The fact remained that she let matters drift on, and continued to prepare—in her own fashion—not only for her reception into the Church of England, but for her marriage to the wealthy American.
Dangelis was continually engaged now in running backwards and forwards to town on business connected with his marriage; and with a view to making these trips more pleasantly and conveniently he had acquired a smart touring-car of his own, which he soon found himself able to drive without assistance. The pleasure of these excursions, leading him, in delicious solitude, through so many unvisited country places and along such historic roads, had for the moment distracted his attention from his art.
He rarely took Gladys with him; partly because he regarded himself as still but a learner in the science of driving, but more because he felt, at this critical moment of his life, an extraordinary desire to be alone with his own thoughts. Most of these thoughts, it is true, were such as it would not have hurt the feelings of his fiancée to have surprised in their passage through his mind; but not quite all of them. Ever since the incident of Auber Lake, an incident which threw the character of his betrothed into no verycharming light, Dangelis had had his moments of uneasiness and misgiving. He could not altogether conceal from himself that his attraction to Gladys was rather of a physical than of a spiritual, or even of a psychic nature.
Once or twice, while the noble expanses of Salisbury Plain or the New Forest thrilled him with a pure dilation of soul, as he swept along in the clear air, he was on the verge of turning his car straight to the harbour of Southampton and taking the first boat that offered itself, bound East, West, North or South—it mattered nothing the direction!—so that an impassable gulf of free sea-water should separate him forever from the hot fields and woods of Nevilton.
Once, when reaching a cross-road point, where the name of the famous harbour stared at him from a sign-post, he had even gone so far as to deviate to the extent of several miles from his normal road. But that intolerable craving for the girl’s soft-clinging arms and supple body, with which she had at last succeeded in poisoning the freedom of his mind, drew him back with the force of a magnet.
The day at length approached, when, on the festival of his favorite saint, Mr. Clavering was to perform the ceremony, to which he had looked forward so long and with such varied feelings. It was Saturday, and on the following morning, in a service especially arranged to take place privately, between early celebration and ordinary matins, Gladys was to be baptized.
Dangelis had suddenly declared his intention of making his escape from a proceeding which to his American mind seemed entirely uncalled for, and tohis pagan humour seemed not a little grotesque. He had decided to start, immediately after breakfast, and motor to London, this time by way of Trowbridge and Westbury.
The confirmation ceremony, for reasons connected with the convenience of the Lord Bishop, had been finally fixed for the ensuing Wednesday, so that only two days were destined to elapse between the girl’s reception into the Church, and her admission to its most sacred rites. Dangelis was sufficiently a heathen to desire to be absent from this event also, though he had promised Mr. Clavering to support his betrothed on the occasion of her first Communion on the following Sunday, which would be their last Sunday together as unwedded lovers.
On this occasion, Gladys persuaded him to let her ride by his side a few miles along the Yeoborough road. They had just reached the bridge across the railway-line, about a mile and a half from the village, when they caught sight of Mr. John Goring, returning from an early visit to the local market.
Gladys made the artist stop the car, and she got out to speak to her uncle. After a minute or two’s conversation, she informed Dangelis that she would return with Mr. Goring by the field-path, which left the road at that point and followed the track of the railway. The American, obedient to her wish, set his car in motion, and waving her a gay good-bye, disappeared swiftly round an adjacent corner.
Gladys and her uncle proceeded to walk slowly homeward, across the meadows; neither of them, however, paying much attention to the charm of the way. In vain from the marshy hollows between theirpath and the metal track, certain brilliant clumps of ragged robin and red rattle signalled to them to pause and admire. Gladys and Mr. Goring strolled forward, past these allurements, with a superb absorption in their own interests.
“I can’t think, uncle,” Gladys was saying, “how it is that you can go on in the way you’re doing; you, a properly engaged person, and not seeing anything of your young lady?”
The farmer laughed. “Ah! my dear, but what matter? I shall see her soon enough; all I want to, may-be.”
“But most engaged people like to see a little of one another before they’re married, don’t they, uncle? I know Ralph would be quite mad if he couldn’t seeme.”
“But, my pretty, this is quite a different case. When Bert and I”—he spoke of the idiot as if they had been comrades, instead of master and servant—“have bought a new load of lop-ears, we never tease ’em or fret ’em before we get ’em home.”
“But Lacrima isn’t a rabbit!” cried Gladys impatiently; “she’s a girl like me, and wants what all girls want, to be petted and spoilt a little before she’s plunged into marriage.”
“She didn’t strike me as wanting anything of that kind, when I made up to her in our parlour,” replied Mr. Goring.
“Oh you dear old stupid!” cried his niece, “can’t you understand that’s what we’re all like? We all put on airs, and have fancies, and look cross; but we want to be petted all the same. We want it all the more!”
“I reckon I’d better leave well alone all the same, just at present,” observed the farmer. “If I was to go stroking her and making up to her, while she’s on the road, may-be when we got her into the hutch she’d bite like a weasel.”
“She’d never really bite!” retorted his companion. “You don’t know her as well as I do. I tell you, uncle, she’s got no more spirit than a tame pigeon.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” said the farmer.
Gladys flicked the grass impatiently with the end of her parasol.
“You may take my word for it, uncle,” she continued. “The whole thing’s put on. It’s all affectation and nonsense. Do you think she’d have agreed to marry you if she wasn’t ready for a little fun? Of course she’s ready! She’s only waiting for you to begin. It makes it more exciting for her, when she cries out and looks injured. That’s the only reason why she does it. Lots of girls are like that, you know!”
“Are they, my pretty, are they? ’Tis difficult to tell that kind, may-be, from the other kind. But I’m not a man for too much of these fancy ways.”
“You’re not drawing back, uncle, are you?” cried Gladys, in considerable alarm.
“God darn me, no!” replied the farmer. “I’m going to carry this business through. Don’t you fuss yourself. Only I like doing these things in my own way—dost understand me, my dear?—in my own way; and then, if so be they go wrong, I can’t put the blame on no one else.”
“I wonder you aren’t more keen, uncle,” began Gladys insinuatingly, following another track, “tosee more of a pretty girl you’re just going to marry. I don’t believe you half know how pretty she is! I wish you could see her doing her hair in the morning.”
“I shall see her, soon enough, my lass; don’t worry,” replied the farmer.
“I should so love to see you give her one kiss,” murmured Gladys. “Of course, she’d struggle and make a fuss, but she’d really be enjoying it all the time.”
“May-be she would, my pretty, and may-be she wouldn’t. I’m not one that likes hearing either rabbits or maidens start the squealing game. It fair gives me the shivers. Bert, he can stand it, but I never could. It’s nature, I suppose. A man can’t change his nature no more than a cow nor a horse.”
“I can’t understand you, uncle,” observed Gladys. “If I were in your place, I’m sure I shouldn’t be satisfied without at least kissing the girl I was going to marry. I’d find some way of getting round her, however sulky she was. Oh, I’m sure you don’t half know how nice Lacrima is to kiss!”
“I suppose she isn’t so mighty different, come to that,” replied the farmer, “than any other maid. I don’t mind if I giveyoua kiss, my beauty!” he added, encircling his niece with an affectionate embrace and kissing her flushed cheek. “There—there! Best let well alone, sweetheart, and leave your old uncle to manage his own little affairs according to his own fashion!”
But Gladys was not so easily put off. She had recourse to her fertile imagination.
“You should have heard what she said to me the other night, uncle. You know the way girls talk? or you ought to, anyhow! She said she hoped you’d go on being the same simple fool, after you were married. She said she’d find it mighty easy to twist you round her finger. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘I can do what I like with him now. He treats me as if I were a high-born lady and he were a mere common man. I believe he’s downright afraid of me!’ That’s the sort of things she says about you, uncle. She thinks in her heart that you’re just a fool, a simple frightened fool!”
“Darn her! she does, does she?” cried Mr. Goring, touched at last by the serpent’s tongue. “She thinks I’m a fool, does she? Well! Let her have her laugh. Them laughs best as laughs last, in my thinking!”
“Yes, she thinks you’re a great big silly fool, uncle. Of course it’s all pretence, her talk about wanting you to be like that; but that’s what she thinks you are. What she’d really like—only she doesn’t say so, even to me—would be for you to catch her suddenly round the waist and kiss her on the mouth, and laugh at her pretendings. I expect she’s waiting to give you a chance to do something of that sort; only you don’t come near her. Oh, she must think you’re a monstrous fool! She must chuckle to herself to think what a fool you are.”
“I’ll teach her what kind of a fool I am,” muttered Mr. Goring, “when I’ve got her to myself, up at the farm. This business of dangling after a maid’s apron strings, this kissing and cuddling, don’t suit somehow with my nature. I’m not one of your fancy-courting ones and never was!”
“Listen, uncle!” said Gladys eagerly, laying herhand on his arm. “Suppose I was to take her up to Cæsar’s Quarry this afternoon? That would be a lovely chance! You could come strolling round about four o’clock. I’d be on the watch; and before she knew you were there, I’d scramble out, and you could climb down. She couldn’t get away from you, and you’d have quite a nice little bit of love-making.”
Mr. Goring paused, and prodded the ground with the end of his stick.
“What a little devil you are!” he exclaimed. “Darn me if this here job isn’t a queer business! Here are you, putting yourself out and fussing around, only for a fellow to have what’s due to him. You leave us alone, sweetheart, my young lady and me! I reckon we know what’s best for ourselves, without you thrusting your hand in.”
“But you might just walk up that way, uncle; it isn’t far over the hill. I’d give—oh, I don’t know what!—to see you two together. She wants to be teased a little, you know! She’s getting too proud and self-satisfied for anything. It would do her ever so much good to be taught a lesson. It isn’t much to do, is it? Just to give the girl you’re going to marry one little kiss?”
“But how do I know you two wenches aren’t fooling me, even now?” protested the cautious farmer. “’Tis just the sort of maids’ trick ye might set out to play upon a man. How do I know ye haven’t put your two darned little heads together over this job?”
Gladys looked round. They were approaching the Mill Copse.
“Please, uncle,” she cried, “don’t say such things to me. You know I wouldn’t join with anyone against you. Least of all with her! Just do as I tell you, and stroll up to Cæsar’s Quarry about four o’clock. I promise you faithfully I haven’t said a word to her about it. Please, uncle, be nice and kind over this.”
She threw her arms round Mr. Goring’s neck. “You haven’t done anything for me for a long time,” she murmured in her most persuasive tone. “Do you remember how I used to give you butterfly-kisses when I was a little girl, and you kept apples for me in the big loft?”
Mr. Goring’s nature may, or may not have been, as he described it; it is certain that the caresses and cajoleries of his lovely niece had an instantaneous effect upon him. His slow-witted suspicions melted completely under the spell of her touch.
“Well, my pretty,” he said, as they moved on, under the shadowy trees of the park, “may-be, if I’ve nothing else to do and things seem quiet, I’ll take a bit of a walk this afternoon. But you mustn’t count on it. If I do catch sight of ’ee, ’round Cæsar’s way, I’ll let ’ee know. But ’tisn’t a downright promise, mind!”
Gladys clapped her hands. “You’re a perfect love, uncle!” she cried jubilantly. “I wish I were Lacrima; I’d be ever, ever so nice to you!”
“Ye can be nice to me, as ’tis, sweetheart,” replied the farmer. “You and me have always been kind of fond of each other, haven’t us? But I reckon ye’d best be slipping off now, up to your house. I never care greatly for meeting your father byaccident-like. He’s one of these sly ones that always makes a fellow feel squeamy and leery.”
That afternoon it happened that the adventurous Luke had planned a trip down to Weymouth, with a new flame of his, a certain Polly Shadow, whose parents kept a tobacco-shop in Yeoborough.
He had endeavoured to persuade his brother to accompany them on this little excursion, in the hope that a breath of sea-air might distract and refresh him; but James had expressed his intention of paying a visit to his gentle restorer, up at Wild Pine, who was now sufficiently recovered to enable her to sit out in the shade of the great trees.
The church clock had just struck three, when James Andersen approached the entrance to Nevil’s Gully.
He had not advanced far into the shadow of the beeches, when he heard the sound of voices. He paused, and listened. The clear tones of Ninsy Lintot were unmistakable, and he thought he detected—though of this he was not sure—the nervous high-pitched voice of Philip Wone. From the direction of the sounds, he gathered that the two young people were seated somewhere on the bracken-covered slope above the barton, where, as he well knew, there were several shady terraces overlooking the valley.
Unwilling to plunge suddenly into a conversation that appeared, as far as he could catch its purport, to be of considerable emotional tension, Andersen cautiously ascended the moss-grown bank on his left, and continued his climb, until he had reached the crest of the hill. He then followed, as silently as he could, the little grassy path between the stubble-fieldand the thickets, until he came to the open space immediately above these fern-covered terraces.
Yes, his conjecture had been right. Seated side by side beneath the tall-waving bracken, the auburn-haired Ninsy and her anarchist friend were engaged in an absorbing and passionate discussion. Both of them were bare-headed, and the young man’s hand rested upon the motionless fingers of his companion, which were clasped demurely upon her lap. Philip’s voice was raised in intense and pitiful supplication.
“I’d care for you day and night,” Andersen heard him cry. “I’d nurse you when you were ill, and keep you from every kind of annoyance.”
“But, Philip dear,” the girl’s voice answered, “you know what the doctor said. He said I mustn’t marry on any account. So even if I had nothing against it, it wouldn’t be possible for us to do this.”
“Ninsy, Ninsy!” cried the youth pathetically, “don’t you understand what I mean? I can’t bear having to say these things, but you force me to, when you talk like that. The doctor meant that it would be wrong for you to have children, and he took it for granted that you’d never find anyone ready to live with you as I’d live with you. It would only be a marriage in name. I mean it would only be a marriage in name in regard to children. It would be a real marriage to me, it would be heaven to me, to live side by side with you, and no one able any more to come between us! I can’t realize such happiness. It makes me feel dizzy even to think of it!”
Ninsy unclasped her hands, and gently repulsing him, remained buried in deep thought. Standing erect above them, like a sentry upon a palisade, JamesAndersen stared gloomily down upon this little drama. In some strange way,—perhaps because of some sudden recurrence of his mental trouble,—he seemed quite unconscious of anything dishonourable or base in thus withholding from these two people the knowledge that he was overhearing them.
“I’ll take care of you to the end of my life!” the young man repeated. “I’m doing quite well now with my work. You’ll be able to have all you want. You’ll be better off than you are here, and you know perfectly well that as soon as your father’s free he’ll marry that friend of his in Yeoborough. I saw him with her last Sunday. I’m sure it’s only for your sake that he stays single. She’s got three children, and that’s what holds him back—that, and the thought that you two mightn’t get on together. You’d be doing your father a kindness if you said yes to me, Ninsy. Please, please, my darling, say it, and make me grateful to you forever!”
“I can’t say it,—Philip, dear, I can’t, I can’t”; murmured the girl, in a voice so low that the sentinel above them could only just catch her words. “I do care for you, and I do value your goodness to me, but I can’t say the words, Philip. Something seems to stop me, something in my throat.”
It was not to her throat however, that the agitated Ninsy raised her thin hands. As she pressed them against her breast a look of tragic sorrow came into her face. Philip regarded her wistfully.
“You’re thinking you don’t love me, dear,—and never can love me. I know that, well enough! I know you don’t love me as I love you. But what does that matter? I’ve known that, all the time.The thing is, you won’t find anyone who loves you as I do,—ready to live with you as I’ve said I will, ready to nurse you and look after you. Other people’s love will be always asking and demanding from you. Mine—oh, it’s true, my darling, it’s true!—mine only wants to give up everything to make you happy.”
Ninsy was evidently more than a little moved by the boy’s appeal. There was a ring of passionate sincerity in his tone which went straight to her heart. She bent down and covered her face with her hands. When at length she lifted up her head and answered him, there were tears on her cheeks, and the watchful listener above them did not miss the quiver in her tone.
“I’m sorry, Philip boy, more sorry than I can say, that I can’t be nicer to you, that I can’t show my gratitude to you, in the way you wish. But though I do care for you, and—and value your dear love—something stops me, something makes it impossible that this should happen.”
“I believe it’s because you love that fellow Andersen!” cried the excited youth, leaping to his feet in his agitation.
In making this movement, the figure of the stone-carver, silhouetted with terrible distinctness against the sky-line, became visible to him. Instinctively he uttered a cry of surprise and anger.
“What do you want here? You’ve been listening! You’ve been spying on us! Get away, can’t you! Get back to your pretty young lady—her that’s going to marry John Goring for the sake of his money! Clear out of this, do you hear? Ninsy’ssick of you and your ways. Clear off! or I’ll make you—eavesdropper!”
By this time Ninsy had also risen, and stood facing the figure above them. Every vestige of colour had left her cheeks, and her hand was pressed against her side. Andersen made a curious incoherent sound and took a step towards them.
“Get away, can’t you!” reiterated the furious youth. “You’ve caused enough trouble here already. Look at her,—can’t you see how ill she is? Get back—damn you!—unless you want to kill her.”
Ninsy certainly looked as though in another moment she were going to fall. She made a piteous little gesture, as if to ward off from Andersen the boy’s savage words, but Philip caught her passionately round the waist.
“Get away!” he cried once more. “She belongs to me now. You might have had her, you coward—you turn-coat!—but you let her go for your newer prey. Oh, you’re a fine gentleman, James Andersen, a fine faithful gentleman!Youdon’t hold with strikes.Youdon’t hold with workmen rising against masters.Youhold with keeping in with those that are in power. Clear off—eavesdropper! Get back to Mistress John Goring and your nice brother! He’s as pretty a gentleman as you are, with his dear Miss Gladys!”
Ninsy’s feet staggered beneath her and she began to hang limp upon his arm. She opened her mouth to speak, but could only gasp helplessly. Her wide-open eyes—staring from her pallid face—never left Andersen for a moment. Of Philip she seemed absolutely unconscious. The stone-carver made anotherstep down the hill. His eyes, too, were fixed intently on the girl, and of his rival’s angry speeches he seemed utterly oblivious.
“Get away!” the boy reiterated, beside himself with fury, supporting the drooping form of his companion as if its weight were nothing. “We’ve had enough of your shilly-shallying and trickery! We’ve had enough of your fine manners! A damned cowardly spy—that’s what I call you, you well-behaved gentleman! Get back—can’t you!”
The drooping girl uttered some incoherent words and made a helpless gesture with her hand. Andersen seemed to read her meaning in her eyes, for he paused abruptly in his approach and stretched out his arms.
“Good-bye, Ninsy!” he murmured in a low voice. He said no more, and turning on his heel, scrambled swiftly back over the crest of the ridge and disappeared from view.
Philip flung a parting taunt after him, and then, lifting the girl bodily off her feet, staggered down the slope to the cottage, holding her in his arms.
Meanwhile James Andersen walked swiftly across the stubble-field in the direction of Leo’s Hill. At the pace he moved it only took him some brief minutes to reach the long stone wall that separates, in this quarter, the quarried levels of the promontory from the high arable lands which abut upon it.
He climbed over this barrier and strode blindly and recklessly forward among the slippery grassy paths that crossed one another along the edges of the deeper pits.
The stone-carver was approaching, though quite unconsciously, the scene of a very remarkable drama.Some fifteen minutes before his approach, the two girls from Nevilton House had reached the precipitous edge of what was known in that locality as Cæsar’s Quarry. Cæsar’s Quarry was a large disused pit, deeper and more extensive than most of the old excavations on the Hill, and surrounded, on all but one side, by blank precipitous walls of weather-stained sandstone. These walls of smooth stone remained always dark and damp, whatever the temperature might be of the air above them; and the floor of the Quarry was composed of a soft verdant carpet of cool moist moss, interspersed by stray heaps of discoloured rubble, on which flourished, at this particular season of the year, masses of that sombre-foliaged weed known as wormwood.
On the northern side of Cæsar’s Quarry rose a high narrow ridge of rock, divided, at uneven spaces, by deeply cut fissures or chasms, some broad and some narrow, but all overgrown to the very edge by short slippery grass. This ridge, known locally as Claudy’s Leap, was a favourite venture-place of the more daring among the children of the neighbourhood, who would challenge one another to feats of courage and agility, along its perilous edge.
On the side of Claudy’s Leap, opposite from Cæsar’s Quarry, was a second pit, of even deeper descent than the other, but of much smaller expanse. This second quarry, also disused for several generations, remained so far nameless, destiny having, it might seem, withheld the baptismal honour, until the place had earned a right to it by becoming the scene of some tragic, or otherwise noteworthy, event.
Gladys and Lacrima approached Cæsar’s Quarryfrom the western side, from whose slope a little winding path—the only entrance or exit attainable—led down into its shadowy depths. The Italian glanced with a certain degree of apprehension into the gulf beneath her, but Gladys seemed to take the thing so much for granted, and appeared so perfectly at her ease, that she was ashamed to confess her tremors. The elder girl, indeed, continued chatting cheerfully to her companion about indifferent matters, and as she clambered down the little path in front of her, she turned once or twice, in her fluent discourse, to make sure that Lacrima was following. The two cousins stood for awhile in silence, side by side, when they reached the bottom.
“How nice and cool it is!” cried Gladys, after a pause. “I was getting scorched up there! Let’s sit down a little, shall we,—before we start back? I love these old quarries.”
They sat down, accordingly, upon a heap of stones, and Gladys serenely continued her chatter, glancing up, however, now and again, to the frowning ridges of the precipices above them.
They had not waited long in this way, when the quarry-owner’s daughter gave a perceptible start, and raised her hand quickly to her lips.
Her observant eye had caught sight of the figure of Mr. John Goring peering down upon them from the opposite ridge. Had Lacrima observed this movement and lifted her eyes too, she would have received a most invaluable warning, but the Powers whoever they may have been, who governed the sequence of events upon Leo’s Hill, impelled her to keep her head lowered, and her interest concentratedupon a tuft of curiously feathered moss. Gladys remained motionless for several moments, while the figure on the opposite side vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Then she slowly rose.
“Oh, how silly I am,” she cried; “I’ve dropped that bunch of marjoram. Stop a minute, dear. Don’t move! I’ll just run up and get it. It was in the path. I know exactly where!”
“I’ll come with you if you like,” said Lacrima listlessly, “then you won’t have to come back. Or why not leave it for a moment?”
“It’s on the path, I tell you!” cried her cousin, already some way up the slope; “I’m scared of someone taking it. Marjoram isn’t common about here. Oh no! Stay where you are. I’ll be back in a second.”
The Italian relapsed into her former dreamy unconcern. She listlessly began stripping the leaves from a spray of wormwood which grew by her side. The place where she sat was in deep shadow, though upon the summit of the opposite ridge the sun lay hot. Her thoughts hovered about her friend in Dead Man’s Lane. She had vaguely hoped to get a glimpse of him this afternoon, but the absence of Dangelis had interfered with this.
She began building fantastic castles in the air, trying to call up the image of a rejuvenated Mr. Quincunx, freed from all cares and worries, living the placid epicurean life his heart craved. Would he, she wondered, recognize then, what her sacrifice meant? Or would he remain still obsessed by this or the other cynical fantasy, as far from the real truth of things as a madman’s dream? She smiledgently to herself as she thought of her friend’s peculiarities. Her love for him, as she felt it now, across a quivering gulf of misty space, was a thing as humorously tolerant and tender as it might have been had they been man and wife of many years’ standing. In these things Lacrima’s Latin blood gave her a certain maturity of feeling, and emphasized the maternal element in her attachment.
She contemplated dreamily the smooth bare walls of the cavernous arena in which she sat. Their coolness and dampness was not unpleasant after the heat of the upper air, but there was something sepulchral about them, something that gave the girl the queer impression of a colossal tomb—a tomb whose scattered bones might even now be lying, washed by centuries of rain, under the rank weeds of these heaps of rubble.
She heard the sound of someone descending the path behind her but, taking for granted that it was her cousin, she did not turn her head. It was only when the steps were quite close that she recognized that they were too heavy to be those of a girl.
Then she leapt to her feet, and swung round,—to find herself confronted by the sturdy figure of Mr. John Goring. She gave a wild cry of panic and fled blindly across the smooth floor of the great quarry. Mr. Goring followed her at his leisure.
The girl’s terror was so great, that, hardly conscious of what she did, she ran desperately towards the remotest corner of the excavation, where some ancient blasting-process had torn a narrow crevice out of the solid rock. This direction of her flight made the farmer’s pursuit of her a fatally easy undertaking,for the great smooth walls closed in, at a sharp angle, at that point, and the crevice, where the two walls met, only sank a few feet into the rock.
Mr. Goring, observing the complete hopelessness of the girl’s mad attempt to escape him, proceeded to advance towards her as calmly and leisurely as if she had been some hare or rabbit he had just shot. The fact that Lacrima had chosen this particular cul-de-sac, on the eastern side of the quarry, was a most felicitous accident for Gladys, for it enabled her to watch the event with as much ease as if she had been a Drusilla or a Livia, seated in the Roman amphitheatre. The fair-haired girl crept to the extreme brink of the steep descent and there, lying prone on the thyme-scented grass, her chin propped upon her hands, she followed with absorbed interest the farmer’s movements as he approached his recalcitrant fiancée.
The terrified girl soon found out the treachery of the panic-instinct which had led her into this trap. Had she remained in the open, it is quite possible that by a little manœuvring she could have escaped; but now her only exit was blocked by her advancing pursuer.
Turning to face him, and leaning back against the massive wall of stone, she stretched out her arms on either side of her, seizing convulsively in her fingers some tufts of knot-grass which grew on the surface of the rock. Here, with panting bosom and pallid cheeks, she awaited his approach. Her tense figure and terror-stricken gaze only needed the imprisoning fetters to have made of her an exact modern image of the unfortunate Andromeda. She neither movednor uttered the least cry, as Mr. Goring drew near her.
At that moment a wild and unearthly shout reverberated through the quarry. The sound of it—caught up by repeated echoes—went rolling away across Leo’s Hill, frightening the sheep and startling the cider-drinkers in the lonely Inn. Gladys leapt to her feet, ran round to where the path descended, and began hastily scrambling down. Mr. Goring retreated hurriedly into the centre of the arena, and with his hand shading his eyes gazed up at the intruder.
It was no light-footed Perseus, who on behalf of this forlorn child of classic shores, appeared as if from the sky. It was, indeed, only the excited figure of James Andersen that Mr. Goring’s gaze, and Lacrima’s bewildered glance, encountered simultaneously. The stone-carver seemed to be possessed by a legion of devils. His first thundering shout was followed by several others, each more terrifying than the last, and Gladys, rushing past the astonished farmer, seized Lacrima by the arm.
“Come!” she cried. “Uncle was a brute to frighten you. But, for heaven’s sake, let’s get out of this, before that madman collects a crowd! They’ll all be down here from the inn in another moment. Quick, dear, quick! Our only chance is to get away now.”
Lacrima permitted her cousin to hurry her across the quarry and up the path. As they neared the summit of the slope the Italian turned and looked back. Mr. Goring was still standing where they had left him, gazing with petrified interest at the wild gestures of the man above him.
Andersen seemed beside himself. He kept frantically waving his arms, and seemed engaged in some incoherent defiance of the invisible Powers of the air. Lacrima, as she looked at him, became convinced that he was out of his mind. She could not even be quite clear if he recognized her. She was certain that it was not against her assailant that his wild cries and defiances were hurled. It did not appear that he was even aware of the presence of the farmer. Whether or not he had seen her and known her when he uttered his first cry, she could not tell. It was certainly against no earthly enemies that the man was struggling now.
Vennie Seldom might have hazarded the superstitious suggestion that his fit was not madness at all but a sudden illumination, vouchsafed to his long silence, of the real conditions of the airy warfare that is being constantly waged around us. At that moment, Vennie might have said, James Andersen was the only perfectly sane person among them, for to his eyes alone, the real nature of that heathen place and its dark hosts was laid manifestly bare. The man, according to this strange view, was wrestling to the death, in his supreme hour, against the Forces that had not only darkened his own days and those of Lacrima, but had made the end of his mother’s life so tragic and miserable.
Gladys dragged Lacrima away as soon as they reached the top of the ascent but the Pariah had time to mark the last desperate gesture of her deliverer before he vanished from her sight over the ridge.
Mr. Goring overtook them before they had gonefar, and walked on with them, talking to Gladys about Andersen’s evident insanity.
“It’s no good my trying to do anything,” he remarked. “But I’ll send Bert round for Luke as soon as I get home. Luke’ll bring him to his senses. They say he’s been taken like this before, and has come round. He hears voices, you know, and fancies things.”
They walked in silence along the high upland road that leads from the principal quarries of the Hill to the Wild Pine hamlet and Nevil’s Gully. When they reached the latter place, the two girls went on, down Root-Thatch Lane, and Mr. Goring took the field-path to the Priory.
Before they separated, the farmer turned to his future bride, who had been careful to keep Gladys between herself and him, and addressed her in the most gentle voice he knew how to assume.
“Don’t be angry with me, lass,” he said. “I was only teasing, just now. ’Twas a poor jest may-be, and ye’ve cause to look glowering. But when we two be man and wife ye’ll find I’m a sight better to live with than many a fair-spoken one. These be queer times, and like enough I seem a queer fellow, but things’ll settle themselves. You take my word for it!”
Lacrima could only murmur a faint assent in reply to these words, but as she entered with Gladys the shadow of the tunnel-like lane, she could not help thinking that her repulsion to this man, dreadful though it was, was nothing in comparison with the fear and loathing with which she regarded Mr. Romer. Contrasted with his sinister relative, Mr.John Goring was, after all, no more than a rough simpleton.
Meanwhile, on Leo’s Hill, an event of tragic significance had occurred. It will be remembered that the last Lacrima had seen of James Andersen was the wild final gesticulation he made,—a sort of mad appeal to the Heavens against the assault of invisible enemies,—before he vanished from sight on the further side of Claudy’s Leap. This vanishing, just at that point, meant no more to Lacrima than that he had probably taken a lower path, but had Gladys or Mr. Goring witnessed it,—or any other person who knew the topography of the place,—a much more startling conclusion would have been inevitable. Nor would such a conclusion have been incorrect.
The unfortunate man, forgetting, in his excitement, the existence of the other quarry, the nameless one; forgetting in fact that Claudy’s Leap was a razor’s edge between two precipices, had stepped heedlessly backwards, after his final appeal to Heaven, and fallen, without a cry, straight into the gulf.
The height of his fall would, in any case, have probably killed him, but as it was “he dashed his head,” in the language of the Bible, “against a stone”; and in less than a second after his last cry, his soul, to use the expression of a more pagan scripture, “was driven, murmuring, into the Shades.”
It fell to the lot, therefore, not of Luke, who did not return from Weymouth till late that evening, but of a motley band of holiday-makers from the hill-top Inn, to discover the madman’s fate. Arriving at the spot almost immediately after the girls’ departure, these honest revellers—strangers to thelocality—had quickly found the explanation of the unearthly cries they had heard.
The eve of the baptism of Mr. Romer’s daughter was celebrated, therefore, by the baptism of the nameless quarry. Henceforth, in the neighbourhood of Nevilton, the place was never known by any other appellation than that of “Jimmy’s Drop”; and by that name any future visitors, curious to observe the site of so singular an occurrence, will have to enquire for it, as they drink their pint of cider in the Half-Moon Tavern.
Luke Andersen’s trip to Weymouth proved most charming and eventful. He had scarcely emerged from the crowded station, with its row of antique omnibuses and its lethargic phalanx of expectant out-porters and bath-chair men,—each one of whom was a crusted epitome of ingrained quaintness,—when he caught sight of Phyllis Santon and Annie Bristow strolling laughingly towards the sea-front. They must have walked to Yeoborough and entered the train there, for he had seen nothing of them at Nevilton Station.
The vivacious Polly, a lively little curly-haired child, of some seventeen summers, was far too happy and thrilled by the adventure of the excursion and the holiday air of the sea-side, to indulge in any jealous fits. She was the first of the two, indeed, to greet the elder girls, both of them quite well known to her, running rapidly after them, in her white stiffly-starched print frock, and hailing them with a shout of joyous recognition.
The girls turned quickly and they all three awaited, in perfect good temper, the stone-carver’s deliberate approach. Never had the spirits of this latter been higher, or his surroundings more congenial to his mood.
Anxious not to lose any single one of the exquisite sounds, sights, smells, and intimations, which camepouring in upon him, as he leisurely drifted out upon the sunny street, he let his little companion run after his two friends as fast as she wished, and watched with serene satisfaction the airy flight of her light figure, with the deep blue patch of sea-line at the end of the street as its welcome background.
The smell of sea-weed, the sound of the waves on the beach, the cries of the fish-mongers, and the coming and going of the whole heterogeneous crowd, filled Luke’s senses with the same familiar thrill of indescribable pleasure as he had known, on such an occasion, from his earliest childhood. The gayly piled fruit heaped up on the open stalls, the little tobacco-shops with their windows full of half-sentimental half-vulgar picture-cards, the weather-worn fronts of the numerous public-houses, the wood-work of whose hospitable doors always seemed to him endowed with a peculiar mellowness of their own,—all these things, as they struck his attentive senses, revived the most deeply-felt stirrings of old associations.
Especially did he love the sun-bathed atmosphere, so languid with holiday ease, which seemed to float in and out of the open lodging-house entrances, where hung those sun-dried sea-weeds and wooden spades and buckets, which ever-fresh installments of bare-legged children carried off and replaced. Luke always maintained that of all mortal odours he loved best the indescribable smell of the hall-way of a sea-side lodging-house, where the very oil-cloth on the floor, and the dead bull-rushes in the corner, seemed impregnated with long seasons of salt-burdened sun-filled air.
The fish-shops, the green-grocer’s shops, the second-hand book-shops, and most of all, those delicious repositories of sea-treasures—foreign importations all glittering with mother-of-pearl, dried sea-horses, sea-sponges, sea-coral, and wonderful little boxes all pasted over with shimmering shells—filled him with a delight as vivid and new as when he had first encountered them in remote infancy.
This first drifting down to the sea’s edge, after emerging from the train, always seemed to Luke the very supremacy of human happiness. The bare legs of the children, little and big, who ran laughing or crying past him and the tangled curls of the elder damsels, tossed so coquettishly back from their sun-burnt faces, the general feeling of irresponsibility in the air, the tang of adventure in it all, of the unexpected, the chance-born, always wrapped him about in an epicurean dream of pleasure.
That monotonous splash of the waves against the pebbles,—how he associated it with endless exquisite flirtations,—flirtations conducted with adorable shamelessness between the blue sky and the blue sea! The memory of these, the vague memory of enchanting forms prone or supine upon the glittering sands, with the passing and re-passing of the same plump bathing-woman,—he had known her since his childhood!—and the same donkeys with their laughing burdens, and the same sweet-sellers with their trays, almost made him cry aloud with delight, as emerging at length upon the Front, and overtaking his friends at the Jubilee Clock-Tower, he saw the curved expanse of the bay lying magically spread out before him. How well he knew it all, and how inexpressibly he loved it!
The tide was on its outward ebb when the four happy companions jumped down, hand in hand, from the esplanade to the shingle. The long dark windrow of broken shells and sea-weed drew a pleasant dividing line between the dry and the wet sand. Luke always associated the stranded star-fish and jelly-fish and bits of scattered drift-wood which that windrow offered, with those other casually tossed-up treasures with which an apparently pagan-minded providence had bestrewn his way!
Once well out upon the sands, and while the girls, with little shrieks and bursts of merriment, were pushing one another into the reach of the tide, Luke turned to survey with a deep sigh of satisfaction, the general appearance of the animated scene.
The incomparable watering-place,—with its charming “after-glow,” as Mr. Hardy so beautifully puts it, “of Georgian gaiety,”—had never looked so fascinating as it looked this August afternoon.
The queer old-fashioned bathing-machines, one of them still actually carrying the Lion and Unicorn upon its pointed roof, glittered in the sunshine with an air of welcoming encouragement. The noble sweep of the houses behind the crescent-shaped esplanade, with the names of their terraces—Brunswick, Regent, Gloucester, Adelaide—so suggestive of the same historic epoch, gleamed with reciprocal hospitality; nor did the tall spire of St. John’s Church, a landmark for miles round, detract from the harmony of the picture.
On Luke’s left, as he turned once more and faced the sea, the vibrating summer air, free at present from any trace of mist, permitted a wide and lovelyview of the distant cliffs enclosing the bay. The great White Horse, traced upon the chalk hills, seemed within an hour’s walk of where he stood, and the majestic promontory of the White Nore drew the eye onward to where, at the end of the visible coast-line, St. Alban’s Head sank into the sea.
On Luke’s right the immediate horizon was blocked by the grassy eminence known to dwellers in Weymouth as “the Nothe”; but beyond this, and beyond the break-water which formed an extension of it, the huge bulk of Portland—Mr. Hardy’s Isle of the Slingers—rose massive and shadowy against the west.
As he gazed with familiar pleasure at this unequalled view, Luke could not help thinking to himself how strangely the pervading charm of scenes of this kind is enhanced by personal and literary association. He recalled the opening chapters of “The Well-Beloved,” that curiously characteristic fantasy-sketch of the great Wessex novelist; and he also recalled those amazing descriptions in Victor Hugo’s “L’Homme qui Rit,” which deal with these same localities.
Shouts of girlish laughter distracted him at last from his exquisite reverie, and flinging himself down on the hot sand he gave himself up to enjoyment. Holding her tight by either hand, the two elder girls, their skirts already drenched with salt-water, were dragging their struggling companion across the foamy sea-verge. The white surf flowed beneath their feet and their screams and laughter rang out across the bay.
Luke called to them that he was going to paddle, and implored them to do the same. He preferredto entice them thus into the deeper water, rather than to anticipate for them a return home with ruined petticoats and wet sand-filled shoes. Seeing him leisurely engaged in removing his boots and socks and turning up his trousers, the three exuberant young people hurried back to his side and proceeded with their own preparations.
Soon, all four of them, laughing and splashing one another with water, were blissfully wading along the shore, interspersing their playful teasing with alternate complimentary and disparaging remarks, relative to the various bathers whose isolation they invaded.
Luke’s spirits rose higher and higher. No youthful Triton, with his attendant Nereids, could have expressed more vividly in his radiant aplomb, the elemental energy of air and sea. His ecstatic delight seemed to reach its culmination as a group of extraordinarily beautiful children came wading towards them, their sunny hair and pearl-bright limbs gleaming against the blue water.
At the supreme moment of this ecstasy, however, came a sudden pang of contrary emotion,—of dark fear and gloomy foreboding. For a sudden passing second, there rose before him,—it was now about half-past four in the afternoon,—the image of his brother, melancholy and taciturn, his heart broken by Lacrima’s trouble. And then, like a full dark tide rolling in upon him, came that ominous reaction, spoken of by the old pagan writers, and regarded by them as the shadow of the jealousy of the Immortal Gods, envious of human pleasure—the reaction to the fare of the Eumenides.
His companions remained as gay and charming as ever. Nothing could have been prettier than to watch the mixture of audacity and coyness with which they twisted their frocks round them, nothing more amusing than to note the differences of character between the three, as they betrayed their naive souls in their childish abandonment to the joy of the hour.
Both Phyllis and Annie were tall and slender and dark. But there the likeness between them ceased. Annie had red pouting lips, the lower one of which protruded a little beyond its fellow, giving her face in repose a quite deceptive look of sullenness and petulance. Her features were irregular and a little heavy, the beauty of her countenance residing in the shadowy coils of dusky hair which surmounted it, and in the velvet softness of her large dark eyes. For all the heaviness of her face, Annie’s expression was one of childlike innocence and purity; and when she flirted or made love, she did so with a clinging affectionateness and serious gravity which had much of the charm of extreme youth.
Phyllis, on the contrary, had softly outlined features of the most delicate regularity, while from her hazel eyes and laughing parted lips perpetual defiant provocations of alluring mischief challenged everyone she approached. Annie was the more loving of the two, Phyllis the more lively and amorous. Both of them made constant fun of their little curly-headed companion, whose direct boyish ways and whimsical speeches kept them in continual peals of merriment.
Tired at last of paddling, they all waded to the shore, and crossing the warm powdery sand, which is one of the chief attractions of the place, they satdown on the edge of the shingle and dried their feet in the sun.
Reassuming their shoes and stockings, and demurely shaking down their skirts, the three girls followed the now rather silent Luke to the little tea-house opposite the Clock-Tower, in an upper room of which, looking out on the sea, were several pleasant window-seats furnished with convenient tables.
The fragrant tea, the daintiness of its accessories, the fresh taste of the bread and butter, not to speak of the inexhaustible spirits of his companions, soon succeeded in dispelling the stone-carver’s momentary depression.
When the meal was over, as their train was not due to leave till nearly seven, and it was now hardly five, Luke decided to convey his little party across the harbour-ferry. They strolled out of the shop into the sunshine, not before the stone-carver had bestowed so lavish a tip upon the little waitress that his companions exchanged glances of feminine dismay.
They took the road through the old town to reach the ferry, following the southern of the two parallel streets that debouch from the Front at the point where stands the old-fashioned equestrian statue of George the Third. Luke nourished in his heart a sentimental tenderness for this simple monarch, vaguely and quite erroneously associating the royal interest in the place with his own dreamy attachment to it.
When they reached the harbour they found it in a stir of excitement owing to the arrival of the passenger-boat from the Channel Islands, one of the red-funneled modern successors to those antiquepaddle-steamers whose first excursions must have been witnessed from his Guernsey refuge by the author of the “Toilers of the Deep.” Side by side with the smartly painted ship, were numerous schooners and brigs, hailing from more northern regions, whose cargoes were being unloaded by a motley crowd of clamorous dock-hands.
Luke and his three companions turned to the left when they reached the water’s edge and strolled along between the warehouses and the wharves until they arrived at the massive bridge which crosses the harbour. Leaning upon the parapet, whose whitish-grey fabric indicated that the dominion of Leo’s Hill gave place here to the noble Portland Stone, they surveyed with absorbed interest the busy scene beneath them.
The dark greenish-colored water swirled rapidly seaward in the increasing ebb of the tide. White-winged sea-gulls kept swooping down to its surface and rising again in swift air-cutting curves, balancing their glittering bodies against the slanting sunlight. Every now and then a boat-load of excursionists would shoot out from beneath the shadow of the wharves and shipping, and cross obliquely the swift-flowing tide to the landing steps on the further shore.
The four friends moved to the northern parapet of the bridge, and the girls gave little cries of delight, to see, at no great distance, where the broad expanse of the back-water began to widen, a group of stately swans, rocking serenely on the shining waves. They remained for some while, trying to attract these birds by flinging into the water bits of broken cake, saved by the economic-minded Annie from the recentrepast. But these offerings only added new spoil to the plunder of the greedy sea-gulls, from whose rapid movements the more aristocratic inland creatures kept haughtily aloof.
Preferring to use the ferry for their crossing rather than the bridge, Luke led his friends back, along the wharves, till they reached the line of slippery steps about which loitered the lethargic owners of the ferry-boats. With engaging alarm, and pretty gasps and murmurs of half-simulated panic, the three young damsels were helped down into one of these rough receptacles, and the bare-necked, affable oarsman proceeded, with ponderous leisureliness, to row them across.
As the heavy oars rattled in their rowlocks, and the swirling tide gurgled about the keels, Luke, seated in the stern, between Annie and Phyllis, felt once more a thrilling sense of his former emotion. With one hand round Phyllis’ waist, and the other caressing Annie’s gloveless fingers, he permitted his gaze to wander first up, then down, the flowing tide.
Far out to sea, he perceived a large war-ship, like a great drowsy sea-monster, lying motionless between sky and wave; and sweeping in, round the little pier’s point, came a light full-sailed skiff, with the water foaming across its bows.
With the same engaging trepidation in his country-bred comrades, they clambered up the landing-steps, the lower ones of which were covered with green sea-weed, and the upper ones worn smooth as marble by long use, and thence emerged upon the little narrow jetty, bordering upon the harbour’s edge.
Here were a row of the most enchanting eighteenth century lodging-houses, interspersed, at incrediblyfrequent spaces, by small antique inns, bearing quaint names drawn from British naval history.
Skirting the grassy slopes of the Nothe, with its old-fashioned fort, they rounded the small promontory and climbed down among the rocks and rock-pools which lay at its feet. It was pretty to observe the various flutterings and agitations, and to hear the shouts of laughter and delight with which the young girls followed Luke over these perilous and romantic obstacles, and finally paused at his side upon a great sun-scorched shell-covered rock, surrounded by foamy water.
The wind was cool in this exposed spot, and holding their hats in their hands the little party gave themselves up to the freedom and freshness of air and sea.
But the wandering interest of high-spirited youth is as restless as the waves. Very soon Phyllis and Polly had drifted away from the others, and were climbing along the base of the cliff above, filling their hands with sea-pinks and sea-lavender, which attracted them by their glaucous foliage.
Left to themselves, Luke removed his shoes and stockings, and dangled his feet over the rock’s edge, while Annie, prone upon her face, the sunshine caressing her white neck and luxuriant hair, stretched her long bare arms into the cool water.
Leaning across the prostrate form of his companion, and gazing down into the deep recesses of the tidal pool which separated the rock they reclined on from the one behind it, the stone-carver was able to make out the ineffably coloured tendrils and soft translucent shapes of several large sea-anemones, submergedbeneath the greenish water. He pointed these out to his companion, who moving round a little, and tucking up her sleeves still higher, endeavoured to reach them with her hand. In this she was defeated, for the deceptive water was much deeper than either of them supposed.
“What are those darling little shells, down there at the bottom, Luke?” she whispered. Luke, with his arm round her neck, and his head close to hers, peered down into the shadowy depths.
“They’re some kind of cowries,” he said at last, “shells that in Africa, I believe, they use as money.”
“I wish they were money here,” murmured the girl, “I’d buy mother one of those silver brushes we saw in the shop.”
“Listen!” cried Luke, and taking a penny from his pocket he let it fall into the water. They both fancied they heard a little metallic sound when it struck the bottom.
Suddenly Annie gave a queer excited laugh, shook herself free from her companion’s arm, and scrambled up on her knees. Luke lay back on the rock and gazed in wonder at her flushed cheeks and flashing eyes.
“What’s the matter, child?” he enquired.
She fumbled at her bosom, and Luke noticed for the first time that she was wearing round her neck a little thin metal chain. At last with an impatient movement of her fingers she snapped the resisting cord and flung it into the tide. Then she held out to Luke a small golden object, which glittered in the palm of her hand. It was a weather-stained ring, twisted and bent out of all shape.
“It’sherring!” she cried exultantly. “Crazy Bert got it out of that hole, with a bit of bent wire, and Phyllis squirmed it away from him by letting him give her a lift in the wagon. He squeezed her dreadful hard, she do say, and tickled her awful with straws and things, but before evening she had the ring away from him. You can bet I kissed her and thanked her, when I got it! Us two be real friends, as you might call it! Phyllis cried, in the night, dreaming the idiot was pinching her, and she not able to slap ’im back. But I got the ring, and there’t be, Luke, glittering-gold as ever, though ’tis sad bended and battered.”
Luke made a movement to take the object, but the girl closed her fingers tightly upon it and held it high above his head. With her arm thus raised and the glitter of sea and sun upon her form, she resembled some sweetly-carved figure-head on the bows of a ship. The wind fanned her hot cheeks and caressed, with cool touch, her splendid coils of hair. Luke was quite overcome by her beauty, and could only stare at her in dazed amazement, while she repeated, in clear ringing tones, the words of the old country game.