Wood and Stone (34 page)

“Well, you can tell her to come here and get it!”

“But this is really serious,” protested Luke, trying in vain to reach the object with his outstretched fingers.

“And I have twisted my hair round it!” the girl went on, in exulting excitement, “I have twisted it tight around. It will be hard to get it off!”

Luke continued making ineffectual dives into the
hole, while she watched him gleefully. He went to the hedge and breaking off a dusty sprig of
wound-wort
prodded the ring with its stalk.

“You can’t do it” she cried, “you can’t do it! You’ll only push it further in!”

“Damn you, Annie!” he muttered. “This is a horrible kind of joke. I tell you, Gladys will want this comfounded thing back tomorrow. She’s
already
asked me twice for it. She only gave it to me for fun.”

The girl leaned across the stone towards him, propping herself on the palms of her hands, and laughing mischievously. “No one in this village can get that ring out of there!” she cried; “no one! And when they does, they’ll find it all twisted up with my hair!” She tossed back her black locks defiantly.

Luke Anderson’s thoughts ran upon scissors,
pincers
, willow-wands, bramble-thorns, and children’s arms.

“Leave it then!” he said. “After all, I can swear I lost it. Come on, you little demon!”

They moved away; and St. Catharine’s church was only striking the hour of nine, when they
separated
at her mother’s door.

T
HE incredibly halcyon June which had filled the lanes and meadows of Nevilton that summer with such golden weather, gave place at last to July; and with July came tokens of a change.

The more slow-growing hay-fields were still strewn with their little lines of brown mown grass waiting its hour of “carrying,” but the larger number of the pastures wore now that freshly verdant and yet curiously sad look, which fields in summer wear when they have been shorn of their first harvest. The corn in the arable-lands was beginning to stand high; wheat and barley varying their alternate ripening tints, from the rich gold of the one, to the
diaphanous
glaucous green, so tender and pallid, of the other. In the hedges, ragwort, knapweed and scabious had completely replaced wild-rose and elder-blossom; and in the ditches and by the margins of ponds, loosestrife and willow-herb were beginning to bud. Even the latest-sprouting among the trees carried now the full heavy burden, dark and monotonous, of the summer’s prime; and the sharp, dry intermittent chirping of warblers, finches and buntings, had long since replaced, in the garden-bushes, the more
flute-like
cries of the earlier-nesting birds.

The shadowy woods of the Nevilton valleys, with
their thick entangled undergrowth, were less pleasant to walk in than they had been. Tall rank growths choked the wan remnants of the season’s prime; and beneath sombre, indistinguishable foliage, the dry, hard-trodden paths lost their furtive
enchantment
. Dog-mercury, that delicate child of the
under-shadows
, was no more now than a gross mass of tarnished leaves. Enchanter’s nightshade took the place of pink-campion; only to yield, in its turn, to viper’s bugloss and flea-bane.

As the shy gods of the year’s tender birth receded before these ranker maturings, humanity became more prominent. Print-frocked maidens assisted the sheep in treading the slopes of Leo’s Hill into earthy grassless patches. Bits of dirty paper and the litter of careless picnickers strewed the most shadowy recesses. Smart youths flicked town-bought canes in places where, a few weeks before, the squirrel had gambolled undisturbed, and the wood-pecker had deepened the magical silence by his patent labour. Where recently, amid shadowy moss “soft as sleep,” the delicate petals of the fragile wood-sorrel had breathed untroubled in their enchanted aisles of leafy twilight, one found oneself reading, upon torn card-board boxes, highly-coloured messages to the Human Race from energetic Tradesmen. July had replaced June. The gods of Humanity had
replaced
the gods of Nature; and the interlude between hay-harvest and wheat-harvest had brought the dog-star Sirius into his diurnal ascendance.

The project of Lacrima’s union with Mr. John Goring remained, so to speak, “in the air.” The village assumed it as a certainty; Mr. Quincunx
regarde
d
it as a probability; and Mr. Goring himself, enjoying his yearly session of agreeable leisure, meditated upon it day and night.

Lacrima had fallen into a curious lassitude with regard to the whole matter. In these July days, especially now that the sky was over-cast by clouds and heavy rains seemed imminent, she appeared to lose all care or interest in her own life. Her mood followed the mood of the weather. If some desperate deluge of disaster was brooding in the distance, she felt tempted to cry out, “Let it fall!”

Mr. Quincunx’s feelings on the subject remained a mystery to her. He neither seemed definitely to accept her sacrifice, nor to reject it. He did not really—so she could not help telling herself—
visualize
the horror of the thing, as it affected her, in any substantial degree. He often made a joke of it; and kept quoting cynical and worldly suggestions, from the lips of Luke Andersen.

On the other hand, both from Mr. Romer and the farmer, she received quiet, persistent and
inexorable
pressure; though to do the latter justice, he made no further attempts to treat her roughly or familiarly.

She had gone so far once—in a mood of
panic-stricken
aversion, following upon a conversation with Gladys—as actually to walk to the vicarage gate, with the definite idea of appealing to Vennie; but it chanced that in place of Vennie she had observed Mrs. Seldom moving among her flower-beds, and the grave austerity of the aristocratic old lady had taken all resolution from her and made her retrace her steps.

It must also be confessed that her dislike and fear of Gladys had grown to dimensions bordering upon monomania. The elder girl at once hypnotized and paralyzed her. Her sensuality, her feline caprices, her elaborately cherished hatred, reduced the Italian to such helpless misery, that any change—even the horror of this marriage—assumed the likeness of a desirable relief.

It is also true that by gradual degrees,—for women, however little prone to abstract thought, are quick to turn the theories of those they love into living practice,—she had come to regard the mere physical terror of this momentous plunge as a less
insurmountable
barrier than she had felt at first.
Without
precisely intending it, Mr. Quincunx had really, in a measure—particularly since he himself had come to frequent the society of Luke Andersen—achieved what might have conventionally been called the “corruption” of Lacrima’s mind. She found herself on several occasions imagining what she would really feel, if, escaped for an afternoon from her Priory duties, she were slipping off to meet her friend in Camel’s Cover or Badger’s Bottom.

When the suggestion had been first made to her of this monstrous marriage, it had seemed nothing short of a sentence of death, and beyond the actual consummation of it, she had never dreamed of looking. But all this had now imperceptibly changed. Many an evening as she sat with her work by Mrs. Romer’s side, watching Gladys and her father play cards, the thought came over her that she might just as well enjoy the comparative independence of having her own house and her own associations—
even though the price of them
were
the society of such a lump of clay—as live this wretched half-life without hope or aim.

Other moods arrived when the thought of having children of her own came to her with something more than a mere sense of escape; came to her with the enlargement of an opening horizon. She recalled the many meandering discourses which Mr. Quincunx had addressed to her upon this subject. They had not affected her woman’s instincts; but they had lodged in her mind. A girl’s children, so her friend had often maintained, do not belong to the father at all. The father is nothing—a mere irrelevant incident, a mere chance. The mother alone—the mother always—has the rights and pleasures, as she has the responsibilities and pains of the parental relation. She even recalled one occasion of twilight philosophizing in the potato-bed, when Mr. Quincunx had gone so far as to maintain the unscientific thesis that children, born where there is no love, inherit character, appearance, tastes, everything—from the mother.

Lacrima had a dim suspicion that some of these less pious theories were due to the perverse Luke, who, as the cloudier July days overcast his evening rambles, had acquired the habit of strolling at
night-fall
into Mr. Quincunx’s kitchen. Once indeed she was certain she discerned the trail of this plausible heathen in her friend’s words. Mr. Quincunx, with one of his peculiarly goblin-like leers, had intimated—in jest indeed, but with a searching look into her face that it would be no very difficult task to deceive,—in shrewd Panurgian roguery, this clumsy clown.
His words at the time had hurt and shocked her; and her reaction from them had led to the spoiling of a pleasant conversation; but they invaded
afterwards
, more deeply than she would have cared to confess, her hours of dreamy solitude.

Her southern imagination, free from both the grossness and the hypocrisy of the Nevilton mind, was much readier to wander upon an antinomian path—at least in its wayward fancies—than it would have been, had circumstances not led her away from her inherited faith.

While the sensuality of Gladys left her absolutely untouched, the anarchistic theories of her friend—especially now they had been fortified and directed by the insidious Luke—gave her intelligence many queer and lawless topics of solitary brooding. Her senses, her instincts, were as pure and unsophisticated as ever; but her conscience was besieged and
threatened
. It was indeed a queer rôle—this, which fate laid upon Mr. Quincunx—the rôle of undermining the reluctance of his own sweetheart to make a loveless marriage—but it was one for which his curious lack of physical passion singularly fitted him.

Had Vennie Seldom or Hugh Clavering been aware of the condition of affairs they would have
condemned
Mr. Quincunx in the most wholesale
manner
. Clavering would probably have been tempted to apply to him some of the most abusive language in the dictionary. But it is extremely
questionable
whether this judgment of theirs would have been justified.

A more enlightened planetary observer, initiated
into the labyrinthine hearts of men, might well have pointed out that Mr. Quincunx’s theories were largely a matter of pure speculation, humorously remote from any contact with reality. He might also have reminded these indignant ones that Mr. Quincunx quite genuinely laboured under the illusion—if it were an illusion—that for his friend to be mistress of the Priory and free of her dependence on the Romers was a thing eminently desirable, and worth the price she paid for it. Such an invisible
clairvoyant
might even have surmised, what no one in Nevilton who knew of. Mr. Romer’s offer would for one second have believed; namely, that he would have given her the same advice had there been no such offer, simply on the general ground of binding her permanently to the place.

The fact, however, remained, that by adopting this ambiguous and evasive attitude Mr. Quincunx
reduced
the more heroic and romantic aspect of the girl’s sacrifice to the lowest possible level, and flung her into a mood of reckless and spiritless indifference. She was brought to the point of losing all interest in her own fate and of simply relapsing upon the tide of events.

It was precisely to this condition that Mr. Homer had desired to bring her. When she had first
attracted
him, and had fallen into his hands, there had been certain psychological contests between them, in which the quarry-owner had by no means emerged victorious. It was the rankling memory of these contests—contests spiritual rather than material—which had issued in his gloomy hatred of her and his longing to corrupt her mind and humiliate her soul.
This corruption, this humiliation had been long in coming. It had seemed out of his own power and out of the power of his feline daughter to bring it about; but this felicitous plan of using the girl’s own friend to assist her moral
disentegration
appeared to have changed the issue very
completely
.

Mr. Romer, watching her from day to day, became more and more certain that her integral soul, the
inmost
fortress of her self-respect, was yielding inch by inch. She had flung the rudder down; and was drifting upon the tide.

It might have been a matter of surprise to some ill-judging psychologists that a Napoleonic intriguer, of the quarry-owner’s type, should ever have entered upon a struggle apparently so unequal and
unimportant
as that for the mere integrity of a solitary girl’s spirit. Such a judgment would display little knowledge of the darker possibilities of human
character
. Resistance is resistance, from whatever
quarter
it comes; and the fragile soul of a helpless Pariah may be just as capable of provoking the aggressive instincts of a born master of men as the most obdurate of commercial rivals.

There are certain psychic oppositions to our will, which, when once they have been encountered,
remain
indelibly in the memory as a challenge and a defiance, until their provocation has been wiped out in their defeat. It matters nothing that such
oppositions
should spring from weak or trifling quarters. We have been baffled, thwarted, fooled; and we
cannot
recover the feeling of identity with ourselves, until, like a satisfied tidal wave, our will has drowned
completely the barricades that defied it. It matters nothing if at the beginning, what we were thwarted by was a mere trifle, a straw upon the wind, a feather in the breeze. The point is that our will, in flowing outwards, at its capricious pleasure, met with opposition—met with resistance. We do not really recover our self-esteem until every memory of such an event has been obliterated by a complete revenge.

It is useless to object that a powerful ambitious man of the Romer mould, contending Atlas-like under a weight of enormous schemes, was not one to harbour such long-lingering rancour against a mere Pariah. There was more in the thing than appears on the surface. The brains of mortal men are queer
crucibles
, and the smouldering fires that heat them are driven by capricious and wanton guests.
Lacrima’s
old defeat of the owner of Leo’s Hill—a
defeat
into which there is no need to descend now, for its “terrain” was remote from our present stage—had been a defeat upon what might be called a
subliminal
or interior plane.

It was almost as if he had encountered her and she had encountered him, not only in the past of this particular life, but a remoter past—in a past of some pre-natal incarnation. There are—as is
well-known
, many instances of this unfathomable
conflict
between certain human types—types that seem to
find
one another, that seem to be drawn to one another, by some pre-ordained necessity in the occult influences of mortal fate. It matters nothing in
regard
to such a conflict, that on one side should be strength, power and position, and on the other
weaknes
s
and helplessness. The soul is the soul, and has its own laws.