THE GRANARY
Luke persuaded Mr. Quincunx to stay with him for the station-master’s
Sunday dinner, and to stroll with him down to the churchyard in the
afternoon to decide, in consultation with the sexton, upon the most
suitable spot for his brother’s interment. The stone-carver was
resolved that this spot should be removed as far as possible from
the grave of their parents, and the impiety of this resolution was
justified by the fact that Gideon’s tomb was crowded on both sides by
less aggressive sleepers.
They finally selected a remote place under the southern wall, at the
point where the long shadow of the tower, in the late afternoon, flung
its clear-outlined battlements on the waving grass.
Luke continued to be entirely pleased with Mr. Quincunx’s tact and
sympathy. He felt he could not have secured a better companion for this
task of selecting the final resting-place of the brother of his soul.
“Curse these fools,” he thought, “who rail against this excellent man!”
What mattered it, after all, that the fellow hated what the world calls
“work,” and loved a peaceful life removed from distraction?
The noble attributes of humour, of imagination, of intelligence,--how
much more important they were, and conducive to the general human
happiness, than the mere power of making money! Compared with
the delicious twists and diverting convolutions in Mr. Quincunx’s
extraordinary brain, how dull, how insipid, seemed such worldly
cleverness!
The death of his brother had had the effect of throwing these things
into a new perspective. The Machiavellian astuteness, which, in
himself, in Romer, in Mr. Taxater, and in many others, he had, until
now, regarded as of supreme value in the conduct of life, seemed to
him, as he regretfully bade the recluse farewell and retraced his
steps, far less essential, far less important, than this imaginative
sensitiveness to the astounding spectacle of the world.
He fancied he discerned in front of him, as he left the churchyard,
the well-known figure of his newly affianced Annie, and he made
a detour through the lane, to avoid her. He felt at that moment
as though nothing in the universe were interesting or important
except the sympathetic conversation of the friends of one’s natural
choice--persons of that small, that fatally small circle, from which
just now the centre seemed to have dropped out!
Girls were a distraction, a pastime, a lure, an intoxication; but a
shock like this, casting one back upon life’s essential verities, threw
even lust itself into the limbo of irrelevant things. All his recent
preoccupation with the love of women seemed to him now, as though, in
place of dreaming over the mystery of the great tide of life, hand
in hand with initiated comrades, he were called upon to go launching
little paper-boats on its surface, full of fretful anxiety as to
whether they sank or floated.
Weighed down by the hopeless misery of his loss, he made his way
slowly back to the station-master’s house, too absorbed in his grief to
speak to anyone.
After tea he became so wretched and lonely, that he decided to
walk over to Hullaway on the chance of getting another glimpse of
Witch-Bessie. Even the sympathy of the station-master’s wife got on his
nerves and the romping of the children fretted and chafed him.
He walked fast, swinging his stick and keeping his eyes on the ground,
his heart empty and desolate. He followed the very path by which Gladys
and he, some few short weeks before, had returned in the track of their
two friends, from the Hullaway stocks.
Arriving at the village green, with its pond, its elms, its raised
pavement, and its groups of Sunday loiterers, he turned into the
churchyard. As we have noted many times ere now, the appealing silence
of these places of the dead had an invincible charm for him. It was
perhaps a morbid tendency inherited from his mother, or, on the other
hand, it may have been a pure æsthetic whim of his own, that led him,
with so magnetic an attraction, towards these oases of mute patience,
in the midst of the diurnal activities; but whatever the spell was,
Luke had never found more relief in obeying it than he did at this
present hour.
He sat down in their favourite corner and looked with interest at the
various newly-blown wild-flowers, which a few weeks’ lapse had brought
to light. How well he loved the pungent stringy stalks, the grey
leaves, the flat sturdy flowers of the “achillea” or “yarrow”! Perhaps,
above all the late summer blooms, he preferred these--finding, in
their very coarseness of texture and toughness of stem, something that
reassured and fortified. They were so bitter in their herbal fragrance,
so astringent in the tang of their pungent taste, that they suggested
to him the kind of tonic cynicism, the sort of humorous courage and gay
disdain, with which it was his constant hope to come at last to accept
life.
It pleased him, above all when he found these plants tinged with a
delicious pink, as though the juice of raspberries had been squeezed
over them, and it was precisely this tint he noticed now in a large
clump of them, growing on the sun-warmed grave of a certain Hugh and
Constance Foley, former occupants of the old Manor House behind him.
He wondered if this long-buried Hugh--a mysterious and shadowy figure,
about whom James and he had often woven fantastic histories--had
felt as forlorn as he felt now, when he lost his Constance. Could a
Constance, or an Annie, or a Phyllis, ever leave quite the void behind
them such as now ached and throbbed within him? Yes, he supposed so.
Men planted their heart’s loves in many various soils, and when the
hand of fate tugged them away, it mattered little whether it was chalk,
or sand, or loam, that clung about the roots!
He looked long and long at the sunlit mounds, over which the tombstones
leaned at every conceivable angle and upon which some had actually
fallen prostrate. These neglected monuments, and these tall uncut
grasses and flowers, had always seemed to him preferable to the trim
neatness of an enclosure like that of Athelston, which resembled the
lawn of a gentleman’s house.
James had often disputed with him on this point, arguing, in a
spirit of surly contradiction, in favour of the wondrous effect of
those red Athelston roses hanging over clear-mown turf. The diverse
suggestiveness of graveyards was one of the brothers’ best-loved
topics, and innumerable cigarettes had they both consumed, weighing
this subject, on this very spot.
Once more the hideous finality of the thing pierced the heart of Luke
with a devastating pang. On Wednesday next,--that is, after the lapse
of two brief days,--he would bid farewell, for ever and ever and ever,
to the human companion with whom he had shared all he cared for in life!
He remembered a little quarrel he once had with James, long ago, in
this very place, and how it had been the elder and not the younger
who had made the first overtures of reconciliation, and how James had
given him an old pair of silver links,--he was wearing them at that
moment!--as a kind of peace-offering. He recollected what a happy
evening they had spent together after that event, and how they had read
“Thus spake Zarathustra” in the old formidable English translation--the
mere largeness of the volume answering to the largeness of the
philosopher’s thought.
Never again would they two “take on them,” in the sweet Shakespearean
phrase, “the mystery of things, as though they were God’s spies.”
Luke set himself to recall, one by one, innumerable little incidents of
their life together. He remembered various occasions in which, partly
out of pure contrariness, but partly also out of a certain instinctive
bias in his blood, he had defended their father against his brother’s
attacks. He recalled one strange conversation they had had, under the
withy-stumps of Badger’s Bottom, as they returned through the dusk of
a November day, from a long walk over the southern hills. It had to
do with the appearance of a cloud-swept crescent moon above the Auber
woods.
James had maintained that were he a pagan of the extinct polytheistic
faith, he would have worshipped the moon, and willingly offered
her, night by night,--he used the pious syllables of the great
hedonist,--her glittering wax tapers upon the sacred wheaten cake.
Luke, on the contrary, had sworn that the sun, and no lesser power,
was the god of his idolatry, and he imagined himself in place of his
brother’s wax candles, pouring forth, morning by morning, a rich
libation of gold wine to that bright lord of life.
This instinctive division of taste between the two, had led, over and
over again, to all manner of friendly dissension.
Luke recalled how often he had rallied James upon his habit of drifting
into what the younger brother pertinently described as a “translunar
mood.” He was “translunar” enough now, at any rate; but now it was in
honour of that other “lady of the night,” of that dreadful “double” of
his moon-goddess--the dark pomegranate-bearer--that the candles must be
lit!
Luke revived in his mind, as he watched the slow-shifting shadows move
from grave to grave, all those indescribable “little things” of their
every-day life together, the loss of which seemed perhaps worst of all.
He recalled how on gusty December evenings they would plod homeward
from some Saturday afternoon’s excursion to Yeoborough, and how the
cheerful firelight from the station-master’s house would greet them as
they crossed the railway.
So closely had their thoughts and sensations grown together, that there
were many little poignant memories, out of the woven texture of which
he found himself quite unable to disentangle the imaginative threads
that were due to his brother, from such as were the evocation of his
own temperament.
One such concentrated moment, of exquisite memory, he associated with
an old farm-house on the edge of the road leading from Hullaway to
Rogerstown. This road,--a forlorn enough highway of Roman origin,
dividing a level plain of desolate rain-flooded meadows,--was one of
their favourite haunts. “Halfway House,” as the farm-dwelling was
called, especially appealed to them, because of its romantic and
melancholy isolation.
Luke remembered how he had paused with his brother one clear frosty
afternoon when the puddles by the road-side were criss-crossed by
little broken stars of fresh-formed ice, and had imagined how they
would feel if such a place belonged to them by hereditary birthright,
what they would feel were they even now returning there, between the
tall evergreens at the gate, to spend a long evening over a log fire,
with mulled claret on the hob, and cards and books on the table, and
a great white Persian cat,--this was James’ interpolation!--purring
softly, and rubbing its silky sides against Chinese vases full of
rose-leaves.
Strange journeys his mind took, that long unforgettable afternoon,--the
first of his life spent without his brother! He saw before him, at one
moment, a little desolate wooden pier, broken by waves and weather,
somewhere on the Weymouth coast. The indescribable pathos of things
outworn and done with, of things abandoned by man and ill-used by
nature, had given to this derelict pile of drift-wood a curious
prominence in his House of Memory. He remembered the look with which
James had regarded it, and how the wind had whistled through it and how
they had tried in vain to light their cigarettes under its shelter.
At another moment his mind swung back to the daily routine in their
pleasant lodging. He recalled certain spring mornings when they had
risen together at dawn and had crept stealthily out, for fear of waking
their landlady. He vividly remembered the peculiar smell of moss and
primroses with which the air seemed full on one of these occasions.
The place Luke had chosen for summoning up all these ghosts of the past
held him with such a spell that he permitted the church-bells to ring
and the little congregation to assemble for the evening service without
moving or stirring. “Hugh and Constance Foley” he kept repeating to
himself, as the priest’s voice, within the sacred building, intoned the
prayers. The sentiment of the plaintive hymn with which the service
closed,--he hardly moved or stirred for the brief hour of the liturgy’s
progress,--brought tears, the first he had shed since his brother’s
death, to this wanton faun’s eyes. What is there, he thought, in these
wistful tunes, and impossible, too-sweet words, that must needs hit the
most cynical of sceptics?
He let the people shuffle out and drift away, and the grey-haired
parson and his silk-gowned wife follow them and vanish, and still he
did not stir. For some half-an-hour longer he remained in the same
position, his chin upon his knees, staring gloomily in front of him.
He was still seated so, when, to the eyes of an observer posted on the
top of the tower, two persons, the first a woman and the second a man,
would have been observed approaching, by a rarely-traversed field-path,
the side of the enclosure most remote from Hullaway Green.
The path upon which these figures advanced was interrupted at certain
intervals by tall elm-trees, and it would have been clear to our
imaginary watcher upon the tower that the second of the two was glad
enough of the shelter of these trees, of which it was evident he
intended to make use, did the first figure turn and glance backward.
Had such a sentinel been possessed of local knowledge he would have had
no difficulty in recognizing the first of these persons as Gladys Romer
and the second as Mr. Clavering.
Gladys had, in fact, gone alone to the evening service, on the ground
of celebrating the close of her baptismal day. Immediately after the
service she had slipped off down the street leading to the railroad,
directing her steps towards Hullaway, whither a sure instinct told her
Luke had wandered.
She was still in sight, having got no further than the entrance
to Splash Lane, when Clavering, who had changed his surplice with
lightning rapidity, issued forth into the street. In a flash he
remarked the direction of her steps, and impelled by an impulse of mad
jealousy, began blindly following her.
Not a few heads were inquisitively turned, and not a few whispering
comments were exchanged, as first the squire’s daughter, and then the
young clergyman, made their way through the street.
As soon as Gladys had crossed the railroad and struck out at a sharp
pace up the slope of the meadow Clavering realized that wherever she
intended to go it was not to the house in which lay James Andersen.
Torn with intolerable jealousy, and anxious, at all risks, to satisfy
his mind, one way or the other, as to her relations with Luke,
he deliberately decided to follow the girl to whatever hoped-for
encounter, or carefully plotted assignation, she was now directing her
steps. How true, how exactly true, to his interpretation of Luke’s
character, was this astutely arranged meeting, on the very day after
his brother’s death!
At the top of the station-field Gladys paused for a moment, and,
turning round, contemplated the little dwelling which was now a house
of the dead.
Luckily for Mr. Clavering, this movement of hers coincided with his
arrival at the thick-set hedge separating the field from the metal
track. He waited at the turn-stile until, her abstraction over, she
passed into the lane.
All the way to Hullaway Mr. Clavering followed her, hurriedly
concealing himself when there seemed the least danger of discovery, and
at certain critical moments making slight deviations from the direct
pursuit.
As she drew near the churchyard the girl showed evident signs of
nervousness and apprehension, walking more slowly, and looking about
her, and sometimes even pausing as if to take breath and collect her
thoughts.
It was fortunate for her pursuer at this final moment of the chase that
the row of colossal elms, of which mention has been made, interposed
themselves between the two. Clavering was thus able to approach quite
close to the girl before she reached her destination, for, making use
of these rugged trunks, as an Indian scout might have done, he was
almost within touch of her by the time she clambered over the railings.
The savage bite of insane jealousy drove from the poor priest’s head
any thought of how grotesque he must have appeared,--could any eyes but
those of field-mice and starlings have observed him,--with his shiny
black frock-coat and broad-brimmed hat, peeping and spying in the track
of this fair young person.
With a countenance convulsed with helpless fury he watched the girl
walk slowly and timidly up to Luke’s side, and saw the stone-carver
recognize her and rise to greet her. He could not catch their words,
though he strained his ears to do so, but their gestures and attitudes
were quite distinguishable.
It was, indeed, little wonder that the agitated priest could not
overhear what Gladys said, for the extreme nervousness under which she
laboured made her first utterances so broken and low that even her
interlocutor could scarcely follow them.
She laid a pleading hand on Luke’s arm. “I was unhappy,” she murmured,
“I was unhappy, and I wanted to tell you. I’ve been thinking about you
all day. I heard of his death quite early in the morning. Luke,--you’re
not angry with me any more, are you? I’d have done anything that this
shouldn’t have happened!”
Luke looked at her searchingly, but made, at the same time, an
impatient movement of his arm, so that the hand she had placed upon his
sleeve fell to her side.
“Let’s get away from here, Luke,” she implored; “anywhere,--across the
fields,--I told them at home I might go for a walk after church. It’ll
be all right. No one will know.”
“Across the fields--eh?” replied the stone-carver. “Well--I don’t mind.
What do you say to a walk to Rogerstown? I haven’t been there since I
went with James, and there’ll be a moon to get home by.” He looked at
her intently, with a certain bitter humour lurking in the curve of his
lips.
Under ordinary circumstances it was with the utmost difficulty that
Gladys could be persuaded to walk anywhere. Her lethargic nature
detested that kind of exercise. He was amazed at the alacrity with
which she accepted the offer.
Her eyes quite lit up. “I’d love that, Luke, I’d simply love it!” she
cried eagerly. “Let’s start! I’ll walk as fast as you like--and I don’t
care how late we are!”
They moved out of the churchyard together, by the gate opening on the
green.
Luke was interested, but not in the least touched, by the girl’s
chastened and submissive manner. His suggestion about Rogerstown was
really more of a sort of test than anything else, to see just how far
this clinging passivity of hers would really go.
As they followed the lane leading out of one of the side-alleys of
the village towards the Roman Road, the stone-carver could not help
indulging in a certain amount of silent psychological analysis in
regard to this change of heart in his fair mistress. He seemed to get
a vision of the great world-passions, sweeping at random through the
universe, and bending the most obstinate wills to their caprice.
On the one hand, he thought, there is that absurd Mr.
Clavering,--simple, pure-minded, a veritable monk of God,--driven
almost insane with Desire, and on the other, here is Gladys,--naturally
as selfish and frivolous a young pagan as one could wish to amuse
oneself with,--driven almost insane with self-oblivious love! They were
like earthquakes and avalanches, like whirlpools and water-spouts,
he thought, these great world-passions! They could overwhelm all
the good in one person, and all the evil in another, with the same
sublime indifference, and in themselves--remain non-moral, superhuman,
elemental!
In the light of this vision, Luke could not resist a hurried mental
survey of the various figures in his personal drama. He wondered how
far his own love for James could be said to belong to this formidable
category. No! He supposed that both he and Mr. Quincunx were too
self-possessed, or too epicurean, ever to be thus swept out of their
path. His brother was clearly a victim of these erotic Valkyries, so
was Ninsy Lintot, and in a lesser degree, he shrewdly surmised, young
Philip Wone. He himself, he supposed, was, in these things, amorous and
vicious rather than passionate. So he had always imagined Gladys to
have been. But Gladys had been as completely swept out of the shallows
of her viciousness, by this overpowering obsession, as Mr. Clavering
had been swept out of the shallows of his puritanism, by the same
power. If that fantastic theory of Vennie Seldom’s about the age-long
struggle between the two Hills--between the stone of the one and the
wood of the other--had any germ of truth in it, it was clear that
these elemental passions belonged to a region of activity remote from
either, and as indifferent to both, as the great zodiacal signs were
indifferent to the solar planets.
Luke had just arrived at this philosophical, or, if the reader pleases,
mystical conclusion, when they emerged upon the Roman Road.
Ascending an abrupt hill, the last eminence between Hullaway and
far-distant ranges, they found themselves looking down over an
immense melancholy plain, in the centre of which, on the banks of a
muddy river, stood the ancient Roman stronghold of Rogerstown, the
birth-place, so Luke always loved to remind himself, of the famous
monkish scientist Roger Bacon.
The sun had already disappeared, and the dark line of the Mendip Hills
on the northern horizon were wrapped in a thick, purple haze.
The plain they looked down upon was cut into two equal segments by the
straight white road they were to follow,--if Luke was serious in his
intention,--and all along the edges of the road, and spreading in
transverse lines across the level fields, were deep, reedy ditches,
bordered in places by pollard willows.
The whole plain, subject, in autumn and winter, to devastating floods,
was really a sort of inlet or estuary of the great Somersetshire
marshes, lying further west, which are collectively known as Sedgemoor.
Gladys could not refrain from giving vent to a slight movement of
instinctive reluctance, when she saw how close the night was upon them,
and how long the road seemed, but she submissively suppressed any word
of protest, when, with a silent touch upon her arm, her companion led
her forward, down the shadowy incline.
Their figures were still visible--two dark isolated forms upon the
pale roadway--when, hot and panting, Mr. Clavering arrived at the same
hill-top. With a sigh of profound relief he recognized that he had not
lost his fugitives. The only question was, where were they going, and
for what purpose? He remained for several minutes gloomy and watchful
at his post of observation.
They were now nearly half a mile across the plain, and their receding
figures had already begun to grow indistinct in the twilight, when Mr.
Clavering saw them suddenly leave the road and debouch to the left.
“Ah!” he muttered to himself, “They’re going home by Hullaway Chase!”
This Hullaway Chase was a rough tract of pasturage a little to the east
of the level flats, and raised slightly above them. From its southern
extremity a long narrow lane, skirting the outlying cottages of the
village, led straight across the intervening uplands to Nevilton Park.
It was clearly towards this lane, by a not much frequented foot-path
over the ditches, that Gladys and Luke were proceeding.
To anyone as well acquainted as Clavering was with the general outline
of the country the route that the lovers--or whatever their curious
relation justifies us in calling them--must needs take, to return to
Nevilton, was now as clearly marked as if it were indicated on a map.
“Curse him!” muttered the priest, “I hope he’s not going to drown her
in those brooks!”
He let his gaze wander across the level expanse at his feet. How could
he get close to them, he wondered, so as to catch even a stray sentence
or two of what they were saying.
His passion had reached such a point of insanity that he longed to be
transformed into one of those dark-winged rooks that now in a thin
melancholy line were flying over their heads, so that he might swoop
down above them and follow them--follow them--every step of the way!
He was like a man drawn to the edge of a precipice and magnetized by
the very danger of the abyss. To be near them, to listen to what they
said,--the craving for that possessed him with a fixed and obstinate
hunger!
Suddenly he shook his cane in the air and almost leaped for joy. He
remembered the existence, at the spot where the lane they were seeking
began, of a large dilapidated barn, used, by the yeoman-farmer to whom
the Chase belonged, as a rough store-house for cattle-food. The spot
was so attractive a resting-place for persons tired with walking,
that it seemed as though it would be a strange chance indeed if the
two wanderers did not take advantage of it. The point was, could he
forestall them and arrive there first?
He surveyed the landscape around him with an anxious eye. It seemed
as though by following the ridge of the hill upon which he stood, and
crossing every obstacle that intervened, he ought to be able to do
so--and to do so without losing sight of the two companions, as they
unsuspiciously threaded their way over the flats.
Having made his resolution, he lost no time in putting it into
action. He clambered without difficulty into the meadow on his right,
and breaking, in his excitement, into a run, he forced his way
through three successive bramble-hedges, and as many dew-drenched
turnip-fields, without the least regard to the effect of this procedure
upon his Sunday attire.
Every now and then, as the contours of the ground served, he caught a
glimpse of the figures in the valley below, and the sight hastened the
impetuosity of his speed. Once he felt sure he observed them pause and
exchange an embrace, but this may have been an illusive mirage created
by the mad fumes of the tempestuous jealousy which kept mounting
higher and higher into his head. Recklessly and blindly he rushed on,
performing feats of agility and endurance, such as in normal hours
would have been utterly impossible.
From the moment he decided upon this desperate undertaking, to the
moment, when, hot, breathless, and dishevelled, he reached his
destination, only a brief quarter of an hour had elapsed.
He entered the barn leaving the door wide-open behind him. In its
interior tightly packed bundles of dark-coloured hay rose up almost to
the roof. The floor was littered with straw and newly-cut clover.
On one side of the barn, beneath the piled-up hay, was a large shelving
heap of threshed oats. Here, obviously, was the sort of place, if the
lovers paused at this spot at all, where they would be tempted to
recline.
Directly opposite these oats, in the portion of the shed that was most
in shadow, Clavering observed a narrow slit between the hay-bundles.
He approached this aperture and tried to wedge himself into it. The
protruding stalks of the hay pricked his hands and face, and the dust
choked him.
With angry coughs and splutters, and with sundry savage expletives by
no means suitable to a priest of the church, he at length succeeded
in firmly imbedding himself in this impenetrable retreat. He worked
himself so far into the shadow, that not the most cautious eye could
have discerned his presence. His sole danger lay in the fact that the
dust might very easily give him an irresistible fit of sneezing. With
the cessation of his violent struggles, however, this danger seemed to
diminish; for the dust subsided as quickly as it had been raised, and
otherwise, as he leant luxuriously back upon his warm-scented support,
his position was by no means uncomfortable.
Meanwhile Luke and Gladys were slowly and deliberately crossing the
darkening water-meadows.
Gladys, whose geographical knowledge of the district was limited to the
immediate vicinity of her home had not the remotest guess as to where
she was being led. For all she knew Luke might have gone crazy, like
his brother, and be now intending to plunge both himself and her into
the depths of some lonely pool or weir. Nevertheless, she continued
passively and meekly following him, walking, when the path along the
dyke’s edge narrowed, at some few paces behind him, with that peculiar
air of being a led animal, which one often observes in the partners of
tramps, as they plod the roads in the wake of their masters.
The expanse they traversed in this manner was possessed of a peculiar
character of its own, a character which that especial hour of twilight
seemed to draw forth and emphasize. It differed from similar tracts of
marsh-land, such as may be found by the sea’s edge, in being devoid of
any romantic horizon to afford a spiritual escape from the gloom it
diffused.
It was melancholy. It was repellant. It was sinister. It lacked the
element of poetic expansiveness. It gave the impression of holding
grimly to some dark obscene secret, which no visitation of sun or moon
would ever cajole it into divulging.
It depressed without overwhelming. It saddened without inspiring. With
its reeds, its mud, its willows, its livid phosphorescent ditches,
it produced uneasiness rather than awe, and disquietude rather than
solemnity.
Bounded by rolling hills on all sides save one, it gave the persons who
moved across it the sensation of being enclosed in some vast natural
arena.
Gladys wished she had brought her cloak with her, as the filmy white
mists rose like ghosts out of the stagnant ditches, and with clammy
persistence invaded her unprotected form.
It was one of those places that seem to suggest the transaction of
no stirring or heroic deeds, but of gloomy, wretched, chance-driven
occurrences. A betrayed army might have surrendered there.
Luke seemed to give himself up with grim reciprocity to the influences
of the spot. He appeared totally oblivious of his meek companion, and
except to offer her languid, absent-minded assistance across various
gates and dams, he remained as completely wrapped in reserve as were
the taciturn levels over which they passed.
It was with an incredible sense of relief that Gladys found herself
in the drier, more wholesome, atmosphere of Hullaway Chase. Here, as
they walked briskly side by side over the thyme-scented turf, it seemed
that the accumulated heat of the day, which, from the damp marsh-land
only drew forth miasmic vapours, flung into the fragrant air delicious
waftings of warm earth-breath. With still greater relief, and even with
a little cry of joy, she caught sight of the friendly open door of the
capacious barn, and the shadowy inviting heap of loose-flung oats lying
beneath its wall of hay.
“Oh, we must go in here!” she cried, “what an adorable place!”
They entered, and the girl threw upon Luke one of her slow, long,
amorous glances. “Kiss me!” she said, holding up her mouth to him
beseechingly.
The faint light of the dying day fell with a pale glimmer upon her soft
throat and rounded chin. Luke found himself disinclined to resist her.
There were tears on the girl’s cheek when, loosening her hold upon his
neck, she sank down on the idyllic couch offered them, and closed her
eyes in childish contentment.
Luke hung over her thoughtfully and sadly. There is always something
sad,--something that seems to bring with it a withering breath from
the ultimate futility of the universe,--about a lover’s recognition
that the form which formerly thrilled him with ecstasy, now leaves
him cold and unmoved. Such sadness, chilly and desolate as the hand
of death itself, crept over the stone-carver’s heart, as he looked at
the gently-stirring breast and softly-parted lips of his beautiful
mistress. He bent down and kissed her forehead, caressing her passively
yielded fingers.
She opened her eyes and smiled at him, the lingering smile of a soothed
and happy infant.
They remained thus, silent and at rest, for several moments. It was
not long, however, before the subtle instinct of an enamoured woman
made the girl aware that her friend’s responsiveness had been but a
momentary impulse. She started up, her eyes wide-open and her lips
trembling.
“Luke!” she murmured, “Luke, darling,--” Her voice broke, in a curious
little sob.
Luke gazed at her blankly, thankful that the weight of weary
foreknowledge upon his face was concealed from her by the growing
darkness.
“I want to say to you, my dear love,” the girl went on, her bosom
rising and falling in pitiful embarrassment, and her white fingers
nervously scooping up handful after handful of the shadowy grain.
“I want to say to you something that is--that is very serious--for us
both, Luke,--I want to tell you,----”
Her voice once more died away, in the same inarticulate and curious
gurgle, like the sob of water running under a weir.
Luke rose to his feet and stood in front of her. “It’s all right,” he
said calmly. “You needn’t agitate yourself. I understand.”
The girl covered her face with her hands. “But what shall I do? What
shall I do?” she sobbed. “I can’t marry Ralph like this. He’ll kill me
when he finds out. I’m so afraid of him, Luke--you don’t know,--you
don’t know,--”
“He’ll forgive you,” answered the stone-carver quietly. “He’s not a
person to burst out like that. Lots of people have to confess these
little things after they’re married. Some men aren’t half so particular
as you girls think.”
Gladys raised her head and gave her friend a long queer look, the full
import of which was concealed from him in the darkness. She made a
futile little groping movement with her hand.
“Luke,” she whispered, “I must just say this to you even if it makes
you angry. I shouldn’t be happy afterwards--whatever happens--if I
didn’t say it. I want you to know that I’m ready, if you wish, if--if
you love me enough for that, Luke,--to go away with you anywhere! I
feel it isn’t as it used to be. I feel everything’s different. But
I want you to know,--to know without any mistake--that I’d go at
once--willingly--wherever you took me!
“It’s not that I’m begging you to marry me,” she wailed, “it’s only
that I love you, love you and want you so frightfully, my darling!
“I wouldn’t worry you, Luke,” she added, in a low, pitiful little
voice, that seemed to emerge rather from the general shadowiness of the
place than from a human being’s lips, “I wouldn’t tease you, or scold
you when you enjoyed yourself! It’s only that I want to be with you,
that I want to be near you. I never thought it would come to this. I
thought--” Her voice died away again into the darkness.
Luke began pacing up and down the floor of the barn.
Once more she spoke. “I’d be faithful to you, Luke, married or
unmarried,--and I’d work, though I know you won’t believe that. But I
can do quite hard work, when I like!”
By some malignity of chance, or perhaps by a natural reaction from her
pleading words, Luke’s mind reverted to her tone and temper on that
June morning when she insulted him by a present of money.
“No, Gladys,” he said. “It won’t do. You and I weren’t made for each
other. There are certain things--many things--in me that you’ll never
understand, and I daresay there are things in you that I never shall.
We’re not made for one another, child, I tell you. We shouldn’t be
happy for a week. I know myself, and I know you, and I’m sure it
wouldn’t do.
“Don’t you fret yourself about Dangelis. If he finds out, he finds
out--and that’s the end of it. But I swear to you that I know _him_
well enough to know that you’ve nothing to be afraid of--even if he
does find out. He’s not the kind of man to make a fuss. I can see
exactly the way he’d take it. He’d be sorry for you and laugh at
himself, and plunge desperately into his painting.
“I like Dangelis, I tell you frankly. I think he’s a thoroughly
generous and large-minded fellow. Of course I’ve hardly seen him to
speak to, but you can’t be mistaken about a man like that. At least I
can’t! I seem to know him in and out, up hill and down dale.
“Make a fuss? Not he! He’ll make this country ring and ting with the
fame of his pictures. That’s what he’ll do! And as for being horrid to
you--not he! I know him better than that. He’ll be too much in love
with you, too,--you little demon! That’s another point to bear in mind.
“Oh, you’ll have the whip-hand of him, never fear,--and our son,--I
hope it _is_ a son my dear!--will be treated as if it were his own.
“I know him, I tell you! He’s a thoroughly decent fellow, though a bit
of a fool, no doubt. But we’re all that!
“Don’t you be a little goose, Gladys, and get fussed up and worried
over nothing. After all, what does it matter? Life’s such a mad affair
anyway! All we can do is to map things to the best of our ability, and
then chance it.
“We’re all on the verge of a precipice. Do you think I don’t realize
that? But that’s no reason why we should rush blindly up to the thing,
and throw ourselves over. And it would be nothing else than that,
nothing else than sheer madness, for you and I to go off together.
“Do you think your father would give us a penny? Not he! I detect in
your father, Gladys, an extraordinary vein of obstinacy. You haven’t
clashed up against it yet, but try and play any of these games on him,
and you’ll see!
“No; one thing you may be perfectly sure of, and that is, that whatever
he finds out, Dangelis will never breathe a word to your father. He’s
madly in love with you, girl, I tell you; and if I’m out of the way,
you’ll be able to do just what you like with him!”
It was completely dark now, and when Luke’s oration came to an end
there was no sound in the barn except a low sobbing.
“Come on, child; we must be getting home, or you’ll be frightfully
late. Here! give me your hand. Where are you?”
He groped about in the darkness until his sleeve brushed against her
shoulder. It was trembling under her efforts to suppress her sobs.
He got hold of her wrists and pulled her to her feet. “Come on, my
dear,” he repeated, “we must get out of this now. Give me one nice kiss
before we go.”
She permitted herself to be caressed--passive and unresisting in his
arms.
In the darkness they touched the outer edge of Mr. Clavering’s
hiding-place, and the girl, swaying a little backwards under Luke’s
endearments, felt the pressure of the hay-wall behind her. She did not,
however, feel the impassioned touch of the choking kiss which the poor
imprisoned priest desperately imprinted on a loose tress of her hair.
It was one of those pitiful and grotesque situations which seem
sometimes to arise,--as our fantastic planet turns on its orbit,--for
no other purpose than that of gratifying some malign vein of
goblin-like irony in the system of things.
That at the moment when Luke, under the spell of the shadowy fragrance
of the place, and the pliant submissiveness of the girl’s form, threw
something of his old ardour into his kiss, her other, more desperate
love should have dared such an approach, was a coincidence apparently
of the very kind to appeal to the perverse taste of this planetary
humour.
The actual result of such a strange consentaneousness of rival emotion
was that the three human heads remained for a brief dramatic moment
in close juxtaposition,--the two fair ones and the dark one so near
one another, that it might have seemed almost inevitable that their
thoughts should interact in that fatal proximity.
The pitiful pathos of the whole human comedy might well have been
brought home to any curious observer able to pierce that twilight! Such
an observer would have felt towards those three poor obsessed craniums
the same sort of tenderness that they themselves would have been
conscious of, had they suddenly come across a sleeping person or a dead
body.
Strange, that the ultimate pity in these things,--in this blind
antagonistic striving of human desires under such gracious flesh and
blood--should only arouse these tolerant emotions when they are no
longer of any avail! Had some impossible bolt from heaven stricken
these three impassioned ones in their tragic approximation, how,--long
afterwards,--the discoverer of the three skeletons would have
moralized upon their fate! As it was, there was nothing but the irony
of the gods to read what the irony of the gods was writing upon that
moment’s drowning sands.
When Luke and Gladys left the barn, and hurriedly, under the rising
moon, retook their way towards Nevilton, Clavering emerged from his
concealment dazed and stupefied. He threw himself down in the darkness
on the heap of oats and strove to give form and coherence to the wild
flood of thoughts which swept through him.
So this was what he had come out to learn! This was the knowledge that
his mad jealousy had driven him to snatch!
He thought of the exquisite sacredness--for him--of that morning’s
ritual in the church, and of how easily he had persuaded himself to
read into the girl’s preoccupied look something more than natural
sadness over Andersen’s death. He had indeed,--only those short hours
ago,--allowed himself the sweet illusion that this religious initiation
really meant, for his pagan love, some kind of Vita Nuova.
The fates had rattled their dice, however, to a different tune. The
unfortunate girl was indeed entering upon a Vita Nuova, but how
hideously different a one from that which had been his hope!
On Wednesday came the confirmation service. How could he,--with any
respect for his conscience as a guardian of these sacred rites,--permit
Gladys to be confirmed now? Yet what ought he to do? Drops of cold
sweat stood upon his forehead as he wondered whether it was incumbent
upon him to take the first train the following morning for the bishop’s
palace and to demand an interview.
No. Tomorrow the prelate would be starting on his episcopal tour.
Clavering would have to pursue him from one remote country village to
another, and what a pursuit that would be! He recoiled from the idea
with sick aversion.
Could he then suppress his fatal knowledge and let the event take place
without protest? To act in such a manner would be nothing less than to
play the part of an accomplice in the girl’s sin.
Perhaps when the bishop actually appeared he would be able to secure a
confidential interview with him and lay the whole matter before him. Or
should he act on his own responsibility, and write to Gladys himself,
telling her that under the circumstances it would be best for her to
stay away from the ceremony?
What reason could he give for such an extraordinary mandate? Could
he bluntly indicate to her, in black and white, the secret he had
discovered, and the manner of its discovery? To accuse her on the
ground of mere village gossip would be to lay himself open to shameful
humiliation. Was he, in any case, justified in putting the fatal
information, gathered in this way, to so drastic a use? It was only in
his madness as a jealous lover that he had possessed himself of this
knowledge. As priest of Nevilton he knew nothing.
He had no right to know anything. No; he must pay the penalty of his
shameful insanity by bearing this burden in silence, even though his
conscience groaned and cracked beneath the weight. Such a silence,
with its attendant misery of self-accusation and shame, was all he
could offer to his treacherous enchantress as a tacit recompense for
having stolen her secret.
He rose and left the granary. As he walked homeward, along the Nevilton
road, avoiding by a sort of scrupulous reaction the shorter route
followed by the others, it seemed to him as though the night had never
been more sultry, or the way more loaded with the presence of impendent
calamity.