Wood and Stone (11 page)

Lacrima did not speak. A vision of a fierce
aggressive
crowd of hard, hostile, healthy young persons, drilling, riding, shooting, fencing, and dragging such renegades as herself remorselessly along with them, blocked every vista of her mind.

“I hate the Empire!” she cried at last. Gladys had subsided once more into her chair—the little bathing-suit, symbol of our natural supremacy, clasped fondly in her lap.

“I know,” she said, “where you get your socialistic nonsense from. Yes, I do! You needn’t shake your head. You get it from Maurice Quincunx.”

“I don’t get it from anybody,” protested the Pariah; and then, in a weak murmur, “it grows up naturally, in my heart.”

“What is that you’re saying?” cried Gladys. “Sometimes I think you are really not right in your mind. You mutter so. You mutter, and talk to yourself. It irritates me more than I can say. It would irritate a saint.”

“I am sorry if I annoy you, cousin.”

“Annoy me? It would take more than a little coward like you to annoy me! But I am not going to argue about it. Father says arguing is only fit for feeble people. He says we Romers never argue. We think, and then we
do
. I’m going to bed. So there’s your book! I hope you’ll enjoy it Miss Socialism!”

She picked up the volume from the floor and flung it into her cousin’s lap. The gesture of contempt with which she did this would admirably have suited some Roman Drusilla tossing aside the culture of slaves.

An hour later the door between the two rooms was hesitatingly opened, and a white figure stole to the head of Gladys couch. “You’re not asleep, dear, are you? Oh Gladys, darling! Please, please, please, don’t make me bathe with you! You don’t know how I dread it.”

But the daughter of the Romers vouchsafed no reply to this appeal, beyond a drowsy “Nonsense—nonsense—let’s only pray tomorrow will be fine.”

The night-owls, that swept, on heavy, flapping wings, over the village, from the tower of St.
Catharine’s
Church to the pinnacles of the manor, brought no miraculous intervention from the resting-place of the Holy-Rood. What was St. Catharine doing that she had thus deserted the sanctuary of her name? Perhaps the Alexandrian saint found the magic of the heathen hill too strong for her; or perhaps
because
of its rank heresy, she had blotted her former shrine altogether from her tender memory.

M
ORTIMER ROMER could not be called a many-sided man. His dominant lust for power filled his life so completely that he had little room for excursions into the worlds of art or literature. He was, however, by no means narrow or stupid in these matters. He had at least the shrewdness to recognize the depth of their influence over other people. Indeed, as he was so constantly occupied with this very question of influence, with the problem of what precise motives and impulses did actually stir and drive the average mass of humanity, it was natural that he should, sooner or later, have to assume some kind of definite attitude towards these things. The attitude he finally hit upon, as most harmonious with his temperament, was that of active and genial patronage combined with a modest denial of the possession of any personal knowledge or taste. He recognized that an occasion might easily arise, when some association with the aesthetic world, even of this modest and external kind, might prove extremely useful to him. He might find it advisable to make use of these alien forces, just as Napoleon found it necessary to make use of religion. The fact that he himself was devoid of ideal emotions, whether religious or œesthetic,
mattered
nothing. Only fools confined their psychological
interest within the narrow limits of their subjective tastes. Humanity was influenced by these things, and Romer was concerned with influencing humanity. Not that these deviations into artistic by-paths carried him very far. He would invite “cultivated” people to stay with him in his noble House—at least they would appreciate that! —and then hand them over to the care of his charming daughter, a method of hospitality which, it must be confessed, seemed to meet with complete approval on the part of those concerned. Thus the name of the owner of Leo’s Hill came to be associated, in many artistic and literary circles, with the names of such admirable and friendly patrons of these
pursuits
, as could be counted upon for practical and efficient, if not for intellectual aid, in the contest with an unsympathetic and materialistic world. It was not perhaps the more struggling and less
prosperous
artists who found him their friend. To most of these his attitude, though kind and attentive, was hardly cordial. He knew too little of the questions at issue, to risk giving his support to the Pariahs and Anarchists of Art. It was among the well-known and the successful that Mr. Romer’s patronage was most evident. Success was a quality he admired in every field; and while, as has been hinted, his
personal
taste remained quite untouched, he was clever enough to pick up the more fashionable
catchwords
of current criticism, and to use them, when occasion served, with effective naturalness and
apparent
conviction.

Among other celebrities or semi-celebrities, across whose track he came, while on his periodic visits to
London, was a certain Ralph Dangelis, an American artist, whose masterly and audacious work was just then coming into vogue. True to his imperial instinct of surrounding himself with brilliant and prosperous clients, if such they could be called, he promptly invited the famous Westerner to come down and stay with him in Nevilton.

The American, who knew nothing of English country life, and was an impassioned and desperate pursuer of all new experiences, accepted this
invitation
, and appeared, among the quiet Somersetshire orchards, like a bolt from the blue; falling into the very centre of the small quaintly involved drama, whose acts and scenes we are now recording. Thus plunged into a completely new circle the distinguished adventurer very soon made himself most felicitously at home. He was of a frank and friendly disposition; at heart an obdurate and impenetrable egoist, but on the surface affable and kind to a quite exceptional degree. He had spent several years in both Paris and Rome, and hence it was in his power to adapt himself easily and naturally to European, if not to English ways. One result of his protracted visits to foreign cities was the faculty of casting off at pleasure his native accent—the accent of a citizen of Toledo, Ohio. He did not always do this.
Sometimes
it was his humour, especially in intercourse with ladies, to revert to most free and fearless
provincialisms
, and a certain boyish gaiety in him made him mischievously addicted to use such expressions when they seemed least of all acceptable, but under normal conditions it would have been difficult to gather from the tone of his language that he was anything but
an extremely well-travelled gentleman of
Anglo-Saxon
birth. He speedily made a fast friend of Gladys, who found his airy persiflage and elaborate courtesy eminently to her liking; and as the long summer days succeeded one another and brought the visitor into more and more familiar relation with Nevilton ways and customs, it seemed as though his sojourn in that peaceful retreat was likely to be
indefinitely
prolonged. It may be well believed that their guest’s attraction to Gladys did not escape the notice of the girl’s parents. Mr. Romer took the trouble to make sundry investigations as to the status of Mr. Dangelis in his native Ohio; and it was with unmixed satisfaction that both he and his wife received the intelligence that he was the son and the only son of one of Toledo’s most “
prominent
” citizens, a gentleman actively and effectively engaged in furthering the progress of civilization by the manufacturing of automobiles. Dangelis was, indeed, a prospective, if not an actual, millionaire, and, from all that could be learned, it appeared that the prominent citizen of Toledo handed over to his son an annual allowance equal to the income of many crowned heads.

The Pariah of Nevilton House—the luckless child of the Apennines—found little to admire in this energetic wanderer. His oratorical manner, his abrupt, aggressive courtesies, his exuberant high spirits, the sweep and swing of his vigorous
personality
, the extraordinary mixture in him of pedantry and gaiety, jarred upon her sensitive over-strung nerves. In his boyish desire to please her, hearing that she came from Italy, the good-natured artist
would frequently turn the conversation round to the beauty and romance of that “garden of the world,” as he was pleased to style her home; but the tone of these discourses increased rather than diminished Lacrima’s obstinate reserve. He had a habit of
referring
to her country as if it were a place whose inhabitants only existed, by a considerate
dispensation
of Providence, to furnish a charming
background
for certain invaluable relics of antiquity. These precious fragments, according to this easy view of things, appeared to survive, together with their appropriate guardians, solely with the object of enlarging and inspiring the vocarious “mentality” of wayfarers from London and New York. Grateful as Lacrima was for the respite the artist brought her from the despotism of her cousin, she could not bring herself to regard him, so far as she herself was concerned, with anything but extreme reserve and caution.

One peculiarity he displayed, filled her with shy dismay. Dangelis had a trick of staring at the people with whom he associated, as if with a kind of
quizzical
analysis. He threw her into a turmoil of wretched embarrassment by some of his glances. She was troubled and frightened, without being able to get at the secret of her agitation. Sometimes she fancied that he was wondering what he could make of her as a model. The idea that anything of this kind should be expected of her filled her with nervous dread. At other times the wild idea passed through her brain that he was making covert overtures to her, of an amorous character. She thought she
intercepted
once or twice a look upon his face of the
particular kind which always filled her with
shrinking
apprehension. This illusion—if it were an
illusion
—was far more alarming than any tendency he might display to pounce on her for aesthetic purposes; for the Pariah’s association with the inhabitants of Nevilton House had not given her a pleasing
impression
of human amorousness.

Shortly after Dangelis arrival, Mr. Romer found it necessary to visit London again for a few days; and the artist was rather relieved than otherwise by his departure. He felt freer, and more at liberty to express his ideas, when left alone with the three women. For himself, however varied their attitude to him might be, he found them all, in their different ways, full of stimulating interest. With Mrs. Romer he soon became perfectly at home; and discovered a mischievous and profane pleasure in the process of exciting and encouraging all her least lady-like
characteristics
. He would follow her into the spacious Nevilton kitchens, where the good lady was much more at home than in her stately drawing room; and watch with unconventional interest her rambling domestic colloquies with Mrs. Murphy the housekeeper, Jane the cook, and Lily the house-maid.

The men-servants, of whom Mr. Romer kept two, always avoided, with scrupulous refinement, these unusual gatherings. They discoursed, in the pantry, upon their mistress’ dubious behavior, and came to the conclusion that she was no more of a “real lady” than her visitor from America was a “real
gentleman
.”

Dangelis made some new and amazing discovery in Susan Romer’s character every day. In all his
experiences from San Francisco to New York, and from Paris to Vienna, he had never encountered anything in the least resembling her.

He could never make out how deep her apparent simplicity went, nor how ingrained and innate was her lethargic submission to circumstances. Nothing in the woman shocked him; neither her vulgarity nor her grossness. And as for her sly, sleepy, feline malice, he loved to excite and provoke it, as he would have loved to have excited a slumbering animal in a cage. He delighted in the way she wrinkled up her eyes. He delighted in the way she smacked her lips over her food. He loved watching her settling
herself
to sleep in her high-backed Sheraton chair in the kitchen, or in her more modern lounge in the great entrance hall. He never grew tired of asking her questions about the various personages of
Nevilton
, their relation to Mr. Romer, and Mr. Romer’s relation to them. He used to watch her sometimes, as in drowsy sensual enjoyment she would bask in the hot sunshine on the terrace, or drift in her slow stealthy manner about the garden-paths, as if she were a great fascinating tame puma. He made
endless
sketches of her, in his little note-books, some of them of the most fantastic, and even Rabelaisean character. He had certainly never anticipated just this, when he accepted the shrewd financier’s
invitation
to his Elizabethan home. And if Susan Romer delighted him, Gladys Romer absolutely bewitched him. He treated her as if she were no grown-up young lady, but a romping and quite unscrupulous child; and the wily Gladys, quickly perceiving how greatly he was pleased by any naive display of
youthful 
malice, or greed, or sensuality, or vanity, took good care to put no rein upon herself in the expression of her primitive emotions.

It was with Lacrima that Ralph Dangelis found
himself
on ground that was less secure, but in the genial aplomb of his all-embracing good-fellowship, it was only by degrees that he became conscious even of this. He found the place not only extraordinarily
harmonious
to his general temper, but extremely inspiring to his imaginative work. It only needed the securing of a few mechanical contrivances, a studio, for instance, with a north-light, to have made his sojourn at
Nevilton
one of the most prolific summers, in regard to his art, that he had experienced since his student days in Rome. He began vaguely to wish in the depths of his mind that it were possible for these good Romers to bestow upon him in perpetuity some pleasant airy chamber in their great house, so that he might not have to lose, for many summers to come, these agreeable and scandalous gossippings with the mother and these still more agreeable flirtations with the delicious daughter. This bold and fantastic idea was less a fabric of airy speculation than might have been supposed; for if the American was enchanted with his entertainers, his entertainers, at any rate the mother and the daughter, were extremely well pleased with him. The free sweep of his capacious sympathy, the absence in him of any punctilious gentility, the large and benignant atmosphere he diffused round him, and the mixture of cynical realism with
considerate
chivalry, were things so different from
anything
they had been accustomed to, that they both of them would willingly have offered him a suite of
apartments in the house, if he could have accepted such an offer.

Dangelis was particularly lucky in arriving at Nevilton at this especial moment. An abnormally retarded spring had led to the most delicious
over-lapping
in the varied flora of the place. Though June had begun, there were still many flowers lingering in the shadier spots of the woods and ditches, which properly belonged not only to May, but to very early May. Certain, even, of April’s progeny had not completely faded from the late-flowering lanes.

The artist found himself surrounded by a riotous revel of leafy exuberance. The year’s “primal burst” had occurred, not in reluctant spasmodic fits and starts, as is usual in our intermittent fine weather, but in a grand universal outpouring of the earth’s sap. His imagination answered spontaneously to this appeal, and his note-books were speedily filled with hurried passionate sketches, made at all hours of the long bright days, and full of suggestive charm. One particularly lovely afternoon the American found himself wandering slowly up the hill from the little Nevilton station, after a brief excursion to Yeoborough in search of pigments and canvas. He was hoping to take advantage of this auspicious stirring of his imaginative senses, by entering upon some more important and more continuous work. The Nevilton ladies had assured him that it would be quite
impossible
to find in the little town the kind of materials he needed; and he was returning in high spirits to assure them that he had completely falsified their prediction. He suspected Gladys of having invented this difficulty with a view to confining his labours to such easily
shared sketching-trips as she might accompany him upon, but though the fascination of the romping and toying girl still retained, and had even increased, its power over him; he was, in this case, impelled and driven by a force stronger and more dominant than any sensual attraction. He was in a better mood for painting than he had ever been in his life, and nothing could interfere with his resolution to exploit this mood to its utmost limit. With the most precious of his newly purchased materials under his arm and the more bulky ones promised him that same evening, Dangelis, as he drifted slowly up the sunny road chatting amicably with such rural marketers as overtook him, felt in a peculiarly harmonious temper.