LODMOOR
It was Mr. Quincunx who had to find the money for their bold adventure.
Neither Vennie nor Lacrima could discover a single penny on their
persons. Mr. Quincunx produced it from the bottom of an old jam-pot
placed in the interior recesses of one of his deepest cupboards. He
displayed to his three friends, with not a little pride, the sum he was
possessed of,--no less in fact than five golden sovereigns.
Their walk to Yeoborough was full of thrilling little excitements.
Three times they concealed themselves on the further side of the hedge,
to let certain suspicious pedestrians, who might be Nevilton people,
pass by unastonished.
Once well upon their way, they all four felt a strange sense of
liberation and expansion. The little Neapolitan walked between Mr.
Quincunx and Lacrima, a hand given to each, and her childish high
spirits kept them all from any apprehensive brooding.
Once and once only, they looked back, and Mr. Quincunx shook his fist
at the two distant hills.
“You are right,” he remarked to Vennie, “it’s the sea we’re in want of.
These curst inland fields have the devil in their heavy mould.”
They found themselves, when they reached the town, with an hour
to spare before their train started, and entering a little
dairy-shop near the station, they refreshed themselves with milk and
bread-and-butter. Here Mr. Quincunx and the child waited in excited
expectation, while the two girls went out to make some necessary
purchases--returning finally, in triumph, with a light wicker-work
suit-case, containing all that they required for several days and
nights.
They were in the train at last, with a compartment to themselves, and,
as far as they could tell, quite undiscovered by anyone who knew them.
Vennie had hardly ever in her life enjoyed anything more than she
enjoyed that journey. She felt that the stars were fighting on her side
or, to put it in terms of her religion, that God Himself was smoothing
the road in front of her.
She experienced a momentary pang when the train, at last, passing
along the edge of the back-water, ran in to Weymouth Station. It was
so sweet, so strangely sweet, to know that three living souls depended
upon her for their happiness, for their escape from the power of the
devil! Would she feel like this, would she ever feel quite like this,
when the convent-doors shut her away from this exciting world?
They emerged from the crowded station,--Mr. Quincunx carrying the
wicker-work suit-case--and made their way towards the Esplanade.
The early afternoon sun lay hot upon the pavements, but from the sea
a strong fresh wind was blowing. Both the girls shivered a little
in their thin frocks, and as the red shawl of the young Italian had
already excited some curiosity among the passers-by, they decided to
enter one of the numerous drapery shops, and spend some more of Mr.
Quincunx’s money.
They were so long in the shop that the nervous excitement of the
recluse was on the point of changing into nervous irritation, when
at last they reappeared. But he was reconciled to the delay when he
perceived the admirable use they had made of it.
All three were wearing long tweed rain-cloaks of precisely the
same tint of sober grey. They looked like three sisters, newly
arrived from some neighbouring inland town,--Dorchester, perhaps,
or Sherborne,--with a view to spending a pleasant afternoon at the
sea-side. Not only were they all wrapped in the same species of cloak.
They had purchased three little woollen caps of a similar shade, such
things as it would have been difficult to secure in any shop but a
little unfashionable one, where summer and winter vogues casually
overlapped.
Mr. Quincunx, whose exaltation of mood had not made him forget to bring
his own overcoat with him, now put this on, and warmly and comfortably
clad, the four fugitives from Nevilton strolled along the Esplanade in
the direction of St. John’s church.
To leave his three companions free to run down to the sea’s edge, Mr.
Quincunx possessed himself of the clumsy paper parcels containing the
hats they had relinquished and also of the little girl’s red shawl, and
resting on a seat with these objects piled up by his side he proceeded
to light a cigarette and gaze placidly about him. The worst of his
plunge into activity being over,--for, whatever happened, the initial
effort was bound to be the worst,--the wanderer from Dead Man’s Lane
chuckled to himself with bursts of cynical humour as he contemplated
the situation they were in.
But what a relief it was to see the clear-shining foam-sprinkled
expanse of water lying spread out before him! Like the younger
Andersen, Mr. Quincunx had a passionate love of Weymouth, and never had
he loved it more than he did at that moment! He greeted the splendid
curve of receding cliffs--the White Nore and St. Alban’s Head--with
a sigh of profound satisfaction, and he looked across to the massive
bulk of Portland, as though in its noble uncrumbling stone--stone that
was so much nearer to marble than to clay--there lurked some occult
talisman ready to save him from everything connected with Leo’s Hill.
Yes, the sea was what he wanted just then! How well the salt taste of
it, the smell of its sun-bleached stranded weeds, its wide horizons,
its long-drawn murmur, blent with the strange new mood into which that
morning’s events had thrown him!
How happy the little Dolores looked, between Lacrima and Vennie, her
dark curls waving in the wind from beneath her grey cap!
All at once his mind reverted to James Andersen, lying now alone and
motionless, under six feet of yellow clay. Mr. Quincunx shivered. After
all it was something to be alive still, something to be still able to
stroke one’s beard and stretch one’s legs, and fumble in one’s pocket
for a “Three Castles” cigarette!
He wondered vaguely how and when this young St. Catharine of theirs
intended to marry him to Lacrima. And then what? Would he have to work
frightfully, preposterously hard?
He chuckled to himself to think how blank Mr. Romer would look, when he
found that both his victims had been spirited away in one breath. What
a girl this Vennie Seldom was!
He tried to imagine what it would be like, this business of being
married. After all, he was very fond of Lacrima. He hoped that dusky
wavy hair of hers were as long as it suggested that it was! He liked
girls to have long hair.
Would she bring him his tea in the morning, sometimes, with bare arms
and bare feet? Would she sit cross-legged at the foot of his bed, while
he drank it, and chatter to him of what they would do when he came back
from his work?
_His work!_ That was an aspect of the affair which certainly might well
be omitted.
And then, as he stared at the three girlish figures on the beach,
there came over him the strange illusion that both Vennie and Lacrima
were only dream-people--unreal and fantastic--and that the true living
persons of his drama were himself and his little Neapolitan waif.
Suppose the three girls were to take a boat--one of those boats whose
painted keels he saw glittering now so pleasantly on the beach--and row
out into the water. And suppose the boat were upset and both Vennie and
Lacrima drowned? Would he be so sad to have to live the rest of his
life alone with the little Dolores?
Perhaps it would be better if this event occurred after Vennie had
helped him to secure some work to do--some not too hard work!
Well--Vennie, at any rate, _was_ going to be drowned in a certain
sense, at least she was meditating entering a convent, and that was
little different from being drowned, or being buried in yellow clay,
like James Andersen!
But Lacrima was not meditating entering a convent. Lacrima was
meditating being married to him, and being a mother to their adopted
child. He hoped she would be a gentle mother. If she were not, if she
ever spoke crossly to Dolores, he would lose his temper. He would lose
his temper so much that he would tremble from head to foot! He called
up an imaginary scene between them, a scene so vivid that he found
himself trembling now, as his hand rested upon the paper parcel.
But perhaps, if by chance they left England and went on a
journey,--Witch-Bessie had found a journey, “a terrible journey,” in
the lines of his hand,--Lacrima would catch a fever in some foreign
city, and he and Dolores would be left alone, quite as alone as if she
were drowned today!
But perhaps it would be he, Maurice Quincunx, who would catch the
fever. No! He did not like these “terrible journeys.” He preferred to
sit on a seat on Weymouth Esplanade and watch Dolores laughing and
running into the sea and picking up shells.
The chief thing was to be alive, and not too tired, or too cold, or too
hungry, or too harassed by insolent aggressive people! How delicious a
thing life could be if it were only properly arranged! If cruelty, and
brutality, and vulgarity, and _office-work_, were removed!
He could never be cruel to anyone. From that worst sin,--if one could
talk of such a thing as sin in this mad world,--his temperament
entirely saved him. He hoped when they were married that Lacrima would
not want him to be too sentimental about her. And he rather hoped that
he would still have his evenings to himself, to turn over the pages of
Rabelais, when he had kissed Dolores good night.
His meditations were interrupted at this point by the return of his
companions, who came scrambling across the shingle, threading their way
among the boats, laughing and talking merrily, and trailing long pieces
of sea-weed in their hands.
Vennie announced that since it was nearly four o’clock it would be
advisable for them to secure their lodging for the night, and when that
was done she would leave them to their own devices for an hour or two,
while she proceeded to the Gloucester Hotel to have her interview with
Ralph Dangelis.
Their various sea-spoils being all handed over to the excited little
foundling, they walked slowly along the Esplanade, still bearing to the
east, while they surveyed the appearance of the various “crescents,”
“terraces,” and “rows” on the opposite side of the street. It was
not till they arrived at the very end of these, that Vennie, who had
assumed complete responsibility for their movements, piloted them
across the road.
The houses they now approached were entitled “Brunswick Terrace,”
and they entirely fulfilled their title by suggesting, in the
pleasant liberality of their bay-windows and the mellow dignity of
their well-proportioned fronts, the sort of solid comfort which the
syllables “Brunswick” seem naturally to convey. They began their
enquiries for rooms, about five doors from the end of the terrace,
but it was not till they reached the last house,--the last except two
reddish-coloured ones of later date,--that they found what they wanted.
It was arranged that the two Italians should share a room together.
Vennie elected to sleep in a small apartment adjoining theirs, while
Mr. Quincunx was given a front-room, looking out on the sea, on the
third floor.
Vennie smiled to herself as she thought how amazed her mother would
have been could she have seen her at that moment, as she helped Lacrima
to unpack their solitary piece of luggage, while Mr. Quincunx smoked
cigarettes in the balcony of the window!
She left them finally in the lodging-house parlour, seated on a
horse-hair sofa, watching the prim landlady preparing tea. Vennie
refused to wait for this meal, being anxious--she said--to get her
interview with the American well over, for until that moment had been
reached, she could neither discuss their future plans calmly, nor enjoy
the flavour of the adventure.
When Vennie had left them, and the three were all comfortably seated
round the table, Mr. Quincunx found Lacrima in so radiant a mood that
he began to feel a little ashamed of his ambiguous meditations on the
Esplanade. She was, after all, quite beautiful in her way,--though, of
course, not as beautiful as the young Neapolitan, whose eyes had a look
in them, even when she was happy, which haunted one and filled one with
vague indescribable emotions.
Mr. Quincunx himself was in the best of spirits. His beard wagged, his
nostrils quivered, his wit flowed. Lacrima fixed her eyes upon him with
delighted appreciation,--and led him on and on, through a thousand
caprices of fancy. The poor Pariah’s heart was full of exquisite
happiness. She felt like one actually liberated from the tomb. For the
first time since she had known anything of England she was able to
breathe freely and spontaneously and be her natural self.
For some queer reason or other, her thoughts kept reverting to James
Andersen, but reverting to him with neither sadness nor pity. She felt
no remorse for not having been present when he was buried that morning.
She did not feel as though he were buried. She did not feel as though
he were dead. She felt, in some strange way, that he had merely escaped
from the evil spells of Nevilton, and that in the power of his new
strength he was the cause of her own emancipation.
And what an emancipation it was! It was like suddenly becoming a child
again--a child with power to enjoy the very things that children so
often miss.
Everything in this little parlour pleased her. The blue vases on the
mantelpiece containing dusty “everlasting flowers,” the plush-framed
portraits of the landlady’s deceased parents, enlarged to a magnitude
of shadowy dignity by some old-fashioned photographic process, the
quaint row of minute china elephants that stood on a little bracket
in the corner, the glaring antimacassar thrown across the back of the
arm-chair, the sea-scents and sea-murmurs floating in through the
window, the melodious crying of a fish-pedler in the street; all
these things thrilled her with a sense of freedom and escape, which
over-brimmed her heart with happiness.
What matter, after all, she thought, that her little compatriot with
the wonderful eyes had been the means of arousing her friend from his
inertia! Her long acquaintance with Mr. Quincunx had mellowed her
affection for him into a tenderness that was almost maternal. She could
even find it in her to be glad that she was to be saved from the burden
of struggling alone with his fits of melancholia. With Dolores to keep
him amused, and herself to look after his material wants, it seemed
probable that, whatever happened, the dear man would be happier than he
had ever dreamed of being!
The uncertainty of their future weighed upon her very little. She had
the true Pariah tendency to lie back with arms outstretched upon the
great tide, and let it carry her whither it pleased. She had done this
so long, while the tide was dark and evil, that to do it where the
waters gleamed and shone was a voluptuous delight.
While her protégées were thus enjoying themselves Vennie sought out
and entered, with a resolute bearing, the ancient Gloucester Hotel.
The place had recently been refitted according to modern notions of
comfort, but in its general lines, and in a certain air it had of
liberal welcoming, it preserved the Georgian touch.
She was already within the hall-way when, led by an indefinable impulse
to look back, she caught sight of Dangelis himself walking rapidly
along the Esplanade towards the very quarter from which she had just
come. Without a moment’s hesitation she ran down the steps, crossed the
road and followed him.
The American seemed to be inspired by some mania for fast walking
that afternoon. Vennie was quite breathless before she succeeded in
approaching him, and she did not manage to do this until they were both
very nearly opposite Brunswick Terrace.
Just here she was unwilling to make herself known, as her friends might
at any moment emerge from their lodging. She preferred to follow the
long strides of the artist still further, till, in fact he had led her,
hot and exhausted in her new cloak, quite beyond the limits of the
houses.
Where the town ceases, on this eastern side, a long white dusty road
leads across a mile or two of level ground before the noble curve of
cliffs ending in St. Alban’s Head has its beginning. This road is
bounded on one hand by a high bank of shingle and on the other by a
wide expanse of salt-marshes known in that district under the name of
Lodmoor. It was not until the American had emerged upon this solitary
road that his pursuer saw fit to bring him to a halt.
“Mr. Dangelis!” she called out, “Mr. Dangelis!”
He swung round in astonishment at hearing his name. For the first
moment he did not recognize Vennie. Her newly purchased attire,--not to
speak of her unnaturally flushed cheeks,--had materially altered her
appearance. When she held out her hand, however, and stopped to take
breath, he realized who she was.
“Oh Mr. Dangelis,” she gasped, “I’ve been following you all the way
from the Hotel. I so want to talk to you. You _must_ listen to me. It’s
very, very important!”
He held his hat in his hand, and regarded her with smiling amazement.
“Well, Miss Seldom, you _are_ an astonishing person. Is your mother
here? Are you staying at Weymouth? How did you catch sight of me?
Certainly--by all means--tell me your news! I long to hear this thing
that’s so important.”
He made as if he would return with her to the town, but she laid her
hand on his arm.
“No--no! let’s walk on quietly here. I can talk to you better here.”
The roadway, however, proved so disconcerting, owing to great gusts
of wind which kept driving the sand and dust along its surface, that
before Vennie had summoned up courage to begin her story, they found
it necessary to debouch to their left and enter the marshy flats of
Lodmoor. They took their way along the edge of a broad ditch, whose
black peat-bottomed waters were overhung by clumps of “Michaelmas
daisies” and sprinkled with weird glaucous-leafed plants. It was a
place of a singular character, owing to the close encounter in it
of land and sea, and it seemed to draw the appeal of its strange
desolation almost equally from both these sources.
Vennie, on the verge of speaking, found her senses in a state of
morbid alertness. Everything she felt and saw at that moment lodged
itself with poignant sharpness in her brain and returned to her mind
long afterwards. So extreme was her nervous tension that she found
it difficult to disentangle her thoughts from all these outward
impressions.
The splash of a water-rat became an episode in her suspended
revelation. The bubbles rising from the movements of an eel in the mud
got mixed with the image of Mrs. Wotnot picking laurel-leaves. The
flight of a sea-gull above their heads was a projection of Dangelis’
escape from the spells of his false mistress. The wind shaking the
reeds was the breath of her fatal news ruffling the man’s smiling
attention. The wail of the startled plovers was the cry of her own
heart, calling upon all the spirits of truth and justice, to make him
believe her words.
She told him at last,--told him everything, walking slowly by his side
with her eyes cast down and her hands clasped tight behind her.
When she had finished, there was an immense intolerable silence,
and slowly, very slowly, she permitted her glance to rise to her
companion’s face, to grasp the effect of her narration upon him.
How rare it is that these world-shaking revelations produce the
impression one has anticipated! To Vennie’s complete amazement,--and
even, it must be allowed, a little to her dismay,--Dangelis regarded
her with a frank untroubled smile.
“You,--I--” she stammered, and stopped abruptly. Then, before he
could answer her, “I didn’t know you knew all this. Did you really
know it,--and not mind? Don’t people mind these things in--in other
countries?”
Dangelis spoke at last. “Oh, yes of course, we mind as much as any
of you; that is to say, if we _do_ mind,--but you must remember, Miss
Seldom, there are circumstances, situations,--there are, in fact
feelings,--which make these things sometimes rather a relief than
otherwise!”
He threw up his stick in the air, as he spoke, and caught it as it
descended.
“Pardon me, one moment, I want--I want to see if I can jump this ditch.”
He threw both stick and hat on the ground, and to Vennie’s complete
amazement, stepped back a pace or two, and running desperately to the
brink of the stream cleared it with a bound. He repeated this manœuvre
from the further bank, and returned, breathing hard and fast, to the
girl’s side.
Picking up his hat and stick, he uttered a wild series of barbaric
howls, such howls as Vennie had never, in her life, heard issuing from
the mouth of man or beast. Had Gladys’ treachery turned his brain?
But no madman could possibly have smiled the friendly boyish smile with
which he greeted her when this performance was over.
“So sorry if I scared you,” he said. “Do you know what that is? It’s
our college ‘yell.’ It’s what we do at base-ball matches.”
Vennie thought he was going to do it again, and in her apprehension she
laid a hand on his sleeve.
“But don’t you really mind Miss Romer’s being like this? Did you know
she was like this?” she enquired.
“Don’t let’s think about her any more,” cried the artist. “I don’t
care what she’s like, now I can get rid of her. To tell you the honest
truth, Miss Seldom, I’d come down here for no other reason than to
think over this curst hole I’ve got myself into, and to devise some way
out.
“What you tell me,--and I believe every word of it, I want to believe
every word of it!--just gives me the excuse I need. Good-bye, Miss
Gladys! Good-bye, Ariadne! ‘Ban-ban, Ca-Caliban, Have a new master, get
a new man!’ No more engagements for me, dear Miss Seldom! I’m a free
lance now, a free lance,--henceforward and forever!”
The exultant artist was on the point of indulging once more in his
college yell, but the scared and bewildered expression on Vennie’s face
saved her from a second experience of that phenomenon.
“Shall I tell you what I was thinking of doing, as I strolled along the
Front this afternoon?”
Vennie nodded, unable to repress a smile as she remembered the
difficulty she had in arresting this stroll.
“I was thinking of taking the boat for the Channel Islands tomorrow! I
even went so far as to make enquiries about the time it started. What
do you think of that?”
Vennie thought it was extremely singular, and she also thought that she
had never heard the word “enquiries” pronounced in just that way.
“It leaves quite early, at nine in the morning. And it’s _some_
boat,--I can tell you that!”
“Well,” continued Vennie, recovering by degrees that sense of
concentrated power which had accompanied her all day, “what now? Are
you still going to sail by it?”
“That’s--a--large--proposition,” answered her interlocutor slowly.
“I--I rather think I am!”
One effect of his escape from his Nevilton enchantress seemed to be an
irrepressible tendency to relapse into the American vernacular.
They continued advancing along the edge of the ditch, side by side.
Vennie plunged into the matter of Lacrima and Mr. Quincunx.
She narrated all she knew of this squalid and sinister story. She
enlarged upon the two friends’ long devotion to one another. She
pictured the wickedness and shame of the projected marriage with John
Goring. Finally she explained how it had come about that both Mr.
Romer’s slaves, and with them the little circus-waif, were at that
moment in Weymouth.
“And so you’ve carried them off?” cried the Artist in high glee. “Bless
my soul, but I admire you for it! And what are you going to do with
them now?”
Vennie looked straight into his eyes. “That is where I want _your_
help, Mr. Dangelis!”
It was late in the evening before the citizen of Toledo, Ohio, and the
would-be Postulant of the Sacred Heart parted from one another opposite
the Jubilee Clock.
A reassuring telegram had been sent to Mrs. Seldom announcing Vennie’s
return in the course of the following day.
As for the rest, all had been satisfactorily arranged. The American
had displayed overpowering generosity. He seemed anxious to do penance
for his obsession by the daughter, by lavishing benefactions upon the
victims of the father. Perhaps it seemed to him that this was the best
manner of paying back the debt, which his æsthetic imagination owed to
the suggestive charms of the Nevilton landscape.
He made himself, in a word, completely responsible for the three
wanderers. He would carry them off with him to the Channel Isles, and
either settle them down there, or make it possible for them to cross
thence to France, and from France, if so they pleased, on to Lacrima’s
home in Italy. He would come to an arrangement with his bankers to have
handed over definitely to Mr. Quincunx a sum that would once and for
all put him into a position of financial security.
“I’d have paid a hundred times as much as that,” he laughingly assured
Vennie, “to have got clear of my mix-up with that girl.”
Thus it came about that at nine o’clock on the day which followed the
burial of James Andersen, Vennie, standing on the edge of the narrow
wharf, between railway-trucks and hawsers, watched the ship with the
red funnels carry off the persons who--under Heaven--were the chief
cause of the stone-carver’s death.
As the four figures, waving to her over the ship’s side grew less and
less distinct, Vennie felt an extraordinary and unaccountable desire to
burst into a fit of passionate weeping. She could not have told why she
wept, nor could she have told whether her tears were tears of relief or
of desolation, but something in the passing of that brightly-painted
ship round the corner of the little break-water, gave her a different
emotion from any she had ever known in her life.
When at last she turned her back to the harbour, she asked the way to
the nearest Catholic Church, but in place of following the directions
given her, she found herself seated on the shingles below Brunswick
Terrace, watching the in-drawing and out-flowing waves.
How strange this human existence was! Long after the last block of
Leonian stone had been removed from its place--long after the stately
pinnacles of Nevilton House had crumbled into shapeless ruins,--long
after the memory of all these people’s troubles had been erased and
forgotten,--this same tide would fling itself upon this same beach,
and its voice then would be as its voice now, restless, unsatisfied,
unappeased.