AVE ATQUE VALE!
James Andersen lay dead in the brothers’ little bedroom at the
station-master’s cottage. It could not be maintained that his face
wore the unruffled calm conventionally attributed to mortality’s last
repose. On the other hand, his expression was not that of one who has
gone down in hopeless despair.
What his look really conveyed to his grief-worn brother, as he hung
over him all that August night, was the feeling that he had been struck
in mid-contest, with equal chance of victory or defeat, and with the
indelible imprint upon his visage of the stress and strain of the
terrific struggle.
It was a long and strange vigil that Luke found himself thus bound
to keep, when the first paroxysm of his grief had subsided and his
sympathetic landlady had left him alone with his dead.
He laughed aloud,--a merciless little laugh,--at one point in the
night, to note how even this blow, rending as it did the very ground
beneath his feet, had yet left quite untouched and untamed his
irresistible instinct towards self-analysis. Not a single one of the
innumerable, and in many cases astounding, thoughts that passed through
his mind, but he watched it, and isolated it, and played with it,--just
in the old way.
Luke was not by any means struck dumb or paralyzed by this event. His
intelligence had never been more acute, or his senses more responsive,
than they remained through those long hours of watching.
It is true he could neither eat nor sleep. The influence of the
motionless figure beside him seemed to lie in a vivid and abnormal
stimulation of all his intellectual faculties.
Not a sound arose from the sleeping house, from the darkened fields,
from the distant village, but he noted it and made a mental record of
its cause. He kept two candles alight at his brother’s head, three
times refilling the candlesticks, as though the guttering and hissing
of the dwindling flames would tease and disturb the dead.
He had been careful to push the two windows of the room wide open;
but the night was so still that not a breath of wind entered to make
the candles flicker, or to lift the edge of the white sheet stretched
beneath his brother’s bandaged chin. This horrible bandage,--one of the
little incidents that Luke marked as unexpectedly ghastly,--seemed to
slip its knot at a certain moment, causing the dead man’s mouth to fall
open, in a manner that made the watcher shudder, so suggestive did it
seem of one about to utter a cry for help.
Luke noted, as another factor in the phenomena of death, the peculiar
nature of the coldness of his brother’s skin, as he bent down once
and again to touch his forehead. It was different from the coldness
of water or ice or marble. It was a clammy coldness; the coldness
of a substance that was neither--in the words of the children’s
game--“animal, vegetable, nor mineral.”
Luke remembered the story of that play of Webster’s, in which the
unhappy heroine, in the blank darkness of her dungeon, is presented
with a dead hand to caress. The abominably wicked wish crossed his
mind once, as he unclosed those stark fingers, that he could cause
the gentle Lacrima, whom he regarded,--not altogether fairly,--as
responsible for his brother’s death, to feel the touch of such a hand.
There came over him, at other times, as he inhaled the cool, hushed air
from the slumbering fields, and surveyed the great regal planet,--Mr.
Romer’s star, he thought grimly,--as it hung so formidably close to the
silvery pallid moon, a queer dreamy feeling that the whole thing were a
scene in a play or a story, absolutely unreal; and that he would only
have to rouse himself and shake off the unnatural spell, to have his
brother with him again, alive and in full consciousness.
The odd thing about it was that he found himself refusing to believe
that this was his brother at all,--this mask beneath the white
sheet,--and even fancying that at any moment the familiar voice might
call to him from the garden, and he have to descend to unlock the door.
That thought of his brother’s voice sent a pang through him of sick
misgiving. Surely it couldn’t be possible, that never, not through the
whole of eternity, would he hear that voice again?
He moved to the window and listened. Owls were hooting somewhere up at
Wild Pine, and from the pastures towards Hullaway came the harsh cry of
a night-jar.
He gazed up at the glittering heavens, sprinkled with those proud
constellations whose identity it was one of his pastimes to recognize.
How little they cared! How appallingly little they cared! What a farce,
what an obscene, unpardonable farce, the whole business was!
He caught the sound of an angry bark in some distant yard.
Luke cursed the irrelevant intrusive noise. “Ah! thou vile Larva!” he
muttered. “What! Shall a dog, a cat, a rat, have life; and thou no
breath at all?”
He leant far out of the window, breathing the perfumes of the night.
He noticed, as an interesting fact, that it was neither the phloxes
nor the late roses whose scent filled the air, but that new exotic
tobacco-plant,--a thing whose sticky, quickly-fading, trumpet-shaped
petals were one of his brother’s especial aversions.
The immense spaces of the night, as they carried his gaze onward from
one vast translunar sign to another, filled him with a strange feeling
of the utter unimportance of any earthly event. The Mythology of Power
and the Mythology of Sacrifice might wrestle in desperate contention
for the mastery; but what mattered, in view of this great dome which
overshadowed them, the victory or the defeat of either? Mythologies
were they both; both woven out of the stuff of dreams, and both
vanishing like dreams, in the presence of this stark image upon the bed!
He returned to his brother’s side, and rocked himself up and down on
his creaking bedroom chair. “Dead and gone!” he muttered, “dead and
gone!”
It was easy to deal in vague mystic speculation. But what relief could
he derive, he who wanted his brother back as he was, with his actual
tones, and ways and looks, from any problematic chance that some thin
“spiritual principle,” or ideal wraith, of the man were now wandering
through remote, unearthly regions? The darling of his soul--the heart
of his heart--had become forever this appalling waxen image, this thing
that weighed upon him with its presence!
Luke bent over the dead man. What a personality, what a dominant and
oppressive personality, a corpse has! It is not the personality of the
living man, but another--a quite different one--masquerading in his
place.
Luke felt almost sure that this husk, this shell, this mockery of the
real James, was possessed of some detestable consciousness of its own,
a consciousness as remote from that of the man he loved as that pallid
forehead with the deep purple gash across it, was remote from the dear
head whose form he knew so well. How crafty, how malignant, a corpse
was!
He returned to his uncomfortable chair and pondered upon what this loss
meant to him. It was like the burying alive of half his being. How
could he have thoughts, sensations, feelings, fancies; how could he
have loves and hates, without James to tell them to? A cold sick terror
of life passed through him, of life without this companion of his soul.
He felt like a child lost in some great forest.
“Daddy James! Daddy James!” he cried, “I want you;--I want you!”
He found himself repeating this infantile conjuration over and over
again. He battered with clenched hand upon the adamantine wall of
silence. But there was neither sign nor voice nor token nor “any that
regarded.” There was only the beating of his own heart and the ticking
of the watch upon the table. And all the while, with its malignant
cunning, the corpse regarded him, mute, derisive, contemptuous.
He thought, lightly and casually, as one who at the grave of all he
loves plucks a handful of flowers, of the girls he had just parted
from, and of Gladys and all his other infatuations. How impossible it
seemed to him that a woman--a girl--that any one of these charming,
distracting creatures--should strike a man down by their loss, as he
was now stricken down.
He tried to imagine what he would feel if it were Annie lying there,
under the sheet, in place of James. He would be sorry; he would be
bitterly sad; he would be angry with the callous heavens; but as long
as James were near, as long as James were by his side,--his life would
still be his life. He would suffer, and the piteous tragedy of the
thing would smite and sicken him; but it would not be the same. It
would not be like this!
What was there in the love of a man that made the loss of it--for him
at least--so different a thing? Was it that with women, however much
one loved them, there was something equivocal, evasive, intangible;
something made up of illusion and sorcery, of magic and moonbeams;
that since it could never be grasped as firmly as the other, could
never be as missed as the other, when the grasp had to relax? Or was
it that, for all their clear heads,--heads so much clearer than poor
James’!--and for all their spiritual purity,--there was lacking
in them a certain indescribable mellowness of sympathy, a certain
imaginative generosity and tolerance, which meant the true secret of
the life lived in common?
From the thought of his girls, Luke’s mind wandered back to the thought
of what the constant presence of his brother as a background to his
life had really meant. Even as he sat there, gazing so hopelessly at
the image on the bed, he found himself on the point of resolving to
explain all these matters to James and hear his opinion upon them.
By degrees, as the dawn approached, the two blank holes into cavernous
darkness which the windows of the chamber had become, changed their
character. A faint whitish-blue transparency grew visible within their
enclosing frames, and something ghostly and phantom-like, the stealthy
invasion of a new presence, glided into the room.
This palpable presence, the frail embryo of a new day, gave to the
yellow candle-flames a queer sickly pallor and intensified to a chalky
opacity the dead whiteness of the sheet, and of the folded hands
resting upon it. It was with the sound of the first twittering birds,
and the first cock-crow, that the ice-cold spear of desolation pierced
deepest of all into Luke’s heart. He shivered, and blew out the candles.
A curious feeling possessed him that, in a sudden ghastly withdrawal,
that other James, the James he had been turning to all night in tacit
familiar appeal, had receded far out of his reach. From indistinct
horizons his muffled voice moaned for a while, like the wind in the
willows of Lethe, and then died away in a thin long-drawn whisper.
Luke was alone; alone with his loss and alone with the image of death.
He moved to the window and looked out. Streaks of watery gold were
already visible above the eastern uplands, and a filmy sea of white
mist swayed and fluttered over the fields.
All these things together, the white mist, the white walls of the room,
the white light, the white covering on the body, seemed to fall upon
the worn-out watcher with a weight of irresistible finality. James was
dead--“gone to his death-bed;--he never would come again!”
Turning his back wearily upon those golden sky-streaks, that on any
other occasion would have thrilled him with their magical promise,
Luke observed the dead bodies of no less than five large moths grouped
around the extinct candles. Two of them were “currant-moths,” one a
“yellow under-wing,” and the others beyond his entomological knowledge.
This was the only holocaust, then, allowed to the dead man. Five moths!
And the Milky Way had looked down upon their destruction with the same
placidity as upon the cause of the vigil that slew them.
Luke felt a sudden desire to escape from this room, every object of
which bore now, in dimly obscure letters, the appalling handwriting of
the ministers of fate. He crept on tiptoe to the door and opened it
stealthily. Making a mute valedictory gesture towards the bed, he shut
the door behind him and slipped down the little creaking stairs.
He entered his landlady’s kitchen, and as silently as he could
collected a bundle of sticks and lit the fire. The crackling flames
produced an infinitesimal lifting of the cloud which weighed upon his
spirit. He warmed his hands before the blaze. From some remote depth
within him, there began to awake once more the old inexpugnable zest
for life.
Piling some pieces of coal upon the burning wood and drawing the kettle
to the edge of the hob, he left the kitchen; and crossing the little
hall, impregnated with a thin sickly odor of lamp-oil, he shot back the
bolts of the house-door, and let himself out into the morning air.
A flock of starlings fluttered away over the meadow, and from the
mist-wreathed recesses of Nevilton House gardens came the weird defiant
scream of a peacock.
He glanced furtively, as if such a glance were almost sacrilegious,
at the open windows of his brother’s room; and then pushing open the
garden-gate emerged into the dew-drenched field. He could not bring
himself to leave the neighbourhood of the house, but began pacing up
and down the length of the meadow, from the hedge adjacent to the
railway, to that elm-shadowed corner, where not so many weeks ago
he had distracted himself with Annie and Phyllis. He continued this
reiterated pacing,--his tired brain giving itself up to the monotony
of a heart-easing movement,--until the sun had risen quite high above
the horizon. The great fiery orb pleased him well, in its strong
indifference, as with its lavish beams it dissipated the mist and
touched the tree-trunks with ruddy colour.
“Ha!” he cried aloud, “the sun is the only God! To the sun must all
flesh turn, if it would live and not die!”
Half ashamed of this revival of his spirits he obeyed the beckoning
gestures of the station-master’s wife, who now appeared at the door.
The good woman’s sympathy, though not of the silent or tactful order,
was well adapted to prevent the immediate return of any hopeless grief.
“’Tis good it were a Saturday when the Lord took him,” she said,
pouring out for her lodger a steaming cup of excellent tea, and
buttering a slice of bread; “he’ll have Sunday to lie up in. It be best
of all luck for these poor stiff ones, to have church bells rung over
’em.”
“I pray Heaven I shan’t have any visitors today,” remarked Luke,
sipping his tea and stretching out his feet to the friendly blaze.
“That ye’ll be sure to have!” answered the woman; “and the sooner ye
puts on a decent black coat, and washes and brushes up a bit, the
better ’twill be for all concerned. I always tells my old man that when
he do fall stiff, like what your brother be, I shall put on my black
silk gown and sit in the front parlour with a bottle of elder wine,
ready for all sorts and conditions.”
Luke rose, with a piece of bread-and-butter in his hand, and surveyed
himself in the mirror.
“Yes, I do need a bit of tidying,” he said. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind
my shaving down here?”
Even as he spoke the young stone-carver could not help recalling those
sinister stories of dead men whose beards have grown in their coffins.
The landlady nodded.
“I’ll make ’ee up a bed for these ’ere days,” she said, “in Betty’s
room. As for shaving and such like, please yourself, Master Luke. This
house be thy house with him lying up there.”
Between nine and ten o’clock Luke’s first visitor made his appearance.
This was Mr. Clavering, who showed himself neither surprised nor
greatly pleased to find the bereft brother romping with the children
under the station-master’s apple-trees.
“I cannot express to you the sympathy I feel,” said the clergyman,
“with your grief under this great blow. Words on these occasions are of
little avail. But I trust you know where to turn for true consolation.”
“Thank you, sir,” replied Luke, who, though carefully shaved and
washed, still wore the light grey flannel suit of his Saturday’s
excursion.
“Give Mr. Clavering an apple, Lizzie!” he added.
“I wouldn’t for a moment,” continued the Reverend Hugh, “intrude upon
you with any impertinent questions. But I could not help wondering as I
walked through the village how this tragedy would affect you. I prayed
it might,”--here he laid a grave and pastoral hand on the young man’s
arm,--“I prayed it might give you a different attitude to those high
matters which we have at various times discussed together. Am I right
in my hope, Luke?”
Never had the superb tactlessness of Nevilton’s vicar betrayed him more
deplorably.
“Death is death, Mr. Clavering,” replied the stone-carver, lifting
up the youngest of the children and placing her astride on an
apple-branch. “It’s about the worst blow fate’s ever dealt me. But
when it comes to any change in my ideas,--no! I can’t say that I’ve
altered.”
“I understand you weren’t with him when this terrible thing happened,”
said the clergyman. “They tell me he was picked up by strangers.
There’ll be no need, I trust, for an inquest, or anything of that kind?”
Luke shook his head. “The doctor was up here last night. The thing’s
clear enough. His mind must have given way again. He’s had those curst
quarries on his nerves for a long while past. I wish to the devil--I
beg your pardon, sir!--I wish I’d taken him to Weymouth with me. I was
a fool not to insist on that.”
“Yes, I heard you were away,” remarked Hugh, with a certain caustic
significance in his tone. “One or two of our young friends were with
you, I believe?”
Luke did not fail to miss the implication, and he hit back vindictively.
“I understand you’ve had an interesting little service this morning,
sir, or perhaps it’s yet to come off? I can’t help being a bit amused
when I think of it!”
An electric shock of anger thrilled through Clavering’s frame.
Controlling himself with a heroic effort, he repelled the malignant
taunt.
“I didn’t know you concerned yourself with these observances,
Andersen,” he remarked. “But you’re quite right. I’ve just this minute
come from receiving Miss Romer into our church. Miss Traffio was
with her. Both young ladies were greatly agitated over this unhappy
occurrence. In fact it cast quite a gloom over what otherwise is one of
the most beautiful incidents of all, in our ancient ritual.”
Luke swung the little girl on the bough backwards and forwards. The
other children, retired to a discreet distance, stared at the colloquy
with wide-open eyes.
“This baptizing of adults,” continued Luke,--“you call ’em adults,
don’t you, on these occasions?--is really a little funny, isn’t it?”
“Funny!” roared the angry priest. “No, sir, it isn’t funny! The saving
of an immortal soul by God’s most sacred sacrament may not appeal to
you infidels as an essential ceremony,--but only a thoroughly vulgar
and philistine mind could call it funny!”
“I’m afraid we shall never agree on these topics, Mr. Clavering,”
replied Luke calmly. “But it was most kind of you to come up and see
me. I really appreciate it. Would it be possible,”--his voice took a
lower and graver tone,--“for my brother’s funeral to be performed on
Wednesday? I should be very grateful to you, sir, if that could be
arranged.”
The young vicar frowned and looked slightly disconcerted. “What time
would you wish it to be, Andersen?” he enquired. “I ask you this,
because Wednesday is--er--unfortunately--the date fixed for another of
these ceremonies that you scoff at. The Lord Bishop comes to Nevilton
then. It is his own wish. I should myself have preferred a later date.”
“Ha! the confirmation!” ejaculated Luke, with a bitter little laugh.
“You’re certainly bent on striking while the iron’s hot, Mr. Clavering.
May I ask what hour has been fixed for _this_ beautiful ceremony?”
“Eleven o’clock in the morning,” replied the priest, ignoring with a
dignified wave of his hand the stone-carver’s jeering taunt.
“Well then--if that suits you--and does not interfere with the Lord
Bishop--” said Luke, “I should be most grateful if you could make the
hour for James’ funeral, ten o’clock in the morning? _That_ service I
happen to be more familiar with than the others,--and I know it doesn’t
take very long.”
Mr. Clavering bent his head in assent.
“It shall certainly be as you wish,” he said. “If unforeseen
difficulties arise, I will let you know. But I have no doubt it can be
managed.
“I am right in assuming,” he added, a little uneasily, “that your
brother was a baptized member of our church?”
Luke lifted the child from the bough and made her run off to play with
the others. The glance he then turned upon the vicar of Nevilton was
not one of admiration.
“James was the noblest spirit I’ve ever known,” he said sternly.
“If there is such a thing as another world, he is certain to reach
it--church or no church. As a matter of fact, if it is at all important
to you, he was baptized in Nevilton. You’ll find his name in the
register--and mine too!” he added with a laugh.
Mr. Clavering kept silence, and moved towards the gate. Luke followed
him, and at the gate they shook hands. Perhaps the same thought passed
through the minds of both of them, as they went through this ceremony;
for a very queer look, almost identical in its expression on either
face, was exchanged between them.
Before the morning was over Luke had a second visit of condolence.
This was from Mr. Quincunx, and never had the quaint recluse been more
warmly received. Luke was conscious at once that here was a man who
could enter into every one of his feelings, and be neither horrified
nor scandalized by the most fantastic inconsistency.
The two friends walked up and down the sunny field in front of the
house, Luke pouring into the solitary’s attentive ears every one of his
recent impressions and sensations.
Mr. Quincunx was evidently profoundly moved by James’ death. He refused
Luke’s offer to let him visit the room upstairs, but his refusal
was expressed in such a natural and characteristic manner that the
stone-carver accepted it in perfect good part.
After a while they sat down together under the shady hedge at the
top of the meadow. Here they discoursed and philosophized at large,
listening to the sound of the church-bells and watching the slow-moving
cattle. It was one of those unruffled Sunday mornings, when, in such
places as this, the drowsiness of the sun-warmed leaves and grasses
seems endowed with a kind of consecrated calm, the movements of the
horses and oxen grow solemn and ritualistic, the languor of the
heavy-winged butterflies appears holy, and the stiff sabbatical dresses
of the men and women who shuffle so demurely to and fro, seem part of a
patient liturgical observance.
Luke loved Mr. Quincunx that morning. The recluse was indeed precisely
in his element. Living habitually himself in thoughts of death,
pleased--in that incomparable sunshine--to find himself still alive,
cynical and yet considerate, mystical and yet humorous, he exactly
supplied what the wounded heart of the pagan mourner required for its
comfort.
“Idiots! asses! fools!” the stone-carver ejaculated, apostrophizing in
his inmost spirit the various persons, clever or otherwise, to whom
this nervous and eccentric creature was a mere type of failure and
superannuation. None of these others,--not one of them,--not Romer nor
Dangelis nor Clavering nor Taxater--could for a moment have entered
into the peculiar feelings which oppressed him. As for Gladys or
Phyllis or Annie or Polly,--he would have as soon thought of relating
his emotions to a row of swallows upon a telegraph-wire as to any of
those dainty epitomes of life’s evasiveness!
A man’s brain, a man’s imagination, a man’s scepticism, was what he
wanted; but he wanted it touched with just that flavour of fanciful
sentiment of which the Nevilton hermit was a master. A hundred quaint
little episodes, the import of which none but Mr. Quincunx could
have appreciated, were evoked by the stone-carver. Nothing was too
blasphemous, nothing too outrageous, nothing too bizarre, for the
solitary’s taste. On the other hand, he entered with tender and perfect
clairvoyance into the sick misery of loss which remained the background
of all Luke’s sensations.
The younger man’s impetuous confidences ebbed and dwindled at last; and
with the silence of the church-bells and the receding to the opposite
corner of the field of the browsing cattle, a deep and melancholy hush
settled upon them both.
Then it was that Mr. Quincunx began speaking of himself and his own
anxieties. In the tension of the moment he even went so far as to
disclose to Luke, under a promise of absolute secrecy, the sinister
story of that contract into which Lacrima had entered with their
employer.
Luke was all attention at once. This was indeed a piece of astounding
news! He couldn’t have said whether he wondered more at the quixotic
devotion of Lacrima for this quaint person, or at the solitary’s
unprecedented candour in putting him “en rapport” with such an amazing
situation.
“Of course we know,” murmured Mr. Quincunx, in his deep subterranean
voice, “that she wouldn’t have promised such a thing, unless in her
heart she had been keen, at all costs, to escape from those people. It
isn’t human nature to give up everything for nothing. Probably, as a
matter of fact, she rather likes the idea of having a house of her own.
I expect she thinks she could twist that fool Goring round her finger;
and I daresay she could! But the thing is, what do you advise _me_ to
do? Of course I’m glad enough to agree to anything that saves me from
this damnable office. But what worries me about it is that devil Romer
put it into her head. I don’t trust him, Luke; I don’t trust him!”
“I should think you don’t!” exclaimed his companion, looking with
astonishment and wonder into the solemn grey eyes fixed sorrowfully and
intently upon his own. What a strange thing, he thought to himself,
that this subtle-minded intelligence should be so hopelessly devoid of
the least push of practical impetus.
“Of course,” Mr. Quincunx continued, “neither you nor I would fuss
ourselves much over the idea of a girl being married to a fool like
this, if there weren’t something different from the rest about her.
This nonsense about their having to ‘love,’ as the little simpletons
call it, the man they agree to live with, is of course all tommy-rot.
No one ‘loves’ the person they live with. She wouldn’t love me,--she’d
probably hate me like poison,--after the first week or so! The romantic
idiots who make so much of ‘love,’ and are so horrified when these
little creatures are married without it, don’t understand what this
planet is made of. They don’t understand the feelings of the girls
either.
“I tell you a girl _likes_ being made a victim of in this particular
kind of way. They’re much less fastidious, when it comes to the point,
than we are. As a matter of fact what does trouble them is being
married to a man they really have a passion for. Then, jealousy bites
through their soft flesh like Cleopatra’s serpent, and all sorts of
wild ideas get into their heads. It’s not natural, Luke, it’s not
natural, for girls to marry a person they love! That’s why we country
dogs treat the whole thing as a lewd jest.
“Do you think these honest couples who stand giggling and smirking
before our dear clergyman every quarter, don’t hate one another in
their hearts? Of course they do; it wouldn’t be nature if they didn’t!
But that doesn’t say they don’t get their pleasure out of it. And
Lacrima’ll get her pleasure, in some mad roundabout fashion, from
marrying Goring,--you may take my word for that!”
“It seems to me,” remarked Luke slowly, “that you’re trying all this
time to quiet your conscience. I believe you’ve really got far more
conscience, Maurice, than I have. It’s your conscience that makes you
speak so loud, at this very moment!”
Mr. Quincunx got up on his feet and stroked his beard. “I’m afraid I’ve
annoyed you somehow,” he remarked. “No person ever speaks of another
person’s conscience unless he’s in a rage with him.”
The stone-carver stretched out his legs and lit a cigarette. “Sit down
again, you old fool,” he said, “and let’s talk this business over
sensibly.”
The recluse sighed deeply, and, subsiding into his former position,
fixed a look of hopeless melancholy upon the sunlit landscape.
“The point is this, Maurice,” began the young man. “The first thing in
these complicated situations is to be absolutely certain what one wants
oneself. It seems to me that a good deal of your agitation comes from
the fact that you haven’t made up your mind what you want. You asked my
advice, you know, so you won’t be angry if I’m quite plain with you?”
“Go on,” said Mr. Quincunx, a remote flicker of his goblin-smile
twitching his nostrils, “I see I’m in for a few little hits.”
Luke waved his hand. “No hits, my friend, no hits. All I want to do,
is to find out from you what you really feel. One philosophizes,
naturally, about girls marrying, and so on; but the point is,--do you
want this particular young lady for yourself, or don’t you?”
Mr. Quincunx stroked his beard. “Well,”--he said meditatively, “if it
comes to that, I suppose I do want her. We’re all fools in some way or
other, I fancy. Yes, I do want her, Luke, and that’s the honest truth.
But I don’t want to have to work twice as hard as I’m doing now, and
under still more unpleasant conditions, to keep her!”
Luke emitted a puff of smoke and knocked the ashes from his cigarette
upon the purple head of a tall knapweed.
“Ah!” he ejaculated. “Now we’ve got something to go upon.”
Mr. Quincunx surveyed the faun-like profile of his friend with some
apprehension. He mentally resolved that nothing,--nothing in heaven nor
earth,--should put him to the agitation of making any drastic change in
his life.
“We get back then,” continued Luke, “to the point we reached on our
walk to Seven Ashes.”
As he said the words “Seven Ashes” the ice-cold finger of memory
pierced him with that sudden stab which is like a physical blow. What
did it matter, after all, he thought, what happened to any of these
people, now Daddy James was dead?
“You remember,” he went on, while the sorrowful grey eyes of his
companion regarded him with wistful anxiety, “you told me, in that
walk, that if some imaginary person were to leave you money enough to
live comfortably, you would marry Lacrima without any hesitation?”
Mr. Quincunx nodded.
“Well,”--Luke continued--“in return for your confession about that
contract, I’ll confess to you that Mr. Taxater and I formed a plan
together, when my brother first got ill, to secure you this money.”
Mr. Quincunx made a grimace of astonishment.
“The plan has lapsed now,” went on Luke, “owing to Mr. Taxater’s being
away; but I can’t help feeling that something of that kind might be
done. I feel in a queer sort of fashion,” he added, “though I can’t
quite tell you why, that, after all, things’ll so work themselves out,
that you _will_ get both the girl and the money!”
Mr. Quincunx burst into a fit of hilarious merriment, and rubbed his
hands together. But a moment later his face clouded.
“It’s impossible,” he murmured with a deep sigh; “it’s impossible,
Luke. Girls and gold go together like butterflies and sunshine. I’m as
far from either, as the sea-weed under the arch of Weymouth Bridge.”
Luke pondered for a moment in silence.
“It’s an absurd superstition,” he finally remarked, “but I can’t help a
sort of feeling that James’ spirit is actively exerting itself on your
side. He was a romantic old truepenny, and his last thoughts were all
fixed--of that I’m sure--upon Lacrima’s escaping this marriage with
Goring.”
Mr. Quincunx sighed. He had vaguely imagined the possibility of some
grand diplomatic stroke on his behalf, from the astute Luke; and this
relapse into mysticism, on the part of that sworn materialist, did not
strike him as reassuring.
The silence that fell between them was broken by the sudden appearance
of a figure familiar to them both, crossing the field towards them. It
was Witch-Bessie, who, in a bright new shawl, and with a mysterious
packet clutched in her hand, was beckoning to attract their attention.
The men rose and advanced to meet her.
“I’ll sit down a bit with ’ee,” cried the old woman, waving to them to
return to their former position.
When they were seated once more beneath the bank,--the old lady, like
some strange Peruvian idol, resting cross-legged at their feet,--she
began, without further delay, to explain the cause of her visit.
“I know’d how ’twould be with ’ee,” she said, addressing Luke, but
turning a not unfriendly eye upon his companion. “I did know well how
’twould be. I hear’d tell of brother’s being laid out, from Bert Leerd,
as I traipsed through Wild Pine this morning.
“Ninsy Lintot was a-cryin’ enough to break her poor heart. I hear’d ’un
as I doddered down yon lane. She were all lonesome-like, under them
girt trees, shakin’ and sobbin’ terrible. She took on so, when I arst
what ailed ’un, that I dursn’t lay finger on the lass.
“She did right down scare I, Master Luke, and that’s God’s holy truth!
‘Let me bide, Bessie,’ says she, ‘let me bide.’ I telled her ’twas a
sin to He she loved best, to carry on so hopeless; and with that she
up and says,--‘I be the cause of it all, Bessie,’ says she, ‘I be the
cause he throw’d ’isself away.’ And with that she set herself cryin’
again, like as ’twas pitiful to hear. ‘My darlin’, my darlin’,’ she
kept callin’ out. ‘I love no soul ’cept thee--no soul ’cept thee!’
“’Twas then I recollected wot my old Mother used to say, ’bout maids
who be cryin’ like pantin’ hares. ‘Listen to me, Ninsy Lintot,’ I says,
solemn and slow, like as us were in church. ‘One above’s been talking
wi’ I, this blessed morn, and He do say as Master James be in Abram’s
Bosom, with them shining ones, and it be shame and sin for mortals like
we to wish ’un back.’
“That quieted the lass a bit, and I did tell she then, wot be God’s
truth, that ’tweren’t her at all turned brother’s head, but the
pleasure of the Almighty. ‘’Tis for folks like us,’ I says to her, ‘to
take wot His will do send, and bide quiet and still, same as cows,
drove to barton.’
“’Twere a blessing of providence I’d met crazy Bert afore I seed the
lass, else I’d a been struck dazed-like by wot she did tell. But as
’twas, thanks be to recollectin’ mother’s trick wi’ such wendy maids, I
dried her poor eyes and got her back home along. And she gave I summat
to put in brother’s coffin afore they do nail ’un down.”
Before either Luke or Mr. Quincunx had time to utter any comment upon
this narration, Witch-Bessie unfastened the packet she was carrying,
and produced from a card-board box a large roughly-moulded bracelet, or
bangle, of heavy silver, such as may be bought in the bazaars of Tunis
or Algiers.
“There,” cried the old woman, holding the thing up, and flashing it
in the sun, “that’s wot she gave I, to bury long wi’ brother! Be
pretty enough, baint ’un? Though, may-be, not fittin’ for a quiet
home-keeping lass like she. She had ’un off some Gipoo, she said; and
to my thinkin’ it be a kind of heathen ornimint, same as folks do buy
at Roger-town Fair. But such as ’tis, that be wot ’tis bestowed for, to
put i’ the earth long wi’ brother. Seems somethin’ of a pity, may-be,
but maid’s whimsies be maids’ whimsies, and God Almighty’ll plague the
hard-hearted folk as won’t perform wot they do cry out for.”
Luke took the bangle from the old woman’s hand.
“Of course I’ll do what she wants, Bessie,” he said. “Poor little
Ninsy, I never knew how much she cared.”
He permitted Mr. Quincunx to handle the silver object, and then
carefully placed it in his pocket.
“Hullo!” he cried, “what else have you got, Bessie?” This exclamation
was caused by the fact that Witch-Bessie, after fumbling in her shawl
had produced a second mysterious packet, smaller than the first and
tightly tied round with the stalks of some sort of hedge-weed.
“Cards, by Heaven!” exclaimed Luke. “Oh Bessie, Bessie,” he added, “why
didn’t you bring these round here twenty-four hours ago? You might have
made me take him with me to Weymouth!”
Untying the packet, which contained as the stone-carver had
anticipated, a pack of incredibly dirty cards, the old woman without
a word to either of them, shuffled and sifted them, according to some
secret rule, and laid aside all but nine. These, almost, but not
entirely, consisting of court cards, she spread out in a carefully
concerted manner on the grass at her feet.
Muttering over them some extraordinary gibberish, out of which the two
men could only catch the following words,
“Higgory, diggory, digg’d
My sow has pigg’d.
There’s a good card for thee.
There’s a still better than he!
There is the best of all three,
And there is Niddy-noddee!”--
Witch-Bessie picked up these nine cards, and shuffled them long and
fast.
She then handed them to Luke, face-downward, and bade him draw seven
out of the nine. These she once more arranged, according to some occult
plan, upon the grass, and pondered over them with wrinkled brow.
“’Tis as ’twould be!” she muttered at last. “Cards be wonderful crafty,
though toads and efties, to my thinkin’, be better, and a viper’s
innards be God’s very truth.”
Making, to Luke’s great disappointment, no further allusion to the
result of her investigations, the old woman picked up the cards and
went through the whole process again, in honour of Mr. Quincunx.
This time, after bending for several minutes over the solitary’s
choice, she became more voluble.
“Thy heart’s wish be thine, dearie,” she said. “But there be thwartings
and blastings. Three tears--three kisses--and a terrible journey. Us
shan’t have ’ee long wi’ we, in these ’ere parts. Thee be marked and
signed, master, by fallin’ stars and flyin’ birds. There’s good sound
wood gone to ship’s keel wot’ll carry thee fast and far. Blastings and
thwartings! But thy heart’s wish be thine, dearie.”
The humourous nostrils of Mr. Quincunx and the expressive curves of his
bearded chin had twitched and quivered as this sorcery began, but the
old woman’s reference to a “terrible journey” clouded his countenance
with blank dismay.
Luke pressed the sybil to be equally communicative with regard to his
own fate, but the old woman gathered up her cards, twisted the same
faded stalks round the packet, and returned it to the folds of her
shawl. Then she struggled up upon her feet.
“Don’t leave us yet, Bessie,” said Luke. “I’ll bring you out something
to eat presently.”
Witch-Bessie’s only reply to this hospitable invitation was confounding
in its irrelevance. She picked up her draggled skirt with her two
hands, displaying her unlaced boots and rumpled stockings, and then,
throwing back her wizened head, with its rusty weather-bleached bonnet,
and emitting a pallid laugh from her toothless gums, she proceeded to
tread a sort of jerky measure, moving her old feet to the tune of a
shrill ditty.
“Now we dance looby, looby, looby,
Now we dance looby, looby, light;
Shake your right hand a little,
Shake your left hand a little,
And turn you round about.”
“Ye’ll both see I again, present,” she panted, when this performance
was over, “but bide where ’ee be, bide where ’ee be now. Old Bessie’s
said her say, and she be due long of Hullaway Cross, come noon.”
As she hobbled off to the neighbouring stile, Luke saw her kiss the
tips of her fingers in the direction of the station-master’s house.
“She’s bidding Daddy James good-bye,” he thought. “What a world!
‘Looby, looby, looby!’ A proper Dance of Death for a son of my mother!”