“No more o’ this,” cried the old man; “no more o’ this! I’ve got to learn ’ee to dance,—and learn ’ee to dance I will. Ye’ll have to go on them boards come noon, whether ’ee will or no!”
The child only clasped her hands more tightly together, and renewed her pleading.
It would have needed the genius of some supreme painter, and of such a painter in an hour of sheer insanity, to have done justice to the extraordinary expression that crossed the countenance of Old Flick at that moment. The outlines of his face seemed to waver and decompose. None but an artist who had, like the insatiable Leonardo, followed the very dead into their forlorn dissolution, could have indicated the setting of his eyes; and his eyes themselves, madness alone could have depicted.
With a sudden vicious jerk the old man snatched the shawl from the girl’s shoulders, flung it on theground, and seizing her by the wrists pulled her up upon her feet.
“Dance, ye baggage!” he cried hoarsely;—“dance, I tell ’ee!”
It was plain that the luckless waif understood clearly enough now what was required of her, and it was also plain that she recognized that the moment for supplication had gone by. She stepped back a pace or two upon the smooth turf, and slipping off her unlaced shoes,—shoes far too large for her small feet,—she passed the back of her hand quickly across her eyes, shook her hair away from her forehead, and began a slow, pathetic little dance.
“Higher!” cried Old Flick in an excited voice, beating the air with his hand and humming a strange snatch of a tune that might have inspired the dances of Polynesian cannibals. “Higher, I tell ’ee!”
The girl felt compelled to obey; and putting one hand on her hip and lifting up her skirt with the other, she proceeded, shyly and in forlorn silence, to dance an old Neapolitan folk-dance, such as might be witnessed, on any summer evening, by the shores of Amalfi or Sorrento.
It was at this moment that Mr. Quincunx made his appearance against the sky-line above them. He looked for one brief second at the girl’s bare arms, waving curls, and light-swinging body, and then leapt down between them.
All nervousness, all timidity, seemed to have fallen away from him like a snake’s winter-skin under the spring sun. He seized the child’s hand with an air of indescribable gentleness and authority, and made so menacing and threatening a gesture that OldFlick, staggering backwards, nearly fell to the ground.
“Whose child is this?” he demanded sternly, soothing the frightened little dancer with one hand, while with the other he shook his cane in the direction of the gasping and protesting old man.
“Whose child is this? You’ve stolen her, you old rascal! You’re no Italian,—anyone can see that! You’re a damned old tramp, and if you weren’t so old and ugly I’d beat you to death; do you hear?—to death, you villain! Whose child is she? Can’t you speak? Take care; I’m badly tempted to make you taste this,—to makeyouskip and dance a little!
“What do you say? Job Love’s circus? Well,—he’s not an Italian either, is he? So if you haven’t stolen her, he has.”
He turned to the child, stooping over her with infinite tenderness, and folding the shawl of which she had again possessed herself, with hands as gentle as a mother’s, about her shoulders and head.
“Where are your parents, my darling?” he asked, adding with a flash of amazing presence of mind,—“your ‘padre’ and ‘madre’?”
The girl seemed to get the drift of the question, and with a pitiful little smile pointed earthward, and made a sweeping gesture with both her hands, as if to indicate the passing of death’s wings.
“Dead?—both dead, eh?” muttered Mr. Quincunx. “And these rascals who’ve got hold of you are villains and rogues? Damned rogues! Damned villains!”
He paused and muttered to himself. “What the devil’s the Italian for a god-forsaken rascal?—‘Cattivo!’‘Tutto cattivo!’—the whole lot of them a set of confounded scamps!”
The child nodded her head vigorously.
“You see,” he cried, turning to Old Flick, “she disowns you all. This is clearly a most knavish piece of work! What were you doing to the child? eh? eh? eh?” Mr. Quincunx accompanied these final syllables with renewed flourishes of his stick in the air.
Old Flick retreated still further away, his legs shaking under him. “Here,—you can clear out of this! Do you understand? You can clear out of this; and go back to your damned master, and tell him I’m going to send the police after him!
“As for this girl, I’m going to take her home with me. So off you go,—you old reprobate; and thankful you may be that I haven’t broken every bone in your body! I’ve a great mind to do it now. Upon my soul I’ve a great mind to do it!
“Shall I beat him into a jelly for you,—my darling? Shall I make him skip and dance for you?”
The child seemed to understand his gestures, if not his words; for she clung passionately to his hands, and pressing them to her lips, covered them with kisses; shaking her head at the same time, as much as to say, “Old Flick is nothing. Let Old Flick go to the devil, as long as I can stay with you!” In some such manner as this, at any rate, Mr. Quincunx interpreted her words.
“Sheer off, then, you old scoundrel! Shog off back to your confounded circus! And when you’ve got there, tell your friends,—Job Love and his gang,—that if they want this little one they’d better come and fetch her!
“Dead Man’s Lane,—that’s where I live. It’s easily enough found; and so is the police-station in Yeoborough,—as you and your damned kidnappers shall discover before you’ve done with me!”
Uttering these words in a voice so menacing that the old man shook like an aspen-leaf, Mr. Quincunx took the girl by the hand, and, ascending the grassy slope, walked off with her across the field.
Old Flick seemed reduced to a condition bordering upon imbecility. He staggered up out of that unpropitious hollow, and stood stock-still, like one petrified, until they were out of sight. Then, very slowly and mumbling incoherently to himself, he made his way back towards the village.
He did not even turn his head as he passed Mr. Quincunx’s cottage. Indeed, it is extremely doubtful how far he had recognized him as the person they encountered on their way, and still more doubtful how far he had heard or understood, when the tenant of Dead Man’s Lane indicated the place of his abode.
The sudden transformation of the timid recluse into a formidable man of action did not end with his triumphant retirement to his familiar domain. Some mysterious fibre in his complicated temperament had been struck, and continued to be struck, by the little Dolores, which not only rendered him indifferent to personal danger, but willing and happy to encounter it.
The event only added one more proof to the sage dictum of the Chinese philosopher,—that you can never tell of what a man is capable until he is stone-dead.
During the hours when Mr. Quincunx was undergoing this strange experience, several other human brains under the roofs of Nevilton were feeling the pressure of extreme perturbation.
Gladys, after a gloomy breakfast, which was rendered more uncomfortable, not only by her father’s chaffing references to the approaching ceremony, but by a letter from Dangelis, had escaped to her room to be assisted by Lacrima in dressing for the confirmation.
In his letter the artist declared his intention of spending that night at the Gloucester Hotel in Weymouth, and begged his betrothed to forgive this delay in his return to her side.
This communication caused Gladys many tremors of disquietude. Could it be possible that the American had found out something and that he had gone to Weymouth to meditate at leisure upon his course of action?
In any case this intimation of a delay in his return irritated the girl. It struck her in her tenderest spot. It was a direct flouting of her magnetic power. It was an insult to her sex-vanity.
She had seen nothing of Luke since their Sunday’s excursion; and as Lacrima, with cold submissive fingers, helped her to arrange her white dress andvirginal veil, she could hear the sound of the bell tolling for James Andersen’s funeral.
Mingled curiously enough with this melancholy vibration falling at protracted intervals upon the air, like the stroke of some reiterated hammer of doom, came another sound, a sound of a completely opposite character,—the preluding strains, namely, of the steam roundabouts of Porter’s Universal Show.
It was as though on one side of the village the angel of death were striking an iron-threatening gong, while, on the other side, the demons of life were howling a brazen defiance.
The association of the two sounds as they reached her at this critical hour brought the figure of Luke vividly and obsessingly into her mind. How well she knew the sort of comment he would make upon the bizarre combination! Beneath the muslin frills of her virginal dress,—a dress that made her look fairer and younger than usual,—her heart ached with sick longing for her evasive lover.
The wheel had indeed come full circle for the fair-haired girl. She could not help the thought recurring again and again, as Lacrima’s light fingers adjusted her veil, that the next time she dressed in this manner it would be for her wedding-day. Her one profound consolation lay in the knowledge that her cousin, even more deeply than herself, dreaded the approach of that fatal Thursday.
Her hatred for the pale-cheeked Italian re-accumulated every drop of its former venom, as with an air of affectionate gratitude she accepted her assistance.
It is a psychological peculiarity of certain human beings that the more they hate, the more they crave,with a curious perverted instinct, some sort of physical contact with the object of their hatred.
Every touch of Lacrima’s hand increased the intensity of Gladys’ loathing; and yet, so powerful is the instinct to which I refer, she lost no opportunity of accentuating the contact between them, letting their fingers meet again and again, and even their breath, and throwing back her rounded chin to make it easier for those hated wrists to busy themselves about her throat. Her general air was an air of playful passivity; but at one moment, imprinting a kiss on the girl’s arm as, in the process of arranging her veil, it brushed across her cheek, she seemed almost anxious to convey to Lacrima the full implication of her real feeling.
Never has a human caress been so electric with the vibrations of antipathy, as was that kiss. She followed up this signal of animosity by a series of feline taunts relative to John Goring, one of which, from its illuminated insight into the complex strata of the girl’s soul, delighted her by its effect.
Lacrima winced under it, as if under the sting of a lash, and a burning flood of scarlet suffused her cheeks. She dropped her hands and stepped back, uttering a fierce vow that nothing—nothing on earth—would induce her to accompany a girl who could say such things, to such a ceremony!
“No, I wouldn’t,—I wouldn’t!” cried Gladys mockingly. “I wouldn’t dream of coming with me! Tomorrow week, anyway, we’re bound to go to church side by side. Father wanted to drive with me then, you know, and to let mother go with you,—but I wouldn’t hear of it! I said they must go in onecarriage, and you and I in another, so that our last drive together we should be quite by ourselves. You’ll like that, won’t you, darling?”
Lacrima’s only answer to this was to turn her back to her cousin, and begin putting on her hat and gloves.
“I know where you’re going,” said Gladys. “You’re going to see your dear Maurice. Give him my love! I should be ashamed to let such a wretched coward come near me.
“James—poor boy!—was a fellow of a different metal. He’d some spirit in him. Listen! When that bell stops tolling they’ll be carrying him into the church. I expect you’re thinking now, darling, that it would have been better if you’d treated him differently. Of course you know it’s you that killed him? Oh, nobody else! Just little Lacrima and her coy, demure ways!
“I’venever killed a man. I can say that, at all events.
“That’s right! Run off to her dear Maurice,—her dear brave Maurice! Perhaps he’ll take her on his knees again, and she’ll play the sweet little innocent,—like that day when I peeped through the window!”
This final dart had hardly reached its objective before Lacrima without attempting any retort rushed from the room.
“Iwillgo and see Maurice. I will! I will!” she murmured to herself as she ran down the broad oak staircase, and slipped out by the East door.
Simultaneously with these events, a scene of equal dramatic intensity, though of a very different character,was being enacted in the vicarage drawing-room.
Vennie, as we have noted, had resolved to postpone for the present her reception into the Catholic Church. She had also resolved that nothing on earth should induce her to reveal to her mother her change of creed until the thing was an accomplished fact. The worst, however, of the kind of mental suppression in which she had been living of late, is that it tends to produce a volcanic excitement of the nerves, liable at any moment to ungovernable upheavals. Quite little things—mere straws and bagatelles—are enough to set this eruption beginning; and when once it begins, the accumulated passion of the long days of fermentation gives the explosion a horrible force.
One perpetual annoyance to Vennie was her mother’s persistent fondness for family prayers. It seemed to the girl as though Valentia insisted on this performance, not so much out of a desire to serve God, as out of a sense of what was due to herself as the mistress of a well-conducted establishment.
Vennie always fancied she discerned a peculiar tone of self-satisfaction in her mother’s voice, as, rather loudly, and extremely clearly, she read her liturgical selections to the assembled servants.
On this particular morning the girl had avoided the performance of this rite, by leaving her room earlier than usual and taking refuge in the furthest of the vicarage orchards. Backwards and forwards she walked, in that secluded place, with her hands behind her and her head bent, heedless of the drenching dew which covered every grass-blade and of the heavy white mists that still hung about the tree-trunks. She was obliged to return to her room andchange her shoes and stockings before joining her mother at breakfast, but not before she had prayed a desperate prayer, down there among the misty trees, for the eternal rest of James Andersen’s soul.
This little incident of her absence from prayers was the direct cause of the unfortunate scene that followed.
Valentia hardly spoke to her daughter while the meal proceeded, and when at last it was over, she retired to the drawing-room and began writing letters.
This was an extremely ill-omened sign to anyone who knew Mrs. Seldom’s habits. Under normal conditions, her first proceeding after breakfast was to move to the kitchen, where she engaged in a long culinary debate with both cook and gardener; a course of action which was extremely essential, as without it,—so bitter was the feud between these two worthies,—it is unlikely that there would have been any vegetables at all, either for lunch or dinner. When anything occurred to throw her into a mood of especially good spirits, she would pass straight out of the French window on to the front lawn, and armed with a pair of formidable garden-scissors would make a selection of flowers and leaves appropriate to a festival temper.
But this adjournment at so early an hour to the task of letter-writing indicated that Valentia was in a condition of mind, which in anyone but a lady of her distinction and breeding could have been called nothing less than a furious rage. For of all things in the world, Mrs. Seldom most detested this business of writing letters; and therefore,—with that perverse self-punishing instinct, which is one of the most artful weapons of offence given to refinedgentlewomen,—she took grim satisfaction in setting herself down to write; thus producing chaos in the kitchen, where the gardener refused to obey the cook, and miserable remorse in the heart of Vennie, who wandered up and down the lawn meditating a penitential apology.
Satisfied in her heart that she was causing universal annoyance and embarrassment by her proceeding, and yet quite confident that there was nothing but what was proper and natural in her writing letters at nine o’clock in the morning, Valentia began, by gentle degrees, to recover her lost temper.
The only real sedative to thoroughly aggravated nerves, is the infliction of similar aggravation upon the nerves of others. This process is like the laying on of healing ointment; and the more extended the disturbance which we have the good fortune to create, the sooner we ourselves recover our equanimity.
Valentia had already cast several longing glances through the window at the heavy sunshine falling mistily on the asters and petunias, and in another moment she would probably have left her letter and joined her daughter in the garden, had not Vennie anticipated any such movement by entering the room herself.
“I ought to make you understand, mother,” the girl began as soon as she stepped in, speaking in that curious strained voice which people assume when they have worked themselves up to a pitch of nervous excitement, “that when I don’t appear at prayers, it isn’t because I’m in a sulky temper, or in any mad haste to get out of doors. It’s—it’s for a different reason.”
Valentia gazed at her in astonishment. The tone in which Vennie spoke was so tense, her eyes shone with such a strange brilliance, and her look was altogether so abnormal, that Mrs. Seldom completely forgot her injured priestess-vanity, and waited in sheer maternal alarm for the completion of the girl’s announcement.
“It’s because I’ve made up my mind to become a Catholic, and Catholics aren’t allowed to attend any other kind of service than their own.”
Valentia rose to her feet and looked at her daughter in blank dismay. Her first feeling was one of overpowering indignation against Mr. Taxater, to whose treacherous influence she felt certain this madness was mainly due.
There was a terrible pause during which Vennie, leaning against the back of a chair, was conscious that both herself and her mother were trembling from head to foot. The soft murmur of wood-pigeons wafted in from the window, was now blended with two other sounds, the sound of the tolling of the church-bell and the sound of the music of Mr. Love’s circus, testing the efficiency of its roundabouts.
“So this is what it has come to, is it?” said the old lady at last. “And I suppose the next thing you’ll tell me, in this unkind, inconsiderate way, is that you’ve decided to become a nun!”
Vennie made a little movement with her head.
“You have?” cried Valentia, pale with anger.“You have made up your mind to do that? Well—I wouldn’t have believed it of you, Vennie! In spite of everything I’ve done for you; in spite of everything I’ve taught you; in spite of everything I’ve prayed for;—you can go and do this! Oh, you’re an unkind, ungrateful girl! But I know that look on your face. I’ve known it from your childhood. When you look like that there’s no hope of moving you. Go on, then! Do as you wish to do. Leave your mother in her old age, and destroy the last hope of our family. I won’t speak another word. I know nothing I can say will change you.” She sank down upon the chintz-covered sofa and covered her face with her hands.
Vennie cursed herself for her miserable want of tact. What demon was it that had tempted her to break her resolution? Then, suddenly, as she looked at her mother swaying to and fro on the couch, a strange impulse of hard inflexible obstinacy rose up in her.
These wretched human affections,—so unbalanced and selfish,—what a relief to escape from them altogether! Like the passing on its way, across a temperate ocean, of some polar iceberg, there drove, at that moment, through Vennie’s consciousness, a wedge of frozen, adamantine contempt for all these human, too-human clingings and clutchings which would fain imprison the spirit and hold it down with soft-strangling hands.
In her deepest heart she turned almost savagely away from this grey-haired woman, sitting there so hurt in her earthly affections and ambitions. She uttered a fierce mental invocation to that other Mother,—her whose heart, pierced by seven swords, had submitted to God’s will without a groan!
Valentia, who, it must be remembered, had notonly married a Seldom, but was herself one of that breed, felt at that moment as though this girl of hers were reverting to some mad strain of Pre-Elizabethan fanaticism. There was something mediæval about Vennie’s obstinacy, as there was something mediæval about the lines of her face. Valentia recalled a portrait she had once seen of an ancestor of theirs in the days before the Reformation. He, the great Catholic Baron, had possessed the same thin profile and the same pinched lips. It was a curious revenge, the poor lady thought, for those evicted Cistercians, out of whose plundered house the Nevilton mansion had been built, that this fate, of all fates, should befall the last of the Seldoms!
The tolling of the bell, which hitherto had gone on, monotonously and insistently, across the drowsy lawn, suddenly stopped.
Vennie started and ran hurriedly to the door.
“They are burying James Andersen,” she cried, “and I ought to be there. It would look unkind and thoughtless of me not to be there. Good-bye, mother! We’ll talk of this when I come back. I’m sorry to be so unsatisfactory a daughter to you, but perhaps you’ll feel differently some day.”
Left to herself, Valentia Seldom rose and went back to her letter. But the pen fell from her limp fingers, and tears stained the already written page.
The funeral service had only just commenced when Vennie reached the churchyard. She remained at the extreme outer edge of the crowd, where groups of inquisitive women are wont to cluster, wearing their aprons and carrying their babies, and where the bigger children are apt to be noisy and troublesome. Shecaught a glimpse of Ninsy Lintot among those standing quite close to where Mr. Clavering, in his white surplice, was reading the pregnant liturgical words. She noticed that the girl held her hands to her face and that her slender form was shaking with the stress of her emotion.
She could not see Luke’s face, but she was conscious that his motionless figure had lost its upright grace. The young stone-carver seemed to droop, like a sun-flower whose stalk has been bent by the wind.
The words of the familiar English service were borne intermittently to her ears as they fell from the lips of the priest who had once been her friend. It struck her poignantly enough,—that brave human defiance, so solemn and tender, with which humanity seems to rise up in sublime desperation and hoist its standard of hope against hope!
She wondered what the sceptical Luke was feeling all this while. When Mr. Clavering began to read the passage which is prefaced in the Book of Common Prayer by the words, “Then while the earth be cast upon the Body by some standing by, the priest shall say,”—the quiet sobs of poor little Ninsy broke into a wail of passionate grief, grief to which Vennie, for all her convert’s aloofness from Protestant heresy, could not help adding her own tears.
It was the custom at Nevilton for the bearers of the coffin, when the service was over, to re-form in solemn procession, and escort the chief mourners back to the house from which they had come. It was her knowledge of this custom that led Vennie to steal away before the final words were uttered; and her hurried departure from the churchyard saved herfrom being a witness of the somewhat disconcerting event with which the solemn transaction closed.
The bringing of James’ body to the church had been unfortunately delayed at the start by the wayward movements of a luggage-train, which persisted in shunting up and down over the level-crossing, at the moment when they were carrying the coffin from the house. This delay had been followed by others, owing to various unforeseen causes, and by the time the service actually began it was already close upon the hour fixed for the confirmation.
Thus it happened that, soon after Vennie’s departure, at the very moment when the procession of bearers, followed by Luke and the station-master’s wife, issued forth into the street, there drove up to the church-door a two-horsed carriage containing Gladys and her mother, the former all whitely veiled, as if she were a child-bride. Seeing the bearers troop by, the fair-haired candidate for confirmation clutched Mrs. Romer’s arm and held her in her place, but leaning forward in the effort of this movement she presented her face at the carriage window, just as Luke himself emerged from the gates.
The two young people found themselves looking one another straight in the eyes, until with a shuddering spasm that shook her whole frame, Gladys sank back into her seat, as if from the effect of a crushing blow received full upon the breast.
Luke passed on, following the bearers, with something like the ghost of a smile upon his drawn and contorted lips.
It was not towards her mother’s house that Vennie directed her steps when she left the churchyard. She turned sharp to the west, and walked rapidly down the central street of the village into the square at the end of it.
Here she found an arena of busy and stirring confusion, dominated by hissing spouts of steam, hoarse whistlings from the “roundabout” engines, and occasional bursts of extravagant melody, as the circus-men made their musical experiments, pending the opening of the show.
Vennie’s intention, in crossing the square, was to pay a morning visit to Mr. Quincunx, whose absence from Andersen’s funeral had struck her mind as extraordinary and ominous. She feared that the recluse must be ill. Nothing less than illness, she thought, would have kept him away from such an event. She knew how closely he and the younger stone-carver were associated, and it was inconceivable that any insane jealousy of the dead could have held him at home. Of course it was possible that he had been compelled to go to work at Yeoborough as usual, but she did not think this likely.
It was, however, not only anxiety lest her mother’s queer friend should be ill that actuated her. She felt,—now that her ultimatum had been delivered,—thatthe sooner she entered the Catholic Church and plunged into her novitiate, the better it would be. When events hadhappened, Mrs. Seldom accepted them. It was during the days of uncertain waiting that her nerves broke down. Once the daughter were actually a postulant in a convent, she felt sure the mother would resign herself, and resume her normal life.
Valentia was a very independent and self-sufficient woman. With her favourite flowers and her favourite biographies of proconsular personages, the girl felt convinced she would be much less heart-broken than she imagined.
Her days in Nevilton being thus numbered, Vennie could not help giving way to a desire that had lately grown more and more definite within her, to have a bold and unhesitating interview with Mr. Quincunx. Perhaps even at this last hour something might be done to save Lacrima from her fate!
Passing along the outskirts of the circus, she could not resist pausing for a moment to observe the numerous groups of well-known village characters, whom curiosity had drawn to the spot.
She was amazed to catch sight of the redoubtable Mr. Wone, holding one of his younger children by the hand and surveying with extreme interest the setting up of a colossal framework of gilded and painted wood, destined to support certain boat-shaped swings. She felt a little indignant with the worthy man for not having been present at Andersen’s funeral, but the naive and childlike interest with which, with open mouth and eyes, he stood gaping at this glittering erection, soothed her anger into asmile. He really was a good sort of man, this poor Wone! She wondered vaguely whether he intended himself to indulge in the pastime of swinging in a boat-shaped swing or whirling round upon a wooden horse. She felt that if she could see him on one of these roundabouts,—especially if he retained that expression of guileless admiration,—she could really forgive him everything.
She caught a glimpse of two other figures whose interest in the proceedings appeared extremely vivid, no less persons than Mr. John Goring and his devoted henchman, Bert Leerd. These two were engaged in reading a glaring advertisement which depicted a young woman clad in astounding spangles dancing on a tight-rope, and it was difficult to say whether the farmer or the idiot was the more absorbed.
She was just turning away, when she heard herself called by name, and from amid a crowd of women clustering round one of Mr. Love’s bric-a-brac stalls, there came towards her, together, Mrs. Fringe and Mrs. Wotnot.
Vennie was extremely surprised to find these two ladies,—by no means particularly friendly as a rule,—thus joined in partnership of dissipation, but she supposed the influence of a circus, like the influence of religion, has a dissolvent effect upon human animosity. That these excellent women should have preferred the circus, however, to the rival entertainment in the churchyard, did strike her mind as extraordinary. She did not know that they had, as a matter of fact, “eaten their pot of honey” at the one, before proceeding, post-haste, to enjoy the other.
“May we walk with you, miss, a step?” supplicated Mrs. Fringe, as Vennie indicated her intention of moving on, as soon as their salutations were over.
“Thank you, you are very kind, Mrs. Fringe. Perhaps,—a little way, but I’m rather busy this morning.”
“Oh we shan’t trouble you long,” murmured Mrs. Wotnot, “It’s only,—well, Mrs. Fringe, here, had better speak.”
Thus it came about that Vennie began her advance up the Yeoborough road supported by the two housekeepers, the lean one on the left of her, and the fat one on the right of her.
“Will I tell her, or will you tell her?” murmured the plump lady sweetly, when they were clear of the village.
Mrs. Wotnot made a curious grimace and clasped and unclasped her hands.
“Better you; much, much better, that it should be you,” she remarked.
“But ’twas thy tale, dearie; ’twas thy tale and surprisin’ discoverin’s,” protested Mrs. Fringe.
“Those that knows aren’t always those that tells,” observed the other sententiously.
“But you do think it’s proper and right the young lady should know?” said Mr. Clavering’s housekeeper.
Mrs. Wotnot nodded. “If ’taint too shameful for her, ’tis best what she’d a’ ought to hear,” said the lean woman.
Vennie became conscious at this moment that whenever Mrs. Wotnot opened her mouth there issued thence a most unpleasant smell of brandy, andit flashed upon her that this was the explanation of the singular converging of these antipodal orbits. In the absence of her master, Mrs. Wotnot had evidently “taken to drink,” and it was doubtless out of her protracted intoxication that Mrs. Fringe had derived whatever scandalous piece of gossip it was that she was now so anxious to impart.
“I’ll tell ’ee, miss,” said Mrs. Fringe, “with no nonsense-fangles and no shilly-shally. I’ll tell ’ee straight out and sober,—same as our dear friend did tell it to me. ’Tis along of Miss Romer,—ye be to understand, wot is to be confirmed this same blessed day.
“The dear woman, here, was out a-gatherin’ laurel-leaves one fine evenin’, long o’ some weeks since, and who should she get wind of, in the bushes near-by, but Mr. Luke and Miss Gladys. I been my own self ere now, moon-daft on that there lovely young man, but Satan’s ways be Satan’s ways, and none shall report that I takes countenance ofsuchgoings on. Mrs. Wotnot here, she heerd every Jack word them sinful young things did say,—and shameful-awful their words were, God in Heaven do know!
“They were cursin’ one another, like to split, that night. She were cryin’ and fandanderin’ and he were laughin’ and chaffin’. ’Twas God’s terror to hear how they went on, with the holy bare sky over their shameless heads!”
“Tell the young lady quick and plain,” ejaculated Mrs. Wotnot at this point, clutching Vennie’s arm and arresting their advance.
“Iam’a tellin’ her,” retorted Mrs. Fringe, “I’m a tellin’ as fast as my besom can breathe. Don’t ’eepush a body so! The young lady ain’t in such a tantrum-hurry as all that.”
“I amratheranxious to get on with my walk,” threw in Vennie, looking from one to another with some embarrassment, “and I really don’t care very much about hearing things of this kind.”
“Tell ’er! Tell ’er! Tell ’er!” cried Mrs. Wotnot.
Mrs. Fringe cast a contemptuous look at her rival housekeeper.
“Our friend baint quite her own self today, miss,” she remarked with a wink at Vennie, “the weather or summat’ ’ave moved ’er rheumatiz from ’er legs, and settled it in ’er stummick.”
“Tell her! Tell her!” reiterated the other.
Mrs. Fringe lowered her voice to a pregnant whisper.
“The truth be, miss, that our friend here heered these wicked young things talk quite open-like about their gay goings on. So plain did they talk, that all wot the Blessed Lord ’is own self do know, of such as most folks keeps to ’emselves, went burnin’ and shamin’ into our friend’s ’stonished ears. And wot she did gather was that Miss Gladys, for certin’ and sure, be a lost girl, and Mr. Luke ’as ’ad ’is bit of fun down to the uttermost drop.”
The extraordinary solemnity with which Mrs. Fringe uttered these words and the equally extraordinary solemnity with which Mrs. Wotnot nodded her head in corroboration of their truth had a devastating effect upon Vennie. There was no earthly reason why these two females should have invented this squalid story. Mrs. Fringe was an incurable scandal-monger, but Vennie had never found her aliar. Besides there was a genuine note of shocked sincerity about her tone which no mere morbid suspicion could have evoked.
The thing was true then! Gladys and Luke were lovers, in the most extreme sense of that word, and Dangelis was the victim of an outrageous betrayal.
Vennie had sufficient presence of mind to avoid the eyes of both the women, eyes fixed with ghoulish and lickerish interest upon her, as they watched for the effect of this revelation,—but she was uncomfortably conscious that her cheeks were flaming and her voice strained as she bade them good-bye. Comment, of any kind, upon what they had revealed to her she found absolutely impossible. She could only wish them a pleasant time at the circus if they were returning thither, and freedom from any ill effects due to their accompanying her so far.
When she was alone, and beginning to climb the ascent of Dead Man’s Lane, the full implication of what she had learnt thrust itself through her brain like a red-hot wedge. Vennie’s experience of the treacherousness of the world had, as we know, gone little deeper than her reaction from the rough discourtesy of Mr. Clavering and the evasive aloofness of Mr. Taxater. This sudden revelation into the brutishness and squalour inherent in our planetary system had the effect upon her of an access of physical nausea. She felt dizzy and sick, as she toiled up the hill, between the wet sun-pierced hedges, and under the heavy September trees.
The feeling of autumn in the air, so pleasant under normal conditions to human senses, seemed to associate itself just now with this dreadful glance shehad had into the basic terrors of things. The whole atmosphere about her seemed to smell of decay, of decomposition, of festering mortality. The pull and draw of the thick Nevilton soil, its horrible demonic gravitation, had never got hold of her more tenaciously than it did then. She felt as though some vast octopus-like tentacles were dragging her earthward.
Vennie was one of those rare women for whom, even under ordinary conditions, the idea of sex is distasteful and repulsive. Presented to her as it was now, mingled with treachery and deception, it obsessed her with an almost living presence. Sensuality had always been for her the one unpardonable sin, and sensuality of this kind, turning the power of sex into a mere motive for squalid pleasure-seeking, filled her with a shuddering disgust.
So this was what men and women were like! This was the kind of thing that went on, under the “covert and convenient seeming” of affable lies!
The whole of nature seemed to have become, in one moment, foul and miasmic. Rank vapours rose from the ground at her feet, and the weeds in the hedge took odious and indecent shapes.
An immense wave of distrust swept over her for everyone that she knew. Was Mr. Clavering himself like this?
This thought,—the thought of what, for all she could tell, might exist between her priest-friend and this harlot-girl,—flushed her cheeks with a new emotion. Mixed at that moment with her virginal horror of the whole squalid business, was a pang of quite a different character, a pang that approached,if it did not reach, the sharp sting of sheer physical jealousy.
As soon as she became aware of this feeling in herself it sickened her with a deeper loathing. Was she also contaminated, like the rest? Was no living human being free from this taint?
She stopped and passed her hand across her forehead. She took off her hat and made a movement with her arms as if thrusting away some invisible assailant. She felt she could not encounter even Mr. Quincunx in this obsessed condition. She had the sensation of being infected by some kind of odious leprosy.
She sat down in the hedge, heedless of the still clinging dew. Strange and desperate thoughts whirled through her brain. She longed to purge herself in some way, to bathe deep, deep,—body and soul,—in some cleansing stream.
But what about Gladys’ betrothed? What about the American? Vennie had scarcely spoken to Dangelis, hardly ever seen him, but she felt a wave of sympathy for the betrayed artist surge through her heart. It could not be allowed,—it could not,—that those two false intriguers should fool this innocent gentleman!
Struck by a sudden illumination as if from the unveiled future, she saw herself going straight to Dangelis and revealing the whole story. He should at least be made aware of the real nature of the girl he was marrying!
Having resolved upon this bold step, Vennie recovered something of her natural mood. Where was Mr. Dangelis at this moment? She must find that out,—perhapsMr. Quincunx would know. She must make a struggle to waylay the artist, to get an interview with him alone.
She rose to her feet, and holding her hat in her hand, advanced resolutely up the lane. She felt happier now, relieved, in a measure, of that odious sense of confederacy with gross sin which had weighed her down. But there still beat vaguely in her brain a passionate longing for purification. If only she could escape, even for a few hours, from this lust-burdened spot! If only she could cool her forehead in the sea!
As she approached Mr. Quincunx’s cottage she experienced a calm and restorative reaction from her distress of mind. She felt no longer alone in the world. Having resolved on a drastic stroke on behalf of clear issues, she was strangely conscious, as she had not been conscious for many months, of the presence, near her and with her, of the Redeemer of men.
It suddenly was borne in upon her that that other criminal abuse, which had so long oppressed her soul with a dead burden,—the affair of Lacrima and Goring,—was intimately associated with what she had discovered. It was more than likely that by exposing the one she could prevent the other.
Flushed with excitement at this thought she opened Mr. Quincunx’s gate and walked up his garden-path. To her amazement, she heard voices in the cottage and not only voices, but voices speaking in a language that vaguely reminded her of the little Catholic services in the chapel at Yeoborough.
Mr. Quincunx himself answered her knock andopened the door. He was strangely agitated. The hand which he extended to her shook as it touched her fingers.
But Vennie herself was too astonished at the sight which met her eyes to notice anything of this. Seated opposite one another, on either side of the solitary’s kitchen-fire, were Lacrima and the little Dolores. Vennie had interrupted a lively and impassioned colloquy between the two Italians.
They both rose at her entrance, and their host, in hurried nervous speech, gave Vennie an incoherent account of what had happened.
When they were all seated,—Vennie in the little girl’s chair, and the child on Mr. Quincunx’s knees,—the embarrassment of the first surprise quickly subsided.
“I shall adopt her,” the solitary kept repeating,—as though the words were uttered in a defiance of universal opposition, “I shall adopt her. You’d advise me to do that, wouldn’t you Miss Seldom?
“I shall get a proper document made out, so that there can be no mistake. I shall adopt her. Whatever anyone likes to say, I shall adopt her!
“Those circus-scoundrels will hold their tongues and let me alone for their own sakes. I shall have no trouble. Lacrima will explain to the police who the child is, and who her parents were. That is, if the police come. But they won’t come. Why should they come? I shall have a document drawn out.”
It seemed as though the little Neapolitan knew by instinct what her protector was saying, for she nestled down against his shoulder and taking one of his hands in both of hers pressed it against her lips.
Vennie gazed at Lacrima, and Lacrima gazed atVennie, but neither of them spoke. There was an inner flame of triumphant concentration in Vennie’s glance, but Lacrima’s look was clouded and sad.
“Certainly no one will interfere with you,” said Vennie at last. “We shall all be so glad to think that the child is in such good hands.
“The only difficulty I can see,” she paused a moment, while the grey eyes of Mr. Quincunx opened wide and an expression of something like defiance passed over his face, “is that it’ll be difficult for you to know what to do with her while you are away in Yeoborough. You could hardly leave her alone in this out-of-the-way place, and I’m afraid our Nevilton National School wouldn’t suit her at all.”
Mr. Quincunx freed his hand and stroked his beard. His fingers were quivering, and Vennie noticed a certain curious twitching in the muscles of his face.
“I shan’t go to Yeoborough any more,” he cried. “None of you need think it!
“That affair is over and done with. I shan’t stay here, any more, either, to be bullied by the Romers and made a fool of by all these idiots. I shall go away. I shall go—far away—to London—to Liverpool,—to—to Norwich,—like the Man in the Moon!”
This final inspiration brought a flicker of his old goblin-humour to the corners of his mouth.
Lacrima looked at Vennie with an imperceptible lifting of her eyebrows, and then sighed deeply.
The latter clasped the arms of her high-backed chair with firm hands.
“I think it is essential that you should knowwhereyou are going, Mr. Quincunx. I mean for the child’ssake. You surely don’t wish to drag her aimlessly about these great cities while you look for work?
“Besides,—you won’t be angry will you, if I speak plainly?—what work, exactly, have you in your mind to do? It isn’t, I’m afraid, always easy—”
Mr. Quincunx interrupted her with an outburst of unexpected fury.
“That’s what I knew you’d say!” he cried in a loud voice. “That’s whatshesays.” He indicated Lacrima. “But you both say it, only because you don’t want me to have the pleasure of adopting Dolores!
“But Ishalladopt her,—in spite of you all. Yes, in spite of you all! Nothing shall stop me adopting her!”
Once more the little Italian nestled close against him, and took possession of his trembling hand.
Vennie perceived an expression of despairing hopelessness pass like an icy mist over Lacrima’s face.
The profile of the Nevilton nun assumed those lines of commanding obstinacy which had reminded Valentia a few hours ago of the mediæval baron. She rose to her feet.
“Listen to me, Mr. Quincunx,” she said sternly. “You are right; you are quite right, to wish to save this child. No one shall stop you saving her. No one shall stop you adopting her. But there are other people whose happiness depends upon what you do, besides this child.”
She paused, and glanced from Mr. Quincunx to Lacrima, and from Lacrima to Mr. Quincunx. Then a look of indescribable domination and power passed into her face. She might have been St. Catharine herself, magnetizing the whole papal court into obedience to her will.
“Oh you foolish people!” she cried, “you foolish people! Can’t you see where God is leading you? Can’t you see where His Spirit has brought you?”
She turned upon Mr. Quincunx with shining eyes, while Lacrima, white as a phantom and with drooping mouth, watched her in amazement.
“It’s not only this child He’s helped you to save,” she went on. “It’s not only this child! Are you blind to what He means? Don’t you understand the cruelty that is being done to your friend? Don’t you understand?”
She stretched out her arm and touched Mr. Quincunx’s shoulder.
“You must do more than give this little one a father,” she murmured in a low tone, “you must give her a mother. How can she be happy without a mother?
“Come,” she went on, in a voice vibrating with magnetic authority, “there’s no other way. You and Lacrima must join hands. You must join hands at once, and defy everyone. Our little wanderer must have both father and mother! That is what God intends.”
There was a long and strange silence, broken only by the ticking of the clock.
Then Mr. Quincunx slowly rose, allowed the child to sink down into his empty chair, and crossed over to Lacrima’s side. Very solemnly, and as if registering a sacred vow, he took his friend’s head between his hands and kissed her on the forehead. Then, searching for her hand and holding it tightly in his own, he turned towards Vennie, while Lacrima herself, pressing her face against his shabby coat, broke into convulsive crying.
“I’ll take your advice,” he said gravely. “I’ll take it without question. There are more difficulties in the way than you know, but I’ll do,—we’ll do,—just what you tell us. I can’t think—” he hesitated for a moment, while a curious smile flickered across his face, “how on earth I’m going to manage. I can’t think how we’re going to get away from here. But I’ll take your advice and we’ll do exactly as you say.
“We’ll do what she says, won’t we, Lacrima?”
Lacrima’s only answer was to conceal her face still more completely in his dusty coat, but her crying became quieter and presently ceased altogether.
At that moment there came a sharp knock a the door.
The countenance of Mr. Quincunx changed. He dropped his friend’s hand, and moved into the centre of the room.
“That must be the circus-people,” he whispered. “They’ve come for Dolores. You’ll support me won’t you?” He looked imploringly at Vennie. “You’ll tell them they can’t have her—that I refuse to give her up—that I’m going to adopt her?”
He went out and opened the door.
It was not the circus-men he found waiting on his threshold. Nor was it the police. It was only one of the under-gardeners from Nevilton House. The youth explained that Mr. Romer had sent him to fetch Lacrima.
“They be goin’ to lunch early, mistress says, and the young lady ’ave to come right along ’ome wi’ I.”
Vennie intervened at this moment between her agitated host and the intruder.
“I’ll bring Miss Traffio home,” she said sternly, “when she’s ready to come. You may go back and tell Mrs. Romer that she’s with me,—with Miss Seldom.”
The youth touched his hat, and slouched off, without further protest.
Vennie, returning into the kitchen, found Mr. Quincunx standing thoughtfully by the mantelpiece, stroking his beard, and the two Italians engaged in an excited conversation in their own tongue.
The descendant of the lords of Nevilton meditated for a moment with drooping head, her hands characteristically clasped behind her back. When she lifted up her chin and began to speak, there was the same concentrated light in her eyes and the same imperative tone in her voice.
“The thing for us to do,” she said, speaking hurriedly but firmly, “is to go—all four of us—straight away from here! I’m not going to leave you until things are settled. I’m going to get you all clean out of this,—clean away!”
She paused and looked at Lacrima. “Where’s Mr. Dangelis?” she asked.
Lacrima explained how the artist had written to Gladys that he was staying until the following day at the Gloucester Hotel in Weymouth.
Vennie’s face became radiant when she heard this. “Ah!” she cried, “God is indeed fighting for us! It’s Dangelis that I must see, and see at once. Where better could we all go,—at any rate for tonight—than to Weymouth? We’ll think later what must be done next. Dangelis will help us. I’m perfectly certain he’ll help us.
“Oh yes, we’ll go to Weymouth at once,—before there’s any risk of the Romers stopping us! We’ll walk to Yeoborough—that’ll give us time to think out our plans—and take the train from there.
“I’ll send a telegram to my mother late tonight, when there’s no chance of her communicating with the House. As to being seen in Yeoborough by any Nevilton people, we must risk that! God has been so good to us today that I can’t believe He won’t go on being good to us.
“Oh what a relief it’ll be,—what a relief,—to get away from Nevilton! And I shall be able to dip my hands in the sea!”
While these rapid utterances fell from Vennie’s excited lips, the face of Mr. Quincunx was a wonder to look upon. It was the crisis of his days, and he displayed his knowledge that it was so by more convulsive changes of expression, than perhaps, in an equal stretch of time, had ever crossed the visage of a mortal man.
“We’ll take your advice,” he said, at last, with immense solemnity.
Lacrima looked at him wistfully. Her face was very pale and her lips trembled.
“It isn’t only because of the child, is it, that he’s ready to go?” she murmured, clutching at Vennie’s arm, as Mr. Quincunx retired to make his brief preparations. “I shouldn’t like to think it was only that. But heisfond of me. Heisfond of me!”
It was Mr. Quincunx who had to find the money for their bold adventure. Neither Vennie nor Lacrima could discover a single penny on their persons. Mr. Quincunx produced it from the bottom of an old jam-pot placed in the interior recesses of one of his deepest cupboards. He displayed to his three friends, with not a little pride, the sum he was possessed of,—no less in fact than five golden sovereigns.
Their walk to Yeoborough was full of thrilling little excitements. Three times they concealed themselves on the further side of the hedge, to let certain suspicious pedestrians, who might be Nevilton people, pass by unastonished.
Once well upon their way, they all four felt a strange sense of liberation and expansion. The little Neapolitan walked between Mr. Quincunx and Lacrima, a hand given to each, and her childish high spirits kept them all from any apprehensive brooding.
Once and once only, they looked back, and Mr. Quincunx shook his fist at the two distant hills.
“You are right,” he remarked to Vennie, “it’s the sea we’re in want of. These curst inland fields have the devil in their heavy mould.”
They found themselves, when they reached the town, with an hour to spare before their train started,and entering a little dairy-shop near the station, they refreshed themselves with milk and bread-and-butter. Here Mr. Quincunx and the child waited in excited expectation, while the two girls went out to make some necessary purchases—returning finally, in triumph, with a light wicker-work suit-case, containing all that they required for several days and nights.
They were in the train at last, with a compartment to themselves, and, as far as they could tell, quite undiscovered by anyone who knew them.
Vennie had hardly ever in her life enjoyed anything more than she enjoyed that journey. She felt that the stars were fighting on her side or, to put it in terms of her religion, that God Himself was smoothing the road in front of her.
She experienced a momentary pang when the train, at last, passing along the edge of the back-water, ran in to Weymouth Station. It was so sweet, so strangely sweet, to know that three living souls depended upon her for their happiness, for their escape from the power of the devil! Would she feel like this, would she ever feel quite like this, when the convent-doors shut her away from this exciting world?
They emerged from the crowded station,—Mr. Quincunx carrying the wicker-work suit-case—and made their way towards the Esplanade.
The early afternoon sun lay hot upon the pavements, but from the sea a strong fresh wind was blowing. Both the girls shivered a little in their thin frocks, and as the red shawl of the young Italian had already excited some curiosity among the passers-by,they decided to enter one of the numerous drapery shops, and spend some more of Mr. Quincunx’s money.
They were so long in the shop that the nervous excitement of the recluse was on the point of changing into nervous irritation, when at last they reappeared. But he was reconciled to the delay when he perceived the admirable use they had made of it.
All three were wearing long tweed rain-cloaks of precisely the same tint of sober grey. They looked like three sisters, newly arrived from some neighbouring inland town,—Dorchester, perhaps, or Sherborne,—with a view to spending a pleasant afternoon at the sea-side. Not only were they all wrapped in the same species of cloak. They had purchased three little woollen caps of a similar shade, such things as it would have been difficult to secure in any shop but a little unfashionable one, where summer and winter vogues casually overlapped.
Mr. Quincunx, whose exaltation of mood had not made him forget to bring his own overcoat with him, now put this on, and warmly and comfortably clad, the four fugitives from Nevilton strolled along the Esplanade in the direction of St. John’s church.
To leave his three companions free to run down to the sea’s edge, Mr. Quincunx possessed himself of the clumsy paper parcels containing the hats they had relinquished and also of the little girl’s red shawl, and resting on a seat with these objects piled up by his side he proceeded to light a cigarette and gaze placidly about him. The worst of his plunge into activity being over,—for, whatever happened, the initial effort was bound to be the worst,—the wandererfrom Dead Man’s Lane chuckled to himself with bursts of cynical humour as he contemplated the situation they were in.
But what a relief it was to see the clear-shining foam-sprinkled expanse of water lying spread out before him! Like the younger Andersen, Mr. Quincunx had a passionate love of Weymouth, and never had he loved it more than he did at that moment! He greeted the splendid curve of receding cliffs—the White Nore and St. Alban’s Head—with a sigh of profound satisfaction, and he looked across to the massive bulk of Portland, as though in its noble uncrumbling stone—stone that was so much nearer to marble than to clay—there lurked some occult talisman ready to save him from everything connected with Leo’s Hill.
Yes, the sea was what he wanted just then! How well the salt taste of it, the smell of its sun-bleached stranded weeds, its wide horizons, its long-drawn murmur, blent with the strange new mood into which that morning’s events had thrown him!
How happy the little Dolores looked, between Lacrima and Vennie, her dark curls waving in the wind from beneath her grey cap!
All at once his mind reverted to James Andersen, lying now alone and motionless, under six feet of yellow clay. Mr. Quincunx shivered. After all it was something to be alive still, something to be still able to stroke one’s beard and stretch one’s legs, and fumble in one’s pocket for a “Three Castles” cigarette!
He wondered vaguely how and when this young St. Catharine of theirs intended to marry him toLacrima. And then what? Would he have to work frightfully, preposterously hard?
He chuckled to himself to think how blank Mr. Romer would look, when he found that both his victims had been spirited away in one breath. What a girl this Vennie Seldom was!
He tried to imagine what it would be like, this business of being married. After all, he was very fond of Lacrima. He hoped that dusky wavy hair of hers were as long as it suggested that it was! He liked girls to have long hair.
Would she bring him his tea in the morning, sometimes, with bare arms and bare feet? Would she sit cross-legged at the foot of his bed, while he drank it, and chatter to him of what they would do when he came back from his work?
His work!That was an aspect of the affair which certainly might well be omitted.
And then, as he stared at the three girlish figures on the beach, there came over him the strange illusion that both Vennie and Lacrima were only dream-people—unreal and fantastic—and that the true living persons of his drama were himself and his little Neapolitan waif.
Suppose the three girls were to take a boat—one of those boats whose painted keels he saw glittering now so pleasantly on the beach—and row out into the water. And suppose the boat were upset and both Vennie and Lacrima drowned? Would he be so sad to have to live the rest of his life alone with the little Dolores?
Perhaps it would be better if this event occurred after Vennie had helped him to secure some work todo—some not too hard work! Well—Vennie, at any rate,wasgoing to be drowned in a certain sense, at least she was meditating entering a convent, and that was little different from being drowned, or being buried in yellow clay, like James Andersen!
But Lacrima was not meditating entering a convent. Lacrima was meditating being married to him, and being a mother to their adopted child. He hoped she would be a gentle mother. If she were not, if she ever spoke crossly to Dolores, he would lose his temper. He would lose his temper so much that he would tremble from head to foot! He called up an imaginary scene between them, a scene so vivid that he found himself trembling now, as his hand rested upon the paper parcel.
But perhaps, if by chance they left England and went on a journey,—Witch-Bessie had found a journey, “a terrible journey,” in the lines of his hand,—Lacrima would catch a fever in some foreign city, and he and Dolores would be left alone, quite as alone as if she were drowned today!
But perhaps it would be he, Maurice Quincunx, who would catch the fever. No! He did not like these “terrible journeys.” He preferred to sit on a seat on Weymouth Esplanade and watch Dolores laughing and running into the sea and picking up shells.
The chief thing was to be alive, and not too tired, or too cold, or too hungry, or too harassed by insolent aggressive people! How delicious a thing life could be if it were only properly arranged! If cruelty, and brutality, and vulgarity, andoffice-work, were removed!
He could never be cruel to anyone. From that worst sin,—if one could talk of such a thing as sin in this mad world,—his temperament entirely saved him. He hoped when they were married that Lacrima would not want him to be too sentimental about her. And he rather hoped that he would still have his evenings to himself, to turn over the pages of Rabelais, when he had kissed Dolores good night.
His meditations were interrupted at this point by the return of his companions, who came scrambling across the shingle, threading their way among the boats, laughing and talking merrily, and trailing long pieces of sea-weed in their hands.
Vennie announced that since it was nearly four o’clock it would be advisable for them to secure their lodging for the night, and when that was done she would leave them to their own devices for an hour or two, while she proceeded to the Gloucester Hotel to have her interview with Ralph Dangelis.
Their various sea-spoils being all handed over to the excited little foundling, they walked slowly along the Esplanade, still bearing to the east, while they surveyed the appearance of the various “crescents,” “terraces,” and “rows” on the opposite side of the street. It was not till they arrived at the very end of these, that Vennie, who had assumed complete responsibility for their movements, piloted them across the road.
The houses they now approached were entitled “Brunswick Terrace,” and they entirely fulfilled their title by suggesting, in the pleasant liberality of their bay-windows and the mellow dignity of their well-proportioned fronts, the sort of solid comfort whichthe syllables “Brunswick” seem naturally to convey. They began their enquiries for rooms, about five doors from the end of the terrace, but it was not till they reached the last house,—the last except two reddish-coloured ones of later date,—that they found what they wanted.
It was arranged that the two Italians should share a room together. Vennie elected to sleep in a small apartment adjoining theirs, while Mr. Quincunx was given a front-room, looking out on the sea, on the third floor.
Vennie smiled to herself as she thought how amazed her mother would have been could she have seen her at that moment, as she helped Lacrima to unpack their solitary piece of luggage, while Mr. Quincunx smoked cigarettes in the balcony of the window!
She left them finally in the lodging-house parlour, seated on a horse-hair sofa, watching the prim landlady preparing tea. Vennie refused to wait for this meal, being anxious—she said—to get her interview with the American well over, for until that moment had been reached, she could neither discuss their future plans calmly, nor enjoy the flavour of the adventure.
When Vennie had left them, and the three were all comfortably seated round the table, Mr. Quincunx found Lacrima in so radiant a mood that he began to feel a little ashamed of his ambiguous meditations on the Esplanade. She was, after all, quite beautiful in her way,—though, of course, not as beautiful as the young Neapolitan, whose eyes had a look in them, even when she was happy, which haunted one and filled one with vague indescribable emotions.
Mr. Quincunx himself was in the best of spirits. His beard wagged, his nostrils quivered, his wit flowed. Lacrima fixed her eyes upon him with delighted appreciation,—and led him on and on, through a thousand caprices of fancy. The poor Pariah’s heart was full of exquisite happiness. She felt like one actually liberated from the tomb. For the first time since she had known anything of England she was able to breathe freely and spontaneously and be her natural self.
For some queer reason or other, her thoughts kept reverting to James Andersen, but reverting to him with neither sadness nor pity. She felt no remorse for not having been present when he was buried that morning. She did not feel as though he were buried. She did not feel as though he were dead. She felt, in some strange way, that he had merely escaped from the evil spells of Nevilton, and that in the power of his new strength he was the cause of her own emancipation.
And what an emancipation it was! It was like suddenly becoming a child again—a child with power to enjoy the very things that children so often miss.
Everything in this little parlour pleased her. The blue vases on the mantelpiece containing dusty “everlasting flowers,” the plush-framed portraits of the landlady’s deceased parents, enlarged to a magnitude of shadowy dignity by some old-fashioned photographic process, the quaint row of minute china elephants that stood on a little bracket in the corner, the glaring antimacassar thrown across the back of the arm-chair, the sea-scents and sea-murmurs floating in through the window, the melodious cryingof a fish-pedler in the street; all these things thrilled her with a sense of freedom and escape, which over-brimmed her heart with happiness.