LACRIMA
Mr. John Goring was feeding his rabbits. In the gross texture of his
clayish nature there were one or two curious layers of a pleasanter
material. One of these, for instance, was now shown in the friendly
equanimity with which he permitted a round-headed awkward youth, more
than half idiotic, to assist him at this innocent task.
Between Mr. Goring and Bert Leerd there existed one of those
inexplicable friendships, which so often, to the bewilderment of moral
philosophers, bring a twilight of humanity into the most sinister
mental caves. The farmer had saved this youth from a conspiracy of
Poor-Law officials who were on the point of consigning him to an
asylum. He had assumed responsibility for his good-behaviour and had
given him a lodging--his parents being both dead--in the Priory itself.
Not a few young servant-girls, selected by Mr. Goring rather for
their appearance than their disposition, had been dismissed from his
service, after violent and wrathful scenes, for being caught teasing
this unfortunate; and even the cook, a female of the most taciturn
and sombre temper, was compelled to treat him with comparative
consideration. The gossips of Nevilton swore, as one may believe, that
the farmer, in being kind to this boy, was only obeying the mandate of
nature; but no one who had ever beheld Bert’s mother, gave the least
credence to such a story.
Another of Mr. Goring’s softer aspects was his mania for tame rabbits.
These he kept in commodious and spacious hutches at the back of his
house, and every year wonderful and interesting additions were added to
their number.
On this particular morning both the farmer and his idiot were absorbed
and rapt in contemplation before the gambols of two large new
pets--great silky lop-eared things--who had arrived the night before.
Mr. Goring was feeding them with fresh lettuces, carefully handed to
him by his assistant, who divested these plants of their rough outer
leaves and dried them on the palms of his hands.
“The little ’un do lap ’em up fastest, master,” remarked the boy. “I
mind how those others, with them girt ears, did love a fresh lettuce.”
Mr. Goring watched with mute satisfaction the quivering nostrils and
nibbling mouth of the dainty voracious creature.
“Mustn’t let them have more than three at a time, Bert,” he remarked.
“But they do love them, as you say.”
“What be going to call this little ’un, master?” asked the boy.
Mr. Goring straightened his back and drew a deep breath.
“What do you think, Bert, my boy?” he cried, in a husky excited tone,
prodding his assistant jocosely with the handle of his riding-whip;
“What do you think? What would you call her?”
“Ah! I knew she were a she, master!” chuckled the idiot. “I knew that,
afore she were out of the packer-case! Call ’er?” and the boy leered an
indescribable leer. “By gum! I can tell ’ee that fast enough. Call ’er
Missy Lacrima, pretty little Missy Lacrima, wot lives up at the House,
and wot is going to be missus ’ere afore long.”
Mr. Goring surveyed his protégé for a moment with sublime contentment,
and then humorously flicked at his ears with his whip.
“Right! my imp of Satan. Right! my spawn of Belial. That is just what I
_was_ thinking.”
“She be silky and soft to handle,” went on the idiot, “and her, up at
the House, be no contrary, or I’m darned mistaken.”
Mr. Goring expressed his satisfaction at his friend’s intelligence by
giving him a push that nearly threw him backwards.
“And I’ll tell you this, my boy,” he remarked confidentially, surveying
the long line of well-filled hutches, “we’ve never yet bought such
a rabbit, as this foreign one will turn out, or you and I be damned
fools.”
“The young lady’ll get mighty fond of these ’ere long-ears, looks so
to me,” observed the youth. “Hope she won’t be a feeding ’em with wet
cabbage, same as maids most often do.”
The farmer grew even more confidential, drawing close to his assistant
and addressing him in the tone customary with him on market-days, when
feeling the ribs of fatted cattle.
“That same young lady is coming up here this morning, Bert,” he
remarked significantly. “The squire’s giving her a note to bring along.”
“And you be going to bring matters to a head, master,” rejoined the
boy. “That’s wise and thoughtful of ’ee, choosing time, like, and
season, as the Book says. Maids be wonderful sly when the sun’s down,
while of mornings they be meek as guinea-fowls.”
The appearance of the Priory servant--no very demure figure--put a
sudden stop to these touching confidences.
“Miss Lacrima, with a note, in the front Parlour!” the damsel shouted.
“You needn’t call so loud, girl,” grumbled the farmer. “And how often
must I tell you to say ‘Miss Traffio,’ not ‘Miss Lacrima’?”
The girl tossed her head and pouted her lips.
“A person isn’t used to waiting on foreigners,” she muttered.
Mr. Goring’s only reply to this remark was to pinch her arm
unmercifully. He then pushed her aside, and entering the kitchen,
walked rapidly through to the front of the house. The front parlour in
the Priory was nothing more or less than the old entrance-gate of the
Cistercian Monastery, preserved through four centuries, with hardly a
change.
The roof was high and vaulted. In the centre of the vault a great
many-petalled rose, carved in Leonian stone, seemed to gather all the
curves and lines of the masonry together, and hold them in religious
concentration.
The fire-place--a thing of more recent, but still sufficiently ancient
date--displayed the delicate and gracious fantasy of some local
Jacobean artist, who had lavished upon its ornate mouldings a more
personal feeling than one is usually aware of in these things. In
place of a fire the wide grate was, at this moment, full of new-grown
bracken fronds, evidently recently picked, for they were still fresh
and green.
In front of the fire-place stood Lacrima with the letter in her hand.
Had Mr. Goring been a little less persuaded of the “meekness” of
this young person, he would have recognized something not altogether
friendly to himself and his plans in the strained white face she raised
to him and the stiff gloved hand she extended.
He begged her to be seated. She waved aside the chair he offered, and
handed him the letter. He tore this open and glanced carelessly at its
contents.
The letter was indeed brief enough, containing nothing but the
following gnomic words: “Refusal or no refusal,” signed with an
imperial flourish.
He flung it down on the table, and came to business at once.
“You mustn’t let that little mistake of Auber Great Meadow mean
anything, missie,” he said. “You were too hasty with a fellow that
time--too hasty and coy-like. Those be queer maids’ tricks, that crying
and running! But, bless my heart! I don’t bear you any grudge for it.
You needn’t think it.”
He advanced a step--while she retreated, very pale and very calm, her
little fingers clasped nervously together. She managed to keep the
table between them, so that, barring a grotesque and obvious pursuit of
her, she was well out of his reach.
“I have a plain and simple offer to make to you, my dear,” he
continued, “and it is one that can do you no hurt or shame. I am
not one of those who waste words in courting a girl, least of all a
young lady of education like yourself. The fact is, I am a lonely
man--without wife or child--and as far as I know no relations on
earth, except brother Mortimer. And I have a pretty tidy sum laid up
in Yeoborough Bank, and the farm is a good farm. I do not say that the
house is all that could be wished; but ’tis a pretty house, too, and
one that could stand improvement. In plain words, dearie, what I want
you to say now is ‘yes,’ and no nonsense,--for what I am doing,” his
voice became quite husky at this point, as if her propinquity really
did cause him some emotion, “is asking you, point-blank, and no beating
about the bush, whether you will marry me!”
Lacrima’s face during this long harangue would have formed a strange
picture for any old Cistercian monk shadowing that ancient room. At
first she had kept unmoved her strained and tensely-strung impassivity.
But by degrees, as the astounding character of the man’s communication
began to dawn upon her, her look changed into one of sheer blind
terror. When the final fatal word crossed the farmer’s lips, she put
her hand to her throat as though to suppress an actual cry. She had
never looked for this;--not in her wildest dreams of what destiny, in
this curst place, could inflict upon her. This surpassed the worst of
possible imagination! It was a deep below the deep. She found herself
at first completely unable to utter a word. She could only make a vague
helpless gesture with her hand as though dumbly waving the whole world
away.
Then at last with a terrible effort she broke the silence.
“What you say is utterly--utterly impossible! It is--it is too--”
She could not go on. But she had said enough to carry, even to a brain
composed of pure clay, the conviction that the acquiescence he demanded
was not a thing to be easily won. He thought of his brother-in-law’s
enigmatic note. Possibly the owner of Leo’s Hill had ways of persuading
recalcitrant foreign girls that were quite hidden from him. The
psychological irony of the thing lay in the fact that in proportion
as her terror increased, his desire for her increased proportionally.
Had she been willing,--had she been even passive and indifferent,--the
curious temperament of Mr. Goring would have been scarcely stirred. He
might have gone on pursuing her, out of spite or out of obstinacy; but
the pursuit would have been no more than an interlude, a distraction,
among his other affairs.
But that look of absolute terror on her face--the look of a
hunted animal under the hot breath of the hounds--appealed to
something profoundly deep in his nature. Oddly enough--such are the
eccentricities of the human mind--the very craving to possess her which
her terror excited, was accompanied by a rush of extraordinary pity for
himself as the object of her distaste.
He let her pass--making no movement to interrupt her escape. He let her
hurry out of the garden and into the road--without a word; but as soon
as she was gone, he sat down on the wooden seat under the front of the
house and resting his head upon his chin began blubbering like a great
baby. Big salt tears fell from his small pig’s eyes, rolled down his
tanned cheeks, and falling upon the dust caked it into little curious
globules.
Two wandering ants of a yellowish species, dragging prisoner after
them one of a black kind, encountered these minute globes of sand and
sorrow, and explored them with interrogatory feelers.
Mingled with this feeling of pity for himself under the girl’s disdain
was a remarkable wave of immense tenderness and consideration for her.
Short of letting her escape him, how delicately he would cherish, how
tenderly he would pet and fondle her, how assiduously he would care
for her! The consciousness of this emotion of soft tenderness towards
the girl increased his pity for himself under the weight of the girl’s
contempt. How ungrateful she was! And yet that very look of terror,
that stifled cry of the hunted hare, which made him so resolved to win
her, produced in him an exquisite feeling of melting regard for her
youth, her softness, her fragility. When she did belong to him, oh
how tenderly he would treat her! How he would humour her and give her
everything she could want!
The shadowy Cistercian monks would no doubt, from their clairvoyant
catholic knowledge of the subtleties of the human soul, have quite
understood the cause of those absurd tears caking the dust under that
wooden seat. But the yellowish ants continued to be very perplexed and
confused by their presence. Thunder-drops tasting of salt were no doubt
as strange to them as hail-stones tasting of wine would have been to
Mr. Goring. But the ants were not the only creatures amazed at this
new development in the psychology of the man of clay. From one corner
of the house peeped the servant-girl, full of tremulous curiosity, and
from another the idiot Bert shuffled and spied, full of most anxious
and perturbed concern.
Meanwhile the innocent cause of this little drama was making her way
with drooping head and dragging steps down the south drive. When she
reached the house she was immediately informed by one of the servants
that Mr. Romer wished to see her in the study.
She was so dazed and broken, so forlorn and indifferent, that she made
her way straight to this room without pause or question.
She found Mr. Romer in a most lively and affable mood. He made her
sit down opposite him, and handed her chocolates out of a decorative
Parisian box which lay on the table.
“Well, young lady,” he said, “I know, without your telling me, that an
important event has occurred! Indeed, to confess the truth, I have,
for a long time, foreseen its occurrence. And what did you answer to
my worthy brother’s flattering proposal? It isn’t every girl, in your
peculiar position, who is as lucky as this. Come--don’t be shy! There
is no need for shyness with me. What did you say to him?”
Lacrima looked straight in front of her out of the window. She saw the
waving branches of a great dark yew-tree and above it the white clouds.
She felt like one whose guardian-angel has deserted her, leaving her
the prey of blind elemental forces. She thought vaguely in her mind
that she would make a desperate appeal to Vennie Seldom. Something in
Vennie gave her a consciousness of strength. To this strength, at the
worst, she would cling for help. She was thus in a measure fortified in
advance against any outburst in which her employer might indulge. But
Mr. Romer indulged in no outburst.
“I suppose,” he said calmly, “that I may take for granted that you have
refused my good brother’s offer?”
Lacrima nodded, without speaking.
“That is quite what I expected. You would not be yourself if you
had not done so. And since you have done so it is of course quite
impossible for me to put any pressure upon you.”
He paused and carefully selecting the special kind of chocolate that
appealed to him put it deliberately in his mouth.
Lacrima was so amazed at the mild tone he used and at the drift of his
words, that she turned full upon him her large liquid eyes with an
expression in them of something almost like gratitude. The corners of
her mouth twitched. The reaction was too great. She felt she could not
keep back her tears.
Mr. Romer quietly continued.
“In all these things, my dear young lady, the world presents itself
as a series of bargains and compromises. My brother has made you his
offer--a flattering and suitable one. In the girlish excitement of the
first shock you have totally refused to listen to him. But the world
moves round. Such natural moods do not last forever. They often do not
last beyond the next day! In order to help you--to make it easier for
you--to bring such a mood to an end, I also, in my turn, have a little
proposal to make.”
Lacrima’s expression changed with terrible rapidity; she stared at him
panic-stricken.
“My proposal is this,” said Mr. Romer, quietly handing her the box
of chocolates, and smiling as she waved it away. “As I said just
now, the world is a place of bargains and compromises. Nothing ever
occurs between human beings which is not the result of some unuttered
transaction of occult diplomacy. Led by your instincts you reject
my brother’s offer. Led by my instincts I offer you the following
persuasion to overcome your refusal.”
He placed another chocolate in his mouth.
“I know well,” he went on, “your regard and fondness--I might use even
stronger words--for our friend Maurice Quincunx. Now what I propose
is this. I will settle upon Maurice,--you shall see the draft itself
and my signature upon it,--an income sufficient to enable him to live
comfortably and happily, wherever he pleases, without doing a stroke
of work, and without the least anxiety. I will arrange it so that he
cannot touch the capital of the sum I make over to him, and has nothing
to do but to sign receipts for each quarter’s dividend, as the bank
makes them over to him.
“The sum I will give him will be so considerable, that the income
from it will amount to not less than three hundred pounds a year.
With this at his disposal he will be able to live wherever he likes,
either here or elsewhere. And what is more,”--here Mr. Romer looked
intently and significantly at the trembling girl--“what is more, he
will be in a position to _marry_ whenever he may desire to do so. I
believe”--he could not refrain from a tone of sardonic irony as he
added this--“that you have found him not particularly well able to look
after himself. I shall sign this document, rendering your friend free
from financial anxiety for the rest of his life, on the day when you
are married to Mr. Goring.”
When he had finished speaking Lacrima continued to stare at him with a
wide horror-struck gaze.
Mechanically she noticed the peculiar way in which his eyebrows met
one another across a scar on his forehead. This scar and the little
grey bristles that crossed it remained in her mind long afterwards,
indelibly associated with the thoughts that then passed through her
brain. Chief among these thoughts was a deep-lurking, heart-clutching
dread of her own conscience, and a terrible shapeless fear that this
subterranean conscience might debar her from the _right_ to make her
appeal to Vennie. From Mr. Romer’s persecution she could appeal; but
how could she appeal against his benevolence to her friend, even though
the path of that benevolence lay over her own body?
She rose from her seat, too troubled and confused even to hate the man
who thus played the part of an ironic Providence.
“Let me go,” she said, waving aside once more the bright-coloured box
of chocolates which he had the diabolical effrontery to offer her
again. “Let me go. I want to be alone. I want to think.”
He opened the door for her, and she passed out. Once out of his
presence she rushed madly upstairs to her own room, flung herself on
the bed, and remained, for what seemed to her like centuries of horror,
without movement and without tears, staring up at the ceiling.
The luncheon bell sounded, but she did not heed it. From the open
window floated in the smell of the white cluster-roses, scented like
old wine, which encircled the terrace pillars. Blending with this
fragrance came the interminable voice of the wood-pigeons, and every
now and then a sharp wild cry, from the peacocks on the east lawn.
Two--three hours passed thus, and still she did not move. A certain
queer-shaped crack above the door occupied her superficial attention,
very much in the same way as the scar on Mr. Romer’s forehead. Any very
precise formulation of her thoughts during this long period would be
difficult to state.
Her mind had fallen into that confused and feverish bewilderment
that comes to us in hours between sleeping and waking. The clearest
image that shaped itself to her consciousness during these hours was
the image of herself as dead, and, by means of her death, of Maurice
Quincunx being freed from his hated office-work, and enabled to live
according to his pleasure. She saw him walking to and fro among
rows of evening primroses--his favourite flowers--and in place of a
cabbage-leaf--so fantastic were her dreams--she saw his heavy head
ornamented with a broad, new Panama-hat, purchased with the price of
her death.
Her mind gave no definite shape or form to this image of herself
dying. The thought of it followed so naturally from the idea of a
union with the Priory-tenant, that there seemed no need to separate
the two things. To marry Mr. John Goring was just a simple sentence of
death. The only thing to make sure of, was that before she actually
died, this precious document, liberating her friend forever, should
be signed and sealed. Oddly enough she never for a moment doubted Mr.
Romer’s intention of carrying out his part of the contract if she
carried out hers. As he had said, the world was designed and arranged
for bargains between men and women; and if her great bargain meant the
putting of life itself into the scale--well! she was ready.
Strangely enough, the final issue of her feverish self-communings was a
sense of deep and indescribable peace. It was more of a relief to her
than anyone not acquainted with the peculiar texture of a Pariah’s mind
could realize, to be spared that desperate appeal to Vennie Seldom. In
a dumb inarticulate way she felt that, without making such an appeal,
the spirit of the Nevilton nun was supporting and strengthening her.
Did Vennie know of her dilemma, she would be compelled to resort to
some drastic step to stop the sacrifice, just as one would be compelled
to hold out a hand of rescue to some determined suicide. But she felt
in the depths of her heart that if Vennie were in her position she
would make the same choice.
The long afternoon was still only half over, when--comforted and at
peace with herself, as a devoted patriot might be at peace, when the
throw of the dice has appointed him as his country’s liberator--she
rose from her recumbent position, and sitting on the edge of her bed
turned over the pages of her tiny edition of St. Thomas à Kempis.
It had been long since she had opened this volume. Indeed, isolated
from contact with any Catholic influence except that of the
philosophical Mr. Taxater, Lacrima had been recently drifting rather
far away from the church of her fathers. This complete upheaval of her
whole life threw her back upon her old faith.
Like so many other women of suppressed romantic emotions, when the
moment came for some heroic sacrifice for the sake of her friend, she
at once threw into the troubled waters the consecrated oil that had
anointed the half-forgotten piety of her childhood.
One curious and interesting psychological fact in connection with this
new trend of feeling in her, was the fact that the actual realistic
horror of being, in a literal and material sense, at the mercy of
Mr. John Goring never presented itself to her mind at all. Its very
dreadfulness, being a thing that amounted to sheer death, blurred and
softened its tangible and palpable image.
Yet it must not be supposed that she meditated definitely upon any
special line of action. She formulated no plan of self-destruction. For
some strange reason, it was much less the bodily terror of the idea
that rose up awful and threatening before her, than its spiritual and
moral counterpart.
Had Lacrima been compelled, like poor Sonia in the Russian novel, to
become a harlot for the sake of those she loved, it would have been the
mental rather than the physical outrage that would have weighed upon
her.
She was of that curious human type which separates the body from
the soul, in all these things. She had always approached life
rather through her mind than through her senses, and it was in the
imagination that she found both her catastrophes and recoveries. In
this particular case, the obsessing image of death had for the moment
quite obliterated the more purely realistic aspect of what she was
contemplating. Her feeling may perhaps be best described by saying that
whenever she imaged the farmer’s possession of her, it was always as
if what he possessed was no more than a dead inert corpse, about whose
fate none, least of all herself, could have any further care.
She had just counted the strokes of the church clock striking four,
when she heard Gladys’ steps in the adjoining room. She hurriedly
concealed the little purple-covered volume, and lay back once more
upon her pillows. She fervently prayed in her heart that Gladys might
be ignorant of what had occurred, but her knowledge of the relations
between father and daughter made this a very forlorn hope.
Such as it was, it was entirely dispelled as soon as the fair-haired
creature glided in and sat down at the foot of her bed.
Gladys looked at her cousin with intent and luxurious interest; her
expression being very much what one might suppose the countenance of a
young pagan priestess to have worn, as she gazed, dreamily and sweetly,
in a pause of the sacrificial procession, at some doomed heifer “lowing
at the skies, and all her silken flanks with garlands dressed.”
“So I hear that you are going to be married,” she began at once,
speaking in a slow, liquid voice, and toying indolently with her
friend’s shoe-strings.
“Please--please don’t talk about it,” murmured the Italian. “Nothing
is settled yet. I would so much rather not think of it now.”
“But, how silly!” cried the other, with a melodious little laugh. “Of
course we must talk about it. It is so extremely exciting! I shall
be seeing uncle John today and I must congratulate him. I am sure he
doesn’t half know how lucky he is.”
Lacrima jumped up from where she lay and stepping to the window looked
out over the sunlit park.
Gladys rose too, and standing behind her cousin, put her arms round her
waist.
“No, I am sure he doesn’t realize how sweet you are,” she whispered.
“You darling little thing,--you little, shy, frightened thing--you
must tell me all about it! I’ll try not to tease you--I really will!
What a clever, naughty little girl, it has been, peeping and glancing
at a poor elderly farmer and inflaming his simple heart! But all your
friends are rather well advanced in age, aren’t they, dear? I expect
uncle John is really no older than Mr. Quincunx or James Andersen. What
tricks do you use, darling, to attract all these people?
“I’ll tell you what it is! It’s the way you clasp your fingers, and
keep groping with your hands in the air in front of you, as if you
were blind. I’ve noticed that trick of yours for a long time. I expect
it attracts them awfully! I expect they all long to take those little
wrists and hold them tight! And the drooping, dragging way you walk,
too; that no doubt they find quite enthralling. It has often irritated
_me_, but I can quite see now why you do it. It must make them long to
support you in their strong arms! What a crafty little puss she is! And
I have sometimes taken her for no better than a little simpleton! I see
I shall not for long be the only person allowed to kiss our charming
Lacrima! So I must make the best of my opportunities, mustn’t I?”
Suiting her action to her words she turned the girl towards her with a
vigorous movement, and overcoming her reluctance, embraced her softly,
whispering, as she kissed her averted mouth,--
“Uncle John won’t do this half so prettily as I do, will he? But oh,
how you must have played your tricks upon him--cunning, cunning little
thing!”
Lacrima had by this time reached the end of her endurance. With a
sudden flash of genuine Italian anger she flung her cousin back, with
such unexpected violence, that the elder girl would actually have
fallen to the floor, if she had not encountered in her collapse the arm
of the wicker chair which stood behind her.
She rose silent and malignant.
“So that’s what we gentle, wily ones do, is it, when we lose our little
tempers! All right, my friend, all right! I shall remember.”
She walked haughtily to the door that divided their rooms.
“The sooner I am married,” she cried, as a final hit, “the sooner _you_
will be--and I shall be married soon--soon--soon; perhaps before this
summer is out!”
Lacrima stood for some moments rigid and unmoving. Then there came over
her an irresistible longing to escape from this house, and flee far
off, anywhere, anyhow, so long as she could be alone with her misery,
alone with her tragic resolution.
The invasion of Gladys had made this resolution a very different
thing from what it had seemed an hour ago. But she must recover
herself! She must see things again in the clearer, larger light of
sublime sacrifice. She must purge the baseness of her cousin’s sensual
magnetism out of her brain and her heart!
She hurriedly fastened on her hat, took her faded parasol, slipped the
tiny St. Thomas into her dress, and ran down the great oak staircase.
She hurried past the entrance without turning aside to greet the
impassive Mrs. Romer, seated as usual in her accustomed place, and
skirting the east lawns emerged from the little postern-gate into the
park. Crossing a half-cut hay-field and responding gravely and gently
to the friendly greetings of the hay-makers, she entered the Yeoborough
road just below the steep ascent, between high overshadowing hedges, of
Dead Man’s Lane.
Whether from her first exit from the house, she had intended to follow
this path, she could hardly herself have told. It was the instinct of
a woman at bay, seeking out, not the strong that could help her, but
the weak that she herself could help. It was also perhaps the true
Pariah impulse, which drives these victims of the powerful and the
well-constituted, to find rehabilitation in the society of one another.
As she ascended the shadowy lane with its crumbling banks of sandy soil
and its overhanging trees, she felt once again how persistently this
heavy luxuriant landscape dragged her earthwards and clogged the wings
of her spirit. The tall grasses growing thick by the way-side enlaced
themselves with the elder-bushes and dog-wood, which in their turn
blended indissolubly with the lower branches of the elms. The lane
itself was but a deep shadowy path dividing a flowing sea of foliage,
which seemed to pour, in a tidal wave of suffocating fertility, over
the whole valley.
The Italian struggled in vain against the depressing influence of all
these rank and umbrageous growths, spreading out leafy arms to catch
her and groping towards her with moist adhesive tendrils. The lane was
full of a warm steamy vapour, like that of a hot-house, to the heavy
odour of which, every sort of verdurous growing thing offered its
contribution.
There was a vague smell of funguses in the air, though none were
visible; and the idea of them may only have been due to the presence
of decaying wood or the moist drooping stalks of the dead flowers
of the earlier season. Now and again the girl caught, wafted upon a
sudden stir of wind, the indescribably sweet scent of honey-suckle--a
sweetness almost overpowering in its penetrating voluptuous approach.
Once, high up above her head, she saw a spray of this fragrant
parasite; not golden yellow, as it is where the sun shines full upon
it, but pallid and ivory-white. In a curious way it seemed as if this
Nevilton scenery offered her no escape from the insidious sensuality
she fled.
The indolent luxuriousness of Gladys seemed to breathe from every mossy
spore and to over-hang every unclosing frond. And if Gladys was in the
leaves and grass, the remoter terror of Mr. Goring was in the earth and
clay. Between the two they monopolized this whole corner of the planet,
and made everything between zenith and nadir their privileged pasture.
As she drew nearer to where Mr. Quincunx lived, her burdened mind
sought relief in focussing itself upon him. She would be sure to find
him in his garden. That she knew, because the day was Saturday. Should
she tell him what had happened to her?
Ah! that was indeed the crucial question! Was it necessary that she
should sacrifice herself for him without his even knowing what she did?
But he would have to know, sooner or later, of this marriage. Everyone
would be talking of it. It would be bound to come to his ears.
And what would he think of her if she said nothing? What would he think
of her, in any case, having accepted such a degradation?
Not to tell him at all, would throw a completely false light upon
the whole transaction. It would make her appear treacherous, fickle,
worldly-minded, shameless--wickedly false to her unwritten covenant
with himself.
To tell him, without giving him the true motive of her sacrifice, would
be, she felt sure, to bring down his bitterest reproaches on her head.
For a passing second she felt a wave of indignation against him surge
up in her heart. This, however, she passionately suppressed, with the
instinctive desire of a woman who is sacrificing herself to feel the
object of such sacrifice worthy of what is offered.
It was not long before she reached the gate of Mr. Quincunx’s garden.
Yes,--there he was--with his wheel-barrow and his hoe--bending over his
potatoes. She opened the gate and walked quite close up to him before
he observed her. He greeted her in his usual manner, with a smile of
half-cynical, half-affectionate welcome, and taking her by the hand as
he might have taken a child, he led her to the one shady spot in his
garden, where, under a weeping ash, he had constructed a rough bench.
“I didn’t expect you,” he said, when they were seated. “I never do
expect you. People like me who have only Saturday afternoons to enjoy
themselves in don’t expect visitors. They count the hours which are
left to them before the night comes.”
“But you have Sunday, my friend,” she said, laying her hand upon his.
“Sunday!” Mr. Quincunx muttered. “Do you call Sunday a day? I regard
Sunday as a sort of prison-exercise, when all the convicts go walking
up and down and showing off their best clothes. I can neither work nor
read nor think on Sunday. I have to put on my best clothes like the
rest, and stand at my gate, staring at the weather and wondering what
the hay-crop will be. The only interesting moments I have on Sunday are
when that silly-faced Wone, or one of the Andersens, drifts this way,
and we lean over my wall and abuse the gentry.”
“Poor dear!” said the girl pityingly. “I expect the real truth is that
you are so tired with your work all the week, that you are glad enough
to rest and do nothing.”
Mr. Quincunx’s nostrils dilated, and his drooping moustache quivered. A
smile of delicious and sardonic humour wavered over the lower portion
of his face, while his grey eyes lost their sadness and gleamed with a
goblin-like merriment.
“I am getting quite popular at the office,” he said. “I have learnt
the secret of it now.”
“And what is the secret?” asked Lacrima, suppressing a queer little
gasp in her throat.
“Sucking up,” Mr. Quincunx answered, his face flickering with
subterranean amusement, “sucking up to everyone in the place, from the
manager to the office boy.”
Lacrima returned to him a very wan little smile.
“I suppose you mean ingratiating yourself,” she said; “you English have
such funny expressions.”
“Yes, ingratiating myself, pandering to them, flattering them, agreeing
with them, anticipating their wishes, doing their work for them,
telling lies for them, abusing God to make them laugh, introducing them
to Guy de Maupassant, and even making a few light references, now and
again, to what Shakespeare calls ‘country-matters.’”
“I don’t believe a word you say,” protested Lacrima in rather a
quavering voice. “I believe you hate them all and that they are all
unkind to you. But I can quite imagine you have to do more work than
your own.”
Mr. Quincunx’s countenance lost its merriment instantaneously.
“I believe you are as annoyed as Mr. Romer,” he said, “that I should
get on in the office. But I am past being affected by that. I know what
human nature is! We are all really pleased when other people get on
badly, and are sorry when they do well.”
Lacrima felt as though the trees in the field opposite had suddenly
reversed themselves and were waving their roots in the air.
She gave a little shiver and pressed her hand to her side.
Mr. Quincunx continued.
“Of course you don’t like it when I tell you the truth. Nobody likes
to hear the truth. Human beings lap up lies as pigs lap up milk. And
women are worst of all in that! No woman really can love a person--not,
at any rate, for long--who tells her the truth! That is why women love
clergymen, because clergymen are brought up to lie. I saw you laughing
and amusing yourself the other evening with Mr. Clavering--you and your
friend Gladys. I went the other way, so as not to interrupt such a
merry conversation.”
Lacrima turned upon him at this.
“I cannot understand how you can say such things of me!” she cried. “It
is too much. I won’t--I won’t listen to it!”
Her over-strained nerves broke down at last, and covering her face with
her hands, she burst into a fit of convulsive sobs.
Mr. Quincunx rose and stood gazing at her, gloomily plucking at his
beard.
“And such are women!” he thought to himself. “One can never tell them
the least truth but they burst into tears.”
He waited thus in silence for one or two moments, and then an
expression of exquisite tenderness and sympathy came into his face. His
patient grey eyes looked at her bowed head with the look of a sorrowful
god. Gently he sat down beside her and laid his hand on her shoulder.
“Lacrima--dear--I am sorry--I oughtn’t to have said that. I didn’t mean
it. On my solemn oath I didn’t mean it! Lacrima, please don’t cry. I
can’t bear it when you cry. It was all absolute nonsense what I said
just now. It is the devil that gets into me and makes me say those
things! Lacrima--darling Lacrima--we won’t tease one another any more.”
Her sobs diminished under the obvious sincerity of his words. She
lifted up a tear-stained face and threw her arms passionately round his
neck.
“I’ve no one but you,” she cried, “no one, no one!”
For several minutes they embraced each other in silence--the girl’s
breast quivering with the after-sighs of her emotion and their tears
mingling together and falling on Mr. Quincunx’s beard. Had Gladys Romer
beheld them at that moment she would certainly have been strengthened
in her healthy-minded mocking contempt for sentimental “slobbering.”
When they had resumed a more normal mood their conversation continued
gently and quietly.
“Of course you are right,” said Mr. Quincunx. “I am not really happy
at the office. Who _could_ be happy in a place of that kind? But it
is my life--and one has to do what one can with one’s life! I have to
pretend to myself that they like me there, and that I am making myself
useful--otherwise I simply could not go on. I have to pretend. That’s
what it is! It is my pet illusion, my little fairy-story. It was that
that made me get angry with you--that and the devil. One doesn’t like
to have one’s fairy-stories broken into by the brutal truth.”
“Poor dear!” said Lacrima softly, stroking his hand with a gesture of
maternal tenderness.
“If there was any hope of this wretched business coming to an end,”
Maurice went on, “it would be different. Then I would curse all these
people to hell and have done with it. But what can I do? I am already
past middle age. I shouldn’t be able to get anything else if I gave it
up. And I don’t want to leave Nevilton while you are here.”
The girl looked intently at him. Then she folded her hands on her lap
and began gravely.
“I have something to tell you, Maurice dear. Something very important.
What would you say if I told you that it was in my power to set you
free from all this and make you happy and comfortable for the rest of
your life?”
An invisible watcher from some more clairvoyant planet than ours would
have been interested at that moment in reading the double weakness of
two poor Pariah hearts. Lacrima, brought back from the half-insane
attitudes of her heroic resolution by the intermission of natural human
emotion, found herself on the brink of half-hoping that her friend
would completely and indignantly refuse this shameful sacrifice.
“Surely,” her heart whispered, “some other path of escape must offer
itself for them both. Perhaps, after all, Vennie Seldom might discover
some way.”
Mr. Quincunx, on the other hand, was most thoroughly alarmed by her
opening words. He feared that she was going to propose some desperate
scheme by which, fleeing from Nevilton together, she was to help him
earn money enough for their mutual support.
“What should I say?” he answered aloud, to the girl’s question.
“It would depend upon the manner in which you worked this wonderful
miracle. But I warn you I am not hopeful. Things might be worse. After
all I have a house to return to. I have food. I have my books. I have
you to come and pay me visits. I have my garden. In this world, when
a person has a roof over his head, and someone to talk to every other
day, he had better remain still and not attract the attention of the
gods.”
Silence followed his words. Instead of speaking, Lacrima took off her
hat, and smoothed her hair away from her forehead, keeping her eyes
fixed upon the ground. An immense temptation seized her to let the
moment pass without revealing her secret. She could easily substitute
any imaginary suggestion in place of the terrible reality. Her friend’s
morbid nerves would help her deception. The matter would be glossed
over and be as if it had never been: be, in fact, no more than it was,
a hideous nightmare of her own insane and diseased conscience.
But could the thing be so suppressed? Would it be like Nevilton to let
even the possible image of such a drama pass unsnatched at by voluble
tongues, unenlarged upon by malicious gossip?
He would be bound to hear of Mr. Goring’s offer. That, at least, could
not be concealed. And what assurance had she that Mr. Romer would not
himself communicate to him the full nature of the hideous bargain? The
quarry-owner might think it diplomatic to trade upon Maurice’s weakness.
No--there was no help for it. She must tell him;--only praying now, in
the profound depths of her poor heart, that he would not consider such
an infamy even for a second. So she told him the whole story, in a low
monotonous voice, keeping her head lowered and watching the progress of
a minute snail laboriously ascending a stalk of grass.
Maurice Quincunx had never twiddled the point of his Elizabethan beard
with more detached absorption than while listening to this astounding
narration. When she had quite finished, he regarded her from head to
foot with a very curious expression.
The girl breathed hard. What was he thinking? He did not at once, in a
burst of righteous indignation, fling the monstrous suggestion to the
winds. What was he thinking? As a matter of fact the thoughts of Mr.
Quincunx had taken an extraordinary turn.
Being in his personal relation to feminine charm, of a somewhat cold
temper, he had never, for all his imaginative sentiment towards his
little friend, been at all swayed by any violent sensuous attraction.
But the idea of such attraction having seized so strongly upon another
person reacted upon him, and he looked at her, perhaps for the first
time since they had met, with eyes of something more than purely
sentimental regard.
This new element in his attitude towards her did not, however, issue
in any excess of physical jealousy. What it did lead to, unluckily
for Lacrima, was a certain queer diminution of his ideal respect for
her personality. In place of focussing his attention upon the sublime
sacrifice she contemplated for his sake, the events she narrated
concentrated his mind upon the mere brutal and accidental fact that
Mr. Goring had so desperately desired her. The mere fact of her having
been so desired by such a man, changed her in his eyes. His cynical
distrust of all women led him to conceive the monstrous and grotesque
idea that she must in her heart be gratified by having aroused this
passion in the farmer. It did not carry him quite so far as to make him
believe that she had consciously excited such emotion; but it led him
to the very brink of that outrageous fantasy. Had Lacrima come to him
with a shame-faced confession that she had let herself be seduced by
the Priory-tenant he could hardly have gazed at her with more changed
and troubled eyes. He felt the same curious mixture of sorrowful pity
and remote unlawful attraction to the object of his pity, that he
would have felt in a casual conversation with some luckless child of
the streets. By being the occasion of Mr. Goring’s passion, she became
for him no less than such an unfortunate; the purer sentiment he had
hitherto cherished changing into quite a different mood.
He lifted her up by the wrists and pressed her closely to him, kissing
her again and again. The girl’s heart went on anxiously beating. She
could hardly restrain her impatience for him to speak. Why did he not
speak?
Disentangling herself from his embrace with a quick feminine instinct
that something was wrong, she pulled him down upon the bench by her
side and taking his hand in hers looked with pitiful bewilderment into
his face.
“So when this thing happens,” she said, “all your troubles will be
over. You will be free forever from that horrid office.”
“And you,” said Mr. Quincunx--his mood changing again, and his
goblin-like smile twitching his nostrils,--“You will be the mistress
of the Priory. Well! I suppose you will not desert me altogether when
that happens!”
So that was the tone he adopted! He could afford to turn the thing into
a jest--into God knows what! She let his hand drop and stared into
empty space, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, understanding nothing.
This time Maurice realized that he had disappointed her; that his
cynicism had carried him too far. Unfortunately the same instinct that
told him he had made a fool of himself pushed him on to seek an issue
from the situation by wading still further into it.
“Come--come,” he said. “You and I must face this matter like people who
are really free spirits, and not slaves to any ridiculous superstition.
It is noble, it is sweet of you to think of marrying that brute so
as to set me free. Of course if I _was_ free, and you were up at the
Priory, we should see a great deal more of each other than we do now. I
could take one of those vacant cottages close to the church.
“Don’t think--Lacrima dear,” he went on, possessing himself of one of
her cold hands and trying to recall her attention, “don’t think that I
don’t realize what it is to you to have to submit to such a frightful
thing. Of course we know how outrageous it is that such a marriage
should be forced on you. But, after all, you and I are above these
absurd popular superstitions about all these things. Every girl sooner
or later hates the man she marries. It is human nature to hate the
people we have to live with; and when it comes down to actual reality,
all human beings are much the same. If you were forced to marry me, you
would probably hate me just as much as you’ll hate this poor devil.
After all, what is this business of being married to people and bearing
them children? It doesn’t touch your mind. It doesn’t affect your
soul. As old Marcus Aurelius says, our bodies are nothing! They are
wretched corpses, anyway, dragged hither and thither by our imprisoned
souls. It is these damned clergymen, with their lies about ‘sin’ and
so forth, that upset women’s minds. For you to be married to a man you
hate, would only be like my having to go to this Yeoborough office with
people I hate. You will always have, as that honest fellow Epictetus
says, your own soul to retire into, whatever happens. Heavens! it
strikes me as a bit of humorous revenge,”--here his nostrils twitched
again and the hobgoblin look reappeared--“this thought of you and
me living peacefully at our ease, so near one another, and at these
confounded rascals’ expense!”
Lacrima staggered to her feet. “Let me go,” she said. “I want to go
back--away--anywhere.”
Her look, her gesture, her broken words gave Mr. Quincunx a poignant
shock. In one sudden illuminating flash he saw himself as he was,
and his recent remarks in their true light. We all have sometimes
these psychic search-light flashes of introspection; but the more
healthy-minded and well-balanced among us know how to keep them in
their place and how to expel them promptly and effectively.
Mr. Quincunx was not healthy-minded. He had the morbid sensitive mind
of a neurotic Pariah. Hence, in place of suppressing this spiritual
illumination, he allowed it to irradiate the gloomiest caverns of his
being. He rose with a look of abject and miserable concern.
“Stop,” he cried huskily.
She looked at him wondering, the blood returning a little to her cheeks.
“It is the Devil!” he exclaimed. “I must have the Devil in me, to say
such things and to treat you like this. You are the bravest, sweetest
girl in the world, and I am a brutal idiot--worse than Mr. Romer!”
He struck himself several blows upon the forehead, knocking off his
hat. Lacrima could not help noticing that in place of the usual
protection, some small rhubarb-leaves ornamented the interior of this
appendage.
She smiled at him, through a rain of happy tears,--the first smile that
day had seen upon her face.
“We are both of us absurd people, I suppose,” she said, laying her
hands upon his shoulders. “We ought to have some friend with a clear
solid head to keep us straight.”
Mr. Quincunx kissed her on the forehead and stooped down for his hat.
“Yes,” he said. “We are a queer pair. I suppose we are really both a
little mad. I wish there was someone we could go to.”
“Couldn’t you--perhaps--” said Lacrima, “say something to Mrs. Seldom?
And yet I would much rather she didn’t know. I would much rather no one
knew!”
“I might,” murmured Maurice thoughtfully; “I might tell her. But the
unlucky thing is, she is so narrow-minded that she can’t separate you
in her thoughts from those frightful people.”
“Shall I try Vennie?” whispered the girl, “or shall we--” here she
looked him boldly in the face with eager, brightening eyes--“shall we
run away to London, and be married, and risk the future?”
Poor little Italian! She had never made a greater tactical blunder than
when she uttered these words. Maurice Quincunx’s mystic illumination
had made it possible for him to exorcise his evil spirit. It could
not put into his nature an energy he had not been born with. His
countenance clouded.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he remarked. “You don’t know what
a sour-tempered devil I am, and how I am sure to make any girl who
lives with me miserable. You would hate me in a month more than you
hate Mr. Romer, and in a year I should have either worried you into
your grave or you would have run away from me. No--no--no! I should be
a criminal fool to let you subject yourself to such a risk as that.”
“But,” pleaded the girl, with flushed cheeks, “we should be sure to
find something! I could teach Italian,--and you could--oh, I am sure
there are endless things you could do! Please, please, Maurice dear,
let us go. Anything is better than this misery. I have got quite enough
money for the journey. Look!”
She pulled out from beneath her dress a little chain purse, that
hung, by a small silver chain, round her slender neck. She opened it
and shook three sovereigns into the palm of her hand. “Enough for
the journey,” she said, “and enough to keep us for a week if we are
economical. We should be sure to find something by that time.”
Mr. Quincunx shook his head. It was an ironical piece of psychic
malice that the very illumination which had made him remorseful
and sympathetic should have also reduced to the old level of tender
sentiment the momentary passion he had felt. It was the absence in him
of this sensual impulse which made the scheme she proposed seem so
impossible. Had he been of a more animal nature, or had she possessed
the power of arousing his senses to a more violent craving, instead
of brooding, as he did, upon the mere material difficulties of such a
plan, he would have plunged desperately into it and carried her off
without further argument. The very purity of his temperament was her
worst enemy.
Poor Lacrima! Her hands dropped once more helplessly to her side,
and the old hopeless depression began to invade her heart. It seemed
impossible to make her friend realize that if she refused the farmer
and things went on as before, her position in Mr. Romer’s establishment
would become more impossible than ever. What--for instance--would
become of her when this long-discussed marriage of Gladys with young
Ilminster took place? Could she conceive herself going on living
under that roof, with Mr. Romer continually harassing her, and his
brother-in-law haunting every field she wandered into?
“It was noble of you,” began her bearded friend again, resuming his
work at the weeds, while she, as on a former occasion, leant against
his wheel-barrow, “to think of enduring this wretched marriage for
my sake. But I cannot let you do it. I should not be happy in letting
you do it. I have some conscience--though you may not think so--and
it would worry me to feel you were putting up with that fool’s
companionship just to make me comfortable. It would spoil my enjoyment
of my freedom, to know that you were not equally free. Of course it
would be paradise to me to have the money you speak of. I should be
able to live exactly as I like, and these damned villagers would treat
me with proper respect then. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take
my pleasure at the expense of such a strain on you. It would spoil
everything!
“I don’t deny, however,” he went on, evidently deriving more and
more virtuous satisfaction from his somewhat indecisive rejection of
her sacrifice, “that it is a temptation to me. I hate that office so
profoundly! You were quite right there, Lacrima. All I said about
getting on with those people was damned bluff. I loathe them and they
loathe me. It is simply like a kind of death, my life in that place.
Yes, what you suggest is a temptation to me. I can’t help feeling
rather like that poor brother of the girl in ‘Measure for Measure’
when she comes to say that she could save his life by the loss of her
virtue, and he talks about his feelings on the subject of death. She
put him down fiercely enough, poor dog! She evidently thought her
virtue was much more important than his life. I am glad you are just
the opposite of that puritanical young woman. I shouldn’t like you very
much if you took her line!
“But just because you don’t do that, my dear,” Mr. Quincunx went on,
tugging at the obstinate roots of a great dock, “I couldn’t think
of letting you sacrifice yourself. If you _were_ like that woman in
the play, and made all that damned silly fuss about your confounded
virtue, I should be inclined to wish that Mr. Goring had got his hands
upon you. Women who think as much of themselves as that, _ought_ to
be given over to honest fellows like Mr. Goring. It’s the sort of
punishment they deserve for their superstitious selfishness. For it’s
all selfishness, of course. We know that well enough!”
He flung the defeated weed so vindictively upon his barrow that some
of the earth from its roots was sprinkled into Lacrima’s lap. He
came to help her brush it away, and took the opportunity to kiss her
again,--this time a shade more amorously.
“All this business of ‘love,’” he went on, returning to his potatoes,
“is nothing but the old eternal wickedness of man’s nature. The only
kind of love which is worth anything is the love that gets rid of sex
altogether, and becomes calm and quiet and distant--like the love of a
planetary spirit. Apart from this love, which is not like human love at
all, everything in us is selfish. Even a mother’s care for its child is
selfish.”
“I shall never have a child,” said Lacrima in a low voice.
“I wonder what your friend James Andersen would say to all this,”
continued Mr. Quincunx. “Why, by the way, don’t you get _him_ to marry
you? He would do it, no doubt, like a shot, if you gave him a little
encouragement; and then make you work all day in his kitchen, as his
father made his mother, so they say.”
Lacrima made a hopeless gesture, and looked at the watch upon her
wrist. She began to feel dizzy and sick for want of food. She had had
nothing since breakfast, and the shadows were beginning to grow long.
“I know what Luke Andersen would say if we asked him,” added Mr.
Quincunx. “He would advise you to marry this damned farmer, wheedle his
money out of him, and then sheer off with some fine youth and never see
Nevilton again! Luke Andersen’s the fellow for giving a person advice
in these little matters. He has a head upon his shoulders, that boy!
I tell you what it is, my dear, your precious Miss Gladys had better
be careful! She’ll be getting herself into trouble with that honest
youth if she doesn’t look out. I know him. He cares for no mortal soul
in the world, or above the world. He’s a master in the art of life! We
are all infants compared with him. If you do need anyone to help you,
or to help me either, I tell you Luke Andersen’s the one to go to. He
has more influence in this village than any living person except Romer
himself, and I should be sorry for Romer if his selfishness clashed
with the selfishness of that young Machiavel!”
“Do you mind,” said Lacrima suddenly, “if I go into your kitchen and
make myself a cup of tea? I feel rather exhausted. I expect it is the
heat.”
Mr. Quincunx looked intently at her, leaning upon his hoe. He had only
once before--on an exceptionally cold winter’s day--allowed the girl to
enter the cottage.
He had a vague feeling that if he did so he would in some way commit
himself, and be betrayed into a false position. He almost felt as
though, if she were once comfortably established there, he would never
be able to get her out again! He was nervous, too, about her seeing
all his little household peculiarities. If she saw, for instance, how
cheaply, how very cheaply, he managed to live, eating no meat and
economizing in sugar and butter, she might be encouraged still further
in her attempts to persuade him to run away.
He was also strangely reluctant that she should get upon the track of
his queer little lonely epicurean pleasures, such as his carefully
guarded bottle of Scotch whiskey; his favourite shelf of mystical and
Rabelaisian books; his jar of tobacco, with a piece of bread under its
lid, to keep the contents moist and cool; his elaborate arrangements
for holding draughts out; his polished pewter; his dainty writing-desk
with its piled-up, vellum-bound journals, all labelled and laid in
order; his queer-coloured oriental slippers; his array of scrupulously
scrubbed pots and pans. Mr. Quincunx was extremely unwilling that his
lady-love should poke her pretty fingers into all these mysteries.
What he liked, was to live in two distinct worlds: his world of
sentiment with Lacrima as its solitary centre, and his world of
sacramental epicurism with his kitchen-fire as its solitary centre.
He was extremely unwilling that the several circumferences of these
centres should intersect one another. Both were equally necessary
to him. When days passed without a visit from his friend he became
miserably depressed. But he saw no reason for any inartistic attempt
to unite these two spheres of interest. A psychologist who defined Mr.
Quincunx’s temper as the temper of a hermit would have been far astray.
He was profoundly dependent on human sympathy. But he liked human
sympathy that kept its place. He did not like human _society_. Perhaps
of all well-known psychological types, the type of the philosopher
Rousseau was the one to which he most nearly approximated. And yet,
had he possessed children, Mr. Quincunx would certainly never have
been persuaded to leave them at the foundling hospital. He would have
lived apart from them, but he would never have parted with them. He was
really a domestic sentimentalist, who loved the exquisite sensation of
being alone with his own thoughts.
With all this in mind, one need feel no particular surprise that the
response he gave to Lacrima’s sudden request was a somewhat reluctant
one. However, he did respond; and opening the cottage-doors for her,
ushered her into the kitchen and put the kettle on the fire.
It puzzled him a little that she should feel no embarrassment at being
alone with him in this secluded place! In the depths of his heart--like
many philosophers--Mr. Quincunx, in spite of his anarchistic theories,
possessed no slight vein of conventional timidity. He did not realize
this in the least. Women, according to his cynical code, were the
sole props of conventionality. Without women, there would be no such
thing in the world. But now, brought face to face with the reckless
detachment of a woman fighting for her living soul, he felt confused,
uncomfortable, and disconcerted.
Lacrima waited in patient passivity, too exhausted to make any further
mental or moral effort, while her friend made the tea and cut the
bread-and-butter.
As soon as she had partaken of these things, her exhaustion gave place
to a delicious sense--the first she had known for many weeks--of
peaceful and happy security. She put far away, into the remote
background of her mind, all melancholy and tragic thoughts, and
gave herself up to the peacefulness of the moment. The hands of Mr.
Quincunx’s clock pointed to half-past six. She had therefore a clear
thirty minutes left, before she need set out on her return walk, in
order to have time to dress for dinner.
“I wonder if your Miss Gladys,” remarked Lacrima’s host, lighting
a cigarette as he sipped his tea, “will marry the Honourable Mr.
Ilminster after all, or whistle him down the wind, and make up to
our American friend? I notice that Dangelis is already considerably
absorbed in her.”
“Please, dear, don’t let us talk any more about these people,” begged
Lacrima softly. “Let me be happy for a little while.”
Mr. Quincunx stroked his beard. “You are a queer little girl,” he said.
“But what I should do if the gods took you away from me I have not the
least idea. I should not care then whether I worked in an office or in
a factory. I should not care what I did.”
The girl jumped up impulsively from her seat and went over to him. Mr.
Quincunx took her upon his knees as he might have taken a child and
fondled her gravely and gently. The smoke of his cigarette ascended in
a thin blue column above their two heads.
At that moment there was a mocking laugh at the window. Lacrima slid
out of his arms and they both rose to their feet and turned indignantly.
The laughing face of Gladys Romer peered in upon them, her eyes
shining with delighted malevolence. “I saw you,” she cried. “But
you needn’t look so cross! I like to see these things. I have been
watching you for quite a long time! It has been such fun! I only hoped
I could keep quiet for longer still, till one of you began to cry, or
something. But you looked so funny that I couldn’t help laughing. And
that spoilt it all. Mr. Dangelis is at the gate. Shall I call him up?
He came with me across the park. He tried to stop me from pouncing on
you, but I wouldn’t listen to him. He said it was a ‘low-down stunt.’
You know the way he talks, Lacrima!”
The two friends stood staring at the intruder in petrified horror. Then
without a word they quickly issued from the cottage and crossed the
garden. Neither of them spoke to Gladys; and Mr. Quincunx immediately
returned to his house as soon as he saw the American advance to greet
Lacrima with his usual friendly nonchalance.
The three went off down the lane together; and the poor philosopher,
staring disconsolately at the empty tea-cups of his profaned sanctuary,
cursed himself, his friend, his fate, and the Powers that had appointed
that fate from the beginning of the world.