Wood and Stone (9 page)

“But this is abominable!” she cried, “simply abominable! You’d better go at once and talk it over with Mrs. Seldom. Surely, surely, something can be done! It is clear they have robbed you of your money. It is a disgraceful thing! Santa Maria—what a country this is!”

“It is no use,” sighed the man helplessly. “Mrs. Seldom can’t help me. She is poor enough herself. And she will know as well as I do that in the matter of law I am entirely in their hands. My aunt had absolute confidence in Mr. Romer and no confidence in me. No doubt she arranged it with them that they were to dole me out the money like a charity. Mr. Romer did once talk about my
lending
it to him, and his paying interest on it, and so forth; but he managed all my aunt’s affairs, and I don’t know what arrangement he made with her. My aunt never liked me really. I think if she were alive now she would probably support them in what they are doing. She would certainly say,—she always used to say—that it would do me good to do a little honest work.” He pronounced the words “honest work” with concentrated bitterness.

“Probably,” he went on, “Mrs. Seldom would say the same. I know I should be extremely unwilling to try and make her see how horrible to me the idea of
work of this kind is. She would never understand. She would think it was only that I wanted to remain a “gentleman” and not to lose caste. She would probably tell me that a great many gentlemen have worked in offices before now. I daresay they have, and I hope they enjoyed it! I know what these gentlemen-workers are, and how easy things are made for them. They won’t be made easy for me. I can tell you that, Lacrima!”

The girl drew a deep sigh, and walked slowly a few paces down the path, meditating, with her hands behind her. Presently she turned.

“Perhaps after all,” she said, “it won’t be as bad as you fancy. I know the head-clerk in Mr. Romer’s Yeoborough office and he is quite a nice man—
altogether
different from that Lickwit.”

Mr. Quincunx stroked his beard with a trembling hand. “Of course I knew you’d say that, Lacrima. You are just like the rest. You women all think, at the bottom of your hearts, that men are no good if they can’t make money. I believe you have an idea that I ought to do what people call ‘get on a bit in the world.’ If you think that, it only shows how little you understand me. I have no intention of ‘getting on.’ I
won’t
‘get on’! I would sooner walk into Auber Lake and end the whole business!”

The suddenness and injustice of this attack really did rouse the Italian to anger. “Good-bye,” she said with a dark flash in her eyes. “I see its no use talking to you when you are in this mood. You have never,
never
spoken to me in that tone before. Good-bye! I can open the gate for myself, thank you.”

She walked away from him and passed out into the lane. He stood watching her with a queer haggard look on his face, his sorrowful grey eyes staring in front of him, as if in the presence of an apparition. Then, very slowly, he resumed his work, leaving however the fallen cabbage-leaf unnoticed on the ground.

The weeds in the wheel-barrow, the straight banked-up lines of potatoes and lettuces, wore, as he returned to them, that curious air of forlorn desertion which is one of nature’s bitterest commentaries upon the folly of such scenes.

A sickening sense of emptiness took possession of him, and in a moment or two became unendurable. He flung a handful of weeds to the ground and ran impetuously to the gate and out into the lane. It was too late. A group of farm-labourers laughing and shouting, and driving before them a herd of black pigs, blocked up the road. He could not bring himself to pass them, thus hatless and in his shirt-sleeves. Besides, they must have seen the girl, and they would know he was pursuing her.

He returned slowly up the path to his house, and—to avoid being seen by the men—entered his kitchen, and sat gloomily down upon a chair. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked with
contemptuous
unconcern. The room had that smell of mortuary dust which rooms in small houses often acquire in the summer. He sat down once more on a chair, his hands upon his knees, and stared vacantly in front of him. A thrush outside the window was cracking a snail upon a stone. When the shouts of the men died away, this was the only sound that came
to him, except the continual “tick—tick—tick—tick” of the clock, which seemed to be occupied in driving nails into the heavy coffin-lid of every mortal joy that time had ever brought forth.

That same night in Nevilton House was a night of wretched hours for Lacrima, but of hours of a wretchedness more active than that which made the hermit of Dead Man’s Cottage pull the clothes over his head and turn his face to the wall, long ere the twilight had vanished from his garden.

On leaving her friend thus abruptly, her heart full of angry revolt, Lacrima had seen the crowd of men and animals approaching, and to escape them had scrambled into a field on the border of the road. Following a little path which led across it, and
crossing
two more meadows, she flung herself down under the shadow of some great elms, in a sort of grassy hollow beneath an over-grown hedge, and gave full vent to her grief. The hollow in which she hid herself was a secluded and lonely spot, and no sound reached her but the monotonous summer-murmur of the flies and the rustle of the wind-troubled branches. Lying thus, prone on her face, her broad-brimmed hat with its poppy-trimmings thrown down at her side, and her limbs trembling with the violence of her sobs, Lacrima seemed to insert into that alien
landscape
an element of passionate feeling quite foreign to its sluggish fertility. Not alien to the spot,
however
, was another human form, that at the same hour had been led to wander among those lush meadows.

The field behind the high bank and thick-set hedge which overshadowed the unhappy girl, was a large and spacious one, “put up,” as country people say,
“for hay,” but as yet untouched by the mowers’ machines. Here, in the heat of the noon, walked the acquisitive Mr. John Goring, calculating the value of this crop of grass, and deciding upon the appropriate date of its cutting.

What curious irony is it, in the blind march of events, which so frequently draws to the place of our exclusive sorrow the one particular spectator that we would most avoid? One talks lightly of coincidence and of chance; but who that has walked through life observingly has not been driven to pause with sad questioning before accidents and occurrences that seem as though some conscious malignity in things had
arranged
them? Are there, perhaps, actual
telepathic
vibrations at work about us, drawing the hunter to his prey—the prey to the hunter? Is the innocent object of persecution, hiding from its persecutors, compelled by a fatal psychic law—the law of its own terror—to call subconsciously upon the very power it is fleeing from; to betray, against its will, the path of its own retreat? Lacrima in any case, as she lay thus prostrate, her poppy-trimmed hat beside her, and her brown curls flecked with spots of sun and shadow, brought into that English
landscape
a strangely remote touch,—a touch of tragic and passionate colour. A sweet bruised exile, she seemed, from another region, flung down, among all this umbrageous rankness, to droop like a
transplanted
flower. Certainly the sinister magic,
whatever
it was, that had drawn Mr. Goring in that fatal direction, was a magic compounded of the attraction of contrary elements.

If Mr. Romer represented the occult power of the
sandstone hill, his brother-in-law was the very epitome and culmination of the valley’s inert clay. The man breathed clay, looked clay, smelt clay, understood clay, exploited clay, and in a literal sense
was
clay.

If there is any truth in the scientific formula about the “survival” of those most “adapted” to their “environment,” Mr. Goring was sure of a prolonged and triumphant sojourn on this mortal globe. For his “environment” was certainly one of clay—and to clay he certainly was most
prosperously
“adapted.”

It was not long before the tragic sobs of the
unhappy
Lacrima, borne across the field on the
east-wind
, arrested the farmer’s attention. He stood still, and listened, snuffing the air, like a great jungle-boar. Then with rapid but furtive steps he crossed over to where the sound proceeded, and slipping down cautiously through a gap in the hedge, made his way towards the secluded hollow, breathing heavily like an animal on a trail.

Her fit of crying having subsided, Lacrima turned round on her back, and remained motionless, gazing up at the blue sky. Extended thus on the ruffled grass, her little fingers nervously plucking at its roots and her breast still heaving, the young girl offered a pitiful enough picture to any casual intruder. Slight and fragile though she was, the softness and charm of her figure witnessed to her Latin origin. With her dusky curls and olive complexion, she might, but for her English dress, have been taken for a strayed gipsy, recovering from some passionate quarrel with her Romany lover.

“What’s the matter, Miss Lacrima?” was the farmer’s greeting as his gross form obtruded itself against the sky-line.

The girl started violently, and scrambled rapidly to her feet. Mr. Goring stepped awkwardly down the grassy slope and held out his hand.

“Good morning,” he said without removing his hat. “I should have thought ’twas time for you to be up at the House. ’Tis past a quarter of one.”

“I was just resting,” stammered the girl. “I hope I have not hurt your grass.” She looked
apprehensively
down at the pathetic imprint on the ground.

“No, no! Missie,” said the man. “That’s nothing. ’Tis hard to cut, in a place like this. Maybe they’ll let it alone. Besides, this field ain’t for hay. The cows will be in here tomorrow.”

Lacrima looked at the watch on her wrist.

“Yes, you are right,” she said. “I am late. I must be running back. Your brother does not like our being out when he comes in to lunch.” She picked up her hat and made as if she would pass him. But he barred her way.

“Not so quick, lassie, not so quick,” he said. “Those that come into farmers’ fields must not be too proud to pass the time of day with the farmer.”

As he spoke he permitted his little voracious pig’s eyes to devour her with an amorous leer. All manner of curious thoughts passed through his head. It was only yesterday that his brother-in-law had been
talking
to him of this girl. Certainly it would be
extremely
satisfactory to be the complete master of that supple, shrinking figure, and of that frightened
little bosom, that rose and fell now, like the heart of a panting hare.

After all, she was only a sort of superior
servant
, and with servants of every kind the manner of the rapacious Mr. Goring was alternately brutal and endearing. Encouraged by the isolation of the spot and the shrinking alarm of the girl, he advanced still nearer and laid a heavy hand upon her shoulder.

“Come, little wench,” he said, “I will answer for it if you’re late, up at the House. Sit down a bit with me, and let’s make ourselves nice and comfortable.”

Lacrima trembled with terror. She was afraid to push him away, and try to scramble out of the hollow, lest in doing so she should put herself still further at his mercy. She wondered if anyone in the road would hear if she screamed aloud. Her quick Latin brain resorted mechanically to a diplomatic subterfuge. “What kind of field have you got over that hedge?” she asked, with a quiver in her voice.

“A very nice field, my dear,” replied the farmer,
removing
his hand from her shoulder and thinking in his heart that these foreign girls were wonderfully easy to manage.

“I’ll show it to you if you like. There’s a pretty little place for people like you and me to have a chat in, up along over there.” He pointed through the hedge to a small copse of larches that grew green and thick at the corner of the hay-field.

She let him give her his hand and pull her out of the hollow. Quite passively, too, she followed him, as he sought the easiest spot through which he might help her to surmount the difficulties of the intervening hedge.

When he had at last decided upon the place, “Go first, please, Mr. Goring,” she murmured, “and then you can pull me up.”

He turned his back upon her and began laboriously ascending the bank, dragging himself forward by the aid of roots and ferns. It had been easy enough to slide down this declivity. It was much less easy to climb up. At length, however, stung by nettles and pricked by thorns, and with earth in his mouth, he swung himself round at the top, ready to help her to follow him.

A vigorous oath escaped his lips. She was
already
a third of the way across the field, running madly and desperately, towards the gate into the lane.

Mr. Goring shook his fist after her retreating
figure
. “All right, Missie,” he muttered aloud, “all right! If you had been kind to the poor farmer, he might have let you off. But now”—and he dug his stick viciously into the earth—“There’ll be no dilly-dallying or nonsense about this business. I’ll tell Romer I’m ready for this marriage-affair as soon as he likes. I’ll teach you—my pretty darling!”

That night the massive Leonian masonry of
Nevilton
House seemed especially heavy and antipathetic to the child of the Apennines, as it rose, somnolent and oppressive about her, in the hot midsummer air.

In their spacious rooms, looking out upon the east court with its dove-cotes and herbacious borders, the two girls were awake and together.

The wind had fallen, and the silence about the place was as oppressive to Lacrima’s mind as the shadow of some colossal raven’s wing.

The door which separated their chambers was ajar, and Gladys, her yellow hair loose upon her shoulders, had flung herself negligently down in a deep wicker-chair at the side of her companion’s bed.

The luckless Pariah, her brown curls tied back from her pale forehead by a dark ribbon, was lying supine upon her pillows with a look of troubled terror in her wide-open eyes. One long thin arm lay upon the coverlet, the fingers tightened upon an open book.