Wood and Stone (19 page)

James rose obediently, and they walked off
together
. They passed from the orchards belonging to Mr. Romer’s tenant, and entered those immediately at the foot of the vicarage garden. Here, through a gap in the hedge they were attracted by the sight of a queer bed of weeds growing at the edge of a
potato-patch
. They were very curious weeds, rather
resembling
sea-plants than land-plants; in colour of a dull glaucous green, and in shape grotesquely
elongated
.

“What are those things?” said Lacrima. “I think I have never seen such evil-looking plants. Why do they let them grow there?”

James surveyed the objects. “They certainly have a queer look,” he said, “but you know, in old days, there was a grave-yard here, of a peculiar kind. It is only in the last fifty years that they have dug it up and included it in this garden.”

Lacrima shuddered. “I would not eat those
potatoes
for anything! You know I think I come to dislike more and more the look of your English
vegetable
gardens, with their horrid, heavy leaves, so damp and oozy and disgusting!”

“I agree with you there,” returned the
wood-carver
. “I have always hated Nevilton, and every aspect of it; but I think I hate these overgrown gardens most of all.”

“They look as if they were fed from churchyards, don’t they?” went on the girl. “Look at those heavy laurel bushes over there, and those dreadful fir-trees! I should cut them all down if this place
belonged to me. Oh, how I long for olives and
vineyards
! These orchards are all very well, but they seem to me as if they were made to keep out the sun and the wholesome air.”

James Andersen smiled grimly. “Orchards and potato gardens!” he muttered. “Yes, these are
typical
of this country of clay. And these vicarage
shrubberies
! I think a shrubbery is the last limit of depression and desolation. I am sure all the murders committed in this country are planned in shrubberies, and under the shade of damp laurel-bushes.”

“In our country we grow corn between the
fruit-trees
,” said Lacrima.

“Yes, corn—” returned Andersen, “corn and wine and oil! Those are the natural, the beautiful, products of the earth. Things that are fed upon sun and air—not upon the bones of the dead! All these Nevilton places, however luxuriant, seem to me to smell of death.”

“But was this corner really a churchyard?” asked the Italian. “I hope Mrs. Seldom won’t stroll down this way and see us!”

“Mrs. Seldom is well suited to the place she lives in,” returned the other. “She lives upon the Past, just as her garden does—just as her potatoes do! These English vicarages are dreadful places. They have all the melancholy of age without its historic glamour. And how morbid they are! Any of your cheerful Latin curés would die in them, simply of damp and despair.”

“But do tell me about this spot,” repeated
Lacrima
, with a little shiver. “Why did you say it was a peculiar churchyard?”

“It was the place where they buried unbaptized children,” answered Andersen, and added, in a lower tone, “how cold it is getting! It must be the shadow we are in.”

“But you haven’t yet,” murmured Lacrima, “you haven’t yet told me, what those weeds are.”

“Well—we call them ‘mares’-tails’ about here,” answered the stone-carver, “I don’t know their proper name.”

“But why don’t they dig them up? Look! They are growing all among the potatoes.”

“They can’t dig them up,” returned the man. “They can’t get at their roots. They are the worst and most obstinate weed there is. They grow in all the Nevilton gardens. They are the typical Nevilton flora. They must have grown here in the days of the druids.”

“But how absurd!” cried Lacrima. “I feel as if I could pull them up with my hands. The earth looks so soft.”

“The earth is soft enough,” replied Andersen, “but the roots of these weeds adhere fast to the rock underneath. The rock, you know, the sandstone rock, lies only a short distance beneath our feet.”

“The same stone as Nevilton house is built of?”

“Certainly the same. Our stone, Mr. Romer’s stone, the stone upon which we all live here—except those who till the fields.”

“I hate the thing!” cried Lacrima, in curious agitation.

“You do? Well—to tell you the honest truth, so do I. I associate it with my father.”

“I associate it with Gladys,” whispered Lacrima.

“I can believe it. We both associate it with houses of tyranny, of wretched persecution. Perhaps I have never told you that my father was directly the cause of my mother’s death?”

“You have hinted it,” murmured the girl. “I suspected it. But Luke loves the stone, doesn’t he? He always speaks as if the mere handling of it, in his workshop, gave him exquisite pleasure.”

“A great many things give Luke exquisite pleasure,” returned the other grimly. “Luke lives for exquisite pleasure.”

A quick step on the grass behind them made them swing suddenly round. It was Vennie Seldom, who, unobserved, had been watching them from the vicarage terrace. A few paces behind her came Mr. Taxater, walking cautiously and deliberately, with the air of a Lord Chesterfield returning from an audience at St. James’. Mr. Taxater had already met the Italian on one or two occasions. He had sat next to her once, when dining at Nevilton House, and he was considerably interested in her.

“What a lovely evening, Miss Traffio,” said Vennie shyly, but without embarrassment. Vennie was always shy, but nothing ever interfered with her self-possession.

“I am glad you are showing Mr. Andersen these orchards of ours. I always think they are the most secluded place in the whole village.”

“Ha!” said Mr. Taxater, when he had greeted them with elaborate and friendly courtesy, “I thought you two were bound to make friends sooner or later! I call you my two companions in exile, among our dear Anglo-Saxons. Miss Traffio I know is Latin,
and you, sir, must have some kind of foreign blood. I am right, am I not, Mr. Andersen?”

James looked at him humorously, though a little grimly. He was always pleased to be addressed by Mr. Taxater, as indeed was everybody who knew him. The great scholar’s detached intellectualism gave him an air of complete aloofness from all social distinctions.

“Perhaps I may have,” he answered. “My mother used to hint at something of the kind. She was always very fond of foreign books. I rather fancy that I once heard her say something about a strain of Spanish blood.”

“I thought so! I thought so!” cried Mr. Taxater, pulling his hat over his eyes and protruding his chin and under-lip, in the manner peculiar to him when especially pleased.

“I thought there was something Spanish in you. How extraordinarily interesting! Spain,—there is no country like it in the world! You must go to Spain, Mr. Andersen. You would go there in a different spirit from these wretched sight-seers who carry their own vulgarity with them. You would go with that feeling of reverence for the great things of civilization, which is inseparable from the least drop of Latin blood.”

“Would
you
like to see Spain, Miss Traffio?
enquired
Vennie. “Mr. Taxater, I notice, always leaves out us women, when he makes his attractive
proposals
. I think he thinks that we have no capacity for understanding this civilization he talks of.”

“I think you understand everything, better than any man could,” murmured Lacrima, conscious of an extraordinary depth of sympathy emanating from this frail figure.

“Miss Seldom has been trying to make me
appreciate
the beauty of these orchards,” went on Mr. Taxater, addressing James. “But I am afraid I am not very easily converted. I have a prejudice against orchards. For some reason or other, I associate them with dragons and serpents.”

“Miss Seldom has every reason to love the beautiful aspects of our Nevilton scenery,” said the
stone-carver
. “Her ancestors possessed all these fields and orchards so long, that it would be strange if their descendant did not have an instinctive passion for them.” He uttered these words with that curious undertone of bitterness which marked all his
references
to aristocratic pretension.

Little Vennie brushed the sarcasm gently aside, as if it had been a fluttering moth.

“Yes, I do love them in a sense,” she said, “but you must remember that I, too, was educated in a Latin country. So, you see, we four are all outsiders and heretics! I fancy your brother, Mr. Andersen, is an ingrained Neviltonian.”

James smiled in a kindly, almost paternal manner, at the little descendant of the Tudor courtiers. Her sweetness and artless goodness made him feel ashamed of his furtive truculence.

“I wish you would come in and see my mother and me, one of these evenings,” said Vennie, looking rather wistfully at Lacrima and putting a more tender solicitation into her tone than the mere words implied.

Lacrima hesitated. “I am afraid I cannot promise,” she said nervously. “My cousin generally wants me in the evening.”

“Perhaps,” put in Mr. Taxater, with his most
Talleyrand-like air, “a similar occasion to the present one may arise again, when with Mr. Andersen’s
permission
, we may all adjourn to the vicarage garden.”

Lacrima, rather uncomfortably, looked down at the grass.

“We four, being, as we have admitted, all outsiders here,” went on the diplomatist, “ought to have no secrets from one another. I think”—he looked at Vennie—“we may just as well confess to our friends that we quite realize the little—charming—‘friendship,’ shall I say?—that has sprung up between this gentleman’s brother and Miss Romer.”

“I think,” said James Andersen hurriedly, in order to relieve Lacrima’s embarrassment, “I think the real bond between Luke and Miss Gladys is their mutual pleasure in all this luxuriant scenery.
Somehow
I feel as if you, sir, and Miss Seldom, were quite separate from it and outside it.”

“Yes,” cried Vennie eagerly, “and Lacrima is outside it, because she is half-Italian, and you are outside it because you are half-Spanish.”

“It is clear, then,” said Mr. Taxater, “that we four must form a sort of secret alliance, an alliance based upon the fact that even Miss Seldom’s lovely orchards do not altogether make us forget what civilization means!”

Neither of the two girls seemed quite to understand what the theologian implied, but Andersen shot at him a gleam of appreciative gratitude.

“I was telling Miss Traffio,” he said, “that under this grass, not very many feet down, a remarkable layer of sandstone obtrudes itself.”

“An orchard based on rock,” murmured Mr.
Taxater, “that, I think, is an admirable symbol of what this place represents. Clay at the top and sandstone at the bottom! I wonder whether it is better, in this world, to be clay or stone? We four poor foreigners have, I suspect, a preference for a material very different from both of these. Our element would be marble. Eh, Andersen? Marble that can resist all these corrupting natural forces and throw them back, and hold them down. I always think that marble is the appropriate medium of civilization’s retort to instinct and savagery. The Latin races have always built in marble. It was certainly of marble that our Lord was thinking when he used his celebrated metaphor about the founding of the Church.”

The stone-carver made no answer. He had noticed a quick supplicating glance from Lacrima’s dark eyes.

“Well,”—he said, “I think I must be looking for my brother, and I expect our young lady is waiting for Miss Traffio.”

They bade their friends good-night and moved off.

“I am always at your service,” were Mr. Taxater’s last words, “if ever either of you care to appeal to the free-masonry of the children of marble against the children of clay.”

As they retraced their steps Andersen remarked to his companion how curious it was, that neither Vennie nor Mr. Taxater seemed in the least aware of
anything
extraordinary or unconventional in this
surreptitious
friendship between the girls from the House and their father’s workmen.

“Yes, I wonder what Mrs. Seldom would think of us,” rejoined Lacrima, “but she probably thinks
Gladys is capable of anything and that I am as bad as she is. But I do like that little Vennie! I believe she is a real saint. She gives me such a queer
feeling
of being different from everyone.

“Mr. Taxater no doubt is making a convert of her,” said the stone-carver. “And I have a suspicion that he hopes to convert Gladys too, probably through your influence.”

“I don’t like to think that of him,” replied the girl. “He seems to me to admire Vennie for herself and to be kind to us for ourselves. I think he is a thoroughly good man.”

“Possibly—possibly,” muttered James, “but I don’t trust him. I never have trusted him.”

They said no more, and threaded their way slowly through the orchard to the place where they had left the others. The wind had dropped and there was a dull, obstinate expectancy in the atmosphere. Every leaf and grass blade seemed to be intently alert and listening.

In her heart Lacrima was conscious of an unusual sense of foreboding and apprehension. Surely there could be nothing worse in store for her than what she already suffered. She wondered what Maurice Quincunx was doing at that moment. Was he
thinking
of her, and were his thoughts the cause of this strange oppression in the air? Poor Maurice! She longed to be free to devote herself to him, to smooth his path, to distract his mind. Would fate ever make such a thing possible? How unfair Gladys was in her suspicions!

She liked James Andersen and was very grateful to him, but he did not need her as Maurice needed her!

“I see them!” she cried suddenly. “But how odd they look! They’re not speaking a word. Have they quarrelled, I wonder?”

The two fair-haired amorists appeared indeed extremely gloomy and melancholy, as they sat, with a little space between them, on the fallen tree. They rose with an air of relief at the others approach.