Wood and Stone (20 page)

“I thought you were never coming,” said Gladys. “How long you have been! We have been waiting for hours. Come along. We must go straight back and dress or we shall be late for dinner. No time for good-byes! Au revoir, you two! Come along, girl, quick! We’d better run.”

She seized her cousin’s hand and dragged her off and they were quickly out of sight.

The two brothers watched them disappear and then turned and walked away together. “Don’t let’s go home yet,” said Luke. “Let’s go to the churchyard first. The sun will have set, but it won’t be dark for a long time. And I love the churchyard in the twilight.”

James nodded. “It is our garden, isn’t it,—and our orchard? It is the only spot in Nevilton where no one can interfere with us.”

“That, and the Seldom Arms,” added the younger brother.

They paced side by side in silence till they reached the road. The orchards, left to themselves, relapsed into their accustomed reserve. Whatever secrets they concealed of the confused struggles of ephemeral mortals, they concealed in inviolable discretion.

T
HE early days of June, all of them of the same quality of golden weather, were hardly over, before our wanderer from Ohio found himself on terms of quite pleasant familiarity with the celibate vicar of Nevilton, whose relations with his friend Gladys so immensely interested him.

The conscientious vicar had sought him out, on the very day after his visit to the mill copse, and the artist had found the priest more to his fancy than he had imagined possible.

The American’s painting had begun in serious earnest. A studio had been constructed for him in one of the sheds near the conservatory, a place much more full of light and air and pleasant garden smells, than would have been the lumber-room referred to by Mrs. Romer, adjoining the chaste slumbers of the laborious Lily. Here for several long mornings he had worked at high pressure and in a vein of
imaginative
expansion.

Something of the seething sap of these incomparable days seemed to pass into his blood. He plunged into a bold and original series of Dionysic “impressions,” seeking to represent, in accordance with his new vision, those legendary episodes in the life of the divine Wanderer which seemed most capable of lending
themselves to a half-realistic, half-fantastic
transmutation
, of the people and places immediately around him. He sought to introduce into these pictures the very impetus and pressure of the
exuberant
earth-force, as he felt it stirring and fermenting in his own veins, and in those of the persons and animals about him. He strove to clothe the shadowy poetic outline of the classical story with fragments and morsels of actual experience, as one by one his imaginative intellect absorbed them.

Here, too, under the sycamores and elms of
Nevilton
, the old world-madness followed the alternations of sun and moon, with the same tragic swiftness and the same ambiguous beauty, as when, with tossing arms and bared throats, the virgins of Thessaly flung themselves into the dew-starred thickets.

Dangelis began by making cautious and tentative use of such village children as he found it possible to lay hands upon, as models in his work, but this method did not prove very satisfactory.

The children, when their alarm and inqusitiveness wore off, grew tired and turbulent; and on more than one occasion the artist had to submit to
astonishing
visits from confused and angry parents who called him a “foreigner” and a “Yankee,” and qualified these appelations with epithets so
astoundingly
gross, that Dangelis was driven to wonder from what simple city-bred fancy the illusion of rural innocence had first proceeded.

At length, as the days went on, the bold idea came into his head of persuading Gladys herself to act as his model.

His relations with her had firmly established
themselve
s
now on the secure ground of playful
camaraderie
, and he knew enough of her to feel tolerably certain that he had only to broach such a scheme, to have it welcomed with enthusiastic ardour.

He made the suggestion one evening as they walked home together after her spiritual lesson. “I find that last picture of mine extremely difficult to
manage
,” he said.

“Why! I think its the best of them all!” cried Gladys. “You’ve got a lovely look of longing in the eyes of your queer god; and the sail of Theseus’ ship, as you see it against the blue sea, is wonderful. The little bushes and things, too, you’ve put in; I like them particularly. They remind me of that wood down by the mill, where I caught the thrush. I suppose you’ve forgotten all about that day,” she added, giving him a quick sidelong glance.

The artist seized his opportunity. “They would remind you still more of our wood,” he said eagerly, “if you let me put you in as Ariadne! Do, Gladys,”—he had called her Gladys for some days—“you will make a simply adorable Ariadne. As she is now, she is wooden, grotesque, archaic—nothing but drapery and white ankles!”

The girl had flushed with pleasure as soon as she caught the drift of his request. Now she glanced mischievously and mockingly at him.

“
My
ankles,” she murmured laughing, “are not so very, very beautiful!”

“Please be serious, Gladys,” he said, “I am really quite in earnest. It will just make the difference between a masterpiece and a fiasco.”

“You are very conceited,” she retorted teasingly,
“but I suppose I oughtn’t to say that, ought I, as my precious ankles are to be a part of this
masterpiece
?”

She ran in front of him down the drive, and, as if to give him an exhibition of her goddess-like agility, caught at an over-hanging bough and swung herself backwards and forwards.

“What fun!” she cried, as he approached. “Of course I’ll do it, Mr. Dangelis.” Then, with a sudden change of tone and a very malign expression, as she let the branch swing back and resumed her place at his side, “Mr. Clavering must see me posing for you. He must say whether he thinks I’m good enough for Ariadne.”

The artist looked a shade disconcerted by this unexpected turn to the project, but he was too anxious to make sure of his model to raise any premature objections. “But you must please understand,” was all he said, “that I am very much in earnest about this picture. If anybody but myself
does
see you, there must be no teasing and fooling.”

“Oh, I long for him to see me!” cried the girl. “I can just imagine his face, I can just imagine it!”

The artist frowned. “This is not a joke, Gladys. Mind you, if I do let Clavering into our secret, it’ll be only on condition that you promise not to flirt with him. I shall want you to stay very still,—just as I put you.”

Dangelis had never indicated before quite so plainly his blunt and unvarnished view of her relations with her spiritual adviser, and he now looked rather
nervously
at her to see how she received this intimation.

“I
love
teasing Mr. Clavering!” she cried savagely,
“I should like to tease him so much, that he never, never, would forget it!”

This extreme expression of feeling was a surprise, and by no means a pleasant one, to Ralph Dangelis.

“Why do you want so much to upset our friend?” he enquired.

“I suppose,” she answered, still instinctively
playing
up to his idea of her naiveté and childishness, “it is because he thinks himself so good and so
perfectly
safe from falling in love with anyone—and that annoys me.”

“Ha!” chuckled Dangelis, “so that’s it, is it?” and he paced in thoughtful silence by her side until they reached the house.

The morning that followed this conversation was as warm as the preceding ones, but a strong southern wind had risen, with a remote touch of the sea in its gusty violence. The trees in the park, as the artist and his girl-friend watched them from the terrace, while Mr. Romer, who had now returned from town worked in his study, and Lacrima helped Mrs. Romer to “do the flowers,” swayed and rustled ominously in the eddying gusts.

Clouds of dust kept blowing across the gates from the surface of the drive and the delphiniums bent low on their long stalks. The wind was of that
peculiar
character which, though hot and full of balmy scents, conveys a feeling of uneasiness and troubled expectation. It suggested thunder and with and
beyond
that, something threatening, calamitous and fatal.

Gladys was pre-occupied and gloomy that
morning
. She was growing a little, just a little, tired of
the American’s conversation. Even the excitement of arranging about the purchase in Yeoborough of suitable materials for her Ariadne costume did not serve to lift the shadow from her brow.

She was getting tired of her role as the naive,
impetuous
and childish innocent; and though mentally still quite resolved upon following her mother’s
frequent
and unblushing hints, and doing her best to “catch” this æsthetic master of a million dollars, the burden of the task was proving considerably irksome.

Ralph’s growing tendency to take her into his confidence in the matter of the philosophy of his art, she found peculiarly annoying.

Philosophy of any kind was detestable to Gladys, and this particular sort of philosophy especially
depressed
her, by reducing the attraction of physical beauty to a kind of dispassionate analysis, against the chilling virtue of which all her amorous wiles hopelessly collapsed. It was becoming increasingly difficult, too, to secure her furtive interviews with Luke—interviews in which her cynical sensuality, suppressed in the society of the American, was allowed full swing.

Her thoughts, at this very moment, turned
passionately
and vehemently towards the young stone-carver, who had achieved, at last, the enviable triumph of seriously ruffling and disturbing her egoistic
self-reliance
.

Unused to suffering the least thwarting in what she desired, it fretted and chafed her intolerably to be forced to go on playing her coquettish part with this good-natured but inaccessible admirer, while all the time her soul yearned so desperately for the
shameles
s
kisses that made her forget everything in the world but the ecstacy of passion.

It was all very well to plan this posing as Ariadne and to listen to Dangelis discoursing on the beauty of pagan myths. The artist might talk endlessly about dryads and fauns. The faun she longed to be pursued by, this wind-swept morning, was now engaged in hammering Leonian stone, in her father’s dusty work-shops.

She knew, she told herself, far better than the cleverest citizen of Ohio, what a real Greek god was like, both in his kindness and his unkindness; and her nerves quivered with irritation, as the hot southern wind blew upon her, to think that she would only be able, and even then for a miserably few minutes, to steal off to her true Dionysus, after submitting for a whole long day to this aesthetic foolery.

“It must have been a wind like this,” remarked Dangelis, quite unobservant of his companion’s
moroseness
, “which rocked the doomed palace of the
blaspheming
Pentheus and drove him forth to his fate.” He paused a moment, pondering, and then added, “I shall paint a picture of this, Gladys. I shall bring in Tiresias and the other old men, feeling the madness coming upon them.”

“I know all about that,” the girl felt compelled to answer.

“They danced, didn’t they? They couldn’t help dancing, though they were so old and weak?”

Dangelis hardly required this encouragement, to launch into a long discourse upon the subject of Dionysian madness, its true symbolic meaning, its religious significance, its survival in modern times.

He quite forgot, as he gave himself up to this interesting topic, his recent resolution to exclude
drastically
from his work all these more definitely
intellectualized
symbols.

His companion’s answers to this harangue became, by degrees, so obviously forced and perfunctory, that even the good-tempered Westerner found himself a little relieved when the appearance of Lacrima upon the scene gave him a different audience.

When Lacrima appeared, Gladys slipped away and Dangelis was left to do what he could to overcome the Italian’s habitual shyness.

“One of these days,” he said, looking with a kindly smile into the girl’s frightened eyes, “I’m going to ask you, Miss Traffio, to take me to see your friend Mr. Quincunx.”

Lacrima started violently. This was the last name she expected to hear mentioned on the Nevilton terrace.

“I—I—” she stammered, “I should be very glad to take you. I didn’t know they had told you about him.”

“Oh, they only told me—you can guess the kind of thing!—that he’s a queer fellow who lives by
himself
in a cottage in Dead Man’s Lane, and does nothing but dig in his garden and talk to old women over the wall. He’s evidently one of these odd
out-of
-the-way characters, that your English—Oh, I beg your pardon!—your European villages produce. Mr. Clavering told me he is the only man in the place he never goes to see. Apparently he once insulted the good vicar.”

“He didn’t insult him!” cried Lacrima with flashing
eyes. “He only asked him not to walk on his
potatoes
. Mr. Clavering is too touchy.”

“Well—anyway, do take me, sometime, to see this interesting person. Why shouldn’t we go this afternoon? This wind seems to have driven all the ideas out of my head, as well as made your cousin extremely bad-tempered! So do take me to see your friend, Miss Traffio! We might go now—this moment—why not?”

Lacrima shook her head, but she looked grateful and not displeased. As a matter of fact she was particularly anxious to introduce the American to Mr. Quincunx. In that vague subtle way which is a peculiarity, not only of the Pariah-type, but of human nature in general, she was anxious that Dangelis should be given at least a passing glimpse of another view of the Romer family.

It was not that she was definitely plotting against her cousin or trying to undermine her position with her artist-friend, but she felt a natural human desire that this sympathetic and good-tempered man should be put, to some extent at least, upon his guard.

She was, at any rate, not at all unwilling to initiate him into the mysteries of Mr. Quincunx’ mind, hoping, perhaps, in an obscure sort of way, that such an initiation would throw her own position, in this strange household, into a light more evocative of considerate interest.

She had been so often made conscious of late that in his absorption in Gladys he had swept her brusquely aside as a dull and tiresome spoil-sport, that it was not without a certain feminine eagerness that she
embraced the thought of his being compelled to listen to what she well knew Mr. Quincunx would have to say upon the matter.

It was also an agreeable thought that in doing justice to the originality and depth of the recluse’s intelligence, the American would be driven to
recognize
the essentially unintellectual tone of conversation at Nevilton House.