Wood and Stone (60 page)

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,
atmossphere
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 unmmarried,—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.