THE ORCHARD
Every natural locality has its hour of special self-assertion; its
hour, when the peculiar qualities and characteristics which belong
to it emphasize themselves, and attain a sort of temporary apogee or
culmination. It is then that such localities--be they forests or moors,
hill-sides or valleys--seem to gather themselves together and bring
themselves into focus, waiting expectantly, it might almost seem, for
some answering dramatic crisis in human affairs which should find in
them an inevitable background.
One of the chief features of our English climate is that no two
successive days, even in a spell of the warmest weather, are exactly
alike. What one might call the culminant day of that summer, for the
orchards of Nevilton, arrived shortly after Mr. Clavering’s unfortunate
defeat. Every hour of this day seemed to add something more and more
expressive to their hushed and expectant solitudes.
Though the hay had been cut, or was being cut, in the open fields, in
these shadowy recesses the grass was permitted to grow lush and long,
at its own unimpeded will.
Between the ancient trunks of the moss-grown apple-trees hung a soft
blue vapour; and the flickering sunlight that pierced the denser
foliage, threw shadows upon the heavy grass that were as deeply purple
as the waves of the mid-atlantic. There was indeed something so remote
from the ordinary movements of the day about this underworld of dim,
rich seclusion, that the image of a sleepy wave-lulled land, long
sunken out of reach of human invasion, under the ebbing and flowing
tide, seemed borne in naturally upon the imagination.
It was towards the close of the afternoon of this particular segment
of time that the drowsy languor of these orchards reached its richest
and most luxurious moment. Grass, moss, lichen, mistletoe, gnarled
trunks, and knotted roots, all seemed to cry aloud, at this privileged
hour, for some human recognition of their unique quality; some human
event which should give that quality its dramatic value, its planetary
proportion. Not since the Hesperidean Dragon guarded its sacred charge,
in the classic story, has a more responsive background offered itself
to what Catullus calls the “furtive loves” of mortal men.
About six o’clock, on this day of the apogee of the orchards, Mr.
Romer, seated on the north terrace of his house, caught sight of his
daughter and her companion crossing the near corner of the park. He
got up at once, and walked across the garden to intercept them. The
sight of the Italian’s slender drooping figure, as she lingered a
little behind her cousin, roused into vivid consciousness all manner
of subterranean emotions in the quarry-owner’s mind. He felt as an
oriental pasha might feel, when under the stress of some political
or monetary transaction, he is compelled to hand over his favorite
girl-slave to an obsequious dependent. The worst of it was that he
could not be absolutely sure of Mr. Goring’s continued adherence.
It was within the bounds of possibility that once in possession of
Lacrima, the farmer might breathe against him gross Thersites-like
defiance, and carry off his captive to another county. He experienced,
at that moment, a sharp pang of inverted remorse at the thought of
having to relinquish his prey.
As he strode along by the edge of the herbaceous borders, where the
blue spikes of the delphiniums were already in bud, his mind swung
rapidly from point to point in the confused arena of his various
contests and struggles.
Mixed strangely enough with his direct Napoleonic pursuit of wealth
and power, there was latent in Mr. Romer, as we have already hinted, a
certain dark and perverse sensuality, which was capable of betraying
and distorting, in very curious ways, the massive force of his
intelligence.
At this particular moment, as he emerged into the park, he found
himself beginning to regret his conversation with his brother-in-law.
But, after all, he thought, when Gladys married, it would be difficult
to find any reason for keeping Lacrima at his side. His feelings
towards the girl were a curious mixture of attraction and hatred. And
what could better gratify this mixed emotion than a plan which would
keep her within his reach and at the same time humiliate and degrade
her? To do the master of Nevilton justice, he was not, at that moment,
as he passed under a group of Spanish chestnuts and observed the
object of his conspiracy rendered gentler and more fragile than ever
by the loveliness of her surroundings, altogether devoid of a certain
remote feeling of compunction. He crushed it down, however, by his
usual thought of the brevity and futility of all these things, and the
folly of yielding to weak commiseration, when, in so short a time,
nothing, one way or the other, would matter in the least! He had long
ago trained himself to make use of these materialistic reasonings to
suppress any irrelevant prickings of conscience which might interfere
with the bias of his will. The whole world, looked at with the bold
cynical eye of one who was not afraid to face the truth, was, after
all, a mad, wild, unmeaning struggle; and, in the confused arena of
this struggle, one could be sure of nothing but the pleasure one
derived from the sensation of one’s own power. He tried, as he walked
towards the girls, to imagine to himself what his feelings would be,
supposing he yielded to these remote scruples, and let Lacrima go,
giving her money, for instance, to enable her to live independently in
her own country, or to marry whom she pleased. She would no doubt marry
that damned fool Quincunx! Lack of money was, assuredly, all that stood
in the way. And how could he contemplate an idea of that kind with
any pleasure? He wondered, in a grim humourous manner, what sort of
compensation these self-sacrificing ones really got? What satisfaction
would _he_ get, for instance, in the consciousness that he had thrown a
girl who attracted him, into the arms of an idiot who excited his hate?
He looked long at Lacrima, as she stood with Gladys, under a sycamore,
waiting his approach. It was curious, he said to himself,--very
curious,--the sort of feelings she excited in him. It was not that
he wished to possess her. He was scornfully cynical of that sort
of gratification. He wished to do more than possess her. He wished
to humiliate her, to degrade her, to put her to shame in her inmost
spirit. He wished her to know that he knew that she was suffering this
shame, and that he was the cause of it. He wished her to feel herself
absolutely in his power, not bodily--that was nothing!--but morally,
and spiritually.
The owner of Leo’s Hill had the faculty of detaching himself from
his own darkest thoughts, and of observing them with a humourous and
cynical eye. It struck him as not a little grotesque, that he, the
manipulater of far-flung financial intrigues, the ambitious politician,
the formidable captain of industry, should be thus scheming and
plotting to satisfy the caprice of a mere whim, upon the destiny of
a penniless dependent. It _was_ grotesque--grotesque and ridiculous.
Let it be! The whole business of living was grotesque and ridiculous.
One snatched fiercely at this thing or the other, as the world moved
round; and one was not bound always to present oneself in a dignified
mask before one’s own tribunal. It was enough that this or that fantasy
of the dominant power-instinct demanded a certain course of action.
Let it be as grotesque as it might! He, and none other, was the judge
of his pleasure, of what he pleased to do, or to refrain from doing.
It was his humour;--and that ended it! He lived to fulfil his humour.
There was nothing else to live for, in this fantastic chaotic world!
Meditating in this manner he approached the girls.
“It occurred to me,” he said, breathing a little hard, and addressing
his daughter, “that you might be seeing Mr. Clavering again tonight.
If so, perhaps you would give him a message from me, or rather,--how
shall I put it?--a suggestion, a gentle hint.”
“What are you driving at, father?” asked Gladys, pouting her lips and
swinging her parasol.
“It is a message best delivered by mouth,” Mr. Romer went on, “and by
your mouth.”
Then as if to turn this last remark into a delicate compliment, he
playfully lifted up the girl’s chin with his finger and made as if to
kiss her. Gladys, however, lightly evaded him, and tossing her head
mischievously, burst out laughing. “I know you, father, I know you,”
she cried. “You want me to do some intriguing for you. You never kiss
me like that, unless you do!”
Lacrima glanced apprehensively at the two of them. Standing there,
in the midst of that charming English scene, they represented to her
mind all that was remorseless, pitiless and implacable in this island
of her enforced adoption. Swiftly, from those ruddy pinnacles of the
great house behind them, her mind reverted to the little white huts
in a certain Apennine valley and the tinkling bells of the goats led
back from pasture. Oh how she hated all this heavy foliage and these
eternally murmuring doves!
“Well,” said Mr. Romer, as Gladys waited mockingly, “I do want you
to do something. I want you to hint to our dear clergyman that this
ceremony of your reception into his church is dependent upon his good
behaviour. Not _your_ good behavior,” he repeated smiling, “but _his_.
The truth is, dear child, if I may speak quite plainly, I know the
persuasive power of your pretty face over all these young men; and I
want you to make it plain to this worthy priest that if you are to
continue being nice to him, he must be very nice to _me_. Do you catch
my meaning, my plump little bird?” As he spoke he encircled her waist
with his arm. Lacrima, watching them, thought how singularly alike
father and daughter were, and was conscious of an instinctive desire to
run and warn this new victim of conspiracy.
“Why, what has he been doing, father?” asked the fair girl, shaking
herself free, and opening her parasol.
“He has been supporting that fellow Wone. And he has been talking
nonsense about Quincunx,--yes, about your friend Quincunx,” he added,
nodding ironically towards Lacrima.
“And I am to punish him, am I?” laughed Gladys. “That is lovely! I love
punishing people, especially people like Mr. Clavering who think they
are so wonderfully good!”
Mr. Romer smiled. “Not exactly punish him, dear, but lead him gently
into the right path. Lead him, in fact, to see that the party to belong
to in this village is the party of capacity--not the party of chatter.”
Gladys looked at her father seriously. “You don’t mean that you are
actually afraid of losing this election?” she said. Mr. Romer stretched
out his arm and rested himself against the umbrageous sycamore,
pressing his large firm hand upon its trunk.
“Losing it, child? No, I shan’t lose it. But these idiots do really
annoy me. They are all such cowards and such sentimental babies. It is
people like these who have to be ruled with a firm hand. They cringe
and whimper when you talk to them; and then the moment your back is
turned they grow voluble and impertinent. My workmen are no better.
They owe everything to me. If it wasn’t for me, half those quarries
would be shut down tomorrow and they’d be out of a job. But do you
think they are grateful? Not a bit of it!” His tone grew more angry.
He felt a need of venting the suppressed rage of many months. “Yes,
you needn’t put on that unconscious look, Lacrima. I know well enough
where _your_ sympathies lie. The fact is, in these rotten days, it
is the incapable and miserable who give the tone to everyone! No one
thinks for himself. No one goes to the bottom of things. It is all
talk--talk--talk; talk about equality, about liberty, about kindness to
the weak. I hate the weak; and I refuse to let them interfere with me!
Look at the faces of these people. Well,--you know, Gladys, what they
are like. They are all feeble, bloodless, sneaking, fawning idiots! I
hate the faces of these Nevilton fools. They are always making me think
of slugs and worms. This Wone is typical. His disgusting complexion
and flabby mouth is characteristic of them all. No one of them has
the spirit to hit one properly back, face to face. And their odious,
sentimental religion!--This Clavering of yours ought to know better.
He is not quite devoid of intelligence. He showed some spirit when I
talked with him. But he is besotted, too, with this silly nonsense
about humouring the people, and considering the people, and treating
the people in a Christian spirit! As though you could treat worms and
slugs in any other spirit than the spirit of trampling upon them.
They are born to be trampled upon--born for it--I tell you! You have
only to look at them!” He glared forth over the soft rich fields; and
continued, still more bitterly:
“It’s no good your pretending not to hear me, Lacrima! I can read
your thoughts like an open book. You are quoting to yourself, no
doubt, at this very moment, some of the pretty speeches of your friend
Quincunx. A nice fellow, he is, for a girl’s teacher! A fellow with no
idea of his own in his head! A fellow afraid to raise his eyes above
one’s boot-laces! Why the other day, when I was out shooting and met
him in the lane, he turned straight round, and walked back on his
tracks--simply from fear of passing me. I hate these sneaking cowards!
I hate their cunning, miserable, little ways! I should like to trample
them all out of existence! That is the worst of being strong in this
world. One is worried to death by a lot of fools who are not worth the
effort spent on them.”
Lacrima uttered no word, but looked sadly away, over the fair
landscape. In her heart, in spite of her detestation of the man, she
felt a strange fantastic sympathy with a good deal of what he said.
Women, especially women of Latin races, have no great respect for
democratic sentiments when they do not issue in definite deeds. Her
private idea of a revolutionary leader was something very far removed
from the voluble local candidate, and she had suffered too much herself
from the frail petulance of Maurice Quincunx not to feel a secret
longing that somewhere, somehow, this aggressive tyrant should be faced
by a strength as firm, as capable, as fearless, as his own.
Mr. Romer, with his swarthy imperial face and powerful figure, seemed
to her, as he leant against the tree, so to impress himself upon
that yielding landscape, that there appeared reason enough for his
complaint that he could find no antagonist worthy of his steel. In the
true manner of a Pariah, who turns, with swift contempt, upon her own
class, the girl was conscious of a rising tide of revolt in her heart
against the incompetent weakness of her friend. What would she not give
to be able, even once, to see this man outfaced and outwitted! She
was impressed too, poor girl, as she shrank silently aside from his
sarcasm, by the horrible indifference of these charming sunlit fields
to the brutality of the man’s challenge. They cared nothing--nothing!
It was impossible to make them care. Hundreds of years ago they had
slumbered, just as dreamily, just as indifferently, as they did now.
If even at this moment she were to plunge a knife into the man’s
heart, so that he fell a mass of senseless clay at her feet, that
impervious wood-pigeon would go on murmuring its monotonous ditty,
just as peacefully, just as serenely! There was something really
terrifying to her in this callous indifference of Nature. It was
like living perpetually in close contact with a person who was deaf
and dumb and blind; and who, while the most tragic events were being
transacted, went on cheerfully and imperturbably humming some merry
tune. It would be almost better, thought the girl, if that tree-trunk
against which the quarry-owner pressed his heavy hand were really in
league with him. Anything were better than this smiling indifference
which seemed to keep on repeating in a voice as monotonous as the
pigeon’s--“Everything is permitted. Nothing is forbidden. Nothing is
forbidden. Everything is permitted.” like the silly reiterated whirring
of some monstrous placid shuttle. It was strange, the rebellious
inconsistent thoughts, which passed through her mind! She wondered
why Hugh Clavering was thus to be waylaid and persuaded. Had he dared
to rise in genuine opposition? No, she did not believe it. He had
probably talked religion, just as Maurice talked anarchy and Wone
talked socialism. It was all talk! Romer was quite right. They had
no spirit in them, these English people. She thought of the fierce
atheistic rebels of her own country. _They_, at any rate, understood
that evil had to be resisted by action, and not by vague protestations
of unctuous sentiment!
When Mr. Romer left them and returned to his seat on the terrace, the
girls did not at once proceed on their way, but waited, hesitating;
and amused themselves by pulling down the lower branches of a lime and
trying to anticipate the sweetness of its yet unbudded fragrance.
“Let’s stroll down the drive first,” said Gladys presently, “till we
are out of sight, and then we can cross the mill mead and get into the
orchard that way.” They followed this design with elaborate caution,
and only when quite concealed from the windows of the house, turned
quickly northward and left the park for the orchards. Between the wall,
of the north garden and the railway, lay some of the oldest and least
frequented of these shadowy places, completely out of the ordinary
paths of traffic, and only accessible by field-ways. Into the smallest
and most secluded of all these the girls wandered, gliding noiselessly
between the thick hedges and heavy grass, like two frail phantoms of
the upper world visiting some Elysian solitude.
Gladys laid her hand on her companion’s arm. “We had better wait here,”
she said, “where we can see the whole orchard. They ought to know, by
now, where to come.”
They seated themselves on the bowed trunk of an ancient apple-tree
that by long decline had at last reached a horizontal position. The
flowering season was practically over, though here and there a late
cider-tree, growing more in shadow than the rest, still carried its
delicate burden of clustered blossoms.
“How many times is it that we have met them here?” whispered the fair
girl, snatching off her hat and tossing it on the grass. “This is the
fifth time, isn’t it? What dear things they are! I think it’s much more
exciting, this sort of thing,--don’t you?--than dull tennis parties
with silly idiots like young Ilminster.”
The Italian nodded. “It is a good thing that James and I get on so
well,” she said. “It would be awkward if we were as afraid of one
another as when we first met.”
Gladys put her hand caressingly on her companion’s knee and looked into
her face with a slow seductive smile.
“You are forgetting your Mr. Quincunx a little, just a little, these
days, aren’t you, darling? Don’t be shy, now--or look cross. You know
you are! You can’t deny it. Your boy is almost as nice as mine. He
doesn’t like me, though. I can see that! But I like _him_. I like him
awfully! You’d better take care, child. If ever I get tired of my
Luke--”
“James isn’t a boy,” protested Lacrima.
“Silly!” cried Gladys. “Of course he is. Who cares about age? They are
all the same. I always call them boys when they attract me. I like the
word. I like to say it. It makes me feel as if I were one of those
girls in London. You know what I mean!”
Lacrima looked at her gravely. “I always feel as if James Andersen were
much older than I,” she said.
“But your Mr. Quincunx,” repeated the fair creature, slipping her soft
fingers into her friend’s hand, “your Mr. Quincunx is not quite what he
was to you, before we began these adventures?”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that, Gladys!” rejoined the Italian, freeing
her hands and clasping them passionately together. “It is wicked of you
to say that! You know I only talk to James so that you can do what you
like. I shall always be Maurice’s friend. I shall be his friend to the
last!”
Gladys laughed merrily. “That is what I wanted,” she retorted. “I
wanted to make you burst out. When people burst out, they are always
doubtful in their hearts. Ah, little puritan! so we are already in the
position of having two sweethearts, are we?--and not knowing which of
the two we really like best? That is a very pretty situation to be in.
It is where we all are! I hope you enjoy it!”
Lacrima let her hands fall helplessly to her side, against the grey
bark of the apple-tree. “Why do you hate Mr. Quincunx so?” she asked,
looking gravely into her friend’s face.
“Why do I hate him?” said Gladys. “Oh, I really don’t know! I didn’t
know I did. If I do, it’s because he’s such a weak wretched creature.
He has no more spirit than a sick dog. He talks such nonsense too! I
am glad he has to walk to Yeoborough every day and do a little work.
You ought to be glad too! He could never marry if he didn’t make some
money.”
“He doesn’t want to marry,” murmured Lacrima. “He only wants to be left
alone.”
“A nice friend he seems to be,” cried the other, “for a girl like you!
I suppose he kisses you and that sort of thing, doesn’t he? I shouldn’t
like to be kissed by a silly old man like that, with a great stupid
beard.”
“You mustn’t say these things to me, Gladys, you mustn’t! I won’t hear
them. Mr. Quincunx isn’t an old man! He is younger than James Andersen.
He is not forty yet.”
“He looks fifty, if he looks a day,” said Gladys, “and the colour of
his beard is disgusting! It’s like dirty water. Fancy having a horrid
thing like that pressed against your face! And I suppose he cries and
slobbers over you, doesn’t he? I have seen him cry. I hate a man who
cries. He cried the other night,--father told me so--when he found he
had spent all his money.”
Lacrima got up and walked a few paces away. She loathed this placid
golden-haired creature, at that moment, so intensely, that it was all
she could do to refrain from leaping upon her and burying her teeth
in her soft neck. She leant against one of the trees and pressed her
head upon its grey lichen. Gladys slipped down into a more luxurious
position. She looked complacently around her. No spot could have been
better adapted for a romantic encounter.
The gnarled and time-worn trunks of the old apple-trees, each looking
as if it had lingered there, full of remote memories, from an age
coeval with the age of those very druids whose sacred mistletoe still
clung in patches to their boughs, formed a strange fantastic array of
twisted and distorted natural pillars, upon which the foliage, meeting
everywhere above their heads, leaned in shadowy security, like the roof
of a heathen temple. The buttercups and cuckoo-flowers, which, here
and there, sprinkled the heavy grass, were different from those in the
open meadows. The golden hue of the one, and the lavender tint of the
other, took on, in this diurnal gloom, a chilly and tender pallour,
both colours approximating to white. The grey lichen hung down in loose
festoons from the higher portions of the knotted trunks, and crept,
thick and close, round the moss at their roots. There could hardly be
conceived a spot more suggestive of absolute and eternal security than
this Hesperidean enclosure.
The very fact of the remote but constant presence of humanity there, as
a vague dreamy background of immemorial tending, increased this sense.
One felt that the easy invasions of grafting-time and gathering-time,
returning perennially in their seasons, only intensified the long
delicious solitudes of the intervals between, when, in rich, hushed
languor, the blossoms bud and bloom and fall; and the fruit ripens and
sweetens; and the leaves flutter down. That exquisite seductive charm,
the charm of places full of quietness, yet bordering on the edge of
the days’ labour, hung like a heavy atmosphere of contentment over
the shadowy aisles of this temple of peace. The wood-pigeons keep up
a perpetual murmur, all the summer long, in these untrodden spots. No
eyes see them. It is as though they never saw one another. But their
drowsy liturgical repetitions answer and answer again, as if from the
unfathomable depths of some dim green underworld, worshipping the gods
of silence with sounds that give silence itself a richer, a fuller
weight.
“There they are!” cried Gladys suddenly, as the figures of the Andersen
brothers made themselves visible on the further side of the orchard.
The girls advanced to meet them through the thick grass, swinging their
summer-hats in their hands and bending their heads, now and then, to
avoid the overhanging boughs. The meeting between these four persons
would have made a pleasant and appropriate subject for one of those
richly-coloured old-fashioned prints which one sometimes observes in
early Victorian parlours. Gladys grew quite pale with excitement, and
her voice assumed a vibrant tenderness when she accosted Luke, which
made Lacrima give a little start of surprise, as she shook hands with
the elder brother. Had her persecutor then, got, after all, some living
tissue in the place where the heart beat?
Luke’s manner had materially altered since he had submitted so
urbanely to the fair girl’s insulting airs at the close of their
first encounter. His way of treating her now was casual, flippant,
abrupt--almost indifferent. Instead of following the pathetic pressure
of her arm and hand, which at once bade him hasten the separation of
the group, he deliberately lingered, chatting amicably with Lacrima
and asking her questions about Italy. It seemed that the plausible
Luke knew quite as much about Genoa and Florence and Venice as his
more taciturn brother, and all he knew he was well able to turn
into effective use. He was indeed a most engaging and irresistible
conversationalist; and Gladys grew paler and paler, as she watched the
animation of his face and listened to his pleasant and modulated voice.
It caused sheer suffering to her fiercely impetuous nature, this
long-drawn out delay. Every moment that passed diminished the time they
would have together. Her nerves ached for the touch of his arms about
her, and a savage desire to press her mouth to his, and satiate herself
with kisses, throbbed in her every vein. Why would he not stop this
irrelevant stream of talk? What did she care about the narrow streets
of Genoa,--or the encrusted façade of San Marco? It had been their
custom to separate immediately on meeting, and for Luke to carry her
off to a charming hiding-place they had discovered. With the fierce
pantherish craving of a love-scorched animal her soul cried out to be
clasped close to her friend in this secluded spot, having her will of
those maddening youthful lips with their proud Grecian curve! Still he
must go on talking!
James and Lacrima, lending themselves, naturally and easily, to the
mood of the moment, were already seated at the foot of a twisted and
ancestral apple-tree. Soon Luke, still absorbed in his conversation
with the Italian, shook off Gladys’ arm and settled himself beside
them, plucking a handful of grass, as he did so, and inhaling its
fragrance with sybarite pleasure.
“St. Mark’s is the only church in the world for me,” Luke was saying.
“I have pictures of it from every conceivable angle. It is quite a
mania with me collecting such things. I have dozens of them; haven’t I,
James?”
“Do you mean those post-cards father sent home when he went over
there to work?” answered the elder brother, one of whose special
peculiarities was a curious pleasure in emphasizing, in the presence of
the “upper classes,” the humility of his origin.
Luke laughed. “Well--yes--those--and others,” he said. “_You_ haven’t
the least idea what I keep in my drawer of secret treasures; you know
you haven’t! I’ve got some lovely letters there among other things.
Letters that I wouldn’t let anyone see for the world!” He glanced
smilingly at Gladys, who was pacing up and down in front of them, like
a beautiful tigress.
“Look here, my friends,” she said. “The time is slipping away
frightfully. We are not going to sit here all the while, are we,
talking nonsense, like people at a garden party?”
“It’s so lovely here,” said Luke with a slow smile. “I really don’t
think that your favourite corner is so much nicer. I am in no hurry to
move. Are you, Miss Traffio?”
Lacrima saw a look upon her cousin’s face that boded ill for their
future relations if she did not make some kind of effort. She rose to
her feet.
“Come, Mr. Andersen,” she said, giving James a wistful look. “Let us
take a little stroll, and then return again to these young people.”
James rose obediently, and they walked off together. They passed
from the orchards belonging to Mr. Romer’s tenant, and entered those
immediately at the foot of the vicarage garden. Here, through a gap
in the hedge they were attracted by the sight of a queer bed of weeds
growing at the edge of a potato-patch. They were very curious weeds,
rather resembling sea-plants than land-plants; in colour of a dull
glaucous green, and in shape grotesquely elongated.
“What are those things?” said Lacrima. “I think I have never seen such
evil-looking plants. Why do they let them grow there?”
James surveyed the objects. “They certainly have a queer look,” he
said, “but you know, in old days, there was a grave-yard here, of a
peculiar kind. It is only in the last fifty years that they have dug it
up and included it in this garden.”
Lacrima shuddered. “I would not eat those potatoes for anything! You
know I think I come to dislike more and more the look of your English
vegetable gardens, with their horrid, heavy leaves, so damp and oozy
and disgusting!”
“I agree with you there,” returned the wood-carver. “I have always
hated Nevilton, and every aspect of it; but I think I hate these
overgrown gardens most of all.”
“They look as if they were fed from churchyards, don’t they?” went on
the girl. “Look at those heavy laurel bushes over there, and those
dreadful fir-trees! I should cut them all down if this place belonged
to me. Oh, how I long for olives and vine-yards! These orchards are all
very well, but they seem to me as if they were made to keep out the sun
and the wholesome air.”
James Andersen smiled grimly. “Orchards and potato gardens!” he
muttered. “Yes, these are typical of this country of clay. And these
Vicarage shrubberies! I think a shrubbery is the last limit of
depression and desolation. I am sure all the murders committed in
this country are planned in shrubberies, and under the shade of damp
laurel-bushes.”
“In our country we grow corn between the fruit-trees,” said Lacrima.
“Yes, corn--” returned Andersen, “corn and wine and oil! Those are the
natural, the beautiful, products of the earth. Things that are fed upon
sun and air--not upon the bones of the dead! All these Nevilton places,
however luxuriant, seem to me to smell of death.”
“But was this corner really a churchyard?” asked the Italian. “I hope
Mrs. Seldom won’t stroll down this way and see us!”
“Mrs. Seldom is well suited to the place she lives in,” returned the
other. “She lives upon the Past, just as her garden does--just as her
potatoes do! These English vicarages are dreadful places. They have all
the melancholy of age without its historic glamour. And how morbid they
are! Any of your cheerful Latin curés would die in them, simply of damp
and despair.”
“But do tell me about this spot,” repeated Lacrima, with a little
shiver. “Why did you say it was a peculiar churchyard?”
“It was the place where they buried unbaptized children,” answered
Andersen, and added, in a lower tone, “how cold it is getting! It must
be the shadow we are in.”
“But you haven’t yet,” murmured Lacrima, “you haven’t yet told me, what
those weeds are.”
“Well--we call them ‘mares’-tails’ about here,” answered the
stone-carver, “I don’t know their proper name.”
“But why don’t they dig them up? Look! They are growing all among the
potatoes.”
“They can’t dig them up,” returned the man. “They can’t get at their
roots. They are the worst and most obstinate weed there is. They grow
in all the Nevilton gardens. They are the typical Nevilton flora. They
must have grown here in the days of the druids.”
“But how absurd!” cried Lacrima. “I feel as if I could pull them up
with my hands. The earth looks so soft.”
“The earth is soft enough,” replied Andersen, “but the roots of these
weeds adhere fast to the rock underneath. The rock, you know, the
sandstone rock, lies only a short distance beneath our feet.”
“The same stone as Nevilton house is built of?”
“Certainly the same. Our stone, Mr. Romer’s stone, the stone upon which
we all live here--except those who till the fields.”
“I hate the thing!” cried Lacrima, in curious agitation.
“You do? Well--to tell you the honest truth, so do I. I associate it
with my father.”
“I associate it with Gladys,” whispered Lacrima.
“I can believe it. We both associate it with houses of tyranny, of
wretched persecution. Perhaps I have never told you that my father was
directly the cause of my mother’s death?”
“You have hinted it,” murmured the girl. “I suspected it. But Luke
loves the stone, doesn’t he? He always speaks as if the mere handling
of it, in his work-shop, gave him exquisite pleasure.”
“A great many things give Luke exquisite pleasure,” returned the other
grimly. “Luke lives for exquisite pleasure.”
A quick step on the grass behind them made them swing suddenly round.
It was Vennie Seldom, who, unobserved, had been watching them from the
vicarage terrace. A few paces behind her came Mr. Taxater, walking
cautiously and deliberately, with the air of a Lord Chesterfield
returning from an audience at St. James’. Mr. Taxater had already met
the Italian on one or two occasions. He had sat next to her once, when
dining at Nevilton House, and he was considerably interested in her.
“What a lovely evening, Miss Traffio,” said Vennie shyly, but without
embarrassment. Vennie was always shy, but nothing ever interfered with
her self-possession.
“I am glad you are showing Mr. Andersen these orchards of ours. I
always think they are the most secluded place in the whole village.”
“Ha!” said Mr. Taxater, when he had greeted them with elaborate and
friendly courtesy, “I thought you two were bound to make friends
sooner or later! I call you my two companions in exile, among our dear
Anglo-Saxons. Miss Traffio I know is Latin, and you, sir, must have
some kind of foreign blood. I am right, am I not, Mr. Andersen?”
James looked at him humorously, though a little grimly. He was always
pleased to be addressed by Mr. Taxater, as indeed was everybody who
knew him. The great scholar’s detached intellectualism gave him an air
of complete aloofness from all social distinctions.
“Perhaps I may have,” he answered. “My mother used to hint at something
of the kind. She was always very fond of foreign books. I rather fancy
that I once heard her say something about a strain of Spanish blood.”
“I thought so! I thought so!” cried Mr. Taxater, pulling his hat over
his eyes and protruding his chin and under-lip, in the manner peculiar
to him when especially pleased.
“I thought there was something Spanish in you. How extraordinarily
interesting! Spain,--there is no country like it in the world! You must
go to Spain, Mr. Andersen. You would go there in a different spirit
from these wretched sight-seers who carry their own vulgarity with
them. You would go with that feeling of reverence for the great things
of civilization, which is inseparable from the least drop of Latin
blood.”
“Would _you_ like to see Spain, Miss Traffio?” enquired Vennie. “Mr.
Taxater, I notice, always leaves out us women, when he makes his
attractive proposals. I think he thinks that we have no capacity for
understanding this civilization he talks of.”
“I think you understand everything, better than any man could,”
murmured Lacrima, conscious of an extraordinary depth of sympathy
emanating from this frail figure.
“Miss Seldom has been trying to make me appreciate the beauty of these
orchards,” went on Mr. Taxater, addressing James. “But I am afraid I
am not very easily converted. I have a prejudice against orchards. For
some reason or other, I associate them with dragons and serpents.”
“Miss Seldom has every reason to love the beautiful aspects of our
Nevilton scenery,” said the stone-carver. “Her ancestors possessed all
these fields and orchards so long, that it would be strange if their
descendant did not have an instinctive passion for them.” He uttered
these words with that curious undertone of bitterness which marked all
his references to aristocratic pretension.
Little Vennie brushed the sarcasm gently aside, as if it had been a
fluttering moth.
“Yes, I do love them in a sense,” she said, “but you must remember
that I, too, was educated in a Latin country. So, you see, we four are
all outsiders and heretics! I fancy your brother, Mr. Andersen, is an
ingrained Neviltonian.”
James smiled in a kindly, almost paternal manner, at the little
descendant of the Tudor courtiers. Her sweetness and artless goodness
made him feel ashamed of his furtive truculence.
“I wish you would come in and see my mother and me, one of these
evenings,” said Vennie, looking rather wistfully at Lacrima and putting
a more tender solicitation into her tone than the mere words implied.
Lacrima hesitated. “I am afraid I cannot promise,” she said nervously.
“My cousin generally wants me in the evening.”
“Perhaps,” put in Mr. Taxater, with his most Talleyrand-like air, “a
similar occasion to the present one may arise again, when with Mr.
Andersen’s permission, we may all adjourn to the vicarage garden.”
Lacrima, rather uncomfortably, looked down at the grass.
“We four, being, as we have admitted, all outsiders here,” went on the
diplomatist, “ought to have no secrets from one another. I think”--he
looked at Vennie--“we may just as well confess to our friends that we
quite realize the little--charming--‘friendship,’ shall I say?--that
has sprung up between this gentleman’s brother and Miss Romer.”
“I think,” said James Andersen hurriedly, in order to relieve Lacrima’s
embarrassment, “I think the real bond between Luke and Miss Gladys is
their mutual pleasure in all this luxuriant scenery. Somehow I feel as
if you, Sir, and Miss Seldom, were quite separate from it and outside
it.”
“Yes,” cried Vennie eagerly, “and Lacrima is outside it, because she is
half-Italian, and you are outside it because you are half-Spanish.”
“It is clear, then,” said Mr. Taxater, “that we four must form a
sort of secret alliance, an alliance based upon the fact that even
Miss Seldom’s lovely orchards do not altogether make us forget what
civilization means!”
Neither of the two girls seemed quite to understand what the theologian
implied, but Andersen shot at him a gleam of appreciative gratitude.
“I was telling Miss Traffio,” he said, “that under this grass, not very
many feet down, a remarkable layer of sandstone obtrudes itself.”
“An orchard based on rock,” murmured Mr. Taxater, “that, I think, is
an admirable symbol of what this place represents. Clay at the top
and sandstone at the bottom! I wonder whether it is better, in this
world, to be clay or stone? We four poor foreigners have, I suspect,
a preference for a material very different from both of these. Our
element would be marble. Eh, Andersen? Marble that can resist all these
corrupting natural forces and throw them back, and hold them down. I
always think that marble is the appropriate medium of civilization’s
retort to instinct and savagery. The Latin races have always built in
marble. It was certainly of marble that our Lord was thinking when he
used his celebrated metaphor about the founding of the Church.”
The stone-carver made no answer. He had noticed a quick supplicating
glance from Lacrima’s dark eyes.
“Well,”--he said, “I think I must be looking for my brother, and I
expect our young lady is waiting for Miss Traffio.”
They bade their friends good-night and moved off.
“I am always at your service,” were Mr. Taxater’s last words, “if ever
either of you care to appeal to the free-masonry of the children of
marble against the children of clay.”
As they retraced their steps Andersen remarked to his companion how
curious it was, that neither Vennie nor Mr. Taxater seemed in the least
aware of anything extraordinary or unconventional in this surreptitious
friendship between the girls from the House and their father’s workmen.
“Yes, I wonder what Mrs. Seldom would think of us,” rejoined Lacrima,
“but she probably thinks Gladys is capable of anything and that I am
as bad as she is. But I do like that little Vennie! I believe she is a
real saint. She gives me such a queer feeling of being different from
everyone.”
“Mr. Taxater no doubt is making a convert of her,” said the
stone-carver. “And I have a suspicion that he hopes to convert Gladys
too, probably through your influence.”
“I don’t like to think that of him,” replied the girl. “He seems to
me to admire Vennie for herself and to be kind to us for ourselves. I
think he is a thoroughly good man.”
“Possibly--possibly,” muttered James, “but I don’t trust him. I never
have trusted him.”
They said no more, and threaded their way slowly through the orchard
to the place where they had left the others. The wind had dropped and
there was a dull, obstinate expectancy in the atmosphere. Every leaf
and grass blade seemed to be intently alert and listening.
In her heart Lacrima was conscious of an unusual sense of foreboding
and apprehension. Surely there could be nothing worse in store for her
than what she already suffered. She wondered what Maurice Quincunx was
doing at that moment. Was he thinking of her, and were his thoughts the
cause of this strange oppression in the air? Poor Maurice! She longed
to be free to devote herself to him, to smooth his path, to distract
his mind. Would fate ever make such a thing possible? How unfair Gladys
was in her suspicions!
She liked James Andersen and was very grateful to him, but he did not
need her as Maurice needed her!
“I see them!” she cried suddenly. “But how odd they look! They’re not
speaking a word. Have they quarrelled, I wonder?”
The two fair-haired amorists appeared indeed extremely gloomy and
melancholy, as they sat, with a little space between them, on the
fallen tree. They rose with an air of relief at the others’ approach.
“I thought you were never coming,” said Gladys. “How long you have
been! We have been waiting for hours. Come along. We must go straight
back and dress or we shall be late for dinner. No time for good-byes!
Au revoir, you two! Come along, girl, quick! We’d better run.”
She seized her cousin’s hand and dragged her off and they were quickly
out of sight.
The two brothers watched them disappear and then turned and walked
away together. “Don’t let’s go home yet,” said Luke. “Let’s go to the
churchyard first. The sun will have set, but it won’t be dark for a
long time. And I love the churchyard in the twilight.”
James nodded. “It is our garden, isn’t it,--and our orchard? It is the
only spot in Nevilton where no one can interfere with us.”
“That, and the Seldom Arms,” added the younger brother.
They paced side by side in silence till they reached the road. The
orchards, left to themselves, relapsed into their accustomed reserve.
Whatever secrets they concealed of the confused struggles of ephemeral
mortals, they concealed in inviolable discretion.