Wood and Stone (28 page)

Whether from her first exit from the house, she had intended to follow this path, she could hardly herself have told. It was the instinct of a woman at bay, seeking out, not the strong that could help her, but the weak that she herself could help. It was also perhaps the true Pariah impulse, which drives these victims of the powerful and the well-constituted, to find rehabilitation in the society of one another.

As she ascended the shadowy lane with its
crumbling
banks of sandy soil and its over-hanging trees, she felt once again how persistently this heavy luxuriant landscape dragged her earthwards and clogged the wings of her spirit. The tall grasses growing thick by the way-side enlaced themselves with the elder-bushes and dog-wood, which in their turn blended indissolubly with the lower branches
of the elms. The lane itself was but a deep shadowy path dividing a flowing sea of foliage, which seemed to pour, in a tidal wave of suffocating fertility, over the whole valley.

The Italian struggled in vain against the depressing influence of all these rank and umbrageous growths, spreading out leafy arms to catch her and groping towards her with moist adhesive tendrils. The lane was full of a warm steamy vapour, like that of a hot-house, to the heavy odour of which, every sort of verdurous growing thing offered its contribution.

There was a vague smell of funguses in the air, though none were visible; and the idea of them may only have been due to the presence of decaying wood or the moist drooping stalks of the dead flowers of the earlier season. Now and again the girl caught, wafted upon a sudden stir of wind, the indescribably sweet scent of honey-suckle—a sweetness almost overpowering in its penetrating voluptuous approach. Once, high up above her head, she saw a spray of this fragrant parasite; not golden yellow, as it is where the sun shines full upon it, but pallid and ivory-white. In a curious way it seemed as if this Nevilton scenery offered her no escape from the insidious sensuality she fled.

The indolent luxuriousness of Gladys seemed to breathe from every mossy spore and to over-hang every unclosing frond. And if Gladys was in the leaves and grass, the remoter terror of Mr. Goring was in the earth and clay. Between the two they monopolized this whole corner of the planet, and made everything between zenith and nadir their privileged pasture.

As she drew nearer to where Mr. Quincunx lived, her burdened mind sought relief in focussing itself upon him. She would be sure to find him in his garden. That she knew, because the day was
Saturday
. Should she tell him what had happened to her?

Ah! that was indeed the crucial question! Was it necessary that she should sacrifice herself for him without his even knowing what she did?

But he would have to know, sooner or later, of this marriage. Everyone would be talking of it. It would be bound to come to his ears.

And what would he think of her if she said nothing? What would he think of her, in any case, having accepted such a degradation?

Not to tell him at all, would throw a completely false light upon the whole transaction. It would make her appear treacherous, fickle, worldly-minded,
shameless
—wickedly false to her unwritten covenant with himself.

To tell him, without giving him the true motive of her sacrifice, would be, she felt sure, to bring down his bitterest reproaches on her head.

For a passing second she felt a wave of indignation against him surge up in her heart. This, however, she passionately suppressed, with the instinctive
desire
of a woman who is sacrificing herself to feel the object of such sacrifice worthy of what is offered.

It was not long before she reached the gate of Mr. Quincunx’s garden. Yes,—there he was—with his wheel-barrow and his hoe—bending over his
potatoes
. She opened the gate and walked quite close up to him before he observed her. He greeted her in his usual manner, with a smile of half-cynical,
half-affectionat
e
welcome, and taking her by the hand as he might have taken a child, he led her to the one shady spot in his garden, where, under a weeping ash, he had constructed a rough bench.

“I didn’t expect you,” he said, when they were seated. “I never do expect you. People like me who have only Saturday afternoons to enjoy themselves in don’t expect visitors. They count the hours which are left to them before the night comes.”

“But you have Sunday, my friend,” she said,
laying
her hand upon his.

“Sunday!” Mr. Quincunx muttered. “Do you call Sunday a day? I regard Sunday as a sort of
prison-exercise
, when all the convicts go walking up and down and showing off their best clothes. I can neither work nor read nor think on Sunday. I have to put on my best clothes like the rest, and stand at my gate, staring at the weather and wondering what the hay-crop will be. The only interesting moments I have on Sunday are when that silly-faced Wone, or one of the Andersens, drifts this way, and we lean over my wall and abuse the gentry.”

“Poor dear!” said the girl pityingly. “I expect the real truth is that you are so tired with your work all the week, that you are glad enough to rest and do nothing.”

Mr. Quincunx’s nostrils dilated, and his drooping moustache quivered. A smile of delicious and
sardonic
humour wavered over the lower portion of his face, while his grey eyes lost their sadness and gleamed with a goblin-like merriment.

“I am getting quite popular at the office,” he said. “I have learnt the secret of it now.”

“And what is the secret?” asked Lacrima,
suppressing
a queer little gasp in her throat.

“Sucking up,” Mr. Quincunx answered, his face flickering with subterranean amusement, “sucking up to everyone in the place, from the manager to the office boy.”

Lacrima returned to him a very wan little smile.

“I suppose you mean ingratiating yourself,” she said; “you English have such funny expressions.”

“Yes, ingratiating myself, pandering to them,
flattering
them, agreeing with them, anticipating their wishes, doing their work for them, telling lies for them, abusing God to make them laugh, introducing them to Guy de Maupassant, and even making a few light references, now and again, to what
Shakespeare
calls ‘country-matters.’”

“I don’t believe a word you say,” protested Lacrima in rather a quavering voice. “I believe you hate them all and that they are all unkind to you. But I can quite imagine you have to do more work than your own.”

Mr. Quincunx’s countenance lost its merriment instantaneously.

“I believe you are as annoyed as Mr. Romer,” he said, “that I should get on in the office. But I am past being affected by that. I know what human nature is! We are all really pleased when other people get on badly, and are sorry when they do well.”

Lacrima felt as though the trees in the field
opposite
had suddenly reversed themselves and were waving their roots in the air.

She gave a little shiver and pressed her hand to her side.

Mr. Quincunx continued.

“Of course you don’t like it when I tell you the truth. Nobody likes to hear the truth. Human beings lap up lies as pigs lap up milk. And women are worst of all in that! No woman really can love a person—not, at any rate, for long—who tells her the truth! That is why women love clergymen, because clergymen are brought up to lie. I saw you laughing and amusing yourself the other evening with Mr. Clavering—you and your friend Gladys. I went the other way, so as not to interrupt such a merry conversation.”

Lacrima turned upon him at this.

“I cannot understand how you can say such things of me!” she cried. “It is too much. I won’t—I won’t listen to it!”

Her over-strained nerves broke down at last, and covering her face with her hands, she burst into a fit of convulsive sobs.

Mr. Quincunx rose and stood gazing at her, gloomily plucking at his beard.

“And such are women!” he thought to himself. “One can never tell them the least truth but they burst into tears.”

He waited thus in silence for one or two moments, and then an expression of exquisite tenderness and sympathy came into his face. His patient grey eyes looked at her bowed head with the look of a
sorrowful
god. Gently he sat down beside her and laid his hand on her shoulder.

“Lacrima—dear—I am sorry—I oughtn’t to have said that. I didn’t mean it. On my solemn oath I didn’t mean it! Lacrima, please don’t cry. I
can’t bear it when you cry. It was all absolute
nonsense
what I said just now. It is the devil that gets into me and makes me say those things! Lacrima—darling Lacrima—we won’t tease one another any more.”

Her sobs diminished under the obvious sincerity of his words. She lifted up a tear-stained face and threw her arms passionately round his neck.

“I’ve no one but you,” she cried, “no one, no one!”

For several minutes they embraced each other in silence—the girl’s breast quivering with the
after-sighs
of her emotion and their tears mingling together and falling on Mr. Quincunx’s beard. Had Gladys Homer beheld them at that moment she would
certainly
have been strengthened in her healthy-minded mocking contempt for sentimental “slobbering.”

When they had resumed a more normal mood their conversation continued gently and quietly.

“Of course you are right,” said Mr. Quincunx. “I am not really happy at the office. Who
could
be happy in a place of that kind? But it is my life—and one has to do what one can with one’s life! I have to pretend to myself that they like me there, and that I am making myself useful—otherwise I simply could not go on. I have to pretend. That’s what it is! It is my pet illusion, my little fairy-story. It was that that made me get angry with you—that and the devil. One doesn’t like to have one’s fairy-stories broken into by the brutal truth.”

“Poor dear!” said Lacrima softly, stroking his hand with a gesture of maternal tenderness.

“If there was any hope of this wretched business coming to an end,” Maurice went on, “it would be
different. Then I would curse all these people to hell and have done with it. But what can I do? I am already past middle age. I shouldn’t be able to get anything else if I gave it up. And I don’t want to leave Nevilton while you are here.”

The girl looked intently at him. Then she folded her hands on her lap and began gravely.

“I have something to tell you, Maurice dear. Something very important. What would you say if I told you that it was in my power to set you free from all this and make you happy and comfortable for the rest of your life?”

An invisible watcher from some more clairvoyant planet than ours would have been interested at that moment in reading the double weakness of two poor Pariah hearts. Lacrima, brought back from the
half-insane
attitudes of her heroic resolution by the
intermission
of natural human emotion, found herself on the brink of half-hoping that her friend would
completely
and indignantly refuse this shameful sacrifice.

“Surely,” her heart whispered, “some other path of escape must offer itself for them both. Perhaps, after all, Vennie Seldom might discover some way.”

Mr. Quincunx, on the other hand, was most
thoroughly
alarmed by her opening words. He feared that she was going to propose some desperate scheme by which, fleeing from Nevilton together, she was to help him earn money enough for their mutual support.

“What should I say?” he answered aloud, to the girl’s question. “It would depend upon the manner in which you worked this wonderful miracle. But I warn you I am not hopeful. Things might be worse. After all I have a house to return to. I have food.
I have my books. I have you to come and pay me visits. I have my garden. In this world, when a person has a roof over his head, and someone to talk to every other day, he had better remain still and not attract the attention of the gods.”

Silence followed his words. Instead of speaking, Lacrima took off her hat, and smoothed her hair away from her forehead, keeping her eyes fixed upon the ground. An immense temptation seized her to let the moment pass without revealing her secret. She could easily substitute any imaginary suggestion in place of the terrible reality. Her friend’s morbid nerves would help her deception. The matter would be glossed over and be as if it had never been: be, in fact, no more than it was, a hideous nightmare of her own insane and diseased conscience.

But could the thing be so suppressed? Would it be like Nevilton to let even the possible image of such a drama pass unsnatched at by voluble tongues, unenlarged upon by malicious gossip?

He would be bound to hear of Mr. Goring’s offer. That, at least, could not be concealed. And what assurance had she that Mr. Romer would not himself communicate to him the full nature of the hideous bargain? The quarry-owner might think it
diplomatic
to trade upon Maurice’s weakness.

No—there was no help for it. She must tell him;—only praying now, in the profound depths of her poor heart, that he would not consider such an infamy even for a second. So she told him the whole story, in a low monotonous voice, keeping her head lowered and watching the progress of a minute snail
laboriously
ascending a stalk of grass.

Maurice Quincunx had never twiddled the point of his Elizabethan beard with more detached absorption than while listening to this astounding narration. When she had quite finished, he regarded her from head to foot with a very curious expression.

The girl breathed hard. What was he thinking? He did not at once, in a burst of righteous
indignation
, fling the monstrous suggestion to the winds. What was he thinking? As a matter of fact the thoughts of Mr. Quincunx had taken an
extraordinary
turn.

Being in his personal relation to feminine charm, of a somewhat cold temper, he had never, for all his imaginative sentiment towards his little friend, been at all swayed by any violent sensuous attraction. But the idea of such attraction having seized so strongly upon another person reacted upon him, and he looked at her, perhaps for the first time since they had met, with eyes of something more than purely sentimental regard.