VARIOUS ENCOUNTERS
During the hours when Mr. Quincunx was undergoing this strange
experience, several other human brains under the roofs of Nevilton were
feeling the pressure of extreme perturbation.
Gladys, after a gloomy breakfast, which was rendered more
uncomfortable, not only by her father’s chaffing references to the
approaching ceremony, but by a letter from Dangelis, had escaped to her
room to be assisted by Lacrima in dressing for the confirmation.
In his letter the artist declared his intention of spending that night
at the Gloucester Hotel in Weymouth, and begged his betrothed to
forgive this delay in his return to her side.
This communication caused Gladys many tremors of disquietude. Could it
be possible that the American had found out something and that he had
gone to Weymouth to meditate at leisure upon his course of action?
In any case this intimation of a delay in his return irritated the
girl. It struck her in her tenderest spot. It was a direct flouting of
her magnetic power. It was an insult to her sex-vanity.
She had seen nothing of Luke since their Sunday’s excursion; and as
Lacrima, with cold submissive fingers, helped her to arrange her white
dress and virginal veil, she could hear the sound of the bell tolling
for James Andersen’s funeral.
Mingled curiously enough with this melancholy vibration falling at
protracted intervals upon the air, like the stroke of some reiterated
hammer of doom, came another sound, a sound of a completely opposite
character,--the preluding strains, namely, of the steam roundabouts of
Porter’s Universal Show.
It was as though on one side of the village the angel of death were
striking an iron-threatening gong, while, on the other side, the demons
of life were howling a brazen defiance.
The association of the two sounds as they reached her at this critical
hour brought the figure of Luke vividly and obsessingly into her mind.
How well she knew the sort of comment he would make upon the bizarre
combination! Beneath the muslin frills of her virginal dress,--a dress
that made her look fairer and younger than usual,--her heart ached with
sick longing for her evasive lover.
The wheel had indeed come full circle for the fair-haired girl. She
could not help the thought recurring again and again, as Lacrima’s
light fingers adjusted her veil, that the next time she dressed in this
manner it would be for her wedding-day. Her one profound consolation
lay in the knowledge that her cousin, even more deeply than herself,
dreaded the approach of that fatal Thursday.
Her hatred for the pale-cheeked Italian re-accumulated every drop of
its former venom, as with an air of affectionate gratitude she accepted
her assistance.
It is a psychological peculiarity of certain human beings that the more
they hate, the more they crave, with a curious perverted instinct,
some sort of physical contact with the object of their hatred.
Every touch of Lacrima’s hand increased the intensity of Gladys’
loathing; and yet, so powerful is the instinct to which I refer, she
lost no opportunity of accentuating the contact between them, letting
their fingers meet again and again, and even their breath, and throwing
back her rounded chin to make it easier for those hated wrists to busy
themselves about her throat. Her general air was an air of playful
passivity; but at one moment, imprinting a kiss on the girl’s arm as,
in the process of arranging her veil, it brushed across her cheek, she
seemed almost anxious to convey to Lacrima the full implication of her
real feeling.
Never has a human caress been so electric with the vibrations of
antipathy, as was that kiss. She followed up this signal of animosity
by a series of feline taunts relative to John Goring, one of which,
from its illuminated insight into the complex strata of the girl’s
soul, delighted her by its effect.
Lacrima winced under it, as if under the sting of a lash, and a burning
flood of scarlet suffused her cheeks. She dropped her hands and stepped
back, uttering a fierce vow that nothing--nothing on earth--would
induce her to accompany a girl who could say such things, to such a
ceremony!
“No, I wouldn’t,--I wouldn’t!” cried Gladys mockingly. “I wouldn’t
dream of coming with me! Tomorrow week, anyway, we’re bound to go to
church side by side. Father wanted to drive with me then, you know, and
to let mother go with you,--but I wouldn’t hear of it! I said they must
go in one carriage, and you and I in another, so that our last drive
together we should be quite by ourselves. You’ll like that, won’t you,
darling?”
Lacrima’s only answer to this was to turn her back to her cousin, and
begin putting on her hat and gloves.
“I know where you’re going,” said Gladys. “You’re going to see your
dear Maurice. Give him my love! I should be ashamed to let such a
wretched coward come near me.
“James--poor boy!--was a fellow of a different metal. He’d some spirit
in him. Listen! When that bell stops tolling they’ll be carrying him
into the church. I expect you’re thinking now, darling, that it would
have been better if you’d treated him differently. Of course you know
it’s you that killed him? Oh, nobody else! Just little Lacrima and her
coy, demure ways!
“_I’ve_ never killed a man. I can say that, at all events.
“That’s right! Run off to her dear Maurice,--her dear brave Maurice!
Perhaps he’ll take her on his knees again, and she’ll play the sweet
little innocent,--like that day when I peeped through the window!”
This final dart had hardly reached its objective before Lacrima without
attempting any retort rushed from the room.
“I _will_ go and see Maurice. I will! I will!” she murmured to herself
as she ran down the broad oak staircase, and slipped out by the East
door.
Simultaneously with these events, a scene of equal dramatic intensity,
though of a very different character, was being enacted in the
vicarage drawing-room.
Vennie, as we have noted, had resolved to postpone for the present her
reception into the Catholic Church. She had also resolved that nothing
on earth should induce her to reveal to her mother her change of creed
until the thing was an accomplished fact. The worst, however, of the
kind of mental suppression in which she had been living of late, is
that it tends to produce a volcanic excitement of the nerves, liable
at any moment to ungovernable upheavals. Quite little things--mere
straws and bagatelles--are enough to set this eruption beginning;
and when once it begins, the accumulated passion of the long days of
fermentation gives the explosion a horrible force.
One perpetual annoyance to Vennie was her mother’s persistent fondness
for family prayers. It seemed to the girl as though Valentia insisted
on this performance, not so much out of a desire to serve God, as
out of a sense of what was due to herself as the mistress of a
well-conducted establishment.
Vennie always fancied she discerned a peculiar tone of
self-satisfaction in her mother’s voice, as, rather loudly, and
extremely clearly, she read her liturgical selections to the assembled
servants.
On this particular morning the girl had avoided the performance of this
rite, by leaving her room earlier than usual and taking refuge in the
furthest of the vicarage orchards. Backwards and forwards she walked,
in that secluded place, with her hands behind her and her head bent,
heedless of the drenching dew which covered every grass-blade and of
the heavy white mists that still hung about the tree-trunks. She was
obliged to return to her room and change her shoes and stockings
before joining her mother at breakfast, but not before she had prayed
a desperate prayer, down there among the misty trees, for the eternal
rest of James Andersen’s soul.
This little incident of her absence from prayers was the direct cause
of the unfortunate scene that followed.
Valentia hardly spoke to her daughter while the meal proceeded, and
when at last it was over, she retired to the drawing-room and began
writing letters.
This was an extremely ill-omened sign to anyone who knew Mrs. Seldom’s
habits. Under normal conditions, her first proceeding after breakfast
was to move to the kitchen, where she engaged in a long culinary debate
with both cook and gardener; a course of action which was extremely
essential, as without it,--so bitter was the feud between these two
worthies,--it is unlikely that there would have been any vegetables at
all, either for lunch or dinner. When anything occurred to throw her
into a mood of especially good spirits, she would pass straight out
of the French window on to the front lawn, and armed with a pair of
formidable garden-scissors would make a selection of flowers and leaves
appropriate to a festival temper.
But this adjournment at so early an hour to the task of letter-writing
indicated that Valentia was in a condition of mind, which in anyone but
a lady of her distinction and breeding could have been called nothing
less than a furious rage. For of all things in the world, Mrs. Seldom
most detested this business of writing letters; and therefore,--with
that perverse self-punishing instinct, which is one of the most artful
weapons of offence given to refined gentlewomen,--she took grim
satisfaction in setting herself down to write; thus producing chaos in
the kitchen, where the gardener refused to obey the cook, and miserable
remorse in the heart of Vennie, who wandered up and down the lawn
meditating a penitential apology.
Satisfied in her heart that she was causing universal annoyance and
embarrassment by her proceeding, and yet quite confident that there was
nothing but what was proper and natural in her writing letters at nine
o’clock in the morning, Valentia began, by gentle degrees, to recover
her lost temper.
The only real sedative to thoroughly aggravated nerves, is the
infliction of similar aggravation upon the nerves of others. This
process is like the laying on of healing ointment; and the more
extended the disturbance which we have the good fortune to create, the
sooner we ourselves recover our equanimity.
Valentia had already cast several longing glances through the window at
the heavy sunshine falling mistily on the asters and petunias, and in
another moment she would probably have left her letter and joined her
daughter in the garden, had not Vennie anticipated any such movement by
entering the room herself.
“I ought to make you understand, mother,” the girl began as soon as she
stepped in, speaking in that curious strained voice which people assume
when they have worked themselves up to a pitch of nervous excitement,
“that when I don’t appear at prayers, it isn’t because I’m in a sulky
temper, or in any mad haste to get out of doors. It’s--it’s for a
different reason.”
Valentia gazed at her in astonishment. The tone in which Vennie spoke
was so tense, her eyes shone with such a strange brilliance, and her
look was altogether so abnormal, that Mrs. Seldom completely forgot her
injured priestess-vanity, and waited in sheer maternal alarm for the
completion of the girl’s announcement.
“It’s because I’ve made up my mind to become a Catholic, and Catholics
aren’t allowed to attend any other kind of service than their own.”
Valentia rose to her feet and looked at her daughter in blank dismay.
Her first feeling was one of overpowering indignation against Mr.
Taxater, to whose treacherous influence she felt certain this madness
was mainly due.
There was a terrible pause during which Vennie, leaning against the
back of a chair, was conscious that both herself and her mother were
trembling from head to foot. The soft murmur of wood-pigeons wafted in
from the window, was now blended with two other sounds, the sound of
the tolling of the church-bell and the sound of the music of Mr. Love’s
circus, testing the efficiency of its roundabouts.
“So this is what it has come to, is it?” said the old lady at last.
“And I suppose the next thing you’ll tell me, in this unkind,
inconsiderate way, is that you’ve decided to become a nun!”
Vennie made a little movement with her head.
“You have?” cried Valentia, pale with anger. “You have made up your
mind to do that? Well--I wouldn’t have believed it of you, Vennie! In
spite of everything I’ve done for you; in spite of everything I’ve
taught you; in spite of everything I’ve prayed for;--you can go and do
this! Oh, you’re an unkind, ungrateful girl! But I know that look on
your face. I’ve known it from your childhood. When you look like that
there’s no hope of moving you. Go on, then! Do as you wish to do. Leave
your mother in her old age, and destroy the last hope of our family. I
won’t speak another word. I know nothing I can say will change you.”
She sank down upon the chintz-covered sofa and covered her face with
her hands.
Vennie cursed herself for her miserable want of tact. What demon was it
that had tempted her to break her resolution? Then, suddenly, as she
looked at her mother swaying to and fro on the couch, a strange impulse
of hard inflexible obstinacy rose up in her.
These wretched human affections,--so unbalanced and selfish,--what a
relief to escape from them altogether! Like the passing on its way,
across a temperate ocean, of some polar iceberg, there drove, at that
moment, through Vennie’s consciousness, a wedge of frozen, adamantine
contempt for all these human, too-human clingings and clutchings which
would fain imprison the spirit and hold it down with soft-strangling
hands.
In her deepest heart she turned almost savagely away from this
grey-haired woman, sitting there so hurt in her earthly affections
and ambitions. She uttered a fierce mental invocation to that other
Mother,--her whose heart, pierced by seven swords, had submitted to
God’s will without a groan!
Valentia, who, it must be remembered, had not only married a Seldom,
but was herself one of that breed, felt at that moment as though this
girl of hers were reverting to some mad strain of Pre-Elizabethan
fanaticism. There was something mediæval about Vennie’s obstinacy, as
there was something mediæval about the lines of her face. Valentia
recalled a portrait she had once seen of an ancestor of theirs in
the days before the Reformation. He, the great Catholic Baron, had
possessed the same thin profile and the same pinched lips. It was a
curious revenge, the poor lady thought, for those evicted Cistercians,
out of whose plundered house the Nevilton mansion had been built, that
this fate, of all fates, should befall the last of the Seldoms!
The tolling of the bell, which hitherto had gone on, monotonously and
insistently, across the drowsy lawn, suddenly stopped.
Vennie started and ran hurriedly to the door.
“They are burying James Andersen,” she cried, “and I ought to be there.
It would look unkind and thoughtless of me not to be there. Good-bye,
mother! We’ll talk of this when I come back. I’m sorry to be so
unsatisfactory a daughter to you, but perhaps you’ll feel differently
some day.”
Left to herself, Valentia Seldom rose and went back to her letter.
But the pen fell from her limp fingers, and tears stained the already
written page.
The funeral service had only just commenced when Vennie reached the
churchyard. She remained at the extreme outer edge of the crowd,
where groups of inquisitive women are wont to cluster, wearing their
aprons and carrying their babies, and where the bigger children are
apt to be noisy and troublesome. She caught a glimpse of Ninsy Lintot
among those standing quite close to where Mr. Clavering, in his white
surplice, was reading the pregnant liturgical words. She noticed that
the girl held her hands to her face and that her slender form was
shaking with the stress of her emotion.
She could not see Luke’s face, but she was conscious that his
motionless figure had lost its upright grace. The young stone-carver
seemed to droop, like a sun-flower whose stalk has been bent by the
wind.
The words of the familiar English service were borne intermittently to
her ears as they fell from the lips of the priest who had once been her
friend. It struck her poignantly enough,--that brave human defiance,
so solemn and tender, with which humanity seems to rise up in sublime
desperation and hoist its standard of hope against hope!
She wondered what the sceptical Luke was feeling all this while. When
Mr. Clavering began to read the passage which is prefaced in the Book
of Common Prayer by the words, “Then while the earth be cast upon the
Body by some standing by, the priest shall say,”--the quiet sobs of
poor little Ninsy broke into a wail of passionate grief, grief to which
Vennie, for all her convert’s aloofness from Protestant heresy, could
not help adding her own tears.
It was the custom at Nevilton for the bearers of the coffin, when the
service was over, to re-form in solemn procession, and escort the
chief mourners back to the house from which they had come. It was her
knowledge of this custom that led Vennie to steal away before the final
words were uttered; and her hurried departure from the churchyard saved
her from being a witness of the somewhat disconcerting event with
which the solemn transaction closed.
The bringing of James’ body to the church had been unfortunately
delayed at the start by the wayward movements of a luggage-train, which
persisted in shunting up and down over the level-crossing, at the
moment when they were carrying the coffin from the house. This delay
had been followed by others, owing to various unforeseen causes, and by
the time the service actually began it was already close upon the hour
fixed for the confirmation.
Thus it happened that, soon after Vennie’s departure, at the very
moment when the procession of bearers, followed by Luke and the
station-master’s wife, issued forth into the street, there drove up to
the church-door a two-horsed carriage containing Gladys and her mother,
the former all whitely veiled, as if she were a child-bride. Seeing the
bearers troop by, the fair-haired candidate for confirmation clutched
Mrs. Romer’s arm and held her in her place, but leaning forward in the
effort of this movement she presented her face at the carriage window,
just as Luke himself emerged from the gates.
The two young people found themselves looking one another straight in
the eyes, until with a shuddering spasm that shook her whole frame,
Gladys sank back into her seat, as if from the effect of a crushing
blow received full upon the breast.
Luke passed on, following the bearers, with something like the ghost of
a smile upon his drawn and contorted lips.