a moment and drew his hand, which certainly resembled the hand of an ethical-minded dispenser of sugar rather than that of an immoralmanual labourer, across his damp forehead. Then he began again.
“Another reason which seems to point to me, in quite a providential manner, as the candidate for this district, is the fact that I was born in Nevilton and that my father was born here before me.
“‘Wone’ is one of the oldest names in the church Register. There were Wones in Nevilton in the days of the Norman Conquest. I love the place—Mr. Taxater—and I believe I may say that the place loves me. I am in harmony with it, you know. I understand its people. I understand their little weaknesses. Some of these, though you may not believe it, I even may say I share.
“I love this beautiful scenery, these luscious fields, these admirable woods. I love to think of them as belonging to us—to the people who live among them—I love the voice of the doves in our dear trees, Mr. Taxater. I love the cattle in the meadows. I love the vegetables in the gardens. And I love to think”—here Mr. Wone finished his glass, and drew the back of his hand across his mouth—“I love to think of these good gifts of the Heavenly Father as being the expression of His divine bounty. Yes, if anywhere in our revered country atheism and immorality are condemned by nature herself, it is in Nevilton. The fields of Nevilton are like the fields of Canaan, they are full of the goodness of the Lord!”
“Your emotions,” said the Papal Apologist at last, as his companion paused breathless, “do you credit, my dear Sir. I certainly hold with you that it is important to counteract the influence of Free-Thinkers.”
“But the love of God, Mr. Taxater!” cried the other, leaning forward and crossing his hands over his knees. “We must not only refute, we must construct.” Mr. Wone had never felt in higher feather. Here was a man capable of really doing him justice. He wished his recalcitrant son were present!
“Construct—that is what I always say,” he repeated. “We must be creative and constructive in our movement, and fix it firmly upon the Only Foundation.”
He surveyed through the window the expansive heavens; and his glance encountered the same prominent constellation, which, at that very moment, but with different emotions, the agitated stone-carver was contemplating from the cottage at Wild Pine.
“You are undoubtedly correct, Mr. Wone,” said his host gravely, using a tone he might have used if his interlocutor had been recommending him to buy cheese. “You are undoubtedly correct in finding the basis of the system of things in love. It is no more than what the Saints have always taught. I am also profoundly at one with you in your objection to Free Love. Love and Free Love are contradictory categories. They might even be called antinomies. There is no synthesis which reconciles them.”
Mr. Wone had not the remotest idea what any of these words meant, but he felt flattered to the depths of his being. It was clear that he had been led to utter some profound philosophical maxim. He once more wished from his heart that his son could hear this conversation!
“Well, Mr. Taxater,” he said, “I must now leaveyou. I have other distinguished gentlemen to call upon before I retire. But I thank you for your promised support.
“It would be better, perhaps”—here he lowered his voice and looked jocose and crafty—“not to refer to our little conversation. It might be misunderstood. There is a certain prejudice, you know—unjustifiable, of course, but unfortunately, very prevalent, which makes it wiser—but I need say no more. Good-bye, Mr. Taxater—good night, sir, good night!”
And he bowed himself off and proceeded up the street to find the next victim of his evangelical discretion.
As soon as he had gone, Mr. Taxater summoned his housekeeper.
“The next time that person comes,” he said, “will you explain to him, very politely, that I have been called to London? If this seems improbable, or if he has caught a glimpse of me through the window, will you please explain to him that I am engaged upon a very absorbing literary work.”
Mrs. Wotnot nodded. “I kept my eyes open yesterday,” the old woman remarked, in the manner of some veteran conspirator in the service of a Privy Counsellor.
“As you happened to be looking for laurel-leaves, I suppose?” said Mr. Taxater, drawing the red curtains across the window, with his expressive episcopal hand. “For laurel-leaves, Mrs. Wotnot, to flavour that excellent custard?”
The old woman nodded. “And you saw?” pursued her master.
“I saw Mr. Luke Andersen and Miss Gladys Romer.”
“Were they as happy as usual—these young people,” asked the theologian mildly, “or were they—otherwise?”
“They were very much what you are pleased to call otherwise,” answered the old lady.
“Quarrelling in fact?” suggested the diplomat, seating himself deliberately in his arm-chair.
“Miss Gladys was crying and Mr. Luke was laughing.”
The Papal Apologist waved his hand. “Thank you, Mrs. Wotnot, thank you. These things will happen, won’t they—even in Nevilton? Mr. Luke laughing, and Miss Gladys crying? Your laurel-leaves were very well chosen, my friend. Let me have the rest of that custard tonight! I hope you have not brought back your rheumatism, Mrs. Wotnot, by going so far?”
The housekeeper shook her head and retired to prepare supper.
Mr. Taxater took up the book by his side and opened it thoughtfully. It was the final volume of the collected works of Joseph de Maistre.
Mr. Wone had not advanced far in the direction of the church, when he overtook Vennie Seldom walking slowly, with down-cast head, in the same direction.
Vennie had just passed an uncomfortable hour with her mother, who had been growing, during the recent days, more and more fretful and suspicious. It was partly to allay these suspicions and partly to escape from the maternal atmosphere that she had decided to be present that evening at the weeklychoir-practice, a function that she had found herself lately beginning to neglect. Mr. Wone had forgotten the choir-practice. It would interfere, he was afraid, with his desired interview with Mr. Clavering. Vennie assured him that the clergyman’s presence was not essential at these times.
“He is not musical, you know. He only walks up and down the aisle and confuses things. Everybody will be glad if you take him away.”
She was a little surprised at herself, even as she spoke. To depreciate her best friend in this flippant way, and to such a person, showed that her nerves were abnormally strained.
Mr. Wone did not miss the unusual tone. He had never been on anything but very distant terms with Miss Seldom, and his vanity was hugely delighted by this new manner.
“I am coming into my own,” he thought to himself. “My abilities are being recognized at last, by all these exclusive people.”
“I hope,” he said, tentatively, “that you and your dear mother are on our side in this great national struggle. I have just been to see Mr. Taxater, and he has promised me his energetic support.”
“Has he?” said Vennie in rather a startled voice. “That surprises me—a little. I know he does not admire Mr. Romer; but I thought——”
“O he is with us—heart and soul with us!” repeated the triumphant Nonconformist. “I am glad I went to him. Many of us would have been too narrow-minded to enter his house, seeing he is a papist. But I am free from such bigotry.”
“And you hope to convert Mr. Clavering, too?”
“Certainly; that is what I intend. But I believe our excellent vicar needs no conversion. I have often heard him speak—at the Social Meeting, you know—and I assure you he is a true friend of the working-classes. I only wish more of his kind were like him.”
“Mr. Clavering is too changeable,” remarked Vennie, hardly knowing what she said. “His moods alter from day to day.”
“But you yourself, dear Miss Seldom,” the candidate went on. “You yourself are, I think, entirely with us?”
“I really don’t know,” she answered. “My interests do not lie in these directions. I sometimes doubt whether it greatly matters, one way or the other.”
“Whether it matters?” cried Mr. Wone, inhaling the night-air with a sigh of protestation. “Surely, you do not take that indifferent and thoughtless attitude? A young lady of your education—of your religious feeling! Surely, you must feel that it matters profoundly! As we walk here together, through this embalmed air, full of so many agreeable scents, surely you must feel that a good and great God is making his power known at last, known and respected, through the poor means of our consecrated efforts? Forgive my speaking so freely to one of your position; but it seems to me that you must—you at least—be on our side, simply because what we are aiming at is in such complete harmony with this wonderful Love of God, diffused through all things.”
It is impossible to describe the shrinking aversionwhich these words produced upon the agitated nerves of Vennie. Something about the Christian candidate seemed to affect her with an actual sense of physical nausea. She could have screamed, to feel the man so near her—the dragging sound of his feet on the road, the way he breathed and cleared his throat, the manner in which his hat was tilted, all combined to irritate her unendurably. She found herself fantastically thinking how much sooner she would have married even the egregious John Goring—as Lacrima was going to do—than such a one as this. What a pass Nevilton had brought itself to—when the choice lay between a Mr. Romer and a Mr. Wone!
An overpowering wave of disgust with the whole human race swept over her—what wretched creatures they all were—every one of them! She mentally resolved that nothing—nothing on earth—should stop her entering a convent. The man talked of agreeable odours on the air. The air was poisoned, tainted, infected! It choked her to breathe it.
“I am so glad—so deeply glad,” Mr. Wone continued,“to have enjoyed the privilege of this little quiet conversation. I shall never forget it. I feel as though it had brought us wonderfully, beautifully, near each other. It is on such occasions as this, that one feels how closely, how entirely, in harmony, all earnest-minded people are! Here are you, my dear young lady, the descendant of such a noble and ancient house, expressing in mute and tender silence, your sympathy with one who represents the aspirations of the poorest of the people! This is a symbolic moment. I cannot help saying so. A symbolic and consecrated moment!”
“We had better walk a little faster,” remarked Miss Seldom.
“We will. We will walk faster,” agreed Mr. Wone. “But you must let me put on record what this conversation has meant to me! It has made me more certain, more absolutely certain than ever, that without a deep ethical basis our great movement is doomed to hopeless failure.”
The tone in which he used the word “ethical” was so irritating to Vennie, that she felt an insane longing to utter some frightful blasphemy, or even indecency, in his ears, and to rush away with a peal of hysterical laughter.
They were now at the entrance to a narrow little alley or lane which, passing a solitary cottage and an unfrequented spring, led by a short approach directly into the village-square. Half way down this lane a curious block of Leonian stone stood in the middle of the path. What the original purpose of this stone had been it were not easy to tell. The upper portion of it had apparently supported a chain, but this had long ago disappeared. At the moment when Mr. Wone and Miss Seldom reached the lane’s entrance, a soft little scream came from the spot where the stone stood; and dimly, in the shadowy darkness, two forms became visible, engaged in some obscure struggle. The scream was repeated, followed by a series of little gasps and whisperings.
Mr. Wone glanced apprehensively in the direction of these sounds and increased his pace. He was confounded with amazement when he found that Vennie had stopped as if to investigate further. The truth is, he had reduced the girl to such a pitch of unnaturalrevolt that, for one moment in her life, she felt glad that there were flagrant and lawless pleasures in the world.
Led by an unaccountable impulse she made several steps up the lane. The figures separated as she approached, one of them boldly advancing to meet her, while the other retreated into the shadows. The one who advanced, finding himself alone, turned and called to his companion, “Annie! Where are you? Come on, you silly girl! It’s all right.”
Vennie recognized the voice of Luke Andersen. She greeted him with hysterical gratitude. “I thought it was you, Mr. Andersen; but you did frighten me! I took you for a ghost. Who is that with you?”
The young stone-carver raised his hat politely. “Only our little friend Annie,” he said. “I am escorting her home from Yeoborough. We have been on an errand for her mother. She’s such a baby, you know, Miss Seldom, our little Annie. I love teasing her.”
“I am afraid you love teasing a great many people, Mr. Andersen,” said Vennie, recovering her equanimity and beginning to feel ashamed. “Here is Mr. Wone. No doubt, he will be anxious to talk politics to you. Mr. Wone!” She raised her voice as the astonished Methodist came towards them. “It is only Mr. Andersen. You had better talk tohimof your plans. I am afraid I shall be late if I don’t go on.” She slipped aside as she spoke, leaving the two men together, and hurried off towards the church.
Luke Andersen shook hands with the ChristianCandidate. “How goes the campaign, the great campaign?” he said. “I wonder you haven’t talked to James about it. James is a hopeless idealist. James is an admirable listener. You really ought to talk to James. I wish youwouldtalk to him; and put a little of your shrewd common-sense into him! He takes the populace seriously—a thing you and I would never be such fools as to do, eh, Mr. Wone?”
“I am afraid we disturbed you,” remarked the Nonconformist, “Miss Seldom and I—I think you had someone with you. Miss Seldom was quite interested. We heard sounds, and she stopped.”
“Oh, only Annie”—returned the young man lightly, “only little Annie. We are old friends you know. Don’t worry about Annie!”
“It is a beautiful night, is it not?” remarked the Methodist, peering down the lane. Luke Andersen laughed.
“Are you by any chance, Mr. Wone, interested in astronomy? If so, perhaps you can tell me the name of that star, over there, between Perseus and Andromeda? No, no; that one—that greenish-coloured one! Do you know what that is?”
“I haven’t the least idea,” confessed the representative of the People. “But I am a great admirer of Nature. My admiration for Nature is one of the chief motives of my life.”
“I believe you,” said Luke. “It is one of my own, too. I admire everything in it, without any exception.”
“I hope,” said Mr. Wone, reverting to the purpose that, with Nature, shared just now his dominant interest, “I hope you are also with us in our struggleagainst oppression? Mr. Taxater and Miss Seldom are certainly on our side. I sometimes feel as though Nature herself, were on our side, especially on a lovely night like this, full of such balmy odours.”
“I am delighted to see the struggle going on,” returned the young man, emphatically. “And I am thoroughly glad to see a person like yourself at the head of it.”
“Then you, too, will take a part,” cried the candidate, joyfully. “This, indeed, has been a successful evening! I feel sure now that in Nevilton, at any rate, the tide will flow strongly in my favour. Next week, I have to begin a tour of the whole district. I may not be able to return for quite a long time. How happy I shall be to know that I leave the cause in such good hands! The strike is the important thing, Andersen. You and your brother must work hard to bring about the strike. It is coming. I know it is coming. But I want it soon. I want it immediately.”
The stone-carver nodded and hummed a tune. He seemed to intimate with the whole air of his elegant quiescence that the moment had arrived for Mr. Wone’s departure.
The Nonconformist felt the telepathic pressure of this polite dismissal. He waved his arm. “Good night, then; good night! I am afraid I must postpone my talk with Mr. Clavering till another occasion. Remember the strike, Andersen! That is what I leave in your hands. Remember the strike!”
The noise of Mr. Wone’s retreating steps was still audible when Luke returned to the stone in the middle of Splash Lane. The sky was clear nowand a faint whitish glimmer, shining on the worn surface of the stone, revealed the two deep holes in it, where the fastenings of the chain had hung. The young man tapped the stone with his stick and gave a low whistle. An amorphous heap of clothes, huddled in the hedge, stirred, and emitted a reproachful sound.
“Oh, you’re there, are you?” he said. “What silly nonsense is this? Get up! Let’s see your face!” He stooped and pulled at the object. After a moment’s struggle the flexible form of a young girl emerged into the light. She held down her head and appeared sulky and angry.
“What’s the matter, Annie?” whispered the youth encircling her with his arms.
The girl shook him away. “How could you tell Miss Seldom who I was!” she murmured. “How could you do it, Luke? If it had been anybody else—but for her to know——”
The stone-carver laughed. “Really, child, you are too ridiculous! Why, on earth, shouldn’t she know, more than anyone else?”
The girl looked fiercely at him. “Because she is good,” she said. “Because she is the only good person in this blasted place!”
The young man showed no astonishment at this outburst. “Come on, darling,” he rejoined. “We must be getting you home. I daresay, Miss Seldom is all you think. It seemed to me, though, that she was different from usual tonight. But I expect that fool had upset her.”
He let the young girl lean for a moment against the shadowy stone while he fumbled for his cigarettesand matches. He observed her make a quick movement with her hands.
“What are you up to now?” he asked.
She gave a fierce little laugh. “There!” she cried. “I have done it!”
“What have you done?” he enquired, emitting a puff of smoke, and throwing the lighted match into the hedge.
She pressed her hands against the stone and looked up at him mischievously and triumphantly. “Look!” she said, holding out her fingers in the darkness. He surveyed her closely. “What is it? Have you scratched yourself?”
“Light a match and see!” she cried. He lit a match and examined the hand she held towards him.
“You have thrown away that ring!”
“Notthrownit away, Luke; not thrown it away! I have pressed it down into this hole. You can’t get it out now! Nobody never can!”
He held the flickering match closely against the stone’s surface. In the narrow darkness of the aperture she indicated, something bright glittered.
“But this is really annoying of you, Annie,” said the stone-carver. “I told you that ring was only lent to me. She’ll be asking for it back tomorrow.”
“Well, you can tell her to come here and get it!”
“But this is really serious,” protested Luke, trying in vain to reach the object with his outstretched fingers.
“And I have twisted my hair round it!” the girl went on, in exulting excitement, “I have twisted it tight around. It will be hard to get it off!”
Luke continued making ineffectual dives into thehole, while she watched him gleefully. He went to the hedge and breaking off a dusty sprig of woundwort prodded the ring with its stalk.
“You can’t do it” she cried, “you can’t do it! You’ll only push it further in!”
“Damn you, Annie!” he muttered. “This is a horrible kind of joke. I tell you, Gladys will want this confounded thing back tomorrow. She’s already asked me twice for it. She only gave it to me for fun.”
The girl leaned across the stone towards him, propping herself on the palms of her hands, and laughing mischievously. “No one in this village can get that ring out of there!” she cried; “no one! And when they does, they’ll find it all twisted up with my hair!” She tossed back her black locks defiantly.
Luke Andersen’s thoughts ran upon scissors, pincers, willow-wands, bramble-thorns, and children’s arms.
“Leave it then!” he said. “After all, I can swear I lost it. Come on, you little demon!”
They moved away; and St. Catharine’s church was only striking the hour of nine, when they separated at her mother’s door.
The incredibly halcyon June which had filled the lanes and meadows of Nevilton that summer with such golden weather, gave place at last to July; and with July came tokens of a change.
The more slow-growing hay-fields were still strewn with their little lines of brown mown grass waiting its hour of “carrying,” but the larger number of the pastures wore now that freshly verdant and yet curiously sad look, which fields in summer wear when they have been shorn of their first harvest. The corn in the arable-lands was beginning to stand high; wheat and barley varying their alternate ripening tints, from the rich gold of the one, to the diaphanous glaucous green, so tender and pallid, of the other. In the hedges, rag-wort, knapweed and scabious had completely replaced wild-rose and elder-blossom; and in the ditches and by the margins of ponds, loosestrife and willow-herb were beginning to bud. Even the latest-sprouting among the trees carried now the full heavy burden, dark and monotonous, of the summer’s prime; and the sharp, dry intermittent chirping of warblers, finches and buntings, had long since replaced, in the garden-bushes, the more flute-like cries of the earlier-nesting birds.
The shadowy woods of the Nevilton valleys, withtheir thick entangled undergrowth, were less pleasant to walk in than they had been. Tall rank growths choked the wan remnants of the season’s first prime; and beneath sombre, indistinguishable foliage, the dry, hard-trodden paths lost their furtive enchantment. Dog-mercury, that delicate child of the under-shadows, was no more now than a gross mass of tarnished leaves. Enchanter’s night-shade took the place of pink-campion; only to yield, in its turn, to viper’s bugloss and flea-bane.
As the shy gods of the year’s tender birth receded before these ranker maturings, humanity became more prominent. Print-frocked maidens assisted the sheep in treading the slopes of Leo’s Hill into earthy grassless patches. Bits of dirty paper and the litter of careless picnickers strewed the most shadowy recesses. Smart youths flicked town-bought canes in places where, a few weeks before, the squirrel had gambolled undisturbed, and the wood-pecker had deepened the magical silence by his patent labour. Where recently, amid shadowy moss “soft as sleep,” the delicate petals of the fragile wood-sorrel had breathed untroubled in their enchanted aisles of leafy twilight, one found oneself reading, upon torn card-board boxes, highly-coloured messages to the Human Race from energetic Tradesmen. July had replaced June. The gods of Humanity had replaced the gods of Nature; and the interlude between hay-harvest and wheat-harvest had brought the dog-star Sirius into his diurnal ascendance.
The project of Lacrima’s union with Mr. John Goring remained, so to speak, “in the air.” The village assumed it as a certainty; Mr. Quincunx regardedit as a probability; and Mr. Goring himself, enjoying his yearly session of agreeable leisure, meditated upon it day and night.
Lacrima had fallen into a curious lassitude with regard to the whole matter. In these July days, especially now that the sky was overcast by clouds and heavy rains seemed imminent, she appeared to lose all care or interest in her own life. Her mood followed the mood of the weather. If some desperate deluge of disaster was brooding in the distance, she felt tempted to cry out, “Let it fall!”
Mr. Quincunx’s feelings on the subject remained a mystery to her. He neither seemed definitely to accept her sacrifice, nor to reject it. He did not really—so she could not help telling herself—visualize the horror of the thing, as it affected her, in any substantial degree. He often made a joke of it; and kept quoting cynical and worldly suggestions, from the lips of Luke Andersen.
On the other hand, both from Mr. Romer and the farmer, she received quiet, persistent and inexorable pressure; though to do the latter justice, he made no further attempts to treat her roughly or familiarly.
She had gone so far once—in a mood of panic-stricken aversion, following upon a conversation with Gladys—as actually to walk to the vicarage gate, with the definite idea of appealing to Vennie; but it chanced that in place of Vennie she had observed Mrs. Seldom moving among her flower-beds, and the grave austerity of the aristocratic old lady had taken all resolution from her and made her retrace her steps.
It must also be confessed that her dislike and fear of Gladys had grown to dimensions bordering upon monomania. The elder girl at once hypnotized and paralyzed her. Her sensuality, her feline caprices, her elaborately cherished hatred, reduced the Italian to such helpless misery, that any change—even the horror of this marriage—assumed the likeness of a desirable relief.
It is also true that by gradual degrees,—for women, however little prone to abstract thought, are quick to turn the theories of those they love into living practice,—she had come to regard the mere physical terror of this momentous plunge as a less insurmountable barrier than she had felt at first. Without precisely intending it, Mr. Quincunx had really, in a measure—particularly since he himself had come to frequent the society of Luke Andersen—achieved what might have conventionally been called the “corruption” of Lacrima’s mind. She found herself on several occasions imagining what she would really feel, if, escaped for an afternoon from her Priory duties, she were slipping off to meet her friend in Camel’s Cover or Badger’s Bottom.
When the suggestion had been first made to her of this monstrous marriage, it had seemed nothing short of a sentence of death, and beyond the actual consummation of it, she had never dreamed of looking. But all this had now imperceptibly changed. Many an evening as she sat with her work by Mrs. Romer’s side, watching Gladys and her father play cards, the thought came over her that she might just as well enjoy the comparative independence of having her own house and her own associations—eventhough the price of themwerethe society of such a lump of clay—as live this wretched half-life without hope or aim.
Other moods arrived when the thought of having children of her own came to her with something more than a mere sense of escape; came to her with the enlargement of an opening horizon. She recalled the many meandering discourses which Mr. Quincunx had addressed to her upon this subject. They had not affected her woman’s instincts; but they had lodged in her mind. A girl’s children, so her friend had often maintained, do not belong to the father at all. The father is nothing—a mere irrelevant incident, a mere chance. The mother alone—the mother always—has the rights and pleasures, as she has the responsibilities and pains of the parental relation. She even recalled one occasion of twilight philosophizing in the potato-bed, when Mr. Quincunx had gone so far as to maintain the unscientific thesis that children, born where there is no love, inherit character, appearance, tastes, everything—from the mother.
Lacrima had a dim suspicion that some of these less pious theories were due to the perverse Luke, who, as the cloudier July days overcast his evening rambles, had acquired the habit of strolling at night-fall into Mr. Quincunx’s kitchen. Once indeed she was certain she discerned the trail of this plausible heathen in her friend’s words. Mr. Quincunx, with one of his peculiarly goblin-like leers, had intimated—in jest indeed, but with a searching look into her face that it would be no very difficult task to deceive,—in shrewd Panurgian roguery, this clumsy clown.His words at the time had hurt and shocked her; and her reaction from them had led to the spoiling of a pleasant conversation; but they invaded afterwards, more deeply than she would have cared to confess, her hours of dreamy solitude.
Her southern imagination, free from both the grossness and the hypocrisy of the Nevilton mind, was much readier to wander upon an antinomian path—at least in its wayward fancies—than it would have been, had circumstances not led her away from her inherited faith.
While the sensuality of Gladys left her absolutely untouched, the anarchistic theories of her friend—especially now they had been fortified and directed by the insidious Luke—gave her intelligence many queer and lawless topics of solitary brooding. Her senses, her instincts, were as pure and unsophisticated as ever; but her conscience was besieged and threatened. It was indeed a queer rôle—this, which fate laid upon Mr. Quincunx—the rôle of undermining the reluctance of his own sweetheart to make a loveless marriage—but it was one for which his curious lack of physical passion singularly fitted him.
Had Vennie Seldom or Hugh Clavering been aware of the condition of affairs they would have condemned Mr. Quincunx in the most wholesale manner. Clavering would probably have been tempted to apply to him some of the most abusive language in the dictionary. But it is extremely questionable whether this judgment of theirs would have been justified.
A more enlightened planetary observer, initiatedinto the labyrinthine hearts of men, might well have pointed out that Mr. Quincunx’s theories were largely a matter of pure speculation, humorously remote from any contact with reality. He might also have reminded these indignant ones that Mr. Quincunx quite genuinely laboured under the illusion—if it were an illusion—that for his friend to be mistress of the Priory and free of her dependence on the Romers was a thing eminently desirable, and worth the price she paid for it. Such an invisible clairvoyant might even have surmised, what no one in Nevilton who knew of Mr. Romer’s offer would for one second have believed; namely, that he would have given her the same advice had there been no such offer, simply on the general ground of binding her permanently to the place.
The fact, however, remained, that by adopting this ambiguous and evasive attitude Mr. Quincunx reduced the more heroic and romantic aspect of the girl’s sacrifice to the lowest possible level, and flung her into a mood of reckless and spiritless indifference. She was brought to the point of losing all interest in her own fate and of simply relapsing upon the tide of events.
It was precisely to this condition that Mr. Romer had desired to bring her. When she had first attracted him, and had fallen into his hands, there had been certain psychological contests between them, in which the quarry-owner had by no means emerged victorious. It was the rankling memory of these contests—contests spiritual rather than material—which had issued in his gloomy hatred of her and his longing to corrupt her mind and humiliate her soul.This corruption, this humiliation had been long in coming. It had seemed out of his own power and out of the power of his feline daughter to bring it about; but this felicitous plan of using the girl’s own friend to assist her moral disintegration appeared to have changed the issue very completely.
Mr. Romer, watching her from day to day, became more and more certain that her integral soul, the inmost fortress of her self-respect, was yielding inch by inch. She had flung the rudder down; and was drifting upon the tide.
It might have been a matter of surprise to some ill-judging psychologists that a Napoleonic intriguer, of the quarry-owner’s type, should ever have entered upon a struggle apparently so unequal and unimportant as that for the mere integrity of a solitary girl’s spirit. Such a judgment would display little knowledge of the darker possibilities of human character. Resistance is resistance, from whatever quarter it comes; and the fragile soul of a helpless Pariah may be just as capable of provoking the aggressive instincts of a born master of men as the most obdurate of commercial rivals.
There are certain psychic oppositions to our will, which, when once they have been encountered, remain indelibly in the memory as a challenge and a defiance, until their provocation has been wiped out in their defeat. It matters nothing that such oppositions should spring from weak or trifling quarters. We have been baffled, thwarted, fooled; and we cannot recover the feeling of identity with ourselves, until, like a satisfied tidal wave, our will has drownedcompletely the barricades that defied it. It matters nothing if at the beginning, what we were thwarted by was a mere trifle, a straw upon the wind, a feather in the breeze. The point is that our will, in flowing outwards, at its capricious pleasure, met with opposition—met with resistance. We do not really recover our self-esteem until every memory of such an event has been obliterated by a complete revenge.
It is useless to object that a powerful ambitious man of the Romer mould, contending Atlas-like under a weight of enormous schemes, was not one to harbour such long-lingering rancour against a mere Pariah. There was more in the thing than appears on the surface. The brains of mortal men are queer crucibles, and the smouldering fires that heat them are driven by capricious and wanton guests. Lacrima’s old defeat of the owner of Leo’s Hill—a defeat into which there is no need to descend now, for its “terrain” was remote from our present stage—had been a defeat upon what might be called a subliminal or interior plane.
It was almost as if he had encountered her and she had encountered him, not only in the past of this particular life, but a remoter past—in a past of some pre-natal incarnation. There are—as is well-known, many instances of this unfathomable conflict between certain human types—types that seem tofindone another, that seem to be drawn to one another, by some preordained necessity in the occult influences of mortal fate. It matters nothing in regard to such a conflict, that on one side should be strength, power and position, and on the other weaknessand helplessness. The soul is the soul, and has its own laws.
It is a case of what a true initiate into the secrets of our terrestrial drama might entitle Planetary Opposition. By some hidden law of planetary opposition, this frail child of the Apennine ridges was destined to provoke, to an apparently quite unequal struggle, this formidable schemer from the money-markets of London.
In these strange pre-natal attractions and repulsions between men and women, the mere conventional differences of rank and social importance are as nothing and less than nothing.
Vast unfathomable tides of cosmic conflict drive us all backwards and forwards; and if under the ascendance of Sirius in the track of the Sun, the master of Nevilton found himself devoting more energy to the humiliation of his daughter’s companion than to his election to the British Parliament, one can only remember that both of them—the strong and the weak—were merely puppets and pawns of elemental forces, compared with which he, as well as she, was as the chaff before the wind.
It was one of the peculiarities of this Nevilton valley to draw to itself, as we have already hinted, and focus strangely in itself, these airy and elemental oppositions. To rise above the clash of the Two Mythologies on this spot, with all their planetary “auxiliar gods,” one would have had to ascend incredibly high into that star-sown space above—perhaps so high, that the whole solar system, rushing madly through the ether towards the constellation of Hercules, would haveshown itself as less than a cluster of wayward fireflies. From a height as supreme as this, the difference between Mortimer Romer and Lacrima Traffio would have been less than the difference between two summer-midges transacting their affairs on the edge of a reed in Auber Lake.
Important or unimportant, however, the struggle went on; and, as July advanced, seemed to tend more and more to Mr. Romer’s advantage. Precisely what he desired to happen was indeed happening—Lacrima’s soul was disintegrating; her powers of resistance were diminishing; and a reckless carelessness about her personal fate was taking the place of her old sensitive apprehensions.
Another important matter went well at this time for Mr. Romer. His daughter became formally engaged to the wealthy American. Dangelis had been pressing her, for many weeks, to come to some definite decision, between himself and Lord Tintinhull’s heir, and she had at last made up her mind and given him her promise.
The Romers were enchanted at this new development. Mrs. Romer had always disliked the thought of having to enter into closer relations with the aristocracy—relations for which she was so obviously unsuited; and Ralph Dangelis fitted in exactly with her idea of what her son-in-law should be.
Mr. Romer, too, found in Dangelis just the sort of son he had always longed for. He had quite recognized, by this time, that the “artistic” tastes of the American and his unusual talent interfered in no way with the possession of a very shrewd intellectual capacity. Dangelis had indeed all the qualities thatMr. Romer most admired. He was strong. He was clever. He was an entertaining companion. He was at once very formidable and very good-tempered. And he was immensely rich.
It would have annoyed him to see Gladys dominate a man of this sort with her capricious ways. But he had not the remotest fear that she would dominate this citizen of Ohio. Dangelis would pet her and spoil her and deluge her with money, but keep a firm and untroubled hand over her; and that exactly suited Mr. Romer’s wishes. The man’s wealth would also be an immense help to himself in his financial undertakings. Together they would be able to engineer colossal and world-shaking schemes.
It was a satisfaction, too, to think that, when he died, his loved quarries on Leo’s Hill and his historic Leonian House should fall into the hands, not of these Ilchesters and Ilminsters and Evershots—families whose pretensions he hated and derided—but of an honest descendant of plain business men of his own class.
It was Mrs. Romer, and not her husband, who uttered a lament that the House after their death should no longer be the property of one of their own name. She proposed that Gladys’ American should be induced to change his name. But Mr. Romer would hear nothing of this. His system was the old imperial Roman system, of succession by adoption. The man who could deal with the Legions, the man who was strong enough to suppress strikes on Leo’s Hill, and cope successfully with such rascals as this voluble Wone, was the man to inherit Nevilton! Be his patronymic what you please, such a man wasCæsar. Himself, a new-comer, risen from nothing, and contemptuous of all tradition, it had constantly been a matter of serious annoyance to him that the wealth he had amassed should only go to swell the pride of these fatuous landed gentry. It delighted him to think that Gladys’ children—the future inheritors of his labour—should be, on their father’s side also, from new and untraditional stock. It gave him immense satisfaction to think of disappointing Lord Tintinhull, who no doubt had long ago told his friends how sad it was that his son had got entangled with that girl at Nevilton; but how nice it was that Nevilton House should in the future take its proper place in the county.
There was one cloud on Mr. Romer’s horizon at this moment, and that cloud was composed of vapours spun from the brain of his parliamentary rival, the eloquent Methodist.
Mr. Wone had long been at work among the Leo’s Hill quarry-men, encouraging them to strike. Until the second week in July his efforts had been fruitless; but with the change in the weather to which we have referred, the strike came. It had already lasted some seven or eight days, when a Saturday arrived which had been selected, several months before, for a great political gathering on the summit of Leo’s Hill. This was a meeting of radicals and socialists to further the cause of Mr. Wone’s campaign.
Leo’s Hill had been, for many generations, the site of such local gatherings. These gatherings were not confined to political demonstrators. They were usually attended by circus-men and other caterers to proletarian amusement; and were often quite aslively, in their accompaniments of feasting and festivity, as any country fair.
The actual speaking took place at the extreme northern end of the hill, where there was a singular and convenient feature, lending itself to such assemblies, in the formation of the ground. This was the grassy outline, still emphasizing quite distinctly its ancient form, of the military Roman amphitheatre attached to the camp. Locally the place was known as “the Frying-pan”, from its marked and grotesque resemblance to that utensil; but no base culinary appellation, issue of Anglo-Saxon unimaginativeness, could conceal the formidable classic moulding of its well-known shape—the shape of the imperial colisseum.
Between the Frying-pan and the southern side of the hill, where the bulk of the quarries were, rose a solitary stone building. One hardly expected the presence of such a building in such a place, for it was a considerable-sized inn; but the suitableness of the grassy expanses of the ancient camp for all manner of tourist-jaunts accounted for its erection; and doubtless it served a good purpose in softening with interludes of refreshment the labours of the quarry-men.
It was the presence of this admirable tavern so near the voice of the orator, that led Mr. Romer, himself, to stroll, on that Saturday, in the direction of his rival’s demonstration. Though the more considerable of his quarries were at the southern end of the hill, certain new excavations, in the success of which he took exceptional interest, had been latterly made in its very centre, and within a stone’s throwof the tavern-door. The great cranes, used in this new invasion, stood out against the sky from the highest part of the hill, and assumed, especially at sunset, when their shape was rendered most emphatic, the form of enormous compasses, planted there by some gigantic architectural hand.
It was in relation to these new works that Mr. Romer, towards the close of the afternoon, found himself advancing along the narrow path that led, between clumps of bracken and furze-bushes, from the most westward of his woods to the hill’s base. Mr. Lickwit had informed him that there was talk, among some of the more intransigent of the Yeoborough socialists, about destroying these cranes. Objections had been brought against them, in recent newspaper articles, on purely æsthetic grounds. It was said they disfigured the classic outline of the hill, and interfered with a landmark which had been a delight to every eye for unnumbered ages.
It was hardly to be supposed that the more official of the supporters of Mr. Wone would condone any such outbreak. It was unlikely that Wone himself would do so. The “Christian Candidate,” as his Methodist friends called him, was in no way a man of violence. But the fact that there had been this pseudo-public criticism of the works from an unpolitical point of view might lend colour to any sort of scandal. There were plenty of bold spirits among the by-streets of Yeoborough who would have loved nothing better than to send Mr. Romer’s cranes toppling over into a pit, and indeed it was the sort of adventure which would draw all the more restless portion of the meeting’s audience. The possibilitywas the more threatening because the presence of this kind of general fair attracted to the hill all manner of heterogeneous persons quite unconnected with the locality.
But what really influenced Mr. Romer in making his own approach to the spot, was the neighbourhood of the Half Moon. Where there was drink, he argued, people would get drunk; and where people got drunk, anything might happen. He had instituted Mr. Lickwit to remain on guard at the eastern works; and he had written to the superintendent of police suggesting the advisability of special precautions. But he felt nervous and ill at ease as he listened, from his Nevilton terrace, to the distant shouts and clamour carried to him on the west wind; and true to his Napoleonic instincts, he proceeded, without informing anyone of his intention, straight to the zone of danger.
The afternoon was very hot, though there was no sun. The wind blew in threatening gusts, and the quarry-owner noticed that the distant Quantock Moors were overhung with a dark bank of lowering clouds. It was one of those sinister days that have the power of taking all colour and all interest out of the earth’s surface. The time of the year lent itself gloomily to this sombre unmasking. The furze-bushes looked like dead things. Many of them had actually been burnt in some wanton conflagration; and their prickly branches carried warped and blighted seeds. The bracken, near the path, had been dragged and trodden. Here and there its stalks protruded like thin amputated arms. The elder-bushes, caught in the wind, showed white and metallic, asif all their leaves had been dipped in some brackish water. All the trees seemed to have something of this dull, whitish glare, which did not prevent them from remaining, in the recesses of their foliage, as drearily dark as the dark dull soil beneath them. The grass of the fields had a look congruous with the rest of the scene; a look as if it had been one large velvety pall, drawn over the whole valley.
In the valley itself, along the edges of this grassy hall, the tall clipped elm-trees stood like mourning sentinels bowing towards their dead. Drifting butterflies, principally of the species known as the “Lesser Heath” and the “Meadow-Brown,” whirled past his feet as he walked, in troubled and tarnished helplessness. Here and there a weak dilapidated currant-moth, the very epitome of surrender to circumstance, tried in vain to arrest its enforced flight among the swaying stalks of grey melancholy thistles, the only living things who seemed to find the temper of the day congenial with their own.
When he reached the base of the hill, Mr. Romer was amazed at the crowd of people which the festivity had attracted to the place. He had heard them passing down the roads all day from the seclusion of his garden, and to judge by such vehicles as he had secured a glimpse of from the entrance to his drive, many of them must have come from miles away. But he had never expected a crowd like this. It seemed to cover the whole northern side of the hill, swaying to and fro, like some great stream of voracious maggots, in the body of a dead animal.
Round the cranes, in the centre of the hill, the crowd seemed especially thick. He made out thepresence there of several large caravans, and he heard the music of a merry-go-round from that direction. This latter sound, in its metallic and ferocious gaiety, seemed especially adapted to the character of the scene. It seemed like the very voice of some savage Dionysian helot-feast, celebrated in defiance of all constituted authority. It was such music as Caliban would have loved.
Unwilling to arouse unnecessary anger by making his presence known, while there was no cause, Mr. Romer left the Half Moon on his right, and crossing the brow of the hill diagonally, by a winding path that encircled the grassy hollows of innumerable ancient quarries, arrived at the foot of an immense circular tumulus which dominated the whole scene. This indeed was the highest point of Leo’s Hill, and from its summit one looked far away towards the Bristol Channel in one direction, and far away towards the English Channel in another. It was, as it were, the very navel and pivot of that historic region. From this spot one obtained a sort of birds-eye view of the whole surface of Leo’s Hill.
Here Mr. Romer found himself quite alone, and from here, with hands clasped behind him, he surveyed the scene with a grave satiric smile. He could see his new works with the immense cranes reaching into the sky above them. He could see the swaying crowd round the amphitheatre at the extreme corner of the promontory; and he could see, embosomed in trees to the left of Nevilton’s Mount, a portion of his own Elizabethan dwelling.
Mr. Romer felt strong and confident as he looked down on all these things. He always seemed to renewthe forces of his being when he visited this grass-covered repository of his wealth and influence. Leo’s Hill suited his temper, and he felt as though he suited the temper of Leo’s Hill. Between the man who exploited the stone, and the great reservoir of the stone he exploited, there seemed an illimitable affinity.
He looked down with grim and humorous contempt at the noisy crowd thus invading his sacred domain. They might harangue their hearts out,—those besotted sentimentalists,—he could well afford to let them talk! They might howl and dance and feast and drink, till they were as dazed as Comus’ rabble,—he could afford to let them shout! Probably Mr. Wone, the “Christian Candidate,” was even at that moment, making his great final appeal for election at the hands of the noble, the free, the enlightened constituency of Mid-Wessex.
Romer felt an immense wave of contempt surge through his veins for this stream of fatuous humanity as it swarmed before his eyes like an army of disturbed ants. How little their anger or their affection mattered to him—or mattered to the world at large! He would have liked to have seized in his hands some vast celestial torch and suffocated them all in its smoke, as one would choke out a wasp’s nest. Their miserable little pains and pleasures were not worth the trouble Nature had taken in giving them the gift of life. Dead or alive—happy or unhappy—they were not deserving of any more consideration than a cloud of gnats that one brushed away from one’s face.
The master of Leo’s Hill drew a deep breath and listened to the screams of the merry-go-round.Something in the strident machine made him think of hymn-singing and mob-religion. This Religion of Sentiment and Self-Pity with which they cloak their weakness and their petty rancour—what is it, he thought, but an excuse of escaping from the necessity of being strong and fearless and hard and formidable? It is easier—so much easier—to draw back, and go aside, and deal in paltry subterfuges and sneaking jealousies, veneered over with hypocritical unction, than to strike out and pursue one’s own way drastically and boldly.
He folded his arms and frowned. What is it, he muttered to himself, this hidden Force, this Power, this God, to which they raise their vague appeals against the proud, clear, actual domination of natural law and unscrupulous strength? Is there really some other element in the world, some other fact, from which they can draw support and encouragement? There cannot be! He looked at the lowering sky above him, and at the grey thistles and little patches of thyme under his feet. All was solid, real, unyielding. There was no gap, no open door, in the stark surface of things, through which such a mystery might enter.
He found himself vaguely wondering whose grave this had originally been, this great flat tumulus, upon which he stood and hated the mob of men. There was a burnt circle in the centre of it, with blackened cinders. The place had been used for some recent national rejoicing, and they had raised a bonfire here. He supposed that there must have been a much more tremendous bonfire in the days when—perhaps before the Romans—this mound was raisedto celebrate some savage chieftain. He wondered whether, in his life-time, this long-buried, long-forgotten one had stood, even as he stood now, and cried aloud to the Earth and the Sky in sick loathing of his wretched fellow-animals.
He humorously speculated whether this man also, this ancient challenger of popular futility, had been driven to strange excesses by the provocative resistance of some feeble girl, making her mute appeals to the suppressed conscience in him, and calling in the help of tender compassionate gods? Had they softened this buried chieftain’s heart, these gods of slavish souls and weak wills, before he went down into darkness? Or had he defied them to the last and died lonely, implacable, contemptuous?
The quarry-owner’s ears began to grow irritated at last by these raucous metallic sounds and by the laughter and the shouting. It was so precisely as if this foolish crowd were celebrating, in drunken ecstasy, a victory won over him, and over all that was clear-edged, self-possessed, and effectual, in this confused world. He struck off the heads of some of the grey thistles with his cane, and wished they had been the heads of the Christian Candidate and his oratorical associates.
Presently his attention was excited by a tremendous hubbub at the northern extremity of the hill. The crowd seemed to have gone mad. They cheered again and again, and seemed vociferating some popular air or some marching-song. He could almost catch the words of this. The curious thing was that he could not help in his heart dallying with the strange wish that in place of being the man at the top, hehad been one of these men at the bottom. How differently he would have conducted the affair. He knew, from his dealings with the country families, how deep this revolutionary rage with established tradition could sink. He sympathized with it himself. He would have loved to have flung the whole sleek structure of society into disorder, and to have shaken these feeble rulers out of their snug seats. But this Wone had not the spirit of a wood-louse! Had he—Romer—been at this moment the arch-revolutionary, in place of the arch-tyrant, what a difference in method and result! Did they think, these idiots, that eloquent words and appeals to Justice and Charity would change the orbits of the planets?