“Higgory, diggory, digg’dMy sow has pigg’d.There’s a good card for thee.There’s a still better than he!There is the best of all three,And there is Niddy-noddee!”—
“Higgory, diggory, digg’dMy sow has pigg’d.There’s a good card for thee.There’s a still better than he!There is the best of all three,And there is Niddy-noddee!”—
“Higgory, diggory, digg’d
My sow has pigg’d.
There’s a good card for thee.
There’s a still better than he!
There is the best of all three,
And there is Niddy-noddee!”—
Witch-Bessie picked up these nine cards, and shuffled them long and fast.
She then handed them to Luke, face-downward, and bade him draw seven out of the nine. These she once more arranged, according to some occult plan, upon the grass, and pondered over them with wrinkled brow.
“’Tis as ’twould be!” she muttered at last. “Cards be wonderful crafty, though toads and efties, to my thinkin’, be better, and a viper’s innards be God’s very truth.”
Making, to Luke’s great disappointment, no further allusion to the result of her investigations, the old woman picked up the cards and went through the whole process again, in honour of Mr. Quincunx.
This time, after bending for several minutes over the solitary’s choice, she became more voluble.
“Thy heart’s wish be thine, dearie,” she said. “But there be thwartings and blastings. Three tears—three kisses—and a terrible journey. Us shan’t have ’ee long wi’ we, in these ’ere parts. Thee be marked and signed, master, by fallin’ stars and flyin’ birds. There’s good sound wood gone to ship’s keel wot’ll carry thee fast and far. Blastings and thwartings! But thy heart’s wish be thine, dearie.”
The humourous nostrils of Mr. Quincunx and the expressive curves of his bearded chin had twitched and quivered as this sorcery began, but the oldwoman’s reference to a “terrible journey” clouded his countenance with blank dismay.
Luke pressed the sybil to be equally communicative with regard to his own fate, but the old woman gathered up her cards, twisted the same faded stalks round the packet, and returned it to the folds of her shawl. Then she struggled up upon her feet.
“Don’t leave us yet, Bessie,” said Luke. “I’ll bring you out something to eat presently.”
Witch-Bessie’s only reply to this hospitable invitation was confounding in its irrelevance. She picked up her draggled skirt with her two hands, displaying her unlaced boots and rumpled stockings, and then, throwing back her wizened head, with its rusty weather-bleached bonnet, and emitting a pallid laugh from her toothless gums, she proceeded to tread a sort of jerky measure, moving her old feet to the tune of a shrill ditty.
“Now we dance looby, looby, looby,Now we dance looby, looby, light;Shake your right hand a little,Shake your left hand a little,And turn you round about.”
“Now we dance looby, looby, looby,Now we dance looby, looby, light;Shake your right hand a little,Shake your left hand a little,And turn you round about.”
“Now we dance looby, looby, looby,
Now we dance looby, looby, light;
Shake your right hand a little,
Shake your left hand a little,
And turn you round about.”
“Ye’ll both see I again, present,” she panted, when this performance was over, “but bide where ’ee be, bide where ’ee be now. Old Bessie’s said her say, and she be due long of Hullaway Cross, come noon.”
As she hobbled off to the neighbouring stile, Luke saw her kiss the tips of her fingers in the direction of the station-master’s house.
“She’s bidding Daddy James good-bye,” he thought. “What a world! ‘Looby, looby, looby!’ A proper Dance of Death for a son of my mother!”
Luke persuaded Mr. Quincunx to stay with him for the station-master’s Sunday dinner, and to stroll with him down to the churchyard in the afternoon to decide, in consultation with the sexton, upon the most suitable spot for his brother’s interment. The stone-carver was resolved that this spot should be removed as far as possible from the grave of their parents, and the impiety of this resolution was justified by the fact that Gideon’s tomb was crowded on both sides by less aggressive sleepers.
They finally selected a remote place under the southern wall, at the point where the long shadow of the tower, in the late afternoon, flung its clear-outlined battlements on the waving grass.
Luke continued to be entirely pleased with Mr. Quincunx’s tact and sympathy. He felt he could not have secured a better companion for this task of selecting the final resting-place of the brother of his soul. “Curse these fools,” he thought, “who rail against this excellent man!” What mattered it, after all, that the fellow hated what the world calls “work,” and loved a peaceful life removed from distraction?
The noble attributes of humour, of imagination, of intelligence,—how much more important they were, and conducive to the general human happiness, thanthe mere power of making money! Compared with the delicious twists and diverting convolutions in Mr. Quincunx’s extraordinary brain, how dull, how insipid, seemed such worldly cleverness!
The death of his brother had had the effect of throwing these things into a new perspective. The Machiavellian astuteness, which, in himself, in Romer, in Mr. Taxater, and in many others, he had, until now, regarded as of supreme value in the conduct of life, seemed to him, as he regretfully bade the recluse farewell and retraced his steps, far less essential, far less important, than this imaginative sensitiveness to the astounding spectacle of the world.
He fancied he discerned in front of him, as he left the churchyard, the well-known figure of his newly affianced Annie, and he made a detour through the lane, to avoid her. He felt at that moment as though nothing in the universe were interesting or important except the sympathetic conversation of the friends of one’s natural choice—persons of that small, that fatally small circle, from which just now the centre seemed to have dropped out!
Girls were a distraction, a pastime, a lure, an intoxication; but a shock like this, casting one back upon life’s essential verities, threw even lust itself into the limbo of irrelevant things. All his recent preoccupation with the love of women seemed to him now, as though, in place of dreaming over the mystery of the great tide of life, hand in hand with initiated comrades, he were called upon to go launching little paper-boats on its surface, full of fretful anxiety as to whether they sank or floated.
Weighed down by the hopeless misery of his loss,he made his way slowly back to the station-master’s house, too absorbed in his grief to speak to anyone.
After tea he became so wretched and lonely, that he decided to walk over to Hullaway on the chance of getting another glimpse of Witch-Bessie. Even the sympathy of the station-master’s wife got on his nerves and the romping of the children fretted and chafed him.
He walked fast, swinging his stick and keeping his eyes on the ground, his heart empty and desolate. He followed the very path by which Gladys and he, some few short weeks before, had returned in the track of their two friends, from the Hullaway stocks.
Arriving at the village green, with its pond, its elms, its raised pavement, and its groups of Sunday loiterers, he turned into the churchyard. As we have noted many times ere now, the appealing silence of these places of the dead had an invincible charm for him. It was perhaps a morbid tendency inherited from his mother, or, on the other hand, it may have been a pure æsthetic whim of his own, that led him, with so magnetic an attraction, towards these oases of mute patience, in the midst of the diurnal activities; but whatever the spell was, Luke had never found more relief in obeying it than he did at this present hour.
He sat down in their favourite corner and looked with interest at the various newly-blown wild-flowers, which a few weeks’ lapse had brought to light. How well he loved the pungent stringy stalks, the grey leaves, the flat sturdy flowers of the “achillea” or “yarrow”! Perhaps, above all the late summer blooms,he preferred these—finding, in their very coarseness of texture and toughness of stem, something that reassured and fortified. They were so bitter in their herbal fragrance, so astringent in the tang of their pungent taste, that they suggested to him the kind of tonic cynicism, the sort of humorous courage and gay disdain, with which it was his constant hope to come at last to accept life.
It pleased him, above all when he found these plants tinged with a delicious pink, as though the juice of raspberries had been squeezed over them, and it was precisely this tint he noticed now in a large clump of them, growing on the sun-warmed grave of a certain Hugh and Constance Foley, former occupants of the old Manor House behind him.
He wondered if this long-buried Hugh—a mysterious and shadowy figure, about whom James and he had often woven fantastic histories—had felt as forlorn as he felt now, when he lost his Constance. Could a Constance, or an Annie, or a Phyllis, ever leave quite the void behind them such as now ached and throbbed within him? Yes, he supposed so. Men planted their heart’s loves in many various soils, and when the hand of fate tugged them away, it mattered little whether it was chalk, or sand, or loam, that clung about the roots!
He looked long and long at the sunlit mounds, over which the tombstones leaned at every conceivable angle and upon which some had actually fallen prostrate. These neglected monuments, and these tall uncut grasses and flowers, had always seemed to him preferable to the trim neatness of an enclosurelike that of Athelston, which resembled the lawn of a gentleman’s house.
James had often disputed with him on this point, arguing, in a spirit of surly contradiction, in favour of the wondrous effect of those red Athelston roses hanging over clear-mown turf. The diverse suggestiveness of graveyards was one of the brothers’ best-loved topics, and innumerable cigarettes had they both consumed, weighing this subject, on this very spot.
Once more the hideous finality of the thing pierced the heart of Luke with a devastating pang. On Wednesday next,—that is, after the lapse of two brief days,—he would bid farewell, for ever and ever and ever, to the human companion with whom he had shared all he cared for in life!
He remembered a little quarrel he once had with James, long ago, in this very place, and how it had been the elder and not the younger who had made the first overtures of reconciliation, and how James had given him an old pair of silver links,—he was wearing them at that moment!—as a kind of peace-offering. He recollected what a happy evening they had spent together after that event, and how they had read “Thus spake Zarathustra” in the old formidable English translation—the mere largeness of the volume answering to the largeness of the philosopher’s thought.
Never again would they two “take on them,” in the sweet Shakespearean phrase, “the mystery of things, as though they were God’s spies.”
Luke set himself to recall, one by one, innumerable little incidents of their life together. He rememberedvarious occasions in which, partly out of pure contrariness, but partly also out of a certain instinctive bias in his blood, he had defended their father against his brother’s attacks. He recalled one strange conversation they had had, under the withy-stumps of Badger’s Bottom, as they returned through the dusk of a November day, from a long walk over the southern hills. It had to do with the appearance of a cloud-swept crescent moon above the Auber woods.
James had maintained that were he a pagan of the extinct polytheistic faith, he would have worshipped the moon, and willingly offered her, night by night,—he used the pious syllables of the great hedonist,—her glittering wax tapers upon the sacred wheaten cake. Luke, on the contrary, had sworn that the sun, and no lesser power, was the god of his idolatry, and he imagined himself in place of his brother’s wax candles, pouring forth, morning by morning, a rich libation of gold wine to that bright lord of life.
This instinctive division of taste between the two, had led, over and over again, to all manner of friendly dissension.
Luke recalled how often he had rallied James upon his habit of drifting into what the younger brother pertinently described as a “translunar mood.” He was “translunar” enough now, at any rate; but now it was in honour of that other “lady of the night,” of that dreadful “double” of his moon-goddess—the dark pomegranate-bearer—that the candles must be lit!
Luke revived in his mind, as he watched the slow-shifting shadows move from grave to grave, all thoseindescribable “little things” of their every-day life together, the loss of which seemed perhaps worst of all. He recalled how on gusty December evenings they would plod homeward from some Saturday afternoon’s excursion to Yeoborough, and how the cheerful firelight from the station-master’s house would greet them as they crossed the railway.
So closely had their thoughts and sensations grown together, that there were many little poignant memories, out of the woven texture of which he found himself quite unable to disentangle the imaginative threads that were due to his brother, from such as were the evocation of his own temperament.
One such concentrated moment, of exquisite memory, he associated with an old farm-house on the edge of the road leading from Hullaway to Rogerstown. This road,—a forlorn enough highway of Roman origin, dividing a level plain of desolate rain-flooded meadows,—was one of their favourite haunts. “Halfway House,” as the farm-dwelling was called, especially appealed to them, because of its romantic and melancholy isolation.
Luke remembered how he had paused with his brother one clear frosty afternoon when the puddles by the road-side were criss-crossed by little broken stars of fresh-formed ice, and had imagined how they would feel if such a place belonged to them by hereditary birthright, what they would feel were they even now returning there, between the tall evergreens at the gate, to spend a long evening over a log fire, with mulled claret on the hob, and cards and books on the table, and a great white Persian cat,—this was James’ interpolation!—purring softly, and rubbingits silky sides against Chinese vases full of rose-leaves.
Strange journeys his mind took, that long unforgettable afternoon,—the first of his life spent without his brother! He saw before him, at one moment, a little desolate wooden pier, broken by waves and weather, somewhere on the Weymouth coast. The indescribable pathos of things outworn and done with, of things abandoned by man and ill-used by nature, had given to this derelict pile of drift-wood a curious prominence in his House of Memory. He remembered the look with which James had regarded it, and how the wind had whistled through it and how they had tried in vain to light their cigarettes under its shelter.
At another moment his mind swung back to the daily routine in their pleasant lodging. He recalled certain spring mornings when they had risen together at dawn and had crept stealthily out, for fear of waking their landlady. He vividly remembered the peculiar smell of moss and primroses with which the air seemed full on one of these occasions.
The place Luke had chosen for summoning up all these ghosts of the past held him with such a spell that he permitted the church-bells to ring and the little congregation to assemble for the evening service without moving or stirring. “Hugh and Constance Foley” he kept repeating to himself, as the priest’s voice, within the sacred building, intoned the prayers. The sentiment of the plaintive hymn with which the service closed,—he hardly moved or stirred for the brief hour of the liturgy’s progress,—brought tears, the first he had shed since his brother’s death,to this wanton faun’s eyes. What is there, he thought, in these wistful tunes, and impossible, too-sweet words, that must needs hit the most cynical of sceptics?
He let the people shuffle out and drift away, and the grey-haired parson and his silk-gowned wife follow them and vanish, and still he did not stir. For some half-an-hour longer he remained in the same position, his chin upon his knees, staring gloomily in front of him. He was still seated so, when, to the eyes of an observer posted on the top of the tower, two persons, the first a woman and the second a man, would have been observed approaching, by a rarely-traversed field-path, the side of the enclosure most remote from Hullaway Green.
The path upon which these figures advanced was interrupted at certain intervals by tall elm-trees, and it would have been clear to our imaginary watcher upon the tower that the second of the two was glad enough of the shelter of these trees, of which it was evident he intended to make use, did the first figure turn and glance backward.
Had such a sentinel been possessed of local knowledge he would have had no difficulty in recognizing the first of these persons as Gladys Romer and the second as Mr. Clavering.
Gladys had, in fact, gone alone to the evening service, on the ground of celebrating the close of her baptismal day. Immediately after the service she had slipped off down the street leading to the railroad, directing her steps towards Hullaway, whither a sure instinct told her Luke had wandered.
She was still in sight, having got no further thanthe entrance to Splash Lane, when Clavering, who had changed his surplice with lightning rapidity, issued forth into the street. In a flash he remarked the direction of her steps, and impelled by an impulse of mad jealousy, began blindly following her.
Not a few heads were inquisitively turned, and not a few whispering comments were exchanged, as first the squire’s daughter, and then the young clergyman, made their way through the street.
As soon as Gladys had crossed the railroad and struck out at a sharp pace up the slope of the meadow Clavering realized that wherever she intended to go it was not to the house in which lay James Andersen. Torn with intolerable jealousy, and anxious, at all risks, to satisfy his mind, one way or the other, as to her relations with Luke, he deliberately decided to follow the girl to whatever hoped-for encounter, or carefully plotted assignation, she was now directing her steps. How true, how exactly true, to his interpretation of Luke’s character, was this astutely arranged meeting, on the very day after his brother’s death!
At the top of the station-field Gladys paused for a moment, and, turning round, contemplated the little dwelling which was now a house of the dead.
Luckily for Mr. Clavering, this movement of hers coincided with his arrival at the thick-set hedge separating the field from the metal track. He waited at the turn-stile until, her abstraction over, she passed into the lane.
All the way to Hullaway Mr. Clavering followed her, hurriedly concealing himself when there seemed the least danger of discovery, and at certain criticalmoments making slight deviations from the direct pursuit.
As she drew near the churchyard the girl showed evident signs of nervousness and apprehension, walking more slowly, and looking about her, and sometimes even pausing as if to take breath and collect her thoughts.
It was fortunate for her pursuer at this final moment of the chase that the row of colossal elms, of which mention has been made, interposed themselves between the two. Clavering was thus able to approach quite close to the girl before she reached her destination, for, making use of these rugged trunks, as an Indian scout might have done, he was almost within touch of her by the time she clambered over the railings.
The savage bite of insane jealousy drove from the poor priest’s head any thought of how grotesque he must have appeared,—could any eyes but those of field-mice and starlings have observed him,—with his shiny black frock-coat and broad-brimmed hat, peeping and spying in the track of this fair young person.
With a countenance convulsed with helpless fury he watched the girl walk slowly and timidly up to Luke’s side, and saw the stone-carver recognize her and rise to greet her. He could not catch their words, though he strained his ears to do so, but their gestures and attitudes were quite distinguishable.
It was, indeed, little wonder that the agitated priest could not overhear what Gladys said, for the extreme nervousness under which she laboured made her first utterances so broken and low that even her interlocutor could scarcely follow them.
She laid a pleading hand on Luke’s arm. “I was unhappy,” she murmured, “I was unhappy, and I wanted to tell you. I’ve been thinking about you all day. I heard of his death quite early in the morning. Luke,—you’re not angry with me any more, are you? I’d have done anything that this shouldn’t have happened!”
Luke looked at her searchingly, but made, at the same time, an impatient movement of his arm, so that the hand she had placed upon his sleeve fell to her side.
“Let’s get away from here, Luke,” she implored; “anywhere,—across the fields,—I told them at home I might go for a walk after church. It’ll be all right. No one will know.”
“Across the fields—eh?” replied the stone-carver. “Well—I don’t mind. What do you say to a walk to Rogerstown? I haven’t been there since I went with James, and there’ll be a moon to get home by.” He looked at her intently, with a certain bitter humour lurking in the curve of his lips.
Under ordinary circumstances it was with the utmost difficulty that Gladys could be persuaded to walk anywhere. Her lethargic nature detested that kind of exercise. He was amazed at the alacrity with which she accepted the offer.
Her eyes quite lit up. “I’d love that, Luke, I’d simply love it!” she cried eagerly. “Let’s start! I’ll walk as fast as you like—and I don’t care how late we are!”
They moved out of the churchyard together, by the gate opening on the green.
Luke was interested, but not in the least touched,by the girl’s chastened and submissive manner. His suggestion about Rogerstown was really more of a sort of test than anything else, to see just how far this clinging passivity of hers would really go.
As they followed the lane leading out of one of the side-alleys of the village towards the Roman Road, the stone-carver could not help indulging in a certain amount of silent psychological analysis in regard to this change of heart in his fair mistress. He seemed to get a vision of the great world-passions, sweeping at random through the universe, and bending the most obstinate wills to their caprice.
On the one hand, he thought, there is that absurd Mr. Clavering,—simple, pure-minded, a veritable monk of God,—driven almost insane with Desire, and on the other, here is Gladys,—naturally as selfish and frivolous a young pagan as one could wish to amuse oneself with,—driven almost insane with self-oblivious love! They were like earthquakes and avalanches, like whirlpools and water-spouts, he thought, these great world-passions! They could overwhelm all the good in one person, and all the evil in another, with the same sublime indifference, and in themselves—remain non-moral, superhuman, elemental!
In the light of this vision, Luke could not resist a hurried mental survey of the various figures in his personal drama. He wondered how far his own love for James could be said to belong to this formidable category. No! He supposed that both he and Mr. Quincunx were too self-possessed, or too epicurean, ever to be thus swept out of their path. His brother was clearly a victim of these erotic Valkyries, so wasNinsy Lintot, and in a lesser degree, he shrewdly surmised, young Philip Wone. He himself, he supposed, was, in these things, amorous and vicious rather than passionate. So he had always imagined Gladys to have been. But Gladys had been as completely swept out of the shallows of her viciousness, by this overpowering obsession, as Mr. Clavering had been swept out of the shallows of his puritanism, by the same power. If that fantastic theory of Vennie Seldom’s about the age-long struggle between the two Hills—between the stone of the one and the wood of the other—had any germ of truth in it, it was clear that these elemental passions belonged to a region of activity remote from either, and as indifferent to both, as the great zodiacal signs were indifferent to the solar planets.
Luke had just arrived at this philosophical, or, if the reader pleases, mystical conclusion, when they emerged upon the Roman Road.
Ascending an abrupt hill, the last eminence between Hullaway and far-distant ranges, they found themselves looking down over an immense melancholy plain, in the centre of which, on the banks of a muddy river, stood the ancient Roman stronghold of Rogerstown, the birth-place, so Luke always loved to remind himself, of the famous monkish scientist Roger Bacon.
The sun had already disappeared, and the dark line of the Mendip Hills on the northern horizon were wrapped in a thick, purple haze.
The plain they looked down upon was cut into two equal segments by the straight white road they were to follow,—if Luke was serious in his intention,—andall along the edges of the road, and spreading in transverse lines across the level fields, were deep, reedy ditches, bordered in places by pollard willows.
The whole plain, subject, in autumn and winter, to devastating floods, was really a sort of inlet or estuary of the great Somersetshire marshes, lying further west, which are collectively known as Sedgemoor.
Gladys could not refrain from giving vent to a slight movement of instinctive reluctance, when she saw how close the night was upon them, and how long the road seemed, but she submissively suppressed any word of protest, when, with a silent touch upon her arm, her companion led her forward, down the shadowy incline.
Their figures were still visible—two dark isolated forms upon the pale roadway—when, hot and panting, Mr. Clavering arrived at the same hill-top. With a sigh of profound relief he recognized that he had not lost his fugitives. The only question was, where were they going, and for what purpose? He remained for several minutes gloomy and watchful at his post of observation.
They were now nearly half a mile across the plain, and their receding figures had already begun to grow indistinct in the twilight, when Mr. Clavering saw them suddenly leave the road and debouch to the left. “Ah!” he muttered to himself, “They’re going home by Hullaway Chase!”
This Hullaway Chase was a rough tract of pasturage a little to the east of the level flats, and raised slightly above them. From its southern extremity along narrow lane, skirting the outlying cottages of the village, led straight across the intervening uplands to Nevilton Park. It was clearly towards this lane, by a not much frequented foot-path over the ditches, that Gladys and Luke were proceeding.
To anyone as well acquainted as Clavering was with the general outline of the country the route that the lovers—or whatever their curious relation justifies us in calling them—must needs take, to return to Nevilton, was now as clearly marked as if it were indicated on a map.
“Curse him!” muttered the priest, “I hope he’s not going to drown her in those brooks!”
He let his gaze wander across the level expanse at his feet. How could he get close to them, he wondered, so as to catch even a stray sentence or two of what they were saying.
His passion had reached such a point of insanity that he longed to be transformed into one of those dark-winged rooks that now in a thin melancholy line were flying over their heads, so that he might swoop down above them and follow them—follow them—every step of the way! He was like a man drawn to the edge of a precipice and magnetized by the very danger of the abyss. To be near them, to listen to what they said,—the craving for that possessed him with a fixed and obstinate hunger!
Suddenly he shook his cane in the air and almost leaped for joy. He remembered the existence, at the spot where the lane they were seeking began, of a large dilapidated barn, used, by the yeoman-farmer to whom the Chase belonged, as a rough store-house for cattle-food. The spot was so attractive a resting-placefor persons tired with walking, that it seemed as though it would be a strange chance indeed if the two wanderers did not take advantage of it. The point was, could he forestall them and arrive there first?
He surveyed the landscape around him with an anxious eye. It seemed as though by following the ridge of the hill upon which he stood, and crossing every obstacle that intervened, he ought to be able to do so—and to do so without losing sight of the two companions, as they unsuspiciously threaded their way over the flats.
Having made his resolution, he lost no time in putting it into action. He clambered without difficulty into the meadow on his right, and breaking, in his excitement, into a run, he forced his way through three successive bramble-hedges, and as many dew-drenched turnip-fields, without the least regard to the effect of this procedure upon his Sunday attire.
Every now and then, as the contours of the ground served, he caught a glimpse of the figures in the valley below, and the sight hastened the impetuosity of his speed. Once he felt sure he observed them pause and exchange an embrace, but this may have been an illusive mirage created by the mad fumes of the tempestuous jealousy which kept mounting higher and higher into his head. Recklessly and blindly he rushed on, performing feats of agility and endurance, such as in normal hours would have been utterly impossible.
From the moment he decided upon this desperate undertaking, to the moment, when, hot, breathless,and dishevelled, he reached his destination, only a brief quarter of an hour had elapsed.
He entered the barn leaving the door wide-open behind him. In its interior tightly packed bundles of dark-coloured hay rose up almost to the roof. The floor was littered with straw and newly-cut clover.
On one side of the barn, beneath the piled-up hay, was a large shelving heap of threshed oats. Here, obviously, was the sort of place, if the lovers paused at this spot at all, where they would be tempted to recline.
Directly opposite these oats, in the portion of the shed that was most in shadow, Clavering observed a narrow slit between the hay-bundles. He approached this aperture and tried to wedge himself into it. The protruding stalks of the hay pricked his hands and face, and the dust choked him.
With angry coughs and splutters, and with sundry savage expletives by no means suitable to a priest of the church, he at length succeeded in firmly imbedding himself in this impenetrable retreat. He worked himself so far into the shadow, that not the most cautious eye could have discerned his presence. His sole danger lay in the fact that the dust might very easily give him an irresistible fit of sneezing. With the cessation of his violent struggles, however, this danger seemed to diminish; for the dust subsided as quickly as it had been raised, and otherwise, as he leant luxuriously back upon his warm-scented support, his position was by no means uncomfortable.
Meanwhile Luke and Gladys were slowly and deliberately crossing the darkening water-meadows.
Gladys, whose geographical knowledge of the district was limited to the immediate vicinity of herhome had not the remotest guess as to where she was being led. For all she knew Luke might have gone crazy, like his brother, and be now intending to plunge both himself and her into the depths of some lonely pool or weir. Nevertheless, she continued passively and meekly following him, walking, when the path along the dyke’s edge narrowed, at some few paces behind him, with that peculiar air of being a led animal, which one often observes in the partners of tramps, as they plod the roads in the wake of their masters.
The expanse they traversed in this manner was possessed of a peculiar character of its own, a character which that especial hour of twilight seemed to draw forth and emphasize. It differed from similar tracts of marsh-land, such as may be found by the sea’s edge, in being devoid of any romantic horizon to afford a spiritual escape from the gloom it diffused.
It was melancholy. It was repellant. It was sinister. It lacked the element of poetic expansiveness. It gave the impression of holding grimly to some dark obscene secret, which no visitation of sun or moon would ever cajole it into divulging.
It depressed without overwhelming. It saddened without inspiring. With its reeds, its mud, its willows, its livid phosphorescent ditches, it produced uneasiness rather than awe, and disquietude rather than solemnity.
Bounded by rolling hills on all sides save one, it gave the persons who moved across it the sensation of being enclosed in some vast natural arena.
Gladys wished she had brought her cloak with her, as the filmy white mists rose like ghosts out ofthe stagnant ditches, and with clammy persistence invaded her unprotected form.
It was one of those places that seem to suggest the transaction of no stirring or heroic deeds, but of gloomy, wretched, chance-driven occurrences. A betrayed army might have surrendered there.
Luke seemed to give himself up with grim reciprocity to the influences of the spot. He appeared totally oblivious of his meek companion, and except to offer her languid, absent-minded assistance across various gates and dams, he remained as completely wrapped in reserve as were the taciturn levels over which they passed.
It was with an incredible sense of relief that Gladys found herself in the drier, more wholesome, atmosphere of Hullaway Chase. Here, as they walked briskly side by side over the thyme-scented turf, it seemed that the accumulated heat of the day, which, from the damp marsh-land only drew forth miasmic vapours, flung into the fragrant air delicious waftings of warm earth-breath. With still greater relief, and even with a little cry of joy, she caught sight of the friendly open door of the capacious barn, and the shadowy inviting heap of loose-flung oats lying beneath its wall of hay.
“Oh, we must go in here!” she cried, “what an adorable place!”
They entered, and the girl threw upon Luke one of her slow, long, amorous glances. “Kiss me!” she said, holding up her mouth to him beseechingly.
The faint light of the dying day fell with a pale glimmer upon her soft throat and rounded chin. Luke found himself disinclined to resist her.
There were tears on the girl’s cheek when, loosening her hold upon his neck, she sank down on the idyllic couch offered them, and closed her eyes in childish contentment.
Luke hung over her thoughtfully and sadly. There is always something sad,—something that seems to bring with it a withering breath from the ultimate futility of the universe,—about a lover’s recognition that the form which formerly thrilled him with ecstasy, now leaves him cold and unmoved. Such sadness, chilly and desolate as the hand of death itself, crept over the stone-carver’s heart, as he looked at the gently-stirring breast and softly-parted lips of his beautiful mistress. He bent down and kissed her forehead, caressing her passively yielded fingers.
She opened her eyes and smiled at him, the lingering smile of a soothed and happy infant.
They remained thus, silent and at rest, for several moments. It was not long, however, before the subtle instinct of an enamoured woman made the girl aware that her friend’s responsiveness had been but a momentary impulse. She started up, her eyes wide-open and her lips trembling.
“Luke!” she murmured, “Luke, darling,—” Her voice broke, in a curious little sob.
Luke gazed at her blankly, thankful that the weight of weary foreknowledge upon his face was concealed from her by the growing darkness.
“I want to say to you, my dear love,” the girl went on, her bosom rising and falling in pitiful embarrassment, and her white fingers nervously scooping up handful after handful of the shadowy grain.
“I want to say to you something that is—that is very serious—for us both, Luke,—I want to tell you,——”
Her voice once more died away, in the same inarticulate and curious gurgle, like the sob of water running under a weir.
Luke rose to his feet and stood in front of her. “It’s all right,” he said calmly. “You needn’t agitate yourself. I understand.”
The girl covered her face with her hands. “But what shall I do? What shall I do?” she sobbed. “I can’t marry Ralph like this. He’ll kill me when he finds out. I’m so afraid of him, Luke—you don’t know,—you don’t know,—”
“He’ll forgive you,” answered the stone-carver quietly. “He’s not a person to burst out like that. Lots of people have to confess these little things after they’re married. Some men aren’t half so particular as you girls think.”
Gladys raised her head and gave her friend a long queer look, the full import of which was concealed from him in the darkness. She made a futile little groping movement with her hand.
“Luke,” she whispered, “I must just say this to you even if it makes you angry. I shouldn’t be happy afterwards—whatever happens—if I didn’t say it. I want you to know that I’m ready, if you wish, if—if you love me enough for that, Luke,—to go away with you anywhere! I feel it isn’t as it used to be. I feel everything’s different. But I want you to know,—to know without any mistake—that I’d go at once—willingly—wherever you took me!
“It’s not that I’m begging you to marry me,” she wailed, “it’s only that I love you, love you and want you so frightfully, my darling!
“I wouldn’t worry you, Luke,” she added, in a low, pitiful little voice, that seemed to emerge rather from the general shadowiness of the place than from a human being’s lips, “I wouldn’t tease you, or scold you when you enjoyed yourself! It’s only that I want to be with you, that I want to be near you. I never thought it would come to this. I thought—” Her voice died away again into the darkness.
Luke began pacing up and down the floor of the barn.
Once more she spoke. “I’d be faithful to you, Luke, married or unmarried,—and I’d work, though I know you won’t believe that. But I can do quite hard work, when I like!”
By some malignity of chance, or perhaps by a natural reaction from her pleading words, Luke’s mind reverted to her tone and temper on that June morning when she insulted him by a present of money.
“No, Gladys,” he said. “It won’t do. You and I weren’t made for each other. There are certain things—many things—in me that you’ll never understand, and I daresay there are things in you that I never shall. We’re not made for one another, child, I tell you. We shouldn’t be happy for a week. I know myself, and I know you, and I’m sure it wouldn’t do.
“Don’t you fret yourself about Dangelis. If he finds out, he finds out—and that’s the end of it. But I swear to you that I knowhimwell enough to know that you’ve nothing to be afraid of—even if he does find out. He’s not the kind of man to makea fuss. I can see exactly the way he’d take it. He’d be sorry for you and laugh at himself, and plunge desperately into his painting.
“I like Dangelis, I tell you frankly. I think he’s a thoroughly generous and large-minded fellow. Of course I’ve hardly seen him to speak to, but you can’t be mistaken about a man like that. At least I can’t! I seem to know him in and out, up hill and down dale.
“Make a fuss? Not he! He’ll make this country ring and ting with the fame of his pictures. That’s what he’ll do! And as for being horrid to you—not he! I know him better than that. He’ll be too much in love with you, too,—you little demon! That’s another point to bear in mind.
“Oh, you’ll have the whip-hand of him, never fear,—and our son,—I hope itisa son my dear!—will be treated as if it were his own.
“I know him, I tell you! He’s a thoroughly decent fellow, though a bit of a fool, no doubt. But we’re all that!
“Don’t you be a little goose, Gladys, and get fussed up and worried over nothing. After all, what does it matter? Life’s such a mad affair anyway! All we can do is to map things to the best of our ability, and then chance it.
“We’re all on the verge of a precipice. Do you think I don’t realize that? But that’s no reason why we should rush blindly up to the thing, and throw ourselves over. And it would be nothing else than that, nothing else than sheer madness, for you and I to go off together.
“Do you think your father would give us a penny?Not he! I detect in your father, Gladys, an extraordinary vein of obstinacy. You haven’t clashed up against it yet, but try and play any of these games on him, and you’ll see!
“No; one thing you may be perfectly sure of, and that is, that whatever he finds out, Dangelis will never breathe a word to your father. He’s madly in love with you, girl, I tell you; and if I’m out of the way, you’ll be able to do just what you like with him!”
It was completely dark now, and when Luke’s oration came to an end there was no sound in the barn except a low sobbing.
“Come on, child; we must be getting home, or you’ll be frightfully late. Here! give me your hand. Where are you?”
He groped about in the darkness until his sleeve brushed against her shoulder. It was trembling under her efforts to suppress her sobs.
He got hold of her wrists and pulled her to her feet. “Come on, my dear,” he repeated, “we must get out of this now. Give me one nice kiss before we go.”
She permitted herself to be caressed—passive and unresisting in his arms.
In the darkness they touched the outer edge of Mr. Clavering’s hiding-place, and the girl, swaying a little backwards under Luke’s endearments, felt the pressure of the hay-wall behind her. She did not, however, feel the impassioned touch of the choking kiss which the poor imprisoned priest desperately imprinted on a loose tress of her hair.
It was one of those pitiful and grotesque situationswhich seem sometimes to arise,—as our fantastic planet turns on its orbit,—for no other purpose than that of gratifying some malign vein of goblin-like irony in the system of things.
That at the moment when Luke, under the spell of the shadowy fragrance of the place, and the pliant submissiveness of the girl’s form, threw something of his old ardour into his kiss, her other, more desperate love should have dared such an approach, was a coincidence apparently of the very kind to appeal to the perverse taste of this planetary humour.
The actual result of such a strange consentaneousness of rival emotion was that the three human heads remained for a brief dramatic moment in close juxtaposition,—the two fair ones and the dark one so near one another, that it might have seemed almost inevitable that their thoughts should interact in that fatal proximity.
The pitiful pathos of the whole human comedy might well have been brought home to any curious observer able to pierce that twilight! Such an observer would have felt towards those three poor obsessed craniums the same sort of tenderness that they themselves would have been conscious of, had they suddenly come across a sleeping person or a dead body.
Strange, that the ultimate pity in these things,—in this blind antagonistic striving of human desires under such gracious flesh and blood—should only arouse these tolerant emotions when they are no longer of any avail! Had some impossible bolt from heaven stricken these three impassioned ones in their tragic approximation, how,—long afterwards,—the discovererof the three skeletons would have moralized upon their fate! As it was, there was nothing but the irony of the gods to read what the irony of the gods was writing upon that moment’s drowning sands.
When Luke and Gladys left the barn, and hurriedly, under the rising moon, retook their way towards Nevilton, Clavering emerged from his concealment dazed and stupefied. He threw himself down in the darkness on the heap of oats and strove to give form and coherence to the wild flood of thoughts which swept through him.
So this was what he had come out to learn! This was the knowledge that his mad jealousy had driven him to snatch!
He thought of the exquisite sacredness—for him—of that morning’s ritual in the church, and of how easily he had persuaded himself to read into the girl’s preoccupied look something more than natural sadness over Andersen’s death. He had indeed,—only those short hours ago,—allowed himself the sweet illusion that this religious initiation really meant, for his pagan love, some kind of Vita Nuova.
The fates had rattled their dice, however, to a different tune. The unfortunate girl was indeed entering upon a Vita Nuova, but how hideously different a one from that which had been his hope!
On Wednesday came the confirmation service. How could he,—with any respect for his conscience as a guardian of these sacred rites,—permit Gladys to be confirmed now? Yet what ought he to do? Drops of cold sweat stood upon his forehead as hewondered whether it was incumbent upon him to take the first train the following morning for the bishop’s palace and to demand an interview.
No. Tomorrow the prelate would be starting on his episcopal tour. Clavering would have to pursue him from one remote country village to another, and what a pursuit that would be! He recoiled from the idea with sick aversion.
Could he then suppress his fatal knowledge and let the event take place without protest? To act in such a manner would be nothing less than to play the part of an accomplice in the girl’s sin.
Perhaps when the bishop actually appeared he would be able to secure a confidential interview with him and lay the whole matter before him. Or should he act on his own responsibility, and write to Gladys himself, telling her that under the circumstances it would be best for her to stay away from the ceremony?
What reason could he give for such an extraordinary mandate? Could he bluntly indicate to her, in black and white, the secret he had discovered, and the manner of its discovery? To accuse her on the ground of mere village gossip would be to lay himself open to shameful humiliation. Was he, in any case, justified in putting the fatal information, gathered in this way, to so drastic a use? It was only in his madness as a jealous lover that he had possessed himself of this knowledge. As priest of Nevilton he knew nothing.
He had no right to know anything. No; he must pay the penalty of his shameful insanity by bearing this burden in silence, even though his consciencegroaned and cracked beneath the weight. Such a silence, with its attendant misery of self-accusation and shame, was all he could offer to his treacherous enchantress as a tacit recompense for having stolen her secret.
He rose and left the granary. As he walked homeward, along the Nevilton road, avoiding by a sort of scrupulous reaction the shorter route followed by the others, it seemed to him as though the night had never been more sultry, or the way more loaded with the presence of impendent calamity.
The day of James Andersen’s funeral and of Gladys’ confirmation happened to coincide with a remarkable and unexpected event in the life of Mr. Quincunx. Whatever powers, lurking in air or earth, were attempting at that moment to influence the fatal stream of events in Nevilton, must have been grimly conscious of something preordained and inevitable about this eccentric man’s drift towards appalling moral disaster.
It seemed as though nothing on earth now could stop the marriage of Lacrima and Goring, and from the point of view of the moralist, or even of the person of normal decency, such a marriage, if it really did lead to Mr. Quincunx’s pensioning at the hands of his enemy, necessarily held over him a shame and a disgrace proportionate to the outrage done to the girl who loved him. What these evil powers played upon, if evil powers they were,—and not the blind laws of cause and effect,—was the essential character of Mr. Quincunx, which nothing in heaven nor earth seemed able to change.
There are often, however, elements in our fate, which lie, it might seem, deeper than any calculable prediction, deeper, it may be, than the influence of the most powerful supernatural agents, and these elements—unstirred by angel or devil—are sometimesroused to activity by the least expected cause. It is, at these moments, as though Fate, in the incalculable comprehensiveness of her immense designs, condescended to make use of Chance, her elfish sister, to carry out what the natural and normal stream of things would seem to have decreed as an impossibility.
Probably not a living soul who knew him,—certainly not Lacrima,—had the least expectation of any chance of change in Mr. Quincunx. But then none of these persons had really sounded the depths in the soul of the man. There were certain mysterious and unfathomable gulfs in the sea-floor of Mr. Quincunx’s being which would have exhausted all the sorceries of Witch-Bessie even to locate.
So fantastic and surprising are the ways of destiny, that,—as shall be presently seen,—what neither gods nor devils, nor men nor angels, could effect, was effected by nothing more nor less than a travelling circus.
The day of the burying of James and the confirmation of Gladys brought into Nevilton a curious cortège of popular entertainers. This cortège consisted of one of those small wandering circuses, which, during the month of August are wont to leave the towns and move leisurely among the remoter country villages, staying nowhere more than a night, and taking advantage of any local festival or club-meeting to enhance their popularity.
The circus in question,—flamingly entitled Porter’s Universal World-Show,—was owned and conducted by a certain Job Love, a shrewd and avaricious ruffian, who boasted, though with little justification,the inheritance of gipsy blood. As a matter of fact, the authentic gipsy tribes gave Mr. Love an extremely wide berth, avoiding his path as they would have avoided the path of the police. This cautious attitude was not confined, however, to gipsies. Every species of itinerant hawker and pedler avoided the path of Mr. Love, and the few toy-booths and sweet-stalls that followed his noisy roundabouts were a department of his own providing.
It was late on Tuesday night when the World-Show established itself in Nevilton Square. The sound of hammers and the barking of dogs was the last thing that the villagers heard before they slept, and the first thing they heard when they awoke.
The master of the World-Show spent the night according to his custom in solitary regal grandeur in the largest of his caravans. The sun had not, however, pierced the white mists in the Nevilton orchards before Mr. Love was up and abroad. The first thing he did, on descending the steps of his caravan, was to wash his hands and face in the basin of the stone fountain. His next proceeding was to measure out into a little metal cup which he produced from his pocket a small quantity of brandy and to pour this refreshment, diluted with water from the fountain, down his capacious throat.
Mr. Love was a lean man, of furtive and irascible appearance. His countenance, bleached by exposure into a species of motley-coloured leather, shone after its immersion in the fountain like the knob of a well-worn cudgel. His whitish hair, cut in convict style close to his head, emphasized the polished mahogany of his visage, from the upper portion of which hissky-blue eyes, small and glittering, shone out defiantly upon the world, like ominous jewels set in the forehead of an obscene and smoke-darkened idol.
Having replaced his cup and flask in his pocket, the master of the World-Show looked anxiously at the omens of the weather, snuffing the morning breeze with the air of one not lightly to be fooled either by rain or shine. Returning to the still silent circus, he knocked sharply with his knuckles at the door of the smallest of the three caravans.
“Flick!” he shouted, “let me in! Flick! Old Flick! Darn ’ee, man, for a blighting sand-louse! Open the door, God curse you! Old Flick! Old Flick! Old Flick!”
Thus assaulted, the door of the caravan was opened from within, and Mr. Love pushed his way into the interior. A strange enough sight met him when once inside.
The individual apostrophized as “Old Flick” closed and bolted the door with extraordinary precaution, as soon as his master had entered, and then turned and hovered nervously before him, while Mr. Love sank down on the only chair in the place. The caravan was bare of all furniture except a rough cooking-stove and a three-legged deal table. But it was at neither of these objects that Job Love stared, as he tilted back his chair and waved impatiently aside the deprecatory old man.
Stretched on a ragged horse-blanket upon the floor lay a sleeping child. Clothed in little else than a linen bodice and a short flannel petticoat, she turned restlessly in her slumber under Mr. Love’s scrutiny, and crossing one bare leg over the other, flung outa long white arm, while her dark curls, disturbed by her movement, fell over her face and hid it from view.
“Ah!” remarked Mr. Love. “Quieter now, I see. She must dance today, Flick, and no mistake about it! You must take her out in the fields this morning, like you did that other one. I can’t have no more rampaging and such-like, in my decent circus. But she must dance, there’s no getting over that,—she must dance, Old Flick! ’Twas your own blighting notion to take her on, remember; and I can’t have no do-nothing foreigners hanging around, specially now August be come.
“What did she say her nonsense-name was? Lores,—Dolores? Whoever heard tell of such a name as that?”
The sound of his voice seemed to reach the child even in her sleep; for flinging her arms over her head, and turning on her back, she uttered a low indistinguishable murmur. Her eyes, however, remained closed, the dark curves of her long eye-lashes contrasting with the scarlet of her mouth and the ivory pallor of her skin.
Even Job Love—though not precisely an æsthete—was struck by the girl’s beauty.
“She’ll make a fine dancer, Flick, a fine dancer! How old dost think she be? ’Bout twelve, or may-be more, I reckon.
“’Tis pity she won’t speak no Christian word. ’Tis wonderful, how these foreign childer do hold so obstinate by their darned fancy-tongue!
“We must trim her out in them spangle-gauzes of Skipsy Jane.Shewere the sort of girl to make theboys holler. But this one’ll do well enough, I reckon, if so be she goes smilin’ and chaffin’ upon the boards.
“But no more of that devil’s foolery, Flick? Dost hear, man? Take her out into the fields;—take her out into the fields! She must dance and she must smile, all in Skipsy Jane’s spangles, come noon this day. She must do so, Flick—or I ain’t Jobie Love!”
The old man paused in his vague moth-like hovering, and surveyed the outstretched figure. His own appearance was curious enough to excite a thrill of intense curiosity, had any less callous eye but that of his master been cast upon him.
He produced the effect not so much of a living person, animated by natural impulses, as of a dead body possessed by some sort of wandering spirit which made use of him for its own purposes.
If by chance this spirit were to desert him, one felt that what would be left of Old Flick would be nothing but the mask of a man,—a husk, a shard, a withered stalk, a wisp of dried-up grass! The old creature was as thin as a lathe; and his cavernous, colourless eyes and drooping jaw looked, in that indistinct light, as vague and shadowy as though they belonged to some phantasmal mirage of mist and rain drifted in from the sleeping fields.
“How did ’ee ever get Mother Sterner to let ’ee have so dainty a bit of goods?” went on Mr. Love, continuing his survey of their unconscious captive. “The old woman must have been blind-scared of the police or summat, so as to want to be free of the maid. ’Tisn’t every day you can pick up a lass so cut out for the boards as she be.”
At intervals during his master’s discourse theparchment-like visage of the old man twisted and contorted itself, as if with the difficulty of finding words.
When Job Love at last became silent, the words issued from him as if they had been rustling eddies of chaff, blown through dried stalks.
“I’ve tried her with one thing, Mister, and I’ve tried her with another,—but ’tis no use; she do cry and cry, and there’s no handling her. I guess I must take her into them fields, as you do say. ’Tis because of folks hearing that she do carry on so.”
Job Love frowned and scratched his forehead.
“Damn her,” he cried, “for a limpsy cat! Well—Old Flick—ye picked her up and ye must start her off. This show don’t begin till nigh along noon,—so if ye thinks ye can bring her to reason, some ways or t’other ways, off with ’ee, my man! Get her a bite of breakfast first,—and good luck to ’ee! Only don’t let’s have no fuss, and don’t let’s have no onlookers. I’m not the man to stand for any law-breaking. This show’s a decent show, and Job Love’s a decent man. If the wench makes trouble, ye must take her back where she did come from. Mother Sterner’ll have to slide down. I can’t have no quarrels with King and Country, over a limpsy maid like she!”
Uttering these words in a tone of formidable finality, Mr. Love moved to the entrance and let himself out.
Their master gone, Old Flick turned waveringly to the figure on the floor. Taking down a faded coat from its peg on the wall, he carefully spread it over the child, tucking it round her body with shakinghands. He then went to the stove in the corner, lit it, and arranged the kettle. From the stove he turned to the three-legged table; and removing from a hanging cupboard a tea-pot, some cups and plates, a loaf of bread and a pat of butter, he set out these objects with meticulous nicety, avoiding the least clatter or sound. This done, he sat down upon the solitary chair, and waited the boiling of the water with inscrutable passivity.
From outside the caravan came the shuffle of stirring feet and the murmur of subdued and drowsy voices. The camp was beginning to enter upon its labour of preparation.
When he had made tea, Old Flick touched his sleeping captive lightly on the shoulder.
The girl started violently, and sat up, with wide-open eyes. She began talking hurriedly, protesting and imploring; but not a word of her speech was intelligible to Old Flick, for the simple reason that it was Italian,—Italian of the Neapolitan inflexion.
The old man handed her a strong cup of tea, together with a large slice of bread-and-butter, uttering as he did so all manner of soothing and reassuring words. When she had finished her breakfast he brought her water and soap.
“Tidy thee-self up, my pretty,” he said. “We be goin’ out, along into them fields, present.”
Bolting the caravan door on the outside, he shuffled off to the fountain to perform his own ablutions, and to assist his companions in unloading the stage-properties, and setting up the booths and swings. After the lapse of an hour he climbed the caravan-steps and re-entered softly.
He found the girl crouched in a corner, her hands clasped over her knees, and traces of tears upon her cheeks. Before leaving her, the old man had placed shoes and stockings by her side, and these she now wore, together with a dark-coloured skirt and a scarlet gipsy-shawl.
“Come,” he said. “Thee be goin’ wi’ I into the fields. Thee be goin’ to learn a dancin’ trick or two. Show opens along of noon; and Master, he’s goin’ to let ’ee have Skipsy Jane’s spangles.”
How much of this the child understood it is impossible to say; but the old man’s tone was not threatening, and the idea of being taken away—somewhere—anywhere—roused vague hopes in her soul. She pulled the red shawl over her head and let him lead her by the hand.
Down the steps they clambered, and hurriedly threaded their way across the square.
The old man took the road towards Yeoborough, and turned with the girl up Dead Man’s Lane. He was but dimly acquainted with the neighbourhood; but once before, in his wanderings as a pedler, he had encamped in a certain grassy hollow bordering on the Auber Woods, and the memory of the seclusion of this spot drew him now.
As they passed Mr. Quincunx’s garden they encountered the solitary himself, who, in his sympathy with Luke Andersen on this particular day, had resolved to pay the young man an early morning visit.
The recluse looked with extreme and startled interest at this singular pair. The child’s beauty struck him with a shock that almost took his breathaway. There was something about the haunting expression of her gaze as she turned it upon him that roused an overpowering flood of tenderness and pity in untouched abysses of his being.
There must have been some instantaneous reciprocity in the eccentric man’s grey eyes, for the young girl turned back after they had passed, and throwing the shawl away from her head, fixed upon him what seemed a deliberate and beseeching look of appeal.
Mr. Quincunx was so completely carried out of his normal self by this imploring look that he went so far as to answer its inarticulate prayer by a wave of his hand, and by a sign that indicated,—whether she understood it or not,—that he intended to render her assistance.
In his relations with Lacrima Mr. Quincunx was always remotely conscious that the girl’s character was stronger than his own, and—Pariah-like—this had the effect of lessening the emotion he felt towards her.
But now—in the look of the little Dolores—there was an appeal from a weakness and helplessness much more desperate than his own,—an appeal to him from the deepest gulfs of human dependence. The glance she had given him burned in his brain like a coal of white fire. It seemed to cry out to him from all the flotsam and jetsam, all the drift and wreckage of everything that had ever been drowned, submerged, and stranded, by the pitilessness of Life, since the foundation of the world.
The child’s look had indeed the same effect upon Mr. Quincunx that the look of his Master had uponthe fear-stricken Apostle, in the hall of Caiaphas the high priest. In one heart-piercing stab it brought to his overpowered consciousness a vision of all the victims of cruelty who had ever cried aloud for help since the generations of men began their tragic journey.
Perhaps to all extremely sensitive natures of Mr. Quincunx’s type, a type of morbidly self-conscious weakness as well as sensitiveness, the electric stir produced by beauty and sex can only reach a culmination when the medium of its appearance approximates to the extreme limit of fragility and helplessness.
Hell itself, so to speak, had to display to him its span-long babes, before he could be aroused to descend and “harrow” it! But once roused in him, this latent spirit of the pitiful Son of Man became formidable, reckless, irresistible. The very absence in him of the usual weight of human solidity and “character” made him the more porous to this divine mood.
Anyone who watched him returning hastily to his cottage from the garden-gate would have been amazed by the change in his countenance. He looked and moved like a man under a blinding illumination. So must the citizen of Tarsus have looked, when he staggered into the streets of Damascus.
He literally ran into his kitchen, snatched up his hat and stick, poured a glass of milk down his throat, put a couple of biscuits into his pocket, and re-issued, ready for his strange pursuit. He hurried up the lane to the first gate that offered itself, and passing into the field continued the chase on the further side of the hedge.
The old man evidently found the hill something of an effort, for it was not long before Mr. Quincunx overtook them.
He passed them by unremarked, and continued his advance along the hedgerow till he reached the summit of the ridge between Wild Pine and Seven Ashes. Here, concealed behind a clump of larches, he awaited their approach. To his surprise, they entered one of the fields on the opposite side of the road, and began walking across it.
Mr. Quincunx watched them. In a corner of the field they were crossing lay a spacious hollow,—once the bed of a pond,—but now quite dry and overgrown with moss and clover.
Old Flick’s instinct led him to this spot, as one well adapted to the purpose he had in mind, both by reason of its absolute seclusion and by reason of its smooth turf-floor.
Mr. Quincunx waited till their two figures vanished into this declivity, and then he himself crossed the field in their track.
Having reached the mossy level of the vanished pond,—a place which seemed as though Nature herself had designed it with a view to his present intention,—Old Flick assumed a less friendly air towards his captive. A psychologist interested in searching out the obscure workings of derelict and submerged souls, would have come to the speedy conclusion as he watched the old man’s cadaverous face that the spirit which at present animated his corpse-like body was one that had little commiseration or compunction in it.
The young Dolores had not, it seemed, to deal atthis moment with an ordinary human scoundrel, but with a faded image of humanity galvanized into life by some conscienceless Larva.
In proportion as this unearthly obsession grew upon Old Flick, his natural countenance grew more and more dilapidated and withered. Innumerable years seemed suddenly added to the burden he already carried. The lines of his face assumed a hideous and Egyptian immobility; only his eyes, as he turned them upon his companion, were no longer colourless.
“Doll,” said he, “now thee must try thee’s steps, or ’twill be the worse for thee!”
The girl only answered by flinging herself down on her knees before him, and pouring forth unintelligible supplications.